Linda Dittmar

Jamming the Works: Art, Politics, and Activism

3 A we enter the second decade of the 21st century, art that aims to actively challenge the social order continues to spark controversy and encounter resistance. In one recent instance, the University of California at San Diego threatened to revoke the tenure of Ricardo Dominguez, a professor of visual art, who developed what he calls “transborder immigrant tools”—recycled cell phones loaded with GPS software that point border-crossers to caches of fresh water in the desert. Dominquez has called the phones, which feature an audio application that plays inspirational poetry to migrants, a “mobile Statue of Liberty.” “I’m interested in how different forms of power respond to this,” Dominguez explained to an LA Times reporter. “Our work has always been to bring to the foreground what artists can do using available low-end, new technologies that can have a wider encounter with society than just the limited landscape of the museum, the gallery and the scholarly paper.”1 Dominguez’s cell-phone project stirs up the age-old debate about what is “art.” Can a mass-produced, quotidian object like a cell phone really be art? Who exactly is the artist—the cell phone designers and manufacturers, the poets whose words are recorded on these machines, the phone users who activate them, or Dominguez himself? As this example suggests, the idea makes the art, not the material object out of which the art was made. Marcel Duchamp’s “readymades” made this point forcefully, as did other dada artists when they assembled the detritus of daily life into what they displayed as art (collages made of bus tickets, bits of string, and other odds and ends). Putting a signed urinal on view as an object of public aesthetic contemplation (Duchamp, Fountain 1917), pulverizing language in paroxysmal fury (Antonin Artaud’s “Theater of Cruelty,” anticipated by Alfred Jarry’s inaugural use of “shit” on stage in Ubu Roi 1896), or inventing the empty label “da-da” to describe their work, artists were responding to the Great War’s gratuitous destruction of so many young lives but also, more broadly, dehumanization by industry and smug bourgeois proprieties. Here is cultural work that slams conventional notions of the unique beauty of the handcrafted object as “art”—work that is disruptive, irreverent, and transformative. While the driving force behind this work was often anarchic rather than ideological, it proved to be the wellspring of a political art that is continuing to challenge the social order to this day. In this sense Dominguez’s cell phones raise questions we already knew in other guises. Is Duchamp’s heap print of Mona Lisa plus mustache art defaced or art? Is a Dadaist “exquisite corpse” poem, made of unconnected lines, actually a Introduction Jamming the Works: Art, Politics, and Activism

Jamming the Works: Art, Politics and Activism Introduction

As we enter the second decade of the 21st century, art that aims to actively challenge the social order continues to spark controversy and encounter resistance. In one recent instance, the University of California at San Diego threatened to revoke the tenure of Ricardo Dominguez, a professor of visual art, who developed what he calls “transborder immigrant tools”—recycled cell phones loaded with GPS software that point border-crossers to caches of fresh water in the desert. Dominquez has called the phones, which feature an audio application that plays inspirational poetry to migrants, a “mobile Statue of Liberty.”

Immigration Filmography for Educators

If anything, this quantity of titles calls for an encyclopedic treatment like Tom Zaniellos Working Stiffs, Union Maids, Reds, and Riffraff: An Expanded Guide to Films About Labor (Cornell: URL Press, 2003). Clearly this brief filmography cannot do justice to the complex issues at stake, including some basic questions about what constitutes immigration as a subject matter: Are we talking here about immigration or migration* Do exile and refugee status count as kinds of immigra tion? And what about collective expulsions (ethnic cleansings and mass transfers of population) born of violent conflict?are they modes of immigration, or is immi gration a personal choice quite apart from collective coercion?

The National Conference of the Society for Cinema Studies New Orleans, Louisiana April 3–6, 1986

Session: Phenomenology and Film Session: “Narration” Sessions: Parody and Bakhtin Session: EARLY CINEMA Session: Approaches to Interpretation Session: Trends and Concepts in Chinese Cinema Session: Narrative in Japanese Cinema Classical German Film Theory Session: Hitchcock and Authorship Session: JERRY LEWIS Session: Women and the Avant garde Sessions: Television and Reception Theory. Theorizing Television: Text, Textuality, Intertextuality. Session: Legal Issues in Film/Video Workshop Session: Intertextuality and Ideology Session: The Promotional Text SCS Cinematheque/Videotheque