It’s a cloudy spring afternoon, and fifty students march around campus to protest Duke University’s discriminatory labor practices and a recent hit-and-run by the university’s executive vice president. Speakers lead chants and read statements from Duke workers past and present. After the march circles the quad once, a speaker announces that nine students have just occupied the administrative offices of the Allen Building. When the next day, admins threaten the students with suspension or expulsion, a tent village forms on the quad to ensure that students can film or protest if the administration tries to arrest the occupiers in the middle of the night. The occupation continues for a week, with on-and-off negotiations, and the tent village, known as Abele-ville or A-ville, lasts for three weeks until the last day of classes of the semester, with plans to continue in the fall.
Thompson, Nato. Living as form: Socially engaged art from 1991-2011. MIT Press, 2012.
Occupation is an art form. As Nato Thompson’s anthology suggests, social practice artists often blur the lines between art and life, and, many times, they bring life into a setting in which viewers can see it as art. Performance artists have lived within gallery spaces to experiment with their lives as works of art. Members of Occupy Wall Street were invited by galleries in Kassel and Berlin, Germany to recreate their camps within an explicitly artistic context.[1] Brian Haw’s camp protesting the War in Afghanistan outside the Houses of Parliament in London was recreated by artist Mark Wallinger in the Tate Modern.[2] Like the other encampments recreated in galleries, A-ville was recreated in a puppet show through a theater class at Duke. A-ville brought students’ lives into a public space in which they took on aesthetic dimension. A-ville’s occupation of a public place called attention to its special politics.
Harper, Glenn, and Twylene Moyer, eds. Artists Reclaim the Commons: New Works-New Territories-New Publics. ISC Press, 2013.
Glenn Harper and Twylene Moyer’s Artists Reclaim the Commons describes how public artists have tried to emphasize public and collective space through their work. Even when spaces are privatized, through the act of “commoning,” artists bring what has been private property back into public hands. In that tradition, the Allen Building sit-in reclaimed administrative offices as a commons. Chanting “Whose university? Our university,” Duke Students and Workers in Solidarity asserted that students can guide the university as much as the administrators. The students weren’t occupying others’ space; they were asserting that administrative space was the students’ to begin with. However, by shutting down the building and threatening the students inside, Duke administration belied their claim of the university as transparent and democratic. Having to appeal to trespassing laws to pressure students, the administration revealed the space to be private rather than public. Student occupiers exposed admins’ discourses of accessibility and openness as a sham.
Purdy, Jedediah. For Common Things: Irony, Trust, and Commitment in America Today. Vintage, 2010.
Jedediah Purdy, a political theorist and professor at Duke Law, suggests that North Americans have lost faith in common political project. Taught that interdependence is the opposite of freedom, people ignore the emancipatory power of collective self-government. Although the students with #DismantleDukePlantation revealed the ways in which Duke has been privatized, it opened up the possibility for a more democratic university. #DismantleDukePlantation is run nonhierarchically through several group texts and Facebook messages, in which various movement members can step up to take the lead and step back to take a break. A-ville itself is a model of collective self-government and can help students imagine their university as a commons rather than a private corporation.
de Andrade, Oswald, and Leslie Bary. “Cannibalist Manifesto”. Latin American Literary Review 19.38 (1991): 38–47. Web.
Written in Brasil in a postcolonial context, the Cannibalist Manifesto suggests that artists can devour colonizers’ culture and use it to their own ends. With #DismantleDukePlantation, we similarly appropriated university branding to destroy/remake that branding. Influenced by the arts collective Not An Alternative’s techniques, the movement took on the university’s iconic architecture, basketball culture, and even its hashtags to cast a new light on Duke’s identity. When the protestors stood with fists raised on the ornate, gothic Allen Building balcony above a banner reading “occupied,” the photo capturing their pose circulated in the media and on Facebook. A-ville mirrored the K-ville of Duke basketball fame and thereby repurposed a stereotypical image of Duke spirit in the service of protest. When protestors used #artstigators, a Duke-sponsored brand to advertise the arts, people actually mistook one art action on the quad in which we positioned chairs in front of a Duke statue as sponsored by the university itself. In this way, protestors hacked the university’s brand to amplify our message.
Bishop, Claire. Participation. London, Cambridge, MA: Whitechapel, 2006.
Claire Bishop’s anthology explores the politics of participation, examining the ways in which participation does and does not empower participants. Aesthetically and out of necessity, #DismantleDukePlantation used participation to build a wide coalition and get the movement’s work done. Two group text messages, one with over 120 subscribers, organize talks and events in A-ville. During alumni weekend, we created a banner reading “worker abuse ends now” that alumni helped to paint, adding handprints and their class year. In the week before the takeover, we built the Students and Workers’ Museum of Resistance and Joy, a pop-up museum at the center of campus exploring the history and future of worker and student solidarity at Duke. We had a core group of people make decorations and create an exhibit of archival material, and this involved a dozen people in the process. Then, during the week when it was up, we invited students to hang ribbons on the museum and to create collages to “Picture a better Duke.” When people visited the museum, it was never a finished product; it was always an invitation to take part. Participation in the museum, in A-ville, and in other parts of the movement allowed us to expand our membership and to get broad input. One peril that we keep encountering is that, even with such a broad membership base, few are willing to take the lead to do labor on projects. Most work falls on the core organizers. Few people take the leap from participant to leader.
At the beginning of the #DistmantleDukePlantation movement, few were thinking about the artistic dimensions of the movement. The main focus was on escalation, disruption, and advancing workers’ demands. As the movement has progressed, however, we have understood the need to engage potential participants and subvert the university in unconventional ways. We needed to make our movement compelling enough for others to join. Now, the movement’s leaders often use the language of art to talk about their work. Even if most of them have not read the texts above or taken our course on social art, the concepts from the course have now become part of the movement’s vocabulary. Art has sustained the movement when the tried and true tactics of community organizing failed to produce results.
[1] http://field-journal.com/issue-1/loewe
[2] http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/entertainment/6264311.stm