William Pope.L's The Black Factory [Enlarge in New Window]

TACTICAL PERFORMANCE AND THE INTERVENTIONISTS
Written by subRosa

The present has been shattered into a thousand shards, all of which require different strategies for resistance. Now more than ever, an anarchist epistemology should be adopted, one that leads to situational knowledge. It must be one that tolerates research and exploration within any time or spatial zone. Resistance cannot be carried out from the safety of a single bunker. Those who are able must be free to move through time by any means necessary.

—Critical Art Ensemble (CAE), The Electronic Disturbance (New York: Autonomedia, 1994)

Introduction

Critical Art Ensemble's statement is a call to cultural producers, tactical media artists and activists to think about the ways in which information and communications technologies (ICT) and bio-technologies have fundamentally changed the conditions, contexts, materials, technologies, and audiences with which they work. Because the conditions of everyday life, public culture, and global/local relations have changed, many artists have reconsidered the relationships between art and life so intensely examined by avant-garde modernist artists. Many artists, intellectuals and professionals have become "immaterial" creative workers serving a burgeoning information and commodity culture industry. Artists and academics are drawing inspiration and techniques from these new realms as they experiment with new ways of engaging the public. Creating projects about key issues of our times, they are simultaneously challenged to expand their reach into virtual and electronic realms and also re-engage in new ways with traditional sites, situations, and audiences. This calls for an approach that is flexible and mobile, ready to move anywhere that audiences might be temporarily mobilized around topics of public concern and action. And yet, because of the complexity of many of the key problems in our culture today, projects must also be able to supply complex information, inspire discussion between artists and audiences, and resonate with the audiences' experiences and concerns.

As a result, experimental forms of politically and socially informed performance-variously called participatory theatre, tactical media, recombinant performance, and biotech-art-have been pioneered by many artists and artist collectives over the past decade. The importance and riskiness of this work has been underscored recently by the prosecution of artist, and CAE founding member, Steve Kurtz, and science professor Robert Ferrell. The case raises urgent issues of freedom of expression, freedom of information, and the right to access materials, processes and technologies heavily guarded by scientific experts and government powers. The indictment of Kurtz and his work affirms that art addressing current social and political issues can play a vital role in mobilizing audiences as partners in open public debate, critique, and resistance to state control. In fact, this kind of cultural production is one of only a handful of arenas where critical exchange may still occur in public.

"Site-U-Ational" and Recombinant Performance

subRosa: Can You See Us Now, MASS MoCa (2004)

As an art activist collective, subRosa's main mode of art production has been "site-u-tational," a form of situated participatory theater revamped for the information age. CAE has formulated the term "recombinant theater," deliberately referencing the process of genetic engineering (recombinant genetics, or transgenics) that produces new genetic (DNA) sequences and genomes by combining genes, often across species lines (1). This type of performance employs open-ended interactive environments in which participants can explore objects, texts, technologies, activities and learning experiences with each other and the artists. When successful, such projects generate a dialogue of conflicting and various voices, and provoke questioning of the taken-for-granted codes of social interaction and methods of learning and knowledge operating in everyday life. They create an environment where participants are able to experience and learn about the politics and material effects of new technologies on our lives. Crucially, participants are also able to discover and practice forms of resistance to established authorities and experiment tactically with materials and technologies.

Biopower Unlimited and U-Gen-A-Chix

Biopower Unlimited: What do university students, knowledge workers, and migrant workers have in common? How is a university like a Phactory Pharm of the Phuture? What is Biopower? Why should you give a moo? Take our entertaining interactive profiler test to learn how you participate in Biopower, a form of power that regulates "the production and reproduction of life itself." How does Biopower function to produce life and social and productive networks? Explore our website and find out more about BIOPOWER UNLIMITED! We advocate an empowered relationship to material and immaterial labor through desire, consciousness and knowledge. (2)

Two examples of these performances are Biopower Unlimited and U-Gen-A-Chix. Biopower Unlimited took place in the context of a campus technology fair. subRosa had previously performed Expo EmmaGenics, staged in Germany as a faux American-style trade fair to acquaint Europeans with the products of commodified U.S. flesh markets of Assisted Reproductive Technologies. At Bowling Green University we posed as technology exhibitors along with Microsoft, Verizon, and many other high-tech firms. When asked by visitors what we were selling, we replied "information and knowledge." It turned out to be a very effective context for our performance. People became intrigued with the Biopower Profiler computer program we had set up on computers in the booth. The Profiler was a questionnaire, the answers to which were scored by the computer program. People were able to calculate daily, weekly or monthly hours spent on various categories of labor, such as immaterial, knowledge or creative work, maintenance of self and family, labor both paid and unpaid, and pleasure, play, or escape from work. subRosa advisors subsequently helped them interpret their colorful Profile graph printout and counseled people on how to protect their biopower from the incursions of capitalism and corporations. Many women especially, were amazed to discover how much time they spent on the life-maintenance of others, while spending virtually no time on pleasure or self-maintenance. Participants ranged from students, professors, maintenance and janitorial staff, townspeople, and high-tech workers. We found that within the context of the tech fair, and by using tools that people are comfortable and familiar with-like computer programs, personal counseling, and marketing products-people responded readily and openly. Most of them had no idea that we were artists, not vendors. This taught us something about information as commodity and entertainment, and about how the market place of commodities intersects virtually seamlessly with the market place of ideas.

subRosa: U-Gen-A-Chix

We subsequently used what we had learned from that project in U-Gen-A-Chix: Cultures of Eugenics, performed at Southwest Missouri State University (Springfield, MO, October 2003). This performance, situated in the lobby of the SMSU Student Union, engaged students directly in an experience designed to reveal and discuss how eugenic desires and profit motives drive genetic engineering of humans and animals and perpetuate eugenic consciousness in culture. We set up tandem marketing booths: One dispensed information on human egg donation and Assisted Reproductive Technologies, while the other offered taste tests of a subRosa-made superior chicken biscuit purported to enhance student smartness and improve memory. After tasting the biscuit, students were invited to give live video interviews on their opinions about genetic engineering of foods, and biological and social eugenic tendencies in Assisted Reproductive Technologies. These interviews were broadcast in the Student Union as a live video feed during the performance and later on the campus television station. Students also filled out questionnaires that helped them assess their "Fleshworth" on the biotech market, and received certificates of worth. subRosa's pamphlet "Cultures of Eugenics" addressed the question "Why are women like chickens, and chickens like women?" and discussed the links between ART and "pharming," (genetically engineering plants or animals to produce pharmaceuticals) and cloning of chickens to produce human-compatible pharmaceuticals in their eggs. This project was perhaps our most successful to date in that it created many paths of audience engagement while it also gave them a rare public platform from which to speak. It was gratifying to hear the thoughtful student statements that showed surprisingly high levels of concern and engagement with current biotech and genetic modification issues.

subRosa also uses feminist consciousness-raising and autobiographical techniques in performances that stress process, dialog and collaboration. In some projects, audiences participate as co-researchers and performers, producing and sharing knowledge gained from their interactions with information and objects presented in the performance. Thus, subRosa incorporates lessons from feminist and postcolonial theory and practice, always being mindful of the many differences among audiences including economic, geographic, educational and health differences.

Projects

A brief discussion of several projects by other collectives and artists serves to illustrate some of the current tactical performative practices.

Los Cybrids: El World Brain Disorder: Surveillance, Control, Pendejismo

El World Brain Disorder inspires dialogue about the impact of information technologies on communities of color and critiques processes of globalization. This project was most recently performed at "The Race in Digital Space" Conference at the University of Southern California from October 11-13, 2003. In its mix of comedy, clowning, audio and visual tricks, this performance draws on Mexican traditions of tent shows, or carpas. Los Cybrids actively engages diverse audiences using a mix of languages, gestures, confrontational and interrogative techniques. The group also adopts the formats of popular television like talk-shows and game shows, and mixes in riffs from community radio and Mexican tele-novelas. While the members of Los Cybrids no longer work together as a collective, founding member John LeaŻos plans to continue the work by taking it to the streets and plazas in keeping with the carpas tradition and groups like the San Francisco Mime Troupe.

CAE: Biotech Performances

The turn to biotechnology from CAE's earlier work on communication technology offered a site for direct interrogation of the relations of digital capital culture and the "loop" to material everyday life. (3)

For the past eight years or so, CAE's work has focused on the field of biotechnology, providing the general public with an awareness of issues raised by biological research. Their participatory performances expose nuances of scientific research often not accessible to the general public. Cult of the New Eve, for example, addressed questions concerning the utopian rhetoric spinning off the Human Genome Project. For this project the collective acted as an actual cult, wearing costumes, handing out literature, and conducting communion and indoctrination ceremonies. They brewed beer and baked communion wafers using transgenic yeast with human DNA from the Human Genome project. In participatory performances the public was first invited to inform themselves about the Human Genome Project by surfing an educational website on computers provided in the performance space. They were then invited to participate in a communion ceremony that would allow them to physically incorporate DNA from "the New Eve, " mother of the Second Genesis and the cult's figurehead. After taking communion (drinking transgenic beer and eating wafers), participants were given medical bracelets with their names encoded in TAGC genetic code and asked to donate a tissue sample from their mouth to the cult's DNA bank.

Critical Art Ensemble: Cult of the New Eve

Cult of the New Eve was performed in several public spaces and museums in Germany, Belgium, Austria, France, and Slovenia. In each country and venue it generated different discussions. Because of the embodied and visceral nature of the performance-i.e. participants had to make a decision whether or not to trust the "realness" of the information, and whether or not to drink the beer and eat the wafers-responses and discussions took on an extremely lively, and sometimes even angry and combative tone. In France, for example, cults had been outlawed the week before CAE arrived, and anti-globalization activist Jose Bove had been stirring up public controversy about genetically modified food; meanwhile, in the U.S., scientist Craig Venter announced that he had won the race to sequence the Human Genome. Thus the public was being engaged on a topic that was of immediate concern to them-life was directly intervening into art and vice versa.

In the pending legal case mentioned earlier, a similar intervention of life into art occurred earlier this year when CAE was scheduled to show its project FreeRange Grain at The Interventionists exhibition at the Massachusetts Museum of Contemporary Art (MASS MoCA) in North Adams. CAE had planned to set up a mobile DNA extraction and analysis laboratory in which common snack foods can be tested for the presence of genetically modified ingredients, such as corn, soy, and canola. This project, which poses no biohazards to participants or the environment, had already been shown successfully and safely at major public art and museum venues in England, Holland, Austria, and Germany.

This time it was the FBI and the Joint Terrorist Task Force that intervened. In tragic and terrifying events detailed on the www.caedefensefund.org website, CAE's laboratory equipment, computers, materials, and documents were seized by the FBI on the eve of the opening of the show. At the time of this writing, CAE founding member Steve Kurtz and scientist collaborator Robert Ferrell have been charged and will be tried for mail and wire fraud, and other members and associates of CAE were subpoenaed to testify at a grand jury. CAE's performance for MASS MoCA could not go forward as planned. Instead of performing food testing in their mobile public lab, CAE exhibited computers with a website clearly explaining the lab procedures and instruments used for the food testing. They also exhibited a statement that explained why FreeRange Grain could not be completed as planned. While tragic and unplanned, this "intervention" clearly demonstrates how threatening it is to state authorities when artists offer "real" tools and knowledge about key socio-political issues to the public. [Visit the Critical Art Ensemble website]

William Pope L.: The Black Factory

William Pope L.'s The Black Factory is a complex collaborative exhibit that explores what it is to be black and white in America today. It uses contributions of miscellaneous everyday objects to start a conversation about class, race, and dichotomies of culture. The Black Factory itself is a van that has been outfitted with a bookstore and a gift shop, and travels around the country, stopping in supermarket and library parking lots, public parks, and other public venues along the way. subRosa saw it in a parking lot in North Adams where it was part of The Interventionists exhibition. People were crowding around donating items that meant "blackness" to them. Pope L. was pulverizing parts of these objects into a "black" powder, and making "gifts" out of the rest of them to sell in the gift shop. This audacious work provides many moments of "black humor;" it was evident that people were both enjoying themselves and often rather shocked to be confronted by their own racism and that of others. Another part of the project involved "value-added" donated cans of food, which Pope L. signed and sold for "art world" prices. He then gave the money to local food banks. Clearly such a project addresses audiences on many levels from the humorous and shocking, to the practical and poetic. It critiques artists, the art industry, and audiences simultaneously, demonstrating both hidden and overt race and class relations in different arenas of everyday life. [Learn about The Black Factory online]

Conclusion

According to Nato Thompson, the curator of The Interventionists: Art in the Social Sphere, the exhibition highlights work by contemporary artists who attempt to intervene critically and tactically in everyday life: "Interventions in the public sphere, the artist as tool/resource provider, the artist as interdisciplinary researcher are a few of these general points of intervention." With a nod to the history of institutional critique, the exhibition statement also noted, "[The artists'] quest for audience and relevance provides signposts for reconsidering museum exhibition strategies as well as a more engaged role of art in everyday life. It is with this task in mind, that The Interventionists provides a unique voyage into the museum as the site for civic criticality."(4)

Little did Thompson dream that this exhibition would be the backdrop for a signature case of artists being investigated in the name of homeland security. The CAE case demonstrates both the urgent necessity for, and the risks of pursuing politically and socially relevant tactical critical projects in times of public intimidation, surveillance, and widespread fear. The right to research issues such as public health, transgenic agriculture, pharmaceutical development, and U.S. bio-defense programs-as well as access to necessary research materials, processes and technologies-is increasingly monopolized by corporate science, intellectual property rights, patenting of life materials, and by government powers "guarding" homeland security. Art-practices that engage these ideas play a vital role as a means of mobilizing audiences as participants in open and informed public debate, critique, and resistance to state control of knowledge.

Let the interventions continue!

1.Critical Art Ensemble, ---. "Recombinant Theater and Digital Resistance." Digital Resistance: Explorations in Tactical Media. New York: Autonomedia, 2001.

2. subRosa, "Cultures of Technology" pamphlet, 2003.

3. Rebecca Schneider in Critical Art Ensemble, The Molecular Invasion, Appendix 2.

4. Nato Thompson, MASS MoCA, preliminary Exhibition Statement for "The Interventionists," 2003.