Transformative

Avant-Garde and
Other Writings
 Krzysztof Wodiczko

Transformative
To the homeless, undocumented immigrants, school refusers, war veterans,
maquiladora workers, and others who—through their art of public testimony and
fearless speaking—became collaborators in my projects, and who greatly inspired
and informed many ideas elaborated in this book.

Avant-Garde and
Other Writings
Contents

7 Introduction: Reading Identity/Cultural 172 Dis-Armor 254 War Veteran Vehicle

Wodiczko Prosthetics 1998 A n I n t ervi e w w it h B e n Pa rry
Rosalyn Deu ts c h 175 Open Transmission 2012
94 Beyond Hybrid State 2000 263 Making of Out/Inside(rs)
Wa rr e n Nie s lu c h ow ski a n d A n I n t ervi e w
Democracy/Avant-Garde Kr z ys zto f Wo di c zko w it h Jaro s l av A n d Ê l
1992 Monument/Projection 2013
16 Maine College of Art 101 An Interview with Bruce Robbins 276 Casting Shadows:
Commencement Address 1992 184 I Want to be a Catalyst If You See Something...
2004 107 On Alien Staff A n I n t ervi e w A n I n t ervi e w w it h
20 Creating Democracy A n I n te rv ie w w it h Wi l l i a m F u r lo n g K at h l e e n M ac Q u e e n
An In te rview w ith w ith To m Fi n ke l pe a r l 1988 2014
Patri ci a C Phi l l ips 2001 187 Memorial Projection 287 The Inner Public
2003 112 Xenology: Immigrant 1986 2015
26 The City, Democracy Instruments 190 Public Projection
and Artistic Practice 1996 1983
2007 114 Cultural Prosthetics 193 A Conversation between Douglas War/UnWar
38 Realism as a Course of Life 2015 Crimp, Rosalyn Deutsche, Ewa Lajer-
an interview 121 Designing for the City Burcharth and Krzysztof Wodiczko 302 Message from the Artist
with sc apegoat of Strangers 1996 1999
2012 1994 206 The Venice Projections 304 City of Refuge: A 9/11 Memorial
45 I’m for the Academy 129 The Prophet’s Prosthesis 1986 2009
An In te rview w ith K A n I n te rv ie w 208 The Homeless Projection:  310 Response to the October Questionnaire
Banachows ka w ith Ch ri stia n e Pau l A Proposal for the City of New York Au g u s t 2 0 0 7
1977 1999 1986 317 Constructing Peace
48 West/East: The De-politicization 135 A Conversation with Marek Bartelik 210 Projection on the Monument A n I n t ervi e w
of Art D ec e mb er 2 0 0 6 to Friedrich II, Kassel w it h C a ro l B eck er
Kar l Berve rid g e a nd 1987 2012
Kr zysz tof Wo dic z ko 212 Speaking Through Monuments 322 Arc de Triomphe: World Institute for the
1980 Interrogative Design 1988 Abolition of War
51  ersonal Instrument:
P 214 City Hall Tower Projection, Kraków 2010
A Response to Maria Morzuch 142 Interrogative Design 1996 328 The Culture of War
1992 1994 218 Instruments, Monuments, Projections 2012
54 For the De-incapacitation 144 Homeless Vehicle Project 2003 334 Tomb of the Unknown Soldier: 
of the Avant-Garde in Canada Dav id Lu ri e 227 Monumental Interruption The Józef Rotblat Institute for 
1984 a n d Kr z ys zto f Wo di c zko 2004 the Abolition of War
62 Avant-Garde as Public Art: 1988–1989 232 Communicating Through Statues 2015
the Future of a Tradition 149 Poliscar 2004 341 Un-War Cities
1998 1991 2012
66 Liberate the Avant-Garde 153 An Interview with Bruce W Ferguson
Gr ego ry Sho l e tte a nd 1991 Parrhésía/Inner Public
Kr zysz tof Wo dic z ko 161 Alien Staff (Xenobacul) 344 Bibliography
2014 1992 236 The Fearless Monument Speaks
74 Transformative Avant-Garde: 163 The Mouthpiece (Le porte-parole) 2003 345 Acknowledgments
A Manifest of the Present 1993 240 Critical Guests
2014 166 Variants of the Mouthpiece John Rajchman 346 Index
85 Art, Design and Education (Le porte-parole) and krzysztof wodiczko
2014 1995–1997 2009
168 Ægis: Equipment for a City of Strangers 246 Art, Trauma and Parrhésía
1998 2011
 Introduction: Reading Wodiczko
Rosalyn deu tsche

I have been reading Krzysztof Wodiczko’s verbal and visual texts for three
decades. I started in 1986, when I saw the Homeless Projection: A Proposal for
the City of New York and took away the accompanying brochure, which contained
the written component of the work.1 I was already familiar with Wodiczko’s
projections, though, with one exception, only in reproduction. Having co-
authored an article with Cara Gendel Ryan on the role that the art world was
playing in promoting the gentrification of New York’s Lower East Side, I was
especially interested in this one, whose title announced that it would focus on
the victims of gentrification, a process that Ryan and I had associated with the
cruelties of the global socio-spatial restructuring of United States-dominated
capitalism.2 By the time I saw the Homeless Projection I had become concerned
about another, related urban-aesthetic alliance: an increase in commissions for
a kind of public art that participates in State-sponsored re-development projects
carried out in the interests of international finance and local real estate. One
such project was under way in Union Square in Lower Manhattan, close to where
I lived and the proposed site of Wodiczko’s projection. The projection was never
realized at its intended location, but I was excited to discover an artwork that
engaged in spatial politics otherwise. Wodiczko planned to project images of the
attributes of homeless people—a crutch, a cast, a shopping cart, a wheelchair,
a can of Windex—onto the four historical monuments that stand in Union Square
Park, the ideological centerpiece of the re-development program. Whereas the city
planning department and real estate developers were using the monuments
to present the program as a restoration of tradition, Wodiczko transformed the
sculptural figures—Lincoln, Washington, Lafayette, a mother with children—
into people making a living on the streets, restoring to visibility the social group
expelled from a space, whose re-development, extolled as beneficial to all, was in
fact evicting thousands of the most vulnerable residents from the city. To borrow

Transformative Avant-Garde and Other Writings Introduction: Reading Wodiczko

 from Henri Lefebvre, Wodiczko performed a “critique of space”, ripping aside
appearances and revealing the conflicts—the subterranean violence—producing
and haunting an urban space that was being made to seem harmonious.3
Reading Wodiczko’s written proposal for the Homeless Projection, I was
struck by the freedom and boldness of the writing, qualities I had also admired
in the visual installation. I would later learn from Foucault, one of Wodiczko’s
principal influences, that in the ancient Athenian polis these were precisely
the qualities that distinguished the democratic parrhésíastes, the citizen who
assumes the responsibility and takes the risk of telling the truth publicly. The user
8 of parrhésía or “fearless speech” “does not hide anything, but opens his heart and
mind completely to other people through his discourse”, acting “on other people’s
minds by showing them as directly as possible what he actually believes”.4
Consider the frankness—intellectual and emotional—of Wodiczko’s description
of contemporary architecture: “What has been defined as ‘architecture’... is
really a merciless real estate system, embodied in a continuous and frightening
mass-scale Event, the most disturbingly public and central operations of which
are economic terror, physical eviction and the exodus of the poorest groups of
city inhabitants from the buildings’ interiors to the outdoors.” Had the Homeless
Projection been executed in Union Square, it would have confronted people in
the streets of the city, asking them to care about reality, much like Socrates, the
exemplary parrhésíastes in the dialogues of Plato.
Wodiczko’s frankness is coupled with imagination. He asserts, for
instance, that “in a monument there is nothing more disrupting and astonishing
than a sign of life”, a remark that helps explain the powerful impact of his
projection technique, which animates petrified statues and shakes their seeming
immobility. Among the Homeless Projection’s goals, he lists the following: “To
liberate the problem of the homeless from the unconscious of the Architecture!”
The psycho-analytic terminology echoes an earlier theorization of the public
projections, which likewise mentions “the unconscious of the building”, and,
calling the projections “symbol-attacks” that interrupt viewers’ psychic
identification with buildings, elaborates: “The attack... must come with the night
when the building, undisturbed by its daily functions, is asleep and when its body
dreams of itself, when the architecture has its nightmares.”5
Wodiczko’s references to the unconscious, dreams, and nightmares of
architectural structures are not just poetic figures of speech. They literally
describe the operations of human memory, including collective memory, which
is constructed by such structures, especially commemorative monuments
or memorials. Official memorials exercise what the French philosopher Paul
Ricoeur calls “instrumentalized memory”, by which he means memory wielded
in the interests of power.6 The city’s restoration of the Union Square statues in
order to portray re-development as a uniformly beneficial return to tradition is
a consummate example. From a psycho-analytic point of view, however, the
questions posed by memory are: What does it omit, which is to say, repress? How,
that is, does what we retain “actively [modify] reality” in a manner that, as Freud
says, is, “not in the interests of truth”.7 Like an analyst, Wodiczko submits memory
to reality-testing, investigating the dreams and nightmares of monuments—or,
more accurately, of those who speak through monuments—so that they remember
differently. Against instrumental memory and its correlative, narcissistic memory,
he helps the statues perform the duty of ethico-political memory, doing justice to
the victims of the social forces the monuments represent. Ricoeur insists that the
Transformative Avant-Garde and Other Writings
moral priority of collective recollection must belong to the victim, and “the victim at
issue... is the other victim, other than ourselves”.8
Inspired by the Homeless Projection, I enlisted its help in writing an essay
that examined the role performed by aesthetic disciplines in Union Square
re-development. At times, in need of particularly trenchant formulations, I
incorporated phrases from Wodiczko’s proposal. A couple of years later, I drew
on the Homeless Vehicle project, 1988, exhibited at New York’s Clocktower,
to issue a call for critical alternatives to public art deployed as the aesthetic
arm of re-development. Wodiczko created the Homeless Vehicle with several
homeless consultants, a collaboration that anticipates the artist’s partnerships 9
with immigrants and war veterans. Wodiczko had constructed instruments in
his native Poland, where he made his first Vehicle, 1972, but the Homeless
Vehicle project was the paradigm of a practice that he would name “interrogative
design”—the design and construction of equipment to help marginalized groups
navigate the city. On the website of the Interrogative Design Group he founded at
MIT, he explained that interrogative design “responds interrogatively to the needs
that should not, but unfortunately do, exist in the present ‘civilized’ world. In the
unacceptable world, interrogative design should present itself and be perceived
as unacceptable.”9
My 1988 essay “Uneven Development: Public Art in New York City”
interpreted the Homeless Vehicle as a work with a dual function: “a practical
instrument and a symbolic utterance”, a combination that typifies many of
Wodiczko’s subsequent works, reaching a high point, as we shall see, in Arc
de Triomphe: World Institute for the Abolition of War, 2010.10 Meticulously
conceived to fulfill the immediate needs of people without homes—the collection
of bottles and a degree of shelter—the Homeless Vehicle, like the Homeless
Projection, also asks viewers to question the society that produces such needs,
which the text in the brochure distributed by Wodiczko and David Lurie during
the Clocktower exhibition, calls an “outrage”. The text also identifies homeless
people as “refugees from the transformation of the city”, an incisive depiction that
immediately prompted me to refer to “the homeless” as “the evicted” and that
foreshadows Wodiczko’s design of equipment for immigrants, especially those
fleeing poverty, persecution, and other dangers.
Wodiczko’s early public projections and interrogative instruments provided
me with examples of a public art practice that assists the speech and visibility
of silenced groups while at the same time asking viewers to become aware of
and to question the presence of power in the built environment. The works
became powerful allies in my investigation into the very meaning of the word
“public”, especially when it is attached to the words “art” and “space”, as in
such commonplaces as “public art”, “the new public art”, “art in public places”,
or “art in the public interest”. So did my regular, if too infrequent, conversations
with Wodiczko himself, which, if I remember correctly, began soon after “Uneven
Development” appeared in October along with documentation of the Homeless
Vehicle project. At that time and increasingly in the early 1990s, a mobilization of
democratic rhetoric to authorize right-wing and authoritarian agendas dominated
mainstream urban policy discourse. In 1994, with the election of Rudolph
Giuliani as New York’s mayor, attacks on specific rights and on the very idea of
rights accelerated as the city embraced “quality of life” campaigns and a “broken
windows” approach to policing, an approach that cracks down aggressively on
minor offenses, particularly in minority areas, and that is implicated in the recent
Introduction: Reading Wodiczko
 police killings of African-Americans across the United States. Advocates of public
art—city officials and urban commentators as well as art journalists—contributed
to conservative democratic jargon by linking public art to such democratic ideals as
“accessibility”, “participation”, and “accountability to ‘the people’”, even as support
of things that are called public justified censorship, exclusionary urban design, and
economic privatization.11 However, other artists and critics, disturbed by the social
conditions of the public art explosion, began to question assumptions about what
it means to say that something is public or to claim to represent the interests of
the public. One of the first to do so, though not with regard to public art or urban
10 re-development, was the critic Craig Owens, who in 1987 wrote that “the question
of who is to define, manipulate and profit from ‘the public’ is... the central issue
of any discussion of the public function of art today”.12
During this period, Wodiczko and I voraciously devoured and shared
theories that, we thought, could re-frame the terms of debate about art’s
“publicness”. Wodiczko introduced me to Emmanuel Levinas’ reading of the
biblical plan for “Cities of Refuge”, which the philosopher used as a metaphor
for contemporary Western cities and which would become the starting point
of the artist’s proposal for a 9/11 memorial.13 I enthusiastically told him about
Claude Lefort’s political philosophy and Kenneth Gross’ The Dream of the Moving
Statue, a book whose ideas, especially those about “talking with statues”, can
be productively applied to Wodiczko’s projections onto sculptural monuments.14
Primarily, we discussed three discourses: those about (1) the social production
of space, the politics of space, and what Lefebvre calls “the right to the city”
and Michel de Certeau “the practice of everyday life”; (2) the public sphere, a
concept that connects public space to democratic politics and, in some of its
ethical formulations, to a response to the suffering of others; and (3) radical
democracy, which, theorized in the 1980s by political philosophers Lefort, Ernesto
Laclau, and Chantal Mouffe, among others, diverges from conservative, liberal,
and traditional Marxist concepts of democracy. As I deployed these bodies of
literature to challenge prevailing notions of public art, Wodiczko’s work—The
New Museum/Astor Building Projection, 1984, the Real Estate Projection, 1988,
and Ægis, 1988—continued to serve as some of my principal examples of a type
of art, whose publicness arises not from its location in a space preordained as
public—“art in public space”—or from its cooperation in designing re-developed
spaces—the “new public art” of the 1980s—but, rather, from the performance
of an operation: “making” or “breaking” a public space, as Vito Acconci puts it.15
In fact, the two cannot be separated, for an artist—or, for that matter, a social
movement like #OccupyWall Street—produces a public space in the sense of a
democratic public sphere precisely by contesting an official one. Wodiczko’s work
performs the two-fold operation in multiple ways. It engages in a conversation
with readymade aesthetic objects—buildings, monuments, urban spaces—and
brings their repressions to light. It declares “a right to the city”—to urban life as
both a physical and social form—for expelled residents. It addresses its audience
by forming them into a public that exercises the freedom of critical speech. And,
as I wrote about the Homeless Projection, Wodiczko’s projects “[take] account of
the exclusions that create the social unity that monuments supposedly represent
and thereby subjects the foundation of that unity to democratic contestation”.16
The last-mentioned is the radical-democratic maneuver, which makes the
others possible. For, says Lefort, democracy appears when references to an
unconditional foundation of social unity disappear, a disappearance that gives rise
Transformative Avant-Garde and Other Writings
to public space—the interactive space between people in which the meaning of
the social order is open to contestation through the declaration of rights.17
In the wake of the 2001 attack on the World Trade Center and the launching
of the “war on terror”, as I turned my attention to the issue of war, I found my
concerns as closely aligned with those of Wodiczko as they had been in the
1980s and early 1990s. In 2005, I analyzed the Hiroshima Projection, 1999, in
light of the ethico-political implications of the feminist critique of subjectivity in
visual representation, which has profoundly affected Wodiczko’s work. I wrote
about the dropping of the atomic bomb, of course, but said little about war in 11
general—or, to put it differently, war as a specific social institution.18 But I was
soon prompted to say more by another post-9/11 development: certain anti-war
intellectuals, including many in the art world, were citing the urgency of the war
situation to justify a return to traditionalism in leftist politics and to repudiate
poststructuralist, psycho-analytic, and feminist interrogations of the meaning
of the political. Taking place since at least the 1960s, these interrogations
challenge absolute foundationalism, forge relationships between struggles
against oppression that are not necessarily commensurable, and theorize a
politics concerned with subjectivity. Against this expansion of the political field,
those whom I, following Walter Benjamin and Wendy Brown, have labeled “left
melancholics” used the war situation to constrict it, dividing the social from
the psychical realm, the private from the public.19 Mignon Nixon articulates the
problem perfectly:
The habit of separating the psychical from the social, the individual subject
from social subjectivity, even seems redoubled in times of war—as if
waging war depends upon holding these terms apart.... Even now, in the
political discourse surrounding the Iraq War, the psychical and the social
are split, even on the Left; as if to reflect on subjectivity in time of war
were, in itself, to reject the political, even to diminish resistance to war.20
Yet, as Virginia Woolf—who, according to Roger Poole, “may be [war’s] greatest
theoretician”, 21 —wrote in 1938, “public and private worlds are inseparably
connected... the tyrannies and servilities of one are the tyrannies and servilities
of the other”.22
In the midst of the retrenchment of masculinist politics, I studied
psycho-analytic theories of war and discussed them with Wodiczko. Freud,
Franco Fornari, Hanna Segal, Roger Money-Kryle, and Jacqueline Rose, among
others, argue that unconscious aggressivity is a significant factor in the waging
of war and that, therefore, psychoanalysis, offering the insight that individual
subjectivity is socially constituted and maintained, has something important to
contribute to the discourse of war resistance. In 2010, I was gratified to come
upon Wodiczko’s astonishing proposal for the Arc de Triomphe: World Institute
for the Abolition of War and two years later, to read his newly published book The
Abolition of War. For against left melancholy, Wodiczko combines a critique of
subjectivity with a critique of the concrete phenomenon of war. Extending the
practice that the artist has called “memorial therapy”—therapy by means of and for
memorials—Arc de Triomphe is a proposal to surround the gigantic war memorial
in Paris with a transparent, scaffold-like structure, which, if built, would facilitate
critical examination of the monument and also house an international research
Introduction: Reading Wodiczko
 institute dedicated to ending war, research in which psychoanalysis would play
an indispensable role. Influenced by Fornari’s assertion that we must return to
the unconscious of the individual subject in order to stop war, Wodiczko, with
incandescent wit, notes that we are “inner war memorials”, which, like external
ones, must be disarmed.23 “What is the ‘unconscious’ of the ‘war memorial’?” he
asks, echoing his earlier writings. “How shall one envisage even the beginning
outline of the psychoanalysis of... war memorials as a part of broader work on
the psychoanalysis of war?”24 Transforming the war memorial into an “un-war”
memorial, Arc de Triomphe would invite viewers and participants to acknowledge
12 psychical desire for war, to, that is, take responsibility for war by taking
responsibility for the unconscious.25 Violence, it would suggest, does not always
come from somewhere or someone else. With this project, Wodiczko once again
takes the risk of speaking out about historical disasters. Once again, he does so
with the freedom and boldness that first impressed me in the Homeless Projection.
Wodiczko’s 2004 commencement address at the Maine College of Art encourages
the students to become artist-parrhésíastes, though not in so many words. The
talk begins by questioning the aim and object of the “success” that is implied in the
term “commencement”, a crucial question in today’s market-oriented art world.
It then presents possible answers: artists, who “make visible things”, can “bring
to light what is hidden and kept in the dark”. They can, that is, make visible those
“who are relegated to the outside of our privileged field of vision” and inspire people
to respond to the suffering of others. They can be prophets, warning communities
about the consequences of injustices and interrupting what Walter Benjamin calls
“the history of the victors”. They can exercise counter-memory, deepen and extend
agonistic democracy, “testify to the wrong in order to propose a change for the
better”, becoming “a notorious trouble-maker who troubles a troubled world by
making its troubles visible”. They can be fearless speakers. Wodiczko summarizes
his passions, values, and ideas, passing them on as a legacy to younger artists.
Many others have been beneficiaries of his generosity. To a significant extent, my
work as an art historian and critic has unfolded in dialogue with Wodiczko. I have
had the good fortune to think in his company.
July 2015
1 “The Homeless Projection: A Proposal for the City of New York”, in Jana Sterbak and
Krzysztof Wodiczko, New York: 49th Parallel, Center for Contemporary Canadian Art,
11 January–15 February, 1986, exhibition brochure.
2 Deutsche, Rosalyn and Cara Gendel Ryan, “The Fine Art of Gentrification”, October,
winter 1984, pp 90–111.
3 Lefebvre, Henri, The Production of Space, Donald Nicholson-Smith trans, Oxford:
Blackwell, 1991, p 92. Originally published by Edition Anthropos, 1974.
4 Foucault, Michel, Fearless Speech (1983), Joseph Pearson ed, Semiotext(e), 2001,
p 12.
5 Wodiczko, Krzysztof, “Public Projection”, Canadian Journal of Political and Social
Theory/Revue canadienne de théorie politique et sociale, vol 7, nos 1–2, winter/spring,
1983.
6 Ricoeur, Paul, Memory, History, Forgetting, Kathleen Blamey and David Pellauer trans,
University of Chicago Press, 2004, p 80.
7 Freud, Sigmund, “Analysis Terminable and Interminable” (1937), The Standard
Edition of the Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud, Volume XXIII (1937–
1939): Moses and Monotheism, An Outline of Psycho-Analysis and Other Works, James
Strachey ed and trans, London: Hogarth, 1953–19­­74, pp 209–254.
8 Freud, The Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud,
Volume XXIII (1937–1939), p 89.
Transformative Avant-Garde and Other Writings
9 Interrogative Design Group, “Statement of Purpose”, http://web.mit.edu/idg/purpose.
html, 2002.
10 Deutsche, Rosalyn, “Uneven Development: Public Art in New York City”, Evictions: Art
and Spatial Politics, Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1986, p 99. Originally published in
October, no 47, winter 1988.
11 For a discussion of conservative democratic discourse in urban policy, see my “Tilted
Arc and the Uses of Democracy” and “Agoraphobia”, Evictions, pp 257–327.
12 Owens, Craig, “The Yen for Art”, in Hal Foster ed, Discussions in Contemporary
Culture, no 1, Seattle: Bay Press, 1987, p 23.
13 Levinas, Emmanuel, “Cities of Refuge”, Beyond the Verse: Talmudic Readings and
Lectures, Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press, 1994.
14 Gross, Kenneth, The Dream of the Moving Statue, Ithaca, NY: Cornell University
Press, 1992.
15 Acconci, Vito, Making Public: The Writing and Reading of Public Space, The Hague:
Uitgever, 1993, p 16.
13
16 Deutsche, Rosalyn, “Krzysztof Wodiczko’s Homeless Projection and the Site of Urban
Revitalisation”, Evictions, p 42.
17 Lefort, Claude, “The Question of Democracy”, Democracy and Political Theory, David
Macy trans, Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, p 19. My characterization
of public space as an organization of people acting and speaking together rather than
as simply a physical space, is of course from Hannah Arendt. See Arendt, The Human
Condition, Cambridge, MA: University of Chicago Press, 1958.
18 Deutsche, Rosalyn, “The Art of Witness: Krzysztof Wodiczko’s Hiroshima Projection, in
Monument Therapy/Pomnikoterapia, Sztuki, Warsaw: Zacheta Narodowa Galeria, 2005.
19 Brown, Wendy, “Resisting Left Melancholia”, Loss, David L Eng and David Kazanjian
ed, Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 2003, pp 458–465.
Also see my “Not-Forgetting: Mary Kelly’s Love Songs”, Grey Room 24, summer 2006.
20 Nixon, Mignon, “War Inside/War Outside: Feminist Critiques and the Politics of
Psychoanalysis”, Texte zur Kunst 17, no 68, December 2007, pp 134–135.
21 Roger Poole, “ ‘We All Put Up With You, Virginia’: Irreceivable Wisdom about War”,
Virginia Woolf and War: Fiction, Reality, and Myth, Syracuse University Press, 1991, p 99.
22 Woolf, Virginia, Three Guineas, San Diego, CA: Harcourt, Brace & World, Inc, 1938,
p 142.
23 Fornari, Franco, The Psychoanalysis of War (1966), New York: Anchor, 1974.
24 Wodiczko, Krzysztof, The Abolition of War, London: Black Dog Publishing Limited,
2012, p 37.
25 For an interpretation of Wodiczko’s Arc de Triomphe: World Institute for the Abolition
of War and for a more extensive explanation of what it means to “take responsibililty
for the unconscious”, see my “Un-War: An Aesthetic Sketch”, October, no 147, winter
2014, pp 3–19.
Introduction: Reading Wodiczko
Democracy/
Avant-Garde

Vehicle-Podium, 1977–1979
Maine College of Art
Commencement Address
16 May 20 0 4
A commencement: a beginning, a succession, with success implied.
But success in what? To what object and what end?
Let us focus on the visual—a proper start in this place, a school of art.
As artists, even when we work in media, performance, design, or sound, we
consider the visual field as our heritage and cultural or professional base.
So, what it is that artists do? What can artists do?
Artists make visible things, in order to make (other) things, visible. They
bring to light what is hidden and kept in the dark.
They make things visibly visible.
As artists, we are also responsible for making our (emotional and
intellectual) response (to these things) visible. Here our artistic response-ability
becomes a responsibility! And to make sense from sensibility may be our political
and ethical responsibility.
You have assumed a share of that responsibility by virtue of the fact that
you are here today. Finishing this portion of your education is probably the most
responsible thing you have ever done....
This ability to respond, to do so in a social and public sphere—the gallery, the
museum, in physical and media-based public space, etc—comprises your aesthetic
qualifications. This capacity of your actions—gesture, speech, sound as well as the
organization of spatial forms that affect our interactions—can make a difference, for
the better (or at least prevent the worse).
To exhibit, or expose, in public what is supposed to be kept in the private
realm often requires breaking a code of invisibility and silence.
Some of us feel an inner necessity to break such a code in order to visually
challenge and respond to our own silence. In this way one may bring out into the
open and share the unanswerable existential (and alienating) questions that hide
in one’s own mind and in one’s own subjectivity.
Transformative Avant-Garde and Other Writings
With striking seriousness or with a disarming sense of humor the artist
may examine (as one example) the very impossibility of understanding why one
makes art in the first place.
Breaking away from our own labyrinth of loneliness, strangeness and
puzzling, uncanny singularity we may (as I try to do) turn our eyes and focus on
the invisibility, silence and alienation of others. As artists we are able, (and in a
democratic society we may feel obligated), to expand the range of freedom and
equality by making visible that—and those—who are relegated to the outside of
our privileged field of vision.
One can further take responsibility for other people’s ability to respond, 17
and for one’s own response to what one sees. Making the presence of these
invisible others visible, and their memories visible and heard—is what I try to
make happen through my work.
Such a task creates the need to complement your sophisticated
emotional and aesthetic equipment by ethical equipment consciousness, the
consciousness to see social implications in one’s own artistic action or inaction.
To follow Walter Benjamin’s thinking, “interrupting history” to prevent the
repetition of catastrophe.
“A prophet (always) interrupts history”, Benjamin said.
Every artist should have the equal right in trying to become (like Gustave
Courbet or Joseph Beuys) a prophet.
In existing (deliberative) democracy, as theorist Chantal Mouffe
demonstrates, a consensus tends to be reached at the price of exclusions. We
must struggle then for the agonistic model of democracy that favors dissensus.
The struggle for a non-passive and inclusive democracy demands an agon, a
contest and creative struggle for the visibility of (and by) those whom no one
wants to see and of whom no one wants to hear.
Can artists help the excluded and the invisible, traumatized, silent
survivors (of today’s ‘democracy’), to be capable themselves of communicating
in public their disagreement? Could they, with our artistic help, become fearless
speakers and respond with a regained critical voice to the unacceptable
conditions of their lives?
We should never forget that every voice has a face—once again, the visual!
Here comes another burning question regarding visibility and invisibility: what
shall we do in our present troubling world, suffused, even suffocated, by horrifying
images of terror, torture and abuse, and by the resulting horror of such images?
In the context of the overexposure of such politically selective (unequal)
visibility let us think about the restrictions imposed on visibility. Of the invisibility
of wounded, horribly mutilated and damaged bodies of our soldiers, of the coffins
containing their bodies. Let us also think of the invisible treatment and abuse
of our own inmates in our own American prisons! How could one help these
prisoners to make themselves visible and heard?
As the political philosopher Hannah Arendt has implied, in a democracy,
visibility is equality. Invisibility and inequality go hand by hand.
Shall we seek refuge (or post-traumatic healing, a therapy) from both our
inner trouble and world troubles in an ultimate (utopian) peace and harmony
created and disseminated through one’s own art (as in Mark Rothko’s paintings
and pacifist lectures)?
Or shall we radically re-interpret them, infusing them with one’s own
outrage and terrifying experiences (as in Leon Golub’s Napalm paintings)?
Democracy/Avant-Garde
 Then again, can we re-present them critically in the contradictory contexts world she helps immigrants to hide while through the artworld (and cultural
of media and propaganda images as counterpropaganda (as in John Heartfield’s attention) she makes the immigrants enforced invisibility, visible.
AIZ montages or Ernst Friedrich’s War Against War, publication)? A good double ceiling.
Thinking of all this, and of other painful cases of inequality in terms of A good double trouble.
visibility, we may also think of Francisco Goya (and his Disasters of War), Honoré In many ways, of course, whether you acknowledge it or not, you—the
Daumier, and Käthe Kollwitz. How can we follow in the footsteps of these great critical mass assembled here: the graduates (and by implication and association
artists, our colleagues, and gain from their achievements and successes? And your professors, parents, friends and supporters)—are already the best trouble
then how can we challenge them, and their heritage, with new artistic approaches in this world. And I realize that there are many paths in art, and not all of you
of our own? The worst of any coming danger may be the increasing obscurity and will follow the same one. And in any case, trouble must be made in an educated
18 diminishing transparency of the social and political reality around us. fashion (for you are professionals now), and in an original manner, unique to you 19
We can and may feel, in a troubling moment, obliged to take up our (for you are creative artists now).
responsibility and be ‘troublemakers’. As I say this, here, ‘ex cathedra’, and having contributed myself in a modest
I am a troublemaker. I have made a ‘career’ out of being one. They call way to educating some of you, I am honored to be accepted by you as your
me an interventionist, and indeed I am one, among many—some younger, some colleague—a notorious troublemaker who troubles a troubled world by making
my own age, some even older—disruptive and critical artists, both suspects and its troubles visible.
exemplars. Our individual and collective works will be on display after next week’s Thank you.
opening of a show at Massachusetts Museum of Contemporary Art called The
Interventionists: Art in the Social Sphere. This is a grand public presentation
of the evidence of the troubling activities of a great number of groups between Commencement Address given on receipt of an Honorary Doctorate from Maine
the 1980s and today. I will be showing the Homeless Vehicle I designed around College of Art, 16 May 2004.
1986, at a particularly acute moment in the urban crisis of New York City—a work
of scandalizing functionalism, or “interrogative design” as I like to call it.
I hope the show is conceived, and perceived, as a successfully disruptive and
disturbing experience, rather than an untroubling and elegant display of documents
and relics of our past troublemaking efforts and works of protest.
But “pro-test” means “to testify to the wrong in order to propose a change for
better”. Protest then is both a critical and a positive (pro-active) practice.
If you are going to make trouble, make it consequential, not mediocre!
Make sincere disturbances, mindful of their effects on others (good,
transformative, one hopes). Develop them carefully, design them well, make them
artistically challenging, in the right places and on the right occasions.
In short, make responsible and meaningful interventions.
If you choose to do this and succeed in it, you may (in this disturbing
way) create a great artistic treasure, something of great cultural, political and
ethical value.
But most importantly:
Do not get arrested! Unless an arrest is a part of your project, and, if it is...
Have a good lawyer.
Let me remind you (this is a warning, and a collegial confession, from
one who has painfully learned it himself): there is nothing worse than a loud,
poorly made, empty of meaning, and (in an even worse scenario) intentionally or
unintentionally violent scandal. Making things visible may be troubling, and it may
affect the world in a good or bad way
Historically, in wartime, artists are often put to work making camouflage.
In the present time of an undeclared state of war, Jenny Polak designs
parasitical artificial ceilings, double ceilings which function in ‘real’ life as
ingenious hiding places. They keep their users, undocumented ‘Arab’ immigrants,
purposely invisible, and safe when deportation-thirsty immigration officers arrive:
a kind of camouflage for endangered species. In addition to this troublemaking
practice the artist is showing her ceiling prototypes in art exhibitions. In the real

Transformative Avant-Garde and Other Writings Democracy/Avant-Garde

Creating Democracy
an intervi e w wit h patric ia c p h i l l ip s
2003
Patricia C Phillips: Rosalyn Deutsche, who has written critically and eloquently on
your work, suggests that democracy involves the recognition, if not perpetuation, of
difficulty and disagreement. In fact, it is constitutionally unsettled.1
Krzysztof Wodiczko: Democracy is always unfinished. It should never be
understood as completed. We accept the idea that democracy—and the public
sphere—is a phantom, a term that Bruce Robbins introduced in a collection of
essays he edited.2 Artists are in a special position to contribute to this exploration
of new forms of democracy, by creating work that is challenging and disrupting.
Artists have the opportunity to continue the avant-garde tradition, which has
always engaged public issues. They should try to make sense of this tradition
without being imprisoned by it.
Public space is where we often explore or enact democracy. In the
1970s, there was a growing interest in public art, public space and site-specific
art because of the rapid transformation of cities. Eventually, site-specificity
was replaced by other concerns, but it was an important stage when artists
began to focus on context. Art could be geographically specific, formally and
visually specific, or socially specific. Artists began to consider the implications
of an intervention in one area when similar events were happening at the same
time in other places. In the 1980s, there emerged influences from critical
urban geography and the ideas of uneven development, urban struggle, and
cultural resistance. Artists began to think critically about art—the position of
their practice—in relation to development in a city and the lives of its people.
Questions of representation also emerged. How should a particular social group
or stratum be represented? More artists became directly involved in the lives of
the inhabitants of cities.
Of course, there always exists a theoretical environment that influences
artists’ activities. I entered this public space with a set of references that are
Transformative Avant-Garde and Other Writings
important to an understanding of my own work. This began in the early 1980s
with Claude Lefort’s theory of democracy.3 Lefort proposed that democracy is
founded on public space that should be essentially empty. This emptiness does
not belong to any individual or group, but should be available to anyone who can
bring meaning to it, recognize others in it and initiate and perpetuate dissemination
and debate about rights. Lefort’s position is a utopian concept. He describes an
ideal, non-existent public space, which in reality is not empty but controlled and
barricaded by speakers, commercial and political, who speak at the expense of
silent others. In the 1980s, Chantal Mouffe and Ernesto Laclau introduced the idea
of “antagonism” to a theory of democracy.4 Society is recognized as impossible, 21
as a space of endless contingencies. Establishing precise distinctions between
difference and conflict, they articulated a democracy based not on hostilities
where parties are enemies to each other, but on “agonism”, where parties are
constructively adversarial. This theory accepts that democracy cannot be organized
in a well-mannered way without room for confrontations and a multiplicity of voices.
More recently, Mouffe has offered a new, agonistic concept of public space,
which finally brings real life to Lefort’s Utopia. Her recognition of antagonisms and
the need for agonism in a democratic process radically questions the prominent
liberal philosopher Jürgen Habermas for his popular legalistic and rationalistic
position on democracy which seeks to resolve disagreements in a blind drive for
consensus.5 I am giving here a very simple description of agonistic democracy,
but it is a complex and dynamic model, which, as Mouffe suggests, invites and
accommodates passion as well as adversarial positions. For her, democracy is
not a solution but a process of engaging more actors (and I hope artists as well)
in an ongoing energetic discourse in the form of an agon, that is, a contest.
In the 1980s we also encountered new conceptions of a public sphere
that radically expand and transform Habermasian theory. Barbara Kruger and
Nancy Fraser articulated a feminist public sphere, for example.6 These are critical
alternatives to the concept of the unified and dominant (bourgeois) public sphere
theorized by Habermas and add to the hope for greater strength of the social
“multitude”. In this way the aggressive, responsible, and critical agonism of a
democratic discourse may be joined by organized social, cultural, and artistic
movements and actions as a part of the workings of the “oppositional public
spheres”. Together they may animate the public space while forcefully holding
the State, mainstream media, and even global financial structures ethically and
politically accountable.
PCP: The idea of public speech or testimony—and its relation to art and
democracy—seems to be a growing preoccupation in your work.
KW: Michel Foucault introduced the idea of fearless speech or, more appropriately,
fearless speaking, in a series of lectures he gave at the University of California,
Berkeley, in I983.7 This idea emerges from Foucault’s careful reading of classical
Athenian philosophy, which examines the role of the public speaker, without
whom democracy cannot exist. A fundamental question is how to prepare this
“fearless speaker” to participate in the agora or contemporary public space. And
what are our expectations for the fearless speaker? Should she speak from her
own experience?
We are speaking here of truth-telling, or the Greek concept of parrhésía,
frank or free speech. In order to believe that a speaker is telling the truth, there
must be trust. The speaker must sustain her ability to convey truths in public,
often to people who may not want to listen. This, of course, relates to agonistic
Democracy/Avant-Garde
 democracy, where there might be more and more fearless speakers who differ
and disagree with each other. Of course, this can be seen as a problem by those
in positions of power.
I find this an attractive proposition with both political and ethical
consequences. Public speech requires a political consciousness that accepts
democracy, as Mouffe and others have proposed, as a process. Being adversarial
is not about creating enemies or escalating hostilities, but is a way to develop
the dynamic conditions from which people learn to respect each other.
PCP: How is public space both an opportunity and obstacle? How can we ensure
22 that new speakers flourish rather than flounder?
KW: Public space is a site of enactment. It belongs to no one, yet we are all a
part of it and can bring meaning to it. How do we do this? How do we come to
recognize each other? There are questions of rights and ideas of utopia. Is utopia
harmonious? Or is it the recognition that we are strangers who recognize and
accept the strangeness of each one of us?
There are inequities and stratification. Artists need to understand, as most
political and social activists and organizers do, that public space is often barricaded
and monopolized by the voices of those who are born to speak and prepared to
do so. First, this is done at the expense of those who cannot speak because they
have no confidence that anyone will listen to them. Historically, they have good
reasons not to be confident. Second, they have no developed language. Third, they
are frequently locked in post-traumatic silence. There is repression so that certain
words cannot be said because particular memory patterns have been shattered.
Yet, these are the most important speakers in a democracy. They should
speak because they have directly experienced its failures and indifference. They
can testify, but often at the risk of their status, health, or even life, in order to
disrupt normal relations.
PCP: You imply that truth-telling, like testimony, is a deeply felt, embodied experience.
KW: Yes, in my work I try to actualize this concept of truth-telling. If we wish to
bring these unheard, invisible, and uninvited speakers to public space, then how
are we to do this? We could give a microphone or loudspeaker to these people,
but we may hear nothing. So the question is, what kind of conditions must be
created for these individuals to be heard? What is required for them to have
some impact? This accepts the political perspective that we truly learn about
the world from those less fortunate than ourselves. Truth-telling also requires
a psychological understanding of democracy. So we need to connect a political
ethic with a psychological program.
PCP: When did this inquiry into the post-traumatic enter your work? And if always
implicitly there, how and why did it become more explicit?
KW: The theories of Mouffe and Foucault must be connected with trauma
therapy concepts. A person to add to this growing list of references is Judith
Lewis Herman, who wrote Trauma and Recovery.8 She is a psychoanalyst and
practising therapist who works primarily with survivors of rape and sexual
violence. She is interested in the relationship between social justice and therapy.
Her understanding of the stages of recovery, if not explicitly about a democratic
process, suggests the kind of work that must be done for people to become
fearless speakers in public space.
It is precisely those who have had traumatic experiences who should
speak first. But they are the ones who cannot. So the political and ethical must
be connected with psychological and sociological agendas. Post-traumatic
Transformative Avant-Garde and Other Writings
stress therapy can never eliminate individual or cultural trauma, but it enables
individuals and society to live with it.
Rather than a theoretical inquiry, like in the work of Jacques Lacan, for
example, this must be pursued in a practical way. People need help to regain their
memory and speech in order to become active members of society. Herman suggests
that moving from self-examination and private testimony to engagement and public
testimony is a key part of the recovery process. I am not speaking in a clinical way,
but this is an issue of personal healing that connects to a vision of society’s health.
This interest began when I first worked with immigrants. Strangers. It became
clear that the operators, users, and performers of the instruments that I make use 23
them to negotiate their inner lives with the outside world. For example, the Alien
Staff, 1992, has a number of functions. These speaking/walking sticks with their
personal reliquaries, monitors, and recordings are a user’s double. They can be used
as therapeutic devices, as well as implements to participate in a democracy. The
instruments provoke an exchange of opinions. The entire process of pre-recording,
speaking, recording, and editing required for the Alien Staff and other instruments is
not unlike the stages of post-traumatic therapy. The process of editing turns speech
into a manageable scope and form that is available to anyone.
Crossing borders, in all senses of the words, is traumatic. Consider the
aftermath, with all of the legal issues, hostility, euphoria, and disappointment.
The stages of transformation of identity for the immigrant, the internal dialogues
and disagreement, create a very stressful complexity. In the process of becoming
a new person, an immigrant must imagine, examine, and question all identities—
the past, present, and future. Those who are ready to negotiate these psycho-
political roles need this equipment, an artifice or prosthesis, to begin this
demanding process of fearless speech.
I do not propose how all of this should be resolved. I only suggest that
artists, who are situated between technology, discourses of democracy, and the
lives of people, have unique opportunities to create practical artifacts that assist
others in this migratory and transitory world.
PCP: Could you discuss ideas of witnessing in the context of your work?
KW: To testify is to bear witness to a wrong, loss, or injustice in order to propose
a change for the better. As an artist, I try to equip unheard individuals with
a prosthetic device so that they can more effectively break the silence. The
equipment allows them to develop their speech—to help them with this final
stage of healing so that they can become more effective agents. They can speak
in either an indirect (by letting the instrument speak) or direct mode. With the
device, they are armed with memory. Memory is annealed through the instrument.
There are opportunities for change and interruption, but the act of testimony
can occur. These instruments are symbolic structures that establish unstable
situations. The user can speak, but cannot be spoken to. The activity of speech
can become a kind of obsession. I think of the survivors of Hiroshima that I
worked with for the Hiroshima Projection, 1999. In this case, it was a challenge
to overcome a silence imposed by their own community.
PCP: I see a connection, one that I did not fully understand or appreciate before,
between your projections on monuments and civic structures on the one hand and
the vehicles and instruments on the other.
KW: There are many contradictions in the reality and ideology of monuments.
It is in the shadows of mute monuments that speechless people dwell. Through
the instrument, the speaker becomes a critical participant in the environment of
Democracy/Avant-Garde
 the monument. The person begins to animate the monument. Another kind of
dialogue begins for the city at large, perhaps for the world. This is what I mean
by animation.
PCP: Helping people overcome silence and move through that final stage of
trauma is potentially empowering. But what are the risks?
KW: Once they have thought about the act of speech, they need to calculate what
is more risky, to speak or not to.
PCP: And what role do you play in these calculations?
KW: Sometimes I meet with people to discuss a project and they never return. It
24 simply is not the right moment. Those who do come back tend to stay until the very
end. Obviously, there are risks with either decision. They need to anticipate what this
process will mean for them. As a creative director, I serve as an active listener.
Everyone has a choice to stay or to leave. Sometimes loss moves them
to speak. Sometimes people are not ready to give testimony. They need more
time or other conditions. In some cases, this reenactment of trauma can be very
helpful and healthy. But it also can be difficult. This is not a clinical situation.
I am not a licensed clinician. I am an amateur in this field who understands the
significance of these situations. I try not to make mistakes.
PCP: Do you ever encounter hostility?
KW: In many ways, there is always mistrust at the beginning of a project. It is
psychologically charged. The people I meet with first have to accept, reject, or
somehow come to terms with this mistrust. Does someone want to make money
from them? Do I want to become famous through them? Is someone after a
sensational story? These are legitimate questions. The fact that I come from the
outside becomes less threatening and probably less interesting. They begin to
listen to themselves and each other. The project becomes less threatening. They
begin to accept that the project will not retaliate. It can, in fact, be used by them.
PCP: Generally, fearless speech is not spontaneous rhetoric, but something that
has to be developed and cultivated. I am interested in the ethical, psychological,
and pedagogical character of your work. The prosthetic device is central
to these ideas. In our earlier conversation, you cited DW Winnicott and the
“transitional object”.9
KW: The project is no longer just my idea, but becomes a transitional space.
This is something that not only designers should learn, but artists as well. We are
talking about an object or space that, with recurring use, becomes a container
for the inner world of the user. At the same time, we accept that it is part of the
outside world. For example, my instruments or equipment have to be chosen by
the users; I do not choose who will use it. And this process is very unpredictable
and frequently begins with a deep skepticism or rejection of the object. Why
would someone whose life is unrepresented in the media trust one of my
mediated instruments?
PCP: The instrument may be perceived as enabling, but it is also controlling
and entrapping.
KW: Or stigmatizing. There are hundreds of reasons why people would mistrust
the situation. But for people who feel marginalized, the opportunity to insert
their voice may be worth whatever risks or discomforts. In terms of psychological
developmental theory—and here Winnicott’s work is very relevant—potential users
must, in some manner, destroy the project and myself. I have to be destroyed, the
project has to be destroyed, if we are to proceed together. Then they need to see
if the project and I will survive our psychological destruction. And once they, or
Transformative Avant-Garde and Other Writings
someone else, determine that I have survived, they may decide that the project
can be used in some way.
Once they determine that they can use me—and I can use them—we may
begin. Once we can use each other, we begin to trust each other. And once we trust,
we can begin to play. These are a triad of Winnicott’s theory: use, trust, and play.
In this case, the transitional object can be the instrument, myself, or the project.
PCP: This allows the people you work with to imagine that this is not just
your project, but their’s as well. But your and their project may have different
objectives and outcomes. This is an empowering way to think about all art: that
it will not retaliate, that it can be used in multiple ways. 25
KW: Some of the questions you sent raised ideas about the ethical dimension
of this work. What is trust in this kind of work? It is about mutual interest. They
can use me. I can use them. And there is nothing really wrong with being used—
ethically speaking—as long as there is some mutual benefit.
PCP: We can accept that there can be a kind of collaboration where participants hold
different expectations and understandings of the consequences. Collaboration
engages the ideas of democracy that we discussed earlier. It does not require a
seamless, harmonious concept of community, but is animated by passages of conflict
and difference. Collaboration can accommodate all of this richness and texture. It isn’t
a homogeneous notion of everyone walking in stride to some common destination.
KW: Yes, this idea of people using the project and me using them is, in fact, a
vital form of democracy.
Originally published in Art Journal, vol 62, no 4, winter, 2003, pp 32–47.
1 Deutsche, Rosalyn, Evictions: Art and Spatial Politics, Cambridge: MIT Press, 1996.
2 Robbins, Bruce, “Introduction: The Public as Phantom”, in The Phantom Public
Sphere, Social Text Series on Cultural Politics, Bruce Robbins ed, Minneapolis:
University of Minnesota Press, 1993.
3 Lefort, Claude, “The Logic of Totalitarianism”, The Political Forms of Modern Society:
Bureaucracy, Democracy, Totalitarianism, Cambridge: MIT Press,1986 and “The
Question of Democracy”, in Democracy and Political Theory, Minneapolis: University
of Minnesota Press. 1988.
4 Laclau, Ernesto and Chantal Mouffe, Hegemony and Socialist Strategy: Toward a Radical
Democratic Politics, Winston Moore and Paul Cammack trans, London: Verso. 1985.
5 Habermas, Jürgen, The Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere: An Inquiry
into a Category of Bourgeois Society, Thomas Burger trans, with the assistance
of Frederick Lawrence, Cambridge: MIT Press. 1989; originally published as
Strukturwandel der Öffentlichkeit, Darmstadt: Hermann Luchterhand Verlag, 1962.
6 Fraser, Nancy, “Rethinking the Public Sphere: A Contribution to the Critique of
Actually Existing Democracy”, Habermas and the Public Sphere, Craig Calhoun ed,
Cambridge: MIT Press, 1992.
7 Foucault, Michel, Fearless Speech (1983), Joseph Pearson ed, New York:
Semiotext(e), 2001.
8 Herman, Judith Lewis, Trauma and Recovery, New York: Basic Books, 1992.
9 Winnicott, DW, The Motivational Processes and the Facilitating Environment, New
York: International Universities Press, 1965 and Playing and Reality, London:
Tavistock, 1971.
Democracy/Avant-Garde
The City, Democracy,
and Artistic Practice
2007
Aeschylus: Why should we admire a poet?
Euripides: For his intelligence and his admonishments, his warnings, and
because we make men in the cities better.
Aristophanes, Frogs
Introduction
In 1977 I left the then undemocratic Poland in my quest for democracy. However,
I have not managed to find democracy as something ready-made that could give
me something concrete. I thought erroneously that, contrary to the bad ‘presents’
which we had always received from an undemocratic system, a democratic system
would give me good ‘presents’. Fairly quickly I came to realize that my hope for
finding democracy and receiving its presents is a utopia. Crossing more and more
new frontiers of different countries and cities I came to realize that democracy is
something that has to be made by ourselves because nobody can make it via ‘a
directive from above’. Democracy cannot be made for us without us. Democracy
cannot be ordered upon us, unless we are willing to accept the ‘democracy’ of
President Putin. By its very nature democracy cannot offer anything definite
beyond constitutional rights, which are in fact only a conceptual ‘legal right’, the
right to have rights, to persistently ask for human and political rights, to strive
for the rights to be stable and all inclusive for ourselves and for others.
In my unending pilgrimage to democracy I also started to understand that
the privilege of having the rights which democracy can offer is connected to the
duty to wake it up from the lethargic sleep it has a tendency to drift into it. I saw
clearly that there is nothing worse for democracy than the passiveness of its
citizens. I came to understand that if dominated by those who will strengthen
their own rights at the expense of limiting access to these rights of others,
Transformative Avant-Garde and Other Writings
democracy will die and it will be like it was in the communist Poland before I left.
Nobody told me about all that before I left Poland. I suspect that then nobody
really knew it. Who then would dare say that when democracy reaches the point
of stability and the safeguarded guarantee of its existence, it disappears? Who
would dare say that democracy often equals risky work and a battle?
As an immigrant from Poland rooted in the Polish tradition and in the
emigrant tradition, I started to think more and more about Adam Mickiewicz. I
remembered that the title Trybuna Ludu (The Tribune of People) was a loan name
from a socialist and Christian journal, La Tribune des Peuples, co-established by
Mickiewicz who was also its editor-in-chief. In this journal the poet published the 27
so-called “constitution for Europe” that is a “set of principles” in which he put
forward the issue of “otherness”, stressing the importance of equal rights for
peasants, women and Jews and where he also formulated a certain social program.
How was it possible to learn the democratic tradition if the words
themselves such as: “democracy”, “socialist democracy”, “citizen”, “social
good”, “conditions of existence”, “equality of rights”, “social activism”, “political
activism”, “economic equality”, “social equality”, “political awareness”, “social
class”, etc all sounded like petrifying slogans from the communist newspaper
Trybuna Ludu and belonged to the language of the place I wanted to run away
from as far as I could? Already I realized then that irrespective of the language,
which was made infamous and corrupted by the communist regime, everything
that is democratic has to have a close link with what is social, political, ethical
and artistic. The work for the cause of democracy has to be continued. We need
to restore and refresh the meaning of the language of democracy.
Today Ladies and Gentlemen, you and I are at the same point of the
above mentioned restoration of meaning to the language of democracy and are
in the process of working for democracy; myself, who as many others was exiled
from Poland by communism, and you, who forced communism to be exiled from
Poland. Today, we meet on the same democratic grounds.
The City
The city—the civitas, topos, locus that means “a place”. Since the 18 April
1791 Free Royal Cities Act, an integral part of the Constitution of 3 May 1791
adopted by the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth, the city is the place where
city-dwellers are equal and free. However, despite this highly inspiring promise,
and perhaps because of it, the city’s egalitarianism and its freedoms and rights
are being put to test every day. The city promises all its citizens to be protective,
supportive, open to newcomers, open to new cultures, practices and discourses
and yet the city does not always manage to deliver this promise and be open
and inclusive enough. The city is both the stage and the stake of democracy.
Paraphrasing Jacques Derrida, it is possible to say that, “the city does not exist”.
Like democracy the city is a phantom, “a thing to come” (a venire), a “thing to
become”. And this is where our ethical and political responsibility comes in as
a continuous, constantly repeated effort (encore un effort) and work on the city.
This effort and work requires political passion and the freedom to express one’s
views, the right to disagree (dissensus), to protest, to contradict and to intervene.
Emmanuel Levinas said that “the political hierarchy and totality of Athens” and
“the ethical and anarchic individualism of Jerusalem” are equally indispensable
in order to suppress violence and secure the democratic process. The city as a
community must be continuously and simultaneously created and de-legitimized
Democracy/Avant-Garde
 in the name of democracy and in the name of that which remains excluded,
neglected and suppressed. The city must take into account those citizens who
live and work in its ruins, in abandoned buildings, in its shelters for the homeless.
It has to account for abandoned women and children in secluded sweatshops and
it has to notice all forms of slavery in the domestic, commercial and industrial
environment. To get fit and fully able in terms of democracy, the city has to look
at itself from the perspective of its ailments: physical, social and psychological.
Can the work of artists make a contribution for the sake of democracy
and can it be used to contribute something significant to the process of inspiring,
28 articulating and disseminating democratic awareness? In my lecture today I
would like to pose the question of whether building such political and emotional
awareness and political discourse marked by passion is only an issue of politics,
law, sociology and culture, or whether it should be an artistic project. If so,
then precisely what kind of project could it be? How should this project be
constructed? Can the artists make all the excluded, marginalized, and publicly
invisible citizens often traumatized in their silent suffering— the city survivors—
not only visible, but more importantly, can the artists help them to make
themselves both visible and heard? Can we, instead of working on their situation,
for them or on their behalf, work with them toward the betterment of their lives
and toward the more open more inclusive democratic city for all? Can the artists
together with the city’s nameless ‘others’ become the inspirers, interventionists,
catalysts and more, the co-authors in such an inclusive democratic project for
the embattled city or rather for the city which is never enough embattled? The
aim of my lecture today is to encourage you to see positive answers to these and
other questions. When elaborating on the issues I have raised I shall refer to
my own experience as one artist’s attempt to contribute to this possibility in the
hope that you will find more effective and more affective artistic methodologies,
means and techniques.
In the 1990s I began to utilize video technology in my projects as they were
taking on a more narrative and more collaborative character. Since then, my work has
been connected not only with the ideas of intervention and public space but also with
the idea of the alien, testimony, monument, trauma, healing, and with what Chantal
Mouffe calls “agonistic democracy” and what Michel Foucault called “fearless
speaking”, evoking the Greek concept of parrhésía.
Parrhésía
I would like to say a few words about the notion of parrhésía. Without protecting
its parrhésía, the city cannot call itself democratic. In Ancient Greece, in the time
of Athenian democracy (and its later Greco-Roman form), parrhésía meant the
Athenian right and duty (and later even the art) of free unrestricted speaking or
outspokenness and it was at the very core of the democratic process and the life of
public space. This open speech, fearless and free speaking required special political
and ethical qualifications. A potential fearless speaker needed to perfect himself (in
Athenian democracy unfortunately only himself). The task of the fearless speaker
was to articulate, to speak out in public space and to be able to tell the truth from
the depth of his own experience while at the same time offering an unsolicited and
brave public criticism aimed to bring about a change for the better.
Michel Foucault made reference to this ancient practice in the context of
the 1970s discussion of “radical democracy”. While the importance of the political
and ethical qualifications of the parrhésíastic speaker were strongly emphasized by
Transformative Avant-Garde and Other Writings
Foucault, the psychological conditions for the development of these qualifications
were only implied. His demand for the ethics of the self, suggests however the
need, and perhaps even a duty to take seriously the “care for the self” by the
parrhésíastic speaker himself. To be able to tell the truth and transmit it effectively
and responsibly in public, the speaker must be ready to tell the truth and to make
it public; he must be of a healthy mind and prepared to develop his capacity to
communicate. It must be assumed that those who bravely come forward with
the otherwise unsolicited, often unspeakable truth need others who can open
themselves up to bravely listen, open their ears, I’oreille de I’autre, (the ear of
the other), using Jacques Derrida’s expression. 29
Art and Parrhésía Today
The ancient democracy was inclusive only for the small group of citizens: the
so-called polis. It did not include women, slaves, foreigners and others. Our
modern democracy in its present form, at least on paper, promises to every citizen
and every resident, rich or poor, the fundamental rights, including the right to
communicate in public space, to speak fearlessly and fearlessly listen.
If one wanted to look for a fearless speaker in today’s democracy, one
should look among those whose experiences should be most urgently heard, as
most instructive, evocative and simultaneously offering valuable criticism to
make the city a more inclusive, just, free and equal space. Unfortunately and
tragically, those who should be the first potential present day parrhésíastes
are too often discouraged, even incapacitated by the very experiences which
they should be publicly announcing and denouncing. As a result of traumatic
life events, their ability to share their passion in an open public space has been
shattered. They are unable to publicly project their experiences, are unable to
protest, to witness, to give a testimony, to voice their criticism and to share
their prophetic vision. In such a difficult situation, Foucault’s demand for the
ethics of the self and “care of the self” on the part of the potential parrhésíastic
speaker, which aimed at perfecting his (and today also her) mental and
emotional qualifications, becomes today the democratic project. However, it
must be said here that without solid social, psychological, cultural, artistic,
technological support and without the help of the community and self-help—
that is work on oneself—the potential fearless speakers, the parrhésíastes,
will remain unable to open up and openly speak out in public space. They will
remain silent.
Parrhésía and Public Art
In this situation, to call itself truly public, art has to develop relevant strategies
and practices which will allow it to effectively and affectively contribute to the
inclusiveness of the democratic process and of public space. In this effort the
process of regaining and developing the ability to be open and to open up others,
as well as to speak out in public space, must become an integral part of the
artistic project.
One among such parrhésíastic projects for artists and designers is to create
inspiring artifices, situations and events to aid expression and communication
through which silent and unheard city residents will be able to fearlessly open up
and share the unsolicited truth about their existence while others, thanks to the
event, will gain the courage to be able to fearlessly bring themselves closer to
them, to listen to them and to hear them.
Democracy/Avant-Garde
 Art of the Other
The word “respons-i-bility”, “being respons-ible’” is a derivative from the words
“response”, “respons-ability”, the ability “to respond”. Since the very beginning
of the artistic avant-garde, about 100, and some would say over 150 years ago,
artists have been mastering the skill of an ethical and aesthetic response and
reaction towards what is often hidden in the world that we live in so that the
suppressed existential and social reality can become visible. I believe that still
today, albeit with new and different strategies and methods, and according to
new notions of “utopia”, our respons-ability, our ability to aesthetically respond
30 to present-day realities, those neglected and kept in the dark, remains the core
of our artistic and civic respons-ibility. At the same time it is obvious that our
responsibility must reach much further.
Having acknowledged the lack of ability to respond in others, we should
take responsibility for the respons-ability of others and in this way alleviate the
scarcity of ‘public response’. Understood in this way the ethical artistic practice,
as proposed by Levinas, is located in the center of democratic interplay between
the asymmetry of human interaction in ethics and the symmetry of these
interactions in politics. Ethical asymmetry is always where I may see myself as
unequal to another and where I am forced to focus more on the other than on
myself. It is the ethical asymmetry that keeps the political symmetry alive, and
in which we are all equal. What is needed in democracy, as put by Levinas, is an
ongoing interruption of politics by ethics, of totality by infinity, interruption of
what is said by what remains unspoken.
Visibility and Equality
According to Hannah Arendt, political equality means visibility in public space
and conversely, political inequality and invisibility go hand in hand. As artists who
use various means of communication, be it multimedia, sound, performance
or the broad field of design, we consider our visual field as the area of contact
with our heritage and our cultural and professional foundations. As visual artists
and designers, as practical experts in making ideas, things and experiences be
visibly visible by finding their purpose and giving them a public form, in making
them effectively appear in public and become affectively useful, we can take
responsibility for others, for the lack of ability and capacity on the part of these
others to react and be visible in public space. As professional artists we are capable
of contributing to the dissemination of freedom and equality by making visible those
who are relegated to the outside of our privileged field of vision.
My city instrumentations, especially those designed by myself as
performative and communicative devices, and my public projections—the
performative appropriation-animation of prominent city monuments—are aimed
to function as the vehicles for creative dissemination and the strengthening of
public presence and public visibility. As such, I hope they can contribute to the
social equality of the city.
Art and Agonistic Democracy
Foucault brought to our attention the Athenian demand—postulate for the place to
be reserved in society for a “fearless speaker”. At present, this form of democracy
is passionately advocated by Chantal Mouffe. She strongly objects to the existing
“deliberative democracy”, claiming that there is a dangerous tendency for
achieving easy agreement (consensus). Mouffe convincingly demonstrates that this
Transformative Avant-Garde and Other Writings
seemingly ‘civilized’ consensus is in fact a shallow compromise, usually reached at
the expense of various social exclusions: rejections that evacuate all inconvenient
(yet burning and painful) problems, issues and voices from public discourse.
Democracy cannot be a solution. Democracy and solution or consensus are
contradictory terms. Of course, no single group should claim a monopoly, priority
or exclusivity as an agent performing the ‘disturbing’ and ‘disorganizing’ agonistic
task in order to keep democracy alive. There cannot be a ‘historically chosen’
class, or group to perform such a role. The ways and methods of gaining access to
communicating through public space and urban media are a part of a democratic
contest and that is agon. 31
Those whose role is to operate within the limits of social support or who
work within ‘cultural agency’ networks in the city, should have the ability to
negotiate and cooperate with various individuals or groups to give priority to the
agonistic choice of potential authors and performers of such public speech acts and
performances. The choice must be agonistically negotiated to secure its greatest
impact in the context of events and circumstances that bring changes to the city.
I firmly believe that art and design in its multiple forms of public
intervention, through contesting ‘oppositional constructions’, ‘temporary
appropriations and infiltrations’, critical city performances, functionally provocative
and scandalizing projects and situations, interrogative design projects, ‘relational
projects’ and, urban media innovations, are in a strong position to contribute in
everyday life to a non-passive agonistic model of democracy. They can help citizens
fearlessly share and disseminate the truth about their unimaginable and unspeakable
life experience in the open and they can help others to openly listen and hear and
comprehend it without fear. This must be the first priority for art that wishes to
contribute to truly inclusive and agonistic democracy!
Trauma, Testimony, Monument, Projection and Protest
As I mentioned before, those who should be the first to publicly testify today to the
truth of their experience, those who should be the new parrhésíastes, are often too
traumatized by these very experiences to open up and appear in public space.
If I may use here Deleuze’s expression (albeit in a less diagnostic but more
prognostic and provocative way) I would like to say that art in today’s democracy
and in today’s city is both a critical and a clinical issue. According to clinical
psychoanalysts, the struggle for recovery from trauma is directly dependant on the
patient’s capacity to actively participate in developing a narrative voice and on his/
her readiness to give direct testimony. Psychoanalysts claim that there is a greater
chance for a successful recovery when the testimony is performed as a public
act, and even more so when it is directed as a social utterance to and on behalf
of others. The act of public truth-telling has a restorative power. A psychologist,
Pierre Janet termed this act “presentification”. Judith Herman, a trauma clinician
says that the “survivors” capacity to perform their testimony and make themselves
visible in public space depends on their success in the process of emerging from
their post-traumatic stress. Public truth-telling is the common denominator of
all social action. Herman adds that survivors often undertake to speak about the
unspeakable in public in the belief that this will help others. In doing so, they feel
part of a power that is larger than themselves. As put by Herman, “trauma forces
an average person to become a theologian, philosopher, and a judge”.
Foucault’s politico-ethical democratic project on the issue of fearless
speaking in the struggle for the truth as “critical truth” must merge with
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 critical memory and with recovery from trauma to become one complex social
and aesthetic project. I am convinced that it is art that is the needed and
indispensable practical form required to realize this project in public space, as
it is well suited for acts of presentification and for making visible the passage
from a private confession through a public testimony to transformative action,
that is to a metamorphosis.
Protest
The word “protest”—pro-test—comes from the Latin testis, that is witness.
32 The word protest includes both praise for testimony and praise for the act of
testifying as well as some encouragement for a change for the better. Protest is
simultaneously a critical and a positive act. I suggest that protest, similarly to
agon, parrhésía, testimony and even monument and memorial, should become a
part of our attempts to reach a critical truth from the point of our “place” (topos)
which is situated in our present day—in our ‘today’: a place which is not hidden
behind the horizon of the future. I also suggest that all these notions should be
combined by something existential, critical, active and prophetic also including
our dissensus for the place (topos). For utopia is not our place, but “No!-place”
meaning I condemn such a place, I protest as a witness of my present day which
I cannot accept and as a witness with experiences of my past. I present my vision
of the future in which there will be no room for such a place.
Monument
Cities are populated by two distinct yet interrelated groups of dwellers:
monuments and residents. And there is a relation between the democratic health
of the city’s residents and the democratic health of public monuments. At times,
monuments and memorials in their stillness and speechlessness look strangely
human, while traumatized humans in their silence and motionlessness may
appear strangely monumental. The silent city survivors living in the shadows of
these monuments look at the blank facades and blind eyes of public buildings
and memorials, which are speechless witnesses to present-day injustices.
Both—monuments and survivors need to be re-animated. They need, what I
call “monument therapy”.
The word “monument” is related to remembering, reminding, or minding
and also to warning. Monumentum, in Latin derives from the verb moneo, monui,
monitum that is to remind, to warn, to remind with regard to future conduct or
events. The word “memorial” refers to the Latin memento that is precisely a
command to mind and to remind.
In our present- and future-bound concerns the critical mission of the
monument and memorial is being repressed through their continuing enslavement
to the past, through all-too-excessive and uncritical commemorative and celebratory
functions and duties. Despite all the painful events and experiences which we
(and also the monument) have witnessed, despite many victims and survivors, the
authorities of public space do not allow for and notoriously prevent testifying, pro-
testing and critically responding in public. In this way the monuments and memorials
are closed, forced to be inanimate and silent, forced to exist while being realistically
and symbolically ‘cut off’ from present-day realities and experiences. They are
forced, as Janet said, to live in a continuing ethical, political, psychological and
aesthetic stress and suffering from, if I may call it in such a clinical way, a Monument
Dissociation Syndrome (MDS), that is in the state of being psychologically
Transformative Avant-Garde and Other Writings
disassociated from the pain causing reality. Let me say here that both city
monuments and city residents need a democratic animation and re-animation.
Let the Monument Speak
A critical monumental ‘clinic’ should be initiated and run by those who, in the
process of recovering from their own trauma, have themselves just become
‘speaking monuments’. I mean those of whom Judith Herman, said, “In refusing
to hide or to be silenced, in insisting that rape (or any other unspeakable life
event) is a public matter, and in demanding social change, ‘survivors’ create their
own living monuments.” 33
My monumental projections, such as my project in Hiroshima and in
Tijuana, attempted to appropriate these qualities of monuments that should and
are able to serve those who are otherwise invisible, unheard and disrespected. It
is clear for me that the traumatized silent city residents need to be democratically
re-animated and it is also clear that the traumatized and silent city monuments
need to be democratically re-animated as well. In the case of my monumental
projections, my motto is as follows: To animate the monument one must animate
oneself. Conversely speaking, to help oneself to be able to animate oneself, one
needs to animate the monument.
City of the Victors and City of the Vanquished
When we say, “This is the public space of the city”, we mean an official
representative and also monumental space of the city which is reserved for the
memory and history of the victors, a space for remembering and celebrating those
who have won, who have succeeded and, let us say it clearly, a space where those
who have not succeeded, the nameless vanquished, the forgotten witnesses and
survivors of yesterday and of today are conveniently forgotten. The success of
democracy depends on the disruptive and performative tradition and on interaction
with the nameless. This tradition of disruption must affect the linear continuity
of the history of the victors.
Referring to Walter Benjamin, the prophetic act of “interrupting history”,
an act which can arrest time, must be an act of closeness to our “time-now”
and a consequence of one’s revolutionary intuition of the present and it must
be combined with the hope that one can prevent the future from repeating the
past and present catastrophes and injustices. The disruptive and performative
tradition is also our artistic heritage. For quite a long time we have been involved
in joining the vanquished and nameless in this prophetic journey as cultural
activists and animators with Gustave Courbet (“Bonjour Monsieur Courbet”),
Die Brücke, Joseph Beuys, Guerilla Girls, Gran Fury, Act-Up, Barbara Kruger,
and others. In this context I should also mention the work of my colleagues in the
United States such as Walid Raad and the Atlas Group, Critical Art Ensemble,
Electronic Civil Disobedience, Autonomedia, the Yes Men, Visible Collective, and
the programs and projects of the Vera List Center for Art and Politics in New
York. Their political and artistic presence and work is also a kind of support for
my own work in MIT’s Interrogative Design Group where I am currently working
on my new project, the Iraq War Veteran Vehicle.
Public Projection
Etymologically, the word “projection” comes from the Latin projectlo (taking out)
and “pro” meaning forward. In its broader sense projection means an action,
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 process, state, technique, an effect of showing something or outlining something,
of emphasizing something against a surface, against a background or against
the surroundings; it refers to something becoming visible, appearing or showing.
Projection as pro-jection suggests movement towards something new. At the
same time it is also kind of connected with ‘e-jection’, throwing out of something
ahead of oneself and out of oneself, and possibly it is also connected with the ‘re-
jection’ of something or someone.
These two seemingly contradictory faces of projection make sense when taken
together. Ejecting (pro-jecting) something new (that we hope to be something better)
34 is generally connected with re-jecting something old (that we perceive as something
worse). What I mean here is a projection which involves a public act of throwing out of
oneself a dangerously hidden inner complaint, which involves uttering this complaint
in public and voicing one’s dissensus in the open. Such a projection is critical and
activates the process of transformation.
In the world of art, publicity and performance projection is often taken
to mean a production of fantasy which has a link with the tradition, effects
and techniques of creating illusion, a magic show which aims at producing an
illusion of reality and replacing reality with illusion. The artist actively projects
and externalizes and the audience takes it in and internalizes. The audience
is expected to introject and identify with the projected image and symbolically
absorb the image. In my opinion these expectations especially in the case of a
projection shown in a public space have dangerously moved projection towards
the range of aims and techniques characteristic of entertainment shows, political
propaganda and the seductive production of consumer needs.
After all, the city itself is already a kind of projection which dominates,
blinds and makes it impossible to create other projections also of what remains
hidden, weak, unpleasant and inconvenient. In comparison with the projection of
‘the city’s superpowers’—their economic, political and religious publicity combined
with the ideological projection of the city’s monuments and architecture, as well
as with the projection of the social silence that is all of what the monuments and
the symbols of the city’s space do not say, to what they do not react and keep
silent about when it should be of their concern and within their visual field—
the public projection which I offer is interrogative projection, interventionist
projection, a counter-projection but not an ideological fantasy, an introjection.
The Public Audience
Public projections count on an ample public audience which will turn up, as put by
Brecht, “not without interest”, that is not without a reason and who will be willing as
an outcome of the projection to become motivated, unnerved, shocked or rebellious
thanks to the projection, together with it or even against it. The city’s public audience
has already got experience with projections because the city itself is a projection in
which the public is both passively and actively involved; where the public is its object
and subject depending on the historical circumstances—circumstances that the
public itself sometimes creates.
In the case of my projections, the audience includes also its authors—
actors, co-authors, co-artists and monument animators; their families, friends and
enemies; people involved in organizing the projection; social organizers, volunteers,
help groups, and self-help groups; journalists and the media; the community
gathered around and involved in staging the actual projection (projection crew,
film crew, sound people, editing team); the public meaning the witnesses; the
Transformative Avant-Garde and Other Writings
public who will give support; the public who will give criticism; the rebelling
public, the infuriated public and the composed public—all these people together
participate in making the unique public life of the projection. Following the earlier
mentioned encyclopedic understanding of projection, its public character becomes
effective when, through projection, issues are made visible and surface against the
background of social life, when new socially important issues are formulated via
a projection and when the third dimension is being added to oneself and others—
others who become vividly visible in public space, who step out into the outer world
(both socially and visually—as well as in any kind of action which aims to broadcast
and make visible the presence of oneself and others. A public projection (frequently 35
preceded by a yearly process of socio-artistic preparations) is a public performance,
stepping out into the forefront, in front of the crowd, fighting one’s way through,
pushing through, pushing out, ‘stepping out’ of line (I mean taking a risk); a
becoming visible in public space that may sometimes prove risky.
Political Art and the Art of Politics
Let us contribute to “the political” rather than to what is called “politics”. Let
us help to create the political on the grounds of disturbance, by disturbing the
‘policing’ and ‘distributional practices’ of the governmental or the corporate
authorities and State agencies: social, cultural and economic.
Since the 1990s our objective has been to contribute to the political rather
than to politics, to the conception of polis rather than to policing or the ‘police’,
to that which is a multitude or potential, rather than potentates. In our actions
we are closer to revolt than revolution, to agon and dissensus than consensus,
to democratic parrhésía than political passivity; we are closer to disciplined
civic responsibility and nomadism than to the State apparatus; and finally we
are closer to self-emancipation than teaching by a directive. Let us continue our
efforts in creating art for the political.
There are new well-described methodologies developed for this purpose by
artists, artistic and cultural groups and local collaborative networks and coalitions.
Referring here to the words of Jacques Rancière, let us see the project of “the
political” as an “emancipatory project”, in the way of disturbing “the set system of
social inequalities” by giving a voice to those who are being excluded or segregated
by fixed “hierarchies of knowledge” and culture. In pursuing our aims let us
avoid categorizing these with whom we work by any preconceived and uniform
terms pertaining to their identity (such as for example the proletariat, the poor, a
minority) and thus approve their common name, “the equals”.
In this respect to contribute to the political means to refuse to act as
‘masters’ over ‘others’ and to reject treating anyone as our disciples. If anything
we should act as if we were ourselves the disciples in the emancipatory process of
others. In short, speaking again like Jacques Rancière, let us consider ourselves
as “the ignorant teachers”, “the ignorant school masters” (maitres ignorantes)
who create conditions for the development of others self-awareness, self-
articulation, self-representation and the skill of communicating with the self.
Doing so, we should understand the psychologically developmental and transitory
character of the artistic production process and see it from the difficult and fragile
perspective of those who choose to work on the project and are willing to infuse
it and transmit through it, their often traumatic life experience. In this process
the question whether it is the work of ‘the participant’ or the work of ‘the artist’
should not be even formulated, let alone responded to. Such a question would
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 destroy the transitory and developmental character of the creative process which, Not public space for art but art for public space, disrupting it, unnerving
as put by DW Winnicott, requires securing the “potential space”: “the third it, stimulating public discourse, directing it toward a better life in the city toward
stratum of experience” in which the participant becomes the artist and, I wish to better people in the city.
add here, the artist becomes a participant in the project. One more thing remains As Bertolt Brecht said in his “Ten Poems from a Reader for Those who
to be said, when working with people let us learn to develop an atmosphere of Live in Cities”,
openness, trust and playfulness.
The cities are allowed to change,
Public Projection in Poznań But you are not allowed to change.
I am currently involved in the planning stages of my newest public projection We shall argue with the stones....
36 which, thanks to the Signum Foundation, can take place in Poznań in a public 37
space. Projection, protest, testimony and parrhésía are already there. The
collaborators in my project are those people whose presence should be noticed Based on a lecture given at the Poznań University of Art on reception of an
by social organizations. The presence and needs of those people who in their life Honorary Doctorate in 2007.
have been less fortunate than us, but who know more than us, about our cities,
have become more visible for me thanks to one of Poznań’s charity organizations
and its great social work, both deconstructive and constructive. I refer to the
Pogotowie Społeczne (Social Emergency Group) at ul Borowki 12 in Poznań. And
more specifically, the work of Beata Benyskiewicz and Wojciech Zarzycki. Their
work described in the Group’s newsletter, Biuletyn Stowarzyszenia Pogotowie
Społeczne shows the breath of practical and theoretical experiences in which
Poznań’s and Poland’s problem of rejection, homelessness, unemployment,
addiction, family and partnership issues is analyzed. It is also a sign that things
can go in the right direction in social work.
As in other projects, the planned public projection in Poznań will be
yet another attempt, once more an effort to employ the symbolic quality and
prestigious presence and scale of a selected city monument and to use it in order
to make publicly visible the city’s others with no false claim of true understanding
of their life situation and with no exaggeration. This project, I truly hope, will
create a two-fold socio-aesthetic situation where, on the one hand, the city will
allow the city’s others to develop and reinforce their weakened or shattered
capacity to open up and share their difficult life experiences in public and in
which, on the other hand, the public will be able to bring itself respectfully closer
to the city’s others and will acknowledge their role as major actors and heroes on
the stage of the city’s agon.
At the same time I hope that the projection will help the city’s monuments
to feel more confident as they become involved in the process of being useful
to the living residents, animators and the animating public. In this respect the
projection will widen our public space. Apart from the city survivors themselves
who will be directly involved as co-artists in this project, there may be many more
participants, such as, social workers, other rescuers and their families and friends
as well as anybody else who is willing to help and cooperate in a variety of ways.
The project is intended to be prepared and carried out in close collaboration with
social support organizations and groups, under the administrative and cultural
auspices of the institutions related to these organizations and in cooperation with
the authorities related to the urban site chosen for the projection, as well as with
the city itself, its civic authorities and all supporters of the project.
I would like to dedicate my ‘project to come’ to these city residents and city
dwellers for whom and with whom these social support organizations work, as
well as to all their workers—that is to all with whom I wish to work to be in accord
with my artistic and public beliefs.

Transformative Avant-Garde and Other Writings Democracy/Avant-Garde

Realism as a Course of Life
an intervi e w wit h s c a p e g oat
2012
Scapegoat: We would like to start with the debates about realism in Poland
in the 1960s. Andrzej Turowski’s essay “Wodiczko and Poland in the 1970s”
discusses these questions in the 1950s, 1960s and 1970s, focusing especially
on the debate between formalism and realism. He argues that in the early 1950s
Socialist Realism was dominant, then following the end of Stalinism in the mid-
1950s there was a quick turn toward abstraction.1 Could you talk about how you
saw your work developing in relation to these debates.
Krzysztof Wodiczko: I really began working as an artist in the 1970s, so the
debates of the 1960s happened before my time. Turowski is bringing a historical
background to the 1970s in order to provide a ground for readers who know
nothing about that particular period, which was curious for its openness and
apparently liberal relationship to art in comparison to Socialist Realism. But realism
as such in the mind of people in the 1970s was still closely connected to Socialist
Realism, so its politics were linked to the authoritarian politics of the communist
party, or those who collaborated with them. Politics was poisoned by Stalinism and
post-Stalinism, and realism was also poisoned by the legacy of that time.
I would say that Social Realism, as opposed to Socialist Realism, was set to
be reborn after the end of Stalinism in 1956, when I was still a high school student.
At that time the Polish philosopher Adam Schaff wrote a spirited defense of Social
Realism against all of the criticism that was coming from those who supported
the abstraction and expressionism flourishing after the end of Stalinism. Schaff
attempted to defend the tradition of realism in an intelligent way, by referring to
political and aesthetic debates on the topic during the early years of the Soviet
Union. However in the mid-1970s, I read Linda Nochlin’s book on nineteenth-
century art, Realism.2 It was translated into Polish by the Academy of Science,
as one of a series of excellent books on topics such as semiology and semiotics,
which the censors allowed because they could be superficially connected to the
government’s theoretical ambitions.
Transformative Avant-Garde and Other Writings
Nochlin’s position was officially accepted, but reading and discussing
her book was not a very popular thing to do, and her book’s elaboration of
“critical realism” has been generally not well understood. However, it was really
an eye-opener for me methodologically. I read it together with In the Circle of
Constructivism by Andrzej Turowski, which was extremely important for me
because it raised the political dimension of the Constructivist movement in the
Soviet Union in both its analytical and Productivist phases.3 It became very clear
to me that in both of those books politics was central, the politics of realism
and the politics of Constructivism. In both cases (however utopian, or even
often misguided) there was an attempt to challenge the imaginary relations of 39
an individual to his or her own real conditions of existence (Louis Althusser’s
definition of ideology) as a condition for action in ‘the real world’ toward social
change.4 Whether it was Gustave Courbet, Èdouard Manet, or the Constructivist
revolution, each attempted to move from the world of imagery, illusion, or
representation into the world of action, production and the transformation of
reality. Vertov, Rodchenko, and Lissitsky were all Marxists. The realist painters
of the nineteenth century were not Marxist, but Marx himself was born into that
milieu; he was a realist. Philosophers and politicians with socialist and anarchist
tendencies, including the utopian socialist Saint-Simon and the anarchist
Proudhon affected both realist artists and the Constructivists. So after reading
Nochlin, realism became a very attractive proposition to me. I met her recently,
when I received an American Art Critics Award for an exhibition at Boston’s ICA
called ...OUT OF HERE: The Veterans Project. This was the first time I had met
her since reading her book in the 1970s and I thanked her. I said, “you didn’t
just influence my life, you set the course of my life”. And she responded: “I also
learned a lot from you.” Which was nice of her to say; at least I discovered she
was aware of what I was doing.
In fact, the work at the ICA, as well as the previous interior projections,
like the one in Galerie Lelong on the anniversary of September 11th, If You See
Something..., and Guests at the 2009 Venice Biennale, were all referring to realist
principles. I think these works resonate with Roman Jakobson’s ideas about
realism, when he argues (using my words, not his) that a realist drills a hole in a
wall between ourselves and reality. The artist’s task and decision was to determine
where to drill this hole, at what point in this wall, because through this hole we will
only see a fragment that stands in for something much larger. I think this may sum
up the nineteenth-century vision of realism.5
S: Can you briefly describe these works?
KW: Galleries rarely have windows. They are usually pure interiors and as such
they stand for all our own interiors. The gallery is a second interior. The first is
inside our own skull. With our eyes partially blind, we are always trying to figure
out what is going on outside, but at the same time so much has accumulated in
our inner world. So when we enter an empty gallery it is already filled with our
memories. The trick that I developed in a number of works was to create the
illusion that the wall is broken somehow, that there are windows where there were
not before, projecting the image of a window with its view.
I did this first in the 1980s at Hal Bromm Gallery in New York City. There
I photographed windows and the view from an apartment that was for sale in
the East Village. In the photos views of urban ruins appear beyond the blinds of
the newly renovated apartment. I then projected those windows into the gallery,
which was the same size—the galleries in the East Village were the same size as
Democracy/Avant-Garde
 the apartments, as it was a residential zone. I called the piece The Real Estate
Projection and I added some real estate magazines and binoculars, just to add a
romantic-anthropological aspect to the projection. This was a classic realist trick—
it broke the wall into reality—showing people a scene that many people saw every
day. Whoever came to the gallery saw it everywhere, but didn’t expect the gallery
to actually become this place, so they had to realize their relationship between
the art world and real estate development. The work resonated with the critique
made by Rosalyn Deutsche and Cara Gendel Ryan in their essay, “The Fine Art of
Gentrification”.6 The project emphasized the neighborhood’s uneven development
40 and the role of artists in real estate development and in constructing a romantic
vision of what Neil Smith would later call “The New Urban Frontier”.7
In 2005, I revisited this strategy in an exhibition at Galerie Lelong in
Chelsea. Again there were windows projected, but this time you couldn’t see
through them. They looked as if they were made of frosted glass, a very typical
material in Chelsea galleries. They let light in, but you couldn’t see through them
unless somebody leans right against them, and then there is a shocking moment
when you realize that there is somebody there, and you can see many close
details, but only while the person remains right at the glass. I projected these
windows as if they opened into a vestibule, a type of space you could imagine
in Chelsea—it could have been a hotel lobby or the gallery entrance. Behind the
windows stood people who were talking about the way they were being mistreated
by Homeland Security, who had lost their jobs, who had been deported, who were
discriminated against. You could hear what they were saying, but you couldn’t see
them unless they leaned close to the glass. In this case the wall was not exactly
broken. On the one hand, the viewers sensed the foggy relation we each have to
the outside world, and on the other, viewers had a strange feeling that the outside
world was very close; that it could almost break through the glass, creating a
disaster. There was someone with whom you have a voyeuristic relationship,
a shadow of somebody that could actually be very close. Perhaps you would
hear something that you weren’t supposed to hear or see something that you
should report. The piece takes its very name from the Department of Homeland
Security’s slogan, “If you see something, say something”.
It is about the reality that is both dangerously close, frighteningly close, with
which you don’t want to have much contact and of which you only have a very foggy
sense. So it’s not the classic realist trick, where I break the wall in order to see reality.
In this piece you actually don’t see it, but you see what you don’t see. It attempts to
illustrate how little we see, how impossible it is to really establish contact with reality,
while at the same time bringing us close enough to it to realize how frightening this
reality is, how unacceptable it is, even if we don’t understand it. It is also impossible
for us to identify with those people whose situations are worse than we can imagine.
This is a different form of realism because it exposes the impossibility of gaining
access to reality, while also giving us a hint of what it is we cannot gain access to. It
is the reality of our interior; the gallery provides space for our fears and uncertainty
about the world.
It also projects the interior against the exterior. We are inside, but all the
issues and threats that come from the exterior are managed by the Minister of the
Interior—or Homeland Security. It also refers obliquely to Orwell’s windowless
Ministry of Love in 1984, which housed Oceania’s Thought Police. There you
can only imagine what is inside, and when you are inside you don’t see what
is outside. In my piece you are trapped inside by the same Homeland Security
Transformative Avant-Garde and Other Writings
that keeps those people outside. Like Homeland Security, the wall and the milky
windows keep you from knowing what is going on. They can protect you from your
own fears, or what Bush called “terror”. In Polish, terror only refers to the outside
world, but in English it can be inside you. Bush’s War on Terror was in fact a war
against the fear of terrorism, not against terrorism itself. A war was staged against
the feeling of terror produced by potential terrorist attacks, which of course
created its own paranoia. The Department of Homeland Security asked you to
confront your fear of terror by being vigilant, which in my piece meant that when
you hear or see something beyond the milky glass you should report it. All the
things that were said outside the gallery were suspicious, despite the fact that they 41
were actually stories of Homeland Security mishandling a situation. Of course, I
am stretching realism quite far, but reality has so many dimensions here, external
and inner realities, and the fear of reality is itself also real.
S: You have explained one dimension of your practice: interior projections. They
seem to get at a very fundamental relationship between a psychic space and the
world outside. These two poles seem to be fundamental to any conception of
realism: on the one hand naive realism argues that things just exist in the world,
and on the other, critical theory claims that reality is fundamentally about how
we think and perceive the world, so it is very much about interiority. We think
it’s great that you started with these interior works because in that way they
resonate quite clearly with nineteenth-century notions of realism in art, especially
in painting or film, but it would be interesting if you could now explain how the
outdoor projections and vehicles operate in relation to reality.
KW: There is a big difference between my interior and exterior projects, especially the
projections. When you are outside a building, the facade is taller than you are. It’s no
longer your interiority that you are confronting, but a superior body, in the shadow of
which you live—a kind of father figure. You feel it in your neck when you look up. You are
like a baby, subjected to a projection from the thing that looms over you, while at the
same time you project yourself onto the structure. So the relationship a person has to
architecture from the outside is very different from being inside. When you encounter
one of my exterior projections with video and sound (rather than slide projection), there
is somebody else there in the building, so your projection meets another projection.
In many of my works, a building is made to speak through the voice and
gestures of a person who may be suffering horrifying life conditions, child abuse
for instance, which as a member of the public you may not want to know about.
You might feel implicated in their condition, because you might have abusive
tendencies yourself, or maybe you were abused and you deny it. It’s frightening
not to simply have your own projection and identification with the structure,
because there is somebody else there and something of you is there too that you
may not want to confront.
So this is a different realism. Here, because of scale, somebody who is
supposed to be very small, even invisible, becomes 50 times bigger. In relation
to that person you are 50 times smaller. You are forced to see the world from a
bottom-up perspective and you feel this perception in your neck, you feel how
small you are, which means you have something to learn from this person as if
you were a student or a child. Through the authority of these structures you are
subjected to their sense of reality.
In the earlier slide projections I tried to really re-actualize symbolic
structures in the present, to see the frightening continuity between what’s
happening today and what those structures meant when they were made,
Democracy/Avant-Garde
 by turning war memorials into symbolic war machines. Rather than simply
commemorating those who died for their country, these structures actually
perpetuate certain beliefs, which is why I began projecting onto buildings. The
last one I did was in 1991 in Madrid during the first Persian Gulf War. There I
projected a skeleton holding a gun and a petrol nozzle on either side of the Arco
de la Victoria, dedicated in 1956 to Franco’s army, in order to recall the phantasm
of civil war. This was also a re-activation, or re-actualization, of a historic war
machine in a time when a new war machine was underway.
At that time I wasn’t able to do video projections in the way I am doing
42 them now. Not only were video projectors not strong enough, but I also did not
have enough experience working with people. I developed this experience through
projects like Alien Staff, 1994 and Mouthpiece (Le porte-parole), 1996. Those
projects forced me to learn techniques of working with people, so they could tell
their stories. In these projects I worked with people who know what reality is,
because they lived through it and are still surviving it. They see the world from
the point of view of its wounds. They have a bottom-up perception. As Walter
Benjamin would say, they see it from the perspective of the vanquished. That
is what realists always wanted to achieve, to see the real conditions of life, to
understand them from the perspective of a nameless survivor. Alien Staff was
realist in the sense that it provided equipment for immigrants to become realist
artists themselves. It allowed them to testify to what was wrong, to protest,
to break the walls of miscommunication by recording, editing, and presenting
testimony of their experiences.
S: Some of your recent works, such as The Arc de Triomphe: World Institute for
the Abolition of War, or The Memorial to the Abolition of Slavery in Nantes, are very
much design projects. They are highly symbolic design objects and at first glance
they appear to function more in that realm than as practical spaces.
KW: Yes, the Arc de Triomphe project is clearly a working thing. The Memorial
to the Abolition of Slavery was deprived of its initial program. It was supposed
to be a monitoring station that would transmit present day abolitionist actions
against contemporary slavery. There was a real working dimension to it that was
never really realized. However, what I proposed with the Arc de Triomphe project
was the opposite. In this work I want to really respond to changing realities and
also help transform that reality. So I attached a machine to the symbolic skin or
body of the Arc de Triomphe itself, which is purely ideological, a machine that
perpetuates certain beliefs—so that the new spaces that surround the arch are
designed to help to monitor, map, and alter changing realities, so there will be
less conflict and less war. At the same time, the Institute for the Abolition of
War is designed to un-poison culture by studying the architecture that actually
perpetuates this culture and introducing an analytical and critical aspect to the
working memorial. The project operates on two sites, attaching itself to the
existing monument in a deconstructive way and at the same time engages a much
broader reality of war in order to change it.
The Memorial to the Abolition of Slavery also has a critical dimension, but is
a more petrified structure closer to a classic monument. Julian Bonder, architect
and co-author of the project, and I both congratulate the City of Nantes for letting
us accomplish quite a lot within and through this monumental form. The project
does more than most monuments of this sort, and that is their achievement.
However, it was never fully realized according to the original competition-winning
design concept that I proposed initially as a sole author. So my motivation to
Transformative Avant-Garde and Other Writings
launch the Arc de Triomphe project was partially a result of being disturbed by
the resistance of politicians and bureaucrats to this kind of project, their fear of
creating something that will in fact act. At the speech during the opening of the
memorial, I ended: “II faut faire quelque chose” (one must do something). It is not
enough to commemorate. I think the city is doing things—not directly through the
memorial, but around it and with it and taking advantage of it. I want things to
be done through the projects themselves and not simply around them. So there
is another aspect of realism here, more of a pragmatic aspect, if there is a link
between realism and pragmatism.
S: It seems to me that your dynamic, changeable, scaffold-like structures, are 43
deliberately set in an oppositional relation to monumental art, which in its very
petrified form is unable to keep up with the mutability of realism. This is why your
détournements of these monuments are so provocative: your projections are
three hours long, and they are always performed in relation to present conditions.
KW: Courbet thought that he could create historical paintings as long as they
were also contemporary, about and of the present. He projected the present
onto the past and argued that the opposite of realism was not idealism, but
“falsism”. What does “false” mean here? It refers to art that falsifies reality. Truth
is a fundamental issue in my work as well, a truth that is wrapped up in public
space, democracy, and parrhésía (the necessity to speak openly). Right now I am
interested in the realism of the democratic process itself. The parrhésíastes are
the truth-tellers—true realists—those who speak of their own lived experience in
order to confront the fakeness of all of the false promises that authorities make
and see the discrepancy between them and reality. In my work it is often the
elected officials that need to be questioned, for what they really are doing and
how they respond to real lives, needs, and critical issues. If the truth was the
centre of parrhésía, then provocative dialogue by cynics was actually often used
to get to the core of the matter, what is the true situation here. Even Socrates to
some degree was a realist, because he was trying to get to the truth of people’s
lives. In that sense the equipment that I designed, and the processes users
engage in are interconnected here in terms of design and projection. Together
they lead to franc-parler, free speaking. These projects could come up with a
proposal or vision, but they don’t have to. In that way my work is “cynicistic”,
not cynical—it doesn’t come up with proposals in order to resolve problems, but
it actually reveals the truth, the reality of somebody’s life, the injustice. The risk
involved in this is a realist risk.
Originally published in Scapegoat: Architecture, Landscape, Political Economy,
Issue 03: Realism, 2012, pp 6–9.
1 Turowski, Andrzej, “Wodiczko and Poland in the 1970s”, Krzysztof Wodiczko, Duncan
McCorquodale ed, London: Black Dog Publishing: 2011.
2 Nochlin, Linda, Realism, London: Penguin Books: 1971.
3 The original title of Andrzej Turowski’s book was The Constructivist Revolution, but he
was forced to change it to The Constructivist Circle because the censors believed the
word revolution should be reserved for political revolutions.
4 Althusser, Louis, “Ideology and Ideological State Apparatuses”, Lenin and Philosophy
and other Essays, London: Monthly Review Press: 1971.
5 This reference is to Roman Jakobson’s assertion that Realism is aligned with the
Metonymic pole of language, rather than the metaphoric pole, which is aligned with
Romanticism. Jakobson lays out this distinction in “The Metaphoric and Metonymic
Democracy/Avant-Garde
 Poles”, Jakobson, Roman and Morris Halle, Fundamentals of Language, The Hague:
Mouton and Co, 1956, pp 76–82. Linda Nochlin refers to Jakobson’s ideas in
Realism, pp 164–65, 182.
I’m for the Academy
6 Deutsche, Rosalyn and Cara Gendel Ryan, “The Fine Art of Gentrification”, October,
no 31, winter, 1984, pp 91–111. an interv iew w it h k banachows k a
7 Smith, Neil, The New Urban Frontier: Gentrification and the Revanchist City, London:
1977
Routledge, 1996.

44

Krzysztof Wodiczko: I should begin by saying what irritates me about the

situation of art in Poland. My view is pessimistic. It’s hard not to notice that
young artists and critics are completely unprepared for working in the field
of contemporary art. Two weeks ago I was at the Remont Gallery in Warsaw,
attending a conference on one of art’s most important aspects—its social
context. Except the organizers, no one on the Polish side (there were foreign
guests too) was prepared to discuss the subject sensibly. The successive
speakers just gibbered and it was impossible to understand what they wanted
to say. There is no doubt that the quality of our artistic education leaves a lot
to be desired. There’s a dearth of professional art periodicals. Neither Sztuka
nor Projekt can be regarded as such. So the few critics who could write serious
stuff have no place to publish. The lack of source materials on contemporary
art renders self-education hopeless. Nor is there any serious media coverage
of artistic facts or the artistic intellectual debate. No editor, even of a literary
magazine, will cover contemporary art extensively. They will run a feuilleton
that distorts facts using trendy language. Given the great achievement of post-
war culture—its wide social reach—the exclusion of contemporary art coverage
from it is particularly nasty.
Everything, of course, begins with schooling. Academic art historians
don’t understand that art history needs to be written in the context of, and
informed by, contemporary art. There is no such thing as a timeless art history.
The same is true for artistic education. Art school professors situate themselves
beyond history and beyond the possibility of passing the artistic tradition on to
their students. Suspended in ‘timeless art’, they claim to be in touch with its
‘spirit’. They enjoy the power and status that magic invariably offers. For this
is not so much about art as about position, and thus about the preservation of
institutional structures.

Transformative Avant-Garde and Other Writings Democracy/Avant-Garde

 All this creates great opportunities for autodidacts in both art and art criticism. KB: How to adorn your walls with objects that examine reality?
Those that are serious about their work need to begin their education anew once KW: Instead of wondering about the relationship between art and home, I’d
they’ve graduated from art school. It’s grassroots work. Yet the academy’s role should rather reflect on how to give people everything they want at home, including
be to “academize”, that is to absorb the avant-garde and its authors so that a new decorative objects in the widest selection possible. It would be absurd to make art
avant-garde can emerge. The quality of the avant-garde, which is a revolt against the for the sake of home decoration. The issue of whether art can function at home is
academy, has always depended on the academy itself. a problem of the home, not of the artwork.
K Banachowska: So what can be done?
KW: There are two possibilities. One is an ‘open’ academy, which teaches
students about everything that is interesting for art and attracts outside artists. Originally published in Sztandar Młodych, Jestem za Akademia, no 184, edition A,
46 We’ve recently had the pleasure to meet the founder of such a school at the 4 August, 1977. 47
Foksal Gallery, Gerald Ferguson, the originator of Canada’s Nova Scotia College
of Art and Design. The other possibility is schools that follow certain artistic
conceptions and study the issues of old and contemporary art accordingly. This
is the model that was developed by Strzemiński. But artistic education is simply
not treated seriously in Poland today. There’s an art school term that perfectly
camouflages the fact: “plastic thinking”. No one knows what it means, but it
makes things sound serious.
KB: What are the prospects for change?
KW: Some people believe that when a school changes, it degrades itself in the
eyes of its students. All this unnerves me because I’m very serious about the
academy. I suggest replacing the well-known slogan that “art can’t be taught”
with “there’s no art without consciousness”.
KB: How about “there’s no art without viewers”?
KW: I’d rather say “without the viewer’s consciousness”. Watching the public
at the opening of my exhibitions, I always ask myself: is what I’ve done here
a step forward in art? One of the fundamental questions that artists can ask
themselves is whether their work is meaningful in terms of social development,
whether they’ve posed a problem that is parallel to what is being discussed by
scientists and philosophers. This should be considered not simply in the context
of individuals but that of society at large.
KB: People find contemporary art irritating and annoying. Few understand its
experiments. They are, it is said, like trying to scratch your left ear with your right
hand. Wouldn’t it be easier with the left one?
KW: It would. But ease is the least criterion here. There’s a widespread view that
we should approach art emotionally, intuitively. This is not true in the context of
contemporary art, unless the artist themselves want it to be like this. Then we
should learn their agenda. If artists aren’t afraid to think, is it too much to expect
the same from viewers?
KB: Art is usually judged according to strict criteria, defined once and for all.
And you advocate thinking? Facts can hardly be discussed, and it’s a fact when
something is pronounced good or bad.
KW: There are no criteria in art anymore.
KB: What about beauty?
KW: The eighteenth-century notion that the artist is a producer of beauty no
longer has validity today.
KB: But what people want from art is beauty.
KW: If artists catered to such needs, they’d have to give up their other ambitions.
And yet even designers can’t confine themselves to that. Artists examine reality and
may even try to change it. This makes beauty an insignificant aspect. Producing
beauty would be like stupefying the public with art.

Transformative Avant-Garde and Other Writings Democracy/Avant-Garde

West/East:
The De-politicization of Art
Kar l Bev eridg e
and Kr zys zto f Wo dic z ko
1980
Political art in its various forms is a topical issue in the ‘Western’ world. The issue
of politics in art has run a different course in the ‘Eastern’, ‘Communist’ and/or third
world, though not necessarily a clearer one. Most of our understanding about art in
Eastern countries is prone to misconceptions about the nature of those societies.
Common to these interpretations is the view that most non-Western art has some form
of relation to an authoritarian State. This reveals that we view such art comparatively,
either colored by a conception of our own relative freedom, or from the vantage point
of a developed industrial State as opposed to an underdeveloped one, or both. In
other words, it is viewed from a position of ‘advantage’ and/or ‘sophistication’.
It is seldom considered that such art is produced under particular conditions
which are the historical variations of a common world economic situation. This is
not to deny the cultural particularity of a given nation, but it could form the basis
of a common frame of reference. More importantly, in the immediate sense, it
might dump the myth of our own cultural superiority. We may sneer at the rigidity
of Soviet cultural production, be amused by the moral naiveté of Chinese art, or
give a nudge of support to the art of Chilean resistance, failing to note the actual
ideological underdevelopment of our own art production, and the problematic
contradictions within which it is produced.
The cultural policies of the ‘East Block’ (Warsaw Treaty) countries
are often dismissed as being purely authoritarian under varying degrees of
Soviet control. Cultural resistance in these countries is greeted uncritically by
Westerners (from ethical and sentimental, but never political, standpoints) as
a positive step towards liberation. This is, of course, a simplistic reading and
mystification which creates an apparent schism between the realities of East and
West. All of this exists as an exotic nightmare punctuated by Cold War reality.
Poland maintains a somewhat special relation to the Soviet Union, but this
only increases the mystery. Holding the same basic ‘principal’ position with the
Transformative Avant-Garde and Other Writings
rest of the East Block, the Polish State maintains a much more elastic strategy
against opposition and a relatively independent cultural policy. This policy,
initiated in response to the famous workers’ struggles in Poznań in 1956, could
be called the most ‘liberal’ within the East Block.
Part of the mystery about Poland is based on a certain astonishment that
‘quality’ art could be produced under ‘authoritarian’ rule, a ‘quality’ that the West
considers to be the cultural legitimation of its own ‘free’ development. This initial
astonishment is quickly overcome, however, by the explanation that Western
ideas have slipped through into Polish life to be heroically taken up by some Polish
artists, and have gradually provoked the ‘liberalization’ of Polish cultural policy. 49
In reality, there is no heroism in the ‘Westernization’ of Polish culture, and
there is no liberalization as such in official policy; one that has in fact supported
this kind of activity for a long period of time.
Looking closer at the character of both Western art and Polish cultural
policy, it comes as no surprise that Modernism, Minimalism or Conceptualism
easily pass State censorship, and are supported by the Ministry of Culture with
the approval of the Cultural Department of the Central Committee.
The de-politicization of art in Poland began in the 1950s with the institution
of ‘official’ Socialist Realism. The shift from the art of “politics as dogma” (Stalinism)
to the art of “politics as taboo” (as it is today) was a characteristic element of the
‘revolutionary’ change after the Stalinist period in the late 1950s. As one Polish critic
pointed out privately, whatever State censorship in Poland does not understand in art
is immediately rubber-stamped for public consumption.
When the State bureaucracy turned from the Marxian theory of class
struggle to an ideology that legitimates its ‘steering’ role, real political opposition,
including its cultural expression, was (and continues to be) isolated and
suppressed. This kind of State rule, disregarding its more or less ‘elastic’ methods,
must continually strengthen itself while its policy of censorship must grow
increasingly more intelligent and sophisticated, so as to ‘creatively’ deal with both
liberal (cultural) and authoritarian (political) dictates.
Most artists in Poland lead a double life; a ‘free’ life relieved from politics,
and a ‘political’ life. The necessity of disengaging art from politics is juxtaposed in
the day-to-day life of the artist with the necessity to be engaged in official politics
through the production of art and design for the State’s propaganda system. The
industry of State propaganda—from monuments to displays and graphic design—
is a major source of income for the entire art community. On one hand, the
State needs to develop effective propaganda to consolidate its power, but it also
needs to develop the illusion of cultural freedom as a part of the same political
propaganda. Consequently both ‘lives’ of the artist—the ‘free’ and the ‘political’—
serve the same end. By dividing art practice into artistic and political spheres, the
State controls both a de-politicized art and an aestheticized politics. (In the West,
the industries of art, the media, and consumer propaganda provide a similarly
‘dialectical’ life for the artist. The predominance of Canada Council and NEA
funding may also be contributing to the unconscious ‘double life’ of Canadian and
American artists.)
Successful artists in Poland, organized into a strong union, win permission
to earn more money,1 are allowed complete tax exemption, extra studio space,
and freelance work, and can more easily travel abroad.2 But they obtain this
special status at a price. In the midst of economic crisis, witnessing the growing
political opposition of workers and the development of underground political
Democracy/Avant-Garde
 activity, they are unable to participate both as citizens and as artists. Thus many Personal Instrument:
transform themselves into ‘philosophers’, and their work on aesthetic theories,
structures and concepts makes them interesting to those in the West. A Response to Maria Morzuch
1992
Excerpt from a longer essay originally published under the pseudonym Andrzej
Ostrowski with Karl Beveridge in Fuse Magazine, Toronto: Artons Cultural Affairs
Society and Publishing Inc, March 1980, pp 140–144.

50
1 Earnings in Poland are arranged into “allowable income” levels. Artists’ allowable
income level is among the highest in the country.
2 Freelance work is outlawed in Poland. Only a few professions, including artists, are
allowed the privilege. Everyone else must be employed on a regular basis.

Maria Morzuch: I would like to make a connection between your work from
1969 titled Personal Instrument (presently in the collection of the Muzeum
Sztuki in Łódź) and your recent public projections. Despite the fact that your
early ‘equipment’ in its direct physicality (as the body, the photo cells, and
sound filters) differed from later public projections which engage the larger
sociopolitical sphere, can one see both projects as an examination of the problem
of communication and silence, speaking and being mute?
Krzysztof Wodiczko: Since 1969 all of my works, from the Personal Instrument to
the present projects, refer to the socio-political sphere. The Personal Instrument’s
silence is haunted by its public voice. Mysterious private play with public sound is
its socio-political statement. By its very name, the Personal Instrument suggests
its close association with private rather than public space. The private character of
this instrument is made visible, however, only through its use of public space, on
which it depends in two ways: first, as an acoustically active environment (it needs
the sounds of the city to process), and second, as a socially active environment (it
needs passersby who would observe its performance and imagine how it works).
The Personal Instrument’s private character (privacy) is thus submerged
in the public character (publicity) of this space, and this determines its social
character (communality). The Personal Instrument is a public-private exaltation of
the citizen’s freedom. It is an art of private counter-censorship.
The street presentation of the Personal Instrument in use was an attempt
to create a public monument to a private human being in a monumental public
space within the State socialism of the early 1970s and during the epoch of
Gierek’s liberal technocratic autocracy (comparable in some ways to Franco’s late
rule in Spain). It was a metaphoric articulation of the boundaries of freedom and
of the ways of practicing it, as well as of the individual Polish citizen’s reserves of
power in relation to the use of public space.

Transformative Avant-Garde and Other Writings Democracy/Avant-Garde

 The Personal Instrument was the point of departure for all my public Public space in Poland would then become a capitalist extension of
projects; it was my first attempt to metaphorically define the situation of a human Stalinism, a stage for life inside the nightmare of “capitalist realism” as the only and
being as ‘citizen’ in a totally controlled environment. It was also my first test run official response to the demand for public art. The Personal Instrument would once
for tactics of speaking through public space under conditions of the practical more become the only critical option permitted. And then once more a proletarian
deprivation of speech rights. Operating in space that was completely politicized revolution, and again a battle for the return of a democratic public space? I would
by the State, I abandoned direct speech and proposed instead a technique of not like this scenario to have to happen again.
indirect but public speaking through half-silence/half-truth; a grotesque exaltation
of virtuosity in creative listening. My current works (the public projections, the
homeless vehicles, and the immigrant instruments) are a continuing investigation Excerpt from Morzuch, Maria, “Krzysztof Wodiczko: Instrumentem osobistym/
52 of the strategies of communicating through public space, but this time under the I’lnstrument personnel”, Krzysztof Wodiczko, exh cat, Łódź: Muzeum Sztuki, 53
conditions of a non-autocratic yet troubling capitalistic system. 1992; reprinted in Museum Sztuki w kodzi, 1931–1992, exh cat, Lyons: Musée
Since the days of the French Revolution, the public space of capitalist d’art contemporain et Espace lyonnais d’art contemporain, 1992.
democracies has been intended to function as a space of communication (a space
for the exercise of communicative rights). The Declaration of the Rights of Men
and Citizens (France, 1791) assured communicative rights as a fundamental
human right. And the active practicing of this right was recognized as the only
means of spreading and reinforcing it. Public speech was considered a primary
civic responsibility. Democracy and freedom are therefore everyday practices.
Rather than something given or guaranteed, as a gift from ‘good authorities’, they
should be understood as an obligation to communicate through public space, to
insert one’s original voice, to voice one’s own opinion, to share a public discourse.
It is my opinion that art is an alternative act of speech and an important
ingredient of the practice of democracy. Active and critical art helps democracy
to preserve its life.
Under the conditions of life in existing public space, democracy as the
practice of making oneself heard (instead of passively listening to someone else’s
voice) is possible almost everywhere, including Poland. However, communicating
one’s own critical voice through the kind of public space that exists today is a
truly difficult political, cultural, and aesthetic undertaking. Poland must learn
how to do it ‘from scratch’, just as I was forced to learn it after my departure from
Poland in 1977. To make the passage from “speaking through silence” (critical
listening) to “speaking through voice” (critical speech), despite and often against
the presence of great orators who are speaking too much already and who do
not intend to stop speaking, is the real task of the artistic speech act. How is
one to speak in or through a space jammed with powerful voices? How is one to
treat such a crowded space as an instrument of democracy when this instrument
is not in our hands and when public space is barricaded and sealed off by the
colossal bodies of the great speakers (demagogues), ringing with the choirs of
advertisements, and occupied by armies of heroic memorials?
The strategy of public art, as an art that is critical and not official, is the
object of my socio-aesthetic investigations and experiments, while public space is
both their terrain and their stake. Today art is one of the voices belonging to the
complex discourse of power and freedom taking place within the space of the city.
To be silent in such a city is to give a sign of agreement and a seal of approval to the
disappearance of public space and consequently the disappearance of democracy.
Without disturbing voices, such public space would become in the end a private
space for the rulers, who would consequently be its owners. It would become a
totalitarian work of art, created by real estate magnates, drug lords, landlords, and
city politicians corrupted and co-opted by the present-day corporate and industrial
action groups.

Transformative Avant-Garde and Other Writings Democracy/Avant-Garde

For the De-incapacitation
of the Avant-Garde in Canada
1984
The Canadian cultural State bureaucracy, with its ‘parallel’ tentacles, appears
today more charming and unchallenged than ever. Its appealing premise is
that every ‘left’ or ‘libertarian’ idea can be incorporated with no delay into the
centralized State bureaucratic system, starting, of course, with appropriating any
idea of the decentralization of ‘culture’ and the need for alternative organizations.
This is especially effective when, in exchange, the art community itself,
conveniently reviving the most questionable side of its avant-gardist unconscious,
a glorious modernist myth of a ‘liberating’ technology, suggests blindly to the
central administration its own bureaucratic, technocratic, totalitarian-like
projects.1 Or when the artistic left attempts to ‘use’ or to ‘take over’ (but in fact
assimilates itself to) the existing Canada Council ‘supporting’ economic programs
and the parallel bureaucratic artistic institutions.2 In writing this I am aware of my
advantage of freedom from the right to apply for Canada Council grants, a freedom
which helped to save me from the danger of integration with the very subject of
my critical focus: the present central bureaucratic process of political, social, or
cultural incapacitation and moral capitulation of the entire artistic culture.3
Feedback
My own and my friends’ lives in my native Poland of the 1960s and 1970s consisted
to a large extent of conducting, as a daily routine, a continuous critique of the
cultural policy of the central bureaucracy. The main place where we exercised our
opposition was, of course, the coffee shop, an important cultural site of intellectual
and artistic discourse in Poland. Remaining continuously in the state of being-
against-‘them’ (against the ‘oppressor’), but not able to imagine any concrete action
(practice), we were, in a negative sense, unknowingly becoming more and more
vulnerable to an osmotic assimilation to bureaucratic ‘reason’. The more liberal and
Transformative Avant-Garde and Other Writings
flexible in their strategies the “State ideological apparatuses” were (the coffee shop
is one of them), the more difficult it was for us to see to what degree our sharp,
restless, and detailed critique was adopting the enemy’s linguistics and subjecting
us deeper and deeper to its seductive site, to its mastery at indoctrinating our souls,
and awakening our unconscious drive for collaboration, and desire for bureaucratic
habits, style, language, aesthetics, philosophy, and power.
Through the same coffee shop, with its microphones in the walls and
informers (real or imaginary), the bureaucracy could learn which sections of
our statements, complaints, and naive fantasies (we called it critique) could
be appropriated by the State as an illusion of its liberalizing processes, to 55
reinforce their operational capabilities and, in the end, to serve the mechanisms
of bureaucratic legitimation.
Hot Beer
The intoxicated, stuffy, and feverish-by-hot-and-strong-espresso atmosphere of a
decorated and illuminated Warsaw coffee shop is in great contrast to the cooled
down, airconditioned, and tranquilized-by-the cold-if-not-freezing climate of the
dark Toronto bar. This contrast could be explained by the ‘cool’ character of an
authoritarian one-party system and the ‘hot’ (warm) character of a ‘liberal’ stoic
democratic organization.
But the situation is not so simple in the case of the artist bar in Toronto;
it is becoming increasingly warmer here—warmer than in any other bar. New
improvements are ideological stratification of the tables, heavy air, ambitious design,
and slightly better lighting (one can see the faces and dresses). All of this was
remodeled not long ago. This might all appear confusing to the foreign visitor or the
immigrant artist. After years of being far from a native cultural life, the life dissolved
in cigarette smoke and coffee table debates, now far from that avant-garde-like style
(of a Baudelairean State-socialist flâneur), here one again finds oneself re-submerged
(to one’s immigrant dismay) into a quite familiar artistic atmosphere and “cultural
climate”. One learns that within the capitalist-liberal State of Canada, this bar belongs
to another State (a State within the State), that is, to the artistocratic ‘State’ of the
Canada Council. The Toronto site of the romantic dialectics of capitalist madness!
This is a Canada Council Toronto bar, in which the trapped spirit of a middle-class
artist is tossing between a desire for democratic egalitarian capitalism and that of a
postcolonial bureaucratic aristocratism. Surprised (and there will be more surprises),
the expatriate-artist, through his discovery, recognizes a serious similarity, not
between Poland and Canada, but between Poland and the Canada Council. Brrrrr!
The present state of high-cultural affairs in Canada is taking more and
more complex institutional forms. The Canada Council State is trying to keep
its naturally shaking authoritarian balance by employing typical (and, I believe,
naturally hopeless—I am still a Polish optimist) ‘feedback’ critical mechanisms.
The one party totalitarian regime is an unstable form—it defuses the political scene,
it no longer assures the feedback of public opinion, the minimal flux in the integrated
circuit which constitutes the transistorized political machine.4
The Canada Council, as in Poland and in every authoritarian machine, must
neurotically produce its own ‘coffee shops’, alternative publications, and spaces,
in order to control its own position and direction and to serve itself as a medium of
critical discourse on its own future. The beer is getting hot (warm).
Democracy/Avant-Garde
 In this permanently unstable survival process, the Canada Council is acting
permanently against itself (in a controlling self-controlled sense), and superficially
fragmenting and camouflaging its main cultural effect: a total bureaucratic
pacification of the intellectual creative power of the artistic intelligentsia and
artistic culture.
The only remaining difference between Toronto and Warsaw (if one can see
it through the smoke of the battle of artistic bars on Queen Street in Toronto—or
the coffee shops on Foksal Street in Warsaw) is that the distinction between
the language and gestures of a bureaucrat and those of an artist is much less
56 recognizable in Toronto (as a matter of fact, it is so blurred that it is almost
invisible). Looking closer, one will be able to disclose a horrifying phenomenon:
what was for Warsaw a nightmare or an imminent danger (not yet reality) has
received its total three-dimensional realization in Toronto. Finally everyone
appears to be both the artist and the bureaucrat. In the happy and comfortable
atmosphere of life in this State-hi-cultural-bureaucratic musak, in the climate
of final reunion of old enemies, artistic (anti-bourgeois) and modern State
(bourgeois) avant-gardes, in the aura of communion between the bureaucratized
artist and the aestheticized bureaucrat, the Toronto artistic intelligentsia elevates
itself to a much higher level of collaboration than artists in Poland. It approaches
the conscious level, the level which I shall call cultural corruption!
Militant Melodrama
Every reversal, being essentially similar to its original, appears to us as an
opposite. Such a reversal deludes us (as a revelation on the original image)
and pretends to reveal the reality behind it, the typical dilemma of every avant-
garde critique.
To claim an objective position necessary for the fulfillment of one’s own
destiny (to reverse the world image), the avant-garde must start first with itself,
turning its own image upside-down, and presenting itself as either non-art-in-life
and anti-bourgeois anti-art (Dada, Futurism, Constructivism), or as a non-
philosophy-for-world-revolution or anti-philosophy (Marxism), or finally, as an
anti-avant-garde-art-as-cultural-work (present-day leftist art). In reversing itself (its
own pre-avant-garde image), the avant-garde never actually recognizes, admits,
or presents itself publicly or discloses itself as the reversed second-degree image
(meta-image). It is a dangerously blind denial by the political avant-garde or artistic
left (anti-avant-garde avant-garde) to recognize itself as ideology, its own perception
and production as being dependent on ideology (anti-ideology=ideology), or finally,
as producing ideology itself.
The artistic left suffers from a great confusion. The political ideology is
confused with artistic utopia.5 The distrust of the artistic left toward artistic
avant-gardism (toward its own roots) expresses itself in a desire to reject the
experimentalism of artistic work “in the studio” or “in the gallery”, and in a
tendency to hunt for “formalist witches”.6
Artistic avant-gardism leads historically to the total and immediate
degradation of art (as bourgeois art, official art, etc). Political avant-gardism,
being artistically conservative and nostalgic for forms which it believes appeal to
the working class (often forms of bourgeois romantic art), cannot allow for such
a degradation of art. By not calling for the “death of politics” and for liberation
from the ideological language, the political avant-garde could not accept and
join the artistic avant-garde’s radical critique of art (“death of art”) nor could it
Transformative Avant-Garde and Other Writings
support artists’ utopian work toward the new social theory of form, leading to the
liberation of artistic (and any) language from falseness.7
The utopian aesthetic-linguistic project of the artistic avant-garde failed as
much as the ideological strategic project of the political avant-garde. Yet the artistic
project was politically, aesthetically, philosophically, and ethically more ambitious.
Its failure was, and still is, intellectually challenging to those whose work deals
with art, language, and representation in relation to ideology, culture, revolution,
and political theory. The political avant-garde’s strategic (as opposed to utopian)
program was unsuccessful because, among other reasons, it never considered the
questions raised by the artistic avant-garde. 57
By refusing to analyze the structures and the mode of ideological
production inherent in its own logic, Marxism is condemned (behind the
facade of ‘dialectical’ discourse in terms of class struggle) to expanding
the reproduction of ideology, and thus of the capitalist system itself.8
Through the false notion of a strategic revolutionary necessity (even if there is
no revolutionary situation, or no revolution as such), and specifically in the name
of not giving ammunition to the enemy, the embattled artistic left does not allow
for any public critical discourse within its own ranks, even if the only clear critical
challenge to the left can arrive almost exclusively (due to the critical weakness
and apathy of the enemy) from the left itself.
In the absence of a revolutionary situation this ideological trap might lead
to the total degeneration of the left and its reduction to the point of an absurd
revolutionary ornament in the State’s liberal bureaucratic cultural firmament.
The absence of self-critical discourse within the left leads to the dangerous
appearance of seriousness about itself and its ‘mission’, and consequently about
everything else, which often functions as a mask of ignorance. Wearing the
militant mask, it is important to remember that its owner is masked both from
outside and from inside. In a challenging intellectual discourse, the unmasking of
the enemy should mean the unmasking of yourself. In other words, in the process
of an intellectual concretization and formulation (such as art, critical writing, etc)
the public discourse leading to the cultural de-ideologization must realize itself
through the process of unmasking its own ideological, critical, linguistic, and
theoretical limitations and cultural mystifications. (It would be better to conduct
this discourse artistically through work on aesthetic practice and theory, and not
only through popularizing didactic art, magazines, editorials, and ‘culturalizing’
popular writings.)
This unmasking process cannot be arrested by any institutional self-
governing desires or decisions. There is no end to mystification (signification) and
ideologization processes. Even “de-ideologization” can assume an institutional
and ideological form. If part of our own ideological limitation is a self-mystification
process, the battle against ourselves as myth (and our masks) is perhaps more
urgently needed than the battle against the ‘enemy’, which may often only appear
as an illusive result of the limited visibility produced by our own ideological outfit,
our camouflaged armor, our militant mask.9 The cultural performance of the
artistic left avant-garde is not only dependent in a negative sense on its enemy
(such as dominant culture and official art) but also unfortunately is dependent in
a positive sense on its main allies: the artistically conservative, if not artistically
reactionary; the political and the independent cultural left.
Democracy/Avant-Garde
 And so, hypnotized by his enemy—of whom he makes an infinitely cunning
and terrifying monster—the avant-gardist often ends up forgetting about the
future. The future, he seems to imply, can take care of itself when the demons of
the past are exorcised.10
In this militant but dependent ideological left atmosphere of struggle,
the intellectual, artistic, and cultural program of the positive and critical left is
unlikely to be built. Before anything else, the left would have to liberate itself
from its dependence on the right. Such a program would, with no paradox,
lead to the final phase, the ultimate liberation of the left from the left itself,
58 after which there won’t be any room for a reactionary shift to the right or
toward the center, but a need for the beginning of a constructive intellectual
artistic work-in-depth in the direction of the new movement of the artistic
intelligentsia, which I shall preliminarily refer to, not as the new avant-garde,
but as an “Intelligence”.
Spirit
The process of neutralization—the transformation of culture into something
independent and external, removed from any possible relation to praxis—makes it
possible to integrate it into the organization from which it untiringly cleanses itself.
Furthermore, this is accomplished neither with contradiction nor with danger.
Today manifestations of extreme artistry can be fostered, produced, and
pretested by official institutions; indeed art is dependent upon such support if
it is to be produced at all and to find its way to an audience. Yet, at the same
time, art denounces everything institutional and official.11
Canada has become a promised land, if not a paradise, for the modern cultural
administrator—a realization of the oldest high-ranking bureaucratic dream, a
re-integration with the detached ‘spirit’. The initial separation from the spirit was,
for the modern bureaucrat, a primary step and ethical condition to the formulation
of an administration, whose objective mission was to protect the spirit outside
of the walls of the governmental office in the new democratic society. The spirit
then achieved for bureaucracy a status of desire, used with religious intonation,
the sacred word-spirit, before the words “excellence” and “beauty”, became a key
term in the highest-ranking official speeches:
I can’t help but hear an echo of the philosopher Henri Bergson of my youth,
invoking a “spiritual supplement for democracy, in these times of enormous
technological achievement...”.
I have a respectable accomplice in the philosopher Jean Lacroix.
In effect, he says that democracy can only exist in a climate of spirituality.
Democracy is not in opposition to the notion of aristocracy but rather in
favor of applying the notion to all men. One cannot define democracy in
terms of institutions, Lacroix says, no matter what their importance. To
say that democracy is government “of the people by the people” does
not have any concrete meaning: there are only oligarchic, or rather,
aristocratic, governments. Democracy makes use of oligarchies, whereas
oligarchies make use of people. The problem is to find a way to bring the
best people to power and, once there, to require them to maintain their
excellence and integrity.12
Transformative Avant-Garde and Other Writings
The cultural, or artistic, bureaucracy is becoming a modern aristocracy and (similar
to the caste of art historians) functions as a high priest which not only protects the
spirit, but co-ordinates it, steers it, governs it, and understands it for everyone.
The Canada Council is serving its national duty well and contributing
effectively to the general politics of bureaucracy, the politics of saying and
doing politically nothing (or as little as possible). By ‘not-doing’, bureaucracy
is supporting the existing political balance.
A mature political system needs to be partly non-political so as to possess
adequate managerial capacity. By helping to provide such capacity, the bureaucracy
has had a hand in the making of the contemporary State. 59
If this be action, the bureaucracy has mostly acted by seeming not to act,
by being neither heard nor seen.13
As such, zero-degree bureaucracy is developing politically zero-degree language.
Such public duty requires permanent linguistic coverage of every political
moment, applying to each official speech terminology which camouflages any
clear meaning. The bureaucratic zero-degree rational discourse is encumbered
with the concepts of the individual human ‘destiny’ and ‘catharsis’ in the
application of such terms as “spirit”, “beauty”, “climate of spirituality”, “quality”,
“creation”, “excellence”, “integrity” etc.
By not saying anything, on the one hand, the Canada Council reinforces
the modern liberal State, and on the other hand, by overstating the romantic
notion of “creativity” it degenerates art to cathartic kitsch and separates it from
any political, social, or philosophical sense.
Not only does the Canada Council have to produce the feedback
mechanisms within the art community, but also within the Canadian democratic
corporate/capitalist system which cannot continue forever to be host to its feudal,
aristocratic parasite. The Canada Council might then be transformed from the
existing centrally appointed ‘oligarchic’ subsystem into a democratically formed
(ie proportional political-cultural representation) parliamentary apparatus—a total
appropriation of the political differences of the art communities in Canada.
Alternation... is the end of the end of representation.... Democracy realizes the
law of equivalence in the political order. This law is accomplished in the back
and forth movement of the two terms which re-activates their equivalence
but allows, by the minute difference, a public consensus to be formed and the
cycle of representation to be dosed.14
‘Democratic’ transformations might challenge all feudal subsystems within
the bureaucratic machine. It is possible that we are witnessing a long-term
strategy, or better and integral to the apparatuses, an irreversible process of
gradual absorption, assimilation, and incorporation of the left avant-garde
into the democratic system. Applying Baudrillard’s terminology, we will see in
this completely balanced system a “back-and-forth movement of two terms”
(“artistocrats” versus “cultural workers”), a permanent spectacle which will not
be the spectacle for us—we will be the spectacle.
The political debate (reflected on the screens in video bars) between the
left avant-garde (artistic left) and the liberal aristocracy will constitute a hot
(warm) medium, cooling down of our bars to their normal freezing darkness: from
Democracy/Avant-Garde
 the idiotic to the worse; to the final movement of official culture; the glorious
progression to “the end of the end of representation”.
Once again (as if nothing ever happened in the 1960s), we are living the
time of a corporate/commercial and bureaucratic incapacitation of art. This time
it manifests itself culturally in various forms of dissolution or capitulation of the
artistic intelligentsia and takes the form of a decadent revival of a pseudo-critical,
anti-intellectual ‘expression’ in art and the ornamental, skating irresponsibly on the
surfaces of history—‘postmodern’ design manipulation.
Only the formulation of self-governing artists’ economic organizations
60 and agencies, the gradual detachment of the artistic cultural community from
the centralized State bureaucracy, and the organization of non-bureaucratic,
small and flexible intelligence-like working institutes and other, yet to be defined,
artistic-educational institutions (always ready to dissolve themselves) will help to
educate and recondition; to de-captivate our bureaucratized minds; to rescue and
revive our stolen souls from bureaucratic protection, annexation, assimilation, and
appropriation; to return to collective or individual constructive critical knowledge,
independent and systematic artistic research, and a sense of social place.
This would be precisely the practical (not moralistic or ideological) cultural
action which is needed more than anything else at this time. This would be an
effective challenge to the monstrous system which, as we have learned in and from
Eastern Europe, has to be challenged first; the system of the “national liberal culture”
as a totally administrated and planned bureaucratic operation.
and the program of Disk in Czechoslovakia, can serve as examples of different choices.
These avant-garde artistic/decorative/aesthetic (utopian) proposals were too advanced
and too theoretical for the ideologists of the left-wing political avant-garde, who (like
most of the members of today’s artistic left) still do not understand the politics of social
and formal revolution proposed by the artists of the 1920s.
8 Baudrillard, Jean, For a Critique of the Political Economy of the Sign, St Louis: Telos
Press, 1981, p 89.
9 Of course, this applies not only to the artistic left, but also to all the factions and
professional groups fighting each other inside and outside the art community.
10 Calinescu, Matei, Faces of Modernity: Avant-Garde, Decadence, Kitsch, Bloomington:
Indiana University Press, 1977.
11 Adorno, Theodor, “Culture and Administration”, Telos, fall 1977.
12 Lussier, Charles, “The Canada Council: The Principle of Excellence and Its
Implications in a Democratic Society”, Speech No 7702, 5 July, 1977. General
Wojciech Jaruzelski would certainly be in agreement with the idea of democracy
61
put forth by Charles Lussier, director of the Canada Council. Oligarchy: “a form of
government in which power is reserved for a small number; also, a state so governed”.
Funk and Wagnalls’ Standard Dictionary, New York: Signet, 1980.
13 Marx, F, “Bureaucracy as a Political Action Group”, in Joseph LaPalombara ed,
Bureaucracy and Political Development, Studies in Social Development, no 2,
Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1963.
14 Baudrillard, “The Orders of Simulacra”, pp 131–32.

Based on the lecture, The Bureaucratization of the Avant-Garde, given at the Rivoli
Cafe in Toronto on 14 June, 1983. Originally published in Parallelogramme 49,
1984 and reprinted in Wodiczko, Krzysztof, Critical Vehicles: Writings, Projects,
Interviews, Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1999, pp 32–41.

1 Here, as in the case of the “Living Museum”, a monstrous Orwellian proposal (see
Parallelogramme, Retrospective 3), the myth of technology is cynically revived by the
present pseudo-avant-garde as it is a common old sentiment of both the artistic avant-
garde and the modern (stoic or capitalist/corporate) administration.
2 As the best example, the 1983 victory of the artistic-cultural left in the election of
the Toronto A Space Board of Directors, or the process of (more or less successful)
use of Canada Council grants for financing radical-cultural magazines, film, video
distribution centers, etc.
3 Under the ‘independent’ Canada Council ‘Law’, after they obtain formal permanent
resident status, immigrant artists must wait five years before they have a right to
participate in the ‘democratic competition’ for the artists’ awards (apply for grants). In
some cases immigrant artists work and live in Canada for many years while waiting for
their formal permanent resident status.
4 Baudrillard, Jean, “The Orders of Simulacra”, in Simulations, New York:
Semiotext(e), 1983, p 131.
5 I am applying here the concepts of “ideology” and “utopian thinking” in the light of
the discussion on their interrelationship by Karl Mannheim in Ideology and Utopia: An
Introduction to the Sociology of Knowledge, San Diego: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich,
1985, p 40.
6 Attacking the shallow Greenbergian concept of artistic modernism, with its orthodox
‘disciplinism’, it is easy to forget that art is and always was a specific method of
questioning and reinventing itself through the practice of analyzing older concepts and
forging new concepts from reality. In this practice, the formal method is the only one
art has at its disposition.
7 In the 1920s the Soviet and Eastern European avant-gardes called for the rejection of
art and demanded the immediate construction of a new and ‘better’ (that is, freed from
the social chains of capitalism and the bourgeois heritage) socialist language and theory
of form. The programs of Opoyaz, Novyi Lef, Vkhutemas, and the work of Rodchenko
in the Soviet Union; Blok, Praesens, and the work of Strzemiński and Kobro in Poland;

Transformative Avant-Garde and Other Writings Democracy/Avant-Garde

Avant-Garde as Public Art:
The Future of a Tradition
1998
Before I attempt to characterize briefly the strategies of public art today in light of
public practices of the avant-garde of the past, I must express my critical detachment
from what is generally called “art in public places”. This bureaucratic-aesthetic
form of public legitimating may allude to the idea of public art as a social practice
but in fact has very little to do with it. Such a ‘movement’ wants first to protect
the autonomy of art (bureaucratic aestheticism), isolating artistic practice from
critical public issues, and then to impose this purified practice on the public domain
(bureaucratic exhibitionism) as proof of its accountability. Such work functions at
best as liberal urban decoration.
To believe that the city can be affected by open-air public art galleries
or enriched by outdoor curatorial adventures (through State and corporate
purchases, lendings and displays) is to commit an ultimate philosophical and
political error. For, since the eighteenth century at least, the city has operated
as a grand aesthetic curatorial project, a monstrous public art gallery for
massive exhibitions, permanent and temporary, of environmental architectural
‘installations’; monumental ‘sculpture gardens’; official and unofficial
murals and graffiti; gigantic ‘media shows’, street, underground and interior
‘performances’; spectacular social and political ‘happenings’; State and real
estate ‘land art projects’; economic events, actions and evictions (the newest
form of exhibited art) etc, etc. To attempt to ‘enrich’ this powerful, dynamic art
gallery (the city public domain) with ‘artistic art’ collections or commissions—
all in the name of the public—is to decorate the city with a pseudocreativity
irrelevant to urban space and experience alike; it is also to contaminate this
space and experience with the most pretentious patronizing bureaucratic-
aesthetic environmental pollution. Such beautification is uglification; such
humanization provokes alienation; and the noble idea of public access is likely
to be received as private excess.
Transformative Avant-Garde and Other Writings
The aim of critical public art is neither happy self-exhibition nor passive
collaboration with the grand gallery of the city, its ideological theater and
architectural social system. Rather, it is an engagement in strategic challenges
to the city structures and mediums that mediate our everyday perception of
the world: an engagement through aesthetic critical interruptions, infiltrations
and appropriations that question the symbolic, psycho-political and economic
operations of the city.
To further clarify my position on public art, I must also express my critical
detachment from the apocalyptic visions of urban design and environment
suggested by Jean Baudrillard in terms of “cyberblitz” and “hyperreality”: 63
however brilliant his metaphorical-critical constructs may be, they cannot account
for the complexity of symbolic, social and economic life in the contemporary
public domain.
For Baudrillard the Bauhaus proposed “the dissociation of every complex
subject-object relation into simple, analytic, rational elements that can be
recombined in functional ensembles and which then take on status as the
environment.”1 Today, however, we are beyond even this: “[W]hen the still
almost artisanal functionalism of the Bauhaus is surpassed in the cybernetic
and mathematical design of the environment... we are beyond the object and
its function.... Nothing retains the place of the critical, regressive-transgressive
discourse of Dada and of Surrealism.” And yet this total vision omits the powerful
symbolic articulation of two economically related but distinct zones in the
contemporary city: State architecture and real estate architecture. The two work in
tandem: State architecture appears solid, symbolically full, rooted in sacred historic
ground, while real estate architecture develops freely, appropriating, destroying,
re-developing, etc. A monstrous evicting agency, this architecture imposes the
bodies of the homeless onto the ‘bodies’—the structures and sculptures—of State
architecture, especially in those ideological graveyards of heroic ‘history’ usually
located in downtown areas.
Now in the current attempts to revitalize—to gentrify—the downtowns,
cities legally protect these graveyards as meaningful ideological theater, not
as places of cyberblitz where “the end of signification” has been reached. In
this regard Marc Guillaume is only partially correct when he states that the
contemporary downtown is just a “signal system” for touristic consumption:
The obsession with patrimony, the conservation of a few scattered centers,
some monuments and museographic remains, are just such attempts [to
compensate for the loss of social representation in urban architecture].
Nonetheless, they are all in vain. These efforts do not make a memory; in
fact they have nothing to do with the subtle art of memory. What remains
are merely the stereotypical signs of the city, a global signal system
consumed by tourists.2
And yet it is still possible to establish a critical dialogue with State and real
estate architecture or even, as described by Guillaume, with monuments to
pseudomemory. Not only is it still possible, it is urgently needed—that is, if we
are to continue the unfinished business of the Situationist urban project:
People will still be obliged for a long time to accept the era of reified cities.
But the attitude with which they accept it can be changed immediately.
Democracy/Avant-Garde
 We must spread skepticism toward those bleak, brightly colored
kindergartens, the new dormitory cities of both East and West. Only
a mass awakening will pose the question of a (conscious construction
of the urban milieu....
The basic practice of the theory of unitary urbanism will be
the transcription of the whole theoretical lie of urbanism, détourned
(diverted, appropriated) for the purpose of de-alienation: we constantly
have to defend ourselves from the poetry of the bards of conditioning—to
jam their messages, to turn their songs inside out.3
64
Of course, the Situationist project of intervention now requires critical evaluation;
some of its methods and aims seem too utopian, totalitarian, naive or full of
avant-garde aestheticism to be accepted today. In this respect we can learn much
from past and present avant-garde practices, which I will schematize below in
terms of their relationships to: the cultural system of art and its institutions; the
larger system of culture and its institutions; the system of ‘everyday life’; and
mass or public spectacle and the city.
Historic Avant-Garde (1910–1940s)
Futurism, Dada, Suprematism, Constructivism, Surrealism. Artistic interventions
against art and its institutions; critical and self-critical manifestations of the
rejection of its cultural system. Discovery of direct public address eg Futurist
synthetic theater, evenings, actions and manifestoes. Discovery of media art;
discovery of critical public art as contestation. Roots of Situationist aestheticism
(rejected by the new avant-garde as well as by engaged and neo-avant-gardes).
Socially Engaged Avant-Garde (1920–1930s)
Brecht, Grosz, Tatlin, Lissitzky, Vertov, Alexander Bogdanov, Varvara Stepanova,
Lyubov Popova, Galina and Olga Chichagova, Heartfield, etc. Critical affirmative
action on culture and its institutions; critical transformation of the institutions of
the cultural system of art. Engagement in mass publications, design, education
systems, film (Kino-Pravda, Kino-Oko) opera, radio, theater (‘epic’ form,
‘estrangement’ technique), Agitprop, Proletkult, spectacles, Novyi Lef (Sergei
Tretyakov’s affirmative intervention). Roots of present affirmative interest in media
cultural programs and the public domain; also roots of Situationist interruption
and détournement.
Critical Neo-Avant-Garde (1960–1970s)
Daniel Buren, support-surface artists, Hans Haacke, etc. Critical affirmative
action on art and its institutions; critical and self-critical manipulation of its
cultural system. Artistic attack on art as a myth of bourgeois culture; critical
exposure of structural ideological links between institutions of bourgeois art
and culture—politics, ethics, philosophy, etc. Critical infiltration of museums as
official public spectacle, but no significant attempts to enter mass spectacle,
popular culture, public design.
Situationist Cultural Avant-Garde as Revolutionary Force (1960–1970s)
Henri Lefebvre, Situationist International, Guy Debord, etc. Cultural revolutionary
intervention into everyday life and its institutions (environment, popular media,
etc); critical and self-critical abandonment of art as cultural system and of
Transformative Avant-Garde and Other Writings
avant-garde art as specialized procedure. Public intervention against spectacle;
tendency toward alternative spectacle. Creation of situations “concretely and
deliberately constructed by the collective organization of a unitary ambience
and game of events”; manipulation of popular culture against mass culture.
Organization of dérive (drift), urban wanderings to contest modern structures,
dominant architecture, city planning (Surrealist tactics). Influence of post-Marxist
cultural studies and sociology; the city as a “re-discovered and magnified” festival
to overcome conflict between everyday life and festivity. Attack on passive
reception of the city: “Our first task is to enable people to stop identifying with
their surroundings and with model patterns of behavior.” 65
Present Critical Public Art: New Avant-Garde as “Intelligence”
Barbara Kruger, Dara Birnbaum, Alfredo Jarr, Dennis Adams, Dan Graham,
etc; also Public Art Fund (New York), Public Access (Toronto), Artangel Trust
(London), etc. Critical affirmative action on everyday life and its institutions
(education, design, environment, spectacle and mass media, etc); critical
transformation of culture from within. Critical collaboration with institutions of
mass and public media, design and education in order to raise consciousness
(or critical unconscious) regarding urban experience: to win time and space in
information, advertising, billboards, lightboards, subways, public monuments and
buildings, television cable and public channels, etc. Address to passive viewer,
alienated city-dweller. Continuous influence of cultural studies enhanced by
feminist critique of representation.
Originally published as “Strategies of Public Address: Which Media? Which
Publics?”, Discussions in Contemporary Art 1, Hal Foster ed, New York: Dia Art
Foundation, 1998, pp 41–45.
1 Baudrillard, Jean, “Design and Environment or How Political Economy Escalates into
Cyberblitz”, For a Critique of the Political Economy of the Sign, St Louis: Telos Press,
1981, pp 185–203.
2 Guillaume, Marc, Zone 1–2, 1986, p 439.
3 See Situationist International Anthology, Ken Knabb ed, Berkeley: Bureau of Public
Secrets, 1981.
Democracy/Avant-Garde
Liberate the Avant-Garde?
Gregory S h o l ett e
and Kr zys zto f Wo dic z ko
2014
It is a time for affirmative action; as social life implodes, as solidarity is
under threat, art and culture feel compelled to take on a role in the social
sphere as community work: participatory art, process-based art, etc.
Lieven De Cauter
The goal of activism (activist art) at the beginning of the twenty-first
century has become extremely prosaic: survival, survival of humanity and
other species on this planet... the new world order requires a redefinition
of the place and role of art.
Karel Vanhaesebrouck   the Lower East Side this past spring (2013) to discuss these concerns. What follows
I would argue that the avant-garde idea continues to operate as the repressed
underside of the contemporary forms of extradisciplinary practice.
Marc James Léger
1. Art Is a Weak Force?
To rethink the idea of the artistic avant-garde today means taking a cold critical
look at the way it has been selectively appropriated by enterprise culture. Just
consider the term avant-garde itself. David Cottington insists it has become
a mere buzzword useful for signaling that something, pretty much anything,
possesses a quality of “up-to-dateness”.1 In certain markets this buzz is enough
to endow brands with a competitive edge, a kind of “brand-guard”. But the
influential aura of the avant-garde is broader still. As art historian Chin-tao Wu
puts it in Privatising Culture: “The irony is, of course, that while contemporary
art, especially in its avant-garde manifestations, is generally assumed to be
in rebellion against the dominant system, it actually acquires a seductive
commercial appeal within it.”2 Or, as Thomas Hoving, former Metropolitan
Transformative Avant-Garde and Other Writings
Museum of Art Director simplified the point: “Art is money-sexy! Art is money-
sexy-social-climbing-fantastic!”3
If the avant-garde has stopped being scandalous—and even subversive
practices become little more than a naughty tease or an instrument for amplifying
commercial value—wouldn’t we be wise to just steer clear of it? For many critical
artists the concept of the avant-garde is a liability with simply too much baggage to
unpack, too many pitfalls to avoid. Theorist Marc James Léger suggests, however,
that the avant-garde hypothesis remains operative though suppressed within
contemporary art discourse. Similarly, the artist Krzysztof Wodiczko urges us to
not abandon the transformative promises of the avant-garde “despite our apparent 67
weakness and marginal position”. He implores us not to give up but to continue
sparking unrest, criticism, and raise questions while “doing something practical,
forming new concrete situations, creating new examples, infiltrating the system’s
web of bureaucracies, collaborating and transforming autonomous organizations and
networked social movements, becoming inspiring catalysts and informed agents in
the best sense of these terms.”
Wodiczko is not denying the frailty of the situation, nor is he disavowing
the instrumentalization of the avant-garde by deregulated capital’s economy
of attractions and distractions. But neither is he shying away from the latent
terminology of tactics and maneuvers that have remained implicit within the term
ever since its coinage by a French military newspaper in 1794. There is a suggestion
of being dropped-in behind enemy lines with all the existential exposure and sense of
duty such a narrative implies. And his emphasis on weakness is significantly different
from Boris Groys’ use of the term. In candidly theological language Groys describes
the avant-garde as modest messengers of time who are forced to repeat their radical
critique of mainstream society as a cumulative evangelism over the long duration. It’s
not that Wodiczko’s call to arms lacks a doctrinal feel of its own, but by positing the
artist as a tactical interventionist colluding with those who have been systematically
excluded from the realm of political participation and representation, his notion of the
avant-garde comes close to Léger’s proposal for an “occupation and radicalization” of
capitalist culture by extra-disciplinary practices that prefigure new forms of political
organizing.4 Krzysztof Wodiczko and I met several times at the De Robertis Caffe on
is an edited account of this discussion:
Gregory Sholette: In the post-industrial West we have seen the demise of labor
unions along with the replacement of the Welfare State by precarious forms of
work. It’s a situation in which organizing opposition to such decentered exploitation
is increasingly difficult. And then along came the so-called ‘great recession’,
the most serious capitalist contraction in over 70 years. Something seems to
have begun to happen. Now, about a year since the emergence of the Occupy
Movement and Movement of the Squares in Europe, as well as of course various
struggles for liberation in the Middle East, artists and cultural workers who were
previously disinterested in the politics of the economy are expressing a growing
unhappiness with their current and future possibilities, both within the art world
and beyond. And yet this resistance, or potential resistance, is not particularly
well organized or theorized, not to mention that it knows little about past attempts
at generating similar opposition to economic injustice, or for that matter anti-
war and pro-democratic organizing. Although this informal movement is now
undertaking its own rapid self-education, its political position would certainly be
Democracy/Avant-Garde
 described as weak. But I am thinking that it is still something irrepressible and
therefore important to artists, including those who refuse the ‘prohibition’ against
framing one’s art as vanguard, as Léger’s hypothesis has urgently noted. In other
words does it possesses a kind of ‘weak force’ that nevertheless makes it oddly
formidable, if that makes any sense Krzysztof?
Krzysztof Wodiczko: Yes, we might think of it as a dispersed power, but
remember we are not dealing here with the normal meaning of ‘weakness’ that
many people think of, although I admit artists themselves might unfortunately
think of themselves as weak. I meant that the imagination and perception of
68 artists actually has a much larger effect than they think. And in fact, this effect,
you know, is very hard to measure, although it is no less significant. The avant-
garde can only be measured much later. Actually, not measured—that is the wrong
word. It is more correct to think what would have not happened had these artists
never existed rather than “they’ve done this; this is the effect”.
GS: So it is like gauging something indirectly by considering its accumulative
reverberations over time within a culture, rather than measuring the force of some
original collision or impact-event?
KW: Yes, these are allusive effects and require their own forms of measurement.
Just imagine: if we didn’t have this kind of historical resistance proposed by the
avant-garde, including the many propositions for transformative collaborative
work, where would we be now? In other words, it’s unthinkable to imagine all
kinds of design, even the Internet, without also considering the legacy of the
Productivists and Constructivists for example.
GS: In this sense the present is therefore also simultaneously the past,
figuratively as well as literally? That would also suggest that the stakes of current
struggles are far more serious than they sometimes appear in the world of
contemporary art. But how in an era like ours, when the very idea of the future
has been foreclosed or at best imagined in only the darkest, dystopian terms,
do we understand the fundamentally radical and utopian dimension of the avant-
garde hypothesis?
2. History and Futurity
Perhaps even more than the term avant-garde the word “revolution” is today
repressed and therefore avoided by artists and critics, unless or course it is being
used ironically, sarcastically. To even call oneself a “revolutionary artist”, as for
instance artist Dread Scott does, seems destined to attract sneers. And yet can
one be an avant-garde artist without believing in a radically transformed future?
The loss of belief in the future as a better place is endemic today among the
younger people I encounter. Occupy and the other movements of last year were to
my mind a railing against the foreclosure of hope brought about by the penetration
of everyday life by the market. This includes art and artists who are expected to
cheerfully join in the affirmation of capitalism because it is presented as the only
option today. Thus the birth of the so-called “creative industries”. But can we
participate in a truly transformative cultural agenda without acknowledging the
importance of imagining an entirely better world tomorrow? I mean something more
profound than the accumulation of small changes or interesting subversive tactics?
Or is the invocation of the avant-garde at this point in time not so much an act of
repetition as it is a kind of necromancy in which we are attempting to revive that
which is deceased—not so much a rearguard, but a “deadguard”, or “necroguard”?
And does that make us more like sorcerers of the past than apostles of the future?
Transformative Avant-Garde and Other Writings
KW: For me it is really a living relationship to the past, not a revival or
resurrection of the past. Because when I see the work of some of the artists from
the time of Productivism or Constructivism, especially in their later phases, or
even the works of Architectonism, which is another phase of Constructivism,
I feel direct connections with my work. It feels sometimes like these concepts
circulate through my veins. This may explain why I have an allergy to the way
the idea of the avant-garde has been neglected and abused by the contemporary
art world. That is not to say of course that I am not also very critical about some
aspects of that historical moment in the time of the Soviet Union, especially
regarding the avant-garde’s complicated and in many ways dubious relation to the 69
Leninist Party.
GS: So it is an immediate if no less contradictory rapport between past and
present, a history that does not round off its rough edges.
KW: And I was thinking that if we don’t think of this gradual accumulative resistance
in terms of small community processes, but instead as one of creating conditions
for several groups to work collaboratively at a particular time and particular place,
then this breaks the self-imposed silence about the avant-garde that Marc Léger has
described. In fact when you look at the history of the avant-garde there were always
various groups operating in tandem. They were never large-scale actions, but specific
to a particular time, place, and context or struggle.
GS: Solidarity as essential to both resistance as well as memory? A solidarity that
is as much with our living colleagues as it is with the past.
KW: Yes, we actualize this monument in present times.
GS: Hmmmm... at first I thought you said we actualize the ‘moment’, but what
you did say helps to throw a light on your practice of projecting images of the
living—workers, immigrants, the victims of wars—onto public monuments in order
to re-animate these otherwise motionless memorials.
KW: Yes, I’m not so interested in the dead, I’m interested in the living.
GS: And yet to some extent these projection works of yours involve the voices of
the living now posing as the dead. So maybe the other question is this: are the dead
interested in you? I mean in a sense does the past not also project its own kind of
expectation or even solidarity forward in time and directly onto us?
KW: Maybe they are or have always been hoping for me to exist and in that sense
they are hoping to be useful for the living. That’s for sure because I always need
their help with these projects! One cannot change the monumental past, but to
move on, one must learn how to live with it in a creative way—animate it, project
new meaning on it—as with the Lincoln statue and the traumatized war veterans
in my recent project.
GS: I too always try to bear in mind Benjamin’s warning that, “not even the dead
will be safe from the enemy, if he is victorious”. It’s a bit heavy certainly, but it
helps keep me on my toes.
3. A Post-Machine Age Agency?
Swarms of belligerent ‘creatives’ occupied Zuccotti Park last fall, generating what
resembled a superorganism of minds and bodies striving to achieve coherence (if only
provisionally). Or at least that is one way to read that extraordinary happening. As The
Occupied Wall Street Journal from 20 November 2011 described it with a kind of
‘fuck you’ bravado: “the 1% is just beginning to understand that the reason Occupy
Wall Street makes no demands is because we aren’t talking to them. The 99%
are speaking and listening to each other.” This inward turn towards autonomous
Democracy/Avant-Garde
 self-governance resonates with much of the history of the avant-garde, which never
sought to simply dissolve art into life if that life was less than transformative in its
own right. This is where relational aesthetics and interventionist art part company.
When Vladimir Mayakovsky proposed that the streets should become canvases for
the avant-garde it was not in order to render an existing reality still locked in the
grip of feudalism, but rather to collaborate with the birth of a new society. Up until
that moment of rupture the radical avant-garde has demanded its own separate
sphere of culture, a space in which judgment, agency and meaning operate apart
from the stifling authority of the state or the disciplinary structures of the economy.
70 But there is another sense in which the historical avant-garde and certain kinds of
socially engaged practice converge. Both express interest in non-human forms
of agency. This was true of Dada, Futurism, Productivism, Constructivism,
Suprematism, even Surrealism in some instances, just as it is true today of tactical
media, hacktivism, interventionist art, and bio-art. Are we again therefore on the
edge of a new societal or even bio-societal mutation that will transform politics,
economics, and culture, and if so what role should artist’s play? Are they in the
vanguard of this process? Or are rapidly evolving technologies driving this change?
Or are both collective forces and technologies merely effects being generated by a
broader paradigm shift?
KW: Maybe this is not an enlightenment moment. I don’t know what it is that we
are in. Artists of course are not invited to the parliament. But what artists are
doing is attempting to figure out other ways of living and surviving under present
circumstances. Again, it’s not a global or even monumental picture of saving the
world in the older avant-garde utopian sense. There’s a very big difference.
GS: But what kind of agency does this experiment in survival presuppose?
KW: The agency today is a prophetic kind of newcomer: the immigrant. They are
the vanguard of our age. And because they do not carry their culture with them
but leave it behind them from the very moment they arrive they inevitably begin
to question everything from a new perspective. They are in a sense located in-
between the science-fiction story and the crime novel. But also between vision,
deconstruction, and construction. So this is maybe my fascination with the
immigrant. They make a connection with the historical avant-garde when artists
sought to work with common people, even if they sometimes treated them as an
essentialized class-consciousness.
GS: So unlike the proletariat who for Marx signaled the birth of a new class but
also a liberatory historical force, today it’s the paperless worker, the migrant, the
exile, and the homeless person?
KW: Yes, exactly. Utopia is ‘no place’ but this has to be pronounced “No!-place”:
No-exclamation mark-place. For the immigrant today utopia is a critical vision of the
future, a vision of the place, the topos in which there will be ‘no place’ for this kind of
place and experience that she or he are forced to live-through today. The immigrant’s
utopia as No!-place is at once a prophetic vision, a criticism, and a resistance.5
GS: Only are we in danger of idealizing these poorest of the poor, of projecting a
kind of lumpen saintliness onto them?
KW: I don’t mean to romanticize but still there are a certain number of these
people who have a very special perspective and who can speak on their own
behalf. War veterans, people who are abused, those who are innocent victims, all
those who have no choice but to sink in where they are, this is the avant-garde of
the people and who we artists should be listening to. My intuition tells me that I
Transformative Avant-Garde and Other Writings
am not alone in attempting to create conditions for them to become co-artists,
agents, or co-agents through my socio-aesthetic projects.
GS: This is how the technology becomes so important in your media work?
KW: Yes, and instead of working ‘for’ or ‘about’ or ‘on behalf of’, the technology
allows me to work with the immigrant for example in developing and realizing a
project. Ideally these works engage people in communicating through a specific
public space or through a form of media, and my role as an artist becomes a kind
of “good enough mother”: a facilitator who can create a ‘potential space’ or space
of potential for the nurturing of speech-acts.
GS: Kind of like the “people’s mike” so to speak? 71
KW: No, something quite different. Something that deconstructs and constructs
participation through language but also bodies, histories, affects, etc, involving,
recording, re-recording, special writing workshops, etc, involving communication
development processes that can sometimes last one year or more.
4. Sci-Fi Crime Stories
Writers such as Stanislaw Lem, the Strugatsky Brothers, Octavia Butler, JG
Ballard, and Philip K Dick have grappled with complex social and political
issues through the medium of science fiction. Some of the most engaging art
projects today similarly explore contemporary subject matter by intermingling
fact with fiction to produce a space of fantastic possibilities. Wodiczko’s
talking public memorials and his Alien Staff project are especially good
examples of this tendency, as is some of the work of Critical Art Ensemble,
but a younger generation of artists is also exploring this connection, including
Jalal Toufic, Trevor Paglen, Tom Sachs, Omer Fast, and Melanie Gilligan.
In my own writings I use the astrophysical metaphor of “dark matter” to
describe the emerging power (a weak but growing power) of social [non]
productivity that:
Appears to mobilize its own redundancy, seems to acknowledge that it
is indeed just so much surplus—talent, labor, subjectivity, even sheer
physical-genetic materiality—and in so doing frees itself from even
attempting to be usefully productive for capitalism, though all the while
identifying itself with a far larger ocean of “dark matter” that ungainly
surfeit of seemingly useless actors and activity that the market views as
waste, or perhaps at best as a raw, interchangeable resource for biometric
information and crowdsourcing.6
Perhaps what we are seeing is not just a convergence between sci-fi and art, but
methods by which the suppressed avant-garde thesis is permitting a return of
the repressed?
GS: What would you say about method and its relationship to art and theory, as
well as to documentation and fiction, two things that were very much present
within the original avant-garde?
KW: Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari have written that the work of philosophy must
be permeated by science fiction and crime stories. Regarding art and its method I
would add that it’s not enough to be deconstructive, one must also have a visionary
sense of construction. But then it’s very difficult to be optimistic and intelligent at the
same time. It’s a risk. But its a risk worth taking.
Democracy/Avant-Garde
 GS: A risk that one is either too much of a forensic analyst or too much of a
utopian fabulist or story-teller?
KW: There is a story about the last Polish King who in 1791 was masterminding
the first European Constitution. At the same time he used his own money and
invited a French engineer to present the first flight of a balloon in Poland. In an
extraordinary move he decided that there would be a crew of four: an engineer, a
writer, an artist, and a dog. So what was he hoping to achieve? In my imagination
at least the king wanted this writer to report on a larger and loftier worldview
than was available at a terrestrial level. Ultimately the balloon-ride experience
72 was formulated into a courtly poem also paid for by the king. I’m sure it was
a commission. It’s called “Balloon Flight”. The poem describes the flight, its
take-off and landing. The observer describes the world changing with people
getting smaller and smaller. Even differences between nobles and peasants, as
he reports, are disappearing. And then appears the graceful curve of the horizon,
proving that the world is round. So he is immediately talking about democracy by
way of science-fiction. Up in the balloon is a vision of the future while down below
rages an argument over the constitution and the city. It’s a fantastic image, it’s a
great image, and this is art and technology. Yet when will we ever have an artist
ascend as an astronaut? Probably never.7
GS: Agreed.
KW: But there is more. As this flight went on there was also a demonstration
of another new technology: the parachute. It was of course the dog who
‘volunteered’ for the test. Unlike poor Laika in the early Soviet space mission
this dog landed softly.
5. Coda
It is the year 2050 and curators at the Museum of Modern Art in New York
hire Vanguard Genetics, an innovative biotechnology firm, to clone Vladimir
Tatlin and Lyubov Popova as living artworks for their upcoming exhibition about
early twentieth-century avant-garde art. After months of preparation Tatlin
is resurrected first. He spends the first day of his new life viewing web news
programs, perusing shopping chains where Rodchenko-inspired graphics entice
consumers to satisfy their desires, and he buys a bio-synthetic blini from an
automated street cart. Arriving back at the museum Tatlin watches a group of
young art fabricators putting the finishing touches on a quarter-sized model of his
legendary Monument to the Third International. A door opens. In walks a newly
restored Popova.
Privet Comrade Tatlin.
Privet Luba.
Popova: So, what do you make of this new world? Tell me honestly, don’t
hold back.
Tatlin: Well, to be honest, there is good news and bad news.
Popova: How about the good news first?
Tatlin: The good news is that after all these years life has finally merged
with art.
Popova: But that is fantastic news! What could be so bad?
Transformative Avant-Garde and Other Writings
Just then the art fabricators step away from the model of Tatlin’s tower revealing
a massive Nike swoosh emblazoned on its exterior.
Tatlin: The bad news is... life sucks.
Originally published in Léger, Marc J, The Idea of the Avant-Garde—And What It
Means Today, Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2014.
73
1 Cottington, David, The Avant-Garde: A Very Short Introduction, London: Oxford
University Press, 2013.
2 Wu, Chin-tao, Privatising Culture: Corporate Art Intervention since the 1980s, London:
Verso, 2002, p 161.
3 Thomas Hoving cited in Chin-tao Wu, Privatising Culture, p 127.
4 Léger, Marc James, Brave New Avant-Garde: Essays on Contemporary Art and Politics,
Winchester, UK: Zero Books, 2012, p 3.
5 See Wodiczko, Krzysztof, “Designing for the City of Strangers”, Critical Vehicles:
Writings, Projects, Interviews, Cambridge: The MIT Press, 1999, pp 4–15. See also
Wodiczko, Krzysztof, “Strategies of Public Address: Which Media, Which Publics?”,
Discussions in Contemporary Culture, Hal Foster ed, New York: The New Press, 1987,
pp 41–45, as well as Wodiczko, Krzysztof, The Abolition of War, London: Black Dog, 2012.
6 Sholette, Gregory, Dark Matter: Art and Politics in the Age of Enterprise Culture,
London: Pluto Press, 2011, p 188.
7 This story about the balloon flight, poet and dog collapses three balloon flights that
were very close but separate in time. The first balloon flight with human crew that took
place in Poland was undertaken by the French engineer Jean-Pierre Blanchard and
his wife Sophie Blanchard in Warsaw in 1789. In order to celebrate and philosophize
on the meaning of this event, the poet, historian, dramatist, translator, and publicist
Adam Naruszewicz wrote the same year a poem called “Balloon”. On 13 May, 1789,
Blanchard launched a balloon with a dog as the only crewmember. The balloon blew
out. Thanks to a delay device, however, a special parachute carrying the dog detached
itself automatically and landed safely, the dog alive and well. On 14 May in 1790,
Jan Potocki, a Polish poet, etymologist, aeronaut and author of the acclaimed The
Manuscript Found in Saragossa, took a balloon flight with Blanchard, his Turkish
servant and his dog (a white poodle). Together they reached a height of 2,500 meters
and landed safely after 30 minutes. On 3 May, 1791, the Polish Constitutions
was adopted in Warsaw. It is often described as Europe’s first modern national
constitution, and the world’s second, after the United States Constitution.
Democracy/Avant-Garde
Transformative Avant-Garde:
A Manifest of the Present
2014
The Avant-Garde Is Dead: Long Live The Avant-Garde!
The term “avant-garde” feels outdated, its meaning washed out, referring to
something that is of no interest to us today.1 Indeed, in the not too distant past, after
its deconstructive examination, the avant-garde was pronounced dead. Disregarding
the fact that its ethical and political energy did not stop circulating in our artistic
veins, we buried the avant-garde alive, without autopsy and proper mourning. After
the last nail was hammered into its coffin we made a silent pact that there would be
no more declarations (of independence or dependence), no more manifestos (like
the Communist Manifesto or those of the Futurists), no more visionary projects (like
Constant’s New Babylon and Victor Papanek’s Design for the Real World), no more
writing with bold typefaces and exclamation marks, and no more speaking with a
strong tone of voice. We promised ourselves that we would stay away from new utopias
and visionary designs because, as we concluded, they were all naive and they failed.
Membership and affiliation with the avant-garde carries a great many public
expectations and the heavy weight of responsibility for what one may say and do,
how one may express oneself and why. By burying the avant-garde we ‘liberated’
ourselves from the risky task of proposing a new transformative agenda for today
and new visionary projects for tomorrow. It was easy, much too easy—a way out.
This is not a call for action. It is not a manifesto for the future. It is
a “Manifest of the Present”. It is a statement of evidence. It is a supportive
recognition of the active existence the avant-garde today.
By calling it “transformative” this manifest points to an important facet
of the avant-garde’s contemporary function: its pro-active attitude and role in
intelligent, critical, post-contestational and post-deconstructive engagement
through social design and civic practice. This manifest is also a reminder of the
avant-garde’s powerful historic tradition, which is part of any transformative and
critically affirmative practice and theory.
Transformative Avant-Garde and Other Writings
The role of the avant-garde has been to unfold new horizons without which
there would be no way for us to move beyond the point where we already are. The
avant-garde is an indispensable force that keeps us moving against the backward
entrapments of our cultures and ideologies. To survive philosophically and
emotionally, to sustain ourselves as sensitive and sensible beings, to have an idea
of our future, and to be able to transform ourselves and our world into something
better, we must critically re-actualize and reinvent the avant-garde.
Without reverting to reactionary nostalgia for its simple recuperation, and
without expecting from it new agendas and methodologies, with its name updated
to its new task and modus operandi, we must bring the avant-garde back to life as a 75
newly transformative, intelligent and critically affirmative artistic force.
After Deconstruction—Towards a New Construction
What is critical today is the recognition of the need for a new intelligent, pro-
active and complex civic art as well as an art that seeks a radical transformation
of social reality through design.
Beyond its role in creating acts and events of contestation, provocation,
disruption and dissensus, the avant-garde art of today must urgently re-actualize the
propositional, pro-active, transformative, and design side of its inherited practices.
Engaged in creating new situations, environments, equipment, and
networks, the new civic and design art can be at once critical and pro-active,
deconstructive and constructive; it can fearlessly create new needs, expose
hidden ones, and propose original visions and unexpected solutions.
Avant-Garde Art as Design
Unless it operates in new critical and transformative ways, the design and civic
work of avant-garde art should not respond to the repertoire of existing public
expectations and market demands, nor should it necessarily be intended for mass
production. Instead, it must take responsibility for creating and proposing new
needs and expectations, and provide an emergency response to existing critical
needs which otherwise would remain ignored, neglected or suppressed.
Being both pragmatic and symbolic, critically pro-active and respectfully
transformative, the new avant-garde art must not be afraid to radically enter the
domain of design in order to challenge the ossified professional norms and limits
that exist in design practice and theory.
In general, design must be understood as the process of invention and use of
projects that assist and improve human environments and living experience. Design may
take the form of processes, objects, spatial structures, environments, networks, bodily
implements and other psycho-social and cultural tools and equipment that are at once
functional and symbolic. Art that is understood as avant-garde design must become a
radical and fearless entry into the field by creating new conditions for a better life and
new living experiences, and a force for acknowledging and disclosing those experiences
that are unacknowledged, hidden and excluded.
The Avant-Garde User
Avant-garde artistic practice should consider the development and
implementation of original long-term or short-term design projects that are
developed with the input, collaboration and expertise of self-selected groups of
initial Users. Avant-garde art needs avant-garde publics and collaborators and
avant-garde design art needs avant-garde users. As the projects respond to
Democracy/Avant-Garde
 critical and emerging needs or propose new vital needs, such avant-garde users
and publics will emerge from the hidden and unexpected pockets of our society.
As Brecht would say, the project users and their publics will join and respond to
the project “not without interest”.
Users choose to be part of design projects because they are intuitively
or consciously ready to speak and publicly express the truth of their lived
experience, not only on behalf of themselves but also on behalf of others who
would like to be part of the project but cannot participate for various reasons.
They are potentially a social front-guard, which both challenges inaction
76 and acts in favor of complex change. They change the preconceived and misguided
public image of themselves, public perception of the issue they address (and of
which they know more than anyone else), and the very social change that is needed
to resolve this issue. In these ways they will use the project to become projectors of
truth and agents for change in the direction of pro-active work and engagement in
organized social movements. As a front-guard, users feel compelled and responsible
to be ahead of, in front of, leading others, and to become, using Hannah Arendt’s
expression, the “vanguard of their peoples”.2
The artistic and design projects that users join become the cultural
equipment and developmental tools of expression and open transmission that
they can further master to the point of communicative virtuosity. As public
speech act survivors, they are part of an “existential avant-garde”, helping others
through the projects they become a part of and contributing with their expressive
performance to the artistic avant-garde as such. Through their own creative and
performative input they collaborate with designers as avant-garde co-agents—
transformative avant-garde co-artists.
The Avant-Garde and the “Experience Economy”
As described by Peter Bürger, the task of the artistic avant-garde, the search for and
recovery of the lost “lived-through experience”, has been taken over by the art of the
new commerce: the experience economy as today’s marketing aesthetics.3
According to Joseph Pine and James Gilmore, the authors of The Experience
Economy, a book that has been translated into more than 15 languages:
Goods and services are no longer enough.... Experiences have necessarily
emerged to create new value. Such experience offerings occur whenever a
company intentionally uses services as a stage and goods as props to engage
an individual. Whereas commodities are fungible, goods tangible, and
services intangible, experiences are memorable.... The company—we will
call it an experience stager—no longer offers goods or services alone but the
resulting experience, rich with sensations, created within each customer.4
Pine and Gilmore predict that the experience economy will have an even greater
after-life:
Once the Experience Economy has run its course, in the decades to come,
the Transformation Economy will take over. Then the basis of success will
be in understanding the aspirations of individual customers and businesses
and guiding them to fully realize their aspirations.... With transformations,
the customer is the product!... When a company guides transformations
the offering is the individual.5
Transformative Avant-Garde and Other Writings
After challenging the dangers of the appropriation of our lived-through experiences
by the experience economy, the transformative avant-garde must now brace itself
for a new task, the task of challenging the approaching appropriation of our very
existential transformations of ourselves by the coming “transformation economy”.
The experience economy goes hand in hand with the ‘creative’ appetites of
the over-expanding “creative class”:
Creativity is becoming more valued in today’s global society. Employers see
creativity as a channel for self-expression and job satisfaction in their
employees. About 38.3 million Americans and 30 per cent of the American 77
workforce identify themselves with the Creative Class. This number has
increased by more than 10 per cent in the past 20 years.6
In the context of the appropriation of art by the experience economy and by the
“event economy” business that orchestrates “urban experience” through urban
spectacles (often to attract the creative class to re-developed city centers), artists
today must focus on projects that challenge the commercial anesthetization and
trivialization of living experience.
Consumer Kitsch and Avant-Garde Tactics
What for the avant-garde was a genuine mission and struggle to create or bring
us closer to ‘lived’ experience (against our experiential numbness) has become,
in the ‘art’ of the experience economy, a mockery—at best a mere nostalgia and
voyeuristic substitute for such experience.
Not unlike German Junker’s art, which was a nostalgic substitute for lost
contact and experience with nature—the origin of Kitsch—the experience economy
has become a substitute for lost contact with experience itself.
New avant-garde art should take a closer analytical look at such commercial
‘avant-gardism’ as the new cultural kitsch.
The new task is to develop methods that are effective in the recuperation of
the public interest in media spectacles and in urban experience from the complete
control by the event industry and the experience economy. We must revert their
‘experiential’ perversions and appropriations back to socially ambitious art
adventures and publicly meaningful events.
The new task is to create autonomous events and projects that are
independent of the workings of the event and experience economy or to infiltrate
and infuse them with ethically and socially radical content. Visionary projects must
become one of the key transformative objectives of the avant-garde today.
One of the aims of the avant-garde today is to challenge the kitschy
consumer substitutes for lived experience by bringing into the foreground the
experience, performance and presence of those whose life, work and survival
is relegated to the outside of privileged fields of vision. We must change our
own perspectives as well as those of the entire creative class, including the
consumer clientele, the ‘performing’ personnel, and the aesthetic managers of
the experience economy.
Inserting our socially and philosophically minded media and design projects
into the existing program of urban festivals and various official cultural events
may be one among many advisable methods. Art must “dis-avant-garde” the
commercial, and “re-avant-garde” itself into it in order to offer (even if only for a
moment) both the pleasure and the meaning of cultural experience. In order to
Democracy/Avant-Garde
 succeed in such work, however, we must accept, as Brecht would have it, the need
to combine in our projects both the “pleasure” of entertainment and “instruction”.
You want experience? Here it is! You wish to be part of a real event? Here is
a chance. You seek flexible work and creative business? Perhaps there is a chance
here as well. You wish to be flexible in the accumulation of your capital? You have
an opportunity here, but... in an unexpected way to you, a way that will open your
eyes, ears, mind and heart to something else... something you may not ‘be ready’
to experience but which you should and ought to experience....
Conscious of this critical agenda, performative, participatory and
78 communicative media projects may involve spatial, or nomadic, wearable designs,
and other potential alternative and avant-garde methods, equipment and armament.
The Avant-Garde as Transformative Engagement
My own sense (and I hope I am not alone here) is that one should stop being
nostalgic for the past historical avant-gardes’ radical ‘negativity’, autonomy
and oppositionality; stop feeling lost in postmodern deconstruction, and stop
lamenting the appropriation and recuperation of our ideas by a spectacle industry,
event economy and creative class culture. We must stop feeling lost and move on.
The new transformative avant-garde must move on by forming new
temporary or longer-term alliances with many partners, engage in its new projects
many publics, communities and social strata, and also be inclusive of the broader
creative class.
In approaching this task, the transformative avant-garde will need to work
collectively not only with social movements and oppositional action groups, but also
with other activist artists, small and large research, educational, political and social
institutions, governmental and NGOs, non-profit public art agencies, and yes,
with municipal and district city agencies, their officials and offices, urban public
space administrations, cultural, heritage and public art agencies, urban festivals
organizers, curators, as well as private owners of public spaces, private cultural
foundations and private agencies.
With all of its problems, issues to address, as well new opportunities,
the world is too complex for artists to work alone. In the forefront of innovative
urban politics, culture and public media, avant-garde leaders like Antanas
Mockus, the former mayor of Bogota, work on transforming culture and society.
They are social workers, cultural and social researchers, urban geographers,
investigative reporters, documentary media artists and researchers, urban
designers, social and art educators, art therapists, psychological health
clinicians, political theorists and philosophers, curators, and cultural producers.
All of these people are waiting for our involvement and potential collaboration.
The ‘Functional’ Avant-Garde
There are people, groups, organizations and movements today who function as
avant-garde even if they are unaware of it. These are today’s functional avant-
garde. They may be too busy with their survival, resistance, pro-active and
transformative work to have time to even think of the avant-garde as a reference
point for their everyday practice. Avant-garde may sound to them as an overly
charged and perhaps pretentious term and so they do not wish to be associated
with such a label or tradition.
Among the many examples of such a functional avant-garde are the
immigrants who have been forced by economic and political conditions to illegally
Transformative Avant-Garde and Other Writings
cross borders and to work illegally and resist restrictions that are set against them.
A functional avant-garde consists also of the groups, organizations and movements
that assist immigrants in the process of becoming non-immigrants, often by liberating
them from detention and retention centers and by bringing them back from the
countries to which they were deported.
Among the functional avant-garde are the war veterans and their families
who agitate against the perpetration of wars, who give witness to the impact of
war on their lives and who educate younger generations about the reality of war.
They are joined by veteran health centers, housing projects and social support
organizations that try to bring them back to social life. 79
The functional avant-garde is also comprised of all other groups and
minorities who are similarly mistreated and at best tolerated as strangers, and
who act to resist and change the preconceived notions of their identity and their
‘place’ and role in society.
The functional avant-garde may be any persons, groups, organizations or
social movements, who, like their predecessors, the resisting slaves, as well as
those who supported and assisted them in their liberation—the suffragists, workers
and labor organizers of the past—radically transform the world for the better.
Without thinking too much about the avant-garde tradition, the two
branches of the functional avant-garde are the existential avant-garde and the
social support avant-garde—those who engage creatively with avant-garde users,
who join each other through artistic, pro-active socio-aesthetic projects and in
this way form one complex alliance of the transformative avant-garde.
The Avant-Garde and the Art World
We need today a recognition of the presence and an understanding of the complexity
of the transformative avant-garde, especially in the context of the sometimes
fashionable and shallow endorsement of “social art” by official art institutions and
in the face of the return of some aesthetically conservative intellectual skepticism
towards the artistic tradition of social engagement and contemporary civic practice.
Rather than forcing emerging socio-aesthetic projects into an old art gallery
and museum framework (only to predictably find out that it does not fulfill its art
world-based set of criteria and expectations), art theorists and critics should seek
and invent new methodologies for understanding the new avant-garde practices.
Conservative critical historians should keep in mind that ‘proving’ that
Constructivism, Productivism, Situationism, Fluxus and other avant-garde
movements, ideas and projects ‘did not work’ proves nothing. We would be nowhere
today without them. Nothing in the avant-garde tradition ‘works’ in the ways one
expects, including the expectations of some of the involved artists themselves.
Our sense and sensibility, our consciousness, artistic methodologies and
artistic programs keep changing in the context of changing times thanks to the
contextual and propositional attitude of these historic avant-garde projects and
this is the way art and design art ‘works’. These projects may ‘not work’ but ‘they
work’ because rather than ‘resolving’ existing problems they work to formulate
and articulate new points of view; they uncover neglected and emerging issues
and they do so through design.
As we see it today, both the ‘fiascos’ and the ‘loss’ of artistic avant-garde
movements, like Constructivism, Productivism and Architectonism, are in fact
its success and victories, while the ‘success’ and ‘victories’ of the Leninist and
Stalinist political avant-garde are indeed their loss and historic fiasco.
Democracy/Avant-Garde
 The Civic Avant-Garde
The work of urban cultural animator Antanas Mockus, with two non-consecutive
terms as mayor of Bogota—a Colombian mathematician, philosopher, and politician
who became known for his surprising and humorous initiatives—is an example of
successful civic avant-garde work. His projects, which encouraged and helped city
inhabitants to become pantomime artists, to act as traffic police, and to become
artist-painters in order to visually transform their urban dwellings, were an indirect
follow-up to avant-garde public art works, as exemplified by Arseny Avraamov’s
Symphony of Factory Sirens in Baku in 1922. In Avraamov’s project, nearly the
80 entire city work force as well as city maintenance workers and military personnel
and their equipment, became part of one collective urban sound creation and the
entire ‘oeuvre’ was directed by a team of avant-garde artist-conductors using flags
and pistols.
These were pro-active art and design projects, designed to counter urban
alienation and create a new sense of creative togetherness—social experience as a
lived process of collective use and play.
Of course Avraamov’s ambitious civic work had a questionable (especially
from our present perspective) propagandist and pro-State agenda, as was the case
with some Constructivist and certainly many Productivist projects. Yet it displayed
an exceptionally original socio-aesthetic methodology, urban scale, transformative
cultural ambition, groundbreaking aesthetic methods and design agenda, including
many projects coming from the circle of Vkhutemas design school. For us today,
these must be seen as instructive and influential.
Despite their questionable inspiration and associations with State
ideology, Soviet Constructivist projects may be a methodological inspiration
for today’s anti-State and anti-hegemonic deconstructive work, and certainly
for contemporary alternative, transformative, affirmative and pro-active socio-
aesthetic projects.
When it comes to building theoretical foundations for such practice, where
would we be without Boris Arvatov’s theory of Productivism? Where would be without
Brecht and Avraamov, without Augusto Boal and before him Paulo Freire, and
today’s social artists like Michael Rakowitz and Tania Bruguera? Where would be the
works by N55, Critical Art Ensemble, Atelier Van Lieshout, without Victor Papanek,
Buckminster Fuller and Tatlin, without the Situationist International? Where would
I be with my Immigrant Instruments, Homeless Vehicle, War Veteran Vehicle, video
animations of war memorials and statues realized with and by war veterans, or my
proposals for institutional and symbolic design supplements to war memorials, without
Constructivism, Productivism and Fluxus, and again, without Papanek and other
chapters of the avant-garde tradition and its socio-aesthetic practice?
Avant-Garde ‘Failures’
They all, the avant-gardists, seem to have failed in their utopian zeal. One should
admit it, and I am willing to do so as well. I wish, however, that we could have
more artistic ‘failures’ of such ethical, aesthetic, and political ambition, scope and
scale. Yes, each time we must be more intelligent in our attempts to not repeat the
previous ‘failures’ of our predecessors, including those from the avant-garde past,
yet we must risk new kinds of projects and new kinds of failures. The failure of an
avant-garde project is a risk worth taking.
There is an overbearing skepticism, perhaps even a ‘cynical intelligence’
at work in pointing to the appropriation of the avant-garde by the very powers it
Transformative Avant-Garde and Other Writings
questions or critically infiltrates and appropriates. We hear about the ‘danger’ of such
appropriation by clever capitalist hegemony, by authoritarian ‘communist’ (State
socialist) apparatuses or by military dictatorships (as in my old country Poland under
the previous regime). Sure, the experience economy has managed to appropriate
artistic avant-garde tactics quite well, but each counter, or sub-movement and each
infiltration project must be aware of its temporality. Inherent in any avant-garde
agenda is the inevitability of appropriation by the powers that it tries to deconstruct
and transform. So be it. Let us dismantle our own projects ourselves just before
each coming moment of appropriation. Let us be as clever as the smartest powers
and the most flexible capitalist forces that surround us. Let us recognize the moment 81
that requires a swift shift to new areas of work and that demands a change of
tactics. The dialectics of the avant-garde method of operation and its politics must
continue: action, appropriation, disbanding oneself, forming new areas of action and
transformation, the coming moment of appropriation... and so on.
We need art to design the transformation of life. We need artists to inspire,
direct and design the conditions for participatory, collaborative and inventive
people’s art and design. We need artists who work with people and not only for
them. One of the avant-garde lines of thinking endorses art as design through
which people are in partial or complete charge of the projects’ realization and of
the processes of design, production, maintenance, distribution and use.
Mierle Ukeles’ Touch Sanitation, 1970–1980, involved shaking hands with
more than 8,500 workers in the New York City Department of Sanitation while
saying “Thank you for keeping New York City alive.”
In 1987, Suzanne Lacy staged the performance work, The Crystal Quilt,
which featured 430 older women talking about their lives as their gathering
created an 82-foot-square tableau in the shape of a quilt.
In 2001, Atelier Van Lieshout realized AVL-Ville, a year-long project of
a “free republic” in the port of Rotterdam. In his project Joep van Lieshout
practically explored and experimented with the complexity of a community building
through peoples engagement in autonomous design process and fabrication. AVL-
Ville had its own flag, its own constitution and its own currency. Van Lieshout had
also designed the money notes for the AVL-Ville. It was a self-reliance based socio-
aesthetic project with a motto “as long as it’s art, just about anything is possible”.
It was a free open-ended republic, a State in the making as a counterpoint to
present-day restricted and ‘well managed’ society. In AVL-Ville, art took form and
a process of design and manufacture. Food and energy, its own houses, objects,
mobile green sections, and mobile buildings were all produced on a daily basis.
During the summer of 2013, Thomas Hirschhorn worked with the
residents of Forest Houses in the Bronx housing project in order to create a
Monument to Antonio Gramsci, which, according to its publicly stated mission,
was designed to “Establish a new definition of monument, to provoke encounters,
to create an event, and to think Gramsci today.” The residents were inspired and
employed in a collective creative process of editing and production of the Gramsci
Monument Newspaper, Gramsci Monument Radio Station, Gramsci Theater,
Gramsci Seminar, Gramsci Poetry Sessions, Gramsci Art School, Gramsci Field
Trips. They created and organized the extensive and comprehensive Gramsci
Library-Archive, edited the daily newspaper, and organized lectures and other
pedagogical cultural events and workshops in order to immerse themselves in
Gramsci’s thinking and to re-interpret and re-actualize Gramsci’s intellectual and
political work in the context of present day existential and political situations.
Democracy/Avant-Garde
 These and many other artists’ projects are original in the ways they are at
once disruptive and transformative, deconstructive and constructive, in the ways
they are both pro-active designs and performative actions.
Where would these socio-aesthetic public projects be without the
groundwork that was paved by the Proletkult, Productivist and avant-garde work
of the 1920s?
We could also ask the opposite question: why would we recall the
Proletkult, Productivist, Avraamovist and other avant-garde histories if not
because of the work by Rajkowska, Rakowitz, Ukeles and Hirschhorn? It is
82 precisely the avant-garde character of these contemporary art projects that
point to and inform our thinking about avant-garde predecessors. We are today
re-discovering the historical avant-gardes because the projects of contemporary
avant-gardes are projecting new meanings onto the past.
Speaking like Walter Benjamin, one could say that the present is here as
if in ‘anticipation’ of the past. When new artistic work encourages new historical,
critical, and theoretical discourse that engages a particular tradition, such new
work becomes a true continuation of such tradition, because by way of a critical
re-actualization of the past, art creates conditions for extrapolating it into the
artistic future.
Avant-Garde and Conflict Transformation
Conflict is a vital life force as long it is creative rather than malignant and bloody. The
task for us today is to transform such malignant conflicts into creative ones by inspiring
a paradigm shift through which the new more common problems, rather than the old
irresolvable ones, will be at the center of public democratic discourse.
One must keep in mind that the work of the transformative avant-garde can
be especially indispensable in the areas of conflict transformation.7 Artists can
contribute to finding new forms and aesthetic means of expression and creation
and in these ways inspire, provoke, and assist in the development of the symbolic
(rather than bloody) exchange of positions, collective memory and communication.
They have already done so through the development of rituals, performative
dramatic therapy or communicative cultural-prosthetic projects. Art can work
in post-conflict situations in order to help people live with and overcome post-
traumatic psychological, social and cultural conditions.
In one example of such projects Joanna Rajkowska worked with Palestinian
youths in performative workshops. The project was aimed at the recognition, creative
articulation and symbolic communication (through invented bodily expressions and
rituals rather than violent actions) of their complex patterns of emotional behavior.
In yet another work, in a dangerously close to violent conflict in Hungary, in a
dramatic and humorous attempt to physically displace, even if for only a memorable
moment, a malignant social and political conflict, Rajkowska organized purposefully
rough airplane flights for an assemblage of passengers who represented extremely
divided political views, beliefs and positions. At the end of such frightening flights,
the project ‘passengers’ landed together not only safely and with a relief, but also
touching a new common ground—the experience and the memory of surviving
together the flight itself.
In 2006 Joanna Warsza conducted a project with the mostly Vietnamese
immigrant population in Warsaw to establish a communicative and performative
bridge between them and the alienated majority of the city. Hers is a good and early
example of transformative socio-aesthetic work in Poland.
Transformative Avant-Garde and Other Writings
My own projects in Europe and in the US with undocumented immigrants
and returning soldiers from contemporary wars may also be included in a long list of
examples of performative and media art projects by artists today that engage the public
domain in an attempt to contribute to conflict mediation and transformation.
In his projects designed for helping people to live in healthier non-violent
ways with tragic post-conflict memories, artist-designer Cristóvão Canhavato
manufactured in 1992 his Thrones of Weapons. These sculptures were pieces
of furniture built with ingeniously appropriated gun parts and other weapons left
behind after a bloody civil war in Mozambique. This was a truly transformative
project of cultural and psycho-social disarmament. His art helped people to learn 83
that in moving on with one’s life one cannot change the tragic and traumatic past
but one can change his or her relation to it and live with such an overwhelming
past in a creative even playful way.
The Avant-Garde and War
War is a sanctioned collective madness. Armed with nuclear weapons, it leads
humanity to global annihilation. The culture of war idealizes war and orchestrates
war psychosis. It mobilizes and unleashes our paranoid, grandiose, and aggressive
behavior, and makes us believe that killing and dying in wars is a just and justified
mission, and an honorable duty.
Building a war-free civilization demands dismantling the workings of the
culture of war, disarming its symbolic arsenal, exposing war’s human toll and
fallout and confronting our drive to enter war situations. An even more important
task is to create and disseminate new and effective peacemaking and peace-
securing projects.
The transformative avant-garde can become a generative and active part in
such war-un-making and peace-building processes.
Some peace researches propose that peace is not simply a state of non-war.
“Positive peace”, they say, is “filled with positive content such as [the] restoration
of relationships, the creation of social systems that serve the needs of the whole
population and the constructive resolution of conflict.” Positive peace means the
non-violent unfolding of conflict in a constructive way.8
Avant-garde design can contribute to such positive peace. Artistic means
are irreplaceable when it comes to helping to publicly express human experiences
that are unspeakable, and to challenge and transform the culture of violence
into a culture of dynamic, honest, inclusive, critical, passionate and emotionally
articulate communication.
The Avant-Garde Beyond Contestation and Deconstruction
In the face of environmental catastrophe and the unknown consequences of
globalization, continued armed and bloody conflicts, civil wars and hunger,
poverty and epidemics, proliferation of nuclear weapons and other large
problems, we must develop methods and practices that learn from and go beyond
the work of our interventionist avant-garde ancestors. We must go beyond the
work of our postmodern and poststructuralist predecessors as well as their
deconstructive critical analysis and critiques of representation.
While continuing to contest and deconstruct, we must also focus on
construction and act pro-actively in transformative ways, critically and in an
affirmative spirit, but all of this on condition, as Chantal Mouffe would prefer,
that we do so in an “agonistic-pluralist” and radically democratic mode.
Democracy/Avant-Garde
 A Personal Note Art, Design and Education
Being ahead of oneself and beside oneself, ahead and beside the ways of one’s
own upbringing, ahead and beside acquired and outdated norms, values and 2015
patterns of thinking, beyond acceptance of one’s own conditions of life, is a
psycho-social, political and ethical imperative for changing such norms, patterns,
values and conditions in oneself and in the larger outside world.
To transform the world one must transform oneself, and transforming the
world helps self-transformation. This is the conviction that informs the pursuits
of my own work and of the work of many fellow artists who have chosen to join or
84 are unintentional part of the transformative avant-garde.
Art is a communicative, developmental psycho-aesthetic, and socio-
expressive tool, as well as a prophetic and magical force. The transformative
avant-garde is born of the artists’ existential, social, political and ethical
consciousness, their critical motivation and visionary will, and of their capacity
and skills in making full use of and mastering such force.
It is a true task to match our avant-garde predecessors in the ambition,
scale, and scope of their transformative projects, in the impact they have
had on public consciousness, in their fearless and pro-active challenge to our
conservative patterns of thinking and feeling, and to our addictions to the
ideologies of our cultures and to our life immersed in everyday phantasms.
I am not ashamed and afraid to see myself, call myself and be seen by others
as an avant-garde artist. I am only afraid that in my attempts to respond to the
present world, and to myself within it, in a critical, transformative and pro-active
way, I may not be, or have been avant-garde enough. What art works most influenced your ideas about the role of the artist when
you were starting out?
Krzysztof Wodiczko: Before answering any questions, I want to say that I find it
This text was inspired by the book by Andrzej Turowski, Manifest/Manifesto. very difficult to advise people on the basis of my own experience because I don’t
Sztuka, ktora wznieca niepokoj/Art That Sparks Unrest: The Artistic-Political want anyone to simply follow me. Everyone is different! In any case, and I don’t
Manifesto Of Particular Art, Warsaw: Ksiazka i Prasa, 2012. Originally published know what use my own art experience may be for young artists today. So please
in Third Text, vol 28, issue 2, 2014, pp 111–122. take note of this qualification. In this context I would say to them: listen to me, if
you wish, but do not ‘believe’ me, nor take me as an example, especially as your
‘best’ or only example.
1 Such general feeling prevails in most countries but is especially evident in the United States. In responding to you question it is difficult to suggest one single image or art
2 Arendt, Hannah, “We Refugees”, Menorah Journal 1, 1942, p 77.
3 See Bürger, Peter, Theory of the Avant-Garde, Michael Shaw trans, Minneapolis:
object that has been the most important for me, but I can suggest a few things that
University of Minnesota Press, [1974] 1984. set the course for my work. First and foremost, there were things that I have read.
4 Joseph Pine II, B and James H Gilmore, The Experience Economy: Work Is Theater
and Every Business a Stage, Boston: Harvard Business Review Press, 2011, p 17.
Reading the book by Linda Nochlin, called Realism, 1971, was a real event in my
5 Pine and Gilmore, The Experience Economy, p 255. life. It was translated into Polish quite quickly and I read it when still living in Poland
6 See the Wikipedia entry on “Creative Class”. See also Florida, Richard, The Rise of
the Creative Class... And How It’s Transforming Work, Leisure, Community and Everyday
in the early 1970s, quite soon after I graduated from the Academy of Fine Arts in
Life, New York: Basic Books, 2002, p 8. Warsaw. Another important reference was the book Design for the Real World by
7 I speak here of conflict transformation, rather than conflict management or conflict
resolution. See for instance Miall, Hugh, Conflict Transformation: A Multi-Dimensional
Victor Papanek, 1971, and also writings On Theatre by Bertolt Brecht, 1978.
Task, Berghof Research Center for Constructive Conflict Management, 2004, In terms of art, learning about the Soviet Constructivist, and Productivist
available online at http://www.berghof-handbook.net/documents/publications/
miall_handbook.pdf.
art inspired me. Thinking of a specific artwork that always stays in my mind, I
8 These are the words of Johan Galtung, the originator of “peace studies” who must recall, a small painting by Honoré Daumier called The Third Class Carriage,
distinguished between positive and negative peace. See “Negative versus Positive
Peace”, of the Irenees Peace Workshop, 2007, available at http://www.irenees.
and also works by Vladimir Tatlin especially one called Letatlin and John
net/bdf_fiche-notions-186_en.html. See also the United Nations Department of Heartfield’s photomontages for AIZ magazine. Of course, the work of visionary
Economic and Social Affairs, The Centre for Conflict Resolution, Skills Development
for Conflict Transformation: A Training Manual on Understanding Conflict, Negotiation
designers, such as Buckminster Fuller and Lucien Kroll, were very important for
and Mediation (1997), available at http://unpan1.un.org/intradoc/groups/public/ me as well. So as you can see both the tradition of critical art and avant-garde
documents/un/unpan001363.pdf.
design have played an important role in my life.
The one particular project that also sticks in my mind is a 1922 project by
the avant-garde composer Arseny Avraamov. It was called Symphony of Factory Sirens

Transformative Avant-Garde and Other Writings Democracy/Avant-Garde

 and was made in the city of Baku (now in Azerbaijan), celebrating the fifth anniversary
of the 1917 October Revolution. Avraamov took nearly the entire city’s workforce,
including maintenance workers and military personnel, and their equipment to become
part of a collective urban sound project. He commanded this grand performance by
conducting other conductors, who, using flag signals and pistols created this urban
symphony with the sounds of car horns, factory and ship sirens, whistles and flying
airplanes. I thought that this was quite an amazing project that showed how much
artists could be involved in transforming the collective perception and imagination of an
urban population. The direct experience of performing and perceiving this kind of project
86 might only last for a moment but because it involves an engagement in an elaborate
process of preparations, it stays in the hearts and minds of everyone involved forever.
Of course, it was the specific context of the Soviet system, which is incomparable
to anything we have today, that made it possible, but it set a precedent for a certain
methodology and an exceptional scale and originality, combining media and involving
many sections of urban strata. An amazing, amazing proposition and experiment!
What writings or projects have inspired you more recently?
KW: I was quite impressed by the work of the Mayor of the city of Bogota in
Colombia, Antanas Mockus, who was elected in two non-consecutive terms from
1995–1997 and then from 2001–2003. He was a mathematician, philosopher
and politician, who became known for surprising and humorous initiatives, which
are an example of successful civic cultural projects. So, he encouraged the city
inhabitants to become pantomime artists, or to become painters so they could
visually transform their urban dwellings. This shows that there could be a new
kind of civic avant-garde art created by civic leaders. Other mayors in several
cities elsewhere followed Mockus’ example.
Another very recent project that caught my attention and surprised me
in an inspiring way, which is more well-known, was by Swiss artist Thomas
Hirschhorn in the summer of 2013. He worked with residents of the Forest
Houses project, in the Bronx, New York, to make a monument to the twentieth-
century Italian political theorist Antonio Gramsci. It was to establish, as
Hirschhorn said, a new definition of ‘monument’, to provoke encounters, to
create an event and think about Gramsci today. So there was a newspaper, a
radio station, a theater, a lecture program and all of the projects involved local
residents, some of whom were immigrants from African countries, and it also
attracted the intelligentsia from other places. Of course, there are ways in which
the project can be critiqued, but its complexity and ambition demanded critical
discourse on a very fruitful and creative level.
So those are some fragments of a larger theoretical and practical body of
work that have affected my life as an artist.
Has anything influenced your ideas about art education and how is this different
from your experience of being a student at the art academy in late 1960s?
KW: The Brazilian educator, Paulo Freire, wrote an important book called
Pedagogy of the Oppressed, which was first published (in English) in 1970. He
reversed the traditional and accepted methods of education and turned things
upside-down by turning students into co-creators of knowledge. This pedagogical
work affected many artists back then.
Freire is not talked about so much now as people prefer Jacques Rancière’s
The Ignorant Schoolmaster: Five Lessons in Intellectual Emancipation, 1981, but
Transformative Avant-Garde and Other Writings
this is actually the same school of thinking. It is about engagement of intellectual
pedagogues and artists, which is not about didactically teaching people, but about
creating conditions for them to become creative producers of knowledge from
whom we ourselves as educators must learn.
This is how I would like to see a methodological direction of my own work
as an artist, designer and educator, and this is exactly what I was not taught in
art school. It was never mentioned as a possibility in my time as a student in the
late 1960s. Today, in a welcome contrast, there are programs in some art schools
and universities that suggest this kind of method of socio-aesthetic practice,
and, specifically, of engagement in working with (rather than only for, on behalf 87
or about) people. I think my generation was the last one that was completely
prevented from taking this kind of approach.
Another important thing not presented to us as an option at art school was
the possibility of the artist to operate as a designer. In fact this is still the case
now. I think the relationship between art and design is something that needs to be
further explored and to help in this direction we should look closer to the avant-
garde tradition. The divisions were less fixed in Constructivist and Productivist
work in 1920s Soviet Union, and also to some degree with the Bauhaus, the
Futurists, Fluxus and the Situationst International. We have, more than we
acknowledge, a tradition of artists operating as designers, and doing so with an
approach that is radical, interventional, deconstructive but also constructive.
Artists who want to bring “art into life”—or better, as Richard Wagner would say,
“life into art”—to make art a meaningful companion to people’s daily life while
disrupting outdated patterns and provoking new perception, while thinking with
new critical imagination and vision, may well consider becoming artists-designers.
Conversely, design students are not encouraged to operate as artists. This
is true especially for future architects. They are not taught and inspired to consider
other, more artistic paths in their design projects even as parallel practice to
the official ‘professional’ one. Development and implementation of shorter term
unsolicited projects, not commissioned by ‘clients’, especially these developed
with the less privileged and less acknowledged potential users, collaborators, and
producers in mind, are seldom encouraged and discussed.
The fact that artists, even these who operate as designers, are rarely
invited to teach or co-teach design studio courses in architectural and design
schools makes the situation difficult to change. As a Professor in Residence of
Art, Design and the Public Domain at Harvard’s Graduate School of Design I
feel lucky and privileged because I am in an a unusual position to encourage and
inspire design students to consider art as a way to expand and transform their
design field and challenge the limits of both art and design for the benefit of life.
Such a challenge however is a difficult task even in my privileged situation because
the design profession is generally not open to temporary projects, interventional
projects, and critical-political projects. Yet design can have a role in identifying
those whose needs are not recognized by the market, whose needs should
not exist but unfortunately do exist in our ‘civilized world’—the needs that, like
wounds, need emergency bandages. These needs can be articulated by design but
at the same time, design should alert us to their unacceptability and emphasize
that the solution (elimination of such needs) must come through other means.
This kind of approach is something that I called “interrogative design”,
or “scandalizing functionalism” in the 1980s. My earlier projects such as the
Homeless Vehicle project didn’t seek to offer a permanent solution to homelessness
Democracy/Avant-Garde
 but instead made the real conditions of survival and practical needs of people living
on the streets more visible and more understood. It was both an articulation of such
needs and a sort of emergency design response to them, aimed at the amelioration
of conditions of nomadic life on the streets, and the labor associated with the
redemption of bottles and cans—the recycling work performed by these people
in exchange for meager income. This kind of critical, interventional and discursive
design is happening more today than it did before, but because of the division
between art and design programs, educational institutions are not the environment
for students to learn how to work as artists-designers. In any case, through working
88 with the homeless, war veterans and their families, illegal immigrants and other
alienated people, potential users, operators or performers, one may consider design
as an artistic method.
Students need to learn the methods of research, development, social
production and critical analysis that such projects offer, and how to become,
critical, interventional, or ‘interrogative’ designers of a useful, tactful, informed,
sensitive and inspiring kind. Unfortunately I continue seeing these ‘disciplinary’
divisions everywhere I go. Even when art and design departments are in the same
building, they put thick walls between them.
It’s difficult, because I do not wish to haphazardly criticize art and design
educational institutions themselves for this, ‘divisionism’, because it is also
something to do with the broader artistic culture and its aesthetic discourse in
which use-value and symbolic value are kept completely separate, especially in
the minds of art theorists, art curators, art critics and art educators. It’s also
reiterated in museums, where art and design works are separated. When a
design project is presented in an art museum, it’s often treated as an aesthetic
object, without understanding it as complex process. Usually, the public is not
encouraged to learn about design as a creative and ethically responsible field that
is engaged in methods of envisioning, effecting, inspiring and developing—often
with the users themselves—processes of invention, experimentation, fabrication,
use, distribution and maintenance. Projects by Buckminster Fuller, Victor
Papanek, Lucien Kroll, N55, Marjertica Potrč, Atelier van Lieshout, Lucy Orta
may be presented on occasions in art museums as desirable exceptions, but very
rarely are the entire social aspects of their design process elaborated there.
Do you think that art has a social role?
KW: A book which I neglected to mention before, which also really affected me
was Trauma and Recovery: The aftermath of violence from domestic abuse to political
terror by Judith Herman, 1992. She explains in this book the stages of work with
traumatized people. In my mind and my practice, these stages allow and invite
artistic involvement in helping people to recover from trauma through becoming
‘agents’ for social change and justice.
I also think about an art project called Throne of Weapons by Cristóvão
Canhavato from Mozambique. In 1992, he made sculptures and furniture from
gun parts and weapons left over from the bloody civil war there. His work actually
helped people to learn how to move on with life; to learn that the past that they
went through cannot be changed, but that one can live with this past in a healthy,
new, creative and playful way. This illustrates the role of artists in post-conflict
situations, in healing and treating conditions through artistic means to help
alienated and traumatized people and society at large to regain cultural and
communicative strength and confidence to move on.
Transformative Avant-Garde and Other Writings
The possibility for artistic engagement in this kind of project is something
that I certainly didn’t learn from going to art school. But again, to be fair, I have
younger colleagues who would not say the same about their educational experience,
and we all see that now the situation is different and changing for the better. I have
lived and worked long enough to witness many major changes. So, I can’t say that
what was deficient in my time is a good way of seeing the present situation.
So, do you think art students today have an easier or harder time?
KW: Students today have many more possibilities than during my time. This kind of
social engagement for artists working out in the world is more recognized. Students 89
now have a better chance of meeting artists who have managed to develop socio-
aesthetic methods of working, despite the fact that nobody taught them how to do
it. Some of these artists are visiting lecturers in art schools and so are becoming
role models to today’s students. In fact “social art” has become a sort of design to
be shown in some museums and its ad-hoc presentation and even production has
now become a superficial art world fashion. Up-and-coming artists should recognize
such superficiality and move beyond it into independent, more engaged enquiry and
projects seeking grants, support and contact among and with independent art and
social networks and organizations.
Some of my own students are showing in the same exhibitions and working
in the same contexts as I do, and we share similar convictions and approach, but
they are making very different work from mine. The relationship between social life,
engagement and the more pro-active role of the artist has become a real option, open
to many forms and methods. Some universities even request that art and design
students seek experience with this way of working by engaging in social projects.
Yet it is very difficult for students to fully engage in this way of working due
to the limitations associated with the semester system. You cannot develop trust
and working relations with busy ‘outside-world’ individuals, groups, institutions,
organizations and social movements leading to an artistic project in just three
months. However, students who genuinely want to learn can gain a great deal
from trying this kind of work even if they engage in it in a limited way. They should
go out to various places where people less known to them work and live to meet
them, talk to them and ask questions. They may be surprised to receive generous
attention, interest, creative and informative responses, which will develop new
ideas and imagination in their own minds. In response to students’ initial artistic or
design proposals, there may sometimes be laughter, or critical reactions, advice or
counter suggestions but ultimately the students who work in this way will learn more,
because art and design is also a cognitive process in which discussion around a new
project invites new consciousness. Through their response to the albeit naive student
projects, parties approached and later involved in the design process may discover or
acknowledge their new ways of thinking and the possibilities to transform their own
situation. So even within the limit of the structure of educational systems, there is
the possibility of genuine creative and transformative encounters.
I just wish that the educational institutions could do more to support this
kind of encounter and project. If they extend their projects beyond one semester
and allowed for learning that combines social research with the development of
collaborative trust and experimental work with the outside parties mentioned
earlier, it would be much better. In places where research experiment and learning
are combined, especially in research-based institutes like MIT, the potential of
such engagement is greater.
Democracy/Avant-Garde
 Are there other places outside of higher education establishments where such
projects are happening?
KW: Yes, in art centers, community cultural organizations, contemporary art
museums or art galleries that have their own media production base, community,
public art expertise, and outreach educational programs, there is always a fertile
ground for such projects. In some museums and art centers, the education
departments are doing cultural and artistic work that is more ambitious than
what the exhibitions departments can offer. It was definitely the case in the New
Museum in New York in the 1980s and 1990s. The pedagogy there was very
90 advanced, with people like Greg Sholette, who was Curator of Education, and
Susan Cahan and Zoya Kocur who published the book Contemporary Art and
Multicultural Education, 1996. There were some tough projects. You can point to
similar projects today, but back then, they were really innovating.
Regrettably, ‘art education’ and ‘art therapy’ are still the two fields that are
greeted with ironic half smiles in the art world. I think that is really, really bad! It
actually puts down a very important field in which artists could be engaged, and it
creates a situation where fewer people are interested in studying these fields. The
word ‘therapy’ is used in a pejorative way as ‘performance’ used to be. There is
no real understanding about how much artists can be involved in helping people,
transforming situations, healing and inspiring new communication, expression
and consciousness in places like hospitals, schools, the workplace, prisons youth
and community centers, working with war veterans and their families, as well as
with and for many other people who really need help. There is a very long list of
places where art educators and art therapists end up working. If we could imagine
their engagement being organically extended by innovative design practice, so that
these artists could acquire more command in social research, social psychology,
anthropology and other relevant fields, it could create an incredible set of options
for young artists to enter the larger outside world, rather than being locked in their
studios to explore and express their own inner worlds like art-monks. It is very
important that this should not be such an obvious option, as is currently the case,
where it is taken for granted as a ‘natural’ way that artists should operate.
This idea of working alone in one’s studio remains so prevalent because
art is still primarily valued in terms of artistic individuality and its exchange value
in the market—as individual artist ‘oeuvre’ and a unique object ‘to be looked at’
and consumed visually as a gallery or museum artifact, a potential object of art
collection. Historically, art as a social or cultural process, and art as a collective
cross-disciplinary project isn’t valued in the art market and in ‘art world’, so
artists are not encouraged to do this.
How should artists learn from the past?
KW: Artists should take some inspiration from the past, but that inspiration must
immediately lead to new contemporary project. Artists have an ethical obligation to
operate in the social and cultural world as a transformative force. They should move
on from what is in their heads into practice, into experiments, into connecting with
others. They should learn how to work with social workers, community activists,
administrators, city officials, curators, with whoever needs to be approached, to give
permission or supply funds or endorse their work in some other way. This is why
artists must move into the present day world as quickly as possible.
So it’s not that we should be learning from history, we should be creating our
own history; not ‘learning from the past’ but ‘teaching the past’, understanding its
Transformative Avant-Garde and Other Writings
new meaning in the face of present circumstances and the vision of the time to come.
We should recall certain facts and projects from the past and bring new meaning to
them in new work. I am uneasy to see students being hypnotized and intimidated by
the aura and halo of art history through slides, and brainwashed by readings of past
art, treating it all as a monument or shrine to worship. They should look at art history
with a critical eye; select things that are relevant to them and critically re-interpret
them. They should dare to discover undetected aspects and notions in past art,
to see and inscribe new meanings in past art works, art projects, art movements,
artistic manifestoes, activities and actions—in all that is not yet written in the
textbooks. And then they should re-write or oppose it radically. In that sense, every 91
artist can and in my opinion should become a historian, but (as Nietzsche would
prefer) of a ‘critical’, rather than ‘monumental’ or ‘archival’ kind, and such artists’ own
unique histories should be shared publicly, as widely as their art.
That approach to history came with the avant-garde tradition. Gustave
Courbet, for example, said that he didn’t mind making history paintings, as long as
they were of contemporary subjects. Édouard Manet is another example in terms
of his relation to Francisco Goya. When you look at their works together, you can
see how Manet, in relating to Goya, created his own academy, his own educational
laboratory and his own art history. He seemingly indulged himself in ‘copying’ works
of those great masters of the past, while in fact he was not copying them at all, but
was responding to them, re-interpreting them, looking at them and ‘un-painting’ and
‘re-painting’ them, doing so both with respect and with a radically critical new mind
and eye.
I don’t see any problem, for example, if young artists and designers look
again at some art and design projects of 1970s and 1980s. Many are already
looking at Buckminster Fuller and Victor Papanek and other ground breaking
visionaries and practitioners, asking why should there be a need to be inventing
new things, if these past works seem still so fresh and relevant to us today. But
if they don’t just adopt these works, but un-do, and re-do them in a new ways,
they can learn and discover a lot. Some ingenious aspects of the agenda and
craft of past projects may be brought back, but transformed in a new way and
in new context. In any case, many things are radically changing: there are new
technologies, new opportunities, new agendas, struggles, and conflicts, new
ecological issues, new survival techniques and new art and design methodologies.
Young artists and designers should be taking these new changes into account while
looking afresh at the past and developing their own critical-historical traditions.
Do you think it is still important that artists have a formal education?
KW: Yes, I think it doesn’t hurt at all to have a formal education, as a starting
point. The important thing is always to find a parallel way to supplement your
formal education through engagement with projects and groups and movements,
outside the school or university where you are actually studying. Take advantage
of what it offers, but take advantage of everything else as well. That is my feeling.
I am sure not everyone will agree and I probably agree with them that they should
disagree with me! That is just my life and my approach. There should be room for
many different approaches—we should disagree and argue!
Originally published in Academie X: Lessons in Art + Life, London: Phaidon Press,
2015, pp 334–345.
Democracy/Avant-Garde
Identity/Cultural
Prosthetics

Ægis, 1999
Beyond Hybrid State
Warr en Nie sł u c h ow ski a nd K rz ys z to f Wodi c zko
1992
Where are you from?
Instead of a simple answer, a prolonged silence meets the question. The silence says,
“You are asking me the wrong question. Ask me, ‘Which “where” am I from?’”
There are millions on this planet today whose silence, too, is an answer.
We are among them.
The following text is an attempt at recording, in the act, an unfinished
dialogue over the Paris-New York line, an attempt to grasp a fragile moment in the
history of democracy and its forms as a political, social, psychological, cultural, and
ideological enterprise, and to situate the place of art in such a moment.
We found ourselves, entangled, in a labyrinth of fragmented ideas,
metaphors imposed on us by the context of events spanning more than two
continents and crossing existing categories. The moment calls for a xenology
(from xenos meaning “stranger”), a new, nomadic, and yet undeveloped form of
understanding and expression.
As empires extend and recede, the boundaries and territories they
incarnate shift, as do the particular and internal ones of the subjects they
comprise. Drawn by the collision of their histories into identities they may not
have freely chosen, these subjects remain in an ongoing struggle over the hold
of imperial powers, engines of war. The forces deployed in these wars are not
always ones from without. Taking advantage of differences, empires have often
succeeded, by enclosing and excluding (Gilles Deleuze), in fashioning their
world along the lines of this forcefield until they, too, fall victim to the crush of
competing imperial formations.
This is true whether the empires in question are capitalist democracies or
absolutisms. Although the premises—or the physics—of the forces may be different,
the goals remain the same: the preservation and extension of a super-identity against
the multiple and individual identities subordinated, assimilated or integrated into
Transformative Avant-Garde and Other Writings
the great whole. Although in the age of Capitalism Militant this was achieved almost
exclusively by (external) warfare, in the age of Capitalism Triumphant it is precisely
on the ruins of these wars (and in the maimed souls of its exhausted, wandering
veterans) that future theaters of war will be staged.
(Re)mobilization
“America” is a state of war. Paradoxically, the social relations of the great standing
army in the desert were more peaceful and more democratic and egalitarian—like
those in the Napoleonic Grande Armée—than at home. In that self-contained civil
society of soldiers, each citoyen has human rights, including rights to social space, 95
public and private, and one must enjoy these rights, whether one desires them or
not. Facing this great mobilization in the unpopulated desert is another civil society,
composed not of soldiers but of warriors, fighting not a war against some enemy of
freedom, but each other. These warriors constantly defend themselves against each
other in an unsuccessful struggle, not for freedom in the abstract, but for their
ration of rights.
The army in the desert represents an oasis of civilization compared to the
society of permanently embattled individual warriors fighting in the urban jungle,
a social desert. This is an army of deserters from the battlefield of the United
States who have consolidated themselves as a new society in the desert, neither
polis nor rus (countryside), abandoning the (e)utopian (good place) but difficult
project of America for the (o)utopian (no place) and featureless terrain vague
of desert and ocean, a new social project of staging a theater of operations in a
space with no social problems—a theater of war.
We propose as the obvious conclusion to that war the repatriation of this
army back to the American polis and a general re-mobilization of society from its
present mission as an outpost of (o)utopian society on the flawless surfaces of the
desert for a social mission—redeployed as a welfare rather than warfare warrior
state. No longer a state as Grande Armée, but as a homeless army, based on the
social realities of our society, important parts of which are composed of ex-slaves,
returning veterans from imperial, social, and civil wars, refugees, and immigrants—
an Operation Social Desert. As new recruits continue to be drawn in large part from
these strata, the ideological sets and decors of the theater of war will be converted
to a broader theater of ideology. This new army will thus broaden its operational
terrain and fill out its complement through a full and voluntary self-conscription.
It will have to transform the egalitarian structure of the army into one of multi-
ideology and multi-identity—each “welfare warrior” exercising his or her right to a
multiplicity of particular identities and ideologies. The communications system of
this army would have as its function the dissemination of the multiplicities of its
individual and collective units, and its mission would be, after a transitional phase,
its own “dis-arm(y)ing” and a passage to a state of “un-war”.
This new dis-army will require a new category of citizen, a member of
nomad kind, defined not in opposition to State power, but rather as a returnee
from the wars seeking a new status and means of conceiving a society beyond the
fatal dualism of social jungle and utopian desert, a social fata morgana. The newly
demobilized will at last be given a chance to see this un-war for what it is, not a
question of individual struggle for some coherent identity based on notions of right
to difference (usually a flat one like some advertising image and often quickly raised
to the level of a new multicultural nationalism or other hegemonic mirage), but a
struggle for the right not to be continuously embattled, the right to be multicultural
Identity/Cultural Prosthetics
 inside and to live one’s multiple identities. This, too, is a utopia, but a nomad’s and
nomadic utopia, that of the new veterans of homelessness looking for a new home
away from wars, soldiers, and warriors.
(Dis)integration
This dis-army calls into question any notion of a State only for survivors and
winners (racially, economically, politically), implying the elimination of the
possibility of recognizing differences, in all their complexity and antagonism. The
capitalist army, for example, has converted its memory of victorious battles (often
96 crimes against humanity committed in common, to which our monuments are
both memorials and cover ups) (Sigmund Freud, Georges Bataille) into an ethos
of social will or moral ‘necessity’, that of constantly fighting designated enemies
at home and abroad. The myth of this necessity—to fight and win—then becomes
the primary social and political bond holding society together, a State fusion of
differences into a hybrid, which comes at the price of alienation (Entaus-serung,
meaning the “estrangement, externalization, driving out”) of ‘passive’ or ‘weak’
elements that cannot be assimilated or integrated into the agonistic culture
(Georg Simmel).
As was pointed out in a proposal for the Poliscar, The Homeless
Communication Network in 1991, these alienated elements, like those who live
in the city but outside, the urban homeless, are treated, or at best tolerated, as
aliens on their own planet. This ‘alienation’—making into legal aliens legitimate
operators within today’s city—has a vicious effect, not so much of excluding
‘them’, those alien, nomad homeless, as ‘us’, the community, from the masses
of strangers from whom we are then estranged and with whom we presume to
have no common language. In fact it is the strangeness of the situation that we
project onto the other rather than confronting it together. This contradiction—
to us they may seem strange in the city, but they are not strangers to the
city—results in a contradictory and complex identity: savage alien nomads
(the homeless) in a noble State and society (the city), or noble alien nomads
homeless in a savage State and society (the city). Squeezed between this play
of images the nomads themselves, in their complexity in a complex city, remain
out of the picture, which has no room for the real life of people who happen
merely to lack a home or dwelling.
The State Hybrid
First proposed by the Enlightenment, the democratic project of social and cultural
‘integration’ (in the strong sense of the word) as a political engineering of the
liberation of the individual through assimilation and total incorporation into a modern
State machine is still being extended today (for example, by the pyramidal Socialist
apparatus in Mitterand’s France through its official State policy of integration). It is
endorsed by many social activists (SOS Racisme) but opposed by some concerned
intellectuals (Julia Kristeva), and provides an inspiration for reactionary ‘criticism’
from politicians of the radical right (Le Pen). It also re-emerges in everyday language
through attacks of utopianism in the form of Orwellian nostalgias for engineered
hybrids superior to their base parts.
At least since the Bronze Age people have mixed metals together to
obtain properties like hardness or ductility that are not present in the
base materials themselves. Now scientists are improving on the alloying
Transformative Avant-Garde and Other Writings
process by combining materials in many fine layers only a few atoms
thick. This atomic engineering holds the promise of designer materials,
ones whose properties are built in by blending elements that could not be
combined in other ways. Scientists say the new materials represent a new
state of matter that was previously unavailable.... Some of the multi-layer
materials are deceptive in appearance. A thin piece of shiny reddish-brown
metal looks like copper. But is does not bend easily the way a thin sheet of
copper would. Instead it is resilient, snapping back in place after a bending
force is removed.1
97
There are many ways of assimilating, deploying and fusing difference, as this
appeal to the victories of Machine Age engineering in such an ambiguously
Durkheimian quote (whose applicability to social engineering is obvious) shows.
The State Hybrid, too, is a transracial and transcultural war machine, one
that fuses sexual, racial, or cultural differences and erects another (abstract)
economic one. This new difference rapidly transforms itself into the very engine
of the machine, like the core of a nuclear reactor, which functions, so to speak,
solely on the difference of energy levels in the states of various isotopes of
radioactive elements.
Those who are too slow for this machine are down(ed) and out. Those who
cannot transform into power and energy are eliminated, like nuclear waste, no
longer of any conceivable use, even dangerous. This is such a fundamental trait
of the ethos that it becomes difficult to appreciate and criticize from within the
categories of the social system itself. The US, which has thus freed itself of any
other restraints on its activity, is in this sense ahead of the rest of the world. In
one sense, of course it had no choice—alienation or ‘estrangement’ in this sense
has characterized its struggle from the very beginning, from the first wars against
nature, ‘Indians’, religious intolerance, etc. Even when physical liquidation is not
involved, elimination, casting beyond the limen, the threshold, is a basic feature of
this alienation. As Foucault indicated, we have passed from the repression of sexual
(and cultural and racial) difference to its deployment. Technically this has been
achieved by an impressive feat of social engineering. For reasons of ideological
coherence, equality must still remain the basic tenet of this new state. Ignoring
the consequences of the deployment of difference, political demagogy of the right,
center, and left can all be useful as a tool for maintaining the machine.
From the Hybrid State to the Labyrinth
To counter such a pseudo-democratic egalitarianizing repression into the unconscious
of these differences and scrape away the veneer of sameness and unity, we strongly
agree with Kristeva that a society must be founded on a dialectical recognition of
the complexity within each ‘human being’. Her humanism, however, is a somewhat
confused notion (since it posits but one human identity), as is the dialectical but
dualist confrontation between ‘I’ and ‘other’, something close to the biblical conception
of “neighbor”. This in turn is different from a “multiculturalism” which proposes the
co-existence of many societies in one larger State, without a real recognition of what
the differences are. (The multicultural project is a more advanced one technically, in
the same sense that Georges Seurat’s chromato-divisionism of complementary colors
and forms was advanced for its time—and perhaps reflected Seurat’s own anarchist-
utopian but totalist positions.) What is required is the recognition of the multitude of
identities and cultures co-existing and often embattled within everyone.
Identity/Cultural Prosthetics
 It is also possible to self-alienate this society of identities-within into society
at large (multiculturalism) without confronting differences, and in one superficial
sense a ‘hybrid state’ already exists as a State Hybrid. Here, just as in its biological
substrate, hybridizing always requires dealing with dominance and duality, and
the danger of an integration, submersion, or simple disappearance into a ‘superior’
strain, a hegemonic whole, with no inscription of one’s own history, is always
present. The more alien element risks being forced to function as an alter ego, a
kind of complement to the citizen, the less alien. (One may, of course, hopelessly
hope that one-day soon dominant white culture will assimilate into weak minority
98 ones.) The State will argue that assimilationism is an important step forward,
perhaps even a prerequisite for its affirmative-action program for aliens, but in
fact this may be simply impossible for those who remain outside with no access
to power. This constitutes a re-moralizing of the problem in the same way that the
Protestant Ethic, the New Socialist Man, or ‘liberation’ have all moralized and
psychologized the various stages of the historical forced march of the modern
capitalist individual (Max Weber).
Far from being a wilderness, the vast and featureless wastes of Desert
Storm are the perfect background for the new multicultural army—women, blacks,
citizen-soldiers from the reserve army of the otherwise morally unemployed. We
insist once again that this tremendous force must be turned inward—crossing the
barriers we erect within and destroying the hold that our categories have over us.
Paraphrasing Bertolt Brecht’s point about cities, the following paradox
arises: America is allowed (or forced) to change, but the individual may not.
Something more than this technical and contradictory liberation must come
into being as rights are extended to ever greater sectors of society, as was done
in the case of slaves after the Civil War. If we cannot necessarily rid ourselves
of the repertory of masks that social categories generate, we must at least
understand what lies beneath them. Societies exist only in social forms, the most
complex of which, democracy, is still in the process of development, and this
is the battleground. Seeing this form not as a fixed essence but as a constant
circulation is already an important victory. Yet, if multiculturalism is to be more
than a liberal(’s) liberation, it too must learn to deploy its forces, inward as well as
outward, psychologically as well as socially.
Strategy must be developed for the passage from monocultural society
(the ‘repression’ or ‘expulsion’ of difference) through multicultural society
(the ‘deployment’ and organization of difference) past the transcultural State
Hybrid (the integration of difference, its ‘crossing’ in this vitalist and biological
metaphor—a kind of superstate)—”the passage from the fort” through the
panopticon and the pyramid of difference toward a labyrinth (Bataille) where one
is lost only when one tries to find a ‘way out’ (the illusion or utopia of exit) instead
of finding oneself or another in it, a ‘way in’, an entry.
Alien Art
For art today, as one entry (in)to this labyrinth, the task lies in finding its relevance
in the midst of the political, demographic, and psycho-social transformations—
relative to the shifting and crossing of collective and individual boundaries. Shifts
in external boundaries (ethnic and State borders, for example, north-south, east-
west) are closely bound up with migrations and the crossing of these boundaries.
The face of Europe and North America in particular is being transformed in this
way. These in turn impose themselves on shifts in internal boundaries—ideas,
Transformative Avant-Garde and Other Writings
beliefs, ideologies, languages, metaphors, slogans—psychological traces, lines,
both shortcuts and roadblocks, running across the individual territories of
human minds. The migratory movements within each of us necessarily include
crossing one important internal boundary, the line drawn between the person
one has been but no longer is and the person one will become, thus establishing,
by transgression, an “extraterritorial de-militarized zone”, which is where the
alien feels most at home. Coming to terms with the varying directions of these
internal shifts and crossings (and their corresponding de-militarized zones) is a
complicated process, but the mapping of these zones constitutes one of the most
important social movements taking place today. 99
For the alien, living is a series of entries, ‘crossings’, not in the biotechnical
sense usually implied by the term “hybrid” (although the latter does have the
attractive force of transformation on its side), but rather the often painful and
problematic crossing of spaces and borders, with concomitant changes in mental and
moral position, which, as in the labyrinth, are as much (or more) internal as external.
Here “alien” means both a political and metaphysical (nomadic and migrant) state
of being and ‘becoming’, perhaps even a psychological encampment in space and
time in today’s displaced and estranged world. In this new work, borders, internal
and external, shift and cross in perpetual movement and transformation, and so do
the identities they determine. “Who am I?” can only be answered in terms of “Who,
where, why, (in the name of) what, have I been?” (Just as it is for the proton in
quantum physics, which constantly and instantaneously ‘becomes’ a sequence of 11
elementary particles, then a neutron and a pion, and then an individual proton ‘again’,
this observed unending transformative process is the ‘definition’ of a proton, and its
only ‘identity’)
The artist who would dare make a contribution to this present, understood as
a home where past and future dwell together (Benjamin), as well as to the history of
this present and future (Friedrich Nietzsche, Michel Foucault), would need to learn
how to operate much like a nomadic Sophist in a migrant polis, providing new tools
of language for it (in the performative sense of metaphoric speech-acts) for aliens
alienated from themselves for lack of language. Like the Sophist in Ancient Greece,
the new Sophist, as a practitioner of democracy in that politically guaranteed but
practically non-existent empty space called “public”, must practically recreate an
agora or forum each time she or he wishes to speak or listen. Even in a democracy,
the liberal State or corporate estate fills this space with its own “publicity” (Jürgen
Habermas), instead of leaving it for the “free communication of thoughts and
opinions” (Declaration of the Rights of Man, 1791), becoming in effect a “tyrant of
opinion” (Alexis de Tocqueville). The Sophist must be prepared for an adversarial
role in going beyond corrupted forms of communication. In a democracy the most
important right is the right to representation. Neither a pedagogue nor a demagogue,
the Sophist is an interrupteur, a ‘switch’ always ready to open rather than close the
communications circuit. There must always be room for this empty space, open to a
multiplicity of expression and interpretation (Claude Lefort). Alien art is this empty
space, existing only between the lines.
Among all the-more-and-less-alien in this world lives one even more
alien half. These are the double-aliens, women aliens, many of whom, often
en-veiled, have learned to operate as double agents, skillfully crossing borders
between antagonistic alien compounds and the embattled zones within them
(Carrie Mae Weems). Crossing by force of commerce or marriage a multiplicity
of boundaries and identities, women become aliens not only to aliens, but aliens
Identity/Cultural Prosthetics
 of and from aliens—the most nomadic of aliens, cross-aliens. In this depth of An Interview with Bruce Robbins
the depths of alienation, women’s memory, thousands of years long, conceals
and discloses sources of knowledge and philosophy for creating social space as 1996
de-alienating space, another private and public agora. One might even look to
women as the first Sophists. Based on the special alchemy in the metaphors and
expressions within this knowledge (devised under the most alienating chains of
circumstances), these traditions constitute an important artistic education for the
contemporary alien artist.
The most difficult and critical challenge is the changing and nomadic
100 status of the metaphor and the directions of its shifts and crossings. How one
disarms or deactivates dangerous metaphors, deciding which of them to preserve
(disarmed but not destroyed) as critical monuments, specimens of the dark past,
and which to publicly unmask or destroy, and creating space for new metaphors
to serve as elements of new aesthetic modes of communication among today’s
(alienated) aliens, are important practical questions facing the Sophist. The artist
who would undertake such a project should be aware of the dangers of repeating
or ‘repatriating’ old and habitual preconceptions, in particular preconceived
notions of (alien) ‘identity’ as a uniform category, and of turning a blind eye to the
internal and external antagonisms within and between it and aliens.
In this labyrinth, art must not only be psycho-demographic, but also
democratic, and it must contribute to the transformation of this democracy through
new nomadic forms and modes—art as xenology, a new form of inquiry (his-toria).
Its critical, historical, and prospective voice is necessary equipment for aliens in
transit, for whom an outdated history book, as much as any fading blueprint for Bruce Robbins: A passerby in the street sees someone holding a walking stick with a
the future, is a suspect, even useless, piece d’identite. TV monitor on top like a hooded cobra. There is a moving image, there is the sound
of a voice, perhaps an accented voice. The person holding the staff seems to want to
Paris-New York, 16 January, 1992 make eye contact. What goes through the passerby’s head? Another crazy foreigner?
(On the first anniversary of the Gulf War) Someone who needs help walking? Moses in front of Pharaoh?
Some of the brilliance of this seems to me the play on what Guy Debord
calls “the society of the spectacle”, on the fact that people will not stop for
Originally published in The Hybrid State, exh cat, New York: Exit Art/The First human beings telling their story but will stop for a televised image of the same
World, 1992, pp 92–98. human being telling the same story. When the image replaces the person, when
there’s an obstacle between you and the person, there’s a better chance of
making contact. Otherwise the operator is likely to be taken as someone asking
1 Holusha, John, The New York Times, 1 December, 1991, p F9. for spare change. Is this what you had in mind? What sort of public encounter are
you hoping to produce?
Krzysztof Wodiczko: It’s very hard for me to present a theoretical model for what I
hoped would happen, or even what I noticed did happen during these performative
presentations. But it was clear that without this object, none of this would happen.
Any kind of object held and operated by a stranger can be useful. But if the object
performs and is attractive by virtue of being strange, it relates to the tradition of
strangers, magicians, performers using instruments that come from somewhere
else, to make magic, or just to sell something. In the environment of the
contemporary city, too, a new object is always desirable.... The Alien Staff, 1992,
proved to be very effective because it was recognized as something familiar at the
same time as something strange. It’s like a cliché. A biblical staff. [Laughter]
BR: Does Emmanuel Levinas laugh when he talks about the face of the “other”?
KW: Comically, the face here is the face of a character and the face of an actor at
the same time. The face of a media performer and an actual person. And there is
the operator, also an actual immigrant, who is performing in relation to the

Transformative Avant-Garde and Other Writings Identity/Cultural Prosthetics

 pre-recorded image. The presence of the actual immigrant takes several forms.
One of the forms is to embody disagreement with what was pre-recorded. Nothing
here is very stable. It’s quite open for exploration. When others ask questions
about what’s in the containers, for example, it brings up things that weren’t said in
the pre-recorded material. But very often the immigrant will also refuse to explain.
He or she will say, “It’s none of your business. It’s there because it’s important
to me.” Other things are explained even if nobody wants to hear. Horrifying
descriptions of the immigration department and so on. You ask for it, you get it.
Then there is yet another person, a person from the crowd—the beginning is the
102 gathering of a crowd, and things are already leaking out of this two-person encounter into
the crowd—which is listening to all of this and is voicing its own opinion: “Well, excuse me,
I’m also an immigrant”, or “I’m not an immigrant, but...”. Levinas’ “third” is the person
who says, “I am not an immigrant, but...”. This is the person who sees the whole situation
from the point of view of a symmetrical democratic project. In France, which lives the
classic democratic Enlightenment, the third is the person who says, “But wait, aren’t we all
members of one large community?”
This triple relation—me, the other and the third—can be reversed. Any
one of these can be the one who sees the triple relation. But the object helps in
this process. It makes a multiple. The possibility of a like artifice, the Alien Staff,
doesn’t really exist for Levinas.
BR: I’m really fascinated by one aspect of your work that seems to me unique. It
seems to be designed so as to require a kind of narrative completion. To provoke
a conversation about the work and between the people who are involved in it, a
conversation which is the building block of some new kind of community.
KW: What I’ve tried to do, that I don’t see being done enough, is create an object
or some intermediate form that inspires and becomes a starting point for exchange.
And this constitutes a tradition that refers to the need of object or instrument,
like a story-teller’s instrument. A kind of magic staff that will make miracles. As
in the Bible. It is clearly stated in Catholic versions of the Bible that the staff is to
make miracles. In Protestant versions, it says to make a sign. But in both cases
there is a magic to it. Without the stick, people would not believe the person who
was using it. But in this case the object can also become a center, a sacred place.
Georges Bataille defines the sacred place much like Jean-Luc Nancy, as the place
where passions are unleashed, where something can be shared that has not yet
been shared or that one has refused to share. It is the place of a birth of some kind.
This object is a performative object. I think we need more objects of this sort to
come between an unprecedented explosion of communication technologies and a
dangerous return to the tragic precedents of complete communication breakdown.
BR: What about the Greek side? Xenology, and so on?
KW: If this equipment seems to be prophetic, it’s because it puts every immigrant,
every operator in the role of a prophet, interrupting history to open up a vision of
community. Each one brings his or her own experience, and in this experience is the
seed of a new community. Of a world that would not ask the immigrant to integrate,
but a world that would disintegrate, made of people who have disintegrated.
This connects to Socrates because Socrates did not tell people what to do.
Socrates used an amazing discursive technique: he created situations in which people had
to start thinking. What is Socratic about the staff is the position of the performer in what
used to be called public space. Maybe a public space is being created in the very moment,
the very act of performance, or in the act of dwelling in the polis. Or, in Bataille’s terms, a
sacred place. Where people face each other’s passions.
Transformative Avant-Garde and Other Writings
BR: Tell me a little about the science of xenology.
KW: By “xenology” I mean a field of knowledge which also connects with the field of
experience: the field of historical intuition or present intuition. I want to propose an
existential knowledge combined with life practice. A struggle of displacement.
BR: But not especially transnational displacement? It could as easily be an
internal or domestic displacement?
KW: A displacement inside of yourself.
BR: Oh, I see. “Strangers to ourselves”, as Julia Kristeva says.
KW: Yes. This external and internal displacement is about crossing the
boundaries inside yourself. Because there are all those different borders one 103
is discovering. Maybe they were there before. But one recognizes this whole
incredible world which is normally not recognized by people who stay in one
place for too long. One can definitely learn a lot from strangers. Those who
move less should listen very carefully to those who move more. (And maybe the
opposite.) Xenology would be experiential, theoretical, and artistic. In the further
development of my project, xenology could be its aesthetic, not just its cultural
or theoretical frame. The xenologist would be someone who is more aware of
the field, a kind of prominent scholar or practitioner in the field. Like a doctor. A
Talmudic doctor exists as long as Talmud exists. Here we are dealing with an oral
history, not written texts. Xenology is not centered around sacred literature, but
it could assign to certain fragments of this historical material something like the
meaning of a sacred text. Maybe it should be more displaced, not fixed in one body
like the Torah.
BR: I have a larger question about the politics of your work and its trajectory,
about what the word “stranger” means to you. If one were unsympathetic, as I’m
not, one could say that to focus on immigration is to forget all the people who
have not immigrated—to privilege, as we say in our jargon, the metropolis as the
center of the story, and to drop out all the people who have not left the countries
that immigrants have come from. Is it to deal with an unhappy but somewhat
privileged group?
KW: That brings us back to Walter Benjamin and Levinas. To put emphasis on
the stranger is to see ourselves, and to see ourselves as a democracy. It’s the
only way to know whether this democracy is human or ethical. We badly need
strangers. We call ourselves a community, we claim openness, rights, and so on,
but we have no way to see that community. So it must be interrupted by strangers
(Benjamin), who are more important than we are. (I don’t consider myself a
stranger, though I am of strange origins; I now have three passports.) For Levinas,
the symmetry of democratic process can only be sustained by an asymmetry
of ethics. If the stranger to the city and someone born in the city are equal, and
democratic equality is guaranteed by human rights and by the Constitution, our
obligation is to challenge that symmetry, to open ourselves up to those who are
less capable of taking advantage of their rights. But it is we who are less capable
of recognizing the needs of others, who do not fight for the rights of foreigners to
vote. We impose taxation on everybody, but we don’t demand that strangers have
representation. They are living here, they have children, they have nothing to say
about how their children will be educated, and so on. There is a myth of equality, a
myth of symmetry between us and them, that needs to be challenged. To make that
symmetry possible, one has to act asymmetrically. You have to overexpose people
who are underexposed.
BR: What kinds of changes in the Alien Staff do you have in mind?
Identity/Cultural Prosthetics
 KW: I’m interested to see to what degree instruments of this sort can be more
playful. Inspire more of an artistic or Baroque use. In other words, if they can
respond better to the gestural and narrative virtuosity of strangers. Of course,
instruments of this kind are not for every stranger. Clearly they are for people who
are more artists than others in their technology of survival, of insertion into the
culture. They are for special agents—or angels.
BR: In Ancient Greek, “angels” meant messengers.
KW: Yes, messengers who like to speak, who are angry enough, who are motivated.
Sometimes even desperate. Or, say, initially reluctant, yet have an internal need to
104 construct, reveal, or open up their experience and share it. It is very hard to describe
the whole process in which people, once they learn about the possibility of this kind of
project, select themselves to be part of it. They are people who want to be more public
than they are despite the fact that what they say, the so-called public doesn’t want to
hear. With the kind of equipment I am giving them at the moment, these people can do
more than what they are expected to do.
But there is also another possibility there. I am talking about an instrument that
is not yet designed; a tool or instrument that will create a new situation. That level of the
unknown is connected with a kind of intuition of the present, a revolutionary intuition
of the present. There’s an intuition that those people will be able, for example, to come
to terms with their impossible set of experiences, the impossible re-configuration of
their identity or the new forms, new connections, inside of them. As they start recording
and re-enacting their stories and re-interpreting, rhetorically articulating them in front of
others, in interaction with the others, one hopes they will learn more about what they
would like to say and also that they will learn to play with this somehow painful, difficult,
and maybe tragicomic device, enjoy it in some humorous and Baroque, or maybe even
in a more polite, Rococo way.
There is also the possibility of modulating the audiovisual recordings with
gestures or even allowing the other people around to participate in this replay or
re-enactment. The Media Lab at MIT is continuing a project that was developed by
Léon Theremin, a Russian inventor, and recently perfected an instrument operated
by gestures. It connects human electromagnetic fields with electromagnetic fields
that are electronically generated. I would like to test this gestural instrument. I
have to build it to see how one could become a virtuoso of his or her own story, also
maybe adding new components to the story, discovering more and more aspects of
the experience and making it into a more playful act of speech and, psychologically,
an act of self-construction. The playfulness is definitely a psychological need here,
for the operator and also for everybody else. In the space between strangers, and
between strangers and non-strangers (if one can describe them this way), this
artifice, which is already there as a kind of object, could become more interactive
and more interpretive or performative than it is now. I hope that it may be the birth
of some other kind of instrument.
BR: Could you say something about any of the reactions to the use of these
instruments either that you’ve seen or that you’ve heard about from people who
were using them?
KW: It has become clear that much more is happening with this stick than I
anticipated. The reactions were usually good when there were both immigrants
and non-immigrants around this stick. First of all, there was an attempt to
exchange and share experience between the operator and other immigrants,
maybe from other countries. There is usually very little connection between
immigrants. And then there are the non-immigrants who, of course, might have
Transformative Avant-Garde and Other Writings
imaginary relations to their memories of their own “first place”. They might feel
that in that sense everyone is an immigrant. Everyone feels strange, everyone is
alienated. So what’s the problem? But when they start getting into the details
of the exchange of experience among immigrants, they realize that they are
actually not part of the same conversation. They cannot be. They want to listen.
Or, they want to speak in order to dominate the discourse, to re-interpret the
situation of immigrants for them. This was very apparent in France. There
were some people who immediately translated fragments of what they heard
into a kind of rough theory, making it an act of their own political speech: “Let
me tell you what you mean”, and “What does it mean from the point of view of 105
democracy in general?” All of those concepts, like egalitarianism, carried from
the eighteenth century—they truly believe in them in France. But usually it is so
ridiculous that they are overwhelmed by the reaction. Or there is silence. A very
thorough kind of silence. They are trying to learn based on some sense of ideals
or recognized ignorance.
There was one moment I found quite amusing. Conversation developed
so well between the immigrants around the stick that they forgot about it. They
ended up in a restaurant and the stick was just leaning against the wall. One of
the immigrants, from Morocco, was laid off. And as a result of this, she got a job
from the operator, who needed a babysitter. Later I took this as an important
possibility for new equipment. There’s something very pragmatic on occasion
that comes out of all of the political and cultural debate, about national policy or
legal problems they share, an exchange maybe of some addresses of lawyers, or
God knows, some services. There is also the job market that appeared here. So I
realized that in some next generation or network of instruments I should design in
the legal and economic issues.
BR: When you were talking about the new computer technology that you’d like
to experiment with, I wondered whether you had recording equipment as part of
the Alien Staff, as a way of making it more interactive, producing something that
would include the people around. And then I thought that, practically, this seems
like the worst idea in the world because of the fears people have that it would be
used as an instrument of surveillance.
KW: Yes, even the idea that I presented is doubtful. How do you convince people
that the possibility of digital transmission is really there and is not really a trick?
How to open this up without scaring people to death? Another possibility would
be to eliminate this transmission altogether and rely on live transmission, rely on
the possibility of meeting the same person at the same time. The operator could
reappear the same time the following week. That is what happened in Greenpoint,
Brooklyn NY, on a Sunday in front of a church. It is a very important place in
Greenpoint because it’s a church attended by both Poles and Puerto Ricans as well
as some other groups—not as many Polish as maybe one would hope, but some.
And it is a sacred place because they share the same religion. And a sacred place
could be used as a site for this performance. And as I said, someone asked, “Will
you be here next weekend?” In this question there is the possibility of a community,
a newly born community. It means I will give myself a week to figure out whether
I should trust you enough to bring my uncle or my brother and tell you something
more. But now I will ask you a few questions. So I will ask you, “Will you be here
next weekend? And by the way, do you know anyplace to go for help? Or in what
way are you connected with, say, people who clean apartments or people who
take care of elderly women or men, or who clean offices at night?” In this moment,
Identity/Cultural Prosthetics
 the operator will have to rethink whether this is actually a trustworthy person.
Eventually, through probing questions they will find each other.
Certain fragments of what Jean-Luc Nancy has said about community
seem strangely familiar when I observe what’s happening around the stick. He
proposed a different kind of community, and this helps me to understand my own
work. He says that there is a kind of undoing of community, an undoing of ties
or preconceived notions of the commonality or communistic or communal. And
this immigrant is refusing to accept any imposed notions, or ties, or connections
with others. She’s saying, “No, no, I’m not part of it. Don’t worry.” Or, “Please
106 do not think that we all have the same situation or that I speak here on behalf of
others. No, this is a unique experience I am opening up. I don’t know what others
go through. Telling you all the complexity, all of the problems I have with myself,
with the way I was and I am no longer, with the things that change in me, it is
difficult to accept what I am doing. All of the questions, all of the disagreements
inside of me, this is something that you have to listen to. Because this is something
that I cannot even say without a certain hesitation and pain.” I’d like to connect
Alien Staff with this kind of community of unworking and undoing, a community
of refusing, of refusal to be fused—I think that is what Nancy says, more or
less—and yet it is also the possibility of a community disseminated, contagiously
spread by the immigrant, a community of all of those disagreements and problems
inside of one person. The person will say, “Join me in this exploration and we will
have in common all of our doubts about what is supposed to be our collective or
community, what is supposed to be the legitimate bond between us. Let’s replace
it or let’s drop it and talk about what is really happening inside of us and whether
we can share it.” In this way, I could see this stick as, maybe for a moment or 15
minutes, the instrument of birth of a new community: a community that comes
from inside the containers, from all those things that are contained in the video and
the relics, but also from the play with them. I would like to make it more playful
and interactive: all the jokes, the disruptions and the changes of topics; all the
absurdity and impossibility of talking about identity. This is the new community.
Originally published in Wodiczko, Krzysztof, Critical Vehicles: Writings, Projects,
Interviews, Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1999, pp 194–210.
Transformative Avant-Garde and Other Writings
On Alien Staff
an interv iew w it h Tom Finkel pea rl
2001
Tom Finkelpearl: You have worked in many different media and under many
different circumstances. How do you see the continuity of your work?
Krzysztof Wodiczko: As I read more and reflect on what I have done, I am
developing a sense of the method of my work. In general, I have employed urban sites
that are charged with some meaning, representing something that Walter Benjamin
called the “history of the victors”, or one might say, the “culture of the victors”. The
sites are monuments or other structures, and now the city at large. Into this, I insert
what Benjamin calls “the secret tradition of the vanquished”. By doing this, it is
possible to interrupt or disrupt, Benjamin would say, the continuity of the history of
the victors. He was talking about the philosophy of history and the necessity to see
history from the point of view of those who do not take anything for granted, who
have a need to speak, for they are usually deprived of history, for example, people
who are perceived and treated as strangers. They are people with ‘no history’, and
these are the people who have been the focus of my work and my collaborators,
whether it is the Homeless Vehicle, 1988 or the Homeless Projection in Boston,
1986–1987, or the Leninplatz Projection, 1990, of a Polish shopper in East Berlin.
The tradition of the vanquished is the point of view of those who have no voice:
those who are newcomers, those born of the transformation of the city, or of global
transformation. They must somehow regain the right to become legitimate members
of the community or have a legitimate relation to the monument and the history it
represents, the Homeless Vehicle, 1998, and Alien Staff, 1992, are both operated,
or performed, or transformed by the operators who do not have a ‘voice’, people who
have no recognized, legitimate presence in the urban environment or in the media.
These projects have a psychological dimension, because the operators
become legitimate members of the so-called “urban community”. They operate tools
or instruments designed for and with them. In this society, once there is a product
designed for specific users, they are taken seriously. Even if onlookers do not know
Identity/Cultural Prosthetics
 exactly what is going on, they recognize the seriousness of this design engagement.
The operators, whether homeless people, or immigrants, or undocumented workers,
feel legitimate as human beings, as presenters of equipment newly designed for
them. They have something to offer and explain through this object, and other
people ask them questions through this ‘machine’. This object, as a ‘third party’ in
this social interaction, helps to initiate communication.
Through the creation and operation of the new equipment, the operators
gain the necessary distance and come to terms with their own conditions of life,
the pathos, tragedy, and comedy of their experience, as something somehow
108 rich and complex, no matter how terrible it is. This condition should not exist,
but, at the same time, it is something human because they are human. They
are witnesses to disaster, and they have comments about it. They are born
of it. They can find form and communicate the history of becoming. They
remember other times. They can, in the midst of a crisis situation, empower
themselves through certain abilities and skills. Strangely enough or perversely
enough, they are not just survivors. Out of their alienation and displacement
and marginalization, through the fact that they managed to survive, they are
strangely powerful, frighteningly okay. (Of course, we do not see all of those
who die in the process.)
With Alien Staff there is an aspect of empowerment and transformation of
the self, and therefore the possibility of seeing one’s map of displacement. This
happens through the performative act on video, recorded and edited and then
continued in front of, or surrounded by, people who the operators have never
seen before, in the space of the very city from which they were alienated. That
part is much stronger in the new projects. It has a psycho-therapeutic effect
for those who choose to use this artifice, this double, this companion or magic
object, around which they hope a new discourse will develop. It is something
that relieves them from the responsibility of telling their story alone, providing
an extension of their own displacement. In this way the Alien Staff alienates
their alienation. In the process of recording, in the process of performing, in the
process of displaying in the museum, as a museological object or artifact—in all
of those cases, I feel that it is much more effective than the Homeless Vehicle
project. The new projects are also much more provocative in terms of the
necessity to respond.
TF: For the Alien Staff do you conduct a series of interviews with the operators that
are then edited and screened on the monitor at the top of the staff?
KW: No. Not interviews. It is more like a video history, a video psychology. It
is not an interview in which I ask questions. In fact, when people start talking
to the camera, they have less difficulty, over time, saying things to the camera
than to a person. It suddenly becomes a kind of confession, but also a kind of
liberation for many people—to finally find the words without any time constraint,
like in a psycho-therapeutic situation. Then they can edit the tape, or help in the
process of editing.
Strangers have an incredible ability to see problems in a new place and
recognize them immediately. They can even criticize the ways in which people try
to be nice to them. On the tapes for the Alien Staff, they can say all the things that
they haven’t had an opportunity to say, acknowledge all of the aspects of their own
displacement, and recognize their transformation. They can relate how they have
changed since they crossed the border, and how many more borders they have
crossed internally. They try to find the words. Very often they speak many languages,
Transformative Avant-Garde and Other Writings
though not necessarily fluently. Often, they help themselves with all kinds of Baroque
phrases and metaphors, the particular language of strangers. They repeat the same
story in various languages, and of course the story is different each time. The final
edited version combines them all.
In other words, the Alien Staff is truly an instrument. Not everyone will
make the same sort of art with it. It requires the operators to become artists to
some degree: performers, story-tellers, oral historians, transforming your identity
into a more and more unfamiliar form. You might not be accepted by your old
community or by the people who are around you. But you have no choice—you are
creating your own history, a kind of critical history that infuses the present with the 109
past, a little like projecting images on monuments. And then you have a history of
the present which is unacceptable and for which there should be no place in the
future. The immigrant utopia, then, is a future place in which there is no place for
the present experience.
TF: So far, you have spoken of the experience of the Alien Staff from the point of
view of the ‘operator’. What about the interaction?
KW: Incredible conversations develop around the instruments, both with
immigrants and non-immigrants. This can be seen from the videos made with a
hidden camera in Paris. In one video the person carrying the staff, a woman in
Paris, is discovering within herself a kind of community—a mental community
of different discourses and dialogues with her own past, projections into the
future, problems with the present—and is acknowledging how mobile this
is. She is projecting this to the outside world, opening it up. This becomes
contagious because there is often someone in the group that forms around her
who understands, who has a close relationship with an immigrant or who is an
immigrant, and then there is also someone who is not. And then it becomes a
discourse around this staff and this operator who is disrupting herself. This staff
is speaking, but she also is taking her pre-recorded comments as tips. She is
saying, “No, no, no. It is not like this, not exactly as the staff says.” It is actually
worse or better, or funnier, or more tragic.
TF: Commenting on what she herself had said?
KW: Yes, because she is always in the process of transformation. It opens up
a different kind of discourse on the identity of community. It is born of what
is happening to that person, and that is why I feel that this is a project that
is cultural, psychological, and political. And there is an ethical dimension,
because each time she uses the staff she is speaking to the world, confessing
or explaining her decision-making process and her impossible circumstances.
For example, she put a broken coffee cup into this container, which was a
very important relic. In the videotape you see her trying to reassemble this
broken cup, but explaining that the parts do not fit anymore. It is not possible
to reassemble it. She cannot reassemble herself, and she does not want to. In
many ways, she has been liberated from an identity that was partially a prison
for her. Now she is in another prison.
Also in the container is a picture of her baby. She used to be totally
dependent upon her husband to sign any documents. Now, her baby is a French
citizen because it is the child of a French father. This immediately gives her the
right to have a work permit, because the mother of a French citizen is entitled to
one. So now she is not dependent so much on her husband as on her child. She
says in this videotape to everyone, “What if my child misbehaves?” Imagine this
monstrously powerful baby. People either identify with her or are amazed. They are
Identity/Cultural Prosthetics
 shocked, they act against it, or they dismiss it. On the hidden camera videotape, if it is presented in the form of artifice, something partially artificial, partially
you can see some French tourists from the provinces talking to the woman. They real, such as talking about a nightmare, or a fairy tale. The hope for strangers
are rightwing, and refuse to acknowledge that there is any problem. Here she is is to produce themselves as artifice.
standing in front of them almost naked, with all of those stories, ready to discuss
them, and they refuse. But then there is someone else standing behind making
faces, understanding. Originally published in Finkelpearl, Tom, Dialogues in Public Art, Cambridge, MA:
One thing that I like about this project as opposed to my projections is that MIT Press, 2001, pp 337–350.
it is not attached to any particular, fixed physical site. It may be a ‘projection’ in
terms of inserting or inscribing something into the everyday life of the city (as an
110 alternative kind of architecture or design), but it is not fixed. So, in other words, 111
it is not site-specific. I do not know why I am so happy about this. It may be
because it is more able to integrate and interconnect with the person. It is very
difficult for me to project, for example, an illegal domestic worker from Haiti onto
the body of a monument of Abraham Lincoln. It is ironically possible—in fact it
would make quite an interesting comment—but the monument will always be seen
as dominant. You are ironically making a hero, but you are still monumentalizing
someone who is marginalized. In the case of the staff, there is not this sort
of monumentalization. In fact, it is relying on the tradition of people who are
crossing boundaries. It is relying on the popular art of story-telling or magic,
performance, tricks. Making artifice in order to communicate. The stranger is the
maker of an artifice using gestures, songs, music and stories—a trickster of some
sort. It is partially artificial, partially natural. They are a cyborg of sorts: someone
who is artificially implanted into something that is called natural, but who is
denaturalizing it.
What I am saying is that this project is not an appropriation of monuments
of victors or of a dominant environment. It is actually a reinforcement of the other
tradition that already exists, the unacknowledged tradition of the vanquished that
I mentioned earlier. Clearly, those operators are agents. Angels and agents. They
are acting not only on behalf of their own life and their own transformation and
empowerment, but they also feel that they are acting on behalf of others who are
in a similar situation, or they would not be participating in the project. There is
a certain prophetic component without being monumental in the manner of an
official monument.
There is another aspect that is difficult to explain—the psychological
part. Freud believed, according to Kristeva, that it is very hard for people to
come to terms with their own strangeness: you feel stranger and stranger as
life goes on, because you have to learn things, and once you learn something,
it is no longer a ‘natural’ state of being. You have a theory for things. You
have words, cultural norms, patterns, and proscribed identities. Plus, there
is the history of being rejected or rejecting someone, a whole set of fears
and repetitions or uncontrollable drives. So, when you face someone who is
properly a stranger, who comes from somewhere else, who speaks in a different
accent, who is lost, it invokes your own strangeness. Rather than acknowledge
this strangeness in yourself, because it is repressed, you expel this strangeness
together with the stranger. This is a Freudian explanation of xenophobia. Of
course, it is much more complicated than that. In life, different categories of
strangeness are in conflict with each other—the stranger within the stranger
within myself, and so on. However, expelling the stranger outside without
recognizing and confronting the stranger inside is a general problem. Freud
thinks that it is easier to come to terms with the uncanny feeling of strangeness

Transformative Avant-Garde and Other Writings Identity/Cultural Prosthetics

Xenology: Immigrant Instruments antagonisms experienced within the newcomers themselves. One way to its
realization is commitment to a community of artifice and play, a recognition that
1996 such an interior community is possible and can be developed. This requires the
recognition of the presence of these strangers and newcomers in this community,
which must continually question and de-legitimize its own identity by asking
strangers to play a central role as major actors in this vast ethical and aesthetic
project on the stage of democracy. Xenology is the art of refusal to be fused, an
art of de-limitization, de-identification, and disintegration.
The life of an immigrant is an artistic process and requires special
equipment. The Alien Staff, 1992, and the Mouthpiece (Le porte-parole), 1993, 113
immigrant instruments, are presented as design contributions to xenology, inspired
by it and intended to further its development. In one sense, the most important
stage of the work is the psycho-aesthetic process that precedes the public
appearance and operation of the Alien Staff or Mouthpiece (Le porte-parole). The
immigrant operator’s preparations: recollections, confrontations, and presentations
of the self with the artifacts of his or her experience. Rather than proposing an art
that refers to, interprets, or translates the experience of displacement, I propose
the design of performative media equipment, albeit aesthetically conceived, to
assist and inspire its migrant operators in the construction and exposition of their
art as they take charge of their newly emerging identity.

Originally published as an exhibition statement in conjunction with Xenology:

Xenology (from the Greek xenos, Latin alienus), the art and science of the Immigrant Instruments, distributed at the Galerie Lelong, New York, 1996 and
stranger, is also the immigrant’s art of survival. Historically the integrity of the reprinted in Wodiczko, Krzysztof, Critical Vehicles: Writings, Projects, Interviews,
community has often been measured by its openness to strangers. Today this Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, pp 131–135.
openness to the stranger, whose contemporary form is the immigrant, has once
again become a test for democracy. The representation of the stranger, the
unfamiliar, interrupts the flow and continuity of the familiar. It seeks to convey
its uniqueness, despite the fact that no one may be ready for such a presence. It
proposes a vision of a better world, as an exceptional and difficult hope lived in
the mode of the present.
This social and communicative utopia, as suggested by Walter Benjamin,
emerges from a unique clarity discovered in the “revolutionary energy of the
new”, based on transporting personal experience into the historical. This new
energy helps break the inertia that perpetuates past injustices provoked by fear
of the stranger.
This is not only an ethical and philosophical program, but also an aesthetic
one. Based on an existing body of knowledge of the world—stories, histories,
sacred and profane texts, literary and oral, lore and science, archives and
correspondence, techniques of social and ethical know-how (with the Talmud as
an example)—it constructs an aesthetics of self-creation and recognition. Being
an immigrant is in some sense already being an artist, even a counter-artist. It
communicates the secret tradition of the vanquished (which never allows itself to
forget) in opposition to the “history of the victors”. It is an art of existential ethics,
creating new communicative and performative forms for survival while employing
ancient traditions of know-how in the design of tactically useful artifacts.
What occurs within each and every immigrant in our present world is far
more interrogative, critical, and visionary than what occurs outside. A community
for new Americans must be born of an unstable world of disagreements and

Transformative Avant-Garde and Other Writings Identity/Cultural Prosthetics

Cultural Prosthetics1
2015
Cultural
1 Of or relating to the ideas, customs, and social behavior of a society.
2 Of or relating to the arts and to intellectual achievements.
Prosthetics
1 Specialty concerned with the design, construction, and fitting of artificial
devices—prostheses—to replace or augment missing or impaired parts of
the body.
2 Pieces of flexible material applied to actors’ faces to transform
their appearance.
Survivors of psychological and physical trauma are today’s estranged, a socially
and culturally excluded people. These are the survivors of wars, of forced
migration and displacement, tragic accident, abuse, neglect, social exclusion,
or personal loss. They may have suffered amputations, physical injuries, or
psychological wounds. They are often incapacitated by the overwhelming events
that have dramatically transformed their lives. Socially stigmatized, they are
treated, at best tolerated, as strangers.
These people need the replacement and augmentation of their missing or
impaired body parts, alongside the missing or impaired zones of their minds and
their emotional, cultural and social lives. For this we need new transformative
tools that challenge both residual and emergent forms of psychological, social and
cultural alienation. In addition, bodily or emotional loss may cause another great—
sometimes even greater—loss: that of social ties, cultural connection, and ability
to communicate.
In the dictionary, prosthetics is defined as a field “concerned with the
design, construction, and fitting of artificial devices—prostheses—to replace
Transformative Avant-Garde and Other Writings
or augment missing or impaired parts of the body”. Cultural Prosthetics adds
a new dimension and emphasis to this charge. It is especially concerned with
replacing and augmenting peoples’ missing or impaired capacity to open up and
communicate with others; to restore missing or poorly functioning means of
expression; and to restore their interpersonal, community, and social ties, as well
as their larger societal connection.
According to the same dictionary the second meaning of prosthetics (in
relation to the production of prostheses) is defined as “pieces of flexible material
applied to actors’ faces to transform their appearance”. Cultural Prosthetics too
is concerned with the technology and methods that allow for the transformation 115
of the appearance of actors, albeit of a particular social and cultural kind:
a transformation that allows those who, while marginalized, alienated, or
psychologically and socially disconnected, to be able to appear and be perceived in
public space no longer as disabled ‘invalids’—useless, inconvenient, and politically
irrelevant—but as significant actors on its stage; as legitimate contributors to
social change and the democratic process.
In response to such situations, needs and demands, Cultural Prosthetics
must define itself and operate as a new techno-artistic and socio-aesthetic field.
It must focus on the development and implementation of human-to-media and
human-to-human interfaces that inspire, encourage, and assist traumatized and
marginalized social and cultural minorities to open up and develop to the point of
virtuosity their communicative and performative skills.
Cultural Prostheses
Design and research into cultural prostheses must respond to and articulate the
situation of people who need to regain and perfect their lost psycho-social abilities
and capacities, as well as the lost meaning of their lives as legitimate actors on
the stage of real life, personal and social.
New artistic, technological, and psycho-social means and methods
of designing cultural prostheses may focus on the invention of original
communicative media artifices, speech-act implements, and performative
techno-cultural equipment that counter new forms of social alienation. Cultural
prostheses should assist in challenging and ‘disarming’ cultural prejudice while
making the user feel safer in public and private space, and therefore more
confident and better equipped to openly share and discuss the critical issues he
or she wishes and needs to address.
In addition, Cultural Prosthetics may focus on developing, experimenting and
socially implementing specially designed techno-aesthetic devices, tools, equipment,
instruments, and other human-to-human interfaces and media-enhanced bodily
supplements for the development of cross-cultural communication, public dialogue,
individual and collective expression, dissent, and civic engagement.
To be intelligent and effective in addressing and challenging social and
cultural alienation through socially inclusive and discursive design, the field of
Cultural Prosthetics must extend its research and collaborative practice beyond
the limits of any single professional inquiry. It must build cross-disciplinary
links between prosthetic technology and the fields of media technology, cultural
and media study, anthropology, social psychology, political philosophy, trauma
therapy, social ethics, industrial design, art therapy, education, social justice,
public health, performative public art, media art, social media, fashion, and
other fields.
Identity/Cultural Prosthetics
 The Survivors of Survivors
The person who assists another person in surviving is a survivor also, and she or
he may also be in a need of cultural-prosthetic equipment.
The lost breast or prostate of one member of the family is a lost breast or
prostate for an entire family. The lost leg of a father in the fog of war is a lost leg
suffered by his entire family. For the family whose members have been physically
or psychologically traumatized in war the trauma is of the loss of the persons that
they once were.
Cultural prostheses are clearly required not only for survivors, but also for
116 their loved ones, those who suffer traumatic symptoms via secondary trauma: the
survivors of survivors.
Family members and partners who are caregivers for those impaired by war,
congenital defect, accident, or illness also have a primary need for prostheses,
so that they too should have the possibility and means to bear their loss together,
without the moral blackmail that prevents them from also being recognized among
the wounded and amputees: as survivors in their own right.
What kind of cultural-prosthetic equipment might they both need, and,
when appropriate, collectively, in tandem or separately, use or share?
Communicative Prostheses
Technically advanced prosthetic substitutes for parts of our bodies are within
reach, but the loss of a breast, eye, hand, foot, arm, or leg also constitute a
charged cultural and psychological domain. Responding to the physical and
emotional needs of the survivors of such loss, we must envisage innovative
psycho-social and techno-aesthetic approaches. Such new cultural-prosthetic
equipment can aid in the process of re-coding the ‘self’ beyond mere substitution
and improvement, to empower the impaired with new abilities, including the
virtuosity to regain and acquire an invigorated sense of personal and social
worth. The design and technology of cultural prostheses must offer its users both
inspiration and assistance in the process of developing new forms and skills of
communication and expression, which will aid users in resuscitating lost social
ties and connections or to create new ones.  ideological path to noble missions.
In order to proceed, we must respond to the core questions in the
development of prostheses. What kind of prosthesis can be designed, equipped,
and ‘fitted’ to overcome survivors’ physical, cultural and social impairment?
How will our prosthetic design resolve those impaired zones and other aspects
of their emotional, family, cultural and social lives? Could, for example, today’s
technologically advanced prostheses be further enhanced by integrated
communications like electronic memory, interactive software, sensors, audio-
visual display and projection components, as well as wireless communication
and transmission functions?
Finally, via a greater inventiveness, elegance, artistry and symbolic
articulation, can we displace, disrupt, and challenge the stereotypical and
often degrading perceptions of survivors of illness, displacement, social and
cultural exclusion, accident or war? A cultural prosthesis must help its users,
wearers, operators, and performers transform themselves into agents who
are different from others not by virtue of their psycho-logical and physical
disadvantage, but through their new bodily and mental skills and expressive
communicative capacities. Cultural prostheses must allow users to be
admired, desired, respected, and welcomed as legitimate members of social
Transformative Avant-Garde and Other Writings
groups, communities and society at large, as those who can offer a unique and
valuable contribution to it.
War Veterans
War veterans suffer—perhaps even more than other survivors—a loss of capacity
to communicate and express emotions, to convey their overwhelming feelings
and memories of war and post-war events and experiences. For psychological
and cultural reasons only a small percentage of them, and almost none of their
families or those close to them, speak of this publicly.
Their incapacitation denies them a chance to share their experience with 117
society at large, especially with younger people (including those who might wish to
join the military) and to help people learn the realities of war rather than absorbing
romanticized media phantasms of war and military recruitment propaganda.
Veterans’ communicative incapacitation contributes to a distorted public image and
imagination of war, leading only to the perpetuation of wars. As a result, the public
remain unaware of what they and their families may face in the event that they join
the military and go to war. The development of cultural prostheses would therefore
play a vital role in helping veterans in the vital task of developing and disseminating
a greater societal awareness of war.
US War Veterans
Only those who have been through war can tell us what war has done to them and
their comrades, to their ‘enemies’ and to civilians, and what war will continue to
do should it occur again.
Unfortunately the wall that separates those who know what war is and those
who do not is a thick one. To challenge such a social divide is a difficult task, not
only because of the very small number of veterans who are inclined to and able to
speak of war but also, and especially, because uninformed and misguided younger
people, potential new soldiers and future veterans, are not inclined to listen. They
are poisoned by our war-based national and ethnic cultures and by the recruitment
propaganda with which they were brought up. They will not listen as they seek an
In such a situation, to close the divide between the minority who are
conscious of war and the unconscious majority who are not requires extraordinary
cultural and artistic measures. It requires an invention of some thing in-between,
some transitional artifice through which veterans experienced in war can
communicate in public. Both war veterans and the path to a war-free world require
the design of special kind of cultural prosthesis.
A New Type of War
We are engaged in a new type of warfare in which 80 per cent of soldiers have been
trained and desensitized so as to better be able to kill (in contrast to 20 per cent
of those who killed in the Second World War). At the same time advanced medical
field technology and armor saves more lives. Every US soldier killed leaves
16 comrades who survive. The greater survival rate contributes to a greater
number of traumatized veterans, survivors who have killed more ‘enemies’ and have
witnessed more killing and wounding. More of them will return alive and more of them
traumatized. An estimated one-fifth of current veterans of the Iraq and Afghanistan
conflicts report suffering from PTSD. Upon their return from war, many will live as if
dead, or have a deadly and violent life. Many will commit suicide.
Identity/Cultural Prosthetics
 In designing cultural prostheses, it is important to stress that many survivors
will pass their trauma on to those closest to them, onto their parents, grandparents,
wives and husbands, children, and even grandchildren. If we estimate that there are
seven to nine people affected by such secondary trauma for every veteran suffering
from PTSD, the ripple effect of the trauma will reach an even greater number of
people than usual, as an increased number of soldiers with larger families have been
deployed from the National Guard and reserves.
According to new research from Stanford University, by 2023 the rate of
PTSD among Iraq war veterans alone could rise to be as high as 35 per cent: one-
118 third of all veterans. Considering that some 2.4 million have been through the Iraq
and Afghanistan wars, ten years from now there may be 700,000 traumatized
in addition to 4,900,000 affected by secondary trauma, who thus become war
veterans in their own right—veterans of veterans. There will be a half-million or
more traumatized people in the US.
The suicide rate among veterans now eclipses the number of combat
deaths among enlisted soldiers, and that rate is rising. The trauma of those
who have lost loved ones to suicide will add to the ripple effect. In 2010, 43
per cent of soldiers who took their own lives never asked for or received help.
An estimated 145,000 US veterans of all conflicts benefit from homeless-
housing programs each year. This number will rise dramatically in the next
ten years with the return of soldiers from Iraq and Afghanistan adding to the
incidence of trauma among veterans and those left behind, especially children.
The US will be facing a major clinical, psychological, social, and cultural crisis
for the next 50 years.
Only one per cent of veterans speak out publicly, and almost none of those
closest to them do so. Even a small number of veterans appearing in public space
and communicating their real war experience could make a big difference.
Given this situation, in order to make a public impact, cultural prostheses
should not be designed immediately for a large market and mass production, but can
be initially designed with input from and use by a smaller self-selected number of
veterans and their families and support groups. Those who choose to begin operating
these cultural prostheses will become its ‘avant-garde’ users and design agents,
ready to take upon themselves the task of expressing their critical and philosophical
position with respect to war and their existential experience of it. They may advance
the use of such prosthetic equipment that aids in the development of their emotional
capacity to appear in public and better perform and communicate. In doing so they
will generate a population of new users as their co-agents.
To cite Judith Herman, veterans with an intense experience of war, like all
trauma survivors, are “living monuments to their own trauma”: traumatized but
silent. How can they be helped to become active as speaking monuments, rather
than silent and passive ones, so they may publicly speak not only for themselves
but also on behalf of the silent others? How can we design effective cultural
prostheses for them?
My past performative media projects, which take the form of wearable and
mobile communicative equipment, developed with marginalized urban minorities (the
homeless, ‘illegal’ immigrants, alienated school youth and war veterans), among them
Poliscar, 1991, Alien Staff, 1992, Mouthpiece (Le porte-parole), 1993, Dis-Armor,
1996, Ægis, 1998, the War Veteran Vehicle, 2009, as well as recent projection-
animations of war-memorial statues, will be the basis for further explorations in
search of a specific answer of my own to such questions.
Transformative Avant-Garde and Other Writings
The Veterans’ Helmet
The Veterans’ Helmet, at present under development at the Interrogative Design
studio at Harvard, is just one example of many potential design approaches in
Cultural Prosthetics.
The main objective of The Veterans’ Helmet is to alleviate the veterans
suffering and symptoms of combat stress, to be more confident and less fearful,
and to feel more protected when moving through busy and crowded public spaces
or places with particularly significant sounds and smells. An important additional
task for the helmet is to help people around its user to become more aware of the
veteran’s war and post-war situation, experience and condition. 119
The visual appearance of the helmet is as important as its protective and
communicative function. It appears partly familiar and partly strange; partly
belonging to the past and partly to the future. It should refer to the memory
of the destruction of combat while contributing to a new vision and future
action. The helmet should be fit for a new, double ‘combat’ mission: against
the user’s own silence, social isolation, and exclusion but also toward a war-
free world, a world in which there would be no ‘need’ for more veterans. The
Veterans’ Helmet’s appearance must assure the user’s readiness for the battle
to transform war culture into a discourse of peace, and war armament into
disarming cultural equipment.
The helmet should resemble a real combat helmet, while at the same time
appearing curiously strange and different: light, elegant and ‘Futuristic’, as if from
the world of science fiction. The design and form of the helmet will emphasize
its playful usefulness—evident in the appearance and interactive functions of its
protective and communicative components—as elements that visually override
the uselessness of the combat-like parts that resemble a real, ‘serious’ combat
helmet. As such, in its function and appearance, for both user and public, the
helmet should acknowledge that a terrible war-torn past cannot be changed but
that one can live with it in a creatively pro-active, useful and healthier way, thus
contributing to a war-less future. The past is a crime story that needs to remain in
memory while the future is a science fiction that must be turned into reality. The
helmet should both contain the crime story and project such a vision of the future.
In sum, the design tasks for the helmet are the following:
 To protect the user against his or her post-traumatic reaction to certain
—
war-related smells (burning flesh, petrol, human sweat, decomposing
animal or human bodies, etc). This may be realized through the use of
special smell-detection and “smell-camouflage” units: special software
and an interface attached to the helmet, covering the area of the face and
nose to inject and disperse smells preselected by the veteran and stored in
the helmet.
— To protect the user against his or her over-reaction to certain war-related
sounds (sudden explosions, like the sounds of shutting doors, firecrackers,
people screaming, etc). This may be realized through the use of sound-
detecting microphones and a special software-driven headphone unit
that responds to unwanted sounds by activating external noise-cancelling
headphones that can project preselected alternative sounds.
— To protect the user against his or her post-traumatic reactions to
certain war-related events and crowd situations (the sudden appearance
of people from high above, behind, and in peripheral vision, the sudden
Identity/Cultural Prosthetics
 approach of another person, the closeness of a crowd, or generally any Designing for the City of Strangers
visual over stimulation caused by crowded places and the like). This
could be realized through the use of mini video screens installed at the 1997
front of the helmet close to the user’s eyes that will survey and display
the situation in the user’s peripheral vision, transmitted from mini-
cameras mounted on the helmet and pointed to the rear and upwards.
— To provide the user with a means of sharing with the public the vivid
images experienced by the user in traumatic combat situations (exploding
and burning military vehicles, suicide bombings, mortar attacks and the
120 like) especially those corresponding to and triggered by certain sounds and
smells. This may be realized through the use of a specially designed unit
with a projector and screen or mini–video monitors attached to the helmet,
or alternatively a unit for projecting onto ceilings, floors and walls in indoor
and outdoor public spaces.
Note: The above function should be part of a special version of the
helmet designed exclusively with and for veterans who are less affected by
combat stress and willing to speak about combat and discuss it openly in
public, in order to inspire and engage public dialogue.
— To secure, when needed, occasional or continuing contact with the
user’s comrades-in-arms, supporting partners and family members, trauma
therapist or other medical personnel and services, through a specially
designed communications interface attached to the helmet.

Presentification The messiah interrupts history.

According to Judith Herman, a trauma therapist and theorist: Walter Benjamin, “Theses on the Philosophy of History”, 1940.

[S]urvivors’ capacity to make themselves visible and perform their testimony

visibly and in public is inter-connected, and depends on their success in
emerging from their post-traumatic stress. Conversely, the struggle for
recovery from trauma—for... finding a narrative voice through testimony—has
a greater chance of success when performed as a public speech-act, even
more so when directed as a social utterance to and on behalf of others. An...
Act of Public Truth-Telling has a restorative power. Psychologist Pierre Janet
termed this act ‘presentification’.
In supporting the development of veterans’ capacity to make themselves visible,
active, and communicative in public space through their acts of presentification,
there is the tremendous potential for artistic, cultural, pedagogical and therapeutic
projects within which the new field of Cultural Prosthetics can play an exceptionally
important role.
1 The term Cultural Prosthetics was first introduced in the context of my research
(2008) and teaching (2009) as a head of the Interrogative Design Group and director
of the Center for Advanced Visual Studies at MIT. See http://act.mit.edu/academic-
program/courses/spring-2009/4-3701-interrogative-design-workshop-g-u
City of the Victors
According to Walter Benjamin, the fact that things ‘go on’ is a catastrophe. The city
is a monumental stage for things to ‘go on’ because it perpetuates both a spatial
relationship between its inhabitants and its symbolic structures and a psycho-social
relationship among its dwellers. These two perpetuations must be perturbed to wake
up the city and to save it from the bad dreams of the present, the nightmares of the
past, and the catastrophes of the future. I would like to propose the possibility of a
design practice that would interrupt these processes and could eventually help to
heal the city’s wounded psycho-social relations and its catastrophic reality.
Theorist Stéphane Mosès, in analyzing Benjamin’s theological-political
model of history, focuses on his concept of the “history of the victors”, which
operates as a past “transmitted to us through a hermeneutical tradition that
selects events, preserving some and rejecting others, at times determining their
interpretation”. It can easily afford to forget the catastrophes it has caused. I
recognize this kind of history as the foundation or cement that stabilizes the
continuity of the ‘legitimate’ and ‘familiar’ city. The history of the victors, the
official presence of the official past, constitutes the official city. This official city is
a lived tradition that celebrates, in everyday life, “the triumph of the strongest and
the disappearance of the weakest”.1 Such a history (as represented in textbooks,
national literature, films, and public monuments) cherishes a notion of progress
that, according to Benjamin, is inevitably linked to a legacy of destruction.
The history of a nation or city, like every synchronic narrative, collaborates
with the history of catastrophe by celebrating the lineage of ‘our’ progressive and

Transformative Avant-Garde and Other Writings Identity/Cultural Prosthetics

 victorious traditions. To avoid future catastrophes, daily disclosures of the often-
hidden destructiveness of the present must be linked to critical recollections of
past disasters. This sort of critical approach to history has been—and continues
to be—an intuitive and interruptive survival practice of every immigrant.
“The inertia that perpetuates past injustices can only be broken by the
eruption of something radically new; unpredictable”, says Stéphane Mosès,
building on Benjamin’s analysis. The history of the victors must be confronted and
interrupted by the memory of the nameless or the tradition of the vanquished.
In staging such an interruption and bringing these traditions to light, the
122 stranger, the vanquished of today, functions as a prophet or messenger. Each
time the experience of a stranger is shared and understood, the city revives and
returns to its conscious life as a democratic hope for us all. To heal one voiceless
stranger, then, is to heal the entire city.
City of the Vanquished
Tremors and aftershocks caused by the end of the Cold War are being felt across
the planet. As the old and stable ideological front lines have vanished, a new war
has begun, no longer cold and seemingly bloodless, but often hot, like fire, and
openly bloody. Refugees are fleeing new religious wars, new chauvinisms, and new
nationalisms. For many, the end of the Cold War has been the end of their world,
their identity, their community, and the beginning of a new diaspora.
With the official account of the population of refugees soon to reach
40,000,000, the United Nations has called the last quarter-century the “Migration
Era”. The influx of immigrants to the United States has now reached the historic
levels of the nineteenth-century immigration wave. By the year 2010, foreign-
born residents and citizens will probably outnumber US-born inhabitants in most
American cities. By then, these cities will undoubtedly be the sites of the greatest
challenges and hopes for democracy in the US.
Historically, the city has always been a hope for the displaced. And today,
as it was in the past, our cities are worth nothing and will be condemned to
destruction if they cannot open themselves to strangers. Look back at Sodom
and Gomorrah! Tens of millions of these strangers now traverse and transgress
frontiers and borders that are simultaneously internal and external, geopolitical
and psycho-social, ethical and spiritual, private and public. Identities and
communities are disintegrating, multiplying, crossing, shifting, and re-configuring,
sparking fear and violence among those who feel invaded by others, who import
speechless pain.
Immigrant Utopia
As part of the second largest wave of immigration in US history, these wanderers
will be confronted by the multitude of divided and competing groups of both US-
and foreign-born residents. But unlike the immigrants of the first wave, these new
refugees enter cities that are already fully built, with their architectural, ideological,
and monumental theaters in place. It is up to these newcomers, then, to transform
and unbuild the cities by inserting their presence, their performances, and their
histories into the collective memories and democratic discourses of the city
itself. The city is reconceived with each new immigrant, assuming that an open
communication exists between the immigrant and all others. Too often, however,
such openings exist only as wounds, a result of the wars that created the need for
these large-scale migrations in the first place, or as a kind of psychosomatic symptom
Transformative Avant-Garde and Other Writings
of the fundamentally asymmetrical nature of this passage, for immigrants do not
have the rights enjoyed by citizens. But within each immigrant lives an entire city,
often richer, more complex, and more hopeful than the public one—the city to come.
This Benjaminian utopia is, according to Stéphane Mosès, “a hope lived in
the mode of the present”. To survive, the immigrant must establish a utopia, a “no-
place” that is located in the present time, not hidden behind the horizon of some
idealized future. Why should the immigrant just add to the perpetuated misery of
past immigrant experience? Why should this degrading experience, now taken for
granted as part of the romantic patrimony, be endlessly imposed on every future
immigrant, who must wear it like a pillory of American identity? No! The no-place 123
should be a “No!-place”. And once formulated in the immigrant’s mind, it must
be projected onto both the future and the past. The No!-place is an unacceptable
place, the site of “my personal experience that I refuse to accept for today, for
tomorrow, and forever, for myself, my children, for everyone, immigrants and non-
immigrants alike”. “My utopia”, says the immigrant, “proposes a vision of hope in
which the society of tomorrow houses no place for the perpetuation of the kind of
experience I am forced to live through today, the kind of misery that your immigrant
parents and grandparents were forced to accept yesterday.” The immigrant’s No!-
place is at once a vision, a criticism, and a resistance.
Cultivation of the tradition of the nameless has a self-defensive function
as well: to survive, the stranger must guard against the fate of nomads, who, first
deprived by the victors of their history (and even the right to have a history), were
later forced to function as merely geographic subjects. As the French philosophers
Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari teach us, “The defeat of the nomads was such, so
complete, that history is one with the triumph of States.”2 Just as we have been told
that nomads “invented nothing”, so we have presumed that migrants and immigrants
have nothing to contribute to public discourse.
But the most questionable question, “Where are you from?”, should
never replace “In what way can your past and present experience contribute to
everybody’s well-being today and tomorrow?”
The infusion of the tradition of the vanquished (a critical-visionary history)
into the history of the victors (a catastrophic-progress history) can be made
by strangers thanks to their political intuition of the present. Such an intuition
realizes the danger of repeating yesterday’s injustices today and tomorrow. Every
day a new history needs to be written, one that will retrieve the tradition of the
vanquished. This new history, what Nietzsche would call a “critical history”,
is announced by the stranger and can help to sustain the agonistic democratic
process. As philosopher Simon Critchley points out, “Democracy is the form
of society committed to the political equality of all its citizens and the ethical
inequality of myself faced with the Other.... Thus the rational order of the polis
is justified by a philosophical language which criticizes the polis in the name of
what it excludes or marginalizes, the pre-rational one-for-the-other of ethics.”3 In
other words, democracy can be kept alive by an ongoing recognition, exposition,
and legalization of the strangers’ ‘illegitimate’ experience, their ‘illegible’ past, and
their ‘illegal’ present.
Transitional Artifice
As psycho-analytic theorist Julia Kristeva writes, “Your speech has no past and
will have no power over the future of the group: why should one listen to it?...
One will listen to you only in absent-minded, amused fashion, and one will forget
Identity/Cultural Prosthetics
 you in order to go on with serious matters. The foreigner’s speech can bank only
on its bare rhetorical strength, and the inherent desires he or she has invested
in it.” Unfortunately, this perception by the non-stranger also conforms to the
symptomatic condition of the stranger: “Settled within himself, the foreigner has
no self. Barely an empty confidence, valueless, which focuses his possibilities of
being constantly other, according to others’ wishes and to circumstances. I do
what they want me to, but it is not ‘me’—‘me’ is elsewhere, ‘me’ belongs to no
one, ‘me’ does not belong to ‘me’... does ‘me’ exist?”4 As Kristeva’s statement
suggests, strangers need to gain confidence in the possibility of communicating
124 their own experiences, and they need to be able to communicate this confidence
as well. The stranger must learn to take his or her own experience seriously. To
gain this confidence, however, the stranger must find a communicative form for
the experience, then establish a playful distance from it.
Conversely, the non-stranger, or ‘local’, must gain a playful distance from
his or her own fear of the stranger to establish a healthy curiosity that will foster
communication and closer contact. The presence of a stranger evokes in the non-
stranger a well-hidden secret: the recognition of one’s own strangeness. The stranger
is unfamiliar and uncanny (unheimlich in German, or “un-homely”). The uncanny,
Freud says, is everything that “ought to have remained hidden but has come to
light”. Kristeva claims that the ideal situation would be one in which the non-stranger
recognized his or her own uncanny strangeness. As she says, “The foreigner is within
me, hence we are all foreigners. If I am a foreigner, there are no foreigners”. In search
of an anti-xenophobic society, Kristeva notes Freud’s stress on “those [esthetic]
works in which the uncanny effect is abolished because of the very fact that the
entire world of the narrative is fictitious. Such are fairy tales, in which the generalized
artifice spares us any possible comparison between sign, imagination, and material
reality. As a consequence, artifice neutralizes uncanniness and makes all returns of
the repressed plausible, acceptable, and pleasurable.”5
In sum, the state of being a stranger accumulates as an experience with
no form, no language, no expression, and no right to be communicated, and
thus becomes a dangerous psychic symptom. This stranger-ness is a strangely
familiar, secret, and uncanny condition that we all share and that, when repressed
in the ideological caves of our subjectivity, can sometimes explode in the face of
an actual stranger. Between the speechless pain of the actual stranger and the
sequestered fear of one’s own strangeness lies the real frontier to be challenged.
Can art operate as a revelatory, expressive, and interrogative passage through
such a frontier? Can it be an inspiration, provocation, and opening act for a
new form of communication in a non-xenophobic community? If the stranger is
a prophet who interrupts history, today’s artists and designers should help the
prophet by designing special equipment for such an intervention.
The Prophet’s Prosthesis
Such equipment would be the result of “interrogative design”, a critical
articulation of what is most questionable and unacceptable in the present: the
stranger’s pain in survival. The oldest and most common reference to this kind
of articulation and design is the bandage. A bandage covers and treats a wound
while at the same time exposing its presence. Its presence signifies both the
experience of pain and the hope of recovery. Is it possible to develop this concept
further? Could we invent a bandage that would communicate, interrogate, and
articulate the circumstances and the experience of the injury? Could such a
Transformative Avant-Garde and Other Writings
transformed bandage address the ills of the outside world as perceived by the
wounded? To see the world as seen by the wound!
In the complexity of the contemporary urban context, this equipment
becomes a device for communication and mediation—design as tactical media,
its purpose being to treat not only individual human suffering but also the external
society that produced the wound. Could this device create new conditions that
would soon render the need for it obsolete? Or, if needed, could it become a
prosthesis, a (semi)permanent extension of the body (politic)? Such design
requires thinking both clinically (therapeutically) and critically.
Over the centuries and millennia, the memory and tradition of the 125
nameless developed certain tactical features against the strategic character of the
history of the victors. Those features, according to Benjamin, have a profoundly
“interactive” character based on “non-linearity, radical negativity”, performativity,
and the “arrest of time”. The tactics of this tradition consist of story-telling, magic,
miracle, humor, and entertainment (refer back to Freud). This is a “discontinuous
tradition while continuity is that of the victor”.6 The tradition of the vanquished
brings something new and unknown to the understanding of lived time,
transposing subjective experience from the personal sphere to the historical.
Even in those societies that are most open, inviting, and attentive to the
displaced, the psychological needs of immigrants are far less recognized than
those of children, for instance. But like children, immigrants must develop their
autonomous identities in the process of psychic development, independent of
internal and external conditions or personal cultures. And they must do so in an
experimental, creative, and playful way, in an atmosphere of internal and external
trust. Yet, unlike children, they cannot expect the necessary protective space,
normally provided by parents or society, for such experiment and play. On the
one hand, then, immigrants are treated as hopeless and voiceless, incapable
infants or defiant children. On the other hand, they are expected to be super-
adults, self-motivated entrepreneurs, and fully independent individuals capable
of facing a harsh new world. At the same time, the locals are treated as infants
by the immigrants, who believe that the hostile or ‘naive’ native residents do not
understand the ‘sophistication’ of the newcomers. The immigrants expect the
locals to be super-adults and to extend themselves in special ways to understand
foreign customs, ideas, and experiences. Both locals and aliens must refuse to be
infantilized or expected to be super-adults.
This situation demands a new artifice that would serve both needs:
inspiring playful distance and playful contact, as well as reinforcing the
stranger’s confidence in communicating the experience of alienation. To
defuse xenophobic paranoia, one important function of this psycho-social
artifice would be to neutralize the uncanniness evoked by the presence of
a stranger. To do this, such an artifice should take the form of a special
kind of equipment designed to function as a “fictitious narrative”, one that
nonetheless preserves and disseminates an emotional understanding of a
painful and unacceptable reality.
On the other hand, if this psycho-social artifice is to be of any use to the
stranger, it would have to function as, in DW Winnicott’s terms, a “transitional
object” or “transitional phenomenon”, or, in extreme cases, as a transitional
prosthesis. For the immigrant, such equipment would have to be perceived as
neither internal nor external but belonging to a “[third zone] of experience in
the potential space between the individual and the environment”. This space
Identity/Cultural Prosthetics
 “depends on experience which leads to trust. It can be looked upon as sacred to
the individual in that it is here that the individual experiences creative living.”7
The zones, spaces, and objects that immigrants invent are the territories
of play, distance, irony, and humor: the uncanny in the locals’ terrain, where the
familiar and the unfamiliar wrestle with each other and where the lost land argues
and jokes in a mother tongue with the promised land, speaking in the newly
acquired language of a new critical history and a new vision of hope. The new
kind of transitional object must be created here, where the zones of experience of
the newcomer and the local can be encouraged, overlapped, and shared. But it is
126 the immigrant who must introduce such an object first. The immigrant is the one
who, in order to survive, must learn how to be both provocative and tactful.
Left alone with such newly designed equipment, the immigrant could
create a space where he or she could accept, shape, even enjoy the complexity
and originality of his or her own strange and often painful experiences. Bringing
the instrument into the open would create the sacred and ethical space of
the third zone. This space exists not only between the stranger and the non-
stranger but also between the inner and outer worlds of the stranger; between
the stranger, the non-stranger, and the ‘third person’ (who may or may not be a
stranger, and who represents the point of view of ‘we’, of the larger society as a
whole); and, lastly, as in the case of the Alien Staff, 1992, between pre-recorded
speech and improvised live speech, contained and ‘broadcast’ by the instrument
and performed by the stranger.
In this way, the newly designed equipment could inspire a birth of a new
community, even a temporary and momentary rebirth of democratic public
space based on the agonistic speech acts and discourses that Hannah Arendt
supported, enacted in a place that allows for the “unleashing of passions”.
Georges Bataille called such a place “sacred”. This space will be constituted
through the use of the Immigrant Instruments, which, in this way, will become
“sacred objects”. It will be constituted on the site of the newcomer, who is the
stake of the society to come and the new mentality to be born.
The Return of the Said
To summarize, the interruption of the victors by the nameless can only happen
through the design and implementation of a new psycho-cultural artifice—a
transitional object, which, on the one hand, will help the stranger to open up and
come forward and, on the other hand, will encourage the non-stranger and other
strangers to bring themselves closer to the stranger’s experience and presence.
This will inspire the new discourse in which the strangeness can be shared across
all social boundaries.
In doing so, such new equipment will provide both the means and the field
of play, where the speechless can creatively articulate their ‘saying’, interrupting
the flow of the ‘said’. Armed with the new equipment, strangers will hopefully
gain new rhetorical power to wrestle with the power of the said. The interactive
character of the encounter with the said, the irony and humor of this unsolicited
performance, will help to articulate, expose, and eventually disseminate the image
of their unstable identity as well as the complex world of their multiplicity and their
internal antagonisms, all overlapping in the process of becoming. Despite all of the
power thus gained, the stranger, speaking from the bottom of the experience of the
vanquished, will not resemble the victor in speech. As Emmanuel Levinas would say,
the stranger, during the performance, will appear as the said, but this time as the
Transformative Avant-Garde and Other Writings
“justifiable said”, since the traces of the original ‘saying’ will remain the sole basis of
his or her speech act.8
The stranger equipped with the immigrant instrument will be able to speak
back to all of those strangers or non-strangers who would like to cast the stranger
in some preconceived mold of an individual or collective identity. The strangers
and their doubles—the instruments—could disagree with each other or with
anybody who wants to fuse the strangers into a particular culture or community.
The use of the Immigrant Instruments, while encouraging trust, can displace any
preconceptions of communion and commonality, protecting the stranger’s right to
exist as a unique singular human being and the right to announce or denounce his 127
or her affiliations and associations.
A summary of the main points for the design of new equipment for strangers:
Proposition 1: Strangers in their relation to the self and to the non-stranger (as
well as to other strangers) need a thing-in-between, an equipment-artifice that
will open up discussion and allow them to reveal and to share (communicate)
their experiences, identities, visions, and unique strangenesses.
Proposition 2: Such equipment (communicative instrument) is an
emergency need in today’s migratory era, and the first user of the instrument
must be the immigrant, followed by other foreigners, and then all of those
native locals who are so profoundly estranged, infantilized, silenced, and
excluded that they resemble the immigrant, even if they did not experience
crossing the ‘proper’ geopolitical borders.
Proposition 3: Such equipment, which I call the Immigrant Instrument,
must offer healing powers to its users, overcoming the ever-present fear
of one’s own strangeness, as well as communicating the strangeness
with playfulness, confidence, and power. For this purpose, the Immigrant
Instrument must operate as a psychological container (the confident
companion) and as a social opening (displayed-presenter), the stranger’s
speaking double.
Proposition 4: The Immigrant Instrument must bring the interlocutor
closer to the stranger. To achieve this goal, the Instrument must first
take attention away from its user and bring the focus on itself as a
‘bizarre’, ‘magical’, ‘strange’, or ‘curious’ object, a cliché, totem, attribute,
technological gadget, or prosthetic device. In the second stage of its
operation, the Instrument will expose, at a close distance, the stranger as
speech-act virtuoso, who, armed with and empowered by the new media
technology and ancient instrumental know-how, will be able to entertain
and announce her or his critical and prophetic presence. Achieving such
goals, the Instrument will increase the user’s communicative abilities
despite all psychic, linguistic, and cultural barriers in the context of the
present-day xenophobia.
Proposition 5: The Immigrant Instrument must operate both as a
transitional object (Winnicott) and as a communicative artifice (Kristeva).
Proposition 6: The Immigrant Instrument must function as an artifice,
inspiring playful distance and playful contact. The foreigners must learn to
take their own experience seriously; to see, however, that one’s own often
painful experience requires the ability to establish a playful distance from it.
Conversely, to establish a communicative contact with the stranger, the
Identity/Cultural Prosthetics
 non-stranger must gain equally playful distance from his or her fear of The Prophet’s Prosthesis
the stranger.
Proposition 7: The situation of today’s immigrant (who is both a psychic an interv iew w it h Ch ris ti ane Paul
and a social symptom) requires an instrument that would help its operator 1999
to become both the patient and the doctor. Self-healing must be combined
with healing others, being healed while healing, making whole, and
articulating and curing wounded psycho-social relations.

The Immigrant Instrument must aid the stranger in making the transition to non-
128 strangeness while assisting the local in recognizing his or her own strangeness. This
will contribute, as Kristeva would like, to the formation of a communicative cross-
stratum based on shared multiplicity of identities in an unstable process of becoming a
community or, better, a community of becoming, the only commonality of which will be
its communicated uncanny strangeness.

Fragments of this essay were delivered as parts of lectures for Harvard University,
the Public Art Fund Lectures at the Cooper Union, New York, the Institute of
Contemporary Arts, London, and the Institute of Contemporary Art, Boston.
Originally published in Wodiczko, Krzysztof, Critical Vehicles: Writings, Projects,
Interviews, Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1999 pp 5–15

1 Mosès, Stéphane, “The Theological-Political Model of History”, History and Memory 1,
Tel Aviv University, 1989, pp 11,13.
2 Deleuze, Gilles and Félix Guattari, Nomadology: The War Machine, Brian Mas-sumi
trans, New York: Semiotext(e), 1986, p 73.
3 Critchley, Simon, The Ethics of Deconstruction: Derrida and Levinas, Oxford:
Blackwell, 1992, pp 235, 239.
4 Kristeva, Julia, Strangers to Ourselves, Leon S Roudiez, trans, New York: Columbia
University Press, 1991, pp 8, 20–21.
5 Freud, Sigmund, “The Uncanny”, in The Standard Edition of the Complete
Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud, London: Hogarth Press, 1955, vol 17, p 225;
Kristeva, Strangers to Ourselves, pp 192, 187.
6 See the discussion of Benjamin in Moses, “The Theological-Political Model of
History”. Winnicott, DW, Playing and Reality, London: Tavistock, 1971, p 103.
7 For an elaboration of the Levinasian concepts of “saying” and “the said”, see the
chapter “A Levinasian Politics of Ethical Difference”, in Critchley, The Ethics of
Deconstruction, pp 229–236.
Christiane Paul: In your recent works, Alien Staff, 1992, and Mouthpiece (Le
porte-parole), 1993, you continue to address issues surrounding the alien, the
immigrant, the stranger. In the age of the “global village”, did you consider the
effects of global communications, or did you focus predominantly on the general
experience of being an alien or stranger?
Krzysztof Wodiczko: There appear to be two disconnected worlds, the world of
the explosion of communication technologies and the world of the explosion of
cultural miscommunication. There are all these enthusiasts of technology who
advocate the liberation of the world through digital technologies and there are
crisis zones, such as Yugoslavia, where people need these technologies, at least
in the most difficult moments of the crisis. Instead, people were sending blankets.
The equipment was needed before the actual conflict exploded. People have to
learn how to open up and communicate before they become manipulated by some
psychologists/ideologists and politicians and are molded into opposing camps to
kill each other.
The Alien Staff project was my response to the situation in France in 1991–
1992 and in Europe in general. At that time, there was an explosion of xenophobia
such as Le Pen and the victory of the xenophobic party, and the xenophobes in
Belgium. There were also a lot of hostile feelings toward foreigners in Germany and
Italy. My response to this climate was informed by an earlier project, which was
a mobile communication network, and the vehicles I previously designed for the
homeless in New York. Unlike the previous homeless vehicles, the new ones were
equipped with a vast array of communications tools and were designed to be operated
by those homeless people who communicate well. There’s a relatively large group
among the homeless population that has some background, education, or experience
in media. I was hoping that they could provide an alternative image of the city from the
point of view of their experience and pain—from the point of view of the wounded.

Transformative Avant-Garde and Other Writings Identity/Cultural Prosthetics

 The idea was that they would create programs that could be heard and
seen: programs necessary for their own survival, for resistance, for communication,
necessary for self-protection against the police or hostile groups, but also cultural
programs that facilitated an exchange among various alienated groups. The
project strives to establish a complicated constituency, which would be based on
the recognition of its unstable character and all the differences and antagonisms
involved. The next step could be that the homeless would form constituencies and
have representation in city councils for example.
The most important parts of the project were the alarm system, the
130 use of the Internet and telephone system, as well as walkie-talkies or beepers,
and sometimes even satellites, Xerox machines, and CB radios. Some of the
technology was already available to the squatters: photos of the Homeless Vehicle
pre-prototypes, not even the working models, were taken by one of the squatters
who actually had a fully equipped photo lab in one of the abandoned buildings.
The buildings often had electricity and telephones, and the squatters were actually
restoring and renovating them and sometimes saved them from destruction.
CP: Devices such as the Alien Staff or Mouthpiece (Le porte-parole) give strangers
a voice by making it possible to prerecord a speech which can then be activated.
On the one hand, these devices bridge psychological gaps and offer new
possibilities of communication; on the other hand, the communication is ready-
made which creates a form of double alienation. The alien has a possibility to
speak out but probably can’t communicate what he/she wants to say in a specific
situation because the speech is pre-recorded.
KW: My experiences in New York helped me to design the Alien Staff device, which
will become more performance-oriented in the future. I abandoned the idea of heavy-
duty equipment in favor of something very simple that can be operated and used by
a single person and that facilitates the development of virtuosity, performance, and
story-telling. At that point, the process of alienation becomes interesting because
whatever is pre-recorded in the Alien Staff can be questioned in direct communication.
I’m not necessarily defending this instrument as good for every immigrant
or stranger. I’m working on a new project now which might be directed more
towards other groups, because there is no single category of ‘stranger’ or ‘homeless
person’. There are so many different kinds of people with diverse beliefs, abilities,
psychological conditions, and histories of external conditions that contribute to
their way of living; so no single piece of equipment can respond to this. On the
contrary, there should be many different devices. The walking stick was designed
for people who are somewhere in-between speechlessness and virtuosity of
communication. They would like to speak and have certain abilities to speak. They
know languages and gestures—they are what Julia Kristeva called “Baroque”. But
they need an artifice to fully realize their abilities because they are afraid to do so
otherwise. They have important things to say but they never really try to say them
because they can’t find words. So the process of de-alienation, the process that is
needed here, has something to do with all the preparations that have to be made
before the equipment can be used in public—the gathering of all the memories, the
recalling of events that sometimes have been repressed or maybe even expelled
or replaced by some half-truth and intermediate stories. Users of the Alien Staff
have to examine all of these aspects in the process of recording in front of the video
camera. Video cameras can tape anything—as the Germans or Russians say, paper
can take anything—particularly if the person who speaks is addressing somebody
behind the camera who is sympathetic, who wants to hear. If the immigrants or
Transformative Avant-Garde and Other Writings
strangers are allowed to tell the same story in several languages, the story will be
different every time it is recorded and the same story will turn into a completely
different one if it is recorded again the next day. The materials that have been
collected this way can later be edited with the participation of the speaker, which
constitutes another construction process.
Statements, speeches, and expressions can be finalized and words might reach
the level of Dada truth. They can be squeezed or liberated, as in Futurism or in Concrete
Poetry, but in a new, cross-cultural way, where all of the divisions between languages
start with questions, such as what one was, who one is, and who one becomes. These
boundaries are not stable but fluctuating and ideas overlap. 131
It is possible to use video in order to create a certain representation of
this instability? Ideally, the strangers who went through this process are armed
with a new confidence and distance from their misery; they suddenly have
created doubles of themselves. This double now contains all of the things that
no one wants to hear and that couldn’t be expressed before, so the operator of
the walking stick is relieved of this incredible load. Once it is externalized, the
operator is ready to open up to anybody else, in any place, whether it’s a domestic
environment, the work place, the streets and parks, or public transportation
systems. Suddenly, the operator becomes a mediator between the speaking stick
and anybody who will approach, not necessarily in order to speak to the operator
but in order to listen and see what this object is, this third part, this in-between.
CP: The object becomes a device to explore one’s own strangeness and to
externalize it in a medium which is a process that again entails alienation.
KW: And this new alienation is needed in a way. The performer must also become
alienated from the staff. Alien of the alien, a kind of double alienation: “Don’t
listen to this, it wasn’t really like this, I now realize it was different, we went
through this so many times and now I find this aspect much more important, just
listen to this part.” Or someone might ask what is displayed in a container—there
are those Plexiglas containers for relics in the central part of the staff—and the
operator might just reply, “It’s none of your business.”
There also is a connection between the relic and what was videotaped. The
process of finding the object that is meant to be exhibited in the staff is a process
of exploring things that are hidden. By being exhibited, these relics are becoming
exposed—they are supposed to be hidden but are brought to light. Sometimes it
takes a long time to even find these relics because they are so well-hidden, they are
so precious. Immigrants usually bury them in some hidden location or they leave
them with friends. There is a process of construction at work here, a recollection
of events and the reconstruction of ties with the past from a new, healthier point of
view. This transcends an attitude such as “I don’t want to talk about this because
it’s shameful” or “I’ll be hiding this, it is something my friends and family in my old
country should never know because I’m supposed to be successful, I’m supposed to
be a victor here, not vanquished.” The immigrants who use the Alien Staff are often
resentful at first—it forces them to reveal awful secrets—but by going through the
process step-by-step they sometimes realize that after resentment and perplexity
comes a new awareness. One of the immigrants went back to her home country
and presented the Alien Staff there; everyone hated it, it caused complete rejection.
The reaction was, “We don’t want to hear this. How dare you?” And at the same
time, the immigrant confirmed her identity, by saying, “What do you know? Who
are you to tell me?” There is an incredible process of communication involved but
it is not going to happen for everybody. Some people rejected the project and never
Identity/Cultural Prosthetics
 came back, they were not ready; others rejected it and then came back or sent their
friends who came back to use it. It is difficult to say what exactly the result will be
or if people are ready for this kind of instrument.
CP: What’s the difference between the old and the new generation of the Alien Staff?
KW: In order to increase the level of adeptness developed by the immigrant in
recalling the stories, I decided to ask George Smith, a PhD student at the Media
Lab, to help me. He came up with the idea to use the “electric field sensing”
system on which they were currently working; it is in fact a quite advanced
version of the instrument which the Russian inventor Leo Theremin developed.
132 The sensing system is embedded in the center section of the walking stick and
responds to the gestures of the user. There are several containers in the new
version of the staff, which can now be taken out for closer examination of the
content and can be discussed with anyone approaching; in the old version,
people had to bend down to look at the content. Now there are electric sensors
between the containers, so when a hand comes close to this zone, it triggers a
response. This kind of interactivity requires a fairly complex computer program
because a certain type of gesture has to be assigned to a certain type of
manipulation of the story’s content, both acoustic and visual.
The Baroque personality of the immigrant has a lot to do with the ability to
use gestures, which in fact has a whole tradition. There is a tradition of migrants,
wanderers, gypsies, aliens, or even magicians whose survival depended on their
talents and knowledge in using gestures or singing, making sounds, performing
magic or tricks. The performative aspect often guarantees the performer’s survival,
without it they might die—as long as the pianist plays or singer sings, they can’t be
chopped into pieces. Some story-tellers might want to have a more performative
instrument than a walking stick, so this new version allows for a story to evolve
according to the choice of container.
CP: So the objects in the containers are now connected to their respective histories.
KW: Yes, and it requires a pretty complicated development process. You have
to select and organize the content, connect an object with a particular story and
also decide what the relationship between the gesture, sound, and the visual
effect shown on the monitor on top of the stick should be. It requires different
levels of development as well as technological literacy. The programming
process is very slow and to be honest, I am a little frustrated. It has something
to do with a larger dilemma: how can artists develop an experimental project
in tune with a scientific and technological research experiment? The agendas
overlap but they often don’t match.
Coming back to the most recent model, I learned a lot from it. The new
model comes with a built-in transmission system and an antenna which is a
symbol of hope. It symbolizes the possibility that singular units could actually
speak with each other across the city and maybe the world—that each single
operator could communicate with a base that could store an enormous amount
of information in computers with powerful memory. The base would be run
by someone who could be called a “xenologist”: an expert on the law and
ethics of displacement. The user of the instrument would be a performer who
is disseminating information on the basis of what’s happening in her or his
mind, opening up a world of displacement and complexity, undoing all those
preconceived notions of identity and community.
CP: In your own work, the agendas constantly overlap. The work addresses
political, psychological, and ethical issues, it exists in the realm of art yet it
Transformative Avant-Garde and Other Writings
transcends the boundaries of this realm. Do you see your works predominantly
as artwork? To what extent would you like to see them integrated into the non-
artistic, socio-economic world? In other words, do you want the Alien Staff to be
mass-produced?
KW: Today, we always assume that a design or prototype must lead to mass
production, but this is a modern way of thinking. David Harvey used to call this
“flexible accumulation capitalism”. A smaller number of units with some variety
can also be understood as production, it doesn’t have to be mass-produced—it
could be an experimental implementation, it could be a cultural project that
is industrial design at the same time, performative industrial design. Cultural 133
agencies all around the world are giving money to public projects. Public art
projects should be understood as a possibility for financing all kinds of projects
including media projects.
Of course, these media projects are often ‘temporary’, time-based, but we
don’t know exactly what temporary means; it could mean years. The Alien Staff,
for example, has been operating for years in various parts of the world, not on a
continuous basis but on and off. A project like that could be more systematically
developed, for example in connection with cultural and psychological projects,
or maybe in cooperation with institutes such as the Institute for Psychology and
Cross-cultural Communication in Stockholm or the Centre Françoise Minkowsky in
Paris—a big center providing assistance to immigrants and refugees that is run in
45 languages. The support could also be provided by a public art organization, like
Public Art Fund in New York or Artangel Trust in London. It could be a combination
of all of these institutions. I don’t see why this approach should be unrealistic.
CP: That’s what I meant, your project belongs to all of these different realms but
people often tend to categorize it. They want to make a distinction between an
artwork and a scientific project.
KW: Not all of the funding institutions and audiences completely understand
what I’m doing. The French Ministry of Culture, which helped to develop and
paid for the Alien Staff and Mouthpiece (Le porte-parole) prototypes, understood
maybe half of it. They fund cultural programs but only over a short time frame.
Nevertheless, as experiments the projects were well funded, and it was enough
time for me to learn a lot. At the V2 organization in Rotterdam, two or three
of the instruments were used for only four or five days and there were about
two weeks of preparation. The person who is running a clinic for immigrants
in Rotterdam and is an immigrant herself evaluated the project and stated in
public that what I had done in two weeks was something they couldn’t achieve
in a year in the clinic because from a medical, psychological point of view, I had
turned the immigrants into “both doctors and patients”. In just a short period of
time, the immigrants had gained enormous confidence and were pleased with
themselves. I was invited to explain the project on a television program, which
makes a lot of sense since I think that the mainstream media should become
an extension of my ‘small’ media where the operator or speaker works together
with the monitor. I had asked the operators to come to the television station
with their equipment, so you had both the speakers and their small screens
and the show’s host on the television screen. The program was a talk show,
and because of a number of coincidences—festivals, events, problems with
immigrants or skinheads—it made national news and everything connected.
Without this little piece of equipment none of this would have happened. Mass
media picked it up because it already was media.
Identity/Cultural Prosthetics
 CP: Your works address issues of interactivity on various levels and technology is
the enabling factor rather than the focus of the communication devices you design.
These devices address a specific need and at the same time explore the very nature of
communication technology. How would you describe the role technology plays in your
works and the improvement of communication you are striving for?
KW: It is still a modern assumption that design should offer solutions to
problems, which, in general, may not be a bad expectation. Modern design is
often supposed to resolve a problem but in reality it becomes a facade behind
which the actual problem is hidden so that there is only a superficial answer to
134 it. There seems to be a similar expectation with technology: each new gadget
and new system is supposed to resolve some problem. Those who work on
scientific or technological research have some playful ideas, they are working
on applications for those ideas in order to sell them or connect them with the
expectations of the industry or consumers. The basic idea is to further improve
the existing world. In fact, both technology and design—technology as a technical
opportunity and design as the relation between this opportunity and the world
of needs—can reveal and clarify needs that should not exist. They both have the
potential to expand on our access to the complexity of the present world rather
than just projecting into the future.
Technology and new media and design could articulate and expose the
problematic world in which we live and at the same time provide emergency service
and help to people who really need it. With media and technology we can achieve
two things at the same time. We can do cultural work and provide access to the
circulation of power for those who are least likely to have it. That way we provide
emergency help and transform the understanding and awareness of the world.
Those who are marginalized, displaced, and misfortunate could in fact become
agents of this new and prophetic way of understanding the world. They can provide
an image of the world from the point of view of those who are in trouble and a vision
of a better world. There are a lot of things we could achieve if the cultural world
would connect technological design and artistic research in the same place at the
same time. Most of the time we are dealing with disconnected organizations and
institutions. Of course I don’t want to advocate a new monstrous institution that
will bury all of these possibilities in a bureaucratic machinery.
CP: Which is the inherent danger of large-scale collaborations. On the other
hand, all of the realms you mention won’t be able to survive by themselves. An
interdisciplinary approach is needed more than ever.
KW: And not in the name of the arts but in the name of life.
Originally published in Sculpture Magazine, vol 18, no 4, May 1999.
Transformative Avant-Garde and Other Writings
A Conversation with Marek Bartelik
Decem ber 2006
Marek Bartelik: Are there places that could be called “beyond” or “poza” as we
have it in the exhibition title?
Krzysztof Wodiczko: Are we really going to switch to English? All our
conversation so far has been in Polish, and I began to formulate my thoughts on
our topic “poza” in Polish. Now that we have switched I need to look for English
words and expressions, and they no longer seem to fit my ideas. This destabilizes
me and requires me to rethink them, to question even the questions I have already
formulated in Polish.
In this transitional and transitory moment, I think I am now inside our topic
of “beyond”. A frightening thing to be in, but, at the same time, it feels strangely
familiar to be there; it’s like home to me.
Am I now and again poza, beyond my own 1970s Warsaw Polish, in which
I was speaking a moment ago, or am I beyond my almost American, New York
English, or with my Polish-American and American-Polish ‘accents’—am I in both
Pozas and Beyonds?
Am I then in a zone beyond and at the same time in-between them, the zone
beyond the language of customary cultural identities and social categories?
Is this then the meaning of our topic, a “utopia”, a topos as a “No!-place” or
a “good place” called Poza? Is this a place of the future, or is it the place already
here, now?
Is Poza, then, a lost land, or the utopia of a promised land, away from
and beyond the strict territory of that which is ‘clear’, ‘stable’, preconceived,
and with a singular meaning? Is this thing we call “beyond” located beyond
the prison house of every easily identifiable ‘ethnic’, sexual, or ‘professional’
state, or a national, regional, geographic, or any other ‘identity’, community,
or commonality, a fixed piece d’identite, as they call ID in French?
Is this the place where I would like to be, the only possible home where I
would agree to move and dwell?
Identity/Cultural Prosthetics
 Is this an understanding of poza one might see, imagine, or hope (for
oneself and others)—a psychic, intellectual, cultural, and political space, a
philosophical and “existential land” called “Beyond”?
It is very possible that during all these years of migration, consciously, or
semi-consciously, I have been trying to immigrate to such a place, to this Poza,
and, strange to say, finally settle down in it. Without admitting it to myself, I may
be already in this place, a somewhat disappointing fact but a consequential and
demanding, even visionary state of being, and a place for working and living, called
New York City.
136 MB: A few weeks ago, I got this email, and then an article, from a young
woman from Hartford who attended the conference that accompanied [the
exhibition] POZA on the issue of Polish identity. She noticed that all the
participants spoke about how they thought their work was international
and more than just specifically Polish. She told me she was first-generation
American and her parents were Polish. “All my life”, she said, “I have been
trying to be more Polish than I am, searching for my Polishness.” Is she
searching for a mirage?
KW: When I hear someone call me “Polish”, I am in fear of being displaced,
evicted, “ex-missioned”, as we say in Polish (eksmisja, “eviction”), from my own
very special home, still under construction but nonetheless already a home, a
home for myself and all my displacements. I feel evicted from a relatively safe, if
in some ways not always stable place, a place for all my own instabilities, for the
multiplicity of my identities, identities that do not always want to agree with each
other, that like to quarrel with identities that keep arguing in the continuing process
of generating and refining their disagreements.
When I am called “Polish” I feel as If I am about to be deported to my old
country, or worse—to Poland, the stereotype and cliché, to which that person
wishes me to belong. The mirage? In fact I am beginning to feel a bit the same
when I am called “American”, “Canadian” or even when one intentionally or not
touches on the nostalgic site of myself by calling me “Jewish”.
When, however, I call myself Polish it is a very different matter. I feel in that
case free to try to provide my own, however convoluted and unstable, definition of
Polishness, to issue myself my own passport, through my own immigration office,
a passport with my own intellectual, artistic, social, historical, geographic, ethnic,
singular, or multiple entry and exit ‘visas’, stamped with my own temporary and
permanent ‘resident permits’—my own carte de sejour, carte de travail, J-1 (cultural
exchange visitor), B-1 (business visitor), H-1 (temporary worker) and finally the
Landed Immigrant (Canada) or Resident Alien Status (the American Green Card).
MB: Could you say something about your Polish upbringing?
KW: Polishness means for me the upbringing by my father, an agnostic Protestant,
a musician of Czech origin (and education), a conductor and composer, a director
of operas and orchestras, a musician devoted to educating and attracting large,
especially younger, audiences, to contemporary and avant-garde music and opera,
and an artist of great social vision and patriotic mission, and, without admitting it,
a truly socialist mind.
The mode of my Polishness also owes a great deal to my mother, an
agnostic, assimilated Jew, a pianist, microbiologist, philosopher, and person
devoted to her work as a music editor for Polish Television Broadcasting, an artist
who believed in the enlightening role of mass media, a musician of great social
and patriotic commitment.
Transformative Avant-Garde and Other Writings
In short, my Polishness is born of the passionate ways of my Jewish
mother’s assimilation and her artistic faith in mass communications, and of
the determined ways of my father’s secular Protestant work ethic and of his
commitment to the realization of his socio-aesthetic vision.
My own version of Polishness was also a response to the context of art
and politics in the 1970s, the time of late Communism in Poland (the State
socialism of the Gierek regime), including my experience as an actor in a
political student cabaret (the Kabaret Stodota in Warsaw). There was also my
work as an industrial designer inside the Polish industrial system (especially at
the Polish Optical Works in Warsaw), my simultaneous active membership in 137
the avant-garde artistic circles of the Foksal Gallery in Warsaw and the Gallery
Akumulatory in Poznań. One significant relationship was with Marxism-minded
art critic and avant-garde art historian Andrzej Turowski (“conversations about
essentials”) as well as ongoing arguments with many other critical intellectuals
and artists.
My changing sense of Polishness also owes a great deal to my early
theoretical and existential encounters with feminism and with Polish-Jewish
history (especially in the period after the Second World War) while visiting in
the US in 1975.
This challenge continued in a similar fashion, or even more so, later in the
1970s and early 1980s, when I was residing in Canada. In this respect I value
very highly my Canadian experience, with studies in social and political theory,
the Marxist philosophical tradition, and discussions and teaching in cultural and
media studies circles in Toronto, Trent, and finally in Halifax (where my public
projections began).
It was then that my Polishness underwent a powerful critical test and
radical transformation.
In sum, my Polishness means a 30-year process of transporting,
extrapolating, challenging, and transforming all my early artistic and design
experience from Poland into my immigrant work as an artist and art educator—a
work and a life in Canada, Australia, France, and the United States, and now in the
new, post-Communist Poland, where I frequently produce and show my work.
My experience of emigrating from Poland was and still is, in many ways,
interconnected with my theoretical and artistic work in and around issues of
displacement, otherness, memory, trauma, public space, media, communications
technologies, and design and democracy, and was informed by deconstructive
and post-deconstructive theory and the related aesthetic and cultural practice of
my fellow artists and intellectuals.
My Polishness also developed in the ways I needed to challenge, and
‘deconstruct’, my own nationalistic tendencies so deeply rooted in Polish culture.
The avant-garde internationalist spirit and sentiment, which, since my Foksal
and Akumulatory Gallery years, have been circulating in my veins, continuing
migration were, of course, helpful in this process.
Speaking here for myself, but I suspect also for many other fellow
immigrants (and I hope non-immigrants as well), I needed to ‘undo’ all those
unfortunate vestiges of ‘historical’ chauvinist ideologies inhabiting my cultural
unconsciousness: Polish feudalistic and hierarchic social snobbery, Polish
anti-Germanness, anti-Jewishness, anti-Ukrainianness, anti-Russianness, anti-
Czechness, anti-Gypsyness, anti-peasantness—all sorts of anti-Otherness, and,
yes, the one that is the most difficult to deconstruct—Polish anti-Polishness.
Identity/Cultural Prosthetics
 I knew that in the context of those feudal and nationalistic vestiges still
remaining in us and in Poland, it is an obligation to be poza and beyond. For me,
the only intelligent way to be Polish is to do so in a deconstructive way, in the
sense of undoing oneself, refusing the way one has been made Polish, questioning
and radically transforming the Polish way in which one was culturally ‘brought up’
and conditioned to become Polish.
This way of Polishness is, of course, a great opportunity, and a relatively
easy task for those who emigrated, who are properly from Poland, but those who
live in Poland should also enlist in such a deconstructive project, and many already
138 do so.... Even if it is more difficult for them than for us emigrants, they too, should
live and work inside Poland as if they were poza. This is also an occasion for a great
contribution to democracy in Poland and elsewhere, wherever each of us may live.
MB: How do you see your work as contributing to this process?
KW: The migration to the land of Poza is probably quite evident in my most
recent project in Poland, the public projection onto the facade of the Zacheta
National Gallery of Art in Warsaw in November 2005.
Thinking optimistically and pro-actively, the process of trying to reach the
state of being and becoming called “poza” and “beyond” means challenging the
lack of confidence in one’s own capacities to make a change for the better.
It means making oneself publicly visible. It means ending one’s life as a person
outside of society (in Polish poza can be understood here not only as “beyond” but
also “outside”). It means taking a step outside the conditions that force us to act as
outsiders, as alienated, marginalized, socially and economically estranged.
It means inserting oneself back into the democratic process, in order to
become a political and cultural actor (and agent) for change, mentally, culturally,
and politically acting on the larger stage of public space.
It often means action, the action of telling the story, giving public testimony,
organizing others becoming an agent, even an agency, of social change.
The task of the Warsaw Projection was to provide safe and patient
conditions for the development of a public speech act, for the social animation
of public space. This task was assigned to those women acting as speaking
caryatids, to the building facade itself, to myself, and to the numerous members
of the social and technical production team.
Among the most indispensable people in this project was Ms Lidia
Ostałowska, a great, socially committed writer and trusted social investigator.
Without her skills and political passion, the project would not have been possible.
In this projection the facade animators, the co-artists in this project,
represented two generations of women from small Polish cities and from Warsaw
itself. They have suffered and survived domestic abuse and violence. Some of them
themselves committed violence against their male domestic partners and their
own children. Some who were still in early stages of recovery from their trauma,
while others, now well recovered, who seemed to enjoy a healthy, even humorous
distance from their traumatic past, all became passionate honest, politically
critical, and savvy public speakers in this project.
The participants in the Warsaw Projection have become scriptwriters,
social activists, actors, story-tellers, and crown witnesses to injustice, survivors
who can publicly testify to it.
They became doctors in healing their own silence and dumbness, and
doctors in healing public social and cultural numbness, and, finally, media artists,
skillful artists of gesture and speech-animation of architectural monuments.
Transformative Avant-Garde and Other Writings
MB: How would you define your own role?
KW: Who was I in this project? Social activist, social worker, psychotherapist,
media artist?
Whose art was this projection? Theirs or mine?
These and other questions were poza—beyond their own right and capacity
to be asked, even formulated. This was a third zone of experience, a potential
space, a “transitional phenomenon”, a necessary space for the development of
participants’ capacity to act and open up in public, speak out in the open, to learn
to do so on their own. It was as well a space for the public to come closer and
open up their ears, minds, and hearts and listen. 139
Was this projection a work of Polish art (taking or not taking into account
all the considerations we have previously mentioned)?
Was this a work of American art (art of the First Amendment to the
Constitution, an art of communicative rights, the most basic political and human
right in the US)?
Was this perhaps a work of Canadian art (an art that understands the
fundamental cultural importance of public media and communications from and
in Canada, where my public projections began)?
Was this perhaps a work of a Jewish kind (art for, of, and by oppressed,
marginalized minorities, a diasporic, prophetic art of memory and trauma, art of
and in wandering and displacement)?
Are these ways of my Polishness, my Americanness, Canadianness, and
my Jewishness...?
My own ways of being poza and the ways of being beyond?
Acting as impatient caryatids in revolt, the women participating in the
Warsaw Projection turned themselves into speaking monuments to their own
trauma. They turned a prominent Warsaw civic landmark into a monument
speaking to social injustice, and to the unacceptable world of Poland, a world in
which they live and one they denounce, a world that needs to be radically changed
for the better... a world poza and beyond.
Originally published in Poza: On the Polishness of Polish Contemporary Art, Marek
Bartelik ed, exh cat, Hartford, CT: Real Art Ways, 2008.
Identity/Cultural Prosthetics
Interrogative
Design

Poliscar, 1991
Interrogative Design
1994
Interrogative
1 Of, pertaining to, or of the nature of questioning; having the form or force of
a question.
2 Of a word or form employed in asking questions.
Design as a research proposal and implementation can be called interrogative when it
takes a risk, explores, articulates, and responds to the questionable conditions of life
in today’s world, and does so in a questioning manner. Interrogative design questions
the very world of needs of which it is born. It must respond with a double urgency to
such a world. First, it should function as an emergency aid in the process of survival,
resistance, and the healing of social, psychological, and physical wounds. Second, it
needs to increase and sustain the high level of ethical alertness that creates, in the
words of Walter Benjamin, a state of emergency understood not as an exception but
as an everyday ethical condition, an ongoing motivation for critical judgment toward
the present and past to secure a vision for a better future.
Instead of deconstructing itself, design should deconstruct life. Design
should unmask and uncover our singular and plural lives, our lived experience,
and a history of this experience from the panopticon of our subjectivity and
ideological theater of our culture, no matter how unacceptable and repressed
or neglected such experiences may be.
Design must articulate and inspire the communication of real, often difficult
lived-through experience, rather than operate as a substitute for it (ie, the kitsch
of Sharper Image design). The experience and its history are the often invisible
and seemingly unimaginable complexes of problems, internal and external, that
have been quickly covered up by the naive facades of all design ‘solutions’ to these
problems, and more recently by a melancholic ‘deconstruction’ of the design heritage
of such cover-ups.
Transformative Avant-Garde and Other Writings
Design must put in doubt its search for all such often well-intended design
solutions or self-deconstructions, to open the way to explore, discover, uncover,
and expose the hidden dimensions of lived experience. Doing so, design as a
practice must acknowledge this experience as a history of resistance to the
conditions of life and a history of one’s destabilized identity in the process of
an often enforced re-configuration.
A history, being a critical structure of experience, is a recollection of the
lived events of the past infused with the criticism of the present. Interrogative
design must create the points and spaces of convergence for a multitude of
internal and external enquiries to such experience and its history. 143
Design of any object, space, place, network, or system must become a
technology and a technique of constructing an artifice that would function as
an opening through which a complexity of the lived experience can be recalled,
memorized, translated, transmitted, perceived, and exchanged in a discursive
and performative manner. Design must not hesitate to respond to the needs that
should not, but unfortunately do, exist.
Designers must work in the world rather than ‘about’ or ‘upon’ it. In an
unacceptable and contradictory world, responsive and responsible design must
appear as an unacceptable and contradictory ‘solution’. It must critically explore
and reveal painful life experiences rather than camouflage such experience by
administering the painkillers of optimistic design fantasies. The appearance of
interrogative design may “attract while scandalizing”—it must attract attention
in order to scandalize the conditions of which it is born. Implicit in this design’s
temporary character is a demand and hope that its function will become obsolete.
The oldest and most common reference to this kind of design is the
bandage. A bandage covers and treats a wound while at the same time exposing
its presence, signifying both the experience of pain and the hope of recovery. Is it
possible to further develop such a bandage as equipment that will communicate,
interrogate, and articulate the circumstances and the experience of the injury,
provoking so as to prevent its recurrence?
The proposed design should not be conceived as a symbolic representation but
as a performative articulation. It should not ‘represent’ (frame ironically) the survivor or
the vanquished, nor should it ‘stand in’ or ‘speak for’ them. It should be developed with
them and it should be based on a critical inquiry into the conditions that produced the
crisis. Interrogative design can also function as a critical mirror questioning the user’s
preconceptions and assumptions about others and about the self. The equipment
can re-interpret various existing materials and components, like protective clothing,
portable tools, electronic gear, defensive armor or weaponry, prosthetic components,
wearable digital equipment, alert devices, shields, or a combination of these. One of
the objectives of the design is to extend the use of the media of communication to
those who have no access to them but who need them the most, and to those who
have full access to them but who fail to take critical advantage of them.
Originally published as “Projektowanie i doświadczenie” in Krzysztof Wodiczko,
Sztuka Publiczna, Warsaw: Centrum Sztuki Wspoczesnej, 1995, p 29.
Interrogative Design
Homeless Vehicle Project
 av id Lu rie a nd Krz ys z to f Wodi c z ko
D Problems of garnering food, keeping warm, remaining safe from personal harm
1988–198 9
I was not insane when they picked me up, I was homeless.
Joyce Brown, homeless person forcibly hospitalized by the
New York City government1
During the winter of 1987–1988, an estimated 70,000 people were homeless
in New York City.2 A large portion of this population is made up of homeless
individuals. Unlike families with children, homeless individuals are not given
priority for placement in the city’s transitional housing facilities or in welfare hotel
rooms. Instead, the city government offers space to the single homeless in its
growing system of dormitory shelters.
Most city-run shelters—though they provide food and respite from the
elements—are dangerous and unfriendly places that impose a de-humanizing, even
prison-like, regimentation on residents. Guards routinely treat clients as inmates,
allegedly denying them food for the violation of rules. Some shelter residents are
bused from place to place for food, showers, and sleep. Charges of violence by
shelter security guards and clients are common.
According to the mayor of New York City, a homeless person who chooses
to live on the street rather than accept placement in a shelter during the cold of
winter is, by definition, to be suspected of mental illness. But given the city’s
official response to the problem of homeless individuals, it is not surprising that
many have made a rational choice to live on the streets.
Though a significant proportion of homeless individuals are the
de-institutionalized mentally ill, a growing majority of them are not. Furthermore,
both the sane and insane homeless share the same immediate, life-threatening
condition: they have no permanent shelter and no safe place to go.
Their alternative has been to develop a means of survival on the streets
of New York City. The nomadic homeless people we all observe and encounter
Transformative Avant-Garde and Other Writings
on the streets have been compelled to develop a series of strategies for self-
sufficiency under constantly changing—and always threatening—circumstances.
and relatively undisturbed during sleep all present challenges that are never
perfectly resolved.
The fact that people are compelled to live on the streets is unacceptable.
But failing to recognize the reality of these people’s situation or holding up the
fact of their living on the streets as proof of their universal insanity is a morally
and factually untenable position. Advocacy for permanent, safe, and dignified
shelter for all people is essential—and is being pursued. But a recognition 145
that all individuals need and deserve permanent housing must also lead to an
examination of the immediate needs of homeless people. Given the failure of the
city’s shelter system, what can we do for individuals struggling for self-sufficiency
on the streets today?
Our proposed vehicle is designed to play a role in filling a dangerous gap in
shelter needs. It seeks to be of use to the significant number of individuals who
will, for the foreseeable future, continue to be compelled to live a nomadic life in
the urban environment. Rather than an ideal shelter, the vehicle is designed with
attention to the specific limitations and compromises imposed by urban nomadic
existence. Though it cannot appropriately be called a home, the vehicle is a
potential means for ameliorating the conditions of life for people surviving under
trying circumstances.
When I came to New York I was struck by the occasional form lying on the
street, with people standing over it as if it wasn’t there.
John Bowers, The New York Times3
Although in our daily encounters with homeless people we are aware of their
status as refugees, we generally fail to recognize that they are refugees from the
transformation of the city itself. The re-design of city parks to allow for better
surveillance and easier removal of homeless people signifies an institutional
ignorance of the fact that the destruction and renovation of entire neighborhoods
has left no place for these people to go.4 We are reluctant to discern the relationship
between the physical transformation of the city—through real estate development
and economic displacement—and the creation of homelessness. An American
Broadcast Company official stated that his company is hesitant to construct a public
plaza next to its midtown headquarters because it does not want to see a “tent city
for the homeless here”.5 But with or without a plaza, the homeless will not disappear.
Homeless people’s marginalization is directly tied to the refusal of other
city residents to recognize them as fellow urban citizens. The dominant notion of
the homeless as mere objects largely explains why we allow people to live and die
on our streets without doing much to help them.
In a television forum, columnist George Will argued that the presence of
ragged masses camped out in front of midtown New York office buildings was an
infringement of the legitimate rights of executives working there. In Will’s view,
dodging the bodies of homeless people and enduring their incessant demands
for small change is an unnecessary addition to the already stressful lives of
businessmen.6 In the activity of moving through the city, described by Walter
Benjamin as a “series of shocks and collisions”, the homeless are apprehended as
Interrogative Design
 immobile barriers to travel. This description, from a recent article in The New York
Times, of seasoned commuters’ strategies for dealing with their daily encounters
with homeless people in the Port Authority bus terminal is typical: they block out
recognition by “locking their eyes forward” and “striding purposefully” toward the
exits. The homeless are seen as identity-free objects that must be negotiated rather
than recognized. The article describes acknowledgment of the presence of the
homeless as a sign of inexperience, a trap that only temporary visitors to the city
fall into: “They stop and stare, eyes wide open to the unfamiliar, raw suffering.”7
Of course, the dramatic image of the homeless as faceless, rag-encased
146 bundles signifies an elision of these peoples’ actual modes of survival. Though
we encounter the homeless as figures anchored to a grate or bench or asleep in
the subway as we rush to work, surviving on the streets of New York is actually
dominated by the constant necessity for movement, often in response to the
actions of authorities. In recreation areas such as Tompkins Square and Riverside
Park, uniformed police officers are routinely deployed to remove homeless
people. All of Grand Central Station and portions of the Port Authority bus
terminal are closed to homeless residents during the night. Survival, therefore,
compels mobility. Especially for those who live entirely outside of the shelter
system, the ability to travel from place to place with one’s personal belongings in
a swift and efficient manner is a key to functioning successfully in the city.
Through the use of adapted, appropriated vehicles, some homeless
individuals have managed to develop a means of economic sustenance in the city.
These people, known as “scavengers”, spend their days collecting, sorting, and
returning cans to supermarkets in return for the five cent deposit. Shopping and
postal carts and other wheeled vehicles are used for collecting and transporting cans
and bottles during the day and for storage of collected materials during the night.
Crowds of homeless redeemers outside of supermarkets have become commonplace
since the Bottle Bill went into effect in 1983.
In their familiar position of supplication and helplessness, homeless
individuals do not stake a claim to the territory that has been taken from them.
They are reduced to mere observers of the remaking of their neighborhoods
for others. Their homelessness appears as a natural condition, the cause is
dissociated from its consequence, and the status of the homeless as legitimate
members of the urban community is unrecognized.
The activities of scavengers and the growing numbers of what one reporter
described as their “gaily decorated” shopping carts have played a role in altering
the public perception of homeless individuals. Their visibly purposive movement
through the city gives them an identity as actors in the urban space. Since
scavengers are mobile, they cannot be walked away from or easily dismissed as
silent non-persons. Where the immobile figure’s status seems provisional and
ambiguous, the scavenger stakes a claim to space in the city and indicates his or
her membership in the urban community.
The shelter vehicle attempts to function usefully in the context of New
York City street life. Therefore, its point of departure is the strategy of survival
that urban nomads presently utilize. Through discussions with scavengers, we
developed a proposal for a vehicle to be used both for personal shelter and can
and bottle transportation and storage. An earlier design was shown to potential
users and modified according to their criticisms and suggestions. Since the design
developed through reference to the needs of a specific group of homeless people,
all of whom are tall, male, and physically strong, it is possible that it may not be
Transformative Avant-Garde and Other Writings
appropriate for other homeless people. As the project develops, the needs and
interests of other groups of potential users must be addressed, particularly those
of homeless women. We have yet to speak with any homeless women and learn of
their particular strategies for survival. Though certain features of the vehicle as it
is presently designed, such as a possible built-in toilet, might be of use to homeless
women, discussions with them will be necessary to develop a design responsive to
their needs.
An initial proposal, the project is not put forward as a finished product,
ready for use on the streets. Rather, it is conceived as a starting point for further
collaboration between skilled designers and potential users. Both parties will have 147
to play roles in the design and production of future versions of the vehicle, with
continued adaptations in the design made in response to the survival needs of
users and additional strategies devised by designers. Though such a collaborative
relationship may sound unlikely or even impossible, it is the key to the project’s
success. Only through such cooperation can the vehicle function usefully. Direct
participation of users in the construction of the vehicle is the key to developing a
vehicle that belongs to its users, rather than merely being appropriated by them.
A false notion of the homeless as individuals functioning in isolation from
the urban community and from each other contributes to their current status
as exiles in their own city. We hope the vehicle will aid in making visible and
strengthening the modes of cooperation and interdependence that exist now
within the homeless population. The possibility of grouping, even linking the
vehicles together could be explored.
The signifying function of the vehicle is as important as its strictly
utilitarian purpose. Building upon the existing image of the scavenger as an
autonomous, active individual, the vehicle attempts to function as a visual
analogue to everyday objects of consumption and merchandising (such as food
vendor carts) and to create a bridge of empathy between homeless individuals
and observers. The use of a vehicle fashioned specially for their collection
activities makes visible the fact that scavengers, like other urban citizens, are
working for their subsistence.
The goal of the vehicle project is, therefore, two-fold: to fulfill the need of
homeless people for a means of transportation and shelter, and to aid in creating
a legitimized status for its users in the community of the city.
The prototype vehicle bears a resemblance to a weapon. In our view, the
movements of carts through New York City are acts of resistance, opposing the
continuing ruination of an urban community that excludes thousands of people
from even the most meager means of life. Though the transformation of the
city, which has compelled so many people to survive through the collection of its
detritus, is an outrage, we must all be forced to recognize the value and legitimacy
of their daily work.
Since its first presentation at the Clocktower in January 1988, the Homeless
Vehicle underwent preliminary tests on the streets of New York City. The working
model was discussed with scavengers and passersby. Drawings and documentary
material were shown to architects, artists, urban geographers, social workers,
activists, and journalists. These tests and discussions resulted in many practical
suggestions, critical comments, new concerns and ideas. New developments in
urban politics, such as the Koch administration’s construction of floating shelters for
the homeless and the confiscation of homeless people’s belongings and destruction
of their habitat in City Hall Park, as well as resistance to the curfew and the related
Interrogative Design
 anti-gentrification riot in Tompkins Square, have intensified the gravity of the situation Poliscar
for which the vehicle was intended, requiring additions to and reinforcements of its
functional and symbolic program. These include the following: 1991

Mobility
— A simple suspension system, larger wheels, and other adjustments to
facilitate increased maneuverability over curbs, potholes, and steps.
Safety
— A simple brake system both for slopes and for parking while resting or
148 sleeping.
— An emergency escape system in case of fire or attack.
— A lock and alarm system to protect collected goods and personal property.
— Rearview mirrors and emergency signals to protect against traffic.
Variants
— Versions of the vehicle responding to the needs of various users, in
particular those of women scavengers.
— Transformation of the vehicle into a vendor’s cart for selling found goods,
such as clothing, magazines, etc.
— Assembling vehicles in groups as collective habitats or defensive
encampments against police harassment.

Originally published by the authors as a photocopied brochure distributed during

the exhibition Public Image: Homeless Projects by Krzysztof Wodiczko and Dennis
Adams, New York: The Clocktower, 1988; reprinted as “Conversation about
a Project for a Homeless Vehicle”, October, no 47, winter 1988, pp 53–67.
In 1988 and 1989 four variants of the Homeless Vehicle, differing in the
materials with which they were constructed and resulting in various technical
improvements, were tested, used, and publicly presented in the following places:
Variant 1 in City Hall Park and the parks across from the Criminal Court and
the Municipal Building (Manhattan); Variant 2 in Tompkins Square Park and the
surrounding area. Wall Street, and the area around Battery Park (Manhattan);
Variant 3 in Central Park, Grand Army Plaza, Fifth Avenue, across from Trump
Tower, and Battery Park City (all Manhattan), and in Greenpoint Park (Brooklyn);
Variant 4 in Washington Square Park and the surrounding area and the area
around Broadway-Lafayette (Manhattan), and in Dilworth Plaza, Rittenhouse
Square, the area around the Liberty Bell, the area around City Hall, and the
National Temple Recycling Center (all in Philadelphia). Those who tested and
used them include Robert of “Dinkinsville”, New York; Allan Benjamin, Oscar,
Victor, and Daniel of Tompkins Square Park, New York; and Vanessa Brown, John
Alston, and Vernon Wilson of Philadelphia.
1 Quoted by Josh Barbanel, The New York Times, 19 January, 1988.
2 Coalition for the Homeless estimate, reported in New York Newsday, 4 January, 1988.
3 The New York Times, 4 April, 1987.
4 See Deutsche, Rosalyn, “Krzysztof Wodiczko’s Homeless Projection and the Site of ‘Urban
Revitalization’”, October, no 38, fall 1986, pp 63–99.
5 Quoted by Paul Goldberger, The New York Times, 17 January, 1988.
6 “David Brinkley Report”, ABC-TV, c January 1986.
7 Gross, Jane, The New York Times, 9 November, 1987.
The name of the vehicle, “Poliscar”, comes from the same root as “police”,
“policy”, and “politics”, namely from the Greek word for city-State, polis. In
Ancient Greece the word referred more to a state of society characterized by a
sense of community and participation of the citizen (polites) than to an institution
or a place. To be a citizen is by definition to be a legitimate and protected
member or inhabitant of the community and, as such, entitled to the rights and
privileges of a “freeman”. Poliscar is meant both to underscore the exclusion of
the homeless from the city community and to provide them with some means of
participating in it.
The homeless population is the true public of the city in that they literally
live on the street, spending their days and nights moving through the city, working
and resting in public parks and squares. The contradiction of their existence,
however, is that while they are physically confined to public spaces, they are
politically excluded from public space constitutionally guaranteed as a space for
communication. They have been expelled from society into public space but they
are confined to living within it as silent, voiceless actors. They are in the world but
at the same time they are outside of it, literally and metaphorically. The homeless
are both externalized and infantilized, and as externalities and infants they have
neither a vote nor a voice. As long as the voiceless occupy public space, rendering
them their voice is the only way to make it truly public.
Poliscar is designed for a particular group of homeless persons, those
who have communications skills and the motivation to work with the homeless
population in organizing and operating The Homeless Communication Network,
an important part of which will be the fleet of mobile communications and
living units—the Poliscars. The vehicle will respond to some of the most urgent
communication needs of the different groups within the homeless population.
It will be serving mostly those who live on the streets and in empty lots, helping

Transformative Avant-Garde and Other Writings Interrogative Design

 them learn and expand communicative strategies and technologies, some of
which are already well developed by the homeless who inhabit abandoned
buildings—the squatters. It will establish links between various encampments,
forming new social ties and leading to greater intercommunity and urban
organization for this emerging constituency.
Through The Homeless Communication Network and its equipment, the
Poliscar will:
A Increase the sense of security among those who live outside by
150 transmitting emergency information, such as early warning of planned
evictions and other dangers facing both the homeless and non-homeless
in troubled areas. Its use can help them organize quick and massive social
action in the face of impending actions against these populations. In this
way the position of the homeless living in empty lots will be closer to that
of squatters who are already developing telecommunications systems for
the same purpose.
B Help develop forms of communication necessary for the participation
of homeless populations in municipal, State, and federal elections. The
Homeless Communication Network and Poliscars will provide a medium for
articulation, exchange, and confrontation of ideas, opinions, experiences,
visions, and expressions among different groups in the homeless population.
Concurrently, it can take advantage of material and information transmitted
from other networks.
C Develop a sense of social and cultural bonds among the members of
the groups. This implies an increased understanding of antagonisms
and differences, resulting in a decrease of tension and the alienation of
one homeless group or individual from another. At the same time, the
preconceived, fixed, and a priori image of the homeless population and
its identity produced and reproduced by existing official networks of
communication will be challenged by this experimental speech-act machine
for homeless self-representation and expression.
D Help create and record not only images but also individual histories of the
homeless. History in this context means the relationship between the present
situation and the changing city, and the changing life of that person within it.
Democracy, liberty, and identity are all forms of continuing practice that cannot
be separated from the instances of their expression, communication, and, by
implication, reception by the larger population.
E Produce both image and sound programs that could aid different
groups and individuals to considerably extend and expand existing
action groups’ constituencies and constantly update the information in
professional areas such as: legal aid—listings and interactive forums for
issues within the realm of the law; medical aid—health and drug advice;
social crisis aid—helping people to communicate with one another in
critical situations; taking into account the specificity of their life on the
streets, encampments, and squats through counseling by homeless and
non-homeless psychologists, sociologists, etc; expression and individual
histories; formulation of political, educational, and aesthetic strategies.
F Help the economic system of the homeless population enter the larger
economic system of the city. There is a possibility of advertising skills and
commodities and using the communication system for job listings within
Transformative Avant-Garde and Other Writings
certain labor markets. Employers who wish to employ homeless people
could use the network as a database as well as advertising for their own
needs. Events (fairs, theatrical, and musical performances, etc) could be
listed as either public or private listings.
Equipment:
Portable Microwave Link
Key Poliscars within The Homeless Communication Network will be outfitted
with Ikegami PP-70 Portable Microwave Links. This is a line-of-sight video
transmission signal requiring a low-power transmission license from the 151
Federal Communications Commission (FCC). A parabolic antenna with split
RF units mounted on the top of the Poliscar will be equipped with Transmitter
and Receiver Control Units capable of two-way transmission on a single-
frequency band.
A 13-GHz unit with a 0.5-foot parabola antenna can operate at a distance
of three to seven miles from its field pick-up site on the 82nd floor of the Empire
State Building. Poliscar locations not capable of direct line-of-sight transmission
will require an IF Through-Relay System positioned on a nearby rooftop to provide
the necessary link from the ground to the Empire State Building.
Video signals from a Poliscar in one community can be directed to
the repeaters on the Empire State Building and transmitted as scheduled
communications to Poliscars across the city, providing a political and cultural
information link between communities within The Homeless Communication
Network. Manhattan Cable receiver antennas also positioned on the Empire State
Building can provide access to the larger community of the city through public-
access cable systems.
CB Radio
The Homeless Communication Network is a mobile land-radio service. The FCC
allows the existence of such networks for private and special-interest public
communications. The CB radio component of the network is comprised of mobile
units (Poliscars) and one or more base stations. A “mobile station”, such as the
Poliscar, according to FCC definition, is used while in motion or during halts at
unspecified points. Usually, a mobile station means a radio-equipped car, truck,
motorcycle, or other single-operator vehicle. A base station is installed at a fixed
location to communicate with the mobile units and other base stations. CB radio
systems operate independently from other communication systems.
CB land-radio services use half-duplex and full-duplex audio operations.
A half-duplex system allows communications in two directions but not
simultaneously. First one communication takes place, then the other. A CB
system’s half-duplex modes require only one frequency. The range between mobile
units is shorter than between mobile units and the base station. Vehicle-to-vehicle
range is from three to ten miles, vehicle-to-base from 5–15 miles, and base-to-base
from ten to 50 miles. FCC regulations limit station antenna height to 20 feet above
natural formations and existing architectural structures.
Electronic Communication and Other Equipment
Each community equipped with a Poliscar will generate information and
communications with video recorders and surveillance cameras. A Star Tech
Video Sender can transmit a high-frequency video signal for short distances
Interrogative Design
 between an active camera and its Poliscar. This allows mobility of a camera An Interview with Bruce W Ferguson
unconstricted by cables.
Beside the motor is a locker for the various materials that the urban 1991
nomad must carry with him or her at all times: water and other beverages; food
supplies (eg, special-diet food); baby food; dog food; cooking tools; equipment
for washing; emergency medical kit (including emergency shots for infections,
medication for asthma, diabetes, and for malnutrition, poisoning, and drug or
alcohol overdose, sleeping aid, vitamins, birth control, pregnancy tests, AIDS
tests, etc, along with a medical history); gas mask; umbrella; suntan lotion
152 and sunglasses; alarm clock; stationery; books; toys and games; audio and
video tapes; disposable bags; spare parts; tools (eg, flashlight, binoculars,
tools for emergency repairs and for attaching the vehicle to other Poliscars);
and valuables (money, personal and official documents, food stamps, drug and
alcohol reserves, etc).
The homeless are treated, at best tolerated, as aliens on their own planet.
This ‘alienation’—making into legal aliens legitimate operators within today’s
city—has the vicious effect of excluding not only the homeless, but us, the
‘community’, from those real masses of ‘strangers’ from whom we are estranged
and with whom we presume to have no common language. In fact it is the
strangeness of the situation that we project onto the other rather than confronting
it together.
This contradiction—to us they may seem strange in the city, but are not
strangers to the city—results in a contradictory and complex identity: the savage
homeless in a noble city, or the noble homeless in a savage city. Squeezed Bruce W Ferguson: Krzysztof, what were the circumstances surrounding the
between this play of images, the homeless themselves, in their complexity in original idea of a vehicle for homeless people?
a complex city, remain out of the picture, which has no room for the real life of Krzysztof Wodiczko: I began thinking about it in 1983. In the area where I lived,
people who happen to lack a dwelling. near Union Square in New York, you could see on a monthly, almost daily basis, a
growing number of homeless people. But I don’t remember exactly when I made
the first drawing.
Originally published as a brochure titled Poliscar, New York: Josh Baer Gallery, 1991. BWF: You could have made clothes, or worked in a shelter, or found some other
way of dealing with this issue. Was it because you had made or proposed ‘ironic’
vehicles when you were still working as an industrial designer in Poland that this
idea occurred to you?
KW: Yes, I just thought of how I could best contribute from the strength of my
professional and artistic background. I saw myself as someone who could come
up with something based on my industrial design experience and education. It’s
not true that a designer can design everything, or that every artist can be or is
a designer, and I’m more comfortable with industrial design than with clothing
design or social work because of my background and skills.
I was also working on projections or maquettes for projections that dealt
with homelessness, like the proposal for image projections onto statues in Union
Square. I was thinking of presenting the first sketches of the vehicle at the gallery
49th Parallel where I had shown those, but I rejected this idea because the
drawings were not developed enough.
BWF: Is there an implication in what you are saying that the vehicle addresses
the limitations or constraints of the projections?
KW: Yes, definitely. The projections rely on images, existing images. The
recognizable, circulating image of the homeless—a romanticized media image—is
already an image of a victim. For the projections, I had to rely on those kinds of
images which are already carved into the memory of the viewers. And then I would

Transformative Avant-Garde and Other Writings Interrogative Design

 try to carve those images onto the monument in a fitting way. The technique is
complicated, but its aim is to question both the contemporary media image and
the monument as image—to create an embarrassing or disturbing connection, a
contradictory relation between the two.
But I knew that a designed vehicle—a ‘pragmatic’ and a symbolic object—
could create even more of an intervention in terms of the way in which people
perceive the homeless. I believe that there is more for the non-homeless and for the
homeless to think about when they suddenly are confronted with a new architecture
and a new space. In other words, I began to build a new kind of monument.
154 But those thoughts came later. At the time, the real motivation was the
urgent need I felt to supply whatever skills and experience I had to this debate.
I understood that it would be a critical and aesthetic intervention, but I also
hoped that I could get closer, through my own work, to the real situation of
homelessness itself. That I could help not only the non-homeless but also the
homeless; become a partner or a colleague, not someone who is just looking at
them from the other side of the image.
The projections, as spectacles, act as a critique of representation by
addressing the image of the homeless in relation to other images, and they are
important as such. But the vehicle enters unknown areas as well, and breaks
the isolation of myself, the artist, from the situation. The vehicle forces a very
real social engagement—discussions of design and compromises introduced by
homeless people themselves. I think that there is an ethical complement to my
industrial design practice—my history of doing this in Poland and the particular
education I had—which recognizes the need for something and, rather than finding
a solution, adds a work or supplements reality in a positive and performative way.
And only design can do it, really.
BWF: Obviously the media representation you mentioned is a voice which speaks as
though for society when it actually speaks only for a few vested interests. As does the
monument in its present state. They are both pseudo-voices, in effect. How do you
feel the artist can speak between those two images, or does the artist speak through
them? How can the artist be more authentic?
KW: I don’t have a clear theory on this. I know there are some theories, but
for me it’s always very important to project onto the monument something that
corresponds to life—to something real—to make the monuments pregnant with
something real. The irony is that, of course, it is not real, it is only an image, and
by necessity it must be recognizable as a media image. In other words, it has to
be a quotation, appropriation, or displacement of an image.
I would prefer to come up with something that isn’t a quotation—without
any reference to a media image—and I often try to use some other icon, but which
is as immediately recognizable. I don’t work by simply taking a media image and
projecting it. I photograph all my images, and I try to rely on something attractive
and dramatic, like the cover of a crime novel, for instance. The image has to
have those qualities or no one will even see it. I simply eliminate images that
won’t be recognizable or strong enough, clear or crisp enough, because people
have difficulty recognizing icons they haven’t seen before—grasping new iconic
arrangements in a short time.
But in a sense, art was always doing this anyway—photography,
architecture, planning, advertising, painting, sculpture, film, and television rely
on existing codes. So, for me, there isn’t a big difference, in the end, between
the monument and the projected image. However, I do make the image as a
Transformative Avant-Garde and Other Writings
counter-image or a counter-monument. Only once have I projected a reproduced
image from a magazine cover, like the Pershing missile. Mostly, I have made
models of missiles to photograph and to clarify certain aspects of them. By
doing this, I can prepare them for the photograph in such a way that they will
have certain structural qualities of the monument in order to make an organic
counter-connection.
BWF: Could you talk about an example of a projection in which the monument has
a generic quality, and how you married it to an image from a recognizable code?
KW: The projection of a missile in Stuttgart is the most perfect example. The
structure of the monument was a classical column. It is already a missile. And 155
missiles are always displayed as columns. They are neo-classical monuments of
slippery powers. In earlier projections I dealt with ideas of the body—an official
body; the body as facade—from images in which the media present people like
buildings. I dealt with the way the media turns those photographs and people into
monuments. I also dealt with the way buildings are constructed and the facades
are often photographed, by emphasizing their symmetrical features to show a
human face and the force of the corporate body. Neo-classicism resembles our
bodies because it is deliberate morphology. The question was always how far I
should go with the similarity between the image and the building—between these
two parallel bodies—and how much should I alter them.
With the projections on monuments, I wanted to break the distance from
the monument by creating something frighteningly real and living, like a ghost
haunting the monument. To achieve something like the statue in Don Giovanni, who
starts speaking of the terrible things that have happened. There are things the city
doesn’t want to talk about, and these are meaningful silences, which must be read.
My projections are attempts to read and carve those silences into the monuments and
spaces that propagate civic and dramatic fictions within the social sphere.
BWF: How do the vehicles act as characters in such a narrative?
KW: With the vehicle, firstly we have users and their relations to the object, and
then we have viewers who are potential users, who have to imagine if this is an
object for them. They examine it in relation to how it looks as a newly introduced
object. So the vehicle is a kind of projection too, a projection into the world of
objects. Its differences from and similarities to other vehicles, such as shopping
carts and cars, are discovered quickly and easily.
And there is also a desire to touch it. So there is a close contact through
the object to the user—the other—who owns or operates it. It is an eerie situation.
Why is the other person using it? And how can I, the viewer, get permission to
touch it and use it, even partially? When we tested it on the streets, no one asked,
“Why are you homeless?” or “Who are you?” Instead they asked, “Why is this
wheel here?” or “Why is it this color?” or “How much does it cost?” and “How
many of these are produced?” There are certain techniques of speaking through
the object that I discovered in testing this vehicle. Then the user might become
a performer, in answering or not answering, or themselves questioning these
questions: become an artist, so to speak. The vehicle becomes a performative
operator, a medium, a stage, or a prop, or an occasion. It becomes a forum by
being an object—a legitimate object. And the user—a homeless person—develops
his or her own talents for public communication and performance by performing
with this vehicle.
In fact, the vehicle became a disturbing communications medium and I
hadn’t predicted the many responses to it. There was a desire for it, a social desire for
Interrogative Design
 it, and the question was, what to do with all those desires? I can’t produce many
vehicles because I don’t have the money, and it was never clear, even to me, if it was a
good enough prototype anyhow. And if it were to be manufactured in units of 30 or
50, they could claim a certain territory and social presence, but they would need an
organization. And the vehicle itself can’t create an organization.
So there were suddenly all these desires and questions in the minds of
people on both sides of the vehicle. Through this object, questions and doubts
and fears, but also utopian visions, were communicated, and helping people
to concentrate. Just about everything that happened in testing the vehicle on
156 the streets is invisible, because even in photographs or written descriptions of
this project the object is only seen partially. Because it was really an event, and
because of all the different inquiries meeting and crossing and reconverging
within it, the description of the vehicle is exhausted too early, so that it becomes
a theory of sorts.
But the object was not outside of anyone anymore. It was the center of
many things—it became a critical point. Impossible, and in fact undesirable,
except to a few, it became too much for many people to take. And the moment
of saturation on the street was very revealing to me. After absorbing all the
questions, the vehicle became the explosive implosion of the problem.
Maybe I shouldn’t have been surprised, because this is what design
is. Or what design should be. It is not just something useful, nor is it just an
image with certain associations. It is also an event—a social experiment that is
also a philosophical experiment. It is something that disrupts reality. It creates
questions with no answers, but it is suddenly more real than something written,
for example, because of our complex relation to objects. They always seem to be
more disturbing in their merciless, naked presence. The vehicle is both there and
not there; it is sculpture and not sculpture. It is an object and an idea at all times,
which was the most fascinating and insoluble part of its reception.
BWF: You talk about the vehicle and objects as “adding to” or “increasing”
or “complementing” a debate—expanding it. But it also seems to me that just
as it increases, it decreases. Because it seems like a solution, it may raise
expectations which can never be met. It starts to take on a kind of pathos or
melancholia precisely because it can’t be a solution.
KW: I agree and disagree with you. I don’t know if, when I agree, that means it
is a failure. It is an answer that is more of a proposition than a solution, or it is
an impossible ‘solution’. But it is true that after all the technical questions which
brought people closer through indirect inquiry, people began to close it off and
make it into a new monument called the Homeless Vehicle. Because suspicion
remains between the non-homeless and the homeless; so it is easier to return to
naming it, just as The Homeless was the name of a monument before the vehicle
was on the street.
For the homeless and non-homeless alike, the vehicle seemed like a beginning. It
looked like a weapon—a projectile—and immediately both groups projected onto it the
idea of a mass-produced object. It created an impossible image of a solution—the image
of an army of masses of people with those vehicles. This could be seen as a criticism
of it, but I think it was morally and politically critical as it became infused with critique,
and that’s why it worked.
Mass production of it will never happen. It is impossible economically, politically,
technically. And I would be the first to make it impossible if anyone wanted to try to
produce them. However, it did effectively produce a monumental image of masses
Transformative Avant-Garde and Other Writings
of homeless vehicles being everywhere and replacing, or altering substantially, the
environment. And this image will stay. And that image, because it is reproduced in
newspapers, journals, or on television, and through word of mouth, already makes it
seem that hundreds of these vehicles are on the move.
I think it worked for several years. But I cannot take responsibility for the
fact that everything acquires a mystique and eventually loses its meaning. You
cannot be responsible for the fact that our art raises itself or becomes shallow
with time and changing circumstances. What is important is what is actually
happening at the very moment of the introduction of the work, between active
and passive actors, and how this is reorganized by introducing this vehicle. It 157
was reproduced everywhere and it was discussed. Now it’s being dismissed as a
failure because it’s not being genuinely produced. But I think it was worth doing
because I was genuinely surprised by the amount of debate and discussion and
exchange it provoked and still arouses. This is the way in which the vehicle is
being produced.
BWF: Do you think that your projects act as a kind of visible conscience—in the
sense that they relentlessly record the idea that someone unofficial is witnessing this
process of homelessness as it is being institutionalized, named, and codified within
the official circles of media and other authorities of classification?
KW: The artist as a kind of tower? Or guard? Yes, I think they may be disturbing
the kind of confinement of reality through images and concepts, and by
reorganizing the connections that people make. Such projects might add to
alertness in place of passivity. They help to communicate because they disrupt
communications in the city.
Yet we have no clear way to consider design as a critical practice. Even
if only a preliminary social experiment, as the vehicle is, we don’t know how to
discuss such events or designs, and we come back to the shortcomings of theory.
And the limitations of language. Because we don’t know how design ‘works’, or
what happens when design appears.
This is especially true in a situation of such complexity and magnitude as
urban crisis. It is also true because we are talking about individual perception and
imagination and how, when a voice occurs through an object, we would need a
phenomenological approach as a starting point. We would have to enter a world
that is very intimate—what is happening to everyone’s mind and body in this
provoking situation, and how everyone’s reactions are voiced.
Thus we enter a world of fantasy, fictions, fears, the unconscious
acceptance, false statements, and a variety of other responses. The object begins
to collapse under the weight of an incredible load of inquiry, appropriations, and
mental, metaphoric use. It might even start to function as a nightmare. Sometimes,
when David Lurie and myself write to city departments, we don’t even receive an
answer. It’s almost as though the project description already acts as someone’s
nightmare or guilt. Jacques Lacan might say that the fact that the letter is sent
doesn’t mean that it is received. Maybe some completely different letter is received
or the answer is sent to somebody else.
So what happened with this vehicle? It is not something that can be
easily confined in a normal art discourse, although art, too, has its normal—
impossible—objects. But this new monument seems very complicated. I can take
responsibility for the first reading of it. But I would like everyone to help me to
figure out what really happened, so I would consciously know the entire world of
responses this project created.
Interrogative Design
 BWF: Could you say that, beginning with the projections in Halifax which dealt
with gestures and codes of authority, your artistic trajectory has moved more
and more toward an admission of the subjective element of both yourself and
your audience?
KW: Well, in the beginning it was not as closed as you describe it. It was open
enough. It was still to be completed in the mind—somewhere between those
images of officialdom and the architecture. The South African Embassy Projection
perhaps had less latitude and was more ‘political’, and my response to the Gulf
War in Madrid necessitated a shift from a more open projection to something
158 directly related to the event—by connecting Franco’s fascist Arco de la Victoria
to the immediacy of the new declaration of war. But it was not I who made this
monument, crowded with contemporary politics and the history of politics. It was
the events surrounding me and the monument. Otherwise I would be useless,
completely. I would be unemployed. Completely.
During the October Revolution, artists would have been unemployed if they
didn’t find a formal project related to the social project. So those two projections
existed in situations which demanded that the projects not seem open to a variety
of readings. Everything seemed to be clear-cut. For instance, the CNN battalistic
art is actually a direct propaganda work. And I think that the Madrid projection, in
contrast to a truly political piece, was actually more of a puzzle for people. At the
time, what was most unexpected was the actual inclusion of the fascist monument
in this situation. In other words, it is not what I projected as an image that resulted
in a variety of readings, but the sight of the projection itself, the monument
otherwise usually dark and free from any relation to reality. Suddenly illuminated, it
is a partner to those events.
Not only were hundreds of thousands of people killed, electronically, in the
name of some redirection, the access to resources and control over political and
geographical spheres of influence, but Spanish people were reminded of their own
Civil War and the very active monuments to Franco throughout the country. And
although they seemed not to want to participate in this contemporary war, the
monument was still there, in the dark. And because everyone was a part of that
extremely prolonged authoritarian culture, it was through their own experience
and stories and images that this new war could act to inspire an uncomfortable
memory. Without the monument, my projection is in trouble because the relation
between present and past is destroyed.
The past must be infused with the present to create critical history, according
to Benjamin and Nietzsche. Watching the monuments to Lenin being destroyed made
me think there should be a public discussion before any of this is irreversible. The
sculptures are witnesses to the past, memorabilia of the monstrous past. In Madrid,
for instance, I thought it was good that this monument of Franco existed. But I’m
only saying that there was neither any attempt to destroy it nor any debate about it
at all. That’s what worried me. That such monuments are morally unemployed and kept
physically and metaphorically in the dark.
BWF: I’ve always been very moved by the way you discuss statues or monuments
in so-called public spaces. You’ve drawn me to the urban crisis and the idea
that witnesses, perhaps more than critics, are the most disturbing and powerful
facts for history. Because someone who has witnessed an event always has the
potential to change its meaning.
KW: Standing in the park at Union Square, the Lafayette monument, a
revolutionary monument, is completely passive—the homeless of history. He is
Transformative Avant-Garde and Other Writings
abandoned because no one wants to think about ‘him’ any more, of what happens
around him, because it is too difficult. How, for instance, can we see Lafayette’s
ideas in the context of the present social, political, and philosophical crisis of
democracy? The procedures inscribed in the American Constitution, with their
ideas of a guarantee of happiness and freedom, seem not to be working. So
Lafayette and others are being erased and repressed, yet they are still physically
standing there. I was interested in how to involve them today.
But there is a problem with simply projecting onto them, and I’m not sure
I would torture history—or, I mean, this past, not history. Maybe those historic
monuments are not only astonished or petrified by what they see. Maybe it is possible 159
to say that they turned a blind eye, a blank eye, on past reality. Or maybe the whole
concept of democracy of the modern kind is simply irrelevant or passé. Maybe there
is a point when a new situation requires a break from the past. I think, personally, that
the process of democracy is only in the preliminary stage.
Nietzsche reflected on history in an essay called “On the Advantage and
Disadvantage of History for Life”. And his insight leads me, too, to think that there
is a certain point when history is just an illusion. Because things don’t repeat
themselves. Do we need another Lincoln? Another Lafayette? So my earlier work had
these limitations, not only artistic and aesthetic, but philosophical.
The design projects may be a response to that constraint, because they
are not actualizing anything past, but simply projecting certain visions of the
future—utopian or dystopian—onto the present. To see the present means
then to use the device of science fiction. The difficulty with Walter Benjamin’s
concept of the future and the past finding a home in the present, in a collision,
is the actual usefulness of the past. Nietzsche divided history into three
categories: critical history, antiquarian history, and monumental history. My
projections, supposedly, are works of critical history, not antiquarian since
I’m not merely preserving history. But they have to revive monumental history
in order to turn it into a critical history. But by illuminating it, no matter what
I project, no matter how critical I want to be, I bring it to its former glory,
its presence. It still re-emerges from the darkness as a glorious symbol, as
Nietzsche would say, giving us “a sense that grand things did happen”.
So to pervert or act as a parasite on those monuments with some
injections, infusions, or actualizations is only possible to a certain degree. Firstly,
most of the images hardly fit because of the strange shapes and iconography of
the monuments. And secondly, their formal arrangements are difficult because
they are not flat screens. And thirdly, and most importantly, is that we should also
be able to detach ourselves from them in order to stop continuing that discourse
of power which they represent. Or at least interrupt it. But to destroy them,
which people do, I cannot entertain because I am not a physical deconstructionist
of monuments. At the same time, I may be getting tired of making dead horses
come alive, like some necrophiliac. And why should I resurrect them from death?
It is very tiring and I can only do it for a short period of time because of course
we know that they are dead. I just bring a kind of artificial life to them as an
alternative to the artificial character of their lives, and I am a little tired after
working with these horrifying structures, these terrible objects, since 1980.
BWF: The communications vehicle is both filled with contemporary, up-to-date
technologies, and has the look and feel of a Medieval object. Even if it tries to
avoid the past in some way, is it inevitable that the past explodes into the present
in the sense that Walter Benjamin spoke of?
Interrogative Design
 KW: I think perhaps the communication vehicle (the Poliscar) could be Alien Staff (Xenobacul)
understood iconographically as a kind of grotesque, but it is simply a response
to the image of the contemporary city, which the uniformed police and the real 1992
estate armies have made a militarized zone. And the image of the city being
overtaken by a force of communication vehicles everywhere, an impossible
insurrection, accounts for the ridiculous aspect of its appearance. As Marshall
McLuhan told us, there is not only war but there is a war of icons, and humor
might have a liberating effect—help us to recognize this image of revolution and
the fear of it differently.
160 I mean, if I were to respond to the idea that my work is political art, I would
say that it is not. I would say, however, that it is a work of the politics of art. The
true political art is the official monument, the officially built environment, as well as
aesthetically considered works of any political propaganda or ideology. Repeating my
disassociation form the label “political artist”, I may say that I am perhaps a politician of
art, in the sense of a new kind of Sophist in the contemporary polis; an artist-politician
revealing the politics of the art of official space. My art must be understood, then, as
a form of aesthetic politics; of making space within the space of political art (polis).
Bringing a set of ‘political’ icons, unwanted and disturbing; bringing issues that are
silenced; bringing the private life, so to speak, to this public death; my art, as politics,
may then de-politicize this totally political art—this monument—this city and its image.

Originally published as “A Conversation with Krzysztof Wodiczko”, in Krzysztof

Wodiczko: Instruments, Projections, Vehicles, Barcelona: Fundació Antoni Tàpies, No aliens, residents, non-residents, legal or illegal immigrants have voting rights,
1992, pp 47–65. nor any sufficient voice or image of their own in official ‘public’ space. When given
a chance by the media (mainstream or ethnic) to communicate their experience or
to state their opinions, demands, and needs, immigrants find themselves already
framed and silenced. Feeling set up by preconceived categories of strangeness and
difference, they have no chance to convey the often unbearable complexity of their
lives, the world of differences between them and the confusing and antagonistic
voices within each immigrant group, family, or individual. These are the strangers in
the process of becoming non-strangers, double aliens in de-alienation.
The Alien Staff is a piece of story-telling equipment and a legal and ethical
communications instrument and network for immigrants. It is an instrument that
gives the singular operator-immigrant a chance to ‘address’ directly anyone in the
city who may be attracted by the symbolic form of the equipment, by the character
of the ‘broadcast’ program, or by the life presence and performance of the operator.
The Alien Staff resembles the biblical shepherd’s rod. It is equipped with a mini video
monitor and a small loudspeaker. A video player and the batteries are located in a
specially designed shoulder bag. The small size of the monitor, its eye-level location,
and its closeness to the operator’s face are important aspects of the design. As the
small image on the screen may attract attention and provoke observers to come
very close to the monitor and therefore to the operator’s face, the usual distance
between the stranger and the observer will decrease. Upon closer examination, it
will become clear that the image of the face on the screen and the actual face of the
person holding it are the same. The double presence in ‘media’ and ‘life’ invites a new
perception of a stranger as ‘imagined’ (a character on the screen) or as ‘experienced’
(an actor offstage, a real-life person). Since both the imagination and the experience
of the viewer are increasing with the decreasing distance, while the program itself
reveals unexpected aspects of the actor’s experience, the presence of the immigrant

Transformative Avant-Garde and Other Writings Interrogative Design

 becomes both legitimate and real. This change in distance and perception might The Mouthpiece (Le porte-parole)
provide the ground for greater respect and self-respect, and become an inspiration
for crossing the boundary between a stranger and a non-stranger. 1993
The first model of the Alien Staff, called Xenobacul in Catalan, was built
and tested in Barcelona in June 1992 with the assistance of Fundacío Antoni
Tàpies and SOS Racisme of Barcelona. The first user was an immigrant from
Burkina Faso. A second model was built and its design further transformed in
New York during the fall and winter of 1992–1993. This new variant of the Alien
Staff differs from the first model in the ways it was developed with the input of
162 a singular person—a story-teller/video-performer, who was willing to present her
own experience and function as a legal and ethical advisor for other immigrants.
This version, with a vertically oriented screen of the “xenoscope” (the top or
crook section of the Alien Staff) for a closer view of the owner’s face, is made of
stainless steel to look more powerful and respectable in the New York context. The
new “xenolog section” (the central part of the rod of the Alien Staff) is made up of
interchangeable cylindrical containers for the preservation and display of precious
relics related to various phases of the owner’s immigration history. This version has
become something of a reliquary, with containers for such relics as rejected visa
applications, immigration and legal documents, apartment keys, old photographs,
and the various identity cards acquired by the owner. Through pre-recorded video
broadcast and live narration, these accounts of the immigrant past are recalled in
the face of the immigrant present and become an art of critical history and a critical
vision of the future.
The first operator of this version of the Alien Staff was Jagoda Przybylak, a The Mouthpiece (Le porte-parole) is a piece of equipment for strangers. It covers
prominent Polish artist-photographer, who moved to New York in 1981. Forced by the mouth of the wearer like a gag. A small video monitor and loudspeakers are
immigrant circumstances, she took various jobs of Polish women: “plejsy” (cleaning installed at the center of the instrument and in front of the user’s mouth. The
private apartments), “ofisy” (cleaning corporate offices), and “kom-paniony” monitor and the loudspeakers replace the real act of speech with an audiovisual
(accompanying elderly American women). Since 1986 she has worked as an broadcast of pre-recorded, edited, electronically perfected and quickly searched
assistant professor at the New York Institute of Technology, where she presented statements, questions, answers, stories, etc.
herself with her Alien Staff to give the students, professors, staff, and maintenance The Mouthpiece (Le porte-parole) ‘replaces’ the immigrant’s actual act
personnel an opportunity to hear and see the stories of her plejsy, ofisy, and kom- of speech with the moving image of the immigrant’s lips and the sound of the
paniony. The process of telling these stories required recording and much editing. immigrant’s voice. It is designed to be as attractive as contemporary virtual reality
She has found recounting and revealing her often hellish past emotionally difficult, gadgets. The clear resolution of the liquid-crystal screen of the video monitor
but morally constructive in terms of self-respect from others. Details forgotten or attracts viewers’ attention. The small size of the screen (no larger than the actual
suppressed return, providing the possibility of the discovery through language, both size of human lips) forces viewers to come close to the user’s face in order to see the
Polish and English, of identities old and new that go far beyond what is usually taken image of speaking lips and to hear the voice clearly. Thus the distance between the
for granted. immigrant wearing the Mouthpiece (Le porte-parole) and the viewers, non-immigrants
and other immigrants, decreases physically and, hopefully, psychologically as well.
For a speechless stranger living in a culturally, politically, and ethically
Parts of this text were originally published as “The Alien Staff (Baton d’immi- unnatural situation, wearing a piece of artificial and artistically conceived
gre)”, in Espaces de transit, Paris: École nationale supérieure des Beaux-Arts, speech-act equipment is a natural thing to do. In today’s migration era, the
1992; reprinted in Borja-Villel, Manuel J, Krzysztof Wodiczko: Instruments, wearer of Mouthpiece (Le porte-parole) appears as a prophetic story-teller and
Projections, Vehicles, Barcelona: Fundació Antoni Tàpies, 1992, pp 303–306 a poetic interrupter of the continuity of established life in public space and
and in Wodiczko, Krzysztof, Critical Vehicles: Writings, Projects, Interviews, the dominant culture. This stranger becomes an expert and a virtuoso in the
Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1999, pp 104–105. Between 1993 and 1997, technology and the artistry of speech, equipped to speak better than others who
more than 20 persons used various variants of the Alien Staff in Barcelona, Paris, have yet to overcome speechlessness in their encounter with strangers.
Marseilles, New York, Houston, Stockholm, Helsinki, Warsaw, Rotterdam, and The Mouthpiece (Le porte-parole) is a further evolution of the Alien
Boston. These were refugees, immigrants, and in some cases citizens who are Staff as the next generation of speech equipment designed for immigrants.
perceived as foreigners in their own countries. The previous instrument was meant to operate as an attribute, an artifice,
a reliquary, a portable memorial to recall in public the ‘private history’ of the

Transformative Avant-Garde and Other Writings Interrogative Design

 immigrant experience. It functioned as a third party between immigrants and non-
immigrants and among immigrants themselves; it functioned as the immigrant’s
double, and as an inspiration for dialogue between the segregated worlds of the
people who entered into conversation around it. The new instrument is a more
radical type of equipment. It is directly attached to the body (the face) of the
immigrant, becoming an extension of the body. The user himself or herself is no
longer delegating power to the instrument, but is integrated organically with it,
transforming him or her into a kind of cyborg, a virtual subject.
The Mouthpiece (Le porte-parole) points to the absurdity of any attempt to
164 deprive people of speech rights in a democratic society. It responds to the actual
political process and experience of such deprivation, while at the same time it
helps to translate this disadvantage into a new advantage. In other words, it is
an instrument whose function is to empower those who are deprived of power.
It is designed to assert the universal communicative rights introduced by the
Declaration of the Rights of Man in France, assured by the First Amendment
to the Constitution of the United States, and guaranteed by most national
constitutions since. An implication of these declarations is that no artifice can be
created to restrict communicative rights and, conversely, no artifice whose aim
is to aid in the exercise of communicative rights can be legally banned. Its basic
purpose is to provide a means of saying all the things that must be said and that
no one wants to hear. In doing so it does not prevent anyone else from doing the
same. The Mouthpiece (Le porte-parole) is thus a democratic artifice.
The Mouthpiece (Le porte-parole) allows its owner to compose and prerecord
his or her act of speaking and to replay and re-enact it later, in a particular chosen
time and place, in private or public situations. This process reinforces a specific
kind of power already acquired by immigrants, the artistic power of speech invention
and story-telling. The story-teller has always been forced to develop an art of speech
in order to tell what has usually been untold and for which there is no ready-made
metaphor. The story-teller creates a situation in which repressed feelings, translated
into stories, can be effectively expressed. The wearer of the Mouthpiece (Le porte-
parole) is a story-teller who is an expert in the technology of speech in the cyberspace
era, an alien who has arrived in a xenophobic land and who looks strangely familiar to
us who have yet to overcome our speechlessness in the face of our repressed fears.
This project, like the previous Alien Staff, creates an artifice that provokes
or inspires communication or translation, a display of what is usually hidden. The
instrument suggests an acknowledgment of the richness and complexity of people
who combine both ‘natural’ and ‘artificial’ qualities in life. This means that feeling
artificial (not at home, alienated from oneself or others) becomes a process that
can open up new questions and introduce the possibility of different identities and
communities beyond nationalisms and fixed notions of difference, crossing social
and psychological boundaries, meeting on new common ground, however shaky and
displaced such ground may be.
‘Aliens’ equipped with specially designed instruments might appear
perfectly natural in the contemporary migratory environment of global
strangeness. Exposing their own disintegration and displaced identity, they
provoke and inspire the larger process of the disintegration of identities among
non-immigrants. They may spread the communicable (contagious) process of
the exploration of one/s own strangeness. They might help create new links and
affinities between immigrants and non-immigrants on the basis of the recognition
of their common strangeness.
Transformative Avant-Garde and Other Writings
With the use of digital technology, the process of recording and editing
the image and sound of a speaking mouth will become an artistic endeavor.
The process of composing and pre-recording each speech act in private is
psychologically, politically, and artistically as important as public live performance
and its social discourse. Advanced video editing, digital enhancement, and
transformation of both the image and the sound of the speech (through the most
recent Macintosh software) is critical to the project. The technology of video
production will help to create a metaphoric synthesis of often overlapping and
displaced memories, fragments of experiences, statements, stories, words, and
sentences, all of which correspond to the unstable identity of the stranger who 165
is living through the pain of displacement and becoming. Electronic montage will
allow for changes in the speed of the lips on the screen and the change of frequency
characteristics of the sound, for dubbing, correcting, playing with and multiplying
accents and gender indicators. Fragments of films and other videos can be inserted
and other people’s lips can be juxtaposed with those of the immigrant, for example.
The careful choice of locations and situations for the performative use
of the Mouthpiece (Le porte-parole) is crucial. Official events and symbolic
environments are the best, because they are the situations where immigrants are
least expected. The presence of a group of Mouthpiece (Le porte-parole) users
is also essential. The image of a crowd of aliens appearing as if they have just
landed from another planet (which happens to be our own) is most desirable.
In the next stage of development of the project, a portable computer
and additional electronic devices will be added to allow for quick searching
through a large repertoire of pre-recorded speeches using the operator’s voice
as a command. In this way the immigrant will have a greater variety of speeches
ready for all anticipated situations and will be able to choose the appropriate
videotape to respond immediately to any question. As portable equipment
improves technically, links to satellite communications and the Internet will allow
an immediate dialogue among Mouthpiece (Le porte-parole) users, enabling an
exchange of experiences and coordination of their presence and their actions
nationally and internationally.
Originally published in the catalogue ARS 95 Helsinki, Helsinki: Museum of
Contemporary Art, 1995; reprinted in Wodiczko, Krzysztof, Critical Vehicles:
Writings, Projects, Interviews, Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1999, pp 118–121.
Between 1994 and 1997 13 persons used various variants of the Mouthpiece (Le
porte-parole) in Paris, Malmö, Helsinki, Warsaw, Amsterdam, Trelaze, and Angers.
These were refugees, immigrants, and other culturally displaced persons.
Interrogative Design
Variants of the Mouthpiece
(Le porte-parole)
1995–199 7
A later variant of the Mouthpiece (Le porte-parole) is equipped with a more
powerful loudspeaker and a more stable and adjustable head attachment. The
video-monitor section can function in two main positions: in front of (covering)
the operator’s the lips. The second position allows for speaking simultaneously
with two voices and ‘two lips’: the real (natural) and the virtual (pre-recorded
and transformed electronically). The disclosure of the previously hidden mouth
of the stranger helps to establish direct contact and dialogue during the public
encounter between the operator and interlocutors on the street.
A prototype of this model was built by Brooklyn Model Works and was used
in France in the summer of 1996 thanks to the support of the French Ministry of
Culture. The present proposal offers three further elaborations of an experimental,
interactive Mouthpiece (Le porte-parole). The first two are technically straightforward.
The equipment necessary for the third may be prohibitively expensive. The
mechanical parts of the new Mouthpiece (Le porte-parole) would be built by the
Brooklyn Model Works, while the electronic part would be developed by the Physics
and Media group at the Media Lab of MIT. In the first scenario, the video- and audio-
recorded speech would be interrupted by the operator’s speech. The operator and
the recording would take turns, creating a dialogue between pre-recorded audio-video
speech and direct, live, amplified speech. The gaps in the operator’s speech would
always be filled in by the recorded material, eliminating all silences. The acoustic
sensitivity would be adjustable. Different sensitivity settings lead to different artistic
effects. For example, the system might interrupt very fluidly, aggressively filling even
the normal gaps between words. Or it might be set more sluggishly, hesitating several
seconds after the operator had stopped speaking before ‘replying’ to the operator.
In addition to the existing Mouthpiece (Le porte-parole) unit, with its video
display, speaker, and video tape player, the additional apparatus needed for this
experiment includes a microphone to be added to the Mouthpiece (Le porte-parole)
unit, a simple custom speech detection circuit (to be built in the Physics Lab within
the MIT Media Lab), and an improved amplifier-speaker system. The microphone
Transformative Avant-Garde and Other Writings
would feed into both the amplifier-speaker and the speech detection circuit. When the
operator begins speaking, the detection circuit suppresses the pre-recorded material,
and the operator’s amplified voice is heard through the speaker. When the operator
stops speaking, the detection circuit re-connects the pre-recorded audio to the speaker
and re-enables the video display.
In the second scenario, the pre-recorded audio-video speech would be
activated by the operator’s live speech. The pre-recorded video speech would be
superimposed over the direct, amplified acoustic speech of the operator, creating
a sense of interruption and contradiction rather than dialogue. There would,
however, be an alternating rhythm of speech and silence: when the operator stops 167
speaking, the pre-recorded speech stops as well, creating silence. When the
operator resumes speaking, the silence is broken not by a single voice, but by the
superimposition of the pre-recorded audio-video speech and the operator’s speech.
The equipment needed for this experiment is the same as for the first
experiment, except that the custom circuit would be slightly different. In practice,
we would make a single circuit with a switch to determine whether the system
would operate in the first, ‘dialogue’ mode, or the second, ‘contradiction’ mode.
The third scenario would involve a more intelligent, though perhaps more unruly,
Mouthpiece (Le porte-parole) unit. The videotape player currently in use would be
replaced by a small computer, and the video and audio would be stored, indexed, and
retrieved digitally. Furthermore, the computer would continuously monitor the signal
on a microphone inside the Mouthpiece (Le porte-parole), and would be hypersensitive
and hyper-responsive to certain words and their configurations through the use of
the voice recognition unit. When it detected one of a set of special words or phrases
(“immigration”, “home”, or “where are you from?” for example), it would trigger a
related video segment on the display. The rhythm of the interaction between the
operator and the pre-recorded material would be ‘more chaotic’ than in the first two
scenarios: at certain times neither source of speech would be active, at others just
one ‘speaker’ would have the floor, and at still other moments both would be active. In
variants of this scenario, the pre-recorded video segments might be triggered by special
words spoken by the interlocutors into an externally mounted microphone, or by either
the operator or the interlocutors. This would lead to still more complex speech rhythms.
This digital video version of the Mouthpiece (Le porte-parole) system might
include a wearable computer, which would be responsible for both the voice
recognition and digital video display. As an example, the Phoenix-2 computer is
based on the Intel 486DX-33 processor, and comes with 680 megabytes of internal
hard disk storage and built-in voice recognition capabilities. This amount of storage
enables it to store substantial amounts of digitized audio-video footage.
To improve the sound quality of the Mouthpiece (Le porte-parole), a low-
frequency speaker could be included as a part of the equipment worn by the
operator, in addition to the medium- and high-frequency speakers already installed
in the Mouthpiece (Le porte-parole). The low-frequency speaker would improve the
perceived sound quality, making the operator’s voice and the pre-recorded material
more understandable. But because the human ear uses only high frequencies to
locate the sources of sounds in space, the presence of this additional low-frequency
speaker would not change the apparent origin of the voice inside the Mouthpiece
(Le porte-parole). This is a well-known and frequently used principle of sound design.
Originally published in Wodiczko, Krzysztof, Critical Vehicles: Writings, Projects,
Interviews, Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1999, pp 122–124.
Interrogative Design
Ægis: Equipment for a City
of Strangers
1998
The Ægis the most recent instrument in my Xenology series, but, unlike previous
instruments like Alien Staff and Mouthpiece (Le porte-parole), it may be freely used
by anyone undergoing alienating experiences, not just immigrants. The ægis was
the cloak of Athena, bearing a Gorgon’s head, that she used to protect herself and
others. The instrument is a piece of equipment designed to represent dual (and
often dueling) truths, those living contradictions that both define, depict, and can
sometimes destroy individual existence. Socrates, himself a stranger in Athens,
appeared in three different roles: technician-teacher, prophet, and truth-teller. The
truth (a-letheia: that which is not to be forgotten; rescued from Lethe, Oblivion)
demands an ethics of “response-ability” that can withstand even the threat of
being silenced. Revealing the complex truth of experience requires showing the
contradictions—that between authenticity and assimilation, or between liberation
of oneself and being bound to or for another. For example, an adequate answer to
the seemingly simple and well-meaning, but ultimately deeply insulting, question,
“Where are you from?” can only be given in the form of a dialogue between
concurrently present images, and can never be achieved without revealing one’s
own contradictions. Perplexity can only be met with complexity. The containers
of these contradictory images require an opener; and the process of disclosure,
opening up—whether through a physical effort on the part of the messenger, some
mechanical device, or, best of all, a sensor that responds to a verbal cue—is the
heart of the Ægis.
The appearance of the stranger, in this new identity wearing and operating
the proposed equipment, resembles that of an angel or prophet. The author of
this project believes that contemporary strangers intentionally or unintentionally
perform an angelic or prophetic mission in today’s migratory and alienating
world. They are messengers of a better world to come as well as critics of the
unacceptable world in which they live. They announce and denounce the world.
They are also discoverers of themselves in the process of disintegration and
becoming, and invite others to join them in this self-exploratory process toward a
Transformative Avant-Garde and Other Writings
new community of difference. I imagine crowds of strangers presenting themselves
in such unsolicited disclosures as they make their way through the city. To help
them do so successfully amidst the stormy interferences of the contemporary
world of communications and media is the purpose of this special psycho-
communications equipment.
Technical Description
The Ægis is composed of a set of two wing-like screens enclosed in a backpack
hanging from the shoulders of its wearer, to be activated by a staff carried by the
wearer. When the wearer is ready to deploy the equipment, the screens will unfold 169
in response to physical, mechanical, or verbal cues (delivered either through
pressure on the staff or words spoken into a microphone, for example) and
simultaneously play pre-recorded video and sound images of the wearer’s face
driven by a laptop computer.
Each of the many sequences will be activated by a specific cue, a given
word or phrase designated in advance by the wearer. A microphone with a voice
recognition system is fitted on the tip of the staff carried by the wearer, with a
small shield to protect from the intrusion of ambient sound.
A more advanced version of Ægis will react to the changing verbal
environment at any given place or time. It will respond to words spoken both by the
wearer and by interlocutors. It will also react to words detected in conversations
occurring around it, as well as any verbal material being disseminated by electronic
media in the area. The voice-recognition system, microphones, and power supply
will be located in the shield-like housing covering the shoulders and chest of the
wearer. This version will be hyper-sensitive and hyper-responsive to certain words
or sentences, and will ‘hear’ and ‘overhear’ preselected speech without regard to
speakers’ intentions or the discursive context. In response to detected words, it
will unfold its wing-like screens and activate their spoken responses automatically,
selectively, and without warning. The investigative argument between the faces
seen and heard on the screens will explore and expose their perplexed and critical
reactions to the word or sentence that triggered the response. The Ægis will
appear as a device, a prosthesis, or a bodily extension that overreacts and behaves
‘inappropriately’, with no ‘self-control’. In order to calm puzzled, amused, or
disturbed interlocutors, the wearer may choose to ‘explain’ to them the ‘symptomatic’
nature of the instrument (as one does on behalf of an unruly child), to switch the
device off (folding and silencing the screens), or to let the Ægis continue speaking.
Preliminary discussions with potential users suggest that the most favored verbal cues
for Ægis wearers revolve around the question “Where are you from?”
Transcript of Preliminary Video Recording, to be Played Simultaneously on
Two Screens of Ægis
Left Screen
Where are you from?
Where are you from?
Where are you from?
Enough!
I don’t want to hear that any more!
Fi-gu-red out!
Interrogative Design
 I don’t want to be figured out. Reconstructed,
Pigeon-holed. Remodeled,
I just don’t, that’s all. Strong.
What if we had met somewhere on a trip around the world, and you asked me, With faith in oneself
“Where are you from?”, and I asked you, “And you?” Because she proved herself in a foreign country.
Fine. Everything in order. We’re in the same boat.
And here Is that me?
You’re on your, your own home ground,
And me from somewhere else. But there’s that tiny nose-tweak.
170 From where, then? “Where are you from?” 171
Am I to explain how I got to your country? Is the building already tottering?
Just a minute—
Can’t this country be my country, too? Right Screen (continued)
Am I supposed to go back where I came from? You recognized my accent,
You shrug. And asked where I was from.
You don’t understand what I mean. Just like that.
So ask, “just like that”,
Right Screen About anything else.
Is that any way to start a conversation? —My shoe size
Where are you from? —Do I like wild strawberries?
I’m from here! I’m me. —Do I have goldfish?
Just like you. But don’t ask,
You’re yourself. “WHERE ARE YOU FROM?”
With your own first and last name. Because that question creates an abyss between us
And it makes me feel
You’re so smart— As tiny
You figured out my accent. As a dwarf
So quick? Next to you.

Where am I from?— And I thought

I’m from outside. I was grown-up.

What good will my answer do you? Do you really

Want to be
Maybe give me a feeling of inferiority. A giant
Next to me?
And you a feeling of superiority.

You’re from here. Originally published in Wodiczko, Krzysztof, Critical Vehicles: Writings, Projects,
Interviews, Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1999, pp 133–136.
Your Highness.
Ægis was developed in the spring of 1999 with the assistance of Adam Whiton,
Left Screen (continued) Sung Ho Kim, and other members and students of the Interrogative Design Group
Settled down. at the Center of Advanced Visual Studies at MIT. Kelly Dobson, Jagoda Przybylak
Pacified. and Jerzy Stypułkowski were consulting xenologists. Steve Weiss of Parallel Inc
Feeling at home. and John Kuntsch of Brooklyn Model Works will collaborate in the fabrication of the
No longer thinking of escaping. final working models of the Ægis. The same team assisted in the development of
Independent, the Mouthpiece (Le porte-parole). This project was supported by the MIT Council
Independent, for the Arts and the School of Architecture and Planning.
And again, independent.

Transformative Avant-Garde and Other Writings Interrogative Design

Dis-Armor
1998
As was the case with the Bushido, ethical integrity in the age of democracy cannot
be attained without the shared sense of a moral code. The goal of the equipment
to be designed is to aid in the enabling and mastering of critical, honest, and
concerned public speech usually concealed behind the masks and armor of proper
social behavior, which keeps private personal experience—a shameful secret—from
becoming a vital contribution to democratic discourse and process. The failure to
develop an ability for openness and criticism creates a feeling there is no room for
honorable private pain in the public sphere, leading to the kinds of self-destruction
often observed among adolescents. This may either take the form of social suicide—
self-exclusion represented by a refusal of the sociality and sociability of school, often
replaced by the alternative society of gangs—or that of the increasingly observed
rises in adolescent criminality, murder, and suicide among teens. An “emotional
democracy” needs to be informed by the equal development of a critical “emotional
literacy” based on a process of individual but passionately shared consciousness-
raising, during which the ‘personal’ is transposed into the ‘historical’ to use Walter
Benjamin’s words, to form the vision of a better future society as a whole.
The project will take advantage of experience accumulated in my previous
work on instruments like Alien Staff and Mouthpiece (Le porte-parole), and
more recently in the ongoing work on Ægis, but also represents an entirely
new field of endeavor. For the first time, an instrument will focus exclusively
on the psycho-social situation of school-age youth, and refer specifically to the
cultural and historical traditions of Japan. The instrument in question will be a
piece of portable equipment that joins the ancient traditions of representation
and mediation. But this Dis-Armor is a new kind of cultural armament, whose
function, perversely enough, is disarming—through the honesty, charm, and
aesthetic elegance and performative virtuosity of the user-wearer. The referent
in question is yoroi, historical Samurai armament and ornament: primarily the
Transformative Avant-Garde and Other Writings
hoshi kabuto, the helmet, with its horns and the horo (silk screen) extended
between them, and the fukikaeshi, helmet flaps, with the shikoro no ita, the
crescent neck-guard, and the sendan no ita and kyubi to ita, the right and left
chest-guards as an additional possibility. It will not be so much a question of
aesthetic parentage or illusion, as of creating a contemporary allusion to a cultural
form so central to Japanese iconography and self-representation. For example,
the tactility and craftsmanship of Samurai yoroi, with its cords and panels,
resembles nothing so much as the mode of fabrication of electronic components,
and antennas and a flat-panel computer screen easily replace the horns of the
helmet and the silk screen of the horo. One historical precedent is the festival 173
known as Hyakumonozoroi Sennin Musya Gyoretsu, which originated in Nikko
to commemorate the first shogun of the Edo period, where children parade with
adults dressed as Samurai. More recently Kunio Ogawara has designed the Zeta
Gundam, a robot-like “extreme machine” that could constitute a playful but
critical opening towards a “humanistic Samurai”, a countervailing force to the
figures school-age children are now modeled into.
Acknowledging our own Samurai-ness is deliberately anachronistic
and contradictory: as a warrior’s code, the Bushido had an ethic with both
individualistic and democratic elements, but within a warrior culture that now
needs to be evaluated and re-evaluated. Furthermore, the demise of Samurai
culture in the last third of the nineteenth century was intimately bound up with the
creation of democratic institutions in Japan, with no small contribution on the part
of Samurai themselves, some of whom launched movements for popular rights
and representative government based on the models disseminated through the
“civilization-and-enlightenment” societies of this period. The proposed equipment
will articulate another historical passage, that of the warrior of the bloody
battlefield, through the warrior-functionary, to the present-day warrior of peace,
responsibility, and honesty, rather than honor alone.
The ethical premise of honor without suicide as a solution to the problem
of being ‘de-classed’ is a thoroughly modern one. The Samurai, however, was
trained for destruction and self-destruction from youth, and remained ever ready
for demotion or death. This new equipment provides an occasion for revising the
outdated aspects of that ethical code and enable an internal psychological and
cultural chitsroku shobun, one which, rather than requiring any form of violence or
violent behavior, challenges and transforms unlivable social realities through public
speech acts that preserve our well-being.
As it was stated earlier, the design of the instrument, and its visual, technical
and ergonomic form will draw inspiration from the upper body components of the
Samurai armor with the greatest focus on the helmet and possibly on some other
components referring to the chest-guard and arm-guards.
The flat panel monitors will most likely be located at the top of the helmet,
or on the sides of the helmet, symbolically referring to the silk screen of the horo
or in a way similar to two horns such as kuwagata, or in another variation to the
‘roll-back’ helmet flaps or fukigaeshi. The other option will be to position those
monitors in the way that arm guards were attached to the body like osode.
In either of the cases proposed above, the flat panel monitor (or the two
flat panel monitors) will mechanically unfold revealing the speaking face(s) of
the user-performer in response to particular words or sentences picked up by
the microphones, the voice recognition unit from the immediate environment
(people speaking among themselves or to the user-performer) or words spoken
Interrogative Design
 by the user-performer herself or himself. The microphone and voice recognition
unit as well as loud-speakers may refer aesthetically to the character of the
ornamentation chest guard of the Samurai warrior.
The project will consist of a minimum of three but preferably five wearable
instruments. Each of the proposed instruments will be equipped with small laptop
computers similar to the type currently proposed by Sony, with detached flat
panel monitors as well as speakers, microphones, and the voice recognition unit.
The voice recognition unit and microphone will be a triggering device
controlling the operation of the computer whose memorized, pre-recorded
174 program (voice and image of the face of the user) will be visible on the screens of
the flat panel monitors as well as heard from the loudspeakers.
The user-performer, a school student, will need to develop an ability
(through the process of trial and error), to speak and to record on video his or
her personal statements, recollections and responses, as well as selected key
words which will trigger the public broadcast of the recorded material during the
performance. The process of selecting, recording and editing of the these words
will need to be emotionally protected by the understanding, trust, and generosity
of the teacher, the psychologist, the artist, and of a person operating the camera
and assisting with the digital editing process.
Originally published in Takeshi, Matsuoka and Toshiya Echizen, The 4th
Hiroshima Prize: Krzysztof Wodiczko, exh cat, Hiroshima: Hiroshima City Museum
of Contemporary Art, 1999, pp 174–175.
Transformative Avant-Garde and Other Writings
Open Transmission
2000
The city operates as a monumental stage and a script in the theater of our way
of life, perpetuating our preconceived and outdated notions of identity and
community, preserving the way we relate to each other and the way we perceive
others and ourselves. An intense presence of historic monuments, advertising,
communication media and urban events merge with our own daily personal
performance into one uniform aesthetic practice that dangerously secures the
continuity of ‘our’ culture. Media art, performance art, performative design: they
must interfere with these everyday aesthetics if they wish to contribute ethically
to a democratic process.
They must interrupt the continuity of existing social relations and
perceptions that are well entrenched in the theater of the city. Such arts, using
the words of Simon Critchley in Ethics of Deconstruction, should “interrupt the
polis in the name of what it excludes and marginalizes”. To preserve democracy
one must challenge it; one must challenge its symmetry with an asymmetry of
ethical responsibility.
The issue of sharing a permanent presence with other people has already
been raised. Permanent presence, or the presence of the other, suggests
establishing some kind of communication with another party in order to cross
barriers, walls, distances; or breaking down the alienation or estrangement
between two different groups. Yet there has not been much said about the actual
world in which we live. It would be a great delusion to assume everyone is in
an equal position to share, to open up towards the other, to communicate his
or her own presence and existence, to learn from somebody else’s experience
and to accept the presence of the other. This is definitely not the case today, in
an era which has been called by the United Nations the “migration era”: an era
of international xenophobia or a fear of the other. This is also an era of uneven
social relations affected by uneven urban development; an era of urban struggles,
Interrogative Design
 of survival through resistance as in the situation of the homeless or of street
children born into poverty, hopelessness, violence; or of people who live with HIV
infection, and many other marginalized and alienated individual beings, groups
and populations. These people are definitely not in a position to share or even
make their experience publicly known.
If we are talking about technology then we must also think about
communications technology. What is the position of communications technologies
in the troubled communications breakdown that we are experiencing today? If we
are so divided, then what is the meaning of an interactive situation between me
176 and somebody else in order to work together, communicate or share things? If
new forms of alienation are emerging today, forms that are yet to be discovered
and studied, that’s where I see the relation between ethics and aesthetics and
technology. The more clearly I see it the more dissatisfied I am with my own
work, which definitely still needs to absorb a lot of issues. I realize how behind I
am in terms of the technological options we have, and the great possibilities that
are there. When I speak with my colleagues in the Media Lab at MIT, I realize
how late I came into the field of technology. There is already a new generation
of people (especially undergraduate students) who are much better equipped
at programming than are graduates or researchers. There is an incredible gap
between those opportunities and the new responsibilities that they bring. It is
in this situation that I am trying to present my work, which will perhaps inspire
younger people to push it much further. I am trying to catch up with them—and
they are hopefully trying to catch up with me—in this area of art and technological
ethics: an ethics of cyborgs, an ethics of interactive environments and so on.
The problems that are at the center of my work as a designer are: how to
confront the communication gap, and the absence of, or the need for, something
in-between our strangeness is a strangely familiar secret, an uncanny condition
which, when kept in the ideological cave of our subjectivity, can explode against
the presence of the actual stranger. For those in transit, the state of being a
stranger accumulates as an experience with no form, language, expression,
or rights to be communicated. It thus becomes a dangerous psychic symptom,
which Julia Kristeva has called the “condition of the migrant”. Between the
speechless pain and despair of the actual stranger, and the repressed fear of
one’s own strangeness, lies the real frontier to be challenged. Can art operate
as a revelatory, expressive and interrogative passage to such a frontier? Can
it be an inspiration of, a provocation to and an opening act for a new form of
communication, a new form for a non-xenophobic community? Can it provide an
iconic object, a symbolic environment, an interface, with which to create or design
such a reconstructive psycho-cultural project? The stranger is not equipped to
deal with this framing, colonizing, intimidating gaze. Nor is he in any position even
to accept his own experience of crossing and trespassing, of the whole process
of ethical and political survival, of living through it all and opening it up to find the
form and the language to present it, expose it, announce it to others who are not
open to hear it.
So some equipment, some ‘thing’ in-between him and himself is needed,
first as a kind of psychological object, a new form of what DW Winnicott might
call a “transitional object”: an object that will allow him to play and achieve
a distance, perhaps even an ironic distance, from the painful and impossible
experience, in order to stand behind or next to his own experience and somehow
open it up to the non-stranger. The non-stranger needs the object as well. For
Transformative Avant-Garde and Other Writings
they cannot confront the presence of a stranger any more than they can confront
their own strangeness, which is well repressed and hidden in their unconscious.
They would prefer to expel the stranger, rather than accept him and thereby
recognize their own strangeness. If, however, there was some kind of strange
object between this person and them, they would focus on the strangeness of
the object first, somehow putting aside for a moment the presence of a stranger.
Perhaps in this intermediate moment, through this intermediate object, they
might more easily come to terms with some kind of story or story-telling, some
kind of performative experience, some kind of artifice, something artificial enough
for them to accept the reality in a step-by-step way. I think that’s what Freud and 177
Julia Kristeva meant when they were hoping for an artifice to help people come
to terms with ‘uncanny’ strangeness. Of course they would want to establish a
playful distance from their own fears through an artifact. That object does not
yet exist; or rather, I have not yet managed to construct one successfully. I only
attempted to do so and this is an experiment which probably will last quite a
long time.
Such an experiment is a risk worth taking. The city is worth nothing if it is
not open to strangers or the estranged. Technology or design is worth nothing
if it cannot create such an opening. Each time the experience of a stranger is
understood and heard, each time such acts occur, the city wakes up and comes
back to life. It brings back hope for all of us if the city is a place of hope for the
stranger. To heal one estranged speechless soul in the city is to heal the entire
city. My role is to contribute to a therapy for the city and for its speechless actors.
The instruments that I design are an attempt to do this. My interests in psychology
and technology merge as they do at MIT; but somehow social ethics is not yet a
powerful component in this merger. At MIT my role is to bring this component as
a part of my art and my design.
My first experiment was a very simple attempt to re-actualize so-called
‘primitive’ technology. A walking stick, the ancient technology of the transient,
the messenger, a migrant or a prophet—a staff with specially-designed code of
interchangeable carvings—could become a symbolic inscription for migratory
experience. For example, being deported (expelled from a new country) three
times would be articulated through three forms attached to the staff; or if
someone spent one year in transitional camps, or someone worked illegally for
a year or two, those things could be carved or sculpted on the staff. Of course,
that idea needed to be abandoned very quickly since all of the Departments of
Immigration—which are de facto Departments of Anti-Immigration—would have
learned very quickly about this ‘secret’ code, and no immigrant would risk using
such a walking stick openly.
At the top of this walking stick, called the Alien Staff, 1992, there was a
video monitor and a loudspeaker which would represent the speaking face and
the voice of the stranger. Using this walking speech-act instrument, a stranger, a
story-teller, would feel he or she was perceived as a respectful and articulate actor
in today’s urban landscape. In this way the stranger could be reinforced by his or
her Le porte-parole (spokesperson), as a companion, a confidant. There would
now be two of them: the stranger as a character and as an actor. The pre-recorded
and well-edited speech—the story-telling—could be broadcast with the comically
disturbing presence and speech of the actual person who recorded it. The relation
between the stranger, his or her media image and anybody on the street—the
interlocutors—would possibly create a complicated discourse in which the stranger
Interrogative Design
 could disagree with what was pre-recorded, because every time the story-teller
speaks, the story would be different. The interlocutor could then ask questions
related to the lower part of the Alien Staff—the history of displacement inscribed
there—and the third person would come and start responding to the discourse
with larger questions, questioning the questions, questioning the discourse and
speaking on behalf of ‘we’ rather than only ‘me’ and the ‘other’. This would create
a political, critical and ethical field where both the interlocutor and the stranger,
by referring to what was pre-recorded and what was broadcast, could actually
take up an external and critical position to it. At the next stage of the experiment,
178 I realized that I needed to replace the carvings of the lower part of the Alien
Staff with interchangeable transparent containers: containers for sacred relics,
important documents, and objects of historical value for the stranger. The stranger
is treated, and at best tolerated, as someone who does not have a history and must
use story-telling, magic, song and other forms of performance and entertainment to
insert his or her own history into the official culture; to propose himself or herself
as a history. The issue is, what kind of history? The history of the time before
crossing the border, or the history of the time after crossing the border—and I am
emphasizing the history after one has crossed the border—that is, the history of the
entire population, society or nation. This history is a performative kind of story that
will eventually be distorted and absorbed by the grand, national mythology and the
city’s monumental narrative, only to be challenged again later by another stranger.
The recollection of past experience infused by the present in part creates
a completely new history of the present, a critical history of the present. If I go
through all the miseries of the past five or ten years, I must reuse them to imagine
that this is going to continue; that the future is going to perpetuate that misery
for myself and for my children. Therefore I—an immigrant and a stranger—am
announcing what is wrong today. My utopia is based on a refusal to accept the
place in which I am—a new concept of ‘no place’—­as utopia. Utopia—that is a
place that is unacceptable; and the hope that is born from this unacceptable
experience is extrapolated into the future as another side of this utopia—so that
the future will not repeat the injustices and catastrophes of the present and of the
past. This concept of recollection, or remembrance, of critical re-actualization and
critical history, is located somewhere in-between Friedrich Nietzsche and Walter
Benjamin. According to Stéphane Mosès, Benjamin suggested that the process
of progress should be replaced by the process of remembrance and recollection.
His utopia was functioning as the hope lived by the mode of the present, rather
than as a projection of an ultimate social solution. I understand all immigrants
as prophets, as prophetic peoples who through their disturbing performance and
recollection of their present experience are each day announcing a better world
for all of us. “The Messiah interrupts history”, says Benjamin.
A Polish exile living in Brooklyn who went through hell working day and
night without documents and as a slave, as a domestic laborer, for a woman, the
oppressor. The exile had no choice, terrorized to the point where she entertained
the idea of committing suicide, or giving up the job and going back to Poland, all
of which were equally impossible solutions for her. She survived this but she kept
it to herself or to be precise, to her unconscious. She never really spoke about
all of this with anybody. When I suggested this instrument to her she rejected
the possibility of ‘using it’ on the spot. Mentally she needed “to destroy” this
instrument—the Alien Staff—in order to later accept it step-by-step and perhaps
in the end even to become addicted to it. At first it was a perplexed reaction on
Transformative Avant-Garde and Other Writings
her part. She rejected this project and at the same time she was allured by the
possibility of exposing the history of her experience to a world ignorant of it.
She also felt a need to share this with somebody, as well as with herself
and even with her own consciousness. The process of video recording—of
recalling details, trying to find documents and other relics, editing the story,
translating very often from one language to another, speaking in two languages
to the video camera—finally began. The same stories are different when spoken
in different languages and on different days. To put it together, to concretize it
in some synthetic way, is also to release the incredible load of speechless pain
and responsibility for carrying all of this inside as a secret, as a uselessly hidden 179
testimony to truth. Once the story is next to her, her strangeness is estranged
from her in a healthy way; she sees and hears it now at a distance. She can
know now that her anger and alienation are contained there (the psychological
container is important here) and now she can be open. She can be very polite,
she can negotiate between herself, her pre-recorded double, the other person and
the third person. She can also reserve her right to disagree with her double—her
Alien Staff—at any time. As one rabbinical scholar said: “The one who believes the
story is a fool but the one who denies the story is a wicked non-believer.”
It is a myth that immigrants can understand each other. In fact there is a
world of disagreement and antagonism between them as much as there is a world
of disagreement and antagonism inside of each immigrant. The boundaries and
de-militarized zones inside the mind of the migrant are in the process of shifting;
they are unstable, so in a way the possibility of internal conflict is as close as the
possibility of external conflict among the different ethnic groups, and of course
between each of them as individuals and the rest of society as well. This is why I
am thinking that the Alien Staff can be expanded and absorb more contemporary
technology, allowing strangers—their operators—to communicate with each
other when they ‘broadcast’ and speak. At the same time they could provide
a communication service as social aid for the larger immigrant population and
everybody else, assuming that, for example, some of the immigrant operators
would become agents or ‘angels’ (l’ange ou l’agent), or messengers who could then
visit or explore different areas of the city where immigrants live. Such angels would
not only open up their own experience using the Alien Staff but also establish trust
(play and trust are interconnected according to Winnicott) to such a point that they
could then transmit back and forth questions and advice. The questions would
usually be legal ones, but could also be ethical ones directed to the communication
base (the xenological base run by xenologists: immigrant experts on displacement),
existential philosophers and legal advisers. Such an Alien Staff as a network is
probably a very important option since many of the immigrants are not in any
psychological, economic and social position to seek help or advice on their own and
take advantage of their rights, if they still have any.
Versions of the Alien Staff were used in Barcelona, Warsaw, Helsinki,
Stockholm, Rotterdam, Houston, New York, Boston, Marseilles, Paris—used
by many people in many places even though there are only six of them. They can
be shared and their containers and videotapes are interchangeable. Confidence
is a very important result of many of the conflicts, once one is prepared to
open up within the situation of the studio. A video camera is very patient. But
then to accept this is another story. Once all of this is accepted it opens a new
possibility: of thinking about one’s own identity and participating in an experience
and a life that is much richer, much more complex, than is the case for those
Interrogative Design
 who never cross the borders. Then confidence and respect become a motivation there are electric sensors being used here. This means that hand gestures towards
for an action, or a speech-act, which is much more critical and demanding or each container can speed up speech ‘switching’ on the particular story related to
provocative. It might perhaps reach the point, as in one particular case, where the particular personal relics. It can modulate in a variety of ways to make it more or
person is invited to a TV station and appears on the national news. On occasions less hysterical, comical or strange, depending on the virtuosity that is demanded
(and it has already happened twice), immigrants appeared on the official TV on the part of the stranger—a performative virtuosity. Those metal components
screen armed with their personal televisions, with both virtual and actual well- are actually functioning sensors; all of this technology was developed in the
prepared statements, stories and visions. 1930s by the Russian inventor Leon Theremin who invented an electronic musical
So those are the three models historically lined up. The next generation instrument named after him and operated by gestures. The Media Lab at MIT has
of immigrant instruments, called Mouthpiece or Le porte-parole, is not for further developed this system using new minicomputers, programs and microchip
180 everybody—but only for those who really want to use it. This is not an artifice technology in this and other new instruments to increase performative quality. 181
positioned next to the stranger. This is a cultural prosthesis which can help the Story-telling will become new art and new craft. It took many months for Joshua
stranger him or herself to become a powerful artifice, perhaps a cyborg. This Smith of the Media and Physics Group at MIT to complete the program for this
equipment is to be used by those who are extremely angry and determined instrument. I realize only now how long it takes to work with this new technology
to speak. But also by people that feel more ‘cyborgian’ than others. A cyborg and new research. Two years is a very short time when it comes to programming
is a cybernetic organism, a hybrid of machine and organism—a creature of and experimenting with new interactive equipment. So I am behind my schedule!
social reality as well as a creature of fiction. Social reality is linked to social But the new instrument, the new Alien Staff responds with its stories and their
relations, our most important social construction, and to the world of change variations to many gestures already. The Prophet’s Prosthesis is coming soon!
and technological development where, as Donna Haraway said, the “distinction
between science fiction and social reality is an optical illusion”. On this basis the
immigrant is, in fact, partially artificial and partially natural. It is also possible Based on a lecture given at the ICA, London and originally published in Read,
to say that once one becomes or is forced to operate this way, then maybe, as Alan, Architecturally Speaking: Practices of Art, Architecture and the Everyday,
Haraway said, “de-humanization is so inevitable that we might as well learn to like London: Routledge, 2000, pp 87–107.
it”. If we can.
Of course, the emphasis here is a prosthetic device. A prosthetic device
is not only like an additional part or a replacement for a lost body-part, but also
empowers or extends the ability of a human or an animal. In this sense the
cyborg analogy is very close to the experience of migrants, and, as Haraway
also suggested, to women and other groups that are marginalized, silenced and
oppressed. There is no way back to the ‘lost land’ or ‘paradise’. In the proposed
Mouthpiece (Le porte-parole) the combination of the deprivation of rights—speech
rights—and the reinforcement of speech ability is ironic enough to let us find some
kind of analogy to Haraway’s concept of the cyborg, which she called an “ironic
metaphor”. This gag—this loudspeaker like a cyborg—takes irony for granted.
These are my hopes and my ideas. My design and organizational projections
have not begun to materialize yet, but more and more is possible. Right now at MIT
we are experimenting with a version of the new Alien Staff that further develops
the possibilities for artistic virtuosity. Gesture is, of course, a very important part
of what is happening around this ‘sacred object’. Strangers assume “Baroque
personalities” according to Kristeva: overemphasizing things, accentuating, full
of gestures, in order to compensate for the lack of adequate communication
and abilities. And ‘locals’ seem to be immobile, completely opposite, making no
attempt even to exchange a gesture. As the stranger becomes a non-stranger,
the non-stranger must become the stranger, and somewhere half-way a new
communication, a new community, is possible. In the new version of Alien
Staff, the original antenna is probably not necessary but is an ‘ambient’ and
important symbol of the possibility of a transmission between or among each of
the instruments and the base. The larger form of the head of this instrument is
to do with the need to reinforce sound via the large speaker, which can be more
effective in an urban environment. Also new containers are being tested, so one
could show or conceal what is inside: there are two options. But most importantly

Transformative Avant-Garde and Other Writings Interrogative Design

Monument/
Projection

Proposal for a public projection at Place de La République, 2000

Democracy/Avant-Garde
I Want to be a Catalyst
an intervi e w wit h Wil lia m Fu r lo n g
1988
William Furlong: Krzysztof, there seem to be two primary characteristics to your
projected works. First, there is the way in which you engage with the specific
meanings of a piece of architecture. Second, you present your works outside a
visual arts context, so that you are making an intervention into the real world, to
put it simply, and people without art knowledge are encountering the works you
make. Could you expand on the sorts of relationships that you are interested in with
particular reference to the Calton Hill project?
Krzysztof Wodiczko: The structure we are discussing is the skeleton of the front
on the unfinished temple which was to be a monument to those who participated
in the Napoleonic campaign—one could say the victims of this blood bath of
history. In many ways I think it works better being unfinished as it forces visitors
to the hill to work to complete their own vision or to project meaning on to an
unfinished symbolic structure. This is much more difficult than projecting a
mental image onto a completed monument. The city is experiencing an extremely
difficult period of urban crisis, visible, at least to those who are interested to see
and understand it, in most of the cities in northern England, Scotland and Ireland.
They are in some ways similar to what we see in the US or in the third-world
countries. This Edinburgh—not the official image of Edinburgh—should somehow
become visible. This is not to say that I am capable of transmitting, with any
precision, an alternative image containing all the critical issues related to the
survival of different groups—the homeless, drug users and addicts, people with
the aids virus, single parents, all the young in those bed and breakfast hotels,
abused groups like women and those who are victims of violence or who are in
prisons—but what I can do is at least try to challenge or question the detachment
of symbolic structures on this hill from what is happening around it. Let us bring a
sign or maybe a gesture, an iconic symbol, and juxtapose it with the architecture,
with the facade of this unfinished monument; maybe in some way, in a temporary
Transformative Avant-Garde and Other Writings
fashion, complete this unfinished adventure or architectural enterprise through a
symbolic act.
WF: So you want to expand the issue beyond the immediate piece of architecture
you are working with to the notion of site and of how a site can relate to the
resonance of what is around it. The Calton Hill site overlooks the city and in that
sense the site is seen to engage with the social, economic, cultural, political and
historic issues that are part of the resonance of the city.
KW: It is surrounded by those issues, but it is distant. It creates a platform,
a deck; reflective but distant.
WF: In a way, then, what you are attempting to do is to bring all of those notions 185
together through your work. The work becomes a sort of catalyst for those issues.
KW: Yes, I just want to be a catalyst or to provide an entry. I want people to talk
to each other in front of this projection. I would like the representatives of those
different groups to whom this hill belongs, including tourists, to start asking
questions and maybe some explanations or descriptions could be exchanged. In
addition, I hope that some of the groups or some very active individuals who are
running alternative programs—inner city social programs—will also come and
maybe distribute their information and leaflets. I won’t mind this. I would actually
like this to happen.
WF: In a way the work would set up another sort of map of the city, an authentic
one, which is much more concerned with the reality of everyday existence. I suppose
what you are really talking about is authenticity in terms of the experience of what a
city such as Edinburgh represents.
KW: It is an interruption of the spectacle. Maybe not with a counter spectacle,
as it is very hard for me to compete with the Edinburgh Festival—especially the
illumination of the city—but the form of disturbance will itself be spectacular in
some way. One also has to see that the city is already an event in itself and there
are events which project themselves on to those structures without my work. It is
just a matter of, perhaps, helping to concretize them visually and concentrating
attention, in maybe a synthetic way, in selected sites. In New York, for example,
the homeless now number 100,000. Their habitat is usually sites and monuments
representing, or at least produced to commemorate, acts of individuals or groups
to secure liberty, civil liberties, the pursuit of happiness, individual freedom,
or economic rights for all. The US was formed on the basis of those ideals.
Here we have Washington, Lafayette, we have Lincoln—statues surrounded by
homeless people who live there and who, even worse, actually look similar to those
sculptures. The possibility of connecting frozen gesture and body cracked through
changing weather conditions, dirt and pollution with the homeless individual
is there. Yet there is a gross contradiction between them—a similarity and
contradiction. They should not be together, yet they are bound to exist together.
For a project in Boston, then, I projected actual bodies of homeless individuals
onto the bodies of those historic figures. The city’s Civil War memorial became a
memorial to the contemporary civil war. Now I cannot really be as precise on Calton
Hill because although it is a fantastic site there are not structures like that. Here I
will have to be a little more abstract—more indirect.
WF: Yes I understand what you mean. In a way, by also working outdoors you are
using meanings that are already in place. It’s as though people are already aware of
part of the work but the work itself creates a focus for those issues and concerns.
It is not as though you are taking something from outside and imposing it. It is very
much a part of a set of codes or emblems or myths that we all know about.
Monument/Projection
 KW: It is not like psychoanalytical work on architecture, trying to reveal what Memorial Projection
it contains. It is really a projection of a new context onto those monuments, in
some ways forcing them to speak in new terms or to accept meanings and not 1986
only to accept, but also to articulate this meaning. They cannot really be forced
to say everything I would like them to speak about. I have to accept the way the
bodies are formed and the way their speech is limited. In that sense I have to
work seriously with the architectural form, but there is no necessity to include the
whole history of the meaning of that architecture, although if it could refer to that
history it would be even better.
186 WF: That is interesting, because when we last spoke in 1985 you were using the
architecture of Nelson’s Column and the Duke of York’s monument in London much
more specifically than you seem to be doing now. In fact now you have broadened
your approach to encompass the notion of the site, its resonances, and the way in
which the issues that surround the site can be articulated through the work.
KW: This is a reflection of the transformation of my own work and a shift of focus. But
still all the elements of this work are there. It is just as you mentioned, the accent is more
placed on what is happening around it. More and more, the work is attached to the
urban environment as a whole and less to particular architectural sites.
WF: The way you are talking about your current works is as though you are much
more concerned with making a social intervention, an engagement.
KW: Yes. Perhaps here I should mention another project which has nothing to do
with light and night. It is an attempt to design and manufacture, in a non-mass-
scale way, a series of tools that are instruments of survival for the homeless
in New York. Design objects function very well as communicative structures, Demonstrations! Clashes! Rallies! Voluntary and involuntary assemblies! Battles!
especially in the middle-class consumer culture. The idea is to introduce highly Events pregnant with far-reaching consequences!
articulate, mobile, functional objects, but ones which articulate things people Surprisingly seized by these social and political outbreaks, the old memorial
don’t want to see; which confront the attempt, on the part of the non-homeless, has no choice but to accept its new role and meaning as a revolutionary site.
to erase the existence of the homeless as living and working individuals, reducing To legitimize its historical indispensability during crowded, dramatic, and risky
them to the status of rubbish or a part of the architectural environment—a moments, the crafty monument must welcome and accommodate the optimistic
static one, a monumental one. It might be quite effective, especially if the and full-blooded events cankering into its skeptical, pale, and wrinkled facade.
‘functionalism’ of those objects was revealed. The condition of an individual who If the memorial were to allow itself any resentment or disrespect toward
is intelligent and capable, and is using all his abilities to, for example, collect these events, they would forcefully and mercilessly impose themselves upon it.
bottles, cans or other objects to sell in order to earn a minimum income, is almost Such meaning-forcing acts would be carried out either by physical destruction of
like the lowest degree of enterprise in this highly individualized consumer world. the memorial or, in a worse and more pathetic case, by cultural abandonment,
Yet it also provides an opportunity for those homeless to form a collective habitat. exposing the now-absurd-in-remaining-there poor structure to its shameful and
Architecture and design cannot liberate anyone but can certainly transmit—if they prolonged death from de-signification.
are critical—the real conditions of existence and maybe help people to survive State celebrations... tourism... free entertainment... health and recreation.
better. So this symbolic object might be a clue for a different type of aesthetic The newly erected memorial was an ideological creation of the post-
practice. This is still really the same as an intervention upon an environment. eventful state, which did not camouflage but, quite the reverse, exhibited outright
throughout its entire site its joyless, deadly, and heavy duty: the duty of the emotional
consolidation of the myth of the event as embodying official public value. The
Originally published in Bickers, Patricia and Andrew Wilson, Talking Art 1: Art previously respectful distance (‘historical perspective’) of the memorial from everyday
Monthly Interviews with Artists since 1976, London: Ridinghouse and Art Monthly, life is now being broken. Cold, tombstone benches, regimenting, mountainous
2007, pp 286–289. stairways, brainwashing fountains, architortured bushes, and windswept floors were
intended to banish unofficial life from the memorial’s territory.
Today, the authorities want to add life and ‘social function’ to the memorial
site, to turn it into a ‘humanized’ place for cultural relaxation, a zone of free
festivity, tourism, permanent recreation, and so-called art in public places.
Misattracted by refurbishing and by trivial cultural ‘events’, the confused public
must now learn how to live closer to the obscene necro-ideology of memorial

Transformative Avant-Garde and Other Writings Monument/Projection

 icons, the naked, cold bodies of the monumentally frozen goddesses, gods, and
heroes of our glorious massacres of humanity.
In extreme cases of life-with-memorial, the public will enter into very close,
intimate, psycho-political relations with memorial architecture, which can then
lead to disastrous neuropatriotic reactions.
Thus administered by the department of ‘parks’ and ‘recreation’,
submerged in newly planted vegetation and tranquilized by bureaucratically
guaranteed positive social reception, the relaxed memorial continues more
effectively than ever its unchallenged ideological life.
188
Father
The son’s unsuccessful rebellion was not aimed against the legal rules and moral,
republican guidelines. The rebellion was against the father’s absolute sexual,
political, and social control. David’s fathers, Brutus and the Horatii, serve as
the monumental lesson on the system of the patrio-patriarchate as well as the
ultimate social definition of the form of the father’s body: the imperturbable,
unshaken, inflexible, sober-minded, sexless and lifeless, silent, cold, odorous
with death, ghastly pale (all blood transfused to the State’s disposal), tired but
powerful and self-disciplined, disciplining structure. The body of an unmoving
father, barricading vast social territory, creates heavy traffic; the traffic which the
father will then regulate himself. His lifelessness will regulate life; his sexlessness
wants to castrate.
The spirit of David’s model body continues to live its imaginary existence in
the bodies of fathers and in all structures built by them. At the cost of their own
aliveness, their repressed particular bodies must continuously supply life-power
to their monumental bodies as memorials to themselves-as-patriarchs. Thus the
body of the memorial, erected in the name of a particular father and a particular
war, carries out an eternal ideological mission to symbolically secure and
‘historically’ legitimize the perpetuation of the ghastly double myth; the myth of a
patriarch as a great, heroic father and that of the war as a sacred, noble sacrifice.
Picture
Where else can one take one’s own camera and one’s own son for a walk?
Only in the atmosphere of ‘nature’ and the environment of ‘history’
can the enjoyment of a walk be sanctioned: a meaningful family pastime, the
amusement instructive, the chat memorable, the picture-taking purposeful.
While I mimic the memorial’s grand gestures, the loud click of my father’s
camera freezes my body. This sound serves as a signal of formal encouragement
of, if not applause for, bravado.
His busy movements are similar to the merciless procedures of land
triangulation. Following photographic strategy for a full-scale survey, he
repeatedly runs across the memorial grounds, moves from one shooting position
to another, changes the vast battery of camera lenses suspended from his body,
compensates for the difference of their focal lengths by short runs back and forth.
Following his sniper desperation for perfecting a shooting position (as if it were
a real combat operation), he will suddenly fall flat on the flagstone or gravel, go
down on his knees, squat, hop or jump over branches, flowerbeds, and fountains.
But the real reward is yet to come: the shiny color pictures and bright slides. It
is, of course, too early to imagine which particular pose of my body, juxtaposed
with which parts of the memorial body, will please my father the most. Only the
Transformative Avant-Garde and Other Writings
picture itself will tell. If Mother approves it, the family-memorial-picture will be
selected and find its place on a prominent page of the official family album.
Memorial
Frolicking, making faces and excessive gestures, running, and climbing, every
height is somehow less restricted here than bodily conduct there, on the street, at
school, at home, in church, shopping center, cemetery, zoo, post office.
To straddle its knees; to ride its imperial lions bareback; to slide down
along their bronze, monstrously long, thick hair; to climb the shining tangles of
their tense muscles. Suddenly, and again, a familiar click of Father’s camera 189
interrupts my journey... yet I continue traversing the edge of the bases of all four
grand bas-reliefs as if nothing at all has happened. With my stomach and chest
adhering to the sharp shapes of their belts, holsters, buttons, and insignias, I
continue clothing myself in their uniforms, arming and equipping myself with their
rifles, bayonets, grenades, and packs. I learn through my fingers and cheek, letter
by letter, sign by sign, emblem by emblem, all the lessons there are to learn. I
sculpt myself through the recesses, nooks, and corners of the halfway-liberated
form, halfway-rooted into its flesh, its permanently thrown-out chests, heroic
bodies, and corpses.
Assuming their poses and gestures, my body grasps their heroic style.
Synchronizing the focus and direction of my gaze with the position of their blank
stare, I see....
Projection
The aim of the memorial projection is not to ‘bring life to’ or ‘enliven’ the memorial
nor to support the happy, uncritical, bureaucratic “socialization” of its site, but to
reveal and expose to the public the contemporary deadly life of the memorial. The
strategy of the memorial projection is to attack the memorial by surprise, using
slide warfare, or to take part in and infiltrate the official cultural programs taking
place on its site.
In the latter instance, the memorial projection will become a double
intervention: against the imaginary life of the memorial itself, and against the
idea of social-life-with-memorial as uncritical relaxation. In this case, where the
monumental character of the projection is bureaucratically desired, the aim of
the memorial projection is to pervert this desire monumentally.
Originally published as a section of the essay “Public Projections”, October,
no 38, winter 1986, pp 4­–10.
Monument/Projection
Public Projection
1983
Motto
It’s not a matter of emancipating truth from every system of power (which
would be a chimera, for truth is already power) but of detaching the power
of truth from the forms of hegemony, social, economic and cultural, within
which it operates at the present time.
Michel Foucault, “Truth and Power”, 1977
The Body
We are looking at the multiple sites of its body, and at the shapes of its external
organs: the colonnades, porticos, domes, helmets, arches, columns, pilasters,
pediments, stairs, doors, windows.... Attracted by its appearance, we begin to
gravitate around its body. Gazing, viewing, observing, and staring, we are trying
to fathom its mysterious grammar. Standing face to face with the front, pacing
along the facade, touring all of the elevations of its vast structure, we are being
transformed into the mediums of a gigantic cultural séance. We are being drawn
into the magnetic field of its architectural appeal and symbolic influence.
The Aura
Crossing the monstrous shade of its elevation, we are halted by the blow of
a cool wind cruising around the corners of its lofty massif. As we approach
its body, we are confronted by an intimate and protective warmth radiating
through the walls, wings, and open doors, confused with the heavy breath
of the airconditioning ventilators.
We feel desire to identify with or to become part of the building. We
recognize the familiarity of the building, like that of our own body. We feel a
drive to ‘complete’ the building and we desire to be ‘completed’ by it. We sense
that there is something about us which is incomplete, and which can only be
completed by a full integration with the building.
Transformative Avant-Garde and Other Writings
Superficially, we resent the authority of its massive monumental structure.
We rebel against a tyranny of its deaf, motionless, immortal walls; yet, in our heart of
hearts, we not only allow ourselves to be outwitted by an academic methodicalness
of the hierarchical order, by its charm, the loftiness of its parts, and the harmony
of its proportional body, but, more dangerously, we allow ourselves to become
intoxicated and seduced by its structural ability to embody and to grasp artistically
our intimate, unspoken drive for a disciplined collaboration with its power.
Social Body
Its body is both individual and social; its harmony is based upon the same 191
discipline, governing a totality of relationships of the whole structure to the
parts and of each part to the other. This embodies and physically represents
the concept of the organization of a utopian society in the form of a disciplined-
disciplining body, allowing for both the multidirectional flow of power and the
controlled circulation of the individual bodies.
The Father
In the process of our socialization the very first contact with a public building is no
less important than the moment of social confrontation with the father, through
which our sexual role and place in society are constructed. Early socialization
through patriarchal sexual discipline is extended by the later socialization through
the institutional architecturalization of our bodies.
Thus the spirit of the father never dies, continuously living as it does
in the building which was, is, and will be embodying, structuring, mastering,
representing, and reproducing his ‘eternal’ and ‘universal’ presence as a
patriarchal wisdom-body of power.
The Medium
The building is not only an institutional “site of the discourse of power”, but, more
importantly, it is a meta-institutional, spatial medium for the continuous and
simultaneous symbolic reproduction of both the general myth of power and the
individual desire for power.
For these purposes, the building is ‘sculptured’ to operate as an aesthetic
structure, thus assisting in the process of inspiring and symbolically concretizing
(reflecting) our mental projections of power.
Social Effect
The prime occupation of the building is to remain still, to be rooted permanently
to the ground, abstaining from any visible movement.
This static occupation—annexation of time and territory—creates both a
dynamic and a somnambulistic social effect. The ‘aura’ of the unmoving building
hypnotically animates and sustains our ritualistic movement around its body.
Circulating around and between the buildings, we cannot stop moving. We
are unable to concentrate and focus on their bodies. This establishes an absent-
minded relation to the building, an unconscious contact, a passive gaze.
By imposing our permanent circulation, our absent-minded perception,
by ordering our gaze, by structuring our unconscious, by embodying our desire,
masking and mythifying the relations of power, by operating under the discreet
camouflage of a cultural and aesthetic ‘background’, the building constitutes an
effective medium and ideological instrument of power.
Monument/Projection
 The Method of Projection
We must stop this ideological ‘ritual’, interrupt this journey-in-fiction, arrest
the somnambulistic movement and restore public focus, a concentration of the
building and its architecture. What is implicit about the building must be exposed
as explicit; the myth must be visually concretized and unmasked. The absent-
minded, hypnotic relation with architecture must be challenged by a conscious
and critical public discourse, taking place in front of the building.
Public visualization of this myth can unmask the myth, recognize it
‘physically’, force it to the surface, and hold it visible, so that the people on the
192 street can observe and celebrate its final formal capitulation.
This must happen at the very place of myth, on the site of its production,
on its body—the building.
Only physical, public projection of the myth onto the physical body of myth
(projection of myth on myth) can successfully de-mythify the myth.
The look, the appearance, the costume, the mask of the buildings is the most
valuable and expensive investment. In the power discourse of the ‘public’ domain,
the architectural form is the most secret and protected property.
Public projection involves questioning both the function and the ownership
of this property.
In defending the “public as the communal” against the “public as the private”, the
projection reveals and is effected by the political contradiction of the culture of capitalism.
As private property, the architectural appearance is well protected by the
police, the guards, and the city bylaws.
The attack must be unexpected, frontal, and must come with the night,
when the building, undisturbed by its daily functions, is asleep and when its body
dreams of itself, when the architecture has its nightmares.
This will be a symbol-attack, a public psycho-analytical séance, unmasking
and revealing the unconscious of the building, its body, the ‘medium’ of power.
By introducing the technique of an outdoor slide montage and the immediately
recognizable language of popular imagery, the public projection can become a
communal, aesthetic counter-ritual. It can become an urban night festival, an
architectural ‘epic theater’, inviting both reflection and relaxation, where the street public
follows the narrative forms with an emotional engagement and a critical detachment.
Warning
Slide projectors must be switched off before the image loses its impact and
becomes vulnerable to appropriation by the building as a decoration.
Post Scriptum
It may be noted, by the way that there is no better start for thinking than
laughter. And, in particular, the convulsion of the diaphragm usually provides
better opportunities for thought than convulsion of the soul.
Walter Benjamin, “The Author as Producer”, 1934
Originally published in Künster aus Kanada: Raume und Installationen, exh cat,
Stuttgart, Germany: Württembergischer, Kunstverein, 1983 and in the Canadian
Journal of Political and Social Theory/Revue canadienne de theorie politique et
sociale, nos 1–2, winter–spring 1983, pp 185–187.
Transformative Avant-Garde and Other Writings
A Conversation between
Douglas Crimp, Rosalyn Deutsche,
Ewa Lajer-Burcharth
and Krzysztof Wodiczko
1986
Rosalyn Deutsche: Last winter you showed the Homeless Projection as a
proposal in a New York gallery. What procedures would be required to execute the
work in its proposed site of Union Square?
Krzysztof Wodiczko: I can only recall for you the procedures required for
a work proposed for Washington Square in 1984. It was explained to 49th
Parallel, the gallery that helped organize the project, that permission was
needed from the New York City Department of Parks and Recreation and from
the community board of the area. In that case, the Parks Department had no
objections, but the community board, which was asked for approval on short
notice, said no. A single individual, the head of the community board, was
responsible for the refusal, because the decision had to be made in an interval
between board meetings. He explained that the board had refused many other
proposals, apparently because they are not interested in organized public
events, which they feel would disturb the normal activities of the park. As you
know, Washington Square has a very rich life, students, people exercising,
drug traffic. I haven’t attempted yet to realize the Homeless Projection, but I
assume the procedures would be the same for Union Square.
Prospect Park, which administers Grand Army Plaza, where I did a
projection in 1985, also has an agreement with the local community board. I
was told that the agreement states that any cultural or artistic event that would
bring politics into the park should be excluded. I was given the impression that
my Grand Army Plaza Projection should not be politically explicit.
RD: What do you suppose they think public art is?
KW: I think they want public art to consist of non-disturbing but spectacular
events or objects that will satisfy the community in an easy and immediate way,
which I do not wish to oppose initially. It is essential to be able to take advantage
of any administrative desire for art in public places, to ‘collaborate’ in such events
Monument/Projection
 and infiltrate them with an unexpected critical element. In this case the main
event was the annual Brooklyn New Year’s Eve gala with a fireworks display by
the Grucci family, music, and hot cider. My projection was intended as an integral
part of the event.
RD: How many people saw the projection?
KW: I was told that 1,400 people attended the event, but since the Grand Army
Plaza is Brooklyn’s major vehicular traffic circle and the red lights forced cars to
stop exactly in front of the projection, many more hundreds of people must have
seen it. Many cars stopped or slowed down despite the green light, and some
194 circled around for a second look. Most of the people who came to the event were
from the black and Hispanic community in Brooklyn, many of whom were school
children. They were people who had no place else to go to celebrate New Year’s
Eve. Some members of the cultural intelligentsia, as well as some junior high
school students who had seen photographs of my projections shown at the New
Museum at that time, made an effort to be there. The projection was on the north
side of the arch and therefore could be seen, not from Prospect Park, but from
the small adjacent park in front of which the arch stands. Cars drive all around
that park, making it a very circumscribed and intimate viewing area. There are
no sculptures or reliefs on the north side of the arch. This is a monument to the
northern army, so the south side of the arch is very busy with representations of
the army marching south to liberate the South from ‘wrongdoing’. The monument
has absolutely nothing to say about the North, because if it did, it would have to
reflect on itself. So despite the fact that the arch is symmetrically designed to
carry sculptures on both sides, there is no sculpture on the north side.
Ewa Lajer-Burcharth: So you were interested in completing the monument
symmetrically with images that ironically echoed the structure and the elements
on the southern side. For example, you projected a padlock, a sign of constraint
and limitation, on the keystone of the arch as a dissonant equivalent of the figure
of liberation, the winged victory.
Douglas Crimp: It also re-inscribes the North/South conflict with an East/
West orientation.
KW: After growing up in the ‘East’ it certainly helps to arrive in the ‘West’ from the
north, by which I mean Canada, in order better to see all sides of the arch, especially
the repressed, northern side. Ironically, this arch, which is conceived as receiving
the victorious northern army and which uses a classicizing Beaux-Arts style, is
challenged by two small realist bas-relief sculptures by Eakins placed inside the
arch. They are the only two figures actually walking north, coming back from the
war, extremely tired. One of the horses is limping. As far as I know, this is the only
monument in the world that contains such an internal debate, aesthetically and
historically. The fact that a realist was allowed to enter the Beaux-Arts domain in
reverse direction is extraordinary. Anyway, my reorientation of the arch to an East/
West conflict converts the reading of the arch from its commentary on the South to
one of left and right, to the weight of the arch’s two bases. The people viewing the
projection offered their own interpretations. What I liked was that everyone was
trying to impose his or her reading upon others. It turned into a political debate based
on reading the symbols and referring to the contemporary political situation. It was a
time when the public was being prepared for impending peace talks between the US
and Soviet governments. There were great expectations about coming back to the
conference table and perhaps for a reduction of the arms race. I wanted to respond
to this, but, of course, it’s impossible today to be optimistic and intelligent at the
Transformative Avant-Garde and Other Writings
same time. So I wanted the people to see various possibilities. But since everyone
was interested in convincing others of his or her own reading, only a few seemed to
realize that the various readings were all simultaneously possible. One reading was
that the missiles were two phallic symbols. Another was that the projection was
about disarmament, the nuclear freeze, the liberal position. And a third group spoke
of the interdependence of the superpowers, the fact that they are locked together,
that they cannot exist without each other, and that there is a frightening similarity
between them. Because the debate was open and easily heard, all the readings were
most likely received by everyone, and hopefully this social and auditory interaction
helped the visual projection survive in the public’s memory as a complex experience. 195
For a moment at least, this “necro-ideological” monument became alive.
Halfway through the projection, behind and above the arch, there was
another audiovisual experience for eight minutes that gave the projection a new,
enhanced context. The fireworks—detonations, explosions, aerial illuminations—
this display would have had a double meaning for anyone who had experienced
bombings of cities or who, growing up in the ruins of cities, had seen films of
those bombings. This was certainly the case for the Polish intellectuals among
the spectators, among them the critic Szymon Bojko.
Bojko, who lives in Poland, wrote a popular book on Soviet Constructivist
graphic design.1 He is able to address, both popularly and historically, the relation
between art and propaganda. Through his connections in the Soviet Union, he knows
a lot about Vkhutemas, the Soviet predecessor of the Bauhaus.2
Working in the 1960s in the cultural department of the central committee
of the Polish United Workers Party, Bojko managed to influence the committee
with very clear ideas on the organization of industrial design education, research,
and practice.3 He came to see my Grand Army Plaza Projection with a group of
Polish and American friends from New York, so I was very interested to see how
they would respond. They were relieved to see that there were both Soviet and US
missiles, because they had heard that one of my projections in Stuttgart consisted
of only a Pershing II missile and that one in Canada was of only a US-built cruise
missile. So there was probably some talk of my not acknowledging both sides of the
problem, which is a very sensitive issue in Poland. They also suggested the reading
of the interdependence between the superpowers, and some of them mentioned
the ironic relationship between the heroic monumentality of the arch and the new
‘heroism’ and ‘monumentally’ of intercontinental ballistic missiles. Poles are very
well educated about public monuments. As the Polish playwright Sławomir Mrozek
put it, “Somewhere between the monuments and the memorials lies Poland.”
EL-B: Your projections also remind me of an important aspect of Polish May Day
parades. The focal point of the parades, the pompous facades of the socialist-
realist buildings on the main street in Warsaw, used to be adorned with huge,
four-storey-high portraits of contemporary Polish heads of State hung side by side
with those of Marx and Lenin. This display was obviously a kind of wish fulfillment
of the Polish rulers anxious to secure symbolic continuity between themselves and
the unquestioned heroes of the communist past. The socialist-realist architecture
was made to reinforce this continuity with the authority of its classicizing forms.
And the portraits reciprocated as an endorsement by the current leadership of
the excessive grandeur of this post-war architecture. Obviously, the effect of your
projections is very different. Far from this reciprocal completion, the clashing of
image and architecture calls into question the authority of both. But wouldn’t you
say that the Polish context is relevant to your attitude toward images of authority?
Monument/Projection
 KW: Yes, to the extent that the architecture of the 1960s, and even more so that
of the 1970s, the Gierek era, embodied a new style, a fetishism of progress, a
Westernized, technocratic version of progress (echoing Lenin’s New Economic
Policy), a ‘State Productivism’, if I may put it that way. In this period the acquired
capitalist, ‘scientifically exploitative’ organization of production was wedded to the
State socialist, centrally planned, bureaucratic exploitation of workers’ labor, all
in the name of achieving a higher, which is to say, closer to Western, standard of
living. The environmental evidence of Gierek’s new “New Economic Policy” was
painfully visible in the form of the rapid development of office towers, gigantic
196 hotels, shopping centers, automobiles, super highways, and urban vehicular
arterials. In this context, the grand official manifestations of the 1970s provided an
opportunity to see very clearly the propaganda effects of both the earlier. Stalinist
architecture, which now looked ‘romantic’, and the new, Western-style, abstract,
technocratic architecture.
EL-B: With the advent of Gierek an important change was introduced into the
official symbolic practices in order to take account of the new economic order.
In the May Day parades, portraits of contemporary Polish leaders were no longer
used. Gierek’s leadership was represented instead by such signs of technocratic
progress as the new Forum hotel, built by a Swedish contractor, at the site
where the parade ends. This building and others built in the 1970s became the
backdrops for portraits of Marx and Lenin. The architecture itself was intended
to testify to the successful continuation of their ideals.
DC: Are you saying, then, that this kind of political manifestation was central to
your own understanding of the relationship between image and architecture?
KW: It did help to be able to see the impact of a grand but temporary political
decoration on the public’s perception of buildings, of the cityscape as a whole. It also
helped me to understand the effect of the absence of such decorations after they
were taken down, to remember the architectural ‘afterimage’ of a political slogan
or icon, its lasting but illusive integration with the building. Such an experience
suggests, of course, the possibility of a temporary, unofficial, critical ‘decoration’,
difficult to imagine in Poland, where censorship of the public domain is total, but
a little easier to imagine here, where censorship is also strong but less centralized.
Generally, Poland was a great laboratory of environmental ideology. But the imagery
of official Polish propaganda is so architectural itself, perfect to the point of its own
death. The obvious, sloganistic character, the lifeless appearance makes Polish
imagery less subversive, less seductive, appearing to be less ‘natural’ than American
propaganda imagery, such as advertising or even an official event like the “Liberty
Celebration”. But Polish propaganda does have a powerful architectural quality that
integrates well with the ideological/architectural environment. So I did learn much
in Poland, but my education needed to be completed in the context of capitalist
consumer culture. It was an advantage that I went first to Canada, where cultural
studies of media and communications are very strong. My teaching affiliation with
the Cultural Studies Program in Peterborough, Ontario, was important in this regard.
Only after several years outside Poland was I able fully to comprehend the degree to
which artists and designers in Poland were ideologically trapped by the Westernized,
‘liberal’ State socialism of the 1970s. Artists earned their freedom to work with
what were called “various means of expression” that is, to exclude official politics
from their art, by including those very politics in the work they did on commission for
the State propaganda apparatus. So one was political as a collaborator-artist in the
morning and apolitical as a ‘pure’ artist in the evening in the confines of one’s studio.
Transformative Avant-Garde and Other Writings
Only a few artists and designers realized that in such a situation they were really
acting as collaborators with the system not in the morning but in the evening.
RD: Can you tell us something about your education?
KW: In the Soviet Union in the 1920s the educational path led from fine art to
design, from analytical Constructivism to Productivism. For me, in the 1960s
and 1970s, the situation was, of course, different. The period of Gomułka’s de-
Stalinization in Poland provided an opening for contact with Western design circles,
such as the school in Ulm,4 and with those of pre-war avant-garde design, such as
BLOK, Praesens, a.r.,5 and the Koluszki school.6 I studied at the Academy of Fine
Arts in Warsaw in the 1960s. Jerzy Sołtan, a former assistant of Le Corbusier, 197
directed the graduate program in industrial design, in which I was a student. At
that time Sołtan was directing a similar program at Harvard, teaching the fall
term in Warsaw and the spring term in Cambridge. I’m sure that Szymon Bojko’s
support was crucial to Sołtan’s success in Poland. Sołtan, his assistant Andrzej
Wróblewski, now president of the academy, and Bojko had devised a post-avant-
garde strategy for post-Stalinist Poland. The special education of designers was
a key point of their strategy. The program emphasized the developments of the
students’ individual and collective skills for infiltrating the institutional structure
while working as common industrial designers, organizers of design offices in all
branches of industry, teachers, researchers, and so on. It was a Neo-productivist
model. This was the period of the creation of the Industrial Design Council, whose
head is vice-premier of the government and whose members are vice-ministers.
So industrial design was very highly bureaucratized, much better organized than
in the West or in Lenin’s Soviet Union. I was trained to be a member of the elite
unit of designers, skillful infiltrators who were supposed to transform existing
State socialism into an intelligent, complex, and human design project. This
positive social program for industrial design, indebted historically to the program of
Vkhutemas, unfortunately shifted in the Gierek era to a technocratic, consumerist
phase and thus adopted the international Constructivist tradition in place of
Constructivism proper, the latter being the Constructivism that developed in the
Soviet Union as a means of building a society rather than decorating bourgeois
society with objects. The de-politicization of Constructivism’s history was a
very unfortunate part of our experience as artists. There is a famous museum of
Constructivism in Łódź.7 In the 1970s it was already quite clear that the effect,
and perhaps even the mission of this museum was to de-politicize the entire
Constructivist tradition, intellectual and artistic, affiliating it more and more
with international, Western Constructivism, the de Stijl movement, and Neo-
Constructivism such as Op and Kinetic art.
EL-B: This tendency to de-politicize Polish Constructivism by playing down
its links with the Soviet experiment should be situated historically within the
liberalization associated with Gierek. The re-interpretation of Polish artistic
traditions as independent from Soviet art paralleled the reorientation of the
Polish economy toward the West. This view of Constructivism was also part of
the defensive reaction to the post-war imposition of Soviet art policies in Poland,
that is, to Socialist Realism. The imposition of Zhdanovist orthodoxy stalled any
discussion of the alternative forms of culture for the new socialist society until
the late 1950s.
KW: Quite openly so. As part of the six-year plan of 1949, the guidelines of the council
of architects specifically declared Socialist Realism a critique of Constructivism.
This ‘critique’ collapsed the complex history of Constructivism into one international
Monument/Projection
 bourgeois movement, excoriated as “cosmopolitanism, Constructivism, and
formalism”, whose “abstract forms” were said to be “always foreign to the people”. But
the Stalinist position, for all its regressive effect, was at least conducted in the name
of social responsibility, socialist content, the national cultural heritage, a human form
for the environment, and so on. The Stalinist era represented a total politicization of
art and design, including a politicization of the war against Constructivism. The Gierek
era, by contrast, represented a total de-politicization of art and design, including a war
on Constructivism carried out through its de-politicization. This most recent perversion
of Constructivism, then, resulted in what I call “socialist technocratism”.
198 RD: So there was a de-politicization of Constructivism in the East that is directly
parallel to that in the West.
EL-B: Except that in Poland this process took place in a more overtly political
context. In the West the de-politicization of Constructivism was effected by the
art-historical discourse, while in Poland it was an element of national cultural
policy. The attempt to restore to Constructivism its real history that is now taking
place in the West has also begun in Poland, especially in the work of Andrzej
Turowski. His Polish Constructivism appeared as late as 1981, but Turowski
wrote an earlier, popular analysis of Constructivism in a book series devoted to
twentieth-century avant-garde movements.8
KW: His title for the earlier book was The Constructivist Revolution, which suggests
the interplay between aesthetic and political revolution. The editors changed it to
In the Circle of Constructivism.9 It is against editorial policy to acknowledge openly
anything as political, including Constructivism. Turowski’s re-politicization and
re-historicization of Constructivism was a crucial experience for me. The Foksal
Gallery, of which Turowski and Wiesław Borowski were the co-directors, had
established itself as a center of criticism of artistic culture. It is a type of alternative
gallery not really known here in that it was run collectively by critics, and not by
artists. Through the presentation of works of art, critical texts, and debates, the
gallery wished to affect the larger context. They applied the avant-garde style of
manifestos and interventions, but were “post-avant-garde” to the extent that they
accepted the limitation of utopia, dealing as they were with a reality that was
already organized in the name of utopia.
When Turowski entered the gallery as a young scholar of Constructivism,
he contributed a Marxist methodology to the gallery’s tactics and strategies, which
was a very significant change, because at that time the gallery critics and artists
were operating with Surrealist ideas. Turowski’s presence resulted in a fusion of a
moral critique of established artistic culture with a social critique, and self-critique,
of that culture’s institutions. Turowski wrote a very important short text entitled
“Gallery against Gallery”. It was the beginning of the concept of the gallery as a
self-critical institution, an institution questioning its own place in society in relation
to other institutions, and doing so to the extent of putting into question the entire
institutional system of culture. Foksal also published texts called “What We Don’t
Like about Foksal Gallery” and “Documentation”, which called for the destruction
of all the art documents. The “Living Archive” created the exaggerated idea of an
archive that would protect documents by preventing their further circulation and
cultural manipulation.
EL-B: This occurred in response to censorship. In Poland, unlike other Soviet
bloc countries, a certain independence is granted within the domain of culture so
long as culture is willing to contain itself and refrain from interaction with other
social activity. Foksal Gallery was one such island of cultural criticism that was
Transformative Avant-Garde and Other Writings
allowed to exist. But even this self-imposed marginalization did not guarantee
complete freedom of operation. When I was involved with another alternative
gallery, founded after Foksal, we managed to publish several issues of a journal
about critical aesthetic practices without asking for party approval for our
editorial staff. We did this by using the paper allotted us for the publication of
exhibition catalogues. Soon, though, we were forced to discontinue publication,
not because of any specific contents, but because it is prohibited to put out a
serial publication—something that can be distributed and read regularly—without
the consent of the centralized apparatus of the State. Seriality itself threatened to
spill culture outside its prescribed limits. 199
KW: The experience with censorship, with official culture, and with the entire
institutional system, the changing meaning of each form of cultural activity in
changing political circumstances, was a central part of my experience in Poland,
especially because of my affiliation with Foksal Gallery but also because of my
father. Throughout the period of Stalinism and the Gomułka and Gierek eras,
my father was involved with serious cultural politics as a conductor and artistic
director of city and State orchestras and opera companies. He was famous
for introducing the Polish public to the contemporary, artistically ambitious
repertoire.10 People such as my father and those associated with Foksal Gallery,
just as the people like Sołtan and Bojko, whom we have already discussed, learned
to cope with the system of restrictions and liberties in order consciously to infiltrate
and manipulate the system while also recognizing the extent to which they were
being manipulated by the system. So, having close contacts with the mechanisms
of censorship and self-censorship and with the politics of official artistic culture
and of industry and education (I was teaching at Warsaw’s Polytechnique), and
having my father’s example, I learned very quickly that we must adopt some kind
of post-avant-garde strategy in Poland.
EL-B: Since you are speaking of the strategy of manipulating the system from
within, of interfering with the codes, so to speak, were you familiar with the
writings of Roland Barthes?
KW: Barthes was not unknown to me and my generation. Most of the French
theoreticians, especially those working in the field of culture, were translated into
Polish, possibly earlier than into English. Writings, films, plays, and art that was critical
of contemporary bourgeois culture were always welcomed by the Polish censorship
apparatus. It was, however, difficult to learn from writers like Barthes how to operate
critically within the Polish situation. Once one realized the best strategies for one’s own
place, though, it was easier to understand what Barthes was suggesting for the West.
But we should not forget that the situation during the late 1960s and early 1970s was
in some respects similar in France and Poland. We lost our student battles in 1968,
too. We lost faith in our utopian revolutionary approach, and we needed new strategies.
Polish students’ demands differed from those of the French students, but there were
many similarities. Poland and Czechoslovakia were part of the overall movement in
the 1960s. So after the failure of all of our revolutions, we found ourselves in similar
situations, whether we happened to be reading Barthes or not. I wonder, by the
way, whether Barthes would have understood the strategies of Foksal Gallery in the
context of French cultural politics of the same period. But you know very well that
Poland and France have been very closely connected. Many Polish students witnessed
what happened in France in 1968. Turowski was one of them. The work of Daniel
Buren and the Support-Surface Group would not have been clear to me without the
conversations with Turowski and some of his friends from Poznań...
Monument/Projection
 EL-B: In Poznań there is a dynamic Marxist intellectual milieu, a rarity in Polish
academic life.
KW: I realized that what the Polish Constructivists Katarzyna Kobro and Władysław
Strzemiński were dreaming about, “the organization of the rhythms of life” as the
ultimate aesthetic project, was already organized all around us. So, learning from
the Constructivists the relationship between society and form, among politics, art,
and everyday life, and by combining this with the knowledge of Futurist, Dada,
and Surrealist interventions, we could begin to understand that our aim was not to
contribute to the further organization of the rhythms of life, but to interrupt, interfere,
200 and intervene in the already highly organized rhythms of life.
DC: So this strategy of interruption or interference, which might be said to
characterize your work now, is something that you had already developed in the
Polish context.
KW: Yes, seeds of my critical activity here in the public sphere can be found
in my early works in Warsaw, especially in the two ‘deconstructivist’ technical
‘inventions’. The first of these was Instrument, presented to the public in Warsaw
in 1971. I designed it with the help of technicians from the Experimental Music
Studio. It was an electro-acoustic instrument/costume that transformed, through
my hand gestures, the accidental noise of city traffic into modulated sounds that
only I could hear. The second was Vehicle, constructed with the help of Foksal
Gallery, and shown publicly in Warsaw in 1972. Through a system of gears and
cables, the vehicle was propelled forward by perpetually walking back and forth
on its tilting top surface. It thus transformed the conventional back-and-forth
pacing associated with intellectual reflection or with being stymied into the
forward movement associated with the official notion of progress. You can see
that my metaphoric vehicle was an ironic reconsideration of such an optimistic,
techno-socialist project as Tatlin’s Letatlin.11
RD: If, to some degree, your work still involves the interruption of the official
organization of society, how does such a strategy function here, in a different
context? In Poland, as you’ve explained, you had to work within a social
organization that includes official and overt censorship, while here censorship
functions very differently; the entire organization of the social is much less
apparent, much less obvious. How do you transfer the ideas that had formed your
strategies in Poland to a different context?
KW: By trying to intervene in the public sphere as close as possible to the legal
and technical limits that are imposed. Acting in the public sphere in the West, I
have confronted not only a different category of censorship, but also a different
level. There is a greater general possibility for working in public, but this creates a
need for more complicated strategies to deal with a complex set of institutional,
corporate, State, and community restrictions. But the ‘transfer of ideas’ to the
West must be discussed in relation not only to forms and categories of censorship,
to different kinds of artistic unfreedom, but also to the applicability of the ideas to
the new situation. It is safe to say, however, that, despite all the differences, there
are great similarities in our everyday lives in relation to our physical environment,
whether in Poland, Canada, the US, or the Soviet Union. There are similarities
in the ways that architecture functions as an ideological medium, a psychological
partner, in the way it educates, orders, participates in the process of socialization,
in the way it integrates its ‘body’ with our bodies, in the ways it rapidly changes or
even destroys our lives. My public projections developed first in Canada, because
in Poland I could not even consider such an art form simply because of technical
Transformative Avant-Garde and Other Writings
limitations, and obviously because of the censorship of the public sphere. Even
to use images from the press for my gallery projections, which I had taken of an
exhibition called References, I needed to have permission, because individuals don’t
own images; the State does. The result is that it is impossible to change the context
of images, because the State is perfectly aware of the semiotics of the image. In
order to use images, one must resort to metaphor rather than direct statement.
DC: Do people learn to read metaphors better in such a situation than they do
here, to perform a hermeneutic operation on every image?
EL-B: This is, in fact, how culture survives. Filmmakers, writers, and artists
who want to comment on social reality usually employ metaphor. Otherwise their 201
possibilities of affecting public opinion are very restricted.
RD: But can’t the censors also read those metaphors?
EL-B: Yes, they can, but they are also embarrassed to admit that they can recognize
them, because that would imply that they are aware of the shortcomings or
problems that the metaphors address. They are afraid to admit to the pertinence
of the criticism. This is why the books of the journalist Ryszard Kapuściński, which
expose the corruption of such regimes as those in Ethiopia and Iran, are permitted
to be published.12 Otherwise, the censors would implicitly acknowledge their
recognition of the analogies of those regimes with the regimes of Eastern bloc
countries, of Poland itself.
KW: One must read Dostoyevsky’s Crime and Punishment to understand the
relationship between censor and censored. You learn the language of the
censor in order to communicate, and, to some degree the censor must also
learn your language. There is a final episode to the narrative of the Grand Army
Plaza Projection that is relevant here. Several months ago I went to Poland and
presented Foksal Gallery with a proposal to show a reconstruction of the project
in the gallery. The idea was submitted to the censorship board and the woman
in charge explained that it would be impossible to present the work because
it would violate article number 800 and something or other of the censorship
code, which says that under no circumstances are weapons of the US and
Soviet Union to be visually depicted as of equal weight, volume, or quantity. An
exhibition of documents of my public projections is opening at Foksal Gallery
in September this year with the Grand Army Plaza Projection and a few others
excluded. A catalogue with reproductions of the projections and my theoretical
texts is being published. The texts, both in English and in Polish translation, are,
of course, censored. “Public Projection”, originally published in the Canadian
Journal of Political and Social Theory in 1983, attempts to situate my work in the
relations among body, architecture, power, and ideology. This was accepted for
publication with only one “criticism”; the words “power” and “ideology” must be
omitted entirely.
RD: But presumably you knew what would not pass the censorship when you
submitted your proposals.
KW: No, because the laws of censorship have changed. But also the very essence
of authoritarian existence is that you never really know what is allowed and what
is not. There used to be a “black book” of censorship, a general list of rules and
regulations. That has now been replaced by a code of specific regulations, which is
changed regularly in response to changing circumstances, so the situation is much
worse now. It is much more difficult to fool the system when there are very highly
qualified censors immediately interpreting changing conditions and implementing
regulations. Some of these people have PhDs; they are ‘intellectuals’. It is a
Monument/Projection
 perfect illustration of Marx’s definition of censorship, which is that it is centralized
criticism. So, in Poland, there is a kind of centralized art criticism. No one in Poland
can complain of the lack of ‘critical response’ to his or her work. Art criticism is
democratically guaranteed!
RD: Were you invited to do a projection on the New Museum of Contemporary Art
in New York, or did you apply for the opportunity? And what was your projection’s
relationship to the exhibition Difference: On Representation and Sexuality?
KW: I was asked to participate in the On View series, smaller exhibitions held in
conjunction with major shows, such as the Difference exhibition. It was not my
202 primary focus to relate my projection to that exhibition. If there was a relation to
the Difference show, it was mediated through the relation of my projection to the
architecture and to the politics of the entire building. The situation at that time
was very dramatic. It was winter and I was living very close to the main shelter
for homeless men and quite close to a shelter for women. I saw many people
living on the street, trying to survive the bitter-cold temperatures by burning tires.
It was therefore shocking to me to see one of the largest buildings in the entire
neighborhood empty. It was very evident that the building that houses the New
Museum was completely dark. People speaking to me at the time of the projection
had no doubts whatsoever about the meaning of it. I learned that the upper floors
of the building were awaiting new tenants at a price of nearly one million dollars
each and at the same time the New Museum received the basement and ground
floor spaces for free, or at least for a very cheap rent. The very fact that the
museum moved into the building creates a certain myth for the building. There
are, in fact, two exhibition spaces there. One is for the New Museum exhibitions,
and next door there is an exhibition of the former state of the building and how it
will look after renovation, a real estate exhibition. There is obviously a connection
between the presence of the museum and the subsequent conversion of the entire
surrounding area into one of art galleries and other art-related institutions and
businesses. I’m not saying that there is direct responsibility on anyone’s part, but
this is a mechanism and it’s important to recognize and reveal our place within that
mechanism, even if we cannot change it at this point.
DC: It is my understanding that the Astor Building functions similarly to the
Museum of Modern Art Tower; that is to say, the real estate development of
the ‘tower’ is used to provide the financing of the museum’s space and perhaps
a portion of its operating costs. Is it not a part of your working methods, as it
is of Haacke’s, for example, to investigate the particulars of such a situation?
KW: If I were to project information onto the building about its operations,
I would certainly undertake systematic research, but what was immediately
striking here was the emptiness of this huge structure when all around it people
were living on the street. The bottom padlock was decided upon later, when I
learned more about the connections between the museum and this art/real estate
operation. So this was, first, the Astor Building Projection, and then, second, the
New Museum Projection.
RD: In discussing the Grand Army Plaza Projection you mentioned various
possible readings of the work. But there are other works, such as the projection
of the swastika onto the pediment of the South African embassy in Trafalgar
Square, that have very unambiguous meanings. Does the necessity of
responding to specific political events suggest a different kind of projection?
KW: That was a very short-lived dilemma for me because I had to make a decision
very quickly. I already had permission for the projection on Nelson’s Column,
Transformative Avant-Garde and Other Writings
permission to project hands onto the column. I had therefore already committed
one violation in not projecting hands but rather a huge intercontinental ballistic
missile wrapped in barbed wire, and tank treads underneath the lions at the
column’s base. But I knew they wouldn’t be able to stop me. For one thing,
bureaucracy doesn’t work at night, even if the media does; BBC televised
the projection nationally. I also knew that I had six xenon arc slide projectors
concentrated in Trafalgar Square. No one knows when such an opportunity might
happen again and it certainly never happened to me before. Many people would
have liked the opportunity to affect this building, for example those who were
demonstrating in front of it just at that time. The projection on Nelson’s column 203
was to take place on two consecutive evenings. So the first evening, I came
prepared with slides with spots of different sizes to test the proper focal length of
the projection on the South African embassy. I had a very short negotiation with
myself. Artists are so trapped in their own so-called histories, thought, “Wait a
minute, this is not the type of work you do. You do not project swastikas”. But
the other side of me answered, “So what? Just because you haven’t done this
sort of thing before doesn’t mean that there isn’t a reason to do it now. What
do you know of your so-called artistic development?” I agree with you, Rosalyn
that this might open up new possibilities for a more specific contextual type of
intervention. It’s public art, and one must respond to changing circumstances.
It was just at this time that a delegation had come from South Africa to ask the
British government for more money, which Thatcher actually gave them, a very
shameful act. So my little negotiation was quickly resolved and I reproduced the
swastika slides of different sizes. All I had to do was to use one of the projectors
from the Nelson’s Column Projection and turn its 400-millimeter lens 90 degrees.
It was projected over the sign in the pediment, which many people knew. There
is a relief of a boat, underneath which it says “Good Hope”. This building is the
most illuminated of all buildings in central London, obsessively illuminated, as if
it were afraid to wake up in the morning and not find itself. The projection lasted
for two hours. Of course I consulted a lawyer. The only charge on which they
would be able to arrest me was for being a public nuisance, and those were the
grounds on which they stopped the projection. After two hours I saw the police
sergeant coming. I switched off the projector and removed the slide, so he could
do nothing. But he told me that if I were to resume the projection I would be
arrested, and he also said, very pompously, “If I might offer my personal opinion,
I find your projection in very bad taste.” Photographs of the projection appeared
in the press the following day in conjunction with condemnations of apartheid,
so the South African embassy sent an official letter of protest to the Canadian
embassy, which is just across Trafalgar Square, and which was exhibiting
documents of my work. The Canadian embassy responded with a letter saying
that the views of individual Canadian citizens are not the responsibility of the
Canadian government.
DC: I’m curious to know more about the legalities of such a situation. Can a slide
projection, which is after all, immaterial, be considered a means of defacement?
KW: We should be precise. This is not a clear legal question but a paralegal
response of the police based on their own interpretation of regulations. That
doesn’t mean that what I am doing is illegal, but neither does it mean that I
cannot be arrested.
DC: Was it especially difficult to get permission from the Swiss government for
the projection on the Swiss national parliament building?
Monument/Projection
 KW: It was a bit difficult, especially for Jean-Hubert Martin, then director of 9 Turowski, Andrzej, W Kregu konstruktywizmu, Warsaw: Wydawnictwa Artystyczne i
Filmowe, 1979.
the Kunsthalle in Bern, who was negotiating the permission for me, since my
10 Bohan Wodiczko (1911­–1985) was conductor and artistic director of the Baltic
projection was done for a show he was co-organizing called Alles und noch Symphony, Łódź Symphony, Kraków Symphony, Polish National Orchestra, Polish
Radio Orchestra, Łódź Opera and Polish National Opera. He was responsible for
viel mehr. I knew that I would have to use an image that would be acceptable
introducing post-war Polish audiences to Stravinsky, Berg, Nono and other modern
to the bureaucracy, and here I think my Polish experience helped. One has to composers, as well as for engaging such avant-garde figures as Tadeusz Kantor as
directors of opera productions.
know the psychology of officialdom, which is in many ways similar wherever I
11 Vladimir Tatlin worked on his flying machine Letatlin between 1929 and 1932, at
work, because it involves the very concept of modern bureaucracy, the kind of which time he attempted to launch it. He called his glider “an everyday object for the
Soviet masses, an ordinary object of use”.
bureaucracy which is supposed to be objective, objective in the sense of helping
12 Kapuściński, Ryszard, The Emperor: Downfall of an Autocrat, William R Brand and
people take advantage of ‘democracy’. I knew I wanted to project onto the Katarzyna Mroczkowska-Brand trans, San Diego: Harcourt, Brace, Jovanovich, 1983;
and Shah of Shahs, William R Brand and Katarzyna Mroczkowska-Brand trans, San
204 pediment, since it was the only free surface on the building. It was a question Diego: Harcourt, Brace, Jovanovich, 1985.
205
of what would be acceptable, and then, when accepted, what would make a  
point. I figured no one would object to the image of an eye, and at the same time
they wouldn’t have to know that the eye would change the direction of its gaze,
looking first in the direction of the national bank, and then at the canton bank,
then the city bank of Bern, then down to the ground of Bundesplatz, under which
is the national vault containing the Swiss gold, and finally up to the mountains
and the sky, the clear, pure, Calvinist sky. It was difficult for them to refuse to
cooperate because the work was part of the Kunsthalle show, which had already
received the support of the city. Of course, the parliament building belongs not
to the city but to the federal government, which would not want to create tension
between itself and the city. I had spent a certain amount of time in bars in Bern
and I learned there about the Swiss gold below the parking area in front of the
parliament, a fact that most people in Switzerland take for granted. It’s not,
after all, so bad to be a tourist. Sometimes you learn things that local residents
take for granted and are then able to expose the obvious in a critical manner.
But of course tourism cannot simply be treated as an individual experience. It is
becoming an ever-more complex political phenomenon, which requires its own
analysis. I intend to focus my projectors on this phenomenon in my work for the
Venice Biennale this summer.

Originally published in October, no 38, fall 1986, pp 22–51.

1 Bojko, Szymon, New Graphic Design in Revolutionary Russia, New York: Praeger, 1972.
2 Vkhutemas, an acronym for the Russian for Higher Art and Technical Workshops, was
founded in the Soviet Union in 1920. In 1927 it was re-formed and renamed Vkhutein
(State Higher Art and Technical Workshops): it was dissolved in 1930. For a brief
history, see Bojko, Szymon, “Vkhutemas”, in The 1920s in Eastern Europe, Cologne,
Galerie Gmurzynska, 1975, pp 19–26.
3 Polska Zjednoczona Partia Robotnicza, the official name of the Communist Party in
Poland, which was created during the Second World War from a merger of the Polish
Socialist Party and the Polish Workers Party.
4 The Horschule für Gestaltung was founded in Ulm, West Germany, in 1955. Walter
Gropius delivered the inaugural address, saying, “The work once begun in the Bauhaus
and the principles formulated there have found a new German home and an opportunity
for wider organic development here in Ulm”. The school was closed in 1968.
5 BLOK (founded 1924), Praesens (founded 1926) and a.r (Revolutionary Artists,
founded in 1929) were the major Polish Constructivist groups as well as the names of
their publications.
6 Katarzyna Kobro and Władysław Strzemiński taught at the industrial school in
Koluszki in 1930–1931 using a curriculum based on the educational principles of
Vkhutemas and the Bauhaus.
7 At the instigation of Strzemiński and the a.r. group, an international collection of
Modern art was formed in 1931 at the museum of Łódź, now the Museum Sztuki.
8 Turowski, Andrzej, Konstruktywizm polski, Warsaw: Polish Academy of Science,
Institute of Art, 1981.

Transformative Avant-Garde and Other Writings Monument/Projection

The Venice Projections contemporary fear of terrorism joins with the fear of the entire empire of tourism,
finding its center today in Venice, whose embattled history and architectural
1986 memory are haunted by it already.

— To recognize the imaginary Venice as the true Venice of today! As the site
of the merciless cultural and economic ‘terrorism’ of the world empire of
tourism, and the site of fear of the merciless ‘tourism’ of world terrorism,
ancient and contemporary!
— To infiltrate the Venetian tourist entertainments with counterfeit
spectacles aimed at the uncritical consumption of historical Venice and her 207
present-day myth!
— To interrupt this Venetian tourist romance, this shopping for the
imaginary past and present!
— To call off this consumer marriage to the sea!
— To take Venetian architecture as a historical ‘screen’ for the critical
projections of the present!
— To turn the projectors upon Venice as a historical fetish of a
contemporary reality!
— To project the symbols of the present onto those of the past!
— To confront publicly their illusive difference and embarrassing similarity!

Originally published as a flyer distributed during Public Projections in Venice,

The new world empire of tourism (travel, entertainment, art, and leisure) has published by the Canadian Pavilion at the 12th Venice Biennale, 1986; reprinted as
turned the ruins of the old world financial-military empire of Venice into an art- a section of the essay “Public Projections”, October, no 38, fall 1986, pp 18–20.
Disneyland and shopping-for-the-past plaza. In alliance with the international
“Save Venice” movement, this new empire has converted (renovated) the
once lavish and decadent capital of capital, that glorious, floating pioneer of
the multi-national corporate World Trade Center, into a tourist playground,
an imaginary ‘refuge’ from the politically and economically troubled world of
today. Such a refuge cannot, however, really succeed in Venice. The escape it
offers must function as a semi-conscious return to the golden roots of today’s
global reality.
The gilded architecture of Venice, thin as its own image, has been copied,
perfected, magnified, and mass-produced throughout the cities, suburbs, and
entertainment centers of Europe and the United States. Thus the imaginary
escapes and semi-conscious returns of Venice are easily furnished by the
‘gondolas’ of the Chicago World’s Fair, the ‘Piazza San Marco’ of Disneyworld in
Florida, the ‘Grand Canal palaces’ of apartment towers, the ‘campanili’ of city
halls, factories, churches, banks, fire and train stations, and by the ‘Condottieri
Colleoni’ of all colonial and post-colonial urban monuments.
The tourist, familiar with contemporary commercial, religious, and
militaristic slogans, draws upon this ‘knowledge’ in order to discover Venice.
Armed with the popular literature of art history, travel guides, and Italian
dictionaries, the tourist begins a consumer love affair with the Venetian past,
shopping for its difference, its richness, and its seductive historical atmosphere.
Today, mercenary pirates of political terrorism are threatening to cut off
the commercial routes of tourism’s global empire, of which Venice is the strategic
center. To secure this empire’s operations, in particular its overseas summer
crusades, the imperial jumbo-jet fleet demands military protection. Thus the

Transformative Avant-Garde and Other Writings Monument/Projection

The Homeless Projection: A Proposal
for the City of New York
1986
Architecture
What has been called architecture is no longer merely a collection of buildings with
‘stable forms’ and ‘permanent structures’. Architecture must be recognized today
as a social system: a new economic condition and a psycho-political experience.
The new meanings ascribed to architecture through their interplay with changing
circumstances and events are not new meanings but exist only as concepts in
semiotic texts (Umberto Eco) and slogans in real estate advertisements for
the gentry (Zeckendorf Towers). If architecture does, on occasion, preserve its
traditional and sentimental appearance in an attempt to ‘interplay’ with new events,
this serves only to create, impose, and ultimately reject or appropriate these new
social circumstances. In this way, ‘architecture’ demolishes, relocates, rebuilds,
renovates, re-zones, gentrifies, and develops itself continuously. Mimicking and
embodying a corporate moral detachment, today’s ‘architecture’ reveals its inherent
cynicism through its ruthless expansionism. What has been defined as architecture
is really, then, a merciless real estate system, embodied in a continuous and
frightening mass-scale event, the most disturbingly public and central operations of
which are economic terror, physical eviction, and the exodus of the poorest groups
of city inhabitants from the buildings’ interiors to the outdoors.
The New Monument
Such forced exteriorization of their estranged bodies transforms the homeless
into permanently displayed outdoor ‘structures’, symbolic architectural forms,
new types of city monuments: ‘the homeless’.
The surfaces of the homeless—over- or underdressed, unwashed, cracked
from permanent outdoor exposure, and posing in their frozen, ‘classic’ gestures—
weather and resemble the official monuments of the city. The homeless appear
more dramatic than even the most colossal and expressive urban sculptures,
Transformative Avant-Garde and Other Writings
memorials, or public buildings, however, for there is nothing more disruptive and
astonishing in a monument than a sign of life. To the observer the slightest sign of
life in the homeless is a living sign of the possibility of the death of the homeless
from homelessness.
The homeless must display themselves in symbolically strategic and
popular city ‘accents’. To secure their starvation wages (donations), the homeless
must appear as the ‘real homeless’ (their ‘performance’ must conform to the
popular myth of the homeless): the homeless must become the homeless.
Adorned with the ‘refuse’ of city ‘architecture’ and with the physical
fragments of the cycles of change, the homeless become the nomadic ‘buildings’, 209
the mobile ‘monuments’ of the city. However, fixed in the absolute lowest
economic and social positions and bound to their physical environment, the
homeless achieve a symbolic stability, while the official city buildings and
monuments lose their stable character as they continuously undergo their real
estate change.
Unable to live without the dramatic presence of the homeless (since their
contrast helps produce ‘value’—social, economic, cultural) and denying the
homeless as its own social consequence, ‘architecture’ must continuously repress
the monumental condition of the homeless deeper into its (political) unconscious.
Projection
If the homeless must ‘wear’ the building (become a new, mobile building) and are
forced to live through the monumental problem of architecture, the aim of the
Homeless Projection is to impose this condition back upon the architecture and to
force its surfaces to reveal what they deny.
— To magnify the scale of the homeless to the scale of the building!
— To astonish the street public with the familiarity of the image and to
make the homeless laugh!
— To employ the slide psycho-drama method to teach the building to play
the role of the homeless!
— To liberate the problem of the homeless from the unconscious of
the architecture!
— To juxtapose the fake architectural real estate theater with the real
survival theater of the homeless!
Originally published in Jana Sterbak and Krzysztof Wodiczko, brochure, New
York: 49th Parallel, Centre for Contemporary Canadian Art, 1986; reprinted as a
section of “Public Projections”, October, no 38, winter 1986, pp 12–16.
Monument/Projection
Projection on the Monument to marked on each side of the crate. The statue itself was subjected to similar
superimposition. Projected over his Roman armor, a white shirt, tie, and Daimler-
Friedrich II, Kassel Benz identity badge had transformed the Landgraf into both warrior and company
executive. The face of Friedrich II, which according to many spectators resembled
1987 that of the Documenta 8 director, as well as the tubes held by the statue and
containing architectural and cultural designs, were strongly illuminated.

Based on a text originally published as “Artist’s Statement” in Documenta 8, exh

cat, Kassel: Fridericianum, 1987, vol 2, pp 278–279. 211

On the monument to Landgraf Friedrich II von Hesse-Kassel, I confront his glorious

but also egomaniacal heroic acts—the spreading of ideas of the Enlightenment
and the popularizing of aristocratic culture, the promotion of art and science—with
his dubious economic and political acts, which served as the monetary source for
all of his cultural and artistic projects. His politics, incidentally, were a source of
criticism even in his lifetime. Gazing proudly at one of these projects, the Museum
Fridericianum, his obscene white body too bloated from gluttony to fit its heroic
Roman armor, the Landgraf cannot conceal his ravenous hunger for conquest,
his imperial appetite for plundering foreign territories (look at Austria). He is
interested in political and cultural power over the world. (One thinks about the
Polish crown.) He also knows that the Soldaten-handel, a trade in soldiers in the
eighteenth century (22,000 peasants were sold to Great Britain for 21,276,778
talers in order to support that country’s war against American independence), is
hardly different from Daimler-Benz’s use of slave labor today by exploiting ‘guest
workers’ to make military equipment such as the Unimog S (a four-wheel-drive
military truck, parts of which are produced in Kassel) and deliver it to South Africa,
where it is used to subjugate blacks; or from accepting donations from Mercedes
and the Deutsche Bank, though knowing of their South African dealings, in order
to organize Documenta 8 in the Fridericianum and the Orangerie Gardens—places
Friedrich II built with money from the trade in soldiers.
To expose the relation between Daimler-Benz and Documenta 8 as a clear
example of the way the shameless “history of the victors” perpetuates itself today,
I had decided to recall the Landgraf’s monument in order to critically actualize it.
This slide projection superimposed onto the large base of the monument
an image of a crate containing axles to Unimog S military trucks produced by the
Daimler-Benz plant in Kassel. The content, the manufacturer, the origin, and the
South African, Salvadoran, and Chilean destinations of this shipment were clearly

Transformative Avant-Garde and Other Writings Monument/Projection

Speaking through Monuments Today, more than ever before, the meaning of our monuments depends
on our active role in turning them into sites of memory and critical evaluation of
1988 history as well as places of public discourse and action. This agenda is not only
social or political or activist, it is also an aesthetic mission.

Originally published as a statement in the brochure Krzysztof Wodiczko: Works,

Washington, DC: Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden, 1988.

213

Among observers of the economic, social, political, and semantic transformations

of urban space, there is growing concern that the city, with all its old and newly
built architectural structures as well as their spatial configurations, is losing the
ability to operate as a communicative environment.
In today’s contemporary real estate city, the mercilessly dynamic space of
uneven economic development makes it extremely difficult for city-dwellers and
nomads to communicate through and in front of the city’s symbolic forms.
The unstable and uneven situation around and between the monuments is
complemented by the transformation of the monuments themselves, which become
victims of the same social and aesthetic manipulation as the entire city. Aesthetic
simulation and trivialization turn historic sites into mere decoration representing the past.
Our historic harbors are being turned into seafood restaurants.
The meaning of city monuments—whether intentional or unintentional,
historic or contemporary—must be secured today, as in the past, through the
ability of the inhabitants to project and superimpose their critical thoughts and
reflections on the monument forms.
We are witnessing the return of themes of nationalism and militarism
in politics in the context of gentrification and the gradual destruction of social
programs that affect urban life. In front of our memorials and monuments,
which were built to commemorate heroes of liberation, the flight to freedom,
civil liberties, and the right of the individual pursuit of happiness, are the facts
of homelessness, segregation, the isolation of individuals, and the destruction
of community ties—all processes that already project themselves on these
monuments. My projection is a clarification or specific articulation of those
already present projections.
Not to speak through city monuments is to abandon them and to abandon
ourselves, losing both a sense of history and the present.

Transformative Avant-Garde and Other Writings Monument/Projection

City Hall Tower Projection, Kraków
1996
In this work, I managed to combine my experience in earlier monumental public
projections with the social, performative, and ethical agenda of my more recent
Alien Staff, 1992, and Mouthpiece (Le porte-parole), 1993, projects. As with
those two communication instruments, the Kraków projection was open to people
who were marginalized and voiceless, those whom no one wanted to hear. For
the first time in my projectionist practice, I used video projectors rather than slide
projectors. And, also for the first time, I used loudspeakers to introduce sound.
This created a completely new possibility: transmitting through a public monument
a narration of a particular person’s actual experience, ‘completing’ this landmark
structure by projecting ‘into’ it bodily movement, gesture, and human voice. This
afforded the participants/performers the opportunity to magnify and articulate
architecturally a voice and gestural expression and to make their experience public.
The process of video recording, editing, testing, and revising the images and
voice recordings became an important experience for the participant/performers,
who learned how to use the tower as a psychological artifice, to develop their
confidence and powers of self-expression.
Public architecture was appropriated here as a transitional object (DW
Winnicott) and as a communicative artifice (Julia Kristeva). Imagine oneself
as a tower! For those whose voices were heard through the tower, addressing
the mass of people gathered in the square below provided a bizarre, almost
comical opportunity to reveal painful secrets either to a particular person
or simply to anyone. Such truths may sometimes be unveiled more safely
and spoken more freely in an open agora or forum, protected by the aura
of democratic public space, than in private, speaking to a friend, or even
silently to oneself. And for those looking and listening in the square below the
projection, it may have been easier to empathize with the person-as-tower than
with the actual speaker.
Transformative Avant-Garde and Other Writings
The video and sound images transformed into a human being the most
prominent architectural structure in Kraków, the fourteenth-century City Hall
Tower, which stands in the middle of the central square, Rynek Glowny. This
brought the people speaking through the tower to the center of public attention and
turned them into strangely prominent public figures. Everybody in Kraków identifies
with this tower. Everyone has a special relation with it. Even people who live far
away, on the outskirts of Kraków, see this tower as a special partner—a lonely, if
not heroically alienated, but authoritative, stable, protective, and trustworthy civic
structure. Even the most critical and ironic minds of Kraków share with the rest of
the city’s population this secret psycho-architectural addiction and sustain a lifelong 215
affair with the tower. Having already mentally projected themselves onto this tower,
viewers were now faced with somebody else being projected onto their projections. The
tower that they already inhabited (or that inhabits them) was now inhabited (or co-habited)
by someone else—someone who was different from them, marginalized, and relegated to
the realm of ‘otherness’, yet now strangely familiar. The animated tower communicated
the loneliness and alienation of someone suffering a nightmare, for example the experience
of domestic violence—an occurrence that is not uncommon in Kraków but which is rarely
communicated in public.
In this way, the tower became a very unsettling junction between me (the
viewer) and the ‘other’, overseen by a ‘third party’ (the crowd witnessing the
dialogue). The third party—the real person standing next to me in the crowd,
who could be my boyfriend, girlfriend, husband, wife—could speak through this
tower on another night, or I could speak to them through this tower, in front of
everybody. What a frightening, liberating possibility. It is easier to be honest
with someone who abuses and neglects you when you are 50 times taller than
that person, when you can speak with your face masked by a huge city clock
and your head protected by a gigantic Baroque helmet, clad in the fourteenth-
century masonry of the City Hall Tower. Suddenly the secrets of the city and
all its nightmares—powerful personal experiences that lie hidden inside homes
or workplaces in the darkness of night—came to light and were publicly shared
through our tower, everybody’s tower.
The tower acts as the stranger’s double, as an artifice and memorial, as
something that is in-between him or her and me, something that can represent
and help the other to come to terms with his or her personal experience. It is
what enables viewers gathered in the square below to confront what is being
conveyed—the other’s experience—as well as to accept the painful similarity
between their own experience and that of the other. Like an Alien Staff or
Mouthpiece (Le porte-parole), the tower allowed the speaker/performer to play
creatively or to be playfully creative in story-telling and using gestural expression
to the point of virtuosity. At the same time it created a possibility for the
spectators to respond to such a performance in a critical and discursive way
while safely sharing the responses. All of those processes were made possible
because the event was partially artistic and partially life-like, partially real and
partially virtual, science fiction and nightmare, personal tale and crime story.
It is easier to accept reality as fiction or as a mixture of reality and fiction than
as reality itself. In this way, the uncanny feeling can be accepted rather than
expelled through the rejection of the stranger. It takes a complicated work of art
to transmit (and to make one accept) what looks and sounds strangely familiar.
The projection on City Hall Tower used high-power video projectors
placed on the ground of the plaza, 65 meters from City Hall Tower at a
Monument/Projection
 35-degree angle. A powerful loudspeaker was installed at the top of the tower Originally published in The 4th Hiroshima Art Prize: Krzysztof Wodiczko Catalogue,
below the clock. Several months before the event, contacts were made with Matsuoka Takeshi and Echizen Toyshiya eds, Hiroshima: Hiroshima City Museum
the homosexual community, the disabled, the Kraków Women’s Center, and of Contemporary Art, 1999, p 155.
with organizations and individuals dealing with the problems of drug users
and people living with HIV. The eight actual participants emerged directly The public projection on the City Hall Tower, Central Marketplace (Rynek Glowny),
and indirectly from those contacts. They shared their troubling accounts in Kraków, was produced in summer 1996 by The Gallery of Contemporary Art
recordings of their voices and hand gestures on video. For the hand gestures, Bunkier Sztuki, the Andrzej Wajda Festival, and the City of Kraków as part of the
they selected everyday objects appropriate to their story, performing such Kraków 2000 celebration, with the cooperation of Centrum Kobiet (the Women’s
simple domestic tasks as peeling potatoes, wringing a washcloth, grinding Center) and the technical sponsorship of the Barco company (video projectors).
216 coffee, mixing kogel-mogel (a frothy mixture of egg yoke and sugar used 217
in Poland to cure laryngitis), and other symbolic gestures such as pulling
petals from a flower or holding a lit candle while protecting it from the wind.
The loudness of the soundtrack awoke the city, revealing these nightmarish
experiences that are normally kept hidden.
All the recorded accounts described personal events that took place at
night. Three women spoke of their experiences as victims of domestic abuse
(suffered by them and their children) at the hands of their husbands. One,
for example, spoke of her many years of ‘imprisonment’ in her own home, not
knowing why she allowed herself to become such a prisoner. Her husband, who
was well respected, had been imprisoned in the past, and was now acting as a
prison guard of his wife. One woman told of trying to calm her screaming infant
one night to protect it from her drunken husband who had earlier beaten the
child. Because she could not quiet the child, she too was beaten by the wakened
husband. Their stories addressed two of the most serious problems in Poland
today, that of domestic violence and alcoholism. A young homosexual described
his painful experience of being discovered by his brother in bed with a man, and
irreversibly losing his brother’s love. A drug-addicted man who was being treated
as someone who had committed a moral crime, not as a sick person, described
his experiences, especially with city agencies and at the illegal drug market in
the train station nearby. At this train station, addicts were treated superficially
and allowed to die by police and emergency medical technicians. An older
blind man talked about his tragic experiences of trying to walk at night in the
city (including the area around the tower), announcing publicly the unbearable
secret he held: that his son had always been ashamed to walk with him in the
streets of Kraków.
The City Hall Tower Projection was very well advertised in various media
as part of the Andrzej Wajda Festival, sponsored by the city of Kraków as part
of the Kraków 2000 celebration. There were many Polish and foreign tourists.
Transcripts of the tower’s narratives were widely distributed in English and
Polish. During the first 45 minutes of the projection, organizers counted 4,000
spectators. The projections lasted from 10:30 pm to 12:30 am for three nights
from 2 to 4 August. Large numbers of people also witnessed seven evenings
of tests conducted in the plaza beforehand. Media including radio, television,
and newspapers, national, regional, and city, reported on the projections,
taping events with audio and video recordings and conducting interviews
with spectators. The Women’s Center organized a special public event on the
occasion of the projections. One spectator was heard remarking to another,
“How is it possible that one does not believe a person, while one believes
the Tower?”

Transformative Avant-Garde and Other Writings Monument/Projection

Instruments, Monuments,
Projections
2003
As we know, public space, like democracy, does not exist as such, and cannot
be understood as something given, as a kind of social security. These things are
always both devenir (becoming), and à venir (coming, to come, the future). They
are continually invented, inspired and initiated by every act of opening up—opening
the space to ourselves, ourselves to others, and others to others: by every act of
exposing and inserting what no one wants to hear into urban discourse; by every act
that breaches the boundary between what is appropriate and what is inappropriate,
and of course, between public and private; and by helping others to commit precisely
such acts. By understanding the theatrical ideology that forms the space or stage on
which such acts of revelatory communication must occur, we may produce, if only for
a moment, a public space. But it is one that, like a phantom, immediately disappears,
leaving us continually in pursuit of it.
Public space, as Claude Lefort passionately argues, can be understood in
two ways. First it could be a virtual space, one that “has the virtue of belonging
to no one” (thus an empty space), or one “large enough to accommodate only
those who recognize one another within it” (and thus an open space). Its meaning
and significance comes from “allowing the questioning of right to spread” (and
thus extending the right to rights—in our case, communicative and performative
rights). However, public space remains barricaded by monuments, by billboards,
by political and commercial discourse. Jürgen Habermas would say that it is
being used for “publicity” rather than as a public space. Rather than creating
a “public sphere”—one where citizens hold authorities to account—the entire
city has become a space of visual legitimization for those who want to convince
others that they are serving well as elected officials, or for others advertising their
products and services.
Now, this asks a lot of public space or the public sphere. How can we
even imagine such emptiness and openness? Indeed, it may be impossible, for
Transformative Avant-Garde and Other Writings
there is no physical evidence of such space. It is a utopia, “a space that exists
nowhere”. But here there is a paradox—the space is practically and permanently
barricaded by actors who, from their elevated positions, speak down, in the
name of democracy, at the excluded, those for whom there is no longer any
room. For a city can be understood as a work of history that celebrates those
who succeeded and forgets those who did not. Consequently, we could say
that public space can only come into existence at the moment when what
Walter Benjamin called the “tradition of the vanquished” can break through to
challenge the “history of the victors”.
The history of the victors is composed of images of the past transmitted to us 219
through a hermeneutic tradition that selects events, preserving some while rejecting
others, and at times determining their interpretation. It also has a profound tendency to
forget things, unlike the tradition of the vanquished, which fears being robbed by that
history. As Benjamin puts it, this history perpetuates past catastrophes—victories—in
order to “allow things to go on”, which is the worst thing in the world). It celebrates
the triumph of the strongest and the disappearance of the weakest.1 The tradition
of the vanquished and the memory of the nameless, the forgotten, the omitted, and
the unheard, must challenge this continuity. The tactics of this tradition are based
on its interruptive nature, its ‘non-linearity’, interactive character, radical negativity,
and arrest of time. It is a tactical movement, as opposed to the strategic moves of the
history of the victors.
If such an intuition can be recognized, articulated, and announced, even
by the nameless or speechless, it may also help sustain the democratic process,
“justifying the rational order or the polis by philosophical language which criticizes
that order in the name of what it excludes and marginalizes”.2 But how can
one who is nameless and speechless expose a history of the new against the
continuity of heritage, challenging the history of the victors, especially if no one
is listening and watching?
For such agonistic public space to be possible, collective memory and
competing collective memories, must be conveyed by voices, even quarrelling
ones, in the very places where the traces of the past—traces of victories, losses
and crimes—persist in the agora in which we have always tended to build our
monuments. We do not have to create these discursive spaces, for they exist
as part of public space and collective memory. In liberal ideological discourse,
collective memory emerges from a mere variety of voices; it is indifferent as to
whether these belong to the victors or the vanquished. My work attempts to help
particular voices, monumental and human, to stand up once again and speak
in public spaces, by interrupting—an ‘interpellation’, an arrest or interruption
of the proceedings, raising an urgent ‘point of order’. It is meant to heighten
our “response-ability”, implying the development of our analytical capacity for
memory, rather than a simple, and symptomatic ‘acting out’—and contradicting
the flow of discourse by allowing “pro-vocative” voices, that were constrained to
be silent, to speak.
If we act as artists in this space, we are already working within a space
that is a work. This space is a theater dominated by forms and events. Within
that space, symbolic structures, sculptural, architectural and spatial, are
given meaning on the one hand by orchestrated State and other official events
and performances (parades, commemorative ceremonies, and the like), and
on the other by disruptive events, ‘wake-up calls’ to those structures (rallies,
demonstrations and, heaven forbid—bloody revolutions) that treat them as both
Monument/Projection
 witnesses and suspects. We have seen an example of the latter during the May
Day demonstrations of 2000.
But in-between these historic events or civic actions, what can we do
in order to allow a public space to actually become a public space? Of course,
we must use our expertise in the field of visual (and, indeed, non-visual) arts
to subvert these spaces, or to navigate a path through them, or to find a way to
create some other experience that will help both ourselves and others contribute
to something that could be called agonistic democracy. This democracy would
be based on competitive processes in which a single voice can never win out,
220 because it will always be locked in a dynamic relationship with other voices. A
multiplicity of experience, and of practice, will be transmitted throughout the
city by such agonistic acts. So we have two things: an ideological space that
is a theater or a conditioned space; and we have the hope for a democracy,
specifically for an agonistic democracy.
To open up such a space, artists have to work through these metaphorical
elements and languages, the semiotics (and semiosis) of the city. In doing so,
we work with those who are silent, those who have lost, or perhaps never had or
never exercised, their capacities of speech. Of course, in a dramatic and radical
moral thesis, one could simply say that these are traumatic cases, people who
have often survived overwhelming events and who, now, though managing well,
somehow need a vehicle simply to open up and convey their experiences. But
people will not necessarily speak, even if we were to design for them the most
fantastic communication equipment. Even in more ordinary cases, the question
of how to imagine ourselves, as designers and artists, to be animators of this
public space, presents the problem of how to approach potential speakers—both
ourselves and others—in terms of developing an ability to respond (one might call
this a “response-ability”) to what is happening around and within us, in ethical
and psychological terms.
The (im)migrant and refugee come first, agents of and for displacement, and
most experienced in this composite mode of identity. But the rest of us, homeless
hybrids in the officialdom of a monological world, are also speakers whose utterances
are characterized, in Mikhail Bakhtin’s words, by the “irruption of alien expressive
elements into authorial discourse”. But for all authors and actors, communicating
requires self-knowledge, the ability to open one’s dialogical self as a dramatic
character in the world, to transmit one’s own quotes, even those “felt and used as
alien”. In caring for the complexities of our culture we create a healthier society. But
for some migrants, those overwhelmed by the complications of social existence,
those whose creative capacities are traumatized by events, there is another caring,
for the subject, which requires its own training and equipment. Social therapeutics
must recognize that often what is taken to be ill—splits in identity, for example—is
also a basis for health. Equipment that reveals and expresses those often-repressed
splits and traumas, recorded as potential scripts, may allow certain individuals to
attain, for the first time, a fullness of dramaturgical enactment. Such clinical ‘fictions’
serve as masks or screens that reveal as much, if not more, than they hide.
The pathological condition of the monument is perhaps not a classic case
of trauma or of post-traumatic syndrome/stress disorder, but a special state
of being, a trauma-like symptom resulting from a prolonged period of life-in-
captivity. This captivity keeps its captives from symbolic participation in the
present, repeatedly and continuously forces them to be at home exclusively with
the past, rather than with history, as understood by Benjamin (the history of
Transformative Avant-Garde and Other Writings
the vanquished versus the history of the victors) or Nietzsche (critical versus
monumental and archival histories—see “On the Advantages and Disadvantages
of History for Life”) as the infusion of present experience on to the past. This
trauma-like state takes the form of a pathological trance, a necessary self-
defense mechanism to help them to survive, or cope with, their own painful
speechlessness, or, to be more precise, their speechless pain.
When those who live in such a state of painful speechlessness speak or
think of the moment in the shadow of which they live, they often say, “If only
the monument could speak.” They identify with the monument’s post-traumatic
condition, and perhaps with their own, and its own numbness. At the same 221
time they express the hope they have not yet reached such an irreversible state
of dumbness that the monument will speak, as they will speak, some time in
the future.
This general map of my concerns reflects the limitations within which I
continue to work—whether I design instruments as interactive or inspirational
vehicles to open up the potential for transmission or communication, or I am
animating pre-existing structures, using them similarly as vehicles. Within the
latter one might include the act of bringing ourselves to these monuments, of
listening to them and listening to those who are speaking through them. In the
cases I will outlined this is quite relevant, but more recently my projections
have changed. I have tried to bring these paired dimensions—equipment and
monument, design and projection, performativity and narrativity, visual and
vocal—together.
At the moment when I began using video and sound, projection became
endowed with narrative possibility. With it came the development of speech (visual
and acoustic), a language I learned from the instruments that I designed, and the
possibility of understanding the monument as a body, a symbolic structure with
some connection to the experience of those who re-animate it, whether comically
or tragically or both. This also allowed those who animated paralyzed monuments,
those who spoke through them, to become both patients and doctors. In healing
themselves they are attempting to heal the monument; in order to heal the
monument, they needed to heal themselves.
I have worked on video projections for the last four years. The first took
place in Kraków, one of Europe’s cultural capitals, which is suffering (or living
through) exactly the same problems as every other large city in Europe, whether
a capital or not. But for some reason, in this cultured environment, it is not
very easy to speak about one’s problems. Similarly, given that the city itself is a
monument, it is impossible to add to or alter anything. Preservation has overtaken
transformation. Consequently, I decided to illuminate the tower of the city hall
with images, and to accompany the projection with sound. The tower is located
in the very center of Kraków. It is really quite an ugly fourteenth-century brick
structure in the German style, the Medieval equivalent of a skyscraper, and a very
lonely one. It wears a Baroque helmet, as most of these structures do, and has a
clock tower and bell. The interior contains a ceremonial space for official events,
such as city council meetings and award ceremonies. The tower also bears the
memory of its function as a place of execution and other horrifying events. Lonely
structure though it is, the tower obviously inhabits the souls of most of Kraków’s
inhabitants. Even the most detached skeptical, and ironic intellectual has a secret
love affair with it. Everyone locates her or himself in relation to this tower and
consequently, there is a type of architectural relation between every single soul
Monument/Projection
 and the city—the body of the city—that is spiritually projected onto the tower.
Thus it was clear that every city dweller had to perceive my projection on to the
tower as the presence of an uninvited guest, someone else dwelling in the tower,
in a forced cohabitation. They now had to live with a stranger.
Citizens of Kraków meet others in the tower. During the projection, these
others are, in the main, women who testify to their nightmarish experiences in
Kraków at night. These are women beaten by drunken husbands, protecting their
children, having all sorts of complex reflections and existential thoughts, and
making use of all manner of survival techniques. The women confess and share
222 these experiences with those on the ground around the tower, amongst which
may be their husbands or their sisters and brothers, their friends or their enemies.
Clearly, even for those whom we might describe as the most sophisticated
inhabitants of the city, there is something strangely familiar in this. There can be no
doubt that similar violence occurs amongst the middle-class intelligentsia as much
as it does amongst the working class. At night, in Kraków, violence is an egalitarian
and classless act.
The crowd came to the projection to be spectators, but a strange electricity
began to be conducted from the body of the tower to the bodies of the spectators,
especially charging the bodies of couples. Freud might have said that this happens
when something that is supposed to be hidden—the uncanny—has come to light.
It is possible to confront the uncanny when it is presented as something that is
partially real and partially artificial, in this case, something somewhere between
science fiction and a crime story, something that is both art and architecture.
Architecture has a very special role in our psychic life: its forms have a
permanence that allows surrounding events to project and confirm new meaning
upon it. These forms represent a history of meaning, and the history of a life can
be seen in relation to their structure, in the way that I have imagined a relation
and identification with the tower in Kraków. I have no theory about this, only
questions. What would a psycho-ideological theory of architecture be? What
really happens there? What is the relationship between art and such structures?
And once they are animated, how much can the people that are animating those
structures heal themselves in the process.
Imagine a mother, or wife (a common historical representation of the State), a
heroic figure who has survived an overwhelming experience, but cannot really speak
about it. She has to be filmed standing on a tall pedestal, imagining herself to be a
tower, looking down at everyone, referring to some point in the city that only she,
being 50 times taller than those around her, can see. Each time she starts speaking
she bursts into tears; that is it for the recording. The next time she might not even
come. But strangely enough she does, usually with the perplexed feeling that she
wants to perform in this architectural theater, but at the same time, knowing that she
cannot do this very well. So we try again. This time her sentence lasts a little longer.
Another time she does not come at all. Somebody else comes. Somebody who has
been somehow inspired, or who heard some gossip or rumor that something like this
is happening. Someone more ready to speak. And then, all of a sudden, more and
more begins to happen in the process of recording, re-recording, editing, changing,
reconstructing. More and more of the story emerges. We are pre-occupied with
keeping their hands in the proper position, because the tower is very narrow, and
speaking in a particular fashion because it is so tall. All of these things emerge from
a mixture of laughter and tears. The distance between the experiences, the memory,
and the person is increasing, and that may be a healthy process. Just as these people
Transformative Avant-Garde and Other Writings
must first heal themselves in order to heal others, they must be ready to animate this
tower by animating themselves.
During the projection you could see the bricks of the tower and hear the noise
of the crowd. Obviously, I do not project onto a blank wall or a white screen. I seek to
establish a dialogue with the physical and corporeal structures of tower and person.
They become interrelated in the old tradition of montage. (Perhaps John Heartfield
would have liked some of these projections, but Heartfield did not work with
physical people and architecture, and that is a big difference.) The bricks function
not only as the skin of the tower, which connects with the skin of the person who
is projected onto it, but also as something like the partition in a confessional box. 223
Given the dramatic confession of the participant/animator, there is a tendency on
the part of the spectators to imprison a person they think of as a ‘victim’ within their
overly empathetic perceptions. This can drive the work towards an extremely kitsch
magnification of the victim—a kind of TV talk-show confession within which there is
no room for a process of coming to terms with what happens to be developing—that
is highly orchestrated and done purely for entertainment value. Those bricks are very
important safeguards; they will always draw people’s attention to the fact that there
is no in-depth illusion. There is a distance that must be maintained.
Many Japanese high school students find themselves in the most
impossible situation. Rather than being within the protected environment of
elementary school, they find themselves in a sort of labor camp. With no warning
they may face impossible situations, impossible demands, a complete lack of
understanding of their lives, and a complete lack of space and time in which to
develop themselves as human beings. They are pushed to pass more and more
exams, and to prove themselves in a theater of desperate progress, governed by
early-modern values.
I thought that designing equipment that would help these school children
to present themselves, to become present, and to tell others about their lives. In
a number of conversations, I had been made aware of a Japanese expression—
“You can tell more about a person by looking at their back than by looking at
their face”—that led me to try and develop the back as a speaking device, one
that might reveal more than you could see in a face. One could say that this
work relates to the projections in that it is a projection in daylight, and that the
performer is the projector. The performer becomes a monument, initially silent,
then animated by the use of the instrument.
Dis-Armor, an instrument focusing on the psycho-social situation of
Japanese school children and “school refusers”, with their difficulties of speech
and facial expression, uses the ancient tradition of arms making to conceive an
alternative to face-to-face communication. The pair of video screens worn on the
back displays a live image of the wearer’s eyes from the camera attached to the
helmet, and the loudspeaker below the screens amplifies the wearer’s voice. A
rear-view mirror, or alternatively, another small camera, permits the operator to see
the spectator behind him. Specifically, Dis-Armor is designed for high school-age
students and school refusers that have survived overwhelming life experiences and
wish to try to overcome a false sense of shame. It is directed toward their difficulty
in facing the truth of what happened to them and in facing the ‘others’ to whom
they must communicate. In short, Dis-Armor is a device to help young trauma
survivors lift their shields of shame, to break inner and outer walls of silence, and
to share difficult memories, critical thoughts, and hopes with others in the midst of
public space. Dis-Armor’s purpose is to attract the attention of passers-by on the
Monument/Projection
 street and others in the city, to entice them to come closer and to focus on the life
difficulties of the young person.
Since direct face-to-face eye and voice contact is often too difficult for
those who have survived such life events, Dis-Armor offers an opportunity for an
indirect, mediated communication. To do so, Dis-Armor transforms the wearer’s
back into an artificial, ‘mediated’ face: a media mask. At the same time, the
actual face of the user is concealed behind the Dis-Armor helmet. This initial
‘masquerade’ of back-to-front communication may soon pave the ground for face-
to-face, open, fearless and shameless contact, which happens at first by simply
224 turning towards the listener, opening the hood of a helmet, and exposing one’s
real face, and then later by taking off the Dis-Armor.
Both variants (blue and gold) of Dis-Armor, consist of three main
components: the helmet, the chest shield, and the backpack. The chest shield
contains a set of electric batteries, the power supply. The helmet is equipped with
the hood. When the hood covers the face of the wearer, two small TV cameras
installed inside transmit enlarged images of his or her eyes, which appear on the
two video monitors, located in the backpack. The microphone installed behind
the mouth cover of the helmet transmits the amplified voice of the wearer to the
loudspeaker located below the two video monitors. The helmet is equipped with
a switch that allows for remote closing and opening of the shields that cover the
monitors. The eyelid-like shields, when open, protect the monitors from excessive
ambient light. The gold variant of Dis-Armor is equipped with a computer located
in its backpack as an additional speech aid. The computer allows for memorizing,
recalling, and emitting pre-recorded speech and images of the wearer’s eyes that
are synchronized with sound. An additional switch, located in the helmet, allows a
choice between recorded and live modes of speech. A special keyboard allows for
the selection of specific units of the recorded material.
In addition, wireless transmission equipment with antennae installed in the
helmets of both variants, allow the two operators to work collectively, each carrying
live images and sound from the other. Both are located in the helmet section and in
the backpack. In the backpack of the gold variant there is an additional shield that
allows for easy access to the computer keyboard and screen. This is necessary
during the process of editing the pre-recorded speech. In the future, both variants
may be equipped with additional microphones located on the top of the backpack
and an earphone attached to the helmet in order to allow the wearer to hear the
responses of the spectators behind his or her back.
It is the psycho-aesthetic process in Dis-Armor, of the preparation
preceding appearance, performance, and interaction in public, required by the
instrument’s front-to-back structure and function—recollecting, recording,
re-recording and editing the written and enacted material—that is most critical.
This technological artifice seeks to create a more playful distance between
the wearer’s drive to ‘tell it all, like it is’, and the spectator’s overly serious and
empathetic identification with the experience or trauma of the wearer. Dis-Armor
inspires the creation of two ethical and psychological spaces: one on the part of
the operator, to open and reveal often suppressed splits and silences, and another
on the part of the spectator, to come closer to the wearer, and thereby to one’s
own trauma and one’s own strangeness.
Dis-Armor sails against the wind, tacking back and forth in a manner that
preserves the trajectory of public history, but acknowledges any and all criticism
and doubts about official progress. It moves forward as a result of a continuing
Transformative Avant-Garde and Other Writings
recollection of the past, which by the very consciousness of this act becomes
historical. The future is understood as an open horizon, but one constantly informed
by the process of critical recollection, making it public, moving it in the direction of a
new public life. Ironically, as in Newtonian physics, the user is propelled forward to
the future through a ‘rear-ejection’ of consciously recognized matter from the past,
accumulated in his or her inner worlds. Expulsed, announced, and denounced to the
outside world, this exteriorized critique of the past is registered in the eyes and ears
of observers and listeners left gathering in the rear, who in turn speak to the back of
the forward-moving user. At times, when encouraged by the listeners’ responses, the
user may turn to speak to them directly and ask them to join her or him in this critical 225
journey. The action of Dis-Armor produces a critical history of the cultural mania of
progress, the problem of a lifeless life whose eventual price is death.
The form of the instrument in-itself, reminiscent of a device out of a
science fiction, suggests the future. It offers hope by helping the viewer to
imagine, from the outset, that there really is a future. Conversely, it revives the
past in its recollection of Japanese traditions of samurai, of prophetic warriors,
and of helpful cyborgs.
More recent works involve specially designed equipment to be worn by
operators whose interruptive responses can be projected on to the monument in
real time, such as the Tijuana Projection. This live projection using high-powered
video projectors and sound equipment controlled by mixing-boards for switching
between pre-recorded and live mode, took place on 23 and 24 February 2001,
and lasted about three hours each evening. It was the closing event of InSite
2000, a several-month-long public art festival on both sides of the Mexican-
American border.
El Centro Cultural de Tijuana, Baja California Norte, is a civic icon of the
border city of Tijuana, Mexico. This cultural complex, with its theaters, museums,
galleries, bookstore, educational programs, and restaurants, is also an agora, a
central gathering place for concerts and other festivities—the symbol of that city.
Tijuana is also the center of a belt of maquiladoras (border factories), some 500
of which have been built there by transnational corporations. Foreign materials
and parts are shipped to them for assembly by cheaper Mexican labor, with the
finished products being returned to consumer markets throughout the world.
Young women from all over the country provide 90 per cent of this labor.
Whether or not the new workers actually cross a border, they must constantly
pass through a multitude of difficult social and psychological checkpoints. There is,
for example, the crossing from the feudal status of a village-based social economy to
the postmodern global and industrial assembly line of the maquiladoras. They also
cross from the older identities of man and woman in a traditional division of labor,
to new ones where woman is the preferred wage earner, even head of household,
rather than the now often unemployed husband.
These migrant families, many from the southern States of Oaxaca and
Chiapas, often plan to come to the north only for a short time, but are then caught
in the fluid, phantom borders of new and alluring extra-urban agglomerations,
where they are held in a tortured and perpetual love-hate relationship with
everything ‘Tijuana’ represents. In the words of one participant in the projection,
“I escaped from one hell into another.”
El Centro Cultural’s huge globe-like form, designed for an IMAX theater,
is reminiscent of the cenotaph Boullée envisaged for Newton, or some gigantic
pre-Columbian structure. The women who participated in the live projection
Monument/Projection
 were able to animate the external body of the monument, transforming its Monumental Interruption
faceless, silent mass into a manifestation of their presence. This presence,
whose force is so central to the social economy, usually remains hidden from 2004
view, as does their testimony.
Inscribed with their architecturally magnified and reinforced faces and
amplified voices, this new center of attention, optical and acoustic, now accorded
them their true place as prominent actors in the drama of the city. For the
projection, six women from various generations sought to voice the difficulties
of their personal situations—domestic and sexual abuse, exploitation in the work
226 place and police violence—trying to find words for life events rarely addressed
either in their culture or in the media. Each of them projected her face on to the
central sphere and amplified her voice via a specially designed head-mounted
camera-microphone and wearable transmission equipment.
For the first time, this was done live, in real time. This was possible only
through a preliminary process of recording, re-recording, and listening to their own
accounts, gauging their effect and effectiveness on others when projected on a large
scale. The participants were then able to operate with greater confidence when in
the midst of spectators during the projection, as well as in facing several film, radio,
and television crews, who broadcast the projection to the city. For the women this
was a great step forward psychologically and ethically. This performative speech-
act, making the passage from testimony to transformative public action became
an important bridge to developing a capacity to intervene in real life. The response
evoked among the public which in a sense became co-actors in the event, in turn
furthered its dynamic. This may bring Tijuana a little closer to fully acknowledging Democratic process and public space cannot, even for a moment, be sustained if
who really inhabits her and how. we do not provide conditions for the inclusion of the silent, invisible and seemingly
passive, but potential, speakers and actors on the public stage. It is the silence of
the city, the invisibility of many of the city’s residents that needs to be interrupted.
Originally published in AA Files, no 43, 2003, pp 32–51. It is our fear of seeing the faces, hearing the voices, of these ‘others’—our
unwillingness, even incapacity, that needs to be exposed and disrupted.
We must be supportive and inclusive towards perhaps the most important
1 Mosès, Stéphane on Walter Benjamin in “The Theological-Political Model of History”, potential speakers: those incapacitated by the very experiences they may wish
History & Memory, fall/winter, 1989.
to communicate, are incapable of opening up. Their capacity for sharing their
2 Critchley, Simon, The Ethics of Deconstruction: Derrida and Levinas, Oxford: Oxford
University Press, 1992. ‘passion’, their witness, their testimony and their critical vision has been internally
and externally, politically and psychologically, shattered. Before they can add
their voices to the democratic agon (contest), they must regain and develop their
communicative abilities, while we must regain our ability to listen and hear. This
is a healing process that must be inspired and protected both for the sake of the
social and psychological health of the city and its residents, and for public space
and democracy in general.
The process of unlocking the post-traumatic silences of the city requires
both a critical and clinical approach. For my part, though without proper
theoretical rigor, I must risk injecting into the theory of “agonistic” democracy
proposed by the political philosopher Chantal Mouffe. In my practitioner-artist’s
mind I try to infuse (and hopefully not confuse) concepts of agonistic democracy
with ethico-political concepts from Michel Foucault and psycho-political ideas
and suggestions from Judith Herman, a trauma therapist and theorist. Calls
for dissensus, disagreement, passion, and an inclusive adversarial discourse
that acknowledges and exposes social exclusions (Mouffe) must be injected
and interjected with the call for an “ethics of the self”, and of the other, through
“fearless speaking” (Foucault), combined with a call for psycho-therapeutic

Transformative Avant-Garde and Other Writings Monument/Projection

 recovery through “re-connection” that emphasizes a role of public truth-telling and
testimony (Herman).
Today’s public space is barricaded and monopolized by the powerful
presence of historic symbolic structures and events, as well as by a monumental
form of ‘publicity’, commercial and political. It represents what Walter
Benjamin called “the history of the victors”, of those chosen to remember and
be remembered, at the expense of the forgotten and invisible tradition of the
“vanquished”. It is the vanquished, not the victors, who are the most invisible and
unheard, and they should be first to share with others the truth of their testimony.
228 Some of them may have lost confidence that their voice will make any difference,
while others may be locked into post-traumatic silence, and even amnesia.
In my case the attempt to disrupt the city means doing so in an aesthetic
way, through the introduction of specially designed communicative artifices and
participatory monumental spectacles. Their aim is to animate both the voice and
gesture of the city’s contemporary vanquished, the blind and numbed ear and heart
of the more fortunate victors, alienated from each other and isolated from the city’s
reality. Inspired and encouraged they may in turn disrupt the silent continuity of the
city’s historic and symbolic space and the passivity and the exclusiveness of its public
life. Such disruption may awaken the city, if only for a moment, a night, a week or
month, with dynamic and critical public discourse.
In my own artistic work I have sought to contribute, as much as I can, to a
fusion of seemingly opposing political and ethical attributes. My projects practically
endorse some of the propositions by the ethical philosopher Emmanuel Levinas,
which call for the ‘projection’ of an ethical space of asymmetry—the inequality
in our ethical obligations toward those less fortunate than ourselves—onto the
public space of political symmetry and equality in rights. Such ethics include these
strangers, the inhabitants of the blind alleys, and the dark and hidden scarred
pockets of our urban life where true public space is located today. Undocumented
immigrants, the hidden victims of the US Patriot Act, traumatized survivors of
urban violence, mothers of murdered children, the homeless and others living in
the shadows of city monuments, are important to me and the basis for my artistic
work. The hope behind such an aesthetic enlargement and more open artistic
transmission is to disturb the illusions of egalitarian society by creating, on a
temporary basis, an interruptive, interrogative, and ethically asymmetrical public
space. This temporary space may become, as I hope it will, the seed of a new agon,
a contest of competing voices of truth-telling, and lead, as I hope it will, to the
recognition and creation of further critical speech acts on the part of those unequal
others, and to their greater social, political and cultural inclusion.
Memorials have been built as a reminder, a minder, and as a warning.
Even when built without such a conscious intention, they should be perceived as
having this monitory, and questioning function—monitors and critics of (and in)
the present. Despite such a demand and an expectation most memorials are (in an
uncanny way) quite inactive and incapacitated. Monuments and memorials, in their
speechlessness and stillness, look strangely human, while traumatized humans, in
their motionlessness and silence, may appear strangely monumental. Speechless
survivors living in their shadows face the blank facades and blind eyes of our public
buildings and memorials, those speechless witnesses to present-day injustices.
Both require re-animation. My public projections focus on animating—awakening
back to life—our silent monuments and memorials, as well as the silent residents of
the cities they inhabit.
Transformative Avant-Garde and Other Writings
But in the shadows of historic and official monuments and memorials lives
a new city, the new city of new living monuments and memorials. These are the
nameless and speechless, potentially new, agonistic living monuments who, with
regained voice, could become new public monuments (from Latin monumentum
or “warning”.) Just as survivors through their witness become monuments in
their own right, public memorials too, can come to life. Indeed, they can doubly
live, and often contend, in an internal dialogue with those who animate them.
But before they can add their voice to the democratic agon they must recover
their shattered communicative abilities, for the sake of their own health, and of
the health of democracy. In such a situation, those among the initially speechless 229
survivors who wish to learn how to animate the equally speechless monuments
of the city, and eventually speak through them, must become both patients and
doctors. In order to heal and animate themselves they will attempt to bring the
monument to life and cure its numbness and dumbness; in order to animate the
monument, they need to critically animate, and bring to life, and cure themselves.
This is an opportunity for using these respectful and respectable structures as
the stage sets and as the costumes or as the monumental puppetry in a dramatic
therapy for the survivors of post-traumatic stress who will learn, with a strong
sense of their mission, how to contribute to social change by becoming artists in
public truth-telling and free and fearless speaking.
A central question for me is how to find a place for technology, from
the explosion of communications technologies occurring contingently during
a time of communication breakdown, in cultural communication: a search for
a new interface, an artistic and not just an industrial interface. Technology,
as communicative artifice, is needed to operate between alienated subjects.
Using psychoanalyst DW Winnicott’s concept, technology is also needed as a
“transitional object”, as a potential space located between the inner and outer
world, between reality and fantasy. Such a transitional communicative and
technological effort can protect and encourage a developmental process through
the use of the designed or adopted object, a vehicle from the inner ‘me-world’
towards the ‘not-me-world’ of others, from post-traumatic hopelessness and
silence to the use of words and gestures directed toward both the conscious self
and others. What I have done is design special speech-act equipment and events,
even to the extent of taking up, on a grand scale, one’s fantasy of becoming a
powerful “cyborg” or a “speaking monument”.
But in order for them to be more fearless witnesses, critical speakers, a
true “monumental therapy” must be undertaken. This is best done through the
intervention of willing monument-animators. Firstly, those who, in the process
of recovery from their trauma have become themselves the speaking monuments,
should initiate it; those of whom clinician Judith Herman has said, “In refusing
hide or be silenced, in insisting that rape (or any other unspeakable life event) is
a public matter, and in demanding social change, survivors create their own living
monuments.” It is possible that the architectural monument or memorial, too,
may similarly get and feel better.
Artists and designers can do something to help by creating a developmental
‘third zone’, a space for these potential fearless speakers and truth-tellers to be
inspired and assisted in learning how to speak. My own projections onto monuments,
participatory video animations of these memorials, magnify the participants’ urgent
testimony. They constitute an attempt to take on the memorial’s greater physical
scale and weight. My work ‘adopts’ these existing symbolic structures of city
Monument/Projection
 architecture, often with the help of specially designed instruments, and offers facade of the monument. Now, in my project for St Louis, I used a microphone in
participants (the co-artists) and the public (the co-agents), as well as media such a way that when a passerby speaks back to the huge body of the building,
people, activists and others, such a transitory and transitional space. All the the person animating the building or monument is able to see her or him through
preparatory stages of recording and re-recording by participants (before the some kind of wireless or wired feedback transmission. An argument is thus able
projections and performances using my instruments), along with the architectural to take place, a dialogical wrestling with and through the monument.
forms and organizing cultural institutions, are transitional phenomena. This situation My artistic method has consisted in creating a socio-aesthetic situation
is designed to foster an enhanced confidence in our engagement with an often that allows, inspires and protects a process where others may become (if only
unfriendly and risky world, both the outside world and the fearful, often frozen and briefly) artists themselves. In this way my art may be used as a transition in the
discouraged, inner world. Those who speak are at the same time helping themselves development of their lives and the lives of others. A re-articulating of the silences
230 move from private confession, through critical public testimony, into action, because in the city and the transmission of the regained voices of the residents—a newly 231
they begin to understand that what they have to say is going to change something. developed “response-ability”—practiced with a sense of responsibility is, in my
The very fact that they are speaking of something of which no one else wishes to opinion, the beginning of the creative dissensus, civic as well as aesthetic, we
speak, and that they are using the authority and the phenomenological power of need more of. All this works against dangerously passive concepts of collective
the architectural body, allows them to assume the historical significance of these memory and of public memorial that still predominate in our thinking today.
monuments as silent witnesses to previous and present events. They also make a As Walter Benjamin himself put it, “The way in which [the past] is honored as
link between their present life and past events, hoping that these events will not ‘heritage’ is more disastrous than its simple disappearance could ever be.”
repeat themselves in the future; they end up becoming real memorials.
By actualizing built memorials, they also become living memorials
themselves, as well as agents and witnesses. They testify and “pro-test” (from Originally published in Timeshift: The World in Twenty-Five Years, festival
testis or “witness”). The testimonial is submerged into the life of the city. catalogue, Ars Electronica, 2004.
Now there is the new and powerful presence of someone who denounces and
announces, in an organic connection to a symbolic structure of some importance.
It becomes clear that if those people can say something, if the monument can
speak, then perhaps they in turn can also do something. There is a possibility of
spreading the contagious process of unnerving, irritating, and interrupting the
passivity and total silence of the city. The silence of the city is the speech of the
city, but no one hears that speech. When they speak of that silence, they also
question it.
They themselves may use it, some more than others, as a vehicle to
re-connect with society, since they—during the long process of recording,
re-recording, editing, putting words to unspeakable experiences—use it as
a therapeutic vehicle. Because they must also become the animators of the
structure, they contribute a comic and strange aspect to it, like some new
dramatic therapy. They create a certain distance from themselves, because they
themselves become monuments and buildings. They see others in the same
situation: they are no longer alone. They are unique, but also part of a larger
picture. It is a process of ‘re-connection’ that artists, or an art of the animation
of the monument, can provide.
There are other forms and techniques of re-connection that occur through
therapy and in cultural work. One instrumental factor in my work is that the
projection is not only practiced and pre-recorded over a long period of time, which
is very important, but that it also has a live component: real time. Thus there is
the possibility of feedback, meaning that the public (whoever chooses to do so)
might have the chance to speak back to the building through the projected person
animating that building. This is what I am trying to test in my more recent work.
In the Tijuana Projection, the speakers were able to add life to speech, once they
realized that people were listening and looking seriously at their faces on the
facade. They put on the instruments, and told the truth, in open and ‘fearless’
speech. They were able to face the listeners directly, and the listeners were also
able to face them—both the actual faces of speakers, and those projected on the

Transformative Avant-Garde and Other Writings Monument/Projection

Communicating Through Statues
2004
For the most part, these statues, these monuments which populate our public
space once lived. Figures without names, they seem to remain as useless,
nameless, speechless and unemployed. Since we generally do not know who they
are, or even what they are, we invest them with our projected needs, desires,
hopes, and so forth. Unconsciously, perhaps, we project ourselves onto their lofty
bodies; we imagine ourselves as them—as lonely and heroic urban characters,
actors and witnesses of grand events, embodiments of historic wisdom and
players on large political stages. We may wish to wake them up, bring them back
to life, provoke their reaction, hear them speaking to us and speak back to them.
We may also imagine ourselves as engaged in a civic debate, political argument
or existential dialogue with them. We may hope to see others to speak with
the statues and later, animated by such a dialogue, continue to debate among
themselves. The civic discourse that truly engages the unseen, speechless present
while at the same time animating a silent, distant, frozen past, cannot readily occur
today given the realities of political life in a mass and media-driven world. To see
and hear the statues speaking and arguing both with each other and with us in an
agonistic way, engaging the space between the past and the present, may bring
back our hopes for the future. If only the statues (as well as our relation with them)
could be re-animated, these two populations, the silent statues and the generally
silent residents, may finally communicate between and among themselves of what
is too often unspeakable, too difficult to accept and to confront. Indeed, it might
even be easier to engage in truth-telling, the basis of all political life since Greek
democracy, through an technologically enhanced medium.
This project seeks to examine and develop the technical and artistic means
for the public to ‘embody’ existing statues—to animate and speak through them.
This will be made possible by the use of especially designed attachments to the
statues to hold the necessary augmented video- and sound-projection equipment.
Transformative Avant-Garde and Other Writings
Video images of the statue animator’s face, features or hands could be projected
onto the statue’s own face, features or hands. The animator’s voice, also
transmitted to the statue, thus create a speaking statue: a new communication
medium, which unlike the mostly “inter-passive” public media we are accustomed
to, could publicly engage other users present, speaking out on any subject they
were concerned about. The animated statue could become in this way vocally
evocative or provocative, encouraging both onlookers and other participants to
respond and develop a dialogue in real time. Responses and ongoing dialogue will
be possible thanks to the public microphones available on the ground that allow
the passersby and any potential interlocutors to address, interrupt and question 233
the animated statue while standing in front of its pedestal or on its steps. Via a
mini video camera attached to the statue’s head (or shoulder) the statue animator
will be able not only to hear but also see those who speak to the statue and even
select from the crowd a particular interlocutor to replace him or her, the process
continuing as the discussion evolves.
To transform the statue into such a dynamic and “agonistic” medium,
special equipment would need to be designed for the statue. These would be in
the nature of light-weight temporary attachments, fiberglass ‘masks’ or ‘shells’
to create surfaces on which faces—either entire or segmented into the eyes
and mouth, hands, singly or in pairs—could be projected from small armatures.
Animators, through switching equipment, would make choices as to what was
projected onto the statues. The recording, projection, and switching would be
controlled from two small mobile studios. These would also allow those interested
in statue animation to become familiar with the equipment technique before
appearing and speaking through the statue, and to see in advance how they look
when embodied by or embodying the statue. Multiple pieces of equipment would
allow several users to embody the statue at any given time. Switching between
animators could be voluntary or be triggered automatically by the passage of a
certain amount of time, or by the utterance of key words or phrases.
Interlocutors and the public see and hear only the statue. However,
as previously explained, users or animators can see and hear the crowd or
interlocutor from the height (the eye-level perspective) of the statue via attached
mini video camera and via a speaker and LCD monitor in their ‘studios’. While
they animate and speak, they will also see themselves embodied in the statue
via an additional camera located on the ground. A computer simulation of their
embodiment may help them in their preparatory rehearsals. Users could take
advantage of the Internet or other communications systems to speak from
a location elsewhere than the statue’s physical location. Whether the statue
animator is linked to the statue by cables or via wireless equipment is a technical
and design concern as much as a metaphorical one.
Much experimenting with various combinations of sound and imagery will
be necessary to determine the optimal use of these “moving statues” in the many
situations and occasions a given social environment provides. Like any form,
these newly enlivened actors will develop over time, transforming them and us as
they—and we—learn through doing.
This text formed part of a finalist project proposal for the Rockefeller New Media
Foundation. Wodiczko was a Rockerfeller Fellowship Nominee in 2004.
Monument/Projection
 Parrhésía/
Inner Public
234

Mouthpiece (Le porte-parole), 1997

Transformative Avant-Garde and Other Writings

The Fearless Monument Speaks
2003
Monuments and memorials are built as a reminder, a minder and warning. The
word “monument” itself comes from the Latin moneo, meaning “warning”, while
the word “memorial” relates to memento, meaning to “remember”. In English a
memorial not only commemorates but also “serves to warn or remind with regard
to conduct or future events” according to the Encyclopedia Britannica. Even when
built without such consciousness or intention, monuments and memorials should
be perceived, and used, in respect of such a ‘monitory’ function—as monitors of
(and in) the present. In the face of new historical events (many of which may be
overwhelming, even personal, the monument’s historic destiny is to ‘respond’.
They may be expected to perform their duties as survivors, witnesses, often
suspects, and, hopefully, as challenging, fearless interlocutors. As our psycho-
political and ethical companions, they should also exercise a healing function,
a ‘making whole’, helping us live with the past and with our traumas. At their
greatest, they should provide the conditions for mourning, that is, the process of
thinking through these traumas, rather than succumbing to melancholia.
Their symbolic and narrative structures, the facades and statues, to some
degree already operate as inspiring screens, re-projecting our mental projections
onto them. They tend to perform the role both of metaphoric screens and memory
containers for our everyday political and existential imaginations. We like to use
them as semiological and psychological vehicles through which we speak to
ourselves and to each other. But we should seek to disrupt the melancholy, theirs
and ours, in order to re-actualize the past, to act as if that past has already been
‘anticipating’ new events.
When those who live in a state of painful speechlessness think of
the monument, in the shadow of which they live, they often say, “If only the
monument could speak!” But what do they really mean when they say this?
Simply, “If only we could speak!” They identify with the monument’s post-
traumatic condition, and perhaps with their own, and its own, speechlessness.
At the same time they express the hope that they have not yet reached such an
Transformative Avant-Garde and Other Writings
irreversible state of dumbness, that the monument will speak, as they will speak,
sometime in the future.
Through my practice I hope to capitalize on the existing psycho-political
capacities of monuments and memorials in order to further expand their role
in the city. Let the historic monuments be free to do what they do best. Let
us animate them; let them animate us into living monuments. Let us speak to
them and through them. Let the monuments speak, to us and through us. Let
monuments and ourselves be both projectors and projection screens.
Despite such demands and expectations, most monuments are (in an
uncanny way) quite inactive and incapacitated. Monuments and memorials, in their 237
speechlessness and stillness, at times look strangely human, while traumatized
humans, in their motionlessness and silence, may appear strangely monumental.
Speechless survivors living in their shadows face the blank facades and blind eyes
of our public buildings and memorials, those speechless witnesses to present-
day injustices. Both monuments and survivors require re-animation. My public
projections and instruments focus on animating—awakening back to life—our silent
monuments and memorials, as well as the silent residents of the cities they inhabit.
This enables the performers, users, and operators to become projectors themselves,
whether they are animating monuments or are themselves being animated, armed
with the required communicative equipment, as mobile living monuments.
My work encounters three main problems. First, official memorials are often
designed or re-designed for the purpose of barricading public space against the free
contest of agonistic memories and testimonies. Second, those who should be the
first to animate and educate the memory of public memorials through their present-
day testimonial memories are often initially incapable of ‘free speaking’, as they
may be locked into their post-traumatic silence. Their speech must be developed,
as must the speech of the monuments. In such a situation, the initially speechless
survivors who wish to learn to animate the (equally speechless) monuments, and
who will eventually speak through them, must become both patients and doctors.
In order to heal and animate themselves, they attempt to bring themselves (and the
monument) to life, to cure it of its numbness and dumbness; in order to animate
the monument, they need to critically animate (bring to life), and cure themselves.
Furthermore, through the notorious anti-homeless and ‘crime-prevention’
re-design of their surroundings, memorials are often in and of themselves cut off
from the present. They are also cut off by the way in which they are imprisoned in
the past, through an enslavement to all-too-excessive commemorative functions
and duties. In this way, they too are forced to function as silent witnesses,
prevented from testifying, from pro-testing, and responding to the present. This
induces a semi-traumatic state that precludes their connection to “the present-
day realities and experiences” of which the psychologist Pierre Janet has spoken.
On occasion we, to some degree, succeed in helping some of those built
monuments to stay alert, free, healthy and alive. But in order for them to be
fearless witnesses and critical speakers a truly “monumental therapy” must be
undertaken. This is best achieved through the intervention of those willing to be
animators. This should be initiated by those who, in the process of recovery from
their trauma, have themselves become “speaking monuments”; those of whom
clinician Judith Herman has said: “In refusing to hide or be silenced, in insisting
that rape (or any other unspeakable life event) is a public matter, and in demanding
social change, survivors create their own living monuments.” It is possible that
the architectural monument or memorial, too, may similarly get and feel better.
Parrhesia/Inner Public
 For monuments and memorials, as for human survivors, it is easier to live when
enlivened with usefulness to the living.
My own projections onto monuments and participatory video animations of
memorials magnify the urgent testimony of the project participants. This constitutes
an attempt to take on the memorial’s greater physical and symbolic scale, to amplify
or magnify its role as public speaker. They do so by adding to the body of the survivor-
monument, which though wounded, now has a supplementary capacity to say more.
Just as survivors through their role as witnesses become monuments in their own
right, public memorials, too, come to life; indeed, they doubly live, and often contend,
238 in an internal dialogue with those who animate them.
As trauma theorists and therapists Inger Agger and Søren Jensen have stated,
“Testimony and truth-telling has both a private dimension—which is confessional and
spiritual—and a public aspect, which is political and judicial.” The traumatic state
precludes survivors’ connection to what psychologist Pierre Janet called “present-
day realities and experiences”. Speaking of dissolving such traumatic amnesia, he
incisively observed, “Memory, like belief, like all psychological phenomena, is an
action; essentially, it is the action of telling a story.... ” In the words of Van der Kolk,
Cermak, and Brown, “Those who work therapeutically with trauma know that no
pain is so devastating as the pain a person refuses to face, no suffering so lasting as
suffering left unacknowledged.” Richard Mollica describes the transformed trauma
story as simply “a new story, no longer about shame and humiliation”, but rather
about “dignity and virtue”. It is precisely this dignity and virtue that rightly or wrongly,
official memorials commemorate and magnify.
The struggle for recovery from trauma—finding the narrative voice through
testimony—has a greater chance of success when performed as a public speech-
act, and even more so when directed as a social utterance to and on behalf of
others. Janet termed this act “presentification”. On one hand this focus on the
present is necessary and positive. On the other we must recognize that it is both
the human condition, and that of the monument, to be prisoners of the past. But
it thus follows that none of us are alone; the monuments are our companions.
However, memorials usually represent what Walter Benjamin called the
“history of the victors”, even though these may at times include those to whom
the ill has been done. These “victorious vanquished”, so to speak, those chosen
to remember and be remembered, are often recognized at the expense of other
past and present survivors, the “forgotten vanquished”.
But can the ‘saying’ of the forgotten vanquished animate the silence of the
‘victorious said’? To do so, we must perturb the established symmetries by creating
an “agonistic” public space in which a contest of contending voices, in no particular
unison, leads to a greater inclusion of those unequal others. The aim of a truly
democratic politics is, as Chantal Mouffe states, “to transform antagonism into
agonism.... An important difference from the model of ‘deliberative democracy’
is that, for ‘agonistic pluralism’, the prime task of democratic politics is not to
eliminate passions from the sphere of the public in order to render a rational
consensus possible, but to mobilize those passions towards democratic designs.”
The agonistic memory that generates testimonial discourse itself contains
an adversarial relation to truth. The witness of survivors must necessarily contend
with other survivors’ witness; that of survivors with of the survivors’ survivors—in
Hiroshima, for example, between Japanese-Japanese and Korean-Japanese, or
between the generation of the survivors and that of their children and grandchildren,
now the generations of survivors of re-traumatized survivors.
Transformative Avant-Garde and Other Writings
It further involves the risks and passion involved in Michel Foucault’s
parrhésía, the Athenian right, duty, and art of ‘free speaking’ and ‘outspokenness’,
as a democratic ethic of the self. Michel Foucault calls this “fearless speech” or
more properly, “fearless speaking”.
Parrhésía is a verbal activity in which a speaker expresses her personal
relationship to truth, and risks her life because she recognizes truth-telling
as a duty to better or help other people (as well as herself). Truth-telling that
implicates the memorial, that makes the facade face the truth and speak the
truth, is surely the most adventurous form of that parrhésía; outspokenness in
the service of political and ethical a-létheia, meaning “truth” in the original Greek, 239
a “recovery” from Léthé, “(traumatic) Oblivion”. In the final stages of recovery
from trauma, the “re-connection stage”, the powerful psycho-­therapeutic effect of
public truth-telling is advocated by both clinicians and social and political workers.
This kind of fearless speaking also demands an art of the public that
allows for “fearless listening”, so that a “fearless audience” can in turn accede
to a fearless speaking of its own. Fearless speaking is contagious—even a
“cont-agent”—as was seen in the Solidarity movement in Poland which spread
elsewhere, everywhere.
To be effective as our critical witnesses, the memorials should be animated
by the most unspeakable, seemingly inappropriate to public eye and ear and often
hidden, politically inconvenient to the public and too painful to be transmitted by
the media, memories, testimonies and pro-tests; a “witnessing-for”.
This counters the dangerously passive concepts of collective memory and
public memorial that still predominate in our thinking today. As Benjamin himself
put it, “The way in which [the past] is honored as ‘heritage’ is more disastrous
than its simple disappearance could ever be.”
My projections and instruments call for several different approaches to
the collective monument: Unprivileged (one that arises from the tradition of
the vanquished, rather than the victors); Fearless (one that encourages fearless
speaking); Agonistic (one that contributes to radical, democratic discourse;
one, which favors discord and disagreement with each other in an adversarial
contest of truth-telling and testifying thus, in Simon Critchely’s words, “justifying
the rational order of the polis by philosophical language which criticizes that
order in the name of what it excludes and marginalizes”.); Therapeutic (one
that contributing both to the psychological development and post-traumatic
reconstruction of memory and to its testimonial—but speaking beyond the
confessional, as Foucault would stress—vocal, public and militant articulation).
Here we attain the full sense of “memorial therapy”: therapy ‘through the
monument’ and ‘of the monument’. This double therapy of public space and of
democracy contributes to ‘reanimating’ the polis and those who inhabit it, towards
an democracy based on an agonistic memory, not to be taken for granted, never
cured but always under care, always in contest (agon), a devenir, “becoming”, and
always à-venir, “to come”.
Excerpt from a lecture presented at the Right to Performance Conference in
London, 2003.
Parrhesia/Inner Public
Critical Guests
John Ra j c h m a n
and K r zys zto f Wo dic z ko
2009
John Rajchman: I’m very happy to invite you to this conversation about guests—
unless it’s you who are inviting me. In a certain way, in all the discussions we’ve
been having over these years, we’ve been guests to one another—you in philosophy,
me in art—and one thing you’ve often said is there’s something dangerous or risky in
the very idea, in fact in the very word “guest” in all of the languages, Polish, Italian,
English. But let’s start with the real guests in this new piece: the undocumented
workers of Europe, in Europe.
Krzysztof Wodiczko: There’s a long history of involvement with strangers in my
work. Today the whole issue is coming back as urgent. In the early 1990s, when
I worked with Swiss strangers, it was during a time of an outbreak of European
xenophobia. I’ve done lots of work in this area but until recently had thought or
hoped that the situation was changing. But I now see we are witnessing the return
of a whole wave of xenophobia within the context of the European Community. So
the question is: what is the cause of this? And what can we, as artists, do about it?
It is clear that strangers are coming from outside the EU and that Italy is one of the
European countries most affected by an influx of undocumented immigrants who
are coming via Greece and Ireland, seeking employment or simply trying to move on
to Germany. Sometimes they come from Turkey or from African countries and then
fall under the rules of the Dublin Convention that forces them to register in the first
country they arrive in, where all the procedures leading to work permits must be
done. The further they go the more impossible it becomes for them to get aid from
various governmental or non-governmental agencies. This is in addition of course to
the old issue of the Roma people who are third or fourth generation of residents of
Italy who have no work permit. Because they have no permit to work they have to
survive outside the law where they are blamed, abused, provoked.
JR: So part of what makes this a European problem is the actual laws, the whole
legal structure; and the existence of these workers as ‘outside’ can be used to raise
Transformative Avant-Garde and Other Writings
questions about the laws themselves. Maybe artists can have a role in allowing
us to see these laws not so much in terms of their justification or enforcement,
but rather in terms of the modes of existence they suppose or institute. There’s
something directly affective, what you call “existential” about their situation, which
you are helping to make visible. It has to do in particular with the concrete work
they do, and the ways they are at once distant from and near to us, strange and
familiar. This is a problem that, aesthetically speaking, is often associated with
theater or theatricality, and in some ways, your piece is a kind of theatrical montage
of affects concerning this relation. It has to do with seeing and being-seen, with
proximity and distance, of course, but also with the ways those things are in turn 241
connected with affects like fear and pity.
KW: That brings up a kind of unintentional functional role that these strangers might
play and the possibility of reinforcing these functions and creating conditions in which
they could become actors in a democratic process. It is clear that for the most part
these conditions are not possible for them. They survive by being quiet, invisible,
smiling all the time, in always being kind. They’re kind because they don’t want to
ever get into trouble. Maybe this is a self-defeating attitude in the long run because
they should be the ones to speak up, to open up and let us see the world from their
point of view and so stimulate and initiate a kind of questioning of the process both
political and legal of the European Community and the role of nationality in it. Of
course it’s never easy; but in creating conditions in which their voice can be heard,
various cultural and artistic processes may be of help. The political and educational
work that is already being done by various organizations could include artists and
cultural animators. These strangers would then be able to say something, to actually
speak, rather than others speaking about them or on their behalf.
JR: That’s right. Documentaries or media treatments of their situation are often
about them without them actually speaking, or speaking freely, fearlessly, outside
of the frameworks of mere tolerance or therapy. Which brings me back to the
theatrical side of your work, the sense in which it involves an enactment in which
we are brought into existential contact with them. We had been talking about
this earlier, the role of the public in Venice, the ways it is invited to relate to these
guests, these strangers, to listen to them, to allow them to speak themselves.
There seems to be an element in your set-up which helps free us from the
traditional affects, the famous Aristotelian catharsis of fear and pity. We often
see a mediatic, if not a governmental, campaign to incite fear with respect to
these people; and at the same time, they are often just held up for our pity, our
tolerance. Entering your piece, we are involved in a different kind of catharsis, a
different kind of theater, which involves an element of distanciation. I think this an
affective problem you’ve been treating in a number of different ways in your work,
for example in your projections, but also in your vehicles land instrumentations.
KW: It’s different with the instruments and the equipment, the prosthetics I
designed for and with strangers. That’s a way of giving them a possibility of
developing their capacity to speak. And also for who are strangers to them to
become close and to open their ears without so much fear, out of curiosity and
entertainment. So it’s a kind of performance. That’s one possible approach.
Another is to take advantage of the prestige of historical symbolic structures like
monuments that bear witness to events and stand for their authority. There it’s a
matter of appropriating these structures or creating the conditions for strangers
to do so. The vehicles and projections as it were ‘arm’ strangers so that they
can speak a bit more freely, and also help us to be a little less fearful in listening
Parrhesia/Inner Public
 to them. But in an interior piece like this one [Guests] it’s a different situation
for the audience since they are actually inside something. They’re not facing an
external presence of the strangers. Through the fog of the windows the viewers
are put in a space in which they turn back toward their own interior, their own
inside. They’re put in a situation in which they must in fact acknowledge the
way they see the world from inside themselves. So it’s this other interior that’s
opened up such that they don’t simply exteriorize these strangers; they don’t
really know who they are and yet they’re very close to them, which produces a
disturbing, yet strangely familiar situation. For in fact, in our lives, they are very
242 close to us. They wash our clothes, they take care of our children, they cook,
they clean the windows in our offices, they see us and we see them, and yet
there is a wall between us and them. We see them from our side of this invisible
wall, but they also see us all the time, even if they never tell us what they see.
The problem is to create conditions for these people to say something through
this wall, to break it to some degree. But you mention fear and pity, and I add
here identification.
JR: Yes. I think we could even say “dis-identification”: a theater of dis-identification.
And yet we remain quite close to these actors, to their real situation. One might
even use Brecht’s old word “alienation”. Within the more classical proscenium
theater, Brecht wanted to be precisely anti-Aristotelian—in his epic theater, in
breaking with our identification with the characters, one would come to see their
real social situation. But your creation of an interior condition is rather different
from the classical stage; and the characters for the most part are real workers, real
strangers, speaking without a script.
KW: Exactly. There’s a kind of dis-identification. The aim of this material projection
is actually to make it difficult to identify with situations and those people and yet
to listen to them and understand their concrete stories, the concrete conditions of
their lives, rather than to think of them as people with no stories, no history of their
own, and therefore to think they don’t exist. I just want to let them tell the story.
Those with no history have no choice but to tell their stories, and in this way to
testify to a wrong that is outside of the usual narratives. They become something
like historians, critical historians: they testify, they bear witness. This testimony is
not confession but a kind of public testimony. Therefore we can learn something
from them without necessarily identifying with them.
JR: So we don’t fear or pity them. We come closer to seeing their situation.
KW: Yes, we might fear them less the more we learn about them but also there is
another issue we were talking about: tolerance. I mean a stranger can say being
tolerated is better than nothing; but tolerance is also a way of taking a superior
position from which to look at others.
JR: Spinoza was opposed to pity on just those grounds. Nietzsche too. We are so
gratified by our easy compassion for the suffering of others that we never in fact
really see them or listen to them.
KW: It’s not about us being higher than them or them being smaller but of them
speaking to us, teaching us something. The foggy window through which we
see them and yet don’t see them, and vice-versa, translates something of this
disturbed identification. We see these guests doing their work, renovating the
scaffolding, and suddenly they see us eating breakfast, taking a shower, but we
don’t know if they’re even interested in us or if they know anything about us. In
the piece you’re both in the situation while at the same time breaking with it—
that’s the “alienation effect”.
Transformative Avant-Garde and Other Writings
JR: We’ve also talked about another ancient practice which has to do with
speaking freely as a condition of democratic politics: parrhésía. In his last years,
Foucault wrote about the Cynics in this way, the ways they break with the
Platonic tradition of giving advice to kings. He quotes an ancient source that
says that the Cynics were swarming in ancient cities like dogs. But the Cynics
in Athens were precisely notoi, without citizenship because born to a slave, a
prostitute or a foreigner. Diogenes of Sinope, proverbially rolling about in his
‘vehicle’, the tub, was in fact the first to use the term “cosmopolitan”: the sense
that we are citizens of the cosmos, the world before we are members of any polis
or State. One of the ways the Cynics exercised fearless speech was precisely 243
to stand up and interrupt in public gatherings, in theaters, festivals, games (we
won’t yet say Biennials) while not having a place like a school of their own in
which to debate or teach.
KW: Yes. We have often talked about all those ancient parrhésíacs and cynics. We
know how much singular persons and smaller groups can in fact contribute to the
democratic process outside of large social movements or revolutions. A democracy
can be measured by the way it deals with these critical situations. If our strangers
could, as I’ve said before, stop smiling and being kind all the time and actually
start saying something, maybe that would create conditions for this critical speech
activity. They would then become the new cynics.
JR: Functional cynics, one might say.
KW: Yes, in the sense that they might then disrupt and make a scandal. They
could renew scandalous actions, the scandalous speech. And make us think/feel
for the first time that something is profoundly wrong. This of course is utopia
and I don’t think we can achieve it on a large scale, but what I’m saying is that it’s
important to have these small moments, these small disruptions.
JR: Foucault’s last lectures on cynicism and “fearless speech” were also part of
an on-going engagement with Kant and his idea of critical acts of emancipation
in the age of Enlightenment and Revolution in Europe. Foucault dreamt of a new
genealogy of the “critical attitude” in Western philosophy and democracy, that
would find one starting point in the way the Cynics turned away from giving advice
to kings, still found in Kant’s own relations with Frederick the Great of Prussia.
The cosmopolitan theme was of course very much part of this; and in the modern
or Revolutionary era, when Kant was writing, it was connected to the Nation State
and so with the problem of transnationality. It seems we see this rather directly
with the guests in your piece.
KW: Democracy is supposed to be inclusive, it’s supposed to include everyone,
but who is this everyone? What is the politics of those who have no rights?
What Hannah Arendt called the rights of those with no rights. In some way the
restrictions of national boundaries create situations in which those who come
outside them are no longer human, no longer part of the ‘everyone’ supposed
by democracy. Now this is a problem for the boundaries of the European
Community. It’s a contraction that’s seen in all those inner borders that are now
creating separate people with different access to rights, depending on which side
of the border you’re on. This creates a situation that is traumatic which leads
to a deprivation of speech, a lack of confidence that speech could make any
difference. For example, a fourth generation resident in Italy without working
permit, born of Roma parents. Those people are a bit like the cynics we were
talking about. Their actions are potentially scandalous, but they are not creating
them as cynics. Their performative talents are instead related to survival. They’re
Parrhesia/Inner Public
 performers in a negative sense. Their talents or skills developed over generations windows will be doing something like this. I feel that this is what makes the pavilion
of survival and displacement. Some of them are polyglots; they speak many Polish. For me politics is a matter of creating a public space—a space where people
languages, where the locals speak only one or two. People from Africa speak bring meaning, and share and recognize each other, include each other, but also
as many as eight languages; the people from Roma often even more. They have undo their identities, argue and question—that is politics. If you don’t make these
capacities the locals don’t have. It’s a question of recognizing these cynical efforts, you return to the old situation. It’s the same with art. There is a kind of
qualifications and creating some options for cultural intervention. Even in the display in a work of art, especially in an event like this one. That’s how people will
world of art—we’re after all talking about masses of people passing through this react to and evaluate my entry. That’s also an issue. Here these strangers, these
festival—many visitors, who might learn a lot from these aesthetic experiences. guests will be acting and speaking. That’s what’s important. This is a work of
JR: Venice, of course, has a long and complicated history as a great cosmopolitan Krzysztof Wodiczko. I take responsibility for it. All those things we’ve been talking
244 city. It was the site of the first European Biennial, the start of the global Biennial about are what is important, so my importance is less, but the responsibility is 245
fever we see today. In some sense it was more international than transnational the same. I take responsibility for the situation. If it doesn’t work it’s my fault. If it
in its conception, more like the nineteenth-century situation of competing Nation works, it’s their achievement.
States. And of course your piece is going to be in the Polish pavilion in which you JR: Well, that’s very generous.
are maybe yourself a kind of “dangerous guest”! Earlier in Venice, after all, you KW: That’s the reality.
represented Canada.
KW: For the issues of what’s happening in the world around us, the national
identities in those pavilions are somewhat dubious. When I visited Venice during Originally published in Wodiczko, Krzysztof, Guests: Polish Pavilion, 53rd Venice
the winter, without the Biennial, it was an incredible experience. Those pavilions Biennale, exh cat, 2009, pp 9–15.
were in a fog, in the night, in the cold, some of them with partially opened
doors with the cold wind blowing through the chained gates. Polonia, Romania,
Germania, Italia—it was like a graveyard of national identity, a catacomb
of national identity. In this context I was reluctant to bring up the issue of
Polishness. It was difficult for me because I feel like I have abandoned my nation
to contribute to a kind of deconstruction or redefinition of Polishness. That’s why
I couldn’t do the kind of thing Hans Haacke did with the German Pavilion
for example.
JR: And yet there’s a way you’re also very Polish.
KW: Of course I’m Polish. I lived in Poland for 33 or 34 years straight, and if
afterwards I went to many countries and lived in so many other places, so did
many other Polish people. I am not alone. What does it mean to be Polish? To be
of Poland? But also to participate in undoing oneself as Polish? That’s the way to
be Polish. Because in my continuing process of questioning my identity, Polishness
remains at the core—that’s anyway my Polishness. I am Polish in the way my
Jewish mother was very Polish at the same time so that everything was very
Jewish, but also in a Polish way. My father was a Czech Protestant. He had doubts
about Poland all the time. He was very critical, very involved in transforming Polish
culture as a musical conductor and director.
JR: So there’s a Polish way of not being Polish?
KW: And a Hungarian way, an American way? Sometimes when I’m called Polish,
I feel like I’m about to be deported to my old country, or worse, to Poland, the
stereotype or cliches. But when I call myself Polish, it’s in a different manner.
I feel in such a case free to provide my own definition of Polishness, however
convoluted and unstable—to issue to myself my own passport, through my own
immigration office, a passport with my own singular or multiple intellectual,
artistic, social, historical, geographical, ethnic entry and exit visas, stamped with
my own temporary and permanent resident permits.
JR: In a strange way, that’s also something that your undocumented guests are
telling us about. They’re also pointing to a kind of deconstruction of national
identity, but in a very different kind of political and affective or existential situation.
KW: Yes, I think these guests who are making this project on the other side of the

Transformative Avant-Garde and Other Writings Parrhesia/Inner Public

Art, Trauma and Parrhésía
2011
The majority may prove to be wrong, but not the public space.
Claude Lefort, 1988
The democratic process depends on the vitality of public space. Public space is
the space of rights.
Claude Lefort writes of public space: “This space which is always
indeterminate, has the virtue of belonging to no one, of being large enough to
accommodate only those who recognize one another within it and who give it
meaning, and of allowing the questioning of right to spread.”
The democratic principles that are constitutive of public space cannot
be sustained if we do not provide the cultural, psychological, technological, and
aesthetic conditions for the inclusion (and acknowledgment) of voices that are
economically, culturally and socially marginalized and estranged—the voices of
those who are perceived, treated, and at best tolerated as strangers, those who
are labeled as “poorly adjusted” or “not integrated”.
The well being of the democratic process is connected to these people’s
capacity for speech and expression, as well as their emotional and mental
health. Unfortunately, many of those who have a great deal to say are often so
emotionally overwhelmed by what they have experienced that they remain silent.
They are locked in a traumatic state of communicative incapacitation, a “freezing
of the failure situation”, to quote DW Winnicott.
Visibility and public testimony are closely linked to recovery from traumatic
experiences. According to trauma theorist and clinician Judith Herman, and to
many others who work with trauma, the struggle for recovery from trauma—to
finding a narrative voice through testimony—has a greater chance of success
when performed as a public speech act, even more so when directed as a social
utterance to and on behalf of others. Thus, truth-telling and testimony have a
restorative power. Psychologist Pierre Janet (termed this act “presentification”.
Transformative Avant-Garde and Other Writings
Media art and performative public art can play a role in recovering—or
‘unfreezing’—the capacity to speak by creating situations in which marginalized
or traumatized people might insert their experience into public discourse.
The key task of critical art and design in public space is to develop projects
collaboratively with these emergent democratic agents. Rather than speaking for
them, we—artists, theorists, designers, researchers, curators, educators and so
forth—can help these citizens and residents develop their own capacity to open
up, speak openly, and become heard and visible in the open. We must at the same
time help create the conditions for what they say to be heard by others whose
perspective might be altered by these new democratic agents, a group comprised 247
of ‘strangers’ and the estranged.
There is a significant population of homeless New Yorkers who work day and
night collecting bottles and cans on the city’s streets. My Homeless Vehicle project,
1988, sought to act as a shock-absorbing mechanism between the homeless
population who inhabit the city’s streets and the many others for whom the streets
serve as a mere passageway. It seemed to me that the purportedly ‘illegitimate’
occupation of the streets by the city’s homeless was reflected by the ‘illegitimate’
tools—such as borrowed shopping carts—that they used to collect bottles. I thought
that the creation of a tool designed with and for the bottle collectors would not only
aid in their day-to-day activities, but also symbolically mark their right to occupy
public space. The Homeless Vehicle can be used both for personal shelter and the
storage of cans and bottles.
It became clear to me that the vehicle operated in a more complex way
than intended. It was used not only as an object that articulated conditions of life,
but also as the communicative instrument for the user to help him or her to open
and share their lived experience, technique of survival, witness and critical vision.
Further, it was used by the street audience as a lure and an ‘excuse’ to come
closer to the homeless operator, ask questions, and listen.
The user-operators of the vehicle began to act as presenters, narrators,
performers, and story-tellers. They testified as existential and political witnesses
to a city undergoing rapid transformation. Communicating their often traumatic
pasts and present ways of life was ordinarily a challenging task; however, the
vehicles acted as a catalyst for speech.
Through its design, a “scandalizing functionalism”, the Homeless Vehicle
communicated a great deal of the conditions and techniques of homeless
survival.1 Its successful symbolic and functional operation began demanding
new equipment, new capacities to meet its emerging communicative role. The
vehicle’s user, no longer perceived as a faceless urban character, became a real
person and an actor, a performer-presenter, conscious of his and her entertaining
and instructing role.
However, the Homeless Vehicle’s communicative potential was as evident
as its communicative insufficiency. While in many ways its symbolic function
helped users to speak more openly about their experiences, it also lacked the
communication equipment specifically used to aid and amplify this process.
The year 1990, when I completed the Homeless Vehicle project, marked a
turning point in my work; the project took on an unforeseen communicative.
The vehicle design was born of the homeless scandal and it aims at further
scandalizing it. In response to an unacceptable world a responsible design should
propose and present itself as an unacceptable solution. While pragmatically
responding to the needs of the homeless, the appearance and function of the
Parrhesia/Inner Public
 Homeless Vehicle aims to direct public attention at the unacceptability of such
needs and in this way further scandalize the scandal of homelessness. The
vehicle’s design is responding to needs that should not exist in a civilized world,
but which unfortunately do exist. The scandalous needs (such as the need for a
homeless vehicle) must be articulated and answered through scandalous forms
and functions. The ‘utopia’ of the vehicle is based on the assumption that its
articulating function and scandalizing presence will contribute to better public
consciousness (regarding the unacceptable homeless situation), toward political
and social change and a new situation in which homeless will no longer exist and
248 there would no longer be a need for the Homeless Vehicle, or its design role that
exceeded its already complex functional program. Upon a critical re-evaluation of
the Homeless Vehicle’s shortcomings, my projects began using video technology
and participatory and narrative strategies in order to reinforce their communicative
objectives. The projections (video-based participatory monument animations) and
instruments (specially-designed performative communication equipment) were my
first works to address these issues through the medium of public art.
Both the projections and the instruments provide participants with the
psychological, cultural, technical and aesthetic means for entering the public
space as a capable communicative agents who, with preparation, can master the
art of speaking in public. Step by step, they recall, articulate, and share formerly
overwhelming life experiences. Armed with especially designed psycho-cultural
prosthetics, and empowered by the monumental scale of civic edifices, they
become—to borrow a term from Foucault—“fearless speakers”. The aim of both
the projections and the instruments is to inspire and assist the users (who I call
the “operators” or “animators”) in developing and ‘projecting’ their voices and
gestures in public space. The projects are designed as a psychological, aesthetic
and political passage that assist these incipient democratic agents so that they
can move from private confession to public testimony, towards a transformative
action in public social life.
The process of creation begins with a ‘preparatory’ video recording that is
integral to the project’s development. This entails repeatedly recording, erasing,
and re-recording testimonies; the process aids participants in developing their
thoughts. Gradually, they become psychologically and politically empowered and
come to see themselves as artistic creators in their own right. This first step
is crucial because it is the moment when participants reflect on their personal
experiences—which is often emotionally and politically fraught—and develop
the capacity to present themselves and their stories to the public. Editing the
recorded material and projecting it in public, are also crucial stages in the process
that come after this initial step.
Projections ‘animate’, in real time, the facades of public buildings both
in pre-recorded mode and in ‘real time’. Maarten Hajer and Arnold Reijndorp,
suggest that the social and cultural value of public space “should be based on
open conditions for developing and holding to one’s own opinion and capacity for
judgment through the processes of symbolic communication, confrontation, and
exchange with others”. My work seeks to create such conditions through the use
of especially designed performative communicative instruments and through the
appropriation of architectural and spatial forms as dynamic screens onto which
meaning can be inscribed and re-inscribed, and thus exchanged.
In the Kunstmuseum Basel projection Sans-Papiers, 2006, four
immigrants agreed to talk about their experience living in Switzerland. Due to
Transformative Avant-Garde and Other Writings
their lack of legal status, these stories had formerly been ‘unspeakable’. The
speakers’ bodies were projected onto the museum, which was chosen because of
its perceived social value. The monumental scale and visibility of the projection
were significant, as they presented purportedly ‘illegitimate’ individuals as
legitimate through their appearance on the Kunstmuseum, one of the most
prominent cultural institutions in Basel. The night projection brought these sans-
papiers from the margins of the city into full view, to the center of our political and
cultural attention.
Their bodies were visible only from the waist down, and it seemed as
though they were sitting on top of the building. One was confronted with the 249
experience of looking up at the immigrants. This configuration evoked the
experience of looking up at a parent or teacher as a small child, of listening to the
stories and lessons of someone more experienced and wiser than oneself. The
point of this dynamic was not only to see the immigrants as larger than us, but
also to make ourselves feel smaller than them.
The monumental scale of the projected bodies made the large building
seem, by comparison very small, about three metres high. The public listened to
immigrants’ stories while watching their hands gesticulate and their legs casually
kick against the building. Though the stories were often painful, there were also
moments of humor.
While they are much smaller in scale, the wearable instruments that I have
developed share many psychological and political objectives with the monumental
projections. Dis-Armor, 1999–2000, was a set of armor enhanced by media
components that was designed to help shield its wearer from the anxieties of face-to-
face communication. The design was inspired by action figure toys that were popular
at the time. The instrument was designed specifically for Japanese students and
“school refusers” (a group of mostly junior high school students who refuse to accept
the present state of the school system, and thus do not attend; in this way, they differ
significantly from drop-outs). These students are often survivors of school bullying
and of domestic conflicts, parental abuse and violence. They have critical opinions
about parenting, families, schooling, methods of education, teachers, and Japanese
culture, but do not speak much. Even when they do, they are often not listened to
under normal circumstances. These psychologically vulnerable young people have
difficulty with speech and facial expression; they need extraordinary means to offer
unsolicited communication. The design of Dis-Armor, developed in consultation with
these students as well as a school psychiatrist and a psychoanalyst specializing in
school refusers, was a response to such a need.
The helmet contains two video cameras, a microphone, a transmitter, and a
rearview mirror. The backplate holds two LCD screens, which relay images of the
user’s eyes in real time, and a speaker, which relays the user’s voice. The screens
and speakers face backwards, so that the user can communicate with their back to
their addressees in an indirect, mediated or mediatized ‘safe’ way without appearing
to be rude or revealing unease or lack of confidence. Their presence was amplified
by the increased size of their eyes, which appeared to bring them closer to their
interlocutors while at the same time preserving a comfortable distance. Dis-Armor
was designed to allow for both real time and pre-recorded forms of communication
allowing the user to freely switch from one mode to another. Thus, the instrument
used media technology to transform an individual incapable of successful public
speaking into someone symbolically and functionally ‘wired’ and empowered
for communication.
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 Since the development of the projections and wearable instruments, my work
has engaged not only with themes of intervention and public space, but also with
testimony, monument, trauma, healing, and the stranger. The development of my
work has been influenced by Chantal Mouffe’s notion of agonistic democracy and
Michel Foucault’s lectures on fearless speech, or parrhésía.
In her writing, Mouffe suggests that a vital democracy is characterized
by agonistic debate, which takes place between adversaries or rivals on shared
symbolic terrain (as opposed to Carl Schmitt’s formulation of an antagonistic political
relationship, which occurs between ‘enemies’ with no shared symbolic terrain).
250 For Mouffe agonism is to be distinguished from rational reasoned
argument, or deliberate communicative action (both in its Habermasian
variant, in which debate is regulated by rules, and the variant derived from
Hannah Arendt, in which disputes are resolved through persuasion). “While for
Habermas consensus emerges through what Kant calls disputieren, an exchange
of arguments constrained by logical rules, for Arendt it is a question of sireiten,
where agreement is produced through persuasion, not irrefutable proofs”, Mouffe
writes. She criticizes the Arendtian understanding of agonism for being an
“agonism without antagonism” and argues instead for a passionate, adversarial
exchange of opinions.
According to the agonistic approach, critical art is art that foments
dissensus, that makes visible what the dominant consensus tends
to obscure and obliterate.... It is constituted by a manifold of artistic
practices aiming at giving a voice to all those who are silenced within
the framework of the existing hegemony.
This act of giving voice to the silenced is precisely what I seek through these
instruments and projections.
Mouffe’s concept of agonism doesn’t determine what kinds of political
statements are correct, right, just, or true; rather, it addresses the social
processes that allow one to speak politically. This characterization is shared by
Foucault’s concept of fearless speech, or parrhésía.
The word parrhésía, normally translated as “free speaking” appears for
the first time in Greek literature in the fifth century BCE and was in use until
the early Christian era. The task of the parrhésíaste (or fearless speaker) was
to be articulate, publicly open, and able to speak out honestly, based on his own
experience, while offering an unsolicited and brave public criticism aimed toward
positive change.
In Ancient Greece, parrhésía—the Athenian right and duty (and later, even
art) of free speaking or of outspokenness, was the very core of the democratic
process and the life of public space. However, this fearless and free speaking
required special political and ethical qualifications.
There is a fundamental difference between the profoundly exclusive form
of Athenian democracy, in which the concept of parrhésía originated, and the
constitutionally inclusive form of democracy contemporary to our time. Greek
democracy only recognized a small group of male property-owners as citizens
of the polis, while excluding women, slaves, and foreigners. In its present form,
modern democracy promises—at least in principle—the fundamental right of
participation to every citizen and resident, regardless of circumstance. This
includes the right to communicate in public, to speak and listen fearlessly.
Transformative Avant-Garde and Other Writings
This extends even to strangers among strangers: immigrants sans-papiers,
‘undocumented aliens’ the homeless, soldiers returning from war, and many other
‘others’. They too have potential rights, the ‘right to rights’, the right to assert
these rights, and the right to access them through the democratic struggle in the
cultural and political sphere.
The potential fearless speaker needed to perfect him or herself (in
Athenian democracy, the speaking subject was, unfortunately, restricted to
himself). Foucault’s interest in parrhésía stems from his interest in the ancient
notion of “care for the self”. Parrhésía is a technique not only for public speaking,
like rhetoric, but also for speaking the truth about oneself requiring (and 251
contributing to) the care for the self.
This concept of care for oneself is crucial to my work. Without perfecting
ones own psychological, emotional, and mental state, one is not equipped for public
communication, let alone parrhésíastic speech in public space.
Parrhésía, like public space itself, is both a clinical and critical matter.
What is needed is not a Deleuzian symptomatology, but rather a developmental
expressive therapy geared toward emotionally charged and articulate public
communication. Public space is not only a stage for democracy but also a healing
environment for free and open speaking. Art and design have a crucial role to play
in contributing to its development as such.
In studying parrhésía Foucault is less concerned with the truth itself than
with the practices of ‘truth-telling’, and the role of the agent who enacts them.
This leads to a set of questions with lasting resonance. Foucault asks:
Who is able to tell the truth? What are the moral, the ethical, and the
spiritual conditions which entitle someone to present himself as, and to be
considered as, a truth-teller? About what topics is it important to tell the
truth? (About the world? About nature? About the city? About behavior?
About man?) What are the consequences of telling the truth? What are its
anticipated positive effects for the city, for the city’s rulers, for the individual,
etc? And finally: what is the relation between the of truth-telling and the
exercise of power, or should these activities be completely independent and
kept separate? Are they separable, or do they require one another?
Truth-telling in the parrhésíastic mode raises questions about who is able to tell
the truth, what truth can be spoken, what the consequences of truth-telling are,
and what relation there is between truth-telling and power. Foucault says that
parrhésía is “a kind of verbal activity where the speaker has a certain relation to
truth through frankness, a certain relationship to his own life through danger, a
certain type of relationship to himself or other people through criticism, and a
specific relation to moral law through freedom and duty”. While the importance
of the political and ethical qualifications of the parrhésíates were strongly
emphasized by Foucault in his lectures of 1983, his lectures the following year
emphasized with the equal importance the capacity and ability of the interlocutor
to listen. Here, Foucault stressed that the participant in Socratic dialogues also
had to enter into a parrhésíastic pact in which they not only agreed not only to
speak, but also to listen to the truth spoken about themselves by others. Foucault
suggests, therefore, that “parrhésía is the courage of truth in the person who
speaks and who, regardless of everything, takes the risk of telling the whole
truth as he thinks, but it is also the interlocutor’s courage in agreeing to accept
Parrhesia/Inner Public
 the hurtful truth that he hears”. Those who come forward with unsolicited and
often unspeakable truth need interlocutors who can open themselves up to listen
fearlessly. Therefore, the truth in every genuine speech act lies not so much in
content but in the emotional charge of both speaking and listening.
Foucault argues that the truth-telling act in Ancient Greece required a
field of mutual protection, trust and courage . In an attempt to create a ‘zone of
truth-telling’, my work seeks to create intermediate, transitory and transitional
artifices, situations, and events that facilitate the development of both fearless
speaking and fearless listening through the exchange of memories, experiences,
252 and critical visions. In particular, the Homeless Vehicle project, 1988–1989,
Tijuana Projection, 2001, and the Veteran Vehicle Project, 2008, illustrate the
relationship between art, trauma and parrhésía in my work. I strongly believe that
artistic projects that facilitate fearless speech can contribute to the development
of a dynamic, agonistic public sphere that runs counter to the pain and silence
that often follow trauma, and actively speaks out against the perpetuation of
violence and bloodshed.
As described above, the Homeless Vehicle combines both communication
and transport; it articulates the real conditions of work and life for this group. In
this sense, the Homeless Vehicle is both a practical piece of design for the daily
needs of the homeless as well as also a device for the homeless person to become
a parrhésíastes - a speaker of uncomfortable truths.
The purpose of the Tijuana Project was to use technological tools to
give voice and visibility to the women who work in the maquiladora industry in
Tijuana. Those who participated in the project wore a special headset (comprised
of a camera, lights and a microphone) while giving testimonies on a variety
of issues, including work-related abuse, sexual abuse, family disintegration,
alcoholism, police violence and domestic violence. These problems were shared
with an audience of more than 1,500 as the women’s voices were broadcast via
loudspeaker system and their faces were projected on the 60-foot facade of the
Omnimax Theater at the El Centro Cultural de Tijuana. This project was part of
InSITE2000, a binational contemporary art project based on artistic investigation
and activation of urban space in San Diego and Tijuana.
...Out of Here: The Veterans Project is a projection-based installation that
focuses the experience of war veterans engaged in active combat in Iraq as well
as Iraqi civilians. In the installation, sounds of everyday life are interrupted by the
noise of destruction and chaos, which seems to be unfolding outside the walls
of the gallery. This immersive projection was based on work undertaken with
medics, soldiers and refugees affected by the current conflict in Iraq. They shared
their wartime experiences through video and audio re-enactments, which were
then projected onto the gallery walls. The projected stories reflect the physical
and psychological environment of combat, as well as the fragmented nature of
memories of distressing or uncertain situations.
In the same vein, the War Veteran Vehicle project seeks to offer a tool
for those who have experienced war firsthand to share their experiences with
others. Military vehicles such as the Humvee (United States), Land Rover (United
Kingdom), and Hunker (Poland) were equipped with special rotating projection
units—sound and video ‘battle stations’ that replace canons and rocket launchers,
projectiles with projectors. The vehicles facilitate the recording of testimonies,
which can then be projected onto blank walls, monuments, and other sites in public
space, resulting in a powerful visual and acoustic resonance. Their aim is to arm
Transformative Avant-Garde and Other Writings
war veterans for a new battle, this time against misinformation that circulates
about war through the re-inscription of city monuments with previously silenced
voices, witnesses to a new history of war and suffering. In doing so, they hope that
this history will not repeat itself.
Tragically, those who should be the first to testify as parrhésíastes are
often discouraged and even incapacitated by the very experience they should be
publicly protesting, announcing, and denouncing. As a result of traumatic life
events, their ability to openly share their suffering through testimony has been
shattered. They may suffer a loss of motivation, expression, and even of memory.
Thus, they keep silent. Even when given a political and technical opportunity 253
to speak, they are often not able to speak fearlessly. In other words, the mere
act of offering a podium, a lectern, a microphone, a megaphone or a cultural
and political stage does not necessarily mean that these individuals will speak
fearlessly, or be heard.
I believe that experimental tools such as the Homeless Vehicle, the Tijuana
Projection, and the War Veterans Vehicle can act as psychological, cultural, and
political aids for those who are unable to open up and communicate in the open.
Through their use, they might help these incipient parrhésíastes re-develop
their ability to open up to themselves and others, while offering a platform
for the transmission of their voices and images in public space. Ultimately,
the communicative and performative properties of the tools inspire such
developments, but the act of speech is ultimately undertaken by their users. It is
their fearless speech—the art of public testimony and performance—that is most
important in part of the process.
To animate public space, one must animate oneself. Conversely, animating
oneself helps to animate public space politically, psychologically and artistically.
Here, Mouffe’s agonistic pluralism, Foucault’s return to parrhésía, and Judith
Herman’s testimonial “Acts of Public Truth” merge in the development of one
complex political psycho-social, techno-aesthetic and cultural-communicative
project that seeks to develop new platforms for critical memory, public testimony,
and recovery from trauma.
Originally published in Art and the Public Sphere, vol 1, issue 3, December 2011.
References
Foucault, Michel, Fearless Speech, Los Angeles: Semiotext(e), 2001.
Foucault, Michel, The Courage of Truth: The Government of Self and Others (Michel
Foucault: Lectures at the Collège de France), London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2011.
Hajer, M and A Reijndorp, In Search of a New Public Domain: Analysis and Strategy,
Rotterdam: NAI Publishers, 2001.
Herman, Judith Lewis, Trauma and Recovery: The Aftermath of Violence from Domestic
Abuse to Political Terror, New York: Basic Books, (1992) 1997.
Janet, Pierre, The Mental State of Hystericals: A Study of Mental Stigmata and Mental
Accidents, New York and London: Putnam Sons, 1901.
Lefort, Claude, Democracy and Political Theory, Cambridge: Polity Press, 1988.
Mouffe, Chantal, “Artistic Agonism and Public Spaces”, Art & Research, vol 1, no 2,
summer 2007, http://www.artandresearch.org.uk/v1n2/mouffe.html
Winnicott, DW, Maturational Processes and the Facilitating Environment: Studies in the
Theory of Emotional Development, London: Hogarth Press, 1965.
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War Veteran Vehicle
an intervi e w wit h B e n Parry
2012
War Veteran Vehicle was commissioned by Foundation for Art and Creative
Technology (FACT) as part of the Abandon Normal Devices Festival 2009. Ten war
veterans from Liverpool and across Merseyside took part in War Veteran Vehicle.
Over a period of four months the veterans participated in a series of interviews
and recorded testimonies of their war and post-war experiences. These voiced
testimonies were translated into a large-scale projection and were shot at buildings
across Liverpool from an army Landrover.
Ben Parry: Your projections, the War Veteran Vehicle and others, are very public
projects, taking place in public spaces around the city. In these projects the
participants themselves are present and then there is also the idea of a general
public, those who come to see the work.
Krzysztof Wodiczko: There is the general public, or the popular notion of the
public that you mention, and then there is another public. The War Veteran Vehicle
was actually created with and by a very special public. Participating war veterans
created a public from within the project—which then grew out of that situation.
Then there is the public on the street who came to see it, or stopped for a moment
to notice something, or who just happened to be there. I refer to these two distinct
publics as the “inner public” and the “outer public”.
The project started out with a psychotherapist from the Combat Stress
organization who works with the war veterans. He needed to develop trust towards
the project, and was generous enough to try to overcome his own doubts about
an artist trying to make art (so-called art) out of the unfortunate conditions of life
and work of war veterans. So we were the first public. Then came some of those
veterans or clients and colleagues of the psychotherapist—interestingly a veteran
himself—who also had to consult with their wives and their friends. As a result of
my encouragement, the wife of one particular veteran presented herself as also a
veteran. Even though she did not go to war, she is a veteran of a war at home. This
Transformative Avant-Garde and Other Writings
made them both decide to be interviewed and I’m sure they spoke to others about
their involvement. Into this group you also bring the editors, the studio crew, those
listening to the recordings and transcribing the texts, people who built the vehicle,
the production crew from FACT, the curator, organizers and so on. This is what I
now term as the inner public. They are part of the city of Liverpool.
As a group, the veterans created the core of the inner public. They used the
project to establish stronger ties between one another and to also include others
who were not immediately part of that group. The veterans were open to bringing
meaning to the project and recognizing each other around the table or in the
studio. They were developing the capacity to open up and share, to find words, 255
record and rerecord. I had developed special software with Robert Oschorn, my
research assistant at MIT, which allows additional recordings from the veterans’
group to be inserted at the last moment. The software helps to immediately edit
and place the sound of spoken words in a meaningful relation to the other sound
effects, like all of the firing sounds, all of the shells and bombardment that is part
of the concept of the projection. So, after a longer process of recording, but still
finding a need to say more, they could add to and provide new content just before
the projection starts. As an example, a few hours before launching the projection
one veteran, a professional chef who, having serious health problems, came
straight from hospital and decided to say, “I cannot cook anymore because the
smell of burning meat brings the flash backs of the colleagues who were burnt to
death” and we inserted that. He was talking about reactions to smell, which is a
very important aspect of the post-traumatic condition.
Their work and engagement as the project’s inner public doesn’t end here,
because those veterans were present and active during the actual projection. I am
trying to say that the public is created here from within the project itself; that the
inner public overlaps with the outer, or external public. For example, amazingly
one of the veterans, Rob, ‘took charge’ of recording and talking to the public
during the projection. Rob actually had his own video camera and microphone and
conducted interviews with the public. He also gave an interview to the BBC, whilst
recommending that people come and see it. At the same time he clarified many
things to journalists and young members of the public, warning them of the dangers
of war and of signing up for service etc. Rob was continuing to develop his part of
the work during the actual projection, he was still “firing the truth”. He just couldn’t
stop. And his wife said “I don’t recognise my Rob; he is back”, meaning the one she
married: “He’s doing things, he is optimistic”. Of course trauma will not be fixed
by this project; it is not going to cure people just like that. Rob will no doubt have
recurrences of this post-war illness, and yet he seems to feel that he is advancing
towards better health, using this project intuitively to make a leap into society,
gaining confidence and re-connecting with himself and others by moving from this
inner public, which he also created, into this outer public.
Though usefully discussed by us here, concepts of the public are not
as important as real life, or how life can use those projects to create better
conditions for itself. We are in this conversation to bring in a theory, an academic
model, but I am trying to introduce this inner public concept not because I want
so much to contribute to intellectual discourse but because it’s impossible for me
to explain what I am doing without clarifying or even interfering with the popular
notion of ‘the public’.
There is therefore a need to clarify where ‘the public’ is in public art
projects that are developed with people who bring life to the work and how many
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 of those people are actually involved? When you calculate it, if there are eight
people is this project projecting themselves as a kind of new parrhésía of free
speakers, and if you take their spouses, their friends, their support group, the
health people, the legal and production people from our cultural institutions,
media people, interviewers; in other words all of those who as Brecht would say,
“are there not without reason”, or “not without interest”, there could be as many
as 200 people involved in a city.
BP: Yes, it begins to have a huge impact at that inner level, through a person-
to-person trace network. Did you have any concerns or fears about how the
256 veterans, their wives and girlfriends might actually respond to seeing their
testimonies fired upon a building in a public situation, at such a scale? There
is a big transition between recording and projecting. Could you anticipate their
response? How did they react?
KW: Actually, they love it! But I did test the ground. This project first began in
Denver, during a democratic convention and developed out of discussions with
the veterans; talking with them actually contributed to the idea of launching this
project, effectively resulting in it being tested. I am not completely uninformed
about psychology because I have worked with so many people on projects that
are developmental, so in a practical way I have been building on my experience
of working with people who are more or less traumatized. Significantly it is the
amount of time given to the project that allows those people to develop and trust
their capacity to actually take ownership of the project. One of the aspects of
this parrhésía and cynicism is actually a capacity to know what to say, which is
why a year, five months with a particular group makes sense when you think of
communication. Even then I think more time is needed, as time is often too short.
BP: My first thought when I saw it was that they might find the gunfire disturbing,
traumatic in that very same way of triggering memory.
KW: No. Those sounds that we used are actually from the collections of the war
veterans. Some are from their own recordings, others are taken from war games
they play. They can have awful reactions to a slamming door or films or any sound
that might evoke memory, but when they are authors of it, when they are working
through it, it’s fine.
BP: Could you tell me a bit about why you added the gunfire to the projection?
In one sense it would have worked very strongly without this, or even without the
vehicle itself.
KW: The gunfire was added because the idea is to break the barrier between
those who know what war is and those who don’t. The blind, faceless and blank
wall of facades and monuments need to be attacked because they are witnesses;
they are standing in for the city which seems to be completely cut off from what is
happening far away. Although many buildings were subjected to attack during the
Second World War, some still bare scars especially in London and Liverpool. The
city needs to reverberate with echoes of the urban warfare that is very much what
is happening in Iraq where civilians are in the middle of conflict, so they in turn
become targets.
BP: So there is a process of attacking the monument?
KW: The monuments, their stability and their continuity has to be disrupted.
There is something about attacking those symbolic structures, through which
you can actually attack people’s attention, disrupt their passivity because we are
normally protected and safe. Projecting and blasting words is strong but so is the
use of the vehicle. Talking about what we see and hear from the projection is only
Transformative Avant-Garde and Other Writings
half the impact, because the actual physical presence of the projection is another
assault: a projection of the war vehicle and war machine on a city in peacetime,
which is shooting and firing, not just passing through for maneuvers. So it is
actually a battle station that is not projecting missiles or projectiles, its weapons
are projecting words and memories, sounds.
People have some imagination attached to those vehicles, they feel that
they are there to win something somewhere with an enemy. Here in the city,
who is the enemy? The enemy is people’s ignorance, their lack of interest, their
passivity, maybe even the politicians who sent soldiers to a war that now seems
to be less and less clear of its intentions to those who were taking part. 257
We’re talking about a certain division of responsibility. The soldiers, they
are the people whose job it is to conduct warfare and kill. It is the politicians’
responsibility to know why they are sending those people and what the benefit is
for the entire society. It is not the soldiers’ job to conduct this political discourse,
but once they start to see they don’t understand why they are there. Then there is
additional trauma as they see civilians being killed, children, little girls. They aren’t
prepared to handle this sort of thing and they were not properly trained to deal
with this kind of fall out. Then they also see contradictions between premises or
ideas, slogans and reality. They start seeing all sorts of things, not because they are
damaged psychologically and nobody cares, but because they decided to go there
and it therefore becomes their problem.
If society is paying taxes to equip people and send them to do this kind
of job, they should also pay taxes to heal them and help them to re-connect to
society and keep their dignity. When they return there seems to be a lack of
interest. Potentially they might slip into alcoholism or drugs, complete madness
or seclusion, but another option is to come back to society and become an agent
of change and contribute to consciousness. In addition to all this, there is the
issue of a secondary trauma on the families. Statistically, seven to nine people
are traumatized for each veteran and only one per cent of veterans speak publicly.
Therefore, this small percentage who want to say something should be equipped
and facilitated to do so. My vehicle is a kind of machine, a kind of equipment, the
best I could provide to do that. There may be other projects, there may be other
ways to do so, but this is what I have done.
BP: In projects such as Poliscar, you were interested in creating a dialogue
between different people using the work itself as a communicative tool or vehicle.
In the War Veteran Vehicle the projection is now rooted in the vehicle itself and is
displayed on the monuments in what appears to be a further development of that
impulse to provoke communication and dialogue between people—both the inner
and outer publics—about the core issues motivating you in initiating the work.
How do you see the form this provocation takes evolving in future works?
KW: If you are talking about the mobilization of monuments and animation of
symbolic architecture in public space, then I think if people could speak with one
another through the actual monuments it would be much more interesting. This
would mean turning monuments into vehicles of communication between people,
so it’s not only a one way projection of ideas and images and sounds created by the
artist and the inner public, but a two-way or multiple-way communication involving
the outer public too. The monuments would in effect become a sort of two-way open
transmission station for either a shorter or longer time period.
I did try experiments in this direction and I have lots of diagrams and
plans that are incomplete because there are never enough funds for social-urban
Parrhesia/Inner Public
 implementation of such ideas. An important issue in this project, to quote DW
Winnicott, is a need to integrate into it, a “transitional zone”, or a “potential
space” to inspire and protect the necessary developmental communicative
conditions for people. By this I mean so that the outer public may be able to
‘prepare’ themselves (in order to argue, discuss, record, rerecord, write, etc) and
as a way to help them to share in the open their experiences, emotions and ideas
in reaction to the War Veteran Vehicle.
Communication is not an act of ‘sending a message’ but a process of opening
oneself up to be frank, fearless and free in one’s emotionally charged transmission
258 toward others. It is about shifting from a one way communication to a dynamic
dialogue where the outer public is free to react and respond to the messages and
ideas represented in the work, so that the core issues which prompted the work in
the first place are interrogated and dispersed amongst more people and also reflect
back on and affect my own future practice.
BP: Your work is rooted in the tradition of site-specificity. However Homeless
Vehicle becomes itinerant following the movement of homeless people and War
Veteran Vehicle freely moves through the city from one building or monument to
another. Could you say something about site-specificity and mobility? How do
they work together?
KW: “Nomadism” is the term I use when thinking of my present projection-
vehicles and the possibility of a two way wireless projection-communication using
monuments in public space. Although each of the projection sites in War Veteran
Vehicle, for example, is situated spatially far apart from each other the work is still
specific to site; it is specific to the social and cultural terrain. The work remains
critically responsive to symbolically and emotionally shaky ground—it is always
attached never detached from the terrain—and it remains tactical. This is the
way nomads operate as described by Deleuze and Guattari in their essay on
“Nomadology”.1
BP: Are there projects that never happened or you wish to do that you would like
to share?
KW: One project that hasn’t happened is a development of the original Homeless
Vehicle and projections in the US that were linked to homeless war veterans.
For example, the proposed design of a vehicle that will help to find homeless
veterans, bring them to hospitals or offer them some medical treatment; since
those veterans are reluctant to seek help, as long as they have some capacity
to live on there own. It can take four to eight years before any of those veterans
find a way to hospital. So they have to be found within various pockets of the
city, as they may never go to hospitals unless they are critically ill and brought
by ambulance. The doctors with whom I spoke were actually interested in the
possibility of designing such vehicles: an ambulance that would operate in various
parts of the city, helping homeless veterans where they live. It is a project that
actually could still happen because it’s just a matter of a few more years before
the start of a new mass of homeless veterans in the US once they come back
from Iraq.
War Veteran Vehicle: Users
Following the end of the War Veteran Vehicle project in Liverpool, Carla McManus
who worked on behalf of FACT as Participants Liaison for the project, carried out
further interviews with two of the participants, a husband and wife, as a means by
which to gauge the personal impact that being involved in the project had on them.
Transformative Avant-Garde and Other Writings
Interviewee: Rob (participant of War Veteran Vehicle and veteran)
Carla McManus: What were your first impressions when you heard about
the project?
Rob: To be honest I was a bit skeptical.
CM: What were you skeptical about?
R: The vehicle, hearing that it would be done up to look like it was in the war;
seeing a vehicle ready for war unnerved me.
CM: So what was it that made you decide to take part? Did you feel that you
would benefit from the project?
R: It was really personal reasons because I have a lot of ghosts. Over the years I 259
have been fighting my own thoughts and memories of things that have happened
and over the last few years I have been seeking help to aid me, to help me get a
bit better with this post-traumatic stress disorder. Then when I was approached
by this project I thought that there might be certain details... that by sharing it
might help me and might help my family and help them understand a bit more
about me and what I was going through.
CM: Did you find it beneficial that your wife Lisa got involved?
R: At the time I didn’t think that it would be, but when I heard my wife Lisa
talking it opened my eyes and also it ripped me apart listening to it, but since then
it has helped me, knowing now what she’s been going through and what I put her
through for all of them years. So yes it has been beneficial in that way, because I
understand now that it’s not just me suffering; it’s her suffering as well.
CM: Do you think that from your first session to the end product, do you think
that you have grown in confidence or benefited from the process?
R: The confidence is immense that you, you seen me with the camera. I thought
on the project, “I’ll just sit back, I’ll watch everyone”, but the more I saw people
at the project, normal civilians looking at it, wanting to know why, I grew in
confidence then. That these people do want to hear stories, they do want to know
if these are real people talking—are they real or are they actors—and when they
found out that I was one of the people involved, it made me more confident and
since then I’ve grown and grown.
CM: In the recording sessions, how did you decide what you wanted to talk
about? Were there specific things that you wanted to get across?
R: There were things that I wanted to talk about and wanted people to know, but
obviously I can’t talk about because there are certain acts in the military and in
the army that prevent that. But the things that I did speak about, which have been
destroying my mind, some of them I thought would upset people, and they probably
did, but they’ve not told me. The bodies, and what I had to do, I spoke about that
and the trauma, but I couldn’t go into detail about certain events and details that
have happened. There are things that only myself and the people that were there
will ever know and that’s going to be part of my torture for the rest of my life.
CM: Do you think that the public need to hear more about these experiences and
to hear more first hand accounts from soldiers?
R: I do because of what you hear on the news; you see roughy-toughy soldiers that
are talking to the camera. But if you sat down and talked to someone who has been
in the military and suffered with it, and the family, and actually listened to what really
happens in war time, in the background, rather than what is shown as a front—it
would be beneficial for young lads, young soldiers to hear and to understand it.
CM: Did you learn anything from the other soldiers, the other participants and
their stories?
Parrhesia/Inner Public
 R: When you hear the stories being played back, they all sound the same. We’ve
all got that voice, we’ve all got that pain and I noticed then it’s not just me, it’s all
of those people including my wife and the families, they’ve all got that pain in their
voice. That has haunted me.
CM: So you can identify with that then?
R: Yes, it’s taken something like that project to help me to understand that we are
all the same, we are all going through the same hurt, pain, emotion. When you
think it’s just you and you’re alone, you’re not. We are all suffering as one, as a
collective. That’s what we need people to understand: we are all hurting inside.
260 CM: At the projection sites, I know that you had the camera and that you were
out interviewing people, was there anything in particular that you talked to them
about, or that they asked you?
R: There was a couple of things that stood out, a couple of young lads and I had
asked them how they felt about the voices and there was a certain person who
said, “Well that’s what your job was”. I tried to explain to him, no, your job is to
protect people and I tried to explain to certain people, I did not join up to go to
war. The army prepare you to a certain extent, but you’ll never know what war is
like until you go there and no one can prepare you for that.
CM: Since you have returned from the Falklands, what help have you received,
do you feel as if there has been enough help?
R: I received no help when I came out of the army in 1992–1993, I went to a
nursing home for drunks and alcoholics for six months, but I went downhill rather
than uphill. It wasn’t until combat stress got in touch with me in 2001 that they
said that I would qualify, whatever that means, to go to their units to see if they
can help me. I go there once or twice a year and now I go to a treatment centre in
Runcorn to get ongoing psychiatric help.
CM: Do you think that a project like this can act in a way as a supplement to the
ongoing help that you are receiving?
R: It opens the eyes of a lot of people and the likes of yourself and the other
ex-soldiers, basically what you are doing is letting people know your stories and
it’s like a release valve. Some things you’ve held for 20 odd years; its like you’ve
got a thousand release valves in your body and each time you’re letting a bit out.
And with this type of project, you are letting a bit out, and by letting that little bit
out, that helps you. It is like a therapy, you’re letting people know what’s going on
and it’s then up to them to pass it on or not. Yes, it is like therapy because from
those months ago to the present day I’ve never felt so confident; its brought the
confidence out in me.
CM: I think that is one thing that I have found from working with everyone
throughout the entire process. Krzysztof talks allot in his work about the notion
of parrhésía and free speech and people that should be heard, speaking out
in public, and I think with your story and seeing how you have grown over the
course of this project and witnessing your confidence grow and your ability to
speak out. For me, I think that is probably one of the main success stories of
the project. What do you think the main success of the project is?
R: Yes, from where I’ve come from to now, it’s just that other little thing that’s
aiding us, that’s helping us. One of the other successes of the project is that other
artists—Imogen who we met at the preview is doing another similar project—all of
these artists are looking at these projects and going, “Hang on! People are taking
note of this, things are happening” and I feel as though people are looking at us
and taking note.
Transformative Avant-Garde and Other Writings
CM: Do you feel like the project has lessened that isolation that you felt?
R: Yes and I now feel like I’m in a position that I can help other people that are in
my situation, point them in the right direction, advise them on which route they
can go down.
CM: Do you think there are any difficulties with this project or projects like this,
or is there anything that you would change?
R: The only thing that I would change would be to have more people, more voices,
more families. Location wise, I would put it nearer the center of town so there are
more people to see it. Also get the schools down to see it and have the soldiers
round the vehicle for people to talk to. 261
Interviewee: Lisa (participant of War Veteran Vehicle and wife of a veteran)
CM: Did you feel it would benefit you to get involved in the project, especially with
your husband Rob also participating?
L: At the time I thought it was a load of baloney, if I’m being honest, and I found
it so emotional. I just couldn’t handle my emotions; seeing my life and Rob’s life
being displayed on buildings. That’s art, but that’s also my life.
CM: I remember that aspect was really difficult for you, and you said that the
other voices, you could relate to them as well.
L: Yes, it was just like listening to Robert at the beginning, the middle, and on
going because I don’t think that there will be an end. Not that type of end where
he is going to get better from it. Just learn to live with it.
CM: Do you think it was an important dimension to the project to have your voice,
the wife of a veteran? Do you think it would have been good to have had a more
families involved?
L: Yes, it think that’s what it was. I kind of felt like I was an outsider because I
was the only one giving my side of the story.
CM: The process itself, did you think it was good to go through that with Rob? Do
you think that it affected your relationship?
L: It did yes, I think it helped both of us. I’ve got more of an understanding of Rob’s
problem and as he says he’s got more of an understanding of what I’m going through.
I only felt what Rob was feeling when he was having his bad days.
CM: And during the recording sessions was there anything in particular that you
wanted to talk about?
L: I think I was angry, a lot of it was to do with that, how I was feeling. I wanted to
get my point across.
CM: I know one thing that you talked about was the lack of support that there
was for wives and families. What additional support do you think is needed?
L: The families, Rob is getting a lot more help now, but there is no support for the
wives and families. The only thing I can think of is that there is help now for those
that fought in Iraq and Afghanistan, but the lads that fought in the Falklands, 20
odd years ago, they are being pushed to the side.
CM: Do you think projects like this help raise awareness?
L: Yes, definitely
CM: Had you any concerns about the project, or anything that you would change?
L: I think what was annoying me most was that it was treated as art, but from my
point of view, although I was doing it as art, at the end of the project I felt like it
was like my life being displayed and I couldn’t cope with that. I just didn’t know
how to cope with that. Seeing it in front of me, that’s what it was.
CM: Was seeing the projections the most emotional time for you?
Parrhesia/Inner Public
 L: Yes, especially night after night. Seeing it, it was like a pounding and I just wanted Making of Out/Inside(rs)
to leave and I just wanted to put it behind us. Rob got so involved in it and although
it was good to see him like that, for me it was really draining. an interv iew w it h Ja roslav AndĚl
C: Would you say that one of the successes of the project was seeing how Rob 2013
developed?
L: Yes, his confidence, and having more understanding, it was an eye opener
seeing the way... I’ve never seen that side of Rob anyway, but it was more like the
Rob that I knew before the PTSD took hold. So it was nice to see that but at the
same time I was worried about the come down with Rob, I was waiting for that to
262 happen but luckily it hasn’t happened yet.

Originally published in Parry, Ben, Cultural Hijack: Rethinking Intervention,

Liverpool: Liverpool University Press, 2012

Jaroslav Anděl: I am interested in the process of making this new work, which
consists of special video statements projected on sculptures of Czech historical
heroes. These statements are testimonies by several Roma children who witnessed
ugly demonstrations in front of their homes in Varnsdorf in August 2011. I know
that you first met with them a couple of months ago before inviting them to Prague
to videotape their statements. How was this done?
Krzysztof Wodiczko: We began slowly, presenting my most recent New York
projection onto the Abraham Lincoln Statue to the group, so they could realize
the value of animating monuments, animating history, and themselves. Secondly,
we projected one of our own faces, actually Andrea Průchová’s face, onto the
sculpture that we had, so they could see that it’s possible to project a human face
on this kind of sculpture. Then at the end, we did project some of their faces, like
the one that you can see on the photograph.
JA: Can you describe the filming process, the studio you used, the technical aspects?
KW: The studio was very good because of its non-intimidating atmosphere. There
was also a lot of space that is used for resting and a little game machine to play. It
was the best type of studio for this kind of work. One by one, those young people
were taking a seat, equipped with a special head support to keep their faces in a
stable position toward the cameras, so that they would feel that they were within
the range of the camera’s vision, but without restraining their movement too much.
We were filming with two cameras, just in case, one at a bit of a wider angle to
record them with their hands and the other with a close-up on the faces, since
we didn’t know exactly what kind of sculptures we’ll get or which video image will
be projected (busts or full body statues). The crew was very skilled, meaning the
team operating cameras and the lightning, as well as the sound person, led by
Jan Šebek who was overseeing the whole media production and Andrea who was
extremely important on the social coordination side of the production. Ruzenka...

Transformative Avant-Garde and Other Writings Parrhesia/Inner Public

 was indispensable to this project—she is a social worker who earned trust among
these young people and their parents and was able to bring them to Prague and to
the studio.
JA: And how were these interviews or conversations organized? Did you
ask questions?
KW: No, it was not much about questions. It was more recalling certain points
that they were discussing among themselves during the trip to Prague and before.
Myself, Andrea Průchová and Ruzenka were there to listen and encourage them to
speak, because the topics must come from them. It was about the future, about
264 what went wrong... also, they were recalling and recounting the horrifying and
traumatic events of the ‚demonstration‘ seen from their perspective, with some
comments. That was during the first day. But during the second day, they were
talking more about the future, how they see the future, about the presidential
elections, how their life should move on, about their future families and also about
the society. They raised the issues of social justice, political process, equality,
and rights.
JA: It was probably difficult for them to speak in the spotlight and in front of the
camera. How did they manage?
KW: We had two days of filming. So, during the first day, these young people
seemed a little intimidated by the situation. The second day was shorter, but
it was much more dynamic. One of the Roma children could not speak in front
of the camera at all, which I concluded was also very important to record and
include in the project, because in the context of the recalled events her silence is
a strong act of speech. When someone remains silent in public, not in private, it’s
different; to be silent “on stage”... it was perhaps a semi-conscious, unintentional
but clear public statement. We asked her many, many, many times to try to
speak. Together, we managed to reach the point at which she actually agreed
to sit in front of camera for a few minutes but without saying a word. Another
teenager didn’t want to speak much, but that was mostly because she was
intimidated by the situation. But during the second day, she actually got used to it
and spoke.
JA: I understand, however, that a couple of boys were quite outspoken.
KW: One young boy, 13 years old, was the most outspoken. Obviously very
talented, the brightest in his capacity to respond to the situation, to improvise
and use speech, having the power to talk. Probably he should become a politician.
He should become a member of the parliament of Czech Republic, in fact. I’m
absolutely sure. He could speak about the needs of the minority. And he has some
philosophical things to say about what direction the Czech Republic should move.
He could speak in the parliament right now, or on television. No doubt. However,
as I learned from Ruzenka, he is not allowed to go to ‘normal’ school, he is pushed
into a school for a ‘special education’ with practically no chance to advance to a
higher education level—to go to the university. He is already on the level of junior
high school and he shows great a talent for learning perhaps history, philosophy,
theory, history of politics and Czech history. He saw my work exhibited at DOX
and went with others to see the Vysehrad cemetery with sculptures, the kind of
national graveyard. His face is also very good for photographs; he knows how
to be photographed. He ‘feels’ the camera. So, he is a born politician or leader.
I hope he will not become a member of some other organized group, you know,
outside of the boundaries of law. Probably not, because he is well aware of lots of
social problems and he speaks against violence.
Transformative Avant-Garde and Other Writings
JA: What about the other teenage boys?
KW: One of the boys had things to say the second day... he is the tallest, perhaps
the oldest. But he is also the one who speaks of the positive experience; he goes
to a ‘normal’ school, and as the ‘black’, he has good relationships with colleagues
and with one of the teachers—with some ‘whites’. He is a fortunate case. So it’s
important to have this made clear here that there is a big disagreement between
him and the 13-year-old of whom we spoke earlier about their experience with
the ‘whites’, but they seem to respect each other’s point of view... it’s a very
interesting democracy in this case. If both of them and many others like them
could move into higher education, into cultural, educational work, or political 265
work, or journalism, I think they would make a tremendous impact on the public
image of this minority, and maybe all minorities.
JA: I would like to know how the new work is different from your previous
projects. You told me that you have worked with the Roma people before.
KW: Well, I did, in Venice. It was very different though. These were not teenagers,
and they were from Rome... and often, by the way, confused with the Romanians
because of political etymology. Some of them are actually Roma people from
Romania, but not in most of the cases. Even if they were, they were already
foreigners there, plus they have no possibility to get Romanian documents because
of some historical-political shifts. Basically, many of them have no documents
whatsoever. But Roma people here... their situation seems different to me.
Listening to these young people, I have an impression that they feel settled in this
country, as if it were their own country. In spite of all troubles and attacks against
them, some consider themselves simultaneously as special (ie, as the Roma
people) and as Czechs—hoping to become an integral part of this country’s culture
and history, moving toward a change for the better: a multicultural place to live and
work together.
JA: This age group I think is interesting because it’s a kind of transitional period
when one is not a child anymore and not yet an adult....
KW: Yes, because they are facing a very important moment or they’re
experiencing it. The fact that they are being forced to attend those ‘technical’
schools, in the name of making their life ‘easier’ and ‘safer’ for them, as if in
ghetto. So they’re actually deprived of an opportunity to have difficult tasks
to deal with, and also of the task of relating to non-Roma children: the equal
opportunity to become a part of greater society with all its problems and in taking
part in resolving these problems. So they are being protected in the worst sense.
This is probably the main issue in terms of the future. How soon and how many
of them will have a chance to advance and become part of the decision-making
process whether political, cultural, social or educational?
JA: I would like to ask whether you have dealt with people in that age
group before?
KW: Yes, I did, in Japan.
JA: And that was your Hiroshima project?
KW: Yes. I worked with a school psychologist and also with a psychoanalyst and
expert on the social problem of so-called school refusers, who pretended to be
interpreter. So we actually worked together with junior high school students. There
are similarities to the situation of Roma children and teenagers here because these
school refusers are now forced to go to special schools, which is a typical bureaucratic
solution in Japan. But it’s not that they’re subjected to racist cultural clichés. They’re
just excluded because of tiny differences. It’s like bullying, a very advanced form of it;
Parrhesia/Inner Public
 it’s about being abused and ridiculed rejected for having slightly different texture or
skin or speaking with a slightly different accent and so on. The similarities are at the
social psychology level, because the impact of this kind of segregation or being treated
as different is similar. It’s also the abuse and domestic violence and violence at school,
it has a similar impact on the structure of personality; it’s a trauma. When I work
with homeless people, or returning veterans, or minorities that are subject to racism,
or other excluded groups, my projects’ common task is trauma recovery and cross-
cultural communication. I sometimes called them “cultural prostheses”. These are
artistically conceived performative and media projects to inspire and assist excluded
266 and marginalized, less fortunate people to open up and share the unsolicited truth of
their experience. They join the projects in the hope to contribute to larger social change
for themselves, others like themselves and all of us.
Trauma and Borders
JA: Can I ask you about the relation between your interest in trauma and your focus
on people on the margins of society, for instance, the homeless? Where is it coming
from, this interest in homelessness, which was a big theme for you in the 1980s?
KW: Yes, it was necessarily a major theme because there were about a hundred
thousand homeless people in NYC when I arrived from Canada.
JA: And you did not see it in Canada, right?
KW: Not at that time. To some degree, it became a problem in Canada as well,
but not as bad.
JA: Did you move right away into the East Village, one of the neighborhoods
frequented by homeless people?
KW: I’m not unusual in this case, There were plenty of artists living there, but
at one point, for a few years I lived in unusually bad conditions, even worse than
some of my artists-colleagues in the East Village: no heat, a cold winter, on the
top floor of a very shaky building, lots of wind, drug dealing on the floors below,
meaning the real drug traffic that I had to go through every day to get to my shaky
“apartment”. But, of course.... I worked on my projects, such as the Homeless
Vehicle, with people who lived in incomparably worse conditions than, for
example during the winter in the tents in the park or sleeping in near by subway
entrance, building lobby or homeless shelter.
JA: So homeless people were your neighbors so to speak.
KW: As you know, the very fact that the artists were close to homeless people
doesn’t mean that they all wished to establish some contact with them or their
work was related to the living conditions of homeless people. But there were
some, I wasn’t alone; there was a group of artists among squatters and squatters
were an important part of the homeless population. So, in fact the photograph
that you see of Poliscar was done by a squatter photographer, from the building
where he was squatting. Now it’s a place where the police station has been built.
Then that was the place called Dinkinsville, of the name of David Dinkins, the
mayor of New York at that time. There was a gigantic encampment of homeless
people there. They were expelled from Tompkins Square Park where they lived
before and with some of whom I developed the Homeless Vehicle, a project
preceding the Poliscar.
JA: It was quite a jump from projections on monuments to the subject of
homelessness, though both are about public space.
KW: It was not a jump, the connection was there. I lived in Boston by that
time. There was the projection for New Year’s Eve: The Homeless Projection on
Transformative Avant-Garde and Other Writings
the Soldiers and Sailors Civil War Memorial. Also, there was the Union Square
proposal, which was shown at the 49th Parallel: Centre for Contemporary
Canadian Art at 420 West Broadway. I originally proposed a projection on all four
statues of Union Square to a community board and the park department, but
did not get permission, so I presented it as a kind of montage slide installation
in the art gallery. I projected the statues of Lincoln, Washington, Lafayette and
of the Charity allegory with images superimposed on them, so they all “became”
homeless. Also, the text I wrote for that exhibition was trying to refer to this
strange relationship between the homeless and monuments, who share the
same frozen gestures—they´re affected by the elements, destructive external 267
conditions. There is also the fact that homeless people inhabit monuments by
necessity and the silent monuments (as silent as the homeless themselves)
cannot say anything about it, even if the situation at their monumental steps is
often in a gross contradiction to noble civic democratic ideas they represent.
Equally there is real estate development—“uneven development”— with its
vehicle-bulldozers as a kind of war machine that produces homelessness and
their mobile presence in the city. Unnerved by this situation, exactly in the time of
this exhibition, with the assistance and consultations from a group of homeless
persons, I began developing my design and implementation of the Homeless
Vehicle and than of the Poliscar, whose function went beyond the Homeless
Vehicle. Poliscar was a mixture of a living unit and communication network, and
this then provided the foundation for the new concepts of urban performative
communication instruments developed with the illegal immigrants in Paris. So
then the Alien Staff was created in the context and in response to the shocking
wave of xenophobia in France and in Europe in 1991.
Everything was connected somehow, it’s very hard to explain connections
quickly, because of the social context. It was also linked to my own existential
situation. When I moved to France, I was once more a member of a very
privileged group of immigrants, but I was still an immigrant....
JA: How much has your experience of immigration impacted on your work?
Obviously, it has to make you conscious of issues that the majority is ignorant of.
KW: It does, of course it helps. It doesn’t hurt to have some sense of the process
of moving into a new society. Even for more privileged newcomers such a move,
a border crossing to work and live in a new place comes not without some
psychological, social and political displacement. Sure. But at the same time that
should not be understood as a condition for this kind of work, because everybody
should have an opportunity and right to deal with any topic, including minority
topics. After all, Marx didn’t share the experience of working class, or Engels, or
Rosa Luxemburg even they wrote with great insight about the conditions of life of
the working class.
JA: But it has to do more with being sensitized to the subject, and sometimes it
can be almost anything which can do that.
KW: Some people are sensitized by their own experience and some people are
the opposite, they actually shy away from it and they even become xenophobic
including some immigrants themselves.
JA: I mean, it raises an interesting question about the issues of identity, for
instance, how one relates to community. I feel that these questions underlie
all your work: the issue of normality and alterity and the role of trauma in this,
both on personal and social levels. We can talk about it on a general level, in
anthropological, sociological and historical terms, for instance about specific
Parrhesia/Inner Public
 characteristics of modernity, but also from personal experience. For example, my
own experience of being an immigrant made me aware of many questions that
certainly I was not before my emigration. I started then to be interested in many
things that related to my own experience.
KW: Sure, to cross the political-geographical boundary and become a part of
the other side, especially in terms of working there, not just visiting—that’s
a profound experience for everybody. There is an exception maybe for some
millionaires and people who have a special relation to the entire planet by the
virtue of being part of some kind of global game, some global expansion, a sort
268 of corporate cosmopolitan for example. Most of us definitely suffer some serious
shock, and maybe it’s a shock therapy as well, conditioned by psycho-cultural and
social displacement.
JA: But let’s also not forget about historical specificity; what I mean is the
specificity of the period of the Cold War and what happened after that. Because
something radically changed, and I think it also had a major impact on your
work, since Alien Staff and other similar works refer to migration, that a lot of
people are moving, and that’s a bit of a different dynamic than what was typical
for the Cold War; that they were two antagonistic worlds and once you switched
from one to the other. You had to rethink preconceptions and prejudices about
the two. It was a completely different situation. We often forget that this basic
existential experience, such as being an immigrant during the Cold War, is
not possible to transfer just by talking about it to another person who doesn’t
have that experience. This is important because once the situation changes for
subsequent generations, they don’t have that understanding and they have a
different experience. The interaction of different generations is based on that
difference, so that there is a certain misunderstanding between them, which is
also very productive.
KW: Yes, so we say that we are double immigrants. But we should not forget that
there are always many borders that people cross, even without this big Cold War
border, the Iron Curtain. There are lots of borders that maybe are more visible
now than before. There is a border between the countryside and the city; there is a
border between the religious cultures, and other cultural borders; there are borders
between national identities and groups that emerge in new Europe; that’s what
Étienne Balibar is bringing up. It means to take seriously the borders that were
kind of suppressed before by the official national borders and which now emerge.
Ethnic borders have emerged very powerfully. In that sense the border between
Roma people and the rest of population has become very strong now due to fascist
reinforcement. Balibar refers to it, bringing to our attention a sensitive speech by
Fichte when Germany lost its independence. Fichte encouraged then to focus on
“inner borders”, to really recognize that once we lost the official border, we actually
have only other borders. Once we crossed this Cold War border, we have to learn
and join the younger people today in recognizing more borders. I hope that this type
of work will be helpful, but perhaps somebody else could expose more issues and
borders, perhaps within the Roma population, better than I could ever try to do.
We’re moving into a more interesting set of problems, I think, than the ones that we
had in our generation. But still, crossing this big border, however overwhelming it
was, it also helped me discover what the borders are. I was hoping to find democracy,
jumping from an undemocratic situation to a democratic situation. Because that
democracy was something that was taken away from us, therefore unconsciously
I thought it was something that could be given back to me. I quickly realized that
Transformative Avant-Garde and Other Writings
democracy cannot be ‘given’, that the fact that it was taken away doesn’t mean it will
arrive with or be given to me by the democratic system or democratic government.
This is not a democracy as something that ‘exists’ but, as what Derrida
called it, is always a “democracy to come”, a “democracy as a promise”, a
horizon; the system that creates conditions for people to either build, act on it,
make democracy themselves every day, or loose it by allowing the “democratic
elite” to “secure” it for us—that is to rule toward the new tyranny set up in the
name of democracy—the “managed democracy” of President Putin as a clinical
case example. So I realized then my own naiveté, which was part of the damage
done by the previous regime in Poland; that we had no idea what democracy is. 269
And in some ways that shock was perhaps the revelation that helped me to speak
to people who were born in that system and also maybe explain to them what
they didn’t see themselves and what they naively took for granted: not seeing
that passively consuming democracy rather than to making it, they loose it.
Jumping from this kind of double border helps to discover the reality. Something
in me decided to recognize this complexity and tried to figure out what the
designer could do in this situation, to be active part of democratic process, to
keep democracy alive. So, sure, it took a while, but I think moving to New York,
and in some degree my experiments or early projections in Canada also were
important to switch from this kind of phantasm of democracy into working for
democracy. Of course, it created a big difference between my point of view and
all my colleagues in Poland. I also lost contact with them for many, many years; I
mean the real sense of trust, because they couldn’t figure out what I was doing—
critically intervening and disrupting through my work the “democratic world” that
that idealized and which at that time they naively misunderstood.
JA: I had a similar experience when I came back in 1990 and organized a series
of discussions on nationalism in Prague.
KW: Democracy does not help guarantee anything, including the transformation
of culture in itself. It creates possibility, but a very difficult one, to re-inscribe or
transform culture, which is an overwhelming thing. National culture. Conditions
are not as easy as we think for what Benjamin would call the “tradition of the
vanquished” and “the nameless” to inscribe itself or to challenge the “history
of the victors”. We constitute ourselves as ‘the sames’, versus ‘the others’, our
counterpoint. These others, the strangers are the ‘unfamiliars’ who in fact are, as
Kristeva pointed it out, our proper un-conscious.
History, as Benjamin says, has a hermeneutical character: it selects
some events, forgets others and takes charge of the interpretation. In the case
of Poland or the Czech Republic, it will be not only the “history of the victors”
but the history of the “victorious vanquished”, history of those who were chosen
to be remembered and cherished as victims or heroes or martyrs, versus others
martyrs and heroes who are not inscribed in the national narrative. Such as
the Roma people. Those young people from Varnsdorf are indeed carrying the
tradition of the vanquished, but will it ever be possible to inscribe their tradition,
witness and traumatic memories and great moments of their survival and
advancement into a history of Czech Republic, as their and our common history?
Since history has been stolen from them, or erased, they are seen as ‘people
with no history’, with no grand narrative of their own. So in that sense their own
constitution or their own kind of sense of their own rights and their own destiny
should be somehow ‘written’ culturally in a performative disruptive ways and what
most important, listened to—every day.
Parrhesia/Inner Public
 Meantime and soon as a strictly political project, constitutions of Europe
and of every other country have to be re-written, because they are still nineteenth-
century Nation State type of constitutions, their relation to newcomers, immigrants
and strangers is not clear. It looks on the one hand like everybody who has been
born human has natural (human) rights, while on the other hand one has a right
to have these natural rights only when lives within the boundary of a ‘one’s own’
particular country or is born to parents that have nationality of that country. It is
contradictory then that everybody coming from other places seems suddenly to
not have these (human) rights, practically speaking. So the process of negotiating
270 those rights with newcomers or with people who are treated or at best tolerated
as strangers (who often live for generations within the national boundary) has to
be written into those constitutions. And those legal documents will not be created
or practically implemented before or without profound and complex cultural and
pedagogical work. I mean, you can write them, but without cultural change they will
be purely paper documents.
JA: You are raising several important issues. One being that the Roma people
don’t have their written history, but they have their own culture, which is different
from our culture.
KW: Sure. They have history that’s not written!
JA: Yes, so it’s encoded in their music, in their story-telling, and so on. And it has
to be shared, which also means translated and transcribed.
KW: Maybe. I don’t know what should be done, but there has to be a presence, an
appearance of that culture in its full sense and complexity rather than operating
as a kind of cliché, or as entertainment for us.
JA: Yes, and that’s why I have included in the publication a montage of texts
which would actually confront different narratives, including Roma narratives
through their folk tales and family stories....
KW: Exactly, because what you are trying to do is maybe to suggest a complex
monument, meaning a monument in the good sense, because monument is not
just about remembering or commemorating, it’s about warning, it’s about witness,
it’s about monitoring the situation, a memento.... Yes, we went through many
things, I went through many things. Many people who went through traumatic
events, like those young people, they are monuments to their own trauma.
They’re usually silent monuments, because they have no right and chance to be
heard and they have no confidence that anyone would listen to them and to their
experience of traumatic difficulties. If they can become speaking monuments
instead of the silent ones, testify and protest in a public space, then of course
they are part of cultural and democratic process, of “democracy to come”. In
protest (protestari) “testis” means witness, and “pro” demands and proposes the
change. Once anybody learns how to listen and open up without fear to what they
say, then we will be talking about public space, the new public domain, about
a democratic process in which someone who went through a hellish experience
finds the form to communicate this in public on behalf of oneself and behalf of
others that cannot do so. So the person becomes an agent who speaks for himself
and others and learns how to do so in order to make a leap from the private silent
person’s confession into public speech, in order to provide conditions for change,
so in the future there will be no place for this kind of experience, for his children,
for children of others, and everybody! So this is a very prophetic act of breaking
the silence and turning something that was private and kind of ghettoized into
public discourse, into grand discourse.
Transformative Avant-Garde and Other Writings
Who are we, Europeans? Who are we: Czechs, or Poles? We’re supposed
to form that kind of new world, right, the world that is better than before! We went
through hell in this part of the world, maybe the worst hell called Europe, and
also were wandering across the planet as immigrants ourselves. These so-called
demonstrations about which these young people are talking about, they wake us
up to the nightmare of fascism, of Holocaust, Roma Holocaust, which seems to be
even worse than the Jewish Holocaust in terms of number of people murdered per
capita, also their children murdered per capita, so in each of those children––there
is also the memory (maybe unconscious memory) of all children murdered and
tortured during the Second World War and socially and culturally mistreated just 271
after the war, and even under Communist rule.
Parrhésía
JA: There seem to be two objectives you’re emphasizing in your talks and
conversations: what these witnesses can do for themselves but also what they
can do for us, for everybody.
KW: For us and for themselves, together.
JA: And can you talk a bit more about this aspect that has become even more
explicit in your recent work than in the earlier one?
KW: I always have to come back to antiquity because I’m in academia, with
one foot still in Harvard or MIT, and academic discourse requires going back to
the ancient roots of democracy and so forth. So there’s always this reference to
the Cynics. It’s called “cynicistic reference” or “cynic reference”. It’s because
the cynics were taking advantage of parrhésía, a kind of right of free speaking in
Ancient Greece, in Athens especially. They were a kind of special breed of those
parrhésíastes, because they lived at the very bottom of society, on the streets, on
the ground, like Diogenes.
JA: By their choice?
KW: By their choice. Most of them were of foreign breed though, so they were
Xenia. By choice maybe, but also they were kind of immigrants, many of them.
Even Socrates, they say he was a kind of foreigner, not a Cynic, but there was
some reference there. But Diogenes, even if he wasn’t a foreigner, he lived like
a foreigner. He called himself “dog”, right; they were “dogs”. So the issue is that
they were exercising the right of free speaking from the social bottom, a point of
view from a critical ground, in terms of status. They were a philosophical school,
but they were disrupting the everyday life to disclaim about what’s wrong, the
corruption, or the wrongdoings of authorities, mistakes made, and so forth. Some
minorities, including the Roma people, may be called “functional Cynics”, if they
can open up and act, speak, try to affect things from the very bottom of their
lived experience, breaking all those boundaries. If Diogenes could speak back
to Alexander the Great the way he did, which was legendary, like “go to the left
because you’re casting a shadow on me and I’m cold” or “you must be a weak
person because you need such a big army”. This means that those people could
actually speak like Diogenes. We need those new Diogeneses, new Cynics or at
least people who can refer to that tradition in practice and do so in a situation
completely different than in Ancient Greece. Parrhésía, which protected the
Cynics, was for a very small group, a small percentage of the population. Not for
slaves, women, or proper foreigners. So there are more things to recognize: the
things Foucault didn’t talk about in the last lectures on parrhésía at Berkeley. How
to extrapolate this democratic principal into the contemporary world with all those
Parrhesia/Inner Public
 borders and visions today in Europe or elsewhere? It’s very hard without cultural
and media projects, without some kind of intervention that would be done jointly
by those members of minorities and majorities. It has to be clear that we are a
part of the project. We cannot simply delegate the project to the
Roma people.
JA: I wanted to explore another issue, the issues of Nation States and national
identity and how it has to be rethought, redefined, and reinvented in a new way.
KW: Or maybe abandoned!
JA: There is another notion and I noticed that you mentioned it couple of times
272 in your interviews: the notion of multiple identities or multiple personality. You
quoted Julia Kristeva on some occasions....
KW: Yes, that was in 1990s when I worked on immigrant projects in France.
JA: In the late 1990s I worked for a couple of years on a project on the rise of
modern self, how this modern notion of individual self emerged in the nineteenth
and twentieth century. To my surprise, I found out that the phenomenon of multiple
personality was an important part of this historical process. There is a book by
the Canadian philosopher Ian Hacking about multiple personality disorder as a
new disease, a psychological illness, in the nineteenth century. It is a very curious
phenomenon. It all started in the city of Bordeaux in 1875, and then all of a sudden
it became an epidemic in the Western world.
KW: This is the other side of the same coin.
JA: Yes, so I think this is interesting, because about the same time you find the
notion of multiple identities in the arts and popular culture.
KW: It’s a romantic idea... But at the same time, it was time of nationalism.
JA: And also let’s remember here the famous statement of Rimbaud “I am an
other”. So this is all related.
KW: Yes, very interesting.
JA: Well, what is interesting about it is that these people have several different
personalities and that they lose memory of their previous self. Once they lost
the memory of their original self, they became migrants and homeless, in some
respect like people with Alzheimer’s who cannot find their way home and then
they wander.
KW: There are two diseases: the chauvinistic nationalism, and the one you
described. I prefer the one you are just talking about. But I think I learn something
from those who don’t lose their memory and whose illness is more interesting.
Because they’re in the process of acquiring those new identities and they have
to rethink the previous ones. It’s not just forgetting, as far as I learned from
immigrants, from so many projects with them, and also from returning soldiers,
from veterans. They don’t forget... no, I think they have a critical history in them,
because they have to think about their past identity as something questionable
in face of the process of acquiring the new identity. And many of them are doing
so through the discursive process, meaning some exchange of points of view
with others, for instance, with family members, who maybe don’t understand
them, but they try to.... There are some conflict moments, since in the process
of becoming less strange, they make others stranger. They may lose their
relationships. They move on to another relationship, somehow leaving behind
those who were most stable and destabilizing them. While they are stabilizing
themselves, they have the history of their own destabilization. And it comes
as a trauma and recovery, their own attempts to heal themselves, or seek help
in healing their traumatic memories. They become conscious of what actually
Transformative Avant-Garde and Other Writings
happened to them, or they see distance from what happened to them in the past,
all the injustice done, and they see that their situation is not so unique because
they had seen themselves as a part of a larger problem. Once they become more
and more outspoken, the recovery from trauma and acquiring new identities is
also a process of acquiring a critical perspective on the previous identities. So
this is the kind of people with whom I worked. They may be another branch of
people with whom I didn’t work because they didn’t want to work with me. They
are those detached, blasé kind of cosmopolitans. I found some of them in Paris
and they didn’t want to be part of the project. They were mostly people from
Romania, the Francophones, who had this relationship to Paris, as a place where 273
they are absolutely at home, because they don’t belong to anybody. The same
thing exists in New York; there are those New Yorkers, new New Yorkers, who
are also cosmopolitan... but I think they don’t need this kind of project, because
they kind of escape from that difficult life with cross-national identities, with all
of that discursive and philosophical critical process, by acquiring a cosmopolitan
identity, which raises all those borders into a kind of phantasm. Therefore they
don’t want to get dirty again, to deal with their problems. There millions of
people with problems, people who might not have the economic base to play
the cosmopolitan. Maybe I don’t do them justice here, because I didn’t really
work with them, so I might not fully understand their point of view. But they are
really a minority within the immigrant population, I can assure you. They are the
migrant aristocracy.
Conflict Transformation
JA: But there is also a strange aspect of this relationship, that we feel threatened by
this otherness. It can be handicapped people. It can be strangers....
KW: Yes, because that’s what Kristeva was trying to say in 1990 when she wrote
that the process without this nationalism, without this grand glue that makes us
‘sames’, we become strangers to ourselves. In normal development, each time you
pass an exam, you’re no longer the same, so you become a stranger to yourself,
because by knowing something, you’re no longer natural, you’re coming out... you’re
actually becoming a stranger to yourself. And you don’t know whether what are
you saying is you, or something you acquired, or something you developed out of
something else rather than something that was inherently yours at birth. So this
process of alienation is part of normal development. Once there is help provided
by the grand ideologies—like we are what historically binds us, religion, the kind
of myth of our histories—then of course we start feeling better. Because we feel
together, because without this nationalism, our own alienation is exposed. It’s being
camouflaged by those external glues, so therefore we forget about those strangers in
ourselves. Kristeva says that once we see the actual stranger in front of us then what
is repressed comes out. So that means that art and culture are good ways to actually
bring up those things that we have repressed, because they are only partially real, so
they can be accepted easier. That’s what Freud was trying to say, I guess. Culture
is thus a real project to bring out different relations to ourselves and to others which
originate in what is really out there. But at the same time, the same culture creates
phantasms that poison the situation, and that makes it very hard for the kind of
cultural projects I’m talking about. So you can have a deconstructive projection, any
construct, or you can try to make new constructions with particular projects.
JA: From time to time you mention psychoanalysis, Freud or Kristeva, and so on.
Could you tell me more about your relationship to psychoanalysis?
Parrhesia/Inner Public
 KW: It’s very tricky because I’m not educated enough in this field. The therapy
part is a more concrete connection, because some therapists, art therapists, or
art education people, they see my work as related to their field. Although I see
differences and they also see the differences. Sometimes I feel that they would like to
join me more than I would like to join them. In any case there is clearly an overlap... I
mean, they may have a clearer sense than me of what that overlap is.
JA: I’m interested in whether art therapists, and psychotherapists in general,
are more attracted to the therapeutic potential of your work or are they also
interested in what the artist can do beyond people suffering from trauma? Your
274 collaboration with New York University on the Union Square Projection might be a
good example.
KW: Yes, art therapists are interested in the impact on the larger public because
they also want to expand their own field in social and public direction. During
the projection at the Union Square people teaching and studying in art education
or art therapy departments with whom I spoke were observing the response to
my projects by the general public. They were there during many evenings. They
observed the fact that some people passed by without noticing and some others
stopped for a moment and came back another time, while others were standing
in a group for longer. They thought it was very interesting. It’s a kind of free, open
therapy for the larger public society. And then in the middle of that, there were
some veterans, of course, who could see through to the complex response of
others. It was not really a finished discussion, I did not understand fully what this
kind of focus would need, how this works. Maybe it’s also overlapping with urban
pedagogy, the department of which is at the same NYU building as the art therapy
and art education.
Maybe I put them together for the wrong reason. But, at the same
time, they’re related. Simply because, among this public, there are masses of
people who really need cultural projects also for psychological reasons, there
is social psychology everywhere, so they recognize that they are not alone, they
are themselves like those monuments, in terms of their own childhood and
experiences. The boundary between health and illness is so foggy, and it should
be, it should not be strict at all. So between art therapy and public art they don’t
want to see the boundary. I think it’s a very healthy tendency for them, to refuse
to be so narrowly identified with their field; to see their own professional identities
as art therapists.
JA: And you are involved in a social psychology program in Warsaw, right?
KW: Yes, until this year I was teaching there. It is the Social Psychology University
of Warsaw (Szkola Wyzsza Psychologii Spolecznej). Unfortunately they recently
dissolved the Institute in which I have been teaching for some years, for some
administrative and maybe conservative reasons. There was a cross-disciplinary
institute and also the Conflict and Complexity Center. Andrzej Nowak, with whom
I taught there, is actually teaching in the United States in social conflict programs
at Florida State University and at Columbia University. He teaches conflict
transformation courses, which interest me a great deal in terms of some aspects of
my own work. So in this context, in terms of social psychology, not psychoanalysis
or psychotherapy, there is a possibility to see the type of work I do as part of the
conflict transformation project. This way the conflict can be transformed rather
than resolved or managed by switching the antagonistic conflict from malignant,
potentially bloody, into symbolic exchange, into a cultural project. Maybe not
in case of the Union Square project, but in case of the Tijuana Projection this
Transformative Avant-Garde and Other Writings
approach may be applicable. Public space also helps. There was so much being
said which was so painful that it’s almost impossible to look at on video, which
frames the facade and actual projection, too much. But in reality, when it was in
the middle of the city, there were people moving, cars, and the history of that place
that is inscribing the memory of most of those who are there. At the event it was
much more possible to accept, to listen to this experience of those maquiladora
workers than in some other transmission. On the other hand, it was much easier for
those people to say it through the special equipment and facade than in any other
situation, including even journalist interviews or public gatherings.
JA: Would you say then that your project did help to transform the conflict into
something else?
KW: Yes, there was a conflict being transformed in the way that it still remains,
that nothing was resolved, but the condition of saying okay, we are sharing
one kind of building, facade, cultural center that should provide room for this
and not only for what’s currently inside of this, the IMAX theater, which was
a propaganda projection, avoiding the problems. I don’t mean that I’m doing
a conflict transformation project, but I mean that there is a work on conflict
transformation, and there is an appeal to invite me or artists like myself to move
into the areas that are post-conflict, or pre-conflict, maybe during the conflict. It
is important to really bring out the memories and move from what some people
call negative peace to positive peace. Negative peace is the one that refuses to
bring up difficult issues, because we are too traumatized by the past. But instead
it is important to bring those issues in a different form, so they can be really
confronted. And argument can shift from talking about the past into what to do,
maybe to find another project that will be accepted by parties in conflict or about
which they will argue. So the argument was shifted from something impossible,
for example, the national history of suffering of our ancestors, into something like
pollution, or the environment, or the issue of housing, I don’t know... or maybe
just a different kind of democracy that will be more inclusive and more open.
Those who now can open up and share the unsolicited, truth of their experience,
who speak of their present, of their future, and of their vision of “democracy
to come”, are the avant-garde part of the population. They are crossing and
encouraging others to cross a great multitude of new borders here, the inner
borders and outer borders in terms of what is happening inside of themselves and
also among and between them. They invite us to cross these borders with them.
They are the vanguard, theirs and ours, definitely they are as Hannah Arendt
would call, “the vanguard of their people”, but at the same time they bring with
them the vision of the future for both themselves and for us all.
Originally published in Anděl, Jaroslav, Out/Inside(rs), Prague: DOX Centre for
Contemporary Art, 2013.
Parrhesia/Inner Public
Casting Shadows:
If You See Something...
an inte rvie w with K ath l e e n Mac Q u e e n
2014
Spatial Divisions
Kathleen MacQueen: Can we talk about your 2005 installation, If You
See Something...?
Krzysztof Wodiczko: Let me explain how I see this work now. First of all, the
interior of the gallery is an important element because galleries usually have no
windows so viewers expect a work of art to be a sort of window: the image of an
inner or an outer world or somewhere in-between the inside and the outside (but
not very consciously so).
The gallery, in the context of Homeland Security—which is in fact the
“Ministry of Interior”, as it is called in many countries—has a kind of Orwellian
connotation. For Orwell, if you remember, the “Ministry of Love” has no windows.
We could ask: What is this ministry policy doing to our psychological interior? So
it’s clear that once you are inside the gallery it becomes a metaphor for your own
isolation from what is happening outside the gallery. What is the relation between
those who don’t know what takes place in the outside­­—you and me, most of us—
and these others—the ones who are in prison, detained and deported, or their
families who are left out and fearful, and those activists who try to help them—
who do know?
KM: How did you reach those individuals?
KW: There were 15 various organizations: without them I would not know
what is happening and, without their support I would not be able to work with
survivors. That wall needs to be broken. You have to pierce some holes between
the interior of ignorance (ours) and the world of unspeakable, unbelievable
experience (theirs). This wall is built by the Ministry of Interior—what we hear
and what we don’t hear—and is their systematic policy to create separation.
Even the Patriot Act, as such, was unknown by those who voted for it
because it was offered so quickly, and, in any case, no one would vote against
Transformative Avant-Garde and Other Writings
something called the “Patriot Act” even if they failed to read it. This is the reality
of our ignorance, fear, and resentment to even learn and the counter-reality of
those who are affected.
KM: And so, you created windows?
KW: It became clear to me that it was not sufficient to break the wall and show what
is on the other side, but that the impossibility of seeing what’s on the other side
should also be represented. Therefore the foggy image; no matter how much we
want to know and how much those people are trying to tell us, there will still be a
fog. That is why those milky windows became useful equipment.
It became an obvious decision for me to project one of those windows, filmed 277
from the inside and multiplied in the gallery, as if it was some kind of pavilion from
which you could see what was happening on the other side, as if it were the real
thing: actual people talking about actual problems with each other unaware that we
are watching them. Voices heard partially, muffled; bodies seen but not recognized.
For various reasons it was the right opportunity: this window and the technology of
high definition projection creates a very strong illusion of a real presence.
When we filmed, people were emotionally in the midst of something
that was happening to them. We reconstructed and created various scenes
and dialogues of stories but some happened in real time as well. For example,
at one point when we were filming, a lawyer took a phone call communicating
with another lawyer about a mass deportation. There was someone praying,
there was a dog, there was a Polish window-cleaning crew: it is something they
do, they clean most Chelsea gallery windows everyday but I asked them to
do it again for the film. You clean the window to bring more light but you still
cannot clear the milky surface. Cleaning is the job of immigrants: they take the
maintenance jobs, often illegally, and often in spite of having advanced technical
or academic degrees.
KM: So how do you move from the day-to-day to the space of exhibition?
KW: I am describing the reasons—aesthetic, political, ethical—for this method
of projection. I usually project on outside surfaces on symbolic structures. The
difference from projecting on the outside and inside is fundamentally different: an
interior projection is our projection of our interior to the outside world. It engages
the gallery as a symbolically charged space that is too often taken for granted as a
space for the display of pictures or objects but it can be a vehicle for serious work. I
was quite happy that I managed to engage this.
KM: The interior space gave the impression that you had gone underground—
politically underground—that the public arena had been symbolically shut down...
KW: Yes, the Ministry of the Interior has disposed people to move the political
process indoors, but of course they have also started wire-tapping. It is Homeland
Security’s doing that we are forced into our interiors, but at the same time we are
subjected to surveillance in those interiors. The opening of the show purposefully
coincided with the anniversary of September 11th; it was a kind of memorial
project but a memorial to whom? In this case, it was to the survivors or victims of
the fallout in response to the bombing.
Fear and the Inability to See
KM: You are interrogating the conditions of terror....
KW: In Slavic languages, “terror” is reserved for external actions that are
threatening you and directed at you; the internal state is one of horror. Speaking in
English, even if no one is terrorizing you—but only if something horrifies you—you
Parrhesia/Inner Public
 can feel terror. The confusion of the use of the word “terror” is that you don’t know
whether you are talking about your subjective relation to it—horrifying feelings of
being terrorized­—or the actual terrorist acts against you.
This is skillfully played by politicians: the “war on terror” is the war both
on terrorism and on terror; is a war on our subjective fears, feelings, imaginations
and perceptions of being terrorized. It’s a kind of psychological project mixed
with a foreign war project. Feelings, imaginations, and perceptions can be
manufactured, including terror. First of all the US war on terror exaggerates fear
so you may be willing to take actions to decrease your sense of insecurity—staging
278 war on the outside and the inside—according to the wishes of the Ministry of the
Interior. This ‘staging’ is not the topic of my work but it is the context.
KM: Your representations become more real to us than the actual people would
be to the Bush administration.
KW: Is this about our fear or that of the people on the other side? Where is this
terror? Whose terror is it? The image of terrorists is being distorted... some other
work should be done on this because they are being treated as non-human. What is
real here is also the reality of the fog between us and them and their emotional charge
as they try to convey their situation of being terrorized. There are so many ‘terrors’
here and this gives a sense of complexity to the situation.
KM: I’d like to put this interior work in perspective with your exterior projections.
When did you move from the slide projections to the video projections?
KW: 1996, Kraków.1 It was waiting to happen. I was working on Mouthpiece (Le
porte-parole) in France and so I was already working in a narrative mode creating
conditions for people to open up and articulate unwelcome, unspeakable, and
overwhelming things in public.2 I was asked by filmmaker Andrzej Wajda to do a
projection for an urban festival he curated. We chose to work in the center of Kraków,
projecting onto the Central Markets City Hall Tower, the area where everyone meets,
at the main point on the cognitive map of the city. The Central Market is the largest
public space in Europe, with a tradition of public gatherings, whether cultural,
religious, or political events, since the thirteenth century.
The occasion of the festival asked for something special to happen and
these powerful BARCO-type video projectors were there for projecting Wajda’s
films in the outdoors. It was the first time this kind of equipment was available
in Poland and I had access to them. Eventually we formed a familiar type of crew
that I need for those projects but it expanded and I became a kind of filmmaker.
I was surprised how easy it was for me to combine the projection work with the
work of a film crew, a sound system crew, an editing crew, and a team of social
workers from the Women’s Center.
“Let not only the tower speak...”3
Poland, and perhaps Kraków in particular, was a very tough place for
women at that time; there had been a change of regime and many social projects
shifted from government to other agencies, including Catholic organizations
that in the name of ‘family values’ often sent those women back to their homes
for further abuse... children as well. The main Polish Catholic paper, Tygodnik
Powszechny, attacked the projection. Most media, though, was very open. I
learned a lot from that project. It was a major leap.
KM: Was that the first testimonial projection?
KW: Yes, I resorted to my previous experience in terms of projection but this was
the first time I used video with a powerful sound system. An additional crew was
required. The projection crew reached 25–30 people, definitely. The crew was the
Transformative Avant-Garde and Other Writings
first public to witness the project but they became increasingly negative; the more
they heard the testimony, the more they were against it. “The situation is not so
simple”, they would say, “the projection is not telling the full truth”.
KM: Or was it a truth they were not able to hear?
KW: The crew considered this as not the full truth but it is also clear that they
were feeling uneasy with what was being said. It was very familiar to their
personal experience, such as alcoholism mixed with domestic violence (“too
close to home” as we say in English). Some of the perpetrators of violence
spoken of in the testimonials were respected intellectuals. The mixture of
success and unpleasant truths was uncomfortable. One person who was 279
speaking through the tower was a psychotherapist and even she was victimized,
held as a prisoner by her husband (an intellectual who had previously been
imprisoned for his political ideas).
There were many other stories of torture and of people addicted to drugs....
At one point, I thought the project would collapse because of the negative and
fearful response of the crew, the project’s “inner public” as I call it....4 See, this is
what I was talking about: such a large crew with tentacles to the rest of the city,
strong connections because they were members of a prestigious and popular city
art center. They were starting to talk about this at night when lots of people heard
and there was feedback during the day.
The projection was falling apart. One of the final tests was taking place as
usual; we finished the test late at night taking advantage of a special agreement
with the city. It was a completely empty, huge plaza—a Gothic/Renaissance
plaza—and we heard some noise but it was hard to tell where it was coming from.
Finally we focused on the source: there were two teenage girls sitting there in the
plaza clapping. We were busy putting back cables and equipment, packing up
seemingly without paying attention—it’s an enormous amount of work to execute
these projections—but the next morning when I came back to the studio, the crew
was smiling.
I don’t know what happened but it was a different world after that. Those
two girls, without knowing it, saved the project. Now what kind of public is that?
How do you call it? They were public witnesses....
KM: They were corroborating witnesses.
KW: Perhaps without them and the effect they had on the crew I would not
have succeeded. They were a living proof of the potentially positive reception
of the project.
KM: Do you think it has to do with the intimacy that was made so large and so
public that made people uncomfortable?
KW: Yes, especially in Kraków, a city of hundreds of monasteries and churches
and hidden dark stories behind a veil of domestic privacy. It’s a beautiful place—
the “pearl of Europe” according to guidebooks—with awful housing projects and
a huge industrial Stalinist district next to a gigantic steel mill, the Nowa Huta.
There’s the other Kraków that is not seen in that official pearl-of-Europe Kraków:
the hypocrisy of ‘Victorian’ bourgeois secrecies, the power of the clergy, and
a post-Stalinist past. The projection was taken seriously by national media as
well as outsiders: students in summer programs and tourists, for example. We
distributed translations in English. The issue became recognized as a public
problem, but not only in Kraków.
KM: Did you have the same response with If You See Something...? Has that issue
become more public?
Parrhesia/Inner Public
 KW: There was a review in The New York Times by art critic Roberta Smith
and her article brought in a large audience in the last week of the show. It was
very crowded. Maybe it was the only show that touched on September 11th at
the beginning of the Chelsea season when you have 200 openings. It was very
public by the timing of it. People, whether they liked it or not, saw it, and it
became a meeting place, a connecting place for various organizations, activists,
and their clients.
Process and the inner public
280 KM: What is more important to you: the process of the work or the impact it has?
KW: The impact of the process. The people with whom I work, who become
co-artists of this project: their lives are a key issue. We were speaking of the
project from the perspective of ‘us’—the viewing public. What if we talk about
the project from the point of view of those who bring their life to it?
My emphasis is on the position of the project in the lives of those who are
potential and actual co-artists. It is important how they can make sense of this
project and make use of it for their own lives and the lives of others: to create
conditions under which those people will open up, articulate their traumatic
memories with an emotional charge, and do so with full consciousness that they
are animating some public space. Also, to take advantage of that environment
with its prestige and accessibility to others, and the attention the media will pay.
My purpose is to give them full understanding of the vehicle they use in order to
become agents who seek social change and to feel that they can help others who
are in similar situations.
They help themselves by getting involved in a cultural project. They
are now re-connecting with society from which they’ve been isolated by
circumstances created in large part by the Ministry of the Interior. They break
that wall to some degree and show also that it is impossible for us to really
identify with their situation or establish a bridge of empathy. No, it is the
impossibility of real understanding of their situation that is being projected.
This is extremely important. The real people, the actors, were there at the
opening and they met each other and could establish links through this project.
The art world is a vehicle through which you can legitimize the importance of a
problem. Every step helps. Those working in film, journalists, theorists, activists
are all missing the boat: these individuals want a certain understanding of the
complexity of the problem but also of the need to unveil or to transmit what is
being hidden.
We were joining each other, even if our objectives were slightly different,
we had a larger objective that we shared. And that was very nice.
KM: How do you see your socio-aesthetic project as different from other
cultural producers?
KW: In order to establish contact with potential co-artists—animators of the
interior—you need to go through various organizations that first protect them
from an artist like myself. It’s a danger; it’s a risk. They resent or even fear the
artists who sensationalize, who romanticize, who make a career out of the misery
of others, who can make trouble by compromising the work of some of those
activists if they are exposed.
It is a complicated process. I met with potential participants who then
convinced their support organizations to take part in the project because they
started to trust my intentions and see their own benefits. It took six or seven
Transformative Avant-Garde and Other Writings
months to go through this process: to be rejected, to be mistrusted, to be put
into tests... but, without the help of a few among the very important intermediary
parties who decided to trust me, without organizers and activists who work
for the victims and their families, mostly the Pakistani organizations, without
their trust—there would be no project. So they know each other and had to
communicate with each other that it is worth getting involved in this project. This
took time. Once the project was initially destroyed (psychologically and politically)
and the project survived the destruction, then the project proved to be strong
enough to be used by those who had attempted to destroy it in the first place....
KM: What do you mean by ‘destroyed’? 281
KW: What they say: “Get out, we don’t have time, etc....” At first there is
understandable suspicion, psychologically speaking there is the destruction of the
project; the project has to survive and be reconstructed as something useful.
We were making various tests to see what would happen with the milky
glass. It was installed here in this space. The participants see on video what is
seen on the other side of the glass and recognize what gestures will make an
impact and how much of their own face they do or don’t want recognized. They
also had to realize how much of the real stories they would bring to the situation,
gradually scripting their own narrative; so a lot of work was done right here where
we are sitting.5
Step by step, the stories that we were recording and re-recording, gained
more emotional components. Bringing back traumatic memories is very difficult.
At first their testimonies take the form of listing only the dry facts of the experience
without any ability to express emotional impact and feelings, at best a kind of
judicial or report language from speaking with police or lawyers. They have yet
to change to another language and retrieve emotional details that are repressed.
It takes time. It is partially psychological work but it is also cultural work,
communication work, and artistic work because they become story-tellers and,
scriptwriters, and actors of their own life.
After we went through training here in the studio we moved to the sidewalk
for two days of filming on location. We had a film, sound, and lighting crew; a
professional, 20-person crew involved in the process.
KM: The conversations seem spontaneous.
KW: Many of those scenes that they re-enacted could have been (or they
actually were) taking place on the street. Many important conversations do
take place in public spaces because it is less likely that someone will record or
wiretap it. Casual meetings and talking about experience often happen outside
especially now because those at work have to go out to smoke; so those scenes
are quite natural.
KM: Yes, the sidewalk cigarette break is as ubiquitous as the subway slogans....
KW: In this moment I want to return to the topic of the ‘public’ and ‘audience’ and
say something that may be the most important from my end about this subject.
In the context of my external projections, I’m being asked: “What is the reaction
of the public?” Why don’t we ask instead: “What was the position of this project
in the lives of those who animated the interiors and exteriors of my projections?”
Isn’t it that they are the public themselves? And who are those people who are not
visible but who are another public in those projects?
They are the families, the lawyers, the social workers, and perhaps many
of those who could not do it, but who are around all the time. They provide a
special zone, a protective zone, during the projections and during the time of
Parrhesia/Inner Public
 production. They may be ready later or at another time to join a different cultural
project. You should add the film crew, the coordinators, the post-production crew,
the gallery staff, and curators who support a project.
It has never been discussed by any critics that there is such a thing as an
inner production-related public sphere of a project that could become, say, 250
people, if we consider numbers as important. Their impact, their position in the
city, and the way the project might help them is then creating another public...
KM: ... and another project.
KW: Yes, this is how the public is being produced by this work and how this becomes
282 a public art project because it is not only their art project but potentially their life
project as well. This “inner public sphere” is the way the group uses the project as a
transitional object. They are developing their capacity to communicate, to express,
to transmit, to talk to each other, to convey something to others; so they infuse this
project with their inner world and at the same time they accept the project as part of
an outside world. DW Winnicott explains his theory of the “transitional object” in his
last work, Playing and Reality....
KM: Winnicott is no longer widely read; perhaps we have forgotten his tools.
KW: He talks about the potential zone, the third zone of experience. It’s an issue
to what degree this is a transitional object for that inner public and also for the
so-called viewing audience, the outside public. It is the way they start recognizing
both the inner and outside world. But the outer public has a quick experience and
the inner public has a longer experience, which gains integrity and conviction and
has the potential to be an agency for change.
KM: Should we distinguish between the inner public and an inner public sphere.7
KW: Yes! It is clear to me that there is an inner public, which becomes a small-
scale public sphere because there is indeed some kind of discourse taking place
that gives feedback to the actual projection. This helps the transmission be more
articulate, critical, and effective in calling authorities into accountability. This inner
pubic sphere has a developmental quality so it may also be called a “developmental
public sphere” in terms of its role in providing for protective conditions that secure
the survivors’ ability to express and transmit their experience and their oppositional
voice. Yes, this Habermas or Kluge and Negt would like in regards to what they call
the “proletarian public sphere”.
Perhaps it could also be called a “socio-aesthetic public sphere”,
developing through this particular projection because of those who are connected
to the participants who give their life and voice to the project. I have not organized
this in my head yet as a theory; I just watch and notice that something else is being
created that stays longer than the project itself. In the process of working on those
projects—including discussions in bars before and afterwards—there is a build-up
of a certain kind of consciousness needed to take action. These co-artists
make use of the kind of set-up I propose: their supporters—case workers,
psychotherapists and activists whom they trust, also their lovers, their friends,
researchers, and media people who are connected to the various groups, and the
technical crew who is often committed to the project—all these people reinforce
their political links and collective identity.
KM: So the inner public is not a closed system?
KW: Intellectuals and others, everyone is there, as Brecht would like. It’s a
complicated process but there are times when those two, the spectators and
the inner public, intersect. Art critics, filmmakers, and others connect through
openings, closings, and parties as I described.
Transformative Avant-Garde and Other Writings
Open Speech
KM: One could think of the inner public sphere as a process of transmission. Is
this where the importance of testimony comes in?
KW: Here “fearless speech” comes in, to which we referred earlier. Without
this inner public sphere as a psycho-cultural project operating as a transitional
object there is no possibility of transmission of what translators of Foucault call
“fearless speech”, Strictly speaking parrhésía does not mean fearless speech but
“open speech” or “free speech”. Free speech for people who are traumatized,
who are isolated, forced to be on the other side of that wall, is extremely difficult.
Foucault could say whatever he liked about antiquity and the democratic process 283
reserved only for the politis, the privileged people of rights, the members of the
polis, but how about those masses of marginalized citizens and residents of our
cities today who, unlike in ancient Athens now have rights but only on paper, not
in reality: how are they able to become parrhésíastic speakers?
They need cultural projects; they need transitional objects; they need to be
an integral part of the process of making the cultural project—often first critically
‘destroying’ it and then rebuilding it—in order to convey something with the help
of the project as a democratic artifice. Something may seem very simple to us but
for them the act of speech, as an emotionally charged act of public truth-telling, is
as enormously difficult as it is crucial for their survival and contribution to positive
change. One of those speaking from behind the foggy glass window in the show—
whose business was destroyed, who was shown on the front page of the Boston
newspaper, who was presented in the media as a traitor working in a terrorist
lab—was in actuality working with people with AIDS. He said he had two things
to keep him going—God and the American Constitution—and he was showing the
copy of the constitution he keeps everyday in his pocket.
He’s a perfect parrhésíastic speaker: he’s talking about democracy from
his stomach, from his heart, speaking from the wounds of his experience about
democracy! He’s telling the truth and reprimanding the world and testifying
through the courts about being a victim of and a witness to injustice. At the same
time he is testifying in the name of democracy in hopes that this will change the
world for the better. This is the definition of a parrhésíastic speaker: someone
who risks his own reputation, well being, and even his life to “pro-test” what is
wrong as a contribution toward the better. It is his pro, on the basis of testis, his
witness. But Foucault didn’t, he could not talk about those people, he was talking
about the politis. Without psychological and aesthetic cultural projects, there is
no possibility to learn from Foucault about present day democracy, open by law to
all... in other words, what he didn’t say: that Athenian parrhésíastic project has to
be turned today into technological, psychological, cultural, and artistic work.
KM: Where Foucault leaves off, Judith Butler brings to the present with her theory
that subjectivity can’t be focused on the ‘I’—it has to be focused on the ‘you’.
KW: That’s Levinas; that’s from our side of the wall, yes.... This ‘other’ on the
other side of this foggy window that we could not recognize, with whom we could
not and should not identify, empathize, or frame, is, as Levinas would put it, the
face of the other as naked evidence of a person’s existence. At the same time we
must protect this other from our appropriation through empathy. So the use of
the frosted, foggy, semi-transparent windows may be the Judaistic aspect of this
project, perhaps.
KM: Memory is thought of as something past but your project gives a strong
impression of the present.
Parrhesia/Inner Public
 KW: Memory is according to some psychotherapists an action of telling a story.6
KM: Which is an action of the present.
KW: A story, a history, a memory is rooted in the present time. Benjamin would
say it is a vision: a hope lived by the mode of the present. It is the present
time that is being refused as unacceptable in the name of this present’s unjust
and catastrophic past; meaning I “re-member”, “re-call” something that has
happened in the past that has a destructive impact on my time now and that
should never happen again in the future. The future should be liberated from
the danger of repetition from the thing that has happened in the past and that is
284 still happening—a fearless warning. Memory has something to do with the word
“memento”, a warning: “I warn you, beware, be mindful, and be reminded.” It is
an urgent call to disrupt the repetition of a catastrophe and injustice in the future.
KM: What is the balance for you between this socio-political-cultural project and
your commitment to visual art? You are a visual artist, after all; you are creating a
piece of visual engagement.
KW: That part of the work that is seen by the art world—only a small part I
might add—should never the less be as thick as possible. There need to be many
layers so that what is not seen directly through the work still gives a sense of
the entire social process. I’m talking about the life engagement of people that
should be leaking through the specially created tiny cracks in the work, and in
this way be transmitted ‘between the lines’. It’s not that different from what
other artists historically have tried to do - perhaps a similar methodology to
Géricault’s The Raft of the Medusa—to re-scandalize the scandal with the help
and involvement of actual survivors of the horrifying catastrophes; just as
Manet’s Execution of Maximilian or Hans Haacke’s projects have done—there are
in principle strong similarities.
The metier, the craft, the aesthetic work is extremely important; otherwise,
you might get the concept but it would not become your full emotional experience.
People who have less experience in creating artifice, illusion, or evocative
installations could actually trivialize the social project. It happens often. Less
experienced artists jump quickly to socio-aesthetic work and it becomes a more
social than aesthetic experience. Now of course we are also dealing with a very
refined audience; lots of people who go to the gallery have seen many other media
shows. I was pleased to get the report from the gallery staff that a prominent
curator came to the show and immediately left complaining: “Someone is washing
the gallery windows! When will the show open?”
KM: Because they couldn’t see it.
KW: They couldn’t see it was art. Artists have always been tricksters, historically;
there’s nothing new about that.
KM: You took an about-face; you went full-thrust into illusionism. That has not
been popular. It is always: make the fact that it is a representation obvious;
show up the perils of representation. You said, OK, we’ve had enough of that;
this is going to be a full semblance of reality and let’s see what happens in
that circumstance.
KW: Fine. I agree and disagree. One has to see both sides of that window. It’s
like Manet’s Bar at the Folies-Bergère—he’s focusing on the presentation but
there is also a person there—what we see and what we can’t see. The realism is
something I don’t want to lose.
KM: And that realism is perhaps the connection between the aesthetic and the
social aspects of the project.
Transformative Avant-Garde and Other Writings
KW: The project was pro-active, both clinically and critically. Clinically not
only in a diagnostic way as Gilles Deleuze would like (merely detecting and
naming the social and singular ills) but also in an interventional, prognostic, and
transformative way (healing the ills, interrupting their continuity, and proposing
preventive means against the sickness to come). The participants used the
project, whether consciously or not, to heal both themselves and society at large,
to have a different channel that’s not judicial. It’s therapy: the project became
a transitional phenomenon for them They learn to accept through the project
both an outside and an inner world they don’t fully control but may learn how to
control to some degree, so it is in this transitional way you can feel they are using 285
the project to gain access to the circulation of power. These people don’t have a
philosophical situation from which to speak; truth is in the process of trying to
figure out what it is you are saying; you have to develop; this is how and why you
work toward recovery from trauma.
Winnicott has a brilliant expression to describe an important aspect of the
traumatic condition: the “freezing of the failure situation.” The primary witnesses
or survivors have to go through a developmental or re-developmental process to
‘unfreeze’ and to regain their confidence in the safety and effectiveness of their
pro-active work.
KM: What are the dangers in working with trauma as your subject?
KW: Yes, if I use the word “trauma” I’m in trouble here. I am not a clinician. This
is strictly speaking not a health-based project: healing in a medical sense. It is
a cultural health project about narrative, pro-active therapy, and para-theatrical
art of public testimony. It is an interventional socio-aesthetic act. If I say it is
cross-cultural communication work then it’s also fine. It is difficult for traditional
psychoanalysts to accept public space as a clinical environment, which I think is a
major mistake. My experience and my intuition as a public artist who works with
people tell me otherwise.
Previously, I have spoken about designing a bandage to heal the wound
even if the wound should not exist; but that is not enough, the bandage could also
be such that it will be able to speak and remember and articulate and transmit
conditions under which the wound happened. Interrogative Design responds as
such as a bandage to the needs that should not exist in hope that articulating them
and providing emergency help and spreading consciousness of those conditions
will lead to their obsolescence—this is its utopia—one I must have in order to
move in the direction of that horizon, even if I never reach it.7 Otherwise, I would
be going backward. Without utopia, you move backward: it doesn’t mean you will
reach that ideal situation but in this way you at least transform the situation. I
think that is an achievement. That is all I can do. I wish I could do more.
Originally published as “Conversation: second person/migrant” in “Chapter 2:
Casting Shadows: Krzysztof Wodiczko’s If You See Something...”, MacQueen,
Kathleen, Strategic Tactical Response: Art in an Age of Terror, New York: Agon
Press, 2014, pp 127–141.
1 For a full transcript and the documentation of the project see KW: projekcje publiczne,
public projections 1996–2004, with contributions by Anna Smolak, Margorzata
Gadomska, Dariusz Dolinski, et al, Kraków: Gallery of Contemporary Art Bunkier
Sztuki, 2005, pp 8–19.
Parrhesia/Inner Public
 2 The instrument Le porte-parole or Mouthpiece (Le porte-parole) was first made in
1993 with variants made and used from 1995–1997.
The Inner Public
3 After the projection, the Women’s Center created a poster with this slogan to mobilize
new members. 2015
4 The term “inner public” is specific to Krzysztof Wodiczko. He uses it to differentiate
the unrecognized participants in a project from the viewing public, which has been
the center of much theoretical debate on spectatorship prompted by semiotic studies
since the 1970s. For a concise but comprehensive outline of reception theory see
Marinis, Marco de, “The Spectator’s Task”, The Semiotics of Performance, Aine
O’Healy trans, Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1993, pp 159–188.
5 The space is almost 80 square-feet, filled with the overflow of too many projects and not
enough time, leaving only as much space as could accommodate a small table and chairs.
6 This statement refers principally to Hanet, Pierre, Psychological Healing, vol 1, E and
C Paul trans, New York: Basic Books, 1992–1997, p 37.
286 7 At the time of the interview, Krzysztof Wodiczko was head of the Interrogative Design
Group at the Massachusetts Institute of technology in Cambridge, Massachusetts.
Their goal “is to combine art and technology into design while infusing it with emerging
cultural issues that play critical roles in our society yet are give the least design
attention.” See http://interrogative.mit.edu/about/, last accessed 22 November 2009.

In this essay I would like to elaborate on the specific kind of public that emerges in
my projects and that is generated from within the process of social and technical
productions. I call this public the “inner public”. The inner public is critical to
project participants’ testimonial role and to the social integrity and complexity
of the projects. For the participants, and for the development of the projects,
the group and network of people who constitute the inner public function as the
projects’ first audience and informed interlocutor. The inner public also plays
a role as secondary witness and as an emotionally involved “fearless listener”
without which the participants’ stories and testimonies my projects’ foundation
cannot be developed and shared. Participants receive moral support and tactical
advice from the inner public, and, considering the risks attached to their acts
of public truth-telling, a sense of protection. Participants are the nucleus and
the core of the inner public. Through its involvement, the inner public generates
the development and transformation of the projects. In sum, the integrity of any
project, in all the stages of its production, including its public reception and its
social afterlife, depends on the testimonial role of the project participants and the
audience function of the inner public.

Project Participants as Collaborators

My works in public space include participatory projections-animations of
urban monuments as well as the performative use of specially designed
communicative equipment. These projects’ purpose is to inspire and assist the
people who choose to take part in them to become present day parrhésíastes
(free, fearless speakers) and social agents.1 By extension, the aim of these
projects is to contribute to the process of animating the city as a site of agonistic
public discourse and dynamic democratic process.2 The most critical aspect
of my projects is the process of involving, inspiring and assisting participant-
collaborators in the development of their capacity for sharing and critically

Transformative Avant-Garde and Other Writings Parrhesia/Inner Public

 communicating their experience in a frank, fearless and emotionally articulate
way. Through these projects they performatively tell the truth of their lived
experience, not only on behalf of themselves, but also, as emergent social agents
speaking, on behalf of others who have lived through and continue to suffer unjust
conditions of life, but do not have the advantage of such communicative media.
In most discussions about my work the focus is on the spectators rather
than on the participants who are the key contributors to my projects. This is due
to the fact that my projects are treated as spectacles or public events–something
that is developed solely for the perception and reception of the so-called “public’”
288 Consequently, those conversations that refer to my projects tend to focus on
questions and matters concerned with the “reaction of the public’” the “audience’s
response’” and further, of the “public impact” of the works. These issues are
important, but in my view, divert attention from most of my projects’ social and
artistic objectives. When people examine my projects from an external perspective
(that of the spectator), they risk missing the point of view of its inner workings
and the projects’ focus on the participants as project collaborators, performers,
truth-tellers and testifiers. The external perspective also misses the psychologically
developmental and aesthetic aspects of the formulation of public witness testimony.
To be fair, the limited focus on public reception is in part understandable,
given that those who comment on a work are often not aware of the process that
goes into the project’s development. Since many participants desire to remain
anonymous, and, due to the psychologically sensitive process of recording
testimony, the inner perspective of a project’s development often cannot be shared.
Thus, the work is perceived externally, on the basis of its final public presentation
and in terms of video documentation. The focus on the final appearance of the
projects misses what I consider to be the main point of the work: everything that
is human and social and that contributes to the making of the project before the
final moment of its public presentation and reception. This includes, among many
other aspects, the initial meetings with the people who may take part in a project,
the long process of their self-selection, the elaborate process of recording and
re-recording testimonies, related conversations and discussions, as well as other
developmental stages of the project–usually referred to as “preparatory” material.
In most theoretical and critical discussions of public art, there is rarely
any emphasis placed on the value and meaning of projects for those who invest
lived experience in them. However, a grasp of the psychologically developmental,
therapeutic, educational and performative procedures of these works is crucial
for understanding the social objective of such projects. In this essay I would like
to recount the basic developmental stages of the process involved in making any
one of my projects. This, I believe, is important for understanding not only the
method of my work, but also the method of other artists’ whose projects involve
working with people. It’s impossible to develop a more sophisticated account of
methodology until we move beyond the narrow focus on audience reaction that is
typical in much art criticism. Such a limited, external focus, seemingly insightful
and no matter how well meaning, reduces the scope and understanding of the
project. Considering the kind of work I do, I would much prefer a more appropriate
question to be asked, such as: “What was the meaning and the value of the project
to those who choose to speak, perform and address the public through it?”
To save one soul by inspiring and assisting someone to break their silence
and publicly share, address and denounce unacceptable conditions of life, is to
save the entire city. By salvaging and expanding the inclusiveness of the city’s
Transformative Avant-Garde and Other Writings
democratic process and its public space as a site of critical discourse, the people
who choose to be part of a project are not merely ‘participants’, since such a word
would suggests too passive a role, but are active agents who take the project to
heart and contribute to it by putting themselves on the line. For this, they must
also develop an artistry—sometimes to the point of performative virtuosity—in
making use of these projects in public space. A self-selected group of such
collaborators and performative users always plays a fundamental role in each
project. If they succeed in making sense of the project for their own lives and the
lives of others, it is their success. If they do not succeed, I consider it my failure.
289
Two Publics
Two kinds of publics are constituted by each project. The first public is internal. It
comes from within the project and is formed through the discourse generated by
and accompanying all the social and technical stages of a project’s development,
research, production and post-production. This is the inner public. The second
public is external as it comes from outside the project and encounters the project
in its final or near final form, through its public tests, final presentation and
through the unfolding public discourse around it. It becomes a witness and an
audience to what is presented as a final work, a result of the workings of the inner
public itself. I call this second public the “outer public”.
In the development of each project, my primary focus is always on the
formation of the inner public. The measure of a project’s success is its capacity to
inspire, assist, and protect the development and transmission of the public voice
and expression of those who choose to take part in it. As they gradually begin
creating and perfecting the project’s narrative and master their communicative
performance they become its formative force—its primary contributors. The
formation of an inner public begins with a small group of potential contributors.
This Core Group serves as an “avant-garde” in the formation of the inner public.
These few people, three or four of them, encourage others to join the project.
Even if later in the process of producing a project one of two of its members drop
out for some reason (as it happened in the case of one of the projects I’ll discuss
below, produced in Tijuana), their formational function is crucial. The Core Group
is not only a nucleus, it also serves as a reservoir from which the “participants”
are recruited and the inner public further developed.
The Core Group benefits from the support of a team that develops a
strong trust towards the projected, in one specific case, the core group consisted
mainly of the head of Factor X, a Tijuana-based worker’s rights organization, and
her-coworkers, as well as a group of family members and friends who provided
hidden, behind the scene informal support. Lawyers, curators, production and
post-production teams and of course myself, are a part of the Core Group’s support
system. The process of decision-making regarding each step in the development
of a project is shared by all parties. This discursive dynamic is an important aspect
of the project because it brings to it both an inside and the outside perspective.
Considering this dynamic, the Core Group, thanks to the formal support team, as
well as the informal support network that operates behind the scenes, becomes the
nucleus of the first public of the project, its inner public. The inner public is born of
the project and acts as its foundation and vital force. Its role as social agent may go
beyond the support that is offered to project participants because its members are
connected with other social support groups and networks through which they may
add critical support and an informed perception of the project. 
Parrhesia/Inner Public
 The project and the formation of the inner public begins as soon as those
who keep coming to a project’s initial meetings begin to discuss it and consider
their potential involvement in it. This is usually a small number of people to whom
the idea of the project has been presented. Often, they are initially suspicious
of the project, for fear of being manipulated. At the same time, for some, their
curiosity and intuitive interest contradicts and challenges this suspicion. Taking a
leap of faith they may eventually choose to endorse the project’s overall cultural
aim and consider the possibility of joining it. Without fully knowing why, they are
gradually drawn to the idea of contributing. Overcoming or at least temporarily
290 putting aside their initial suspicion, they open up to the project and consider the
possibility that in some ways it will be useful to them. At this stage, their role shifts
beyond being mere participants. Rather, they become co-creators as they gradually
become involved and invested in developing the project. Initial discussions
become increasingly sharp and articulate and exchanged stories gain in honesty,
fearlessness and emotional charge. What is said, and how it is said, connects the
participants’ existential experience with a critical and political perspective.
As meetings proceed and are attended by new potential participants, who
are often accompanied by their friends and families, the Core Group of those
who are now fully committed to the project emerges. This group becomes the
core of subsequent meetings. Every participant deliberates over the possibility of
their direct or indirect, “behind the scene”, involvement in the project by gauging
what they might gain from it, emotionally, socially, and culturally. They take
into consideration not only their own gain but also the project’s social impact on
others and on society at large. In this way, regular meetings are extended by other
contacts and gatherings, behind the scenes, which trigger the focus of the inner
public on matters that are often kept private, hidden, or suppressed, and which
then become issues of political and public significance. Despite the fact that the
project’s working meetings unfold within places that are not “public” and are
that are invisible to the “outside world’” these discussions are nonetheless part
of the larger public discourse. This is because of the “publicness” of the project
and the fact that issues that are normally hidden are then shared, exchanged and
passionately deliberated are at the very heart of these meetings.
Engaged in this discourse, members of the initial group finally confirm
their “participation” in the project. They have come to perceive the social need
for revealing in public the hidden truth of their lives, and they do so on behalf of
themselves and others. They see the value of the project as a vehicle for such
testimony. They also feel that through the project they can connect or re-connect
with the larger society and, in addition, gain communicative skills. In this way,
the Core Group of the project’s inner public is formed. In further stages of the
development of the project, and as a result of its social inclusiveness, this Core
Group of the inner public will greatly expand. When expanded, the inner public
will engage others who are not directly involved but who support those who attend
the meetings. Through its connections with the broader city population, the inner
public becomes an informative and supportive force affecting the reception of the
project on the part the outer public.
Stages in the Formation of the Inner Public
The inner public is formed through the following successive stages.
The idea of the project is presented to an art institution that is experienced
in the production of media-based projects in public space, such as a media art
Transformative Avant-Garde and Other Writings
center, public art festival, museum, etc. The institution then establishes an initial
connection with those social support organizations that are most relevant to
the project, be it a war veterans’ association, a homeless center, a maquiladora
workers association, an immigrant support center, or a transitional social housing
service. These organizations in turn involve their cadre of social service workers as
potential collaborators. The proposed project is then presented to other members
of the organization. As the first objective of these workers is to protect and help
the people they serve, they will likely raise many questions and concerns regarding
the participants’ safety and the project’s concrete cultural, social and psychological
benefits for the participants. These issues must be further discussed with both the 291
social workers’ superiors and with the art institution.
In the case of the Tijuana-based project, staged at El Centro Cultural de
Tijuana, the process of determining the subject matter for the work, as well as
identifying a potential urban sited learning about and discussing possible options
and issues, included, among other contacts, the head of a team of social workers
at Factor X, an urban sociologist from the University of Tijuana who’s work focuses
on the situation of maquiladora workers in Tijuana (specifically addressing violence
against women and their social and legal supporters by factory managers, the
police, and unemployed men, and against police by drug cartel’s etc), and some
very initial but important contacts with female maquiladora employees. The idea of
creating a projection-animation at El Centro Cultural de Tijuana, an iconic building
in Tijuana which residents call La Bola, and of inscribing speaking faces onto it,
developed in response to what I learned from these people. I thought that the
idea of projecting, in the most familiar and accessible public space in the city, the
magnified faces and voices of these who refuse to hide and be silent, who bravely
tell the truth of their lives and share their critical position on the current situation in
Tijuana, and who do so through the facade (face) of the most prominent structure
in the city, made democratic and parrhésíastic sense. My initial sketches presenting
this idea were than presented to the above mentioned people and to the curators,
to whom I also conveyed my willingness to change the proposed projection
idea, should they feel it was for some reason wrong or inappropriate. I was a bit
surprised that it met with their approval without much question or worry. During
the subsequent pre-production and production meetings the aesthetic direction
of the projection itself was seldom discussed or questioned.
If the project “survives” this initial stage of consideration, examination and
discussion, and if it promises both benefits and safety, it is now ready to move on
and be presented to potential participants by a social worker, by myself and by the
project’s social production coordinator. Potential participants are initially skeptical
and suspicious of being invaded and manipulated by the project. My responsibility
is to make clear to them that my aim as an artist is to animate public space with the
ideas, experiences, and voices of those who are marginalized from it, for their own
benefit and for that of the larger public. It also has to made clear that the specific
direction of the project is subject to changes occasioned by the participants’
feedback and that the substance of the testimonial, critical and propositional input
must come from them and not from anyone else. The participants are made to
understand that they will be both the authors and actor-performers of what they
say and how they say it through the project.
Despite the above explanations, the integrity of the project is put to the
test once again by both the social workers and the potential participants who feel
curious but still skeptical about the undertaking. While discussions take place
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 some among the potential participants express a guarded interest in joining the
project; others no longer show up to the meetings. On the other hand, those
who initially claim to have “nothing to say”, but keep returning time to time to
observe the proceedings, may come to be the most motivated, articulate and
frank performers and animators of the projects. Still, the project is in danger of
being psychologically compromised and even destroyed by potential participants,
who doubt, mistrust, and scrutinize it for having been proposed to them from an
external, unknown, and uninformed agent. It is now in serious danger of being
rejected entirely. Despite such a self-defensive reaction, the social production
292 team and I continue to organize the meetings, determined that the project will
somehow take place.
The obligation of the primary team is to survive this potential destruction
and present itself as strong again and again. We may have to present the project
to new potential participants as a way to spark the interest and confidence of
those in doubt. It is now clear to the latter that they must choose the project
rather than be chosen by it: no one is going to be rejected but neither is anyone
going to be privileged as a participant. Upon such realization, the project
seems to have survived the danger of destruction. Consequently, its use value
has increased as it has begun to be perceived as self-confident, open, inclusive,
and durable. As participants understand that the project is in their hands,
they become both its users and collaborators. As discussions continue, the
participants feel that they are ready to confront difficult matters and take on
brave tasks, such as publicly sharing the harsh and often painful truth of their
lived experience.
As the proposed project gradually loses its “outsider” status, it is
progressively adopted and shaped by the inner world of the Core Group. While it
still belongs to the outside world from which it originated, it has now become part
of the inner world of those who infuse it with their shared stories, testimonies
and critical ideas. The project becomes a sort of “transitional object” for the
participants why become its collaborators.3 To secure the project’s developmental
character, the issue as to whether it is “Wodiczko’s artistic project” or the “art of
participants testimonial performance” is formulated and brought into discussion
by the organizers. It is not raised again, and—in the course of the increasingly
emotional exchange and sharing of stories by the Core Group and later by the
participants in pre-recording and recording sessions—it is perhaps intuitively
understood as an inappropriate and potentially disturbing question. The project
absorbs the ideas, imagination, and hopes of those who now intuitively feel that
they can somehow use it for the betterment of their own traumatized lives, and
even further the lives of others like themselves. Some sense a potential new
role and even a mission for themselves as spokespeople and social agents.4
The meetings gradually take the form of an experience-sharing and truth-telling
workshop, during which some participants write notes in preparation for the
video recording. In some instances the project becomes a truth-writing workshop.
Because writing is governed by a different part of the brain than the one responsible
for speaking, writing helps some people recover suppressed and difficult memories.
They may try to read them aloud before recording them for projection or before
sharing them with the use of the performative equipment that I design for use in
public space. At the same time, outside of the meetings, potential participants
discuss the project with their friends, trusted members of their family, lawyers,
psychotherapists, social workers, investigative journalists and so forth. They
Transformative Avant-Garde and Other Writings
may be in a contact with lawyers (in the case of the Tijuana Projection through
the Factor X social support organization) or psychotherapists, art therapists and
cultural workers (as in the case of Derry-Londonderry project discussed below
through the Verbal Arts Center). They debate the meaning of the project and the
risk and benefits that further and deeper involvement may entail.
An increasing number of people are now involved as indirect contributors
to the project. The inner public expands in scale and scope beyond the initial core
group, becomes more confident and committed to the project, and more open
and inclusive to newcomers. As others join the working meetings, the traumatic
memories and difficult experiences are now shared and confronted. The project 293
is now ready for further development. Supported by a network of informed and
engaged members, the initial Core Group of potential participants has now become
an integral part of the growing inner circle of the project–its inner public. This could
include not only family and friends, but also social, legal, and therapeutic support
networks, as well as a technical production and post-production crew, including
a film crew, video editing and special interface equipment crew, and a projection,
sound and lighting team, among others. At this stage, the formation of the inner
public is complete.
The Inner and the Outer Public
The public media, especially their local branches, as well as socially minded
journalists and reporters, tend to focus their attention on project collaborators and
other members of the team, giving them a voice through interviews. This offers
an additional opportunity for the members of the inner public to share further
with the outer public what they have to say, that is, beyond what has been already
said through the projections,monument-animations or public performances with
instruments. Prepared by their own testimonial work , the project’s participant-
collaborator-performers may now wish to say more through radio, television and the
press. In this way the witnesses, listeners and readers multiply, as do the points
of conversation throughout the city. This increased mediation injects a pointed
content to the exchange of information and views among the members of the
outer public. The project takes place not only during the public presentation but
also, and often, during the earlier projection and performances tests, when media
people and passers-by stop and speak to the project’s performative users, the crew
members, the project coordinators and to other members of the inner public. Ad
hoc discussions about the project’s technical aspects switch to questions related to
the project’s social aspects.
People in the city begin to hear rumors while driving by (stopping without
turning off their car’s engine). Because “someone was wearing strange equipment”
or because there is “something involving the monument” the next day at work, or
in some other situation, someone will ask someone else what was happening and
may receive a quite informed and passionate answer. The public media, especially
the press, use the secondary or ripple response to the project to acknowledge and
address the issues that are still too controversial to expose directly. Rather than
‘tackle the problem head on’, the press takes the opportunity of the projection
event or media performance itself and of the availability of direct statements and
stories from people who collaborated in it, interviewing each of them (and myself)
separately to raise issues with apparent objectivity. Typically TV crews interview
the larger, diversified ‘audience’, with the same question: “What do you think about
this?” When present at that moment, the members of inner public often relay the
Parrhesia/Inner Public
 question to others in order to trigger further public discourse and to reach toward
the outer public.
Speaking of the impact of the inner public on the outer public, one must
acknowledge the importance of ‘unintentional’ contributors, collaborators and
users of my projects. In the example of the projection on El Centro Cultural de
Tijuana, such an unexpected collaborator was a professional interpreter who
was commissioned from Mexico City to provide live translation of the unfolding
of a real time projection narrative. At one point the interpreter burst into tears,
unintentionally interrupting the flow of translation and of public reception. The
294 emotionally disturbing narrative of the projection became emotionally disturbed
itself. A large number of people, who had come from San Diego and knew little
if any Spanish, and who had been wearing headphones to hear the translation,
suddenly took them off. The translator told me later that this was the first time in
her long career that she had experienced such an emotional and unprofessional
reaction. This was a reaction that came from her heart or stomach, perhaps
triggered by some of her own lived experience, a “Brechtian” interruption
producing the “alienation effect”.5 She joined the project only at its final production
stage but unexpectedly and unintentionally became its crucial collaborator. Her
‘unprofessional’, emotionally charged behavior greatly contributed to the strength of
the inner public and to the project’s perception by the outer public.
The Outer Public as Witness
Even when viewers come to a project as mere spectators, they often stay there
“not without interest” and listen to—and hear—painful stories and testimonies.
They may stay through repeated cycles in the projection loop for ethical reasons.
Despite even the rain, they perhaps feel obliged to listen and watch out of
solidarity with those who have bravely spoken out. What is projected is not only
the truth of what is said, but also the truth of the very refusal to remain silent
about that truth—the truth of the possibility of doing so with emotional intensity,
honesty, and with a sense of social mission.
Testimony in public space is an assault on the silence about matters that
are vital to the city and to its people. Viewers are reluctant to walk away from
such a blast of truth. Perhaps they feel obliged to stay because what is said is
difficult to hear and because it is painfully true.
It is possible that some spectators regret they were not part of the
performance, because they realize its critical and pro-active (transformative)
dimension. Realizing this loss, they are ready to take on the role of relay, to speak
up, to break the silence, and to design a more meaningful way of living with their
own trauma. Were they spectators? Were they an audience? Although many may
come with the expectation and intention to simply ‘enjoy’ the projection as a
‘spectacle’, they may find themselves drawn into it as unintentional witnesses,
co-witnesses or secondary witnesses. They recognize through their own
experience the truthfulness of the testimonial narrative of the projection. Staying
with the projection, these viewers both reveal and publicly confirm the accuracy
that is transmitted by the project’s stories, testimonies and statements. Through
their emotional focus on the projection, they build an empathetic bridge between
themselves, as members of the outer public, the participants and the inner public
of the project. Through their fearless listening they add to the credibility and the
truthfulness of the project. Despite emotional difficulty, and even sometimes the
rain, these committed and well-informed people are an example to others to stay
Transformative Avant-Garde and Other Writings
and bear witness. They become true contributors to the project and help build the
civic consciousness of the outer public.
“Fearless Speaking” Requires “Fearless Listening” and Vice Versa
The projection at El Centro Cultural de Tijuana gained momentum when the project
participants spoke through special wearable equipment to project their faces and
voices ‘in real time’ onto the gigantic facade in front of the assembled crowd. They
were encouraged by the supportive focus and fearless listening commitment of this
special and large contingent of the outer public and this added to their confidence
and the emotional force of their fearless speech. This added to the external ‘moral 295
support’ received by participants by trusted and emotionally supportive social
workers, friends, family members, lawyers, and others from the project team and
larger network of the inner public who came to encourage and protect them. My
own participation was temporary of course, but continuity was created through
Factor X, which supported the project. They continued to use the original footage
of the projection’s testimonial videos, as well as the video documenting the actual
event to solicit new members, to educate them and trigger their engagement. It was
also used by Factor X social workers as part of their case studies presentations at
national and international conferences on maquiladora labor and border economy.
This is another example of the influence of the inner public on the outer public, this
time in terms of the ‘afterlife’ of the project.6
Case Study: Public Projections in Derry-Londonderry, 2013
As was the case in Derry-Londonderry some participants may need to seek the
approval and endorsement of larger groups of people before they can make a
final commitment to a project. They may need the approval of the segregated and
embattled parts of the city where they themselves live and work. Participants,
especially those involved in social work, have done this so as to protect their
families, the people with whom and for whom they work, themselves and the
project from violent repercussions. They present to others the larger benefits of
the public dialogue that the project is hoping to encourage, and defend it against
sectarian mistrust and opposition. Again, in the case of the Derry projection,
dialogue was especially difficult and critically important, since it relied upon
the participation of people of all ages from both the Republican and Loyalists
communities, many of whom, in the not too distant past, were fighting and killing
each other in a protracted civil war. Radical groups and militants from each side
of the conflict were ready to threaten the project by posing the risk of violent
attacks against participants and the larger public.
According to the account of a cultural worker from the Verbal Art Center,
a cultural center responsible for co-organizing the project, and thanks to the
engagement of the participants, community workers and activists, at least 500
people from Protestant and Catholic parts of the city were involved behind the
scenes as part of the project’s social and political support. These 500 people
greatly multiplied the inner public well beyond the 22 participants (also from
both Catholic and Protestant communities). This was in addition to the similar
number of people on the social, cultural and technical production team plus their
friends and families, as well as these who could not participate but were ‘around’.
The Derry City Council did not expect that the project would receive such broad
social support. Its members were not aware or were not yet confident about the
potential benefits of the project, secured by the very process of its production
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 via an inner public, and expressed fear that the project would cause violence
rather than encourage an open and inclusive dialogue in public space. The fears
increased when the City Council was informed by Sinn Féin, the political wing of
the Irish Republican Army, that it could not protect the project against threats of
attacks from militant paramilitary groups in the city.
Despite such a tense situation, the risk of violence diminished because of the
support that was gained by the participants from their inner circles and because of
the positive impact of informal community meetings that engaged influential groups
from Catholic and Protestant sections of the city. Generated in this way by an inner
296 of nearly 600 people that represented two very different religious and political views,
the project’s method acted as a security blanket and buffer zone for the development
of it’s final presentation, when members dissolved potential violence by invisibly
but effectively mixing with the outer public at various sites of projection. They did
this by merging into the ‘audience’ during the projection without being recognized as
members of the inner public. They would engage in conversations with spectators,
‘infiltrating’ them with a more refined or informed perception of the project based on
an understanding of the projection as a cultural contribution to the necessary work of
an open and inclusive engagement with the memory of the civil war. People endorsed
and protected the project as a cultural vehicle for the creation of an inclusive public
space and for the transformation of a dangerously segregated city into a common
place. They supported the use of public space for symbolic, non-violent exchange,
open to opposing views and beliefs, including the traumatic memories of the civil war
in Northern Ireland, The Troubles.
With the support of its inner public, the project was ready to become a
transitional zone in conflict transformation that could contribute to a positive peace
process, based on open, “agonistic” memory discourse and not on the idea that this
violent history should be segregated to public silence and private sectarian talk.7
As a result of the presence and influence of the inner public, the violent members
of sectarian groups from the outer public lost their social support and could not
attack the project. Projections were staged at the Derry Corner, a site charged with
the memory of Bloody Sunday and of the beginning of The Troubles. The project
demanded an emotional focus on the voices of the participants who expressed
opposing points of views, critical interpretations of the past and the present, and
ideas about the future. By listening to disturbing memories and testimonies, the
outer public actively engaged in agonistic memory and no violent reactions against
the project took place. And so, the fears of the City Council and the warnings from
Sinn Féin proved to be unfounded
Case Study: El Centro Cultural de Tijuana, Baja California Norte, Mexico, 2001
For the El Centro Cultural de Tijuana projection, there were eight core members
who finally chose to join the project. The work focused on women who had suffered
domestic and labor-related violence. Through the larger-than-life projections of
their faces the participants testified about their own experiences and those of
hundreds of young maquiladora workers who had survived police assaults, drug
violence, gender abuse and life threatening industrial working conditions. The
project was organized by the InSite 2000 border art festival. Key to the project
was the involvement of Factor X, an organization that functions primarily to teach
maquiladora workers about their rights. Since the overwhelming majority of these
workers are very young women Factor X also operates as a post-traumatic self-
help support group for them, and thus indirectly supports their families. In their
Transformative Avant-Garde and Other Writings
discussions with workers and their families Factor X helps them cope with, and
reduce, the many forms of violence that they regularly encounter, including violence
related to either the workplace or the police, domestic and sexual violence and
violence they encounter in crossing the border into the US.8 It is the first space in
Tijuana in which these workers can share experiences that had been, due to shame,
previously kept private, such as physical abuse, rape, incest, sexual abuse, their
merciless exploitation at work, and medical and family problems in Tijuana, and in
the countries and villages from which they came (southern Mexico and further into
Central and South America). Factor X meetings fostered arguments, discussions,
confessions, grievances and new demands, and helped in the development of 297
stories, testimonies and statements for the project.
My arrival at the Factor X center initiated a process of self-selection by
potential participants. Because people seemed reluctant to participate, I was
repeatedly questioned by a social worker, who insisted that I call her regularly
but who was nearly impossible to reach by telephone. I had to keep proving
myself committed, qualified, and resilient, despite the fact that the odds seemed
stacked against the project. I faced initial doubt and skepticism on the part of this
social worker. Other members of Factor X as well as the militant lawyers’ group
that supported and protected its operation were understandably wary of foreign
filmmakers and journalists who notoriously exploit local misery for their careers
abroad, and who, doing so, simplify, romanticize and sensationalize the lives of
people and compromise their safety. However, in the end, a new perception of me
emerged and I began to be called artista polaco (Polish artist), which gave me some
credibility—though one could just as easily have called me American or Canadian.
The name “Polish artist” was probably invoking the myth of the Pole as imaginary
fellow-revolutionary from the time of Mexicans’ nineteenth-century independence
struggles and definitely as someone to be trusted more than a Gringo (a derogatory
name for Americans in Mexico).
At each meeting, there was a different configuration of potential self-
selecting participants. A discussion about collaboration led us to include the
feedback and tangential involvement of even those who ultimately decided to not
participate. Each of the potential participants began consulting with their families
and friends before considering taking a calculated risk in agreeing to join the
project. As it has been the case with many other projects, the eight people who
eventually decided to embrace the project were each part of larger networks that
were not directly involved but acted as witnesses, disputants or supporters. This
multiplying effect also expanded to an outer circle of social workers, lawyers, and
professionals. Some maquiladora women workers who came to the meetings to
discuss their involvement in the project brought their babies and children. Others
brought their husbands, brothers and sisters, and even their dogs. All of these
became contributing members of the inner public, even the dogs.9
Because it was a public project, the contributing performers had to think
carefully about what they would say and how to say it. One striking example of
the calculated risk involved in participating in the projection came from a woman
whose husband had been imprisoned as a result of her report to the police and
a lawsuit for incest. He had made it clear that upon his release he planned to kill
her, but she chose nevertheless to speak through the projection with the hope
of protecting herself. She hoped that the visibility and public knowledge of her
situation granted by the project would lead to a degree of protection on the part of
the media and the public sphere. The process of developing the project created a
Parrhesia/Inner Public
 protective buffer zone of witnesses between the protagonists and those who might
wish to act against them. Thus, from the initial core, the circle of the inner public
began expanding into concentric networks of people who came to provide social
protection and moral support to participants during the projection tests and later
during the final presentations.
The following is an account of the people who contributed to the
development and formation of the inner public. There were eight project
participants and three social workers—members of the Factor X organization.
The three social workers engaged a few others, plus some other volunteer rights
298 workers who were working for Factor X. About six people engaged others in
discussing and elaborating the project and so there were about 18 people in total.
The initial group of users-contributors expanded through their closest friends and
family members, who provided consultation, consolation, and opinions (eight
contributors x three or four close contacts = 24–36 people). The friends and
family members of the Factor X professional help network became implicated in
decisions related to the project (about eight professionals involving five friends
and family members in discussions = 40 people). There were also the social
researchers and academics from outside of Factor X, like urban geographers from
the University of Tijuana, a documentary filmmaker-activist, and the colleagues of
artists from a border art collective (about ten people).
All of these people were highly engaged in discussions about the project and
without them it would have been difficult for me to learn about Tijuana’s labor and
cultural context. Also involved was the social production coordinator of the project
and her assistant, two InSite 2000 festival co-curators, the director from El Centro
Cultural de Tijuana, a translator, and a videographer documenting the project, as
well as volunteer student helpers (six to seven people). Last but nor least there
was an emotionally and politically committed technical production crew made up of
around 25 people: a technical coordinator, a video and sound recording team (three
to four people), a video editing team (two people), a video projection team (three
people), a sound projection team (three people), people to light the building (one
or two people), the videographers (three operators plus one technician), the real
time projection interface, sound and video mixing team (two people), a professional
interpreter, some university students and a few others who assisted.
All of the aforementioned people were the members of the inner public.
They amounted to a sizable group of about 150–200 people. This inner public was
always there, as Brecht would say, “not without interest”, that is, with a willingness
to become motivated, responsive, unnerved, at times shocked or radicalized by
what they saw. Being a passive or active part of the tests and of the final projection
event, some of the members of the inner public chose to act as the project’s
informal advocates as well as a protective buffer zone for the safety of those
participants performing in public. Most of the 150–200 members of the inner
public had been socially connected with a large number of people from various
social strata in the main cities of Tijuana and San Diego. Through such links the
inner public—a strong, well informed, and emotionally supportive context-specific
nucleus—helped to generate some 450 to 600 members of the outer public. This
developmental and interventionist inner public formed a temporary context-specific
nucleus around which the project generated its outer public, which now includes
the reader of this text.
Deliberations on the ‘role of the public’ in public art must take into account
the fact that in some cases such art, through the social and technical process of
Transformative Avant-Garde and Other Writings
its making, may generate its own public, a ‘public-within’, the inner public, and
that such a public may indirectly and directly effect the larger reception of work by
a ‘public-without’, the outer public. This may be especially evident in the case of
artistic and cultural projects that are based on the development of communicative
performance by the participants (collaborating contributors) and on the support
received by them from their families, friends, and the projects’ social and
technical production team, as well as from other social groups, organizations
and networks.
299
This text, updated in Vinalhaven during the summer of 2013 and 2014, is
based on lecture notes for the symposium The Public in Question: The Politics of
Artistic Practices, organized and moderated by Chantal Mouffe and held at the
Academy of Fine Arts, Vienna, 4 and 5 May, 2007. Fragments are drawn from
an unpublished interview with Doris Sommer at Harvard University in 2009.
Originally published in Field, issue 1, spring 2015, pp 27–52.
1 Michel Foucault, Fearless Speech, Joseph Pearson ed, Los Angeles, CA:
Semiotext(e), 2001.
2 Chantal Mouffe, “For an Agonistic Model of Democracy”, in The Democratic Paradox,
London: Verso, 2000, pp 80–107.
3 DW Winnicott, “Transitional Objects and Transitional Phenomena”, in Playing and
Reality, London: Routledge, [1971] 1982, pp 1–25 .
4 Judith Herman, Trauma and Recovery: The Aftermath of Violence–From Domestic
Abuse to Political Terror, New York: Basic Books, 1992.
5 See Bertolt Brecht, Brecht on Theatre: The Development of an Aesthetic, John Willet
ed, Frankfurt: Suhrkamp Verlag, 1964.
6 One year after the projection, a PhD candidate from Dublin visited the Tijuana
projection site and the Factor X organization. Her dissertation addressed Dublin
issues through the encouragement of Factor X to think seriously about developing
new educational and cultural methods on domestic and workplace violence as they
relate to human rights and politics. Examining the Dublin and Tijuana situation, she
referred to Foucault’s concept of fearless speech. She later wrote me a note about her
experience in that Tijuana bore out my own observations that the courage to speak
depends on reciprocal fearless listening and that public truth-telling (testimony) and
public truth-seeking (witnessing) are interdependent.
7 On the subject of conflict transformation and positive peace, see Hugh Miall, Conflict
Transformation: A Multi-Dimensional Task, Berghof Research Center for Constructive
Conflict Management, 2004, available online at http://www.berghof-handbook.net/
documents/publications/miall_handbook.pdf, accessed 15 September 2013.
8 Maquiladoras are Mexican factories run by foreign companies that export their
products to the country of origin. More than 90 per cent of all the murder victims
in Tijuana are teenage women. The factories where they work broadcast their labor
preferences on big banners that say “Girls Only”. Murder is the most visible crime
committed against these young women–and therefore against their families and
children–but the private and common crimes of rape and incest are a significant
feature of their exploitation. A larger part of the population of Tijuana is supported by
these women as cheap and dependable labor in the many hundreds of maquiladora
factories along the border. Tijuana is a large metropolis and the great numbers of
unemployed and frustrated men are sources of violence against women.
9 If the initial objective of Factor X was to teach younger maquiladora workers their
rights, the projection also eventually became a forum for the trainers themselves,
regarding their social, political and cultural activity. Benefits could be perceived to
come from public media art, including its art education and art therapy aspects,
especially since the activists of Factor X raised issues linked to their own lives that
would otherwise not have seemed primary. In many ways they began to work as a
post-traumatic stress therapy self-help group.
Parrhesia/Inner Public
War/Un-War

Arc de Triomphe: World Institute for the Abolition of War, 2010

Message from the Artist I am myself one among millions who were born of and grew up within the
physical and moral ruins of the Second World War. Making art according to these
1999 beliefs is a special obligation. I will spend the rest of my life and the full focus of
my artistic and ethical energy to try and be deserving of this prize. As a person,
as an artist, and as an inhabitant of our troubled planet, I humbly accept the
Hiroshima Art Prize as a generous act of encouragement and as a statement of
your high expectations. It gives me the new moral and political energy to move my
artistic work toward the ethically imperative horizon of concern and of action that
you have envisioned not only for artists, but for all citizens of the world.
303

Originally published in The 4th Hiroshima Art Prize: Krzysztof Wodiczko Catalogue,
Matsuoka Takeshi and Echizen Toyshiya eds, Hiroshima: Hiroshima City Museum
of Contemporary Art, 1999, p128.

I am greatly honored and humbled to receive the Hiroshima Art Prize. I consider
it to be an honor given to me in advance of the work I have yet to accomplish and
that I hope may fulfill the extraordinary expectation it creates. It is an invitation
that you, the city of Hiroshima, have extended to me—an invitation to work with
you, sharing your restless and demanding hope for true world peace.
Hiroshima, as the site and the living memory of this grave example of
destruction and disregard for human life, is for me the historical and ethical
reference that compels us to condemn all acts of war and violence, be they ethnic,
regional, national or global; those taking place on the battleground of the street,
in the school, at work, or behind the veil of domestic life.
I have always believed that the present should contribute to the
critical recollection of the past. Today’s art, equipped with all of its iconic,
communicative, and emotional skills, must articulate the troubled experience of
the present and project it into the memory of past catastrophes in order to protect
the future from their tragic repetition.
I believe that true peace can only be perpetuated through a cultural
and political process that supports honest but civil forms of turbulence
as critical checkpoints through which difference and disagreements are
exposed, shared and cherished. This prelude to “agonistic democracy”, a
democracy of peaceful but perpetual struggle, demands that public space be
animated with competing human voices critically engaging one another and
their contemporary and historical environment. This creates a public space
for participatory politics and for a new, pluralistic practice of peace through
the inclusion of new voices, all voices, of a constantly changing citizenry.
Artists’ particular expertise in questioning and intervening in urban forms,
communications media, and patterns of life and perception can and should
inspire this engagement.

Transformative Avant-Garde and Other Writings War/Un-War

City of Refuge: A 9/11 Memorial
2009
An Introduction
This proposed memorial to 9/11 is a project parallel and supplemental to the
World Trade Center Memorial presently under construction. Its aim is to create
a place for a more active, critical, and discursive memory of the 9/11 attack,
examined in its historical and political context, in the light of the military action
taken in its wake, and its domestic and international fallout. The memorial will
be a place for operative memory, memory in action. It will be an interrogative and
“agonistic”, not antagonistic, institute of memory, a public forum and base from
which to initiate new transformative projects.1
It is only through such work that a memorial can contribute to the prevention
of global injustice, arrogance, ignorance, and disrespect, which, if not stopped, will
continue to ignite anger and provide fertile ground for new attacks.
It will be a working memorial, an active, engaged and engaging, socially
inclusive institution, a network as well as an organization. Its public programs
and events in remembering and recollection will aim to inspire, provoke and assist
in the process of raising consciousness and knowledge of our unintentional role
and indirect implication in the misery of the world, even when our action and its
effects unfold at a distance, in terrains and territories little known to us.
The founding reference for this memorial is the ancient Jewish notion of
“half-guilt and half-innocence” and the biblical blueprint for “Cities of Refuge”
related to it.2 In one of his Talmudic lectures, ethical philosopher Emmanuel
Levinas reintroduced and actualized this notion as a powerful ethico-political
metaphor for our Western globalizing attitude and the concomitant lack of
consciousness of the crimes and injustices unintentionally (or half-intentionally)
committed towards those less fortunate and less prosperous than ourselves.
In the face of continuing and seemingly uncontrollable and unavoidable
bloody conflicts and man-made catastrophes, further critical re-actualization
Transformative Avant-Garde and Other Writings
of the ethico-political paradigm and metaphor of “Cities of Refuge” remains an
imperative for our social survival and for the advancement of our civilization.
In this global context any political and ethical consciousness of our half-guilt
and half-innocence gained is a valuable start, and a necessary, albeit insufficient,
first step. Our goal is to move even beyond that consciousness, beyond even an
intelligent emotional reflection, beyond a psycho-analytical process of “working-
through” the trauma of 9/11.3 One must take a further step. One must begin
doing something about our present world. One must transform it.
A new, inspiring and evocative institution is needed for this advancement
beyond consciousness, toward an informed and responsible practice in the world, 305
free of recklessness, ignorance, arrogance, and self-centered deeds, toward a
world liberated from irresponsibly unintentional, harmful and destructive actions
and inactions.
In the proposed memorial the focus on memory will be complemented by
a concentration on learning, research, and pro-active programs of engagement,
and will encourage new and informed practical initiatives and actions, in the hope
of paving a way to a safer and less miserable, unjust and violent world. As a place
for memory in action, the 9/11 memorial will attempt to radically contribute to
this direction.
General Objective of the Memorial
The word memorial is related to the word “memento”, a thing—or more
precisely a command—to mind and remind. A memorial’s function is not only to
commemorate past events, but also “to serve to warn, or remind, with regard
to conduct of future events”. A memorial may be something more, something
other than an object or site; it may be an event, even a working institution or
organization that simultaneously mourns the tragic events of the past and minds
and reminds us to be vigilant in the future, to take action so that certain events
never happen again. A memorial demands memory-work and active agency,
an action.
The harm and damage done to others and to ourselves must be historically
and critically remembered and re-remembered, and this must be done in a way
both discursive and analytical, agonistic and socially inclusive. We must first
critically and historically analyze and debate every dimension of the half-guilt and
half-innocence evoked and inscribed in our consciences by the horrors of the 9/11
attacks and their aftermath. And then we need to move forward, beyond mere
study, discussion and reflection, to assume collective responsibility for doing
something about it.
How can the memorial be designed to secure, inspire and assist in such an
agonistic and inclusive program?
Tasks
Honoring the meaning of the word “memorial” (and its etymological origin), the
9/11 memorial should be a place of study, though not exclusively so. Parallel
to this, it should be a place of inspiration and should enable the participation in
projects in which we can engage and make a positive difference, especially in
areas where ‘we’, as a group, population, society or nation may have “caused
foreseeable accidents (in the world) in which there was some degree of negligence
involved”.4 The 9/11 memorial should be inclusive and open to all residents of the
city, including refugees, immigrants, documented and undocumented activists,
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 politicians, students, as well as all our present day ‘Masters’—intellectuals from
cultural, teaching and research institutions such as curators, critics, analysts,
professors, researchers, and others.
To achieve ethical and political clarity as a contemporary proposition,
its functional and symbolic program, its social organization, its design, even its
name will need to become the subject of inclusive and heated discussion, public
examination, criticism, careful development and realization.
Which Location and What Symbolic Form?
306 But what urban structure shall we design for examining and questioning our own
and each other’s pasts and presents, all those fictions of ourselves, the idealizations,
ideologies, and ‘official’ identities—in order to ‘undo’ the way we are or rather, the way
we have become? How should a memorial allow for critical and philosophical study,
and for open and informed discussion to advance the political, economic, cultural and
historical understanding of the 9/11 and post-9/11 catastrophe? Should we think of
designing a central, multimedia and interactive sanctuary and a massive gathering
place for such purpose?
What sort of design project would be effective in both protecting and inspiring
the process of questioning and undoing the stability and solidity of our idealized
notions, structures and practices? Should we think of designing a philosophical urban
laboratory, or a multitude of laboratories, for such a deconstructive/constructive,
existential, political, cultural and psycho-analytical project? Should these laboratories
be communication networks, stationary structures, mobile units, or monumental
gathering spaces? Should the proposed memorial commemorate and engage both
traumatized US soldiers and the families affected by that trauma? Should Afghan and
Iraqi victims and survivors, both soldiers and civilians, be included in the memorial’s
program and design? Should such a working memorial include the domestic victims
of Homeland Security repression?
Monitoring the unfolding dynamics of the world situation will need to
be another part of the memorial’s agenda. The memorial institute should be
home to an organization monitoring acts of terror and violence, both symbolic
and real, around the world, keeping a close watch for the symptomatic signs
of material and psycho-social conditions that foster revanchiste tendencies. It
will track and analyze these conditions and events, recognizing in them possible
harbingers of future strife. It will also monitor conditions of freedom, or the lack
of it, throughout the world, tracking developments, both positive and negative,
related to the rights of the citizens and non-citizens of different nations. Events
that might have been monitored in the past include the Serbian and Albanian
nationalist movements in Kosovo that arose in the 1980s, and the hate speech
and low-level violence that took hold in Rwanda in the years leading up to the
Rwandan genocide. In both cases, explicit threats and incremental curtailing of
human rights anticipated actual violence.
The 9/11 memorial should be a working space of pro-active engagement
which will allow the visitor to re-conceptualize the past by projecting onto it
questions about the present and the future. It is a space that exists to ask and
provoke questions. What is happening in the world? What are some of the
political and cultural consequences of 9/11, both in the US and the world? What
might we do, and what are we currently doing, to ensure that certain events will
not happen again, here or anywhere else? What have we not been doing to prevent
it from happening in the first place?
Transformative Avant-Garde and Other Writings
The organization that monitors world conditions will be linked to other
organizations that are taking action to affect change. The visitor to the memorial
site, having gained some sense of ‘what is happening’, will be encouraged to ask the
questions: “What is being done?”, “What must be done?”, and “What can I do?”.
Organizations that are taking action provide a possible answer, an outlet for pursuing
concrete change in the world, and visitors will be given an opportunity to see what
they do, and to contribute to or join these organizations.
The architectural structure of the 9/11 memorial should be easily
accessible and visible to all New Yorkers. Let us envisage it as a structure to
be placed not on solid ground but on water, on unstable ground, one connected 307
through the ocean to stormy lands overseas, the lands of troubles in which we
may be implicated—the symbolic and historic connection with the world of our
unintentional global deeds and potential points from which the new intentional
and unintentional exiles may come.
The 9/11 memorial should take the external form of a globe-like structure,
floating, and slowly rotating, anchored in the harbor, somewhere between the site
of the World Trade Center, Statue of Liberty, Ellis Island, Governor’s Island, Battery
Park, New Jersey, Manhattan, Brooklyn, and Staten Island.
In this way, the memorial will be symbolically linked to, visible from, and look
upon the Statue of Liberty—which itself calls to and welcomes the “misfortuned
and mistreated of all foreign lands”—and upon Ellis Island—a former immigrant
gateway to New York City, immigration asylum, and now immigration museum.
The Program
The memorial will be made up of seven major programmatic components:
— First component: facilities for historical, philosophical and cross-disciplinary
study of the conditions and forms of terrorism and terror, such as archives,
multimedia and other facilities for research, learning and teaching, and spaces
for smaller and larger group discussions, meetings and conferences.
— Second component: a central information resource and communication
facilities for the public to connect with organizations and groups in the US
and throughout the world; a resource especially designed for those wishing
to engage in pro-active social, political, economic and cultural work, to
help in the process of ameliorating existential and political conditions in the
world, while preempting the potential growth of terrorism and an interactive
multimedia facility with real-time links to those working in the social and
political sphere will need to be designed.
— Third component: a ‘situation room’ displaying the changing map of
zones negatively affected by the global and regional presence and policies
of the US and other cultural and economic powers—zones that may
become a fertile ground for the growth and dissemination of terrorist
ideologies and actions.
— Fourth component: an open agora, a central forum for public debates, with
arenas for cultural and artistic projects and events and pre-recorded and real-
time spectacles. Among other aims, they may provide cultural and political
links between New York City and other cities, public places, events and
networks in the less understood parts of the world.
— Fifth component: a legal aid, social work, political advocacy, medical
care and human-rescue program. One example of an outcome for this
War/Un-War
 facility and program could be the freeing and compensation of those
who have been mistaken for terrorists and unjustly detained, deported,
or imprisoned, whether American residents or foreign visitors. A post-
traumatic research program and a medical clinic for survivors of 9/11 and
of US military and Homeland Security actions may be an important part of
this facility.
— Sixth component: urban headquarters, a coordinating media and
information resource and archive for urban commemorative and intellectual
projects, including those supplemental to the memorial center. The 9/11
308 memorial will, of course, be a major resource for the city. At the same
time, it will embrace the city itself as a vital resource, learning and drawing
inspiration from it. Through its central facility it should be linked to many
smaller sites and organizations that function as symbolic and practical
supplements to existing urban sites, institutions and organizations.
These may include: City Hall, convention, trade and shopping centers,
train and subway stations, airports, major hotels, public libraries,
schools, universities, museums, art and cultural centers, art and science
foundations, social advocacy or assistance organizations, hospitals and
clinics, mosques, churches and synagogues, war memorials as well as civic
monuments and other symbolic edifices and structures.
— Seventh component: a global and local media broadcast facility including
television and radio studios, press, world wide web and electronic media, as
well as all traditional forms of publishing and distribution.
Final Argument
As a working memorial, the memorial must bear careful and analytical witness to
new events, to responses to them, and to events that follow. Memory is a working
process. Each time a new attack or act of vengeance takes place, it must be
projected onto our commemoration of 9/11. We must critically infuse the past
with the present, as if the past has always been pregnant with the seeds of the
present. This will allow history to remain dynamic and move forward. It will help
us to actualize the past and, in turn, will make the past useful for the future, a
future wherein generations with no direct remembrance of 9/11 will continue to be
informed, visionary, critical, pro-active and practical.
New York City is a reluctant, but nonetheless vital part of the US, and the
US, for better and worse, has an enormous economic, environmental, cultural
and political impact upon the world. Decisions made in Washington and on Wall
Street, whether careless or well-considered, affect the lives of millions of people
across the globe. Levinas may be right in saying that the prosperous cities of the
global North (New York City being one of the most prominent examples) have
economies that are intertwined with—if not indirectly or even directly built upon—
the miseries of the cheap labor of the cities of the global South, the maquiladora
assembly factories along the borders, immigrant sweatshops, the undocumented
labor force (half a million in New York City alone) in our own cities and in our
suburban and rural plantations.5 Even if unintentionally, we may be living in half-
conscious Cities of Refuge, half-ignorant and half-informed about our devastating
global deeds.
Given our economic and cultural prominence, should we not strive to
further educate ourselves about our empire, to gain further awareness and
understanding of the impact that it has upon the world?
Transformative Avant-Garde and Other Writings
Perhaps we should not think of our city as the City of Refuge from but as
the City of Refuge for: for both study and practical work on and for the new global
reality, for confronting our ignorance, blindness and numbness, and, finally, for
intelligent contributions toward healing the world’s ills, and toward the vision and
practice of a ‘non-catastrophic’ progress.
In the proposed memorial, through an act of ethical imagination, the
victims of the 9/11 bombing may not only be remembered, but ‘seen’, as if they
were watching and critically evaluating our actions today—witnesses to our pro-
active work towards a better human world.
As a metaphor and practical proposal, the 9/11 memorial may turn out to 309
be an indispensable urban supplement to New York City, the supplement that may
aid and inspire its transformation into the intentional City of Refuge.
To testify to and bear witness to the event may be essential for traumatized
survivors, those who suffered terrible personal loss in the World Trade Center
attack and still cry out—though this is not necessarily the only possible path. To
heal their traumatic wounds they may choose to work toward a more conscious
and a less inhuman, violent and vengeful world.
Originally published in Wodiczko, Krzysztof, City of Refuge: A 9/11 Memorial,
London: Black Dog Publishing, 2009, pp 12–46
1 For the concept of “agonistic democracy”, as a counterpoint to Jürgen Habermas’
“deliberative democracy” see Mouffe, Chantal, “Democracy, Power and the Political”
and “For an Agonistic Model of Democracy”, The Democratic Paradox, London/New
York: Verso, 2000.
2 According to the Old Testament and Talmudic interpretations, Moses declared seven
cities to be built as refuge for those who unintentionally killed others. These cities
were elaborate defensive settlements to protect the “half-guilty” (and half-innocent)
residents from the attack of the “avengers of blood”: the followers of the “eye for an
eye” tribal law. These cities were to be designed as places both of protection and
ethical (re)education, so when their exiled residents were allowed to leave and return
back to society (under new secured legal conditions) they would not repeat their
deadly mistakes and have the knowledge to ethically educate others.
3 For the concept of “working-through” and “acting-out” see Freud, Sigmund,
“Remembering, Repeating and Working-Through”, 1914, and “Mourning and
Melancholia”, 1917, Freud Reader, Peter Gay ed, New York: Norton, 1989. See also
LaCapra, Dominick, “Conclusion: Acting Out and Working-Through”, Representing the
Holocaust: History, Theory, Traum, Cornell: Cornell University Press, 1994.
4 Levinas, Emmanuel, “Cities of Refuge”, Beyond the Verse: Talmudic Readings and
Lectures, Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1994.
5 A maquiladora or maquila is a factory that imports materials and equipment on a
duty-free, tariff-free and cheap labor basis for assembly or manufacturing and then
re-exports the assembled product, usually back to the originating country.
War/Un-War
Response to the
October Questionnaire
august 2 0 0 7
Though I am not an expert in political and cultural anthropology, I will attempt
to elaborate on some conditions and issues that may have contributed to the
passivity and silence of artists, intellectuals, academics, and those from within
the cultural domain.
The War
Unlike during the Vietnam War, we have no official military draft, which is
an important condition for the potential of a nationwide anti-war movement.
And unlike before the Vietnam War, the US was indeed attacked (in
2001)—not by any country, and certainly not by Iraq—and thus, for many,
retaliation seems legitimate. The cultural and larger publics, including artistic
audiences and institutions, are confused by their complex relation to the popular
“support our troops” slogan.
I lived in Poland during the Vietnam War and cannot be a witness here, but
from what I hear from my American-born colleagues, the resentment, resistance,
and fear of military draft in the context of the illegality of the war (because the US
was not directly attacked) were critically linked with, and to some degree fueled by
powerful and emotionally charged reports and images of war.
The Media
In the current war, there is no attempt to present politically insightful information
and images of war; particularly absent is the damage done to civilians and to cultural
and social life in Iraq.
To make it worse, the real picture of war damage inflicted on the US
population (including trauma transmission and dissemination) is not being
taken into account by the media. (I will come back to this issue in the later part of
my response.)
Transformative Avant-Garde and Other Writings
The damage to immigrants and their families caused by Homeland
Security’s domestic “war on terror” (the subject of my interior projection titled If
You See Something...) is also neither seen nor heard.
Through skillful imposition of the editorial technique of omission, the
government’s ‘public information’ machine has silenced the complexity and
magnitude of the toll of war and successfully manipulated a confused and
disappointed middle-class and its centrist ‘public sphere’. In this way, the
government turned media into its ‘publicity’. The art of the front page image (no
more than trite photographic war icons) in the The New York Times and affiliated
Boston Globe testifies to this. 311
Anti-war discourse between cultures, classes, and generations needs
evocative, passionate, and “agonistic” war reports and images, ones that compete
for ‘truth-telling’. Artists and intellectuals, especially visual artists and their
audiences, rely today only on media imagery. In order to construct new forms and
methods for critical thinking, resistance, and rescue, artists and intellectuals—
and the public at large—need to see and hear information and imagery that
reports, testifies, explores, and uncovers the war.
Ernst Friedrich’s Anti-War Museum and Krieg dem Kriege! (War Against
War!) project, which relied on photographic documents as evidence of the
horrors of war, would be as difficult today as it was then, in the time of German
censorship during the First World War. John Heartfield would have had have a
hard time as well (but I am sure that his sense of humor would have helped him
find a way to unmask and ridicule the empty sentimentality and hypocrisy of the
media’s war imagery and the workings of the censorship itself. He would have
embraced the Internet and the methods of “Electronic Civil Disobedience”, just
as he mastered the method of photomontage and the use of the most advanced
printing technology, rotogravure).
Reading the Morning Newspaper...
Our post-deconstructive artistic efforts (analytical, critical, and pro-active) are
not only sporadic and lonely but also overshadowed by the ‘spiritual’ impact of
media imagery.
The media provides for a daily spectacle of ‘humanized’ and
‘universalized’ war trauma. Television, radio, and the Internet provide
‘spiritual’ assistance to one’s confused life. The physical, mental, or moral
injury and suffering of those in Iraq and Afghanistan are being turned into
soft and digestible parareligious media representation. Aimed at comforting
our ethically confused souls, today’s art of media culture is elegant and
hermeneutical in its careful choice and omission of critical issues. The
phantasm it inspires has a ‘sublime’ and ‘metaphysical’ effect. Hegel said:
Reading the morning newspaper is a kind of real Morning Prayer. One
orients one’s attitude against the world and toward (in one case) God, or
(in the other case) toward that which the world is. The former gives the
same security as the latter, in that one knows where one stands.
Made long before the advent of the newspaper’s advanced color photography and
its iconic impact, Hegel’s observation seems surprisingly accurate today. Present
day image reproduction technology adds ‘quality’ to Hegel’s “real Morning Prayer”.
The large-scale, ‘holy’ image on the front page of The New York Times functions
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 as an altar in front of which we justify our political passivity in real life. They are
skillfully created to be used by a reader as empathy objects.
As long as we look at the tragic media icons with ‘feelings for the
victims’—establishing a bridge of empathy with them, or, more precisely, with
their icons—we feel that we are part of a larger human family. We may imagine
and wish (pray) that the suffering of these war survivors and victims may
‘redeem’ us, or offer a sort of ‘salvation’, and relieve us from an obligation to try
to do anything about their and other’s situations. One’s empathy functions here
as a substitute for action.
312 When in the time of war the middle-classes spiritual, humanistic, and
aesthetic needs seem to be ‘fulfilled’ by the art of the media, the critical artist
and his or her art are put out of business by the art of an official and powerful
‘media artist’.
Is there a way to confront the artistic impact of the media? To disclose and
challenge what it is shown, how it misrepresents, and what it hides about the war?
If You See Something...
In my interior projection If You See Something..., a reference to the Homeland
Security signs still displayed in the public transportation systems of New York and
other cities that read “If You See Something, Say Something”, I focus on the tragic
effects of our “Ministry of Interior”, US Homeland Security, on the limits of our
perception and imagination effected by the ‘interior’ of our uninformed minds (our
subjectivity), and most importantly on the invisible people, the working residents
of our country who are struggling to survive the US government’s unjust actions
conducted against them in the name of the war on terror.
With the use of high-definition video projection, the windowless space
of Galerie Lelong was transformed into an illusion of an interior with windows.
‘On the other side’ of milky glass windows (Chelsea-style), as if outside on the
side-walk, one could see the foggy images of those ‘others’ suffering arrests,
detentions, and deportations, the ‘aliens’ from whom we are alienated. The
actors worked according to scripts written themselves; they recalled and
reenacted scenes from real life, situations that happened and could happen
again to them on the New York streets.
The psycho-political and aesthetic aims of the projection were as follows:
— To come close enough to these ‘strangers’, who one usually does not
notice, to see and hear some unexpected details of their painful, often
brave and comically tragic experiences, and to realize how incomplete our
understanding and access to their experience is.
— To engage the survivors emotionally and aesthetically as co-artists in the
production and animation of the projection: to help them develop rhetorical
survival skills and emotional capacities by publically articulating their
traumatic encounters with Homeland Security.
— To help organizations attract media and public attention for their clients’
situations.
— To take advantage of the cultural production situation in order to build
new connections between immigrants and social support networks.
During the two years of the project’s development, I joined the work of many social
support groups and established political ties with the “Visible Collective”, directed
Transformative Avant-Garde and Other Writings
by Naeem Mohaiemen, which developed Disappeared in America, in conjunction
with the Queens Museum. Besides those immigrants who were directly involved,
numerous lawyers, social worker, families, friends, and organizations helped with
the project.1
Cultural Economy Of Silence
The ineffectiveness of early anti-war demonstrations (here and abroad) and the re-
election of George Bush weakened the self-confidence and strength of critical sections of
the middle-class: the media, universities, museums, cultural institutions, etc.
Today, in cultural institutions and academia it is in ‘good taste’ to imply that 313
one may be ‘against’ the interventionism and imperial war conducted by the present
government—yet only in private or in confidential meetings. In public and, above all,
in one’s projects, one must remain ‘neutral’, ‘humanistic’, and ‘universal’—anything
to avoid what could be called ‘political’.
The political climate ignited by our fears of terrorism, real and/or imagined,
controls our thinking. Collectors, directors, curators, gallery dealers, art professors,
and artists themselves live with self-censorship and the dubious results of their
common sense choices made in the name of economical survival and aesthetic
‘sophistication’. (They say political art is ‘too simple’; that artists should not be
‘preaching to the converted’; that ‘in our hearts’ we are all against the war anyway,
so let’s keep quiet ‘to survive’; it’s only a year before ‘he’ is gone.)
Boards of trustees, corporate and individual sponsors, and State and city
political support have indirect or direct connections with the US government’s
interventions. One cannot mess with these interests; the new managerial styles of
cultural and academic institutions say so quite openly.
Many people say that the idea of political art is ‘passé’, which sounds like
saying that criticism and the political process are passé, that critical thinking, protest,
and opposition to right wing nationalistic and imperialistic ideology are passé. The
political art of the past cannot, of course, make sense for the present; another form
will need to be invented now and in the future. What was good yesterday may not
be good for today, what is today may be not good for tomorrow. Why, then, have we
been attempting since the 1990s to bury all kinds of political and engaged art? Why
haven’t we just gone ahead and invented new ones?
I absolutely agree with your questionnaire’s implication that the market-
driven cultural economy alienates us from the collective and/or coalition based
oppositional practice of the 1960s, 1970s, and 1980s. Emphasis on an individual
artist’s oeuvre (demanded by the market) and the fashionable aversion to any
kind of socially focused, critical art (a bad name, if not a curse), is a serious
background for the lack of any socio-aesthetic action and movement (another
bad name).
The Internet
Contrary to October’s implied skepticism about the effect of the Internet, and
in accordance with the more optimistic position of Critical Art Ensemble and
other technologically and politically minded groups and artists, I believe that the
Internet’s communication technology and culture are NOT socially alienating and
de-politicizing factors.
I hold that the Internet continues to be a great political and artistic vehicle
for all of us and the vital means of collective being and action. The creative use
of the Internet, in conjunction with digital imaging technology cellular telephone
War/Un-War
 communication, and other media, is an organic part of the public oppositional
presence—as much as physical gatherings, actions, and events. Through
various interfaces and cross-organizational networks, the Internet can enforce,
protect, and disseminate oppositional projects, developing them collectively
and coordinating them often globally. The Internet allows the social actions in
electronic space to be organically linked with social actions in urban, suburban,
and distant environments.
In addition, today’s oppositional projects and protests do not always
need to take the form of massive street demonstrations or marches on
314 Washington. The actions that take place between these big gatherings—
actions prepared through the use of digital media and communication
technologies—can be effective.
The War Silence
The US population’s silence is in part a result of vast war fallout at home—the rapid
spread of the secondary trauma transmitted by returning soldiers to their families.
Soldiers’ psychologically and socially harmful (post-traumatic stress-related behavior)
directly affects their close and extended families.
This war is unprecedented in US history for its excessive use of the National
Guard and military reserves and for recalling older individuals, who typically have
large families, three or four times. Each traumatized soldier re-traumatizes five
to nine members of his or her own family. Secondary war trauma is spreading so
rapidly across the country that it will cripple and destroy the lives of a third of the
US population. The soldiers’ families are as much war veterans as the soldiers
themselves. For too many back home, the peace is a “continuation of war by
other means”.
As a result of new boot camp desensitizing techniques, 80 per cent of
US soldiers are trained and armed to kill in Iraq and Afghanistan (only 20 per
cent did so in the Second World War). In this situation, it must be very difficult
for returning soldiers to re-sensitize themselves back home, and there is no
comprehensive and effective government program for such re-integration.
For every US soldier killed, there are 16 wounded comrades, an
unprecedented ratio of survival, which means an enormous number of veterans will
suffer deep physical and mental wounds. New kinds of brain, bodily, and emotional
injuries are multiplying. These emotional, moral, and physical injuries affect the
lives of veterans as well as those of their children and grandchildren.
Those soldiers recalled several times to Iraq are not only traumatized, but
also re-traumatized, and in turn they traumatize, re-traumatize, harm, and even
kill others or themselves.
The Iraq human trauma is, of course, far greater than the one among US
soldiers and families. 80 per cent or more of the children in Iraq suffer post-
traumatic stress, joining the vast majority of Iraq as a traumatized population.
Countless Iraqis have lost their lives; countless Iraqis have lost their closest
kin, their friends, and their community; countless Iraqis live wounded and
impoverished, and seek uncertain and traumatic refuge abroad.
The Tasks
There is enormous emotional and political illiteracy about the scale of today’s war
and the spread of war trauma, about war as a lived-through experience, as an
experience with resulting generational and cultural fallout.
Transformative Avant-Garde and Other Writings
The silence of those who know what the present war is—that is, the silence
of one-third of the US population, and the silence of the entire population of Iraq—
is reinforced by the common sense passivity on the part of cultural, artistic, and
academic worlds.
In this situation it is difficult, if not impossible, for the younger generations,
artists among them, to learn and comprehend the existential dimension and scale
of the present war. They do not know what war is from the point of view of Iraqi
civilians or Iraqi ‘insurgents’, nor from US soldiers and their families. There is no
agonistic democratic discourse, based on fearless speech by all parties.
Young people do not have any cultural base from which to develop their 315
ethical and political acts of public speech and art in opposition to the war. The war
impact will soon be so large that they will have many everyday experiences with the
social epidemic of secondary trauma, but without a larger social discourse they will
have no equipment to understand the scale and depth of its existential fallout. The
younger population has no idea what war is.
Since 2001, I have been engaged in teaching workshops and seminars
as a part of my Interrogative Design Group at MIT. The courses explore public
art, media art, methodologies in advancing designs and technologies of protest,
dissensus and social inclusion, and critical and agonistic memory; I have focused
more recently on the design of communication and mobility equipment design for
today’s war veterans.
Each year I receive more student demand for images and information
on soldiers’ and civilians’ lived war experience. War veterans are invited to
speak to the students, alternative films from the war are shown, and the Internet
communications about the war and its fallout—and online anti-war art and
cultural projects—are reviewed.
In the isolated academic environment, it is almost impossible to break the
wall of silence, reinforced by the media and cultural worlds, that separates these
two alienated populations: those who know what war is and those who do not.
The wall of silence, passivity, and ignorance must be dismantled. Tactical cultural
projects must be urgently developed with those who know, with the veterans, their
families, and those who work directly with them.
Art for the Political
If, since the 1990s, our objective has been to contribute to the political, rather
than to politics, to the polis rather than the police, to that which is potentia and
multitude rather than potentates, to revolt rather than revolution, to agon and
dissenus rather then consensus, to Democratic parrhésía and public interpellation
rather than ‘patriotic’ or ‘civic responsibility’, to nomadology rather than the State
apparatus... let us then continue our effort in inventing “art for the political”.
There have been new and versified methodologies developed in this direction
by artists, artistic and cultural groups, collaborative networks and coalitions.
Let’s hope they will focus on the methods of war against war as a new,
post-deconstructive project. In this context, I would like to mention some
names of oppositional artistic groups and projects (some of them are among
the respondents to the October questionnaire).
Walid Raad and the Atlas Group, Critical Art Ensemble (Electronic Civil
Disobedience and other projects), Todd Hirsch and works by Autonomedia, 16
Beaver, the Yes Men, Naeem Mohaiemen and the Visible Collective, John Malpede
and the programs and projects of the Vera List Center for Art and Politics, the
War/Un-War
 projects and teaching of MIT’s Interrogative Design Group (including the War Veteran Constructing Peace
Vehicle project presently under development), and many others.
It is my conviction that if these and other artists, artistic groups, networks, an interv iew w it h Ca rol Bec ke r
and coalitions further focus their attention on the present war and on fallout for 2012
later generations, we will contribute not only to the end this war, but to a situation
in which it will be much more difficult for society to allow an unjust, irresponsible,
interventionist war to reoccur.
Developing my Interrogative Design Group and the War Veteran Vehicle
project in collaboration with Theodore Spyropoulos, preparing new interior and
316 exterior public projections with war veterans, as well as learning and teaching the
methods and techniques of oppositional art, I try to contribute in this direction.

Originally published in October, no 123, winter 2008, pp 172–179. The

primary premise of this “Questionnaire” was to reflect on the question: “In what
ways have artists, academics and cultural institutions responded to the US-led
invasions and occupations of Iraq?”

1 The social support organizations and groups that directly collaborated were the
American-Arab Ami-Discrimination Committee (Asli); the American Friends Service
Committee (William Colev); the Asylum Project, Immigrant Rights Program—
NYMRO; the Civil Liberties Union Boston Chapter; the Coney Island Avenue Project
(Bobby Khan); the Council of Pakistan Organization (Mohammad Razvi); DRUM
(Desis Raising Up and Moving): Families for Freedom (Aarti Shahani and Subhash
Kateel); Keeping Hope Alive (Jane Mee); the National Immigration Project (Malik
Ndau); Peaceful Tomorrows (Nail Ashour); Physicians for Human Rights (Barbara
Ayoite); Safe Horizons, Immigration Law Project (Ellen Friedland); the Visible
Collective (Naeem Mohaiemen); and the War Resisters League (Steve Theberge).
Without these groups, examples of the presence of an oppositional public sphere, this
project would not have been possible.
Carol Becker: What is the basic thought behind your proposal Arc de Triomphe:
World Institute for the Abolition of War?
Krzysztof Wodiczko: The concept is to create a spatial, institutional and media
supplement to the Arc de Triomphe de I’Étoile in Paris. My work would take the
form of a scaffold-like structure built around and over the Arc. The aim of thus
‘encaging’ the monument is to re-present the arch as a war specimen—a relic and
a suspect, an object of examination to help move humankind toward permanent
peace. Vertical moving platforms and mechanical walkways will allow visitors to
study the war iconography presented on the arch. Internal and external plasma
screens, offering immersive and interactive environments, will display information
related to the institute’s own project and inform us about the work on this
subject done elsewhere. Other features will include a massive World Situation
Map, charting ever-changing areas of conflict and calm. The goal is to conduct
research, develop plans and engage in practical work to help create local, regional
and global peace.
CB: Why did you select the Arc de Triomphe?
KW: It’s a natural choice. The Arc de Triomphe is the biggest triumphal arch in
Europe. It’s huge—160 feet tall, 148 feet wide and 72 feet deep. I’ve been using
media projections to ‘animate’ monuments and memorials for a long time, and
it was always on my mind to work with this particular structure because it’s the
mother of all European triumphal arches. In fact, inside the arch an interactive
media display currently enables visitors to press a button and view all the other
arches in the world that took this as their model.
CB: It’s truly archetypal.
KW: It is the arch of arches, the first modern triumphal arch, designed after the
Arch of Titus near the Roman Forum and completed in 1836. Another memorial
was added underneath after the First World War—the Tomb of the Unknown

Transformative Avant-Garde and Other Writings War/Un-War

 Soldier, the first eternal flame memorial since Roman times. So this site now
hosts two kinds of master models for war memorials in our time.
CB: How did you come to this plan?
KW: I conceived the idea 20 years ago and then, with the establishment of
the European Union in 1993, I thought that something had to be done to
this monument, which commemorates some of the bloodiest of all European
adventures. Only several years ago did I realize that image projection, my usual
technique for re-activating symbolic structures, might not be enough. I had to
treat its ideology—so deftly and beautifully inscribed into it—in a deconstructive
318 way, to reread this monument while working to eliminate the need for such
structures in the future. Right now, there’s a major cultural war machine that
perpetuates and reinforces old beliefs underlying the culture of war. One of
those beliefs is that peace is made through war. Memorials reinforce that idea.
In the First World War, there were 17 million deaths; in the Napoleonic Wars, an
estimated four million deaths. The main thrust of the war-culture narrative is that
after all these people have died, after countless families and large stretches of the
environment have been destroyed, the end result is peace. It’s an absurd illusion.
Peace is not achieved through war. After the end of the Napoleonic Wars in 1815,
there were 122 major wars and smaller deadly conflicts in the remainder of the
nineteenth century alone. Facts such as these should be publicly elaborated.
Many other well-entrenched notions serve the culture of war, too. Like the
pleasure of dying for the leader—war masochism. Or the notion that dying young
is dying better—the martyrdom of youth. It’s crucial to analyze how war is made,
how people are drawn into it, how ideological stereotypes and cliches perpetuate
it. These subjects can be very closely examined with the help of the physical
structure and the media armature I want to build around this famous monument.
Consider, for example, the kind of masculine woman who hovers over and leads
the figures in the Arc’s Marseillaise relief. If we view the sculpture at eye level, we
see that she looks mad. Looking closely is one way to recognize the iconic power of
these tableaux, a way to disarm them. It can inspire media projections, immersive
environments and alternate narratives that invite debate and discussion.
CB: So this is the proposed World Institute’s main purpose?
KW: The aim is to avert war, or perhaps to repair damages by creating a more
dynamic and energetic peace, rather than continuing to foster a melancholic
silence or a congratulatory post-war complacency.
CB: Yours is a very radical approach—the undoing of all the assumptions most
other war memorials were designed to embody. Can you talk about these
structures in general?
KW: Not all of them promote the conditions that lead to war. But most seem
pre-occupied with two things: sacrifice and the perpetuation of memory. At times
those words are actually inscribed on them. So what they do is one problem; what
they don’t do is another. The word “memorial” is related to “memento”—to some
kind of reminder and warning. There is an etymological basis for thinking that a
war monument should help prevent us from making the same mistake again. Such
structures could actually contribute to making themselves obsolete.
CB: Did this project evolve out of your being awarded the Hiroshima Art Prize?
KW: The prize was certainly important. I received it based on many projects
involving war memorials—for example, my projections on the Soldiers’ and Sailors’
Memorial Arch in Brooklyn in 1983 and on the Arco de la Victoria in Madrid during
the early days of the first Iraq war in 1991. But I realized how much more I should try
Transformative Avant-Garde and Other Writings
to do once that prize was given. I accepted it as advance credit. Almost immediately
after receiving it in 1999, I staged a projection in Hiroshima about the bombing
there. This was during the time I was presenting my work in museums. Then I
started to think about what else I could do.
CB: How did your upbringing affect your consciousness about these issues?
KW: I am from the generation of people born during the last years of the Second
World War, those who grew up amid the ruins of war—both moral and physical. To
grow up like this is also to absorb, to be educated by, the damages of war in the
deepest way. That is true for everybody my age in Poland and in a large part of the
world, maybe the entire world,as a result of the impact of the Second World War. 319
I’m not a very unusual person. I just happened to be born at the wrong time in the
wrong place.
CB: Or at the right time to gain such awareness?
KW: Yes. I was born in Warsaw in 1943, the year before the general Warsaw
Uprising, which cost about 200,000 Polish lives, and two days before the smaller
ghetto uprising, which resulted in some 13,000 Jews being killed outright and
over 40,000 being transported to death camps. Having a Jewish mother, in
addition to being Polish, was not the best idea at that time.
CB: Do you feel that artists bring a unique perspective or methodology to
such issues?
KW: Artists have a position of tremendous responsibility. When they explore their
own subjectivity, they discover a great world inside themselves that they then
share with the rest of the populace. It is incredible what art can do: the best and
the worst. Those war memorials, including the Arc de Triomphe, were made by
artists—lots of artists, very good ones, often the best-educated of their day. So the
culture of war is very much perpetuated by artists. I don’t blame them, but they
certainly contribute to war propaganda and to the art of armament itself. If they
have done so much in such a negative way, couldn’t they also do the opposite?
CB: You have said that we ourselves are war memorials.
KW: Yes, as products of national, ethnic and religious groups, we contain
the culture of war inside us. Our unconscious teems with various shortcuts,
ideological cliches and unexamined beliefs that are waiting to be exploited by
those who are mobilizing masses for war. When the time comes, we are easily
drawn in. That’s why it’s very important for artists to expose all the mechanisms
of war. There is also another type of art, and I am busy trying to develop it as a
category of practice—working with people to enable them to become co-artists,
transmitting their own experiences of war or dealing with those recently returned
from combat.
CB: Are you referring to projects such as the War Veteran Vehicle, which you did
in cities like Denver, Warsaw and Liverpool between 2008 and 2010?
KW: Yes. I developed that vehicle to give public voice to veterans struggling with
their return to civilian life. We transformed a military Humvee into a tool for self-
expression by installing a powerful video projector and a loudspeaker where the
missile launcher would normally be mounted. Veterans could amplify sounds and
project text on buildings and monuments to tell their stories and reflect on their
existential situation. I’ve done similar projects with different groups and different
iconographic devices, enabling the participants to become collaborators in a kind
of techno-political therapy. Public space is well suited for aiding this passage
from private confession to transformative action. Participatory media-art projects
in public spaces give survivors a chance to shift from post-traumatic silence to
War/Un-War
 cathartic words and gestures. In my pieces, they engage in animating buildings and KW: I have to clarify here. There is a difference between the aggressive
monuments, operating special equipment, all in order to transmit truths. In public tendencies of individual humans and all-out war.
space it is easier to tell the truth to thousands, even millions—or to the closest CB: But don’t aggressive tendencies lead to war? Isn’t that a causal relationship?
person in your life. KW: No.
CB: I believe the Arc de Triomphe proposal is the first time that you’ve talked CB: Where does that aggression lead, if not to war? Aggression separates groups
not only about animating a structure but about building a second structure to from each other.
envelop an existing one. Which is more utopian—the unlikely prospect of actually KW: “War” refers to armed conflict between organized societies. That’s very far
being allowed to erect the scaffolding cage or your core belief that human away from someone shooting someone else in a courtyard.
consciousness can be transformed? CB: But is it really that far away?
320 KW: I don’t consider my proposal far-fetched. When I presented it at Galerie KW: Yes, it is. By simply saying that every act of aggression leads to war, we 321
Gabrielle Maubrie in Paris in 2011, I invited as many people as possible; then an completely demoralize ourselves. We perpetuate the belief that human nature
image of the project was published in the newspaper Liberation. is inherently war-like. Humans can do horrible things to other humans, but that
CB: Did French viewers faint when they saw it? doesn’t mean it’s in their nature. It means we are capable of doing those things.
KW: Actually, they reacted positively. I can’t know exactly what’s behind such a But I also think we are capable of not doing them.
positive response, because France has a very politically complex yet polite and
sophisticated culture. But a curator from the Centre Pompidou came to see the
show, looked at the maquette and asked, “Can this be built?” I said, “Well, if you Originally published in Art in America, June/July 2012, pp 83–87.
could build the Centre Pompidou, you could build this. It even looks similar.” My
initial concept was for the project to be a disruptive intervention, to assault the
sacred status of the monument. But now I believe my structure doesn’t have to
be permanent. It could be built for certain occasions and then disassembled. Its
potential to be installed for a while and then taken down has become part of the
project, so that’s why the structure will resemble scaffolding. Keep in mind that
the Eiffel Tower was supposed to be temporary.
CB: If this project were ever actually built, would it mark an evolution of
global consciousness?
KW: Yes, it would. The work’s purpose is the abolition of war. Period.
CB: And you believe that’s a real possibility?
KW: That ‘utopian’ end is not as remote as it might seem. If you had told
somebody in the eighteenth century—or even in the early nineteenth—that slavery
would soon be abolished, they would have said, “You’re crazy.” Historically,
many people thought slavery was a natural part of human society, because it’s in
the Bible and existed with the Greeks at the foundation of Western civilization.
Yet all along a few people fought hard against it—Quaker abolitionists in New
York City in 1839, for example. Abolition came very late in the US—1865—but
it happened. Of course, slavery and a slave trade still exist, but the practice
is illegal now, which makes an enormous difference. As for war, when the
International Criminal Court was established in 2002, “crimes of aggression”
were included under its jurisdiction. It is no longer acceptable for nations to
attack without sufficient provocation. They have to prove that their aggression
was an act of defense.
CB: You feel we’re moving in a more hopeful direction?
KW: Yes. It is a lot more difficult for war to happen in Europe now. Remember that
the main reason for the EU was to reduce or eliminate wars in Europe.
CB: In your new book The Abolition of War, there is a great essay by anthropologist
Douglas P Fry. His research counters assumptions about human aggression.
KW: Fry is trying to demolish the myth that war is a part of human nature. His
idea is important because it directly supports ending the culture of war.
CB: If one believes humans are innately aggressive and will always be aggressive,
then your project seems futile.

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Arc de Triomphe: World Institute 
for the Abolition of War
2010
Arc de Triomphe de l’Étoile
In today’s world, in its present, unaltered form and especially in the context of the
European Community, the Arc de Triomphe de l’Étoile must be seen as a most
anachronistic symbol. It is a major historical suspect and a historical witness to
the most deadly and destructive military and ideological adventures in the history
of modern Europe.
The Arc de Triomphe commemorates the Napoleonic Wars and the First
World War (through the Tomb of the Unknown Soldier) in elaborate iconic,
inscriptive, and architectural ways, but it does not commemorate in any way their
devastating aftermath, nor does it follow world peace efforts. Most importantly, it
does nothing toward ending war, whether through research, advocacy, pedagogy,
or (what is most needed) practical work. In the Arc de Triomphe, war is being
elaborated iconically and sculpturally as a process through which every citizen
is ready to sacrifice his or her own life for the sake of the nation’s great leader
and his grand global vision (Napoleon’s) and who in turn imposes it with brutal
force over other nations toward a final ‘peace’. Every citizen becomes a soldier
in this process. As a monument to Napoleon’s Empire, the Arc de Triomphe is
specifically implicated in this devastating modernization of the Total War concept,
and as the legitimizing marker for subsequent wars and conflict and hence the
worldwide dissemination of modern “triumphal” memorial arches, eternal flames,
and tombs for unknown soldiers.
The ‘peace’ achieved at the end of the Napoleonic wars, the earlier
“Heavenly Kingdom of Perfect Peace” war, and the later “war to end all
wars”—the First World War—serve as grave testimonies to the absurd illusion
that a lasting peace can be achieved through war. War can end only after
a universal and global abolition of wars. Yet the four gigantic reliefs on the
exterior of the Arc de Triomphe—The Departure of the Volunteers, 1792, The
Transformative Avant-Garde and Other Writings
Triumph of Napoleon, 1810, The Resistance, 1814, and The Peace, 1815
explicitly reinforce the illusion that war can make peace.
As a part of the obligatory Parisian itinerary, local and regional tourists
as well as visitors coming from all over the world, including groups of school
children and parents with children, all are seduced by the aesthetic charm and
lofty grandeur of the 50-metre (160-feet) high, 45-metre (148-feet) wide,
and 22-metre (72-feet) deep architectural body of the Arc de Triomphe. They
are hypnotized by the spectacular artistry of its sculptural friezes and reliefs,
its highly organized and perfectly orchestrated elegance, and its splendid
ornamentation. They gaze at the gigantic militaristic sculptures on the Arch’s 323
exterior facade, in its interior they read one by one the rows of inscriptions that
glorify, and immortalize hundreds of heroic Napoleonic generals, review “the
richly sculptured frieze of soldiers” and in the attic above look at each of “30
shields engraved with the names of major Revolutionary and Napoleonic military
victories.” To add to the hegemonic spectacle of this symbolic war machine, the
“Visitors can climb 284 steps to reach the top of the Arc” to enjoy Paris as seen
from the monument’s lofty point of view.
“A good war halloweth every cause” famously wrote Nietzsche.1 Inspired by
its artistic impact of fanatic symbolism, visitors to the Arc de Triomphe seem to
be in-tune with these kinds of statements. This proves the point that the memorial
projects aimed at war abolition cannot be simply limited to the acts of symbolic
‘disarmament’ of monuments such as the Arc de Triomphe or any other ‘great’
War Memorial, in order to deprive them of their psycho-ideological power over
us. To such cultural disarmament agenda one must add an important, if not most
critical project, the one that will focus on creating conditions for the successful
disarmament of our psychic and social need for and drive toward war—war
that deeply inhabits our “souls” and our “group mind.” A desirable side effect
of such “inner disarmament” would be the process of dismantling our psychic
interdependence with war memorials.
One should be able to commemorate past and present wars through the
“work of memory”, understood as a historical, theoretical, and critical analysis
of what went wrong in the past, what continues today and what has been leading
to war’s perpetuation. Simultaneously, we should commemorate war through
practical, systematic, and trans-disciplinary work to do all we can and beyond
to make sure that the naivete, arrogance, ignorance, and other mistakes and
conditions of the past that led to such wars will not repeat themselves or happen
ever again. In this way the death and suffering of so many millions of people will
be best honored and will not be in vain.
The Project
The project Arc de Triomphe: World Institute for the Abolition of War proposes
a radical supplement to the Arc de Triomphe de l’Étoile in the form of a new
symbolic and functional structure and institution. The new structure will
combine in discursive ways the process of commemoration with research on
both the conditions and factors that cause past and present wars and past and
present world peace efforts. Its primary goal is to developed plans and conduct
practical work toward actual regional and global peace. The design allows
and encourages sharing with the public the progress of such work increasing
public awareness in the context of evolving war and peace situations around
the world.
War/Un-War
 The World Institute for the Abolition of War, is a proposed structure
surrounding the Arc de Triomphe de l’Étoile the largest war memorial in Europe,
erected to commemorate early modern world wars. When the Institute is built,
the Arc de Triomphe will be seen as if immersed in this larger structure, displaying
daily work toward the abolition of war. Capitalizing on its most prominent location
on the axe historique (historical axis) in line with monuments that extends from
the center of Paris to the west (also known as the voie triomphale (triumphal way)
the proposed Arc de Triomphe: World Institute for the Abolition of War will assume
its central place on the cognitive map of Paris, recognized as a major symbolic
324 structure in the world. Its enforced scale and new silhouette in the landscape
of the city will become a major iconic urban intervention that will inscribe itself
powerfully in the minds of residents of Paris, visitors from other cities and regions
in France, Europe, and abroad. Arc de Triomphe: World Institute for the Abolition
of War is a dual institutional and architectural proposal for an international trans-
disciplinary center offering both a symbolic structure for inspiring philosophical,
psycho-analytical, and political engagement and an activist center to encourage
analytical, pro-active, and transformative approaches to the war abolitionist
process. Its purpose is to develop, expand, and implement a practical global
project for a war-free world.
The scaffolding-like structure of the World Institute for the Abolition of War
encompasses the Arc de Triomphe leaving the memorial visible in its new context
as a gigantic ‘war cultural specimen’—a relic of the bellicose past re-configured
as a gigantic object of research and pro-active work toward global and permanent
peace. The abolition of war is a task of gigantic scope and scale; the physical
scale of Arc de Triomphe itself, and the even larger scale of the architectural
structure the World Institute for the Abolition of War in which it will be contained,
corresponds symbolically to this scale.
Enveloping the work of the World Institute for the Abolition of War in visual
transparency and facilitating free circulation through and around its physical
structure offers an open-access invitation to all who wish to be historical witnesses,
critical interlocutors, and potential intellectual and activist forces toward a war-
free world. The full relationship between the monument and the World Institute
for the Abolition of War will hopefully become self-evident over time. Constructing
peace requires deconstructive scientific and philosophical research. Aside from its
symbolic value, those who work in the World Institute for the Abolition of War need
continual access to the body of the Arc de Triomphe, as part of the forensic study
of war. There, anthropological, psycho-analytical, cultural, ideological, artistic
and other analytical and critical studies will use the imagery and visual symbolism
of war to devise new symbolic narratives and generate new cultural projects to
detoxify our war-infected arts, sciences, technologies and cultures.
Like an archeological site, the scaffolding-like structure resembles the
way monuments of the ancient past have been examined. However, a so-called
neutral scientific examination is not the purpose here. Transforming war-bound
cultures requires analytical and critical investigation of its roots, artifacts, and
relics. The grand national and imperial war narrative inscribed through all parts
and surfaces of the monumental body of the Arc de Triomphe requires detailed
cross-examination. In scrutinizing the entire surface of the monument—all of its
carvings inscriptions reliefs and sculptures, acting like a of doctor who looks at
the skin of a giant animal—one can detect evidence of deep war neurosis, post-
traumatic stress disorder, or war-related pathological mental illnesses.
Transformative Avant-Garde and Other Writings
For the purpose of such an examination the structure of the Institute will
be equipped with a system of moving walkways, ramps, and elevators as well
as vertically moving viewing platforms to allow, inspire, and assist the scholars,
philosophers and visitors, individually and in groups, to take a close analytical
look and critically examine, discuss, and learn the complex war iconography of
the Arc de Triomphe. For example, they might consider the substance and form of
the four gigantic sculptural reliefs; the inscriptions of names of the 660 persons
inscribed most of them generals who served during the First French Empire
(1804–1814) with additional figures from the French Revolution (1789­–1799),
vertically in ten columns on each pillar, with underlined names signify that that 325
person was killed in action; the names of all major battles of the Napoleonic
Wars; and the frieze of soldiers, as well as 30 shields engraved with the names
of 96 major Revolutionary and Napoleonic military victories. There are also the
six reliefs depicting General Marceau’s burial (south facade, right), the Battle of
Aboukir, (south facade, left), the Battle of Jemappes, (east facade), The Battle
of Arcole, (north facade, right), the Fall of Alexandria (north facade, left), and
the Battle of Austerlitz (west facade). In addition each pillar lists the names of
27 Napoleonic armies: Armées Du Nord; Des Ardennes; De La Moselle; Du Rhin;
De Sambre-et-meuse; De Rhin et Moselle; De Hollande; De Hanovre; Armées du
Danube; D’Helvétie;. Des Grison; Des Alpes; Du Var; D’ltalie; De Rome; De Naples;
Des Pyrénées ORales, Des Pyrénées OCales; De L’Ouest; De Réserve. Du Camp
De Boulogne; Grande Armée De Dalmatie; D’Egypte; D’Espagne; Du Portugal;
D’Andalouise; D’Arragon; De Catalogne, and Armée Du Midi.
The visitors moving vertically and horizontally on the Arc de Triomphe’s
moving platforms and mechanical walkways will be able to examine the
entire complex iconography of the triumphal arch while listening and viewing
interpretative and historical narratives, as well as debates and discussions among
philosophers, scholars, peace activists, politicians, and others and have the
opportunity to engage with them in a dialogue directly or via specially installed
communication media equipment.
The very word “Institute” suggests research, experiment, and pro-active
work. Using the words of Deleuze and Guattari, the task of the Arc de Triomphe
should be both clinical and critical but also diagnostic and prognostic, health
sustaining, and preventive, toward a healthier war-free world: the ultimate
triumph to come.
The Program
The specific methodology, program, and organizational structure of the World
Institute for the Abolition of War will need to be developed through international
study involving consultation and collaboration with major peace organizations and
institutions throughout the world. The proposed program is only a starting point
as an initial suggestion, subject to critical and radical revisions or completely new
suggestions. The architectural structure as well as mechanical and media equipment
of the project will be designed to allow for easy and flexible transformations
according to changing programmatic and operational ideas and needs.
According to the initial plan the project proposes the creation of four main
research centers for the Institute. The centers could be located symmetrically
around the four corners of the Arc de Triomphe in four vertical areas within its
structure. They may have following programmatic profiles:
War/Un-War
 — Center for Social, Psychological, and Anthropological Analysis of War
and Peace
— Center for Politico-Ethical and Legal Analysis of War and Peace
— Center for Cultural and Ideological Analysis War and Peace
— Center for Economical, Scientific and Technological Analysis of War
and Peace
In the area above the roof of the Arc de Triomphe, within the lower area of the
horizontal section of the structure of the World Institute for the Abolition of War,
326 there will be a place for the centrally located World Situation Map displaying the
changing global dynamics of potential and existing wars, conflicts as well as post-
war, post-conflict and lasting peace zones.
At the center of the Discursive Forum for the Abolition of War will be a large,
highly mediatized gathering space, open to visitors, to scholarly and public debates,
and designed for special events and global conferences. At the corner zones, on the
same level of the structure of the Institute there will be Four Conference Centers
linking the top levels of the Four Research Centers. In the same area bellow
and around the Situation Space there will be the set of facilities for the Cross-
Disciplinary Center for Global Peace Projects developing and implementing large-
scale, practical work toward the abolition of war, the projects based, and practically
capitalizing on the work conducted by the four research centers.
Various topics of the Center for Global Peace Projects may include:
— General and complete nuclear and conventional disarmament, Statecraft
of rational restraint, radical transformation of the world’s political structure
toward peace, psychological conditions of decision makers and diplomats,
transformation of international law against war, and the elimination of the
conditions for the growth of terrorism.
— More specific projects may focus on designing methodologies for pacific
settlements of disputes and conflict control, complete de-militarization of
national, popular, and media cultures, global directives in creative conflict
transformation and sustained positive peace, methods of healing individual,
social, and cultural trauma (both primary and secondary), a global project for
the revision of history text books, re-designing physical and electronic toys
and games globally, peace education and conflict transformation pedagogy
projects, the realization of Robert Filliou’s proposal for neighboring countries
to exchange their war monuments, and a similar mutual exchange of
nationalistic/chauvinistic ‘historical’ films, etc. The Center can accommodate
a wide assortment of global and regional, cultural and artistic projects.
The system of powerful external and internal plasma screen and pixel boards
installed through out the entire scaffolding-like structure will display programs
and information related to the Institute’s work, to potential and emerging conflict
situations of violence and wars, to major peace-related world developments, as well
as events, conferences, debates, and research projects of the Institute.
The Institute’s system of moving walkways and elevators, crossing along
the outside and through the inside of the structure of the Institute, allows visitors
to see the work of the Institute, stop to join presentations, events, and projects
and, as described earlier, to examine, learn, and discuss the iconography of the
Arc de Triomphe.
Transformative Avant-Garde and Other Writings
The World Institute for the Abolition of War will have working links with
peace-building organizations around the world, mostly regional, and local, but
some central as well. Public access to information about these organizations,
centers, and institutes and their activities serving as a liaison in the development
of an actively participating public will be provided.
Conclusion
In our unconscious we are ourselves inner war memorials while, as a product
and a fabric of our nationalistic and in other ways chauvinist heritage, we are
part of a larger external war memorial named Culture. If we wish to foster 327
living rather than dying and killing, we must take up the task of disarming
both ourselves as war memorials and the entire culture as one integrated
war memorial. Franco Fornari has said, “If it were not for war, society would
be apt to leave men defenseless before the emergence of the Terrifier as a
purely internal foe.”2 The Institute’s Center for Social, Psychological, and
Anthropological Analysis of War and Peace needs to search and find the ways
to eliminate or creatively replace war as people’s “defense” against such a
Terrifier. On reaching such an ultimate goal, we will be able to de-commission
our war memorials, liberate them from military service in our psychic army,
while de-commissioning our souls from serving in their ideological war mission.
In this abolitionist process, we, as monuments to wars, will be free from war
duty and war service, and will gradually gain a healthy, humorous distance to
the idea of war as something that belongs to the past and our formerly bloody,
self-destructive minds. Our interdependence with war memorials will find its
triumphal end and the Arc de Triomphe will finally deserve its glorious name.
With the help of the World Institute for the Abolition of War, in a world
increasingly populated by people whose souls will be war-free, and in a world
of de-militarizing cultures, Arc de Triomphe and all other war memorials will
gradually become inoperative as ideological war machines. In such situation, there
will be less need for the abolitionist program of the proposed World Institute for
the Abolition of War. As the Arc de Triomphe requires less work around itself, the
structure of the World Institute for the Abolition of War can be transformed into
an anthropological, psycho-analytical, and cultural museum of the complex and
successful process of the abolition of war. Eventually, its scaffolding-like structure
could step by step be dismantled and replaced by the Museum of the Abolition of
War, a new permanent architectural structure that will encase the Arc de Triomphe
as a curious relic of the never-to-return-again time of wars and war cultures.
Nietzsche said that one should have the kind of past that one deserves. We
should act now to make ourselves deserving of a past without war. This proposal
would like to become a contribution in this direction.
Originally published in Harvard Design Magazine, no 33, fall/winter 2010;
reprinted in Wodiczko, Krzysztof, The Abolition of War, London: Black Dog
Publishing, 2012, pp 32–55.
1 Nietzsche’s original expression: “You say it is the good cause that hallows even war? I
say unto you: it is the good war that hallows any cause.”
2 Fornari, Franco, The Psychoanalysis of War (1966), New York: Anchor, 1974.
“Terrifier” means here “our internal destructiveness”.
War/Un-War
The Culture of War
2012
War has generated a distinctive culture. Processes of preparing for, waging,
and commemorating war are seen as “essential elements of history, rooted in
psychology”, admired and joined in with as a martial cultural tradition that, with
an intensity of emotion, remains central to the lives of those who participate in
it.1 The motivation to fight and die in war is perpetuated by a culture of war that
manifests itself through uniforms, war games, parades, military decorations,
and war memorials (including statues and shrines, triumphal arches, cenotaphs,
victory columns, and other commemorations of the dead); the creation of war art
and military art, martial music, and war museums; and the popular fascination
with weapons, war toys, violent video and computer games, battle reenactments,
collectibles, and military history and literature.
The culture of war makes men and women face death willingly, even
enthusiastically. War is a destructive, self-destructive, and masochistic mass
operation, and the culture of war reinforces its social pathology and its function
as “an end in itself”.2 The culture of war helps to orchestrate war as collective
madness. Through culture and art, war is understood, perceived, and felt as not
what it is—that is, a psychotic, grandiose, paranoid mass behavior—but as a just,
admirable, and noble mission and destiny. It is, in many ways, through culture
and art that ‘we’ (and our leaders) are seen and heard, imagined, and idealized as
‘good’, even superhuman, while ‘they’—others, the enemy (and their leaders)—are
depicted as ‘evil’, demonized and deprived of humanity, and regarded as animals or
‘subhuman’.
It is with the indispensable help of the art of the culture of war that “our
psychotic parts are merged into group identity, and we do not feel mad since our
views are sanctioned by the group”, and we “can free ourselves of guilt by allowing
the group to sanction aggression which in an individual would be unforgivable”.3
The workings of the art of the culture of war permit, endorse, and encourage us
to act “in a way which in an individual would be called mad”.4 The culture of war
Transformative Avant-Garde and Other Writings
splits our souls, as its manifestations are “despised and regularly denigrated as
atavistic and irrational”, while secretly or openly embraced and celebrated.5 Art, as
an essential part of such a culture, tends to reinforce this split by positioning itself
on one side or another.
Some facts are so large that we do not see them. The largest such fact is
that war poses a mortal danger to our civilization. This situation is the result of
our tolerance, passivity, and silence in the face of the continuing international
legality and popular acceptance of the culture of war. Such silence and passivity
is closely related to our denial, blaming of others, and inadequate effort in taking
deconstructive and constructive actions toward war. It all leads us to the point of 329
nuclear war annihilation. Public attitudes are a symptom of the split condition in
which we claim a critical stand against war while paying taxes that support war
and enjoying war parades and war films, with their necro-orgiastic war spectacles.
The struggle between two human instincts—one pro-active that bonds us,
called “eros”, and an aggressive, destructive instinct—is close to being mortally
resolved by giving victory to our self-destructive side, our ‘death wish’. Our
collective cultural superego, of which Freud wrote in Civilization and Its Discontents,
has been reinforced for too long by misguided nationalistic ‘high conscience’, a
religious-military-nationalistic duty to offer our lives to a ‘just’ war. The culture of
war is a dangerous weapon in an armory of such a collective cultural superego.
The Un-War
I prefer the terms “un-war” and “peacemaking” to the word “peace”, because
peace is not a simple matter. In making it, one must first confront the social and
cultural phenomenon of war and recognize how war is entrenched in our singular
and collective minds. Un-war is the new state of mind that enables the process
of understanding, uncovering, and undoing war. It implies that the war exists as
something hidden within us that should be brought symbolically and culturally to
our singular consciousness before it erupts outward as bloody conflict. The other
implication of the term un-war is that war is an old state of mind and a mental
condition installed in us from without, through the culture of war.
In this context, the primary task in transforming a war-bound world into
a war-free civilization is to create a new consciousness and a new culture: the
consciousness of war and the culture of un-war. In other words, if we wish to
challenge the drive toward war that seems hidden in our unconscious (a matter of
mostly the id), imposed on us through the culture of war (as part of the workings
of the collective cultural superego), the culture of un-war must aim at the creation
of a new civilized consciousness and cultural practice (a matter of the ego) as a
project that enforces our critical self-guard against the psycho-social pressures
of war ideology. In this way, the war desires, psychological war projections, soul
splitting, and our destructive and self-destructive impulses and instincts will no
longer be easily unleashed.
Unfortunately, the dismantling of the culture of war is not included in most
global and regional peace proposals. Most proposals are based on technical,
political, diplomatic, and economic approaches to a step-by-step reduction of the
possibility of armed conflict, without emphasizing the need to develop a similar
step-by-step methodology for larger cultural transformative work, without which
war will never end. Peacekeeping forces cannot be effective in transforming
cultures. Efforts toward mediation, peace enforcement, collective security,
global governance, world security (Grenville Clark’s and Louis Sohn’s proposal
War/Un-War
 for world law, and Richard Folk’s plan for radical change), a reduction in military
deployments, and general and complete disarmament, have barely mentioned
art and pedagogy, neglecting the need for cultural and educational work in re-
examining national histories, re-writing misguiding textbooks, and critically
re-interpreting nationalist and chauvinistic literature, films, music, visual arts,
and theater.6 In challenging the ‘ready-to-die-in-war-against-others’ notion of one’s
national identity, such work should also examine and counter the continuing impact
of national monuments, war memorials, and related commemorative ceremonies.
All previous plans to end war—not merely curtail particular conflicts—including
330 the most informed, complex, and articulate ones, have failed to be adopted. We
must act despite such failure, and do so even more urgently because of it. There
is no time for waiting. Scientists cannot wait for support and co-ordinated actions
from politicians. Social organizations and social movements cannot easily be
synchronized. Legal work toward un-war and the International Court of Justice
cannot wait for each other to move on. Artists also cannot wait for actions by others.
We must all act now, even if ‘out-of-sync’. This may become our strength. Developing
a new way of imagining a state of un-war may lead to new perceptions and new
actions and new experiences. This is our task.
Putting an end to war is a bloodless form of revolution involving various
theoretical and practical disciplines such as technology, media, law, politics,
socio-psychology psychoanalysis, anthropology, philosophy, and cultural and
artistic production, but we all must act in ‘out-of-sync’ mode. Our potential for
making change, our capacity for critical intuition and thought, our pro-active
imagination, our experience in effecting cultures, our skills in working with
people on socio-aesthetic projects—these strengths need no central plan to be
unleashed. As artists we may, however, inspire others to act.
The practice of civil disobedience, whether in an international context or
within one country, has been more effective than any tightly co-ordinated plans,
as shown in Indian efforts to obtain liberation from British rule, and in US draft
resistance and the popular anti-Vietnam War movement and Civil Rights culture
of the 1960s. These events helped spread the non-violent ideas of Buddha,
Thoreau, Tolstoy, Gandhi, and Martin Luther King. To survive, our civilization
needs every possible assistance from such activists and philosophers, as well
as artists, and a willingness to think beyond what has previously been possible.
It needs to support our collective eros, develop a means of open and bloodless
communication of human disagreement to counter the continuing challenge of
war that comes from human aggressive instincts, and overcome fear to confront
the real danger—the danger of the end of our living world.
Artists and the Culture of War
War must be abolished. It must be made illegal and treated as a criminal act. As
war is ignited and maintained by the present-day operation and tradition of the
culture of war, such a culture must be challenged by analytical and pro-active
counter-practices; disrupted and questioned and kept at a critical distance,
especially from young people. How can art contribute to undoing the culture of
war and transforming it into a new un-war culture? How could it contribute to the
development of creative conflict and bloodless, agonistic democratic discourse
rather than repressed and managed ‘peace’ that is always loaded with the
potential for renewed explosions of war aggression? It may well be said that the
matter cannot be addressed by acting within any one field, much less by cultural
Transformative Avant-Garde and Other Writings
and artistic engagement alone. For war to be abolished, political scientists and
war and peace analysts say that many steps will need to be taken, and they admit
that there is no agreement as to which ones would be most effective—and so none
are implemented.
Not unlike the abolition of slavery (which took 300 years of difficult work
to accomplish), the abolition of war is a complex project, political and judicial, as
well as cultural and artistic. It must become the great challenge to the culture of
war. Yet for many ‘intuitive’ artists, driven by the pleasure principle, the building
of consciousness goes against their artistic mindset and tradition. Consciousness-
building or consciousness transformation and art making is for many artists a 331
difficult if not impossible marriage. Mixing social consciousness and artistic
intuition seems a contradiction to some, but the most challenging art, the art
that has contributed to social and cultural change, has always come from such
a marriage and such a mixture. In fact, consciousness and art is potentially a
revolutionary mixture and an essential part of a revolutionary process. As with
social, political, racial, and sexual inequality, repression for some while freedom
for others—such as man’s domination over women and the long-held right to
treat others as personal property—was seen for centuries as something natural,
a part of human nature. Like the eighteenth century democratic revolutions, the
eighteenth and nineteenth-century process of abolishing slavery, the nineteenth
and twentieth-century feminist struggle and the pressure to end racial segregation,
the dismantling of the culture of war and continuing the process begun in the
seventeenth century of abolishing war is also a revolutionary project.
Since ancient times visual, sound, performance, and mixed-media artists
have been major contributors to the culture of war. The massive presence in our
museums of military art and the participation of artists in war propaganda efforts—
in designing symbolically and visually effective uniforms, armor, and camouflage as
well as hundreds of thousands of artistically conceived and built war monuments,
memorials, and shrines—testifies to this fact. If art and artists have contributed to
war through the aesthetic reinforcement of war phantasms, war mobilizations, and
warfare itself, they can certainly contribute to the opposite project—the creation of
an un-war culture and the construction of a new consciousness toward a war-free
civilization and the global abolition of war. Since the bombing of Hiroshima, we
have faced the potential of war as global nuclear annihilation. It is time for artists
to urgently engage in and initiate peace-building and un-war projects, share their
experiences, educate themselves and others toward a war-free world, and conduct
these activities locally, regionally, and globally.
Of course artists have long been involved in conflict-transformation initiatives,
war-related post-traumatic stress relief, and cross-cultural communication projects.
Many war veterans and members of their families have become artists to better
heal their emotional wounds and publicly share their war experiences, addressing
society’s lack of an emotional comprehension of war. A number of important artists
have questioned the assumptions surrounding war. The work of Francisco Goya,
Honoré Daumier, Édouard Manet, George Grosz, Otto Dix, Käthe Kollwitz, Pablo
Picasso, Hans Haacke, Leon Golub, Nancy Spero, Yoko Ono, Barbara Kruger,
Jochen Gerz, Ben Shahn, Walid Raad, William Kentridge and collectives such as
Publixtheatre Caravan are just some among many examples of past and present anti-
war art practices. Significant parts of this artistic tradition include, after First World
War, Ernst Friedrich’s War Against War project and the Anti-War Museum in Berlin,
shut down by the Nazis in 1933, and John Heartfield’s counter-war photomontages
War/Un-War
 satirizing the Nazis. Following the Second World War, Robert Filliou’s disarming
Fluxus proposal for exchanging war monuments between adjacent countries and
Yoko Ono’s “art for peace” projects are noteworthy. The Vietnam War ended in part
thanks to resistance movements supported by anti-war artists.
Unfortunately, despite the many powerful anti-war art practices, artistic
culture and to a large extent the entire Western visual culture remains dominated
by art that is either fascinated by war, emotionally distant from war, or—the
most regrettable—silent about war. The number of artists involved directly in
peace-building processes is still comparatively minuscule. In this situation, the
332 deconstruction of the culture of war, while constructing a new culture of un-war,
is the most urgent project for artists to pursue.
Towards the Un-War Memorial
As one vital step toward a new consciousness, let us transform war memorials.
Let us change them from machines that install in us a war-bound collective
superego into cultural equipment that can reveal and de-install such a superego
while paving the ground for a new un-war consciousness and a war-free
civilization. Since the earliest times, artists (often in tandem with architects)
have been asked, expected, educated, and been found willing to collaborate with
political, cultural, and military authorities on war memorial commissions and
other official war art. Any further work to design, re-design, transform, counter,
or create alternative war memorials and other war art needs the continuing,
albeit very different, engagement of artists and architects. This proved to be the
case for many anti-war projects developed since the end of both World Wars and
the invention of ‘counter-memorials’ in US war protest art in the 1960s and in
Germany in the 1980s and 1990s.
My own critical public art projects involving war memorials and monuments
(memorial projections) joined that tradition in the 1980s and was aimed at
ridiculing memorials’ ‘moral’ authority, exposing their militarism, and revealing the
contradictions between their lofty slogans and cruel war outcomes.
I wrote then:
The aim of the memorial projection is not to ‘bring life to’ or ‘enliven’ the
memorial nor to support the happy, uncritical, bureaucratic ‘socialization’
of its site, but to reveal and expose to the public the contemporary deadly
life of the memorial. The strategy of the memorial projection is to attack
the memorial by surprise, using slide warfare, or to take part in and
infiltrate the official cultural programs taking place on its site.
In the latter instance, the memorial projection will become a double
intervention: against the imaginary life of the memorial itself, and against the
idea of social-life-with-memorial as uncritical relaxation. In this case, where
the monumental character of the projection is bureaucratically desired, the
aim of the memorial projection is to pervert this desired monumentally.7
I believe that there is a continuing need to expose war memorials’ ideological
operations and disrupt their role in reinforcing the pro-war collective cultural
superego. There is also a need for alternative, non-monumentalizing ways
of commemoration, yet to my mind, such ‘deconstructive’ and alternative
projects make sense today only on the condition that we superimpose on them
new, supplementary, and constructive approaches and components. We must
Transformative Avant-Garde and Other Writings
transform and prepare existing war memorials (including the counter and
alternative ones) for their new pro-active role in providing moral, cultural, and
pedagogical equipment, symbolic environments, and communicative conditions
toward a new collective consciousness and a new culture—the culture of un-war
for a war-free world.
What is proposed here is therefore not a peace memorial or a counter-
memorial but an un-memorial. This new, special supplement to existing memorial
structures and programs would focus on a philosophical-historical, cultural-
ideological, ethico-political, and psycho-social understanding of the processes
involved in leading to, staging, and carrying out a war, as well as on a full account 333
of the human, material, and environmental destruction caused by war before,
during and after its outbreak. This program and structure would take the form
and technique of interactive displays, immersive environments, and testimonial
narratives regarding war. At the same time, a new such supplemental un-war
memorial program would offer visitors a pro-active display and testimonial-based,
interactive, and narrative focus on the pedagogical, cultural, artistic, political,
judicial, and other methods of war prevention. It would invite, inspire, and assist
visitors in their potential engagement with undoing war by conflict-transformation
initiatives and remaking the national, regional, and ethnic aspects of cultures that
see war as an essential part of a shared historical identity and as community’s
sacred and perpetual duty.
Realizing the above programs and transforming existing war memorials
into un-war memorials would call for the creation of special supplemental
architectural structures to allow for alternative public access; these structures
would be equipped with new media environments and public communication
systems to inform and inspire new interpretations and discourses. There would
also be a need for new alternatives to official memorial events and ceremonies,
including commemorative performances.
In my own practice, these may involve designing and building scaffolding-
like architectural structures as institutions constructed around existing
memorials, such as the Arc de Triomphe, and artistic media animations in the
form of textual/sound/video narrative projections that engage war statues and
war monuments, as well as work with war-veteran vehicles and projections in
art gallery interiors and existing memorial sites.8 These projects should be done
initially with the active participation and close collaboration of civilians and
ex-soldiers and their families—those who know from experience what war really
means to human life.
Originally published in Wodiczko, Krzysztof, The Abolition of War, London: Black
Dog Publishing, 2012, pp 11–31.
1 From a Publishers Weekly review of Martin van Creveld’s The Culture of War, New
York: Presidio Press, 30 September 2008.
2 Publishers Weekly.
3 Segal, Hanna, Psychoanalysis, Literature, and War, London: Routledge, 1997, p 162.
4 Segal, Psychoanalysis, Literature, and War, p 162.
5 Publishers Weekly.
6 As summarized by Seyom Brown in The Causes and Prevention of War, London: St
Martin’s, 1994, pp 144–148.
7 Originally published as a section of “Public Projections”, October, no 38, fall 1986,
pp 4–10.
8 I would like to acknowledge Robert Ochshorn’s important contributions to the digital
interface design of this work with war veterans.
War/Un-War
Tomb of the Unknown Soldier: 
The Józef Rotblat 1 Institute
for the Abolition of War
2015
The Soldier Unknown
Are the columns of young boy and girl scouts who march in the paramilitary
parades before the Tomb of the Unknown Soldier in Warsaw aware of the fact
that the soldier buried within is a child of their own age?
Most likely they are not conscious of this fact, but their unconscious is
certainly well educated in it. A sense of national duty and a willingness to sacrifice
their young lives for the nation have been well inscribed into their souls by a
national culture that it is now central to their patriotic ‘instinct’. And it is clear
that in the not too distant future when they grow up, in the event of a national call
to arms they will be ready for an even greater sacrifice: to send their own children
to fight and die in some ‘noble war’.
Instead of being properly commemorated, the fact that the human
remains buried there are those of a 14-year-old volunteer, a child-soldier from the
contingents called Orlatka (Eaglets) sent into battle to defend the then Polish
city of Lwów in 1918, remains culturally suppressed. Among the 6022 soldiers
in that battle, 1421 were less than 17 years old; the youngest was nine. Antoś
Petrykiewicz, at the age of 13, became the youngest recipient in Polish history of
the Virtuti Militari Cross, the highest Polish decoration.
Here is an excerpt from a written account regarding the selection
process of the remains to be reburied in the Tomb of the Unknown Soldier
in Warsaw:
During the exhumation procedure in the presence of representatives
of the Polish Ministry of the Interior and the Ministry of Public Works,
on the 29th of October, 1925 at 14:30 hours three graves of soldiers
with plaques stating “Here lies an unknown soldier-defender of Lwów”
were unearthed.
Transformative Avant-Garde and Other Writings
Jadwiga Zarugiewiczowa, a Polish woman of Armenian heritage, mother of a
soldier killed on the fields of Zadworze and buried in an unknown place, was
asked to choose the remains of one of the soldiers from the three unearthed
coffins. When that coffin was opened, it was obvious that the remains belonged
to a soldier without rank wearing a maciejówka, a round cap, with the Polish Army
insignia of the ‘eaglet’ attached to it. This was an indication that the remains
selected were those of a civilian volunteer, as regular soldiers wore rogatywki, the
regular squared caps. The doctor who examined the remains determined that the
soldier had been shot through the head and leg, an indication that he had been
taking part in a military attack and died “on the field of glory”, giving his life for 335
the nation. The doctor also established that the soldier was approximately 14
years old.
Under Article 8(2)(a)(xxvi) of the Rome Statute of the International
Criminal Court (ICC), adopted in July, 1998 and endorsed by Poland, entering
into force on 1 July 2002, “Conscripting or enlisting children under the age of
15 years into the national armed forces or using them to participate actively in
hostilities” is a war crime.
According to the spirit and letter of this article the person whose remains
‘rest’ in the Tomb of the Unknown Soldier must be recognized as a victim of a
war crime.
Should Poland today have dressed such a boy in a military uniform (or even
allowed him to put it on), to voluntarily or involuntarily be enlisted for military
front-line service (an opportunity to heroically and gloriously die for Poland),
Polish political and military authorities would be brought before the International
Criminal Court to stand trial for a war crime.
Still, despite all the international conventions that forbid it, the death at
a young age to please God and country continues to be seen as a most beautiful
‘rite of passage’ to immortal glory and eternal memory.
As in the case of drafted or volunteer teenage suicide-soldiers (still seen
globally in Iraq, Afghanistan, the Middle East, until recently in Northern Ireland,
and at present as an element of terrorist tactics in today’s ‘holy wars’), the death
of a teenage or child soldier is seen as a most glorious sacrifice. There the ‘purest’
sacrifice, based on chauvinistic nationality, ethnicity or religion, requires the
youngest and the most innocent lives.
The frequent scene of parading scouts saluting the Tomb of the Unknown
Soldier creates an uncanny impression. They look as if any of them could have just
marched out of this Tomb, for the sheer purpose of marching back to it again after
responding to the “National Need” (Narodowa Potrzeba) by offering to serve via
martyrdom. Instead of the proverbial ‘marshal’s staff’ each carries in the backpack
of their unconscious, the marching and saluting Scouts carry their own sad future
as those chosen to be the “fallen on the fields of glory”—nameless child heroes,
the new Unknown Soldiers. According to the UN Information Center “more than
300,000 children below age 18 in more than 30 countries are active participating in
armed conflicts”. To emphasize this participation of children in war, the UN has been
employing the term “Children’s Wars”.
The Silence
When I point out to my colleagues and friends in Poland that in the Tomb of
Unknown Soldier lies a 14-year-old, their usual reaction is first silence, then a
change in the topic of conversation.
War/Un-War
 Why silence? How do we explain such an absence of visible reaction?
This is a publicly open fact, but not allowed to become the topic of
conversation. Or perhaps it is something of which people do not wish to know, or
to accept as truth. Behind such silence there is perhaps also the belief that ‘there
is no reason’ to speak of it, because it is something obvious and natural, not worth
a conversation or elaboration, or even acknowledgement, that at such a historical
moment even children must go to war.
Or, in another explanation, the popular notion is that one ought not, or that
it is ‘inappropriate’ to know the Unknown Soldier’s age, because everything about
336 him must remain strictly unknown, a kind of sacred secret.
Finally and hopefully, the silence is a healthy sign of the realization of a
contradiction between the patriotic sense of obligation circulating in one’s veins,
a duty to give even the youngest life—including that of one’s own child—for the
defense of the nation, and the legal restriction against engaging children in armed
conflicts, today punishable as a war crime.
The Tomb of the Unknown Soldier
In a psycho-social sense, even unacknowledged, the Unknown Soldier is already
buried inside of each of us from early childhood. It is a strangely familiar, uncanny
condition and symptom.
To keep moving toward a war-free world we must first bring to
consciousness the Unknown Soldier’s presence inside each of us and recognize
his or her influence over our minds. In this sense that soldier must be made un-
unknown, must become the Known Soldier.
The Unknown Soldier seems to be a sacrifice offered in our collective as an
act of begging the war itself (the God of War?) for forgiveness. We assume that by
accepting such a sacrifice war will forgive us the fact that in our minds, in secret,
and against its commands, we keep deserting the service to war, ‘sinfully’ daring to
enjoy peace. Soullessly and with petty minds, we are mindful only of our own safety
and that of those closest to us, no longer measuring (as we did in the great past) the
value of life by our capacity to honorably die on the battlefield, our greatest sin today
is our shamelessness in ‘going about without war’.
In its physical scale the Tomb of the Unknown Soldier is small, but as a
grand spiritual force it is a true Temple of War. When explaining to our children
and making them (as well as ourselves) ‘conscious’ of the meaning of the sacred
Tomb, life itself appears to us again fuller and more precious. In this moment,
The War (God of War) feels itself assured that ‘when the time comes’ and when
the ‘historical moment arrives’ our children will be ready (gotowi) to sacrifice their
lives for It.
In a world run by the superstition of war, belief in this ‘natural order’ and
the unavoidability, even the benefits and blessings, of war, one who sees the
sense, necessity, or real possibility of the abolition of wars is mocked as ‘naive’,
intellectually shallow or arrogant, as utopian or ‘ideological’; one who would
dare to subvert and change our eternal human nature, and in that way commit
blasphemy against the sacred icons, deities, and altars of war, and thus injury to
our national feelings.
Our moral blindness, admonishes and warns the God of War, lies in our
‘fantasized’ vision of a war-less world, as we advocate a senseless and shameful
sacrifice-free existence, a life without a higher, sacred meaning or end. The
Unknown Soldier reposes in his ideological coma like some sleeping knight, and
Transformative Avant-Garde and Other Writings
that lethargy of his is hypnotically contagious. In order to end wars he must be
awakened and brought back to consciousness, and to achieve this we must first
awaken ourselves.
The Józef Rotblat Institute for the Abolition of War
At present, international laws, treaties and UN conventions remain only paper as
long as they stand contradicted by the practices of national cultures, dragging
their ideological patterns and rituals through the centuries. History provides bitter
testimony to the fact that the ‘natural’ process of the transformation of cultures
can be lethally slow. 337
In the effort to advance pro-peace legal measures as real, what is
important is the development of theoretical and practical projects in the cultural
and pedagogical sphere, especially of the kind that engage the young. To make
this socially effective requires an exceptional investment of political will, ethical
energy, imagination, intellectual depth and artistic vision.
One of the conditions for ending wars and maintaining peace in the European
Union, indeed its very survival, is the disarmament of this culture of war, historically
entrenched, even cherished, by its member States—a dangerous condition from
which all Europe suffers, especially Central European countries.
To abolish wars one must first abolish the culture of war. Such a task would
require the creation of a special transformative research center, a working institute
that could develop new methods of transforming a war-based and war-bound culture
toward a culture of un-war and advise national, regional, and city governments in
implementing them. I am convinced that Warsaw would be the most suitable choice
for the location of such an Institute, and that the appropriate site for its headquarters
would be in close physical and symbolic proximity to the Tomb of the Unknown Soldier.
This is the Polish bastion of culture of war. Despite its exceptionally
modest architectural scale, it is a place of the greatest monumental impact.
It is well inscribed in the collective memory of Warsaw as a key symbolic
urban structure. It is a small albeit central section of the massive palace Pałac
Saski or Saxon Palace and the sole portion that survived destruction by the
German occupiers during the Second World War. Through carefully selecting
and preserving ‘injured’ details as ‘war scars’, the Tomb’s architecture exposes
its previous connection to the massive edifice of the Palace destroyed by war.
Before its destruction, this monumental building was the seat of the Polish High
Command, and during the war it housed that of the Wermacht.
Today the Tomb faces the largest of Warsaw’s plazas, which now bears
the name of Marshal Józef Piłsudski (his statue was recently re-sited across the
square along the Tomb’s axis). During Communist rule it was called Victory Plaza,
and during the war Hitler-Platz. In 1794 it also witnessed Tadeusz Kościuszko’s
anti-Tsarist Insurrection as well as the November Uprising, and during the
150-year-long Russian annexation was the site of a monumental Russian Orthodox
cathedral, an imposing symbol of “Russification”.
Today the plaza functions as the designated site for major national
celebrations, commemorations, military and scout parades and other official
patriotic and religious events. More recently a tall cross has been placed on
the spot where the Polish Pope John Paul II delivered the sermon in which he
sanctified Polish martyrdom in war.
With its walls covered by inscriptions of the names and dates of all the
battles fought by Polish soldiers dating back to the eleventh century, along
War/Un-War
 with military crosses, the ritual rhythm of the changing of the guard, and, most
importantly, the Eternal Flame, the Tomb of the Unknown Soldier seems to share
a narrative with that of the Arc de Triomphe in Paris. Its central European context
brings, however, a distinctly different meaning to the Tomb, as the vast majority
of the battles inscribed in it were tragically lost, with the exception of a small
number won at a horrifying cost.
Polish visitors know well that the Tomb commemorates and celebrates
not only an unprecedented sacrifice in war, but also a long history of honorable
defeats and ‘moral victories’ in defense of honor and the uniform, but at the cost
338 of a massive sacrifice of Polish lives. In the heart of those who visit it, it is a
shrine to the cult of national military martyrdom.
Indeed, this specific context of the Tomb is composed of layers of trans-
generational collective trauma—a result of suffering that reached a level beyond
human imagination: uprisings, foreign invasions, massive losses of life at home and
abroad, the bloody toll of European and world wars rolling through Poland.
At the same time Polish national culture does not wish to acknowledge
the fact that Poland and the Polish people have been not only victims of bloody
and merciless colonization by Western, Northern and Eastern Europe, but also
initiators and perpetrators in past European wars and crimes. In this context Polish
identity is built on a double, contradictory basis: firstly on a collective memory of
heroic Polish victimhood, a martyrologia of the Poles, and secondly, on a repressed
memory and history of a Polish colonial past in which Poles were themselves
bloody pacifiers, occupiers, and merciless colonizers.
Martyrologia is the Polish word for the obsessive elaborate commemoration
of those who heroically died for the nation, and of battles and wars heroically
lost, a specific feature of Polish collective memory. This internal split between
the glorification of victimhood and the denial of Polish colonial war crimes lives
in every Polish soul. Forbidden from being brought into consciousness or publicly
acknowledged, this psychological split remains the symptomatic foundation of
Polish collective identity and its preservation continues to be a primary function of
the Tomb of the Unknown Soldier.
The Relation Between The Józef Rotblat Institute for the Abolition of War and
the Tomb of Unknown Soldier
It may appear paradoxical that the Tomb of the Unknown Soldier and the terrain
of Marshal Pilsudski Plaza—so traumatized and soaked in war culture and
martyrologia—should be the most appropriate place for the proposed Institute. I
do not see this as a paradox because I take the position that a process of research
focused on the complexity of the culture of war and on proposing intelligent steps
toward its disarmament demands close proximity to the central place of its cult.
Cultural change is a discursive process that requires the time and work of
generations. Considering and respecting this, and despite its proximity, the program of
the proposed Institute, neither its activities nor its architectural form, should assume
any direct influence over the programs and forms of the existing commemorative or
celebratory events that take place before the Tomb and in Pilsudski Plaza. Under this
stipulation, the proposed Institute could have fundamental symbolic consequences for
the cause and the course of disarming the culture of war and ending wars. Thanks to
the Institute’s research and educational and cultural programs, the symbolic function
and meaning of the entire area will be transformed, a breath of fresh air in a site so
saturated with the memory of martyrdom.
Transformative Avant-Garde and Other Writings
Rather than a symbolic bastion and ideological ‘drilling field’ for
the exercise of the will to fight and readiness for war and consequently its
perpetuation, both sites’ commemorative functions will become gradually
transformed into sites for thoughtful and respectful visiting that will continue to
preserve the memory of historical sacrifice in war, but only as events, deeds, and
losses that should never be expected to occur again.
The Institute’s presence on the very site of war commemoration testifies
to our engagement and collective work to this end. Combining a visit to the Tomb
of Unknown Soldier with one to the Institute for the Abolition of War would be a
double experience: of a respectful and thoughtful commemoration of the sacrifice 339
of war losses with that of an education about the conditions and manipulations
leading to war and potential practical options for one’s own engagement in programs
and projects toward the ending of wars, helping to heal dangerous cultural and
psychological wounds and their social fallout, and thus end war culture.
According to the design proposal—presently developed in collaboration
with prominent artist and architect Jaroslaw Kozakiewicz—the main body
of the Institute would be built underground, under the surface of the Marshal
Pilsudski Plaza, with it’s main entrance located between the Tomb of Unknown
Soldier and the adjacent Saxon Park, the gate of which is marked by the
historic Public Fountain.
To place such an entrance between a site that commemorates sacrifice
and destruction by war and, conversely, a place of regeneration—the cultivation
of life and peaceful social bonds through respectful common use and recreation,
ecological mindfulness and co-existance with nature as symbolized and marked
by the fountain—seems the most suitable for a project aimed at disseminating a
culture of un-war, and indeed the abolition of war itself; building towards a better
life—one worth living—rather than a celebration of death and dying.
The Program
The specific methodology, program, and organizational structure of The Józef
Rotblat Institute for the Abolition of War will need to be developed through regional
and international study involving consultation and collaboration with major
peace-research centers, governmental and non-governmental organizations and
institutions in Europe and throughout the world.
According to the initial programmatic plan, in many ways similar to the
project Arc de Triomphe: World Institute for the Abolition of War proposed earlier,
though with a specific focus on issues and projects for the Eastern European
region, the Institute for the Abolition of War would have the following four
programmatic research profiles that may involve research, public discussion,
methodological development, pedagogy, and public information display and
dissemination as well as conferences, lectures, cultural events, exhibitions and
other forms of work and activities:
— Social, psychological, and anthropological analysis and discussion of war
emphasizing new practice in peace building.
— Politico-ethical and legal analysis of war toward a new practice in
peace building.
— Analysis of culture, art and ideology of war and the present if new
practice in peace building with a special focus on the culture of war and
culture of martyrdom.
War/Un-War
 — Economic, scientific, and technological analysis of war toward a new Un-War Cities
practice in Peace Building.
2012
The Key Objective of The Józef Rotblat Institute for the Abolition of War
While conducting research and advising how to arrest the perpetuation of
war-bound cultural, ideological, psychological, and sociological patterns and
symptoms, the Institute for the Abolition of War would focus on providing
continual support for new analytical and critical ‘work of memory’, a fuller
consciousness of the conditions leading to war, in order to advance the
340 development of new pedagogical, cultural and political programs and methods,
as well as legal measures for war prevention, post-conflict healing, conflict
mediation and conflict transformation.
In these ways the Institute, through research, education and advising
national and European governments, would advance the process of ending the
perpetuation of a culture of war and creating instead a culture of un-war, toward
the ending of all wars, so that the death and suffering of thousands and millions
of soldiers, their families and communities and societies, of entire populations of
cities, regions, nations, in Europe and in the larger, indeed global, world, would
not have been in vain.

A shorter version of this text was originally published in Wodiczko, Krzysztof,

Obalenie wojen, Kraków: Museum of Contemporary Art Kraków, 2013.
War and Cities
The ending of wars requires a massive and co-ordinated global movement.
1 Born in Warsaw Józef Rotblat (1908–2005) studied physics at the University of The inhabitants of large cities and urban agglomerations have
Warsaw and became the Assistant Director of the Atomic Physics Institute of the Free
University of Poland in 1937. He later studied under James Chadwick, winner of the
been especially affected by the devastating impact of armed conflicts,
Nobel prize for the discovery of the neutron, at the University of Liverpool. Despite being especially vulnerable to war and its lasting fallout (human, material,
Rotblat’s apprehension, after the outbreak of the Second World War Chadwick and
Rotblat began to work explicitly on the creation of a nuclear deterrent and in 1944
cultural, environmental and economical) and they should become the very core
Rotblat went with Chadwick to the US to work on the Mahattan Project (1942–1946). of such peace making movement.
However, Rotblat continued to have strong reservations and left the Manhattan Project
on the grounds of conscience. He would be the only scientist to do so.
In time when the proliferation of nuclear weapons increases the danger of
Returning to Britain, Rotblat became senior lecturer and acting director of global nuclear annihilation and bloody civil wars continue to destroy millions of
research in nuclear physics at the University of Liverpool. Horrified by the use of
nuclear weapons against Japan, he campaigned for a three-year moratorium on all
human lives and urban civilizations world wide, global metropolia must act against
atomic research. Turning his attention towards the medical uses of radiation, in 1949 war culture, and war mobilization perpetuated by governmental administration in
he became Professor of Physics at St Bartholomew’s Hospital in London where
his research on the effects of radiation on living organisms led him to an interest
national capitals to protect themselves and the rest of the world.
in nuclear fallout. This work was integral to the ending of atmospheric tests imposed
by the Partial Nuclear Test Ban Treaty. A prominent critic of the nuclear arms race
Rotblat was a signatory of the Russell-Einstein Manifesto of 1955, a document that
Cities as War Memorials
called for world leaders to resolve international conflicts peacefully without nuclear In my old country there is a saying: “Somewhere between the war memorials
threat. Rotblat would continue to argue for the relevance of this manifesto into the
next century as a ceaseless campaigner against nuclear weapons.
there is Poland”, but the truest war memorials are the war torn cities themselves,
Rotblat won the Albert Einstein Peace Prize in 1992, sharing the prize with as are their inhabitants.
the Pugwash Conferences on Science and World Affairs, for which Rotblat served and
became president of the organization. Rotblat won the Nobel Peace Prize in 1995 and
Born in Warsaw in April 1943, I am a child of one such city of war and am
was elected a Fellow of the Royal Society in the same year. He was knighted in 1998 a witness-survivor of the post-war trauma suffered by millions like my parents,
for his peace work. Rotblat is, despite his accomplishments, little acknowledged
in Poland.
grandparents and myself. Like each and all surviving Poles from my generation, I
am too a living war memorial.
As a result of the Second World War, 800,000 inhabitants of Warsaw were
killed: 60 per cent of the city population. At the same time, as a result of systematic
Nazi destruction and earlier damage suffered at the beginning of the Second World
War in 1939, over 85 per cent of the city was destroyed by January 1945.
My post-war memory is haunted by Warsaw as a flattened land of
ruins populated by the psychologically destroyed war survivors trying to

Transformative Avant-Garde and Other Writings War/Un-War

 re-establish their lives, all suffering from the profound loss of those closest to
them, their own childhood, their adulthood and a sense of the future. These
vivid memories inform my public motivation and what I believe is my personal
obligation to do all I can to contribute to the ending of all wars.
 
Cities as Symbolic War Machines
The devastating war memories that haunt city inhabitants exist as a
potent contradiction to the urban cult of war and tradition of official war
commemoration, through which war is romanticized, misrepresented, celebrated,
342 glorified as a landmark of urban and national identity and seen not simply as
something unavoidable, but as something to be admired, even desired.
These war-bound ideas and beliefs, are reinforced with the monumental
help of symbolic urban structures and memorials that act as a stage set for
elaborate mass events such as military and paramilitary parades, commemorative
mass gatherings and other State and city performative public rituals that at once
commemorate and perpetuate wars.
The process of war perpetuation is supported by these glorified
presentations and interpretations of war history that is at the heart of national
heritage and therefore remains guarded against criticism. This prevents the
city inhabitants from  ‘working through’  their traumatic war past, and provides
instead  a quick and fake ‘cure’ in forms of phantasmic escapes from painful war
memory and collective trauma.
In sum, despite their terrible experiences of war that have devastated them
over the centuries and millennia, cities, are set to function as a powerful ideological
and symbolic environment of control over the cultural and national narratives that
perpetuate a global culture of war.
Un-War Cities
To end all wars the cities must begin with recognizing and dismantling the culture
of war that resides within their own collective souls. They must de-mobilize and
disarm the culture of war that maintains the city residents’ ideological readiness for
war mobilization, to fight other nations and, yes, other cities.
Considering all of the above, the city inhabitants, through their social, cultural,
artistic and educational organizations and institutions, as well as their elected
governments, must commit themselves to the transformation of their culture and
politics toward a new un-war vision, identity and peace building process.
They should agree to jointly work on the following tasks:
— Firmly refuse to support war mobilizations, war propaganda and
military recruitment.
— Refuse the building of new and maintenance of existing military
installations, units, and command centers, military academies, navy
yards, military airports and military industrial plants, recruitment centers,
armories, missile batteries and war museums and memorials (unless
transformed into un-war museums and memorials); refuse the continuance
of nationalistic military parades, and war commemorations; and insist on
changing the names of the streets plazas institutions that romanticize and
glorify wars, war heroism, war martyrdom and war suffering.
— Engage in the building of new and the transformation of existing places
of memory, monuments, and institutions that commemorate the past
Transformative Avant-Garde and Other Writings
through critical and pro-active historical and cultural and pedagogical work
that focuses on peace-building projects and on those people and organizations
that contributed to the ending and prevention of armed conflicts.
— Create un-war research and education urban centers to contribute to
new methodologies and practices of conflict and post-conflict mediation,
resolution, and transformation.     
— Create a continuing public education program of exchange between cities
as coalition members in the gathering of historical and analytical research
data and information on their war and post-war memories, experiences and
cultural trauma as recovery and prevention methods. 343
— Engage in cooperation through un-war projects and peace-building
efforts among those cities that were involved in past wars between their
respective countries.   
— Oppose and undo all war-bound ideological pollution of the minds of
present and future generations, especially among the youngest city, against
the effects of pro-war and militaristic campaigns and propaganda efforts
staged by national and regional governments, institutions and organizations.
— Act towards dismantling forever all forms of the culture of war through
deconstructive re-interpretative projects involving war monuments, forms
of war commemorations via a new un-war urban pedagogy, new educational
programs, textbooks, new tourist guides, new urban festivals etc. 
— Following the avant-garde ideas of Robert Filliou, the cities should
engage in an exchange of their war memorials, war films, war literature and
other forms of war art with the cities of adjacent countries with which they
were at war in the past. 
— Initiate and engage in a peace-building dialogue with the cities of
countries with which their own country is at war or is locked in a malignant
conflict that may lead to the outbreak of war in an effort toward conflict
resolution and the shift of a conflict paradigm toward one of common
interest and solvable issues.
Coalition of Cities for the Abolition of War
I urge citizens of all cities that have experienced the tragedy of war to join with
each other and form the seeds of a global coalition of cities that, through a
co-ordinated war-ending program, will work toward the global abolition and end
of all wars.
Located in the heart of one of most war torn cities, and built on the site of
Tomb of Unknown Soldier, the proposed Józef Rotblat Institute for the Abolition of
War would engage in initial the coordination of a global un-war urban peace-
building movement, and become the first rotating headquarters of the proposed
World Coalition of Cities for the Abolition of War.
War/Un-War
Bibliography
Books
Wodiczko, Krzysztof, Obalenie wojen, Kraków: Museum
of Contemporary Art Kraków, 2013 (Polish).
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of War, London: Black Dog Publishing, 2012.
Wodiczko, Krzysztof, Krzysztof Wodiczko,
Duncan McCorquodale ed, London: Black Dog
Publishing, 2011.
Wodiczko, Krzysztof, Propozycja przeksztatcenia
Nowego Jorku w “Miasto ucieczki”, Jarostaw Lubiak
ed, Łódź: Muzeum Sztuki, 2010 (Polish).
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Memorial, Mechtild Widrich and Mark Jarzombek
eds, London: Black Dog Publishing, 2009.
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superieure des Beaux-Arts, 1995 (French).
Wodiczko, Krzysztof, with David Lurie: The Homeless
Vehicle Project, Kyoichi Tsuzuki ed, Kyoto: Art
Random, 1992 (Japanese/English).
Books/Catalogues on the Occasion
of Solo Exhibitions
Wodiczko, Krzysztof and Bozena Czubak ed,
Krzysztof Wodiczko: On Behalf of the Public Domain/
Na rzecz domeny publicznej, Łódź: Muzeum Sztuki,
2015 (Separate Polish and English editions).
Jaruslav, Anděl, Krzysztof Wodiczko: Out/Inside(rs),
Prague: DOX, 2013 (Czech/English).
Wodiczko, Krzysztof and Bozena Czubak ed,
Krzysztof Wodiczko, Przejscie 1969–1979/Passage
1969–1979, Warsaw: Profile Foundation, 2013
(Separate Polish and English editions).
Wodiczko, Krzysztof and Bozena Czubak ed, Krzysztof
Wodiczko: Sztuka Domeny Publicznej/Art For the Public
Domain, Profile Foundation, Sopot: Profile Foundation,
Państwowa Galeria Sztuki w Sopocie, 2011.
Krzysztof Wodiczko: Guests/Goscie, The Polish
Pavilion at the 53rd International Exhibition,
La Biennale di Venezia, New York, NY: Zacheta
Narodowa Galeria Sztuki and Charta Books, 2009.
Potocka, Maria A ed, Krzysztof Wodiczko: Projekcje
publiczne 1996–2004/Public projections
1996–2004, Kraków: Galeria Sztuki Wsp.łczesnej
Bunkier Sztuki, 2005.
Designs fiir die wirkliche Welt. Azra Aksamija,
Marjetica Potrc, Florian Pumhosi, Krzysztof
Wodiczko, Vienna: Generali Foundation, 2002.
Krzysztof Wodiczko: The 4th Hiroshima Art
Prize, Hiroshima: Hiroshima City Museum of
Contemporary Art, 1999 (Japanese/English).
Krzysztof Wodiczko, Amsterdam: De Appel
Foundation, 1996 (Dutch/English).
Krzysztof Wodiczko: Sztuka publiczna Krzysztof
Wodiczko and Piotr Rybson, Warsaw: Centrum
Sztuki Wspolczesnej, 1995 (Polish).
Krzysztof Wodiczko: Instruments, Projections,
Vehicles, Barcelona: Fundació Antoni Tàpies, 1992
(Spanish/English/Catalan).
Public Address: Krzysztof Wodiczko, Minneapolis,
Minnesota: Walker Art Center, 1992.
Krzysztof Wodiczko, New York City Tableaux: Tompkins
Square, The Homeless Vehichle Project, New York:
Exit Art, 1989.
Texts in Books, Catalogues and Periodicals
Wodiczko, Krzysztof, With Reference to Hans
Haacke, Hans Dickel and Oliver Schwarz eds,
Cologne: Walther Konig, 2012.
Transformative Avant-Garde and Other Writings
Wodiczko, Krzysztof, “Miejsce Pamieci ofiar 11
wrzesnia (Propozycja przeksztatcenia Nowego
Jorku w ‘miasto ucieczki’)”, Artium Quaestiones,
19, 2008, Poznań: Uniwersytet im, Adama
Mickiewicza w Poznaniu, Instytut Historii Sztuki,
Wydawnictwo Naukowe, 2008.
Wodiczko, Krzysztof, “Des ecrits de Wodiczko”,
Scene polonaise, Elsa Marie-Saint Germain and
Jeanette Zwingenberger eds, Paris: École nationale
supérieure des Beaux-Arts, 2004.
Wodiczko, Krzysztof, “The Tijuana Projection, 2001”,
Rethinking Marxism, vol 15, issue 3, July 2003.
Wodiczko, Krzysztof, “Przyrzqdy, projekcje,
pomniki”, Maria A Potocka ed, Publiczna przestrzeh
dla sztuki?, Kraków: Bunkier Sztuki Inter Esse and
Vienna: Triton Verlag, 2003 (German/English).
Wodiczko, Krzysztof, “Assemblage”, Canadian
Journal of Political and Social Theory, 23, 1995.
Wodiczko, Krzysztof, “A Response to the New
Museum”, Milena Kalinovska and Deirdre
Summerbell, Rhetorical Image: Dennis Adams, Art and
Language, Jennifer Barry, exhibition catalogue, New
York: New Museum of Contemporary Art, 1990.
Wodiczko, Krzysztof, “Projections”, Hans Baldauf,
Baker Goodwin, and Amy Reichert, Theater,
Theatricality, and Architecture, Perspecta 26, New
Haven: Perspecta Inc, 1990.
Wodiczko, Krzysztof, The Homeless Vehicle Project,
New York: Exit Art, 1990.
Wodiczko, Krzysztof, “The Homeless Vehicle
Project”, Sites, 20, 1988.
Wodiczko, Krzysztof, “City Hall Tower Illumination: A
Proposal by Krzysztof Wodiczko for the Fairmount
Park Art Association of Philadelphia”, Light
Up Philadelphia: Presentations and Discussion,
Philadelphia: Fairmount Park Art Association, 1988.
Wodiczko, Krzysztof, “Conversations about a Project for
a Homeless Vehicle”, October, no 47, summer 1988.
Wodiczko, Krzysztof, “The Wall”, Quintessence,
Dayton, Ohio: City Beautiful Council 6, 1984;
reprinted in Public Projections (brochure), Halifax:
Anna Leonowens Gallery, Nova Scotia College of
Art and Design, 1985.
Books Discussing the Artist’s Work
Kasuya, Akiko, Polish Avant-Garde Art:
Applied Fantasy for Survival, Osaka: Sgensha,
2014 (Japanese).
Cherel, Emmanuelle, Le Memorial de I’abolition
de I’esclavage de Nantes. Enjeux et controverses
(1998–2012), Rennes: Presses Universitaires
de Rennes, 2012.
Desai, Dipti, Jessica Hamlin, and Rachel Mattson eds,
History as Art, Art as History: Contemporary Art and
Social Studies Education, New York: Routledge, 2010.
Deutsche, Rosalyn, “Hiroshima Projection”,
Hiroshima after Iraq. Three Studies in Art and War,
New York: Columbia University Press, 2010.
Piotrowski, Piotr. Agorafilia, Sztuka i demokracja
w postkomuni-stycznej Europie, Poznań: Dom
Wydawniczy Rebis, 2010.
Ronduda, Łukasz, Sztuka Polska lat 70. Awangarda.
Warsaw: Polski Western, Centrum Sztuki
Wspotczesnej Zamek Ujazdowski, 2009.
Nader, Luiza, Konceptualizm w PRL. Warsaw:
Wydawnictwo Uniwersytetu Warszawskiego, 2009.
Heartney, Eleanor, Art & Today, New York: Phaidon
Press, 2008.
Jarzombek, Mark, “The Post-traumatic Turn and the
Art of Walid Raad and Krzysztof Wodiczko: From
Theory to Trope and Beyond”, Trauma and Visuality,
Lisa Saltzman and Eric Rosenberg eds, Lebanon,
NH: Dartmouth College Press, University Press of
New England, 2006.
Saltzman, Lisa, Making Memory Matter: Strategies
of Remembrance in Contemporary Art, Chicago: The
University of Chicago Press, 2006.
Piotrowski, Piotr, Awangarda w cieniu Jatty, Sztuka
w Europie Srodkowo-Wschodniej w latach 1945–
1989, Poznań: Dom Wydawniczy Rebis, 2005.
Foster, Hal, Rosalind Krauss, Yve-Alain Bois, and
Benjamin Buchloh, Art Since 1900: Modernism,
Antimodernism, Postmodernism, New York: Thames
and Hudson, 2005 (and subsequent editions).
Lovejoy, Margot, Digital Currents: Art in the
Electronic Age, New York: Routledge, 2004.
Jurecki, Krzysztof, and Krzysztof Makowski, Stowo o
fotografii, Łódź: ACGM Łódźart, 2003.
Doss, Erika, Twentieth Century American Art, Oxford:
Oxford University Press, 2002.
Turowski, Andrzej, “Wodiczko and Poland in the
1970s”, Primary Documents: A Sourcebook for
Eastern and Central European Art Since the 1950s,
Laura Hoptman and Tomas Pospiszyl eds, New
York: Museum of Modern Art, 2002.
Hirsch, Robert, Seizing the Light: A History of
Photography, New York: McGraw-Hill, 2000.
Piotrowski, Piotr, Znaczenia modernizmu. Wstrong
historii sztuki polskiejpo 1945 roku, Poznań: Dom
Wydawniczy Rebis, 1999.
Deutsche, Rosalyn, Evictions: Art and Spatial Politics,
Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1998.
Fichner-Rathus, Lois, Understanding Art, Englewood
Cliffs, New Jersey: Prentice-Hall, 1997 (and
subsequent editions).
Triggs, Teal ed, Communication Design In Visual
Communication, London: BT Batsford, 1995.
Kocur, Zoya, and Susan Cahan, Contemporary Art and
Multicultural Education, New York: Routledge, 1995.
Gablik, Suzi,The Reenchantment of Art, New York:
Thames and Hudson, 1991.
Lovejoy, Margot, Postmodern Currents, Ann Arbor,
Michigan: UMI Research Press, 1989.
Foster, Hal, Recodings: Art, Spectacle, Cultural
Politics, Seattle: Bay Press, 1984.
Selected Films in Distribution
Art 21: A Publication of Art in the Twenty-First Century:
Season III, PBS series, 2005 (DVD format).
Krzysztof Wodiczko: An Interview, Collection: On Art
and Artists, Interviews, Video Data Bank, 2005
(DVD format).
Krzysztof Wodiczko: Projection in Hiroshima, a film by
Yosushi Kishimoto, Kyoto: Ufer! Art Documentary,
2000 (VHS and DVD formats, French and English
subtitles).
Krzysztof Wodiczko: Projections, a film by Derek May,
National Film Board of Canada, 1991 (VHS and
DVD formats).
Krzysztof Wodiczko: Bunker Hill Projection a
film by Branka Bogdanov, Boston: Institute of
Contemporary Art, 1989, (DVD format).
Acknowledgements
I would like to thank Graduate School of Design
of Harvard University, especially Dean Mohsen
Mostafavi, for the exceptional intellectual climate
and academic support, which greatly contributed to
many writings in this book.
My very special thanks to Rosalyn Deutsche, Hans
Haacke, Jean-Hubert Martin, Chantal Mouffe, John
Rajchman, Andrzej Turowski, and Manuel Borja-
Villel for all exchanged ideas, critical response,
advice, and lasting connection that has been
inspiring and informing my art and writings.
My gratitude to Ikuko Acosta, Edith Ackerman,
Jaroslav Anděl, Dora Apel, Asher Romero, Marek
Bartelik, Carol Becker, Karl Beveridge, Jody
Berland, Saskia Bos, Julian Bonder, Wiesław
Borowski, Peter Boswell, Anne Boyman, Juliana
Bruno, Sherry Buckberrough, Susan Buck-Morss,
Emmanuelle Cherel, Roger Conover, Douglas
Crimp, Christophe Domino, Carmen Cuenca, Kelly
Dobson, Mark Dorence, Toyshiya Echizen, Tom
Eckles, Robert Fleck, David Haanah, Maarten
Hayer, Bruce Ferguson, Tom Finkenpearl, Hal
Foster, Douglas Fry, Dick Habdage, Rafael Rozano-
Hemmer, Alfredo Jaar, Philipp Kaiser, Norman
Kleeblatt, Besel van de Kolk, Jaroslaw Kozakiewicz,
Barbara Kruger, Shinji Kohmoto, Michael Krichman,
Tomasz Kubikowski, Sanford Kwinter, Robert
Ochshorn, Ewa Lajer-Burcharth, Mark Leger,
Janusz Marciniak, Bartomeu Mari, Yves Micheaux,
Bill Mitchell, Stéphane Moses, Hisashi Muroi,
Warren Niesluchowski, Andrzej Nowak, Adam
Ostolski, Kyong Park, Ann Pasternak, Christiane
Paul, Patricia Phillips, Leah Pires, David Lurie,
Lucy Orta, Maria-Anna Potocka, Piotr Piotrowski,
Mark Rakatansky, Michael Rakowitz, Bruce
Robbins, Jean-Christophe Royoux, Piotr Rybson,
Warren Sack, Allan Sekula, Leslie Sharpe, Greg
Sholette, Milada Slizinska, Neil Smit, Kirk Savage,
Doris Sommer, Theodore Spyropoulos, Adam
Szymczyk, Michael Stubbs, Joseph Schwartz,
Orkan Telhan, Nato Thompson, Asher Remy-Toledo,
Hafthor Yngvnson, James Young, Monika Weiss,
Brian Wallis, Hanna Wroblewska and many others,
who—through discussions, interviews, curatorial
and art collaboration—contributed to many ideas
and concepts in this book.
I would like to thank Mary Sabatino and Galerie
Lelong, New York; Galerie Gabrielle Maubrie.
Paris; Bozena Czubak, Andrzej Paruzel and Profile
Foundation, Warsaw for their support collaboration
and assistance in development of projects
elaborated in these texts.
I am very grateful to Duncan McCorquodale,
Hannah Newell, and the team of Black Dog
Publishing for their invaluable editorial work
and advice.
My wholeheartedly thanks to Ewa Harabasz whose
companionship in life and camaraderie in art have
been vital for my work and writing.
Acknowledgements
Index
9/11 5, 10, 11, 304–309, 344 Barthes, Roland 199 Civil Rights Movement 330 El Centro Cultural de Tijuana 225, 252, 291,
16 Beaver Group 315 Basel 248, 249 Clark, Grenville 329 294–296, 298
49th Parallel Centre for Contemporary Canadian Art Bataille, Georges 96, 98, 102, 126 Coffee shops 54, 55 Electronic Civil Disobedience 33, 311, 315
12, 153, 193, 209, 267 Baudrillard, Jean 59, 60, 61, 63, 65 Cold War, the 48, 122, 268 Enlightenment, the 96, 102, 210, 243
Bauhaus 63, 87, 195, 204 Collaboration 9, 25, 36, 55, 56, 63, 65, Eternal Flame, the 338
Abolition of slavery 320, 331 Beaux-Arts 162, 194, 344 75,78, 147, 191, 274, 297, 316, 325, 333, Ethics 29, 30, 64, 103, 112, 115, 123, 132, 168,
Abolition of war 320, 322, 324, 326, 327, 331, Becker, Carol 5, 317, 345 339, 345 176, 177, 227, 228
336, 339 Belgium 129 Columbia University 128, 274, 344 Europe 27, 60, 67, 73, 83, 98, 129, 204, 206,
Academy of Fine Arts in Warsaw 85, 197 Benjamin, Walter 11, 12, 17, 33, 42, 69, 82, 99, Combat stress 119, 120, 260 221, 240, 243, 267, 268, 270–272, 278, 279,
Acconci, Vito 10, 13 103, 107, 112, 121–123, 125, 128, 142, 145, Conceptualism 49 317, 320, 322, 324, 337–340
Act-Up 33 148, 158, 159, 172, 178, 192, 219, 220, 226, Concrete Poetry 131 European Union (EU), the 240, 318, 320, 337 347
Adams, Dennis 65, 148, 344 228, 231, 238, 239, 269, 284, 345 Conflict transformation 82, 84, 274, 275, 296, Experience economy, the 76, 77, 81
Ægis 4, 10, 93, 118, 168, 169, 171, 172 History of the victors 12, 33, 107, 112, 299, 326, 340 Experimental Music Studio 200
Afghanistan 117, 118, 261, 311, 314, 335 121–123, 125, 210, 219, 221, 228, 238, 239 Constant, Nieuwenhuys 74
Afghanistan wars 118 Tradition of the vanquist 107, 110, 112, 122, New Babylon 74 Factor X 289, 291, 293, 295–299
Agger, Inger 238 123, 125, 209, 239, 269 Cottington, David 66, 73 Fast, Omer 71
Agonism 21, 238, 250 Benyskiewicz, Beata 36 Courbet, Gustave 17, 33, 39, 43, 91 Feminism 11, 21, 65, 137, 331
Agonistic democracy 12, 21, 28, 31, 220, 227, Bergson, Henri 58 Creative class, the 77, 84 Ferguson, Bruce W 4, 153–159
250, 302, 309 Bern 204 Crime and Punishment 201 Ferguson, Gerald 46
AIZ 85 Beuys, Joseph 17 Crimp, Douglas 5, 193, 194, 345 Fichte, Johann Gottlieb 268
Alexander the Great 271 Beveridge, Karl 48, 50, 345 Critchley, Simon 123, 128, 175, 226 Filliou, Robert 326, 331, 343
Alien art 99 Birnbaum, Dara 65 Ethics of Deconstruction 128, 175, 226 Finkelpearl, Tom 4, 107–109, 111
Alienation 17, 62, 64, 80, 96, 97, 100, 108, 114, BLOK 197, 204 Critical Art Ensemble 33, 71, 80, 313, 315 First French Empire 325
115, 125, 130, 131, 150, 152, 161, 175, 176, Boal, Augusto 80 Critical Vehicles: Writings, Projects, Interviews 60, First World War 311, 317, 318, 322, 331
179, 215, 242, 273, 294 Pedagogy of the Oppressed 86 73, 106, 128, 162, 165, 167, 171, 344 Florida 206
Alien (law) 28, 96, 98, 99, 100, 129, 130, 131, Bogdanov, Alexander 64 Cultural prostheses 115–118, 266 Florida State University 274
164, 220 Bogota 78, 80, 86 Cultural Prosthetics 4, 115, 119, 120 Fluxus 79, 80, 87, 332
Alien Staff 4, 23, 42, 71, 101–103, 105–109, Bojko, Szymon 195, 197, 199, 204 Culture of war 83, 318–320, 328–332, 337–340, Foksal Gallery 46, 137, 198– 201
113, 118, 126, 129–133, 161–164, 168, 172, Bonder, Julian 42, 345 342, 343 Folk, Richard 329
177–181, 214, 215, 267, 268 Borja-Villel, Mauel 162, 345 Cyborg 110, 164, 180, 229 Fornari, Franco 11, 12, 13, 327
Althusser, Louis 39, 43 Borowski, Wiesław 198, 345 Cynics, the 243, 271 Foster, Hal 13, 65, 73, 345
American Art Critics Award 39 Boston 39, 84, 107, 128, 162, 179, 185, 266, Czechoslovakia 61, 199 Foucault, Michel 8, 12, 21, 22, 25, 28–31, 97,
Ancient Greece 28, 149, 250, 252, 271 283, 311, 316, 345 Czech Republic 264, 269 99, 190, 227, 239, 243, 248, 250–253, 271,
Anděl, Jaroslav 5, 263, 275, 345 Boston Globe 311 283, 299
Andrzej Wajda Festival 216, 217 Bowers, John 145 Dada 56, 63, 64, 70, 131, 200 Foundation for Art and Creative Technology (FACT)
Anthropology 90, 115, 310, 330 Brecht, Bertolt 34, 37, 64, 76, 78, 80, 85, 98, Daimler-Benz AG 210, 211 254, 255, 258
Arc de Triomphe de l’Étoile 5, 9, 11­–13, 42, 43, 242, 256, 282, 298, 29 Daumier, Honoré 18, 85, 331 France 52, 96, 102, 105, 129, 137, 164, 166,
301, 317, 319, 320, 322–327, 333, 338, 339 On Theatre 85 De Cauter, Lieven 66 199, 253, 267, 272, 278, 320, 324
Arc de Triomphe: World Institute for the Abolition of “Ten Poems from a Reader for Those who Live Deleuze, Gilles 31, 71, 94, 123, 128, 258, Declaration of the Rights of Man, 1791 99
War 5, 9, 11, 13, 42, 301, 317, 323, 324, 339 in Cities” 37 285, 325 The French Ministry of Culture 133
Architectonism 69, 79 British Broadcasting Corporation (BBC) 203, 255 Democracy 10, 12, 17, 20–23, 25–31, 33, 43, Franco, General Francisco 11, 13, 42, 51,
Architecture 8, 34, 41, 42, 63, 65, 110, 154, Brooklyn Model Works 166, 171 52, 58, 61, 72, 94, 98–100, 103, 105, 112, 158, 327
158, 184–186, 188, 192, 195, 196, 200­–202, Brown, Wendy 11, 13 113, 122, 123, 137, 138, 159, 172, 175, 204, Fraser, Nancy 21, 25
206–209, 214, 222, 223, 230, 257, 337 Bruguera, Tania 80 218–220, 227, 229, 232, 238, 239, 243, 250, Freire, Paulo 80, 86
State architecture 63 Buddha, Guatma 330 251, 265, 268–271, 275, 283, 302, 309 French Revolution 52, 325
Arco de la Victoria 42, 158, 318 Buren, Daniel 64, 199 Derrida, Jacques 27, 29, 128, 226, 269 Freud, Sigmund 8, 11, 12, 96, 110, 124, 125,
Arendt, Hannah 13, 17, 30, 76, 84, 126, 243, Bürger, Peter 76, 84 de Tocqueville, Alexis 99 128, 177, 222, 273, 309, 329
250, 275 Bush, George W 41, 278, 313 Deutsche Bank 210 Fridericianum 210, 211
Aristophanes 26 Butler, Judith 283 Deutsche, Rosalyn 5, 7, 12, 13, 20, 25, 40, 44, Friedrich, Ernst 18, 311, 331
a.r (Revolutionary Artists) 197, 204 Butler, Octavia 71 148, 193, 344, 345 Anti-War Museum 311, 331
Artangel Trust (London) 65, 133 Dia Art Foundation 65 War Against War 18, 311, 331
Art education 86, 90, 274, 299 Cahan, Susan 90, 345 Dick, Philip K 71 Fry, Douglas P 320, 344, 345
Art in America 321 Cambridge, MA 197 Die Brücke 33 Fuller, Buckminster 80, 85, 88, 91
Art therapy 90, 115, 274, 299 Canada 4, 46, 49, 54–61, 136, 137, 139, Dilworth Plaza 148 Fundació Antoni Tàpies 160, 162, 344
Arvatov, Boris 80 194–196, 200, 244, 266, 269, 345 Diogenes of Sinope 243 Furlong, William 5, 184–186
Astor Building Projection 10, 202 Canada Council 49, 54–56, 59– 61 Dis-Armor 5, 118, 172, 223–225, 249 Fuse Magazine 50
Atelier Van Lieshout 80, 81 Canadian Journal of Political and Social Theory 12, Dix, Otto 331
Atlas Group 33, 315 192, 201, 344 Documenta 8 210, 211 Galerie Gabrielle Maubrie 320, 345
Australia 137 Canhavato, Cristóvão 83, 88 Don Giovanni 155 Galerie Lelong 39, 40, 113, 312, 345
Autonomedia 33, 315 Capitalism 7, 55, 60, 68, 71, 133, 192 Dostoyevsky, Mikhailovich 201 Gallery Akumulatory 137
Avant-garde 20, 30, 46, 55–87, 91, 118, 136, Centre Françoise Minkowsky 133 DOX Centre for Contemporary Art 264, 275, 344 Gallery of Contemporary Art Bunkier Sztuki 217
137, 197–199, 205, 275, 289, 343 Centre Pompidou 320 Dublin Convention, the 240 Gandhi, Mahatma 330
Avraamov, Arseny 80, 85, 86 Cermak, Anton 238 Gentrification 7, 148, 212
Symphony of Factory Sirens 80, 85 Certeau, Michel de 10 Eakins, Thomas 194 Gericault, Theodore 284
Chichagova, Galina and Olga 64 East Block 48, 49 The Raft of the Medusa 284
Bakhtin, Mikhail 220 Children’s Wars 335 Eastern Europe 60, 204, 338 Germany 129, 192, 204, 240, 268, 332
Balibar, Étienne 268 “Cities of Refuge” 10, 13, 304, 305, 309 Echizen, Toshiya 174, 217, 303, 345 Gerz, Jochen 331
Ballard, JG 71 City Hall Park 147, 148 Eco, Umberto 208 Gierek, Edward 51, 137, 196–199
Barcelona 160, 162, 179, 344 City of Refuge: A 9/11 Memorial 5, 304, 309, 344 Edinburgh 184, 185 Gilligan, Melanie 71
Baroque 104, 109, 130, 132, 180, 215, 221 City of the Vanquished 33, 122 Calton Hill 184, 185 Gilmore, James 76, 84
Bartelik, Marek 4, 135, 139, 345 City of the Victors 33, 121 Edinburgh Festival 185 Giuliani, Rudolph 9

Transformative Avant-Garde and Other Writings Index

 Golub, Leon 17, 331 Iraq war 118, 318 Maine College of Art 4, 12, 16, 19 Astor Building 10, 202
Gomułka, Władysław 197, 199 Ireland 184, 240, 296, 335 Malpede, John 315 New Museum Projection 202
Goya, Francisco 18, 91, 331 Italy 129, 240, 243 Manet, Édouard 39, 91, 284, 331 New York 4, 5, 7, 9, 12, 13, 18, 25, 33, 39, 60,
Disasters of War 18 Bar at the Folies-Bergère 284 61, 65, 72, 73, 81, 84, 86, 90, 94, 100, 113,
Graham, Dan 65 Janet, Pierre 31, 32, 120, 237, 238, 246, 253 Execution of Maximilian 284 128–130, 133, 135, 136, 144–148, 152, 153,
Gramsci, Antonio 81, 86 Japan 172, 173, 265, 340 Manhattan 7, 148, 151, 307, 340 162, 179, 185, 186, 193, 195, 202, 204, 208,
Grand Army Plaza Projection 193, 195, 201, 202 Jarr, Alfredo 65 Manhattan Project 340 209, 253, 263, 266, 269, 273, 274, 280, 285,
Gran Fury 33 Jensen, Søren 238 Maquiladoras (border factories)225 286, 299, 307–309, 311, 312, 320, 327, 333,
Great Britain 210 Josh Baer Gallery 152 Marseilles 162, 179 344, 345
Greece 240 Junker, German 77 Martin, Jean-Hubert 204 Battery Park 148, 307
348 Gross, Kenneth 10, 13 Martyrdom 318, 335, 337–339 Bottle Bill, the 146 349
The Dream of the Moving Statue 10 Kabaret Stodota 137 Martyrologia 338 Brooklyn 105, 148, 166, 171, 178, 194,
Grosz, George 64, 331 Kant, Immanuel 243, 250 Marx, Karl 39, 70, 195, 196, 202, 267 307, 318
Groys, Boris 67 Kassel 5, 210, 211 Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) 9, Chelsea 40, 277, 280, 312
Guattari, Félix 71, 123, 128, 258, 325 Kentridge, William 331 13, 25, 60, 73, 89, 104, 106, 111, 113, 120, Clocktower 9, 147, 148
Guerilla Girls 33 Kim, Sung Ho 171 128, 162, 165, 166, 167, 171, 176, 177, 180, East Village 39, 266
Guillaume, Marc 63, 65 King, Martin Luther 330 181, 255, 271, 315, 316, 344, 345 Empire State Building 151
Gulf War, the 42, 100, 158 Kitsch 61, 77 Center of Advanced Visual Studies 171 Grand Army Plaza 148, 193–195, 201, 202
Kluge, Alexander 282 Interrogative Design Group 9, 13, 33, 120, Greenpoint Park 148
Haacke, Hans 64, 202, 244, 284, 331, 344, 345 Kobro, Katarzyna 60, 200, 204 171, 315, 316 Lower East Side 7, 67
Habermas, Jürgen 21, 25, 99, 218, 250, 282, 309 Kocur, Zoya 90 MIT Council for the Arts 171 New York City Department of Parks and
Hajer, Maarten 248, 253 Kollwitz, Käthe 18, 331 MIT Media Lab 104, 132, 166, 176, 181 Recreation 193
Hal Bromm Gallery 39 Kościuszko, Tadeusz 337 Massachusetts Museum of Contemporary Art 18 Prospect Park 193, 194
Halifax 137, 158, 344 Kozakiewicz, Jaroslaw 339 Mayakovsky, Vladimir 70 Soldiers’ and Sailors’ Memorial Arch 318
Haraway, Donna 180 Kraków 5, 214–217, 221, 222, 278, 279, 285, McLuhan, Marshall 160 Tompkins Square Park 148, 266
Harvard University 84, 87, 119, 128, 197, 271, 340, 344 McManus, Carla 258, 259 Wall Street 69, 148, 308
299, 327, 345 Centrum Kobiet (the Women’s Center) 217 Memorials 8, 11, 12, 32, 42, 52, 69, 71, 80, Washington Square 148, 193
Graduate School of Design 87, 345 Kristeva, Julia 96, 97, 103, 110, 123, 124, 127, 96, 188, 195, 209, 212, 228–230, 236–239, Union Square 7–9, 153, 158, 193, 267, 274
Harvey, David 133 128, 130, 176, 177, 180, 214, 269, 272, 273 308, 317–319, 323, 327, 328, 330, 331–333, New York Institute of Technology 162
Heartfield, John 18, 64, 85, 223, 311, 331 Kroll, Lucien 85, 88 341–343 Nietzsche, Friedrich 91, 99, 123, 158, 159, 178,
Hegel, Georg Wihelm Friedrich 311 Kruger, Barbara 21, 33, 65, 331, 345 Memory 8, 12, 22, 23, 32, 33, 63, 69, 82, 96, 221, 242, 323, 327
Helsinki 162, 165, 179 Kunsthalle Bern 204 100, 116, 119, 122, 125, 132, 137, 139, 153, Nixon, Mignon 11, 13
Herman, Judith 22, 23, 25, 31, 33, 88, 118, Kunstmuseum Basel 248 158, 195, 207, 213, 219, 221, 222, 231, 236– Nochlin, Linda 38, 39, 43, 44, 85
120, 227–229, 237, 246, 253, 299 Kuntsch, John 171 239, 253, 256, 271, 272, 275, 284, 296, 302, Realism 38, 85
Trauma and Recovery 22, 25, 88, 253, 299 304, 305, 315, 318, 323, 335, 337, 338–342 No!-place 32, 70, 123, 135
Hiroshima 11, 13, 23, 33, 174, 217, 238, 265, Lacan, Jacques 23, 157 Mexico 225, 294, 296, 297 North America 98
302, 303, 318, 319, 331, 344, 345 Laclau, Ernesto 10, 21, 25 Mickiewicz, Adam 27 Northern Ireland 296, 335
Hiroshima Projection 11, 13, 23, 344 Lacroix, Jean 58 Middle East, the 67, 335 Derry Corner 296
Hirschhorn, Thomas 81, 82, 86 Lacy, Suzanne 81 Military 67, 80, 81, 86, 117, 120, 206, 210, Derry-Londonderry 293, 295
Historic avant-garde 64 The Crystal Quilt 81 259, 304, 308, 310, 314, 319, 322, 323, 325, The Troubles 296
Homeless Projection: A Proposal for the City of New Lafayette, Marquis de (Gilbert du Motier) 7, 148, 327–329, 331, 332, 335, 337–339, 342 Nova Scotia College of Art and Design 46, 344
York 7, 12, 208 158, 159, 185, 267 Minimalism 49 November Uprising, the 337
Homeless Vehicle 4, 9, 18, 80, 87, 107, 108, Lajer-Bucharth, Ewa 5, 195–201, 345 Mollica, Richard 238 Novyi Lef 60, 64
130, 144, 147, 148, 156, 247, 248, 252, 253, La Tribune des Peuples 27 Money-Kryle, Roger 11 Nowak, Andrzej 274, 345
258, 266, 267, 344 Lefebvre, Henri 8, 10, 12, 64 Monumental therapy 229, 237 Nuclear War 329
Houston 162, 179 Lefort, Claude 10, 13, 21, 25, 99, 218, 246, 253 Monuments 5, 7, 8, 10, 23, 30, 32–36, 42, 43, 49,
Hoving, Thomas 66, 73 Léger, Marc James 66–69, 73 63, 65, 69, 96, 100, 107, 109, 110, 118, 121, 138, Occupy Movement 67, 68
Lem, Stanislaw 71 139, 154, 155, 158, 159, 175, 185, 186, 195, Zuccotti Park 69
Ideology 23, 39, 49, 56, 57, 60, 80, 95, 160, Leninist Party 69, 79 206, 208, 209, 212, 213, 218, 219, 221, 228– Occupy Wall Street 69
187, 196, 201, 218, 313, 318, 329, 339 Leninplatz Projection 107 230, 232, 236–238, 241, 252, 253, 256–258, October 5, 9, 12, 13, 44, 148, 189, 204, 207,
If You See Something... 5, 39, 276, 279, 285, Lenin, Vladimir 43, 158, 195, 196, 197 263, 266, 267, 270, 274, 287, 308, 317, 319, 209, 310, 313, 315, 316, 333, 344
311, 312 Le Pen, Jean-Marie 96, 129 320, 323, 324, 326, 327, 330–333, 342, 343 October Revolution, the 86, 158
Immigrant, immigrants 2, 9, 18, 19, 23, 27, 42, Levinas, Emmanuel 10, 13, 27, 30, 101–103, Mouthpiece (Le porte-parole) 4, 42, 113, 118, Ono, Yoko 331, 332
52, 55, 60, 69–71, 78, 79, 82, 83, 86, 88, 95, 126, 128, 226, 228, 283, 304, 308, 309 129, 130, 133, 163–168, 171, 172, 180, 214, Oschorn, Robert 255
101–109, 112, 113, 118, 122, 123, 125–133, Liberty Bell, the 148 215, 235, 278, 286 Ostałowska, Lidia 138
137, 161–165, 168, 177–180, 228, 240, 248, Lincoln, Abraham 7, 69, 110, 159, 185, 263, 267 Movement of the Squares 67 Ostrowski, Andrzej 50
249, 251, 267, 268, 270–273, 277, 291, 305, Lincoln Memorial 263 Mrozek, Sławomir 195 Outer public, the 254, 255, 257, 258, 282, 289,
307, 308, 311–313 Lissitsky, El 39 Muzeum Sztuki 51, 53, 344 290, 293–296, 298, 299
Immigration 18, 102, 103, 122, 136, 162, 167, Łódź 51, 53, 197, 344, 345 ...Out of Here: The Veterans Project 252
244, 267, 307 London 12, 13, 25, 43, 44, 65, 73, 91, 128, N55 80, 88 Owens, Craig 10, 13
Industrial design 115, 133, 153, 154, 195, 197 133, 181, 186, 203, 239, 253, 256, 299, 309, Nancy, Jean-Luc 102, 106
Inner public, the 254, 255, 257, 279, 280, 282, 327, 333, 340, 344, 345, 352 Nantes 42, 344 Paglen, Trevor 71
283, 286–290, 293–299 Nelson’s Column 186, 202, 203 Napoleonic Wars 95, 184, 318, 322, 323, 325 Pałac Saski 337
Institute of Contemporary Art (Boston) 128 South African embassy 202, 203 National Guard (US) 118, 314 Papanek, Victor 74, 80, 85, 88, 91
...OUT OF HERE: The Veterans Project Trafalgar Square 202, 203 Nationalism 95, 212, 269, 272, 273 Design for the Real World 74, 85
(exhibition) 39 Lurie, David 4, 9, 144, 157, 344, 345 Nazis, the 341 Parallel Inc 171
Institute of Contemporary Arts (ICA) (London) 128 Wermacht, the 337 Paris 11, 94, 100, 109, 133, 162, 165, 179,
International Criminal Court 320, 335 Machine Age 97 Negt, Oskar 282 267, 273, 317, 320, 323, 324, 338, 344, 345
Interrogative design 9, 18, 31, 87, 124, 143 MacQueen, Kathleen 5, 276–285 Nelson’s Column Projection 203 Eiffel Tower 320
Iraq 11, 33, 117, 118, 252, 256, 258, 261, 310, Madrid 42, 158, 318 New Museum of Contemporary Art 10, 90, 194, Parrhésía 5, 28, 29, 239, 246, 250, 251, 271
311, 314–316, 318, 335, 344 Mae Weems, Carrie 99 202, 344 Paul 129

Transformative Avant-Garde and Other Writings Index

 Paul, Christiane 129–134 Rancière, Jacques 35, 86 236, 237, 238, 249, 276, 277, 282, 284, 285, Un-war 12, 95, 329–333, 337, 340, 342, 343
Performance art 175 The Ignorant Schoolmaster: Five Lessons in 306, 308, 309, 312, 319, 341 Utopia, utopian 22, 26, 30, 32, 56, 70, 96,
Pershing II Weapon System 155, 195 Intellectual Emancipation 86 Switzerland 204, 248 98, 109, 112, 123, 135, 178, 198, 219, 243,
Personal Instrument 4, 51, 52, 53 Real estate 7, 8, 40, 52, 62, 63, 145, 160, 202, 248, 285
Petrykiewicz, Antos 334 208, 209, 212, 267 Talmud 103, 112
Phillips, Patricia C 20– 25 Real Estate Projection 10, 40 Tatlin, Vladimir 64, 72, 73, 80, 85, 200, 205 V2 Institute for Unstable Media 133
Picasso, Pablo 331 Reijndorp, Arnold 248, 253 Letatlin 85, 200, 205 van der Kolk, Bessel 238
Piłsudski, Józef 337 Remont Gallery 45 Testimony 2, 21, 22–24, 28, 29, 31, 32, 36, 42, Vanhaesebrouck, Karel 66
Pine, Joseph 76, 84 Ricoeur, Paul 8, 12 120, 138, 179, 226–230, 238, 242, 246, 248, van Lieshout, Joep 81
Plato 8 Robbins, Bruce 4, 20, 25, 101–105, 345 250, 253, 279, 283, 285, 288, 290, 299, 337 Varnsdorf 263, 269
350 Pogotowie Społeczne (Social Emergency Group) 36 Rodchenko, Aleksander Mikhailovich 39, 60, 72 Thatcher, Margaret 203 Venice 5, 39, 204, 206, 207, 241, 244, 351
Polak, Jenny 18 Romania 244, 265, 273 The 4th Hiroshima Art Prize 217, 303, 344 245, 265
Poland 9, 26, 27, 36, 38, 43, 45, 46, 48–50, Roma, the 240, 264, 265, 268–271 The Abolition of War (book) 320 Venice Biennale, the 39, 204, 207, 245
52–56, 60, 72, 73, 81, 82, 85, 136–139, 153, Rose, Jaqueline 11 The Experience Economy 76, 84 Vera List Center for Art and Politics 33, 315
154, 178, 195–204, 216, 239, 244, 252, 269, Rotblat, Józef 337–340, 343 The Homeless Communication Network 96, 149, Verbal Arts Center 293
278, 310, 319, 335, 338, 340, 341, 345 Rothko, Mark 17 150, 151 Vertov, Dziga 39, 64
Cultural Department of the Central Committee Rotterdam 81, 133, 162, 179, 253 The Interventionists: Art in the Social Sphere Veteran, veterans 79, 118, 119, 254, 255, 257,
49 Ryan, Cara Gendal 7, 12, 40, 44 (exhibition) 18 259, 261, 333
Industrial Design Council 197 The Józef Rotblat Institute for the Abolition Vietnam War, the 310, 330, 332
Polish Army, the 335 Sachs, Tom 71 of War 337 Visible Collective 33, 312, 315, 316
Polis 8, 29, 35, 95, 99, 102, 123, 149, 160, 175, Saint-Simon, Henri de 39 The Memorial to the Abolition of Slavery 42 Vkhutemas 60, 80, 195, 197, 204
219, 239, 243, 250, 283, 315 Samurai armor 173 The New York Times 100, 146, 148, 280, 311 von Hesse-Kassel, Landgraf Friedrich II 210, 211
Poliscar 4, 96, 118, 141, 149, 150–152, 160, San Diego 13, 60, 205, 252, 294, 298 The Occupied Wall Street Journal 69 Vysehrad 264
257, 266, 267 Sans-Papiers 248 The Prophet’s Prosthesis 4, 124, 129, 181
Polish Optical Works 137 Scandalizing functionalism 18, 87, 247 Therapy 11, 17, 22, 23, 32, 82, 90, 115, 177, Wagner, Richard 87
Polish United Workers Party 195 Scapegoat 38, 43 229, 230, 237, 239, 241, 251, 260, 268, 274, Wagner, Ricjar 87
Political philosophy 10, 115 Schaff, Adam 38 285, 299, 319 Wajda, Andrzej 216, 217, 278
Poole, Roger 11, 13 Schmitt, Carl 250 Theremin, Leo 104, 132, 181 War 5, 9, 11, 13, 18, 33, 41, 42, 48, 70, 73,
Pope John Paul II 337 School of Architecture and Planning 171 The Veterans’ Helmet 119 80, 83, 98, 100, 117, 118, 122, 128, 137, 158,
Popova, Lyubov 64, 72 School refusers 2, 249 Third Text 84 185, 204, 252–254, 256–259, 261, 267, 268,
Poststructuralist 11, 83 Scott, Dread 68 Thoreau, Henry David 330 271, 301, 303, 310, 311, 314–334, 336–344
Post-traumatic Stress Disorder (PTSD) 31, 120, Šebek, Jan 263 Tijuana 33, 225, 226, 230, 252, 253, 274, 289, War crime 335, 336
229, 259, 299, 314, 324, 331 Second World War 117, 137, 204, 256, 271, 291, 293–299, 344 War on Terror 41
Potrč, Marjetica 88 303, 314, 319, 331, 337, 340, 341 Tijuana Projection 225, 230, 252, 253, 274, Warsaw 13, 45, 48, 55, 56, 73, 82, 84, 85, 135,
Poza 135, 136, 138, 139 Segal, Hanna 11, 333 293, 344 137–139, 143, 162, 165, 179, 195, 197, 199,
Poznań 36, 37, 49, 137, 199, 200, 344, 345 September 11th 39, 277, 280 Tolstoy, Leo 330 200, 204, 205, 274, 319, 334, 337, 340, 341,
Praesens 60, 197, 204 Seurat, Georges 97 Tomb of the Unknown Soldier, the 5, 317, 322, 344, 345
Prague 263, 264, 269, 275, 344 Shahn, Ben 331 334–338 Pilsudski Plaza 338
Presentification 31, 32, 120, 238, 246 Sholette, Gregory 4, 66, 67, 73, 90, 345 Toronto 50, 55, 56, 60, 65, 137 Warsaw Projection 138, 139
Proletkult 64, 82 Signum Foundation 36 Toufic, Jalal 71 Warsaw Uprising 319
Propaganda 18, 34, 49, 117, 158, 160, 195, 196, Simmel, Georg 96 Transformative avant-garde 76–79, 82–84 Warsza, Joanna 82
275, 319, 331, 342, 343 Sinn Féin 296 Transitional object 24, 25, 125–127, 176, 214, War Veteran Vehicle 5, 33, 80, 118, 252, 254,
Protest 18, 27, 29, 32, 36, 42, 203, 270, 313, Situationist International, the 64, 65, 80 229, 282, 283, 292 257­–259, 261, 316, 319
315, 332 Slavery 28, 42, 320, 331 Trauma 22–24, 28, 31–33, 88, 114–116, 118, Washington 308
Průchová, Andrea 263, 264 Smith, George 132 120, 137–139, 220, 221, 223, 224, 227, 229, Washington, George 7, 185, 267
Przybylak, Jagoda 162, 171 Smith, Joshua 181 237–239, 246, 250, 252, 253, 255, 257, 259, Weber, Max 98
Psychoanalysis 11, 12, 273, 274, 330 Smith, Neil 40 266, 267, 270, 272–274, 285, 294, 305, 306, Weiss, Steve 171, 345
Public Access 65 “The New Urban Frontier” 40 310, 311, 314, 315, 326, 338, 341–343 Welfare State, the 67
Public art 7, 9, 10, 20, 52, 53, 62–64, 78, 80, 90, Smith, Roberta 280 Secondary trauma 116, 118, 256, 314, 315 Whiton, Adam 171
115, 133, 193, 203, 225, 247, 248, 255, 274, Socialism, Socialist 96 Trent 137 Will, George 145
282, 288, 291, 298, 315, 332 Socialist Realism 38, 49, 197 Tretyakov, Sergei 64 Winnicott, DW 24, 25, 36, 125, 127, 128, 176,
Public Art Fund 65, 128, 133 Social psychology 90, 115, 266, 274 Trybuna Ludu (The Tribune of People) 27 179, 214, 229, 246, 253, 258, 282, 285, 299
Public projections 8, 9, 30, 51, 52, 137, 139, 200, Socrates 8, 43, 102, 168, 271 Turkey 240 “Good enough mother” 71
201, 214, 228, 237, 285, 316 Sohn, Louis 329 Turowski, Andrzej 38, 39, 43, 84, 137, 198, Wodiczko, Bohan 205
Public space 10, 11, 13, 16, 20–22, 28–37, 43, Sołtan, Jerzy 197 199, 204, 205, 345 Woolf, Virginia 11
51–53, 71, 78, 102, 115, 118, 120, 126, 137, SOS Racisme 96, 162 “Wodiczko and Poland in the 1970s” 38, World Coalition of Cities for the Abolition of War 343
138, 149, 163, 214, 218, 219, 220, 223, 227, South African Embassy Projection 158 43, 345 World Trade Center 11, 206, 304, 307, 309
228, 232, 237–239, 245–248, 250–253, 257, South America 297 World Trade Center Memorial 304
258, 266, 270, 278, 280, 285, 287, 289–294, Soviet Union 38, 39, 48, 60, 69, 87, 195, 197, Ukeles, Mierle 81, 82 Wu, Chin-tao 66, 73
296, 302, 320 200, 201, 204 Touch Sanitation 81
Public sphere, the 10, 16, 20, 21, 172, 200, 201, Spain 51 Ulm School of Design 197 Xenologist 103, 132
218, 252, 282, 283, 297, 311, 316 Spero, Nancy 331 “Uneven Development: Public Art in New York City” Xenology 94, 100, 103, 113
Publixtheatre Caravan 331 Spyropoulos, Theodore 316, 345 9, 13
Putin, Vladimir 26, 269 State Hybrid, the 96–98 United Nations (UN) 84, 122, 175 Yes Men, the 33, 315
Strugatsky Brothers, the (Arkady and Boris) 71 United States (US) Yugoslavia 129
Queens Museum (New York) 313 Stuttgart 155, 192, 195 Department of Homeland Security 40, 41
Stypułkowski, Jerzy 171 First Amendment, the 139, 164 Zacheta National Gallery of Art 138
Raad, Walid 33, 315, 331, 344 Support-Surface Group 199 Patriot Act, the 276, 277 Zarugiewiczowa, Jadwiga 335
Rajchman, John 5, 240–245, 345 Suprematism 64, 70 United States Constitution 73 Zarzycki, Wojciech 36
Rajkowska, Joanna 82 Survivors 17, 22, 23, 28, 31, 32, 33, 36, 76, 96, University of California, Berkeley 21 Zhdanovism, Zhhdanovist 197
Rakowitz, Michael 80, 82, 345 108, 114, 116, 117, 118, 138, 223, 228, 229, University of Tijuana 291, 298

Transformative Avant-Garde and Other Writings Index

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