Cultures of Violence

Visual Arts and Political Violence

Ruth Kinna, Gillian Whiteley

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2020
• ISBN:
  9780429863455
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Law
• Subtopic: Criminal Law
• Index: Law

Investigating art practitioners' responses to violence, this book considers how artists have used art practices to rethink concepts of violence and non-violence. It explores the strategies that artists have deployed to expose physical and symbolic violence through representational, performative and interventional means.

It examines how intellectual and material contexts have affected art interventions and how visual arts can open up critical spaces to explore violence without reinforcement or recuperation. Its premises are that art is not only able to contest prevailing norms about violence but that contemporary artists are consciously engaging with publics through their practice in order to do so. Contributors respond to three questions: how can political violence be understood or interpreted through art? How are publics understood or identified? How are art interventions designed to shift, challenge or respond to public perceptions of political violence and how are they constrained by them? They discuss violence in the everyday and at state level: the Watts' Rebellion and Occupy, repression in Russia, domination in Hong Kong, the violence of migration and the unfolding art activist logic of the sigma portfolio.

Asking how public debates can be shaped through the visual and performing arts and setting taboos about violence to one side, the volume provides an innovative approach to a perennial issue of interest to scholars of international politics, art and cultural studies.

1
From Watts to Wall Street

A Situationist analysis of political violence

Martin Lang

Introduction

This chapter approaches the theme of political violence through a Situation-ist lens. The Situationist International (SI) were highly political artists that could be considered proto art activists, if not art activists proper. The focus of the first part of the chapter will be their essay ‘The Decline and Fall of the Spectacle Commodity Economy’ – first published in the tenth issue of the Situationists’ eponymous journal Internationale Situationiste on 10 March 1966,¹ seven months after the Watts Rebellion (Los Angeles, 1965) that it analyses.² The chapter is, then, from the outset concerned with artists’ interpretations of, as well as opinions and influences on, political violence.

‘The Decline and Fall…’ has received little critical attention. Only Heath Schultz’s recent article addresses the SI text in depth (Schultz, 2018). Schultz contrasts Debord’s ‘Marxism’ with Afropessimism, ultimately to show that the two positions are not as unreconcilable as they first appear. He does this, largely, through an analysis of imagery of the Watts Rebellion in Debord’s film version of Society of the Spectacle (1973).

Gavin Grindon dedicates a section of his 2015 essay on what he calls the Situationists’ ‘fantasy of brainwashed political violence’ to their assessment of Watts. Like Shultz, he focuses on their use of imagery (from Watts) and accuses them of not engaging with Watts directly but through ‘the spectacle of Watts projected across the media’ (Grindon, 2015b: 79). While Grindon recognises ‘riot’ as ‘an open legal category blanketing a variety of particular forms of mass-cultural public assembly as “disorder”’, he nonetheless describes Watts as ‘a black working class riot’ (Grindon, 2015b: 79). Grin-don’s verdict is that the SI’s assessment of Watts is to fetishise its political violence, rather than recognise the potential of the riot-as-festival. Although Grindon is critical, ‘The Decline and Fall…’ is not the main focus of his essay: it is not mentioned until after seventeen pages.

The first major study on the SI – Sadie Plant’s The Most Radical Gesture (first published in 1992) – only mentions ‘The Decline and Fall…’ once. Plant claims that it deals with a situation that has ‘since reasserted itself in countless instances from Handsworth to Brixton’ (2002: 30). Plant likens the SI assessment that Watts was a commodity ‘riot’ to the Poll Tax riots (UK, 1990), in which she claims emblems of consumption were attacked – ‘the most expensive shops, the brightest neon signs, and the most prestigious cars’ (2002: 31). The Situationist claim – that the unrest of 1965 was a rebellion against the commodity economy, not a ‘race riot’ – will be the central contention of this chapter.³

Other books on the SI similarly pay short shrift to their assessment of the Watts Rebellion. McKenzie Wark does not mention the essay in The Spectacle of Disintegration (2013), although she does mention Watts in passing. Simon Sadler’s The Situationist City (1998) does not mention it either, although he includes an illustration on page 162.

In Beneath the Beach the Street (first published 2011), Wark dedicates nearly a couple of pages to ‘The Decline and Fall…’. She partly agrees with the SI assessment that the Watts Rebellion was a revolt against the commodity – concurring that Black Americans were able to see through the spectacle. She also considers Watts as a ‘cruel reminder of inequity to Black America’ (Wark, 2015: 148). Wark notes that the SI account omitted many details: ‘the thirty dead, the thousands injured, the four thousand arrests’ (2015: 148). However, it is uncertain how much attention she really gives the matter, since she incorrectly claims, ‘Before Watts, there was Newark, July that same year’ (2015: 147) – in fact the riots in Newark took place two years later in July 1967.

Building on these accounts, this chapter will include a substantial analysis of Situationists’ account of Watts, subjecting their claims to scrutiny by comparing them to other historical sources, such as government inquiries and newspaper reports – both contemporary to the events and looking back on various anniversaries and milestones.

The second text that I refer to in the first part of this chapter is Black Mask’s account of the Newark ‘riots’, published in the seventh issue of their eponymous newspaper (1967). Black Mask were certainly art activists and might also be considered the SI’s New York wing. Gavin Grindon writes that they were ‘excluded from the Situationist International without having ever agreed to join’ (2015a: 186). According to Grindon, Black Mask were in contact with the ‘English Situationists’ (T.J. Clark, Donald Nicholson Smith, Charles Radcliffe, Dave and Stuart Wise), and leading Belgian Situationist Raoul Vaneigem ‘travelled to New York to visit potential situationists there, but refused to meet Morea’ (2015a: 185–6).⁴ When the English Situationists protested Black Mask’s exclusion, they too were expelled (Grindon, 2015: 186). Grindon draws parallels between the expulsion of Surrealists and Black Mask’s situation – terming them ‘dissident Situationists’ (2015a: 187).

The originality of the second part of the chapter will lie in its application of the Situationist analyses of political violence in the 1960s to more contemporary iterations. It will highlight similarities between the Situation-ists’ assessment of the Watts Rebellion, Black Mask’s account of the Newark riots and the ‘August riots’ of 2011.⁵ The aim, as will become clear, is to question whether the ‘long, hot summer of 1967’⁶ and the ‘European Summer’ of 2011 played comparable roles as precursors to the occupations that came shortly after (May’68/Occupy).⁷ The second part also applies the Situationist analysis of Watts to Occupy, highlighting its moralistic and individualistic ethos to make surprising links with earlier claims about race and class. Then, investigation into recent scholarship on race and class will inform my final assessment of the Situationist claims made in ‘The Decline and Fall of the Spectacle-Commodity Economy’ and whether they remain relevant today.

The Watts Rebellion and the long, hot summer of 1967

In the aftermath of the protests, occupations and riots of May’68, Situation-ist René Viénet claimed that ‘the commodity system was undoubtedly the target of the aggressiveness shown by the masses’ (2014: §6).⁸ He quotes de Gaulle’s televised speech of 7 June 1968, in which the French president also acknowledged that ‘this explosion was provoked by groups in revolt against modern consumer and technical society’ (Viénet, 2014: §8). Viénet notes that:

The situationists had foreseen for years that the permanent incitement to accumulate the most diverse objects, in exchange for the insidious counterpart of money, would one day provoke the anger of masses abused and treated as consumption machines.

(2014: §6)

Indeed, the SI did foresee a build-up of mass dissatisfaction with consumer capitalism: not in France but in the United States. They took a keen interest in US race relations and civil unrest, imagining the Watts Rebellion as the first stage in a broader struggle, signs of which they saw in the 1964 student strike at University of Berkeley that was linked to both civil rights and the Vietnam War. They predicted that African Americans had the potential to ‘unmask the contradictions of the most advanced capitalist system’ (Situ-ationist International, 2006: 195). In the obituary of ‘the man who started the [Watts] riot’, the New York Times described the Watts Rebellion as the biggest insurrection by African Americans in the United States since the slave revolts (25 December 1986). The uprising in Watts was the catalyst for a series of riots across America (1965–67) that I refer to as the ‘long, hot summers’.⁹

At first, it seemed obvious that the Watts ‘riots’ were ‘race riots’, as they were described as such in the Los Angeles Times. For example, on 13 August they reported that an eighteen-year-old girl admitted to throwing bricks and rocks at ‘anything white’ (Hillinger and Jones, 1965). The LA Times also reported on how the riots were perceived abroad. It was front-page news in several countries, including the UK and South Africa. On 15 August, under the headline ‘Reds Call L.A. Rioting Evidence of Race Bias’, they reported that the foreign communist press was taking the opportunity to highlight US discontent (Associated Press, 1965). The New China News Agency is reported to have said that the riot was evidence of ‘a general outburst of their (negroes) pent-up dissatisfaction’ – the brackets, we assume, were inserted by the LA Times.

Contemporary reports from the LA Times did refer to racial tensions, but headlines also referred to ‘negro heroism’ saving whites (13 August 1965). Referring to sociologists’ and other expert opinions, mixed reasons were reported for the rioting (on 14 and 17 August) and even doubts that ‘racial hostility’ was the cause of the riots at all (14 August). The SI went further, declaring that ‘The Watts riot was not a racial conflict’ (Situationist International, 2006: 196). Instead, they claimed that what they were witnessing was a ‘rebellion against the commodity… in which worker-consumers are hierarchically subordinated to commodity standards’ (2006: 197).

The SI proclaimed that looters targeted ‘black shops’ and left ‘whites’ alone, only targeting white police officers. Similarly, their analysis of ‘black-on-black’ crimes is used as evidence that Watts was not a race riot: ‘black solidarity did not extend to black store-owners or even to black car-drivers’ (Situationist International, 2006: 196). Their estimation of events is contradicted by some news reports. For example, a reporter for the Los Angeles Sentinel (the principal paper serving the black community at the time) reported that ‘the problem, as far as the residents were concerned, is that they were white-owned stores, selling substandard stuff for high prices’ (Landsberg and Reitman, 2005). The Sentinel also reported how a large supermarket, notorious for bad quality food, was burned to the ground, without even being looted, while a tiny grocery store was left untouched because it was black-owned.

The Sentinel and some of the reports in the LA Times seem to cast doubt on the SI account. Were the SI unfairly attributing a revolt against consumer capitalism to a series of incidents on the other side of the world that they could not comprehend? Or, could it be that they were right? Might we consider that the supermarket owners happened to be white but also represented a ruling elite that owned property in a working-class neighbourhood?

The SI were not alone in their assessment. We have already seen that popular accounts were conflicted regarding the cause of the ‘riots’, but there is also testimony from more authoritative sources. Two days after the unrest ended, Martin Luther King visited Watts and subsequently declared that the causes were

environmental and not racial. The economic deprivation, social isolation, inadequate housing, and general despair of thousands of Negroes teeming in Northern and Western ghettos are the ready seeds which give birth to tragic expressions of violence.

(https://kinginstitute.stanford.edu)

As is customary following riots, an inquiry was set up to establish the cause. The McCone Commission’s report recommended, among other things: ‘“emergency” literacy and preschool programs, improved police-community ties, increased low-income housing, more job-training projects, upgraded health-care services, more efficient public transportation’ – although on the twenty-fifth anniversary of the riots the LA Times reported that most of these measures were never implemented (Dawsey, 1990).

The SI declared that one reason the unrest was more likely in LA than other US cities was relative poverty. African Americans in LA, they tell us, were wealthier than the average African American, but they were also surrounded by the ‘superopulence’ of Hollywood ‘that is flaunted all around them’ (Situationist International, 2006: 198). Previous revolutions have encountered the problem of scarcity; the Watts Rebellion highlighted the problem of abundance. The SI recognised this when they noted that:

Unable to believe in any significant chance of integration or promotion, the Los Angeles blacks take modern capitalist propaganda, its publicity of abundance, literally. They want to possess now all the objects shown and ...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Series Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Contents
• List of contributors
• Acknowledgments
• Introduction: ‘art, culture and violence’
• 1 From Watts to Wall Street: a Situationist analysis of political violence
• 2 Protest art and public space: Oleg Kulik and the strategies of Moscow Actionism
• 3 Project sigma: the temporality of activism
• 4 Challenging state-led political violence with art activism: focus on borders
• 5 Power v. violence: how can contemporary art create a ‘space of appearance’ and generate social change?
• Index