It's mind-numbing when your head bounces slowly back and forth with programmed regularity in the blank "interstices" between art and politics. It's just as mind-numbing to tread critical water in an endlessly shifting sea of subjectivities and "positionalities." Where are you? By now capital has purchased that body of water and your flexible identity fits it skin-tight, a wet-suit. How long do you need to be held under before you start fighting your way out? At some point you have to pull yourself together, take a position, stand.

"Come on, it is pointless for you to look for a seat so you can watch the fight as a spectator. There are no seats in the place. . . . There is only room in the ring." (-Subcommandante Marcos)

So, the question of whether or not you are making "political art," and the double-binding questions "but is it art? and "but is it politics?," strikes me as largely irrelevant if you have not addressed another question: What are your politics? This question, first of all, regardless of what institutional setting you are working in or think you are working outside of, demands an answer. The time to come up for air is now: Are you opposed to the greed, stupidity and terror of capitalist systems? Do you really think that some sort of user-friendly capitalism is possible? Or are you for building cultures which dispense with property and profit? This would affect your chances of making a living from art and politics, so don't shoot yourself in the foot too quickly with an answer. Do you want to merely "tolerate" people, or respect them? And what is to be done with the ones who impose and enjoy the current global state of affairs? What do you think about workers controlling the means of production? Do you want to transform society or just make yourself more comfortable? Do you take your politics depoliticized? One lump or two? Is resistance merely another exhibition in the right place at the right time, advancing the career of the fucking idiot artist? Or is it a practice which might provide art with a purpose you've only been pretending it has up to now? These are all questions without easy answers unless you completely cop out with the fantasy that "everything is fine." I'm asking these questions and include myself in their address because at this point straight critiques of rotten systems are not even funny and will always be stopped dead in their tracks if they express no possibilities or strategies for resistance. Critical resistance: what are you against and what are you for and are you willing to use any means necessary to bring it about? Despite it's cultivated irrelevance, politics (art) is a necessary means. It's what we're making. Fuck off, or just pardon my unimaginable naiveté and reckless anachronism. I'd rather try to find some language for all this than sit tight even though there are no seats and shut up. I'd rather try to "be political" and fail than not even try. Defeatism has not won me over. Submission is futile.