"New Languages, New Visions, New Political Structures”: An Interview with Prof. Stephen Duncombe, Director of the C4AA
As part of a new CLAMOR interview-series with experts and practitioners in the fields of art and activism, we talked with Stephen Duncombe, Professor at New York University, and Director and Co-Founder of the C4AA about the imaginative work of the Center, the entanglements of art institutions with fossil-fuel companies, and his upcoming book “Art of Activism”, published with O/R Books.
The Center for Artistic Activism (C4AA) in New York City is a world reference for people eager to craft creative means for transformative campaigns and activism. After more than 12 years of operation, the center supports justice activists, educational institutions and art organisations in imagining and realizing desirable futures. C4AA has worked with over 1500 activists and artists on hundreds of projects, among those Actipedia, an open-access and user-generated archive of artistic actions.
Project Your Vote is an Unstoppable Voters Project – the Center for Artistic Activism supported works that celebrate voting rights and counter voter suppression. Picture from: C4AA
CLAMOR: The first statement that we see when entering the website of the Center for Artistic Activism (C4AA) is "Imagination powers change. And changes power". Among the many transformative effects of art, why did you choose to feature imagination?
Stephen: Art has always functioned as an imaginative space. It is a space in which one can do things that are impossible. My go-to example is always Vladimir Tatlin´s “Monument to the Third International” which was commissioned by the newly formed Soviet government. This building was, in fact, unbuildable: There was not enough steel in the country and the construct was structurally unstable- it was an impossible building. Even Trotsky weighted on him quoting: “Tatlin´s work reminds me of the ships that were built inside the bottles. It sparked my imagination of how this could be possible. Yet, in the end, the ship can only stay in the bottle.” Tatlin was using a model that could not be built until the revolution would realize a world that could build his monument. This is exactly what art is doing. It allows us to imagine what many cannot imagine now: new languages, new visions, new political structures etc.
CLAMOR: What was your personal journey working with this topic?
Stephen: I have always been interested in political imagination. Six years ago, I edited an open-source website and book on Thomas More´s “Utopia” which came out of a trip to Moscow where I taught on Political Imagination. Taking this as a starting point, in a place where political imagination ended up in a disaster, I now aim to think about imagination in much more structured ways, because imagination is absolutely necessary to have transformation: What are we going to transform towards if we cannot imagine the world that you would like to bring into being?
CLAMOR: Tell us about the origin of the C4AA and your main lines of work today.
Stephen: When we started, our main job was to explain what artistic activism actually is. People thought it is more part of the art world than the activist world. That is no longer true. Most NGOs and activist groups, nowadays, integrate creative strategies in their work.
Personally, I am concerned with assessing how artistic activism can work or not work. Currently, we either use banal metrics that do not really tell anything, low-hanging fruits like Tweets or media clicks, or we claim that impact cannot be measured at all. Thus, I have developed a methodological approach that starts with the artists themselves, guided by questions of audience and intent. The interesting result of this methodology is not that we certainly know which tactics work better, but that the artist produces better work when they focus on audience and intent. They empathize more with others they work with.
The Art of Activism, by Stephen Duncombe and Steve Lambert, got published in November 2021. Source: https://artofactivismbook.com/
One big project of C4AA that recently received funding is a campaign on voting behavior. For five years, we will work with artists and organizations across the United States on campaigns in areas where voters rights were taken away, such as Arizona or Texas. We aim to foster relationships between artists and organizations addressing both affective and effective level and having artists embedded in the campaign from the ground. Democracy in the United is actively under attack and it is really important to create new strategies to fight for it.
CLAMOR: The partnerships and sponsorships of artistic organisations with fossil fuel corporations gained much attention after the controversy for the sponsorship deal between Shell and the British Science Museum last July. Is there a position of the C4AA on this matter?
“What are we going to transform towards if we cannot imagine the world that you would like to bring into being?”
Stephen: Last year, we worked closely with the activist group Decolonize This Place and artist Hans Haacke on a campaign called GULF Project, where we organized against the destructive sponsorships of a dozen large art institutions. Frankly, I used to be a bit cynical about chasing down big institutions like MoMA or the Whitney Museum. I even thought that these museums will eventually take our protest signs and place them in their gallery, claiming ownership over them.
However, Amin Husain from Decolonize This Place has really convinced me to look at this as a stage. These art institutions are in a place that is very susceptible to guilt and exposure, and therefore open to a group of activists in a way that other “stages” will not be. Activists targeting colonized sponsorships do not want to end their fight at the institutional level. It is not the end, it is the means. It is not the campaign or the objective, it is the tactics. Sometimes we get caught up in the tactics and think of them as goals.
The goal is not to make these big institutions entirely pure from money. Money is dirty and there is no way around it. There is no good money and bad money. It is all bad money, that comes from financial markets involved in corruption and colonization. However, if you open a platform with large museums to talk about fossil fuels and how they destroy the environment, I am all for it.
“My challenge to environmental art is thus to provide an answer to the question of what we should envision as new way of living and being.”
CLAMOR: Do you think those campaigns deflect the attention from the actual art towards institutional infrastructures and politics?
I can understand a concern that the art becomes irrelevant when you talk about politics of these institutions. Yet, this is exactly what the activists are saying: For years and years, everybody talked about the art and nobody talked about the institutions. It is a strategic move to show that these institutions, which exhibit critical and political art, are themselves engaged in destructive political work.
I sometimes worry with political art that it is the art work that gets all the attention. For example, what happened at the Whitney Biennale in 2016: The female, white artist Dana Schutz exhibited “Open Casket”, a reference to Emmeth Till, who was a young, black boy lynched in the 1950s by two white men. There was a huge protest against the art work, condemning it for expropriation of representation of the black body. Many artists organized petitions to get rid of the piece, other artists wanted to preserve artistic freedom. Now, here am I standing outside of all this and realizing this is all about the art. In fact, Emmeth Till´s open casket funeral was staged by his mom in the 1950s in cooperation with civil rights movements.
What I was distressed about was that it was all about representation of a black body by a white artist and the lost attention to the original act and artist´s intention to raise consciousness about the continued destruction of the black body. That got lost in all of it. Sometimes the art and representation of it becomes louder than the politics itself. Instead, the politics got sucked into a conversation about institutions and not about dead, discriminated bodies.
We encountered Stephen´s work via the Copenhagen Experiment in 2021.
CLAMOR: CLAMOR focuses on environmental artivism. From your experience, what is the position of art in the environmental discourses?
Stephen: Many environmental artists adopt a framework of climate policies implying austerity and doing less. Furthermore, and this is quite perverse, many artists adopt a dystopian perspective in which the world is doomed. I think the absence of environmental art that imagines a future beyond technological wonders, means that we deeded over utopia to the technocrats. My challenge to environmental art is thus to provide an answer to the question of what we should envision as new way of living and being. Do we want a world based on fear, or do we want a world based on dreams? I prefer dreams, not nightmares.
CLAMOR: Could you finally share what your upcoming book “The Art of Activism” will be about?
Stephen: It is a 270-page picture book... with a lot of text! (laughs) It is taking 10 years of our training into book form and captures all the lessons we have learned from all the folks around the world. We then brought these lessons into book form, and eventually attached 50 exercises which are also part of our trainings. In fact, we realized that if we continue our trainings, and even if we do two trainings per weekend for the rest of our lives, we still only reach a few thousand people. The book is a way to make them much more accessible for as many people as possible.
Stephen´s book “The Art of Activism” , co-written with Steven Lambert, can be ordered from O/R books now. The Center for Artistic Activism and Stephen can be found on Twitter @theC4AA and @srduncombe.
The interview was conducted by Beatriz Rodriguez-Labajos and Julian Willming as part of the CLAMOR interview series with artists, activists and other experts at the intersection of art and activsm.