[The Seven by Nine Squares home page] [YAWN 2] [Art Strike 1990-1993]

20 OF THE MOST DIFFICULT, AWKWARD, & SEARCHING QUESTIONS YOU COULD ASK ABOUT THE ART STRIKE (1990-1993)

  1. What is the Art Strike?
    Art Strike is the total withdrawal of all cultural production for a period of 3 years. All artists will cease to distribute, sell, exhibit, or discuss their work between January 1, 1990 and January 1, 1993.
  2. What art will be struck?
    Art Strike is an assault upon all cultural activity within the modernist and post-modernist traditions.
  3. Strike for what?
    To dismantle the cultural apparatus.
  4. Is this a joke?
    Absolutely not. How can you have shows when people don't even have shoes?
  5. What is the Art Strike?
    Art Strike is the rough undressing of creativity. What an artist considers to be his/her identity is nothing but a divisive set of schooled, snotty attitudes.
  6. What's wrong with being an artist?
    To call one person an artist is to deny another the equal gift of vision.
  7. What will I be if I'm not an artist?
    Think of how many people have gotten laid without even talking about making art.
  8. What's wrong with making art?
    We're living in an isolation tank, only instead of warm water we're bathing in bullshit. Within the information economy, opposition speeds the flow, each statement creates its own negation, context shifts constantly, and the only principle that emerges from the din is the principle of flux itself: consumption.
  9. What is the Art Strike?
    Silence.
  10. What do you expect to accomplish?
    We will step outside of history.
  11. Why should I go on strike?
    Self-interest.
  12. Is this a joke?
    Sure: a joke, a fraud, the worst idea ever.
  13. What is the Art Strike?
    In its origins, just another cocky white-boy spectacle. Now, however, girls are playing too.
  14. What's in it for you?
    We hope to promote our own careers. Of course, only the Strike's failure will accomplish this, so you can't get out of it that way.
  15. Why do so many people hate this idea?
    Because they stand to lose everything they don't have and wouldn't deserve even if they did have.
  16. Will sex be better in the years without art?
    It goes without saying.
  17. What is the Art Strike?
    Art Strike is the ceremonial mask of a movement away from competitive art and toward a culture without curators.
  18. Who's behind it?
    Better a thousand movements fail than one leader succeeds. Anyone can organize the Art Strike, many have.
  19. Why 3 years?
    In the first year, the world will be a field of undifferentiated experience. In the second year figures will emerge from a background. In the third year new perceptual methods will arise.
  20. Why must we stop making art?
    Because the refusal of artistic identity is the only weapon left to us and the demolition of serious culture the only way ahead.
Reprinted in SMILE 11, Glasgow 1989