The civil war died down but there were still his patients with pains from their phantom limbs. There was still the occasional unrest.
—Cathy Park Hong
“The American Revolution of 1776,” Walt Whitman wrote forty years after that war, “was simply a great strike, successful for its immediate object—but whether a real success judged by…the long-striking balance of Time, yet remains to be settled.” We’ll need more than five years to evaluate Occupy’s lasting effects, but Yates McKee’s Strike Art: Contemporary Art and the Post-Occupy Condition (Verso, 2017) helpfully starts the record on Occupy and its influence. With Strike Art, McKee has begun to make the case, if nothing else, that Occupy was, indeed, a great strike—one much larger than the original events surrounding #OccupyWallStreet.
Strike Art will serve as a valuable primary text for future historians. Because McKee himself participated in Occupy, current readers and future writers benefit from his own involvement in, and his own perspectives on, the movement. “I myself have been a participant in many of the projects detailed here,” McKee notifies readers in his introduction, “which colors my perspective.” An inherent quality in participant-observation, this “colored perspective” is something to keep in mind as Strike Art is both history and analysis. As Barry Schwabsky has written in his recent book A Perpetual Guest, “a subjective response from a participant”—like that of McKee’s—“would lack the sense of spectatorial distance essential to criticism; and an objective account would not be criticism but reportage.” McKee’s insider status cannot help but color both his criticism and his reportage.
Having been removed from Occupy central—as I was, and as future historians will be—has its benefits. Though much of Occupy (particularly McKee’s Occupy), happened physically in New York and other cities, it was clear to me, from Chicago, that the most active of the Occupy activists were part of the creative class—that is, “students, organizers, artists, writers, designers, programmers, and other ‘creative workers’”—people who believed art, whether manifested through images, words, performance, or some combination, can make something happen. Because I saw that the role of artists in Occupy was pivotal, it’s hard for me to believe, as McKee writes, that it was “a little known fact.” McKee’s mistake here, I think, is a result of his insider role in Occupy, and it comes with the territory of writing such a recent history from the front lines. Doing so is a bold undertaking, since most of us have our own memories of Occupy with which we can’t help but compare McKee’s account.
Where McKee must know better, regardless of his insider status, is when he states that “Occupy involved the emergence of ‘the artist as organizer.’” Artists and poets have organized numerous and notable movements in the past—examples include but are not limited to F. T. Marinetti in Fascist Italy, Amiri Baraka and the Black Arts Movement in the U.S., even the “radical art workers of the Paris Commune” that McKee refers to on the next page.
For Occupy, there is no equivalent F. T. Marinetti or Amiri Baraka, no one founder, no charismatic poet-artist-leader, no genius movement architect, no communications mastermind—at least not as identified in the pages of Strike Art. But then who called everyone to Zuccotti Park? And who wrote those memorable words: “We are the 99%”?
Could Occupy truly have been led by the 99%? McKee’s answer, I think, would be yes. But he shows instead of tells.
•
Chronicling the makings of the Occupy movement, McKee shows how nonprofits like Creative Time, artist networks like Art and Revolution, magazines like Tidal, and exhibitions like Democracy in America made Occupy possible. In McKee’s account, Occupy grew out of a particular moment in the established art world, one in which the passive viewer of art was making way for the active participant. This was, to be fair, “an outcome of a cultural shift that’s been a long time in the making,” as Schwabsky has put it. (At least as long ago as the nineteenth century—the French poet Stéphane Mallarmé acknowledged that “modern audiences seek to participate in the creative process.”) According to McKee, audience involvement heightened in summer 2011, to the extent that it could be “diagnosed” by art critic Claire Bishop. As McKee notes, Bishop showed that recent “discourses took artistic participation as a prefiguration of direct democratic participation.” Thus, involved Occupy audiences were participating in the American democratic process as a result of engaging in the specific creative process of Occupy.
Participation in the creative process changes traditional artist-viewer roles. Experiencing art is no longer top-down—an artist makes art, another regards it. Instead, increasingly, viewers become part of the art or the art experience, bringing their own backgrounds and interpretations. Works are incomplete without audience participation. In the case of Occupy, no one at the top instilled rules and regulations for how the Occupy brand was used. Instead, according to Strike Art, a “common set of languages, principles, and practices were developed” (italics mine).
McKee uses passive construction to either avoid naming the source of the Occupy identity (negating hierarchies, and avoiding naming that charismatic leader I seek), or to suggest that common practices were developed on a group level. With Occupy, another mode of collective life was not only imagined, it was practiced. Structures that were being redeveloped during and leading up to this time made it possible for the entire movement to happen in such a way—for people who otherwise would have been passive bystanders to become participants in the movement, for the existing structures, particularly of the art world, to be subverted, and to bring that subversion to bear within the structure of the movement so that it might influence the structures of society at large.
McKee maintains that Occupy was not “an unstructured free-for-all,” but he doesn’t select any individuals as responsible for Occupy’s communications and brand. (Some movement organizers, however, such as Judith Butler, are named.) He never refers to Occupy’s identity, or uses any communications lingo—brand, slogan, or the like. They are part of marketing-speak—taboo in academia, they might seem out of place in McKee’s art historical analysis, or even in the pages of a journal such as this. But it’s worth considering Occupy conceptually as a brand. Because if the Occupy movement was successful, insofar as we all now remember it, understanding how it was made memorable would teach us a lesson in the art of movement-making.
Occupy’s brand was true to participants’ beliefs, values, and concerns: that a fraction of the population was living at the expense of the much greater majority, that American citizens must defend the health of our democracy, and that doing so would require rectifying systemic issues. Because the Occupy brand was created by the participants themselves (though McKee doesn’t state so outright), it was authentic. This, at least in part, is why the Occupy campaign was so memorable. It was a brand not created by marketers for a target audience, but an identity that all Occupy participants helped to shape and extend via the “populist figure of the 99%, the form of the general assembly, the embodied technology of the People’s Microphone, the aesthetics of cardboard signage, and the tent encampment with its infrastructures of mutual aid,” all of which were manifestations of the Occupy brand.
When we see Occupy as a brand, rather than as a collectivist utopia, we can see it as a movement whose success was due to its inclusiveness. As a brand, as a movement, Occupy found a way to unite people by focusing on dissatisfaction with the 1%, and by speaking clearly to the other 99%.
•
“We are the 99%” was plastered across New York City, at least the one we saw in the media. Yes, “we” was overrepresented by the creative class, but by setting “everyone off against the common enemy of Wall Street” with a memorable slogan, Occupy assured audiences and onlookers, passersby and passive viewers of the movement that yes, you are one of us, part of our community. This too was key to Occupy’s success. This rhetoric is why we remember Occupy: clear, resonant messages and images, culminating in a powerful brand, one whose strength derived from empowering its community, from transforming an “audience” into participants and collaborators. This message is why I would suggest that the movement was successful in its “immediate object,” as Whitman put it—that is, successful in getting our attention, not necessarily in making identifiable, measurable change.
The fact that Occupy is a moment in our collective American memory accounts for something of the movement’s success. I’d like to learn more about how and why Occupy succeeded in getting our attention, trace the root of its memorable communications strategy and brand, and identify the people or person responsible for it; but such information is not included in Strike Art, because, it would appear, such a hero does not exist. This is part of the genius of the movement: it was generated communally. It thus defies easy summary, a clear sequence of events. It also defies, in McKee’s terms, being measured by “success”:
My own approach to Occupy in this book, however, finds a closer affinity with those thinkers who have approached it not in terms of a predetermined metric of success relative to which Occupy would be found lacking, but rather in terms of the unknown possibilities and impassioned energies it unleashed for the present.
The sentiment is akin to another I’d read on the outcomes of Occupy, outside of the confines of McKee’s book. It’s attributed to the author of the line that I’d been trying to trace, the reason, perhaps, I picked up McKee’s book in the first place. I wanted to know who the author of the line “We are the 99%” was—it’s a line that became central to the Occupy movement, one that has since codified the mood of multitudes, and originally came from a Tumblr which first started publishing submissions on September 8, 2011. It’s a unifying statement, one that evokes the Occupy moment but also outlives it, a statement I think Americans alive in 2011 will forever remember, one that was invoked over and over in the 2016 election cycle. And it’s a line attributed to a man named only as Chris, someone we might make the hero of the movement, if only he had a last name. He’s quoted in an October 7, 2011 post on Mother Jones:
The important thing is to go as far as we can for as long as we can, and to try as hard as we can. Because that means the next time someone else is going to try harder. And then, someone else will try harder than that. Until, eventually, we win.
Winning, of course—that would mean success. But then that same sentiment—the one that shrugs off success in any measurable terms—was struck, yet again, when I traced the father of the Occupy brand (according to the New York Times). Though he went unnamed in Strike Art, in the press Kalle Lasn was often referred to as the founder of the movement, the source of its brand. Lasn defined Occupy’s success for the New Republic: “They have been successful in launching a heavy duty conversation in America about the state of America…. It doesn’t get any better than that.” Meaning, by starting the conversation, Occupy (or they, nota bene) had in a sense already won.
Lasn is the editor of Adbusters, a magazine published in Canada and widely distributed in the U.S. Lasn is notably absent from Strike Art, though McKee does mention Adbusters. The magazine’s contribution, according to McKee, was in providing “the foundational meme of Occupy,” an image released on July 2, 2011 which McKee describes this way:
A ballerina stands atop the sculpture [Charging Bull, a mascot for the finance industry] in an arabesque pose, her lithe, linear figure playing off against the lumbering bronze corpus of the bull. In the background, hordes of gas-masked militants surge forward toward the viewer through clouds of teargas. At the top of the image, at the apex of the ballerina’s pose, we read “What is Our One Demand?” At the bottom, against the cobblestones of Bowling Green: #OCCUPYWALLSTREET SEPTEMBER 17TH. BRING TENT.
It’s as though they were all working together. Lasn sent the invitation, “Chris” set the anthem, McKee wrote this book. For Schwabsky’s part, we might say, it’s part of a larger, longer-running picture. One where creatively, together, we get the Union back into shape—one where democracy wins? Let Whitman have both the first and last word: “I can conceive of no better service in the United States, henceforth, by democrats of through and heart-felt faith, than boldly exposing the weakness, liabilities and infinite corruptions of democracy.”
September 2017
This review was published in Issue 61:1.