Dear artists of the Manifesta Biennial and events related to it,
I write to you as a fellow worker. I have rejected the role of artist and become the DAta Miners Travailleurs Psychique (DAMTP)
DAMTP has been formed out of the Art Strike biennial of 2009 via discussions with the Industrial Workers of the World. So some other workers are also the DAMTP.
Our specific aim at the moment is to attack white supremacy, patriarch and bourgeois culture. These problems exist in art – and even in the protest movement by artists against the art system.
we will attack your role in the spectacle
we will attack your bourgoisification
we will attack your role in european bourgeois patriarchal serious culture
The art strike in 1970 New York Art Strike Against Racism, War and Repression was organised by exclusively white male artists. It was counteracted at the time by Women Students and Artists for Black Art Liberation (WSABAL), who succeeded in opening the protest action to women and people of colour.
http://ringgoldinthe1960s.blogspot.co.uk/2009/09/excerpt-from-invisibility-blues-reading.html
Successive art strikes have strived to become more proletarianised. When we held the first psychic workers conference in 2011 at the Art Strike Biennial in Alytus, Lithuania we discussed these problems and therefore invited Sudanese and African American workers – we gave talks in Arabic and Urdu and Russian and Lithuanian to counteract western European hegemony.
Why particularly Manifesta? Because it is one of mostly Eurocentric events ever as due to the approach to the meaning, as due to the composition of the artists represented. Also it is because of radical exploitation of the artists – hundreds of the artists are working for free just because of inertial trust towards the white supremacy ideology inherent in the art institution as such and with secret hope to climb it up. We showed an attempt to radically engage with the subject of the attracting the black refugies communities and african diaspora immigrants to join our gathering there in in Hasselt, but it was taken rather as a joke, or at least an „art work“ of the kind. We found it cynical that this year Manifesta is held in the historical location of the mining as continuous form of gentrification and could it be said once again that this will be yet another case of “the eternal defeat of the miners”.
While we reject the role of artist we feel it is important to continue and intensify psychic production to destroy art. This year at the same time as the Manifesta biennial there are Dakar biennial in West Africa, the Berlin biennial and the Documenta are also happening in Western Europe (see http://2012istheseasonfortreason.wordpress.com/)
We will be in these places to attack the continuing bourgoisification, europeanisation and racism inherent in the art system – and to support those artists who wish to resist their commodification and exploitation.
We will be with you in Genk and Hasselt (Belgium) and count for you to join us. See you all soon there, comrades!
infoRmation, intElligence, military operatiVes:
sOcial, poLitical and culTural workers:
PROPHETS SEERS & SAGES:
Join the union of
Data Miners & Travailleurs Psychique
