I should take a step back and tell you a little bit about Not an Alternative. We're an arts collective that formed in 2004 with people with a very wide mix of backgrounds. So I come out of activism and organizing. My partner and co-founder comes out of art. >> Jason Jones, right, yeah. >> Jason Jones, that's right. And we work with a theorist, we work with public relations people, art historians, designers, a wide range. And we are interested in sort of cross-pollinating our worlds and blurring those boundaries between those disciplines. But ultimately have a pretty consistent orientation with our practice, and that is the occupation of existing symbols, stories, events, institutions, in order to affect what they mean. It's our assessment that every symbol, every subject is fundamentally split. So it's defined as much by its positive characteristics as it is by that which it excludes or that which it isn't. So if you were to use the analogy of room, it's defined as much as by its ceilings and floors and walls as the negative space in between. And so it's in sort of inhabiting that space, activating that split within a subject, bringing in that exclusion, or thing that it refuses that we can ultimately affect and transform, the very understanding, or the very definition of a particular thing. >> Yeah, in fact, the question I had about Not an Alternative had to do with you have a very interesting mission statement, which you partly described now, this idea of symbols, right? Very few institutions or organizations have in their mission statement a core place for symbols and how we deal with symbols, right? >> It was hard for us to avoid, that was a challenge. It's not a very traditional mission statement, yet the world, the immaterial world of symbols and symbiotics and stories has a very direct, palpable impact on the material world. >> Right, right. >> And that's where our work in Occupy is legible, I think. There, we were really interested for a number of years, in particular, after the 2008 economic crash where it felt like the crisis was most visible in the collapse of the housing bubble, and the ensuing foreclosure crisis. We started to collaborate with a group called, Picture the Homeless based here in New York. They're a homeless-led organization. And we sort of occupied, or hijacked, the visual language of the symbols and signs that govern our use of space. So we were thinking about that as a vocabulary, as a language that exists in the world that you recognize and maybe take for granted, right? But yellow and black or high visibility orange or caution tape or road signs. So yeah, it was in these collaborations with Picture the Homeless. They had just done a several year survey of vacant properties throughout Manhattan. It was a survey that hadn't been performed since the 30s in the city. And they really wanted to demonstrate that homelessness and the foreclosure crisis, etc., is not as much an issue of space as it is an issue of political will. So in conducting this survey with volunteer canvassers over the course of a couple of years, they compiled a report. And demonstrated that there's more vacant properties in Manhattan alone than the entire homeless population of all five boroughs in New York City. Yet, that was going to be a blip on the radar screen when they issued this report, right? The media's maybe going to make a quick mention of it. So, we teamed up so that we could bring our skills as visual artists and cultural producers to help to create more sort of mediagenic spectacle around that. And we don't, in our collaborations with community groups or activist organizations, necessarily always have the same ends. >> Mm-hm. >> Our goals are symbiotic. Yet for us, it was really about destabilizing the symbolic terrain such that we can effect a broader transformation. >> Yeah. >> In the narrative discourse around spatial politics, in our understanding of the world around us. In particular, with sort of occupying this particular visual language of spatial politics we were questioning a city built for whom, right? And this tug between public and private. And who gets to determine who uses the city and how? Well you're right, I come at it as an activist with a background of over 20 years of organizing. So that's the lens I apply to this work. And for me, I went through organizing school, and not once in that entire year were the words culture or aesthetics mentioned. >> And where was that? >> Seemed like a big blind spot. It was a program called Green Corps, which teaches you the fundamentals and you're running campaigns across the country and working with communities. But yeah, that seemed like a blind spot, in particular, activists and NGOs are always talking about how to get their content or their campaigns to go viral. Yet popular culture is already that, can we occupy it and redirect it, or point it in a new direction? >> It's about getting a message across, not about transforming a general culture or something. >> Yeah, it's like a lot of activists have traditionally avoided public relations, right? As like the purview of the enemy, right? That's manipulation. It's capitalism, it's selling something. Yet the right has wholeheartedly embraced it, and so we were really interested in sort of yeah, can you use the tools of persuasion to different ends. That's my perspective, yet I think that there's others in the collective who come from an art background who understand our work within the canon of art history, having a relationship to institutional critique artists like Hans Haacke, Andrea Fraser and Fred Wilson. >> Yeah. >> Being as sort of iteration upon that. But then also, having a sort of fundamental relationship to a particular understanding or definition of art that is not necessarily shared across the board by socially engaged artists, right? We reject the idea of the instrumentalization of art, useful art is not. Yet we're doing activism with our art. But at it's core, if we were to define it as art, it would be more about sort of occupying this gap or what's invisible within a particular subject. Yeah, David Koch is the, one would argue, the sort of lynch pin of the climate denial machine, right. So he and his brother Charles have made their money in Koch Industries, the second largest privately held fossil fuel company. They profit from the burning of fossil fuels. They also have spent, since 1997 they've spent $79 million funding climate denialism. So lobby groups and indoctrination. >> If Not an Alternative had- >> $79 million? >> 100th of that money. [LAUGH] >> Yeah we'll take it all. Yeah, so there's this great contradiction. And this is something we're always interested in is the gap between the ideals of the institution and it's practice, or again, that gap in any particular subject between what it says it is and then what it sweeps under the rug. And in this case, David Koch, the biggest climate denier, one of the biggest climate deniers out there, sits on the board of our country's two largest natural history museums. >> Mm-hm, right. >> So why do you have a climate denier sitting on the board of a science institution? It doesn't make sense. >> Mm-hm. >> And that points to a larger systemic issue of the corporatization of our cultural institutions, the privatization of these spaces, the embedding of the fossil fuel industry in cultural institutions as a public relations or greenwashing move, in particular places that communicate science to the public. So that was the impetus. >> And the overarching influence that some of these individuals have in their cultural institutions too, and scientific institutions as well. >> And that they sort of are increasingly consolidating influence within these institutions, while they then fund lobbying for budget cuts to those very same institutions. >> And so how did this project work on a day-to-day basis? You have a truck, right, you have bears. What do you do, you wrote a letter to the New York Natural History Museum, right and- >> We teamed up with, to kick it off we, so we do exhibitions, that happen within existing institutions, So our first one was at the Queens Museum. Over the next few years, we're teaming up with natural history museums that are affiliated with universities to do pop-up exhibits. We have a 15-passenger Natural History Museum bus that travels our exhibitions, but is also used for tours and for expeditions with scientists and members of the public to sort of contested areas. And we do educational workshops and panels in some. So everything that traditional natural history museums do, we do as well. >> Great. >> With this project we're adopting the authoritative vocabulary of the generic natural history museum in order get inside the museum sector and transform it from within. So we're interested in identifying and creating space for allies on the inside of these institutions to make change to push this agenda. And so for us, we're not necessarily romanticizing the smallest beautiful alternative education that we're doing when we host a workshop. We're thinking about this symbolic power of doing that within a container that accrues all this sort of force and influence over time. So that's something that we've sort of named counter-power infrastructure. It was our goal in Occupy, in developing Occupy Tape, and this visual language to knit together various manifestations of the movement around the world so that they were visible as a movement, as a force more powerful, as counter-power infrastructure. We're trying to do the same thing with the Natural History Museum Project so that we're not just activating our alternative institution as a pedagogical one, but we're trying to activate the entire museum sector. And recognizing that while there are privatizing forces that are trying to direct those institutions to their ends, we can as well. >> Yeah. >> Who gets to speak on behalf of these institutions? Is it just people who get a paycheck? >> Yeah. >> Is it the docents? Is it the visitors? Can we blur the boundaries? In all of our projects we deal with how politics are mediated through representation. And so looking at natural history museums, through dioramas, through visual display, etc., they educate people about science. Yet there's no culture of criticism within these spaces, as there is when an art exhibit opens, you've got critics who write about it. We know how to deconstruct newspaper articles or what you see on television. But there is nothing like that. >> Do you already have a science show critic in residence in your museum? >> Yeah, we built an advisory board of upper echelon museum sector professionals, scientists, etc. We've teamed up with dozens of the world's top scientists and several noble laureates to release a letter calling on science museums to cut ties to the fossil fuel industry. So for us, it's not just about us coming in to this institutions and saying you should kick David Koch off your board. It's really more about creating a container, creating counter-power infrastructure for scientists to speak politically, right? >> Yeah, yeah. >> And for museum sector professionals who really believe in the ideals of their institutions to find a voice and form a sort of collectivity that can have a power to shape the sector's future. I would just say that we have a ton more agency than we give ourselves credit for, and so just finding those opportunities and start small. When we released that scientist letter, there were probably about 100 press hits around the world in the largest media outlets. And it just kept going. And kicked off, it set in motion a chain of events that was beyond our expectations. >> Well, and start small is a great advice for our students because they will often be sitting, reviewing these materials, and reading, and listening to the lectures and guest presentations, and think how can I possibly do that. Their assignments or projects are in one week. Two weeks, six weeks at the most. And so they may think this is impossible, right? But as you said, you start small and then you'll get somewhere. If you never start. >> That's the learning process, absolutely. You get little tastes of success and then you build upon them and get more complex over time. Well thanks so much, Becca. And it was great to talk to you. >> Thank you. [LAUGH]
