Reverend Billy and Savitri D at the Mladi levi festival

Screening
Stara mestna elektrarna, Ljubljana
WED, 8 August 2021 at 9 pm

Workshop
21–24 August 2012
Glej theatre, Ljubljana

Public intervention
FRI, 24 August 2012 at 4pm
Starting point: Novi trg square fountain, Ljubljana

Sermon
FRI, 24 August 2012 at 7.30 pm
Glej theatre, Ljubljana

“Why do I shout? Why do I preach? Because I think I hear something. As you listen to me, I hear a shout in you. Oh, let me preach. Let’s stand up! Let’s shout like we do when we are loving, like we do at a peace rally, like we shout in a church when the spirit tells us to give it up. Amen? We’re safe from shopping now. How quickly our shouting becomes a kind of singing that gives the product nothing to say!”

Reverend Billy was born in the late 90s on a sidewalk in New York’s Time Square out of an impelling need to speak up against consumerist frenzy and the dysfunctional, sad and inhumane society that was growing around it. A waiter’s white jacket, a cardboard collar and a bleached, Elvis-like hairdo were enough for actor and playwright Bill Talen to give life to the street-corner persona called Reverend Billy.

He then became a visionary, a solo pseudo-evangelist who passionately urged people to stay away from “consumer narcosis” and “affluenza”, warning against the “shopocalypse”, the vast collective drift towards personal anxiety, worker exploitation, environmental collapse and the destruction on a human-scale of the social fabric.

Soon, what might have looked like yet another end-of-the-century eccentricity started revealing itself for what it really was: a crazy adventure into the sacred space of shopping and a contagious call to action. Reverend Billy was then joined by other activists, and together, they mutated the preacher’s antics into a virus aimed at collapsing the fake allure of brands. Malls and franchise stores were turned into an invisible, undeclared stage for a “fictional” folk hero to engage a fight with a bigger consensual fiction, the credit-card reality of the incessant economic growth. It was the turn of the millennium and The Church of Stop Shopping was born.

By the time director Savitri D joined the Church, the mainstream and commercial media were already starting to pay attention to Rev. Billy, probably in consideration of the wave of creative activism that was fueling resistance to top-down globalization all over the world. At that point, the Reverend could have started a successful parody-based career, but that never happened.

Reality was getting more and more compelling: the September 11 attacks on the US, the growing delocalization of production and the implosion of the national economy in the early 2000s, the collapse of credit and financial markets, the unrestricted exploitation of the environment and the ever-growing evidence of a global climate change. “Lift your hand from the product,” as Rev. Billy used to chant in his sermons, was not an imploration anymore, but a fact.

While Reverend Billy was entering the mass media stage through, astonishingly, the unlikely doors of Fox News, CNN Money and even right-wing talk shows, the Church – now called “The Church of Life After Shopping” – was starting to reach new corners of a country going through a deep crisis of self-confidence. Up till then, Reverend Billy had preached to the converted, gathering a family of fellow activists, genius part-time musicians, amateur choir singers and creative subversion lovers. But now, grassroots janitors’ unions, Christian groups, radical environmentalist bikers and even unemployed housewives were knocking at the door of the Church…or rather…filling Rev. Billy’s email box.

From then on, a vertiginous new phase of the Reverend Billy Project started, beginning with 2007’s “What Would Jesus Buy”, an internationally applauded movie produced by Morgan Spurlock and directed by Rob Van Alkemade, who told the story of the Church as a long, crazy road tour into the heart of disillusioned consumerist America. In 2009, Reverend Billy officially ran for mayor of New York, and though he was never a serious threat to the multi-millionaire candidate Michael Bloomberg, the campaign was no fiction and it actually lay the ground for new collaborations with NY State-based groups of citizens concerned with the collective issues of environmental exploitaton and the banks’ backing of unethical commercial activities.

In 2011, Billy, Savitri D and the Church whole-heartedly embraced the growing “Occupy” movement and have still not stopped continuing to organize, perform, teach, get people involved and produce their own media (such as the overwhelming videocast “Reverend Billy’s Freakstorm”, whose installments are available on the Church’s website), while at the same time opening up a dialogue about what the Church is doing and discussing it in public.

As Alisa Solomon wrote, “Reverend Billy snatches pleasure from rampant consumerism – and indeed, recalls the loneliness and passivity one experiences when her life revolves around a series of advertisers-manipulated purchases – and reclaims it for the live, communal satisfactions of theater and action. This church’s pious practice is not one of abstinence and self-abnegation, but of agency.”

Critical Art Ensemble & Institute for Applied Autonomy
Seized

Exhibition
13–29 June 2012

Screening
WED, 27 June 2012 at 9 pm

Aksioma | Project Space, Ljubljana

The theme of the Seized exhibition started as a shocking personal experience in the paranoid US political climate. In spring 2004, the FBI raided the home of art professor and CAE member Steve Kurtz. What followed was a four-year legal case that was finally dropped in 2008 due to all evidence of any crime being “insufficient on its face”.

The reason for the FBI raid is telling… Steve’s wife Hope died entirely unexpectedly because of an undiagnosed heart defect. Police who responded to Kurtz’s 911 call for help noticed a benign-looking chemistry laboratory in the house and informed the FBI, who considered “preparations for an upcoming show” to be a lame excuse. During the three-day raid, the authorities not only confiscated Kurtz’s computers, archives, artworks and a set of books he was using for research on his upcoming book project, but also his wife’s corpse. Steve himself was interrogated for 22 hours with the aim of charging him with “bioterrorism” and even murder.

In the installation Body of Evidence, CAE and IAA turn the perpetrator-victim relationship of this horrifying personal experience upside-down. In the same manner in which the FBI stole their artistic material, the artists confiscated pizza boxes, Gatorade bottles, hazmat suits and biological sample bags, as well as written notes and a single cigar butt that were left behind by the FBI at the scene of the crime – Steve Kurtz’s lawn.

The display of the notes and papers that the federal agents wrote during the raid resembles a subversive strategy of counter-appropriation, as the artists use the objects the FBI left behind as “evidence” of their own investigation, and with that act, the power structure is subverted. As the actions and rationale of the FBI and the Department of Justice are questioned, a rare window into the anatomy of a “bio-terror” investigation opens up…

As we can read in the catalogue of the Seized exhibition:

“The project as an art exhibition raises questions about artistic freedom of expression and governmental repression, reflects about the interdependency between politics and business, and presents artistic strategies that try to undercut this.  America, the country of freedom, was the setting for the events which underlie this exhibition. It shows that it is not self-evident for artists, even in a democracy, to criticize the structures of power and to publicly take a firm stand.Besides the complex installation Body of Evidence, the exhibition Seized also documents material for works and performances by CAE that Steve and Hope were working on just before the raid, such as Free Range Grain (2003–2004) and Molecular Invasion (2002–2003), that were confiscated from their home by the FBI along with various other household objects.”