Image: “Advice from My 80-Year-Old Self,” 2011. Courtesy The Estate of Susan O’Malley

“All the great movements for social justice in our society have strongly emphasized a love ethic.”

– bell hooks

On the 50th anniversary of the founding of the Black Panther Party (BPP) Open Engagement finds itself in the city that gave birth to this powerful revolutionary movement. When one thinks of the BPP one of the first things that likely comes to mind is that undeniably strong look—leather jackets, berets, button downs, turtlenecks, natural hair, shades, and the most important accessory—bearing arms. Originally known as the Black Panther Party for Self-Defense, the image of police patrols, armed protests, and training formations come to mind before we can conjure images of their free breakfast programs for school children, people’s health clinics, liberation schools, or community housing. All of these initiatives fell under the BPP’s Survival Programs, all of which were intended to help support individuals and communities meet the basic rights and necessities outlined in their Ten Point Platform, as well as provide the tools and resources for empowerment. Former BPP member Jamal Joseph has said that the guiding principal of the party that drove them forward was “an undying love for the people” (The Black Panthers: Vanguard of the Revolution 2015). All of their gestures, whether rooted in protection, defense, or care, was about showing love for one another. The BPP was treated as a serious threat as acknowledged by the reactions of the US Government, police enforcement, and the FBI. I believe the most dangerous aspect of the BPP was not their power as a radical armed faction, but in their ability to harness the power of collectivity and love. Many of the people who convene at Open Engagement continue to work toward the equality and justice that they were fighting for, and do so with the same commitment to care and desire to serve the people.

Jeremy Deller said, “If pop art is about liking things, as Andy Warhol once said, then folk art is about loving things.” Given that the last Open Engagement took place in Warhol’s birthplace, I want to say instead that if pop art is about liking things, then socially engaged art is about loving things. One of the projects at the 2015 conference was a tour of Pittsburgh centered on the life and work of Mr. Rogers organized by Michelle Illuminato and Emily Blair. In 1969, Fred Rogers appeared before the United States Senate Subcommittee on Communications to support funding for PBS and the Corporation for Public Broadcasting. In his senate statement I was struck by how clearly he defined the purpose of the work he was doing in creating his children’s program, “This is what I give, an expression of care each and everyday to each and every child. … for 15 years I have tried in this country and Canada, to present what I feel is a meaningful expression of care.” It made me realize that we could clearly articulate that the work of Open Engagement is about creating a space of care for the field of socially engaged art.

René de Guzman began this reader with a quote from Che Guevera, “… at the risk of seeming ridiculous, the true revolutionary is guided by great feelings of love.” I truly believe that the artists, activists, administrators, educators, and cultural workers who are engaged in transforming the world through creativity and radical imagination do so fundamentally from a position of love. What follows is a playlist of songs about love and my thoughts on these songs that connect power and love in relation to the individual, the collective, and their role in movement building.

Track 1: Tina Turner, What’s Love Got to do With It

Her hair is strong — a shield of peroxide, standing defiantly against gravity, it is a glorious, full and spiky crown that mimics the way an animal might puff up in size to assert its dominance. She is armored in slick black pointy stilettos, sheer hose, a leather dress swallowed by an oversized jacket. Her outfit takes a cue from Bruce Springsteen’s repertoire of American denim and says, I am the real BOSS. This is the image we get of Tina Turner in her 1984 hit “What’s Love Got To Do With It?”

Tina Turner is a complicated note to start off this reflection on love and power. This song comes six years after her divorce from Ike Turner, and on the crest of her incredible comeback. In Ike Turner’s notorious interview with Edward Kiersh in the August 1985 issue of SPIN that ran with the exclusive on the cover: “IKE TURNER What he had to do with it: The flip side to Tina’s Story”, Ike reflects on the song, as well as the abuse:

“When I saw Tina do ‘What’s Love Got to Do With It?’ I picked up the phone and called her. ‘Hey, Bo [short for Bullock, her maiden name], that’s a cute song. I really like it.’ … But it’s years ago that I had a temper. I don’t regret nothing I’ve ever done, absolutely nothing, man, because it took all of that to make me what I am today—and I love me today, I really do.”

As the SPIN cover promised, Ike indeed delivered the flip side to Tina’s story. While her song puts love at arms length, discounts love as a second rate emotion, and identifies love as vulnerability, Ike illustrates the dark side of self-love, individualism, and egotism. This might seem an unlikely starting place, but this song and these figures setup the foundation with which to grapple with some of the issues and struggles around power dynamics, collaboration, and the inevitable, necessary emotional investment.

Tina Turner’s body language in the music video for this song reads loud and clear — she is powerful. One of the most viewed TED Talks is about power poses. Amy Cuddy’s talk titled “Your Body Language Shapes Who You Are” has been viewed 8,755,987 times.  Cuddy describes the simple act of striking a power pose (think a gorilla with fists clenched raised high in the air arms out spread) as a life hack that can ultimately help you feel more powerful and increase your individual success, maybe get gainful employment over someone who hasn’t yet mastered the art of the power pose. Similarly, I recently heard a piece on NPR about online dating platforms and how more people respond positively to pictures of people with open poses, like power poses, arms outstretched, human flight clearly imminent. Not only can posturing your body in a certain way help you get the job, it could also help you be a more desirable mate. Cuddy’s talk is clearly a resource on power that has potentially helped millions of individuals, but what about power and the collective body? How does power play into movement building?

Track 2: Kathy Heideman, Move With Love

Deborah Fisher’s contribution to this reader considers Aikido. She wrote, “The purpose of Aikido training is to transform conflict into cooperation, even love for one’s opponent.” Her piece is an important reflection on collective power and the various means and methods with which to achieve it. While Cuddy’s Ted talk emphasizes the potential of a powerful individual and leader, one of my favorite YouTube videos is “First Follower: Leadership Lessons from Dancing Guy.” The video clearly shows that being a charismatic leader is overrated, and that it is really the first follower and ultimately collective energy that makes a movement. The video shows that while it is risky to be at the helm of a movement, the courage of the first follower is needed to make space for the collective. Collective movements need to be based on bravery, love, support, and understanding.

We need to move with love and risk ridicule by being the first one to stand up, or to be the courageous one that follows. To love and be loved is a often to put oneself in a vulnerable position that could be seen as compromising one’s strength, but I want to propose that there is no position greater than love.

Track 3: Celine Dion, Let’s Talk About Love

“I do not need to be powerful if my message is powerful.” Ernesto Pujol

Celine Dion has dozen of songs that remind us the power of love is an undeniable force. The lyrics of Dion’s “Let’s Talk About Love,” in her signature schmaltzy style, pontificates on love. But unlike many of her love songs, such as the “Power of Love” which speak to a romantic love between two people, “Let’s Talk About Love” sees love as a powerful unifier and common language. From the “laugh of a child” to the “tears of a man”, love is there. While this song might not be to everyone’s taste, who amongst us would want to deny her message that love is the one emotion that can help lead to understanding? Dion reminds us that it is through love that we can work together and towards trust.

Track 4: The Brother Love, I Can Be

Open Engagement 2016 keynote speaker Angela Davis has said that our society does everything it can to foster individualism because it wants us to forget about the immense collective power we have for change together. The track “I Can Be”, by The Brother Love appears on the Free Angela LP that was released by Golden Triangle Records in 1971. This deep soul song describes a man coming up against potential criticism for his choice of who to love. He says that wrong or right, love is worth the sacrifice. Similar to Dion’s “Let’s Talk About Love” love is described in the track as a great equalizer.

Track 5: Rihanna, Close to You

“I love in your direction hoping that the message goes somewhere close to you.”

-Rihanna

Rihanna is tough. Bad gal Riri’s latest offering Anti is full of tracks that demonstrate that the classic love ballad, and even the classic storybook romance, is not what she is after: “I was good on my own… Didn’t they tell you that I was a savage? Fuck your white horse and a carriage.” Songs like “Needed Me” and “Consideration” disparages relationships and champions the ability to deflect connection. It is for this reason that a song like “Close to You” stands out on the album. It is stripped down, the absence of complex musical compositions and booming beats leaving little room for emotional camouflage. It is a love song that cannot hide behind the retro pastiche of a track like “Love On the Brain” that alludes in form to love being an old fashioned notion, or a song like “Higher” that feels the need to have expressing love be accompanied by excuses and apologies. The first time I heard “Close To You” I have no problem admitting that I got teary eyed. I loved how vulnerable how she was willing to be, how she would chose to put love in someone else’s direction, even if they were either not willing to receive it, she still hoped the message of love would reach them. To connect this idea to movements and social change, in Martin Luther King Jr’s August 16, 1967 “Where Do We Go From Here” speech he reflected on why he continued to love even his enemies:

“And I say to you, I have also decided to stick with love, for I know that love is ultimately the only answer to mankind’s problems. And I’m going to talk about it everywhere I go. I know it isn’t popular to talk about it in some circles today. And I’m not talking about emotional bosh when I talk about love; I’m talking about a strong, demanding love. And I have seen too much hate.”

I know that love is not all we need (just one reason that no Beatles track appeared on this playlist), but I do believe love can help us get closer to equity, social justice, and a compassionate world.

Love is Worth Fighting For

On April 24th I attended a Fight Night at Soho House in Chicago. As part of the night artist and educator Cheryl Pope included poets from JUST YELL / POETRY as SELF DEFENSE. Founded by Pope in 2013, Just Yell is committed to confronting issues of inequality, abuse of power, and causes of gun violence and works with teens and young authors throughout Chicago to develop writing, installation, and performance. Interspersed between boxing matches young poets took to the ring to share their writing. The power of the work was palpable. As each poet entered the spotlight the frenetic crowd came into focus. Taking center stage in the dramatically lit ring, the power of their words exceeded the force of the fights that had just been contained within the ropes. The stories held the beauty, pain, and joy of their lives—they showed with full force the power of their experiences, and the transformative potential of art. At one point in the evening a small table was brought into the ring, and a microphone was set in front of a chair. Del Marie Nelson sat down, her gaze looking out at the crowd. She began to sing, “true love doesn’t die unless you crush it like clover.” Her song was punctuated with spoken word. With each return to her chorus it gained more weight and meaning as her words rolled over her own relationships, drawing in our own connections. The resilience of love felt galvanized with each syllable. Its ability to rise us up and bring us together rang clear. As the last of her prose echoed through the crowd, all of the lovers, and the fighters, assembled in the room rose to their feet and collectively cheered the power of being able to share love with one another.

About the contributor: Jen Delos Reyes is a creative laborer, educator, writer, radical community arts organizer, and author of countless emails. She is the director and founder of Open Engagement, an international annual conference on socially engaged art that has been active since 2007. Delos Reyes currently lives and works in Chicago, IL where she is the Associate Director of the School of Art & Art History at the University of Illinois at Chicago.

San Francisco’s Prelinger Library is self-described as an “independent research library…open to anyone for research, reading, inspiration, and reuse.” I posed a set of questions to Megan Prelinger, the library’s co-founder, as a way to learn about POWER in the context of the Library. Her responses reflect on and extend the work of the library’s twelve years of public access, marked by an ongoing commitment to the sharing of knowledge as co-production and exchange…

If I want to learn about POWER in the Prelinger Library, how would I begin?

Following a welcoming orientation, walk down our first aisle and stop in front of Electrical West magazine, the trade magazine that records the construction of hydroelectric infrastructure across the western United States in the 20th century. Electrical West has many photographs of power corridors under construction and articles about power grids and dams.

If I want to research POWER in the Prelinger Library, where should I look first?

Continue looking at the infrastructure section in the first aisle, and then stop for a minute. Reflect on the offering of the open shelves, and the prompt that you heard from your welcoming host to let your curiosity be your guide as your browse.

You then have a choice before you: You may continue, following Electrical West, to research physical power networks as they lay in the land. Or, you may take the mirror path and research how the Library itself exists to break down power hierarchies around access to historical resources. A third alternative would be to keep walking around the room and conduct a broad survey of the Library’s holdings, and draw a map of where the holdings empower historical memory in unusual ways.

If I want to learn about POWER in the model of the Prelinger Library, what do I need to understand?

Please understand, and share, our philosophy of sharing. The Library exists to model the gesture of sharing, which is an alternative philosophy of resource distribution to hierarchical models. The Library also exists to model a research and community environment where many of the mechanisms of controlled inquiry that dominate institutional research library environments have been removed.

As the Prelinger Library is a hybrid library located in San Francisco, (how) does it speak to POWER locally?

The Library is a twelve-year-long project that has many facets. One of those is an ongoing dialogue with power in San Francisco and the Bay Area, as expressed by our invitation to anyone to make any kind of nondestructive use of any of the materials for any purpose that serves the future, either “the future” writ large, or any project that is in development for the future. The Library exists to channel historical resources to all visitors in this manner, free of entrance criteria, free of even the prompt to pose a query, and free of any concern for how the Library came into being or how it is maintained. The open hours are structured as a conversation-friendly workshop environment, where people can engage with one another, friends and strangers alike, in a totally noncommercial transactional space.

Is the library is a response to POWER? If so, how do visitors encounter that in decisions you’ve made in creating and maintaining it?

The Library is a response to many conditions of its historical moment: One is the power of the prevailing political structures to enforce presentism — the state of mind in which the “now” is totalized, even idealized, to protect against the possibility of change. As a historical library (holding very few materials published since 1980), we exist as a counter-space to the force of presentism and its ally, historical amnesia. Another is the relative loss of power by institutional public-access memory organizations over the past half-century (museums, libraries, archives; historically-oriented academic programs); a huge proportion of these organizations in North America have lost resources and been reduced in their scope and ability to support change.

Does the use, distribution of or organization of knowledge (or materials) at the Prelinger produce any specific type of power?  A follow up: do you have an anecdote to share?

Knowledge itself is power, to some extent, so in that sense the Library gives away knowledge for free – generating power. It is also our hope and our belief that the use, distribution, and organization of knowledge at the Library produce the power of delight and the power released by the realization that such a place exists. Delight and realization themselves open up human powers of creative and intellectual energy that over twelve years doubtless have had an incalculable accumulated array of outcomes.

Anecdotes: People have walked into the Library and burst into tears at the sight of it… people regularly arrive straight from the airport, making the Library their first stop in San Francisco when visiting, even before their guest lodgings…we believe no one has ever stolen anything from the Library…people regularly bring gifts of food and drink to the Library as gifts to the founder/curators and volunteers. This form of expression is a symbolic recognition that the Library’s gesture of openness and communitarianism is more central to its signification than the specifics of its holdings.

Do the spatial and classification of the Prelinger Library address, inform, or exert POWER over research, use, or insights?

The classification system is designed to offer a counterpoint to conventional systems of organizing libraries. We believe that the two main established systems, the Dewey Decimal system and the Library of Congress system, each encode injustice in different ways. Our approach to a geospatial arrangement scheme is the working alternative: Formulated as a lay of the land, each subject area lays on the land at the same level as every other; it’s just in a different place. It’s a horizontalist system (in spite of how tall the shelves are). The spatial arrangement is designed to make each subject area visually browsable, removing the need for keyword searching and freeing a curiosity-driven mode of inquiry that is not limited by a cursor flashing in a box on a monitor.

Is the Prelinger Library shaped by the POWER or influence of its users through use or contributions? How much?

Yes, the twelve years of users have had enormous power over the shape of the holdings, both through their use patterns that caused we keepers/curators to learn to understand different usefulnesses of different kinds of materials, and also through extraordinary reciprocal generosity and sharing. The Library’s holdings are about 25% – 30% different today than when the Library opened in spring of 2004, both through the generosity of institutional librarians and through the generosity of individual donors.

As the Prelinger Library has both physical and digital infrastructures, who hosts, serves, and powers the digital library?

The Internet Archive.

Can you talk about the POWER of discarding or discarded books?

We have come to think of discarding books as formative: Like pruning a tree to promote the growth of fruit-bearing branches. Our practice of offering our discarded books for free to any interested visitor is a very modest form of resource sharing. Discarded books are much more important: Many of the most historically and socially important materials in the Library were discarded by someone else before they came to us.

Are there any materials that current POWER structures prevent you from gaining access to or adding to the library’s holdings?

Not in particular. The Library’s holdings are quite full and over time have benefited from an enormous degree of wish fulfillment. We can’t always satisfy every researcher’s desire because some of the materials that people desire have hyperinflated value in various collectors’ markets. But more often those hyperinflated collectors’ markets disappoint our visitors, not we keeper/curators. [One example: historic photographs of San Francisco]

Does Prelinger Library speak truth to POWER? (If so, is it primarily through your choice of holdings that reflect on POWER, the power of classification, action towards enhancing access and re-use as knowledge production, or in the library’s social function in dialogues and community-building, or in some other way?)

Yes, the Library project speaks truth to power through all the ways mentioned in the language of the question, all the ways articulated in the above answers, and probably in other ways as well: Primarily we speak for the power of free access to information; the truth of the strength of noncommercial transactional spaces; the truth of the strength of gestures of community and collaboration; the truth of the strength of historical memory to make change to a society that is biased against memory.

Full Disclosure: The Library has supported, through holding and providing access, to the materials in my own project, A People’s Archive of Sinking and Melting in 2014.

Visit the Prelinger Library at: 301 8th Street (near Folsom Street), Room 215, San Francisco, CA

For current library days visit http://www.prelingerlibrary.org

Digitized collections are at https://archive.org/details/prelinger_library

About the contributor: Amy Balkin’s projects propose a reconstituted commons, considering legal borders and systems, environmental justice, and the sharing of common-pool resources in the context of climate change. She lives in San Francisco, where she co-teaches Social Practice & Public Forms at CCA.

The longtime artist, writer, and social activist creates socially engaged art that stimulates dialogue about race, inequality, and social justice

This spring, the Oakland Museum of California hosts Open Engagement, an annual three-day, artist-led conference dedicated to socially engaged art. This year’s event, which takes place April 29–May 1, addresses the theme of power. Los Angeles-based artist, writer, and educator Suzanne Lacy will be one of the keynote speakers, along with political activist and scholar Angela Davis. Lacy is a pioneer in the field of socially engaged art—also called social practice—having created video, performance, and installation works that address issues of race, class, and gender inequality since the 1970s. She served in former Oakland Mayor Jerry Brown’s education cabinet and as the dean of fine arts at the California College of the Arts. Here, Lacy discusses social practice with Senior Curator of Art René de Guzman.

Social practice is deeply associated with your generation of avant-garde artists. What were some of your influences?

I grew up in a relatively poor area. I was fortunate to be given an almost free college education by California’s Higher Education Act. At the time I went to college—along with other working-class people, people of color, women—there was an influx of artists like Judy Chicago and Allan Kaprow. They set the stage for a more radical art in California and had a big impact on me.

How do you describe social practice?

I relate it to the history of performance art, when art became dematerialized and artists began looking at different sources for their ideas. They started to look intensely at issues that really concern people and incorporated them into their work. Social practice emerged in the ’60s and ’70s, and sprang, in a way, out of the political and cultural movements of those times. Another way to explain it is that there is the art object and the art maker, and then there’s the space in between. What social practice does is focus on all three. The artist is no longer the mythologized crazy guy who whacked his ear off; he is moving into a form of engaged citizenship.

Much of your work seems to be about the coalitions you build and the people who are transformed by participating in them. Is the process more your focus than the final work?

Yes. I was doing community organizing even before I was an artist. And most social practice people are engaging, to some extent, in a form of community organizing, even if it’s for a small group of ten students. Those are skill sets that need to be brought back into the arts arena through education. That’s why Open Engagement is important, because it includes so many people in the arts and in education.

What are some of the challenges you face in your large-scale social practice works?

They can be difficult because they are sited in public and often deal with controversial subjects. Performance can be high risk, imperfect, and improvisational. Here is an example: Last fall, I did a project in Quito, Ecuador, called De tu puño y letra, diálogos en el ruedo [trans: Your handwriting, dialogues in the ring], which involved hundreds of men reading letters written by women about domestic violence. We held it in a bullring on November 25, the International Day for the Elimination of Violence Against Women. And if you saw all these men reading those letters, you might think, “Wow, big outcome in the political arena! Wow, social impact!” But you don’t really know if that’s true. You have to know how your work fits in with ongoing societal practices and how engaged people are with these issues. You can know how many people sign up, but you can’t know if your work has changed people’s thinking.

There are a few panels at this year’s Open Engagement conference about institutional involvement in socially engaged art. Are you concerned that this attention might be at odds with social practice, which many see as an insurgent activity?

I’ve been through at least three major waves of funding for my practice. In the ’90s, the funding institutions were all hopping on board, and now they’re doing it again. So if you look at this over the long haul, no, I’m not worried that it will kill our creativity. And now that museums like OMCA are getting involved, I am convinced that social practice will continue to thrive.

To learn more about the Open Engagement conference and to register for Suzanne Lacy’s keynote address on Saturday, April 29, at 7:30pm, visit openengagement.info.

There are limited POWER PASSES available to attend keynote sessions.

I would like to take this opportunity to perhaps provide a few warnings to the phenomenally growing field of socially engaged art/public practice/whatever you want to call it. As many of us have seen, the conversation around art and community has grown, and with that growth has come some foreseeable and some not so foreseeable tensions that are worth noting.

The first tension of course is the knee-jerk response that most artists have to things that become popular. The ongoing hunt for “the new” must come equipped with myriad caveats, as some of those urges might be well-founded and others, well, not so much. Certainly the hunt for the new is important when it comes to an individual style, particularly in a form of cultural capitalism that deeply encourages innovation and personal articulation. For the field of contemporary art, the new is its sine qua non. In the mid 19^th century, the search for the new and the breaking of tradition became an important aesthetic maneuver that disrupted the chains of power bound up in cultural traditions, but since that period, we see an increasingly capitalist-friendly language bound up in discussions of innovation and rebels.

That said, as things grow, one finds an increasing capacity of power to use the language of an art form, particularly one that possess a revolutionary capacity, and defang it. This ability of institutions to, for lack of a better term, co-opt political art work is certainly real to some extent. One will find that the more famous of the political artists, the ones that actually make a killing in the art market, will probably have the least revolutionary language around what they do. That said, feeling that everything that is popular is simply co-opted is just not exactly thorough thinking.

Finally, we must be aware of the dangers that occur when those in power finally have a language of utility in the field of art. Certainly, there is much to be gained from having useful methods for working on communities toward the end-goals of social justice, but these methods can also fall rather neatly into overzealous funding circles eager for quick fixes and politically over-simplified language. There is value in not always making sense. We see a growing interest in this field and I would say, with that, comes a responsibility to articulate a vision of social justice that appreciates the values, and power, of working in methods that not only resist the logic of capital, but also privilege the power that happens when people come together in an open-ended space of poetic ambiguity.

Working out methods that account for cultural difference and imbalances of power across race, gender, class, and sexuality is critical for the field. On a positive note, these conversations are becoming more frequent, and though very complex, are what is critical to making the field all the more meaningful and able to side-step some of the problems I have just listed.

About the contributor: Nato Thompson is the Artistic Director of Creative Time. Previously, he worked as Curator at MASS MoCA, where he completed numerous large-scale exhibitions. His writings have appeared in numerous publications, BookForum, Frieze, Art Forum, Third Text, and Huffington Post among them. In 2005, he received the Art Journal Award for distinguished writing. His book Seeing Power: Art and Activism in the 21st Century was published in 2015.

The Hidden Curriculum understands translation and language in the broadest, most creative and expansive way. This is the fifth translation made by The Hidden Curriculum, a project currently in its pilot form. This project assembles translations from a diverse set of texts that are deemed central to artistic production by individuals from different cultures, ethnicities, languages, gender identities, historical times, and geographies.

Our group was interested in the performative act on stage taking place during Antonio Negri’s keynote – Negri and the interpreter individually and their coupled dynamic. We were concerned what our roles and purpose were in extending this translation. In this way we explored the marginal and incidental performative acts of the video that happened during the “non-translation”––Negri’s hand gestures, head scratches, accidental microphone taps, nervousness, and page turning. We decided to create a score for others to perform via a karaoke video, for it to has the possibility of generating infinite translations. The audio was made from such de-constructed “non-translation” audio moments and was looped; the video was made in response to the audio and used generic video editing transition effects to enter the language of karaoke video aesthetics. The text was generated from an alternate translation transcript which took note of specific word use frequency and accordingly created the phantom “lyrics”. The product–– a confused space of visual gestures, fragmented sounds, and reconfigured sentences––resulted in an impossible karaoke, and parallels the perils of the act of translation.

Below is the karaoke video score and initial iteration performed during a meeting of the Hidden Curriculum – organized by Arkadiy Ryabin, Alix Camacho, Eric Magnus.

About the contributors: The Hidden Curriculum project being developed by a working group of CUNY (City University of New York) graduate students and faculty: Clara Chapin Hess, Adam Golfer, Miatta Kawinzi, Gabriela Vainsencher, Daniel Alexander Matthews, Ishai  Shapira Kalter, Paola Di Tolla, Arkadiy Ryabin, Alix Camacho, Estefania Velez, Eric Magnus, Katy McCarthy, Rebekah Smith and Paul Ramirez Jonas.

The Hidden Curriculum understands translation and language in the broadest, most creative and expansive way. This is the fourth translation made by The Hidden Curriculum, a project currently in its pilot form. This project assembles translations from a diverse set of texts that are deemed central to artistic production by individuals from different cultures, ethnicities, languages, gender identities, historical times, and geographies.

Continuing with our responses to the keynote by Antonio Negri, this approach to Negri came out of the observation that there is no single way to interpret or translate a prompt. People make interpretations according to their tastes and abilities. For this adaptation, organized by Katy McCarthy, Adam Golfer, Clara Chapin Hess – we gave participants 60 seconds to make a sandwich from provided supplies. While the supplies and prompt were the same for each person, the technique and order in which they compiled their sandwiches was entirely their own. Relatedly, Jorgen Leth’s iconic video of Andy Warhol eating a hamburger shows us an individual doing something totally mundane in his own way. In the end, everyone had created a sandwich, but no two were completely alike. The everyday task of making a sandwich yields an infinite number of interpretations.

About the Contributor: The Hidden Curriculum project is being developed by a working group of CUNY (City University of New York) graduate students and faculty: Clara Chapin Hess, Adam Golfer, Miatta Kawinzi, Gabriela Vainsencher, Daniel Alexander Matthews, Ishai  Shapira Kalter, Paola Di Tolla, Arkadiy Ryabin, Alix Camacho, Estefania Velez, Eric Magnus, Katy McCarthy, Rebekah Smith, and Paul Ramirez Jonas.

The Hidden Curriculum understands translation and language in the broadest, most creative and expansive way. This is the third translation made by The Hidden Curriculum, a project currently in its pilot form. This project assembles translations from a diverse set of texts that are deemed central to artistic production by individuals from different cultures, ethnicities, languages, gender identities, historical times, and geographies.

Gabriela Vainsencher created The Hidden Curriculum Body Language Workshop in response to Antonio Negri’s keynote address on the final day of the Creative Time Summit 2015 in Venice. This was our first blog entry and translation as The Hidden Curriculum.

Watching the Italian thinker talk, Gabriela Vainsencher felt like she could understand much of what he was saying, even though her grasp of Italian is minimal. Vainsencher attributed this understanding to Negri’s body language, which managed to communicate so much. Vainsencher decided to lead a body language learning workshop, in which participants teach each other non-verbal ‘phrases’ or ‘words’ that mean very particular things in the cultures they come from. This project was created in collaboration with Miatta Kawinzi and Estefania Velez.

About the Contributor: The Hidden Curriculum project is being developed by a working group of CUNY (City University of New York) graduate students and faculty: Clara Chapin Hess, Adam Golfer, Miatta Kawinzi, Gabriela Vainsencher, Daniel Alexander Matthews, Ishai  Shapira Kalter, Paola Di Tolla, Arkadiy Ryabin, Alix Camacho, Estefania Velez, Eric Magnus, Katy McCarthy, Rebekah Smith, and Paul Ramirez Jonas.

“I’m not a social worker, I’m an artist who’s trying to create a conversation”, Michel Tuffery (2012).

It’s an important distinction for the artist, whose holistic practice has seen him work in an increasingly social realm, collaborating with a wide range of communities to produce art together. Based on a deeply held belief in the possibility of art to create connections, Tuffery’s collaborative projects have included working with communities across Aotearoa (New Zealand), Australia, Asia (Taiwan, India) and the wider Pacific including Solomon Islands, Vanuatu, Fiji, Samoa, Cook Islands, New Caledonia, Tahiti, Hawaii and Tokelau.

Like many artists that incorporate relational practices, Tuffery, without straying into social work, endeavors to engage with and nurture societal bonds. Frequently his artwork seeks to bring together disparate or disenfranchised groups with their own histories, tracing social and cultural lineages through the most unlikely and highly playful means.

 (Emma Bugden, 2013).

Open Engagement had the pleasure of speaking with Michel Tuffery to contribute to A Reader on Power and offer a perspective on a socially engaged practice unique to the South Pacific region. Michel discusses his approach to working with community, informed directly by his background and traditions specific to Aotearoa (New Zealand). Our conversation highlighted Michel’s emphasis on engagement with the community over time, his process, art as a vehicle for change, and the importance of legacy with community based art projects. This was discussed in the following video interview, specifically in relation to his 2014 project Transforma. This project was a seven week residency located in Airds in South Western Sydney, Australia that comprised of four main components.

1. The retrieval of cars dumped in the Woolwash area of the Upper Georges River.

2. An outdoor sculpture studio located in the car park of Airds Bradbury Central.

3. Ongoing workshops with young people.

4. A series of public programs culminating in a major public event – The Transforma Party which celebrated the launch of Buru Transforma Kangaroo – a massive bust of a kangaroo made from the bodies of cars abandoned then salvaged from the Upper Georges River.

About the contributor: Michel Tuffery is part of a generation of trail-blazers in Aotearoa (New Zealand), artists now in their 40s who were among the first wave of artists with Pacific ancestry to work within the contemporary art world. Coming to prominence in the early 1990s, these artists were notable for a refusal to choose between traditional forms of customary art and the western art canon, instead finding a third way, a space in which to connect both strands. They paved the way not only for new generations of Pacific artists but from the 2000s onward for a growing group of Asian New Zealand artists, whose work can also be seen to engage in plurality across cultural and art historical divides. More recently he partnered with the Museum of Contemoray Art (MCA) and Campbelltown Arts Centre (CAC) to deliver his Transforma project within the C3West Program (Emma Bugden, 2013).

It is just after the 2016 Super Bowl, and I keep stumbling across Beyoncé. This may not seem surprising, but I’m not a pop culture maven in the least. I didn’t watch the Super Bowl; I don’t even have cable. I don’t have much opinion on Beyoncé’s music. I am aware of the critiques – especially of her feminist posturing, and her unabashed capitalism. But very few people have the platform that Beyoncé does, and how she uses that platform matters to culture.

She dropped a new single, Formation, a day before her controversial Super Bowl performance, in which her back-up dancers were clad in costumes reminiscent of Black Panther Party uniforms, complete with giant afros and military style black berets, to commemorate the Party’s 50^th anniversary (an anniversary that, officially, has largely been ignored). On its face, this was a bold, provocative and typically savvy marketing move, standard operating procedure for Queen Bey. But the rhetoric in the clickable headlines popping up in my Facebook feed captivated me, because they seemed to so perfectly encompass the discussion around race, class, and power in the US right now.

I first clicked on “Breaking: Old white people find Beyoncé’s black activism distasteful” on Gawker.

This clip from the Fox News show Fox & Friends featured Rudy Giuliani how “outrageous” her Super Bowl performance was, after being told it was in honor of the Black Panther Party. His commentary ranged from the paternalistic “I didn’t know what the heck it was, a bunch of people bouncing around” to the truly incensed. What really bothered him was her shout-out to the Black Lives Matter movement, and that she should use her platform not to “attack police officers,” but that what she should be doing is to “work within African-American communities to build up a respect for the police.” He painted her, and others of her race, as ungrateful to “the people who protect her…and keep us alive.” He criticizes the NFL for letting her on the stage at all, reminding them that “you’re talking to Middle America out there, let’s have some decent, wholesome entertainment.”

It’s easy for liberals like myself to take pot shots at Fox News, but the fact remains that a swath of America would agree with Giuliani (case in point is the “All Lives Matter” pushback to the Black Lives Matter movement). A lot of Americans do not know, and do not wish to know about the radical black activism that Beyonce celebrates. In fact, they wish desperately to refute it. Black radical activism has called for the reform (and in many cases, the complete abolition) of the prison-industrial complex because of the devastating institutional racism embedded in every step of the justice system, economic systems, and social systems that send millions of young black men through the correctional system every year. This activism does not wish to assimilate into a broken and undemocratic system—undemocratic because it (still) does not work for millions of its citizens. This is activism that imagines entirely new societal structures. And that is profoundly terrifying to someone like Giuliani. Of course he would rather ignore it. Of course he would rather believe that America is great, and that these “problems” are foundationless rabble-rousing.

But Bey’s ploy, saavy marketing or not, was hard to ignore. Black radical activism, throughout much of its history, has been about making things hard to ignore.

The great Angela Y. Davis spoke this past weekend in Los Angeles, at a panel entitled “Abolition and the Radical Imagination.” She spoke about the abolition of the prison-industrial complex as the last step in the abolition of slavery itself. But, she contended, the conception of a future with no more jails requires a radical imagination, and art becomes a necessary piece of that puzzle. Poet Fred Moten, who sat with Davis on a panel after her address, saw radical imagination as encompassing two key activities – both imagining the things that do not yet exist, but also eliciting the empathy to imagine and understand things as they are. These two sides of the coin summon the black radical experience for Moten – to both understand the real horror of things, as well as hope for what they can be. What is it to live with loss and tragedy, Moten asks, only to turn around and celebrate?

Formation is a lush video, unsubtle and full of imagery of both tragedy and celebration. Images of a drowning New Orleans are juxtaposed with Mardi Gras Indian dancers and Social Aid and Pleasure Club parades, tightly knit and powerfully resilient Black community traditions. Most of all, as Dr. Zandia Robinson of the site New South Negress explains, Formation highlights the “margins of Blackness” as a resistance practice. We see the imagery of queer blackness, feminist blackness, and those both in the center and the margins of Black society as organizing forces. Robinson argues:

Formation is a recognition of one another at the blackness margins–woman, queer, genderqueer, trans, poor, disabled, undocumented, immigrant–before an overt action…to be successful, there must be coordination, the kind that choreographers and movement leaders do, the kind that black women organizers do in neighborhoods and organizations. To slay the violence of white supremacist heteropatriarchy, we must start, Beyoncé argues, with the proper formation.

In this sense, Formation is about organizing. It’s about community, the rise of critical consciousness, but also just being with the people who have your back. Organizing creates collective power.

“Yes,” cry the organizers and the activists, who have been working for change in their communities for decades. “But what about your unabashed capitalism, Beyoncé?” As Robinson acknowledges, and Black activism has recognized for centuries, racism, class, and economic power are inextricably interconnected.

Dianca London of Death and Taxes calls Beyoncé’s activism into question in an article entitled “Beyoncé’s capitalism, masquerading as radical change.” She rolls her eyes at the laudatory response to Formation: “Yet another single by Beyoncé has been canonized as a call to arms. She has been lauded as a pop icon turned activist. An anthem that will make her millions has been dubbed a revolution.” London goes on to acknowledge the power of Beyonce’s storytelling and representations of Blackness, but deeply questions her brand of activism. She strongly suggests that Beyonce’s participation in this platform (Super Bowl 50 and all it represents as part of global capitalism) is playing into the very system that has always profited from black culture. This is co-option, she argues, not a call to arms. It is a very slick branding play. In London’s view, Beyoncé makes this clear when she says “the best revenge is my paper” and “always stay gracious.” As London suggests, the route towards liberation for Beyonce “is contingent on two things: respectability and the mobility that comes with affluence.” In fact, this reliance on “paper” betrays the very Party that Bey seeks to celebrate—the Black Panther Party has always argued that nothing less than the overthrow of the capitalist system would lead to Black liberation.

And when Red Lobster starts calling their spike in sales the “Beyoncé Bounce,” it makes you wonder if London doesn’t have a point.

I feel this critique, but I also don’t blame Beyoncé one bit for using her platform with every iota of craft and thought and storytelling that she is capable of. We all swim in capitalism, and Beyoncé can’t remove herself from it, no matter how hard she might want to. None of us can. Times have changed since the BPP, and methods of resistance must evolve as well. Because although I agree that in order to end racism, we must end incarceration, and provide affordable housing, and create better social services, and invest in communities, and have excellent free healthcare and education, and fundamentally rethink the way we organize ourselves and our societies as humans—I also believe that systems undergo drastic alterations only after many, many microscopic shifts have occurred. I am fundamentally a pragmatist in that way. I would never advocate revolution nor violent overthrow, but rather the small movements of hearts and minds. When people work hard in communities on a grassroots level, convincing people one by one and empowering them to change their conditions, things start happening. When this work is bolstered by national media conversations and bold statements by pop stars that drive more and more people towards organizing…even more starts happening. Beyoncé does not work in isolation. She is just very hard to ignore.

Angela Davis said, “Capitalism has affected the way we think about ourselves.” We are taught to always think of ourselves as individual actors, not as a community that “extends backwards and forwards in time.” Part of the role of art is to re-orient that conception of self in relation to others.

Which is why another thread of internet chatter disturbed me more than anything else—one calling for white people to “shut up and listen” to Beyoncé. These were the articles that gave me the most pause. Blogger Melissa Hillman on the site Bitter Gertrude came out with a post titled “White people: Shut up about Beyoncé.” As a self-described white woman, she lauded Beyoncé for “brilliantly telling Black stories for Black people, brilliantly seizing the narrative,” and urged white people not to voice their outrage or opinion, but to shut up and listen. Another white woman writer and fat activist Kath tweeted “It’s not that white women can’t write about Beyonce and Formation, but maybe they shouldn’t,” and this sentiment has cropped up a lot in commentary and other articles (ironically). NB: I am not black, but I am not white either. I get asked “What are you?” A lot. So what should I do?

I completely agree with Melissa Hillman that people should listen. True collective listening is the foundation for meaningful critical discourse, which we sorely need more of. But she and Kath are utterly, tragically wrong that white people should shut up. This reminds me of the Paulo Freire quote, “Washing one’s hands of the conflict between the powerful and the powerless means to side with the powerful, not to remain neutral.”

Nobody should ignore this struggle, and everyone should rumble with it. We should understand what the Black Panther Party was fighting for and why. We should know what “Bama” means and why Beyoncé talks about albino alligators. This is about organizing, and fighting for the imagination of a different future for all of us. And empathy is the key to that future. So yes, listen, listen, listen, and know when to give up power. Know when to give up control. That is an incredibly radical act as an artist. But also, understand when you do have power, and when you do have a platform. And use it to amplify silenced voices and unpack the insidious nature of oppression.

About the contributor: Sue Bell Yank organizes, educates, enacts, reads and writes about social practice in contemporary art. She worked on the Watts House Project and at the Hammer Museum in Los Angeles, among various other independent endeavors. She also produces online educational programs at the Oprah Winfrey Network. suebellyank.com