Daniel Drennan
In April 2010 I found myself in Montreal for an academic conference. It was my first time there, and as I am wont to do in such a new place, I looked up used bookstores and otherwise roamed around the city. In one such English-language bookstore in the city center I asked the owner if he had any books on the Montreal Olympics that were actually critical of the games. A bit taken aback, he stated “no”, and wondered, defensively, why I was looking for such material. I explained that I was going to be teaching a design studio entitled “Mediating the Real World”, and one of our projects would involve investigating the Olympic Games as a paragon of corporate branding and design that obliterates other valid manifestations and expressions of a popular and populist nature; I was hoping to find readings for the students. He apologized again for not knowing of any such work, and left me to my browsing.
When I came back to the counter, he looked at my assembled books for purchase and he re-engaged the conversation. “You know, my wife refers to the Stadium (still listed as a tourist attraction in my guidebook) as the ‘toilet bowl’. It never worked properly; the roof kept caving in. Those games were in 1976, and we only paid off the debt on them this past year!” Our conversation turned to the bookstores that I could not seem to find although they were listed in my guidebook just a year old, all replaced by mall outlets. “They’re all closed. All of them. I’m not sure how long I can hold on.” He clued me in to the protests that were taking place on the periphery of the city, as the police, in the name of urban renewal forces, continued to wage their war on the working class, to replace it with the much more desirable cosmopolitan consumer class of academics, college students, and white-collar professionals–the urban hip as we now know them–and as witnessed in many cities around the globe. I thanked him for his time, and promised to get back to him if I found any such reading matter. “I would love to stock those books!,” he said.
Further research shows that the faulty stadium he spoke of was referred to locally as the “Big Owe,” 1 and the remnants of those games of 30 years previous are still quite evident in the city, although they currently take on a rather ominous significance some three decades later. The Modernist architecture, then signalling a “new era”, and extended now to museums and other dominant cultural spaces, can be seen as a mirror reflection of Olympic Committee propaganda that, with a few minor alterations, would just as easily describe historically similar (albeit more odiously fascistic) endeavors that blend urban renewal with a disdain for the Other, an elitist design sensibility removed from the needs of the street and of the people, and marching in lockstep with the rampages of globalizing Capitalism.
This was reflected in my walks around Montreal, with its revamped and displaced downtown and underground mall where English is bizarrely the dominant language in terms of universities, shops, and street talk, in what I expected to be a French secessionist province. The limits of this city center are marked by the buildings of the era of the Olympic games, vast concrete sweeps of order and structure, delimiting this inner realm from the much poorer industrial zones, residential areas, and even the old city, all of which were undergoing a vast destruction as well as police oppression, as witnessed by graffiti and homemade posters I found there, and in stark contrast to the clean, well-maintained urban core.
In a book I later found that same day, Olympic Industry Resistance, Helen Jefferson Lenskyj spells out this link between the Olympics and the ability of cities to “recreate” themselves at the expense of the residential poor, marginalized populations, and the working class. She lists the results of studies done in Olympics host cities, and the trends she cites include:
Eviction of tenants from low-rent housing, particularly in Olympic precincts and downtown areas, to make way for Olympic tourists; evictions resulting from gentrification and beautification of low-income areas; significant decrease in boarding house stock; artificially inflated real estate prices; unchanged or weakened tenant protection legislation, resulting in rent increases and evictions without cause, a problem for low-income tenants in particular; the criminalization of poverty and homelessness through legislation; increasing police powers over homeless and under-housed people in public spaces; temporary or permanent privatization of public space; temporary or permanent suppression of human rights, particularly freedom of expression. 2
That was Montreal. And this is London today, continuing in this great Olympic tradition. And this became the basis for our investigation in the classroom concerning this topic, avoiding the usual cliché design approach of “imagine the Olympics coming to your city” which only reveals design at its most devious, insincere, and tied to corporate and capitalist production of not only cultural manifestations, but of an entire zeitgeist that targets the working poor in the name of and to the benefit of elite consumer classes. Instead we used an original framework that focused on ideas of voice, audience, communicator, venue, form, technique, and the distances and removes that result from discrepancies among them.
For example, the students were given four groups to research in terms of particular Olympic games cities and their communicated messages: The Olympic Committee itself, the host city government, the design firm responsible for the corporate identity, and any protesters they could find. This gave us the full spectrum of those involved, whether actually present locally or not. The results of the research showed a complete disconnect between the imposing force of the Games and those suffering from this imposition. To no one’s surprise, the designed communication always fell on the monologuist side of those imposing the propaganda of promised urban renewal, an influx of jobs, and redevelopment programs.
In a reversal of sorts, the students were asked to come up with a brochure/poster, a street intervention, as well as a public performance on behalf of those protesting the games in their city. We researched street theater, graffiti and stenciling, as well as the aspects of empowerment inherent to their work. Meaning, how do they as advocates close the distance between themselves and those they are working with? This led to research into and readings on social justice, forms of dominance and power, economic and political inequality, racism and classism, etc. Most interesting were the conclusions and parallels the students were able to make between London and the local scene of Beirut and other cities of the region, which have seen a similar destruction of the urban fabric in the name of both Capital and a continuing colonialism marketed as revitalizing the city, mostly for the sake of wealthy tourists and foreign NGO workers as well as monied compradors.
In all aspects of the students’ work, they focused on their own engagement with those whose voice they were taking on. They understood the distances of class, education, and access to information, and attempted at all times to minimize any kind of talking down or willful remove from those they were researching. One group (all work was collaborative and communal) used a “punk” collage/zine aesthetic, and we discussed how this aesthetic was co-opted by designers of the time and rendered toothless, looking for means to successfully revive it. One group used linoleum cut illustrations and stencils as techniques traditional to revolutionary artists, and tied factually what is happening in London to other cities that had a similar experience. One group centered their work around a park slated for destruction to make way for the equestrian events years hence, and their intervention was designed to be activated by local residents and their children. In all of the students’ work, no communication was allowed that did not thoroughly think through these distances and removes, and which did not enable, empower, or otherwise allow for advocacy of those opposing the Olympic games in their midst.
The recent events in London were succinctly summed up via one student’s recent email:
Check it out. 3 Brings back Mediating the Real World….the thing is, it is not just this one “death of a local man”; it is so many different issues, like taking away benefits from single mothers and raising tuition and rent, and guess where most of the money is probably pouring into: the Olympics!
What was so evident to us has so far been completely ignored by the mediated realm following as it does a game plan which requires public relations and indoctrination over any realistic appraisal of the effects of the Olympic games, as clearly spelled out in critiques such as Olympic Industry Resistance. And so it was no surprise that CNN turned its coverage from the buildings burning in Tottenham to a beach volleyball test game, played by scantily clad women and complete with bikini-wearing cheer leaders. 4 When this mediation wasn’t enough, we were witness to the mayor of London pathetically assuring investors abroad that the Olympics would indeed take place, as if this were the most pressing issue of the day. We can only imagine what this means for local residents, now obviously at their boiling point.
In an interesting parallel, the design magazine Eye ran an article in 2005 on the 1968 Olympic Games in Mexico City, stating:
Of all Olympic events staged in living memory, Mexico 1968–the XIX Olympiad–is one of the most fondly and best remembered. Not because it was the Olympiad where a woman first lit the Olympic flame, nor because more world records were broken in Mexico than in any other prior Olympiad, nor even because of the clenched-fist, Black Panther salutes of two African American athletes whose names almost nobody now recalls. Mexico ’68 sticks in the mind because the originality and cogency of its system of communication converted it into a paradigm of modern graphic and event design. 5
This reading views the event of the Games as politically and culturally normal–an accepted status quo–the basic premise of which is not even questioned. It further claims that its “innovative” corporate graphics were the single most important aspect of these Games’ relevance, while glibly sidelining any attempt from within the Games to protest or to resist.
Hugely slighted are voices which, if heard, would not only condemn the Games as presenting a fascistic notion of nationality and individual accomplishment, but would further tell a story of other no-less important cultural manifestations barely alluded to by the elitist article: The theft of indigenous Mexican craft by the designers of the Games’ graphics (this is referred to as “inspiration” in design education), the manifestations of the student protests then taking place on Mexico City university campuses, the continent of Africa boycotting the presence of apartheid South Africa in the Games, as well as the American athletes who raised their fists in sympathy with the Black Power movement. These cultural manifestations are not recorded, or passed forward, or celebrated, and for very particular reasons; and if they are, it is often misleadingly packaged as “design history”, in an effort to relegate to the past and make a consumable product out of activist fervor.
The fact of the matter is that there are more vital, creative, interesting, and inherently valid artworks made by those protesting the Olympic Games than by design firms working for them, and this is easily verified (do an Internet search on “protest,” “Olympics,” and “Vancouver,” for example), leaving the design realm woefully out of touch with reality. This distance from the street can be summed up by the recently held What Design Can Do conference in Amsterdam, as well as the upcoming Design Activism and Social Change conference of the Fundació Història del Disseny in Barcelona — another Olympic city that went through its urban restructuring and is now witnessing uprisings — which without apparent irony will feature a city tour of “Anarchism in Barcelona” for attending designers. The blog for the Barcelona conference more incredibly critiques the former conference for maintaining that neo-liberalism is a given, yet this is validated by many of the speakers in Barcelona and their connections to core centers and peripheral extensors of Capital. A more potent and far more valid critique would be along the lines of the anarchists in Copenhagen, defacing the mural painted by artist Shepard Fairey, best known for his “Hope” painting of Barack Obama.
This reveals the truths, if you will, that came forward during our class studio: Our “design” is not divorced from the real world, nor from current events, nor from the political and economic frameworks that sustain design as an industry and practice. Most importantly, our design is connected to those who also have a say in the matter: In one performance brief, for example, the students humbly list as a desired realization of the project “The empowerment of East Londoners”. Our work is inherently political; to claim an objective remove is in and of itself a political statement. Any distance between our communication and those we claim to speak for is invalid; the minimizing of this distance is paramount to any truly socially activist work. Taking this one step further, the engagement of this voice we champion requires us to reach out, teach, provide tools and means, and attempt to bring back the creativity that has likewise been sapped from our lives by Capitalism. Finally, it is incumbent on us to point out the mimicking of these ideas by those who in fact empower Capital–Designers, Artists, the Media–and who determinedly accomplish the exact opposite of what they claim in terms of valid social awareness.
I will grant you that students have the luxury of temporarily stepping down (or pretending to) from their class position, and that the real world will be a rude awakening for them in many cases. But I can attest to their active engagement with issues that otherwise would not have been brought to their attention in a “normal” design education, or for which they previously did not have the tools to grasp and dissect, due to a steadfastly ossifying academy that attempts to remain apolitical, entrenched as it is in an outdated post-modern tradition that maintains a macabre dance with those it pretends to go up against. I would much rather they have this background in what was recently thought impossible using frameworks also recently considered invalid, at long last being renewed by local and now global upheavals and revolutions. I prefer this because such approaches and their resulting manifestations are grounded in life as it is experienced, in a resistance that is lived. Students now see that activism is not an affectation, a jewel-encrusted red ribbon, a silly avatar, an online petition; that their action as well as inaction both matter, both have political weight. And I think my students would agree with me when I say that designers and design instructors, more familiar with the theory end of it as debated in ivory towers, more content with the commodifying approach to it as compiled in endless coffee-table books of design porn, indeed, more comfortable with passivism than any true activism, should heed well the following dictum:
“If you don’t practice, then don’t preach.”
After years of watching, discussing, and describing cities that have become inhospitable to their own residents while morphing into playgrounds for those of the cosmopolitan Wallpaper class, perhaps it is time to link up forces, make bridges. Just as globalization sees cities interconnected and removed from their context, a grassroots resistance to this could equally take shape. For this to happen, I would nominate the Olympic games as the focus of attention and action, both for cities which were former hosts, as well as those vying to hook onto this engine of profit based in creative destruction. Because it begs the question: Why do we take them for granted? Why is there no criticism? In the final analysis, the Nuremberg Rallies that they mimic and the inequality of age-old Athens that they promote are nothing to celebrate.
With special thanks to Sara Jane Arida, my co-instructor, as well as our Design III: Mediating the Real World second-year design studio at the American University of Beirut, from whom we learned much: Rola Abou Baker, Izzat Abu Bakr Kreidieh, Aya Al Bawwab, Sawsan Arja, Lama Azhari, Salam Baalbaki, Rewa Baassiri, Loulwa Bohsali, Tania Bou Samra, Leen Charafeddine, Farah Fayyad, Joelle Haddad, Sara Hafi, Ayman Hassan, Maher Mhanna, Christian Moussa, Maria Mouteirek, Dominique Salloum, Lynn Sharafeddine, Layla Smaili, Sara Sukhun, May Wahab, Joyce Younes, Hiba Ziade.
Notes
1) http://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/montreal/story/2006/12/19/qc-olympicstadium.html
2) Olympic Industry Resistance, Helen Jefferson Lenskyj; SUNY Press, 2008; p. 17.
3) http://www.boston.com/bigpicture/2011/08/london_riots.html
4) http://www.guardian.co.uk/sport/london-2012-olympics-blog/2011/aug/09/london-2012-beach-volleyball-whitehall
5) “Linking Huichol imagery to Op Art gave the Mexico Olympics a memorable graphic identity”; Carolina Rivas, Daoud Sarhandi. Eye, issue 56.
Daniel Drennan is founder of the Beirut-based artists’ collective Jamaa Al-Yad, and can be reached by email at daniel.drennan@jamaalyad.org
3 Responses to “Riots by Design: Blaming the London Olympics”
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September 18th, 2011 at 2:35 pm
I’m paraphrasing badly here, but I read somewhere about the London demonstrations, a local person saying to a reporter: “Well, no one would pay any attention to us if we didn’t riot.”
Daniel, thanks for the really great post and work.
This is a great beginning, shifting the students from sympathy (feeling sorry for someone else) to empathy (seeking to understand someone else).
Right … Olympic sites are recreated by an elected and unelected leadership determined to put the most positive spin on whatever they need the city to be. And, of course, such efforts do not include housing the homeless, feeding the hungry, or profiles of citizens in poor neighborhoods not bulldozed to make way for another “Big Owe.”
Yeah, a great insight here from Aditya Prakash (a worker in Le Corbusier’s office as the plan and capital complex at Chandigarh, India was designed): “The first people to break the law are the people who make the laws.” This is fantastic, the understanding that the law-makers know where the law is weak – they wrote it, after all, and maybe the law was written so as to be vulnerable in ways that privilege the authors and their intentions.
Flipside, I like the attitude voiced by the Spanish architect Santiago Cirugeda (his website is titled “recetas urbanas” or urban prescriptions): “The role of the architect is to show people the limits of the law.” In this, Santiago suggests a place of interpretation, of engagement, of activism that I like a great deal.
There’s much to agree with in your writing, in your teaching, in your work. Is your syllabus available on-line? (If you don’t know the book, look for “Mobile Vulgus” by Christian Nold’s attempt “to reclaim the mobility of the crowd as a physical force for change.” Published in 2001, the opening scene, presciently, is a demonstration in Trafalgar Square.)
If I could offer two areas for development…
First, I’d say get out of the classroom. You write “focused on their own engagement with those whose voice they were taking on” but I don’t get the sense that there was any sort of conversation involved in this voicing. Am I correct? In my own work, I’ve shifted away from the “on behalf of” stuff, which still privileges the designer. Step outside the comfort zone of textbook and online research and blog post. Move beyond analysis to action and then to self-action and self-reflection.
Grace Lee Boggs, a 96-year-old activist in Detroit, writes in her autobiography “Living for Change”: “This is the key to the distinction between rebellion and revolution. Rebellion is a stage in the development of revolution but it is not revolution. Rebellions break the threads that have been holding the system together and throw into question its legitimacy and the supposed permanence of existing institutions. A rebellion disrupts the society but it does not provide what is necessary to make a revolution and establish a new social order. To make a revolution, people must not only struggle against existing institutions. They must make a philosophical/spiritual leap and become more human human beings. In order to change/transform the world, they must change/transform themselves.”
Get your students on the sidewalk, in the communities. Just make the leap with them.
And … we don’t need to go after the Olympics. It and they are an obvious target (which might be appropriate in a classroom introducing such concepts).
For me, the question is: How to stand alongside local people, fighting a daily fight against oppression, against consumerism, against marketers, against even the best intentions of outsiders, even as those same people have desires, might have political ambitions of their own, and might willingly become co-opted and accept whatever outsiders give them. That’s where there’s both action that is being taken already (without the engagement of designers) and learning to be done (by designers).
How does one go about “empowering East Londoners”? I’d suggest: listening to East Londoners discuss the on-going Murdoch empire scandals, knowing East Londoners’ football preferences, eating fish and chips with East Londoners, all of that.
And … How does one become empowered by East Londoners?
That’s the question I like the most.
Wes Janz
September 21st, 2011 at 10:29 am
Dear Wes—
Thank you for your thought-provoking response, the welcome references, as well as the questions/points you have raised here. I should probably explain that the driving forces of this class included a Gramscian idea of unity of theory/praxis–one does not exist without the other–as well as the Marxist notion of the universality of artistic potential, as found in Ernst Fischer et. al., and as opposed to the cultural elitism of the designer/artist. The students were grounded in such readings and saw themselves more as “activators”, if you will, as opposed to “interpreters” or even “communicators”.
From the project brief:
So you are absolutely right to raise the flag of “on behalf of”, which we actively tried to avoid. We studied the Olympic games historically, as well as in the various levels of communication as mentioned in my article, and there was indeed a reticence on the part of my co-instructor and I that London was too far away to engage with successfully based on our framework for the class. We did have a hope that contact might be made with protest groups in London, but this proved to be logistically difficult. What it then turned into was an exercise that allowed the students to see how their own city is likewise being “creatively destroyed”; we found this “common cause” hugely if not equally important, as it replaces or attempts to replace the current mode of globalizing Capital that common and “universal” cultural references make for such common cause, undermining the truly local in the process.
To understand too in the bigger picture is that students here are educated outside of their local culture, elite instruction is in English (or French, or both), and engagement on the local side is fraught with the specter of sectarian and class politics; so we walk a crooked mile. Having said that, outside of the classroom our artists’ collective maintains regular contact with the communities of the Palestinian camps; I have taken the students on trips to work with Bedouin farmworkers (for one example); all of their locally based projects require them to intrinsically, extensively, and committedly engage with their communities one-on-one. Our greatest desire is to see the barbed wire-laden stone fence surrounding the university taken down. So yes, I understand this criticism very well, and we address it as we can.
Everything else you are saying is understood and a given in my mind, but I thank you for the reminder nonetheless. I would, however, argue with the idea that the Olympics are an obvious target; like much that the students consider “just is”, the Olympics are not challenged in any significant way, and are accepted like the passing seasons. We put our work up in the halls of the department, and we were happy to see that we challenged many preconceived notions of the Games among students and faculty. The legacy of the Olympics in terms of the cities they’ve targeted make an interesting starting point for global resistance of other kinds is what I was attempting to say.
I would also take what you say one step further, actually. I think–again, going back to Gramsci–that there can only be hope if those who have the privilege and luxury to speak on a mediated level (the designer elite, in this case) make the effort to step down from the comfort of their class position and live based on the lowest common denominator of the most restricted level of their society. Personally, because of where I live and the makeup of my community, I limit myself as much as possible to what is considered “public space” to this population (domestic and migrant workers, marginalized segments of society) living in Beirut. Furthermore, I maintain the importance of this real and valid community to any “virtual” one, or else any one made up of false and affected identity markers as was my experience living in the States.
This fundamentally changes one’s perception of what is “radical” or “alternative” or “resistant” to the dominant modes, and thus our framework in the classroom of studying one’s positioning in terms of this dominant discourse. Because there is a danger here of falling into some twisted kind of anthropological mode that is just as condescending as the “outsider” sympathizer or naive Orientalizing viewpoint. The imbalance between oppressed and oppressor cannot change as long as the privileged maintain their class position, no matter how sympathetic they might pretend to be. This is witnessed in Lebanon by recent “supportive” demonstrations of the “Syrian people’s struggle”, but was marred by the group promoting this demonstration’s press release which advertised it as being comprised of “Lebanese intellectuals, artists, and writers”. This is the inherent inability of a group to see their own privilege, ignoring as they do the huge population of Syrian workers among them. As you say, how many of these “intellectuals” have ever spoken with or lived as as Syrian worker here? This is an active maintaining of distance and remove, and this cannot stand.
This brings me back to the classroom, which is a sensitive mix of various groups within the population and the region without much variation in terms of class, and presents the problematic of asking students to question this position they hold by virtue of their families’ societal status. Here is where our artists’ collective represents the “real world” model of what we would ideally do in the classroom, for example, participating in the May 15 Return to Palestine March, and being part of the organizing committee for that, working with Palestinian camp residents and their parties and organizations. There are unfortunately limits to what I can bring into the classroom of this private university, but the students do react positively when they see people “putting their money where their mouth is”. Anything else would be simply creating more “Weapons of Mass Deception”.
The syllabus for this class I hope to make available soon, as the class was rather experimental and I need to update it in terms of our readings and such. The class was only given once, and I believe that my activism in the classroom in no small part has cost me my job, due to our challenging some of these core tenets of what makes currently for “design” or a “designer”. This is unfortunate, because these notions, imported from the centers of Capital, do not really fit in this region except as purely addressing the needs of the extended arm of the cores of Capital here. What I mean to say is that there are models and modes of communication that already exist within the local social structure and cultural space, and these can be availed of without imposing foreign ideas of elitist design-based ways of working, that have also failed to address problems in the First World to any degree. For this we referred to works such as Humanitarian Imperialism as well as The Craft of Dispossession.
It is heartening to hear words of encouragement, as I believe this is a crucial and transitional phase in the history of Capital, as well as for peripheral societies around the world finally attempting to put an end to their abject condition. It might be interesting to note that one of the projects of this class–based on the work of Victor Papanek, involving the construction of a radio transmission device to allow for pirate radio broadcasts from local communities–ended up resulting in contact with Egyptian revolutionaries who were looking to bypass the government’s hold on Internet and phone communications–so much for the so-called hi-tech “Twitter” aspect of the revolution there. Maybe this will make for a future article as well.
Thanks again for taking the time to reply. I very much welcome this dialogue, which I hope to continue to engage in with words and–primarily of course–with deeds.
Daniel Drennan
October 6th, 2011 at 1:07 pm
[...] interesting article on the Design Altruism blog by Daniel Drenan on the role designers and design education could play in helping communities [...]