Dark and Light Matters: On Proximity, an Arts Magazine from a Previous Crisis
05/08/20
By Gregory Gillam
Just before the pandemic, I volunteered to help archive Proximity, a slickly designed arts magazine by some of the folks behind the Quarantine Times. Proximity ran 11 issues from 2008 to 2013 and featured a panoply of text and visual content from pedantic to playful. Each issue was loosely arranged around a topic (The Chicago Issue, The Art & Food Issue) and, despite some aspirations to a consistent table of contents, varied in structure from issue to issue. I initially expected it to be a somewhat chaotic exercise in nostalgia for decade old art hipster culture.
Then the Covid-19 crisis made Proximity seem immediate, because 2008 was another moment when all masks came off the capitalist death spiral, and it shaped the sensibility of the magazine. The nature and severity of the housing crash was different but not separate–instead, it flows from then to now.
Reviewing Proximity often felt like reading a current discussion or a vivid historical analysis by people who were unwittingly prescient. It was also a useful reference - publishers Ed & Rachael Marszewski called it "our ongoing catalog of strategies". Production of the magazine itself was a means of community building "The philosophy of Proximity is to bring ourselves closer to each other... start to sort out our messy, dysfunctional family." And each issue release was a pretext for a family celebration.
I'd amend their mission statement to "a catalog of strategies for survival of capitalist catastrophe", as Proximity was produced by people who couldn't avoid thinking about survival.
This condition is described in the essay that anchors the first issue: "Swampwalls, Dark Matter & The Lumpen Army of Art" by Gregory Sholette (the title is a sly nod to Proximity's older sibling magazine The Lumpen Times).
Sholette defines dark matter as things which seem worthless in the formal economy yet help define it: "the entire range of superfluous people generated by the market" and "informal social production and non-production...understood as structurally necessary for a system that benefits only a small portion of the global population."
Dark matter is both product and symptom of labor conditions: "The need to accumulate capital requires the majority of the population to be superfluous, as well as cowed by the authority of market productivity." This description seems contemporary in a moment labor has been divided into classified as essential and non-essential, highlighting how most wealth is distributed to those doing the least. And now the utterly inessential upper class is most invested in "re-opening", i.e. forcing people back to work and precarity.
"Swampwalls" uses the art world as a vivid illustration of the larger dynamic, "most professionally trained artists make up what Marx described as a reserve army of the unemployed...Most will never leave its service." They not only help keep labor costs down but also "inadvertently prop up the symbolic and fiscal economy of art too...an indistinct backdrop against which the small percentages of artists who succeed appear sharply focused." The art industry depends on "isolating them from any share in the overall industry revenue". He points out, "artists are far from passive victims in this process" providing "symbolic and material revenue for maintaining the art market and its hierarchies" and "reproduce the dark matter workforce by teaching future generations of artists..."
Sholette emphasizes cultural dark matter is more than professional product. He starts by describing a collage created by factory workers on breaks, echoing methods popular in high end modern art. Art relentlessly vacillates between worthless and useful to the market, like graffiti which is criminalized when not being mined for urban authenticity.
"Swampwalls" is sprawling, but the main point is "Dark matter invisibly anchors productivity, but also occasionally disrupts it". Dark matter cannot help but confront survival and resistance within capitalism, consciously or not.
Not every article in Proximity addresses these issues. Art is the focus, community strategies is the frame, but the latter is why the publication is resonant and comforting now. Besides "Swampwalls", there is Together, a recurring column by Brett Bloom and Salem Collo-Julin, which comes close to offering manifesto for today:
"The dominant culture is not going to give you a better life, better health care, a living wage or anything else without a fight. You must fight. We all must fight for things to be different. We are seeing a wave of art projects and efforts by many that seek to organize things larger than themselves. In the last decade, there have been increased efforts by people to work collectively, create networks of support and visibility, and to combine their personal research with others through networking. We applaud these efforts and we think that every artist could benefit from being part of a collaborative group or shared effort."
Reading Proximity one sees a slow rise of class-conscious strategies becoming cool for the kids again.
This awareness grew alongside but separate from the surges of protests in the last two decades. In those, energy and hope consolidated only to dissipate: the anti-globalization protests interrupted by 9/11, the progressive side of Obama's first campaign that faded upon success, the rise and fall of Occupy, the mass protests in 2017, even the Sanders campaign fits this pattern. This is not a cycle of false hope and defeat. Rather it is like an art scene - a big opening will momentarily energize it, but it persists due to less flashy structures that evolve and renew. Proximity was made by members of that structure, who recognized the value of extended strategy one must occasionally relearn and revise.
Sholette touches on this, writing: "it is time, as cultural historian Michael Denning insists, to begin to 'make connections between the occasional eruptions..." and that longue durée (long term) of resistance that may not even be aware of itself as a history from below...The revolutions that don't take place are as disturbing as those that do. Recognizing the radically militant potential of dark matter productivity is but one step towards realizing it...Instead organizing around one's market redundancy is how politically savvy artists deal with their dark matter status...focus pleasure, anger and resentment towards the possibility of imagining a radically different social and cultural terrain."
This perspective also reflects Proximity as a Chicago production. I wrote this on May Day, which began in Chicago and went global in part due to the Haymarket incident, a defeat in that labor leaders were jailed and killed, but one that eventually inspired revolutions. Chicago's progressive history is one of long struggle and ideals grounded by hard lessons. Sholette's essay reflects this in rejecting easy optimism: "This missing cultural mass is not intrinsically progressive in the traditional liberal or radical sense of the term. It possesses only a potential for progressive resistance, as well as a potential for reactionary resistance." Proximity's generally positive attitude does not avoid dealing with dysfunction.
Proximity was also influenced by Chicago's second city status, some interviews touch on how being outside the coastal centers of cultural power motivates or frustrates and some essays, such as Why We Feel Slighted As A Mere Dotted Line by Renay Kerkman, embrace it. I think distance from clout made the magazine better, more in tune with the wider community, even if it limited its long-term viability.
Proximity lasted five years, decent for a money losing effort run by people involved a thousand projects. The catalog of strategies mission was remarkably consistent, even as the culture aggressively pushed the lessons from the crash into the background.
In the coming months we hope to share the best of Proximity Magazine, providing a history and catalog of strategies for use now. I realize this essay has discussed strategies without specifics, which I find annoying in other articles, so I'll attempt to cram five years of complex thought in a few pithy aphorisms: Artists should embrace their dark matter role and mutual aid without concern for profit. Seize opportunities yet focus on the long term. Realize that no one is coming to save us but us. And the struggle matters more than any one victory or defeat.
A copy of Proximity Magazine Issue One is available for download here.