Strike Art by Yates McKee

Author:Yates McKee
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Penguin Random House LLC (Publisher Services)

Occupy Wall Street, Spring Training exercises, March 8, 2012. Banner by Debra Thimesch.

These objects demonstrated a wide spectrum of tones and valences. One end of this spectrum emphasized the negativity of the general strike as a form of subtraction or withdrawal from figurative representation, typically expressed through stark, pared-down forms. The other end of the spectrum might be called the affirmative pole, visually prefiguring the creativity and festivity to be released with the coming strike. This pole was informed by the seasonal narrative of spring (familiar from the figure of the “Arab Spring”) exemplified by the carnivalesque “Spring Training” sessions held each week at Zuccotti Park, devoted to athletically and mentally preparing participants for May Day.

Among the representative examples of the negative pole of the May Day imaginary, we can cite a pair of austere wheat-paste posters found throughout Brooklyn in the spring of 2012. In the poster to the left, a thick horizontal band of red strikes through the white field, creating a division within the plane, with a red circle hovering at the lower right-hand corner as a kind of nascent revolutionary force recalling the agitprop of Russian Constructivists in the early years of the Soviet Union. Accompanying the image is the injunction “ALL OUT,” and at the bottom of the poster, the words “MAY DAY 5-1-12.” In the adjacent poster, a column of different kinds of “workers” is printed in a vertical list descending arbitrarily according to word count so as to create a kind of visual wedge in the overall field. Recalling the reductive, text-based aesthetics of Conceptual Art, the litany is printed in lower-case black font and starts with “communication workers,” ending with “sex workers,” “art workers,” and finally, in red, “all workers.” The red strike-bar inscribes a social division in which “all workers” come to identify as a single element—the red circle—that is nevertheless understood to encompass a potentially endless series of subject positions that only come into a unitary identification when responding to the summons “ALL OUT.” All out—as in all out of the workplaces and into the streets, but also perhaps an exit or withdrawal from the limited identifications prescribed to different workers by the dominant order, an injunction to strike through or cancel divisions through an act of solidarity in opposition to a common enemy.

Another design in this vein of austere aesthetic subtraction is the apparently simple phrase, printed in black against a white background on numerous stickers and posters, “I PREFER NOT TO,” a literary reference to Herman Melville’s celebrated short story “Bartleby the Scrivener.”27 In the story, a low-level copyist in a Wall Street office uncannily repeats this phrase in response to directives from his boss to perform work tasks, to the point that Bartleby eventually is doing almost nothing at all other than repeating the phrase and physically occupying the space of the office without explanation. Philosophers from Agamben to Blanchot have read Bartleby as an enigmatic herald of radical noncompliance, a “human strike” as Tiqqun might put

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