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ARTSPEAK: Events -‐‑ Postscript 21

and  Events

Postscript 21
Links
Jamie  Hilder  

2006

Not  Sheep:  New  Urban  Enclosures  and  Commons  [Exhibition]

I  want  to  point  briefly  to  two  works  presented  in  Not  Sheep:  New  Urban  Enclosures  and  Commons:
Clint  Burnham’s  Be  Rich  or  Move  to  Suburbia  and  Klub  Zwei’s  My  Eyes  Come  From  Brasil.  I  choose
these  pieces  not  because  the  artists  parallel  the  positions  of  the  show’s  organizers  –  Clint  Burnham
being  a  Vancouver  writer,  educator,  and  poet,  similar  to  Jeff  Derksen;;  and  Klub  Zwei  [Simone  Bader
and  Jo  Schmeiser]  being  a  collaborative  pair  of  artists  from  Austria,  much  like  Sabine  Bitter  and  Helmet
Weber,  who  with  Derksen  make  up  the  collective  Urban  Subjects  [US].  Nor  do  I  think  that  these  pieces
should  stand  in  for  the  exhibition  as  a  whole.  With  close  to  fifty  artists,  theorists,  architects,  and  poets
contributing  work  from  post-­socialist  cities  and  other  urban  centres  in  Eastern  and  Western  Europe,
North,  South,  and  Latin  America,  no  two  works  should  be  expected  to  bear  that  burden.  But  both  pieces
do  represent,  in  concise  ways,  a  poetics  I  see  Urban  Subjects’  project  advocating,  a  poetics  which
seems  to  have  its  roots  in  an  experience  of  astonishment.  And  by  poetics  I  don’t  want  to  refer  simply  to
the  literary,  but  rather  to  an  ethics  of  making.
The  poetics  of  astonishment  recognizes  the  challenge  of  addressing  a  dominant,  neoliberal  discourse
that  has  strategically  cloaked  itself  in  the  rhetoric  of  freedom,  a  term  which,  since  Richard  Nixon  and
Nikita  Khrushchev’s  Kitchen  Debate  in  1959,  has  come  to  refer  more  to  a  free  market,  and  less  to  the
democracy  of  the  agora.  It  struggles  with  a  space  in  which  an  economic  common  sense  –  think  Mike
Harris’s  “Common  Sense  Revolution”  in  Ontario,  think  Margaret  Thatcher’s  “There  Is  No  Alternative,”
think  Bill  Clinton’s  “It’s  the  Economy,  Stupid”  –  has  come  to  replace  a  sense  of  the  commons.
So  when  Clint  Burnham  submits  a  found  text  /  object  of  a  Dutch  antacid  /  anti-­flatulent,  which  carries  the
brand  name  Rennie,  and  when  he  titles  it  Be  Rich  or  Move  to  Suburbia,  Rotterdam-­Vancouver  2006,  the
reference  becomes  obvious  to  anyone  who  has  heard  of  the  condo  king  of  Vancouver,  Bob  Rennie,
head  of  Rennie  Marketing  Systems,  the  firm  responsible  for  the  packaging  of  the  Woodward’s
development.  And  the  idea  of  a  Rennie  brand  antacid  becomes  curious  to  anyone  who  has  recently
passed  by  the  abandoned  Woodward’s  building,  seen  the  posters  carrying  the  slogan  “Be  Bold  or  Move
to  Suburbia,”  and  felt  a  certain  turning  in  their  stomachs,  or  felt  their  heart  burn.  Whose  pain  does
Rennie  soothe?  Do  developers  get  nervous  on  the  Downtown  Eastside?  Is  that  why  people  who  waited
in  line  for  up  to  twenty-­four  hours  to  purchase  a  share  in  Vancouver’s  gentrifying  history  did  so  at  the
Shaw  Tower  in  Coal  Harbour,  wrangled  by  “event”  staff  with  jackets  emblazoned  with  the  same  slogan?
I  want  to  be  fair:  let’s  say  that  Bob  Rennie,  for  all  his  visibility  and  success,  will  for  a  long  time  to  come
function  synecdochally  for  the  gradual  expulsion  of  the  working  class  from  the  city  of  Vancouver.  He
will  function  this  way  especially  within  an  arts  community  whose  placation  he  cannot  expect  to  come
included  with  the  work  he  collects.  But  we  need  to  remind  ourselves  that  he  is  only  part  of  a  whole,
however  catchy  his  name  may  be.  His  firm  has  nothing  to  do  with  the  Henderson  Group’s  España
towers,  just  two  blocks  south  of  the  Woodward’s  site,  whose  marketing  campaign  is  equally  sickening.
And  he  is  not  responsible  for  a  spineless  city  council  who  seems  incapable  of  standing  up  to
developers  when  it  comes  to  social  housing.  Or  a  provincial  government  whose  Safe  Streets  legistion  –
it  hurts  my  stomach  just  thinking  about  it  –  deals  only  with  the  imagined  threat  that  visible  poverty  poses
to  tourist  dollars.  Thanks,  voters!  But  let’s  also  refuse  to  be  naïve,  or  even  nice.  Let’s  say  that  when
there  are  those  for  whom  urban  boldness  is  characterized  by  real  estate  speculation  over  policy,  by
investment  over  co-­operation,  that  we  have  a  problem,  and  it  helps  if  that  problem  has  brand
recognition.
So  when  Klub  Zwei  submits  a  series  of  posters  for  Not  Sheep  from  their  Work  on  /  in  the  Public,  2000  /
2001,  posters  which  document  conversations  between  the  artists  and  the  Autonomous  Center  for
Migrant  Women  [MAIZ]  in  Vienna,  and  which  document  them  in  six  different  languages,  the  reference
becomes  clear  to  anyone  who  has  felt  suspicious  of  the  dominant  media’s  distribution  of  information.
And  although  Klub  Zwei  has  a  local  concern  in  this  piece  –  a  specific  group  of  women  trying  to  intervene
in  and  expose  the  cultural  stupor-­structure  of  Vienna  –  the  gesture  of  translation  allows  it  to  function  on
a  (CanWest)  global  scale,  so  that  events  in  Austria  in  2000  /  2001  match  up  topographically  with
Vancouver  in  2006,  and  let’s  not  kid  ourselves,  2007,  8,  9,  and  beyond.
I  want  to  be  clear,  so  I’ll  let  the  dominant  speak  for  itself  (from  the  Retort  collective’s  recent  book,
Afflicted  Powers,  quoting  the  New  York  Times):

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ARTSPEAK: Events -‐‑ Postscript 21
Brigadier  General  Mark  Kimmitt,  at  that  time  the  senior  military  spokesman  in  Iraq,  was  asked  on  April
11,  2004  –  as  the  first  major  offensive  against  the  occupation  was  unfolding  –  what  he  would  tell  Iraqis
in  the  face  of  televised  images  ‘of  Americans  and  coalition  soldiers  killing  innocent  civilians.’  ‘Change  the
channel,’  was  his  reply.  ‘Change  the  channel  to  a  legitimate,  authoritative,  honest  news  station.’  (187)
If  the  poetics  of  astonishment  has  a  posture,  or  an  expression,  it  stands  with  arms  folded  in  frozen
exasperation,  as  if  it  were  receiving  horrible  news  about  someone  it  once  knew  but  has  lost  track  of.  It
breathes  in  sharply  and  exhales  slowly,  with  wide  unfocused  eyes  and  a  weighted  pause.  But  what
makes  it  a  poetics,  and  not  simply  a  condition,  is  a  decision  to  act,  a  rescuing  of  resolution  from
despair,  to  steal  a  phrase  from  Retort,  who  takes  it  from  Milton.  It’s  the  poetics  Mark  Nowak  describes
in  his  contribution  to  Not  Sheep,  Notes  Towards  an  Anti-­Capitalist  Poetics  II,  a  poetics  that  stands
counter  to  the  spatial  poetics  of  the  authors  of  IMF  or  WTO  economic  policies  –  documents  which  all
too  obviously  contain  a  specific  ethics  of  making.  It  aims  for  collective  activity:  in  Nowak’s  terms,
borrowed  from  Adrienne  Rich,  “to  form  and  inform.”
But  the  poetics  of  astonishment  should  be  careful  not  to  decay  into  a  poetics  of  complaint.  The  work
produced  can  neither  be  cathartic  nor  palliative,  nor  can  it  be  satisfied  with  its  contribution  to  a  wider
discourse.  It  must  imagine  and  implement  a  bricolage  beyond  the  rootless,  postmodern  meaning  of  the
word,  back  to  its  context  in  Paris  in  1871,  where  the  term  described  a  method  of  constructing
barricades  against  the  forces  of  Versailles  out  of  any  and  all  available  material:  a  poetics  of  and  through
resistance.  But  unlike  the  Communards,  who  attacked  and  toppled  the  symbolic  Vendôme  Column
while  leaving  Notre  Dame  Cathedral  and  the  Bank  of  France  untouched,  let’s  not  forget  where  the
money  lives.
JAMIE  HILDER  is  a  PhD  candidate  in  the  English  Department  at  the  University  of  British  Columbia.  He
has  recently  given  himself  a  hernia  trying  to  do  something  he  knows  is  impossible.

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