Chautauqua – Vandalism as a Rejection of Consumerism

In the silence of a city under martial law, the post-capitalist gallery is open. Here, the shattered windows of a Warner Bros. store, each fallen shard swept away into invisibility. Here, a boarded-up McDonald’s restaurant, suddenly isolated and exposed in its empty parking lot. In the middle of a street, an abandoned police car robbed of its authority by two spray-painted words: "We Win." Everywhere there are flags adorned with new symbols, newspaper boxes piled into barricades - dozens of acts of destruction, each loaded with aesthetic and social importance. Acts of art. Acts we would typically call "vandalism."

As told on the TV news, vandalism ruled the day last November 30, when tens of thousands of protesters shut down the World Trade Organization and created a state of emergency in downtown Seattle. Vandalism is an intentional violation, the defacement of something deemed valuable by others, but we know, too, that it can be a form of expression. Vandalism is young lovers carving their names in the bark of a tree, a street youth tagging a four-star hotel, anarchists kicking in the windows of Niketown. What could be a more complete expression of the desperate cynicism of postmodern decadence than this cathartic, primal lashback? Could any art form of our age offer a shred of hope for escape without a direct confrontation with property, the core value around which each of us is driven to build a sense of self.

Vandalism is a kind of parasitism born from the essence of millennial western civilization. In our current culture we stand fractured, manipulated by technology and commercial interests. Marketers assign meaning to clothing, cars, furniture, even food; we choose our meanings with our products, simultaneously creating and eradicating our sense of our selves. We are commercial projects of meaning. We are host organisms and commodity culture is the parasite. We are vandalized objects — bent, warped, covered with markings we can’t honestly say we chose by free will. Sapped of community and humanity, we have come to believe that we depend on our parasite for identity.

What we know as "vandalism" is in fact a rejection of consumer dependency. The vandal undermines commercial meaning. Consumer culture lumbers overgrown above us and vulnerable to its own shallow roots. It fears all reflection. Citizens living within it are in a state of perpetual self-evasion, avoiding contemplation for fear of confronting the void of utter meaninglessness or, worse, competitive disadvantage and social exclusion. Vandalism is an expression of this psychology of flight and the understanding that existence itself has become a criminal activity. Vandalism is art when art can no longer rescue meaning from the overwhelming absurdity of present material conditions. In a society that promotes a myth of total choice, the most crucial choice has been made criminal: the ability to create new meaning. The point where the myth and reality meet is the intersection of politics and art, the haunt of the vandal, the culture jammer, the anarchist. It is at this intersection that the barricades went up, November 30, 1999.

– Based on a philosophical essay by Andrew Stillman