How are the roles of ethics changing?
BAD DEEDS
Social practice might be described as having a utilitarian ethos, one that spurns individual acts of expression and avant-garde shock while favoring cooperation, pragmatism, and conversation. There is an implicit hope that reason and dialogue will ultimately prevail over repression and disorder not only if one is engaging with other artists and friends, but also when project participants include prison guards or police. What then becomes of the desire to disobey, to dissent, or create trouble: all well-known staples of art history? Under what circumstances is such dissonance more than mere shock, and should it factor into any discussion about the ethos of social practice art?
In February of 2012 the anarcho-feminist group Pussy Riot entered Moscow’s Cathedral of Chris Church the Savior where they performed a “Punk Prayer” calling for the elimination of Russian president Vladimir Putin. The group’s “bad deed” led to the arrest, trial, and incarceration of two band members who spent time in a Siberian prison on charges of hooliganism and undermining the “moral foundations of the nation.” A year or so earlier another Russian-based artists’ collective known as Voina (War) fled underground when authorities issued arrest warrants for them after members flipped a patrol car over because “a child’s ball had rolled underneath it.” Previously they spray painted a monolithic phallus in front of the FSB (former KGB) headquarters in St. Petersbug, and Voina’s female members stalked Moscow streets and subways spontaneously kissing police officers (mostly females) on the lips. Nor are such “bad deeds” limited to overtly repressive regimes. In New York City performance artist Reverend Billy recently faced a possible year in prison for staging an environmental consciousness raising intervention inside the lobby of a Chase Manhattan Bank in Manhattan. The performance involved several choral singers denouncing the bank’s financial links to the petrochemical industry. They happened to be dressed-up as “Golden Toads,” a species of amphibian recently made extinct by climate change. In 2010 artist Dread Scott received a summons for “disturbing the peace” after burning US dollars on Wall Street to protest capitalist economic policy, and in 2004 Critical Art Ensemble member Steve Kurtz almost spent two decades in a federal prison after the U.S. Justice Department sought charges of bio-terrorism against him for purchasing harmless bacteria that the artist planned to use to illuminate the hidden history of American biological weapons research.
These “bad deeds” (and certainly many others come to mind including the infamous release of cockroaches at a MoMA trustee dinner to protest the war in Viet Nam by activists associated with Guerrilla Art Action Group) suggest an e(s)thetic of defiance in which lawbreaking is the only ethical response to the normalization of unfreedom. Under such circumstances, even a seriously playful act of disobedience inspires hope. If social practice art is to take up the mantel of those artistic practitioners who reject art for art’s sake and despise the global culture industry then its ethos of care-giving and community service may need to share its bed with such bad deeds. As Emma Goldman put it “every society has the criminals it deserves.” Perhaps we are they?
About the contributor: Gregory Sholette is an artist and writer whose publications include It’s The Political Economy, Stupid co-edited with Oliver Ressler, Dark Matter: Art and Politics in an Age of Enterprise Culture, both Pluto Press UK, as well as Collectivism After Modernism with Blake Stimson University of Minnesota Press, and The Interventionists with Nato Thompson distributed by MIT. His recent art projects include Collectibles, Action Figures and Objects, at Station Independent Gallery, Imaginary Archive: Graz, Rotor Art Center, Graz, Austria; NY; Exposed Pipe at the American University Beirut art gallery; Torrent for Printed Matter Books in Chelsea; iDrone for cyberartsp
gregorysholette.com, darkmatte