Brother Can You Spare a Bailout?
PHP: One of the things that makes capitalism so powerful is its ability to appropriate its opposition; some grand oppositional statement emerges like Dada, the 60s counterculture, punk rock, and within a generation it’s a packaged product. A question for artists has been how to continue making art without turning it into this commodity for the middle class. Do you struggle with that?
MB: It’s a really funny moment, actually. I think that for people who are making films in particular, everybody’s actually struggling to commodify their own stuff in such a way that it supports them. And it’s almost impossible!
PHP: How do you commodify a prank? How do you turn a prank into a collectible?
MB: We haven’t found out how. The bottom line is that we still basically support our stuff by writing to our e-mail list and saying “Hey, can anybody send us ten bucks? We don’t have enough money to make something—we can’t tell you what it is, but we think you’ll like it.”
So that’s how we’re doing it now, and the filmmaking part we haven’t figured out either. What we ended up doing this time around was spending more money because we thought we had more money; we had broadcasters who said they were going to give us money. That meant we dug ourselves too deep a debt hole to be able to climb out of in a reasonable way.
PHP: Fitting moment in history for that!
MB: Exactly. We all need a bailout.
Anyway, we have some really funny friends from Spain who organized a massive campaign around shoplifting, because they figured that shoplifting was the only uncommodifiable act. So if you’re fighting capitalism the thing that you should do is make shoplifting incredibly popular so that—[laughter]—and we thought “O.K., that’s pretty brilliant.” Like, if you make it the coolest thing ever, and everybody’s having contests, and you have social networks of people who are all trying to outshoplift each other—as a political act, but also as a necessity—maybe you can defeat capitalism that way!
So it’s interesting. We all have this uneasy relationship to capitalism because we all need to survive and make a buck. Even if we work for somebody else—I work for a university, and it’s a research university, so their reason for existing is not what I do; it’s basically to serve the needs of industry, which, so to speak, means also developing cluster bombs.
PHP: And I guess you’re there doing what artists have always done for universities, which is legitimating them.
MB: You always have these dual purposes, and that is the slippery nature of capitalism, how it pervades everything. We still use money as a form of exchange and have bank accounts; maybe we have an account at Chase Bank, the largest investor in mountaintop removal [coal mining] .
So what do you do? That’s why the main focus of our action now is to continue focusing all the poetic gestures we can figure out and have in our arsenal on making government create laws that reign capitalism in and make it responsible—or responsive—to democracy. It’s that relationship between capitalism and democracy that becomes the problem: which one’s really in charge?
PHP: So these people in Spain were trying to create almost an anti-economy. And you were talking about raising funds through these vast, extended personal networks that capitalism, ironically, has made possible. Is there any experimentation with alternative economies?
MB: We’re definitely interested in local currencies. Everywhere I’ve seen local currency projects they seem pretty amazing; Calgary has a really good one, Calgary Dollars. Ithaca has an older one that’s quite good. Those kinds of things are super great. And I’m sure if we could implement local currencies all over the place it would probably improve things in a lot of different ways, because you no longer have the pressure to extract wealth from communities and place it in other hands—[for example] in banks where it can be part of a loan system that allows for mountaintop removal to continue in West Virginia. It’s that process of always extracting wealth from regions, as opposed to what was originally the whole purpose of money, creating value locally.
So we’re relying on a lot of other really cool people to put that together. I mean, it would be really interesting to have a local currency in New York City.
PHP: You would think we’d have one, given what New York is.
MB: And New York is so huge that it would actually be a massive economy. That would be incredible. I don’t know why it never occurred to me, but if Calgary can do it, why the fuck not New York! [laughter]
