Week 9: Response to Thompson & Shalette, “The Interventionists”
This piece is a catalog of works covered in an exhibition, as such my reaction is to collection of works and not necessarily the essay itself. While I admire the works of the artists quoted in the piece, I cannot help being somewhat frustrated at their self-imposed limitation of scope.
Intervention, in political and medical terms, refers to an action that produces lasting change without asserting direct control. By this definition, the Interventionists do not really achieve this, though they clearly aspire to.
Most of the artists involved have strong political views, and intend their work to cause change through political and/or social commentary. However, for the most part, their works end up being witty and amusing entertainments for what is, in fact, a cultural elite. I’d say that this probably due to the self-conscious identification of their work as art, presented through known channels for “alternative” art (which do exist). The moment the work is presented as art, it immediately becomes pigeon-holed, and I believe, limited in its ability to effect any kind of real change.
Those groups that seem most successful at creating high-impact interventions are those like the Yes-Men that actively impersonate the institutions that they are trying to subvert. Spectators believe they are seeing an authority figure, and the success of the intervention depends on the shock of actually hearing the “truth” that they never expect to hear. The Austrian State of Sabotage does something similar, infiltrating a variety of political and cultural institutions, with extremely subversive results. Groups like the Billboard Liberation Front (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Billboard_Liberation_Front) do the same – their work is intended to be read, at least initially, as if it were a real ad.
Another weakness of a lot of Interventionist art is the lack of engagement with people as anything other than spectators. Once again, the Yes-Men are a notable exception, actively involving large groups of non-artists as a key part of the work.
I suspect that any true intervention would use existing cultural and political mechanisms to such an extent that its instigators would no longer be classified as artists, but as activists. Taken to an extreme, Interventionism would necessarily make its practitioners saboteurs, guerillas or terrorists. But does this necessarily mean that they stop being artists? Does the definition of a political artist have to imply a degree of impotence, or is it possible to go further?
There is another option, that of “attacking the system from within”, infiltrating large and influential mass media such as television and cinemas as a way of getting across ultimately subversive messages. Unfortunately, the current economic structure of these industries means that such works are reviewed extensively, by people knowledgeable of influencing techniques, before they are distributed.