[A proposal by Uruguayan artist Alejandro Turell to ask the Belgian microbiologist scientist (invited to perform scientist in the spectacular event HDI in Hasselt) to sign the paper about refusing from misuse of people and further their discrimination in the sense of inequality as it usually is demonstrated in the name of science. The scientist agreed finally with some limitations by simply saying that she does not agree with everything said in the paper, but follows the reasoning…]  


 

The report is about DAMTP infiltration into the event of extreme eurocentrism in the essence and approach while involving wide range of international artists (majority as usually were white males).

But I was first struck by the true dimensions of that problem in 1970, when Faith and I attended a guerilla art action protest against Art Strike, which was itself a protest against ‘racism, war and repression’. A group of famous white male artists led by Robert Morris decided to withdraw their work from the Venice Biennale, a prestigious international exhibition, in order to protest US bombing of Cambodia and the murder of college students at Kent, Jackson and Augusta. Although the protest was supposed to be against ‘Racism, War, and Repression’ (sexism was not yet on their agenda), Art Strike then expected to mount a counter-Biennale in New York without altering the all-white male composition of the show. This seems to be the key to understanding the intrinsic limits of Western cultural avant-gardism: while it can no longer deny its own white male supremacist presuppositions it cannot be rid of them either.

 

In the first years of our feminism, working through an organization that we founded called Women Students and Artists for Black Art Liberation (WSABAL), Faith and others succeeded in opening this exhibition to women and people of color. WSABAL was also influential in the subsequent development of Ad Hoc Women Artists, led by Lucy Lippard. This group repeated WSABAL’s 50 per cent women demand in their protest against the Whitney Biennial, which was in the habit of including white male artists almost exclusively. Specifically because of Faith’s research and support of Ad Hoc, black women artists Barbara Chase Riboud and Bettye Saar were included in the next Whitney Biennial.

[Michele Wallace “Invisibility Blues”]

 

In 2009 artists in Alytus responded to the EU city of culture award to Vilnius, by declaring an Art Strike and hosting an Art Strike Biennial. I was involved with the IWW at the time and put forward the idea of creating a psychic workers union. This was to counter Bolshevik ideas of a division between cultural, political and economic organization of workers as well as the bourgeois Eurocentric ideas of art production as separate from other creative activities.

 

The Psychic workers union was indeed formed when I left the IWW in 2009 after briefly organizing with the Cambridge branch as they would not support the terms of myself and the Art Strikers of Alytus – so we created the DAta Miners Travailleurs Psychique. This summer we have been attacking the Manifesta Biennale, the Berlin Biennale and also linking up with the artists of the Dakar Biennale. We saw it imnportant to not only attack Eurocentric bourgeois culture at its source (the art biennial) but also in its neo-colonial form in Dakar, Senegal while also extending the hand of comradeship to the African black and coloured artists there.

 

This is not about identity politics – but about (re)defining what we mean by the Proletariat! Any situation is defined in Time, Space and Class – and its measurement begins with the here and now – our own situation as workers who are constructing it.

 

That’s why recent texts of the psychic workers are always talking about black power. The failure to link up the strikes (of workers), the protests (of students) and the riots (of the so-called “lumpen” proletariat) in a time when the most vulnerable in society are being hit by government cuts is not necessarily the sign of total defeat. Much is going on which is invisible - unrepresentatable – outside and beyond the surface of the spectacle. However international proletarian organizing and uprising will inevitably make contact with the spectacle in order to destroy it.

 [ACTIVE PSYCHIC WORKER‘S ABC]

 


Introduction fitting the main regulations by police, authorities and bourgeois art world

 

The text below is intended to serve as the mean for self-education and amusement. Better do not make copies, simply hide yourself at home, do art or go to work, and stay in fear!

 

1. What do we want?

 

Art world is in a process of neo-liberalization (i.e. privatization, commercialization, taxation) what makes the basic institution of art even less acceptable than it was when established in 18th century as a mean to gain privileged status for bourgeoisie and to start the total capitalist alienation and the specialization (including non specialized specialists) of the society.

 

We simply want to turn away from ongoing bourgeoisification of the psychic workers and data miners – many of them still call themselves being artists or in rare cases – art workers. We ask to quit with art production in support capitalist machine and to start production of meaning without giving a right for capitalists to distribute it. We demand immediate quite the exploitation of working people at the same time damaging their minds filling it with propagandized-diverted meaning just produced by themselves.

 

Nowadays we have reached the critical point of neo-liberalist biennalization of the art world what is nothing else but global corruption of the art system and industrialized privatization of the meaning fitting it to the customized standards and clichés. The customized forms of the culture are true forms of the colonization of mind, alienation of human beings and nature, humans and humans, humans and dead humans… etc. what lead towards further exploitation of all working people of the world.

 

Debiennalization – that is a newest approach – the kick into ass of seeming-to-be capitalist stability. Our task is to result the bloody convulsions of capitalist rites rooted in contemporary forms of biennialization.

 

Dear artists of the Manifesta Biennial and events related to it,


I write to you as a fellow worker. I have rejected the role of artist and become the DAta Miners Travailleurs Psychique (DAMTP)

DAMTP has been formed out of the Art Strike biennial of 2009 via discussions with the Industrial Workers of the World. So some other workers are also the DAMTP.

Our specific aim at the moment is to attack white supremacy, patriarch and bourgeois culture. These problems exist in art – and even in the protest movement by artists against the art system.

we will attack your role in the spectacle

we will attack your bourgoisification

we will attack your role in european bourgeois patriarchal serious culture