Thanks to the nowadays rapid diffusion of a certain kind of European cultural theory, one easily recognises in Giorgio Agamben’s much-used phrase a combative appeal: ‘The state of emergency (the suspension of rights and liberties) is now becoming the normal order of things. There is no framework of rights, no room for participation, decision-making, debate. When what we call parliamentarism has no meaning (when ‘political representation’ is a caricature of democratic participation) there is no law to rely on. And society must resist this and institute its own norms.’ [i] In this famous text, Agamben refers to 28 February 1933 (Hitler’s decree), 24 December 1811, (Napoleon’s decree), and to the origins of this legalised illegality in the Roman Senate, in order to draw the analogy with the military order imposed on 13 November 2001. Perhaps uncharacteristically for a philosopher, Agamben’s use of the Schmitt/Benjamin conflict on the origin of violence has a deadpan lack of ambiguity: The State has the exclusive power to impose a state of emergency.

Yet, in stating the obvious, it is also challenging. People have always known that the State has been able to impose a state of emergency throughout its history. There has always been a tension between the law of the State and social conflict. In modern times, societies organised through capitalist relations experience the perpetual production of crises of meaning at the intersection of law and life, of the legal and the illegal, of the desirable and the undesirable, since capitalism is a system based on the continuous redefinition (and repackaging) of ethics, aesthetics and morality. The consciousness of a ‘state of emergency’ has not ceased to inspire, pressingly, new techniques of opposition and reaction — and ‘forms of emergency’ have changed with it.

Art, a commodity of the highest order in capitalist society, has often found itself at the other end of the ‘privilege of violence’ — it is by definition a creator of norms through means that could be defined as the opposite of the ‘force of law’. Art is hardly executive power. It is not legislative power. It is an immaterial claim to the power of social attraction (similar, in its means, to deception and magic) [ii], an effort to produce meaning in exquisite ways, it is a power that must constantly renew its forms, ideas and environments, needs to be radical all the time in order to be rated successful, yet also to remain symbolic and weak, dreaming of its own sovereignty. The conflict between the need to be radical and the danger of social irrelevance has been the greatest tension in modern art. The best art has tried to make sense of this tension.

So it is interesting that after the demise, in the interwar period, of the avant-gardes of the first decades of the last century, certain genres have emerged without needing to refer to some ‘cutting edge’ of the art establishment, and have obtained a political and aesthetic relevance that has made them historically significant. Let us remember the Paris ’68 posters or the Californian ‘pop surrealism’ of the ’60s and ’70s underground. The same goes for independent footage with no artistic pretense that has become emblematic of historical events, from records of the anti-Vietnam war demos to the whole Zapatista iconography and later to the political reprocessing of the coverage of Abu Ghraib torture scenes. These classes of images, enduring and withstanding the mass media mincing machine, have shaped our perceptions in ways comparable to the function of graphic satire about the 1871 Paris Commune.

Millner and Larsen have been making movies since the mid-seventies. Irrelevance has never been their problem. Yet neither has aesthetic experimentation, though they don’t seem to confuse it with intentional obscurity and hyper-subjectivity. Following their themes, concepts and techniques is like reading an insider’s history of the US critical underground: After they distanced themselves from the SDS and joined a situationist group, they collaborated on a performance in the mid-seventies explaining the reasons why they are not joining the [individualist attacks against life] of the Weather Underground. A Super 8 critique of the spectacle of total destruction and how it appeals to the bored and passive mass audiences  (Disaster, 1976) was followed by two 16 mm ‘anti-documentaries’ (as they have called them) on crime: One of them (Shoplifting: It’s a Crime?, 1979) makes a serious point, in a deadpan manner, half ‘verité’, half art-perfomance, about the fact that there are especially white women or men and women of colour who do not have the means to live up to consumer society’s paranoid standards of beauty and wealth, and that the real looting is being carried out by an unjust system against poor people. A semi-autobiographical video about raising a child in a highly militarised mass democracy (Out of the Mouth of Babes, 1987), featuring their own daughter, raised questions about the nuclear family in the US and the challenges it poses for radical people who become parents, (and, interestingly, provoked reactions about the limits of the autobiographical genre and the possibly traumatic impact of self-satirical filming on minors!) … In 2000, their video 41 Shots helped the victim’s family in the trial against the policeman who shot Amadou Diallo. After 9/11, their horror retained its sense of sober humour in their representation of ritual flag-burning in the US (Graven Images, 2008).

It is only natural then that their State of Emergency delivers. Some works in this series of videos could be classified as critical art-clips (Suprematist Kapital, by Yin-Ju Chen and James T. Hong), some border on the political documentary genre (Allan Sekula’s Waiting for Teargas-Seattle, 1999) and there’s a lot in between. Leslie Thornton’s Minus 6 uses historical footage of Hitler rehearsing a speech in 1925 to point to the sheer constructedness and theatricality of the political passion of a convincing mass murdering politician, Martha Rosler’s God Bless America is a sarcastic comment on the bankruptcy of the once unifying US military idealism, The Class Action Group takes performative political expression to another level of earnestness with Every Village, Mary Kelly’s Women’s Liberation Movement Demo Remix too, but perhaps with a laconic (and self-critical?) reflexivity this time. John Greyson’s Motet for Amplified Voices (the performance of a choir with loudspeakers each repeating their own chosen motto or phrase) is dedicated to a Jewish student expelled from York University for three years in 2004 for speaking against the Israeli war with ‘an unauthorised amplification device’.

If this first part of videos discusses recent resistant and radical political performance or criticises patriotic propaganda and repressive laws, the presentation of the express-bed with which to sleep against on the sidewalk while still standing, an ideal piece of portable ersatz-furniture for a busy stockbroker who does not want to waste time going back home or to the hotel, undressing and even lying down (Jamie O’ Shea’s Vertical Bed), sets the tone for what we could call the second part of State of Emergency: This group of videos addresses, with a straightforward language, yet offering a richness of interpretative possibilities at the same time, today’s repetitive/exceptional rhythm of life (Marty Lucas’ An Earlier Incident), its psychosexual subtext (Louis Hock’s Feral), and the criminal dishonesty of propaganda rhetoric (The State of Things by Ligorano/Reese). Cooking Up Real Estate Futures in Lower Manhattan by Gregory Sholette presents the global cycle of capitalist exploitation as being ridiculous — an ironic euphemism for lethal.

This 50-minute series of video-works is being rear-projected on the windows of Millner’s and Larsen’s Manhattan apartment. It bears a special relationship to its site of reception: A lot of the videos explore distinctly US-filtered international topics, and are made by artists living in the US, yet this is not a strictly site-specific or site-dependent work. It’s out there, visible from street-level, to be consumed by any passer-by, (and possibly on any well-frequented street). Without being a city — or corporate — sponsored, pre-advertised art projection, it is a sequence of moving pictures (and some sounds) that attack the viewers individually, just like a billboard ad. It thus becomes part of a critique of how we consume pictures and how we understand the moving image. These competitive short ads, critical of the US militarist complex, of patriotism, of the Israeli occupation and the censorship on dissenting voices, of the militarisation of everyday life, of corporate domination, are definitely relevant far beyond Manhattan or the US … The three excellent videos by Millner and Larsen included in the series (Graven Images, Canine Patriot, Predators in the Aviary) seem to hold the whole thing together, pointing to poetic and combative ways to survive the perversion …

The State of Emergency is both a collage of styles and contents, and a collection of masterful coherence. The main idea of this ‘unity in variety’ seems to be that, if the State of Emergency has become the norm rather than the exception, then we have no choice: Like ‘security’, a term usurped by the anti-terrorist rhetoric, we should turn ‘emergency’ on its head and put it to good use — by choosing to live in a state of constant awareness, conscious doubt and conscientious resistance.


Millner & Larsen have just completed a film essay on the aftermath of the Greek insurrection of December 2008, currently on show in Thessaloniki as part of the exhibition It’s Political Economy, Stupid!, curated by Gregory Shollette and Oliver Ressler.


Contributors and titles of contributions:

Mary Kelly, WLM Demo Remix, 2-minute loop

Leslie Thornton, As the World Turns

Louis Hock, Feral, 5-minute video

Allan Sekula, 5 Days That Shook the World, slideshow

Michael Mandiberg, All Haiku All the Time

Annetta Kapon, 405 North, 405 South

Gregory Sholette, Chatter: Return of the Atomic Ghosts

Jenny Lion, August 9, 2005: Shoal Nuclear Test Site, 7-minute video

Sherry Millner & Ernest Larsen, Quailing in our Boots, Sight Gags #3, 6, 7,11

Yvonne Rainer, Help

LigoranoReese, Democracy

Walid Raad, No Title

Martha Rosler, No Ttitle

Marty Lucas, No Title

Sally Stein, Talking Cures


[i] Excerpt from a lecture o Carl Schmitt given at the Centre Roland-Barthes (Universite Paris VII, Denis-Diderot), where Agamben also presented basic ideas from his book State of Exception, University of Chicago Press 2005, s. http://www.generation-online.org/p/fpagambenschmitt.htm
[ii] David Graeber makes this simple point nicely in his review of the ‘Art and Immaterial Labour’ Conference (Tate Britain, 19 January 2008) published in The Commoner (April 2008), s. http://www.commoner.org.uk/wp-content/uploads/2008/04/graeber_sadness.pdf