Strike Art: Contemporary Art and the Post-Occupy Condition

Artists Space

Yates McKee, Nina Felshin, Amin Husain, Victoria Sobel Conversation Documentation Wednesday, June 29, 2016, 7pm Artists Space Books & Talks 55 Walker Street In "Strike Art: Contemporary Art and the Post-Occupy Condition" (Verso, 2016), Yates McKee shows that during the five years since Occupy Wall Street—a period that has also witnessed the upsurge of the black liberation movement, climate justice mobilizations, the struggles of workers, debtors, students, tenants, and more—artists have increasingly embedded their practice in expanded fields of political organizing. While much such work has taken place outside the art system, in many cases it has also involved doubling back upon art institutions themselves as arenas of action in ways exceed the traditions of Institutional Critique, including the work of groups such as The Natural History Museum; Free Cooper Union; the Global Ultra Luxury Faction, known for its actions at the Guggenheim; and the recent intervention of the Decolonial Cultural Front at the Brooklyn Museum. In such work, creative direct action is coupled with long term movement-building work in which the reclaiming of certain artistic infrastructures proceeds alongside the cultivation of new political formations that far exceed the domain of art per se. This conversation takes the release of "Strike Art" as the occasion to address the following proposition: If we are seeing a move from Institutional Critique to institutional liberation (the latter being an admittedly multivalent term) it is imperative that an ethos of decolonization be developed in the process—one that draws links between struggles against displacement, dispossession and white supremacy from the occupied Lenape territory of Manhattan itself, to the frontiers of real estate speculation in New York such as Chinatown and Bushwick, and the ongoing colonization of Palestine. Webpage: http://artistsspace.org/materials/strike-art