Ode to Art School / Wednesday on Edgewood Ave
lazz:
from lazzThe last assignment of an intro studio art class is to respond to the question “What would you create—anything at all—if you were not limited by time, space, or resources?” For what the instructor names ‘The Impossible Project’ each group is to draft + present a proposal for a public art project (that must ‘benefit the community’) which would then be given a yay or nay by the “board members.” Some previous group, for example, drafted a clothesline that stretched across the Atlantic ocean to other continents: an exchange machine where people could send and receive clothes from outside their country. (Whatever.)
The class separated into groups and threw around ideas. After a while I started talking about how the $300 billion bailed out the banks and the banks are foreclosing houses, completely uprooting/degrounding people. So in the spirit of ‘That’s public money, the houses belong to the public now’ I proposed that we draft an enormous reclamation of foreclosed houses and/or empty buildings across Atlanta. We could draw a blueprint and devise a system that would house people (no public housing in ATL), starting with Atlanta’s legendary largest abandoned building—City Hall East. CHE is bigger than the mall of Georgia. Plenty of people’ll tell you it’s “impossible” to re-prioritize our social environments according to ideals, right.
After I laid it on the table the rest of the group (18, 19, 20 years old) shuffled around and nodded. “That’s cool,” trailing off. A young, whiny girl defiantly asserted that those people got kicked out of their houses because “they bought houses and loans they couldn’t afford, they knew they couldn’t afford them” with that ignorant, hollow sound characteristic of anyone repeating shit they heard once. After my response she remained completely unmoved. “Ehh, yeah…that’s just like too political. I mean that’s like a social…project, not really art. Like what’s artistic about it? It’s political and I want to make something, more, beautiful you know.”
So someone suggested that we transform City Hall East into an art school for people in the “community” to come to.
I got up mentioning the restroom, gone for longer than could be excused for any bathroom break. When I got back the notetaker leaned forward and told me “We’re thinking about doing something more impossible, like something in outer space maybe. Just wanted to fill you in since you’ve been gone.” Class was ending. Told her thanks but actually meant ‘You don’t even give a shit about people here, what the fuck are you gonna do in space?’
On my walk to the free parking space I’ve managed to find downtown I passed the park where everybody without home comes to absorb warmth while the sun’s out. Their shopping carts and sleeping blankets turned burden in the daytime hours. I passed the biting smells of urine down Edgewood ave, the scattered lottery tickets, so many houseless wanderers too internally frozen to give a shit about passersby. Finally, I’m under the bridge where I park, walking on the same ground their bodies sleep on.
I hate ‘art.’ I fucking hate these people. I’m enraged and sweating, I don’t sweat. Tears are making my eyes fuzzy and my face is burning and I’m smelling the piss on cold concrete.
If that’s not art I don’t give a shit about art.
When I had nowhere to go once, a very aged someone taught me that a way to stay warm when you have no heat is to never wash your clothes. It traps body oil and keeps in the heat.
I saw an incredible thing last week. Two lines of very poor seeming, possibly homeless black men were marching in unison down Auburn Avenue, the street where MLK Jr grew up. Their clothes worn and tinted with earth tones, being led by another homeless drill sergeant. Fanon came to mind: “The violence which has ruled over the ordering of the colonial world…that same violence will be claimed and taken over by the native at the moment when, deciding to embody history in his own person, he surges into the forbidden quarters.” My only thought then, and even more now, was I hope they’re doing what I hope they’re doing.
freeganism
someone somewhere (this person right here, in fact) posted about freeganism; a few reblogs later, whycantibehim rightfully pointed out an important and possibly uncomfotable fact:
In places like Santa Cruz, at least, when you’re homeless it’s really hard to find edible food because all the bakery discards and things like that have been taken by college student freegans who are making the choice but can afford to sustain themselves. I’m not kidding. It’s a real problem. I would know.
transartorialism replied:
word. i was gonna start dumpstering but then i stopped, because it isn’t my place to steal food from folks when i have the resources to get it on my own. it’s tricky.
creatureboy replied to that:
Dumpstering isn’t stealing, it’s taking what’s yours by right from capitalism…
which lead to transartorialism saying:
i know dumpstering isn’t stealing (at least from the rich/the system [whatever that means], and i have few qualms about stealing, at least in its definition via capitalism); i used that word in response to the quote i reblogged, because in a lot of ways dumpstering is stealing from folks who have less resources than i do. […]
in general i am frustrated with a lot of sentiment in activisty/anarchisty spaces that claim things like dumpstering, shoplifting, and other stuff as only hurting capitalism and not hurting people who might need those resources more.
it’s tricky, and i know that, and i should have written more last night to explain how i feel. but i’m also a little mad at folks who told me why i shouldn’t be uncomfortable dumpstering and who decided to give me a dumpstering 101. […] dumpstering didn’t (and shouldn’t) give me socialist points, or make me a cooler person, or mean that i acquired food outside the capitalist system.
i’ve got to agree with transartorialism on multiple points here; mostly that it’s all tricky and that the way a lot of activisty and anarchisty folks approach dumpstering is pretty busted
it’s tricky because i feel like one big thing neoliberal capitalism does is to convince people that they surely aren’t poor enough or exploited enough or marginalized enough to matter or to deserve things: “my life isn’t that bad, there’s always someone worse off than me, other lives are oh so terrible so what right do i have to complain or to get free things or to steal or to receive help from the government or from the community …”
and this is clearly fucked insofar as it can keep pushing the bar demarcating ‘the deserving’ from ‘the undeserving’ lower and lower and lower untill there’s only a tiny little group of ‘the deserving’ left if anything, and there’s this gross attitude that ‘we’ need to work on behalf of ‘them’ because of course ‘we’ couldn’t possibly really be exploited by the system because ‘we’ went to college or because ‘we’ can usually pay rent on time or whatever, and ‘they’ are just so very marginal and powerless they couldn’t possibly ever work for themselves
and also because it attaches this weird and tragic moral value to getting what you need, like there should be a certain amount of suffering you should be required to go through before it’s ok to steal or to use government benefits or to game the system to get stuff
but
i’ve definitely met a lot of activisty and anarchisty folks who act as if they genuinely think that the idea of eating food from a dumpster was invented by some punk kids some time in the past twenty years or so
a lot of these folks (and these folks are usually but not always white and from a middle or upper class background) really really do not realize that a lot of homeless people, often racially marginalized people who’re criminalized pretty much just for being poor and hungry, eat food from dumpsters and trashcans to survive
even well-meaning (or ‘well-meaning’) food not bombsy kids can think like this; i remember a FNB meeting several months ago where a visibly middle-class and white punk kid who i mostly like a whole lot told a really uncomfortable story about how they were dumpstering for FNB and were startled into screaming when a homeless black man approached the same dumpster looking for food
this punk kid, who had been dumpstering and doing FNB for a while at the time, talked about how that was the first time they actually realized that people besides punks and other FNB participants utilize the dumpsters for food, and that it was important to leave food, good and edible food, for other people
and even if it’s true that kid screamed because they were just surprised and edgy about being caught dumpstering, and were planning to use a lot of the food they were dumpstering to get nutritious and good-tasting food to people who probably would not otherwise have the resources to eat like that - the fact is that they were white and middle-class and screaming, and their scream could’ve been very bad for the black person whose presence provoked it
thus we have the gentrification of dumpsters: it would not surprise me at all if there are a lot of places where the choice that some people who are not-poor have made to consciously practice and promote dumpster diving (without checking in with other folks who dumpster in the area) has made dumpstering less accessible or totally impossible for some people whose ability to eat and survive - or to have a little bit more autonomy over their food outside of the reaches of charities or government ‘services’ - depended largely on dumpstering
dumpstering isn’t ‘bad’ in itself but it does have consequences that a lot of people who practise it just don’t regularly think about
i think it’s totally legitimate to talk about those consequences, and to look at one’s own financial and social situation and decide that choosing to dumpster would probably hurt more people and perpetuate more oppression than choosing not to dumpster would be likely to
