Reflections on “The Social Turn”
He Will Not Divide Us, 2017-2021
He Will Not Divide Us was a public art piece first installed at the MOMA upon the first day of Donald Trump’s presidency in 2017, and was recreated in different iterations in various locations across the country for the duration of Trump’s term. The project was created by the artist trio of Shia Lebouf, Nastja Säde Rönkkö, and Nate Turner, who are known for their discourse-generating performance art pieces. He Will Not Divide Us was simply a camera mounted on the outer wall of the MOMA which lives-streamed participants 24/7 from 2017 until the conclusion of Trump’s presidency in 2021, and was designed to serve as a collaborative political art piece to generate and show solidarity for not allowing the newly elected president to “divide us” through his xenophobic, misogynistic, and illogical rhetoric. Click here for the full website.
La Commune, 2000
Even though La Commune is part feature film, part documentary, I decided to include it because it speaks to one artist’s vision for an art piece which can only be achieved through collaboration, and the political implications of this work rest on the collaboration itself. From the Wikipedia page:
“La Commune (Paris, 1871) has been noted for its very large cast. [The cast] is mainly non-professional, including many immigrants from North Africa. Members did much of their own research for the project. Watkins once said of the film, "The Paris Commune has always been severely marginalized by the French education system, despite - or perhaps because - it is a key event in the history of the European working class, and when we first met, most of the cast admitted that they knew little or nothing about the subject. It was very important that the people become directly involved in our research on the Paris Commune, thereby gaining an experiential process in analyzing those aspects of the current French system which are failing in their responsibility to provide citizens with a truly democratic and participatory process.”
To me, what is notable about La Commune is that the non-professional actors, in learning about their roles for the film, were required to learn about a real historical event which has political reaches and implications for their lives in 2000. As Watkins notes, the cast was directly involved in the research on the Paris Commune, and thus the work they produced ended up being an extremely collaborative project (much of La Commune is ad-libbed based on the casts’ knowledge of their character and events, and thus the art is created “on the spot,” with the actors participating as artists).