Manifesto on Interventionist Art

Artistic Interventions: Moving from Uselessness to Failure
“All art is quite useless.” --Oscar Wilde
All art was quite useless. No more. Now all that can be art has a function, if only to be Art. Art can no longer become itself by virtue of the excellence of a piece's production yielding beauty. Advertisers are, perhaps, the most technically proficient artistic creators today, and what they create is as far from art as rape is from love-making.All that is produced is produced with the techniques and tactics that artists have developed. This art in and of production is not limited to pieces meant for spectators. If a boundary can be placed between creating a piece of art and creating a piece of technology, it parallels that boundary between -do and -jutsu in Japanese Martial Arts. That boundary is at once dissolved and reformed through a moment of conflict, and a moment of conflict is precisely what an intervention creates.

An artistic intervention must restore art and in so doing humanity without denying what both have become: Contemporary reality is mankind's collective creative endeavor produced through and with technology. This reality is experienced, is felt, through the application of the same aesthetic principles which allow any piece of art to generate an emotional response in its viewer.

Hierarchies of complexity and tradition seem to provide a way to distinguish Fine Art from pop-art and pop-art from a homework assignment, but such efforts mistake a diffusion of artistic practices for a fragmentation of art itself. The problem facing art is one of diffusion not fragmentation, and the solution to diffusion is concentration not formalized division. A re-concentration of what is truly artistic about art requires an injection pure of uselessness.

Uselessness is that which resists functionality, efficiency, and acceleration. All of which are essential attributes of that system on which contemporary reality runs. Uselessness demands slowness which sets the stage for contemplation. Uselessness, however, does not translate into the language of systems. Error does: Error as an indicator of that failure which an intervention must generate.

To speak of the System is to evoke the antagonist of the conspiracy theorist or the teenage rebel. That whole which such evocations represent does not exist. There is no system outside of that which can be represented not as such but by such a term. The System is the representation of that internal pressure the contemporary citizen responds to when existing as a user. This response is trained through a person's interactions with various systems: the education system, the healthcare system, etc.
Interventionist art must expose the fine print of the user-agreement spelled out through a person's training while receiving the benefits of these sundry systems which contribute to that pressure represented by The System. In so doing an intervention reminds the user that he is a person first and a participant in these systems by choice - if not necessarily his choice. Interventionist art must expose the artifice of those institutions which have been naturalized through the inscription into the subject of his role as a user.

To illustrate this type intervention with a metaphor, let us imagine that being the user of a web-browser is analogous to being a user of The System. Interventionist art is never the image, text, movie, or song which has been browsed regardless of its quality. A piece of interventionist art is that which generates an error message in the place where the image ought to be. This error message suspends the virtual experience of browsing. It frustrates that in the user-system relationship which is equivalent to the willing suspension of disbelief in theater's relationship between audience and play.

Reality is our interface for The System. We login through those documents and identities we accumulate while living: birth certificate, social security number, passport, nick-name, Facebook profile, mental health diagnosis, World of Warcraft character.

There are naturally occurring errors. These are moments when the human being making use of its identity feels misrepresented and yet bound to the representation. These errors tend to manifest in acts of violence toward oneself or others. Artistic intervention must recreate that intense experience of misrepresentation, but in place of pain, panic, or violence, the artistic intervention must offer a way to heal and liberate. It must return to the user its humanity, where humanity represents consciousness with the potential for empathy and imagination. The artistic intervention must accomplish all this without denying the functional importance of reality or the systems it allows us access to.