At once a prosaic verb and a proper noun, an ethical injunction and a sociological entity, a mobile trope and a site-specific tactic, Occupy lacks a unified meaning. Or, to put it more affirmatively, Occupy involves a surplus of meaning and cannot be reduced to one thing. The word itself is of course marked by ongoing legacies of colonial violence, calling to mind the forceful domestication of alien territories, the enclosure of common wealth, and the eviction or subjugation of native inhabitants. Yet the word has been indelibly inscribed with a new history involving the emancipatory reclamation or reinhabitation of those spaces colonized by Wall Street, which is to say the entirety of the planet and its life-support systems. From the warming of the climate, to the foreclosure of homes, to the militarization of streets, to the subjective internalization of market-based morality, Wall Street is Everywhere. Thus, “Occupy Everywhere, Occupy Everything,” as student activists in the UC system declared in the years preceding the advent of the Occupy Wall Street (OWS) camp in September 2011. Occupy has inaugurated a radical “spatial politics” in the sense of the term passed down to us from Rosalyn Deutsche, where the contestations of physical spaces, media spaces, and psychic spaces are understood to be inseparable.1 Occupy is at once familiar and strange, proximate and distant, embodied and virtual. Occupy is uncanny. As Talib Agape Fuegoverde put it last spring in the buildup to the historic reclamation of May Day in the United States by an alliance of unions, immigrant-justice groups, and OWS: “Occupy is an apparatus of defamiliarization and dissemination that enables spaces and objects, words and concepts, histories and memories to leave home and take flight into the future. Occupy enables us to revisit the past, but with a distance and a twist.”2 Occupy is especially uncanny from the perspective of art critics invested in tracing the legacies of the avant-garde in contemporary practice.3 Occupy is an arguably proto-revolutionary phenomenon that emerges in part out of the very artistico-political milieu of the sort that has concerned critics at October and elsewhere in recent years in discussions of relational aesthetics, interventionism, neo-Situationism, tactical media, experimental geography, the pedagogical turn, and more. While the

In order to explore the impact of the Occupy movement on artists and the art world, the editors of October wished to engage as broadly and openly as possible with figures who are directly involved, or who have a theoretical stake in Occupy. In addition to commissioning two essays and a conversation, we consulted in depth with Yates McKee, who helped us form a question and a list of potential respondents to a questionnaire. Lara Weibgen and Daniel Spaulding offered addi tional help. Here is what we asked, imposing nothing but rudimentary copyediting on the responses:As part of a cluster of texts devoted to Occupy Wall Street, the editors of October are soliciting responses, in any form, to the character, effects, aesthetics, and politics of the OWS movement. How has OWS affected your daily life and your political activities, and how have you affected it? What, in short, does it mean to you?

This generously illustrated volume surveys a new chapter in the history of environmental art, one in which space, geopolitics, human relations, urbanism, and utopian dreamwork play as important a role as, if not more than, raw earth. Discussed are case studies by seven artists and two artist teams-Jennifer Allora and Guillermo Calzadilla, Francis Alys, Yael Bartana, Joana Hadjithomas and Khalil Joreige, Emre Huner, Andrea Geyer, Matthew Day Jackson, Lucy Raven, and Santiago Sierra. While some of these artists explore historical and symbolic configurations of space, others parse the social, legal, and economic conditions of specific land-sites, including the Navajo Nation, the island of Vieques, the border town of Juarez, and the cities of Tongling, Jerusalem, and Beirut. Not confined to the displacement of matter, these artists employ a wide range of media, such as performance, animation, assemblage, and photography.

The artistic collaborative of Jennifer Allora and Guillermo Calzadilla's exhibition at the Venice Biennale, titled Gloria, comprises six new works developed partly in response to the U.S. Pavilion site. Combining performance, sculpture, video, and sound elements, the works use poetic shock and unexpected juxtaposition to reflect upon competitive enterprises such as the Olympic Games, international commerce, the military industrial complex and even the Biennale itself. The result is a series of artistic experiments that explore the nature of physical, visual, and audible experience. This publication documents Allora & Calzadilla's exhibition in the U.S. Pavilion, including a plates section displaying images of the works as they are installed in Venice as well as documentation of performances by professional athletes affiliated with U.S.A. Gymnastics and U.S.A. Track and Field. Essays by exhibition curator, U.S. Commissioner Lisa Freiman, and art historians Carrie Lambert-Beatty and Yates McKee explore the themes addressed in Gloria and place Allora & Calzadilla's works within a larger art historical and social context.

The contributions to this issue of October respond to a questionnaire formu-lated by Benjamin Buchloh; revised and edited by the editors of October', and then circulated to a number of artists, writers, academics (both faculty and graduate students), curators, and critics in June 2007. Rather than addressing intellectuals, academics, or scientists at large, we felt we should address those with whom the editors of October could claim to be linked by professional categories. We asked how they would begin to evaluate and explain the seeming absence of visible opposition to the Iraq War during the past four-now almost five-years within the milieu of cultural producers working in the sphere of contemporary visual culture. This is not to suggest that there is no opposition to the Iraq War; on the contrary, when polled during the past year, the majority of Americans, after initially offering support, now appear to be against it. But …

OCTOBER 117, Summer 2006, pp. 99–121. © 2006 October Magazine, Ltd. and Massachusetts Institute of Technology. “9/11 OUTRAGE DRAW THE LINE NOW.” Thus enjoined the front page of the Daily News in June 2005 after sending a reporter to vet the archives of the Drawing Center, one of three cultural institutions planned as part of the World Trade Center memorial complex. According to the News, “Governor Pataki is allowing a museum that exhibits anti-American art to display its works at Ground Zero,” thus ruining the “sacred soil” of the site.1 The works in question, which featured iconic references to the Abu Ghraib photographs and to the September 11 attacks, were accused of committing violence against the public at large and the families of the victims in particular, whose supposedly unified voice the article claimed to represent. As suggested by another headline reading “VIOLATED . . . AGAIN,” the violence of the art in question was not just any violence; it bore, rather, a structurally continuous relationship to the original violence of the attacks themselves. Thus, to evoke traces of violence and violabilit y at Ground Zero—whether that of Americans or others—would be logically tantamount to a kind of aesthetic terrorism. Called by the News in the name of a terrorized public, Governor Pataki responded the next day with a warning to cultural institutions that was appropriate for a War on Terror: “We will not tolerate anything on that site that denigrates America, denigrates New York, or freedom, or denigrates the sacrifice and courage that the heroes showed on 9/11.”2 Claiming to safeguard the principle of freedom itself, Pataki’s demand for an “absolute guarantee” against potentially “offensive” material suggests a doctrine of cultural preemption that, like the Bush administration, claims a sovereign right to act against threats “before they are fully