Art and the Re-Invention of Protest (original) (raw)

INTRODUCTION TO THE ART OF ACTIVISM AND THE ACTIVISM OF ART

THE ART OF ACTIVISM AND THE ACTIVISM OF ART GREGORY SHOLETTE, 2022

* This is the introductory chapter to THE ART OF ACTIVISM AND THE ACTIVISM OF ART (Lund Humphries, UK, 2022) * Since the global financial crash of 2008, artists have become increasingly engaged in a wide range of cultural activism targeted against capitalism, political authoritarianism, colonial legacies, gentrification, but also in opposition to their own exploitation. They have also absorbed and reflected forms of protest within their art practice itself. The Art of Activism and the Activism of Art maps, critiques, celebrates and historicises activist art, exploring its current urgency alongside the processes which have given rise to it. Gregory Sholette approaches his subject from the dual perspective of commentator (as scholar and writer) and insider (as activist artist), in order to propose that the narrowing gap separating forms of activist art from an aesthetics of protest is part of a broader paradigm shift constituted by the multiplying crises within contemporary capitalism and democratic governance across the globe.

Art imitating protest imitating art: performative practices in art and protest.

Art’s connection with politics is usually mentioned in connection with the 1970s, an epoch of social and political upheaval but also a time of shifts in art that coincided with the emergence of conceptual art. In this paper I will be discussing recent art projects and instances of political and social protest, as practices with similarities. I will be demonstrating how these similarities do not remain on an aesthetic level but partake of the same performative practice. Lastly, I will be identifying the modalities of difference and exclusion which they both exercise: The subversion of mainstream acts, the assumption of a caricature of identity, the adoption of stillness as defiant presence, the modifications of the body and the use of rituals.

How to see Violence: Artistic Activism and the Radicalization of Human Rights

Through an analysis of protest art produced within the Argentine human rights movement from 1998-2000, this paper shows how artists take up and transform aesthetic forms, discourses, and tactics produced by social movements and, in so doing, contribute to these movements’ aesthetic repertoires and political narratives. The groups Grupo de Arte Callejero (GAC) and Etcétera… participate in the Argentine human rights movement through their interventionist art practices that are also forms of direct action. Their work pushes for a radicalization of the movement by mobilizing its social condemnation of state terrorism under the past dictatorship towards a critique of the multiform violence of capital and the ongoing violence of the postdictatorial neoliberal state. Through an analysis of their work, this essay also theorizes struggles over historical narratives and the ways these enable or occlude apprehensions of violence and recognition of its agents, uses, and effects. The counter-hegemonic historical narratives I track in this essay refute state narratives and liberal ideologies to enable alternate apprehensions of violence and justice, while elucidating the historical constitution of the present social order.

The Art of Protest: Understanding and Misunderstanding Monstrous Events

Theory & Event, 2021

This essay explores the basis for dialogue at the junction of political theory, historical research and aesthetic analysis. It does so by making two claims. The first one concerns political emergence, which refers to movements that emerge outside democratic institutions and portend profound reorganizations of political order although they are not yet fully recognizable as political entities as they have weak political representation. The second claim implies that aesthetic presentations and performances (fiction, poetry, visual arts, film, theater) offer unique ways of understanding political emergence, and hence also collective protest, revolt and revolution. Artworks embody this potentiality because they register the experience of protests, not as representations of fixed historical agents, but in ways comparable to the testimonial mode of the participant and the witness in situations of social stress, struggle and political violence.