Rights and wrong - Grapevine - Right2Fight exhibit

Afterimage, July-August, 2002 by Jill Dawsey

Among Right2Fight's offerings of net art are Picture Projects's www.360degrees.org site, which navigates the cells and stories of incarcerated people, and a beautiful and disturbing site by Israeli Web artist Horit Herman Peled, which holds pltotography's truthtelling power in tension with the ethics of viewing, as images of the Gaza checkpoint, barbed wire and women soldiers wielding machine guns appear and quickiy fade into the whiteness of the screen.

The most significant and lasting effects of Right2Fight may ultimately be as a continuing Web project, www.molodiez.org/nightzfight/, providing resources and documentation of cultural production and making simple Web tools available to activist groups. One of the questions raised by the event, and a major task of politics in the age of global capitalism, is how to forge meaningful links between disparate activist issues and groups without resorting to monolithic notions of power that efface the specificity of each struggle (e.g., the excessive police force used on predominantly white WTO demonstrators as opposed to that used on predominantly black youths in urban centers)-a task well-served perhaps by the democratic potential of the Web. If Right2Fight raises questions and juxtaposes ideas that don't always coalesce, this seems to the point: democracy, as Ressler's video reminds us, is a form of government in which it is possible to question power. It follows, then, that cultural practices that support this i deal do not produce a space of comforting unity, but rather one of productive conflict. Right2Fight offers a vision of what democracy looks like, and how we might make our right to fight count.

JILL DAWSEY is a Ph.D. candidate in art history at Stanford University, She is also working as an independent curator in New York City.