One month after the obscure
Tuesday morning of 9/11, John Berger writes in, ‘To Try and Understand’, the foreword
to novelist, essayist and activist, Arundhati Roy’s, the algebra of infinite justice.
‘I’m tempted to say that the world has never been more confused. Yet this
would be untrue. The world has never had to face such a global confusion. Only
in facing it can we make sense of what we have to do. And this is precisely
what Arundhati Roy does in the pages which follow. She makes sense of what we
have to do. Thereby offering an example. An example of what? Of being fully
alive in our world, such as it is, and of getting close to listening to those
for whom this world has become intolerable.’[1]
Talking of her native India, Arundhati Roy makes a very strikingly
vital and humane observation that seems to escape all realities where
opportunist governments aim to keep citizens under hardhearted control. Following
the order in 1998 of India’s then Prime Minister, Atal Bihari Vajpayee, to go
ahead with the nuclear tests due to a ‘deteriorating security environment,’[2]
Arundhati Roy brings crucial reminders from India to our attention. ‘We are a
nation of a billion people… More than 400 million of our people are illiterate
and live in absolute poverty, over 600 million lack even basic sanitation and
over 200 million have no drinking water’[3],
she tells us. Given these inhumane conditions, how can any consumption of
destructive nuclear power or exorbitant bombs not amount to a criminal and unethical
act committed in an age and world of deep crises, when eating and drinking
clean water remains a real struggle for millions of people in only one country.
For those of us living in countries where we still have enough food to eat and
water to drink, we can wrestle harder to ‘get closer to listening to those for
whom this world has become intolerable.’
Ten years after 9/11, the big
question of whether this overall confusion has settled in to our lives and
created a deeper gap between ourselves and the systems we vote for, remains
life-size. As global confusion and public opinion (c)rises, and, spontaneous
narratives and artificial democracies spread out and root themselves,
respectively, we search for new ways to collect our actions and connect our
narratives with those most pushed out of the humane social conditions which
keep us in the only world we have to live. My goal, here, is to show, and push,
activist art-making, writing and intervening, which produce provoking and
transforming truths that undermine media sources, and form a new field of
aesthetic and critical action. Today, more than ever, we wonder what we should
be doing to ‘get closer to listening to those for whom this world has become
intolerable.’
Working with means, which
communicate ideas and issues –
whether with art, aesthetics, language and critical writing – holds us open to current
challenges of the vast value of producing truths today. In a period of
detrimentally high rates of unemployment, a phenomenal concentration of
corporate greed, elevated levels of consumption beyond our means, increasingly
excluding anti-immigration laws which, at best, keep the vulnerable on the
fringes of society, a deeply unequal distribution of wealth and energy, and, high
levels of distrust towards democratically elected governments[4], we
are, more than ever, perhaps, called as responsible citizens of this world to re-evaluate
how we produce truths, and, to keep on creating spaces from which to
disseminate stories and transforming messages, capable of reaching large
audiences worldwide.
Writer, curator, editor and
artist, Alfredo Cramerotti, in Aesthetic
Journalism: How to Inform without Informing, talks about tracing a shift in
the production of truth from the domain of the news media to that of art and
aestheticism. He writes, ‘we no longer consider artists as specialized
craftspeople: to produce sense socially and politically one has to abandon the
idea of artisanship in favour of innumerable forms of expression, which include
film festivals, newspapers, television, internet, radio and magazines’[6]. If
every artist is a journalist, as the title of the Blowup Reader series[7]
suggests, then our ongoing belief that ‘journalism is intended to be a service
in the interest of the highest number of people possible’[8]
can work its way imaginatively through infinite forms of visual and textual articulation,
focusing on the importance of what art practice and research transforms, and not
what it represents. With a real emphasis insistent on what artistic means can do rather than “be”, they bring us, I
believe, ‘closer to listening to those for whom this world has become
intolerable.’
Artists as intervening tellers of
critical communication, and as reclaimed journalists, in the way that
journalism ought to ‘comfort the afflicted and afflict the comfortable[9]
was born in the 1960s. As media historian, critic and curator, Deirdre Boyle writes, ‘[This]
was an auspicious time for the debut of portable video. The role of the artist
as individualist and alienated hero was being eclipsed by a resurgence of
interest in the artist’s social responsibility, and as art became politically
and socially engaged, the distinctions between art and communication blurred. At
first there were few distinctions between video artists and activists, and
nearly everyone made documentary tapes.’[10]
On April 22, 2011, a year after the disastrous oil
spill in the Gulf of Mexico, art activist
group Liberate
Tate protested against Tate’s sponsorship relationship with
BP. Their intervention involved pouring charcoaled sunflower oil from “gas cans
painted with the BP logo on them” over a third member’s naked body”. On the
same day, 166 artists published a letter in the Guardian calling on Tate to end
its sponsorship with BP.[11]
To watch the documented video of the protest/performance, visit: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=f4-vGbsBLKM
However, unlike the mid to end of
the 20th century, this century has abundant means by which to re-tell
its histories and stories, and to make its interventions, digital and physical postings,
or direct actions. And it’s important that we have access to so many places
from which to be inventive and truthful in speaking critically to the social
injustices around us. American hacker-ethicist Steven Levy in discussion with
British poet and blogger Rick Holland tells us that, ‘the daily forms of
communication and storytelling have changed drastically, and I think that
affects how we think. I think our brains are hard-wired to respond to narrative
and storytelling, so it’s not surprising to me that we construct narratives out
of all possible forms of communication and expression, and that’s why platforms
like Facebook, Twitter, YouTube, blogs and instant messaging have become such
rich wells of ideas: because they each present different forms of spontaneous
narrative.’[12]
Digital narratives and literacy
actually stir us from being idle consumers of a technology where information is
received without much critique, to becoming cradles of awareness by posting
ourselves publicly in the world which we live, both online and off. This
publicized process of production and prophetic endorsement potentially
transforms public opinion and destabilizes the protocol of traditional media
and mainstream platforms of news broadcasting. It is not the question of truths
that is in any crisis, I don’t think. It is how we evaluate these truths and
the means made available to us so that we can relay them that we ought to be
concerned about keeping current, truthful and imaginative. And what these
visual and other means share is their effectiveness as tools to enhance
critical reflection and provoke action in public and private spaces, consequently,
showing us how to ‘get closer to listening to those for whom this world has
become intolerable.’
Jane and Louise Wilson, Untitled 1 (Nature Abhors a Vacuum) 2010 - (interior of building in Pripyat) the ghost
town situated within proximity to the Chernobyl disaster. The artists travelled
to the Ukraine to “shoot a series of large- format photographs in a 30-square
km radius known as the Exclusion Zone. This area marks the limits of
radioactive territory that is still considered too dangerous to support
prolonged exposure (although thousands of people entered the zone each day to
work in the three remaining nuclear reactors until December 2000).”[13]
Maria Petrides, Independent
Writer
Appeared in The Cyprus Dossier - Issue 3: 'In Crisis - Countdown To Infinite Crisis'
Notes
Boyle Deirdre, ‘A Brief History of American Documentary Video’, Subject to Change: Guerilla Television
Revisited, Oxford University Press, 1997
Cramerotti Alfredo, Aesthetic Journalism: How to Inform without
Informing, Intellect:
The University of Chicago Press, 2009
Griffee Susannah L, Ojalvo Holly
Epstein, ‘Do You Trust Your Government’, The
New
York Times, May 8, 2012
Ed. Gordon MacDonald, photoworks, Issue: November-April
2011/12
Popken Ben, ‘Art Activists Cover
Naked Body In Oil In Tate Museum To Protest Censorship And BP Sponsorship’, The Consumerist, April 22, 2011,
retrieved May 5, 2012, from
Roy Arundhati, the algebra of infinite justice, Viking by Penguin Books, 2001
[1] Roy Arundhati. (2001) the algebra of infinite justice, p. xxii
[2] Indian governments have often used the pretext of
threat to both India and Kashmir from neighbouring Pakistan in order to enforce
extreme nationalist agendas. ‘Text of Vajpayee’s Letter to Bill Clinton’, The Hindu, 14 May 1998
[4] In October 2011, a relatively recent poll found that
Americans’ distrust of government is at its highest levels in history. Almost
half of the public thought that the sentiment at the root of the Occupy
movement generally reflects the views of most Americans.
[6] Cramerotti Alfredo. (2009), ‘Why Aesthetic? P. 22. See also Cramerotti’s website. http://www.alcramer.net/
[7] This particular series collected texts on the subject
of art as a form of journalism. Visit http://www.v2.nl/archive/articles/every-artist-a-journalist-blowup-reader-2/view
[8] Cramerotti Alfredo. (2009), ‘Why Journalism? P. 22. See also Cramerotti’s website. http://www.alcramer.net/
[9] Dunne Finley Peter. (1899), Mr. Dooley in Peace and in War. The whole quote of the humorist is
as follows: ‘The newspaper does
everything for us. It runs the police force and the banks, commands the
militia, controls the legislature, baptizes the young, marries the foolish,
comforts the afflicted and afflicts the comfortable, buries the dead, and
roasts them afterward’.
[10] Boyle Deirdre. (1997), A Brief History of American Documentary
Video, p. 51
[11] Popken Ben. (2011) Art
Activists Cover Naked Body In Oil In Tate Museum To Protest Censorship And BP
Sponsorship
[12] Ed. Dax Max (2011) Holland Rick & Levy Steven
during a skype discussion, “I thought I was staring into the mystery of life
itself”, Electronic Beats Magazine, p.
71
[13] Schuppli Susan. (2011) ‘Material Malfeasance: Trace
Evidence of Violence in Three Image-Acts’,
photoworks, p. 29
