Day 8

What is art's relation to activism? What qualifies a gesture as activist? When do the formal qualities of an act, such as repetition, rules of engagement, method of documentation, medium, physical and temporal dimensions, become political? Does art exist in a realm unrelated to organized politics? If the personal is political, then what are the politics of my subjectivities? Through the act of wearing a body camera that I can put on and take off at will, do I shift back and forth each day between being an object and a subject? Does the presence of the mechanism overpower the possibility of embodied space? Can I become a body camera without actually wearing a body camera? Has the technical aspects of my methodology disconnected me from being present? Have I achieved a simultaneous state of empowered vulnerability?

READING

"The Documentation of Activism as Aactivism: The New York Art Strike and the Politics of Personal Responsibility", Adrian Piper, Race, Gender, and Embodiment, John P Bowles, 2011.