[Written for fun and newsprint publication on the occasion of the visit of Etcétera (a.k.a. the Errorist International) to faraway and downunder Australia, for the event “If you see something, say something,” which opened on Friday Jan. 26 and in which a ton of great lefto-anarchist artists are involved: www.ifyouseesomethingsaysomething.net .]
“It is not the world as a thing in itself, but the world as imagination (as error) that is so rich in meaning, deep, wonderful, pregnant with happiness and unhappiness.”
Nietzsche, Human, All Too Human
It was December 20, 2003 in
Buenos Aires, the “heroic phase” of the Glorious Argentine Revolution was
already over, and the politicians who were all supposed to go without even one
remaining had all come back home to roost – including the neoliberal thief,
former president Carlos Menem. A movement of young artists had begun making
life-sized black-and-white photocopies of the colorful revolutionaries whose
effigies, captured on film by innumerable photographers, now formed the
folklore of an inexorable return to normal. Mounted on hinged wooden backings
with snap-out sticks to prop them up in public, these were the Gente Armada, or “Army People.” But the
Spanish title doubles the sense of “armed and dangerous” with the idea of a
mechanical trick, so it could just as well be “Phony People.” Set up on the
Plaza de Mayo like a fairground attraction, a group of them featured cut-out or
missing heads, so that the passing admirer could pose behind them and become
“part of the movement.” The artists, who had participated for years in the
illegal, carnivalesque demonstrations against accomplices of the former
dictatorship, had a slogan to accompany their satirical creation. In English it
goes something like this: “We put our bodies on the line, you put your face in
the picture.”
The bodies on the line were
Etcétera, who think of themselves less as a group of artists and more as a
movement of the surrealistic imagination. During the heyday of the
anti-militarist escraches, from 1998
to 2001, they would stage delirious theatrical events in front of the houses of
former murderers and torturers, as part of a larger project of denunciation
carried out by the sons and daughters of those who disappeared in Argentina’s
“dirty war” (H.I.J.O.S.: Children for Identity and Justice, against Oblivion
and Silence). Politics has always been at the heart of their concerns, but
protest tactics of the usual sort would never be enough for Etcétera, whose
story is filled with unlikely inventions, improbable encounters. While seeking
to squat an empty building for their activities, the collective happened upon
the abandoned premises of the former Argonauta publishing house founded by the
surrealist Juan Andralis, filled with dusty books, photographs, images,
paintings, sculptures, costumes and old mannequins from the 1930s-40s. It was a
turning point, a moment of "objective chance," just as Marcel Duchamp
had described it. They built up a library, a darkroom, a studio and a small
theater with seats recovered from an old cinema, and they used the materials
around them as the accessories of a unique aesthetic, somewhere between the
guerrillas of the 1970s and the “gay science” of a Nietzschean future. Their
relation to the public became clear when they created the Niño Globalizado (Globalized Boy), with a hand-pump that the art
audience could use to bloat the child’s belly into a distended globe of hunger.
But that was only one station on a longer journey. The point was to develop an
art as poetically unpredictable as a dream, and then hurl it like a football
into an unbelievable reality.
One of their early protest
pieces was the satirical soccer match, "Argentina vs. Argentina," held
before the home of the former dictator, General Galtieri, in June of 1998
during the World Cup pitting Argentina against England. It recalled the waste
of life in the Malvinas war under the direct command of Galtieri, but also the
shame of the 1978 World Cup, held in Argentina beneath the spotlights of the
media even while torture and assassination continued off camera. The mock
soccer match reached its conclusion when a member of H.I.J.O.S. kicked a
penalty ball full of red paint into the former dictator's house, triggering the
climax of the public denunciation. Video recordings show the paint spattering
onto the hats of police lined up in rows around the building. At other escraches, like the one against Dr. Raúl
Sánchez Ruiz, the Etcétera performance served as a lure, a decoy, distracting
the attention of the police at a critical moment. It's impressive to realize
that interventions like this unfolded in Argentina at the exact time when
groups such as Reclaim the Streets were inventing the carnivalesque
demonstrations of the antiglobalization movement. In this case, the political
carnival would culminate in a national insurrection.
After the revolt of December 20
and 21, 2001, the streets of Buenos Aires and all of Argentina became an open
theater of action, even as the escrache
generalized into the major form of political demonstration. Etcétera fulfilled
some of their wildest dreams at this time, including Otra realidad es posible (Another Reality Is Possible), in which
they dressed up as a kind of medieval troupe of knives and forks with tin-pot
helmets and silvery shields, comically attacking transnational corporations
like McDonalds, YPF and Shell with the oversized tableware they had made in an
occupied aluminum factory. The riot-performance recalled the hunger stalking
the provinces; but it also represented a fusion between the pot-banging
middle-classes and the militant piqueteros
armed with wooden sticks and shields. Their most outlandish event was the Mierdazo, in February 2002, when they
invited people to hurl bags of shit and rotting vegetables at the Congress
building and to "crap on the system" during the vote of the 2002
national budget. The action had been approved by due process in the
inter-barrio assembly and was destined to a huge popular success, leading to a
similar assault on transnational banks like HSBC. Television news clips – often
the only trace of Etcétera performances, since the group was more concerned
with acting than recording – portray the protest scenario on the congressional
steps beneath the caption, "Algo
Huele Mal" (something really stinks). “Is this your form of protest?”
asked the man with the TV camera. “Yes, because they treat us like shit,”
replied an anonymous woman who spoke the blatant truth for everyone.
Those days of the truth are
gone, however, “cleaned up” by the return of the politicians and the police;
and now we have all become “phony people,” wandering around the world circus,
connected by wires and whispers, watching, wondering, waiting for the next lucky
chance. Maybe Etcétera realized this around the time when they photocopied me
into the Gente Armada, shrunken down
to the size of a dwarf, with a copy of the journal Multitudes in my hands and an even more diminutive Karl Marx as a
sidekick. But the return of the police and the politicians has not stopped
people from protesting, nor Etcétera from stumbling into more improbable
encounters. Such was the case on another day of celebration, November 5, 2005,
when the President of the World Mr. G.W. Bush came flying to the city of Mar
del Plata in Argentina for the failed Fourth Summit of the Free Trade Area of
the Americas – one of the biggest mistakes of an administration that has made
them its specialty. U.S. Marines were directing traffic and people in a supposedly
sovereign country, while on the other side of the fence, Chavez and Maradona
worked up their worshipers to an anti-imperial frenzy, tossing around the name
of G.W. Bush like a political football. Out under the sun on a peaceful beach,
far from the madding crowds of demonstrators, a strange commando appeared as if
by magic from the sea, waving photocopied bazookas and machine guns with bright
red pennants that said BANG! at the end of the barrel. Just as they reached the
beach, took up their combat positions, and unfurled the banner that revealed
their name and their creed – ERRORISTAS – who else but G.W. came flying through
the skies, on his way to meet the refusal of his policies by Latin America? And
what greater mistake could the Errorists make, if not to raise the photocopied
guns in a pointed salute?
http://ut.yt.t0.or.at/site/images/stories/Brian/Fourfold%20Erroristas.jpg
Sure enough, in a matter of minutes a whole
platoon of policemen were there, dogmatic and unblinking, to find the Errorists
laughing and lounging on the beach. “What’s the matter, can’t you see our
weapons are made of cardboard?” they asked the officers. And so they were,
manifestly. “It doesn’t matter, we have orders, this is serious,” the head cop
replied, trying to hang on to some authority. “We were filming a scene in a
movie, a parody of the media’s exaggerations of terrorism,” the Errorists
explained in return. “But then you need a permit,” the policeman countered,
sweating in the sun, with the locals incredulous all around, and the Errorists
filming everything. Out came the permit, specially forged for the occasion.
G.W. hadn’t even yet faced off against Chavez and Maradona, but the tide was
already turning. And the best, amidst the banter and the jokes and the liberation
of the locals “by mistake,” was when one of the Errorists asked the chief cop,
“Is this what you always wanted when you were young, what you always dreamed
of, to be a policeman?” He looked back at them, at the costumes and the props
and the beach and the cameras, and he said, “Are you kidding? Me, I always
wanted to be an actor!”
Play your parts, backwards or forwards,
right-side up or up-side down, or leave them behind if you choose. And just
imagine what might happen, if the Errorist International washed up by mistake
on a beach in Australia.