Means without End:

Ayreen Anastas and Rene Gabris Camp Campaign*

T.J. DEMOS
OCTOBER 126, Fall 2008, pp. 6990. 2008 October Magazine, Ltd. and Massachusetts Institute of Technology.
How is it that a camp like Guantnamo Bay can exist in our time? With this
question Ayreen Anastas and Rene Gabri initiated Camp Campaign, a recent
process-intense investigation of a political issue that continues to be urgent
todaynearly eight years after the 2001 invasion of Afghanistan, which precipi-
tated the opening of the detention center on the United States naval base in Cuba
in 2002. The many different iterations of their projectincluding an exploratory
road trip across the US; several videos, a Super-8 lm, and a slide show, which
formed part of a gallery exhibition at New Yorks Art in General in early 2007; and
an active Web site containing a variety of political texts and archived podcasts
(www.campcampaign.info)indicate the expansiveness of their approach to this
vexing question. Not surprisingly, their campaigna term diverted here from its
political or military associationssoon spiraled into multiple questions concern-
ing human rights, constitutional protections for the stateless, and viable modes of
political contestation currently available within artistic practice. Anastas and
Gabri included these and other questions in their detailed map of the US that
charts the journey they took from New York to Los Angeles during July and
August, 2006: What is the legal status of the detainees in Guantnamo Bay? Who
is the subject of human rights? What is the status of a human being who has been
stripped of any legal standing or any political rights? How to open up this discus-
sion to a wider public and to do so in all of its complexities?
Thus was Camp Campaign directed rst of all toward provoking discussion, a
central vehicle for Anastas and Gabri, who have collaborated since 1999. Since
then they have also been active organizers at 16Beaver, a space initiated to cre-
ate and maintain an ongoing platform for the presentation, production, and
discussion of a variety of artistic/cultural/economic/political projects.
1
As an
* An earlier version of this essay appeared in the exhibition catalog Ayreen Anastas & Rene
Gabri: Camp Campaign, ed. Sofa Hernndez Chong Cuy with Miguel Amado (New York: Art in
General, 2006), pp. 3145. My thanks go to Art in General for allowing me to publish its extended
version here.
1. See http://www.16beavergroup.org.

70 OCTOBER
open and inclusive forum for collective exchangeit is the point of many
departures/arrivals16Beaver has also maintained a Web site and an online
forum for the documentation and consideration of the collectives past work,
which has comprised numerous projects intended as platforms for the critical
engagement of political and artistic issues: for example, Strategies of Resistance
(2003) combined a series of conversations in New York, Vienna, and elsewhere
with online networking between arts-and-politics-oriented collectives to address
questions such as Is collective practice inherently more political than individ-
ual practice?, and What tactics/strategies of political or collective practice
from past experiences do you find useful/useless?; 24/7 (2003), at the
Contemporary Art Center in Vilnius, Lithuania, consisted of conversations with
local artists and non-artists follow-
i ng col l aborat i ve readi ngs of
Gi orgi o Agambens 1998 Homo
Sacer: Sovereign Power and Bare Life
and a screening of Sal, Pier Paolo
Pasolinis infamous 1975 lm about
the decadence of Italian fascism;
and Bet ween Us (2006) initiated a
research project in Seoul and
Gwangju, South Korea, that was
part aesthetic intervention, part
communicative scenario in order
to examine the political, cultural,
aesthetic, and social aspects of the
various conflicted geographies of
globalization.
2
However, it was with RadioActive
in 2002 that Anastas and Gabri rst
approached the topic of the status
of US security and the suppression
of civil rights following the attacks
on the World Trade Center, which
set the st age for Camp Campaign.
Invited to participate in an exhibition at New Yorks White Box Gallery, the pair
decided to use the opportunity to catalyze debate around censorship in relation
to cultural institutions in the wake of the incipient war in Afghanistan and the
buildup to the bombing and occupation of Iraq. On the day of the opening
September 11t hey posted an Order of Closure not ice by t he newly
inaugurated but ctitious Homeland Security Cultural Bureau, explaining that
the Bureaus Director General had determined that the exhibition space at
2. These projects are described and archived on 16Beavers Web site.
Ayreen Anastas and Rene Gabri. Screenshot of the
Homeland Security Cultural Bureau home page, from
Radioactive. 2002.
White Box was [being] used for illegal activities and events that pose a threat to
national security.
3
The notice clearly played on the charged emotions inspired
by the US governments belligerent and opportunistic response to the World
Trade Center attacks a year earlier. Two days later, the artists extended the ruse
by distributing a protest letter over email in which they detailed the circum-
stances of the closure, identied the responsible Homeland Security Cultural
Bureau, and provided a link to its (ersatz) Web site, which the artists had
devised in advance, requesting that recipients raise [their] voice against this
closure. Not surprisingly, heated rejoinders quickly mounted on 16Beavers dis-
cussion forum (as well as those maintained by several other artistic and activist
groups). They were soon divided between those outraged at the audacity of the
government, others who indignantly scolded the artists for making light of the
real suppression of certain, dissenting voices, and still others who defended
the artists elaborate hoax as a significant exposure of the self- censorship
already rife in American cultural institutions.
4
But while these responses may all
possess a degree of validity, it is clear that Anastas and Gabris intervention not
only brought to light certain ineffectual elements of post-9/11 left-wing political
practiceincluding the lack of critical awareness manifested by automatic peti-
tion-signingit also, in so doing, aimed to reinvigorate the space of cultural
opposition and critically reect on its present options. As the artists set out in
their original proposal, these actions will try to generate public debate among
cultural workers and institutions about the ramications of heightened security
and policing of the Homeland. Furthermore, they will seek to question the
role and responsibility of cultural spaces/workers in contesting and calling into
question emerging social/political problems.
5
Representing an extension of the concerns with heightened security and
policing that motivated RadioAct iveyet without its hoax elementCamp
Campaign retrained the earlier projects focus onto the specic role of the camp
in the war on terror since 2001. Like RadioActives questioning of cultural
approaches to political problems, Camp Campaign continued this self-reexive crit-
ical impulse. To address Camp Campaigns initial querysuggesting at once
incredulity (how can the camp at Guantnamo Bay exist?) and an earnest determi-
nation to understand its conditions of possibility (how can it exist?)Anastas and
Gabri visited numerous types of camps during their trip across the United States,
such as a longst anding Nat ive Amer ican reser vat ion in New Mexico; a
postHurricane Katrina relief camp in New Orleans; an erstwhile internment
Means without End 71
3. The artists censored original project, commissioned by curator Tanya Leighton, was to present
a radio station with programming related to or engaged with 11 September, with responses by gures
both within and outside the artistic and cultural community, as described on White Boxs Web site.
4. These quotes derive from the discussion forum that was hosted on 16Beavers Web site in 2002,
archived at http://web.archive.org/web/20030721192029/www.16beavergroup.org/forums/RadioActive.
Further responses can be found at http://www.16beavergroup.org/radioactive/artistalk.htm.
5. The project proposal can be found at http://www.16beavergroup.org/radioactive.
camp for Japanese, Italians, and Germans during WWII ; and a former POW camp in
Ohio that now plays host to the annual NRA National Outdoor Rie and Pistol
Championships. Along the way, they held meetings with legal experts, political
activists, and artists, some of which were recorded for local radio programs and sub-
sequently archived on Camp Campaigns Web site. These discussions help to parse the
diversity of those camps and maintain the historical specicity of their different
types. Nevertheless, these diverse examples share a generalized set of procedures
including spatial mechanisms of geographical exclusion, the suspension of law, and
the retraction of civil rights. For Anastas and Gabri, these procedures increasingly
dene the relationship between power and everyday life today, leading the artists to
suggest that the camp is truly the paradigm of our time.
6
In terms of the diversity of its engagement, Camp Campaign advances an innova-
tive approach to the intersection of artistic practice and political activism. First of all,
Anastas and Gabri have refused the complacent positioning of their activity solely
within the borders of art, where questions of medium, object production, and repre-
sentational logic tend to prevail. Instead, they have prioritized collective social
engagement and the raising of political awareness in their work, which forms the
basis of an expanded notion of art as cultural practice. It is signicant that the artists
road trip, for instance, constituted an integral component of Camp Campaign, for it
emphasizes the projects diversication in terms of both its possible sites of reception
beyond the art gallerys walls, and its mobilization of a variety of publics, interlocu-
tors, and collaborators. In this regard, Anastas and Gabri reinvigorate past models of
cultural activism and social aesthetics, particularly those that turned to collabora-
tive process and multidisciplinary practice as a way of addressing the democratic
crises of the Reagan era (think of Group Materials 1984 Timeline: A Chronicle of US
Intervention in Central and Latin America, at P.S.1, or Democracy, their 198789 exhibi-
tion at Dia, which approached four areas of perceived political crisiseducation,
electoral politics, cultural participation, and AIDSthrough planning sessions,
roundtable discussions, pedagogical displays, town meetings, and the publication of a
book).
7
Anastas and Gabris model of practiceas manifested most clearly in
RadioActivealso resonates with recent interventionist approaches of the recent
past that emerged from that earlier commitment to cultural activism, including the
work of Critical Art Ensemble and the Yes Men, which have exploited tactical
media and cultural sabotage in order to forward distinct political goalssuch as
raising awareness of the presence of GMOs (genetically modied organisms) in
OCTOBER 72
6. In Project for an Inhibition in New York or How to Arrest a Hurricanethe roughly fty-page
script that in some ways frames Camp Campaign, and is reprinted in its catalogAnastas and Gabri
write that the camp as a paradigm denes a generalized set of procedures, which allow the denition
and establishment of new sets [of operations] in the relationship between power and the everyday life
of man. Anastas and Gabri, in Camp Campaign, p. 11 (hereafter referred to as Script). A primary ref-
erence here is Giorgio Agamben, What is a Camp?, in Means Without End: Notes on Polit ics
(Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2000).
7. See David Deitcher, Social Aesthetics, in Democracy: A Project by Group Material (Seattle: Bay
Press, 1990).
consumer food products and holding multinationals like Exxon Mobil accountable
for environmental destruction. In such models, the choice of medium and represen-
tational strategy is determined by the specific projects political objectives;
consequently the tools of cultural intervention become primarily instruments of
social engagement, connecting to the movement for global justice or to the cam-
paigns against environmental destruction, homelessness, and neo-imperialism.
8
But if Camp Campaign exemplies arts recent politicizationthough the sim-
ple artistic categorization of their practice is precisely what Anastas and Gabri place
in questionthe project was not solely directed toward any practical result (e.g., the
closure of the military camp at Guantnamo Bay) or theoretical resolution: if analy-
ses were needed, the projects Web site provided numerous compelling ones by
Giorgio Agamben (A Brief History of the State of Exception), Judith Butler
(Guantnamo Limbo), and Jacques Rancire (We Prisoners of the Innite),
among others. Rather than simply reiterate the model of cultural activism, Camp
Campaign suspended the pragmatic force of its engagement in favor of a sharing of
discourse, an opening up of questions, and a replacement of the declamatory and
the accusatory with the interrogative and the conditional, where the journey repre-
sents a means without an end.
9
If the paradigm of the camp is what informs the
organization of our cities and states, write Anastas and Gabri in the Script that
accompanied their exhibition and unfolded alongside it, then what can we do?
10
Yet this admission proved to be far from a confession of defeat. To explore the vari-
ous questions posed in their project, Anastas and Gabri in effect reserved a zone
apart from goal-oriented activism and instrumentalized political engagement, creat-
ing a placeone that is mobile and multiple, transformative and generativefrom
which to consider anew issues of representation, strategy, and political practice, and
to do so collaboratively. As they acknowledge in their Script, they refuse to give up
the capacity of the poetic and the aesthetic . . . to generate new meaning or tear away
from the past something which is altogether useful still. To think. To question. To
move. To shift things, unsettle held assumptions, reorganize the perceptual domains,
the sensible.
11
This destabilized positioning of Camp Campaigns site of intervention
clearly disturbed its easy reception in both artistic and political contexts.
12
Just as the
Means without End 73
8. For further examples, see the catalog for the 2004 exhibition at MASS MoCA (which included
the 16Beaver Group), The Interventionists, eds. Nato Thompson and Gregory Sholette (North Adams,
Mass.: MASS MoCA, 2004).
9. It thus contrasts with Cultural activism [which] might be dened simply as the use of cultural
means to try to effect social change, according to Brian Wallis discussion of groups like Border Arts
Workshop, ACT UP, PAD/D, Artists Call, Gran Fury, and Group Material. Democracy and Cultural
Activism, in Democracy, p. 8.
10. Script, p. 34.
11. Script, p. 16.
12. In this regard, still other models come to mind: insofar as Camp Campaign was organized around
a political issuethe question of the campin relation to a multiplicity of geographical locations, it
might be related to the 1990s development of discursive site specicity as conceptualized in Miwon
Kwon, One Place After Another: Notes on Site Specicity, October 80 (Spring 1997). Similarly perti-
nent is the contemporaneous investment in the functional sitei.e., a process, an operation occur-
ring between sites, a mapping of institutional and textual liations and the bodies that move between
Other Collective (a group of Arab-American artists based in Detroit) asked Anastas
and Gabri how exactly their project gures as art, so a radio host of New Yorks WBAI
wished to understand Camp Campaigns political function and objectives.
13
Because
Camp Campaign falls into neither and both categories, it became a location of uncer-
tainty, one that defamiliarized the conventional expectations of art and politics alike.
While this uncertainty regarding what is art and what is politics invariably
arose in the reception of Camp Campaign, it is also internal to the projects very
forms; indeed, uncertainty may constitute its very aesthetic condition. Consider
the projects map, suggestively titled Fear Is Somehow Our For Whom? For What? +
Proximity to Everything Far Away: on the one hand, it charts the geographical and
historical appearance of the camp as it has variously come into existence in the
United States, its legend detailing information regarding each site and describing
the artists activities and experiences there during the trip. For example, one
nds the following annotation for their nal visit in California:
Our last trip is through downtown Los Angeles at night. A tent city,
hundreds of tents strewn along the sidewalks just south of the large
banks and ofce towers. Here is an improvised camp comprised of the
citys outcasts, derelicts, mentally ill, drug addicts, poor, homeless,
abandoned, or exiles. Here camp is a signifier for where bare life
resides, here camp is a testimony for the failures, the cracks and gaps of
economic and social policies.
OCTOBER 74
them . . . an informational site, a locus of overlap of text, photographs and video recordings, physical
places and things . . . as developed by James Meyer, The Functional Site, Documents 7 (Fall 1996),
p. 21. However, Camp Campaigns sheer mobility and heterogeneity of forms also signal an obvious
rupture from the genealogy of site specicity, making this term seem out of place here.
13. These conversations are archived on Camp Campaigns Web site.
Anastas and Gabri. Fear Is
Somehow Our For Whom?
For What? + Proximity to
Everything Far Away, from
Camp Campaign. 2006.
Anastas and Gabri.
Detail of Fear Is Somehow Our For
Whom? For What? + Proximity to
Everything Far Away,
from Camp Campaign. 2006.
On the other hand, the artists also break from this descriptive and analytic tra-
jectory by introducing a certain opacity in the maps format, represented by the
inclusion of passages of poetic language, stuttering repetitions, and nonsensical
sequences of words. How to navigate the maps territory when one nds the note
Mexico begins here right next to Vancouvers geographical location, and discovers
a jumbled list of related concepts and meaningless articles on its periphery: for
example, What is a Camp? camp, concept, crime, an, camp, place, most absolute,
conditio inhumana, appear, all, counts, as, as, posterity? The procession disarticulates
descriptive language, providing a frame of free association, a subtext of subconscious
wonderings around the representation of the United States. These elements obscure
the clarity of the otherwise rational cartographic logic and resist the analogical struc-
ture that normally rules the format of maps. In this regard, Camp Campaigns map
differs from certain contemporaneous models, such as the various ow charts of the
French collective Bureau dtudes, which adopt a scientic paradigm of clearly pre-
sented objective information to schematize economic, political, and military
networks, with the subjective imagination banished into exile.
14
By presenting lan-
guages functionality and its lawless breakdown in close proximity, Anastas and
Gabris map creates an informational site that is simultaneously one of disorienta-
tion. It is as if with the map they take a rst step toward overcoming the existential
condition of fear that is named in its title by acknowledging that the distant
unknownin terms of both the spaces of exception and the traumatic lawlessness of
languageis actually quite near.
What lies behind the simultaneity of political engagement and aesthetic sensi-
bility that characterizes Camp Campaign? If renewing the intersection between
aesthetics and politics has become a major concern in recent years, then it is for two
mainand by now familiarreasons. First, artistic practice is commonly seen to
have forfeited whatever oppositional force and critical purchase it once possessed in
the face of cultures overwhelming commodification and institutionalization.
Second, there nevertheless remains a deeply felt urge to respond to the crises of pre-
sent-day reality, including the quotidian conditions that support state terrorism and
endless war; the growth and spread of economic inequality and the retraction of civil
rights; environmental destruction; and mindless consumerism. More, it appears
imperative to do so with a creative subtlety and analytic power that resist the reduc-
tive tendencies of political discourse, whether that of the mass media, governmental
publicity, or protesters rhetoric. For many artists, critics, and curators, this con-
icted condition has entailed a return to cultural activism and collaborative social
engagement in order to transcend what many perceive as arts myopic self-reexive
tendency and domination by market concerns.
15
Critics such as Brian Holmes, an
OCTOBER 76
14. For further informat ion on Bureau dtudes and further examples of their maps, see:
http://utangente.free.fr.
15. On this trend, see Grant Kester, Conversation Pieces: Community and Communication in Modern Art
(Berkeley: University of California Press, 2004); and Collectivism After Modernism: The Art of Social Imagination
after 1945, eds. Blake Stimson and Gregory Sholette (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2007).
Recent exhibitions have also directly responded to these imperatives, but the risks are obvious: MASS
occasional 16Beaver collaborator, thus tap into a widely sensed impulse when they
identify the need to conceptualize new forms and sites of resistance, including the
desire that pushes more and more artists to work outside the limits of their own disci-
pline, dened by the notions of free reexivity and pure aesthetics, incarnated by the
gallery-magazine-museum-collection circuit, and haunted by the memory of the nor-
mative genres, painting and sculpture.
16
The extradisciplinary investigations that
Holmes supports involve occupying a eld but bringing it into critical relation with
exterior disciplines, thus reinventing each, so that art escapes its specialized form of
enclosure and sociopolitical practices are reinvigorated with creative energy.
Yet while such analyses are doubtlessly provocative (in particular, Holmess
critique of the institutionalization of interdiscipinarity, which, in its sheer ubiq-
uity and market-friendliness, threatens to lose whatever critical potential it once
possessed), they are frequently weakened by the quick and summary dismissal of
art (especially as found in the gallery context) as formalist and thus apolitical,
severed from life in the streetsan area all too easily idealized by activists.
Means without End 77
MoCAs 2004 exhibition The Interventionists brought activist practices into the museum, thereby potentially
neutralizing them; meanwhile socially-engaged relational aesthetics has attempted to create zones of
conviviality outside of spectacle, reinforcing the institutions in which these practices are inevitably staged.
16. Brian Holmes, Extradisciplinary Investigations. For a New Critique of Institutions, February,
2007, http://brianholmes.wordpress.com.
Bureau dtudes. Detail of
World Government. 2004.
The reductiveness with which art is treated frequently accompanies a related
failure to appreciate the signicance of recent theoretical debates regarding the
politics of artistic representation, which posit the performative force of art
within institutions that are more complexly dened than many analyses typically
allow.
17
It is also striking that current dismissals of the gallery and museum come
at a time when so many curators are dedicated to rethinking and reinventing
the role of such institutionsparticularly so in Europeby developing their
capacity to facilitate distinctly political projects and diverse social aims.
18
Yet
more than anything, the often facile denunciation of arts perceived autonomy
fails to account for its historical complexity as a longstanding site of negotiation
between aesthetics and politics. As Jacques Rancire has argued, it is the very
unstable relationship between the two that governs arts modern appearance,
and in this sense, recent challenges to and realignments of the relationship
between art and politics indicate something important about the current status
of artistic practice.
Contemporary art, for Rancire, advances a paradigm that stretches back to
the late eighteenth century, to the time of Friedrich Schiller, for whom the notion
of aesthetics holds the promise of both a new world of art and a new life for indi-
viduals and community.
19
At the crossroads between art and life, the aesthetic
regimeRancires periodizing term for modern artconsequently outlines a
paradox of competing claims for autonomy and heteronomy, for arts loyalty to its
own formal laws and its rule by external determinations. Yet Rancire negotiates
this seeming antinomy by forwarding an innovative reading of autonomy that
avoids the dead end of arts solipsism: for him, autonomy designates a mode of
experience that transcends the realm of art, rather than identifying an aesthetic
purity existing solely within it.
20
Art, then, proposes a heterogeneous eld wherein
the relation between aesthetics and politics is precisely one of indeterminacy,
dening a condition that individual practices will uniquely negotiate. Arts auton-
omyas a mode of experiencemight even designate the self-sufciency of a
collective life that does not rend itself into separate spheres of activities, of a com-
munity where art and life, art and politics, life and politics are not severed one
OCTOBER 78
17. For example, in Extradisciplinary Investigations, Holmes writes of the art gallery that
everything about this specialized aesthetic space is a trap, that it has been instituted as a form of
enclosure. For a counter-model that articulates the art gallerys politicized space, see Rosalyn
Deutsches Agoraphobia in her Evictions: Art and Spatial Politics (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press,
1996). According to her compelling argument, the photography of Cindy Sherman, for example, is
seen to contest the boundaries between the public and the private, beseeching us to no longer take
it for granted that art institutions are secure interiors, isolated from social space. (p. 315).
18. Consider, for instance, the curatorial efforts of Adam Budak, Okwui Enwezor, Charles Esche,
Anselm Franke, Maria Lind, and Nina Mntmann.
19. Jacques Rancire, The Aesthetic Revolution and its Outcomes, New Left Review 14 (March-
April 2002), p. 133.
20. Ibid., p. 136: The autonomy of art and the promise of politics are not counterposed. The
autonomy is the autonomy of experience, not of the work of art. To put it differently, the artwork par-
ticipates in the sensorium of autonomy inasmuch as it is not a work of art.
from another.
21
Certainly, Camp Campaign rescues this possibility, and it prompts
the desire, moreover, to expand that reserve of autonomous experienceeven
while never sacricing it completelyso that it ultimately challenges the norm of
alienating forms of separation that dene everyday life. This argument is certainly
not entirely new. Peter Brger, in his classic account of the avant- garde, asks
whether [maintaining] the distance between art and the praxis of life is not a req-
uisite for that free space within which alternat ives to what exist s become
conceivablei.e., rather than making that space into the site of the sublation of
the two, as was so often desired in avant-garde practice.
22
Camp Campaign neither
denies autonomous space (although the artists would likely reject the notion that it
is simply free) nor gives itself over complacently to the distance between art
and life that engenders itand this, in my view, identies the radical and innova-
t ive polit ical nature of Anast as and Gabris project , which is to direct it s
entwinement of aesthetics and politics against the force of separation that has
arisen recently in relation to the camp.
It is precisely the force of separationbetween life and law, between human
being and citizenthat, for Agamben, brings the camp into existence. Which
returns us to the question of Guantnamo Bay. The camp, as we learn from
Agambens analysis, represents a manifestation of the state of exception (or state
of emergency), for which sovereignty suspends law and creates a space of lawless-
ness, a decision that simult aneously const itutes the power of sovereignt y,
particularly in its limited sense of executive authority. Such a decision created
Guantnamo Bay in the rst placea camp on an island where neither US nor
international law applies (including that of the host nation, Cuba, which refuses
to recognize the legal validity and territorial claim of the American naval base).
Because in its declared war on terror the Bush administration has claimed to con-
front an opponent that is not aligned with any specific nation but rather a
transnational organizationi.e., Al-Qaeda and similar groupsit argues that these
extraordinary circumstances justify the suspension of law in the process of respond-
ing to the threat, which has led to the creation of the camp at Guantnamo Bay.
Accordingly, in the name of national security, detainees have little recourse to legal
counsel, are subject to indenite detention, and are denied the protections that
ensure humane treatment according to international rules for legitimate prison-
er s of war (even t hough t hese pract ices are subject to cont inued legal
contestation). The result, as Judith Butler observes, is that the stateless are terror-
ized by the distinction between state violence and terrorism, an articial and
politically opportunistic distinction enforced by governmental power.
23
Means without End 79
21. Ibid. For a related engagement of Rancires arguments vis--vis contemporary art, see Claire
Bishop, The Social Turn: Collaboration and its Discontents, Artforum 44, no. 6 (February 2006) and
Artforums special issue on Rancire, 44, no. 7 (March 2007).
22. Peter Brger, Theory of the Avant-Garde, trans. Michael Shaw (Minneapolis: University of
Minnesota Press, 1984), p. 54.
23. Judith Butler, Guantnamo Limbo, The Nation (April 1, 2002); online at: http://www.camp-
campaign.info/materials.htm.
Insofar as the stateless and dispossessedwhether refugees or illegal combat-
ants, prisoners, or the internally displacedare stripped of rights, Camp Campaign
consequently views them as inhabiting the condition of bare life, which, according
to Agamben, designates a state of existence shed of the clothing of legal protections
and exposed to the direct application of state power. In taking up this reasoning,
Camp Campaign posits both the historical progression of this condition to its current
widening basis, and the unique situation of the present state of exception. By visiting
various camps across the country, Anastas and Gabri reveal how such zones of
anomie have in fact pockmarked the history and geography of the United States
from its very beginningfrom eighteenth-century Native American reservations to
contemporary detention centers. Moreover, by placing these various enclaves in rela-
tion to extraterritorial camps like Guantnamo Bay, as well as comparing them to
similar areas in other countries, their research, videos, and conversations seek to
uncover the structural connections between them, which are infrequently acknowl-
edged. For instance, in the year before realizing Camp Campaign, Anastas and Gabri
traveled to and researched several international locations, the results of which were
subsequently included in or related to their later project. One location, depicted in
By Many Means Necessary (2006) was Baltimores so-called Middle East, a segregated
OCTOBER 80
Anastas and Gabri. Photo of East Baltimore, from
By Many Means NecessaryBaltimore. 2006.
zone of poverty, where the urban poor, in this case mostly African American, are tar-
geted, deemed a threat, an unwanted population, [their] neighborhoods terrorized
with ood lights, [and] 24 hour surveillance . . . , as it is described in the Script;
another was the village of Daechu-Ri in South Korea, which was under threat and
then destroyed by the expansion of a nearby US military base.
24
The pair also traveled to Israel and the Palestinian Occupied Territories,
visiting Al-Lydd and Ramleh, two of Israels mixed cities not far from Tel Aviv,
as well as several Bedouin villages in the Al-Naqab that are unrecognized by the
Israeli state. Completed before Camp Campaign, these trips in particular repre-
sent important preparation for their later project in that Anastas and Gabri
conducted extensive interviews with local inhabitants and political activists,
which resulted in several quasi-documentary videos: Day 1: Good Architecture, Day
8: Building Vacancy Maps, and Day 12: Valley of the Graces (all 2007). In the rst, a
handheld camera records Israeli activist Jeff Halper speaking to an audience
before a section of the wall dividing Israel from the West Bank. He explains how
the occupation is advanced not only by the Israeli Defense Forces, but also more
subtly, in its nuts and bolts, by liberal planners and architects. In the second
video, the Palestinian architect and activist Buthaina Dabit, facing the camera
directly, outlines what she sees as Israels historical and continuing program of
ethnic cleansing, which she explains with the aid of detailed maps.
25
While
recorded in straightforward documentary styles, these videos nevertheless man-
age to disrupt the seemingly
object ive portrayal of facts
that characterizes the videos
content: the fragmentation of
the narratives, interrupted fre-
quent ly with shot s of the
landscape or broken off sud-
denly without explanat ion,
implies that the artists rep-
resentation of this particular
state of exception simultane-
ously challenges its nality by
an exposure that can never
be total, by a depiction that
can never be complete.
Situated within the con-
text of Camp Campaign, each of
these various cases comes to
exemplifywhether formally
Means without End 81
24. Script, p. 21. The artists visited South Korea during their participation in the Gwangju
Biennale, 2006.
25. Cf. Ilan Pappe, The Ethnic Cleansing of Palestine (Oxford: Oneworld, 2006).
Anastas and Gabri. Video still from
Day 8: Building Vacancy Maps, from
What Everybody Knows. 2006present.
or informallythe suspension of law and the reduction of its inhabitants to a state
of political dispossession. Committed to investigating the notion of the camp as
both historical singularity and modern paradigm, the artists explain how they have
sought to explore the recurrent motif of security to justify a suspension of law, a law
which is outside the law, or an outside the law which the law attempts to territorial-
ize and with it, a life which falls under a law that is lawless.
26
Indeed, as described in
the Script, Camp Campaign represents a project which attempts to not only be pre-
sent [to] the ongoing crimes taking place in Guantnamo Bay, Cuba, but to connect
these crimes to other contexts, historical as well as contemporary, far off the
American map, in Occupied Palestine, or right in the heart of American cities like
Baltimore or New Orleans.
27
By referring to zones of political dispossession as areas
of criminalityand thus refusing the extralegal categorization of the campthe
artists invoke a law that would designate them illegal, but without specifying its ori-
gin. Whether they mean to identify contradictions within US law, to bring
international law to bear on rogue states, or to point toward a notion of universal
justice remains unclear; what is crucial is that they make the rst performative effort
to condemn the tortuous legal justication of camps.
One might nevertheless object to the implication that bare life represents a
state of metaphysical abandonment, as Judith Butler does, asserting that the vari-
ous enclaves of political disenfranchisemente.g., those of migrant workers in
Germany or Palestinians living under occupationare not undifferentiated
instances of bare life but highly juridied states of dispossession.
28
She reminds
us, moreover, that bare life is a state actively produced, maintained, reiterated, and
monitored by a complex and forcible domain of power, and not exclusively the act
of a sovereign or the permutation of sovereign power.
29
Yet, while Butler is cer-
tainly right to insist on viewing bare life as a distinct area inscribed within
particular relations of power and to challenge the reductive denition of sover-
eignty, one could respond, with Gabri, that Agamben is also writing about the
dispossession that takes place within the framework of the law, whether it is in apply-
ing it, as the Nazis did in fully stripping Jews of citizenship (denationalizing) before
sending them to the camps, or in suspending it in the name of preserving it.
30
Not
only do Gabri and Anastas acknowledge nding inspiration in Agambens refusal
OCTOBER 82
26. Script, p. 10.
27. Ibid. During a public conversation I had with Anastas and Gabri in Beirut as part of the
Homeworks IV forum, they described their interest in the camp as both paradigm and singularity
(April 20, 2008).
28. Judith Butler in conversation with Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak, in Who Sings the Nation-State?
Language, Politics, Belonging (London: Seagull Books, 2007), pp. 10, 42.
29. Ibid., pp. 1011. Furthermore, if our attention is captured by the lure of the arbitrary decisionism
of the sovereign, then we risk inscribing that logic as necessary and forgetting what prompted this inquiry
to begin with: the massive problem of statelessness and the demand to nd postnational forms of political
opposition that might begin to address the problem with some efcacy (p. 42). In my view, this is exactly
Agambens point as well.
30. Anastas and Gabri discuss Butlers criticism of Agamben with Mntmann in Their Maps vs.
Our Maps: A Conversation between Ayreen Anastas, Rene Gabri, and Nina Mntmann, in Manifesta 7:
Companion, eds. Adam Budak and Nina Mntmann, et al. (Milan: Silvana, 2008), pp. 37273.
to acquiesce to a reading of the Nazis as a singular and aberrant exception in the
history of the world, they believe it urgent to also nd that there is something
which took place in those camps that is repeating itself [today]and these reasons
justify their investigation of the camp as a contemporary paradigm of biopolitics. If
the camp should not be seen exclusively as a historical fact (e.g., Auschwitz) or as
an exception reserved only for the inhuman (e.g., Guantnamo Bay) or displaced
refugee (e.g., Palestine), but as the paradigm, the hidden matrix and nomos of the
political space in which we are still livingas the artists write in an essay included
on Camp Campaigns Web sitethen the reason is to challenge its existence as an
anomaly or freak occurrence, and to comprehend it instead as a means of condi-
tioning and establishing (a relation to) [what is now becoming] the norm.
32
That said, our present political situation nevertheless appears perilously
unique and precisely for the reason offered above. As former Legal Director of the
Center for Constitutional Rights Jeff Fogel points out in a radio interview with
Anastas and Gabri, US law has historically been reinstated soon after periods of its
suspension (as when the Supreme Court reestablished the writ of habeas corpus
following its retraction by President Lincoln during the Civil War). Yet because
the US currently claims to be ghting an innite war on terror with neither geo-
graphical boundaries nor temporal limitations, we therefore currently face the
prospect of an indenite, potentially permanent, suspension of law (including
civil liberties that many take to be constitutive of democracy).
33
One might rea-
sonably conclude, therefore, that today the state of exception has become the
normas Agamben argues, invoking Walter Benjamins famous formulation
made in the context of the Nazi terror.
34
If this division of sovereignty and bare life denes our present political era,
then it is precisely against that separation that Camp Campaigns joining of aesthetics
and politics becomes particularly signicant. But rather than a simple collapse or
equalization of the two spheres, Anastas and Gabri place them in a relation of inde-
terminacy, which transforms their practice into a site of the perpetual reinvention
of each. Such a site was created by Camp Campaigns exhibition in early 2007,
Means without End 83
31. Ibid., p. 372.
32. Anastas and Gabri quote Agambens What is a Camp?, p. 37.
33. During the summer of 2008, the US Supreme Court determinedonce againthat
Guantnamo Bay detainees do have the constitutional right to bring their cases to federal court to chal-
lenge their detention (see Linda Greenhouse, Justices, 5-4, Back Detainee Appeals for Guantnamo,
New York Times, June 13, 2008). Delivering a rebuff to the Bush administration, the Courts opinion
declared it unconstitutional to strip federal courts of jurisdiction to decide on habeas corpus petitions
from those detainees seeking to contest their designation as enemy combatants. In response to similar
decisions in the past, Congress has amended statutes regarding jurisdiction, sidestepping the Courts
challenges; however, with the Congress new Democratic majority, there may be a different outcome this
time. Writing for the majority most recently, Justice Anthony Kennedy declared: The laws and
Constitution are designed to survive, and remain in force, in extraordinary times.
34. Agamben writes that Walter Benjamins diagnosis, which by now is more than fty years old,
has lost none of its relevance. Giorgio Agamben, Means without End, p. 6, referencing Walter
Benjamin, Theses on the Philosophy of History, in Illuminations, trans. Harry Zohn (New York:
Schocken, 1989), p. 257.
which built a montage-like media environment inside Art in Generals small
ground oor gallery space. The presentation included a Super-8 lm projection, a
series of videos playing on two monitors, a projection of slides, and a musical
soundtrack, which took on an improvised, semi-chaotic cast. Offering both raw
and edited footage from the artists road trip, the display invoked both documen-
tary models and ctional scenarios, often running them up against one another.
In addition, the multiple components diversified the projects status as both
activist and artistic, which emerged in part from the provocative relations between
the exhibitions diverse and processed materials. In one video, for instance, a series
of names of Middle Eastern nationalities (Saudi, Yemeni, Egyptian . . . ) cycled as sub-
titles against a blank background; a second video showed a slowly progressing scene
of a barbed wire fence surrounding a farm at night, then cut to shots of Fort
Rockvale, a Southwestern casino advertised by garish ashing lights and a gigantic
plastic gure of a cowboy holding a rie; and in a third video, one encountered
images of a placid lake in Wyomings Shoshone National Forest, the soundtrack of
which is suddenly interrupted by a voice that yells out Close Guantnamo Bay!
which echoes in the canyons of the Native American land. The selection, in other
words, dramatized the sheer multiplicity of the projects source materialfrom the
encyclopedic listing of nationalities that one might expect to nd at Guantnamo
Bay to the documentation of common mechanisms of spatial division and security,
from images suggesting paranoid insecurity and its corresponding hyperbolic com-
pensat ion to recordings of the art ists desperate but obviously ineffect ive
interventions. Because there was no pretense to categorize or order the unwieldy
data, the exhibition offered a desultory assemblage of resonant alignments, nonsensi-
cal contiguities, and potential allegorical relations, which could be neither clearly
summarized nor easily comprehended.
Intensifying its unruly presentation, the exhibition changed its appearance
while in progress, both loosely following and simultaneously revising the artists
script, which Anastas and Gabri produced over the course of the two-month-
long display. Entitled Project for an Inhibition in New York or How Do You
Arrest a Hurricane, the Script, written by Anastas and Gabri under the initials
RL and VL, reveals a further rift between the presentation of analysis based on
extensive research and the subjective, interpretive relation to that material.
35
The roughly fty-page document, reproduced in the exhibitions catalog, offers
a diverse account of theoretical speculation (including engagements with the
writings of Rancire and Agamben), the authors subjective wonderings, and their
expression of questions and doubts, all of which opens a window onto the artists
thought process by revealing some of the deliberations and considerations that lie
behind Camp Campaign. Made available, in parts, for reading at Art in General, the
text also provided a discursive entrance for visitors to the dispersed project. As a
OCTOBER 84
35. These initials may stand for the Communist revolutionaries Rosa Luxemburg and Vladimir Lenin,
although in the Script, RL and VL are artists and seem to represent the alter-egos of Anastas and Gabri.
script, the text implied that the exhibition space existed as an uncertain zone
between art installation, theatrical event, and film set, thus inviting viewers,
who were ascribed an unspecied role, to gure out their own relation to the
material on view.
Playing on the terms inhibition and exhibitionsuggesting both an
inhibition of the exhibition and an exhibition of the inhibitionthe show at
Art in General reiterated the heterogeneous status of Camp Campaign. On the
one hand, the exhibition at times gave the appearance of mounting a political
campaignclear in the placement at one point of two large banners in the
gallerys windows (thus blinding views of the interior art space from outside),
which read Let Americans Know that the World is Against Torture, written in
red block letters in English and Cantonese, the language of the local Chinese
community. Yet, on the other hand, the exhibition manifested an introverted
element, which, as conveyed in the Script, opened up a space of subjective ques-
tioning pertaining to the limits of Camp Campaigns status as an art exhibition.
Most exemplary in this regard was the exhibitions so-called dream sequence,
which paralleled a passage in the Script where RL dreams about the use of music
as a device of torture at Guantnamo, prompted by reading an article on the
topic before bed one evening. During that phase, the exhibition introduced sev-
eral new videos. One offered a set of quickly edited imagesincluding shots of a
demolished Palestinian village in Gaza, a close up of a Guantnamo detainees
wristband, and a map of Guantnamo Bay, Cubawhich were divided by poetic
and tone- setting inter-titles, such as the loneliest loneliness. A second video
continued this melancholy passage by documenting a nocturnal perambulation
around the immediate vicinity of Art in General during the exhibitions opening,
showing scenes of a valet who parks cars amidst dreary empty ofces, the police
Means without End 85
Anastas and Gabri.
Video still from
All Strayed And
Were Incapable of
Using, from Camp
Campaign. 2006.
Anastas and
Gabri. Video
still from The
Redeemed
Night,
from Camp
Campaign.
2006.
Anastas and Gabri. Video still from The Redeemed Night, from Camp Campaign. 2006.
in a local station, and homeless men sleeping nearby a New York City jail known
as The Tombs. At times accompanied by a soundtrack of death-metal music
(the kind played to inmates at Guantnamo), the video concluded inexplicably
with appropriated historical TV footage of the famous Egyptian singer Abdel
Halim Hafez performing amongst a circle of Arab musicians and dancers.
One immediate effect of this sequence was to bring the art exhibition into
a poignant relationship with the social reality that surrounded it. In other
words, the artists resisted isolating their gallery exhibition, avoiding the poten-
tial contradiction of creating a show about systems of enclosure that repeated
some of the very divisions their project was attempting to analyze and dissolve.
The video compilation, moreover, gured as a sort of reversal of roles, imaging
lower Manhattan as itself a camp of divided and alienated lives, next to which
the representation of traditional Arab culture appeared as an antidote of joyous
communal existence. Joining seemingly irreconcilable spheres, RL wonders in
the course of her dream what life is like in the camp, as her character gestures
toward an identication with its inhabitants that transcends the enemy/friend
opposition that characterizes the relation between sovereignty and bare life:
What does it sound like at night in Guantnamo? RL asks. At what point does
the music stop? Do they sing to themselves? What songs do they sing? The
immediate answers to these questions were discovered not in Guantnamo, but
on the streets of New York.
The exhibitions dream sequence consequently gured as a nightmare, not
only because it intimated that the camp currently represents a generalized con-
dition of everyday life extending beyond the island that is Guantnamo, but also
because it meditated upon the quixotic project of Camp Campaign itselfas if its
goal was comparable to arresting a hurricane. During this time, the exhibition
also gave further expression of the artists inhibitions: the slide show (which
flashed snapshots from their trip) was turned off, implying a period of dor-
mancy and contemplat ive withdrawal from polit ical engagement , and the
protest banners on the windows were placed on the gallerys floor, which
tempted visitors to walk on them, implicating them in the nightmares unfold-
ing. In these ways, the exhibition enacted an allegory of the feared neutralization
of the project, inspired by the artists anxieties regarding the potential perception
of the exhibitionsand even the projectsinsignicance in the face of the enor-
mity of the problems they confronted, and more, the possibility of the absorption
of its critical energies by the very system the artists were struggling against.
36
Nevertheless, there was an afrmative element in the dream sequence, par-
ticularly as represented by a third video, which reached toward the transformative
potential of art, despite the overarching challenges. The video portrayed sections
of Camp Campaigns map in tonal reversal on top of which appeared Martin
Means without End 87
36. Cf. the Script, p. 16: They have attempted in their exhibition to outline the contours of the
questions that have motivated them . . . . They question their activity, their militancy, their ability to
actually raise pertinent questions that could motivate a change.
Heideggers Nietzsche-inspired Five Statements on Art. In manifesto-like fash-
ion, the statements proclaim the global signicance of art as a self-creating force
of becoming, as afrmative of life, and of the importance of comprehending art
from the artists perspective, rather than the recipients.
37
This latter suggestion
seemingly obsolete and avant-gardist, but perhaps newly relevant today, especially
in the context of politically committed practicends realization in the subjec-
tive elements of Camp Campaign. Anastas and Gabri have refused to abdicate a
creative authorial position in relation to their work, which in corresponding mod-
els might otherwise risk dilution in endless collaboration or negation by activist
instrumentalization.
38
Insofar as the exhibitions dream sequence highlighted an
unconscious component of existence, it brought a certain skepticism toward the
rationalist assumptions of activismparticularly the belief that the exposure of
the truth behind ideological mystication will lead automatically toward changes
in behavior. As the artists ask in the Script at the point immediately following the
dream sequences videos: What can be extracted from these tapes which could
resist the language of information? What is this power of the aesthetic?
39
It is in light of this latter question that we discover the signal contribution
of Camp Campaign: by rendering indeterminate the relation between aesthetics
and politics, the project destabilizes each in turn, refusing their clear separation
and thereby revivifying the unexpected potential of each when intertwined in an
expanded model of practice. In this sense, Camp Campaign takes on a political
cast that corresponds to what Rancire terms the politics of aesthetics. While it
mounted its documentary evidence of the camps reality and prevalence today
focusing on urban povert y, rendit ion airport s, unrecognized villages, and
detainment centersit ultimately left one in a state of the interrogative: What is
to be done? How can one represent the paradigm of the camp? What is the rela-
t ion bet ween art ist ic represent at ion and polit ical engagement? How can
multiple communities be engaged, expanded, created anew? In this regard, one
might argue that the form of the question was the dominant representational
structure of Camp Campaign. By refusing the easy solution and consumption of
the political slogan, the propagandistic logo, the media sound bite, and the
activist poster, Anastas and Gabri disavowed the authoritative rhetoric that
OCTOBER 88
37. Five Statements on Art appears in the Script, pp. 2324, as follows: I. Art is the clearest and
most familiar conguration of Becoming. II. Art must be grasped in terms of the artists, the creators,
and producers, not the recipients. III. According to the expanded concept of artist, art is the basic
occurrence of all beings; to the extent that they are, beings are self creating, created. IV. Art is the dis-
tinctive yes-saying to life. Life is not meant in the narrow sense of human life but is identied with
world. V. Art is more worth than-. For the original, see Martin Heidegger, Nietzsche, vol. 1, trans.
David Krell (New York: Harper Collins, 1991).
38. This refusal should be understood in the larger context of practices that privilege collaboration
above all else. Consider Bishops take, which she proceeds to criticize: The discursive criteria of social-
ly engaged art are, at present, drawn from a tacit analogy between anticapitalism and the Christian
good soul. In this schema, self-sacrice is triumphant: The artist should renounce authorial presence
in favor of allowing participants to speak through him or her. (The Social Turn, p. 183).
39. Script, p. 16.
closes down thinking and critical contemplation, that negates sharing in the act
of interpretation throughout the process of creation and reception. Retaining
the ambiguity and complexity of their subject (as well as the ambiguity of the
artists relation to it), they resist a false clarity, and by doing so, Camp Campaign
creates the terms of its participatory mode, even as it shares the artists research,
analysis, and conclusions. Appropriately, copies of its map were freely available
at the exhibition; its Web site remains openly accessible.
40
At the same time, the
project presents the aesthetics of politics, in the sense that it acknowledges the
fact that, as Rancire argues, the political is constituted by enacting rearrange-
ments to the dominant organization of the sensiblewhat is sayable, thinkable,
and communicable where and when. In other words, rather than subscribing to
Benjamins pejorative notion of the aestheticization of politics, the project
supports Rancires position that politics is not derailed, but constituted by aes-
thetics, otherwise understood as the distribution of the sensible.
41
By behaving
as both artists and political beings, Anastas and Gabri dened Camp Campaign as
a political event, precisely because it stood opposed to the depoliticizing polic-
ing of boundaries, conventional identities, and systems of thought that is rife in
everyday life.
42
Insofar as Camp Campaign refuses to separate creative existence from politi-
cal being, it aligns itself as well with what Agamben terms a form-of-life, that is,
a life that becomes the indivisible locus of political engagement and reexive
thought. Life, according to this formulation, retains its potentiality for undeter-
mi ned devel opment and unl i mi ted growt h t hrough t he exert i on of
intellectuality as antagonistic power, which becomes a force of cohesion and
also of community.
43
Correlatively, this commitment means not only resisting
the separating power of zones of lawlessness, but also taking seriously the insta-
bility of the law. As Fogel contends, we must be careful not to fetishize the law in
the act of responding to anomie, for that would mean taking law as possessing
an inherent power to enforce itself, which it does not have. Only when law is
desacralized and understood as powerless can it become an object of struggle,
and only then does it assume power. In this regard, taking the law as unstable
advancing it s just realizat ion and challenging it s arbitrary enactmentis
Means without End 89
40. It was still active during the nal preparation of this essay in October, 2008.
41. See Jacques Rancire, The Politics of Aesthetics: The Distribution of the Sensible, trans. Gabriel
Rockhill (London: Continuum, 2004).
42. In the Script (4546), Anastas and Gabri explicitly consider these ideas inspired by Jacques
Rancire, ultimately contesting his celebration of the emancipated spectator, owing to the perception
that his realignment risks the eclipse of the artists thought process by collectivist participation and the
free interpretation of viewers. Yet instead of reading Rancires text as amounting to an exclusion of the
artist, we might understand it as negotiating between Benjamins artist as producer and Roland
Barthes death of the author, wherein the artist is reborn as one readeror storytelleramong oth-
ers. See Rancires The Emancipated Spectator, Artforum 45, no. 7 (March 2007).
43. Agamben, Form- of-Life, in Means without End, pp. 911. Also see Giorgio Agamben,
Potentialities: Collected Essays in Philosophy, ed. and trans. Daniel Heller-Roazen (Stanford: Stanford
University Press, 2000).
homologous to Camp Campaigns undoing of the cert itude of the relat ion
between aesthetics and politics, which means that whatever disciplines, forms of
representation, and signifying models are put into use, they cannot be taken for
granted, their meanings assured or assumed, their rules predetermined. Rather,
the relation between disparate fields becomes an object of ongoing negotia-
tionand this is the power of Camp Campaigns aesthetic. How to afrm their
form-of-life, ask Anastas and Gabri, how to see the intrinsic politics of their
entire way of being, as a resistance?
44
OCTOBER 90
44. Script, p. 9.