\’The Dystopia Files\’ at g-mk is the newest iteration of Mark Tribe\’s ongoing project, which recontextualizes the history of demonstrations in the US. Tribe had gathered an archive of protest footage, which serves as a base for creating site specific video installations in gallery and museum spaces. The work poses the questions about power relations, spectatorship, image manipulation, participation, interaction and political engagement.
rnThe relationship between these issues and recent curatorial practices will be discussed during the workshop held by the artist. In a lecture following the workshop, Tribe will present his multimedia artistic practice, including his acknowledged projects such as Rhizome and Port Huron.
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The exhibition is curated by ®eljka Himbele Kožul.
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Photo credit: Marko Ercegovic
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Mark Tribe, The Dystopia Files
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Public protests, demonstrations and rallies on the streets, with their origins going back to the nineteenth century, have historically shown how people, by acting together, gain an active role on the political stage. Getting out on the street presumes claiming a certain territory and occupying places of historical or symbolic connotations. The street becomes a stage for the conception and execution of public events, offering participants the possibility of being present and visible, directly expressing feelings and beliefs and creatively showing resistance and dissatisfaction with existing conditions. These events facilitate bonding among the like-minded, and interaction between the proponents and opponents, as well as communicating with the society at large. Because they establish alternative forms of political agency, mass mobilizations are usually treated as threats by traditional political structures. Their inherent subversion, potential for political impact, and complex, continuously changing and fluid dynamics can rarely be predicted or completely controlled. As a result, street protests are almost always policed by state agencies, which use various forms of repressive power against them.
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Mark Tribe’s The Dystopia Files—a series of video installations and performances, each time adjusted to a particular exhibition/theatrical venue—derives from an archive of video recordings of public interactions between police and protesters. Assembled by the artist, this archive contains footage shot by activist groups, journalists, external observers, the artist himself, and, significantly, by the police. The project is exclusively focused on documentation of North American protest actions that took place after 1999—the year in which the historic demonstrations against the World Trade Organization in Seattle took place. While this event was important for the geographical spreading and worldwide mobilization of the counterglobalization movement, it also marked an important shift in the forms and structures of grassroots organizing and public protest. The so-called “Battle of Seattle” also triggered significant changes in the security measures employed by the police and security companies, including increased surveillance, infiltration of activist groups, the use of alternative weapons, and various other tactics including preemptive arrests.
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But Tribe is not exclusively interested in the socio-political and historical circumstances which triggered and/or modified these protest actions. Rather, by recombining and recontextualizing clips from his archive, the artist draws attention to the ritualistic and theatrical aspects of protests and conflicts. He focuses on grouped bodies and mobilized crowds, which often appear to perform scripted actions for the omnipresent cameras. Tribe’s work resonates with current interdisciplinary studies of modern forms of local, national as well as transnational protests, which are seen as a fusion of different historical, choreographed public presentations and processions, since they appropriate traditional military, monarchical, ecclesiastical and vernacular forms within the urban setting. These forms continuously evolve and alter throughout history in relation to wider social, economic and political conditions. Even in the age of the Internet, the setting of the street still holds the strongest potential for unsanctioned political communication. As most recently demonstrated in the “Arab Spring” uprisings of 2011, activists now use social networks in conjunction with mass media to plan, coordinate and represent their collective actions. Accordingly, there is an increasing awareness of scripted behavior, prescribed roles, and performing in front of the cameras. All of the parties involved in today’s protests pay special attention to video documentation, mediation, dissemination and manipulation with the recorded visual information and its unstable meaning, in various public spheres and for different purposes- the issues which are precisely in the focus of Tribe’s multimedia projects.
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The Dystopia Files (2009-2011), like Tribe’s previous and in many ways related Port Huron Project (2006-9), analyzes and questions the possibility of fruitful political engagement and resistance to structures of power in the present and the past, as well as the political role of art. In naming the Port Huron Project, Tribe appropriated the title of a manifesto adopted by the Students for a Democratic Society at a 1963 meeting in Port Huron, Michigan. This text was widely distributed and exterted a strong influence on American activists in the 1960s and ‘70s. While The Dystopia Files concentrates on public protests, Tribe’s former work elaborated the public speech as a political agency. It consisted of public reenactments of several influential protest speeches from this era, delivered by prominent leaders of the New Left movements, at the exact locations in several American cities where the original speeches were delivered. Tribe casted professional actors to deliver speeches by Coretta Scott King (widow of Martin Luther King, Jr.), Howard Zinn (a well- known historian and social activist), Paul Potter (President of Students for a Democratic Society organization), César Chávez (a charismatic Chicano labor activist), Angela Davis (a prominent left- wing political activist), and Stokely Carmichael (Black Power activist and a leader of the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee). These historical speeches linked issues of civil rights, institutional racism, class and poverty to the Vietnam War and militarism- representing the New Left’s focus on the complex interconnectedness of all of these issues, and the importance of collaborative actions in addressing them. All of the actors delivered poignant speeches which strikingly resonate in today’s political circumstances. Later, they were distributed online, screened in public spaces, and exhibited in the form of panoramic video installations which simulated the rally stage in a gallery setting, creating—after the re-enactments in situ and their video recordings—a third level of mediation and alienation from the authentic archival material.
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In these two projects, then, Tribe unravels and re-contextualizes the historical legacy of political protest and its documents; he edits the footage in a restrictive way which results in the estrangement of visual information, so that the material seems simultaneously familiar and odd, and then further juxtaposes this imagery with the real time experience of the viewer in the gallery. In Zagreb, The Dystopia Files takes a form of an interactive three- channel video installation, with muted projections stripped of their original soundtracks and running on a loop, featuring dynamic excerpts from the protest videos. The work playfully incorporates specific architecture of The Miroslav Kraljevic Gallery; since the door and the entrance wall are entirely made of mirror glass, the artist painted them in black, leaving only one unpainted horizontal stripe running accross this sleek glass surface. Through this intervention, the surface is accentuated as a barrier between the indoors (a “neutral” white cube exhibition space) and the outdoors (the city architecture, streets and common passers-by). The stripe which allows for looking inside gains an ambivalent character; while it invites the viewer to take a clandestine peek of the protest footage and the current situation inside the gallery, it also simulates the mirror surfaces of surveillance cameras, reflecting the viewer’s features which, depending on the time of the day, visually blur with the gallery interior. Furthermore, the reflecting glass, together with the projections that appear as cuts in the gallery walls to look through, create the effect of double window and further complicate the categories of inside and outside, inclusion and exclusion.
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Upon entering the gallery, the motion sensors register the viewer’s body and movement. This suddenly censors the projected imagery by uncovering its basic structure- the protest videos are transformed into red, green and blue fields of color, with the colors implying the RGB color model in which red, green and blue serve as the basis for creating a wide range of colors, as well as the foundation for creation and reproducion of any image through an electronic system. The new setting created by the viewer in an almost empty, clean gallery space also brings to mind more conventional modes of a gallery display, while the color fields become reminiscent of monochromatic painting and its variations throughout the last several decades. The created situation, therefore, can also be perceived as the artist’s comment on High modernist, self- referential tendencies in the art of the past as well as of today, and the ways they shape predominant modes of artistic rendition, production, presentation and consumption.
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The protest footage starts running again only if the viewer stands motionless in the gallery. While holding still surrounded by the videos certanly puts the viewer in demanding situation, it also can be interpreted as an efficient method of becoming an active protagonist in the created ambiance, i.e. hacking the surveillance system implemented in the gallery. Moreover, with more than one beholder present, for the videos to start running again, coordination, communication and acting together is required – as much as in all the actions captured in the protest videos. Accordingly, the visitor in The Miroslav Kraljevic Gallery continuously shifts among various positions: from the spy and the passive consumer to the active participant.
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Tribe’s work balances between melancholic resignation, which epitomizes today’s predominant attitude towards positive changes in the society and the possibility of an active political engagement (especially in relation to the worldwide, widespread revolutionary enthusiasm of a few decades ago) and optimism. Indeed, while mass protests often fail to achieve their immediate goals, the success of any protest can be measured not only by its impact on public opinion, but also by the impact of this specific collective experience on the participants themselves. The Dystopia Files asks us to rethink the complexity of our own position vis-à-vis protest within a current, dystopian state of affairs. Through utilizing the viewer’s participation and metaphorical speech, it examines the possibility of acquiring dissenting agency in various public spheres including the cultural production, acting as a corrective of today’s political processes and structures, and contributing to a productive political discourse.
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Zeljka Himbele Kozul
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Mark Tribe (b. 1966) graduated in 1990 from Brown University, Providence, RI, and received a MFA in Visual Arts from the University of California, San Diego, CA in 1994. His acclaimed art projects often incorporate various media and technologies. They revolve around institutional critique, activism, audience participation and collaboration, and raise questions about performance, mediation and public sphere. Tribe’s art work has been exhibited at Wexner Center for the Arts, Columbus, OH; LACE (Los Angeles Contemporary Exhibitions); Ronald Feldman Gallery, New York, NY; the DeCordova Biennial at DeCordova Museum and Sculpture Park, Lincoln, MA; Aspen Art Museum, Aspen, CO; Park Avenue Armory, New York, NY; Haifa Museum of Art, Haifa, Israel; and the National Center for Contemporary Art, Moscow, Russia. He has organized curatorial projects for the New Museum of Contemporary Art, MASS MoCA, and inSite_05. Tribe is the author of two books, The Port Huron Project: Reenactments of New Left Protest Speeches (Charta, 2010) and New Media Art (Taschen, 2006), and numerous articles. He has lectured at CalArts, Goldsmiths College, the Boston Museum of Fine Arts, MIT, and UCLA. He is Assistant Professor of Modern Culture and Media Studies at Brown University, where he teaches courses on digital art, curating, open-source culture, radical media, and surveillance. In 1996, Tribe founded Rhizome, an organization that supports the creation, presentation, preservation, and critique of emerging artistic practices that engage technology.
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rnThe exhibition is supported by: Ministry of Culture, Republic of Croatia; City of Zagreb – City Office for Education, Culture and Sports; Embassy of the US, Zagreb
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rnSpecial thanks to: Helena Anrather, Glassbead Collective, Larry Hildes, Ariel Hudes, Zinka Ivanković, Sarah Kay, Ivan Marušić Klif, Ron Kuby, William Linn, Ines Loje, Brandon Neubauer, Nikita, Shruti Parekh, Sarah G. Sharp, Time\’s Up Video Collective, Sunčana Tuksar
