Interview with Stephen Duncombe

Q: Why did you choose to become involved with art activism? Did something motivate or inspire you?

A: My motivation was very pragmatic. I was doing community organizing in the Lower East Side of Manhattan and I noticed that while politics was something very specialized—and that people, other than committed activists, tended to avoid—culture and the arts were things people flocked to in the neighborhood; they were things people actually enjoyed. As an activist, it simply made sense to combine political activism with artistic expression.

In addition, my long experience as an activist taught me that people get involved in politics for non-rational, non-cognitive reasons. Very few people are politicized by reading a pamphlet or signing a petition; instead, people have experiences—often emotional, visceral experiences—that lead them into politics. Creating these affective states is what art is particularly good at.

Q: What do you intend to achieve through your work?

A: Through the Center for Artistic Activism and our two main training programs—the School for Creative Activism (SCA) and the Arts Action Academy (AAA)—we hope to help create a hybrid practice of artistic activism.

More specifically, through the SCA we teach activists to think more like artists, and through the AAA we teach artists to work with activists to help them think more like activists. With both programs, we are aiming toward the same end result: making more creative and effective actors, and designing more creative and effective means, to bring about social change.

Q: To what extent do you believe that your work has an effect on the contemporary world? To whom and what kind of effect?

A: I can’t make any grandiose claims for our work. We work with very skilled activists and very creative artists in our trainings, and we try our best to help them do what they set out to do: change the world. We try to help them be more creative, more strategic, and thus more effective. If we succeed, then it’s really them who are going to change the world.

Q: In your opinion, what does it mean for art to be useful nowadays?

A: Art has always been useful, even when it insists it is not. Art has valorized wealth, art has set ideals for racial, class, and gender superiority, and art has even created an escape from politics. What we are asking for is art to be self-consciously useful for social change.

Q: Do you think that art is powerful? In which sense?

A: Art moves us. And it moves us by speaking to our senses. It’s a mistake—one made by most democratic theorists—to think that politics is a purely rational affair: rational actors making rational decisions based upon their access to rational information. Perhaps it would be nice if politics worked this way, but it doesn’t.

Politics is about setting—and challenging—“common sense”; whoever sets what a society thinks of as common sense controls that society. Politics, when it is hegemonic, is not something that you think about or contemplate or decide upon. Instead, politics is something unspoken, almost invisible: something you feel or sense. Art operates on this terrain of the sensible.

Art can also shift what we consider sensible—what Jacques Rancière calls the “distribution of the sensible.” Art can introduce new perspectives and shift our very ways of sensing the world. What was once perceived to be noise is then understood as music, or a urinal is thought of as art. This has always been the role of the avant-garde.

Q: How do you think that art functions within an economic system?

A: If art is being bought and sold, then it is a commodity. This, however, is not the only exchange that has to happen with art. Art can be a gift, or it can be a shared experience, or it can be a way of facilitating others’ creations. Art’s economic function has everything to do with its economic context.

Q: To what extent and how do you think capitalism and the ‘rules’ of cultural production affect your work and art in general?

A: We live under capitalism, so there is nothing that you or I do that is not influenced by capitalism—from how we think about our art to the way we brush our teeth. There is no outside; no autonomous realm. But we can be conscious of this fact and, from within this space and within these confines, use our art to reflect back—in the longstanding artistic tradition of mimesis—upon capitalism.

We can also do something even more important: use our creativity to imagine something, someplace different—utopia. These utopias are, as the Greek roots of the word suggest, no-place. They are fictions only imagined within and through our current situation, yet they can give us a direction and a path out of the present and into a new—and as of yet nonsensical—future. Art, at its best, has always done this.