TRUTH

ISA handbook for

artistic strategies
in real politics

CON-
CRETE
Truth is concrete
A handbook for artistic strategies in real politics
How does art play a role in social and political struggles all over the world?
Can it be a tool with which to shape the world rather than just reflect it?
“Truth is concrete” collects 100 strategies by artists, activists and theorists,
mapping the broad field of engaged art and artistic activism today.
Additional essays focus on the philosophy, structures and modalities
behind the many fights to make this world a better place.

Jonathan Allen, Udi Aloni, Hector Aristizabal, Katherine Ball, Reverend Billy, Leah
Borromeo, Chimurenga, Church of Kopimism, Santiago Ciurgeda, Neil Cummings, Diedrich
Diederichsen, Stephen Ducombe, Charles Esche, etcetera, Femen, Noah Fischer, Andrea
Fraser, Christine Gaigg, Federico Geller, Marc Greil, Marina Gržinić, Núria Güell, The Haircut
before the Party, Stefano Harney, Iconoclasistas, International Institute for Political Murder
(IIPM), Janez Janša, Khaled Jarrar, Anna Jermaloeva, Jeudi Noir, John Jordan, Kaddu Yarax,
Kavecs, Jisun Kim, Kominas, Bernd Kräftner, Omer Krieger, Steve Lambert, Lexxus Legal,
André Lepecki, Lawrence Liang, Alanna Lockward, Matteo Lucchetti, Florian Malzacher,
Joana Mazza, Markus Miessen, Antanas Mockus, Monochrom, Chantal Mouffe, Rabih Mroué,
Michal Murin, Marina Naprushkina, Occuprint, Ahmet Ögüt, Sibylle Peters, The Pinky Show,
Srđa Popović/CANVAS, Public Movement, raumlaborberlin, Gerald Raunig, Richard Reynolds,
Scott Rigby, Irit Rogoff, Florian Schneider, Gregory Sholette, Stevphen Shukaitis, Kevin
Smith/Platform, Petr Sourek/CorruptTour, Jonas Staal, Mladen Stilinović, Kuba Szreder, Claire
Tancons, Nato Thompson, Tiqqun, Mierle Laderman Ukeles, Ultra Red, The Vaccum Cleaner,
Dmitry Vilensky/Chto Delat, Marina Vishmidt, Voina, Joanna Warsza, WHW, Wochenklausur,
Stephen Wright, Yomango!, Salam Yousri and many more …

Edited by steirischer herbst & Florian Malzacher

Co-edited by Anne Faucheret, Veronica Kaup-Hasler, Kira Kirsch, Andreas R. Peternell &
Johanna Rainer

Sternberg Press
April 2014, English
16 x 22 cm, approx. 300 pages
ISBN: 978-3-943365-84-9
Retail price: € 19.00
Subscription price: € 17,00
Preorders: truthisconcrete@steirischerherbst.at
neoliberal form of capture of all—operative
or performative capture, whereby things are
put to work, made to perform. Escapology,
in short, is the theory and practice of
suspending the operations of all these
capture mechanisms.
Yet escapology is a paradoxical undertaking,
and an often ambivalent science. For obvious
reasons, escape itself can neither assert
itself for what it is, nor perform itself as
escape: it must always appear impossible
from the perspective of power, yet at the
same time it must always be already under
way. Escapology, then, is less the study
and implementation of sets of tactics or
strategies for avoiding capture, than the
acknowledgement of a simple, concrete fact:
escape happens. This is escapology's a priori,
and though it seeks to better appreciate
the escapological drive in contemporary
culture, it does not see escape as a self-
conscious attempt to escape from something.
It envisages escape in terms of offensive
retreat; as such, it shares none of the
projective logic of an event-driven vision of
history. Whereas (left-leaning) art historians
and social theorists have conditioned us
to think of emancipation, and indeed of
art itself, in terms of events—whether past
or yet to come—escapology rejects this
masculinist perspective as one premised
on the luxury of being able to wait for the
coming event or to look back on the one
which took place. Escapology is the science
of the kind of everyday elusiveness, leakage
and doing-otherwise that can really only be
described as "escape" once power structures
shift to capture its movement. Ultimately,
escapology's examples, those that instantiate
its concrete truth, all lie beyond, or behind,
the event horizon itself.
In lieu of an example, then, consider this
speculative etymology suggestively put forth
by a contemporary escapologist. The verb
"escape" is usually thought to derive from
the Vulgar Latin excapare, from ex- ("out") +
capio ("capture"). It may well be, however,
that it comes from the Late Latin ex cappa, in
312
reference not to capture at all, but to a "cape"
or cloak which remains behind even as the
living body that it clad has already slipped
away.
Stephen Wright (CA/FR) is a Paris-based writer and
professor of the practice of theory at the European
School of Visual Arts. His writing has focused on the
usership of art, particularly in contexts of collaborative
extradisciplinary practices. Together with Basecamp,
Wright set up the Platform Plausible Artworlds, a proje
to collect and share knowledge about alternative mod
of creative practice.
Stevphen Shukaitis
A r t
S t r i k e
"Everyone is an artist."This would seem a simple
enough place to begin: with a statement
connecting directly to Joseph Beuys and,
more generally, to the historic avant-garde's
aesthetic politics, which sought to break down
barriers between artistic production and
everyday life. But this one statement contains
actually two notions: thefirstalludes to the
creativity that everyone could exercise if they
realized potentials that have been held back by
capital and unrealistic conceptions of artistic
production. The second notion argues that
everyone already is an artist and embodies
creative action and production within their life
and being.
If there has been an end to the avant-garde,
it is not its death, but rather a monstrous
multiplication and expansion of artistic
production in zombified forms. The creativity
contained within the future-oriented potential
of the becoming-artistic has lapsed precisely
because it has perversely been realized in
 —

K_;

To subtly remind their patron, Prince Esterhdzy, that the musicians had worked already far more th
adagio of his Symphony No. 45 as a symbolic farewell: one by one, each musician stops playing, b
UlfAminde (DE) interprets this piece in different performances—in Graz during "Truth is Concrete

313
existing forms of diffuse cultural production.
"Everyone is an artist" is realized as a Utopian
possibility in the same way as "everyone is
a worker."This condition has reached a new
degree of concentration and intensity within
the basins of cultural production: in the post-
Fordist participation based economy where the
multitudes are sent to work in the metropolitan
factory, recombining ideas and images through
social networks and technologically mediated
forms of communication. We don't often think
of all these activities as either work or art.
Consequently it becomes difficult to think
through the politics of labor surrounding them,
whether as artistic labor or just labor itself.
The notion of the Art Strike becomes more
productive precisely as labor changes
its articulation in relation to the current
composition of artistic and cultural work. First,
the Art Workers Coalition (AWC) called for an
Art Strike in 1969 to protest the involvement
of museum board members and trustees in
war related industries. Gustav Metzger then
called for a strike of a minimum of three
years, from 1977-1980, though he noted that
almost no one noticed. Metzger and the AWC's
formulations of the Art Strike were directed
against the problems of the gallery system. This
conception was picked up by Stewart Home
and various others within the Neoist milieu who
called upon artists to cease artistic work entirely
for the years 1990-93. In this version, the strike
moves beyond a focus on the gallery system
to a more general consideration of artistic
production and a questioning of the role of the
artist. In the most recent iteration, Redas Dirzys
and a Temporary Art Strike Committee called for
an Art Strike as a response to Vilnius becoming
the European Capital of Culture for 2009: the
concept broadens from a focus on the gallery
system to artistic production more generally,
andfinallyto the ways in which artistic and
cultural production are infused throughout
daily life and embedded within the production
of the metropolis.
The Art Strike emerges as a nodal point
forfindingways to work critically between
the two compositional modes contained
314
within the statement, "Everyone is an artist":
an autonomist politics focuses on class
composition, or the relation between the
technical arrangement of economic production
and the political composition activated by
forms of social insurgency and resistance.
Capital evolves by turning emerging political
compositions into technical compositions
of surplus value production. Similarly, the
aesthetic politics of the avant-gardefindthe
political compositions they animate turned into
new forms of value production and circulation.
The Art Strike becomes a tactic for working
between the Utopian "not yet" promise of
unleashed creativity and the "always already"
but compromised forms of artistic labor that
we are enmeshed in. To repropose an Art
Strike at this juncture, when artistic labor is
both everywhere and nowhere, is to force that
issue. It becomes a concern not solely of the
one who identifies as the artist, but a method
of withdrawing the labor of imagination and
recombination involved in what we are already
doing in order to hint at the potential of what
we could be doing.
Bob Black argues that the Art Strike, rather
then negating artistic production, enacted the
ultimate realization of art, where even the act
of not making art becomes part of an artistic
process. While Stewart Home has argued
repeatedly that the importance of the Art Strike
lies not in its feasibility but rather in the ability
to expand the terrain of class struggle, Black
objects to this on the grounds that most artistic
workers operate as independent contractors,
and therefore strikes make no sense for them.
While this is indeed a concern, it is also very
much the condition encountered by forms of
labor in a precarious post-Fordist economy.
The Art Strike goes from being a proposal for
social action by artists to a form of social action
potentially of use to all whofindtheir creativity
and imagination exploited within existing
productive networks.
But how can we enact this form of strike?
And how can this subsumption of creativity
and imagination by capital be undone? That
is precisely the problem, for as artistic and
cultural production become more ubiquitous KalleLasn/Adbusters
and widespread throughout the social field,
they are rendered all the more imperceptible.
Relational aesthetics recapitulates avant- N e w A e s
garde ideas and practices into a capital-
friendly, service-economy aesthetics. This
does not mean that they are useless or that t h e t i c s
they should be discarded. Rather, by teasing
out the compositional modes contained
within them, they can be reconsidered and The perspective—the aesthetic—of our
reworked. How can we struggle around or sustainable future has yet to take hold, but it's a
organize diffuse forms of cultural and artistic simple, honest way of living. It follows organic
labor? This is precisely the kind of question cycles and mimics nature's ways. It's not so
explored by groups such as the Carrotworkers' much about being moral or "good" as about
Collective, W.A.G.E. (Working Artists and the being a little bit wild andfiercelydetermined,
Greater Economy), and Haben & Brauchen, like crabgrass growing through cracks in the
who formulate ways to organize around labor concrete. It's about "being" rather than "having"
involved in unpaid forms of cultural production, and "process" rather than "form." As this new
such as all the unpaid internships that sustain way of experiencing the world seeps into our
the workings of artistic and cultural institutions. imaginations, it begins to change our clothes,
In 1953, Guy Debord painted on the wall of the our houses, our shops, streets, food, music, and
Rue de Seine the slogan "Ne travaillezjamais"especially, our currency.
("Never work"). The history of the avant-garde The money of the future will not have
isfilledwith calls to "never artwork," but the famous men, architectural triumphs, Masonic
dissolution of the artistic object and insurgent symbolism—no pyramid or all-seeing eye of
energies of labor refusal have been rendered providence or god ... nor will it reflect the
into the workings of semiocapitalism and the anonymity, the faceless modern scientific
metropolitan factory. To renew and rebuild a aesthetic, the abstract emptiness of the current
politics and form of social movement adequate crop of Euro notes ... these gloriously old-
to the current composition does not begin with fashioned designs will give way to snow-capped
romanticizing the potentiality of becoming mountain peaks, salmon river runs, caribou herds,
creative through artistic production or working towering glaciers, breathing forests, teaming
from the creative production that already is, jungles, vibrant plains ... it will reflect the mind
but rather by working in the nexus between shift from anthropocentric to ecocentric ... from
the two: in other words, to start from how the individual to communal... from political to
refusal of work is reinfused into work, and by spiritual... and from concrete to nature ... which
understanding that imposition and rendering, is the ultimate source of survival of this human
and struggling within, against and through it. experiment of ours on Planet Earth.

Stevphen Shukaitis (US/GB) is an editor at Autonomedia

Kalle Lasn (EE/CA) is cofounder of the Adbusters Me
and a lecturer at the University of Essex. HeFoundation
is the author(CA) an anticonsumerist global network o
oflmaginal Machines: Autonomy & Self-Organizatiartists,
on activists, writers, pranksters, students, educa
in the Revolutions of Everyday Life (2009) and and entrepreneurs who want to advance the new soc
the editor (with Erika Biddie and David Graeber) activist
of movement of the information age. Adbusters
Constituent Imagination: Militant Investigations // publishes an activist magazine and has launched
Collective Theorization (2007). numerous international campaigns, including Buy
Nothing Day, and Occupy Wall Street. They are know
their subvertisements spoofing popular advertisemen