Revitalizing Debates around Collective Action and Democracy: A Conversation between Oliver Ressler and Bruce Barber

When we first met at the Was Tun conference at the Depot in Vienna some 15 years ago (December 1999), you were just beginning your practice and thinking through political strategies for an artist. Perhaps like some Austrian art activists, for example Wolfgang Zinggl and his colleagues in Wochenklausur, you were stimulated by a turn to the right in 1980s Austrian politics with the growing strength of Jörg Haider and the FPÖ. I remember there were demonstrations against the FPÖ on the Ringstrasse at this time and some activists of these demonstrations were concerned enough to challenge the Was Tun participants to join them in the street. Were you a participant in these demonstrations?

Sure, I joined several of the demonstrations against this coalition between the People’s Party ÖVP and the far-right FPÖ, which finally started to work as a coalition in February 2000. Very soon a different type of small-scale, very flexible and inspiring demonstration started, the so-called ‘Donnerstagsdemonstrationen’. Every Thursday, hundreds of people marched through the city in unannounced demonstration routes for many hours. The right-wing government could not ban these demonstrations, as they would have wished, because the international community was carefully observing if the democratic rights of the bourgeois state were still in place after the far right was in government.

Could you perhaps return to this earlier period of your life and speak to this formative period in your practice as a political artist?

After I graduated at the Art Academy in 1995 this shift of the Austrian political system towards the right became somehow the central theme to which I felt it is necessary to react and to oppose it. I decided – and fought to achieve this – to carry out projects in public space on right-wing politics, nationalism and institutional racism, most in collaboration with my friend, the artist Martin Krenn. In 1995 we carried out The New Right: Materials for the Dismantling, a series of four different large-scale billboards in Vienna, focusing on right-wing ideology. In 1996 we installed a billboard-object at the main square of Graz and an exhibition at Neue Galerie Graz, Learned Homeland, deconstructing nationalism and the notion of homeland in school books in Austria. The most public attention we received was in 1997 for Institutional Racism, a 3 x 3 x 3 m wide billboard cube in front of the Viennese State Opera, presenting the detention centres for undocumented migrants as a form of state-regulated racism.

During your recent public lecture at NSCAD you showed several works including a series of interventions, the first a poster indicating that democratic elections are a sham. You indicated that the republication of this poster lead to a lawsuit that you won. Could you describe this work?

At the beginning of Elections are a Con was the refusal of the Cultural Department of the Tyrolean provincial government in Austria in December 2011 to pay me a production grant for a series of posters, for which I was selected by an independent jury of the cultural organization TKI. In one of her statements in the following media debate, Dr Palfrader from the conservative People’s Party (ÖVP) said, ‘the Tyrolean provincial government could not support my work, because the text on the poster would be wrong.’ Local, national and also some international media focused on the case, which was discussed as censorship. I finally initiated a lawsuit against the conservative party when it came to my attention that they used my poster draft Elections are a Con in their party magazine, indicating that I have ‘misused’ cultural subsidies and did something dishonourable or illegal. In a settlement the provincial court in Innsbruck ruled that the People’s Party must retract these allegations and refrain from unauthorized reproductions or modifications of the poster Elections are a Con and must remove all existing copies of their modification of the artwork. It was irritating that it appeared impossible to present posters using the text Elections are a Con in public space in Austria, while just a couple of months later it did not seem to be a problem to present a Georgian version of the piece in public inner-city spaces in Tbilisi.

You showed another video work, What Is Democracy? that shows the slow but deliberate burning of national flags (the flags of the USA, UK, Germany, France, among others) which fall as ash while we the spectators watch this spectacle. In the discussion that followed you acknowledged that in most countries this is considered a criminal act. What does this mean with respect to your understanding of statehood and nationalism?

What Is Democracy? is an 8-channel video installation on which I started working in 2007, based on interviews I carried out with activists all around the world. To create the imagery of burning flags was a decision I made at the very end of the editing process, shortly before the piece was presented at the Biennale de Lyon in France in autumn 2009, as it is a compelling imagery that could be seen as a kind of visual condensation of the failure of representative democracy. That the burning of flags is criminalized in several states I was aware of, even though not how severe this trivial act to burn a textile is being punished. In Germany, for the public attempt to burn a German flag – or a flag of any country with which they have diplomatic relations (which I guess are more or less all countries) – you can be arrested and jailed for up to three years. That the State sees this importance to protect itself against any attempts to annihilate these constructed national symbols like flags points to the weakness and vulnerability of the concept of the nation state. As a work of art, What Is Democracy? is directed against any kind of national identification. It tries to think democracy beyond national states and national identities; therefore it expands a global discourse with activists from 18 cities around the globe. This anti-national approach becomes also visible that in the installation only the names of cities in which these interviews have been recorded are named, but not the states. The states only become visible through the burning of their flags.

The erosion of state structures also became quite visible in the course of the global financial crisis of 2008 – a major theme in many of your works, such as for example Robbery. What is this about?

Robbery is somehow atypical of my films, as it has no sound and is only 1.5 minutes long. It tries to suggest a parallel between the looting of shops as happened for example during the social unrest in the UK in 2011 (‘night-time robbery’) and the looting of state coffers, which are usually being carried out under the phrase of bailing out the banks. The piece uses an image of the former French President Sarkozy and German Chancellor Merkel, which is directly related to the text insert ‘daytime robbery’. The short film was first installed in a window at Kadist Foundation in Paris visible to passers-by from the street.

Your series of photographs in We Have a Situation Here (2011) involved actors, men lying on top of each other and recognizably dressed as managers, police and soldiers. Some look very dead but there is no sign of struggle, no blood or evidence of gore. The images are somewhat aesthetic looking. Are you perhaps referencing your work to some paintings or photographs in the art historical canon? Could you discuss this?

I guess you can find some historic reference for every artwork. So for this photographic series, The Fall of the Titans by the Dutch painter Cornelis van Haarlem could be used as a reference. Anyway, I do not consider it important that the viewer finds such references. We Have a Situation Here is an attempt to create an image for the out-datedness of a system that failed us all. The piece is much more informed, for example, by the Italian philosopher Giorgio Agamben’s consideration of ‘thinking a politics freed from the form of the state’, than by any work in art history. What if the central actors of power lose control at some point? I developed three photographic images of the agents of the authoritarian crisis regime lying motionless on the floor, but what I am primarily interested in is the questions these images might provoke in the audience. How could a society without these central actors of power be structured/organized? How could new institutions look like after the ones that oppress us today lost their power?

You mention Agamben whose book The Coming Community (1993) can be read in one important sense as a response to Jean-Luc Nancy’s An Inoperative Community (1986) in which he suggests that ‘Community is only realised through the death of others.’ Agamben also argues that the Camp is the ‘political nomos of the day.’ Could you perhaps link these philosophically nuanced notions of community and containment, contingency and exigency to your work on the Occupy movement, Take the Square?

My interest in the square and Occupy movements was less affected by reading theory than through my involvement in the alter-globalization movement that shared many organizational principles and goals with the subsequent movement, and the fact that between 2001 and 2008 I produced three films on the alter-globalization movement. For me it was less a question of whether to produce a film on the second wave of the global movement, but rather of how and when. I finally decided to focus on three cities – Athens, Madrid and New York – that had very strong and influential movements and to invite activists from these movements to discuss with each other in small groups central questions of organizing, decision-making processes and assemblies. The three-channel video installation Take the Square thrusts aside the big media’s focus on spectacular occupations of central squares in order to create a space to think about how to make the square, to develop key political structures for organizing responses to the current global economic crisis.

Hans Ulrich Obrist is famous for saying: ‘Collaboration is the answer but what is the question?’ (Foster, 2006: 194; Obrist, 2013; Obrist et al., 2003). You are an artist who collaborates with many others in the production of your projects that are often focused upon the critique of capitalism in the age of liberal democracy. Would you care to comment on this statement?

Social change can only be achieved in collaboration between people – therefore collaboration is essential. For me, to pick up on Obrist, usually first the question exists, and only after this question or field of research has been defined do I think about ways of carrying out the idea – and collaborating with other artists, filmmakers, political analysts and activists is very often the path I decide to pursue. As my artistic practice is one that is based very much on the written or spoken text, obviously the work on a piece requires much discussion. Therefore it appears natural to involve other people in the production of projects. For example, the collaboration with Australian artist Zanny Begg opened up the fantastic possibility to create inspiring work that is not only interview-based, but the interviews also build a parallel narration based on Zanny’s wonderful animations.

Much of your work could be described as an attempt to stimulate debates around collective action and the revitalization of democracy. For example, in your collaborative film with Zanny Begg you focus on the financial and economic crisis of 2008. Your description states ‘The Bull Laid Bear “lays bare” the economic recession (bear market) that hides behind each boom time (bull market).’ When we consider the complex dynamism of international capital and the forces of globalization; forgive me, but isn’t this binary thinking a little too simplistic?

Well, as the film The Bull Laid Bear discusses primarily destructive and harmful deregulation politics in the US, we have to be aware that such a description – which employs some humour and a play on words of course in itself – is based on the assumption that the economic model in the US in the last 20 years or so consisted primarily to ride on and inflate bubbles, as the economist Gerald Epstein eloquently points out in The Bull Laid Bear: there was the dotcom bubble, the housing bubble, a stock market bubble, and so forth, but there hasn’t been a coherent model of economic growth that was sustainable and socially efficient. A central argument in the film, which you do not come across in any mainstream analysis, is described by the former bank regulator William Black (2005), that in 2008 the US bailed out the banks and left the fraudulent CEOs in charge of the bank and changed the accounting rules, so that the fraudulent bank with the fraudulent loans could create fraudulent income for which you could pay real bonuses to the CEOs who had destroyed their banks through fraud. This is a quite complex analysis by someone from an inside perspective, whose arguments are not being listened to usually, so no simplicity at all.

You often employ wry humour in your work, and this is particularly evident when collaborating with Zanny Begg. Do you feel that humour is the best way to get a political message to a broad audience?

I am the type of artist who tries not to decide on a particular way of how to produce works and to keep on working in this particular method for years and pretends to know: this is the way, or manner in which, to do things. In the opposite case, I try to keep my artistic practice open for a variety of different approaches. In some projects humour plays a certain role, but in a specific context a direct slogan or comment might be a better option. And many of my works are based on conversations/assemblies/interviews with activists of social movements all around the world. Of course, also if you employ such a format, it is good if humour is part of a piece, but I would not seek it for all means of work and political action.

You and Greg Sholette have collaborated on a major curatorial and publishing project, It’s Political Economy Stupid (2001). As you may know, I reviewed his book Dark Matter: Art & Politics in the Age of Enterprise Culture (2010) and suggested that reading it awry his book may simply be an acknowledgement that the art world is a Ponzi-like pyramid scheme with artist players, payers and prayers at its base, symbolically and economically paying forward and upward to the accumulators of symbolic and actual capital aggregated at the apex: the mega art stars, gallerists, collectors, publishers, art critics and art historians (Barber, 2012). Do you agree that the art world requires some major remedial action as far as capital and democracy are concerned?

Although in the last few years I have been invited to participate in more and more exhibitions and it may therefore be claimed I am successful to a certain extent, I still have the feeling that my work is only being presented and discussed at the margins of the art system. The system with art stars, gallerists and collectors you describe is one I have the opportunity to observe from time to time from the distance, but I am not connected to or part of it at all. The majority of people who invite me, artists who show their work in the same exhibitions as me, are highly informed, political thinking people. So this system you describe definitely deserves to fail, and I guess it will fail along with the perpetual failure of the capitalist system which we can currently observe and which will probably continue for a couple more years or at least until a point (in the best case, which I really hope will take place) when social movements will become strong enough to not only struggle for a new system but also are able to achieve a transition to something new.