Category: Arts & Culture

We speak with Tim Ridlen about his new book, Intelligent Action: A History of Artistic Research, Aesthetic Experience, and Artists in Academia (Rutgers University Press, 2024). Ridlen holds a PhD in Art History from the University of California, San Diego and is currently Associate Teaching Professor in the Department of Film, Animation, and New Media at the University of Tampa. In Intelligent Action, Ridlen challenges dominant readings of mid-20th Century art preoccupied with critiques of the commodity form by shifting critical focus from the familiar spaces of the gallery & museum to the contested scenes of US higher education. 

Through archival research and analysis of artworks by Gyorgy Kepes, Allan Kaprow, Mel Bochner, and Suzanne Lacy, among others, Intelligent Action examines how these artists brought alternatives to dominant conceptions of research and knowledge production. The book is organized around specific institutional formations—artistic research centers, proposals, exhibitions on college campuses, and the establishment of new schools or pedagogic programs. Formal and social analysis demonstrate how artists responded to ideas of research, knowledge production, information, and pedagogy. Works discussed were produced between 1958 and 1975, a moment when boundaries between media were breaking down in response to technological, cultural, and generational change. In the context of academia, these artistic practices have taken up the look, feel, or language of various research and teaching practices. In some cases, artists bent to the demands of the cold war research university, while in others, artists developed new modes of practice and pedagogy. Reading these works through their institutional histories, Ridlen shows how artistic research practices and artistic subjectivity developed in the long 1960s within and alongside academia, transforming the role of artists in the process.

During our discussion, we consider the significance of Ridlen’s theorization of “intelligent action” for a democratic politics centered around public money, educational provisioning, and aesthetic experimentation. 

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Transcript

Scott: Tim Ridlen, welcome to Money on the Left.

Tim Ridlen: Thank you. I’m really excited to be here. Thank you for having me.

Scott: We have invited you onto the podcast to discuss your brand new book from Rutgers University Press titled Intelligent Action, A History of Artistic Research, Aesthetic Experience, and Artists in Academia. Before we get into this book, what its arguments are, what its big stakes are, we’d like to invite you to tell our audience a little bit about yourself, something about your professional background, perhaps your personal background, and how you came to write this interesting and compelling new book. 

Tim Ridlen: Sure. I will start a little bit before my turn towards a more scholarly form of practice, because it’s relevant to the book. I went to an art school in Chicago, the School of the Art Institute. I was headed towards becoming an art practitioner. I went on to do an MFA. Then, I was working freelance in New York, trying to do the art thing, trying to make a go of it, while also doing things like freelance artist assisting, freelance art handling for galleries and things like that. An important detail: during that time, I worked for this organization called e-flux, to which I refer in the introduction of the book. We can talk a little bit about why that’s important later. But I was always academically minded, even as I was artistically focused. And I think the experience of living in New York and not knowing where my next paycheck was going to come from prompted me to look at options. That’s when I decided to go into a PhD program. The PhD program that I went into was one of the first programs that was specifically for art practice. The way that it was set up though, was through an existing art history PhD program. You do all the training of an art historian, and then they call it a “concentration in art practice.” This was at the University of California, San Diego. I thought, “Well, that fits.” I think I could get into that program, first of all, and it fits with how I see myself. I went into that program thinking that I was going to continue making art, being an artist, finding a way to reconcile that with my more academic interests. That is what happened to a degree. Then the book project proved to be a culmination of a successful transition to more academic scholarly modes of producing work. Though I haven’t really made a lot of art recently, I nevertheless continue to think of myself as an artist, occupying a weird split between writing and thinking about other people’s art and potentially creating my own.

I mention all that because that is relevant to the topic of the book, the book being about artists in academia. It really came out of the experience of going into this PhD program. It was a pretty new PhD program and a new idea that artists should even think about getting PhDs. I entered this very self-reflexive mode because there was a lot of conversation going on about PhDs for artists, even if that was more in Europe. As for this program in the U.S., it wasn’t really clear if it was going to take off. To be honest, I’m not really so sure if it has even now. You know, this was around 2011 that I went into that program. At that time, there were lots of conversations and conferences for the College Art Association about whether or not this was going to become the new terminal degree. That, of course, hasn’t really come to pass. What has come to pass, however, is that there’s a lot of interest in artistic research. I thought maybe this will be a trend  during this time that I was working on this project. And I wasn’t really sure if it would come back. But what certainly was also at play is that there was a lot of interest in artists and education, not just, how do we educate artists in colleges and universities or art schools, but educational structures as potential forms for art making and art exhibiting. So, maybe we’re getting into the territory of the book now. Coming back to this organization that I worked for, e-flux: They were a big part of that around 2008, 2009, when I started working there.

Around that time, as a result of this interest in Europe and PhD programs for artists and artistic research, in addition to certain events that were connected to the artists who run e-flux, people started to talk about an “educational turn” in art. Then when you talk to people who’ve been around a little bit longer, they’re like, “Oh, yeah, this always comes back every 10 years.” So, this is not really anything new. But at the time, it seemed like there was an interest in education and artistic research, and those things are connected, but not necessarily the same. That’s a longish answer to the question of how I came about it. And there’s a little bit more. I would like to share a little bit more about e-flux just because it explains where I was coming from when I started the project.

E-flux is this artist-run organization. It’s not a nonprofit, and it’s not just a gallery space or something. So, I always have a hard time describing exactly what it is. But people probably know it mostly because of their email announcement service. They send out email announcements for exhibitions, and museums pay them. Basically, it’s advertising. And this money funds all kinds of interesting projects. Now, it funds a very reputable and influential journal. Not an academic journal in the sense that it’s not peer reviewed; but it is leading a lot of intellectual conversations in the art world. A lot of that came out of the artists Anton Vidokle and Julieta Aranda, who were the artists behind e-flux. They started to use the revenue that they were generating to do some very interesting projects, one of which was the Martha Rosler Library. That’s the example that I open the book with. Martha Rosler is an artist who is best known for her work in the 1970’s as a conceptual artist. One of her best known pieces is this photo-conceptual piece called “The Bowery in two inadequate descriptive systems.” In that piece, Rosler is critiquing documentary photography, critiquing systems of language and the way that they construct our ideas of the social world. It’s a very 1970’s kind of piece.

So, Martha Rosler is this artist that the artists at e-flux were looking to as a source of inspiration and legacy. Their project, “Martha Rosler Library,” took all of Rosler’s books and put them on display. They rented a space in the Lower East Side of Manhattan, which just so happened to be exactly the neighborhood where, or blocks from the Bowery, where she had taken the images for the original project. And they exhibited her books. It was treated as an artwork at the same time that it was really just her personal library. And when you ask them about it, ask Martha Rosler or the artists at e-flux about it, they say: “Well, this started because she was looking for a place. She needed to move her books. She was looking for a space to store them. And they were like, let’s exhibit them.” It was a very successful project.

After its first exhibition in New York, it toured all over Europe. That was part of this educational turn–people were starting to get interested in thinking about artists as not just people that make paintings or do projects, but as people that study and research and read. What do they read? Let’s look at that. That became an interesting thing to actually exhibit as the artwork itself. Another other thing—although I don’t talk about this in the book–is there was at the time an exhibition called “Manifesta.” I mean, there still is. It’s a biennial exhibition. At the time, Anton Vidokle, the artist from e-flux, was invited to be one of the curators for this biennial. And the whole format for that biennial was they were going to run it like an art school. They were going to invite, they actually did, in fact, invite artists to apply. Then the idea was that they would come to Cyprus. They would come there and basically instead of an exhibition, it would be like a school. They would invite artists to teach classes and run seminars and that kind of thing. This was in the air when I started that project.

And that’s what interested me in approaching it and taking it on as a subject.

Billy: So in your research, like any good dissertation, it’s part biographical. Did you find that your turn to academe and your reasons for it were common among those artists that you looked into in the 60’s? Was it a way to bide time-slash subsidize your artwork?

Tim Ridlen: Yeah, I think that’s definitely it. Like I said, I was looking for institutional support. There’s all kinds of places you can get that kind of support. It’s not going into academia, but that was what I thought would work for me. And I think that definitely resonates with the artists that I was looking into.

People like Alan Kaprow, who is a major figure in the book, he’s got a great quote where he says something like, “You know, I used to think teaching was a way to buy the groceries. But, you know, now I’ve come to realize that it’s much, much more than that.” He admitted that at the beginning, it was a way to pay the bills. But then he starts to, throughout his career, engage more and more with academia as a site and a format that allows him to do more participatory kinds of work. So, I try to contest this narrative that art became more academic. That’s the standard line that you’ll get from people like Howard Singerman, who has a major book on the art schools and artists in universities.

He traces the history of the MFA degree. That book is very well-researched, I don’t disagree with anything that’s in it, but it tells the story of a tendency towards more academic development towards academia that culminates in the 70’s. I guess there’s truth to that; but I also try to point out that artists like Alan Kaprow were working in universities in the 1950’s, and not just working in universities, but making that a central component of their work. That actually starts much earlier. It has important consequences, especially for alternatives to engaging with ideas about research in academia.

Scott: One of the big claims for your whole project is putting pressure on a certain dominant reading of mid-late 20th century U.S. art that is pretty preoccupied with the problem of commodification, right? Could you talk about who’s behind those kinds of arguments? What are they really saying? And what does shifting the scene from the gallery or the museum to academia as a heterogeneous institution do to complicate this false story that’s out there?

Tim Ridlen: Yeah, I like that you call it a false story. It’s part of a larger position that in the book I also talk about. People like Boltanski and Chiappello have the idea that that the artistic protests of 1968 in France were somehow co-opted.

I do see this as part of a larger position out there. But to get to the question about who’s behind this idea of art as a critique of the commodity and what my response to that is, I mean, who’s not? Who’s not behind that idea in the sense that it’s a pretty mainstream way to understand the turn towards conceptual art? You could trace it all the way back to people like Clement Greenberg, to Abstract Expressionism and the idea of an autonomous work of art that is supposed to somehow be a refuge or a holdout from the commodification of everything else and every other part of our life.

So it starts with people like Greenberg, but of course, the big bête noire in the book is Benjamin Buchloh. Buchloh is a very respected art historian who has a famous seminal essay on conceptual art, where he critiques the turn towards language and information and what people had at the time called the “dematerialization” of art. Of course, there’s lots of questioning about whether art ever really dematerialized. In any case, Buchloh critiques conceptual art because he sees it as a breakdown between the role of the artist and the critic. He says there’s a separation of powers between people making art and people critiquing art and conceptual artists went too far in critiquing art. And he proposes that this is a dialectical process that began with Marcel Duchamp and Duchamp’s ready-mades. It then culminates in conceptual art. Buchloh thinks that the way out of this is a mode of art practice known as “institutional critique.” But what I’m trying to get at here is that Buchloh’s claim really functions to bring back into art practice some bounded form. Conceptual art broke the boundaries of what could be considered the artwork and what could be considered criticism, whereas institutional critique used the exhibition format or the institution itself as the container within which the artwork would be held so that it doesn’t spill over into some other role that I guess the critics are supposed to be in charge of.

Billy: Could you say something about the examples of that artist as critic? You mentioned Duchamp, but for listeners who may not have ready access, we’re talking about the toilet, right?

Tim Ridlen: Yeah, we’re talking about the toilet. We’re talking about “Fountain” (1917).

It’s starting with Duchamp, where he exhibits this urinal turned on its side. He gives it a title, calls it “Fountain,” submits it to this exhibition that was supposedly trying to be more open, trying to be more open to other kinds of work. And he does this under a false name, knowing that, of course, they will reject it because it’s ridiculous. Then writes about it, not revealing that he was actually the one that presented it.

He claims that it’s an artwork because the artist chose it. It’s an artwork because he gave it a title and that gives a new thought to the object. That’s the impulse that conceptual art runs with this idea that you can transform something into a work of art through the thought or, or through language. So conceptual artists starting in the mid-60’s start to really pick up on this idea that art can be an idea, that it doesn’t have to take a form or any one form, that art can be engaged with language.

There’s different flavors of conceptual art. There’s capital C conceptual art as a movement. And then there’s also conceptualisms and a lot of interest in talking about global conceptualisms. How did this turn in the 1960’s take place in different places? But by and large, conceptual art is an ontological break with how the artwork has been defined or how it has been contained. So, now you can have different iterations of artworks that are the exemplary materializations of the idea.

One of the figures I talk about in the book is a curator named Elayne Varian, who was at this college on the Upper East Side of New York. And she inadvertently was really important in developing conceptual art with the artist Mel Bochner. Mel Bochner is another seminal conceptual artist who is working with her on these exhibitions, sometimes as a co-curator, sometimes just as one of the exhibiting artists. They talk about this in “Art in Process” exhibition, this idea that artworks are just exemplary materializations of the idea. They make the point that the artwork is not just what you see on display, but somewhere else. And that’s why people say, well, it’s dematerializing, but of course, it always needs to take some form, I guess, in order to be exhibited. So, it’s not exactly correct to say that they’re dematerializing, but perhaps the idea that artworks take exemplary forms or exemplary materializations in different places at different times, and they can be, you know, fragmented or dispersed. The word that I use in the book is actually associated with the artist Mel Bochner. He talks about decentralized aesthetic experience, that the artwork can be decentralized. That’s one way to think about it.

Other conceptual artists were more invested in analytical philosophy. The idea that artwork was a proposition, that something like Duchamp’s “Fountain” was simply a proposition. This is an artwork, and therefore, it’s within the logic of analytical philosophy. But I think the other strains like Mel Bochner’s are more interesting because they don’t get lost in the instrumental logic of analytical philosophy.

Scott: To pick up on the latter part of my question, how would you say your shift of focus in this history to academic institutions and the figure of the artist as researcher in some more conformist and some more radical ways, how does that challenge the going fall story that’s perpetuated by a figure like Benjamin Buchloh about the decline of mid-century art.

Tim Ridlen: Yeah. Thank you for bringing me back to that, because that’s an important point. So in challenging the idea that the turn to conceptual art was a critique of the commodity, that wasn’t something that I set out to do. That was something that I came upon because I was looking at these artists who were working in academia. And what I started to see there is that if you think about what artists were doing as a response to what people in academia were doing, specifically, you know, Cold War researchers, you saw a development, you know, you could think about it as a, in some cases, as a critique of knowledge production, as opposed to the commodity fetish. So if there’s a critique to be had there, it was a, or, you know, intervention that these artists were making, it wasn’t just about the commodity formula.

It certainly was in some spaces, right? But when you turn your attention to the university and academia and what research was supposed to be at that time, you see something different. You just see a little bit more, you see a different understanding of what creativity is or what art making is about, what it’s meant to do. And you get a little bit away from the idea that art making is about producing objects. And you get closer to the idea that art making is a process of, I don’t want to say producing knowledge, but a little bit, that’s where it starts out. The expectation for artists in academia is that they would be producing knowledge. But in fact, what artists do often, the artists that I look at, at least, and the ones that I’m interested in, they don’t just focus on producing knowledge. They focus often on creating experiences, right? Aesthetic experience. And that doesn’t always look like producing knowledge the way that it did for other Cold War researchers, right?

What that leads to is a transformation of who the artist is. And the way I talk about it in the book is that it’s not really just about literally what were artists doing, but what does it mean to be an artist for society, for people outside of academia? What do they think of as the artist’s role or what an artist does? And what I observe and argue for in the book is that in the attempt on the part of these artists to engage with and challenge knowledge production, they end up reconfiguring the artist as somebody who is, you know, it moves away from this idea of the artist as creative genius and visionary sole author of this artwork and towards something where the artist is actually engaged in society, engaged in the world. And that doesn’t necessarily mean producing objects, but it means engaging in the social sphere. So it leads into socially engaged art practices and examples of that. I mean, Martha Rosler is an example of that. Somebody who starts out as a conceptual artist and then, you know, especially with some of her projects becomes more of a socially engaged artist where she’s doing things, projects in New York that are engaged with, you know, housing, the housing crisis in New York in the 80’s. So, the upshot of all this engagement with the university is not just a more academic art, but it is a socially engaged art where it moves from university to the wider polis. So for folks like Buchloh, conceptual art is a bridge too far.

Billy: So for folks like Buchloh, conceptual art is a bridge too far. For whatever else it is, it’s undermining the traditional, conventional infrastructures and institutions of art, capital A. And this is happening at a time where there’s thought to be all sorts of threats to tradition, convention and the moral foundation of, you know, in the context of the United States the U.S. polity, could you talk a little bit about how that may or may not have been coded or understood by folks like Buchloh or the concept the work of the conceptual artist might have been perceived by folks at the time and and since then as participating in some way in, you know, the great communist conspiracy or, on the other hand, the great CIA conspiracies of the time in the heat of the Cold War.

Tim Ridlen: I’m not sure if I can totally speak to what Buchloh, how Buchloh would have read these conceptual artists in the context of the Cold War.

But what I can say, I think what’s relevant to your question here is that there were some artists engaging. I mean, there’s, I’m trying to think here. The artists that I discuss in the book, conceptual artists are one group of artists that I discuss. They’re a stop along the way in this trajectory for artists in universities. And really, these artists in universities start out more pressured by the demands of the Cold War, which is to say that, We must produce, you know, we’re going to fund works that really produce basic research without necessarily knowing what that might lead to.

So, you know, Vannevar Bush’s statement on universities was that research is this endless frontier–some artists like György Kepes at MIT really bought into this idea that artists should try to be like researchers. He conformed to these expectations in ways that other artists did not. Artists that I look at who are at Rutgers University, Allan Kaprow and Robert Watts, and George Brecht who wasn’t teaching at Rutgers, but he was part of their milieu. They paid lip service to some of these demands that the universities should be helping to fight the Cold War through developing research. They paid lip service in some places to get money, but they were also very critical of this idea. They point out that basic research in the sciences really serves technology. You alluded to the space race and things like that, but it’s less clear what basic research in the arts leads to. They arrive at this answer that it leads to a reconfiguration of subjectivity, through what it looks like to be an artist, and that becomes a model for what it looks like for other people, for what the experience of life is like in this late 20th century.

Scott: It actually reminds me of an episode we did with a professor of dance, Colleen Hooper, years ago. I think it was during our first season. She conducted important research into the CETA programs under Nixon, which were poorly designed to address unemployment and had all kinds of stipulations attached to the public monies that were being allocated for this purpose. But a bunch of artists across fields and media, including dancers and dance choreographers, they were canny.They saw a chance to have financial and institutional support and to build up whatever they were doing.

They changed their identities and their rhetorical frames to gain access to this support. But then at the same time, they ended up variously challenging the power-structures-that-be, some in more radical ways than others. All that’s happening actually at the same time as the art researchers that you’re talking about.

This is not to excuse them, the ones that are more in line with the Cold War science research model that’s serving American militarized commercial imperialism around the globe. But it’s to say that there’s another lesson here in seizing an institution, seizing a funding opportunity and experimenting with that.

Tim Ridlen: Yeah, exactly. And that’s exactly the point that I try to make in the book is that these artists were engaging with what other scholars have called the knowledge-based polis. But my argument is they engage with this knowledge-based polis only then to expand that to the polis at large. That becomes this starting point. And the way that it happens is multifaceted.

I should say, Buchloh is a Marxist. I’m not sure if I made that clear, but he is influenced by Greenberg and Adorno and Frankfurt School thinking. So, what would he make of all this? How was he thinking about this in relation to the Cold War? He was just through and through a Frankfurt school art critic. So that bears pointing out and clarifying.

Scott: He’s not afraid of any communist conspiracies. He is the communist conspirator.

Tim Ridlen: Yeah, he’s not a traditionalist by any means. He’s thought of, he’s part of October, the leading art journal that is still probably today considered the most, you know, rigorous. He’s the most representative Frankfurt School person among October critics. But yeah, the October critics are not concerned about artists being communists.

Billy: Well, I mean, it’s happening in the context of all this. I guess, is all of this contest and debate and innovation happening somehow insulated from the broader politics of the time? I’m just trying to get a sense for how shaped it is by the Red Scare, essentially, in any way, shape, or form. 

Tim Ridlen: Conceptual art is a fulcrum. It’s a moment, it’s a particular turning point. And that’s not my argument. A lot of people make that argument. Peter Osborne, art historian, talks about how all contemporary art can be explained as conceptual art, that now that conceptual art was this particularly important turning point.

Buchloh is also engaging in that idea that conceptual art was a particular turning point, but for him, it was a misstep and it only gets reconciled because some of that turned into institutional critique. So in a way, the book is not only about conceptual art, but that is still a pivot point. I try to explain that as well. When people talk about conceptual art, sometimes they’ll say, well, we’ve actually got artists who are more associated with Fluxus in the early 1960’s, who were proto-conceptual artists. So oftentimes, some of the artists that I’m looking at, like Allan Kaprow and Robert Watts, are read as proto-conceptual artists.

Conceptual art before actual conceptual art became what it became. And there’s truth to that. For example, I write about Jack Burnham, who was also at MIT, but he had a big break with György Kepes. He was writing about what he called “systems aesthetics.” That was his name for what he saw happening with conceptual art. It was still connected to the kinds of Cold War research that was going on with things like cybernetics. But he was saying, “Well, look, this is the art that we’re seeing today in the 1960’s. This work is a lot more like systems rather than objects.” So, that kind of thing wasn’t called conceptual art, but it was certainly a precursor to conceptual art. So there is an important place for conceptual art in the book, But Scott’s right that it’s not just about conceptual art.

Research and artists working in the university started out doing things that looked like lectures or being invited to universities where they would give a talk and then do a Happening, which is what Kaprow was famous for. Then, they could have some discussion afterwards that might look like a seminar. The idea was that these forms of support that the university was providing enabled more participatory kinds of art and more things like that would eventually become conceptual art or be conceived and labeled conceptual art at a later point.

Scott: I’d like to invite you to explore some of these examples in greater detail. Maybe talk a little bit about Kaprow’s works, his lectures with some specificity?

Tim Ridlen: Sure. Like I said, Kaprow is a major figure in the book. He is most known for the Happening. A lot of people did Happenings, people like Carolee Schneemann and Claes Oldenburg. This is the 60’s. Sometimes Happenings have just been understood as performance art. It really comes out of the influence of John Cage.

Artists like Allan Kaprow and others such as George Brecht and Robert Watts, who are teaching and associated with Rutgers University, they take this class, this composition class with John Cage that’s happening at the New School in 1957 to 1959. They take the composition class and they try to apply the ideas and methods of chance composition that Cage is talking about to visual art. But what that ends up looking like is time-based performance type art that Kaprow calls a “Happening” and Fluxus artists start to conceive of as “Events.” There’s a number of different outgrowths from that class and that intersection with Cage. Kaprow is just one iteration of that.

He’s showing in galleries in New York, but he’s also doing some of these Happenings on campus at Rutgers University. One of the first ones that he does is a piece called “Communication,” which is essentially part of a series of lectures that he and Robert Watts had organized at Rutgers. It uses the lecture format to disrupt the idea that art communicates in any direct way. He’s standing on stage lighting matches. There’s this red light going off. There’s banners that are hanging from the balcony. There’s a recording that’s playing; that’s the part where he’s actually giving his speech about the idea of communication, which a lot of people were talking about who are associated with cybernetics research. 

He was critiquing this idea that art was about communicating directly in that recorded speech. There, he planted some people in the back of the room to start taking tin cans out of a bag so that it would be noisy in the audience. He’s doing this performance and that one looks more like a performance because he’s standing up at the lectern and performing these actions and you’re hearing this recorded speech. He continues to do things that look more and more participatory, more like rituals or something. He comes up with these ideas for activities that he and the students or other participants will do. And usually what that looks like is that he will give a lecture and explain the piece. Oftentimes, there’s a complicated score that shows what the different parts of the Happening are going to be. Then maybe the next day, everybody will come together and do that Happening. Not in all cases, but in some cases, there would be this discussion afterwards of what that was like.

So my reading of Kaprow’s trajectory is that he does lots of Happenings in the beginning that are more focused on him as a central actor. But he moves more and more towards participants being involved. It also starts to put explicitly in conflict things like his intention, which he tries to spell out in the score and in the lecture, and the experience of actually participating. So I think that part of what develops over the course of his career, in the 60’s at least, as he does more of these Happenings on college campuses is that his authorial control or imprint on the work kind of, it doesn’t go away, but it becomes joined by the actual experience of the participants, right? So he’s been, in some cases, critics have understood Kaprow’s approach to incorporating chance in his work as distinct from John Cage because Kaprow still tried to say, well, I am the artist. I am creating this. This is my project.

But I think that that might have been true at the very beginning, but I think that it’s a little bit more complicated than that. I think that in a way, as he goes on in his career, he starts to think, you know, include more participation and then start to think about the place of the artist in all of this work. And what we eventually come to in the book is that Kaprow starts to talk more and more about un-arting, about leaving art, right? About a transformation of the artist into something else, right?

And I think that’s his influence when he’s at CalArts, that’s when he starts to write these texts about un-arting and leaving the art profession or leaving the idea of being an artist. It intersects literally at CalArts with the Feminist Art Program. And so I think that’s where you start to see his political interest in participatory structures starts to have something in common with the Feminist Art Program, but also literally intersects with the Feminist Art Program at CalArts. So at CalArts, when Kaprow gets there, he is one of three major strains of influence at CalArts and the visual arts. There’s Kaprow, along with some other Fluxus artists like Allison Knowles.

So they’re one big influence on the artists at CalArts. Then there’s John Baldessari, who was brought up from University of California, San Diego, to teach at CalArts. And he is the West Coast conceptual artist that I discuss also in this chapter on CalArts. And then there’s the Feminist Art Program, which CalArts brings down from Fresno State University, and that’s run by Judy Chicago and Miriam Schapiro.

I discussed the intersection of those three strains at CalArts. And the artist Suzanne Lacey, who’s one of the students at CalArts at this time, is one of the artists who comes out of the Feminist Art Program. So she’s a student of Judy Chicago and Miriam Schapiro. And she starts to use consciousness-raising meetings as a starting point for some of her works. And that looks very much like the kinds of discussions that Kaprow is having before and after his happenings.

I don’t think it’s just a one-to-one, it’s not a question of influence, but it is a question of Kaprow, in his engagement with Suzanne Lacy, also starts to think of what he’s doing in these same terms as a mutual conversation that’s happening between them. And so in noticing that, I started to notice the latent political stakes of what Kaprow was doing much earlier in the late 50’s that culminates in the socially engaged art that Suzanne Lacy was doing. Her best known project “Three Weeks in May,” where she, it’s a multifaceted project where she gets data from the police, police data about rapes in the city. And she creates this map that shows where rapes have been happening around the city. And she also goes around the city and, you know, marks in different places where these rapes are occurring. All of that came out of consciousness raising groups that she was a part of where women were recognizing this shared experience. And she puts that into this project “Three Weeks in May” and really engages with public space to bring some of this to light, right? And so she’s engaged. That’s one of the examples where it’s like some of what we’re seeing here is artists who are taking on a new role, who are taking on a new understanding of what they can do, and then engaging in, you know, the wider world, engaging outside beyond the boundaries of the university or the campus itself.

Scott: Can you talk a little bit more about the Feminist Art Program and some of their productions and how they end up challenging a certain patriarchal male-centered approach to art and art pedagogy? 

Tim Ridlen: Yeah, the Feminist Art Program is really interesting. It starts in Fresno by Judy Chicago and Miriam Schapiro. It moves to CalArts in 1971. One of the first major projects that they do in CalArts is a project called Woman House, where they get access to this house, and they basically turn it into a studio, an art studio, and a place for installations and exhibitions and performance art, things like that. One of the goals of the Feminist Art Program that Judy Chicago talks about was really trying to break down the barriers of the male dominated art world. She talks about how she would see her male counterparts furiously taking notes when they’re in a sculpture class about how to set up the manual saw or something, because they know realistically that they’re going to run a studio of their own one day. And she thought that that was the kind of thing that was really lacking, that wasn’t really emphasized for female art students. And she said, we’re going to take this on by really giving students the professional skills that they need, right? Transform it. That means everything from fixing up the drywall, repairing things in the house, to putting on performances there that comment on the experience of being a woman in the 1970’s.

What ends up happening that’s interesting is that, although the goal for people like Judy Chicago was to professionalize these artists, people like Suzanne Lacy, who was one of the students, she doesn’t just become an artist in the mold of other artists at the time. All of the experience of doing this Woman House project, it transforms the possibilities or the imagined possibilities for what art can do, right? So it becomes more about socially engaged art that, maybe it’s also coming out of performance art and things like that so it has these interesting upshots that weren’t necessarily the the intention of of Judy Chicago. That there’s a lot more to it, it’s more complicated.

Scott: That’s great. If you have more to say, you can say it; but if not that’s great, too. 

Tim Ridlen: i mean the kinds of things that—one of the things that comes up a little bit in the book is that there are many artists who are part of this, not just Judy Chicago and Miriam Schapiro but the the students that were there as well. But one of the things that Miriam Schapiro’s work was doing, Miriam Schapiro was doing things that were more straightforward painting, although she was part of this Woman House project as well. But they start to explore what Miriam Shapiro called central core imagery, which is like trying to work on questions of representation, how feminine imagery is seen, to try to reconfigure it as not passive but active. And in some cases that looks like painting and in some cases that looks like these plays that Judy Chicago was doing called “Cock and Cunt Play” where they’re working with these props of, genitalia props and they’re doing these, they’re play acting these conversations between a man and a woman that are very over-the-top, ironic critiques of these gender roles.

And then she doesn’t just do that as a performance. She actually takes that around when she’s invited to college campuses and has students perform that play as a way to, maybe it’s crude or simplistic or something, but it’s effective as a way to, you know, draw attention to these gendered roles and gendered representation, in the way that those things get represented.

Scott: I want to give you an opportunity to talk about the theoretical framework for the book, which is encapsulated in the title, Intelligent Action.You take that title from John Dewey, the pragmatist philosopher, and you run with it in your own direction. Would you discuss what intelligent action means for you in this project?

Tim Ridlen: Yeah, you’re right. It comes from Dewey, and it’s not like Dewey had a theory of intelligent action. It’s really a phrase that he uses once or twice and that I run with. It also happens to be a phrase or at least variations on that phrase that Kaprow also uses. He talks about intelligent activity. And so starting with Dewey, I guess that’s the best place to start.

Dewey was an influence on some of these artists, but it’s not the only influence. To give you a quick brief on Dewey’s philosophy of art, he has this idea that when he talks about art, he’s really talking about aesthetic experience. So he’s talking about not just making art, but seeing art. And he’s also not just talking about art. He’s actually talking about any experience that you might consider aesthetic. And for him, he uses this metaphor of a stone rolling down a hill. And he says, you know, the stone rolls down the hill, not passively, but actively, right? Feeling all of the little bumps along the way. And an aesthetic experience can be considered aesthetic, not just everyday experience, when it is consummated in some way. He uses the word consummated. So that it has this quality of wholeness, that it comes to some moment of completion. And so some of these artists were influenced by that, and that’s how they understand things like their Happenings, but it wasn’t strictly like an application of Dewey. So for me, that’s why I tried to start there, but articulate this idea of intelligent action, where these artists, again, as a result of them being in the university, they start to think about other places, other parts of this aesthetic experience. So the aesthetic experience is not just what you see or what you experience somatically, but also there’s an inner dimension to it. What are you thinking about? So the language becomes a part of that and other systems of knowledge can become a part of that. And the idea of intelligent action is that is a little bit messier than what Dewey proposes. Dewey proposes this very nice idea of this whole consummated aesthetic experience. And he doesn’t really have in mind something that I bring to the table as well, which is that sometimes this experience has conflicts within it or tensions within it. I mean, Dewey was also concerned with democracy. And in a way, there’s a link here between his theories of aesthetic experience and his idea, his writing about education. Part of his critique, as I understand it, of education at the time, turn of the 20th century, he’s talking about how schools are missing this aesthetic dimension, right? They don’t bring this aesthetic dimension to learning. And that folds into his his critique or his ideas about democracy, that we need these moments of understanding the aesthetic dimension to learning and working together.

And I guess that involves recognizing this experiential dimension. But to return, I’m probably getting on a tangent there, to return to his idea of aesthetic experience. And the way that I try to supplement that is that I try to bring in or allow a bit more for this idea that within an aesthetic experience, sure, maybe there’s some conclusion or consummatory character, as Dewey calls it, but there’s also lots of room for tension and conflict to be staged within that. So the way that I talk about it with the work of these artists is that in some cases they are staging the conflict between, you know, language and vision and experience in the case of Kaprow where he, or even his intentions as the artist and the experience as the participant, that staging that conflict or that disconnect is part of what intelligent action is about.

The other thing that I borrow from Dewey, actually I’m borrowing it from a thinker named Hans Joas, and he’s writing about Dewey. He pulls out of Dewey this idea of “ends in view,” the idea that, you know, again, going back to this idea of the stone rolling down the hill, that action in the present or experience in the present is also guided by or informed by this end in view. And he distinguishes the end in view from a goal because it’s not just goal-oriented action, but it’s this way in which the action in the present has some end in mind and is informed by that end and moves towards that end.

And so it’s not just a matter of arriving at the end and reflecting back on the experience, right? That would be more maybe like the idea of contemplating a work of art. But it is about this aesthetic experience that is in creativity that is in action, right? Creativity that is in action. And for somebody like Joas, it’s not just the creativity of making art, it’s the creativity of social action. That’s also the link there.

The other important influences here on this idea of intelligent action are Donna Haraway and Gayatri Spivak, who both talk a lot about doubling, right? So Haraway’s idea of situated knowledge resonates with what Joas attributes to Dewey as situated creativity. And Haraway talks about this idea that there’s always at least two modes of knowing, right? That we’re always experiencing at least two kinds of knowledge or ways of knowing. Spivak in particular, who’s interested in a critique of enlightenment institutions from a post-colonial perspective, talks a lot about playing the “double bind.” That’s her phrase for talking about how does one work within these institutions that have these demands of, you know, whether it’s research or enlightenment reason, what does one do with that? And she talks about the role of the aesthetic as, again, this conflictual model that the aesthetic is that space for play. And the phrase, I mean, interestingly, the phrase playing the double bind, she’s getting that from Gregory Bateson and applying it in a different way. But basically it’s a way of saying like, well, what do you do with these competing demands? And play is a very interesting connection because people like Kaprow also talk about play. People like Joas in his reading of Dewey is also talking about this idea of situated creativity as play. But play is not just about open-ended, you know, messing around, but it actually is informed by some end in view, even if that end is not instrumental in the same way.

Billy: Could you reflect on what has happened to the artist as academic in the intervening years? The 60’s are a very active time, and a different time in a lot of ways. Of course, beginning in the 70’s and into the 80’s, we get the dawn of the neoliberal era and the imperatives of the university change, the experiences of academics and students change. So I’m not asking you to write a sequel, but if you did, what would it look like? What do you think you would pick up on as continuities and divergences? 

Tim Ridlen: Hmm, that’s a good question. 

Billy: It’s a bit speculative, but let’s riff. 

Tim Ridlen: Well, I’m thinking, I mean, initially I was going to answer your question by bringing us back to where we started in terms of things like relational aesthetics that artists start to engage with—sometimes that goes by socially engaged art or dialogical aesthetics. There’s all kinds of names for this work that actually begins with people like Suzanne Lacy in the 70’s, and then has this continuation today, this tradition that continues today. And that is joined by artistic research. And I think, I guess, that brings me back to where I started, where I said, you know, in the early 2000s, there’s this interest in artistic research, a lot of which comes from the Bologna process in Europe, which was a standardization framework.

Once the EU was in place, there was this attempt to standardize university education in Europe that was called the Bologna process. And that’s what led to the creation of PhDs for artists. So initially I was going to say, well, that’s part of the story, but I think there’s obviously a big gap in the middle there. There’s also a disconnect because that’s something that’s happening in Europe. And I’m talking about, I’m really just talking about US context. But I guess if I were going to start to think about what happens in universities, I think some of the big changes are, I mean, like, I don’t have a lot of this history of the university in the 80’s at my fingertips, but there are quite a lot of changes, like you mentioned, like the university is becoming more and more neoliberal throughout the 80’s and I think that that has some pretty dire consequences for the possibilities of artists working within those institutions. But I guess the way that I read it is that there’s this move from the university to the wider social sphere. So I guess that’s where you get artists who are doing things that look like socially engaged art or even look like education out in the public. And maybe in some cases they are supporting that work through university positions. It’s like in the late 70’s that the MFA degree becomes the terminal degree. So artists have a more secure position in the university. And that doesn’t always doesn’t translate into research-based art the way that it might have been pushed or impressed upon artists that they need to frame their work as research earlier in this history. But it did continue to give them security so that they wouldn’t necessarily have to be gallery selling artists. And then there are really good, I mean, there are really good texts out there about socially engaged art in the 1980’s, some of which takes pedagogic form.

So like Adair Rounthwaite’s book, Asking the Audience, in a way, there are parts of that book that could be sequels to what I’m talking about, because she’s talking about socially engaged art and how it engages in some of these pedagogic forms, not just in the university, but in other places. So that might be something to take up. I think in my next, thinking about a future project, It probably won’t be about the university per se, but it would potentially be about transformation of art away from, you know, medium specificity and objects to, you know, a transformed role for artists. 

Billy: And if I could maybe offer and see what you think about this, the university in the 60’s is, if nothing else, a lot cheaper, a lot more accessible in certain ways and a lot more exclusive in other ways. Today, of course, working at a university, as opposed to if you could get employment back in the 60’s, there are more and different positions, but a lot more precarity as well to distribute across ranks and things. Students are paying a lot more.

I guess I’m trying to think about, you know, the allure or the space that artists may feel today in academia, the invitation from your own experience, right, to have support for your work and to also think about that work. It seems like there’s different constraints, pressures today that artists in academe would feel, and then that it might be a more hostile, in some ways, place.

Tim Ridlen: Yeah, I mean, I think there’s definitely some truth to that. And I mean, you know, there are reasons to critique the MFA degree, as people have talked about it as, at worst, a Ponzi scheme, you know, like the idea that you’re going to take out a loan and go to an MFA program, which being somebody who’s in academia now, you can see a lot of times master’s programs, not necessarily MFA programs, but a lot of times master’s programs are like money-making devices for universities.

And so there’s definitely room for a critique there of the idea of getting an MFA, that it sells you this idea that you’re gonna make it as an artist if you get an MFA, and that’s not necessarily the case. I don’t think the PhD has become like that, at least not in the US. There might be a little bit different story in Europe.

So, yeah, I mean, I certainly, I guess in a way what I was, I’m aware of that critique, and I don’t think that it’s wrong, the critique of the university as this, there’s some problems there. I guess with the book, part of what I was trying to do was learn something. Well, I guess one of the things that I was concerned about was the way that that critique of the university and specifically getting an MFA or giving money to get an MFA that might not guarantee a career. I wanted to try to separate that very real critique from the persistent critique that going to school or going to a university as an artist is somehow taming the artist or somehow, you know, taking away the creative genius. I guess what I was interested in was to push back against that anti-academicism that I saw. It’s weird because at the same time I mentioned there was this educational turn, what seemed to immediately follow was this idea that MFA programs are ruined, and that really pushback against artistic research. Good things came out of it, like rethinking artistic research as artistic thought.

But I think also some of those critiques are easily bound, they easily return to this idea that the artist is some representative of a free-thinking individual that sounds naive or sounds naive at best or, at worst, perpetuates a neoliberal way of thinking that artists should be independent people, like freelancers with projects instead of people with institutional support. So, that was part of my concern and I definitely think that the university costs too much money. There’s a problem here with the way that students are asked to pay and then fund these programs. And that idea is that you need it, that you have to have it in order to be an artist. And that’s just not true. But at the same time, it too easily ends up becoming part of a logic that I think is also problematic. This logic that artists are meant to be like starving in an attic somewhere, because they’re brilliant, you know, something. Brilliant in a way that’s not academic. Brilliant in a way that’s somehow outside the bounds of intellectual activity or thinking, right? That it’s something else.

Billy: I’m reminded of how cultural critic and commentator, Mark Fisher, liked to talk about how the Beatles were on the dole for the production of some of their finest music. And I’m just thinking about that because there were, you know, different kinds of supports in Europe in the 60’s. Thinking about the remnants of the welfare state in the context of the 1960’s versus the complete wasteland of, you know, social support for that could fund somebody who wanted to just make art. It’s just not an option for most people.

Tim Ridlen: Yeah.

Billy: I think where we land with Money on the Left is like, we find lots redeeming, I think, in academia and share your critiques.

It would also be great if we had means and mechanisms in place at the level of policy to just pay artists, you know, more directly as artists who would then have, you know, more discretion about whether or not they would seek additional employment at a university, for example, where they might feel, you know, variously part of a system that tends to divert student energy in directions that they might not need to go and student resources and finances in ways that aren’t super helpful.

So I guess I’m saying, I don’t imagine you’d be opposed to a job guarantee for artists, but I wonder if you have any thoughts on what that might do for your history and maybe the future of the artist as an academic or as a researcher.

Tim Ridlen: That sounds great. And that is a little bit, I mean, that is a little bit the story of how I, of why I went into academia in the sense that I mean, it’s sort of funny to think about now that I thought it was a source of stability, that I thought it was going to be a more stable job than being an artist or trying to make a living in the art world as a freelance art handler or artist assistant.

Because, you know, now I can say this as somebody who works in academia, that it’s not any more stable. I mean, maybe a little bit more stable. But yeah, it was funny. But I also think that what you’re saying is also how I understood these artists, like I mentioned earlier, Kaprow, who did say, like, I started teaching to pay the bills, but then realized that there was a lot more to it. I mean, I think that echoes what you’re saying.

And yeah, the idea that some artists might still engage with the university is definitely true. I mean, I don’t think it’s in all cases that artists take jobs just to make money because a lot of artists, there are examples of artists who make tons of money in the gallery art world and they also take teaching jobs, you know? So there’s as many examples of ways to engage with academia or not, as there are artists out there. 

I’m gonna take us in another direction here because you mentioned, how does this book potentially fit with Money on the Left and, your project, which I know a little bit about from talking to Scott and reading Scott’s book and things like that. And I think one of the things that was, in addition to some of the projects that you guys have been involved with–the Uni, right? That’s really interesting way in which the university becomes this staging ground for something larger. 

Scott: Right. 

Tim Ridlen: And for me, that’s how I’m understanding transformation that’s happening from the late 50’s into the 70’s—that there’s a transformation that occurs in the way that people can imagine what artists do, right? And that it goes from thinking that artists are like people who make objects. And at the very best, according to somebody like Benjamin Buchloh, they can critique the commodity fetish through the kinds of objects that they produce. But part of what I’m saying here is that, well, what happens with artists in the university is that we start to see that artists can do something else. And, and that’s not just a transformation in artists’ roles, like, oh, artists can also be useful or something. Instead of just making paintings, they can also build bridges or something. It’s actually a transformation that happens because we start to imagine artists not as these beautiful souls with creative genius who are going to express something insightful about the world, but they’re actually more like researchers, but it’s not necessarily the research that produces new technologies or better television or better missiles.

There are researchers that actually stage aesthetic experiences that are intellectually informed, that are intelligently informed, intelligent action coming back around as the name that I apply, that I come up with for that. So I think that that’s my understanding of how the book might resonate with some of the interests of your podcast.

The other thing that I’ll say that I think is interesting, that I found really interesting in talking to Scott and learning a little bit about MMT, was that there’s a lot of the criticism from people like Buchloh that comes out of the Frankfurt School based on this idea that artworks work under the same logic as the commodity or the commodity fetish. Value is developed or, let’s say, deposited in the object, and then the object goes and gets exhibited, and it’s then withdrawn by the viewer, right?

So what was interesting to hear about and learn about was the idea that value doesn’t necessarily inhere in an object in that way, but has its origin somewhere else. 

Scott: Right. 

Tim Ridlen: And I think, Scott, you can put better words on this, but this idea of a fiat currency comes to mind, that understanding of value, where value in money comes from. And I guess,, that really, there’s other critiques of this commodity fetish that I think are also interesting. So there’s multiple ways to understand this.

But one of the things that I think the book does underneath the surface, maybe not always overtly, but one of the things that the book does and that I’m interested in continuing is rethinking how we understand art away from this idea that it somehow works the way that the commodity fetish works. Yeah. So those are my own thoughts on what my project might have to do with the things that you all are interested in here. But I don’t know if that’s accurate.

Scott: I think it’s accurate. I’m going to add one more twist. So in formulating your theory of intelligent action, you know, you’re starting with John Dewey, you’re moving through Spivak and multiple authors. One author that you haven’t mentioned on the podcast that you do cite is Paolo Freire, right? And, you know, radical pedagogue and pedagogical theorist. I was really taken with his critique of the hegemonic model of learning. And that hegemonic model assumes that the teacher is a kind of vat that’s filled up with stuff. In this case, it’s knowledge or data or whatever. And that the student or the class is empty and they come and get their heads filled up with this stuff. Right. And I agree with Freire that this traditional model of teaching and learning is garbage. It doesn’t work that way. And trying to pursue pedagogy as if it works that way is a big problem.

But what I found really interesting apropos of this conversation and thinking about connections between your project and money on the left is that Freire calls it the banking concept of teaching and learning. And from a Money on the Left point of view, what’s so fun and funny about that is that that’s not actually how banking works. Banking is not about having emptiness and fullness and moving, you know, bits of value from one place to another. Banking is an institution that is driven by multiple values and money is created ex nihilo as a function of its authority and its standing in a particular community.

This doesn’t make banks good. This doesn’t make the corporate private banking sector morally OK. But in terms of just thinking about, well, how do we understand, how do we contest, and how do we build otherwise? Banking doesn’t even work according to the banking concept of teaching and learning. So I think that there’s all kinds of sparks and resonances that can happen there between these two categories.

Tim Ridlen: Yeah, exactly. And the parallel that gets made actually by Grant Kester, he actually makes this similar comparison to Freire that, you know, it’s the parallel is that meaning gets deposited in the object to be taken out later. That’s the parallel that Kester makes. And yeah, that’s what’s being contested or, you know, what I’m trying to go around or think about in another way.

But yeah, you’re right. Freire is not interested in banking and getting that metaphor correct. But what he is interested, to riff on that a little bit, one of the things that comes up in the book is that some artists in the university, like György Kepes, are interested in creative problem solving. I had to think about this a little bit because Freire talks about problem posing versus problem solving. And I thought that was an interesting distinction because somebody like Kepes is interested in creative problem solving and making artists useful in this crude way. There’s more to his thinking than just that, because he also talks about aesthetic virtue. Well, he doesn’t talk about aesthetic virtue, but his way of thinking about what art does has been referred to, and I like this phrase, as cultivating aesthetic virtue among students.

So Kepes is a little bit more complicated, but he’s still thinking about creativity as part of this instrumental problem-solving. And Freire talks about problem posing. And I think that people like Henry Giroux also, he’s building on Freire, but pointing out the ways in which Freire’s idea of problem posing is not so instrumental. It’s not really intended to be this instrumental problem solving.

Scott: Tim, thanks so much for joining us on the podcast. Everybody should go out and buy Intelligent Action, a history of artistic research, aesthetic experience, and artists in academia. Thank you.

Tim Ridlen: Thank you for having me.

* Thanks to the Money on the Left production team: William Saas (audio editor), Billy Saas, Scott Ferguson & Tim Ridlen (transcription), & Robert Rusch (graphic art)

We speak with Josefina Li, Assistant Director of the International Program Center at Bemidji State University and doctoral candidate at University of Missouri, Kansas City. Josefina’s dissertation research brings feminist and ecological economic traditions into conversation with Modern Monetary Theory. We first encountered Li’s work at the inaugural “Money on the Left” conference, which was held at University of South Florida in Spring 2018. At that conference, Li delivered a paper that explored the prospects of developing community currencies and implementing job guarantee programs in tribal nations. We were thrilled to finally speak with Li on the podcast and to learn more about her ongoing project of envisioning a jobs guarantee program for an ecofeminist future.

Visit our Patreon page here: https://www.patreon.com/MoLsuperstructure

Music by Nahneen Kula: www.nahneenkula.com

Transcript

Billy Saas:  Josefina Li, welcome to Money on the Left.

Josefina Li:  Thank you. Thanks for having me.

Scott Ferguson:  Well, it’s our pleasure. We met you many moons ago in 2018 when a few of us held a conference at the University of South Florida that we titled Money on the Left, and you came and presented your work at the time on tribal nations and the prospect of starting a job guarantee on reservations, and we were very taken by this work, and we immediately turned around and started a podcast called Money on the Left, and we invited you onto this podcast, I think, within the first year, but you were more of a beginning PhD student at the time and you wanted more time to develop your ideas. Which is fair enough, and we’ve reached out to you again, and you’ve agreed to share some of your more mature thoughts on this and other issues such as eco-feminist theorizations and developments of Modern Monetary Theory and the job guarantee. But for our listeners who likely don’t know much about you, maybe you can tell them a little bit about yourself and your training, your background and some of your professional interests, yeah, well, thank

Josefina Li:  Yeah, well thank you, Scott, for that background story of how I came to this podcast. I went to the University of Missouri Kansas City for my undergraduate and my graduate program. I’m a UMKC home breed. I was an undergraduate research assistant for Dr Mathew Forstater, and just stayed on with them for the PhD program. When I presented at the conference this idea of a tribal job guarantee, I was living and teaching in Minnesota. At the time, I was working at the University of Minnesota Duluth, but I lived in Bemidji. Bemidji is a city, and for listeners who might think Bemidji, the name sounds a little different than an English word, you would be correct. It is not English. It’s Ojibwe. So a language spoken by the tribal nations there. In Ojibwe, Bemidji means water flows through land. So Bemidji is also known as the first city on the Mississippi. It’s just about 45 minutes from the headwater of the Mississippi, and it’s located in the center of a triangle marked by three tribal nations and so as a PhD student studying at UMKC, I was exposed to the literature of MMT, of job guarantee, and some of the newer theoretician in the field have started to feel a little bit of frustration, given the gridlock of Washington, DC, it’s really hard to pass a federal level job guarantee. So we’re looking for grassroot ways to organize at the community level, ways to mobilize underutilized resources. So community currency, this is certainly not new. It has existed for many, many years, in response to a crisis, basically whenever a community does not have enough money, it seeks to create some more. So that community currency field is not new. However, very few people in that literature have also read MMT, so there seemed to be a bridge that needed to be made at the same time. We also know, you know, from the legal perspective that the federal government does not want competition with US dollars, so there’s a lot of restriction around who can issue currency for circulation. And these three tribal nations surrounding religion, Red Lake Tribal Nation, for example, is an entirely close tribal nation in the US, and they have sovereignty. So the thought that came to mind as well, if you are a sovereign nation, what is, what marks, what represents sovereignty better than having your currency? And that’s kind of the few reasons that led to the idea of a tribal job guarantee funded by what I call Junia, which is the Ojibwe word for money. I realize I’m supposed to be introducing myself, but I kind of went a little bit into the work presented in 2018 Yeah, and I currently work at Bemidji State University as the Assistant Director of the International Program Center. So I also work with international students and US students studying abroad. I came to the US as an extreme student when I was 17. So that work feels a little bit like a circle, coming to a full circle.

Billy Saas:  Let’s talk about the Zhooniyaa, can you walk us through that project?

Josefina Li:  I think what prompted me to do this, other than the few things I’ve mentioned, is just the geographic location with the Native nations. Also, we were seeing socio-economic problems in Bemidji, we are keenly aware of the socio economic problems that face the Indian countries and intensifies in Indian countries. We’re keenly aware of the unemployment, poverty, lack of meaningful economic opportunities on the reservation, and all of these we know from research also contribute to other social problems. We know the Bureau of Indian Affairs, they try to track data and reports, and they do have some grants to support the Indian countries, but a story that we often heard is they would apply for some federal grants, they would set up a project, and by the time the money runs out, everything shuts down. You go back to square one. We have a Walmart located just off the highway here, and this pattern, whenever welfare checks are released, you will see a lot of people go in there shopping. And we know as economists that when you spend at a local business, a higher percent of that cash stays in the community and continues in circulation. Versus if you spend at Walmart or national chain, Big Box Company, a lot of that ends up leaving the community. Murray in 2018, using county level data, sampled five reservations, and they show that the one big reason for the decline in retail services was because earnings were flowing out of the reservation rather than coming in, to be more exact, of $6 million annually. So that’s a big, serious outflow of earning problems. At the same time, the Indian countries also face problems of lack of capital, financial capital, lack of human capital, and means to develop it. And that also goes back to my example of when the grants run out. If you don’t have the capital to maintain the infrastructure, then the operation can just come to a sudden halt. There’s also poor, mismanaged natural resources, competition from the non-native or non-Indian markets. Knowing these socio-economic problems, my thoughts are, I also feel like Indian nations have often been presented with these ideas. Like, oh, this can solve your problem. That can and to some degree, they feel or I feel a little resistance from them on, accepting sort of outsider proposals and solutions. So that goes a little bit into the political development of me trying to present and talk to some of the community members about this idea. One other practical problem with working with the Indian nations is it’s no different than working with any other governing bodies. There’s turnovers in the government. So if the current leader is interested in your project. That might go on for a little bit, but then, if there is a change at the leadership level, that idea could also come to a halt. At the time, the Zhooniyaa idea I proposed was for the tribal government to start by imposing a household civic tax. Certainly the idea came from MMT’s tax driven money idea. One of my critique to the existing community currencies, alternative currencies out there, was that if they understood that taxes were not there to finance spending, but rather to create demand for the currency, then they would understand that there needs to be some sort of, not necessarily tax per se, but some sort of universal obligation placed on the currency users so that they would continue to use the currency. And tribal government is a governing body, and they have the ability to impose a household civic tax, which would be universal  within the boundaries of the tribal nations. Also, the three tribal nations could engage in some sort of internal trading. We would also target businesses with products of higher local components. And that goes again to the idea of the more money stays in the community, the more circulations, then you would put the money supply and demand would be higher. The one other component I wanted to throw in there to create even more demand for the currency was energy. So Red Lake Nation, for example, started a project of solar power production. That gets into some other complicated utility company related issues. But the thought is, everyone needs to use electricity, right? It’s a universal demand. If the tribal government could also be producing solar power, producing utility and energy, and if they would accept Junior as a currency to pay for the utility that would create additional demand and help with the circulation in the community. The funds, I kind of build on the idea of solar Commons. The funds can be generated by a solar Commons. That helps with setting up the system to promote circulation and use. I would then say, what sort of shifted my research focus away from that was a conversation actually attending another conference. This was organized at Salem State, just outside of Portland, Oregon. It was a group of MMT related people talking about or envisioning possibilities of using public banking for social provisioning. At that conference, I met a couple of people from, I think, the Osage Nation. There was also some legal experts. So we had some conversation about the legality of a tribe issuing their own currency. So the research I had found, or literature I have found at the time states that their sovereignty would include currency issuing. But they brought to my attention, and I only know a little bit about that, some treaty language which would prevent the tribal nations from marshaling resources for war. So there’s some language in the treaty regarding if you were to issue currency, then you could be raising resources that potentially engage in warfares with the states, and that’s certainly not allowed. Now, ultimately, which way or how it would go would have to be fought out in the court. As an economist, I am here to envision what our future society would like. I think of myself as a dreamer, also as a mother. We like to envision what kind of world we want our children to live in. So I’m envisioning but I also know there are some challenges regarding the legality of the currency, and that what has to be determined in the courtroom, not in the sphere of economics.

Billy Saas:  In the MMT community, I think on this podcast, and more broadly, we understand our ambition to be in the service of democracy and equity and justice. So I’d be interested to know how that factored into or would factor into conversations you might have in approaching tribal nations about something like the Junia.

Josefina Li:  I mean, full disclosure, I have not approached the tribal governments themselves, so I have talked with nonprofit that works on the tribal land with various things and just different stakeholders that have worked with them, but I have not brought the idea to the tribal leader themselves, so I don’t know exactly how they would react. I would like to get back to that idea someday just to see if there’s any possibility of implementation. But I certainly agree, and you’ve also given me a great idea on sort of the angle to pivot the idea. One of the benefits of the community currency is the participatory democracy aspect. When the currency is issued at the federal level, a lot of the decisions in the monetary system are so far removed from the everyday concern at the local level. So a lot of the proponents of community currency are citing the reason as sort of an insulation of the regional economy and also bringing the decision making process back to the community. Those two being really important to the design of the currency and the reason for using alternative currency. So I do know that the tribal nations very much value having that decision making right at the tribal level in a way that also respects their tradition and way of life and their values. So, yeah, I really appreciate that, that angle.

Billy Saas:  I feel like it’s a sort of default or de facto angle for a lot of MMTers. So less like an angle, more like an assumption.

Scott Ferguson:  Yeah, as opposed to just a technocratic economist who comes in and consults and advises and tells people what to do and disrupts…

Billy Saas:  This isn’t micro loans, in other words. On the question of community currency and legality, I think that there’s something interesting going on here between your conversation with legal scholars and the folks from the Osage Nation and what happens in, say, Western Massachusetts with the Berkshares program. It’s my understanding that complementary currency, itself, exists in a kind of gray area, legally, broadly, something like Berkshires or other community complementary currencies. They could be taken out or subject to some kind of enforcement against them, but they’re not. They don’t tend to be. I wonder if I have some thoughts, if that same kind of leeway or flexibility would apply if it were introduced into a tribal nation context where there are treaties like that. Certainly nobody’s making the argument that the Berkshares are getting ready to militarize, or the Berkshires. It’s interesting that there is a kind of gray area, but it doesn’t stop in certain directions, but it seems like an obstacle that might present differently in the context of tribal nations. I wonder if you have any thoughts along those lines around the history of complementary currency and the kind of free pass that seems to be given for lots of those projects and experiments.

Josefina Li:  Yeah. When I brought the idea up to the Osage people from legal backgrounds, I got the sense that it was dead on arrival, just no, but looking at the history is how the court has made decisions regarding what is deemed as a currency that comes in competition with the US dollar and what is not. I think that’s probably an area for further research. There also might be a forthcoming paper (in the American Review of Political Economy) by Ely Fair from Knox college, attacks the history of complementary currency and how it’s been thought out in the courtrooms, and seems like how much it resembles US dollars is used for primarily exchanges, circulations or use value, the level, the scale of acceptability, and the geographic location, distribution of the trade. These are all factors that play into whether something is legal or not. Ultimately, the judging factor is the federal government does not want currency to be replacing the US dollars and in competition with it. It’s also the emission of the currency, which also means some gray area and room for digital currency. We’re talking about new developments, the development of digital currency and a new way to keep track of the ledger. It’s definitely something communities can look into as a way around some of the constitutional restrictions on local state entities or other organizations issuing currency. This is certainly something I can circle back to and bring it back to the local nations here to see if it’s possible. Yeah, I feel like there’s still room. Again. I’m just not a legal scholar who wants to challenge that in one way or another.

Scott Ferguson:  Yeah, that makes sense. I do think it’s worth stating aloud some of the tacit assumptions that structure these contests and these decisions and the precedents, right? So obviously, we’re talking about a history of racism and settler colonialism that’s structuring the language of these treaties and this legal language, right? As opposed to, I mean, let’s take a radical counter example. You know, what was it? A week or so ago, Donald Trump promised if he wins the election to establish a strategic Bitcoin reserve or something like this. Bitcoin, along this logic, would be competition with the dollar. But here we have a former President of the United States saying that he would establish this at the federal level. So I recognize that what your project is to think about a more democratic economic design for peoples who are struggling and have suffered from oppression, and these legal structures are real obstacles. But I think right, obviously the broader framework and the broader historical politics are pretty glaringly racist and sort of arbitrary or hypocritical, right? What counts as a form of credit that threatens the dollar is not an objective, neutral question?

Josefina Li:  Yeah, absolutely. And just to add on, on top of that, I think the reason we’re calling for local currency for the tribal nations or any community needing to have an alternative currency is because their needs are not met by the federal dollars. And the Berkshare is a great and relatively long lasting system, but a closer examination will reveal that the incentive for participants to engage with this dual, it’s essentially a dual currency system and to deal with the annoyance of exchanging, keeping track of that is that discount. So they, I think it’s a 90 cents on $1 or 95 cents on $1 discount for using the Berkshare. It’s used predominantly in the farmers market for produce. So the community currency, in that sense, also at a freely exchangeable or convertible to the US dollars, really limits that currency’s ability to mobilize underutilized resources. You’re not really issuing or putting more money supply into the economy, if anyone is free to exchange it back to the dollars, at a one to one ratio. Also, for those that have read the MMT literature, would know this free, convertible currency is essentially like a foreign government that has their currency pegged to US dollars. So they’re not really monopoly issuers of that currency, which means they do not have both the fiscal and monetary tools at their disposal. If they are not free to issue their currency, instead it is pegged, they’re limited by the supply of US dollars. That also means they have to import whatever monetary policy that the US is implementing, and that essentially means the community is importing whatever macro economic policy at the federal level. That, in a sense, kind of defeats the purpose of implementing a local currency, because the community has underemployment and capacity for human resources. So, legally, a local money that succeeds at becoming the term they use in the legal sentencing was, not sure if sentencing is the right word, is “ordinary”. So if the currency becomes ordinary, it becomes legal. But for a local currency to be successful at its economic goals, it needs to be ordinary. We want it to be circulating for that Keynesian multiplier effect to kick in. So a local money which succeeds at becoming ordinary may also succeed at being illegal. I think that just adds a level of kind of irony to all of this.

Billy Saas:  I wonder if it’s not the emission so much or the fact of the currency existing, a complimentary or community currency, for example, again, the Berkshares. That’s not the threat, the fact that it exists, and circulates and is emitted and used in exchange, but that perhaps in the context, the very reason that you are critiquing those currencies for their ignorance of or unawareness of tax driven money. The fact that money tends to derive its value from being tax driven. In the context of tribal nations, if they were to roll out something like this currency, it would not actually rise to the level of threat or noteworthy competition until it was collected back in taxes by that local government. That may be the missing ingredient, why complementary currencies have been sort of untroubled or not very notably challenged is because of that ignorance. Because once there become two sovereigns who are collecting taxes, that’s where the threat comes from. That’s the real competition. Because otherwise, like you say, it’s a parallel currency that is always going to be sort of redeemed in dollars, but if you don’t have to redeem it in dollars, then maybe that’s the source of competition. What do you think?

Josefina Li:  Yeah, I mean, if you don’t have to redeem for dollars, then it certainly is a competitive force. I would also add, when I use the word tax, many remind me that for everyday people, who do not think in the framework of tax driven money, there’s a negative connotation associated with tax. It is something to take away from the people, and in a community that is so impoverished, to think that there could be even more added on to what they’ve already been asked for, seems like a really hard starting point. I do think pivoting and highlighting the part of the participatory democracy aspect could be more appealing. We’re avoiding the use of the term tax. We know it’s not tax, it’s that obligation, it’s that debt relation. It’s knowing that you can ultimately settle some sort of obligation with this money or thing or zhooniya. That’s what makes people want to accept it. So getting past and understanding that could be a game changer.

Scott Ferguson:  This is probably a good time to pivot to some of your more recent work in your dissertation project, where you’re trying to bring ideas from Ecological Economics and feminist economics into a kind of synthetic dialog with Modern Monetary Theory and adjacent heterodox thinking. Maybe you can walk us through how you came to these ideas, and why they’re so important for you.

Josefina Li:  I’ve been sort of stewed and raised out of the job guarantee and MMT tradition, having had key people like Stephanie Kelton, Randy Wray and Mathew Forstater as my teachers. Dr Forstater pointed me in the right direction. The names are Donatella Alessandrini. I became aware of this political Italian feminist group and their writing, including Sylvia Federici and others. I have learned some ecofeminism in grad school. I have come to another, in an earlier chapter of my dissertation, outline this fundamental incompatibility between the capitalist mode of production and sustainability and ecofeminism is kind of shared this, this fundamental principle that capitalism is built or necessarily requires the exploitation of nature and women and slavery, the colonial. All of that is how capitalism came to be. Federici’s work in Caliban and the Witch should kind of track the historical transition from feudalism to capitalism to show this exploitation and situating an ecofeminism is double exploitation of the environment and of women. Having been a woman who has engaged in the role of social reproduction, the more I engage with their literature, the more I could relate and appreciate the way that the care economy is theorized in their framework. Because oftentimes when we think of the feminist movement, we think of increasing female labor force participation rates. We think of incorporating females into the market economy. Even, you know, in the context of the care work, how can we do so much? How can we do that? It just tracks the last 100 years. It’s this massive market type of commodification of work that is produced in the home front. You know, as the family grows to a dual income family, a lot of time, we become time poor. The concept of time poverty is real, and so therefore you have to make up the time lost by saving it somewhere else. And so that’s when packaged food, frozen meals, you know, childcare, all of these become available and commodified. The industrialized food production system is at the backbone of modern dual income family households. As I’m living through this myself, I’m constantly struggling between, do I save the time and whip a meal together with something that’s easily off the pulled off the shelf from a store, but the same time I value so much of getting down on my knees and gardening, picking off the excess tomato leaves, growing a garden, and then preparing the meal that is from the land and table. This constant pull of how the time is spent between production in the market economy and reproduction in the household front. When I engaged with the Italian political feminist work, it all made sense. This divide between the sphere of social reproduction and production was not so much of a divide before the Industrial Revolution. In my work, I started with a little bit of history of economic thought. So I thought it was important to trace back to the classical political writers and see how wage is seen in the work of Adam Smith, David Ricardo, and even Marx himself. So I write a little bit on wages as a social reproduction, because when you’re writing in the context of classes, you have labor, capital, and a landlord. You have these classes that are essentially competing for the outputs, each making a claim of the output based on their property ownership. Do you own labor power? You earn a wage? Do you own land? You earn rents. You are a property owner, then you earn profits or claim. Everyone can make a claim. Even though we know from the writings of mainly classical political writers with a labor theory of value, they would say that labor is the primary creation or source of profit and economic output. But because of the framework of this class struggle, wage is a result of this power dynamic and struggle amongst the classes and Smith was very clear that the Capitalists have the upper hand in this struggle. They are more likely to hold out for much longer than the labor and I mean, also a plug. This is why we need to have a labor union. Even though the capitalist class would try to squeeze Labor Wages as low as possible, they understand that, at the very minimum, there needs to be a level to allow the social reproduction of the laboring population. Which is also why I have situated my research and my thinking in the concept of social provisioning. So economics is not a study of scarce resources among competing ends, but rather a study of social provisioning, that is how society organized themselves for social provision, and that includes social reproduction. For so many women, and through the division of labor and market economy, the work that used to be done and still needs to be done, the social reproduction still needs to be done, became something outside of the market. If economists are only studying market activities or market production, we’re overlooking an entire sector, so huge, such a sector in the economy. So the more I engage with the feminist literature, the more I’m thinking how can the job guarantee and MMT literature also serve some of these concerns in the feminist writing? Some of the feminist including Alessandrini, as also they were aware of the job guarantee proposal. Their one critique was the job guarantee is saying, everyone who’s willing and able to work shows up and gets paid a going wage. But we all know that wage as an institution post the classical political writers, it became a prize that is set in the labor market through competitive forces. So wages are part of this capitalist market production system. It comes with everything else that comes with commodification of work, of female or women’s work. So they have that critique of wage institutions as the backbone of job guarantee. So I am thinking to myself, job guarantee has so many other benefits, including it being, if it’s implemented at the government level, which has non capitalist social objectives, they do not have to be profit driven. Does that create space for recognizing the alternative livelihood, recognizing, not valuation, using the word valorization of women’s work and where, how does community currency fit in? How does community production fit in? That’s kind of how it all started, because they do fit together.

Billy Saas:  What have you discovered, and what do you make of the prospects of this project in this liminal moment?

Josefina Li:  Yeah, that’s a great question. I really appreciate that question. I feel really optimistic with this synthesizing work of job guarantee, MMT, feminist economics, the sustainability aspect. I do think that a community powered job guarantee can be a vehicle to achieve social justice and sustainability. I think we can start from, starting from the basics. For the listeners who are maybe not as familiar with the job guarantee idea, I’m going to reiterate its non capitalist mode of production that came from Abba Lerner’s functional finance tradition. In functional financing, the key being the functional, it opens up a whole space of thinking about financing, thinking about money. Because if we’re allowed to pursue other social and environmental objectives, and we also know from a variety of writers, including Jakob Feinig, who presented on the same panel as me back at the conference, glad to see that his book is out, had demonstrated to readers that money as a social institution is shaped by social and political forces. It represents power relations and also gender hierarchy, but it’s also malleable. It is a social technology that can be redesigned and produced, and I’m glad to hear, Billy, that you have your students engaging in that exact exercise in the classroom. Understanding. MMT means that we have a new way of thinking of money and to design it in a way to accomplish the things we want to accomplish. A job guarantee in the same long train of thoughts. In designing the program, there’s space to reinvent the meaning of work and employment. Jobs could be created to address justice and sustainability. Going back to the tribal proposal, there’s a lot of gap of community needs that could be fulfilled by a community currency powered job guarantee. There’s a lot of trails that could be updated. We know there are a lot of community needs which are not fulfilled by private markets. Because there’s no profits to be generated. It does not mean they do not function. They do not provide important social functioning or environmental sustainability. Tying it back to the feminist perspective, I think I’m being really optimistic, because just the simple fact that we are bringing to light this whole sphere of social reproduction, and that it creates value, and not just to think of it as non market activities, or think of it as the care economy or the Love economy that women engage with because they love. Let’s do the right thing, to valorize the work so that we could finally rediscover what love means. If anything we learned from the global pandemic is when there is a gap in the social reproduction, someone needs to step in and fill that gap. And oftentimes we see it’s women, where migrant workers, or intersectionality is real. It’s migrant women, immigrant women, women of color doing, performing those jobs. It also means the traditional idea of incorporating women into the capitalist market production will somehow solve all the problems. Well, no, it would just follow this path of least resistance, if you will, right? So, yes, you incorporate the white women into the market economy, but then all the social reproduction just gets pushed onto the women of color, black women. So that was some of the other critiques that black feminist writers had early on to feminist writing in general. Not to mention, the traditional benefits that come with job guarantee, which I’m sure many of your audience are familiar with: it being a buffer stock that sets the floor of pricing for labor skills, maintenance and being complementary to the private sector. Perhaps we need to address the feminist issue, their critique of wage being in what they call the wage institution. So maybe calling it a social provisioning gift. But it’s not just what we call it. The work that we’re doing at home, I’m just going to give food production as an example. Food production is such a window that allows us to just look at all of the non-market activities, how it’s been overlooked, from growing food from the garden or preparing a meal, meal prepping, freezing, or foraging food. There’s so much that goes into food production that shows love, but also it is the bedrock of the neighboring population being able to perform their productive work in the market economy. So essentially, the rest of the economy, the capitalist system, rests on the work of social reproduction that is not recognized. We’re not just paying them a wage, but also recognizing their contribution to our social provision. Yeah, so if a woman wants to be a girl power and as a CEO of a company, that’s great. But if they just want to provide healthy meals to their family, that work also needs to be recognized. I think a community currency powered job guarantee would allow for this alternative valorization of a different livelihood. One of the sociologists used the term “radical homemaking”. I love that idea of radicalizing just in the kitchen.

Scott Ferguson:  This is one of the first things that became clear to me and the most exciting to me when I first came to Modern Monetary Theory and heterodox understandings of money and credit. Once I unlearned the idea that money was simply just an expression of a private market economy and simply an expression of the capitalist mode of production, it precisely opened up alternative frameworks, like what you’re calling the social provisioning framework, and allowed us to think that we can do lots of different things with money that isn’t just about exploitative wage labor. I also was very compelled of what this meant for feminist causes and impulses, intersectional feminist impulses, precisely for socializing care work. So I really, really appreciate this work that you’re doing. I think I have a comment and then a question. One comment is, I think one of the many reasons we like to invite people like you onto our podcast to discuss your work is because, I think in the larger culture, MMT has some recognition, but it’s often treated as sort of one technocratic explanation for how things work and what we can do, as against another one. I don’t blame the MMT messaging for that, I think that’s the context that we’re in. I think somebody like Stephanie Kelton has to bring a certain kind of technical expertise to the table and fight toe to toe with people like Jason Furman or Larry Summers, and there’s a gendered element there as well. But I think so often MMT ends up needing to defend itself on technocratic grounds that what gets lost in the broader public is all the sort of rich not just potential of of the framework, but all the rich work that’s going on pedagogically in institutions like UMKC and people asking more and more questions, right? It’s not over. MMT isn’t done. It’s an ongoing project. So I just really like talking to and platforming you and your work and others just to honor that kind of creativity and problem solving that keeps going on. So that’s my comment. My question is, do you have thoughts in your work about specific programs, right? So you know one option is just to offer wages for housework, and that could come in the form of welfare benefits or care benefits. It could be a kind of laissez faire approach which just says here is access to money, to credit, in thanks for the work that you do in your home. And there’s probably a place for that. But what about socializing and restructuring feminized and racialized care work? What kinds of programs, public programs, whether it’s at the community level or at larger scales. Do you find yourself thinking about, meditating on, maybe developing ideas about?

Josefina Li:  In my free time, what very little I have, that’s what I meditate on and focus on. I mean, I love the concept of sociological imagination. I think we all need a little imagination. And so also, I was just at Dr Forstater’s recent workshop where he had shared some alternative methodology, and Adolf Lowe being the one of the people he had cited his instrumentalism, which essentially says, you start with the vision, your goal, where do you want to get to? Then you work backwards. So that’s a little bit kind of how I’m thinking this through. I know the end result is we want to have some sort of post capitalist society that’s socially just and environmentally sustainable. We know that the current capitalist mode of production is destroying that. So what do we need to have in between, to work backwards so we can get to that, to that goal? I certainly think there is still a place for the work that Kelton is doing at the federal level. We’re still going to be pushing for a Green New Deal, job guarantee. But there’s also so much power in the idea of Commoning, and I think we can accomplish that Commoning idea at The community level. In my survey of different community complementary currencies that existed, Bristol pounds being one that is linked to a municipal tax. So there has been a kind of a renewed, maybe a resurgence, of the thinking of designing community currency with a tax component, so working with municipal or county level governments for the implementation of this community currency, because their tax base is also really wide and the services they provide are all community based. My kids pay the cities for their swimming lessons. We use the State Park and the city skate park extensively. They also provide a lot of youth program campaigns. So these are all services that could be settled in the currency. So, calling it wages or not, recognizing the work that’s done in the social reproduction sphere would mean that for women who are growing a garden or a foraging mushrooms to put on the table that are never sold in the market economy, that work can now be recognized, and I don’t know if compensated is the right…or enumerated, recognized for their contribution in this currency. The currency has an emphasis on a really strong local emphasis. If it’s local, borrowing some of the lessons from community currencies that are “LETS” which stands for Local Exchange Trade System to boost more local exchanges so that the production here where the money is to value. Let me organize my thoughts here.

Scott Ferguson:  No problem. 

Josefina Li:  Money is circulated, issued, produced to recognize the use value rather than the exchange value, so much as the dollars. To quote someone, I can’t remember who recently I read, we’re using improved means to achieve unimproved ends. If we’re realizing the end is a just, sustainable society where I know the name of the farmers that raised the cow that’s sitting on my table, and I know those kinds of production, local production, also has a much lower ecological footprints. By valuing and encouraging these local production, social production, in providing the currency to facilitate that exchange, it has the benefit of both ecological sustainability as well as the gender conscientiousness, recognizing the value of the work in caring and loving. I don’t know if I’m answering your question on designing this currency. I know there has to be a tax component, and the more additional sort of add on demand there is, the stronger this currency will be. So again, I would revisit two things, food and energy. That is, two things that we cannot live without. As I also mentioned, Local production of food and energy also have much lower, again, ecological footprints. So if energy could be locally sourced with solar production, and if food can be locally produced and purchased, exchanged, if you consider those as you know the debt relation when you use or buy or consume those things. If that debt can be settled with the community currency, that also broadens the base of the demand. Yeah, I certainly invite everyone to join me in a little re-envisioning, or envisioning.

Scott Ferguson:  All of that makes a lot of sense to me, and all that is very exciting. I was also imagining, rather than individual homemakers foraging by themselves, there could be a foraging cooperative and a foraging bank and a seed bank. Not that these things don’t exist. They do exist, but not everywhere. I guess I was just interested in some ideas for organizations, groups, facilitations that would do the work of more than just offering a basic income, right? Say, you’re doing this work at home. We know it’s hard. Here’s some welfare benefits for it. And for some people that might be what they need. But I also think we all share a desire to not just remunerate the work that is done in the home, but rather transform it and make it less of a burden, socialize it, transform it, make it more joyous.

Josefina Li:  Yeah, that’s, that’s, that’s really the million dollar question here. I don’t pretend to have the answer. I think the entity, and there’s also a lot of legal questions and how to set this up with the city or the county trustee to a bank that then issues and monitors and tracks the digital ledger of the currency that could be one way. Keep in mind, this is a job guarantee, so it’s not just providing an income to stay at home moms for foraging and cooking. But also anyone who is unemployed and has skills and ways to contribute or wants to do, I know local nonprofits are under a lot of pressure to provide a lot of resources to much needed community, and they’re also kind of in competition with one another on a limited pool of volunteers in the community.

Scott Ferguson:  And grants.

Josefina Li:  Right? So the currency could also, I’m just now again, adding another demand employee were essentially as a bonus wage to people who are performing volunteer or civic duties in the community. Again, there has been much literature written on the different green jobs, maybe perhaps more labor intensive but environmentally sustainable jobs that could be performed by the job guarantee population. There is one idea by Ely Fair. In this proposal, they said the city would impose this Civic tax. It has to also be readily available for people to get a hold of this currency. So if you’re not participating in this job guarantee program, you’re not working for the city, or you’re not foraging right, or preparing a meal, you can also buy it from the city at $20 US dollars. That, again, sets a floor of wage offering, effectively driving up the real wages in the private sector. So there’s a lot of different ideas we’re getting into the practical nitty gritties, details of designing the currency. Again, I don’t have all of the answers. I hope my contribution is really for us to, first of all, a community currency, redesigning it, we have to add a tax driven component to it, and broaden the base to bring in food and energy production. The higher the acceptability. It should not be designed as a system of free convertibility to the US dollars. That, we do know. I don’t have the answer for you. I’m sorry.

Billy Saas:  You’ve got the vision, though, and we’re very much into the visioning. On that note, you mentioned a couple times part of that vision being post capitalist, but I think for some listeners and for some readers of MMT and adjacent literatures, you say post capitalist, they might presume or often, in Marxist literature particularly, post capitalist means post money. Or it implicates or implies post money. But that’s not what we’re talking about here. Money will continue to play. In fact, we’ll have a central role in this post capitalist imaginary that we that you’re providing us with.

Josefina Li:  Yeah, I really appreciate that comment. Absolutely. You know, as we all know, in the understanding of money as a debt relation, it’s a set of relationships. In fact, one other benefit I don’t know if I’ve mentioned with community or local currency, is through this network of trading, you’re also strengthening community networks and these community local relationships. For someone who is cooking a meal at home, or someone else might have the skills of growing just the best tomatoes in their garden, we have a lot of forests here, so lots of woodworkers. They can make nice cabinetry. I might know a handful of people that I trade with, but without the local currency, that trade will be very limited to a very small circle. The idea of a local currency is –and recognizing money as, again, the debt relation–will facilitate and encourage reciprocity exchanging the community so that someone maybe I’ve never met, I could purchase a meal at her home and try some authentic frying taco and someone else could do you know, my driveway in exchange for this doesn’t have to be trading, right? It’s not bartering anymore thanks to the existence of a digital, modernized local currency. So post capitalist definitely does not mean post money. In fact, money as a debt relation has long existed before. It probably has existed as long as written language or any writing system.

Scott Ferguson:  Jo Li, thanks so much for joining us on Money on the Left. We really appreciated your visit with us.

Josefina Li:  Thank you so much for having me. I’ve also learned a lot, and you’ve also given me some great insights and ideas for further studies.

* Thanks to the Money on the Left production team: William Saas (audio editor), Mike Lewis (transcription), & Robert Rusch (graphic art)

Money on the Left is joined by Grant Kester, professor of Art History at University of California, San Diego. We speak with Kester about his multi-decade career, researching and teaching the history of socially engaged art. 

Kester’s scholarship underscores the limits and contradictions of the dominant modern Western tradition of aesthetics. Such aesthetics value “autonomy,” insisting that the artist, the artistic medium, or art as an institution ought to stand alone and outside of society and its corrupting influences. Paradoxically, autonomy in this tradition is supposed to secure art’s political dimension by blunting and often deferring any claims to immediate social efficacy. Kester, by contrast, affirms what is variously called dialogical aesthetics or socially engaged art, a collaborative sensuous practice in public space, which aims to transform thought and action by forging complex relationships among artists and publics.

Here, we focus on Kester’s two recent books published by Duke University Press. In The Sovereign Self: Aesthetic Autonomy from the Enlightenment to the Avant-Garde (August 2023), Kester examines the evolving discourse of aesthetic autonomy from its origins in the Enlightenment through avant-garde projects and movements in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. In Beyond the Sovereign Self Aesthetic Autonomy from the Avant-Garde to Socially Engaged Art (December 2023), Kester then shows how socially engaged art provides an alternative aesthetic with greater possibilities for critical practice. Instead of grounding art in its distance from the social, Kester demonstrates how socially engaged art, developed in conjunction with forms of social or political resistance, encourages the creative capacity required for collective political transformation. 

Throughout our conversation, we tease out affinities between Kester’s scholarship and heterodox theories of public money and provisioning. Problematizing unquestioned desires to cordon off aesthetics from political economy, we call on artists and activists to contest, reconstruct, and build anew the forms of mediation that heterogeneously shape a shared sensuous life. 

Visit our Patreon page here: https://www.patreon.com/MoLsuperstructure

Music by Nahneen Kula: www.nahneenkula.com

Transcript

The following was transcribed by Mike Lewis and has been lightly edited for clarity.

Scott Ferguson:  Grant Kester, welcome to Money on the Left.

Grant Kester:  Why thank you, Scott and Billy, happy to be here.

Scott Ferguson:  So we’ve brought you on the show today to give you an opportunity to talk to us about your two new books from Duke University Press, which as you were telling us before we started recording, were actually part of one larger book project that got split into two. The first one is called The Sovereign Self: Aesthetic Autonomy from the Enlightenment to the Avant-Garde, and the second book is called Beyond the Sovereign Self: Aesthetic Autonomy from the Avant-Garde to Socially Engaged Art. But before we jump into this discussion about the two texts, we want to give you an opportunity to tell our listenership a little bit about your professional and perhaps personal background.

Grant Kester:  Very good. Happy to give you a little brief rundown. I’ll make this brief, because it’s probably not very interesting. But I grew up in Kansas City, and then moved to Washington DC for high school, and went to community college outside of DC, dropped out of community college, moved to Atlanta to work in commercial photography. When I was there, I got interested in photography in general, and I’d go to the galleries and so on. So that kind of drew me into art a little bit, really, for the first time, because I didn’t have much exposure to it before then. My mom used to like to decoupage old master paintings onto wastebaskets and stuff, which is kind of awesome. But nobody I knew that I grew up with was like, I’m gonna go to art school or anything like that. So that got me interested. And then I started to be interested in writing about it at that time. I published my first review probably in 1982 or so for Atlanta Art Papers. All that led to a shift, and I ended up going to art school in Baltimore, at the Maryland Institute College of Art in Baltimore, which is very old fashioned, but also not old fashioned in terms of conservative but just they’ve been around a long time. So art classes back then you had to sit there and draw from casts from Greek and Roman sculpture, that sort of a thing. But this is the 1980s, I think I was there for ‘84 through ‘86. So it was the height of postmodernism, and a lot of photo appropriation going on. So I did that kind of work. But also at the same time, because of my writing, I got interested in broader issues outside the arts. A lot of my early research is on reform culture, and reform movements in the United States, going back to the progressive era. History as a social documentary and the visual culture of political reform movements, and so on. When I was at the Maryland Institute, I curated an exhibition along with a faculty member named Diane Fessler, on activist forms of photography, basically. It was called “Expanding Commitment: Diverse Approaches to Socially Engaged Photography”. And that was in 1986. I was doing my art practice at the same time, but then I was shifting and finding it more interesting to deal with the kind of historical and theoretical issues. That led me to eventually get a job for an art magazine called The New Art Examiner. That was published in DC, so I ran their DC office. At that time, this was the middle of the “Culture Wars” of the 1980s. So we were in DC, I would talk to people at the endowment (National Endowment for the Arts) and I worked at the Washington Project for the Arts and the Corcoran at the same time, when the Robert Mapplethorpe show was canceled, and there were protests and so on. So I kind of got to see firsthand the turbulence of Culture Wars with Jesse Helms and all the rest of it at that time. That made an impression on me, I think in terms of the politics of culture. After that, I got another job as an editor at a journal called Afterimage in upstate New York, in Rochester. That would have been about 1990 or so. That’s a journal associated with media criticism, photography, video and so on, but it always had a pretty strong political orientation in terms of the editors before me, Catherine Lord or David Trend, who had an interest in the cultural politics of media. I had, at the same time, started a graduate program part time at the University of Rochester because at that point, I was like, Okay, I think I’m going to keep doing this writing research thing. Maybe I better actually get a degree. I was going to school part time and working as an editor full time, at Afterimage. I had a couple of essays at that point where I was, I think, segue-ing from the visual politics of photography and documentary into art more generally. One of them was “Rhetorical Questions,” which is an analysis of the ways in which certain kinds of art practices in the 1980s: appearing in galleries and museums would often be staged as these kinds of provocations and attacks on the viewer. I called the essay “Rhetorical Questions” because my experience was consistently that the people that were going to see the exhibits did not think they were the targets of the attacks. I realized there was a kind of recursive loop going on there where somebody’s being lectured or attacked, but the people that the work is being presented to see that as a hypothetical person. I realized that there’s a rhetorical discourse underneath this work, which has to do with evoking a certain kind of audience, the actual audience that shows up and consumes it. And I was interested in those disconnections in that essay. Then I did another essay, around 1995 called “Aesthetic Evangelists,” which was, on the other side of the coin, a critique of community based art practices at the time.

Scott Ferguson:  You were critiquing community based art practices at the time?

Grant Kester:  I was, yeah. There was a project called “Soul Shadows: Urban Warrior Myths” done by an artist from New Orleans. She’d had the experience of getting mugged in the French Quarter. This is an artist who was white, and she realized she was carrying along a lot of this kind of residual fear of Black men, which is a very positive reflective thing to be self aware of. To deal with that she decided to develop this open ended collaborative project with some young Black men in New Orleans who were…one of them might have been incarcerated, but they were associated with gang activity. And it turned into these large photos, where they dressed up a certain persona and so on and so forth, and became an installation. So the installation then traveled to places like Baltimore, and elsewhere, and it was used in conjunction with what at the time would have been kind of neo-conservative cultural and social policy initiatives to “scared straight”, and “Oh, see what happens with the gang members when they express contrition.” The whole thing felt kind of unseemly to me because it failed to problematize the nature of poverty and racism very clearly. It was being used in conjunction with these public agencies that were pushing a particular argument about Black poverty as being in some ways, there’s a whole series of these conservative arguments that go way back about “culture of poverty”, and it’s “Black poverty is the result of the lack of father in the home”, and Daniel Moynihan, and all of these really pernicious arguments that are what William Ryan called back in the day “blaming the victim”. So I saw this work being employed in that context. That led to a broader reflection on the problematics of middle class reform movements, and community based art practice. I think it was me just exploring the politics of two different domains, so to speak. Yeah. After Afterimage, I finished my dissertation, which was primarily on aesthetic philosophy and the 18th century, because I just got interested through my coursework in issues of the aesthetic and the politics of the aesthetic. I worked in the philosophy area and so the dissertation looks at the concept of possessive individualism, the idea of a certain kind of a self who sees their identity as caught up with their ability to impose their will on the world and appropriate it to their needs. The kind of thing you see in John Locke and early modern philosophers of that nature. I was looking at that in connection to early evangelical Christianity and the concept of harvesting souls, figures like William Wilberforce and a lot of the Methodists and so on. They’re really the pre-history of what we think of as evangelical Christianity in the 18th century and landscape gardens. Landscape gardens are a great example because they’re large gardens in England that were created by wealthy landowners and intended as a kind of Thorstein Veblen expression of their wealth and power, that they could have this much land that they’re not cultivating. There was this obsession with trying to make your landscape garden look larger than it really is. I got fascinated by the aesthetics of that and how the garden designers would try to design the gardens to look both natural and in some ways, completely natural, but were also completely manufactured. All of these were ways, I suppose for myself, that I was working through notions of the aesthetic in my dissertation. After that, I had a series of teaching jobs, Cranbrook Academy of Art, Washington State, Arizona State the usual schlep that one does. Then, I finally ended up at UCSD. So that’s the prehistory, anyway.

Scott Ferguson:  So am I right to see you making a linkage back then between a kind of not just a Lockean sense of self possession and world mastery, but there’s a Lockean version of the labor theory of value. The idea that the pre-social individual mixes their labor with nature and then whatever results is a kind of extension of that sovereign, that autonomous selfhood. Are you saying that the garden, the English Garden, becomes a way for a wealthy bourgeoisie or maybe nobility to project that kind of sense of labor and expression into a cultivated natural scape?

Grant Kester:  Yeah, that’s exactly right. I think it was Stowe, one of the landscape gardens, Stowe or Rousham. Before that was the Dutch style or the French style, which is very geometrical and rigid. It’s as though they get it from Versailles, that the sovereign ruler has to impose his will on nature and bend it to his needs. In England, they wanted it to look like nature naturally conformed to the desire to be possessed, which is very central to Kantian aesthetics, as well. So yes, it’s this idea, I suppose, of the bourgeoisie wanting to see its own worldview, that it’s uniquely equipped to master and tame and organize the natural world, and to extract resources from it, and creating almost like a virtual reality bubble that they can wander. They would have little perambulations around the gardens and so on. I actually link it to the development of early suburbs outside of London like Clapham Common because that landscaped garden as a kind of spatial container migrates into early suburban design in England and the Georgian era in the late 18th century. So yeah, for sure, and that’s so central to figures like Locke because they all want to make the argument that defining the self through the possession of nature is a kind of intrinsic condition of the human self as opposed to prior aristocratic models. This is the true nature of the self and it evolves naturally it is an artificially imposed, so that’s why it’s so important for them to the gardens still look like they’re just natural, even though there were massive amounts of human labor involved to create the gardens, to move Earth and create hills and lakes and stuff. It had to look like…

Scott Ferguson:  Not by the bourgeois themselves.

Grant Kester:  Exactly, yeah. They’d hire unemployed workers to pose as shepherds in hermitages. The whole thing was like a Disneyland of bourgeois perception. And so I think that interested me, and for me, that’s an aesthetic question, because it’s how do you organize the sensory world to confirm your own self image. For me, it ran all the way up to gated communities and so on. In the suburbs of Detroit when I was teaching at Cranbrook were these huge lawns and this isolation of the bourgeoisie from the broader world so that they can kind of indulge in a fantasy that they’re all self made, as opposed to dependent in a sense, yeah.

Billy Saas:  Reminded of an episode we had way back where we talked about the Franciscan monks who were so utterly opposed and disgusted by money that they would pay people to carry the money and sacks behind them, so they wouldn’t have to touch it. Just yeah, that the lengths people will go to, to preserve an image.

Grant Kester:  Yeah, that’s really interesting. Yeah, absolutely.

Scott Ferguson:  Much of your writing, as a professional academic, has been dedicated to and often controversially dedicated to exploring what is variously called socially engaged art, social practice art, a kind of dialogic aesthetic, I think you’ve called it. So I’m wondering if you could tell our listeners a little bit about — for those who are following along and have little sense of what this is, where it comes from, what it means what, what it’s related to what it’s not related to — what’s up with this socially engaged art scene that you’ve been caught up in and theorizing for a long time?

Grant Kester:  Okay, so this is an interesting question. That term “socially engaged art” emerges, I would say, in the 1980s. In conjunction with a body of work that was pretty marginal to the mainstream art world. Remember that during the 1980s the two big trends were Neo-Expressionist painting, which is kind of big, oil painted canvases by people like Julian Schnabel and Sandro Chia, and Francesco Clemente, and lots of oil paints being spread around. They looked a lot like expressionistic canvases from the 1920s, but 20 times as big. They were very much a throwback to earlier art practices. Then, there was this whole body of postmodern, appropriation based off and photo based work: Cindy Sherman, Sherry Levine and Richard Prince, figures like that. There was also, however, this adjacent body of work pretty localized in the US and Europe. But there were some people working that were building on activist art traditions that came out of the 60s and the 70s. Frankly, building on earlier precedents, that came together. There were multiple terms for it, people would say it’s activist art, socially engaged is just one of them. It’s an imperfect term. It’s problematic in many ways, because all artists, social. All are engaged with something or the other. But what differentiated this kind of work for me is that the engagement implied a reciprocal, in a way, responsibility to site or the audience that involved a kind of a feedback loop, if you will, in which the work wasn’t simply imposed onto a site. Think of Richard Serra’s famous Tilted Arc sculpture, which was a big controversy around that time. In a government plaza in New York City, a big corten steel sculpture put in the middle of the GSA (Government Services Administration) Plaza in Manhattan. And that is how conventional art would operate in a public space. You’d say, Okay, I’m going to come up with an idea in my studio, and I’m going to plop it down in the middle of a public space. Serra actually talks about that work as having a behavioral quality. I always found that interesting, because behavioralism is something we associate with well, in a way, like training animals and things like that. So there was the sense that the artist has that their job is to intervene in the public space, and to variously awaken or enlighten the public to alter their consciousness, which is, you know, all well and good. It’s what art does, but there was not a sense that Serra needed to actually consult with the people who would come into contact with the work ahead of time. He kind of knows. In a sense, the assumption is that the artist has already experienced an epiphany or an enlightenment of some kind, and that their job is to communicate that heightened sense of awareness to the viewer who was a priori assumed to have not achieved that level of insight. So if Tilted Arc represented one model for how the artist relates to the broader public outside of a museum or a gallery space, the works that I got interested in at the time tended to not carry forward the same presumption that artists didn’t have something to learn from the site. I guess that’s how I’d phrase it. Serra, and I don’t want to ventriloquize Serra, who just recently passed away, but I don’t think he would have seen his job as learning in detail about the site, at the complex micro political level. He would see the site and be aware of it as a kind of symbolic container in a Federal Plaza, with government workers and so on. But that would be about it. I was interested in practices that involve actually opening yourself up to the unexpected insights, that the artist might in some way learn from, be transformed by, the specific conditions of site, and public and space and community in ways that maybe would problematize all of those terms. That’s, for me, the engagement is an engagement that implies this reciprocal or dialogical, back and forth where the artist learns from, and is transformed by as well as exercising and effect on a particular site, or public. So that socially engaged concept gets carried forward into the 80s and the 90s. Again, along with lots of other terms, it gets confusing. I think the lack of a single terminology is probably fine. It’s a good thing, it suggests just how varied this practice is. The other thing that started to happen was these practices, which is what I’ve suggested, often tended to be collaborative, or collective, or participatory in some way. They often tended to be long in terms of duration, they might extend for quite a long period of time. They often involve the artist, and again, these are artists that are working outside the institutional art world, various forms of interaction with social movements, activist groups, and so on. So that term socially engaged, for me, has that particular resonance. What happened is that by the 80s, and the 90s, this kind of work was going on in lots of places, not just in the US or Europe. More and more networks of communication opened up in the 90s, and the early 2000s. A lot of these groups start to become aware of each other. It becomes more networked. Not coherent, necessarily, but a broader community of practitioners who are learning about each other’s work and so on. That is all proceeding, at the same time, the institutional art world occasionally will draw some of this work in for exhibitions, and biennials and so on. But generally, most of the work that I was looking at was not being produced with any direct connection to the institutional art world, or very little direct connection.

Scott Ferguson:  As a follow up, can you give us a preliminary counter example to the Serra’s work you mentioned? What is, for you, a quintessential exemplar of socially engaged practice?

Grant Kester:  Yeah, that’s a great question. And here’s an example. I mean, there’s lots of examples in that time period. But here’s one that I got to talk about in Conversation Pieces, which is my first book. That’s a project developed by a group called Wochenklausur, which is an Austrian collective whose name means “weeks of closure”. Their approach was to identify a site and over a period of several weeks to develop a project there, and they were invited to do a project in Zurich. They just they ended up wanting to do a project on the condition of sex workers in Zurich. Zurich had a very kind of whatever Calvinist, Puritanical attitude towards sex workers. They existed, there was a whole economy, but there was very little recognition or support. In many cases, they would struggle with housing issues and so on. Their goal was to try to get support from the city government to build basically a boarding house or “pensione” for sex workers in Zurich, which would have seemed impossible because of the political polarization among conservatives and so on in Zurich at that time, to even publicly admit that sex work is going on. And then to have the support or imprimatur of the government, and providing these people with a place to live, would seemed inconceivable. So they developed these “boat talks,” and they would take individual members of the different parties and government agencies and different stakeholders, activists, and so on, and they go out and Lake Zurich on this pleasure boat, and they didn’t record anything. They didn’t allow the media. And so a lot of people whose opinions about this question would have immediately in a more mediated space than politicized, like, I’m not allowed to say this because people will attack me, and so could communicate and reach a consensus to support this boarding house. Of course, this took weeks and it was accompanied by all sorts of complex machinations. But at the end of the day, they had that support, and they were able to actually get the boarding house built. Now, look, there’s all kinds of issues with a project of that nature that you can criticize. But what interested me more than just the other thing actually got done, which seems kind of miraculous. What interested me is the process of doing it, and that speaks to a very different relationship to site. They didn’t go into the site a priori, assuming here’s what needs to happen. They went into the site saying, Oh, this is a problem, that would be great if it could be resolved in some way. And instead of imposing a solution, they literally invited the people that were in the position to create a solution to talk. It’s such a simple and elegant thing. And of course, it won’t always work. We can’t always settle our differences by conversation. But it intrigued me and it was presented as an art practice. That raised questions for me about well, what is it about this that makes it an art practice? It was the antipode to Serra’s sovereign, if you will, consciousness, creating an image in the studio and putting it into the site, that’s all fine. That’s how most art is made. But I wasn’t really attracted to this other approach. And so I’d say Wochenklausur’s Boat Talks project is probably a good example.

Scott Ferguson:  To a lot of our listeners, they’re probably interested in what they’re hearing. They’re thinking, Oh, well, you know, there’s different kinds of ways of making art and, maybe, each their own. As we’ve said, you’ve been rather controversial, because the Serra practice is not just Serra. It is the dominant practice. There is a dominant going back centuries, as you show in your work, and as others have shown, a whole epistemology of art, a whole understanding of what art is, and what our isn’t, what the limits of art are, that are dedicated to this idea of autonomy, or this idea of sovereignty. That’s what you really take up in the first of your two volumes, and I’m wondering if you can tell us a little bit about how that came to be? Why is modern art so invested in sovereignty? And what are the limits and problems with that?

Grant Kester:  Yeah, so you know, I think the books came out of a gradual process because I’ve written Conversation Pieces and then I wrote The One and the Many which picks up on some of those questions. Throughout this, really going back to the 80s and before you know, I’ve lost track of how many times I would have these conversations where I might present the work and somebody saying: Why is this art? That’s not art, because X, Y, and Z. The work would be often criticized by critics associated with conventional approaches, as being un-aesthetic. That was very common “It’s not aesthetic” in some way. It often wasn’t just that this is an art, this isn’t “We don’t like it as art” it’s that it literally can’t be art. I felt that the practice was, I guess, in some ways, threatening some pretty deep ontological questions about what art is. It intrigued me because the projects I’ve looked at are all being produced by artists or not just artists, but artists working on people and being presented by them as art. I felt that it was important to learn and listen to what artists are saying they’re doing, and see if there’s something there that is being missed. Part of that led me to this question of rethinking the nature of the aesthetic, and this is where the two books come from. I couldn’t really come up with an aesthetic analysis of engaged art without settling accounts with the conventional aesthetic paradigm. That’s the one that supports the notion of the Artist as a kind of a sovereign intelligence. Yes, the first part of the book goes back and tries to trace the history of the aesthetic and sovereignty to figure out where that comes from. For me, it was important, a sovereignty, autonomy, because I felt that the aesthetic was often being collapsed into notions of autonomy, or sovereignty, unproblematically. That there was something in the history of the aesthetic that was being lost in that. Oh, it’s just a matter of the artist has to be absolutely free. Their consciousness is a model for the rest of us to follow. I felt there was something important about the aesthetic that was being lost, that had to do with the aesthetic from its original meaning, right. It’s “aisthesis” in Greek, which means sense-based knowledge. Something about the way the knowledge we get through our senses is legitimate, that our sensory experience of the world generates important insight. Of course, in certain versions of the aesthetic, the knowledge of the body is subordinated to the mind, or the intelligence, or sentiment, and emotion, subordinated to reason. That kind of gets baked into certain accounts of the aesthetic, almost unselfconsciously. So I felt like there was something lost in collapsing the aesthetic into notions of autonomy, about the status of somatic or bodily experience. The other thing that interested me about the aesthetic was that the aesthetic and its earliest versions has to do with how consciousness is transformed. The critique of judgment is all about how people learn to experience their selfhood differently. It’s about the relationship between transformations and individual consciousness or self awareness, and broader trends, social, maybe even political transformation. How does having my consciousness transformed relate to broader social and political change, is what I drew out in that. That whole complex set of issues was getting lost. Instead, you so often find this kind of routine invocation of autonomy and sovereignty. You can’t make art that goes outside the art world because it will be collapsed into or appropriated by these impure forces. There’s a whole kind of problematic binary opposition that I wanted to try to work through a little bit and break down some of these things like mind over body, or pure and impure or artworld and impure social and political world and so on.

Billy Saas:  Would ‘individual’ and ‘collective’ be another one of those kinds of divisions that could play into that?

Grant Kester:  Absolutely. That’s why I write about the “washing the flag” or Lava la Bandera performances in Peru in 2000, which were a series of, of actions that were developed by a collective, the CSC or Civil Society Collective, composed of artists and activists and it developed a performance based practice at the moment that Alberto Fujimori was attempting to stay in power by limiting the freedom of the press and stage a kind of…He was already in power, but kind of keep himself in power and elections were kind of soft coup or something along those lines, right? By repressing the election process. This group came together and they started these actions, as a collective, of washing the Peruvian flag in the main plaza outside of the government buildings in Lima. And it fascinated me because it was such an innocuous gesture like they’re just washing…It was just a few of them at first, just a few individuals washing the flag. Okay, who cares? But the government realized that it was dangerous. They weren’t throwing rocks or anything. They were just washing the flag and hanging it up to dry. Like performance art, it looked like something from the 70s. Right, like performance art. But the government reacted really strongly and saw that symbolic gesture as a threat. What happened was, it started to spread. It became collective. It went from a handful of people washing some flags. Well that wouldn’t really pose much of a threat. But all of a sudden, you had 500 or 1000 people in this plaza every weekend. Then you started to see people doing the same gesture in towns and villages across Peru. The effect of that wasn’t simply Oh, well, then that led to the ouster of Fujimori. But it gave people a sense of the strength of solidarity in Peru at the time against Fujimori, because there was a sense of hopelessness. Like he’s going to do it again, he’s going to stay in power, and there’s no hope, there aren’t enough of us. All of a sudden, the viral contagion of that gesture made people feel a sense of agency that they have not felt before or encouraged them to do so. So yes, that’s the key connection to me because conventional art is all about transforming consciousness. Richard Serra’s Tilted Arc was supposed to make the government workers see this huge barrier, and say, Ah, the barriers a symbol or metaphor for the constraint of government bureaucracies. And I see I’m an apparatchik that’s employed by this entire oppressive system, I get it. Right. So conventional art is all about transformation of consciousness, but it always has to be limited to the individual. There’s never an understanding of how that might expand or become scalable. Things like Lava la Bandera and the Escrache in Argentina that I talked about, and Saba Zavarei’s work in Iran, of singing in public, all of these gain their power by their proliferation, as opposed to their constraint and limitation to the individual. That goes back to this idea of the aesthetic which is in Kant the sensus communis, common sense, in the aesthetic is what happens when we as individuals intuit our connection to a larger social whole. But it can only unfold in the individual consciousness. That idea, that linkage, actualized was really interesting to me in these practices. So yeah, Billy, absolutely. From individual to collective. That’s the key movement, I think.

Scott Ferguson:  To develop that a little bit more, you know, one of the things I really appreciate about the genealogy or the genealogies that you lay out of both autonomous art and socially engaged art and thinking about them, is that you’re often de-familiarizing really well known histories and well known figures and bringing out the limits of them, and in doing so, you’re not just critiquing them, you’re also drawing out tension. Forgive me for using such hamfisted terms, but a villain in your first book can turn out to actually have seeds of heroism in your second book. Friedrich Schiller is the beginning of a problem in book one, but in book two, the play drive has this possibility that can outstrip Schiller, and I’m wondering, maybe you can talk a little bit about Schiller, you have also a very complicated relationship to Marx’s significance in this history. Also Leninism and the historical avant-garde. Just get into some of these details that I find absolutely fascinating.

Grant Kester:  Of course. Yeah, I like your point about the complexity of it. I think there’s a tendency, I don’t know how widespread but I have encountered it, to a certain notion of, you’ve encountered this a lot in art criticism, of purity. That is a particular theory and particular practice is either completely, irredeemably corrupt and co-opted, or it can’t be questioned. And I think there’s almost like a theological underpinning to a lot of that in art criticism where we get identified with these positions. You see it in the debates over ethics versus aesthetics and so on and in art criticism going back 10 or 15 years. You see a version of this in, I suppose, certain forms of left political theory, which is that, and I talk about this in the second book, that the only legitimate form of political change is something that effectively reproduces the convulsive overturnings of the Russian Revolution in 1917. If it doesn’t seem like a revolution that completely clears away everything that came before and rebuilt from scratch, anything that is partial or incremental, fails. Which has always struck me as problematic. For one thing, it’s not as though the Bolshevik Revolution was reinvented. Autocracy continued on in Russia quite nicely with a different set of names attached to it than Czarist names. So there is never an absolute overturning like that. It doesn’t exist in human history. I always felt that, in the same way with particular theorists, that there’s almost always with human complexity, and there are resources that are for me, for what I’m interested in doing that are productive and generative, and others that aren’t. Schiller is a good example of that. Schiller’s analysis of the kind of early modernity and the soul destroying effect of modern life. And this is a guy that’s writing in pre-unification Germany. It’s a bunch of duchies and principalities, one of the more backwards parts of Europe, in a way, in terms of what modernity looks like. Yeah, England was different, but Germany, not so much. Yet, he could see how damaging to the human self, certain forms of modernization were. The instrumentalization of other people in the natural world, and so on. So there’s a lot of important stuff. I’ve got on my wall cover of AIZ, workers illustrated newspaper. And that’s this Life magazine for German workers, basically, from the 20s and early 30s. John Heartfield, the photo montage artist, did their covers. And I’ve got a cover that he did that’s basically an Nazi propaganda minister on the occasion of Schiller’s 175th birthday and he’s saying, “who is this guy, I don’t believe anything he says. I’d arrest him if he was alive today.” The Nazis really didn’t like Schiller, because he critiqued modernization, and he critiqued it from a kind of spiritual perspective that it was soul destroying. He said, You need to rise up against authoritarianism. There’s always these mixed…it’s like the Enlightenment in relation to colonial expansion that I talk about in the second book. There’s robust anti imperialist discourse in the enlightenment of all places. So anyway, that’s just a way to say, I think the way I think tends to avoid too many of these binary oppositions of pure and impure and so on. It doesn’t mean you don’t circle back around and say, yeah, there’s problems with Schiller, and so on. But it’s important to think, well, in a more dialogical manner, right? There’s a back and forth that goes on, and you extract those elements that are productive, and then don’t worry about the others. So these ideas also come up in the way that I understand the Marxist tradition. Here I want to focus briefly on the Leninist tradition. In many ways, there’s a tension in modern political history and the Marxist tradition. There’s a tension between revolutionary change, and what I talked about in the book as prefigurative forms of experience of various kinds. Revolutions have always, in the Marxist tradition, in pursuit of a society that would be defined by Liberty, Fraternity and Equality. 1789 in the French Revolution, those are the watchwords. Of course, the Marxist critique of 1789 is that it’s a bourgeois revolution. The promise of liberty, freedom, and equality was never realized fully for everyone, including colonial subjects, including women, including the working class never got there. Every revolution failed in some sense, until we got to 1917. We ended that cycle in the French tradition with the Paris Commune. The Paris Commune is an extremely complicated moment in French history and is a failure yet again. Lenin famously celebrates when the Bolshevik Revolution survives longer than the Paris Commune did before it was destroyed. He does a little dance and so on, like, Yes, we did it where he finally had the right kind of revolution. What he learned, what he takes away from the commune is you cannot prematurely de-sublimate utopian values. What does that mean? It means you look at the commune, you look at Courbet’s work in the commune. There’s all sorts of reinvention of what life could be in a commune: the police force is done away with and schools are open and free and galleries, the Louvre is open to the public. We eliminate a lot of the bureaucratic positions and so on. There’s this euphoric kind of moment. It’s kind of like Russia after the Bolshevik Revolution, the Civil War. You find this euphoria of potential. Wow, we had a revolution. Now we get to actually have liberty, equality and fraternity and freedom, real freedom for everyone. That’s a really poignant moment. And so Lenin looks at the commune and says the reason the commune failed is because they celebrated too soon. What they needed to do was be hard-nosed revolutionaries. It shows that we can’t rely on the working class, to have the hard-nosed, disciplined mentality of a bourgeois intellectual, which is what the party is right? He talks about Karl Kautsky, the German Marxist’s famous remark about Communism having to be brought to the masses from outside from bourgeois intellectuals, or alienated bourgeois intellectuals. Lenin’s lesson is that revolution has to be an utterly hard nosed unyieldingly hierarchical process. And yes, the dictatorship of the proletariat, there is no appeal to justice. If the party says you are an enemy, you go to jail or you’re executed. It’s like the elements of the terror all over again. So I was interested in that image of what revolution can be that gets carried forward. Of course, a version of it that migrates into the avant-garde is the idea that art’s role is to attack and assault the viewer. That becomes a symbolic and displaced expression of the role of violent political revolution at the cognitive level, in a sense. But there were other voices in the Bolshevik party, including Alexander Bogdanov, who was an early founder of the Bolsheviks, right, and Bogdanov says, No, the idea that the party should have absolute and unyielding control, and we have to impose this hierarchical discipline on society and set up the Cheka and police state and all the rest, which begins to happen under Lenin, the Cheka is created under Lenin’s watch, says no, if your revolution looks like that, then it’s likely going to reproduce that same level of authoritarianism after it’s over, whenever that comes. So my feeling from just my own reading of history is that revolutions that are predicated on such a complete disavowal of the prefigurative emancipatory and utopian elements of human sociality, are unlikely to end up producing anything more than more inequality and injustice. That puts me athwart of a strong Marxist tradition, which I still find figures like Zizek wanting there to be another Leninist revolution or Badiou who’s like a big fan of the Chinese Cultural Revolution because it got all the nasty bourgeois Chinese people out of the way or, I mean Badiou was celebrating the Khmer Rouge for crying out loud until like a decade ago, still. That is not my experience and understanding of the history of communist revolution. That led to my interest and practices of political social change that incorporate within themselves these prefigurative elements. New social architectures, new forms of being together, new forms of decision making. Now, of course, there has to be a tactical dimension to any change. But that tactical dimension, the instrumental element of change, like we have to do this and produce that effect and attack this agency of government or whatever has to, for me exists in it in a relationship with these other elements, or you end up reproducing the very thing you thought you were fighting against. I know that for many that’s liberal humanist claptrap, and not sufficiently and all the rest. But, it’s just based on my reading of history, in my experience on this planet, that that’s more likely to produce a decent kind of life after the revolution occurs. Frankly, what does revolution even look like? I think of the United States today, where we’ve got these really insane Christian Nationalist ideas being promulgated, at all levels of society. Dramatic restrictions on abortion, and attacks on immigration and so on, that represent the belief systems of a fairly small part of the public. Really, I mean it’s scary how many people believe these things, but still, it’s maybe 30%. The only reason the Supreme Court has six ideologues bought and purchased ideologues on it, is because the Federalist Society has been working for 30 years to do that, like right wing, Neo fascist groups, white supremacists have been working for decades to infiltrate school boards, and they have a very mobilized base. So you have these belief systems, which the vast majority of the American public disagree with, that are being imposed on us. And that’s what a revolution would look like, wow. If Trump gets reelected, that will look like a revolution. But how did it happen? It took three decades, you know, you can go back and look at the history of neoconservatism and Aryan Nations and KKK and trace that genealogy, it was a slow patient work. And on the left, there’s often not a recognition of how important that kind of work is. Can you imagine a parallel version of that, that was actually devoted to progressive, enlightened ideas about how society should operate that had been going on for 30 years, that was supported by, you know, 75% of the American people. But we don’t have that so much. So anyway, that’s all a long winded way of saying that, for me, that prefigurative and the tactical element of the political need to be conjoined. To take it back to engaged art, that’s what I see happening on an experiential level and along with the practices that I write about, it’s just one space. It’s not like the only place this work has been done. I’ve talked about that Black Lives Matter and the Cleveland Convening in the book, because it’s such a great example of this. That wasn’t an engaged art project project. But what occurred is the Cleveland Convening, when they they blocked the arrest of a young Black man, was fascinating, because it was a moment at which there were all of these schisms within the group, the Black Lives Matter group, in the convention center, that were threatening to drive them apart into camps and so on. And they instantly reconnected into a collective that could peacefully prevent the arrest of this young man. So it’s, it’s a passage from one of the books that I described. Anyway, this kind of work is happening in lots of places. It’s obviously not just in the arts or engaged art. I think it’s part of a broader shift in how we are conceptualizing social and political change.

Billy Saas:  I suppose I have the cynical and the optimistic path to pursue. But let’s end with the optimistic and tarry in the cynical for a moment. It seems to me a lot of–even left progressive circles–a lot of this investment in autonomy, and the aesthetic and modern art is about generating and preserving value. It’s about ownership. It’s about persona, it’s about cults of personality, and ultimately a need to have a job and to make a buck. Right. I think that that would be kind of a self defense, I could anticipate coming from somebody who is espousing the views that you’re critical of, and why they might be defensive. Well, at the end, I have a house of kids, I got it, I gotta do this, right. This is the paradigm we’re in. How do we get over that or through that, or do you have some examples or models that you think we can look to or point to share with our comrades and colleagues and say, No. Another way lies this misdirection?

Grant Kester:  Well, let me say a couple of things. One, there’s this tension between a kind of spontaneous all encompassing revolution and gradual. I don’t want to overstate that. But I would say that even in the case of Russia, Lenin didn’t expect the Russian Revolution. He famously said I’d be happy for a bourgeois revolution. We’re like the most backwards in terms of this Hegelian version of capitalism that he would have believed in, was in an unlikely place to have it. So we’re often being surprised even by people that we imagined to have a privileged access to the truth. So things can happen. Entirely possible that it happens all the time, frankly. Rosa Parks sits down in a bus, and certain events, performances happen that trigger not maybe revolutionary change, but pretty big and important change. But I also would say that the precondition for those events like the Russian Revolution, or the civil rights movement was decades of work that is more subterranean. So the subterranean work, the thankless daily work that people do to foment social changes. That’s the ground on which any of those, as Badiou would say, evental changes occurs? They don’t come from the consciousness of the individual theorist or Vanguard leader, they come from human Praxis in a myriad of ways. Yes, people have to survive. I mean, I teach art history for a living. We’re all flawed and imperfect revolutionaries, for sure. But there is, I suppose, at the end of the day, and look, Billy, I’m completely with you. I can be completely cynical about all of this, because you just look at it…Yeah, and so what? Things are actually getting worse. Doesn’t matter how many art collectors do how many things that’s not really moving the needle in any significant way. That’s all true. It’s not hard at all to kind of be a little despondent about that. But I also look around at a world that’s changed dramatically in the last five or 10 years, that’s changed because a whole crap ton of really mean evil people have been working to make it change for a long time. They didn’t give up. Right? They didn’t get despondent. This goes back to Goldwater and before right. It goes back to Father Coughlin in the 1930s. They didn’t give up. So there is a need, I suppose for what Gramsci says, “Pessimism of the intellect, optimism of the will.” That is, you’re right, and I can completely see…I myself feel like things are hopeless, and why am I writing about these little projects that didn’t really do as much as they might have done, but there also has to be, for me at least, a capacity for hope. I think you mentioned the art world. Part of what drew me to this question of autonomy is this odd disconnect in left circles around what art can be and in some ways, it really unreconstructed notion of avant-garde autonomy. There’s a history of this kind of lack of a kind of awareness of how artistic practice has begun to change. Goes back to like Clement Greenberg writing for partisan review, setting the mold for a kind of a formalist notion of art in the midst of revolution. He famously says in “Avant-Garde and Kitsch”, this essay he wrote in 1939 I want to say, that the only hope to preserve revolutionary consciousness lies in these isolated avant-garde experiments that artists are doing in the privacy of their studios.

Scott Ferguson:  Paid for by the bourgeoisie. He says it explicitly, yeah. And Kitsch is when the bourgeoisie stops paying for the autonomist artists.

Grant Kester:  Exactly, he calls it the umbilical cord of gold.

Scott Ferguson:  He does, yes, he did.

Grant Kester:  I wrote for The Nation back in the 90s. I used to write reviews for them, and I can remember that their art critic was Arthur Danto. God bless Arthur Danto. He’s a great philosopher, but the last thing you’d find him writing about would have been activist art practices. There’s an insecurity on the left, that they’ll appear as Zhadnovites or something. They’ll appear like they’re supporters of the most vulgar forms of Stalinist social realism if they don’t go out of their way to embrace so called advanced avant-garde art. It all went to Verso Press as it is sometimes because they have this relationship to October, the journal October. There’s been a failure, from my perspective on left associated cultural platforms, to really come to terms with how art has changed in the last 20 years. Now, if you look at theorists, you’ll look at Rodrigo Nunes “Neither Vertical Nor Horizontal” or Asad Haider or Hamed Hosseini figures like that. You find political theorists going yay, yeah, we need to combine the vertical and the horizontal as Nunes calls it. But the art side, the people that see themselves as invested in art criticism and so on, still remains quite hidebound in my perspective in terms of the kinds of art that are recognized and accepted and constructs quite astoundingly odd arguments to me. There’s a guy Nicholas Brown who wrote a book Autonomy: The Social Ontology of Art under Capitalism. A lot of this is neo-Adornoian, that is Adorno, Theodor Adorno, Frankfurt School critic, famously, very critical, like Greenberg of mass culture, or popular culture, and very supportive of art as having to be opaque, hard to understand, isolated, can’t find an audience because everybody is too benumbed by consumer culture to even be aware enough to understand it, but that’s okay. It’s like a message in a bottle to a future generation that might wake up enough to actually have a revolution. All of these arguments get carried forward and in his book, Brown develops this whole argument about how any art that relates itself in any way to political change immediately becomes what he calls a consumable sign of opposition. Rancière, Jacques Rancière, says something like this. He says once art collapses into political mobilization, it disappears. So the very figures you think you would turn to on the left to write intelligently about art often feel invested in this very conservative model of what art can be. Now, Brown, to his credit, writes about popular culture, but the argument he makes comes out of Frederic Jameson and Adorno, which is that art preserves its radicality, not by getting on the art world and engaging with actual political and social change, but remaining in. It only has meaning in the institutional art world, and its meaning that it only occurs as it pushes off against or critiques certain generic rules and norms and compositional norms, and so on, specific to art media, which is kind of a Greenberg argument. It can’t overtly address the political. As soon as it does that, it’s lost. It disappeared as art. In Brown’s book, he actually makes this argument that based on that argument, that art becomes political by critiquing certain ideas and compositional structures that are unique to particular art media, like painting, or film, or television. He makes this whole argument that progressive political cultural production is associated with the original version of The Office, as opposed to the US version. He has this whole argument about how the original version, the UK version of The Office, was real, critical, because it engaged and subverted the generic conventions of comedy, in a way that the US version did not. Or The Terminator was authentically in a way avant-garde work that carried forward really kind of a prototypical revolutionary awareness, whereas Avatar was not because it did not destabilize the generic conventions of film in the way that The Terminator did. People end up tying themselves in knots to make the argument that this work is political in a meaningful way, and that’s okay, I don’t object to that. Look, I would say maybe you need to work a little harder to come up with the argument because it doesn’t, for me, seem very convincing. But I appreciate that that’s what most art criticism wants to do. The part that bothers me is the parallel argument therefore any artists that don’t work that way, that operate outside the institutional art world, or reduce political resistance to “I’m going to challenge the norms of filmmaking in some formalist manner” have stopped making art. That is not true for me. I think that they are making a different kind of art. It saddens me that it’s so hard to find critics and theorists associated with this arguably on the left side of the spectrum, if you will, that don’t want to accept that. So I do. I guess I’ll say that’s where I come down and say, Yes, it is art, but it’s a kind of an art that requires you to rethink your definition of art and to rethink your definition of autonomy, because autonomy is the basis for a lot of these arguments in Rancière and Nicholas Brown and Walter Benn Michaels and a number of these critics.

Billy Saas:  It seems like one way to put it would be like overtly political art obviates the need for the critic. And so the critics are somehow invested in and preserving their aura and prestige of interpretation from the inimitable genius.

Grant Kester:  One, Adorno literally will say this in aesthetic theory, that is he’s not really convinced there is anybody that looks at Beckett plays or Schoenberg compositions and really grasps them. The only person that does is the critic, and that’s okay. He talks about the artist as a deputy, working on behalf of the kind of revolutionary consciousness the working class should exhibit but does not yet. It’s like Lukacs talks about the “imputed consciousness” of the word proletariat in history, class consciousness, it’s what the working class…the whole argument of Marxism is that they will spontaneously evolve class consciousness through the oppression of the capitalist system and industrialization. But they failed to do so. So somebody else must have to experience it for them. And that somebody else is the Vanguard theorist, it’s going to be the artists for Adorno, and so on. They become a kind of a repository, or a talisman, or something, a vessel, that carries revolutionary consciousness forward in a non-revolutionary period. All of those vessels are basically ending up as commodified elements within bourgeois cultural productions in galleries and museums, and Beckett retrospectives and everything else. For me, it’s like, I get the argument, I just don’t find it very compelling. I do think that the work that is going on, that engages with the political and social, doesn’t, and this is typical, like, “well, this is what Rancière says.” “Well, it’s nothing new. It’s just protest banners and things like that. It’s just making political demands in a very social realist manner.” Part of why I spend so much time in my book talking in detail about things like the “escrache” tradition in Argentina, or Lava la Bandera, or Saba Zavarei and various public performances in Iran, is precisely to challenge this idea that all political art or activist art is crude and simplistic, and relies on crude versions of representation. Like its worker posters from the 1930s. It’s just not true. This work for me is incredibly complex in terms of how it relates to representation, in terms of how it understands the subject position of the artist, and in terms of how it relates, challenges, stands in some relationship of tension with political transformation. It’s a very complicated body of work, if you look at it, and you’re willing to see it. I guess, that’s kind of been my commitment to try to see what’s actually going on in the practice. Then, to bring what I see back through the traditions of the aesthetic and just say, Okay, you want to say this other work is aesthetic, that’s fine. I get that, I can see why. This work also draws on that tradition, but it draws a different set of lessons. That’s all. It’s just a different set of lessons.

Scott Ferguson:  Can you tell us a little bit more about the Escrache experiments? Maybe in a little bit more detail, and maybe work through some of their complexities. And also, I want to say, you know, let’s not knock work or posters in the 30s. You know, they’re probably pretty cool and interesting, too.

Grant Kester:  I would not disagree with that. Yeah, I was reaching. I didn’t want to talk about Zhdanov and Soviet policy. So I was trying to think of something that would be…but yes, absolutely. Socialist Realism can actually be quite interesting, some of it’s quite interesting and complex.

Scott Ferguson:  Yeah, some people argue that Socialist Realism is one breed of modernism.

Grant Kester:  Indeed, there is indeed that argument and I wouldn’t disagree. I have a particular interest in the history of woodcuts, and I’ve been researching woodcuts in the May 4th Movement in China. We usually think of woodcuts is, again, one of these crude folk forms, but they can be in the same manner…One of my interests going forward is to write on realism, because there is such a truncated version of what realism means that comes out of the work that you see going on in the 20s and 30s. It’s far more complex than a lot of traditional histories allow. So yeah, I completely agree with that. The Escraches emerge in around 2000 or so, maybe a little bit earlier, in Argentina, and escrache means to scratch or reveal something. It has the implication of revealing something hidden. So they built out of HIJOS (the sons and daughters of the disappeared), which is a collective of, a lot of it was the mothers of young people who were murdered or imprisoned by the military junta that ruled Argentina that took power in the 1970s. You’re probably familiar with and listeners will be familiar with that kind of awful history of 1000s of people. They’d been taken to these isolated camps and tortured and drugged and then dropped into the Rio de la Plata River, from helicopters and all the rest. After the military leadership of the country lost power, after the Falklands War, this whole history kind of disappeared in Argentinian public life. Early on, there were some laws. Oh, you can’t get a job in the government, again, if you are part of the military regime, and so on, but eventually those kinds of things get suspended. There was never a public accounting for the fact that there were hundreds, if not 1000s, of people walking freely around Argentina who’d been responsible for killing your son, or your cousin, or your brother, or your parents. So there’s a generation of young Argentinians that came of age in the late 90s, early 2000s, that came out of this historical amnesia. HIJOS, this collective of survivors, had begun to do legal research, and so on, to try to identify who some of these people were, that were walking around with complete impunity, because they were, of course, not going to announce their role. But yet they would have lives and get jobs in the government and so on and so forth. They worked with some art collectives; Grupo Etcetera, which is one of them, kind of a performance based collective of artists; Grupo de Arte Callejero, which is the group of street artists, to develop these performances now. Performances would be staged outside their homes once they identified, oh, this is the guy that ran the secret camp at the naval facility outside Buenos Aires. He ran the secret detention center, where they raped women and then gave the babies to members of the Junta and then killed the mothers. He was that guy that ran that center. HIJOS would originally protest outside the houses, but that wasn’t as effective as they wanted it to be. Police would come and so on. They started much more elaborate performances, where this collective would go to the neighborhood where they were going to do an intervention months ahead of time, and they would talk to the people. They’d set up a center and they’d research the history of the neighborhood and let people know oh, by the way, the person that lives in this apartment building right over here is– this is who it is because you didn’t know. They call it the pre-escrache. It’s a research phase. It is an organizational phase. Then the escrache itself was a public performance. They would have what they call Murga bands, which are bands with trombones and drums and accordions or violins that have a particular tradition in Argentina. They’d marched through the street to the home. They would do these performances where they act out the crimes of the person that they’re targeting. But in a very kind of Commedia dell’arte manner. They were very over the top hyperbolic, almost silly. Google them on YouTube, and you’ll find them there. They’re almost meant to be humorous in the way and absurd and over the top. They do the performances, and the police would come and try to prevent them from getting near the house. Because the penultimate gesture was to then throw balloons with red paint that signified the blood of the people they’ve murdered onto the walls to mark the home. So the performances evolved in part to distract the police so that the people with the balloons could have a clear line of fire. There was a tactical dimension to the performances, but it also had the effect of teaching the people in the neighborhood, restaging the crimes because people didn’t always know what the person had done. These would be recorded. So they’d throw the bones at the end of the performance, and then the home would be marked for a significant amount of time, at least, from this blood red paint. These still go on today, the whole escrache tradition, again, has expanded and gone into other realms, You find it taken up in other parts of Latin America, as well. What interested me, there’s a lot of things to be said about the complexity of that work. Oh, I should mention the Grupo de Arte Callejero (GAC) would also put signs up as part of the pre-escrache that look like actual road signs in the vicinity of the home, but they would say things like 200 meters to the home of a genocidal torturer or something like that. So you’d be driving down the street, and it looks like an actual sign. So the whole streetscape would be restaged in a sense to facilitate this performance. But what interested me is that nine times out of 10, from what I can understand from talking to people involved with them, the person was not home when they were staging their performance. It really wasn’t this cathartic assault, they would know because they’d be aware that people were meeting and there was talk going on. They wouldn’t even be home, but they didn’t need to be home because that person was…Yeah, it would have been gratifying to yell and spit in their face or whatever you killed my relative. But what mattered more, I think, was the sense of solidarity and agency that was provided by the people that were involved in the action itself, and the viral proliferation of the recordings. It’s not simply a matter of political art reduced to screaming at somebody to believe something different. And this goes back to the prefigurative, that there was a solidarity enhancement, a pedagogical dimension to this work that had to do with expanding the awareness of the Argentinian public of the nature of these crimes. In fact, eventually, the result was a shift of laws in Argentina that cracked down on the impurity of the elements of people that were associated with the junta. So I thought that reception of the work was really interesting, because for me, and again, it kind of collapses some of these ideas that activists and political art is always this kind of crude, simplistic gesture. That representational repertoire of their performances called on all kinds of theatrical traditions in the kinds of ways that the modes of address were quite complicated. Same thing in the Lava la Bandera. So those are both examples of work that is political and engaged in political and social change, but cannot be reduced to a kind of crude caricature, at least for me. Yeah.

Scott Ferguson:  Yeah, that’s wonderful to hear about, and especially once you start talking about the rich details of the construction, the preparation, the playing out of these events, to speak back to the cynical concerns, the Ah well, but what does it amount to? I guess when I hear about these kinds of movements, I think to myself, Wow, this is incredibly meaningful, and it’s even more meaningful that there were legal results, but I would say that it’s the actions, the activities, the aesthetic experiences themselves are already meaningful. It’s wonderful that those meanings are paying dividends, so to speak, and creating more change. But even if it hadn’t, it still seems like it already created change. If anything, I would say in response to criticisms that this is not enough. It’s not because they’re not autonomous enough, it’s because there aren’t enough of these experiments going on constantly all the time. It’s not, Oh, we should have less because they’re not overturning right wing forces around the world completely. Let’s have more, and the more we have, the better luck we’re gonna have to overturn right wing forces around the world completely.

Grant Kester:  I agree, it kind of seems common sense to me. Guess what, the Fourth International does not exist right now. There is no global, networked, oppositional movement that is poised to take control. How do you get to the point of having more power to change things? It only begins this way locally, and situationally, and to dismiss it all as Oh, it’s just reformist. And all that’s doing is validating the existing system of domination because they can point to these singular gestures and say, See how tolerant we are. I mean, yeah, that’s true, and that can be disabling. Also, I don’t know how else you get to broader forms of systemic change, except through the hard work, the piecemeal work of operating at this level. That’s why in the book I talk about broader projects like Lava la Bandera that contributed to Fujimori’s overthrow or Laurie Jo Reynolds Tamms Year Ten project that led to the closing of a supermax prison in Illinois, but also very localized work like Saba Zavarei’s work. She’s an Iranian artist that left Iran after the Green Revolution, and had come back for a visit and was in quite a well known mosque in Isfahan. She recorded herself singing a love song to Iran, which again, is like, okay, but actually you’re not allowed to do that. It’s not against the law, but it’s against the guidelines of what women can do in public. She posted it on our website, it just says I was moved by this beautiful space, and I sang. She got, like, 1000s of women responding to her, and then doing it themselves, and posting their own public scene performances. There’s this whole body of public dancing, which if your Hijab is not adjusted properly, you can end up dead as we saw not so long ago in Iran. Because of the Basij and the policing of the streets by the morality police and so on. That work was just her in this mosque, her consciousness transformed. But again, it became scalar. And now it was 100 women and 1000 women. I’m not saying Oh, and because of that the protest movements in Iran developed later. But that is one piece of the precondition for broader changes. I talk about the offering of mind in a project in Myanmar, that was done in 2005 in The One and the Many, Chu Yuan. The military regime in Myanmar had driven any Western groups out of the country, the Red Cross, and so on. There are very few artists working there. Chu Yuan and her partner Jay Koh from Singapore. So they were kind of tolerated. She did a project based on this Theravadic Buddhist tradition. And in Theravada Buddhism, you make prayers and give contributions at a temple for the temples that have more gold leaf put on it or what have you. By doing that you buy yourself good will for your next incarnation. You make sacrifices now so that when you’re reborn, you’ll be at a higher level. It’s an argument that’s made in Myanmar society that the political leadership and so on is there because they were so good in their previous lives, they deserve that authority. Chu Yuan came up with this idea where she had young people, just people she knew in Myanmar, come up with their own wishes for what they wanted to change about Myanmar society. Created with them, these little chicken wire stupa head pieces, and they put their wishes on scrolls, because they’d write them on scrolls and the headpiece acting out, again, at a very limited individual level. She did this with a fairly small number of people. She took pictures of them, and she documented them. One was on the cover of that book. They had to be extremely careful just walking down the streets of Rangoon like this, because that could attract attention. That’s why they’re all photographed from behind, so you can’t see their faces, because they could have gotten arrested. Because the assumption is their wishes might have been things like Gosh, I wish our country wasn’t run by a military dictatorship or something along those lines, we don’t know. So again, very small changes in consciousness. I want to argue, I make this argument in the book, that there is a capillarity relationship between those incremental and small. This goes back to the aesthetic. Individual consciousness transformed, how does that become scalable? How does that proliferate and extend and build? And yes, it can feel hopeless. But again, like you’ve all said, I don’t know how else we get to the broader forms of resistance except through this hard work.

Billy Saas:  I guess there’s a pretty clear analogy between, I think, what we’re up to, and why we’re interested in talking to you at Money on the Left. It’s as much for us I think about a project of recovery and discovery of these incremental, sometimes spontaneous practices and experiments over time and across the world, in public provisioning for the public good. There’s also a critique of sovereignty at the center of, I think, what we’re up to. So I guess one last question for me, for you, is if you have any sense about how best to go about the curation or collection, or dare I say, organization, the process of bringing all these things together without finding oneself again, and kind of like that critical priesthood position. It’s like, this is how I see the lay of the land, and here’s the project. This is what it is. And now we’re moving forward with this. And without my particular genius, and assembling these recovered pieces, you wouldn’t be able to see it, so you gotta buy my book. Right? Yeah. How do we do it carefully, respectfully, and in a way, or is it even important to do it?

Grant Kester:  I had looked a little bit and I’m not obviously knowledgeable about economics, but I looked a little bit into modern monetary theory. It looks like, and I’d want to learn from both of you, maybe somewhat connected to David Graeber’s work on debt and so on. So I was like, Oh, what are the commonalities here? I thought, oh, yeah, because Graeber is trying to challenge the notion that the a priori condition of the human self is this possessing an individualistic drive, that then gets normalized in economics in so many different ways, including austerity discourse. Like we’re bad people, and we have to sacrifice, economically, which is kind of antithetical to the reality of the way capitalism has worked in the 20th century and the 21st century. I mean, the thing that led the United States out of the depression was military industrial spending by the government, and debt. So the weird moralizing around debt. It’s become so transparent recently, within the Republican Party, I think how completely and utterly indifferent they are to actual debt. It was always just an excuse. It’s never intended as anything other than a bludgeon to justify dismantling 100 years of social policy and provision that had been hard won going back to the 1880s, 1890s. Honestly, I don’t know how it was not ever obvious to anybody all along, that that was the game, but for sure it is now. So I think, to the extent to which that leaks in with the tendency broadly to normalize, I don’t know what to call them. Bourgeois notions of the self, I see where it comes into my work, I guess one way would be: one, in looking at projects that appeal to this different version of the self. It’s what I call the dialogical model of the self in the second book. It’s more open, permeable, less committed to I’m a self that must master and dominate and instrumentalize. Not the Odyssean self that Adorno and Horkheimer critique in Dialectic of Enlightenment, but a self that actually is open to the shape and influence of the other. That that is important work at the level of the subjectivity of the individual person, and that that’s what’s being worked out, rehearsed, performed in various ways in a lot of these practices. And that there is a tendency for me and I’d be interested to hear what both of you have to say about this, but there has been a tendency to normalize that version of the self on the left as well. This is my criticism of Leninism, which is Gorky’s famous quote about Lenin, he’s like a cold blooded aristocrat. He’s a product of his class background. The proletariat are the “iron ore” that he’s going to hammer into the ideal form. I mean, that is to me so self-evidently an extension of this possessive…Yes, of course it’s on behalf of world revolution, I get all that. But there’s an utter lack of self reflection on how problematic it is to carry that forward sometimes. My sense is that that’s one of the places where there’s a productive alliance or overlap with what you guys are up to as well with this modern monetary theory. I was gonna ask you, How do you understand the relationship between Oh, it’s economic theory, what does that have to do with other things and art and culture? I’d be interested to hear you talk about that. I’d like to learn from you.

Scott Ferguson:  Yeah, we’ll need maybe 10 more podcasts to do that. But I can weigh in a little bit here and talk a little bit about more convergences that I see between our project and yours. So yes, we are aligned with David Graeber’s work in Debt, although we would say that we complicate Graber and that modern monetary theory does too, in the sense that we tend to be more interested in just recasting re-understanding money in the first place is not bound to that private, possessive labor theory of value in the first place. That it is not about private exploitation, private property and private exchange, that money is essentially a kind of public utility that belongs to all of us. And that as much as it works through debt, the other side of debt, which Graber doesn’t really talk about in his giant volume, is credit and credit is a kind of granting, a kind of creativity, a kind of you could say artistic practice. We want to recover that positive dimension, and not just at the individual level, but at the mezzo and macro level and modern monetary theory and certain adjacent heterodox left legal scholarship, that we’re in dialogue with, too, will argue again, and again, that money is a political and legal design. It is a construction that can be constructed in all kinds of ways. So it just so happens that this modern Euro-American bourgeois, now globalized, monetary system is organized around this private, possessive, mastering individual, predicated on the exploitation of others. But in a sense, that’s a lie. And that money doesn’t have to be organized in that way. In fact, it often doesn’t actually work the way that the dominant ideology says it does. So another way in which I think our work really converges, in my own particular publications, I’ve been very critical of what I call the dialectic between money and aesthetics, or art and the market, that has structured this whole dialectic of autonomy and heteronomy that you’ve published on so extensively and so informatively. So I want to claim that this is all predicated on a very big L Liberal, very problematic reduction of money to private labor, private exploitation, private property, that then the bourgeoisie themselves in their philosophy, express an intense ambivalence about, and then they want an escape valve, right? They’ve constructed a world of monetary economy that they assume must be inherently alienating. They need to theorize and practice this sensuous sphere of expansive communion with nature and others. The Marxist tradition to its credit will come along and say, Ah, you hypocritical bourgeoisie, we should be having this aesthetic project realized in our everyday lives. We at Money on the Left would agree, but where we break with the Marxist tradition is because we say, we can do that, and we need to do that through money as a public project that is a democratic, sensuous project. Not throw out the baby with the bathwater, and just take the bourgeoisie’s word for it. That oh, indeed, money is sin, and everything’s gonna be okay, once we stop counting things, once we stop provisioning using numbers.

Grant Kester:  That’s really helpful, Scott. Thank you for that. That makes so much sense. Yeah, what you’re describing in terms of the aesthetic for the bourgeoisie, I mean, this is very much connected, and maybe, almost identical to the idea of the false transcendence that the aesthetic is meant to provide for the bourgeois subject. Schiller talks about this experience that you have, when you have an aesthetic encounter in which you step back from your unselfconscious immersion in the external world and pay attention to– he gets it from Kant in Critique of Judgment. Pay attention to the operations of parts of your mind or consciousness, the kind of the form giving drive and the sensuous drive and so on. That in that moment, you have an intuition of something different than what it is. That something different is a world in which you can conjoin sensuous pleasure and joy, and the form giving drive is the controlling drive and the masking drive that those things can be synthesized and not held apart. But of course, for Schiller, that can only happen in the realm of what he called ‘semblance’ that can only be a representation in art. You can’t try to make it happen in the real world of monetary policy, for example.

Scott Ferguson:  Right, it has to be disinterested, no interest, because interest can only be bourgeois interests, right? It can’t be about collective or democratic interests.

Grant Kester:  Absolutely. You know, and think about the way this interest is structured in the enlightenment. It’s always going to involve this emptying out of the self. To get to the disinterested self, you have to go back to this free, Schiller will talk about this, the self before any external determination. So you empty out the entire contents of what it is to be a subject to become disinterested, because all the rest of it are accumulated experiences. Being human is completely invalid and irrelevant.

Billy Saas:  You pay someone to carry your interests in a sack.

Scott Ferguson:  I mean, I’m pretty preoccupied with the Franciscan roots of modernity, and that kind of kenotic self emptying. They didn’t invent it, but they were very much a part of that. This very zero sum sense that, in order to have a transcendent connection with God, I have to empty myself of all, of interest in any kind of possession, any kind of mediation in institutions, etc, etc.

Grant Kester:  It’s a lot like German Pietism, which is an important influence on quite a number of German aesthetic philosophers who were informed by that same tradition. In the Pietist tradition, it’s the same argument about the emptying of the self and so on to achieve transcendence and everything else. Yeah, because the self here and now is always impure, always contaminated, and incapable of utopian thought, incapable of indulging in joy or sensuality without being corrupted in some manner. Yeah, it’s very interesting.

Scott Ferguson:  Right. So we just would say that, I mean, there are very corrupt monetary designs. There are very, very evil fiscal policies. There are very, very terrible, terrible ways in which money is privatized and used for exploitative purposes. But at the same time, we are obliged to imagine alternatives and alternatives that don’t escape from the problem but embrace it and transform it. I’m interested in all of your wonderful examples and money touches everything, but I’m especially interested in the examples that seem to be more conventional, overtly taking up this role of democratic public provisioning. In my own work I’ve written about Mierle Laderman Ukeles who you touch on too, right? She’s working with the New York Sanitation Department to this very day. She’s not just staging events, calling attention to care work and maintenance work, but she’s using the public purse to provision aesthetic collective practices, and I find that extremely inspiring.

Grant Kester:  Well, you’re probably familiar with this work already, but Helen and Newton Harrison’s work, Newton passed away just recently, but they worked for decades on environmental policy issues that were in some cases, they were in dialogue in their projects in Europe and elsewhere with public agencies to implement solutions, responses to particular environmental situations, that were intensely problematic, or to envision a replanning a form of planning at the regional or broader scale that governments would need to be part of that would be much, much more healthy, productive, less destructive. Their entire life is dedicated to that matrix between their individual practice and public policy. You see the same thing and Suzanne Lacy’s work as well, in her relationship to work in the criminal justice system and working in Oakland in the 90s. Those are really interesting examples. Yeah, I can see now, the connection.

Scott Ferguson:  Well, we’re gonna stop here, but this seems like the beginning of a much longer conversation, Grant. Thanks so much for coming on Money on the Left and speaking with us.Grant Kester:  It was my pleasure. I learned so much from both of you, and I really enjoyed it. I really did. So thank you for the invitation.

* Thanks to the Money on the Left production team: William Saas (audio editor), Mike Lewis (transcription), & Robert Rusch (graphic art)