Action-Interview at WBAI Radio Station-N.Y. (1970)

Album title: Action-Interview at WBAI Radio Station-N.Y.
Title: - (Side 01 of the record)
Publisher: Radiotaxi # 10, Edizioni Lotta Poetica & Studio Morra, Verona/Neaples
Date: 1970, publ. 1983
Medium: record 30 cm, supplement "Lotta Poetica" # 15/16
Cover: Sarenco & Franco Verdi
Performers: Jon Hendricks, Jean Toche, Poppy Johnson, Laurin Raiken

The Action Interview at WBAI Radio Station-N.Y. by the New York-based artist group Guerilla Art
Action Group is a documentary of a live performance on WBAI Radio on January 5th, 1970. It consists
of a series of statements and questions that juxtapose the role of art with war, economics, society
and people of different skin colours. The motivation for this and many other actions of the group was
the atrocities and human rights violations in the Vietnam War and the linking of some US cultural
institutions to political and war actors through financial dependencies and personal connections.

The group thus highlights the position of art as an impetus for social change, despite its extravagant
position outside the lifeworld of many people. It calls on other artists to focus less on aesthetic
abstraction and more on intellectuality, interactivity and personal expression.

Moya Stahlmann, a trainee art teacher, explains the content of the interview as follows:

The protagonists introduce as follows:

Lauren Raiken: I accuse.

Jean Toche: You say you are an artist.

Poppy Johnson: I say you lie. You are just a business man.

Jon Hendricks: You are guilty of currying the very nature of art.

This introductory statement already makes clear what the group wants to draw attention to. They
address the relationship between art and business, in which it is no longer clear whether an artist is
an artist or rather a "business man". And in doing so, they point to the artist's betrayal of art itself, to something far removed from the idea of profit, to something that should be used to stand up for one's fellow human beings instead of being complicit in their continued oppression by participating in a racist and sexist system.

They ask the artist directly what their motives are for continuing to operate in such a corrupt system
and for accepting and even supporting the suffering of oppressed people within that system. Are
money, exhibitions and good reviews more important to them than standing up for human rights? Do
they feel that as an artist, they are worth more than other people? Do they see themselves as
something divine? Between their statements and questions, they sometimes leave longer,
sometimes shorter pauses, presumably to give the audience space for self-reflection.

The often-repeated statement "Art is Business" is particularly catchy. Art, he says, is an instrument with which an oppressive society idealises its own image. It is used to force people to accept the
subjugation of "big business". Museums and cultural institutions are instrumentalised as self-healing by artists who collaborate with this manipulative system and cultivate such idealisation. The
consequence: art has become irrelevant, trivial and sterile. It has thus become the supreme symbol
of the dehumanised process of business. Artists describe them as psychopaths who are ready to absorb inhuman values within the competitive rivalry of the art industry.

Hasn't art thus become a weapon of the cultural gangs to corrupt people? Is art used by them as an
opiate for the oppressed people? But it is also about the artist him/herself, who allows him/herself
to be a creative plaything for the elite, for an elite that enjoys murder, rape and "dirty" money.

Between the statements, there are repeated sequences in which one of the artists being heard asks:
"Are you guilty?"

The interview on this record is intended to expose the relationships between art and business, art
and the military, art and social classes, art and racialisation, and the instrumentalised role of the
artists themselves in supporting and thus legitimising these relationships through their actions within
the art establishment.

PS, MS