The Interventionists: User's Manual for the Creative Disruption of Everyday Life

by Nato Thompson and Gregory Sholette, Editors
The MIT Press, Cambridge, MA, 2004
154 pp. Trade, $25.00
ISBN: 0-262-20250-X.

Reviewed by John F. Barber
School of Arts and Humanities, The University of Texas at Dallas

jfbarber@eaze.net

Rather than simply representing politics through language or visual imagery, politicized art is frequently placed into the heart of the political situation itself. The works of Goya and Picasso, as well as those by black Civil Rights and feminist artists are cases in point, all created to operate within and upon real-world systems of power and trade using the technology of art.

Unfortunately, the work of such interventionist artists is seldom collected as a form and exhibited. This is one reason the current exhibition at the Massachusetts Museum of Contemporary Art (MASS MoCA) is so significant.

Running from May 2004-March 2005, the exhibition, entitled The Interventionists: Art in the Social Sphere, argues that interventionist artists and their work represent both a social litmus of politics today and a harbinger of politics tomorrow and surveys, in limited form, tactical, interventionist practices in contemporary visual culture beginning in the late 1980s.

Since interventionist art is often ephemeral, created for or in the streets rather than museums, much of this exhibition is based upon documentary evidence or clever reconstructions. Nonetheless, the exhibition illustrates broad approaches in four broad categories: Reclaim the Streets, Nomads, Ready to Wear, and Experimental University.

Generally, Reclaim the Streets speaks to the use of public streets by political artists as their natural field of action, one far more natural and hospitable than museums or galleries. Indeed, the hoped-for result is to reach the general public and to cultivate their participation.

Nomads focuses on tools for mobility, individual autonomy, and makes visible certain forms of social repression. In a world increasingly forced to stay on the move–the homeless, for example–like a bandage covers and treats a wound while at the same time exposing its presence, such projects signify both the pain and the hope of recovery.

Ready to Wear focuses primarily on clothes that become tools to activate the body as a locus of politics, as well as provide spaces of refuge at the most intimate levels. Fashion also acts as camouflage, and projects in this category speak to disguise, the power to conceal, to hide in the shadows, of going undercover, whether for entertainment, insight, charade, or satire.

The Experimental University manipulates the visual field to create learning environments in which viewers can participate, and learn, or at least adjust their consciousness. These projects are forms of pedagogy, teaching and learning, although framed in radically shifted theoretical perspectives.

The exhibition features specific examples from each category, and the featured artists, activists, and designers all point to new forms of resistance in an age of an increasingly privatized and visualized cultural sphere. They represent methods of protest and public education integrally connected to larger social movements. But, rather than telling us what to do about the perceived danger in the current political climate, these artists instead provide tools of opportunity and engagement.

Accompanying the exhibition is a catalog entitled The Interventionists: User's Manual for the Creative Disruption of Everyday Life edited by Nato Thompson, Assistant Curator at MASS MoCA and curator of the exhibition and Gregory Sholette, cofounder of REPOhistory artists' collective and Batza Family Chair of Art History at Colgate University. The book both augments and expands upon the ideas and concepts foregrounded by the exhibition.

As an artifact of the exhibition, the book is a work of art itself. Arranged in sections corresponding to the exhibition organization, each section is delineated by thumb tabs cut into the edges of the pages, thus allowing easy access. Biographical information is provided for each artist/performer/designer, as well as a project description, numerous color photographs, and an in-depth interview, all formatted into a distinct and highly visual format. Accompanying essays by noted scholars, as well as texts by the artists themselves, place the art projects in a broader cultural and social context. As a result, The Interventionists allows readers to become much closer to the artists and their projects, more so than the typical coffee table art book.

Like the exhibition, the book itself, because of its design and execution, is a political intervention, a showing and a doing, much different from the telling of a more typically formatted art book. Whether dealing with art as mobile projects, art as action (or activism) in public places, fashions for political actions, or pedagogy and theory, The Interventionists is about art created by individuals or collectives who trespass into the everyday world in order to raise our awareness of social injustice.

Neither these artists nor their art proselytize or preach. Instead, they give us tools with which to form our own opinions and to create our own political actions. The Interventionists, as both an exhibition catalog and a users' manual, is about art and action that is both, and at once, exciting, provocative, unexpected, inspiring (artistically and politically), and fun.

Interventionist artists enjoy a cachet of raising our awareness of political and social injustice and other problems. In the dark days ahead, we may need the insight and motivation of these interventionist artists more than ever. The ideas and concepts presented in The Interventionists: User's Manual for the Creative Disruption of Everyday Life are not only timely, but, perhaps, necessary.