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Found Objects & Waste Transmutation Dominates African Art?

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Found Object, Recycled Art, Readymade or Junk Art?

Abstract

The phenomenon of found objects and waste transmutation into works of art, dominates contemporary African art ostensibly as the new continental creative identity. Majority of contemporary African artists experiment with waste as their preferred artistic medium and find in them (waste), potent metaphors for creative expressionism. However, although this art form is rapidly gaining prominence and international acclaim, it is surrounded by equivocations emanating from available literature sources.

Calixte Dakpogan – between tradition and modernism | AFRICAN CONTEMPORARY ART NOW (wordpress.com)

Discourses have emerged which attempts to theorize this genre of art but such discourses have only created varying levels of ambiguities which impedes understanding of its history, conceptuality and context in contemporary art-space. This article reviews recent literature dealing with found object appropriation in Africa, to expose the obscurities inherent in such studies. Using discourse analysis, this review indicates the existence of ambiguities ranging from terminology devising and classification to issues of hegemonic exclusivity and problems of contextualization. On the premise of these existing gray areas, I propose an in-depth study into this modern African art type, such study should adopt a particularized system to investigate the methodology of African found object art, its ideology and cultural motivation as basic criteria to enable our understanding and establishing of this modern art form as traditional to Africa in form, content and context and subsequently differentiate it from those of European art conventions to which it is currently erroneously likened to.

Keywords: Found Object, Readymade, Ambiguity, Junk Art, Upcycling, Surrealistic Object, Bricolage.

1. Introduction

Incorporation of materials from pop culture into African visual practice may have existed since the continent’s encounter with the west during slave trade and even earlier, as evidenced in the use of European spirit bottles assembled to build deities and shrines (Shiner 1994). But very little is found in literature that provides an account of any in-depth investigation into the historiography of this African art convention. This art genre (waste and found objects appropriation) has proliferated across the entire continent and now dominates contemporary art practice. As observed by Sylla and Bertelsen (1998), “found object art dominates modern African visual practice and very few are those who have not practice found object appropriation art in the continent”.

Numerous reasons are responsible for the fast propagation of this art type and subsequent adoption of ‘bricolage’ creative methodology by African artists, but the most noticeable factor is globalisation (Shiner 1994, Sylla & Mertelsen 1998). While through 21 st century advances in technology and innovations the world is becoming a global village, it conversely leads to increased consumption and accompanying generation of varieties of waste. These waste and found materials occasioned by modernity, become materials for artistic use (Kart 2009). Modern waste (the bye products of modernity and civilization) are employed by Africans as effective visual metaphors for creative explorations and expressionism. This interconnectivity between globalization, modernity and waste generation, accompanied by technological advancements in contemporary Africa, results in waste uniquely adapted into art to a high level it has even been argued that, discarded objects incorporation into art originated from Africa. Evans (2010, p.1) posited that, “through found object transformation, African artists have created a truly unique art form and have bequeathed a new art context to the world”. Reasons being that, for many contemporary African artists trained in western art education systems and equipped with such artistic conceptualism, interrogating the rich meanings locked in waste and found objects is considered quintessential for artistic self expressionism and creation of heighten multifarious layers of meanings since according to Aniakor (2013), “images and objects are plaited with meanings and only by interrogating them, that knowledge is extended and certain messages and ideologies expressed”. Thus, such artists tailor their creative experimentations towards achieving artistic self expressionism and higher codified meanings. This is because as observed by O.Connor, found object artworks are believed to be enriched with superlative double fluidity of meaning (Op cit 2013).

Mamiwata, 2006 Calixte Dakpogan

It is perhaps achieving that fluidity of meaning which has driven modern African artists to position themselves as material experimentalist to creatively interrogate waste and found objects, exploring their artistic qualities and meanings, as well as using such works to reflect societal circumstances and issues in contemporary Africa, as the basis for their art. They do so because, according to Fontaine (2010, p57), “by engaging with ready-mades from pop culture, the artist becomes an agency through which the inherent beauty and art qualities trapped in found/waste materials are brought to lime light via transmutation”.

From an African

Arts and Design Studies www.iiste.org ISSN 2224-6061 (Paper) ISSN 2225-059X (Online) Vol.12, 2013 42 trajectory, not just the beauty in waste is considered but the circumstances creating these waste (globalization, modernity and consumption) forms the ideological/conceptual framework for waste transformation into new art conventions. Whilst this genre of art is gaining prominence and widespread international recognition, it has stirred up scholarly interest from both African/western art historians and critics. Available literature with regards to this contemporary African art form, consist of numerous ambiguities which impedes understanding of its contextual artistic existence. Such literatures have sprang up in the 21st century by scholars [African and western] who, ignoring the historiography of this African art form, only problematically treat found object transmutation into art in Africa as a recent artistic endeavour.

A lot of hasty generalizations and confused contextualizations exist, pointing to the fact that no in-depth research has been conducted to provide clarity to existing gaps in this body of knowledge. Some scholars have struggled with devising a rubric for this art form that will define and categorize it as African. Others have adopted what may be considered a problematic discourse of likening this art form in parallel morphological and ideological terms with European Readymade, Dadaism, Surrealism and Found Object Art, indicating the extent to which scholars have grappled with this subject.

The rubric ‘Recycling in Contemporary African Art’ has been problematically adopted by scholars to holistically describe this African art form in the past two decades, a rubric which Binder (2008) argues that is “misleading”. Binders view point is supported by Van-Dyk who observed that “A lot of artists have made art out of found materials before the word ‘recycle’ was even known in our society… the term Recycling in African Art therefore is a misconception” (Van- Dyk, 2013. P2). This paper reviews recent articles and catalogues which deals with waste transmutation into art, in order to reveal the ambiguities surrounding this modern art genre in Africa, it goes further to posit that for proper understanding to be attained, an in-depth research into found object art is exigent.

Providing solutions to these existing gaps is beyond the scope of this paper, however, in the course of this discourse, insights will be provided into ways through which studies can be effectively directed using cultural perspectivalism of particularised methodological investigation which will enable the possible establishing of this contemporary art convention as African in form, content, and context and, distinguish it from those of western art culture.

2. Articles, Submissions and Gray Areas on waste ‘Upcycling’ into contemporary Africa art:

Four literature sources (three papers and a book) are reviewed in this section to bring to lime light gray areas and gaps in the body of knowledge with regards to found object appropriation in contemporary African art.

African Folk Art Recycled Tin Can Turtle Tanzania

2.1 Globalizing East African Culture: From Junk to Jua Kali Art.

By Margaretta Swigert-Gacheru 2011 Swigert-Gacheru’s paper focuses on waste transformation into art practiced in East Africa, using Kenya as case study. The main idea from an economic and innovative view point purported by the author is that, Jua Kali Ingenuity which culminates into Kenyan Junk Art is a contemporary East African renaissance movement which not only defines a unique genre of art, but contributes to boosting the economy through its bricolage productivity. Also, the author pointed out that Jua Kali is the most dynamic contemporary art form in Kenya which exists as a heighten level of creative ingenuity inspired by the presence of global waste/throw-away and poverty (Swigert- Gacheru 2011. P129).

She further observed that, by virtue of its appropriation of global waste, Jua Kali Junk Art bridges the gap between African and western art worlds by creating a global flow through such hybridization which in turn defies the myth of tribal art and primitive order (Swigert-Gacheru 2011. P127). Another submission made by the author is that, through creative resuscitation of discarded materials deposited in East Africa from Europe, Jua Kali Junk Art combines makeshift creativity with entrepreneurship as a strategy for survival (Swigert-Gacheru 2011. P129). Thus, poverty is cited as the motivation for the innovation of Jua Kali Junk Art in Kenya, whilst various artists inspired by economic hardship are listed. Although Swigert-Gacheru presents evidence of how makeshift creativity in the arts can boost the economy of both the artists and the nation, and also brought to lime light the fact that this ingenuity in East Africa was relegated to the background before now by scholars, the authors classification of what constitutes junk and debris is very confusing and especially problematic because this classification is the proviso for her dubbing of this art form as Junk Art.

The author stated that Junk Art is made from electronic garbage and found natural objects, while environmental debris and old clothes are used in installation (Swigert-Gacheru 2011, p. 131). This classification brings about various unanswered questions which subvert this genre of contemporary African art. For instance, can all art made from junk in Africa be classified as Junk Art? How does natural found object like stones, sea shells etc which are not electronic garbage justify their inclusion in the categorisation Junk Art? Or, does the inclusion of discarded materials into an artwork in this case as the author enumerated (old clothes and environmental debris), automatically transform such works into installation art? Is discarded material Upcycling into art, the-same as installation art? By using media as the criterion for devising the rubric ‘Jua Kali Junk Art’, one will assume that all artworks in East Africa or Africa at large made from found, discarded or readymade

Arts and Design Studies www.iiste.org ISSN 2224-6061 (Paper) ISSN 2225-059X (Online) Vol.12, 2013 43 objects will ideally fall into this category (junk art) but this isn’t the case. Castellote (2011) observed that Olu Amoda uses discarded materials and junk which he prefers to call ‘Re-Purpose Materials’, and that his art be looked at as ‘Repurpose Material Art’. One observes that, Olu Amoda and other African artists even though make use of junk, devise different names for their waste materials and refuse that their artworks be called junk art. This is why Swigert-Gacheru’s adoption of the term junk art to generalize found objects transmutations in Kenya is problematic because other waste appropriation artists in Kenya have different names for their waste materials. Furthermore, by using numerous names for waste materials, devised by different artists as the main trust or generic mode of investigation to explore and interrogate this genre of African art, such line of enquiry as adopted by Swigert-Gacheru and other scholars has only lead to different confused classifications. Two issues stand out from Swigert-Gacheru’s study.

Firstly, the fact that the categorization of what constitutes waste and what falls into the typology debris is problematic means the terminology adopted for this art form is equally problematic. From the author’s submissions, it implies that natural objects, old clothes or environmental debris are excluded from the typology Junk art and by virtue of their waste composition, have become installation art. Also, classifying electronic garbage as the material used for making Junk Art, means they can’t be used in installation art by the author’s submission which makes her proposition very confusing. Secondly the author’s problematic waste categorisation culminates in an inability to differentiate junk art from Installation art. We are thus left with a rubric (Junk Art), which doesn’t even encompass all of Kenya’s found object appropriation, neither does it, reflect or encompass found object transmutation practiced elsewhere in East Africa, nor the entire African continent, and submissions which leaves us unaware of the boundaries between this art (Junk Art) and Installation Art. These unanswered questions and issues stated above, indicates the presence of more than a modicum of gray areas and uncertainties in Swigert-Gacheru’s paper.

2.2 Zimbabwe: The Lost and Found Art.

By Knowledge Mushohwe 2012 This article provides peripheral insights into contemporary African found object appropriation and possesses accompanying obscurities. The main purport of the article is the branding of art that utilizes available waste or ready-mades as ‘Found Object Art’, with the author positing that Zimbabwean artists use found object art as a way of finding meaning in thrash to communicate encoded messages. One major assertion made by the author is that, found object works of art are superlative to the more mundane forms of sculptures which are the old conventions. Arguing that, the punctuated coding system within found object art gives such sculptures a contemplative challenging quality which is an edge over traditional forms of sculpture (Mushohwe, 2012. P1). That additive aesthetic edge is born out of the complex creative process which the author describe as ‘Organised Vandalism’, a process which involves displacing old meanings and forms of objects to create and accord them new forms and meanings (Mushohwe, 2012. P1).

Whilst pointing to the fact that, found object art involves re-contextualisation of objects by dislocating them from their original context and locating them in higher realms of artistic existence, the author equally draws ones attention to the fact that its vandalising nature constitutes a cause for concern as critics question the legality of such practice. Most noticeably and ambiguously so too, is the fact that the author describes and associates found object art in Africa to those of western rebellious art movements. He stated that, “the rebel nature of this found object art is traced to Dadaism and its principal exponent is Marcel Duchamp” (Mushohwe, 2012. p2). Such a bold assertion however, is not proven with adequate facts which make it confusing and problematic as will be enunciated in the next paragraph. Although this paper provides some new insights into this genre of contemporary African sculpture, especially by branding it ‘Found Object Art’ and establishing the fact that, because this art form dislocates discarded objects from their original context to a new creative realm, it assumes contemplative/challenging qualities which accord them aesthetic/creative edge over traditional forms of sculpture such as modelled statues, carvings etc, the article notwithstanding, constitutes further ambiguities and raises various questions.

The author’s likening of this African art convention to Dadaism and purporting that Marcel Duchamp is the founder of Dadaism is shrouded in obscurities without sufficient scholarly evidence to support such claims. Firstly, in as much as Duchamp, Ricaba and Man Ray started anti art in America, Duchamp is not the founder of Dadaism.

Dadaism began in Zurich with artist like Tristan Tzara, Marcel Janco, Jean Arp, etc credited for stemming the process that lead to Dadaism (Hans 1965, Uwe M 1979, Sandqvist 2006). However, Duchamp a pioneer member of anti-art in America originated the ‘Readymade’ which varies from Dadaist Surrealistic objects in various respects. Therefore, his linking of Duchamp’s Readymade and Surrealistic Found Object in same category is problematic. This is because, he implies by such proposition that Duchamp’s Readymade and Surrealist found objects are same art types which from literally evidence is not the case. Duchamp’s Readymade is a conceptual art style arrived at through his disinterested art ideology and experimentation with his ‘Creative Order and Infrathin’ [aesthetics of indifference] emphasizes the intellectual/conceptual content of an artwork over its visual form, to question what defines/constitute art and the entire art institution. Furthermore, such Readymade were unaltered by the artist and only assumed the dignity of art through ‘Dislocated Contextual Description’ (Read 1985, Obalk 2000, Arts and Design Studies www.iiste.org ISSN 2224-6061 (Paper) ISSN 2225-059X (Online) Vol.12, 2013 45 El Anatsui’s works and practice methodology.

Her main submission is that Anatsui’s works frequently interpreted principally in relation to clothe, should instead be read as conceptual contemporary sculpture, and a localized reading be adopted in discussing his practice of incorporating locally available or sourced materials into his art. The author also argues that the rubric ‘Recycling in Contemporary African Art’ used to describe all modern African art involving material reclamation is misleading. Also, the term Found Object Art is said to be inappropriate and a wrong reflection of Anatsui’s practice and works since the artist himself chooses to refer to his materials and works as “Objects the Environment Yielded” (Binder 2008, p.27). Thus, she refers to Anatsui’s works as ‘Transformations’ instead of Found Object Art on the premise that the term ‘Found Object’ was born to art history of a particular European movement not relating to Africa, so the term ‘Transformation’ is more appropriate and not only signifies ownership but also an elevation of the material form of Anatsui’s art.

Citing Dilomprizulike (The Junk man of Africa) who works with discarded materials and always requires his works whether they are transformed or not to be called ‘Junk’ as an example, Binder argues that although many artists in Africa work with discarded materials, they are dissimilar in many ways thus, the dubbing of this art type “Recycling in Contemporary African Art” is cloaked in misconceptions. Another valid contribution in this paper is the advocating for a ‘Localized Reading’ of discarded material appropriation in modern African art as the most appropriate method of investigation for understanding its individual cultural peculiarities, since studies and categorizations with emphasis on material rather than practice methodology is inadequate. (Binder 2008, p.35)

By proposing a ‘Localized Reading’, the author indicates that dissimilarities exist between African artists practicing found object appropriation and between this African art convention and those of western art cultures. This view is supported by Olu Oguibe who observed that “the found object for Anatsui was not complete in and of itself, but required the transfiguring intervention of human agency in order to be translated into sculptural form thus, his works differ from others” (Oguibe 1998, p.48). This is why Binder proposed a localized reading into individual’s practices to be able to understand this art phenomenon.

What this reiterates is the fact that, the individual/cultural ideology, methodology and motivation behind found object creative manipulation are key to understanding the works produced and determines the way we perceive and appreciate such oeuvres. This is because “ones aesthetic responses are often functions of what one’s beliefs and perceptions about an object are” (Danto 1981. p99). Furthermore, the suggestion for a localized reading into this genre of contemporary African art is one that will provide a possible vantage point towards really understanding its modern art qualities and conceptuality. If a localized methodological reading is adopted perhaps alongside cross cultural comparison, then Binder’s argument that the adopted rubric ‘Recycling in Contemporary African Art’ for this art genre by western and African scholars is ambiguous and misleading will properly be understood and addressed.

This is because, only by understanding the practice methodology, cultural inspiration and ideology upon which these works derive the potency for their artistic being that the point of departure can be established that will lead to a comprehensive understanding as to why this art form may be peculiarly African. This said, propositions in Binder’s article raises a lot of issues that further contribute to the obscurity ubiquitous on this subject matter. The author classifies Anatsui’s artworks as ‘Transformations’ and her decision to adopt this terminology as appropriate for this style of art, hinges on two hypothesis; on the one hand is the fact that the found materials are manipulated creatively and the degree of such manipulation is employed as a vital coefficient and on the other hand, the ideology and intended codified messages locked in the piece to be expressed or communicated to the general public.

This paradigm of thinking though insightful, leads to the following lines of questioning; If the degree of manipulation of the discarded is the basis for devising the rubric and classification ‘Transformation’, how is Anatsui’s works different from Jua Kali Junk Art which adopts even deeper levels of material manipulation? By adopting the degree of artistic manipulation of the discarded as the sine qua non for classification, it is apparent that Anatsui’s assemblages or constructions are not different from Kenyan Junk art nor are they different from those of other Nigerian and African artists who work with found objects. On this premise, can those other works be classified too as Transformations? Or, the other way round, Anatsui’s works as Junk Art? Furthermore, by citing technique of making (Construction) as the basis for differentiating Anatsui’s works from others, does it mean that artworks made with this same technique (Assemblage/Construction) using different materials are or not qualified for this sobriquet Transformations?

Another trajectory in Binder’s investigation is the use of intent/metaphoric content (ideology) behind the works as a criterion and reason for underpinning the exclusive categorization of Anatsui’s works as Transformations. If the conceptuality, and metaphoric content are central to terminology devising for art types, then it becomes very confusing why Anatsui’s art should be treated as exclusive from others nor is there any need for discussing and differentiating found object appropriation in Africa under numerous terminologies by scholars because, almost all African artists who engage in this practice uses their art for same purposes; which according to Peek (2012), “is to create aesthetic objects for appreciation or to comment on the present condition of modern societies”. Issues relating to over consumerism, socio-economic and political ills and cultural/moral decadence are regular Arts and Design Studies www.iiste.org ISSN 2224-6061 (Paper) ISSN 2225-059X (Online) Vol.12, 2013 46 themes associated with this art genre in Africa, which is equally the conceptual feature in most postcolonial art.

Which is the aesthetics of humanity that engages with the current and transforming state of human race and defined by such extend of engagement with these concerns (Young 2010). As this is the case, based squarely on ideology and messages conveyed like in most post colonial African art, there are no major differences between Anatsui’s art and those of other African artist who work with waste and convey same contemporary concerns in visual form.

Olu Amada “Trois Jeunes Filles”

Conversely, will it then be a misplaced submission, if Anatsui’s art is called Junk or Found Object art? Or can Jua Kali Junk Art or that of Zimbabwe, those of Delomprizulike or the works of Olu Amoda qualify to fall under the typology Transformations? While Binder’s article provides great insights into Anatsui’s practice, as well as pointing out the fact that, attempting to generalize this genre of African art under the rubric ‘Recycling in Contemporary African Art’ as is often the case is misleading, and further observing that, adopting Euro-American terminologies and likening African found object art tradition to those of the west is a faulty proposition, her assertions in this article equally bellies lots of uncertainties observed above which hasn’t help provide clarifications needed on this subject.

3. Ambiguities Identified

This brief survey indicates the presence of gaps in the knowledge and discourse of found object appropriation in modern Africa. Thus, various issues emanating from the reviewed literature sources are categorised into the following problems subheadings:

3.1 Muddle Terminologies and Classification Problem

From the foregoing, it is apparent that the first ambiguity is the problem of classification. Terminologies such as Junk Art, Trash Art, Found Object Art, Recycled Art, Transformations, Readymade, Objects the environment yielded, Re-purpose Material Art, etc have all been adopted by scholars and artists alike to exclusively discuss and describe their art as products of individual ingenuity even though their artworks like those of others, equally involves the use of same creative methodologies and ideologies for waste and found object appropriation from pop culture into art in Africa. This trenchant attempt at carving out a unique individualistic identity or for ethnic groups or gilds working in this modern African art convention as is the main purport in many literary discourses, is an evidence of classification ambiguity which constitutes into grappling with devising or coining a suitable terminology for this art form which will effectively categorize it as individually exclusive or holistically encompassing to accommodate all African art forms made from readymade or found materials into one typology.

3.2 Hegemonic Exclusion of the Historiography of African Found Object Appropriation

There is also the problem of hegemonic exclusion which is made manifest in the writings of western scholars on African contemporary art. In an attempt to co-opt other art traditions into western art mainstreams, these scholars have refused to investigate or make any references to the origin of found object art in Africa and have concentrated in treating this art form as a recent artistic endeavour. In doing so over the years, that is ignoring the historiography of this African art convention, western scholars have fashioned a discourse on African found object transmutation art, which problematically excludes its historic context (origin). The resultant effect is evidenced in the fact that, even African scholars and critics have adopted this paradigm and thus, problematically treats African found object appropriation as simply an extension of European modernism rather than an art form with any cultural particularities/inspirations or determined by traditional philosophies.

So long as this remains the case and the origin of this art convention in Africa hegemonically excluded from contemporary discourse, the ambiguities surrounding it will continue to impede any comprehensive understanding of its contemporary artistic existence.

3.3 Problem of Contextualization

“There has been much debate surrounding the applicability of Euro-American terminology and classification to systems of art production outside of that specific history. While I am in no way arguing that these terms are not also applicable to practices other than those in Europe and America, I am suggesting a considered application rather than a catch-all grouping of the work as either recycling or found object. The answer is to acknowledge the local while assessing the reciprocity of art practices in a global historical context” (Binder 2008, p36) Binder’s argument is on the premise that, Euro-American terminologies may not effectively reflect or apply to art traditions or styles that fall outside the specific history which generated such terminologies.

If this happens, that is, Euro-American terminologies applied to outside art traditions, it will deprive such art forms or traditions drawn into European art mainstreams, of their true cultural artistic value, identity and conceptuality. Binder’s observation exhibits another level of ambiguity surrounding found object appropriation art in Africa as equally observed in the studies surveyed earlier in this paper, which is the problem of contextualization. Most writers both African and western, have applied Euro-American terminologies to describe this genre of art and in the process contextualize it based on western art movements of the 1900s like Readymade, Found Object, Dadaism etc. This application has not proven to be exceptionally adequate because, the ideological and conceptual frameworks that gave birth to those art forms and movements in the west are not responsible for the innovation.

Arts and Design Studies www.iiste.org ISSN 2224-6061 (Paper) ISSN 2225-059X (Online) Vol.12, 2013 47 of this modern African art form. This means that such Euro-American terminologies cannot effectively reflect and encompass this art type in Africa. Other writers have invented terminologies to treat this art type as uniquely African yet they fall into the pit fall of making references to and likening this African art convention to western terminologies/theories and modernists art movements attempting to justify their course, but in the process, do not provide enough evidence to establish why this art form is uniquely African and different from those of the west. Such multifarious terminology devising and faulty contextualization for exclusivity purposes by these scholars and artists end up excluding others in the continent who work in same style convention and beclouding their art practices in ambiguities.

This problem exists because contemporary African artists and critics as well as their western counterparts have consciously and continuously engaged in the discourse of treating found object art in Africa as a very recent artistic endeavor and have avoided any trace of history to establish the origin of this African art form. If an in-depth research into the origin and growth of found object art in Africa is conducted, then the problem of contextualization of this art genre will be addressed.

4 Conclusion

Whilst found object appropriation into art in Africa has become the core of almost all contemporary creative experimentation, artist’s inventions of numerous rubrics to describe their materials in unison with some African and western scholars, has lead to problematic and obscured submissions. Such problematic propositions as this paper illustrates, has created various levels of obscurities (muddle terminologies/classification problem, problem of western hegemonic exclusion of the historiography of this art form in Africa and the problem of contextualization) which impedes understanding of this modern art convention.

Available literature sources reviewed in this discourse which contextualizes this art type in analogous aesthetic context with European art movements are misleading, while those that treat it as traditional to Africa provide insufficient information to underpin their assertions. Conversely, it is my opinion that for clarity to be attained, an in-depth research into found object transmutation into art in Africa is exigent. The point of departure firstly for such investigation will be to examine the origin and history of found object art in Africa. If the origin is established, it will determine if this art convention is inspired by traditional culture or occasioned by western influences.

Furthermore, such study should adopt a particularized reading system to examine the practice methodologies of African found object appropriation artists, the ideologies and cultural motivations behind this art convention. If a particularized reading is conducted into these three key aspects of African found object art, both the colonial, cultural and contemporary context of waste and found object appropriation into African art will be accorded much needed clarity and the problem of contextualization addressed. If this is done, it will effectively establish it (found object and waste appropriation genre of art in the continent), as African in form, content and context as well as differentiate it from European art movements/art cultures for which it is currently erroneously likened to. Providing solutions to these ambiguities is beyond the scope of this investigation.

Rather, what I have done is simply bringing to lime light the various obscurities surrounding this modern art type and suggesting directions for further investigations. For the Silo, Clement Emeka Akpang, School of Art and Design, University of Bedfordshire, Luton, United Kingdom.

Featured image- Dadaab Refugee Camp :: Behance

References

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Available at :http://www.contemporary-african-art.com/contemporary-african- art.html#sthash.wGlqQyzZ.dpuf….14 Accessed: 3rd June 2013 Hans, R. (1965), Dada: Art and Anti-art. Oxford: University Press. Iversen, M (2004) ‘Readymade, Found Object, Photograph’ Art Journal Vol. 63, No. 2, pp. 44-57 Kart, S. (2009). ‘The Phenomenon of Récupération at the Dak’Art Biennale’ African Arts, 42(3), 8-9. Mushohwe, K. (2012) ‘Zimbabwe: The Lost and Found Art’. The Herald [Online]

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The Metapolitics of Burning Man- ‘Fighting the Lie of The Normal Art Economy’

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OCCUPY BLACK ROCK! THE METAPOLITICS OF BURNING MAN by MARK VAN PROYEN

As annual journalistic rituals go, the annual Time Magazine  “Person of the Year” has been the most enduring barometer of the spirit of the moment of its announcement. For close to a century, the banner was “Man of the Year,” but after Corazon Aquino and Queen Elizabeth smiled at the world from the front cover of that influential publication, gender neutrality became the preferred modality. In 1982 “the computer” received the coveted award, so gender went out the window altogether. But the 2011 award was given to “the protestor,” and the representative image was a masked face of an angry-eyed anonymous person.

TOP Black Rock City from above Photo: AJPN Anthony Peterson BOTTOM Black Rock City seen from Old Razorback Mountain Photo: Peretz Partensky
TOP Black Rock City from above Photo: AJPN Anthony Peterson
BOTTOM Black Rock City seen from Old Razorback Mountain
Photo: Peretz Partensky

This image followed a long year of public demonstrations that started at Cairo’s Tafir Square in late January 2011, spread to the shores of Tripoli and then moved on to Damascus. In September 2011, it arrived in New York’s Zucotti Park, a tiny sliver of public space surrounded on all sides by the world’s most prominent financial institutions. According to the surging multitudes that participated in what would come to be known as Occupy Wall Street, those institutions were evil, and needed to be called into account.It took the major media a full ten days to report the story of the occupation of that little park, although the story had already been thoroughly distributed via social media networks. The movement’s rhetoric was ingeniously crafted for those modes of distribution, and usually took the form of declarative slogans. These proclaimed that the protestors represented the 99 per cent of the American population that would no longer stand for being fleeced by irresponsible government tax policies, a lack of regulation of the financial markets and a vast system of political bribes routinely called “campaign contributions.” Conservative commentators squealed “Class War!” in comic disregard of an OWS placard reminding its readers “they call it class war when we fight back!” From the OWS point of view, that war had been ongoing since Ronald Reagan’s first term in office. When the major media did get around to picking up the story, “What do they want?” or “What are their demands?” were published everywhere, as if the protestors were unintelligible in their calls for economic justice and political fair play. OWS did not give in to the “demand for demands” and this is crucially important, because their movement never was nor is now a conventional exercise in political advocacy. It is much better to describe it as a case of spontaneous socio-cultural upheaval intended to reshape contemporary political priorities into a more ethical form. In an America where an uber- wealthy minority has garnered a proportionally larger piece of the economic pie for decades, one might have anticipated that the protesters would have adopted a more conventional form of utopian rhetoric. But theirs was decidedly pragmatist. They pointed at real problems that could and should be solved in a political practice governed by simple sanity. One sign read, “I don’t mind you being rich. I mind you buying my government out from under me.” The sign referred to the draconian political atmosphere created when the Supreme Court voted five to four to overturn the McCain/Feingold Campaign Reform Act in the now infamous Citizens United vs Federal Election Commission decision of 2010. 3

The real issue at stake in the Occupy Movement’s actions is the control that money exerts over the political process. The movement reveals the plutocratic Achilles heel of neoliberal corporatism’s claim that it is more democratic than its chief rivals in model government. I call these rivals “state capitalism” and “theocratic tribalism,” and intend them to be non-euphemistic names for what are conventionally called socialism and religion-based social organization. Because of its distinctly modern emphasis on upholding the prerogatives of individual political actors, neoliberal corporatism is easy to sell as the ideology of choice for free thinkers. But, as history shows, free thinking never stays free for long, because it too has to live in a marketplace of encouragements and discouragements governed by instrumental rationales that are epiphenomenal to the formation and protection of wealth. In other words, those who have the gold set the standards, regardless of any vision of or obligation to social fair play. This insures that instrumental reason will always protect itself from any utopian vision so that in the realms of conventional discourse, we are always given an “intelligentsia” that functions as the public face of bureaucracy and policy. However “oppositional” its posture of hidden loyalty might be, it will nonetheless always end up fleeing from the Socratic mandate that philosophical thinking helps its aspirants to actually live better. From the point of view of the Occupy movement, that mandate desperately needs to be returned to the core of any thinking that seeks to establish anything resembling a political priority.
When I refer to model forms of governmentality, I am not pointing to any operational political entity, any and all of which are circumstantial admixtures of the three models of neo-liberalism, state capitalism and tribal theocracy all achieving legibility much in the same way that tertiary colors do through the mixture of the primary hues of red, yellow and blue. For example, social democracy is really a blend of neo-liberal corporatism and state capitalism. Another example reminds us that there will always be a black market of goods and subversive ideology working in the shadows of any state capitalist system, or for that matter, within any theocratic tribe. Any system configured around any of these three model forms will also contain latent aspects of one or both of the others, arranged into dominant and subordinate formations. These are always in a perpetual state of change and reconsolidation.
Art Police Badge Black Rock City
They are also always in a state of subtle redefinition, and the factors that shape these redefinitions can sometimes come from surprising vectors. The Occupy Wall Street movement is one such example, surprising in that it refuses to operate according to the rules of normative political advocacy. Whereas the extremely conservative Tea Party rallies held during the previous year were examples of a durable tradition of anti-government American populism, the OWS movement is representative of an equally durable anti-bank populism that has a long-standing place in American history reaching back to early colonial laws against debtors’ prisons. Even though the two groups blamed different entities for the economic misery that swept the land after the 2008 financial crisis, there is an important difference: in an act of support for the second amendment, Tea Party activists often brought guns to their rallies. The only firearms seen at Occupy Wall Street (and its more contentious sister event, Occupy Oakland) were in the hands of over-zealous law enforcement officers. Occupy Wall Street events are significantly more complicated animals than their Tea Party predecessors. The movement has gone far out of its way not to be co-opted by the mass media or any collection of candidates for public office. Conversely, the Tea Party groups were all too happy to be ventriloquized by Rupert Murdoch’s Fox News affiliates. OWS had a justifiable concern that any such affiliation would inevitably lead to the seven stages of political futility: cooptation, division, dilution, pacification, neutralization, disappointment and betrayal. Because of these concerns, what one sees coming out of the Occupy movement is not an exercise of politics defined by the normal terms and conditions of any conventional political science. Rather, it operates as an example of what Alain Badiou has called a Metapolitics, that is, a strategic restaging of the ethical grounds by which political matters are imagined, understood, debated and acted upon. According to Badiou, Metapolitics is a form of “Resistance by Logic.” 4
No group, no class, no social configuration or mental objective was behind the Resistance… there was nothing in the course of this sequence which could have been described in terms of objective groups, be they ‘workers’ or ‘philosophers’…. Let us say that this resistance, proceeding by logic, is not an opinion. Rather, it is a logical rupture with dominant and circulating opinions…. For the contemporary philosophical situation is one where, on the ruins on the doctrine of classes and class consciousness, attempts are made on all sides to restore the primacy of morality. 5
It is particularly interesting to look at Badiou’s metapolitical thesis in light of his larger project to transform the most basic grounds of philosophical inquiry so as to place greater emphasis on ethics. He is well known for proposing a change in the basic categories of philosophy (metaphysics, ethics, logic and epistemology), seeking to restage them as the interdependent “truth procedures” of “art, love, politics and science.” 6
His metapolitical restaging of the truth procedure of political science can be understood to be of a piece with his postulation of an ethical “inaesthetics.” This seeks to deny the meditative subject/object relationship of contemplation with something suffused with “immanence and singularity,” leading to a “transfiguration of the given.” The Occupy Wall Street movement has followed suit on this score, fashioning itself as an immanent and singular metapolitical gesture that has embraced a unique resistance by logic that was and still is a vigorous disruption of logic. It has accomplished this by staging a theatrical moment that calls attention to the withering state of the commons, that being the place of democratic co-existence and rational debate where all citizens can freely enter and exist regardless of their inability to rent media time. And let there be no mistake: in the second decade of the twenty-first century, social media has become the new commons, needing only a shared event to galvanize its attention to the point of putting a wide-ranging discourse about political priorities into play on a vast and unregulated scale. Occupy Wall Street is one such event, one whose time has clearly come. But the model for this kind of actual/virtual exercise in reformulating a common space into a rhetorical congregation had been established two decades earlier in a very different public location that also galvanized a vast virtual community. It too was a brilliantly conceived exercise in a metapolitical “resistance by logic.” That space was and still is the vast Black Rock Desert, a dry lakebed in northwestern Nevada that is administered by the Federal Bureau of Land Management.

Karen on Eileen and George, from Crude Awakening PHOTO: ROGER MINKOW M.D.
Karen on Eileen and George, from Crude Awakening
PHOTO: ROGER MINKOW M.D.

The event was and still is Burning Man. Since the early beginnings of the Internet, many observers have postulated that there was revolutionary potential in its ability to widely and instantaneously distribute unmediated information. Some have proclaimed it to be the new commons, this in recognition of how the forces of neoliberal corporatism have turned the old commons into shopping malls of various kinds, those being places where the subtle doctrine of “pay to play” began to slowly displace all other opportunities for political participation. Burning Man was the first major instance of an organized recognition of this new communal possibility of the digital revolution, and the first to act upon it at any meaningful scale. It did so by “occupying” a piece of public land in a wilderness area, and then configuring itself as a kind of free city where monetary exchange and corporate advertising would not be allowed. Participation, collaboration and self-reliance were upheld as paramount civic virtues, and art was defined and welcomed as the product of any “radical free expression” that any person could devise, regardless of any lack of previous experience or education. When web-browsing software first became available in 1994, Burning Man was already nine years old, and had already been using email networks and virtual bulletin boards to distribute its messages to a growing audience. The emergence of such communications technologies were a natural fit for the event, and even to this day, it has never paid for any advertising beyond the printing and mailing of its own promotional materials. That was the same year that the mass media initially came out to report on the event. The following year, the population doubled, making it clear that a tax on participants was needed to cover necessary costs for staging the event on a much larger sale. Admission tickets were sold, and federal rules were re-written so that the federal Bureau of Land Management could charge the organizers of Burning Man a hefty fee to use the space. Soon after that, much more money was spent in legal fees to support litigation that should have never have come to any court’s attention, if constitutional guarantees of rights to free assembly and self-expression were deemed worthy of any respect. But they weren’t, because it was difficult to convince certain political operators that the self-expressive thing that had engendered Burning Man’s free assembly of pilgrims had anything to do with art. From their point of view, what was happening at an increasingly large scale every year in the Black Rock Desert on Labor Day weekend was much more frightening, in that its almost complete lack of artistic supervision portended something akin to a mass participation Satanic ritual.7 It also threatened to unmask the lie that art had become.

 
I
From the perspective of an art world populated by museum curators, globe trotting art collectors and the toney gallerists working the crowds at international art fairs, Burning Man represents a kind of Special Olympics for Art. To give credence to this view, all any nay-sayer would have to do is attend the event and take in its many starry-eyed unicorns and countless geodesic domes built in service to obscure comic-book deities fashioned from disfigured mannequins. If our nay-sayer were guided by courage and in search of additional evidence to support her initial observation, the next logical destination would be the large indoor exhibition space called the Café, which is usually decorated by the work of a great many amateur photographers and collage artists working on heavy doses of misinformed spiritual pretense and undeserved self-esteem. And yet, as revealing as the Café environment might be, it still pales in comparison to the best place to witness Burning Man’s culture of unfettered creativity, that being the array of unmapped theme camps located away from the Esplanade that separates the event’s semi-circular camping area from the mile-wide no-camping zone at its core. Here, one is liable to find a vast assortment of incomprehensible do-it-yourself efforts at representational makeshiftery, often times manifested in things that look more like distorted family entertainments than the objects of any conventional art history. Looking like the mutant offspring of a theme park and a slum conceived in the prop closet of George and Mike Kuchar’s Studio 8 Production Company, 8 these provisional amalgamations of such materials such as fluorescent fabric and solar powered lava lamps oftentimes seem to allegoricize the traumas and contradictions of a consumer culture blindly addicted to the debt-driven circulation of pseudo-goods and non-services; all saying something troublingly oblique about an America that is amusing itself to death in the age of Walmart.
The real value of Burning Man lies in how it reverses this model. It does so by simply allowing its participants to amuse themselves back to life through their participation in a week of collective catharsis. Fortunately for our dyspeptic pilgrim, the artistic offerings of Burning Man get bathed in a seemingly endless sea of electro-luminescent blinky lights when nightfall arrives, and her attention will then most likely be diverted by an omnipresent soundscape of pulsating techno music punctuated by the explosive flashings of propane fireballs surging into the sky. To this, add the lumbering peregrinations of large, slow moving vehicles that appear as grotesque carnival rides taken from a Dada-themed amusement park, and the picture of a vastly absurd semiotic entity comes close to completion, a relational esthetics
 gesamtkunskwerk 9 that is metaphorically and geographically located at the exact half-way point between San Francisco’s Mission District and Robert Smithson’s Spiral Jetty protruding from the north shore of the Great Salt Lake. It is equal parts game space and refugee camp, and as such, it presents itself as a gargantuan omni-participatory rejoinder to the regulation of subjectivity embedded in the cognitive illusions bred by normative market-defined existence. And for this reason, the ensemble experience of participating in Burning Man provides a much-needed transfiguration of everyday assumptions about what passes for cultural nourishment. Its chief lesson lies in the way that it demonstrates how well a do-it-yourself social economy can work if and when it reframes itself in the terms of a do-it-with-others ethos, and this represents a profound political revelation as well as its chief metapolitical legacy to be later taken up by the Occupy Wall Street movement.
Rather than calling this vast entity by its proper name of Black Rock City, lets give it a more descriptive moniker: the living model of an alternative version of contemporary culture based on advancing an ethical glocalism as the highest of priorities. And then let us note that, in theatrically performing itself as such a model, it also forms itself into a fun house mirror reflection of the absurdities of twenty-first century existence, all-the-while organizing itself as a temporary corrective for many of that century’s social and political shortcomings, especially those pointed toward systematically excluding people from social participation for no good reason. At Burning Man, the stranger is always welcome, and there are always opportunities for any given participant to do things that she never imagined herself to be doing. And in so doing, she oftentimes learns a great deal about the roles that she plays in her everyday life, in turn allowing her to imagine and act upon other roles that might lead her to a better world, at least for herself and maybe for others. Yes, Burning Man does feature a great deal of so-called “New Age” art made by people who might best be called hippies, and yes, almost all of that art is at best a guileless exercise in naïve cluelessness that is scripted not so much by any “radical free expression” as it is by the simplistic recirculation of pop cultural cliché. At worst, it is something on a par with toenail fungus, but even that can be strangely entertaining when contrasted with the vastness of the desert. Indeed, accounting for maybe two- or three-dozen notable exceptions during the past decade, we would have to concede that almost all of the art at Burning Man is as bad as its detractors say that it is. But in admitting this fact, another obvious question comes to the fore: in the great scheme of things, how important is it whether any of it is bad or good? And following from this, another obvious set of questions: who or what are the entities that are empowered to decide on any such differentiation? What values do they represent? What is masked by the authoritative proclamation of said values? And again: why does any of it matter?
Turnabout being fair play, it now becomes obligatory to imagine what an everyburner might make of the current world of contemporary art, resplendent as it is when ensconced within opulent museum architecture and festooned with price tags that are the monetary equivalent of real estate when it is not. It is undeniable that those environments are the sites of a kind of authoritative coldness designed to intimidate the viewer into a kind of passive submission to the historical authority of those things that are beheld within them. It is also undeniable that the large majority of those snobjects contain very little that conveys the kind of truthful generosity that might reward the attention of the serious viewer who is not party to the vested interests that have been influence-peddled into the visible existence of their environment’s adoration.
And so, our everyburner would no doubt ask: given the sorry state of the world, why all the fuss? Presumably, money is part of the equation, although it is difficult for the uninitiated to see exactly how it plays out through the elaborate web of private, corporate and public support that buoy any given museum’s orchestration of the importance effect. As Paul Werner succinctly put it in 2005: “The illusion that art museums could be run for profit like everything else was derived from the notion museums themselves had worked so hard to foster: that art and capital were all one and circulated in the same manner.”10
Werner goes on to quote former Metropolitan Museum director Phillipe de Montebello’s statement that “It is the judicious exercise of the museum’s authority that makes possible the state of pure reverie that an unencumbered esthetic experience can inspire,”11 and then goes on to state that “by the same logic, the absence of ‘a state of reverie’ interferes with ‘the judicious exercise of authority.’” Werner drives this point home when he writes “What Brecht wrote of the Nazis then now applies to cultural apparatus of the twenty-first century: they want to turn the People into an audience. Same policy, different means.”12
Once again, we are reminded of the truism stating that propaganda works best when those who are being manipulated believe that they are acting on their own free will. How you might ask, and the answer is obvious: in the way of the translation of a certain class of objects—let’s call them symbolic commodities—into a certain class of equities. It is easy to suppose that said equity is simply gained from the fortuitous position that any given investor might take amid the normal value/worth fluctuation of the commodity in question. But works of art are not commodities in same way as are barrels of crude oil or tons of copper, nor is it a form of reserve currency as are ounces of gold or silver. The commodity value of a given work of art is instead a function of its status as a reliquary representation of its own myth status, and that is something that continues to be manufactured long after said work of art leaves the studio of the artist who created it. Ultimately, it is the museum that confirms the mythic status of the objects that it chooses to display and collect, creating a fortuitous feedback loop that points to how the world of contemporary art has been transformed into a rather perverse epiphenomena of the financial services industry.
Here is how the normative art economy actually works. Artist a) makes a work of art b) and shows it at the gallery of dealer c), who gets it written about by critic d) and then sells it to collector e) for f) amount of money. Collector e) hangs on to artwork while the reputation of artist a) rises by way others repeating the same machinations described in the aforementioned equation, and then, at a fortuitous moment, she either sells said artwork for profit f)+x , or more normally donates said artwork to museum g), for which she receives donor recognition h), which represents the fair market value that museum g) places on artwork b).
 Because the work has been accepted into museum g)’s collection, its fair market value automatically rises, so that donor recognition h) is actually worth much more that the original purchase price f) of work of art b).  And it is donor recognition h) that collector e) sends to the tax collector as a claim for a tax deductable charitable contribution that reduces collector e)’ s overall tax burden by a significant sum of money (yes, the federal government does support the arts!). The value added portion of this equation lies in how much greater a sum of money donor recognition h) represents in relation to original cost of artwork b), and in many cases that sum is ten or 20 or 100 times the original investment. Thus the economy of art is laid bare, and it can rightfully be called a speculative marketplace in objects that might represent a significantly enhanced tax-deductability that can be exercised at some future juncture, all assuming that museum g) is interested in acquiring work of art b) at any point in time. This means that work of art b) has to fit in with what museum g)  considers to be a worthwhile esthetic experience, based in part on its own vested interest in perpetuating its ability to exercise such consideration. Werner gets that particular point right when he states that “if the Guggenheim, or any other museum, had actually covered its expenses through admissions, that would have harmed its true function: The manufacture of exclusiveness.”13
But, even though money is a major part of the equation, it by no means is all of it. It is worth noting that Werner’s remarks about the museum world point to a specific historical moment, and that moment was defined by the aftermath of the politically motivated reformulation of the National Endowment for the Arts that took place between 1989 and 1994. After that reformulation (which effectively ended government support for the arts in the United States), both the world of the museum and the larger world of contemporary art were momentarily recast as perverse sub-functions of the entertainment industry, with a reigning style called “Pop Surrealism”14
This coming to the fore as the stylistic marker for the art of that brief and bygone moment, and indeed, a perfectly useful and legitimate term that could accurately describe much of the art that one might find at any given iteration of Burning Man. In fact, it is a far more accurate term than the more common ascription pointing to it as new form of “outsider art.” This is so because at that particular moment, there was a major lack of clarity about what was inside or outside of anything other than what financially motivated turnstiles might keep in a state of separation, and in the wake of the cessation of government funding, an increase in audience size became an necessary institutional mandate. Thus, we had an art style that “took its inspiration from popular culture,” meaning that it was trying and failing to be popular culture, rather than the kind of critical comment on it that we saw with 1960s Pop Art. Part-and-parcel with the 1990s embrace of Pop Surrealism as an audience development strategy was another related trend called Postart spectacle, which transformed whole museums into elaborately staged pseudo-operas of the type made famous by Matthew Barney, Paul McCarthy and Martin Kippenberger—artists who all infused Pop Surrealist esthetics with the theme park ambience of an arena rock concert. Finally, it is worth noting that the rhetorical pendent that was hung around the neck of this esthetic shift toward popular entertainment was something called “art writing.” It did not come from the traditional world of art historically trained art critics, but instead issued from a new hybrid discourse that proclaimed itself to be something called “visual studies,” which in many cases was little more than culturally sensitive entertainment reporting—“celebrity porn journalism” to use a deservedly uncharitable term. Its most characteristic feature was a shameless willingness to be used as a tool for institutional audience development.
Nonetheless, in the art world, all of this was brief and transitional, because the focus would again shift in dramatic form after the 9/11 terrorist attacks, making Pop Surrealism suddenly look very anachronistic. Very soon thereafter, Globalism became the new buzzword for a suddenly robust emphasis on a transnational art hailing from under-recognized parts of the world. Presumably, Globalism represented an impetus toward encouraging the embrace of art as an instrument of national liberation, or failing that particular pretense, as a focal point for the kind of cultural lubrication that might politically facilitate desirable access to the labor, natural resources and markets of the developing economies so dearly prized by neoliberal corporatism. It might also represent a politically motivated usage of art as an instrument of pacification, that is, as an administrative technology for deflecting the potential for actual conflict into the containable realm of symbolic conflict. The visible shape that this newly globalized art took on was not manifested in any particular form of artistic cultural production, but instead, was revealed as a relatively new form of cultural presentation called the Mega-Exhibition. These were exemplified by such time-honored extravaganzi as Documenta and the Venice Biennial, but also by a metastasizing host of newer entries into the global mega-exhibition fray, held in such cities as Istanbul and Taipei. These are giant affairs that operate under the guidance of an elite class of internationally renown curatorial directors, and in addition to operating as certification mechanisms for the investability of the art contained by them, they also function as major engines of cultural tourism and transnational ideological propaganda that have been used to enrich the coffers of their host cities. It is also worth thinking about how other imperatives might be in play. As Okwui Enwezor has written, globalism embodies a new vision of global totality and a concept of modernity that dissolves the old paradigm of the nation-state and the ideology of the ‘center,’ each giving way to a dispersed regime of rules based on networks, circuits, flows, interconnection. Those rhizomatic movements are said to operate on the logic of horizontality, whose disciplinary, spatial, and temporal orders enable the mobility of knowledge, information, culture, capital, and exchange, and are no longer based on domination and control… globalism was part of the maturation of a certain kind of liberal ideal, which in its combination of democratic regimes of governance and free market capitalism was prematurely announced as the end of history.15
These attributes are all pointed at the imagination of “a truly unified world system whereby all systems of modern rationalism would finally be properly fused.”16
Of course, the inquiring mind will ask, to what end? And more importantly, to whose end? Of course, answers to these questions are never made clear, perhaps because they cannot be made clear. But it is worth pointing out that the impetus toward the aforementioned fusion is a very different thing than the impetus toward cultural diversity, and it is also interesting to note that among the many topics of cultural identity that have surfaced during the heyday of the global mega-exhibition, the debt obligations of post-colonial nation states is one that almost never comes up. That is because the thing instigating and benefiting from the aforementioned fusion is a global, trans-national banking system that has learned how to use both art and nation states as tools for its own purposes. That much said, we can go on to productively note Burning Man is also a mega-exhibition, but in many ways it is also an anti-mega-exhibition, especially in the ways that it prefigured, mirrored and satirized the “the rhizomatic logics of horizontality, interconnection and dispersal” that have become de rigueur themes in twenty-first century art. III

Electrical Suit sketch by Dr. Austin Richards AKA Dr. Megavolt
Electrical Suit sketch by Dr. Austin Richards AKA Dr. Megavolt

For all of Burning Man’s claims of being a place apart from the default world that it pretends to leave behind, it nonetheless does seem that the event sustains an oblique relationship to that world. During the technologically addled 1990s, Burning Man seemed to be prophetically far ahead of the cultural environment surrounding it. The chief reason for this was its far-reaching imagination of the ways that new technology could recast how social relations might be reconfigured in critical relation to what Naomi Klein would later call “Disaster Capitalism.”17

In those days, the presiding spirit of Burning Man was not any getting back to the mythical garden that so captured the imagination of the Woodstock generation so much as it was a celebration of various kinds of real and imagined love taking place amongst the post-apocalyptic ruins of rampant military adventurism and financial and ecological unsustainability. But in 2001, the specter of real apocalypse became traumatically evident when the 9/11 terrorist attacks ushered in an unfunded war wedded to the draconian trappings of the National Security State. Suddenly, the world caught up with Burning Man’s parsing of the utopian and dystopian themes of technologically-assisted social capitalism, making them seem redundantly similar to the mass media narratives about a brave new cyber-economy as well as the emergence of other forms of Postart spectacle that had come into prominence in the art world. The fact that Burning Man had become the putative darling of a kind of trivializing mass-media condescension did not help, and over time the event become more-and-more indistinguishable from the “wild and crazy” caricatures that were heaped upon it. By 2007, the event had clearly become a victim of its own clichés of flagrant silliness, mired in a repetitious cycle of nostalgia for the exuberant 1990s. Soon after that, that the world would pass it by, because in 2008, the story would take another turn, a downturn to be exact. The financial crisis that exploded in October of that year once again recalibrated the larger terrain of cultural understanding, and the urgency of that moment began to make Burning Man look every bit as indulgent and frivolous as it did the institutional art world. Soon thereafter, a new concern for the politics of social justice had come into the foreground, eclipsing the themes of alternative identity and self-sustaining community-of-desire that were such prominent features of the event during its 1990s heyday. It was time to pass the metapolitical torch of the do-it-with-others ethos so that a very different fire might be lit with the aid of a few well-placed Falstaffian pitchforks.
Returning to Badiou, we read that the ethical understanding of justice is something quite specific. It is based on the following injunction: “to examine political statements and their proscriptions, and draw from them their egalitarian kernel of universal signification.”18
If Burning Man has done nothing else, it has certainly created an Archimedean ground from which such an examination might proceed, much more successfully than anything that happened in the institutional art world during the same time period. Following from this recognition, we might then ask how the metapolitical kernel of Burning Man was passed to Zucotti Park, as if, in an age of social media, the assertion and exertion of any influence on anything can somehow be supposed to not be operable until proven otherwise. We know that one of the key instigators of the OWS movement was Micah White, the Berkeley-based co-editor of the Vancouver-based journal Adbusters , therefore a Bay Area connection is easily made, although it is not clear if White was in any way influenced by Burning Man. Because there is a very large contingent of Burning Man participants that hail from New York City, one could easily suppose that their experience of the event might have had something to do with the encampment at Zucotti, especially since Occupy Wall Street initially took place just ten days after the conclusion of the 2011 Burning Man event. But there is one important kernel of indisputable influence that clearly stands out, and that is Bill Talen, who is better known in his performance guise of Reverend Billy of the Church of Stop Shopping, a New York-based performance group that has extensively toured the United States and is the subject of two widely circulated documentary films. What makes Talen’s performances so timely for this discussion is his evocation of the tropes of a theocratic tribalism that are severed from the politics of hate and fear, all enacted in service to the kind of communitarianism and pleas for justice that earmarked the earliest Christian communities of the second century. Obviously, those same values are in short supply among so-called evangelical churches populated by legions of CINOs (Christians-in-Name-Only), reminding us of how deeply perverted the gospel message has become in twenty-first century America. The fact that the more organized churches proclaiming allegiance to the gospels have been outdone on this score by a performance artist should be cause for concern, outrage and cruel mockery. Starting in 2002, the 30-member band and gospel choir of the Church of Stop Shopping has regularly performed at Burning Man, putting on a rousing revival show that is a stunningly convincing mimic of similar services consecrated to “the old time religion” a la Elmer Gantry, only at Burning Man, it was comically staged under the shadow of an 40-foot-tall effigy that echos the real old old old time religion of Neolithic cult worship.
At the forefront of the Church’s performance is Talen’s character named Reverend Billy, who preaches in passionate, Elvis Presley-inflected voice about the evils of consumerism and the tragic human cost of debt-driven consumption, backed up by a gospel chorus and small orchestra featuring a church organ. The chorus sings songs about the virtues of an economic democracy that is described as a promised land, and the mood is always persuasively festive, even joyous.
Talen’s passionate and eloquent sermons come across like rhapsodic poems made from the many fragments of Occupy Wall Street signage, and in fact, Talen did perform (sans choir) at the 17 September 2011 beginning of OWS, just a few days after returning to New York from Burning Man. Subsequently, he performed with the choir at Zucotti Park on several other days, to audiences that grew ever larger during the month of October. These were rousing and inspirational shows that galvanized the attention of ever-growing crowds in a way that gave them a coherent group identity, meaning that, for a few brief moments, the Occupy protesters found themselves attending a church of their own politically inclusive revelation, which allowed them to see themselves as being a part of something much larger than themselves.
As always, Talen’s performances were a brilliant obversion of the pernicious role that religion has come to play in American politics, where so-called “values” candidates have been using church affiliation for decades as the preferred excuse for supporting candidates and policies that embody the hateful opposite of Christian morality. Such ethically duplicitous rhetoric also has a metapolitical name, and that name is Neoconservatism when practiced by Americans who identify with Judeo-Christian tradition, and fundamentalism when practiced by others. Either way, the word “fundamental” applies in all of its many nuances, especially the one that highlights its definitional opposition to enlightened sophistication. Essentially, Neoconservatism is a subtle theologicization of the neoliberal doctrine that defines the subject along the secular lines of economic self-interest, but it deviates from that doctrine in that it assumes that self-serving moral edicts are required when the economic interests of cultural Others begins to gain too quickly in relation to the economic self-interest of the culturally entitled.
Talen’s Reverend Billy performances are so entertaining and well executed that it is easy to miss the seriousness of the metapolitical critique embodied in them. Certainly, they provide a thoughtful and dramatic critique of the empathy deficit disorder that is bred by neoliberal corporatism, and they command and entice their audiences to insist on ethical correctives. As for the relation of his work to his experience of Burning Man, Talen himself has a clear vision of the similarity between Burning Man and the OWS movement. He writes: Burning Man and Occupy Wall Street share this: we discovered that living together is a performance with long-range power. How we live—people watch and learn. Then they live back at us and we change too. We experience the decisions of how to live as drama, and (we found out) as protest—more than traditional theater which rarely has electrical charge these days. For years we were the butt of journalist jokes, calling us refried 60s protesters—angry people carrying signs and chanting. All that was wiped away by the glorious arrival of Occupy, which was the simple notion of living together in public, in a park under the scrapers of Wall. Sharing food, stories, making media, figuring out laws, discussing health, feeding each other—LIVING TOGETHER is the devastating protest form of our day. Burning Man’s fascination—you see it around the world—flows from living together under arid desert conditions for a week. BM also chucks the conventional stage and finds a new charged theater in sashaying in outrageous costumes and nakedness in front of 50,000 people who are doing the same thing back at you. Burning Man is great theater—leaves Broadway in its playa dust. And Wall Street guys are there too—wearing fluorescent underwear while they check out a 100-foot-long chandelier. How change comes to the world from these two forms of theatrical living— stay tuned! It has begun.” To this I can only say Amen.
notes- *apologies for layout issues, text spaces have been modified to allow for full citation listings.

1.

 Alain Badiou,
 Metapolitics
(1998), translated by Jason Barker, London: Verso Books, 2005, p. 19.
2.
 Jean Tingley, “On Statics,” (text from a leaflet dropped near Dusseldorf in 1959. Recorded in
The Diary of Anaïs Nin, Volume VI 
, edited by Gunther Stuhlman, New York: Harcourt, Brace and Jovanovich, 1966 p. 284.
3.
 See Adam Schiff, “The Supreme Court Still Thinks That Coroporations Are People,” (July 18, 2012)
The Atlantic Monthly 
; http://www.theatlantic.com/politics/archive/2012/07/the-supreme-court-still-thinks-corporations-are-people/259995/court-still-thinks-corporations-are-people/259995/
4.
 Badiou, Op. Cit., p. 5.
5.
 Ibid, pp. 5–6.
6.
 For a synopsis of Badiou’s key claims, see his
Manifesto for Philosophy 
, translated by Norman Maderaz, State University of New York Press, 1999. Further references to Baudiou’s ideas are extracted from this source, unless otherwise cited.
7.
 Claims of Burning Man being a socially dangerous satanic ritual were made on the 18 May 1998 broadcast of Pat Robertson’s 700 Club program on the
Christian Broadcast Network 
.
8.
 George Kuchar (1942–2011) and Mike Kuchar (b.1942) were San Francisco-based underground filmmakers whose low budget works used and misused exaggerated gender clichés to satirize the most preposterous aspects of conventional “sinematic” exposition. George Kuchar’s most well known film was titled
Hold Me While I’m Naked 
, 1966, while Mike Kuchar is best known for his 1966 film titled
Sins of the Fleshapoids.
 In 1997, they collaborated on a book of comic reminiscences titled
Reflections from a Cinematic Cesspool 
 (San Francisco: Zanja Press). Here we might note a persistent albeit unconfirmed rumor that San Francisco’s long-running stage play titled
Beach Blanket Babylon
was originally indebted in some way to the George Kuchar esthetic. In Jennifer Kroot’s 2009 documentary film titled
It Came From Kuchar,
 it was revealed that Bill Griffith’s comic character named
Zippy the Pinhead
was modeled on George Kuchar.
9.
 
Gesamtkunskwerk 
 literally means “total work of art.” It was coined by Richard Wagner to describe his view opera production as a synthesis of all of the arts. See his
The Artwork of the Future 
 (1849, translated by William Ashton Ellis) at http://users.belgacom.net/wagnerlibrary/prose/wagartfut.htm. “Relational Esthetics” was a term originally coined by Nicholas Bourriard in 1986 as a way of calling attention to certain artistic practices that were/ are less concerned about the creation of a final product than they are about the social processes of inclusion and participation leading up to it. Bourriaud defined the approach simply as “a set of artistic practices which take as their theoretical and practical point of departure the whole of human relations and their social context, rather than an independent and private space.” (p. 113). See Nicholas Bourriard,
Relational Esthetics , Dijon, France:  Les Presses du Reel , 2002. For a critique of Bourriard’s thesis, see Claire Bishop, “Antagonism and Relational Aesthetics,”
October 110, Fall 2004. Bishop points out that “The curators promoting this ‘laboratory’ paradigm—including Maria Lind, Hans Ulrich Obrist, Barbara van der Linden, Hou Hanru, and Nicolas Bourriaud—have to a large extent been encouraged to adopt this curatorial modus operandi  as a direct reaction to the type of art produced in the 1990s: work that is open-ended, interactive, and resistant to closure, often appearing to be ‘work-in-progress’ rather than a completed object. Such work seems to derive from a creative misreading of poststructuralist theory: rather than the interpretations of a work of art being open to continual reassessment, the work of art itself  is argued to be in perpetual flux. There are many problems with this idea, not least of which is the difficulty of discerning a work whose identity is willfully unstable. Another problem is the ease with which the ‘laboratory’ becomes marketable as a space of leisure and entertainment. Venues such as the Baltic in Gateshead, the Kunstverein Munich, and the Palais de Tokyo (in Paris) have used metaphors like ‘laboratory,’ ‘construction site,’ and ‘art factory’ to differentiate themselves from bureaucracy-encumbered collection-based museums; their dedicated project spaces create a buzz of creativity and the aura of being at the vanguard of contemporary production. One could argue that in this context, project-based works-in-progress and artists-in-residence begin to dovetail with an‘experience economy,’ the marketing strategy that seeks to replace goods and services with scripted and staged personal experiences. Yet, what the viewer is supposed to garner from such an ‘experience’ of creativity, which is essentially institutionalized studio activity, is often unclear.” (p. 52) Bishop goes on to quote Bourriard: “It seems more pressing to invent possible relations with our neighbors in the present than to bet on happier tomorrows” (p. 54;
Relational Esthetics,p. 45), Then she adds “This DIY, microtopian ethos is what Bourriaud perceives to be the core political significance of relational aesthetics.” (p.54). It is worth noting that there has never been much difference between Bourriard’s assertion of “Relational Aesthetics” art practices and Allan Kaprow’s much older advocacy of Happenings, the first principle of which being “the line between the Happenings and daily life should be kept as fluid as possible,” so that “the reciprocation between the handmade and the ready-made will be at its maximum power.” (Allan Kaprow, “The Happenings are Dead: Long Live the Happenings!” (1966) in Jeff Kelly ed., The Blurring of Art and Life: The Collected Writings of Allan Kaprow , Berkeley: University of California Press, 1996, p. 62). The key point lies in how both Relational Esthetics and the earlier Happenings resurrect the tenants of Lukasian social realism by substituting real-time face-to-face encounters for the older tropes of representing and/or narrating ideas of “class consciousness.” More recently, similar activities have again rebranded themselves as “Social Practice Art,” as a way of emphasizing more specific political ambitions. See Nato Thompson, Living as Form: Socially Engaged Art from 1991 to 2011,
Cambridge, MA. MIT Press, 2012. But even here, the obvious equation of institutionally supported “social practice art” with inefficacious postures of mild political concern (scented with the bad faith of loyal opposition) are never directly addressed. An important early instance of a Relational Esthetics artwork was San Francisco-based artist Tom Marioni’s Drinking Beer with Friends is the Highest Form of Art 
, a weekly relational esthetics performance that has been ongoing since the mid-1970s. Clearly, San Francisco-based Burning Man is far and away the largest and most complex example. Neither was mentioned in Bourriard’s famous book.
10.
 Paul Werner,
Museums, Inc.
, Chicago: Prickly Paradigm Press, 2005, p. 9.
11.
 Ibid., p. 15.
12.
 Ibid
.,
 p. 58.
13.
 Ibid
.,
p. 41.
14.
 Pop Surrealism was the name of a 1998 exhibition organized by Richard Klein, Ingrid Schaffner and Dominique Nahas held at the Aldrich Museum in Ridgefield Connecticut. It contained the work of artists such as Peter Saul, Mike Kelly, Paul McCarthy, Lisa Yuskavage, Ed “Big Daddy” Roth, John Currin and Robt. Williams, and could be said to have reprised and expanded upon an earlier exhibition titled Helter
Skelter that was organized in 1992 by Paul Schimmel at the Museum of Contemporary Art in Los Angeles. The monthly publication Juxtapose (founded by Williams in 1994) has done much to promote many of the artists associated with the Pop Surrealism movement, but the publication’s claim that the movement originated in southern California is erroneous. The real historical sources of the Pop Surrealism movement is found in the earlier work of Bay Area-based artists such as Peter Saul and George Kuchar, as well as the underground comics movement that was based in the same area during the middle 1960s. Chicago artists of the early 1970s such as Jim Nutt, Gladys Nielson and Karl Wirsum were also important early influences. The most important aspect of the Pop Surrealism movement lied in its embrace of a populist turn in art that was responsive to circumstances related to the political controversies surrounding government funding for the arts. In 1998, the National Endowment for the Arts published the findings of a multi-year research project that concluded that the arts were widely perceived to be irrelevant and elitist. The project was called American Canvas 
. See Gary O. Larson,
American Canvas: An Arts Legacy for Our Communities 
, Washing ton D.C.: US Government Printing Office, 1998.
15.
 Okwui Enwezor, “Mega-Exhibitions and the Antinomies of a Transnational Global Form,” in Andreas Huyssen ed.,
Other Cities, Other Worlds: Urban Imaginaries in Globalizing Art 
, Duke University Press, 2008, pp. 148–149.
16.
 Ibid
.,
p. 149. In an anonymous introductory remark made in the online journal
Italian Greyhound , we read that “Enwezor uses as an illustration of the serious and thoughtfully considered nature of righteous internationalists in fomenting new representations in academic programs and curated collections by pointing to a think tank he participated in 1997 in Italy whose members came from Brazil, Turkey, Cuba, Australia, South Africa, and Thailand, amid other countries. These panelists endeavored to recode the complex dialectics between globalization and the long process of modernization towards market basked-economies on the course of which much of the developing world was set since the early days of decolonization. Enwezor reports that this group drew and reached no conclusions other than to continue meeting at subsequent retreats and biennale exhibitions.” The same anonymous interlocutor also summarizes a response formulated by art critic George Baker to Enwezor’s essay that takes exception to its optimistic assessment of the equalizing nature of enormous international art fairs, arguing that “the only valid definition of globalization is one that must include an acknowledgement of the invasiveness of multinational corporations.” Baker defiantly asks “who and where is the audience for mega-exhibitions?” echoing Enwezor’s use of the words “spectatorship” and “spectacle.” The roving biennale, Baker says, “creates a traveling fair for global elites, excluding both artists and the local populations where such exhibits take place.” Baker dismisses Enwezor’s Trauma and Nation model concepts, claiming instead that “shows such as Documenta existed for years merely as a forum for exported American art and views of art.” Baker further argues “mega-exhibits are in fact created, like the Olympics, with the intent of defining, promulgating, and delineating American culture.” Baker asks “why it is that biennials,” (which are, he says, “essentially the same showcasing of many of the same works repeated in different time zones”) “are the new model for counter-hegemonic spectatorship?” (See the summary provided at athttp://italiangreyhounds.org/errata/2007/06/13/“mega-exhibitions-and-the-antimonies-of-a-transnational-global-form”-by-okwui-enwezor-vs-“the-globalization-of-the-false-a-response-to-okwui-enwezor”-by-george-baker/)
17.
 See Naomi Klein,
The Shock Doctrine: The Rise of Disaster Capitalism,
New York: Henry Holt &Co., 2007.
18.
 Badiou, Op. Cit., p. 17.
19.
 Bill Talen, Email correspondence with the author, 7 April 2012.
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Monolith
, 2012
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Playa Play 
, 2000
Greeter Station 
, 1997
Double Expusure 
, 1995
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Guiding Light 
, 1999
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Ravishing Raven 
, 2000
Desert Rat 
, 1997
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Dust Cloud 
, 1996
Tableau Vivant 
, 1994
Water Woman 
, 1997

 

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