Luke Pickrell talks to Andrea
Steves and Timothy Furstnau, the artists who founded and curated the Museum of
Capitalism in Oakland, which opened in June.
July 25, 2017
Interview
"EMANCIPATORY POLITICS
must always destroy the appearance of a 'natural order,' must reveal what is
presented as necessary and inevitable to be mere contingency, just as it must
make what was previously deemed to be impossible seem attainable."
These words of the late author
Mark Fisher, printed on parchment paper in purple ink and an eye-catching font,
were handed out to visitors at the opening of the Museum of Capitalism (MoC) in
Oakland, California.
The museum's, whose stated mission is to "educate
this generation and future generations about the ideology, history, and legacy
of capitalism," opened in June with a series of multimedia exhibits
created by artists, scholars and others, with more to come.
It has already hosted numerous events,
including a presentation by the Sustainable Economies Law Center (SELC) and a
lecture on "How to do nothing" by local artist Jenny Odell. Upcoming
events include discussions with Occupy Museums and the Anti-Eviction Mapping
Project. Thousands of people, including students from high school and college
classes, have passed through the museum since it opened in late June.
The Museum of Capitalism, June
18-August 20. (Open Wednesday–Sunday 12–6 p.m.; Fridays to 8 p.m.) 55 Harrison
Street along the Jack London Waterfront in Oakland.
To find out more about the
museum's plans and goals--at a time when the threat that capitalism poses to
human existence has never been greater, and an increasing number of people are
seeking an alternative to the status quo--I stole a moment of time from Andrea
Steves and Timothy Furstnau, the artists who opened the museum in June.
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HOW WOULD you describe the
content of the museum to those who haven't seen it? What are you trying to
convey about capitalism and what are some of the ways you do it?
Timothy: The museum contains a
wide variety of artifacts, artworks and exhibits created by a wide variety of
artists.
The exhibits aren't organized
into a rigid structure, but rather into an open layout that encourages the
experience of thematic resonances between them. These different elements of the
museum are intended to give impressions of how issues of class, race, gender,
and ecology are linked to capitalism, sometimes in subtle ways, and how
struggles around these issues might be seen as common struggles against
capitalism.
The exhibition also includes a
special exhibition called American Domain, curated by Erin Elder, exploring
land ownership in the United States; a library where visitors can study
capitalism to learn more about some of the issues raised in the exhibits and
the local groups working on them; and a gift shop where visitors can buy
mementos of the museum in a familiar retail environment.
The text labels in the museum,
and the framing of the project in general, use a "future anterior"
tone that looks back on capitalism as if it is a thing of the past, giving
visitors a chance to do what we like to call
"pre-enactment"--exploring their cognitive and emotional attitudes
towards capitalism and encouraging radical imagination in a way that does not
deny current realities, but de-familiarizes them.
We hope this sheds light on
the realities of capitalism and makes people feel more empowered to change
them.
WHAT ARE your backgrounds as
they relate to art?
Timothy: I don't think there
was ever a time I decided I wanted to be an artist. This doesn't fit neatly
into other career trajectories or categories.
I came to art through
anthropology and linguistics. Art is where all of my projects were supported.
There wasn't a careerist mentality. Art is the space we can operate in.
Whatever it gets called doesn't matter.
Andrea: We don't make art as
an end point, but in order to work through or make sense of something. We've
always thought of our projects as having an ability to bring about change,
whether that's a mental shift or a change in perspective.
A lot of our projects stem
from ideas of justice and our desire to bring justice to the world. To
paraphrase one of the artists on display in the museum: Art makes space for
belief, and belief makes space for change.
Timothy: I was working the
front desk of the museum and watching a group of people leave--I'm always
curious about people's response to the show.
There was a group of people
who were leaving, and they were in a daze, as people tend to be when leaving
the museum because it can be overwhelming. Just as they were getting out the
door, this one guy said to the other five: "It really is easy to take all
that stuff for granted." That was such a nice thing to hear, because
that's one of the feelings we are trying to provoke.
Andrea: It's about seeing the
world as it is, and also as it could be. That's the idea of the project. It
offers this moment of rupture in the way you see something--and in which you
can imagine something different.
ARE THERE any artists that
influenced your work or your life?
Andrea: I was trained as a sound
artist and musician. One of the points of influence for me comes from working
with sound, during which you spend a lot of time listening to things around
you.
From my experience as a
performer, I'm aware of the ways in which a visitor to an installation--an
audience member--experiences a thing. I'm always thinking about the bodily
experience and how something will unfold for someone. I'm always concerned with
what someone will be confronted with upon entering a space, what will draw
their attention, what will cause them to move.
I was influenced by the
composer Pauline
Oliveros, and in particular, the field she defined called deep listening,
which thinks about listening and attentiveness to the things around you, and
places an emphasis more on listening than producing.
I've always been interested in
flipping the traditional audience-performer relationship, where the audience
becomes part of the performance and part of the completion of the work. The
piece isn't a piece until the audience participates.
Many of the artists in the
show are also teachers and inspirations for us, and they tackled different
topics in different ways.
HOW DID you come up with the
idea for the museum?
Timothy: In a talk including Slavoj
Žižek and John Holloway, Alex Callinicos said that, like the Apartheid
Museum in South Africa, there might one day be a museum of capitalism. This was
the inspiration.
Putting something in a museum
historicizes that thing and gives it some force. It seems controversial in this
country to historicize capitalism, because it's said to be ahistorical –
something all-encompassing, like the air we breath.
The political question is interesting
because it shouldn't be controversial to say that something historically
specific won't last forever. That seems like a pretty sober claim to make, and
yet it gets people all up in arms.
"Political" as a
word gets thrown at things to attack them. We're told it's not good to be
political, and that we should be quiet and accept the status quo. As an artist,
you don't want to be put in the category of "political" because it's
used to silence and dismiss the work you do.
WHAT ROLE can art play in
politics and changing the world?
Andrea: I'm reminded of a
quote in an Ian Alan Paul essay, in
which he talks about how engaging in the struggle for justice is to knowingly
fight for that which we, in some way, cannot know in advance.
When it comes to changing the
world, art helps you imagine possible futures or scenarios that aren't
necessarily known. What we are trying to do with the museum is wrestle with
this idea that it's easier to imagine the end of the world than it is to
imagine the end of capitalism.
Some think it's incomplete if
you don't say what comes next. But art can help you fight against something
that might otherwise be hard to define. This relates to the initial question of
why art.
We started this project not
from a point of fully understanding what it means to say that capitalism has
ended, or even what capitalism is. But we are embarking on a project to fight
against something we know is unjust, even if we can't quite define it, and the
project becomes a way of working through what we can't define right away.
Timothy: Art can bring
awareness to an issue and serve as propaganda. It can also be embedded in
social movements, like signs and banners, or through tactical media campaigns.
Right now, when the political
discourse is so polarized, we are interested in art's ability to
de-familiarize--which is a fancy word for making the familiar seem strange
again. Art can cause a moment of rupture. It can shake up the framework and be
disorienting so that the familiar can be reworked.
When you walk in the museum,
there's hopefully something a little disorienting that you have to grapple
with. Capitalism isn't over, but it's in a museum.
We're in a period in which you
can give people lots of facts, but nothing gets through. We want to shake up
the framework, and maybe in that process, things can come in and be
assimilated. It can be hard to separate from an emotional attachment to
capitalism, and maybe art can help us do that.
CAN YOU talk about the media
attention for the museum?
Andrea: People want to talk
about capitalism but aren't given permission. It's sort of a dirty word. As
we've gone through the project, there have been people who have reacted
strongly to the "c" word, or done verbal gymnastics to avoid saying
it. But when you put it in the museum title, you can't avoid it.
Maybe I'm being cynical, but
the media don't necessarily have an interest in the politics of the museum.
They just know that saying the "c" word is provocative and can draw
clicks.
WHAT WOULD qualify as a
success for the museum?
Andrea: The emphasis isn't so
much on achievement, but more so about working through something. It's about
using the space to take in every interaction as its own possibility.
We've brought in groups,
artists and many different perspectives, and this puts an emphasis on dialogue
and collective thinking about a subject we aren't all experts on. Maybe this
can be a space in which failure is acceptable, and in which we can experiment
and sometimes fail. Some of these artists are doing things they've never done
before.
Timothy: This is an
experiment. It's not a finished product to bring to market. As was the case
with Thomas Edison, each "failure" was just a step on the road to the
light bulb. The museum isn't about reaching a certain quota of likes or clicks.
We're looking to gain as wide an audience as possible from outlets you might
not expect.
Andrea: Some people say the
museum is too radical, and some say it's not radical enough. While this creates
pressure, it means we are at least engaging people on both sides.
WHAT ARE your plans going
forward?
Timothy: The MoC is a
long-term project, but we don't know what the future holds because a lot
depends on funding. We've been pretty nimble so far. There's been a lot of
interest from people in other cities, and this is a theme that can adapt to
different sites. It's fun to think about a MoC in Detroit or the Dust Bowl. The
project is more of a framework that can support a bunch of different things.
The only way to defeat Trump—
and to redeem what is worth saving in liberal democracy—is to detach ourselves
from liberal democracy’s corpse and establish a new Left.
Elements of the program for
this new Left are easy to imagine.
Trump promises the
cancellation of the big free trade agreements supported by Clinton, and the
left alternative to both should be a project of new and different international
agreements.
Such agreements would
establish public control of the banks, ecological standards, workers rights,
universal healthcare, protections of sexual and ethnic minorities, etc.
The big lesson of global
capitalism is that nation states alone cannot do the job—only a new political
international has a chance of bridling global capital.
Excerpt from:
“We Must Rise from the Ashes
of Liberal Democracy”
BY Slavoj Žižek
http://inthesetimes.com/article/19918/slavoj-zizek-from-the-ashes-of-liberal-democracy
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