anastas gabri means without end

8/11/2019 Anastas Gabri Means Without End

1/22

Means without End:Ayreen Anastas and Rene Gabris Camp Campaign*

T.J. DEMOS

OCTOBER 126, Fall 2008, pp. 6990. 2008 October Magazine, Ltd. and Massachusetts Institute of Technology.

How is it that a camp like Guantnamo Bay can exist in our time? With thisquestion Ayreen Anastas and Rene Gabri initiated Camp Campaign, a recent process-intense investigation of a political issue that continues to be urgenttodaynearly eight years after the 2001 invasion of Afghanistan, which precipi-tated the opening of the detention center on the United States naval base in Cubain 2002. The many different iterations of their projectincluding an exploratoryroad trip across the US; several videos, a Super-8 film, and a slide show, whichformed part of a gallery exhibition at New Yorks Art in General in early 2007; andan active Web site containing a variety of political texts and archived podcasts(www.campcampaign.info)indicate the expansiveness of their approach to thisvexing question. Not surprisingly, their campaigna term diverted here from itspolitical or military associationssoon spiraled into multiple questions concern-

ing human rights, constitutional protections for the stateless, and viable modes ofpolitical contestation currently available within artistic practice. Anastas andGabri included these and other questions in their detailed map of the US thatcharts the journey they took from New York to Los Angeles during July andAugust, 2006: What is the legal status of the detainees in Guantnamo Bay? Whois the subject of human rights? What is the status of a human being who has beenstripped of any legal standing or any political rights? How to open up this discus-sion to a wider public and to do so in all of its complexities?

Thus was Camp Campaigndirected first of all toward provoking discussion, acentral vehicle for Anastas and Gabri, who have collaborated since 1999. Sincethen they have also been active organizers at 16Beaver, a space initiated to cre-ate and maintain an ongoing platform for the presentation, production, anddiscussion of a variety of artistic/cultural/economic/political projects.1 As an

* An earlier version of this essay appeared in the exhibition catalog Ayreen Anastas & ReneGabri: Camp Campaign, ed. Sofa Hernndez Chong Cuy with Miguel Amado (New York: Art inGeneral, 2006), pp. 3145. My thanks go to Art in General for allowing me to publish its extended

version here.1. See http://www.16beavergroup.org.


2/22

70 OCTOBER

open and inclusive forum for collective exchangeit is the point of manydepartures/arrivals16Beaver has also maintained a Web site and an onlineforum for the documentation and consideration of the collectives past work,which has comprised numerous projects intended as platforms for the critical

engagement of political and artistic issues: for example, Strategies of Resistance(2003) combined a series of conversations in New York, Vienna, and elsewherewith online networking between arts-and-politics-or iented collectives to addressquestions such as Is collective practice inherently more political than individ-ual practice?, and What tactics/strategies of political or collective practicefrom past experiences do you find useful/useless?; 24/7(2003), at theContemporary Art Center in Vilnius, Lithuania, consisted of conversations with

local artists and non-artists follow-ing collaborative readings ofGiorgio Agambens 1998 HomoSacer: Sovereign Power and Bare Life

and a screening of Sal, Pier PaoloPasolinis infamous 1975 film aboutthe decadence of Italian fascism;and Between Us (2006) initiated aresearch project in Seoul andGwangju, South Korea, that waspart aesthetic intervention, partcommunicative scenario in orderto examine the political, cultural,aesthetic, and social aspects of the

various conflicted geographies ofglobalization.2

However, it was with RadioActivein 2002 that Anastas and Gabri firstapproached the topic of the statusof US security and the suppressionof civil rights following the attackson the World Trade Center, whichset the stage for Camp Campaign.

Invited to participate in an exhibition at New Yorks White Box Gallery, the pairdecided to use the opportunity to catalyze debate around censorship in relation

to cultural institutions in the wake of the incipient war in Afghanistan and thebuildup to the bombing and occupation of Iraq. On the day of the openingSeptember 11they posted an Order of Closure notice by the newlyinaugurated but fictitious Homeland Security Cultural Bureau, explaining thatthe Bureaus Director General had determined that the exhibition space at

2. These projects are described and archived on 16Beavers Web site.

Ayreen Anastas and Rene Gabri. Screenshot of theHomeland Security Cultural Bureau home page, fromRadioactive. 2002.


3/22

White Box was [being] used for illegal activit ies and events that pose a threat tonational security.3 The notice clearly played on the charged emotions inspiredby the US governments belligerent and opportunistic response to the WorldTrade Center attacks a year earlier. Two days later, the artists extended the ruse

by distributing a protest letter over email in which they detailed the circum-stances of the closure, identified the responsible Homeland Security CulturalBureau, and provided a link to its (ersatz) Web site, which the artists haddevised in advance, requesting that recipients raise [their] voice against thisclosure. Not surprisingly, heated rejoinders quickly mounted on 16Beavers dis-cussion forum (as well as those maintained by several other artistic and activistgroups). They were soon divided between those outraged at the audacity of thegovernment, others who indignantly scolded the artists for making light of thereal suppression of certain, dissenting voices, and still others who defendedthe artists elaborate hoax as a significant exposure of the self-censorshipalready rife in American cultural institutions.4 But while these responses may all

possess a degree of validity, it is clear that Anastas and Gabris intervention notonly brought to light certain ineffectual elements of post-9/11 left-wing politicalpracticeincluding the lack of critical awareness manifested by automatic peti-tion-signingit also, in so doing, aimed to reinvigorate the space of culturalopposition and critically reflect on its present options. As the artists set out intheir original proposal, these actions will try to generate public debate amongcultural workers and institutions about the ramifications of heightened securityand policing of the Homeland. Furthermore, they will seek to question therole and responsibility of cultural spaces/workers in contesting and calling intoquestion emerging social/political problems.5

Representing an extension of the concerns with heightened security andpolicing that motivated RadioActiveyet without its hoax elementCampCampaignretrained the earlier projects focus onto the specific role of the campin the war on terror since 2001. Like RadioActives questioning of culturalapproaches to political problems, Camp Campaigncontinued this self-reflexive crit-ical impulse. To address Camp Campaigns initial querysuggesting at onceincredulity (how canthe camp at Guantnamo Bay exist?) and an earnest determi-nation to understand its conditions of possibility (howcan it exist?)Anastas andGabri visited numerous types of camps during their trip across the United States,such as a longstanding Native American reservation in New Mexico; apostHurricane Katrina relief camp in New Orleans; an erstwhile internment

Means without End 71

3. The artists censored original project, commissioned by curator Tanya Leighton, was to presenta radio station with programming related to or engaged with 11 September, with responses by figuresboth within and outside the artistic and cultural community, as described on White Boxs Web site.4. These quotes derive from the discussion forum that was hosted on 16Beavers Web site in 2002,archived at http://web.archive.org/web/20030721192029/www.16beavergroup.org/forums/RadioActive.Further responses can be found at http://www.16beavergroup.org/radioactive/artistalk.htm.5. The project proposal can be found at http://www.16beavergroup.org/radioactive.


4/22

camp for Japanese, Italians, and Germans during WWII ; and a former POW camp inOhio that now plays host to the annual NRA National Outdoor Rifle and PistolChampionships. Along the way, they held meetings with legal experts, politicalactivists, and artists, some of which were recorded for local radio programs and sub-

sequently archived on Camp Campaigns Web site. These discussions help to parse thediversity of those camps and maintain the historical specificity of their differenttypes. Nevertheless, these diverse examples share a generalized set of proceduresincluding spatial mechanisms of geographical exclusion, the suspension of law, andthe retraction of civil rights. For Anastas and Gabri, these procedures increasinglydefine the relationship between power and everyday life today, leading the artists tosuggest that the camp is truly the paradigm of our time.6

In terms of the diversity of its engagement, Camp Campaignadvances an innova-tive approach to the intersection of artistic practice and political activism. First of all,Anastas and Gabri have refused the complacent positioning of their activity solelywithin the borders of art, where questions of medium, object production, and repre-

sentational logic tend to prevail. Instead, they have prioritized collective socialengagement and the raising of political awareness in their work, which forms thebasis of an expanded notion of art as cultural practice. It is significant that the artistsroad trip, for instance, constituted an integral component of Camp Campaign, for itemphasizes the projects diversification in terms of both its possible sites of receptionbeyond the art gallerys walls, and its mobilization of a variety of publics, interlocu-tors, and collaborators. In this regard, Anastas and Gabri reinvigorate past models ofcultural activism and social aesthetics, particularly those that turned to collabora-tive process and multidisciplinary practice as a way of addressing the democraticcrises of the Reagan era (think of Group Materials 1984 Timeline: A Chronicle of US

Intervention in Central and Latin America, at P.S.1, orDemocracy, their 198789 exhibi-tion at Dia, which approached four areas of perceived political crisiseducation,electoral politics, cultural participation, and AIDSthrough planning sessions,roundtable discussions, pedagogical displays, town meetings, and the publication of abook).7 Anastas and Gabris model of practiceas manifested most clearly inRadioActivealso resonates with recent interventionist approaches of the recentpast that emerged from that earlier commitment to cultural activism, including thework of Critical Art Ensemble and the Yes Men, which have exploited tacticalmedia and cultural sabotage in order to forward distinct political goalssuch asraising awareness of the presence of GMOs (genetically modified organisms) in

OCTOBER72

6. In Project for an Inhibition in New York or How to Arrest a Hurricanethe roughly fifty-pagescript that in some ways frames Camp Campaign, and is reprinted in its catalogAnastas and Gabri

write that the camp as a paradigm defines a generalized set of procedures, which allow the definitionand establishment of new sets [of operations] in the relationship between power and the everyday lifeof man. Anastas and Gabri, in Camp Campaign, p. 11 (hereafter referred to as Script). A primary ref-erence here is Giorgio Agamben, What is a Camp?, in Means Without End: Notes on Politics(Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2000).7. See David Deitcher, Social Aesthetics, in Democracy: A Project by Group Material (Seattle: BayPress, 1990).


5/22

consumer food products and holding multinationals like Exxon Mobil accountablefor environmental destruction. In such models, the choice of medium and represen-tational strategy is determined by the specific projects political objectives;consequently the tools of cultural intervention become primarily instruments of

social engagement, connecting to the movement for global justice or to the cam-paigns against environmental destruction, homelessness, and neo-imperialism.8

But if Camp Campaignexemplifies arts recent politicizationthough the sim-ple artisticcategorization of their practice is precisely what Anastas and Gabri placein questionthe project was not solely directed toward any practical result (e.g., theclosure of the military camp at Guantnamo Bay) or theoretical resolution: if analy-ses were needed, the projects Web site provided numerous compelling ones byGiorgio Agamben (A Brief History of the State of Exception), Judith Butler(Guantnamo Limbo), and Jacques Rancire (We Prisoners of the Infinite),among others. Rather than simply reiterate the model of cultural activism, CampCampaignsuspended the pragmatic force of its engagement in favor of a sharing of

discourse, an opening up of questions, and a replacement of the declamatory andthe accusatory with the interrogative and the conditional, where the journey repre-sents a means without an end.9 If the paradigm of the camp is what informs theorganization of our cities and states, write Anastas and Gabri in the Script thataccompanied their exhibition and unfolded alongside it, then what can we do?10

Yet this admission proved to be far from a confession of defeat. To explore the vari-ous questions posed in their project, Anastas and Gabri in effect reserved a zoneapart from goal-oriented activism and instrumentalized political engagement, creat-ing a placeone that is mobile and multiple, transformative and generativefromwhich to consider anew issues of representation, strategy, and political practice, and

to do so collaboratively. As they acknowledge in their Script, they refuse to give upthe capacity of the poetic and the aesthetic . . . to generate new meaning or tear awayfrom the past something which is altogether useful still. To think. To question. Tomove. To shift things, unsettle held assumptions, reorganize the perceptual domains,the sensible.11 This destabilized positioning of Camp Campaigns site of interventionclearly disturbed its easy reception in both artistic and political contexts.12Just as the


8. For further examples, see the catalog for the 2004 exhibition at MASS MoCA (which includedthe 16Beaver Group), The Interventionists, eds. Nato Thompson and Gregory Sholette (North Adams,Mass.: MASS MoCA, 2004).9. It thus contrasts with Cultural activism [which] might be defined simply as the use of culturalmeans to try to effect social change, according to Brian Wallis discussion of groups like Border Arts

Workshop, ACT UP, PAD/D, Artists Call, Gran Fury, and Group Material. Democracy and CulturalActivism, inDemocracy, p. 8.10. Script, p. 34.11. Script, p. 16.12. In this regard, still other models come to mind: insofar as Camp Campaignwas organized arounda political issuethe question of the campin relation to a multiplicity of geographical locations, itmight be related to the 1990s development of discursive site specificity as conceptualized in MiwonKwon, One Place After Another: Notes on Site Specificity, October80 (Spring 1997). Similarly perti-nent is the contemporaneous investment in the functional sitei.e., a process, an operation occur-ring between sites, a mapping of institutional and textual filiations and the bodies that move between


6/22

Other Collective (a group of Arab-American artists based in Detroit) asked Anastasand Gabri how exactly their project figures as art, so a radio host of New Yorks WBAIwished to understand Camp Campaigns political function and objectives.13 BecauseCamp Campaignfalls into neither and both categories, it became a location of uncer-tainty, one that defamiliarized the conventional expectations of art and politics alike.

While this uncertainty regarding what is art and what is politics invariablyarose in the reception of Camp Campaign, it is also internal to the projects veryforms; indeed, uncertainty may constitute its very aesthetic condition. Considerthe projects map, suggestively titled Fear Is Somehow Our For Whom? For What? +Proximity to Everything Far Away: on the one hand, it charts the geographical andhistorical appearance of the camp as it has variously come into existence in theUnited States, its legend detailing information regarding each site and describingthe artists activities and experiences there during the trip. For example, onefinds the following annotation for their final visit in California:

Our last trip is through downtown Los Angeles at night. A tent city,hundreds of tents strewn along the sidewalks just south of the largebanks and office towers. Here is an improvised camp comprised of thecitys outcasts, derelicts, mentally ill, drug addicts, poor, homeless,abandoned, or exiles. Here camp is a signifier for where bare liferesides, here camp is a testimony for the failures, the cracks and gaps ofeconomic and social policies.

OCTOBER74

them . . . an informational site, a locus of overlap of text, photographs and video recordings, physicalplaces and things . . . as developed by James Meyer, The Funct ional Site,Documents7 (Fall 1996),p. 21. However, Camp Campaigns sheer mobility and heterogeneity of forms also signal an obviousrupture from the genealogy of site specificity, making this term seem out of place here.13. These conversations are archived on Camp Campaigns Web site.

Anastas and Gabri. Fear IsSomehow Our For Whom?For What? + Proximity toEverything Far Away,fromCamp Campaign. 2006.


7/22

Anastas and Gabri.Detail of Fear Is Somehow Our ForWhom? For What? + Proximity to

Everything Far Away,fromCamp Campaign. 2006.


8/22

On the other hand, the artists also break from this descriptive and analytic tra-jectory by introducing a certain opacity in the maps format, represented by theinclusion of passages of poetic language, stuttering repetitions, and nonsensicalsequences of words. How to navigate the maps territory when one finds the note

Mexico begins here right next to Vancouvers geographical location, and discoversa jumbled list of related concepts and meaningless articles on its periphery: forexample, What is a Camp? camp, concept, crime, an, camp, place, most absolute,conditio inhumana, appear, all, counts, as, as, posterity? The procession disarticulatesdescriptive language, providing a frame of free association, a subtext of subconsciouswonderings around the representation of the United States. These elements obscurethe clarity of the otherwise rational cartographic logic and resist the analogical struc-ture that normally rules the format of maps. In this regard, Camp Campaigns mapdiffers from certain contemporaneous models, such as the various flow charts of theFrench collective Bureau dtudes, which adopt a scientific paradigm of clearly pre-sented objective information to schematize economic, political, and military

networks, with the subjective imagination banished into exile.14 By presenting lan-guages functionality and its lawless breakdown in close proximity, Anastas andGabris map creates an informational site that is simultaneously one of disorienta-tion. It is as if with the map they take a first step toward overcoming the existentialcondition of fear that is named in its title by acknowledging that the distantunknownin terms of both the spacesof exception and the traumatic lawlessnessoflanguageis actually quite near.

What lies behind the simultaneity of political engagement and aesthetic sensi-bility that characterizes Camp Campaign? If renewing the intersection betweenaesthetics and politics has become a major concern in recent years, then it is for two

mainand by now familiarreasons. First, artistic practice is commonly seen tohave forfeited whatever oppositional force and critical purchase it once possessed inthe face of cultures overwhelming commodification and institutionalization.Second, there nevertheless remains a deeply felt urge to respond to the crises of pre-sent-day reality, including the quotidian conditions that support state terrorism andendless war; the growth and spread of economic inequality and the retraction of civilrights; environmental destruction; and mindless consumerism. More, it appearsimperative to do so with a creative subtlety and analytic power that resist the reduc-tive tendencies of political discourse, whether that of the mass media, governmentalpublicity, or protesters rhetoric. For many artists, critics, and curators, this con-flicted condition has entailed a return to cultural activism and collaborative social

engagement in order to transcend what many perceive as arts myopic self-reflexivetendency and domination by market concerns.15 Critics such as Brian Holmes, an

OCTOBER76

14. For further information on Bureau dtudes and further examples of their maps, see:http://utangente.free.fr.15. On this trend, see Grant Kester, Conversation Pieces: Community and Communication in Modern Art(Berkeley: University of California Press, 2004); and Collectivism After Modernism: The Art of Social Imaginationafter 1945, eds. Blake Stimson and Gregory Sholette (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2007).Recent exhibitions have also directly responded to these imperatives, but the risks are obvious: MASS


9/22

occasional 16Beaver collaborator, thus tap into a widely sensed impulse when theyidentify the need to conceptualize new forms and sites of resistance, including the

desire that pushes more and more artists to work outside the limits of their own disci-pline, defined by the notions of free reflexivity and pure aesthetics, incarnated by thegallery-magazine-museum-collection circuit, and haunted by the memory of the nor-mative genres, painting and sculpture.16 The extradisciplinary investigations thatHolmes supports involve occupying a field but bringing it into critical relation withexterior disciplines, thus reinventing each, so that art escapes its specialized form ofenclosure and sociopolitical practices are reinvigorated with creative energy.

Yet while such analyses are doubtlessly provocative (in particular, Holmesscritique of the institutionalization of interdiscipinarity, which, in its sheer ubiq-uity and market-friendliness, threatens to lose whatever critical potential it once

possessed), they are frequently weakened by the quick and summary dismissal ofart (especially as found in the gallery context) as formalist and thus apolitical,severed from life in the streetsan area all too easily idealized by activists.


MoCAs 2004 exhibition The Interventionists brought activist practices into the museum, thereby potentiallyneutralizing them; meanwhile socially-engaged relational aesthetics has attempted to create zones ofconviviality outside of spectacle, reinforcing the institutions in which these practices are inevitably staged.16. Brian Holmes, Extradisciplinary Investigations. For a New Critique of Institutions, February,2007, http://brianholmes.wordpress.com.

Bureau dtudes. Detail ofWorld Government. 2004.


10/22

The reductiveness with which art is treated frequently accompanies a relatedfailure to appreciate the significance of recent theoretical debates regarding thepolitics of artistic representation, which posit the performative force of artwithin institutions that are more complexly defined than many analyses typically

allow.17

It is also striking that current dismissals of the gallery and museum comeat a time when so many curators are dedicated to rethinking and reinventingthe role of such institutionsparticularly so in Europeby developing theircapacity to facilitate distinctly political projects and diverse social aims.18 Yetmore than anything, the often facile denunciation of arts perceived autonomyfails to account for its historical complexity as a longstanding site of negotiationbetweenaesthetics and politics. As Jacques Rancire has argued, it is the veryunstable relationship between the two that governs arts modern appearance,and in this sense, recent challenges to and realignments of the relationshipbetween art and politics indicate something important about the current statusof artistic practice.

Contemporary art, for Rancire, advances a paradigm that stretches back tothe late eighteenth century, to the time of Friedrich Schiller, for whom the notionof aesthetics holds the promise of both a new world of art and a new life for indi-viduals and community.19 At the crossroads between art and life, the aestheticregimeRancires periodizing term for modern artconsequently outlines aparadox of competing claims for autonomy and heteronomy, for arts loyalty to itsown formal laws and its rule by external determinations. Yet Rancire negotiatesthis seeming antinomy by forwarding an innovative reading of autonomy thatavoids the dead end of arts solipsism: for him, autonomy designates a mode ofexperience that transcends the realm of art, rather than identifying an aesthetic

purity existing solely within it.20Art, then, proposes a heterogeneous field whereinthe relation between aesthetics and politics is precisely one of indeterminacy,defining a condition that individual practices will uniquely negotiate. Arts auton-omyas a mode of experiencemight even designate the self-sufficiency of acollective life that does not rend itself into separate spheres of activities, of a com-munity where art and life, art and politics, life and politics are not severed one

OCTOBER78

17. For example, in Extradisciplinary Investigations, Holmes writes of the art gallery thateverything about this specialized aesthetic space is a trap, that it has been instituted as a form ofenclosure. For a counter-model that articulates the art gallerys politicized space, see RosalynDeutsches Agoraphobia in her Evictions: Art and Spat ial Polit ics (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press,1996). According to her compelling argument, the photography of Cindy Sherman, for example, isseen to contest the boundaries between the public and the private, beseeching us to no longer takeit for granted that art institutions are secure interiors, isolated from social space. (p. 315).18. Consider, for instance, the curatorial efforts of Adam Budak, Okwui Enwezor, Charles Esche,

Anselm Franke, Maria Lind, and Nina Mntmann.19. Jacques Rancire, The Aesthetic Revolution and its Outcomes, New Left Review14 (March-

April 2002), p. 133.20. Ibid., p. 136: The autonomy of art and the promise of politics are not counterposed. Theautonomy is the autonomy of experience, not of the work of art. To put it differently, the artwork par-ticipates in the sensorium of autonomy inasmuch as it is not a work of art.


11/22

from another.21 Certainly, Camp Campaignrescues this possibility, and it promptsthe desire, moreover, to expand that reserve of autonomous experienceevenwhile never sacrificing it completelyso that it ultimately challenges the norm ofalienating forms of separation that define everyday life. This argument is certainly

not entirely new. Peter Brger, in his classic account of the avant-garde, askswhether [maintaining] the distance between art and the praxis of life is not a req-uisite for that free space within which alternatives to what exists becomeconceivablei.e., rather than making that space into the site of the sublation ofthe two, as was so often desired in avant-garde practice.22 Camp Campaignneitherdenies autonomous space (although the artists would likely reject the notion that itis simply free) nor gives itself over complacently to the distance between artand life that engenders itand this, in my view, identifies the radical and innova-tive political nature of Anastas and Gabris project, which is to direct itsentwinement of aesthetics and politics against the force of separation that hasarisen recently in relation to the camp.

It is precisely the force of separationbetween life and law, between humanbeing and citizenthat, for Agamben, brings the camp into existence. Whichreturns us to the question of Guantnamo Bay. The camp, as we learn fromAgambens analysis, represents a manifestation of the state of exception (or stateof emergency), for which sovereignty suspends law and creates a space of lawless-ness, a decision that simultaneously constitutes the power of sovereignty,particularly in its limited sense of executive authority. Such a decision createdGuantnamo Bay in the first placea camp on an island where neither US norinternational law applies (including that of the host nation, Cuba, which refusesto recognize the legal validity and territorial claim of the American naval base).

Because in its declared war on terror the Bush administration has claimed to con-front an opponent that is not aligned with any specific nation but rather atransnational organizationi.e., Al-Qaeda and similar groupsit argues that theseextraordinary circumstances justify the suspension of law in the process of respond-ing to the threat, which has led to the creation of the camp at Guantnamo Bay.Accordingly, in the name of national security, detainees have little recourse to legalcounsel, are subject to indefinite detention, and are denied the protections thatensure humane treatment according to international rules for legitimate prison-ers of war (even though these practices are subject to continued legalcontestation). The result, as Judith Butler observes, is that the stateless are terror-ized by the distinction between state violence and terrorism, an artificial andpolitically opportunistic distinction enforced by governmental power.23


21. Ibid. For a related engagement of Rancires arguments vis--vis contemporary art, see ClaireBishop, The Social Turn: Collaboration and its Discontents, Artforum44, no. 6 (February 2006) andArtforums special issue on Rancire, 44, no. 7 (March 2007).22. Peter Brger, Theory of the Avant-Garde, trans. Michael Shaw (Minneapolis: University ofMinnesota Press, 1984), p. 54.23. Judith Butler, Guantnamo Limbo, The Nation(April 1, 2002); online at: http://www.camp-campaign.info/materials.htm.


12/22

Insofar as the stateless and dispossessedwhether refugees or illegal combat-ants, prisoners, or the internally displacedare stripped of rights, Camp Campaign

consequently views them as inhabiting the condition of bare life, which, accordingto Agamben, designates a state of existence shed of the clothing of legal protectionsand exposed to the direct application of state power. In taking up this reasoning,Camp Campaignposits both the historical progression of this condition to its currentwidening basis, and the unique situation of the present state of exception. By visitingvarious camps across the country, Anastas and Gabri reveal how such zones ofanomie have in fact pockmarked the history and geography of the United Statesfrom its very beginningfrom eighteenth-century Native American reservations tocontemporary detention centers. Moreover, by placing these various enclaves in rela-tion to extraterritorial camps like Guantnamo Bay, as well as comparing them to

similar areas in other countries, their research, videos, and conversations seek touncover the structural connections between them, which are infrequently acknowl-edged. For instance, in the year before realizing Camp Campaign, Anastas and Gabritraveled to and researched several international locations, the results of which weresubsequently included in or related to their later project. One location, depicted inBy Many Means Necessary(2006) was Baltimores so-called Middle East, a segregated

OCTOBER80

Anastas and Gabri. Photo of East Baltimore, fromBy Many Means NecessaryBaltimore. 2006.


13/22

zone of poverty, where the urban poor, in this case mostly African American, are tar-geted, deemed a threat, an unwanted population, [their] neighborhoods terrorizedwith flood lights, [and] 24 hour surveillance . . . , as it is described in the Script;another was the village of Daechu-Ri in South Korea, which was under threat and

then destroyed by the expansion of a nearby US military base.24

The pair also traveled to Israel and the Palestinian Occupied Territories,visit ing Al-Lydd and Ramleh, two of Israels mixed cities not far from Tel Aviv,as well as several Bedouin villages in the Al-Naqab that are unrecognized by theIsraeli state. Completed before Camp Campaign, these trips in particular repre-sent important preparation for their later project in that Anastas and Gabriconducted extensive interviews with local inhabitants and political activists,which resulted in several quasi-documentary videos: Day 1: Good Architecture, Day8: Building Vacancy Maps, andDay 12: Valley of the Graces(all 2007). In the first, ahandheld camera records Israeli activist Jeff Halper speaking to an audiencebefore a section of the wall dividing Israel from the West Bank. He explains how

the occupation is advanced not only by the Israeli Defense Forces, but also moresubtly, in its nuts and bolts, by liberal planners and architects. In the secondvideo, the Palestinian architect and activist Buthaina Dabit, facing the cameradirectly, outlines what she sees as Israels historical and continuing program ofethnic cleansing, which she explains with the aid of detailed maps.25 Whilerecorded in straightforward documentary styles, these videos nevertheless man-age to disrupt the seeminglyobjective portrayal of factsthat characterizes the videoscontent: the fragmentation of

the narratives, interrupted fre-quent ly wi th shot s of thelandscape or broken off sud-denly without explanation,implies that the artists rep-resentation of this particularstate of exception simultane-ously challenges its finality byan exposure that can neverbe total, by a depiction thatcan never be complete.

Situated within the con-text of Camp Campaign, each ofthese various cases comes toexemplifywhether formally


24. Script, p. 21. The artists visited South Korea during their participation in the GwangjuBiennale, 2006.25. Cf. Ilan Pappe, The Ethnic Cleansing of Palestine(Oxford: Oneworld, 2006).

Anastas and Gabri. Video still fromDay 8: Building Vacancy Maps,from

What Everybody Knows. 2006present.


14/22

or informallythe suspension of law and the reduction of its inhabitants to a stateof political dispossession. Committed to investigating the notion of the camp asboth historical singularity and modern paradigm, the artists explain how they havesought to explore the recurrent motif of security to justify a suspension of law, a law

which is outside the law, or an outside the law which the law attempts to territorial-ize and with it, a life which falls under a law that is lawless. 26 Indeed, as described inthe Script, Camp Campaignrepresents a project which attempts to not only be pre-sent [to] the ongoing crimes taking place in Guantnamo Bay, Cuba, but to connectthese crimes to other contexts, historical as well as contemporary, far off theAmerican map, in Occupied Palestine, or right in the heart of American cities likeBaltimore or New Orleans.27 By referring to zones of political dispossession as areasof criminalityand thus refusing the extralegal categorization of the camptheartists invoke a law that would designate them illegal, but without specifying its ori-gin. Whether they mean to identify contradictions within US law, to bringinternational law to bear on rogue states, or to point toward a notion of universal

justice remains unclear; what is crucial is that they make the first performative effortto condemn the tortuous legal justification of camps.

One might nevertheless object to the implication that bare life represents astate of metaphysical abandonment, as Judith Butler does, asserting that the vari-ous enclaves of political disenfranchisemente.g., those of migrant workers inGermany or Palestinians living under occupationare not undifferentiatedinstances of bare life but highly juridified states of dispossession.28 She remindsus, moreover, that bare life is a state actively produced, maintained, reiterated, andmonitored by a complex and forcible domain of power, and not exclusively the actof a sovereign or the permutation of sovereign power.29 Yet, while Butler is cer-

tainly right to insist on viewing bare life as a distinct area inscribed withinparticular relations of power and to challenge the reductive definition of sover-eignty, one could respond, with Gabri, that Agamben is also writing about thedispossession that takes place within the framework of the law, whether it is in apply-ing it, as the Nazis did in fully stripping Jews of citizenship (denationalizing) beforesending them to the camps, or in suspending it in the name of preserving it.30 Notonly do Gabri and Anastas acknowledge finding inspiration in Agambens refusal

OCTOBER82

26. Scr ipt , p. 10.27. Ibid. During a public conversation I had with Anastas and Gabri in Beirut as part of theHomeworks IV forum, they described their interest in the camp as both paradigm and singularity(April 20, 2008).28. Judith Butler in conversation with Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak, in Who Sings the Nation-State?Language, Politics, Belonging(London: Seagull Books, 2007), pp. 10, 42.29. Ibid., pp. 1011. Furthermore, if our attention is captured by the lure of the arbitrary decisionismof the sovereign, then we risk inscribing that logic as necessary and forgetting what prompted this inquiryto begin with: the massive problem of statelessness and the demand to find postnational forms of politicalopposition that might begin to address the problem with some efficacy (p. 42). In my view, this is exactly

Agambens point as well.30. Anastas and Gabri discuss Butlers criticism of Agamben with Mntmann in Their Maps vs.Our Maps: A Conversation between Ayreen Anastas, Rene Gabri, and Nina Mntmann, in Manifesta 7:Companion, eds. Adam Budak and Nina Mntmann, et al. (Milan: Silvana, 2008), pp. 37273.


15/22

to acquiesce to a reading of the Nazis as a singular and aberrant exception in thehistory of the world, they believe it urgent to also find that there is somethingwhich took place in those camps that is repeating itself [today]and these reasonsjustify their investigation of the camp as a contemporary paradigm of biopolitics. If

the camp should not be seen exclusively as a historical fact (e.g., Auschwitz) or asan exception reserved only for the inhuman (e.g., Guantnamo Bay) or displacedrefugee (e.g., Palestine), but as the paradigm, the hidden matrix and nomos of thepolitical space in which we are still livingas the artists write in an essay includedon Camp Campaigns Web sitethen the reason is to challenge its existence as ananomaly or freak occurrence, and to comprehend it instead as a means of condi-tioning and establishing (a relation to) [what is now becoming] the norm.32

That said, our present political situation nevertheless appears perilouslyunique and precisely for the reason offered above. As former Legal Director of theCenter for Constitutional Rights Jeff Fogel points out in a radio interview withAnastas and Gabri, US law has historically been reinstated soon after periods of its

suspension (as when the Supreme Court reestablished the writ of habeas corpusfollowing its retraction by President Lincoln during the Civil War). Yet becausethe US currently claims to be fighting an infinite war on terror with neither geo-graphical boundaries nor temporal limitations, we therefore currently face theprospect of an indefinite, potentially permanent, suspension of law (includingcivil liberties that many take to be constitutive of democracy).33 One might rea-sonably conclude, therefore, that today the state of exception has become thenormas Agamben argues, invoking Walter Benjamins famous formulationmade in the context of the Nazi terror.34

If this division of sovereignty and bare life defines our present political era,

then it is precisely againstthat separation that Camp Campaigns joining of aestheticsand politics becomes particularly significant. But rather than a simple collapse orequalization of the two spheres, Anastas and Gabri place them in a relation of inde-terminacy, which transforms their practice into a site of the perpetual reinventionof each. Such a site was created by Camp Campaigns exhibition in early 2007,


31. Ibid., p. 372.32. Anastas and Gabri quote Agambens What is a Camp?, p. 37.33. During the summer of 2008, the US Supreme Court determinedonce againthatGuantnamo Bay detainees do have the constitutional right to bring their cases to federal court to chal-lenge their detention (see Linda Greenhouse, Justices, 5-4, Back Detainee Appeals for Guantnamo,New York Times, June 13, 2008). Delivering a rebuff to the Bush administration, the Courts opiniondeclared it unconstitutional to strip federal courts of jurisdiction to decide on habeas corpuspetitionsfrom those detainees seeking to contest their designation as enemy combatants. In response to similardecisions in the past, Congress has amended statutes regarding jurisdiction, sidestepping the Courtschallenges; however, with the Congress new Democratic majority, there may be a different outcome thistime. Writing for the majority most recently, Justice Anthony Kennedy declared: The laws andConstitution are designed to survive, and remain in force, in extraordinary times.34. Agamben writes that Walter Benjamins diagnosis, which by now is more than fifty years old,has lost none of its relevance. Giorgio Agamben, Means without End, p. 6, referencing WalterBenjamin, Theses on the Philosophy of History, in Illuminations, trans. Harry Zohn (New York:Schocken, 1989), p. 257.


16/22

which built a montage-like media environment inside Art in Generals smallground floor gallery space. The presentation included a Super-8 film projection, aseries of videos playing on two monitors, a projection of slides, and a musicalsoundtrack, which took on an improvised, semi-chaotic cast. Offering both raw

and edited footage from the artists road trip, the display invoked both documen-tary models and fictional scenarios, often running them up against one another.In addition, the multiple components diversified the projects status as bothactivist and artistic, which emerged in part from the provocative relations betweenthe exhibitions diverse and processed materials. In one video, for instance, a seriesof names of Middle Eastern nationalities (Saudi, Yemeni, Egyptian . . . ) cycled as sub-titles against a blank background; a second video showed a slowly progressing sceneof a barbed wire fence surrounding a farm at night, then cut to shots of FortRockvale, a Southwestern casino advertised by garish flashing lights and a giganticplastic figure of a cowboy holding a rifle; and in a third video, one encounteredimages of a placid lake in Wyomings Shoshone National Forest, the soundtrack of

which is suddenly interrupted by a voice that yells out Close Guantnamo Bay!which echoes in the canyons of the Native American land. The selection, in otherwords, dramatized the sheer multiplicity of the projects source materialfrom theencyclopedic listing of nationalities that one might expect to find at GuantnamoBay to the documentation of common mechanisms of spatial division and security,from images suggesting paranoid insecurity and its corresponding hyperbolic com-pensation to recordings of the artists desperate but obviously ineffectiveinterventions. Because there was no pretense to categorize or order the unwieldydata, the exhibition offered a desultory assemblage of resonant alignments, nonsensi-cal contiguities, and potential allegorical relations, which could be neither clearly

summarized nor easily comprehended.Intensifying its unruly presentation, the exhibition changed its appearancewhile in progress, both loosely following and simultaneously revising the artistsscript, which Anastas and Gabri produced over the course of the two-month-long display. Entitled Project for an Inhibition in New York or How Do YouArrest a Hurricane, the Script, written by Anastas and Gabri under the initialsRL and VL, reveals a further rift between the presentation of analysis based onextensive research and the subjective, interpretive relation to that material.35

The roughly fifty-page document, reproduced in the exhibitions catalog, offersa diverse account of theoretical speculation (including engagements with thewritings of Rancire and Agamben), the authors subjective wonderings, and their

expression of questions and doubts, all of which opens a window onto the artiststhought process by revealing some of the deliberations and considerations that liebehind Camp Campaign. Made available, in parts, for reading at Art in General, thetext also provided a discursive entrance for visitors to the dispersed project. As a

OCTOBER84

35. These initials may stand for the Communist revolutionaries Rosa Luxemburg and Vladimir Lenin,although in the Script, RL and VL are artist s and seem to represent the alter-egos of Anastas and Gabri.


17/22

script, the text implied that the exhibition space existed as an uncertain zonebetween art installation, theatrical event, and film set, thus inviting viewers,who were ascribed an unspecified role, to figure out their own relation to thematerial on view.

Playing on the terms inhibition and exhibitionsuggesting both aninhibition of the exhibition and an exhibition of the inhibitionthe show atArt in General reiterated the heterogeneous status of Camp Campaign. On theone hand, the exhibition at times gave the appearance of mounting a politicalcampaignclear in the placement at one point of two large banners in thegallerys windows (thus blinding views of the interior art space from outside),which read Let Americans Know that the World is Against Torture, written inred block letters in English and Cantonese, the language of the local Chinesecommunity. Yet, on the other hand, the exhibition manifested an introvertedelement, which, as conveyed in the Script, opened up a space of subjective ques-tioning pertaining to the limits of Camp Campaigns status as an art exhibition.Most exemplary in this regard was the exhibitions so-called dream sequence,which paralleled a passage in the Script where RL dreams about the use of musicas a device of torture at Guantnamo, prompted by reading an article on thetopic before bed one evening. During that phase, the exhibition introduced sev-eral new videos. One offered a set of quickly edited imagesincluding shots of a

demolished Palestinian village in Gaza, a close up of a Guantnamo detaineeswristband, and a map of Guantnamo Bay, Cubawhich were divided by poeticand tone-sett ing inter-tit les, such as the loneliest loneliness. A second videocontinued this melancholy passage by documenting a nocturnal perambulationaround the immediate vicinity of Art in General during the exhibitions opening,showing scenes of a valet who parks cars amidst dreary empty offices, the police


Anastas and Gabri.Video still from

All Strayed AndWere Incapable ofUsing, from CampCampaign. 2006.


18/22

Anastas andGabri. Video

still from TheRedeemed

Night,

fromCampCampaign.

2006.

Anastas and Gabri. Video still from The Redeemed Night, from Camp Campaign. 2006.


19/22

in a local station, and homeless men sleeping nearby a New York City jail knownas The Tombs. At times accompanied by a soundtrack of death-metal music(the kind played to inmates at Guantnamo), the video concluded inexplicablywith appropriated histor ical TV footage of the famous Egyptian singer Abdel

Halim Hafez performing amongst a circle of Arab musicians and dancers.One immediate effect of this sequence was to bring the art exhibition intoa poignant relationship with the social reality that surrounded it. In otherwords, the artists resisted isolating their gallery exhibit ion, avoiding the poten-tial contradiction of creating a show about systems of enclosure that repeatedsome of the very divisions their project was attempting to analyze and dissolve.The video compilation, moreover, figured as a sort of reversal of roles, imaginglower Manhattan as itself a camp of divided and alienated lives, next to whichthe representation of traditional Arab culture appeared as an antidote of joyouscommunal existence. Joining seemingly irreconcilable spheres, RL wonders inthe course of her dream what life is like in the camp, as her character gestures

toward an identification with its inhabitants that transcends the enemy/friendopposition that characterizes the relation between sovereignty and bare life:What does it sound like at night in Guantnamo? RL asks. At what point doesthe music stop? Do they sing to themselves? What songs do they sing? Theimmediate answers to these questions were discovered not in Guantnamo, buton the streets of New York.

The exhibitions dream sequence consequently figured as a nightmare, notonly because it intimated that the camp currently represents a generalized con-dition of everyday life extending beyond the island that is Guantnamo, but alsobecause it meditated upon the quixotic project of Camp Campaignitselfas if its

goal was comparable to arresting a hurricane. During this time, the exhibitionalso gave further expression of the artists inhibitions: the slide show (whichflashed snapshots from their trip) was turned off, implying a period of dor-mancy and contemplative withdrawal from political engagement, and theprotest banners on the windows were placed on the gallerys floor, whichtempted visitors to walk on them, implicating them in the nightmares unfold-ing. In these ways, the exhibition enacted an allegory of the feared neutralizationof the project, inspired by the artists anxieties regarding the potential perceptionof the exhibitionsand even the projectsinsignificance in the face of the enor-mity of the problems they confronted, and more, the possibility of the absorptionof its critical energies by the very system the artists were struggling against.36

Nevertheless, there was an affirmative element in the dream sequence, par-ticularly as represented by a third video, which reached toward the transformativepotential of art, despite the overarching challenges. The video portrayed sectionsof Camp Campaigns map in tonal reversal on top of which appeared Martin


36. Cf. the Script, p. 16: They have attempted in their exhibition to outline the contours of thequestions that have motivated them . . . . They question their activity, their militancy, their ability toactually raise pertinent questions that could motivate a change.


20/22

Heideggers Nietzsche-inspired Five Statements on Art. In manifesto-like fash-ion, the statements proclaim the global significance of art as a self-creating forceof becoming, as affirmative of life, and of the importance of comprehending artfrom the artists perspective, rather than the recipients.37 This latter suggestion

seemingly obsolete and avant-gardist, but perhaps newly relevant today, especiallyin the context of politically committed practicefinds realization in the subjec-tive elements of Camp Campaign. Anastas and Gabri have refused to abdicate acreative authorial position in relation to their work, which in corresponding mod-els might otherwise risk dilution in endless collaboration or negation by activistinstrumentalization.38 Insofar as the exhibitions dream sequence highlighted anunconscious component of existence, it brought a certain skepticism toward therationalist assumptions of activismparticularly the belief that the exposure ofthe truth behind ideological mystification will lead automatically toward changesin behavior. As the artists ask in the Script at the point immediately following thedream sequences videos: What can be extracted from these tapes which could

resist the language of information? What is this power of the aesthetic?39

It is in light of this latter question that we discover the signal contributionof Camp Campaign: by rendering indeterminate the relation between aestheticsand politics, the project destabilizes each in turn, refusing their clear separationand thereby revivifying the unexpected potential of each when intertwined in anexpanded model of practice. In this sense, Camp Campaign takes on a politicalcast that corresponds to what Rancire terms the politics of aesthetics. While itmounted its documentary evidence of the camps reality and prevalence todayfocusing on urban poverty, rendition airports, unrecognized villages, anddetainment centersit ultimately left one in a state of the interrogative: What is

to be done? How can one represent the paradigm of the camp? What is the rela-tion between artistic representation and political engagement? How canmultiple communities be engaged, expanded, created anew? In this regard, onemight argue that the form of the question was the dominant representationalstructure of Camp Campaign. By refusing the easy solution and consumption ofthe political slogan, the propagandistic logo, the media sound bite, and theactivist poster, Anastas and Gabri disavowed the authoritative rhetoric that

OCTOBER88

37. Five Statements on Art appears in the Script, pp. 2324, as follows: I. Art is the clearest andmost familiar configuration of Becoming. II. Art must be grasped in terms of the artists, the creators,and producers, not the recipients. III. According to the expanded concept of artist, art is the basic

occurrence of all beings; to the extent that they are, beings are self creating, created. IV. Art is the dis-tinctive yes-saying to life. Life is not meant in the narrow sense of human life but is identified withworld. V. Art is more worth than-. For the original, see Martin Heidegger, Nietzsche, vol. 1, trans.David Krell (New York: Harper Collins, 1991).38. This refusal should be understood in the larger context of practices that privilege collaborationabove all else. Consider Bishops take, which she proceeds to criticize: The discursive criteria of social-ly engaged art are, at present, drawn from a tacit analogy between anticapitalism and the Christiangood soul. In this schema, self-sacrifice is triumphant: The artist should renounce authorial presencein favor of allowing participants to speak through him or her. (The Social Turn, p. 183).39. Script, p. 16.


21/22

closes down thinking and critical contemplation, that negates sharing in the actof interpretation throughout the process of creation and reception. Retainingthe ambiguity and complexity of their subject (as well as the ambiguity of theartists relation to it), they resist a false clarity, and by doing so, Camp Campaign

creates the terms of its participatory mode, even as it shares the artists research,analysis, and conclusions. Appropriately, copies of its map were freely availableat the exhibition; its Web site remains openly accessible.40At the same t ime, theproject presents the aesthetics of politics, in the sense that it acknowledges thefact that, as Rancire argues, the political is constituted by enacting rearrange-ments to the dominant organization of the sensiblewhat is sayable, thinkable,and communicable where and when. In other words, rather than subscribing toBenjamins pejorative notion of the aestheticization of politics, the projectsupports Rancires position that politics is not derailed, but constituted by aes-thetics, otherwise understood as the distribution of the sensible.41 By behavingas both artists and political beings, Anastas and Gabri defined Camp Campaignas

a political event, precisely because it stood opposed to the depoliticizing polic-ing of boundaries, conventional identities, and systems of thought that is rife ineveryday life.42

Insofar as Camp Campaignrefuses to separate creative existence from politi-cal being, it aligns itself as well with what Agamben terms a form-of-life, that is,a life that becomes the indivisible locus of political engagement and reflexivethought. Life, according to this formulation, retains its potentiality for undeter-mined development and unlimited growth through the exertion ofintellectuality as antagonistic power, which becomes a force of cohesion andalso of community.43 Correlatively, this commitment means not only resisting

the separating power of zones of lawlessness, but also taking seriously the insta-bility of the law. As Fogel contends, we must be careful not to fetishize the law inthe act of responding to anomie, for that would mean taking law as possessingan inherent power to enforce itself, which it does not have. Only when law isdesacralized and understood as powerless can it become an object of struggle,and only then does it assume power. In this regard, taking the law as unstableadvancing its just realization and challenging its arbitrary enactmentis


40. It was still active during the final preparation of this essay in October, 2008.41. See Jacques Rancire, The Politics of Aesthetics: The Distribution of the Sensible, trans. GabrielRockhill (London: Continuum, 2004).

42. In the Script (4546), Anastas and Gabri explicitly consider these ideas inspired by JacquesRancire, ultimately contesting his celebration of the emancipated spectator, owing to the perceptionthat his realignment risks the eclipse of the artists thought process by collectivist participation and thefree interpretation of viewers. Yet instead of reading Rancires text as amounting to an exclusionof theartist, we might understand it as negotiating between Benjamins artist as producer and RolandBarthes death of the author, wherein the artist is reborn as one readeror storytelleramong oth-ers. See Rancires The Emancipated Spectator, Artforum45, no. 7 (March 2007).43. Agamben, Form-of-Life, in Means without End, pp. 911. Also see Giorgio Agamben,Potentialities: Collected Essays in Philosophy, ed. and trans. Daniel Heller-Roazen (Stanford: StanfordUniversity Press, 2000).


22/22

homologous to Camp Campaigns undoing of the certitude of the relationbetween aesthetics and politics, which means that whatever disciplines, forms ofrepresentation, and signifying models are put into use, they cannot be taken forgranted, their meanings assured or assumed, their rules predetermined. Rather,

the relation between disparate fields becomes an object of ongoing negotia-tionand this is the power of Camp Campaigns aesthetic. How to affirm theirform-of-life, ask Anastas and Gabri, how to see the intrinsic politics of theirentire way of being, as a resistance?44

OCTOBER90

44. Script, p. 9.