Gregory Sholette is an artist, writer, activist, curator and Chair of the Master of Arts in Arts Administration Program at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago. He was a founding member of the REPOhistory artist's collective and of Political Art Documentation and Distribution, a graduate of the Whitney Museum Independent Studies Program in Critical Theory as well as the former Curator of Education for the New Museum of Contemporary Art in New York City. Sholette's work was recently featured in the exhibition Critical Mass at the Smart Museum of Art in Chicago, and his critical writings can be found in the journals Third Text, Afterimage, Oxford Art Journal, and the New Art Examiner.

Greg Sholette was interviewed by Nicolas Lampert in January, 2002 via email.

REPOhistory had a very interesting history of its own. Could you briefly explain the work and concepts behind REPOhistory to someone unfamiliar with the project.

GS: REPOhistory was founded in 1989 in New York City by a heterogeneous group of visual artists, performers, activists and educators. Between 1992 and 2000 the group produced over a dozen collaborative art projects primarily in public locations in New York City and Atlanta Georgia. The group’s mission consisted of “repossessing” the unknown or forgotten histories of working class men and women, of minorities and children, at specific urban sites. REPOhistory ‘s primary means of doing this involved three components. First, we installed a series of artist-designed, street signs at or near the location of each “lost” history to be “recovered.” Second, we created maps of the entire region of the city undergoing one of REPOhistory’s historical revisions and then printed and distributed these for free. And finally, we made certain to publicize these critical re-mapping projects and not in the art press only, but in mass media publications including the New York Times and the Village Voice.

However from my perspective at least, REPOhistory's mission was not merely a making visible of "other" histories, other peoples, other cultures in order to “steal back” this or that lost history or curios if antiquated historical detail, but an attempt to initiate a public dialogue about present day concerns. I understood the group’s practice as a salvaging of some version of a public sphere, to retrieve a critical space for discourse and dissent from the hegemony of mass consumerism and corporate culture that dominates modern life. But why the focus on history?
Every REPOhistory alumni will have their own take on this but mine is based on the somewhat utopian politics or redemption embedded in the work of Walter Benjamin and Fredric Jameson among others. History or better yet, collective memory stands in relation to the present like the Id or the “it” does to consciousness. At once fascinating and monstrous it is the very “otherness” of history that posits both hope and danger. The hope is that of past generations for a "better" world. The danger is, as Marx pointed out, the very weight of the past pressing upon the lives of the living…so that is my sense of what fueled our mission: a practice that is activist, didactic, liberatory and not without risk, if only at the level of metaphor. Curiously, when you consider the fact that on more than a few occasions our "salvaging" of specific histories actually caused a ruckus, for example our 1998-99 project Civil Disturbances in particular, there exists strong indication that recalling the past can indeed redeem this residual utopian potential.


What originally inspired the idea for REPOhistory?

GS: There is no simple answer to this question of proper origins, nor for REPOhistory or perhaps any group.** But I can say with certainty that REPOhistory’s inaugural meeting took place in May of 1989 when a dozen people gathered in response to a three-page proposal that I wrote and distributed initially to a group of colleagues. My proposal outlined what I informally called a “history project” and was itself based loosely on another public art project from 1988 called Points of Reference in which invited artists installed site specific work about the veiled Nazi past in Graz Austria. My retailored proposal called on artists to “retrieve and relocate absent historical narratives at specific locations in New York City through counter-monuments, actions, and events.” What emerged from the first meeting was a public art intervention that instead of exposing a hidden fascist past would offer a critical counterpoint to the then upcoming celebration of the Columbus Quin-centenary planned for 1992. The Lower Manhattan Sign Project, the group’s first public installation, was the eventual outcome of the direction taken at this first meeting. We then spent almost two years formulating the first public art project while reading books including Howard Zinn’s People’s History of the United States. One could almost say that our inaugural project was a graphic tribute to Zinn’s revisionist project.

** Another strong contributing factor to the group’s formation was a 1988 organizing effort to produce an illustrated booklet called “How To ‘92” that offered artistic ways of counter-acting the Columbus celebration planned several years hence. Of the future members of REPOhistory who worked on this publication Mark O’Brian, Todd Ayoung and Lisa Maya Knauer all played key roles in the formation and collective management of the group.

What was your own experience learning about American history as a high school / college student?

GS: I was the oldest of four children from a middle class catholic family of Irish and French (Québécois) ancestry. I grew up in a suburban borderland of Northeastern Philadelphia Pennsylvania and was not especially an outstanding student except when it came to music, art and science. Nor was history a subject of particular interest but for two exceptions. I have strong recollections of one, special High School teacher who’s passion for Russian and Soviet history inspired me. She even arranged a screening of Eisenstein’s Alexander Nevsky all of which left a very strong impression on me both in terms of content as well as the formal attributes of modernism. The other influence relates to my own family history and to a distant cousin named Pierre Cholet who was stolen as a very young boy in the early 1870’s from a town near Montreal Canada and forced to work on a ship of French origin for the next forty years. (There is in fact a small book about his life entitled L’enfant perdu et retrouve ou Pierre Cholet: or in English, the story of the child lost and found again that has been published several times over in Quebec.)

All in all however I would say that when I was in high school in the early 70s the political focus was on current events especially opposition to the US war against the Vietnamese. It was not until college that I began to see how important an understanding of history was and not only to the seemingly endless political crisis of modern life, but also the relevance of history to economics and culture more broadly. As things turned out I was the only one of four children to attain a college degree and left Pennsylvania in 1977 to live on the Lower East Side of New York City in order to attend The Cooper Union School of Art. I rented a room on East 7th Street from an energetic octogenarian social activist and former union organizer named Sophie Saroff. I was the kind of kid who produced an “underground newspaper” at the age of thirteen using a school mimeograph machine and was there for quite open to other, non-mainstream views and ideas. Listening to Sophie’s vivid memories of the founding of the American Communist Parties, (there were initially two you know), as well as the steel strikes in Philadelphia of the 1920’s, or the idealistic volunteers who went to fight and sometimes die against Franco’s fascists in Spain in the early 1930’s and of course the rise and fall of McCarthyism, I was literally and quite radically re-educated about US history. All of this dovetailed perfectly with my studies at The Cooper Union primarily with the German artist Hans Haacke who’s systems-based conceptual projects had shifted from ecological concerns to institutional criticism within the art world focused on social and political issues. His famous Shapolsky et al. Manhattan Real Estate Holdings, Real-Time Social System. piece was of course censored from the Guggenheim Museum in 1971 because, as Thomas Messer, the museum’s director,
summed up:

“To the degree to which an artist deliberately pursues aims that lie beyond art, his very concentration upon ulterior ends stands in conflict with the intrinsic nature of the work as an end in itself.”.

But perhaps the work that first stirred my interest in history as a political practice are the two “tracings” Haacke produced in the mid 1970s mapping the successive ownership of several post-impressionist paintings by Manet and Seurat respectively. By tracking the lineage of these objects Haacke cleverly reveals how paintings ––one made by an artist who participated in the Paris Commune the other who moved in anarchist and communist circles–– were later owned by Left wing radicals, Nazi sympathizers and eventually transformed into such extremely valuable commodities that they were last purchased by a consortium of multiple investors. Haacke also gave us an amazing reading list that included the book of Walter Benjamin’s writings Illuminations. In it is Benjamin’s famous essay on memory and redemption, the Thesis on the Philosophy of History. Among other insights gleaned from this essay is the way Benjamin gives weight to the invisible reverberations of history ––including both the wondrous as well as the horrific––and the way these impact places and objects and individuals in the present. This very powerful, dialectical concept has fueled a great deal of my work: both as an individual artist, as a writer and educator and of course as a collective cultural practitioner. Interestingly enough my daughter is now in seventh grade in a school in Manhattan and her history text book is none other than Zinn’s People’s History of the United States!

Noam Chomsky, in a Z Magazine interview (February,1999), talked about how schools can act as a filter. “A good educational system ought to nurture and encourage creativity and a moral instinct and allow them to flourish. But of course that has problems. For one thing it means that it will encourage the challenge of authority and domination. It will encourage questioning powerful institutions. The fact is that honesty, integrity, creativity, all these things we’re supposed to value, all run up dramatically against the hierarchic, authoritarian structure of the institutional framework in which we live… They (schools) filter out independence of thought, creativity, imagination, and in their place foster obedience and subordination…There are people who don’t accept, who aren’t obedient. They are weeded out, they’re behavior problems. The long term effect of this is to reward and foster subordination: it begins in kindergarten and goes all the way through your professional career..

What are your thoughts on this statement. I am curious if you see this same type of pattern develop at art schools?

GS: I have great respect for Naom Chomksy however the problem you refer to is even more complex and insidious than the bleak description of his you cite here. Simply put: within liberal democratic societies the kind of overt suppression of dissent by an authoritarian institutional structure, or what Foucault aptly described as a Society of Discipline, this has by and large become an in-effective means of control. Consider for a moment that an entire layer of current educators at both primary and secondary schools today are men and women from the post-68, post-Watergate generation. As a matter of course they operate from a position of doubt in which the dominant forms of politics, economics, and history are constantly called into question. And this ubiquitous skepticism has indeed been passed along via the very institutional structures that Chomsky is roundly denouncing. So you might ask then, where is the revolution? Why are we not living in an egalitarian and peaceful society where freedom and knowledge rather than money and authority rule? For the short answer, take a look at any corporate advertising campaign that markets to “youth culture.” Look for example at Nike, Macintosh, MTV as well as the automobile, music, cell phone and of course fashion industries. As Thomas Frank author of “The Conquest of Cool” has shown, these global businesses are managed by “hip” nonconformists, in some cases art school graduates raised on the idea of a permanent avant-garde revolution. To these bohemian entrepreneurs “Thinking outside the box” is standard operating procedure. So, to answer your question about art schools the danger is not that we educators will turn out armies of obedient clones, but that our very premise, that we are a last vestige of unorthodoxy in a world of conformity, is itself in need of radical revamping. Yes certainly, we are currently in a period of conservatism unlike anything since perhaps the 1950s. But this reactionary condition, with its normalization of militarist nationalism, patriarchal authority, ecological degradation and unprecedented economic inequality (the latter is in fact quite unlike the 50s) is at the same time encapsulated in an ideology that offers everyone with a credit card and telephone the chance to live the "lifestyle" of their choice. Within limits of course because one can not for example refuse to be "connected," not that is without serious consequences on the employment front: the very field of battle for the modern homo sapian. To revamp the frequently quoted words of Descartes: I am marketable: there for I am.

Looking at the art shown in museums, galleries, periodicals and art schools in the United States, one would probably come to the conclusion that political art is close to non-existent. What do you think are some of the reasons behind this lack of political art in our society? Is it simply a case of it being created and not shown? Or are artists in general not interested in the subject?

GS: I think both your hypothesis have validity. As you suggest, artists in general are disinclined towards explicit political commentary in their work by the circumscribed nature of the art world. By the term art world I mean the integrated, trans-national economy of auction houses, dealers, collectors, international biennials and trade publications that, together with curators, artists and critics, reproduce the market, as well as the discourse that influences the appreciation and demand for highly valuable artworks. And while a certain dalliance in political content moves in and out of fashion within the art world, few artists seriously interested in pursuing a career attempt any sustained engagement with worldly concerns not directly impinging on the narrow self-interest of the art world itself. The result is too often a neutralizing form of irony whenever politics does make an appearance in galleries, museums and so forth. Having stated this, there is a great deal of creative work being produced with social and political intent most of which is simply not seen. This work, some of it naïve in content and/or form but always impassioned can be found on display in community centers, union halls and churches. It has also recently become visible over the internet and in the carnivalesque street demonstrations that have marked the counter-globalization movement of recent years. There are also a few exhibition spaces where such work is occasionally still exhibited including college and university art galleries and alternative spaces such as Exit Art. But this raises another impediment to politically engagement on the part of artists and that is money. In a profession where most people work two or three jobs simply to make ends meet it is a hard sell suggesting that artists should handicap themselves still more by making work that is of limited interest to the few sources of financial support that do exist.

I have been surprised by the lack of massive protests in the United States against George W. Bush since he came to power. Any ideas why the left has been so quiet? Is this time period any different than the 1980’s, the Reagan-era? Could an optimist say that this swing to the far right will pass or have we entered new territory?

GS: From all indications, the US Left is in shambles. Considering that economic disparity is at an all time high, at least for the post-war United States, while credit card debt is astronomical and the cost of housing, medical care and education is out of reach for many so-called middle class people, the exact reasons for the lack of organized opposition is hard to account for. If asked to speculate, I would remind readers that it was precisely the question of why the majority of workers in Germany supported the National Socialists who so clearly contradicted their own economic and political interest, that led to the revisionist form of Marxism known as the Frankfurt School. Their analysis of ideology is still the high water mark of cultural criticism in the Marxist tradition and perhaps in general. But it is important to add that aspects of the admixture of Freudian theory and historical materialism that characterize Frankfurt School theory no longer appear as a strong contender for understanding post-Reagan/Thatcher social structures. However, I don’t think a new theory adequate to the present circumstances has emerged. Bits and pieces yes, but not the sort of persuasive analysis that could begin to answer your question…nevertheless strong opposition to the current administration does exist, if not in the systematized form one would hope for. And this is nothing to dismiss especially since it is in fact all we have at present to build upon.

Speaking of the 1980s. The “Culture Wars” (the battle over censorship and public funding of the arts) seemed in the end to be a one sided conversation between the art elite and the political elite. The people on the bottom, the majority of artists and people under attack, were left out of the equation and the real issues (attacks against working class people, attacks against gays, woman…seemed to be put to the side.)

Where are we now a decade latter? What are the positives and negatives for artists working today. Is public funding for the arts (such as what you see in Canada and many Western European countries) something to strive for?

GS: The so-called Culture Wars of the 1980’s as you correctly summarize it netted progressive politics virtually zero. To be truly skeptical but honest, the entire “battle” wound-up doing more for the reactionary agenda of conservative politicians and secondarily for the careers of a few artists than it did for freedom either in the abstract of concrete sense of the word. Meanwhile public arts funding was slashed to the bone as the art world ran to the barricades to defend their own, rather uncomplicated interpretation of the First Amendment. (As it turns out even the right wing Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas has revealed a more nuanced take on the limits of free speech in his recent comments on cross burning than most artists and their sympathizers hold.) Certainly support of public funding not only for art, but for housing, health care, education, utilities and transportation are important goals to once again press as publicly funded, civic resources. If that sounds rather old-world today so be it. But recent election trends in Latin America and Eastern Europe suggest even the developing world’s love affair with free market economics may be coming to a close.

I was interested in a quote of yours from a recent interview that you did with “Groups and Spaces” (http://www.groupsandspaces.net/e_zine1.html)

“What happened in my opinion by the end of the 80s was this: the art world selected a few, individual artists making "political art" or "art with social content" and set about legitimating them within the museum and within the art historical canon. Meanwhile, the broad base of such activity that had led to the very possibility of this recognition was thrust back into darkness, a darkness I should add that made us invisible not just to the institutional center but also each other.”

Could you expand upon this topic, in particular those who are legitimized. I sense that artists that rise from the underground to fame in established art circles, in a sense become what they once rebelled against. A “Rage Against the Machine” scenario where the message is diluted by the carrier.

GS: The entire history of middle class notions of art rest on a controlled self-criticism and at times even lampoonery of high art itself. At certain times political art fits that bill nicely. At other times it is formally extreme works and still other times it is sexually explicit imagery and so forth and so on. That is not to invalidate the importance of these moments of rupture such as brought about by early Conceptual Art any more than one should simply dismiss socially critical work that ends up in museums. But the problem that seems to repeat itself each time politicized art “has its day” is the way recognition within the legitimating institutions of the art world evacuates the critical punch of the art itself. Why is that? In my view one reason in is that no political art practice can succeed at truly challenging the status quo beyond a certain aesthetic reformism if it is not linked in a meaningful way to real-world (not art world) movements aimed at progressive social change. Short of this, political art that situates itself primarily as a critique of bourgeois institutions largely exists as a sort of rehearsal at best. Besides, this leaning into the wind of history, a “history” that is formulated by the limited horizon of capitalist imagination to boot, is not that different from other kinds of avant-garde and neo-avant-garde art practices. Nevertheless it is vital to illuminate this process both within and outside the mechanisms of art, high art that is. For example the history of collective art practice, most of it linked to left culture, remains to be excavated. I believe that were such a history to be written it would overturn a great deal of what museums present as the genealogy of art. The same is true of the entire range of creative work produced within society. I recently have called this the Dark Matter of the art world and theorize that its increasing visibility via ever more affordable digital and web-based technologies in particular is not only affecting art world practices, but is threatening the very foundation of value production within these elitist institutions and discourses.

 In the same interview, you stated.

“It is apparent that today a similar kind of cross-over phenomenon in which artists move away from a strictly art world context and into an activist or autonomous mode, is taking place. This new activism is most visible in the WTO counter-actions in various international cities. Antonio Negri and Michael Hardt have even described these new activists as "Nomadic Revolutionaries." What one finds is the participation of academically trained artists working beside "non" professionals and political activists all involved in transforming collective dissent into an energetic and pleasurable carnival. Let me repeat that it is invigorating to see this crossover activity happening and perhaps this time, thanks to the self-awareness and cleverness.. as well as the increased visibility and networking potential afforded by new technologies, things will go differently.”

Could you give some examples of this cross over of artists to activist that inspire you.

GS: Certainly. The range of cross-over art activism is quite amazing. The groups I like to cite in this regard include RTmark, Ultra-Red, Temporary Services, Wolkenklausure, Las Agencias, Critical Art Ensemble, Reclaim the Streets, The Reverend Billy and the Church of Stop Shopping, The Center for Land Use Interpretation, Ne Pas Plier. To one extent or another each of these organizations involves or has included in specific projects both trained artists as well as non-art activists. Some of the work is so “borderline” in between art and activism that it is does not even register on the art world’s radar screen. And that may be a very good thing if not indefinitely at least for the moment. Admittedly my observations are largely anecdotal, but while there is as yet no effort yet to conceive of or let alone produce an over arching networking structure or political agenda, the existence of this growing interest in such collaborative practices among younger artists is encouraging.



Many of the new tools available to artist and activists revolve around computer technology and the Internet. One could say that we are playing into the hands of the very technology that the power structure (the military/industrial complex) has developed and uses to their full capacity.

Why not instead focus on a more ecological path, one based on true survival techniques such as learning how to grow your own food and getting back to more land based/ community based form of living.

What are your thoughts on these opposing paths?

GS: At the risk of reductivism I must say that this is in many respects a very old debate. You can see remnants of it in the historic battles between Anarchists and Marxists, between the Soviet “left” artists of the Proletcult and the avant-garde Constructivists (now that was a real culture war!) and again in the Cultural Revolution of China or even lesbian separatism in the 70's. In many respects each revolves around a similar question of developing independent and autonomous social structures verses a “stealing back” of the means of production and there for the very wealth and control of society. My thoughts, for what they are worth, are to rethink the entire metaphor of divergent paths itself. Consider first that given the apparent incompetence of the intelligence and military prior to the horrific events of September Eleventh 2001 one should not monumentalize these institutions any more than museums or universities. The creative potential of the masses as Antonio Negri refers to the contemporary public is not likely to be fully circumvented by even the most sophisticated technologies. I say use them for progressive ends, while remaining cautious about their limits, as well as one’s own limits both historically and politically. The other side of your equation is in need of an equal deconstruction. While imagining and attempting to produce a provisional autonomy is important, one can not be seduced into believing there is such a thing as a “clean slate” or a safe place from which to build a new and sovereign culture. Derrida writes about this desire to ‘start from scratch’ in his essay, “The Ends of Man: Reading Us,” first published in France in 1969 and warns that,

“To decide to change terrain, in a discontinuous and irruptive fashion, by brutally placing oneself outside” [is risking a form of] “tromp-l’oil perspective in which such a displacement can be caught, thereby inhabiting more naively and more strictly than ever the inside one declares one has deserted…”

The solution he proposes is one I offer you now: to weave aspects of each of these “paths” you refer to, as well as other strategies both old and new, into a hybrid, progressive theory and practice. This emerging framework may at first seem improbable, even monstrous but who said that making a revolution would be a walk in the woods?

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For more on some of these topics please see:

“Stealing The State: Sophie Saroff, An Oral History,” edited by Arthur Tobias and Letta Schatz and published by the Community Documentation Workshop of St. Marks Church-in-the-Bowery: 1983, NYC.

And by Gregory Sholette:

“Heart of Darkness: a Journey into the Dark Matter of the Art World”

(Forthcoming in a book based on the conference Visual Worlds, U.C. Davis, 10/01.)

 “Some Call It Art: From Imaginary Autonomy to Autonomous Collectivity”: Dürfen Die Das?: Kunst als sozialer Raum: Art/Education/Cultural Work/Communities, Ed. Stella Rollig and Eva Sturm, (Verlag Turia & Kant, Wein, Austria, 2002). 161-184. (And forthcoming in a book published by Social Text based on the conference Cultural Capital/Cultural Conference at NYU, 12/00.) http://www.eipcp.net/diskurs/d07/text/sholette_en.html

“Fidelity, Betrayal, Autonomy: In and Beyond the Post-Cold War Art Museum.”

(Forthcoming in a book based on the Second Curatorial Summit in Banff Center, Canada, and in the journal Third Text, Summer 2002.)

“News from Nowhere: Activist Art & After, Report from New York City,” in the book Metropolenkultur: Kunst, Kultur und Politik in den Großstädten der 90er Jahre in den Zentren der Welt. ed. by Utta Held. Schriften Der Guernica-Gesellschaft, (Weimer, Germany 2000). 227-249. And in the journal Third Text #45, (Winter, 1999.) 45-56.

“Counting On Your Collective Silence: Notes on Activist Art as Collaborative Practice,” Afterimage, The Journal of Media and Cultural Criticism, (11/99) 18-20.

“Authenticity Squared: REPOhistory Anatomy of an Urban Art Collective,” New Art Examiner, (12/99) 20-23 & 71-72.