Events__________________________________________
"From Healing the Divide to Taking a Side," a lecture and conversation as part of Curatorial Design: Workshop 4 - Designing for Co-habitation
Canadian Centre for Architecture
Montreal, QC, Canada
September 23, 2015
What if our first question is not “how do we design for cohabitation,” but “who are we, and what, if we are to live together, needs to be done?” What would it mean to build a "space for life" premised on the elimination of Rio Tinto and its world? To pursue this line, this talk outlines three different principles of unity that have informed museum practice at various times and in various places, and which have reinforced specific relations between humans and nonhumans, civilization and its others: fascist unity, liberal unity, and communist unity.
“Language as a Site of Struggle: A Conversation with Lou Cornum, Jeffers Lennox, and Steve Lyons”
@ Ezra and Cecile Zilkha Gallery
Wesleyan University, Middletown, CT, USA
November 11, 2021
The "language in common" can be understood as a call for the left to create signs, symbols, and traditions that can both unify the movement and withstand attempts at co-option by the state and capital. The precedent for such an undertaking can be found in Indigenous cultures of protest and resilience, which have served to unite a movement without essentializing its participants.
A live conversation in the Ezra and Cecile Zilkha Gallery on this topic featuring Andrew W. Mellon Postdoctoral Fellow in Native American Studies Lou Cornum, Associate Professor of History Jeffers Lennox, and artist and art historian Steve Lyons, a core member of Not An Alternative / The Natural History Museum, and co-author of the November 2020 e-flux Journal article "The Language in Common."
"Natural History is a Blockade"
@ NO WORK, NO SHOP:
Socio-Environmental Imagination and Pedagogies of Action
Vera List Center for Art and Politics, New York, NY, USA
April 26, 2021, 11am–1pm
Struggles for cultural heritage are not simply about cultural history and preservation, nor are they reducible to the frameworks of climate or environmental justice. They are about environmental harm and public health, but also about the making and sustaining of a world. When people organize around objects they regard as sacred, they activate these objects as concrete manifestations of an idea, of a cultural relation between people and place that is incommensurate with the logic of extraction that governs the capitalist world.
"Red Natural History"
@ School of Philosophy and Art History Seminar Series
University of Essex, Essex, UK
February 25, 2021, 3-5pm GMT
What if we understood natural history not as an intrinsically colonial enterprise, but as the site of struggle between two incommensurate relations to the world—one governed by a logic of extraction and enclosure and another that relates to the world as a world in common that cannot be enclosed? This lecture sketches out a critical framework to examine this operative split in natural history, exploring the ideas, histories, and practices that form what Not An Alternative proposes to call Red Natural History: a natural history built not on colonial or capitalist relations, but on a comradely and reciprocal relation to land, life, and labor.
"Museum as Movement Infrastructure"
@ Barricading the Ice Sheets, organized by Oliver Ressler
Camera Austria, Graz, Austria
February 29, 2020, 2-7pm
Today, the climate movement is stronger than ever. Polite protest is a thing of the distant past. Activists all over the world use mass civil disobedience tactics to disrupt climate-wrecking activities. This conference brings together a group of internationally respected climate movement protagonists working between art and activism. The artist-activists will discuss the movements’ methods, purposes, its past and future, speaking from the perspective of the fields in which they are personally most active. They will describe the strategies that have succeeded in breaking through the sophisticated strategies used by corporations to make pollution, emissions, and responsibility invisible. In bringing together artists involved in activist practices, the program deliberately calls into question the widespread habit of treating “art” and “activism” as distinct categories, professions or “silos,” when in practice the “affinity” between the two is such that they often overlap and sometimes cannot meaningfully be separated at all.
"Museums, Neutrality, and the Red Threat"
@ Art and the Spectacle of Ideology, curated by iLiana Fokianaki
Vera List Center for Art and Politics, New York, NY, USA
February 22, 2020, 11am–5pm
Following the first exhibition of the Rojava Film Commune in the United States, which opens at e- flux curatorial platform on the 21st of February 2020, Vera List and e-flux co-organize a day of discussions and screenings that respond to the exhibition and the general practice of the commune as one informed and formulated through political ideology. Their work poses many questions in relation to the role of political ideology in artistic practice, as they use cultural production as a space to engage and shape ideological compositions. This one-day public event at Vera List will address this particular aspect of cultural practice, that sits between activism and artistic expression, and springs from a concrete ideological framework.
Through the discussion, we explore what is the role of ideology in art in the twenty-first century, and what new toolbox emerges through ideologically informed cultural practices to confront our turbo-capitalist present. Can some of the key ideas of political experiments from indigenous and revolutionary struggles (like the Rojava revolution) that are built on equality, feminism, social ecology, and anti-capitalism positionings, be useful for cultural practices in the Western context as well?
“Inventing the Radical”
@ Training for the Future, organized by Jonas Staal and Florian Malzacher
Ruhrtriennale Festival, Bochum, Germany
September 20-22, 2019
In a time of increasing global crises in politics, economy and ecology, dystopia has turned into the new norm. Training for the Future is a utopian training camp where audiences are turned into trainees to pre-enact alternative scenarios and reclaim the means of production of the future. Its faculty of trainers consists of futurologists, progressive hackers, extraterritorial activists, transnationalists, theatre makers, artists, and many others, each of which offer concrete exercises in alternatives to present-day crises.
Not An Alternative’s training, “Inventing the Radical,” proposes strategies for deploying myth and conspiracy in the production of social movement power.
“Institutional Splitting”
@ Socialism in Our Time, presented by Historical Materialism and Jacobin
James Baldwin School, New York, NY, USA
April 13-14, 2019
Faced with the limitations of after-hours socialism under the conditions of unending work, political theorists have returned to the question of organization, considering what forms of organization and practices of organizing can hold open the gap of possibility created by temporary activist mobilization. This lecture turns to the unfolding history of insurgency within institutions of science, education, and natural history in the US to attend to the risks and possibilities of institutional splitting—the practice of organizing inside and against existing institutional structures—as a tactic for Left activism today. From the Sociology Liberation Movement, Science for the People, and other radical academic caucuses operating in the 1960s and 1970s, to the Undercommoning Project, The Natural History Museum, the Architecture Lobby, and the recently re-instituted Science for the People, insurgent academics, architects, scientists, and museum workers have occupied the threat associated with a Left-wing insurgency, forging what one 1951 Rand Corporation publication called “organizational weapons.” I argue that the effect of such forms of institutional splitting should be understood as both actual and symbolic. In representing the insurgent threat to capitalist power, such forms of activism draw lines through institutional work sites, reappropriate institutional resources for anti-capitalist struggle, and restore the promise of institutionality largely abandoned in the post-1968 era.
“Rezoning the Alternative”
@ Humanities Center Colloquium Series
Humanities Center, University of Pittsburgh, Pittsburgh, PA, USA
March 28, 2019
Rezoning the Alternative explores the history of alternative art spaces in New York City, asking how the austerity politics instituted in the aftermath of the city’s 1975 fiscal crisis impacted the organizational forms and institutional positions adopted by artists and cultural organizers. Drawn from this larger book project, “Chapter One: Contesting the Alternative” sets the stage, tracing some of the key historical factors that led to the emergence and gradual transformation of New York’s alternative arts infrastructure over the course of the 1970s. After an exploration of the pre-history to the alternative spaces, I map the range of organizational models, focuses, and ideas of the “alternative” expressed by many of the institutions, organizations, and groups composing the first wave of alternative art. I then turn to the earliest efforts to historicize the alternative spaces in the late 1970s—a period in which widely accepted narratives about the failures of the alternative spaces first emerged. Examining the complex and contradictory ways in which the early alternative spaces inherited the legacy of the counterculture and social activism of the late 1960s, this chapter exposes a crisis at the root of the alternative arts infrastructure that will reappear in different guises throughout the book.
“Ecology’s Other”
@ History of Art and Architecture Colloquium Series
Department of History of Art and Architecture, University of Pittsburgh, Pittsburgh, PA, USA
February 20, 2019
Contemporary concepts of ecology map human and nonhuman, local and planetary forces into complex systems of inter- or intra-action, effectively subsuming or eliminating the theoretical concept of the outside. In the Anthropocene, there is no nature beyond the human. The whole world has been dominated by the forces of capitalism. There is no alternative. Challenging the assimilative tendency at the core of much contemporary ecological thought, we argue that every ecosystem is constructed around an exclusion—a hole within the whole, a repressed space of conflict that, if embraced, can serve as the political ground from which to undermine the system itself. By pointing to the repressed exterior pressing against the edges of the social-economic-ecological system, this lecture will elaborate the theoretical basis for an environmental politics capable of assembling the unassimilable.
“The Split in Ecology”
@ Ecology as Intrasectionality: Radicalizing Arts of Climate Justice, organized by T.J. Demos and Emily Eliza Scott
New York University, New York, NY, USA
February 14, 2019
A roundtable discussion with artists Not An Alternative / The Natural History Museum (represented by Steve Lyons), Elaine Gan, Terike Haapoja, Sarah Kanouse, MTL Collective. Organized by TJ Demos and Emily Eliza Scott, hosted by Contemporary Art Research Collaborative, Department of Art & Art Professions at NYU Steinhardt, and Experimental Humanities + Social Engagement at NYU GSAS.
“The Language in Common”
@ Art x Human Rights: Propaganda, Power, Protest, organized by Northwestern University Community on Human Rights
Northwestern University, Evanston, IL, USA
January 13-15, 2017
This panel explores the intersection of art and activism by introducing three artists who use their work to resist injustice. By examining the successes and limitations of various movements and mediums, this panel will provide insights for young artist-activists to bring back to their own causes and communities.
“Institutional Liberation as Insurgent Practice”
@ Universities Art Association of Canada Conference
UQAM, Montreal, QC, Canada
October 27-30, 2016
This paper explores the political organizing advanced within the Not An Alternative working group: the development of counter-power through a struggle over institutions and institutional infrastructure, a praxis that is operative for instance in the coordinated efforts of UK and US-based activist art groups Art Not Oil (UK), Liberate Tate (UK) and The Natural History Museum (US). These groups return to tight organization, long-term planning, and the consolidation of left political power. They see existing institutions as vital sites of collective infrastructure, treating them as base camps for political struggle. Moving beyond the analytical or deconstructive gesture of institutional critique, the set of practices I describe form an organized insurgency inside and against institutions representing power.
"Oil Out of Culture"
@ Les Laboratoires d’Aubervilliers and La Générale, Paris, France
December 4-8, 2015
In the midst of the climate crisis, an international movement of arts/activist collectives has taken shape around a common demand to cultural institutions: cut all ties to fossil fuels. Railing against BP’s sponsorship of Tate Galleries in London, Shell’s sponsorship of climate change programming at London Science Museum, Total’s sponsorship of the Louvre, and climate denier David Koch’s position on the board of the American Museum of Natural History, these groups are taking aim at the role cultural institutions play in variably green-washing or “art-washing” fossil fuel sponsors--laundering their public image, while diverting attention away from their relentless environmental and human rights abuses around the world.
On the occasion of the 21e UN climate summit in Paris, COP21, Les Laboratoires d’Aubervilliers and La Générale will co-host a two-day meeting with groups from 6 or 7 countries around the world that are all doing "cultural divestment" work, borrowing methodologies from Institutional Critique to call on cultural institutions to cut ties to sponsors from the fossil fuel industry. Some of these groups are Liberate Tate (UK), BP or not BP? (UK), and Not An Alternative (US).
Drawing on strategies culled from the artistic practice of institutional critique and activist organizing in equal measure, they suggest that we should recalibrate our relationship to institutions--to not only imagine ways of opposing, dissolving, or drawing lines of flight from existing institutional power, but also to imagine how existing institutional forms can be occupied and used as tools for the production of culture and collective solidarity against the corporations that bare the greatest responsibility for climate change.
"The Museum Divide: Beyond Institutional Critique"
@ The Natural History Museum - Grand Opening
Queens Museum, Queens, NY, USA
September 14, 2014
Institutional critique expresses and comes up against the limits of the institution. When the practice first came to the fore, artists were responding to the institution as a repressive and bureaucratic body. The institution denoted an exclusive, hierarchic, and unaccountable site marked by seemingly intractable power relations. At the same time, its critique indicated that the institution was worth fighting for as a site that both represented and supplied basic societal infrastructure. More recently, market pressures on a wide array of social and cultural institutions have intensified. Instead of operating through mechanisms of centralized control, contemporary power relations are fragmented, decentered, networked, and privatized. Institutions are crumbling, losing power and resources. This disintegration of collective infrastructure reveals that no institution was ever as unified or total as some of its critics implied, relying instead on fluid and uneasy combinations of ideals, limits, and possibilities.
The panel looks at ways artists and activists borrow the vocabulary of the museum and in so doing extend the political potential already dividing the institution from within. Such artistic practices of political extension may be invited or uninvited, done in collusion with curators or to their chagrin. As they raise the question of who speaks on behalf of the institution, they activate a split, suggesting ways to work within as well as against—affirming the value of the institution as a resource for the production of culture, collectivity and solidarity.
