Art and Activism

This study examines artists’ approaches to social change in New York City from 1966 to 1976. During this period, overlapping communities of artists and art professionals sought means of providing a social meaning and purpose for their practice – one that addressed the political ruptures of the 1960s and 1970s, and challenged what was perceived as a classed, elitist, and socially disengaged art establishment. In doing so, they produced politically motivated art and performance, while participating in active protest, initiating museum reform, and engaging in community arts and education projects. While these developments reflect the national context, the thesis argues that they need to be understood within their local setting. As artists responded to political and social concerns, they did so with reference to their own local conditions as both artists and residents of New York City. Tracing these impulses into the 1970s, the thesis also challenges scholarly periodizations that present 1969 as an endpoint for social movements initiated in the 1960s. Within this framework, the art and actions of New York art-protesters reflect unique and innovative approaches to activism and social change that both appropriated aspects of the avant-garde tradition, and anticipated future modes of political radicalism.

This article aims to explore the notion of activist-art, identifying it as a distinct tendency in Modern art through a re-examination of historical and theoretical approaches to the radical avant-garde, drawing on autonomist Marxist and materialist post-structural perspectives.

First, through a critique of Peter Bürger's Theory of the Avant-Garde, I attempt to place the use of the idea of ‘autonomy’ by the avant-garde in its critical historical context not only in the negative sense of separation, but in the positive sense of freedom from restraint. I argue that for the avant-garde this took the particular form of a thematic engagement with the refusal of work. Secondly, I examine one particular form of this refusal: the engagement with social movements amongst Dadaists in Berlin. I set out a theoretical frame of ‘affective composition', in order to place avant-garde artistic production in relation to the art of social movements, whose production operates outside the institutions of art. I argue that not only is the avant-garde at crucial points influenced by the art of social movements, but that the Dadaists in Berlin attempt to imagine new forms of ‘activist-art’ which synthesise avant-garde and social movement performance and object-art in disobedient performances and performative disobedient objects.

Disobedient Objects was a major exhibition at the Victoria and Albert Museum, London. It focused on art and design objects produced within activist social movements since the late 1970s internationally. It opened from 2014-15. It was the most-visited exhibition at the V&A since 1946.

This is the illustrated introductory essay to the catalogue, written by co-curators Gavin Grindon and Catherine Flood.

Further information:
http://www.vam.ac.uk/content/exhibitions/disobedient-objects/

“The phenomenon of art activism is central to our time because it is a new phenomenon” insists Boris Groys in his 2014 eFlux essay “On Art Activism,” and yet art activism has a solid backstory brimming with risks and minor victories, compromises and outright failures, just the same as any other cultural narrative, even if this one remains largely closeted within mainstream art history. How then do we approach the new wave of art activism emerging today across the globe,  and what perception of time, repetition and the archive must be invoked or forgotten in order to counter what Marx described as the nightmarish weight of tradition that presses upon the brains of the living? [Published in http://field-journal.com/ ]

As wondrous lands are represented as “wastelands” to make way for urban and industrial development in Hawaiʻi, kūpuna or elders and cultural practitioners are currently building a movement across the islands to mobilize moʻolelo (stories and histories) in huakaʻi aloha ʻāina, (physical and spiritual travels to view and remember celebrated and sacred places) in order to protect them.  On these huakaʻi, moʻolelo have critical decolonial effects as they articulate an ʻŌiwi moʻoʻāina economy of abundance that restores “wastelands” to ʻāina kamahaʻo (wondrous land) and ʻāina momona (abundant land).  In this essay, I focus on a 2010 community struggle to protect the birthplace of the kupua (supernatural hero) Māui in Lualualei valley from a developer’s proposal for a light industrial park. The Concerned Elders of Waiʻanae organized the Huakaʻi Kākoʻo no Waiʻanae environmental justice bus tours to share the Māui moʻolelo and build a broad base of support for their struggles, enabling wonder to grow into direct action.  I discuss the ways that Indigenous and critical settler cartographies map the wonder of the Māui moʻolelo on the ground, and I look to narrative conventions of moʻolelo that compare and connect distant places, helping to grow affinity activism.

Black Mask/Up Against the Wall Motherfucker existed from 1966-69 in New York, moving from abstract painting and intermedia environments to street posters and increasingly militant political happenings. They were definitive, influential activist-art groups, often cited as a key historical precedent for contemporary activist-art and social practice. Additionally, they represent a crucial but neglected moment in the contested radical legacy of the avant-garde of Surrealism and Dada. Their history has been previously available only in brief, mythologising accounts, but this article draws on interviews and extensive cross-archival research to present the first thorough historical account of their political art practices.

In this article I analyse the notion that social movement politics and contemporary art interventions increasingly traverse a porous boundary, be it in terms of practices, relations, or institutions. Premised on Nicolas Bourriaud's seminal reading of 1990s art, I contend that the theory of " relational aesthetics " (2002) offers a synthetic platform from which we can understand how artistic interventions with activist connotations are increasingly moving away from the utopian and prescriptive, and thus echoing the " subjective turn " of social movement politics more widely. Based on fieldwork with contemporary artists and social movement actors in Brazil, the chapter mobilises relational aesthetics as a criteria to differentiate various forms of contemporary art intervention. Through conversation with ethnographies of radical politics, I argue that an analysis that foregrounds ephemerality, the " absolute centrality of diversity " , and different forms of dissonance, allows us to productively theorise how subjectivity is elaborated and meaning created. If art really is the locus of " imminence " , then understanding how these processes are contested is to grasp how prefigurative politics can have consequences for the immediate future.

Concerning my and our work in Eurocentric academia, to rethink Transgender studies, trans* politics and activism in relation to decoloniality, the text focuses on body-politics, knowledge production and trans* imaginary in the context of crisis. This asks also for an analysis of the post-Cold War reconfiguration and multiplication of European borders, as my intention here is to shift the geography of reason, point to counter-genealogies of thought and to decolonial practices of resistance. This means to engage with decolonial critique in relation to the processes of colonial capitalist divisions and differentiation, when speaking about the coloniality of gender, as well as the global imposition of western Eurocentric feminist, queer and transgender knowledge.

This paper will try to investigate new and original forms of government of the commons. The Italian academic debate on common goods is at present very much alive, fed by several practical attempts which are variously spread and among them heterogeneous. Citizens, local communities, groups of workers and activists aim to redesign spaces of public decision-making concerning the management and the use of common goods and collective resources assuming it should be broader and more representative of what currently provided by laws and Public Administrations. Here we propose a distinction between "necessary commons" and "accidental commons" in order to identify special differentiated governance regimes that take into account the profound heterogeneity of common goods and collective resources that appeal to the category at issue here. These hypotheses will be investigated on the basis of significant experiences arisen within political and artistic movements born to defend specific common goods and to promote through the practice original institutional models that enable unprecedented forms of participatory management of public goods

En la década del setenta se desarrollaron prácticas gráficas alternativas que actuaron en la frontera entre lo poético y lo político y han sido mayormente excluidos del discurso canónico de la historia el arte en Puerto Rico porque implican un desplazamiento gráfico respecto de la ortodoxia de la gráfica y su circulación en el país. En este trabajo se estudia y amplía la concepción de prácticas artísticas de motivación política entre 1970 y 1980, tomando en consideración la relación entre varios actores culturales que actuaron en el límite de la poesía, la gráfica y la acción política. El estudio se centra en la publicación Fuera de Trabajo (1977) de Esteban Valdés y la campaña del Gobierno Araña llevada a cabo por el Comité Pro Defensa de la Cultura Puertorriqueña (1980), pero también incluye otras obras y acciones centrales a esta problemática, tales como la revista mural Alicia la Roja, las performances de Carlos Irizarry, un billete-volante utilizado por el Movimiento Pro Independencia y las protestas en las bienales grabado de San Juan durante la década del setenta. Indagando en el significado que estas piezas tuvieron en su época, quiénes las realizaron, el por qué de su circulación alternativa y las implicaciones políticas que tuvieron, se ha hecho una interpretación de por qué fueron excluidas del canon de la gráfica puertorriqueña, posicionando las obras y artistas en un contexto local e internacional. También se investiga sobre las relecturas que se les hizo a partir de la inclusión de estos trabajos en distintas instancias de exhibición y circulación a partir de 2000. Como hipótesis principal, esta tesis sostiene que la gráfica experimental y política realizada en Puerto Rico entre los años 1970 y 1980 constituye un desplazamiento gráfico de circulación alternativa en relación al canon artístico local y una vanguardia relacionada al conceptualismo. Las piezas no sólo se enfrentaron a los cánones del arte en Puerto Rico, sino que también intervienen muy puntualmente en el escenario político del país, como acciones en y sobre la historia que sólo han sido reconsideradas en acción diferida a principios de la década del 2000.

This article considers how computational simulation can be used to amplify imagination and make its effects sharable, persuasive and activist. It argues that this is not only possible but important for the future of design and introduces the concept of living models as a device that can express the futuring potential of such simulations. Developing this argument, the article explores whether, by postponing top-down rationalisms in favour of a ‘methodological naiveté’, designers can gain the capacity to uncover and engage with the unusual participants of the complex dynamic assemblages they aim to change. When designers collaborate with the agencies of the living models they deploy, the outcomes prove useful for the exploration of alternative values and worldviews. Explorations of this kind are significant because human designs need to improve their integrations with existing complex systems and are innovative in their ambition to see creative agency in non-human actors. In a practical demonstration of such approaches, the experiments in generative computation presented in this article illustrate that design creativity occurs through humans but not entirely because of them.

Convocarte — Revista de Ciências da Arte n.º 5
Revista Internacional Digital com Comissão Científica Editorial e Revisão de Pares
Tema do Dossier Temático ARTE E ACTIVISMO POLÍTICO: PERSPETIVAS DA HISTÓRIA DA ARTE E ESTUDOS DE CASO
Ideia e Coordenação Geral Fernando Rosa Dias
Coordenação Científica do Dossier Temático Cristina Pratas Cruzeiro

This essay examines three critical artists who orchestrate participatory spectacles and experiences as a means of challenging neoliberal financialization, an overarching paradigm and process that is reshaping economics, politics, society and culture. Critical art, I argue, can offer us a particularly insightful vantage point on these transformations. This is not, as it is usually supposed, because art has some lofty transcendental perspective above society; rather, it is precisely because art is already so deeply integrated into finance and financialization. Not coincidentally, "participation" appears as a keyword for the restructuring of both art and finance today, which I argue is key to understanding the challenges, limits and potentials of even avowedly critical participatory art, with lessons for cultural production more broadly. In order to analyse and draw broader lessons from the three artworks in question, I identify each with a strategic paradigm: benign pessimism, tactical parasitism and the encrypted common. These strategies, I argue, emerge within, against and beyond financialization and can help complicate our approach to its complex cultural politics.

Kampung Dago Pojok is a local neighborhood within the Dago area of Bandung, an area wellknown for its cultural and artistic activities which have contributed significantly to the development of Bandung as a 'creative city' in the early 2000s. However, Kampung Dago Pojok has largely been excluded from this development and the wider creative atmosphere of the city. In response to this, the community art activist group Komunitas Taboo has collaborated with local kampung communities to adapt the 'creative city' concept to local conditions and forms of social organization, establishing it as a 'creative kampung'. This paper draws on a participatory research method to explore the lived experiences and creative practices of those who make use of the kampung, with a particular focus on the urban activism of Komunitas Taboo and their collaborative work with local communities. It describes how the 'creative kampung' is expressed and produced within the daily 'traditional activities' of Kampung Dago Pojok residents, as well as the community organizing work carried out through Komunitas Taboo. These activities draw on local knowledge and practices, and the kampung's social, economic and geographic position within the Dago area and the city of Bandung, to produce value for the community and to build a social movement for the 'creative kampung' as a localized counterpart to the 'creative city'.

The uprising that started with Taksim Square’s Gezi Park in Istanbul on 28 May 2013 emerged as a unique movement of resistance in Turkey’s history and has continued without interruption in the last several weeks. The Gezi Park Movement will be remembered as a successful mass movement of youth activism whose main purpose has been to reclaim public space in the cities in Turkey and the rural countryside, a political ecology that is under threat from the government’s neo-liberal utopias of development and capital intervention. The protestors on the streets have proven that they care deeply for their environment and have put themselves at risk in reclaiming their rights to the public space in Turkey.

This paper examines the protection of indigenous peoples’ intangible heritage at the international level. It addresses the problem of appropriation and commodification of traditional and artistic cultural expressions (‘TCEs’) through the multiplicity of existing international legal regimes. These include general and indigenous-specific human rights rules, UNESCO conventions and guidelines, as well as international norms of general application such as those pertaining to Intellectual Property (‘IP’). The paper adopts a sceptical approach towards the suitability of international norms and processes to address the question of indigenous heritage. Drawing upon the efforts of regional bodies and national paradigms from Australia, New Zealand, Canada and the U.S., it argues that priority in legal planning and decision-making be given to the “localization” of indigenous claims and peoples’ local empowerment.

This article examines Henri Lefebvre's concept of revolution-as-festival, its textual sources and its relationship to contemporary notions developed by Georges Bataille and the Situationist International. It is a companion-piece to the examination of Bataille's revolution-as-festival in Third Text 104, vol 24, no 3, May 2010. The author argues that Lefebvre's revolution-as-festival embodies the multiple methodological ambiguities of his ‘open’ dialectical approach, and his attempt to transplant Surrealist and Dadaist concerns into a Marxian framework. It is, paradoxically, these ambiguities that allow his revolution-as-festival to become a useful concept: firstly as a discursive making-visible and valorization of the art and culture of social movements; and secondly as a term through which to critically re-imagine this art and culture's limits and possibilities. This potential is borne out, not least, in the influence of Lefebvre's essay ‘Revolutionary Romanticism’ on the founding debates of the Situationist International.

When I first became involved with the research of Saharawi culture and politics in 2011, one of the first people I had access to in order to start learning about the conflict and the role of music in the Saharawi struggle for independence was the then delegate of the Polisario Front in London, Lamine Baali. The Polisario Front is the Saharawi liberation movement, created in 1973 when the Western Sahara was still a Spanish colony, and the internationally recognised representative of the Saharawi people since Morocco invaded the territory in 1975, forcing half of its population to become refugees in Algeria. At the time, Lamine told me something that has been in my mind ever since: 'Have in mind that everybody who gets involved with the Saharawi in any capacity has to find their own way of contributing to our cause'. That way, thanks to my love for the music and the people, I consciously became an activist.
Drawing from extensive ethnographic fieldwork in the Saharawi refugee camps and the development of 'Portraits of Saharawi Music' (2013-2014), a collaborative music archiving and research project in partnership with the British Library and the Saharawi Ministry of Culture, this paper explores methodological and ethical issues derived from the uses of political and cultural activism as an ethnomusicological research method. It examines the problematic and interactions of the ideologies, motivations and personal relationships of the researcher, the musicians and the institutions involved in activist-research projects, especially focusing on the establishment of the criteria, objectives and potential political uses of those projects. In agreement with the basic principles of social responsibility of academia, it seeks to analyse the real potential of ethnomusicology in the advancement of a critical, collaborative and constructive academic activism.

The Situationist International (SI) have become a canonical reference point when discussing artists' participation in political action or activism. This article attempts to decentre the SI from this position, by tracing their theories and representations of political agency and labour. I argue that their notion of agency is deeply conflicted, epitomized by the dual invocations 'never work/all power to the workers' councils. I examine how the SI's representations of agency betray an attraction to and fascination with 1960s reactionary fantasies around brainwashing, conditioning, control and torture. Their practical descriptions of a constructed situation, which 'makes people live' are, in fact, closer to torturous state control than total liberation. The notions of agency they mobilise draw on colonial and classist sources, which actually deny the agency of radical movements. As a result, the SI produce a series of weak fantasies of participation, in which agency is denied and 'demanding the impossible' is actually a demand to constitute and police the impossible. Artistic-political agency was both guarded centre and constituent other. The SI's policing of their identity, tied in name to the agency of 'situations', involved the ongoing exclusion and repression of other artists' more practically-engaged labour within social movements.

urban space, art, and social movements 2 2 Rebel streets : urban space, art, and social movements Art's presence in the urban space is dynamic and interactive that communicates the complex forms of globalization, cultural hybridity, and plurality in contemporary daily life-where we experience politics. The new forms of agencies and strategies of urban creativity in the form of graffiti, wall paintings, yarn bombing, stickers, urban gardening, street performances, tactical art, creative campaigns and theatrical actions-among others-demand an active spectatorship and have a growing power to renegotiate space for new forms of political participation in the urban space.

The question can no longer just be whether “art and social practice” or creative forms of activism are part of larger neo liberal agenda nor if they are potentially radical in their conception, delivery or consumption. The question also becomes: what are the effects of social practice art and design for the artists, institutions, and the publics they elicit in public and private spaces; that is, how can we consider such artworks differently? I argue the dilution of social practices’ potentially radical interventions into cultural processes and their absorption into larger neo liberal agendas limits how, as Jacques Rancière might argue, they can intervene in the “distribution of the sensible.” I will use a case study example from The Center for Tactical Magic, an artist group from the San Francisco Bay Area.

Art activism has been a key element in current social movements and uprisings, even as the relation of art and activism appears to have changed significantly during recent decades. In the aftermath of the alter-globalization movements, Arab Spring, Occupy movements around the world, the Gezi Resistance in Turkey, and the ongoing Black Lives Matter Movement in the United States, discussing and theorizing about art has inevitably involved taking resistance, occupation, protest, and activism into consideration. Artists engage in making political intervention, and activists use artistic strategies as a part of political action. Political communities and artistic communities are more and more constitutive of one another in the counterhegemonic struggle. Drawing on photographic and artistic evidence from the 2013 Gezi Park resistance in Turkey, in tandem with theoretical work by Mikhail Bakhtin and Chantal Mouffe, Alain Badiou and Jacques Rancière, this essay examines the changing relationship between art and activism to the extent that protest today references and embodies street carnival and carnival aesthetics. I contend that carnival aesthetics brings about displacements within modes of perception, thus stimulating new forms of subjectification and sociability through which the communities of social movements are constituted.

Bifrost is an environmental arts-research intervention on climate change led by educators and researchers from the Nordic Network for Interdisciplinary Environmental Studies (NIES) working in close collaboration with visual artists and media designers. It is a not-for-profit project based at several universities in the Nordic countries. Since 2011 these partners have worked to disseminate knowledge on a range of environmental questions at the intersection of nature and culture. The next iteration of the project, Bifrost -- The Future is Now, will launch in autumn 2017. It will bring together citizens from all walks of life to showcase knowledge and demonstrate the capacity for decisive individual, organizational and community engagement in climate-change mitigation and adaptation efforts as we work to realize the world’s commitments as set out in the Paris climate agreement.

This article explores forms of ‘grief-activism’ commemorating those who have perished on the move, in the waters surrounding EUrope, at physical border barriers, or on EUrope’s streets and in its detention centres. Contestations in death protest the differential distribution of vulnerability and a politics of division, abandonment and necropolitical violence on which EUrope’s border regime thrives. Mobilising both Judith Butler’s notion of grievability and Jacques Rancière’s proposition of an ‘impossible identification’ as a heterological form of politics, this article examines what occurs in attempts to form solidarities in precarious moments of collective mourning. While a politics that seeks to include lost others must always be replete with impossibilities, it is argued that grief-activist practices that counter-perform exclusions in transformative political encounters engender imaginaries of what it might mean to create community ‘beyond borders’.

Key words: grief-activism, migration struggles, solidarity, grievability, impossible identification, community

ABSTRACT
Departing from Judith Butler’s ground-breaking book Notes toward a Performative Theory of Assembly, this article will explore why extra cultural meaning is attached to resisting bodies that are involved in demonstrating assemblies. Across the globe resistance is played out by bodies that occupy pavements, streets and squares. The participants in public assemblies, are taking part in various emotional processes while coming together to struggle against, for example, disenfranchisement, effacement and abandonment. In embodied, coordinated actions of resistance the gathering itself signifies something in excess of what is being said at the event; there is a distinction between forms of linguistic performativity and forms of bodily performativity. By bringing in the concepts of emotions and matter, this paper will explore how and why resisting bodies signify something else/more than the vocalised or linguistic demands that they are making.

The article explores cinematic and photographic images of the ‘Greek crisis’ in order to show how the visual can render the crisis both visible and invisible, clear and opaque, normalized and contested. Greek new wave cinema, iconic repetitive images of suffering in the center of Athens, and the group of visual artists Depression Era are discussed in this context. I argue that the images in focus articulate the crisis and render it visible. At the same time, however, they challenge one's expectations of what the crisis is and how normalized it has become. I argue that these images can encourage civic responsibility and a dialogue about freedom and democracy in the current predicament.

An inner link has always connected the artistic avant-garde with acts of insurgency carried out by socially disenfranchised populations insofar as both embrace the possibility of an emancipated future that is radically at odds with the present (picture Gustave Courbet
helping to topple the Vendome Column in
1871), except something about such historical repetition and reenactment at this time  –a moment best described as an uncanny present: a present unfamiliar in its very presentness (Rebecca Bryant)– cries out for something like verification. The essay (published in ASAP Journal 3.2 2018) asks is such a thing as proof of authenticity even possible?

In this chapter, I describe one part of the strange and fateful symmetry between art and money, focusing on how this entanglement has evolved through the advance of financialization. I have selected the six works by radical artists from two key moments of crisis in the history of financialization: 1973 and 2008. All six directly engage with money, either as a tangible medium or as a prompt for artistic, political and cultural critique and invention. By critically examining this work, we can see how artists understand the broader economic conditions in which they find themselves, gain an understanding of those conditions, and trace the fate of money itself. Artists like these seize upon the contradiction with which I opened this chapter: under late capitalism money and art appear as sworn enemies but in fact share deep affinities. It is these affinities that give money-art, and especially radical money-art, its aesthetic and its critical heft. Such approaches are especially important today, in our moment of financialization.

The pillars of the autonomous cantons of the Rojava Revolution in Syrian-Kurdistan enforce secular politics, gender equality through quotas, and the reduction of centralized structures to a minimum. These pillars are not derived from the model of the nation-state; they are the pillars of a new political imaginary that has yet to be developed in full, a political imaginary aimed at transforming our very practice and understanding of power. Stateless democracy is based on the profound processes behind the Kurdish movement’s decades of struggle and sacrifice, with women in front. This struggle has not only made it possible for power to operate in different ways; it has made difference itself possible.