Letter from the Editor – Issue 16
Heading into election season, two issues keep coming up that touch on questionable notions of accountability and performance in relation to American political economy. The first is money and the question of our tax dollars paying to produce and supply weapons for a genocide. The second, and obviously related issue, is that of the vote.
One common refrain in the progressive discourse around the ethnic cleansing in Gaza has been some play on fretting about taxes, a kind of buyer’s remorse for not liking what we’ve purchased. This assumes that there is a correlation between the money leaving our pockets, so to speak, as federal tax dollars, and the number of bombs dropped on Palestinians. But as the work of modern monetary theorists has shown, there is not a checking account at the U.S. Treasury that fills up with our tax dollars each year that then get spent back into the world. Money is created by the Federal Reserve when it credits the reserves of private banks to enable the enactment of policies voted on by congress.
With regard to the vote, it is a well-documented fact that public opinion has no impact on public policy, that there is no correlation between voter desire and congressional or executive action. As Martin Gilens and Benjamin Page conclude in a 2014 study, “When the preferences of economic elites and the stands of organized interest groups are controlled for, the preferences of the average American appear to have only a minuscule, near-zero, statistically non-significant impact upon public policy.”
So, if money is created ex nihilo as a function of public policy, and our vote has no apparent effect on that policy, two questions are raised: first, who is at the wheel in our “democracy?” Public money and the vote are easy to place accountability on, but both turn out to be disavowals in our actually existing system. The headless specter of empire, the spiraling algorithm of capital, brain-dead neoliberal elites—whoever’s in charge, it isn’t “us.”
The second question raised, of course, is: what is to be done? To ask for something more in our political discourse or to behave accordingly—to join the uncommitted movement, to vote for third parties, or simply not to vote at all—is often regarded as non-strategic, unrealistic, vain, or as merely performative politics. But might performance have the power to outstrip strategy? If enough performers can coordinate their movements for a long enough period of time, isn’t the pretense of performance dissolved? Doesn’t performance just become practice?
The art world is pretty clearly an ethical swamp, so there’s no point in pretending in the actuality of the utopian daydreams that so many artists and arts institutions feed us about the power of art. But I do believe that at a certain scale, in certain places, artists are allowed the latitude to bring performed modes of life and politics into practice, to quietly fake it til we’ve made it. Now, perhaps, demands a louder performance.
We’re particularly proud of this issue of Cornelia, and there is much in it about disavowal and deferral, about what we’ve been promised and about what we’ve gotten, about our illusions of control: in Sophia Oppel’s analysis of the so-called good life through the work of Andrew Harding at Blouin Division’s Project Space, in Kit Xiong’s critique of nostalgia in a recent exhibition at Hunt Art Gallery, and in Leo Zausen’s esoteric poetry approaching Alex Boeschenstein’s work near the boundary of the unknowable in his recent exhibition at BICA. Ava Danieu’s piece on the upcoming Wilhelmina Godfrey exhibition curated by Tiffany Gaines at The Burchfield Penney Art Center and Ashley Culver on Hearth in Toronto both give us something hopeful to look back at and forward to.
Thanks as always to our supporting sponsors, several of whom are joining us for the first time. And, of course, look at that cover! Mark Yappueying’s ongoing design refresh makes us look better than we ever imagined. Thanks, also, to wavy for their careful photo editing and captioning work, and to Emily Mangione for the final polish on the texts.
On a more sorrowful note, our hearts are with the family of Elisabeth Samuels. Elisabeth has been a wonderful partner and schemer on several projects over the last five years; we are extremely lucky to have had such a gracious and graceful mentor as we’ve navigated Buffalo’s artistic landscape.
Be well, hang in there, and we’ll see each other in the real world,
Nando Alvarez-Perez
Editor-in-Chief
Published by
The Buffalo Institute for Contemporary Art
Editor-in-Chief
Nando Alvarez-Perez
Executive Director
Emily Ebba Reynolds
Copy Editor
Emily E. Mangione
Design
Mark Yappueying
Production Assistant & Photo Editor
wavy
Contributing Writers
Ashley Culver
Ava Danieu
Sophia Oppel
Kit Xiong
Leo Zausen
