BOOK REVIEW
Seeing Power: Art and Activism in the 21st
Century
By Nato Thompson
Melville House, 2015
165 pp./$20.00 (hb)
Anyone who has been involved in or
SEEING POWER has researched activist art in the past
two decades is likely to be famil
ART AND iar with the work of Nato Thompson.
ACTIVISM As assistant curator at MASS MoCA,
he co-edited, with Gregory Sholette,
IN THE the catalog for the groundbreak
21ST CENTURY ing exhibition The Interventionists:
A rt in the Social Sphere (2 0 0 4 -0 5 ),
and as the chief curator of Creative
Time, he edited the massive anthol
NATO THOMPSON ogy Living as Form: Socially Engaged
'KHIB THOMPSONISI CHIUS.' -m m M HIl WlMtff
Art from 1991-2011 (2012). Whereas
these previous books presented
short essays by Thompson, this new
book-length text provides readers with a better appreciation of the
thoughts of one of the best-known and most whimsical activist cu
rators. Seeing Power is a finely woven and detailed argument on the
issues defining activist art today. With no endnotes, no bibliogra
phy, and no image captions, the book is a pleasant, user-friend
ly experience that discusses the work of leading socially engaged
artists, including REPOhistory, W.A.G.E. (Working Artists and the
Growing Economy), Thomas Hirschhorn, Tania Bruguera, Paul Chan,
WochenKlausur, Yomango, William Pope.L, Rick Lowe, Laurie Jo
Reynolds, Center for Land Use Interpretation, and Trevor Paglen.
From the start, Thompson tells us that Seeing Power is not a
typical book about art and politics, but rather a combination of
philosophy and practice, with observations based on twenty years
of immersion in the activist milieu and the art world (vii). The pro
ductive tension between contemporary art and Thompson's ap
proach to a distinctly American grassroots version of anarchist
politics is the distinguishing feature of this undertaking. It is clear
from the outset that the purpose of conjoining activism with art
is to bring about radical social and subjective change. The capital
ist system is throughout the text an ominous presence affecting
all social institutions and in particular that of cultural produc
tion. Whereas from the title of the book one might have expect
ed a Foucauldian lens through which to "see power," it is Antonio
Gramsci's notion of hegemonic contestation that is first evoked as
a way to define the practices of everyday life and the alternative
spaces that animate the text.
One of the main points of Peter Burger's 1984 text, Theory o f
the Avant-Garde, is that the postwar neo-avant-gardes failed to
sublate art into life in a revolutionary manner and that, instead,
this overcoming of the contradiction was effected by what Max
Horkheimer and Theodor Adorno defined as the "culture industry."
Seeing Power makes a similar sort of assessment of the difficul
ties that have confronted the kinds of activist art that emerged in
40 afterimage
the m id -to -la te 1990s. Referred to variously as tactical media, so
cially engaged art, and Thompson's own "social aesthetics," such
practices have had to confront the problems of commodification
that have affected avant-garde movements since at least the mid
nineteenth century. Thompson is therefore consistent through
out the book in understanding artistic labor and consumption in
terms of the cultural contradictions of capitalism. This, for him, is
a condition that cannot be escaped. What concerns him instead is
capitalism's "ecstatic devotion" (9) to cultural production, its end
less diversification of needs and its overwhelming ability to absorb
anything that reacts against it.
One gets a glimpse of how the ideas of Michel Foucault might,
in fact, have seeped into Thomspon's thinking as he fails to re
flect on the fact that revolutionary impulses were abandoned in
the postwar period along with class politics. What replaces these
in Thompson's description of events are countercultural move
ments, cultural trends, and people organized around new identities
and lifestyles. All of these intermingle with the culture industries
in such a way that resistance becomes more difficult. The silver
lining for Thompson is that this total cooptation allows us to see
power with greater clarity (12). The packaging and reselling of sig-
nifiers of resistance indicates a paradoxical embrace and recogni
tion of alternatives. Thompson therefore situates his thinking as a
post-politics for which, in terms of today's common sense, there
is no "outside" to capitalism. As he notes, the replacement of the
term "culture industry" with the more positive "creative indus
tries" only serves to indicate the extent to which culture and cap
ital are increasingly intertwined. When Thompson closes his first
chapter with the assertion that the artists he discusses operate
self-consciously at the intersection of art and politics, the ques
tion of how it is possible to think politics has already in some way
been steered in an ultimately pragmatic direction. Seeing Power is
less concerned with a productivist and revolutionary art, and more
with art that reacts to the excesses of capitalism. W ithin these pa
rameters, Thompson's thinking flows effortlessly between, for ex
ample, radical art collectives like the Situationists, Superflex, and
Critical Art Ensemble, and that of social movements around alter-
globalization such as the Indignados, Occupy Wall Street, and
Black Lives Matter.
Whereas the critical task for activist artists, Thompson says, is
to create more effective and affective forms of activism (27), one
is left with the difficulty that arises when critical cultural theo
ry has abandoned mediation and the concept of to ta lity in favor of
a more "realistic" capitulation to economic determinism, attem pt
ing to transform the system from w ithin—through spatial occupa
tions, nonhierarchical organizing, and anti-branding—rather than
from w ithout, through cultural revolution, radical political par
ties, and ideology critique. One of the key intellectual reference
points for this book is the French sociologist Pierre Bourdieu. One
gets a sense of Bourdieu's influence in the second chapter, where
Thompson addresses the suspicion that activists tend to show
toward socially engaged artworks that are ambiguous and elu
sive rather than straightforward and didactic. It so happens that
the dichotomy that is used to structure Thompson's argument
43.4
corresponds in Bourdieu's analysis to the class habitus (disposi
tions) of the middle and working classes. Of course, as a result
of more widespread cultural education, the traditional markers of
class distinction are no longer useful. Nevertheless, the outer shell
remains, and so this dynamic between artists' preference for the
ambiguous and activists' preference for the didactic has to be ac
counted for. Giving the example of Jeremy Deller's Iraq war proj
ect, It Is What It Is: Conversations About Iraq (2008), Thompson
emphasizes artistic intention and the use of didactic means to
reach a more complex level of ambiguity where viewers must de
cide for themselves the meaning of a work. When the intentions of
an artist are not legible, the gap between the artist and the audi
ence may widen, but this at least allows the work to escape singu
lar interpretations. Thompson's insight is that in an unambiguous
world of exchange relations and media manipulation, an atm o
sphere of "visual suspicion" is created in which people become
paranoid and m istrustful (46).
While he could have made productive use of Slavoj Zizek's discus
sion of the weakening of symbolic efficiency and the interpassivity
of belief, Thompson opts for a somewhat more naive theory of para
noia regarding the ambiguous gesture. This comes into play in an
other chapter where Bourdieu's influence is present through the use
of concepts like cultural and social capital. Unlike Bourdieu, howev
er, who developed these ideas as a means to go beyond vulgar mate
rialism, Thompson is once again more deterministic in his emphasis
on how the quantitative increase in exchange relations and the fact of
cooptation make social capital the object of paranoia. Here too, how
ever, there is a saving grace for living as capitalist form. When one's
authentic street cred and radical merits are offered up to bigger in
stitutions and subsumed by capitalism, when social networking and
the accumulation of social capital become necessary for survival in
a world with more demands and fewer job opportunities, we might,
he suggests, ease up on denunciations of careerism and selling out.
Since the logic of neoliberalism is to set people against one another,
Thompson argues that politically minded people should work to build
trust and social cohesion rather than satisfy themselves with outings
and purges (88,164). The activist artist who can build social capi
tal and better navigate more fields and infrastructures has a better
chance of effecting change.
The notion of infrastructure is the central concept of Seeing
Power. The organizational capacity of activists to develop sus
tainable alternative spaces, or "infrastructures of resonance,"
marks what Thompson refers to as a shift from temporary ta cti
cal actions to long-term strategic structures that can also act as
"transversal" sites of becoming (131). In this sense, new groups
like Gulf Labor A rtist Coalition are picking up where people orga
nized around A rt Workers' Coalition left o ff in the late 1960s. If
the world is full of complicated bureaucracies and interconnect
ed infrastructures that shape our lives, then these spaces can be
occupied, reclaimed, or created from the ground up in such a way
that their impact can accommodate new forms of collective in
tersubjectivity. New infrastructures like the Journal o f Aesthetics
and Protest or 16 Beaver Group give themselves the power to le
gitimate practices and lend activist artists the kind of recognition
43.4
they may not otherwise receive in the mainstream media and ma
jor art institutions. Thompson's personal experiences living in a
student co-op in Berkeley and working with Temporary Services in
Chicago offer some insights into the fact that art institutions need
not be run like businesses but could instead be far more integrat
ed with everyday life, and with the need for communion with o th
ers through mutual networks. He writes: "This ability to read a
phenomenon based on the infrastructures of resonance around it
is what I refer to as seeing power" (72). Such infrastructures ben
efit the ambiguous artistic gesture by couching it in a world of
discovery and connection rather than the underlying neoliberal
economy. Thompson's experience as a high-level curator here al
lows for some understanding of the failings of what he refers to as
the "nonprofit industrial complex," with its increasingly conserva
tive values and financial pressures (77). New infrastructures might
therefore legitimate activist practices while at the same time pro
vide added social capital for its users.
Although we all need to make money to survive, there is no
need, Thompson says, to abandon our radical ambitions (104).
However, it is never altogether clear in Seeing Power to what ex
tent cultural capital per se is ever anything more than a cipher for
social relations under capitalism. Such is the influence of the the
oretical immanentism than defines radical thinking under the in
fluence of people like Felix Guattari and Antonio Negri. Because of
this lim itation on the subject of ideological reflection one cannot
consider Seeing Power to be a work with much bearing on art the
ory. As Thompson says humorously: "If the art world were a car,
we have handed over the transmission, engine, body, and tires so
we can work on the windshield wipers" (80). So much for the art
world as far as many social movement activists are concerned.
But what about the other side of this equation—the one that
makes an activist supposedly anti-capitalist? Thompson's book
avoids the opportunity to more rigorously critique capitalism. This
might seem an unfair assessment given the fact that capitalist
cooptation is mentioned at every turn. However, instead of a rad
ical ideology critique, Thompson's default intellectual horizon is
a social constructionist discourse theory. Of course he can hardly
be blamed for the current academic intellectual hegemony, and no
one to my knowledge has found an adequate solution to capital
ism. Thompson nevertheless broaches the issue when he writes:
"This contradiction of [cultural] content and capital is part and
parcel of the very fiber of contemporary art" (49). In this sentence
he is very close to identifying capital as form. Had he followed up
on this insight he might have further considered ways to escape
the perverse loop of power and resistance. But then, had he done
so, his book would have been about revolution and dialectics rath
er than today's forms of biocapitalist activism. The strength of
Seeing Power lies in its discussion of practices of cultural resis
tance. Despite my criticisms here, I consider the book a welcome
addition to the ongoing debates within social practice art.
MARC JAMES LEGER is an independent scholar living in M ontreal. He is au
th o r o f Brave New A vant Garde (2012) and Drive in Cinema: Essays on Film,
Theory and Politics (2015).
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