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Take the Quiz:
The Art of Activism and the Activism of Art
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Gregory Sholette: FEINART Lecture 19/3/2021
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“Take the Quiz,” prompts the canny, pop-up questionnaire on Tate.org’s webpage.“Which art collective do you belong to?” “Should you be in the Black Audio Film Collective…or are you a Hackney Flasher at heart?”The test refers to a pair of London-based artists’ groups from the 1970s and 1980s, one focused on the British African diaspora, the other foregrounding working women’s rights through photography and public posters. More questions immediately follow. “Who makes up your collective? What is your mission all about? What inspires you?” A click, A pause, and like a vintage coin-operated fortune telling machine, the platform’s algorithm reveals your innermost communal proclivities. (Somehow, I wound-up belonging to the early 19th century painting circle known as The Ancients who gathered at the home of poet William Blake.)
Scrolling down we find information about how to “start a movement,” along with short biographies of other “radical art groups.” A large button that leads to a £5 membership deal offering discounted tickets and 29% off café items puckishly marketed under the brand “Tate Collective.” I don’t want to overstate this next point, nor do I wish to proclaim that the art world has finally begun to shift away from its adoration of individual authorship towards cooperative forms of production, but, the very fact that one of the institutional pillars of high culture is endorsing, however waggishly, collective artistic activist agency indicates a marked degree of change towards socialized art practices, previously relegated, if they appeared at all, to the basement archives.
Tate inc. is not unique in this regard. [1] Before this past year, would it have been possible for Black Lives Matter to top the annual ranking of 100 art world influencers as proffered by the ArtReviews in 2020, with the #metoo movement in fourth place close behind? A primary question I will explore today is why this embrace of socially engaged and activist art now? Which is to say, before those of us who have sought for many years to add critical weight to these practices take what appears to be a well-deserved victory lap, let us stop to acknowledge that contradictions around issues of fair labor, racial representation, gender equality and decolonial politics all remain fully present within the mainstream art world. For example, just one year after the Tate corporation uploaded its “Which art collective do you belong to?” questionnaire, more than 100 of its employees went on a labor strike to protest the institution’s massive job cutting measures, allegedly brought about by the COIVED Sars-2 pandemic. The ax was going to fall on half the work force, even as senior administrative staff continued to earn six-figure salaries uninterrupted. I am certain that most, if not all of the art groups listed on the Tate’s pop-quiz would have joined the picket line in solidarity. But one significant change today from the 1970s, is the way these contradictions have become virtually impossible to hide away from public sight, or from the press, and more importantly, the institutions appear incapable of managing these conflicts, at least not without drawing high-profile reprisals from artists as we shall see. So let me dig a bit deeper into this curious and uneasy parley that is taking place between a cautious embrace of social practice art by the established art world, and the social discontent felt by so many art world constituents.
This is not a new phenomenon of course.
In 1971, Hans Haacke’s solo exhibition at the Guggenheim Museum, was cancelled, ostensibly over a few works explicitly tracing New York City’s unscrupulous real estate market using data drawn from municipal archives. Like some art world epidemiologist, Guggenheim museum director Thomas M. Messer, claimed he was dutybound to block Haacke’s work because it was “an alien substance that had entered the art museum organism.”[2] Defending his project, curator Edward Fry declared unequivocal support for “the freedom and integrity of this or any other artist’s work over and above any question of bureaucratic loyalty to an institution.”[3] Fry was promptly dismissed. To put this in context, the early 1970s was an extraordinary moment of social discontent, or what Herbert Marcuse labeled The Great Refusal. Specifically, Haacke’s Guggenheim confrontation took place just a few years after the global student and worker uprisings of 1968, and only a few months before five hundred thousand people marched on Washington DC to condemn the US led “undeclared” war in Vietnam, a conflict recently expanded by Nixon and Kissinger to include Laos and Cambodia. And in addition,1970 also witnessed the National Guard shootings of unarmed student demonstrators at Kent and Jackson State Universities, but also the “New York Artists’ Strike against Racism, Sexism, Repression and War.” ]
Before digging into this in a more detailed way, let me draw out this contrast between past forms of art world based social engagement and what has been taking place in recent years, especially in the aftermath of the 2008 financial crash that arguably politicized so many artists and other “creative workers” who were already leading a precarious existence as the so-called 99%.
Effectively, Haacke was blacklisted from most major U.S. museums, with the exception of New Museum, though his high-profile Guggenheim cancellation also assured that his practice would henceforth shape what Aruna D’Souza describes as “the way subsequent generations of artists have understood the relationship between art and the social world.”[4]
Artists continued to call attention to the allegedly neutral façade of the mainstream art world throughout the late 1960s and much of the 1970s, including in 1969 with the Black Emergency Cultural Coalition’s opposition to the Metropolitan Museum’s Harlem on My Mind exhibition that included not a single African American artist, either living or dead, but also picket lines set-up outside the Whitney Museum of American Art in 1970 declaring “Women Now,” to demand art institutional accountability for the low number of women artists,
1969/1970
>Art Workers’ Coalition
>Black Emergency Cultural Coalition
>Ad Hoc Women’s Committee of the Art Workers Coalition,
>Women Artists in Revolution
>Women Students and Artists for Black Artists’ Liberation.
>Guerilla Art Action Group (GAAG)
These concerns ticked-up again around 1976, with the formation of Artists Meeting for Cultural Change, who published their own anti-catalog demonstrating the profound absence of women and people of color who were selected to represent 300 years of American Art for the Whitney’s Bicentennial Exhibition, which was effectively the personal art collection of John D. Rockefeller, the Standard Oil Barron and nation’s first billionaire.
After the 1980s, with the partial exception of the Guerilla Girls, socially engaged artists sought-out ways to work fully-outside the institutional frame of high art. The AIDS activist group Gran Fury created public campaigns displayed as advertising on city buses, Neo-Situationist Tactical Media artists like Electronic Disturbance Theater, Critical Art Ensemble focused on interventions into digital and biological technologies, while community-based social practice artists such as Rick Lowe with project Row Houses in Houston, Texas, or maintenance artist Mierle Laderman-Ukeles, produced projects in collaboration with municipal agencies. But fast-forward to the present moment, and after several decades of relative disinterest in treating cultural institutions as a site of protest, we find a sweeping resurgence of direct engagement in the art world. This is especially so, since the global financial crash of 2008, in which we find artists becoming increasingly engaged in a wide-range of cultural activism, much of it starting-off as a means of addressing the art-world’s stupendously asymmetrical economic structure with groups such as bfamfaphd.org, Occupy Museums, Debt-Fair, and Working Artists for the Greater Economy or WAGE, but soon after expanding to include system-wide condemnation of high culture’s institutional ties to neighborhood gentrification, the fossil fuel industry, pharmaceutical companies that push opioids, and a call for the removal of “toxic” trustees with links to arms manufacturing, private debt asset management and so-called artwashed income.[5]
For example, British art collective Liberate Tate carried out six-years of actions in protest of the Tate Museum’s petrodollar contributions from British Petroleum (BP), including dousing a volunteer with thick tar-like goo, an action the group insisted was also an homage to Black Square, a1915 painting by Russian avant-garde artist Kazimir Malevich whose work was simultaneously featured at the museum.[6] Though never acknowledging the success of such direct art activism on its donor policies, the museum announced an end to its affiliation with BP in 2016. Similarly, though with less of a conclusive outcome, Gulf Labor Coalition and Global Ultra Luxury Faction (G.U.L.F.) agitated against the Guggenheim Museum’s planned Abu Dhabi facility, boycotting, publicly chastising, debating and eventually intervening and occupying both the flagship New York 5th Avenue location, and Peggy Guggenheim house in Venice, Italy. In 2017 work stopped on the new building where treatment of migrant construction workers by the United Arab Emirates (UAE) is described by Human Rights Watch as seriously exploitative, with internal critics of the regime silenced by imprisonment.[7] Members of Gulf Labor/G.U.L.F. were themselves put under surveillance and later blocked from entry into the UAE, allegedly “for security reasons.”[8]
Given all of the “good trouble,” as the late John Lewis called his civil rights activism, let me return to my opening question to ask again: why the embrace, sometimes awkward embrace perhaps, by mainstream institutions of socially engaged and activist art now? Here is a tentative checklist.
Naturally, we might first, attribute this recent interest in radical art groups, activist art and collectivism to a new generation of art historians, critics, curators and arts administrators expanding the range of sanctioned cultural production as they displace more object-oriented art world gatekeepers. And while this is doubt this is one important factor, it implies conventional modes of top-down validation, a claim this essay, and all of my work, have sought to dispute. A second explanation hinges on the need for major cultural drivers such as museums, biennials and art collectors to remain up-to-date with regard to new developments. And who could deny, that the current and impressive wave of socially engaged art with its myriad array of participatory projects, informal collectives and racialized aestheticization, can only be ignored at the cost of irrelevance. This is also not entirely incorrect, but neither is it a totally satisfying explanation, nor is it a strictly new phenomenon. In the late 1980s and early 1990s a series of high-profile exhibitions featured politicized and collective art including the Museum of Modern Art’s Committed to Print in 1988, Group Material’s Democracy Project and Martha Roslers’s If you Lived Here between 1988 and 1989 for the Dia Art Foundation, and the 1993 Whitney Biennial, an exhibition which despite its rather tepid effort at introducing audiences to socially engaged art even earned the disparaging label “politically correct.”[9] In sum, although art’s social agency has repeatedly been forced into temporary visibility, usually as a response to extra-artistic circumstances, as was the case in the 1920s and 1930s, and the 1960s and 1970s and late 1980s, it has just as rapidly submerged again out of sight. That is until it doesn’t, or until it won’t. This is the situation I believe we have arrived at today, as the abstract, and typically fragmented “offscreen” presence of cultural labor is materializing into a distinct social agency. This has in tern led to a condition that, with apologies to philosopher Giorgio Agamben, I call our “bare art world,” one in which the presumed sovereignty and freedom of high culture has been stripped-clean of its claims to autonomy, and in which the economic and political contradictions of the art world are becoming impossible to conceal.
First, let us address a stubborn issue: art was never the exceptional and autonomous human pursuit promised by so many art historians and aestheticians since at least the time of Shiller and Kant. This widely held view renders artistic production a unique mode of human labor, a type of work unmotivated by wages or capital or disciplinary authority. In a word, artistic autonomy came to define human freedom in an all too inviting romance of bourgeois idealism. But whether under capitalism or socialism or anarcho-libertarianism, what is defined as artistic culture is always mediated by institutional and ideological structures. This mediation invariably assists, exploits or appears to impede the work of the imagination, regardless if it is carried out by professionalized artists compelled to reject their administrative overlords in the name of freedom, or the “anti-institutional” labor of gritty underground, street, or samizdat artists, or even within the vast, unlit sphere of DIY, informal, and amateur arts, forms of informal cultural practice that have become inescapable in recent times thanks to the Internet. And yet, what is significant today is that sometime in the late 1980s, the emerging neoliberal economy began subsuming the mythical attributes of artistic labor into the capitalist market place as never before. Imagination, creativity, and thinking “outside the box,” became watchwords of the so-called new economy.
Previously ignored, suppressed, or feared, these volatile veins of affective value generated by everyday post-industrial life were mined and monetized. Inevitably, this knowledge and creativity mining exposed art’s inherent social productivity, far more profoundly than the wave of post-1968 social art historians and practitioners of institutional critique ever imagined. This dual process of artistic assimilation and institutional unconcealment begain ramping-up after the collapse of the socialist world in the early 1990s. In the United States in particular, high culture’s nearly fifty years of service to the ideology of bourgeois individual freedom suddenly required a substantial reboot.
By 1989, the necessity of promoting America’s cultural freedom as an ideological contrast to their rival geopolitical hegemon, the Soviet Union, vanishes, and in its place, the National Endowment for the Arts will spend much of the 1990s shifting towards prioritizing utilitarian values, including the social impact of culture and community-based art programs. In other words, the end of the Cold War left art institutions in the US -and other capitalist nations- scrambling for a new paradigm that might grant continued state support despite assertions we had reached “the end of history,” to cite neo-libertarian theorist Francis Kukuyama and his famous1992 application of Hegel to the triumph of Western style capitalism over the socialist East. Thus, privatization, marketization, and propositions that museums might serve as regional engines of economic co-productivity soon gave birth to projects such as the Guggenheim Bilbao and the Massachusetts Museum of Contemporary Art (MASS MoCA), both dreamt-up by former Guggenheim director Thomas Krens, perhaps the first major museum director to hold an MBA from the Yale School of Management, rather than a traditional doctorate in art history. But Krens’ mission of harnessing contemporary art’s alleged tourist dollar magnetism in order to spur economic growth in financially underdeveloped regions, became a parody of its own post-Cold War ambition when the Guggenheim Foundation announced a new museum franchise in Abu Dhabi, a kingdom riven with human rights and migrant labor abuses (and we already visited the response by Gulf Labor and Global Ultra Luxury Faction to this development).
Nevertheless, the coup de grâce for the notion of artistic autonomy really starts with the aftermath of the 2008 financial crisis and its ensuing uprisings: The Arab Spring, the 15-M indignados encampments in Madrid, and the soon to be global Occupy Wall Street Movement. As artists came to identify with the so-called 99%, and in fact artists often played key-roles organizing these various occupations, even as contemporary art itself has been so conspicuously entwined with the laws of economic value production that it has become ensnared in and by capital’s increasingly rapid and reoccurring political and economic crises. Thus a “bare art world.”
Put differently, the pervasive grammar of the economy has permeated the art world, a place where such conversations once remained well out of sight. As the late Randy Martin observes about the overall affect of neoliberal society, “if money was, even in the recent past, what people were thought to be more defensive about than any other subject, the veil has, in many ways, been lifted.” [10] Stripped of all romance this radically demystified “bare art world” was no doubt aided by decades of Marxist theorizing and institutional critique, but its delivery to us now, at this moment of ceaseless capitalist crisis, is largely the result of two forces: 1.) recession-hardened, post-Occupy over-indebted artists on one hand, and 2.) a seemingly irrefutable dose of reality offered-up by the culture industry’s own managerial elites on the other, and here we can think of not only the career of Thomas Krens, but the current fascination with NFTs or non-fungible tokens – the art market auctioneer’s answer to bitcoin, and only the latest bare art bubble that follows fast on the heels of art flipping and bundled art asset instruments (maybe someone can explain the NFT phenomenon better that I can hope to in our discussion later on?)
Bare art spreads across a meme-driven cybersphere, leaving “high” culture exposed and on par now with other objects and practices, as high culture’s once fantastical privilege of autonomy plunges to earth, where it is submerged in a realm of dark matter including tactical media, craftivism, DIY street art, and all species of socially engaged and activist art, but also an emerging form of social agency that has always been present within the art world, but is now organizing, expanding and spreading throughout its institutional spaces.
Significantly, while we witness a new surge of socially engaged artistic resistance on the outside of art institutions, we also find a growing unionization movement on the inside, in which museum employees (in the US) seek better pay and working conditions, but also in many instances also demanding such extra-financial improvements as an end to gender and racial workplace bias, and greater overall respect from management and senior staff members, towards junior level staff.
Notably, many of these pro-union museum workers are themselves art-educated graduates with degrees in studio practice and art history. This is, in other words, a generation schooled in the deconstruction of art world spaces and ideological facades by the likes of Michael Asher and Hans Haacke, followed by Andrea Fraser and Fred Wilson and who, after some fifty years of Institutional Critique, are consciously, or perhaps more likely unconsciously, applying these lessons to their own precarious real-world circumstances. Except this new variant of Institutional Critique -if you will permit me this somewhat brazen characterization- is not manifest as works of art, but instead involves an intervention by cultural workers, for cultural workers. And certainly, the very term “cultural worker” has its own peculiar etymology, with roots in the 1930s if I am not mistaken, though frequently and problematically used by Conceptualists and minimalists in the 1960s as a means of identifying with the proletariat. Which is to say that today, art workers are merely art workers, and not just those who make up the creative class or “cognitariet,” the part-time website designers and studio assistants, but also the hundreds of highly educated, nominally paid, museum employees who install exhibitions, write press releases, serve lattes and biscotti in the museum cafés, clean bathroom stalls, mop floors, and provide security for the multi-million-dollar objects adorn walls in the white cube citadels of fine art. Think of this unsung art army as a type of non-reflective dark matter, a sphere of cultural labor that has always been invisible within plain sight, even as it has maintained and reproduced the foundational logic of the high art industry, including its neoliberal permutation as enterprise culture.
Therefore, what began as a demand for a fair slice of art’s high cultural assets, is also now weakening the always-fraught boundaries separating art and life, as if to demonstrate, in an echo of early avant-garde proclamations, that the gap between caring for objects, and caring for the collective social wellbeing, must henceforth be annulled.
Complimenting these internal contradictions of an increasingly naked art world is the external (more or less external) cascade of artists trying to escape the confines of high culture altogether. Some approach this by demanding a total decolonization of art and its institutions, including Gulf Labor as we well as DeColonize This Place. All of this might seem to be at bottom, another instance of institutional critique, somewhat akin to the 13 demands made by Art Workers’ Coalition in 1969 in which the group stipulated that the art world must adopt a clear partisan position against racism, sexism, ecological degradation, and the war in Vietnam. But reforming the ideology of high culture, as was the case with Art Worker’s Coalition, the Black Emergency Cultural Coalition and Women Artists in Revolution in 1969, is quite a different gambit from seeking the elimination of the entire foundation on which high culture rests. When the Congolese activist Mwazulu Diyabanza defiantly detached an ancient African artifact from its display pedestal at the Quai Branly Museum in Paris, and then proceeded to attempt and walk-out of building, all the while loudly proclaiming that “we want our riches back,” the implication of this action is not to “how can we rethink the way that these mostly purloined objects can be better displayed and more correctly contextualized?” The logical outcome of such decolonial thoughts and deeds goes far beyond re-arranging the deck chairs by calling into doubt the entire cultural paradigm of art inherited from the19th Century, including its implicit conviction that European, mostly Northern European and Anglo-American, societies are uniquely suited to study, collect and interpret the history and artifacts generated by other peoples, even when these “other” peoples are located within their national boundaries as cultural subgroups, migrants or refugees.
Locally and globally, this set of assumptions is being called into question, with a corollary movement of monumentacide against the publicly celebrated legacy of White Supremacy. Certainly, monument take-downs, have a very long and convoluted history, but these actions have been accelerating since May 25th, 2020, when “George Floyd,” an unarmed Black man, was suffocated to death by Minneapolis police during an arrest, his death captured on a cell phone by a nearby witness. According to some researchers, the citizen’s video documentation of Floyd’s horrific asphyxiation was viewed some 1.4 billion times between the time of the assault, and less than two weeks later on June 5th. Three months later, close to 40 Confederate monuments were either officially removed or scheduled for removal, with many also taken-down through acts of collective civil disobedience. This soon built upon a nearly global wave of monument take-downs from South Africa to Belgium, from the Caribbean to the US South, (but also the North), in which memorials, statues, and other public tributes to White supremacist men, and sometimes women, were dethroned: toppled-over, deformed, beheaded, tossed in streams and harbors, typically with the less easily assailable plinth or pedestal left behind, although now coated in graffiti reading “George Floyd,” or “Black Lives Matter,” or simply “BLM.” These collectively transmuted vacant perches and pedestals of broken concrete or marble, sometimes revealing bare and rusted anchoring bolts jutting up from their graffiti-covered surfaces, nevertheless keep dragging our eyes and thoughts and sense of identity back to a hole or space in the surplus archive of cultural time. We glimpse some version of the past that sought to convince us about a seemingly less conflicted world, that now speaks clearly to our bad new days of unsettled and unsettling catastrophes.
To my mind, these ostensibly “bad deeds” constitute an attempt to push-back against the economic and political crisis that has emerged, certainly since 2008, but more emphatically, following the 2016 Brexit and US Presidential Elections. Writing in the aftermath of these stupefying events, and after four years of chaotic anti-governance climaxing in the Jan 6, 2021 populist right-wing riot in Washington DC, uncanny political, I believe we have collectively entered into the unpresent: a distinct mutation of Capitalist Realism, a concept made famous by the late Mark Fisher.
For Fisher, Capitalist Realism was the aestheticization and so-called normalization of post-socialist, post-Cold War capitalism: a historically contingent condition positing itself as the only imaginable reality. All alternatives to this system, so we are led to believe, have either failed, or are now incorporated into capital’s spectacularized hegemony as commodified lifestyle choices, think of the counter-culture, Punk, Goth, Hip-Hop, as obvious examples, but also contemporary art and its faith in a reconstituted avant-garde. Capitalist Realism’s implicit promise was to offer in exchange for its unchallenged hegemony an assurance that periodic economic and political catastrophes would be followed by a return to business as usual, that is to say, a return to the familiar, if monotonous terrain of Capitalist Realism. What makes the unpresent an unforeseeable variant of Fischer’s thesis, is the growing sense that our current crisis is not a temporary detour, but is instead a permanent pathological state from which any notion of a past or future perceived to be fundamentally different and better than the delirium of our current situation has been so completely excised. More than this, fading fast into inaccessibility was even the memory of the memory that alternative possibilities once existed. Then came weeks of monumentacide last Spring: a collective and highly socially cooperative process of wounding or lacerating centuries of a certain dominant historical narrative. And despite the movement’s attempt to fully erase public representations of White supremacy, colonialism, patriarchy, and class oppression, paradoxically, its destructive negativity served to illuminate memory’s lacuna by way of deletion.
In conclusion: both in the late 1960s and early 1970s, as well as over the past decade, what typically began as an effort by cultural workers for equitable pay and greater security swiftly intensified into a broader program of demands. And because of the forked genealogy of socially engaged art ever since the post-1968 era, with some practitioners attempting to jettison the art world and the avant-garde altogether in a move theorist Stephen Wright terms escapology, while another branch focused its attention on challenging the art world’s internal doctrine of alleged economic and political neutrality, it is the legacy of this dual critique that now confronts, and is in turn confronted by, a radically denuded, bare art world, one that is no longer capable of disguising its dependency on socialized forces of artistic labor that maintain and reproduce its ideological architecture.
Raucous public pageants, banner drops, giant puppets, politicized street performances, boycott campaigns, museum occupations, guerrilla monumentacides, demands that compromised individuals be removed from museum boards, and above all else, calls for the total decolonization of high culture, suggest that the likely answer to my initial question involving the embrace of socially engaged art by mainstream art institutions something akin to sympathetic magic, a sort of cargo-cult effigy intended to hold at bay the far more consequential challenge that activist and socially engaged art agency represents to the art world’s unvarnished status quo. To cite John Roberts, radical art internalizes “the retroactive and non-linear latency of revolutionary time in order to unleash the present from the necessities of chronological time.”[11] As opposed to clever pop-up quizzes about radicalized art collectives that no longer pose, or appear to no longer present, a danger to the present, I keep thinking of recent, COVID era landscapes dotted with empty monument pedestals. Objects collectively transmuted from remnants to revenants. Now vacant perches made of broken concrete or marble, sometimes revealing bare and rusted anchoring bolts jutting up and out of their graffiti-covered surfaces. Weird uncanny things that keep dragging our eyes and thoughts and sense of identity back over to the holes torn into a surplus archive of cultural time, overflowing with hopes and failures, possibilities and liberatory movements from below. And it is there, in this incision, that we glimpse a version of the past that once sought to convince us about a seemingly unconflicted world, and its stable social hierarchies, but which now speaks to us about our bad new days of unsettling delirium and crisis, and unstoppable, buoyant rebellion.
[1] The Guggenheim, MoMa, Whitney, New Museum have all attracted the attention of art activists, meanwhile, to Tate’s credit, in 2019 its board refused future financial donations from the Sackler family following the opioid addiction scandal, and in 2016, after six years of steady protest by the activist art collective Liberate Tate, the institution also stopped accepting support from British Petroleum. Neither decision, however, was made without a public confrontation over ethics, a spur that we find necessary with major museums and collections that seek to distance themselves from toxic assets, artwashed income, Nazi paintings and pillaged colonial artifacts.
[2] Cited Benjamin H. D. Buchloh, Neo-avantgarde and Culture Industry: Essays on European and American Art from 1955 to 1975. MIT Press, 2000. 208
[3] Cited by Grace Glueck, “Ousted Curator Assails Guggenheim,” New York Times, May 1, 1971. 22.
[4] Aruna D/Souza, “What can we learn from Institutional Critique ?,” Art in America, October 29, 2019. https://www.artnews.com/art-in-america/features/hans-haacke-new-museum-retrospective-institutional-critique-63666/
[5] Warren Kanders at the Whitney and Larry Fink at the MoMA
[6] “Liberate Tate Plans Mass Protest Over BP Sponsorship,” Artnet News, September 2, 2014: https://news.artnet.com/art-world/liberate-tate-plans-mass-protest-over-bp-sponsorship-90479
[7] Human Rights Watch, “United Arab Emirates: Events of 2019,” World Report 2020: https://www.hrw.org/world-report/2020/country-chapters/united-arab-emirates
[8] See: Gulf Labor et al, The Gulf: high culture/hard labor. OR Books, 2015, and “For Security Reasons,” A Gulf Labor Report, July 2015: https://gulflabor.org/wp-content/uploads/2015/07/GulfLaborReport_July2015_images.pdf
[9] Christopher Knight citing Biennial organizer Nan Golden in his review, “Crushed by Its Good Intentions…” Los Angeles Times, March 10, 1993, and before the late 1980 early 1990 wave of interest in social and politically engaged art British institutions hosted a series of similar exhibitions in the late 1970s including: Art For Whom, Serpentine Gallery, London (22 April – 14 May 1978); Three Perspectives on British Photography: Recent British Photography at the Hayward Gallery that included the Hackney Flashers collective; Social Strategies by Women Artists at the Tate, also presented in Belfast in 1981and in New York, Art from the British Left, curated by Lucy R.Lippard, Artists Space, 1979, which formed the direct antecedent to the activist art collective Political Art Documentation/Distribution one year later (See pages XXX) Los Angeles ? Paris ?
[10] Randy Martin, The Financialization of Everyday Life, p 37.
[11] Roberts, Revolutionary Time and the Avant-Garde, p 48