Plastic · Measures

--Jonathan Flatley, "Art Machine," in: Sol LeWitt: Incomplete Open Cubes, ed. Nicholas Baume (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2003): 82-101

"For the simple reason that, according to available information, people appear to have no other choice. The historical actors (social movements, political parties, institutions) that were supposed to provide the answers to the new challenges at the global level, were unable to stand up to them. ... So, faced with an overpowered labour movement, an omnipresent one-way communication system indifferent to cultural identities, an all-powerful centralized state loosely governed by unreliable political parties, a structural economic crisis, cultural uncertainty, and the likelihood of nuclear war, people go home. Most withdraw individually, but the crucial, active minority, anxious to retaliate, organize themselves on their local turf. They react against the exploitation-alienation-oppression that the city has become [sic] to represent. They may be unable to control the international flows of capital, but they can impose conditions on any multinational wishing to set up in their community. Although not against the television networks they do insist that some broadcasts are made in their language at peak-viewing hours; and they do keep their local celebrations to which the media takes second place. They will support representative democracy, but they go to the city council meeting en masse both to remind their representatives that they are there to represent them, and so to exercise some control. So when people find themselves unable to control the world, they simply shrink the world to the size of their community.

"Thus, urban movements do address the real issues of our time, although neither on the scale nor [on] terms that are adequate to the task. And yet they do not have any choice since they are the last reaction to the domination and renewed exploitation that submerges our world. But they are more than a last, symbolic stand and desperate cry: they are symptoms of our contradictions, and therefore potentially capable of superseding these contradictions. They are the organizational forms, the live schools, where the new social movements of our emerging society are taking place, growing up, learning to breath[e], out of reach of the state apparatuses, and outside the closed doors of repressed family life. They are successful when they connect all the repressed aspects of the new, emerging life because this is their specificity: to speak the new language that nobody yet speaks in its multifaceted meaning. When the vocabulary becomes too restricted (a single focus on rent control, for instance) the movements lose their appeal and become yet another interest group in a pluralist society. When they try to impose their programme, they become a counter-society, and collapse under the combined pressure of multinational capital, a mass media system, and the bureaucratic state.

"Urban movements do, however, produce new historical meaning -- in the twilight zone of pretending to build within the walls of a local community a new society they know to be unattainable. And they do so by nurturing the embryos of tomorrow's social movements within the local Utopias that urban movements have constructed in order never to surrender to barbarism." --Manuel Castells, The City and the Grassroots (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1983) 329-31

"But now, thanks to a popular family-support program, they're even closer.

"Welcome to the 'Flat Daddy' and 'Flat Mommy' phenomenon, in which life-size cutouts of deployed service members are given by the Maine National Guard to spouses, children, and relatives back home.

"The Flat Daddies ride in cars, sit at the dinner table, visit the dentist, and even are brought to confession, according to their significant others on the home front.

"'I prop him up in a chair, or sometimes put him on the couch and cover him up with a blanket,' said Kay Judkins of Caribou, whose husband, Jim, is a minesweeper mechanic in Afghanistan. 'The cat will curl up on the blanket, and it looks kind of weird. I've tricked several people by that. They think he's home again.'" --Brian MacQuarrie, "Guard Families Cope in Two Dimensions: 'Flat Daddy' Cutouts Ease Longing," The Boston Globe, August 30, 2006

Meanwhile, outside my window, a homeless man keeps yelling "Fuck society! FUCK society!"

I cannot disagree.

I like the rain. I like puddles. I like seeing the sky reflected on the ground, the ground parting to show sky: windows everywhere. It makes the world seem less solid.

Who said that about Algeria -- was it Algeria? Someone said that the desert was hard to look at because it lacked the glassy surfaces of ponds and lakes, which give the eye respite. Funny, I've always thought just the opposite: that deserts were easy on the eyes. You can look everywhere; there's nothing to stop you. You can go flying.

You can go swimming.

Walls. I just got back from an excellent talk Anna gave about her solidarity work in Palestine, during which she showed lots of pictures of the Wall, a.k.a. the "security fence." (You call this a fence?) My thoughts haven't gone terribly deep on this yet, but I've been wondering about the phenomenology of the Wall, of big walls in general: the Berlin Wall, the Great Wall, Hadrian's Wall, the wall they keep threatening to build at the U.S.-Mexico border. What must it be like to have one's field of vision cut off so abruptly, to know what's on the other side (neighbors, enemies) and yet not be able to see it? I keep thinking of these walls as big eyelids, permanently shut.

Art. At one point during her presentation, Anna put up a photograph of a section of the Wall covered in colorful graffiti, both images and slogans ("The Wall will fall!"). All at once, after a deadening few weeks, I felt enlivened to art, or at least to the particular idea of art that sustains me, that keeps me from abandoning my studies and running off to join the Peace Corps or the circus. The thing to remember, I think, is that art isn't only a product: it's a process, a social process. It's something people do, and feel driven to do, even under desperate circumstances -- or especially then, since it's also a way of insisting on beauty and life when everything else seems to insist on just the opposite. In other words, it's a form of nonviolent resistance.

The most effective political art (and by "effective" I mean heartening, galvanizing to those by and for whom it's made) isn't necessarily about politics, but derives its political force from the mere fact of its existence, its celebration of the human spirit in the face of dehumanizing elements. It sounds goofy when I put it that way, but that's only because you're a cynic.