How Will Art Survive Us?
Remarks for Agora speakers series at Museum of Modern Art, July 13, 2016
click here for accompanying post on the MoMA blog.
click here for accompanying post on the MoMA blog.
Hi, I’m Tal Beery. I am an artist and an educator and I am thankful for the invitation to present on some ideas that are very important to me. Thank you Henry, Leticia, Paula, and everyone else at MoMA’s education department for making this possible.
And thank you all for being here this afternoon. If you’re here, it probably means that the arts, and the role of a culture in society, are important to you, so I am looking forward to where our conversation takes us this afternoon. I’ll be talking about two different works today. The first is a pedagogical project called School of Apocalypse at Pioneer Works, which is a Center for Art and Innovation in Red Hook, Brooklyn. The other is a sculpture and mobile educational tool that is currently on view until August 7 at the Agitprop! Exhibition in the Brooklyn Museum.
The question framing our session today “How Will Art Survive Us?” is beautifully provocative and can lead us many ways. So before I present my work, I would like to start by saying a few words about how I understand this question. The enlightenment left us with some faulty assumptions about how the world works. We tend to imagine everything, from birds to humans to ecosystems, as complex machines that can ultimately be mastered by human ingenuity and the science. Complete control is simply a matter of gaining the right knowledge. But when do we know enough to act? We have a history of being rather overeager and have often found ourselves acting at too large a scale with significant gaps in understanding. When we look back at it from far enough away, the 20th Century may very well be the century of unintended consequences. Our recklessness was supercharged by fossil fuels and today, we have found ourselves at a frightening precipice: the sixth great extinction is upon us, global warming is accelerating, ocean fisheries are depleted and many other worrying symptoms of reckless human intervention threaten our life on Earth.
In other words, some major misunderstanding about limits of human control has led us to approaching various apocalyptic outcomes.
This is, at least, one prevailing narrative among some environmentalists. I believe that parts of it are true, but not entirely. In popular sources today apocalypse seems to have merged with Armageddon and catastrophe. But in the Greek, the word apocalypse literally means an uncovering, a revelation. And for each of our imagined forthcoming catastrophes, there is the revelation of some higher power to which humanity must surrender.
I find this story suspicious for how similar it sounds to other stories we all know too well: For example, Eve’s eating from the tree of knowledge in the garden of Eden. It also sounds like the Tower of Babel and like the Icarus myth, both of which admonish us for our arrogance. In other words, our collective apocalyptic fantasies in the West so neatly fall in line with some of the founding myths of our civilization that if you probe a bit, you can see that these magnificent fears come from the same root as our recklessness – a belief in our chosen-ness. For some reason, we still believe that God or the Universe reserves great rewards and great punishments for our species alone.
My point is, we aren’t heading to some spectacular apocalypse. Instead, we have already entered an interregnum, a period of time between the reign of one monarch and the next, a pending, parenthetical time of uncertainty and unrest, as we grapple with cultural, ecological, and technological phenomena that challenge basic assumptions about human existence. I believe that, considering these major challenges ahead, we can no longer proceed in our current form. We must become something new if we are to survive.
How does art participate in this transformation? What kind of influence do artists have over its direction? What responsibilities should our cultural institutions take on in facilitating it? What will art be like when it’s over?
In making sense of this situation, I have chosen to pursue projects that rely on collaboration and challenge authorship. I also prefer to work in the public sphere so that my projects are open to the influence of contingencies beyond my control.
School of Apocalypse is an educational project that brings cultural producers together to examine connections between creative practice and notions of survival. I am one of the founding faculty, alongside Catherine Despont, Eugenia Manwelyan, and Adam Stennet. We offer courses and programming that seek to develop new modes of inquiry and apply broader levels of experience to intellectual investigation. But more than a school, School of Apocalypse is like a school of fish or school of thought, bringing artists together to develop ideas side by side. We host open monthly meetings, courses, field trips, and working groups. We aim to define and redefine survival, broaden perceptive capacities, model alternative cultural systems, and connect theory and practice. Our efforts are place-based, participatory, experiential, and collaborative. School of Apocalypse is not meant to become a long-term educational institution. Instead, the institution will succeed when it dies, and leaves behind it a community of artists with shared values, a movement influencing the direction of cultural transformations in ways that are currently unknown.
I am concerned with the role of institutions, because they are powerful tools. Some institutions can entrench us in an unsustainable present, some might dampen efforts, and some can accelerate or facilitate the transition. So what role should our cultural institutions, like the museum we are in right now, play within this new paradigm? I am core member of Occupy Museums, an art activist group committed to exposing the corrupting influence of speculative finance on fine art. We started by doing large-scale performance interventions in museums like this one. We now also make sculptural interventions that visualize how major economic trends influence the arts. On view right now at the Brooklyn Museum’s survey of activist art, our “Eroding Plazas and Accumulating Resistance” is a relief map that is meant to be a mobile tool used in outdoor educational actions. In this piece, we tease out the relationships between ultra luxury real estate investments in Manhattan and rapid gentrification and displacement in Brooklyn. It is hard to miss that both processes are unfolding around New York’s two major encyclopedic public museums, the Met and the Brooklyn Museum. What role do these museums play? Well, that role couldn’t have been clearer after the Brooklyn Museum hosted the 6th Annual Brooklyn Real Estate summit where investors, developers and public officials were literally planning the gentrification of currently stable Brooklyn neighborhoods. The more we dug, the clearer the connections between these institutions and the real estate industry became. And as Occupy Museums, we chose to use our platform at the Brooklyn Museum in the wake of the Real Estate Summit to argue that our public institutions should serve the public, not only 1% of the public.
The sculpture itself is split into two sections. The first section maps the area around the Metropolitan Museum and Central Park, showing the locations of new ultra luxury developments in which more than 70% of apartments are uninhabited – empty. The second maps the rate of gentrification and displacement around the Brooklyn Museum over the last ten years, block by block. The coin-shaped centerpiece includes models of the Brooklyn Museum and the Met back to back. These are meant to help us choreograph actions in the public plazas in front of each museum. Because it is an educational tool, meant for use in public space, to me the object will only truly be successful if and when it becomes worn out and can no longer function.
Our cultural institutions are crucial to our survival, which is why they have become a battleground of sorts over the last half century. I believe that all of us concerned with culture and democracy need to be actively pushing for these institutions to take clear positions on the economic and social phenomena to which they contribute. Museums must be taking a stronger role in the vibrancy of our moral ecology – spaces for ideas, histories, and debate. Museum Education departments are doing great work, and its time for curatorial programs to follow suit.
So how will art survive us? My honest, and most idealistic answer is that I hope it doesn’t - that art dies to once again become part of everything we do and are. This is kind of like the Avant Garde utopia, after all. Realistically, I know art will survive what we have become, but it may not be as spectacular to us in the future as it is today. In my view, one of the main drivers of ecological and social crisis is income inequality, and eventually we will just have to create more equitable societies if we want to survive well. Diminished income inequality will create more space for more artists, and less space for art stars and celebrities. More local democratic control over resources will see a flourishing of place-based cultures. Each of these will reflect unique engagements in the practice of living. I am not arguing for a return to some mythic tribal past of sustenance farming or hunting and gathering. Instead, I’m hoping for a networked localism that will enable greater openness and diversity.
But I’m no prophet, and I think we are all equally expert in the practice of divination. So, I’d like to open this up now and to hear what you all have to say.
Thank you.
And thank you all for being here this afternoon. If you’re here, it probably means that the arts, and the role of a culture in society, are important to you, so I am looking forward to where our conversation takes us this afternoon. I’ll be talking about two different works today. The first is a pedagogical project called School of Apocalypse at Pioneer Works, which is a Center for Art and Innovation in Red Hook, Brooklyn. The other is a sculpture and mobile educational tool that is currently on view until August 7 at the Agitprop! Exhibition in the Brooklyn Museum.
The question framing our session today “How Will Art Survive Us?” is beautifully provocative and can lead us many ways. So before I present my work, I would like to start by saying a few words about how I understand this question. The enlightenment left us with some faulty assumptions about how the world works. We tend to imagine everything, from birds to humans to ecosystems, as complex machines that can ultimately be mastered by human ingenuity and the science. Complete control is simply a matter of gaining the right knowledge. But when do we know enough to act? We have a history of being rather overeager and have often found ourselves acting at too large a scale with significant gaps in understanding. When we look back at it from far enough away, the 20th Century may very well be the century of unintended consequences. Our recklessness was supercharged by fossil fuels and today, we have found ourselves at a frightening precipice: the sixth great extinction is upon us, global warming is accelerating, ocean fisheries are depleted and many other worrying symptoms of reckless human intervention threaten our life on Earth.
In other words, some major misunderstanding about limits of human control has led us to approaching various apocalyptic outcomes.
This is, at least, one prevailing narrative among some environmentalists. I believe that parts of it are true, but not entirely. In popular sources today apocalypse seems to have merged with Armageddon and catastrophe. But in the Greek, the word apocalypse literally means an uncovering, a revelation. And for each of our imagined forthcoming catastrophes, there is the revelation of some higher power to which humanity must surrender.
I find this story suspicious for how similar it sounds to other stories we all know too well: For example, Eve’s eating from the tree of knowledge in the garden of Eden. It also sounds like the Tower of Babel and like the Icarus myth, both of which admonish us for our arrogance. In other words, our collective apocalyptic fantasies in the West so neatly fall in line with some of the founding myths of our civilization that if you probe a bit, you can see that these magnificent fears come from the same root as our recklessness – a belief in our chosen-ness. For some reason, we still believe that God or the Universe reserves great rewards and great punishments for our species alone.
My point is, we aren’t heading to some spectacular apocalypse. Instead, we have already entered an interregnum, a period of time between the reign of one monarch and the next, a pending, parenthetical time of uncertainty and unrest, as we grapple with cultural, ecological, and technological phenomena that challenge basic assumptions about human existence. I believe that, considering these major challenges ahead, we can no longer proceed in our current form. We must become something new if we are to survive.
How does art participate in this transformation? What kind of influence do artists have over its direction? What responsibilities should our cultural institutions take on in facilitating it? What will art be like when it’s over?
In making sense of this situation, I have chosen to pursue projects that rely on collaboration and challenge authorship. I also prefer to work in the public sphere so that my projects are open to the influence of contingencies beyond my control.
School of Apocalypse is an educational project that brings cultural producers together to examine connections between creative practice and notions of survival. I am one of the founding faculty, alongside Catherine Despont, Eugenia Manwelyan, and Adam Stennet. We offer courses and programming that seek to develop new modes of inquiry and apply broader levels of experience to intellectual investigation. But more than a school, School of Apocalypse is like a school of fish or school of thought, bringing artists together to develop ideas side by side. We host open monthly meetings, courses, field trips, and working groups. We aim to define and redefine survival, broaden perceptive capacities, model alternative cultural systems, and connect theory and practice. Our efforts are place-based, participatory, experiential, and collaborative. School of Apocalypse is not meant to become a long-term educational institution. Instead, the institution will succeed when it dies, and leaves behind it a community of artists with shared values, a movement influencing the direction of cultural transformations in ways that are currently unknown.
I am concerned with the role of institutions, because they are powerful tools. Some institutions can entrench us in an unsustainable present, some might dampen efforts, and some can accelerate or facilitate the transition. So what role should our cultural institutions, like the museum we are in right now, play within this new paradigm? I am core member of Occupy Museums, an art activist group committed to exposing the corrupting influence of speculative finance on fine art. We started by doing large-scale performance interventions in museums like this one. We now also make sculptural interventions that visualize how major economic trends influence the arts. On view right now at the Brooklyn Museum’s survey of activist art, our “Eroding Plazas and Accumulating Resistance” is a relief map that is meant to be a mobile tool used in outdoor educational actions. In this piece, we tease out the relationships between ultra luxury real estate investments in Manhattan and rapid gentrification and displacement in Brooklyn. It is hard to miss that both processes are unfolding around New York’s two major encyclopedic public museums, the Met and the Brooklyn Museum. What role do these museums play? Well, that role couldn’t have been clearer after the Brooklyn Museum hosted the 6th Annual Brooklyn Real Estate summit where investors, developers and public officials were literally planning the gentrification of currently stable Brooklyn neighborhoods. The more we dug, the clearer the connections between these institutions and the real estate industry became. And as Occupy Museums, we chose to use our platform at the Brooklyn Museum in the wake of the Real Estate Summit to argue that our public institutions should serve the public, not only 1% of the public.
The sculpture itself is split into two sections. The first section maps the area around the Metropolitan Museum and Central Park, showing the locations of new ultra luxury developments in which more than 70% of apartments are uninhabited – empty. The second maps the rate of gentrification and displacement around the Brooklyn Museum over the last ten years, block by block. The coin-shaped centerpiece includes models of the Brooklyn Museum and the Met back to back. These are meant to help us choreograph actions in the public plazas in front of each museum. Because it is an educational tool, meant for use in public space, to me the object will only truly be successful if and when it becomes worn out and can no longer function.
Our cultural institutions are crucial to our survival, which is why they have become a battleground of sorts over the last half century. I believe that all of us concerned with culture and democracy need to be actively pushing for these institutions to take clear positions on the economic and social phenomena to which they contribute. Museums must be taking a stronger role in the vibrancy of our moral ecology – spaces for ideas, histories, and debate. Museum Education departments are doing great work, and its time for curatorial programs to follow suit.
So how will art survive us? My honest, and most idealistic answer is that I hope it doesn’t - that art dies to once again become part of everything we do and are. This is kind of like the Avant Garde utopia, after all. Realistically, I know art will survive what we have become, but it may not be as spectacular to us in the future as it is today. In my view, one of the main drivers of ecological and social crisis is income inequality, and eventually we will just have to create more equitable societies if we want to survive well. Diminished income inequality will create more space for more artists, and less space for art stars and celebrities. More local democratic control over resources will see a flourishing of place-based cultures. Each of these will reflect unique engagements in the practice of living. I am not arguing for a return to some mythic tribal past of sustenance farming or hunting and gathering. Instead, I’m hoping for a networked localism that will enable greater openness and diversity.
But I’m no prophet, and I think we are all equally expert in the practice of divination. So, I’d like to open this up now and to hear what you all have to say.
Thank you.
