The Other Side of History was an action staged at the Columbia University Graduate Student Protests exactly 50 years after May 1968. Campbell Carolan produced a line of custom aprons for the demonstrators. The protests were sponsored by the United Auto Workers Union and made the demand that student work be recognized as formal labor. Within this conflict, we recognized a historical alliance with materialist feminisms, specifically concerning the Italian autonomia struggles.

The aprons served as protest signs and, as a wearable good, represented the indivisible relationship between production and reproduction across the student body.

The line has been acquired by the Columbia University Library.

First performed during Miami Basel, 2018. Produced as a radio play by Montez Press Radio May 2019, New York.

Written by Campbell Carolan

Cast: Samuel Ashford Dean Kissick Ala Dehghan James Shaeffer Pujan Karambeigi Micaela Carolan (understudy for Marianna Ellenberg)

An adaptation of Glengarry Glen Ross staged in an art fair booth

NAFTA Miami is set in the art world — at an imaginary art fair called NAFTA Miami— starring our own community of arts professionals in the roles of Mamet’s blazing salesmen. Only, we’ve replaced all of the original lines with the language of a press release— and the blue-collar vernacular of a backroom car dealership with the canting language of critical discourse.

It could be said that there are no characters in Glengarry Glen Ross: there are only actors, so positioned and possessed by the roles they perform in speech that, by the end of the play, they ultimately come to resemble their consequences more than they do themselves. Campbell Carolan’s adoption of David Mamet’s 1984 Pulitzer drama stays faithful to the original form, if it is possible to recontextualize fidelity as a postmodern gesture. NAFTA Miami is a sincere hit of postmodern theatre— a work of theatre before it’s a work of art— with a lot of stuff going on behind it. Reaganism, masculinity, the art world, institutions— all feature here as one or many horizons of sense, rather than “commentary” or “critique.”

Words were replaced with other words in a sort of mad-libs process, which was later supplanted by a computer algorithm. Words, they say, work. They work on other words. One listener might witness a promiscuous abandonment of plot, another might call into question the very nature of the subject, someone is bound to screw up the lines. At stake in this work was participation, reflexivity, belief, a little bit of treason, but never betrayal.

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Spike Art Issue 66

Artist's Document