How Reena Spaulings decided to support the Tarnac 10 and ask others to do the same.
That morning, Reena woke up in a surly mood. Some pale stranger was in her bed, as was often the case
after an opening. And as was often the case after an opening, she had to suffer through the effects of her
chronic alcoholism, this dull halo around everything and this body that she would have liked to be able to
toss, once and for all, into the dirty laundry pile.
To add to the irritation of reality, there was the slow rise, one by one, like bubbles in a champagne glass,
of memories of the previous evening. The guy who claimed that the only authentic artistic gesture, these
days, was that of the anarchist Black Bloc. He was standing, glass in hand, before a canvas soberly printed
with the words I AM WHAT I AM, the title of the first chapter of The Coming Insurrection. Or the one who had
built her fortune on the commercialization of street art and nostalgia for the era of squats and riots in the
East Village. Reena recalled an installation on the gallery wall: a revolutionary slogan from the first issue
of Tiqqun, spelled out in thousands of kitchen matches and treated with a fire retardant so that the gallery
would not have burst into flames if a passing anarchist happened to have had the bad idea of taking this
slogan literally, and set it on fire.
Reena had just learned that those whom the French Justice were now accusing of having written The
Coming Insurrection, those accused of having paralyzed the French TGV network through a sophisticated
act of sabotage, those whom Glenn Beck regularly called, in his Fox News diatribes, the enemies of Empire -
that these people, now facing 10 to 20 years in prison, no longer had a penny to pay their lawyers.
She thought about the gallery with its impeccable white walls, the cases of Bollinger Vieilles Vignes, of which
she herself had finished three bottles the night before, and these thousands, millions of dollars that, each
week, changed hands so politely within the little world of contemporary art where she had landed - a little
like this stranger who had landed in her bed, drunk, without her really even realizing it.
And she told herself that the minimum of decency, not to go crazy, would be to ask a few successful artists
to donate works to be sold for the benefit of the Tarnac 10.
Those who wanted to help the Tarnac 10 directly,
without going through her, could always wire money to the support committee's bank account.
She thanks you in advance, and hopes to see you at the next opening.
Selected Texts & Info
Article: Le Monde
Article: Politis
LINK: U.S. Support Committee
LINK: Fragments du visible