I don´t konw much about revolution what i know what i like

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This is not a protest. Repeat. This is nota protest. This is some kind of artisticexpression. Over.Toronto police radio broadcast. 1

The Global Street Party on 16 May 1998was one of the rst internationally coordi -

nated manifestations of the counter-globalisationmovement. With people dancing, marching andcavorting through streets around the world, itprovided an early indication that something newwas happening in politics. This feeling would beirrevocably con rmed a bit over a year later duringthe riots and demonstrations in Seattle, when thecolourful street party turned serious and shut downthe World Trade Organization meeting, effectivelyscuttling that round of trade negotiations.

Zanny Begg onpolitical art andthe counter-globalisationmovement

CAL: ART AND LIFE

Program for De-Turnstilisation of Life Itself ,Contra Filé, Sao Paulo, 2004

OVERLAND 199, 2010 49



The call-out on the Toronto police radiosindicates the sense of shock and concernthat accompanied the emergence of this newmovement. What exactly was it: a demonstra-tion? a party? art? Of course it was all of thesethings combined, and it was this very ambigu-ity that was to be such a source of strength forcontemporary culture and politics at the turn ofthe millennium.

The Global Street Party helped create a newpolitical movement that was born out of theprocess of globalisation and yet was its mostserious critic: the riots in downtown Seattlewere both a product of the high-speed, net-worked, informational capitalism known asglobalisation and a plea against its devastat-ing social consequences. The demonstrationbrought together several lineages of politi-cal protest and culture – rave, cyberpunk,Marxism, anarchism, grunge and avant-garde– into a movement that unforgettably coalescedinto ‘ ve days that shook the world.’

The relationship between ‘protest’ and ‘artis -tic expression’ has long troubled cultural theorynearly as much as it troubled the Toronto policeon that day in 1998. There is a heavy and fore-boding history of debates over politics and art,where notions of political revolution are boundup with ideas of the vanguard and notions ofartistic innovation bound up with ideas of theavant-garde. In both cases, change was con-ceived in terms of destruction – the destructionof the old order, be it political or artistic – at amoment when the new was felt to be possible .Adorno described this destructive and creativepotential as the ‘world once over, as like it as itis unlike it.’ 2

But if this discussion reaches back to theworld of the avant-garde of the beginning ofthe twentieth century, it also takes a new format the end of that century with the emergenceof the counter-globalisation movement. Thismade the new possible again while simultane-ously questioning the importance of the new asconceived by earlier generations of artists and

activists. In the late 1990s revolution was back,

but the more linear traditions of the avant-gardewere reinvented in more embodied, horizontaland transversal ways.

Avant-garde mash-up

One example is the counter-globalisation move-ment’s reinvention of the ideas of the 1960savant-garde art group the Situationists. Thebasic building block of the new movement wasthe ‘af nity group’, a small group of friends orfellow activists who planned their own way ofparticipating in larger events. The movement ofthese groups through the city could be consid-ered – to paraphrase a famous Situationist text– as modern day dérives : ‘the passage of a fewpersons [the af nity group] through a ratherbrief unity of time [the protest].’

While some af nity groups focused on moretraditional activities such as blockades or sit-ins, many used demonstrations as a platformfor creative experimentation in forms of pro-test. The sum total of these experimentationscould be regarded as ‘constructed situations’that disrupted the spectacular operations ofcapital. The Situationists’ idea of constructedsituations drew heavily on Henri Lefebvre’snotion of the Moment, which he saw as a ges-ture or action that breaks with the continuumof everyday life by providing a critique of thetotality of moments that constitute this con-tinuum. 3 According to Lefebvre, these momentswere destined to be lost but, in their moment ofrisk and anticipatory fantasy, they recon guredthe possible (‘Another World Is Possible’).

Seattle was the most serious anti-capitalistdemonstration in a developed country sincethe collapse of the Berlin Wall and was thusthe rst chance for the Left to build a move-ment beyond the in uence of Stalinism and thetotalitarian ethos it had bequeathed. In manyways, the counter-globalisation movement wasas much a demonstration against the organis-ing tactics and strategies of Stalinism and theOld Left as it was against neoliberalism and

the New Right.

Right: The Braidsof Insurgency, mapof resistance , IconoClasistas, Argentina2010

OVERLAND 199, 201050





By the end of the 1990s, the revolution-ary impulse of the Russian revolution – thetwentieth-century’s great political ‘event’ – hadbecome ‘saturated’, unable to generate or inspireanything new. In an interview in October 2006,Alain Badiou explained the concept of satu-ration not as ‘a brutal rupture’ but an overabsorption of ideas:

It becomes progressively more dif cult tond something new in the eld of the del -ity. Since the mid-80s, more and more,there has been something like a saturationof revolutionary politics in its conventionalframework: class struggle, party, dictator-ship of the proletariat, and so on. 4

The organisers of the counter-globalisationdemonstrations wanted the experience of pro-test to be different from the previous culture ofrevolutionary struggle. Those who came were

to be regarded as central to the decision-making

processes of the demonstration itself. No longera passive audience to applaud the edicts handeddown from the podium, participants wereencouraged to make their own decisions aboutwhat they wanted to happen – or, indeed, to setup alternative, mutually supportive demonstra-tions in an activist ethos of ‘tactical diversity’.

Carnival

The Spanish artist Marcelo Expósito traces theorigins of the counter-globalisation movementin his lm Radical Imagination (Carnivals ofResistance) . Expósito’s lm explores a key aspectof the new movement: the carnival. As one of hisinterviewees put it, ‘it was common sense, unlessyou create a space where people enjoy changingthe world, a space of joy and conviviality, youare not going to change anything … we wantedto get away from a traditional confrontationalprotest situation and pre- gure our imagined

world in the moment of the protest itself.’ 5




During the mid-1990s activists and revo-lutionaries increasingly began to question thejoyless and stoic traditions handed down by theLeft. The idea that the new world was born inthe here and now out of people’s joy and desirefor a more human existence was counterposedto the transcendent notion that struggle wouldbring the promised land of happiness andequality tomorrow. Subcomandante Marcos,the in uential spokesperson for the Zapatistas,explained this shift:

The revolution, in general, is no longerimagined according to socialist patterns ofrealism, that is as men and women stoicallymarching behind a red waving ag towardsa luminous future. Rather it has become asort of carnival. 6

Concurrent with this shift was a growinginterest in the ideas of the Russian philosopherand literary theorist Mikhail Bakhtin. Expósito’slm is structured around a series of quotes fromBakhtin’s Rabelais and His World. Bakhtin sawthe carnival as a popular expression of subver-sion or a ‘world turned inside out’ 7 in whichpeople could make fun of the systems of powerthat structured their everyday existence. Thisfreedom allowed them to parody ‘normal life’– not just in an imaginary way but also in anembodied way that celebrated abundance andlived out feelings of pleasure in a temporary

space without hierarchies.

Top of both pages: What Would It Mean to Win? lm by Oliver Ressler and Zanny Begg, 2008Above: Erroristas Action, Bronte Beach, 2007

OVERLAND 199, 2010 53



(Cologne, 2004; Barcelona, 2004; Buenos Aires,2006); Now-Time Venezuela: Media Along thePath of the Bolivarian Process (Berkeley ArtMuseum, 2006) ; Cycle Tracks Will Abound inUtopia (Australian Centre for Contemporary Art,Melbourne, 2005) . The rise of these big politicalshows led Russian artist Dmitry Vilensky to jokeof ‘a spectre … haunting Europe – the spectre ofthe political exhibition’. 8

The exhibition projects were complement-ed by publications and discussions such asGerald Raunig’s Art and Revolution (2008);the Verso Cultural Resistance Reader (2002);the Documenta 12 Magazine Project (2007);Empires, Ruins + Networks (edited by ScottMcQuire and Nikos Papastergiadis); MUP’s Artand Social Change : A Critical Reader (2005);

the Monday night critical discussion program

Using an intimate, close-cropping techniquethat focused solely on the eyes and mouth ofthe speaker, Expósito’s lm presents activistsdiscussing the link between previously disassoci-ated experiences of party/carnival and politicalprotest. Moving beyond the counterculturalidea that alternative lifestyles could be a uto-pian escape from the drudgery of capitalism, theGlobal Street Party activists sought to transformalternative culture itself into a form of confron-tation. The carnival would stop the levers ofcapitalism from working and simultaneously‘embody’ the new and imagined reality.

Activist Art

Marcelo Expósito’s direct exploration of thecounter-globalisation movement was typicalof a growing interest in political activism fromartists and cultural institutions during the millen-nium’s rst decade. A raft of political exhibitionsopened in the wake of Seattle: Who If Not We…? (multi-venue project across Europe, 2004); Collective Creativity (Kunsthalle Fridericianum,Kassel, 2005); There Must Be an Alternative(Forum Stadtpark, Austria, 2004); Space ofCon icts; The Invisible Insurrection of a MillionMinds – 20 Proposals for Imagining the Future (Sala Rekalde, Bilbao, 2005) ; Disobedience (Ivan

Dougherty Gallery, Sydney, 2005) ; Ex-Argentina

Top and below right: Conversations , Zanny Begg, 2010




by 16beaver in New York; Russia’s Chto Delat? newspaper; the Sarai Media Collective in Indiato again name just a few.

In addition, a range of art projects over-lapped directly with community organising andactivism outside of the gallery framework, suchas SquatSpace’s Tour of Beauty (Sydney); ChtoDelat’s project Drift (St Petersburg); Contra Filé’sProgram for the Deturnstilisation of Life Itself (SaoPaulo); Taring Padi’s banner works (Indonesia);Oliver Ressler’s documentaries of the movementin Genoa and Venezuela; Dmitry Vilensky’s par -ticipation in the European Social Forums; ShilpaGupta’s exhibitions to coincide with the WorldSocial Forum (India); Grupo Etcetera’s ErroristInternational protests during George Bush’s visitto La Plata (Argentina); and so on.

If, as the Toronto police pointed out, politi-cal demonstrations were now looking like‘artistic expressions’, artistic expressions werealso beginning to look like political demon-strations. Activist art came out of a moment ofoverlap between the spheres of revolutionaryactivism and art, generating new possibilities

within both. Today the counter-globalisation

movement has entered its own period of satu-ration, with the joy and excitement of earlycounter-summit protests replaced by more ritu-alised confrontations with the heavily forti edapparatus of the state, or even indifference: touse Jacques Rancière’s terms, the moment of‘dissensus’ has passed into the ‘politics as usual’of police lines and road-blocks.

Thus recent discussions on the counter-globalisation movement have focused on itslimitations: the impact of September 11, theincreasing spectacle of counter-summit pro-tests, the ritualising of violence between policeand protesters, the economic crash and the re-assertion of state-driven economics, the deathof utopian visions of globalisation. But if themovement feels ‘played out’ in a political sense,its cultural impact retains much of its vitality.

While even just a few years ago, artists weremaking works speci cally with activists fromthe counter-globalisation movement – projectssuch as Expósito’s lm – today the ‘moment’has diffused within art more broadly. Artists areworking within the subjective space opened up

by that wave of activism but in ways that have

Jumps and Surprises , Zanny Begg and Oliver Ressler, Den Frie, Copenhagen, 2008

OVERLAND 199, 2010 55



transmuted from that ‘event’ into other areasand concerns. The counter-globalisation move-ment may have set out to culturise politics butalong the way it has also politicised culture.

The process of globalisation has facilitateda rapid expansion and diversi cation of theimpulse towards networking, collaborationand collectivism contained within earlier avant-garde art movements: thus mail art becomesthe email list, détournment becomes sampling,the readymade becomes plagiarism, plagiarismbecomes copyleft, the dérive becomes GoogleEarth, the collage becomes the mash-up, appro-priation becomes the fanzine and so on. Ratherthen emaciating the avant-garde impulses ofearlier art movements (as gloomy postmodern-ists prophesised), the globalised informationage has expanded the capacity of artists and artmovements to experiment with networked prac-tices in which social relationships and politicalaction become a form of art. ‘Relational aes-thetics’, as propounded by Nicolas Bourriaudin the late 1990s, only touched the tip of thisparticular iceberg.

Of course, activist art cannot continue tothrive if activism doesn’t, and so the malaise ofthe counter-globalisation movement presentscertain challenges for the ongoing vitality ofpoliticised cultural experiments. But the move-ments and struggles that emerge will do so inan environment where ‘artistic’ and ‘political’expressions have become entangled in ways thatwill no longer surprise either the Toronto police

or cultural theorists. In the future, art’s abilityto continually amaze will manifest itself in asyet unimagined experiments in the gap betweenpolitics and art, activism and everyday life. Toquote Badiou again, ‘art must be as rigorous as amathematical demonstration, as surprising as anambush in the night, and as elevated as a star.’

1 Naomi Klein, No Logo , Flamingo, London,2001, p. 312.

2 Theodore Adorno, Aesthetic Theory , Continuum,

London, 1997, p. 427. 3 John Roberts, Philosophizing the Everyday:

Revolutionary Praxis and the Fate of CulturalTheory , Pluto Press, London, 2006, p. 80.

4 Diana George and Nic Veroli, ‘Interviewwith Alain Badiou’, 30 October 2006,<http://scentedgardensfortheblind.blogspot.com/2006_10_15_scentedgardensfortheblind_archive.html>.

5 Marcelo Expósito, Radical Imagination (Carnivalof Resistance) , 2004, DVD, 60 min., exhib-ited at ‘Self Education – Self Organisation’,National Centre for Contemporary Art, Moscow,September 2006.

6 Notes from Nowhere, We Are Everywhere: TheIrresistible Rise of Global Anticapitalism , Verso,London, 2003, p. 176.

7 Mikhail Bakhtin, ‘Rabelais and His World’(trans. Helene Iswolsky) in Stephen Duncombe(ed.), Cultural Resistance Reader , Verso, London,2002, p. 88.

8 Dmitry Vilensky, ‘On the Question of thePolitical Exhibition’ in Keg de Souza andZanny Begg (eds), If You See Something, SaySomething , Break Out, Sydney, 2007.

Above left: Jumps and Surprises , Zanny Begg and Oliver Ressler, Den Frie, Copenhagen, 2008Above right: Tour of Beauty , SquatSpace, Performance Space, Sydney, 2009


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I don´t konw much about revolution what i know what i like