Activist and Socially Engaged Art

Art History ◽  
2021 ◽  
Author(s):  
Grant Kester
Keyword(s):  
Cultural Production ◽  
Time Frame ◽  
Reciprocal Relationship ◽  
Art Practice ◽  
Power Structures ◽  
Political Movement ◽  
Graphic Art ◽  
Socially Engaged Art ◽  
Activist Art ◽  
The Public Sphere

The terms “activist” or “socially engaged” art (used interchangeably throughout this article) refer to artistic practices that are integrated with, or responsive to, forms of political protest and resistance. This typically entails some connection to a social or political movement, community, or group that is seeking to challenge an authoritarian regime or contest hegemonic forms of domination, often associated with differences of class, race, ethnicity, or sexuality. The form taken by activist art can range from relatively abbreviated performative gestures to extended engagements with institutional power structures, to modes of symbolic or discursive production circulating in the public sphere (murals, graphic art, etc.). In each case, however, we can observe a reciprocal relationship between artistic production and mechanisms of social and political transformation oriented toward human emancipation. Between the mid-19th and mid-20th centuries there were significant interconnections between the concept of an activist art practice and the modern avant-garde. I’ll provide a brief outline of some of these navigational points in the section Historical Studies. It’s not possible, however, to provide a comprehensive account of sources across this broader historical range. For the purposes of this article, I will focus primarily on work since the 1960s, when we can observe the initial expression of a recognizably contemporary set of referents for activist or engaged art practice. Even within this limited time frame, the range of possible material far exceeds the space necessary to acknowledge relevant sources. Activist art practices, by their very nature, tend to overlap with, and ramify into, a range of adjacent forms of cultural production. We can find meaningful connections to activist theater (Augusto Boal), radical pedagogy (Paolo Freire), the Art and Labor movement, the traditions of community and street art, digital activism, tactical media, activist filmmaking, and urban murals, among many other relevant sources. Moreover, there are distinctive manifestations of activist or engaged art in every region of the globe. Argentine activist practice has its own unique traditions and concerns, as does art produced in Eastern Europe, South Africa, India, Japan, and Mexico. Rather than attempting to fully address each of these areas, I will offer a series of chronological divisions that chart some of the shifts that have occurred in the production of activist art since the mid-20th century.

scholarly journals OCCUPY BIENNALE? SOCIALLY-ENGAGED ART PRACTICE AND ART INSTITUTION

ARTis ON ◽  
2018 ◽  
pp. 171-177
Author(s):  
Urszula Staszkop
Keyword(s):  
New York ◽  
The Political ◽  
Occupy Wall Street ◽  
Political Protest ◽  
Art Practice ◽  
Wall Street ◽  
Occupy Movement ◽  
Socially Engaged Art ◽  
Activist Art ◽  
Participatory Practices

The political phenomenon of Occupy Wall Street obtained the global attention in the fall of 2011 with its encampment in the Zuccotti Park (New York). As the movement grew, there also seemed to be an aesthetic component to it revealed in socially-engaged, participatory practices. Those presuppositions provoked the debate focused on the emerging issue of activist art and on the art’s capability to transmit the aims of political protest. Consequently, curators and art institutions attempted to endorse the Occupy movement, while incorporating it into various art events. This text seeks to explore those issues through the analyses of emerging discourse on socially-engaged practices and its existence within art institution on the example of Berlin Biennale 7.

Visual Arts, Representations and Interventions in Contemporary China

2018 ◽  
Keyword(s):  
Urban Space ◽  
Visual Arts ◽  
Cultural Production ◽  
Mainland China ◽  
Social Changes ◽  
Power Structures ◽  
Cultural Activism ◽  
Political Issues ◽  
Wide Range ◽  
The City

This edited volume provides a multifaceted investigation of the dynamic interrelations between visual arts and urbanization in contemporary Mainland China with a focus on unseen representations and urban interventions brought about by the transformations of the urban space and the various problems associated with it. Through a wide range of illuminating case studies, the authors demonstrate how innovative artistic and creative practices initiated by various stakeholders not only raise critical awareness on socio-political issues of Chinese urbanization but also actively reshape the urban living spaces. The formation of new collaborations, agencies, aesthetics and cultural production sites facilitate diverse forms of cultural activism as they challenge the dominant ways of interpreting social changes and encourage civic participation in the production of alternative meanings in and of the city. Their significance lies in their potential to question current values and power structures as well as to foster new subjectivities for disparate individuals and social groups.

Public Service Media and Social TV: Bridging or Expanding Gaps in Participation?

2015 ◽  
Vol 154 (1) ◽  
pp. 89-100 ◽  
Author(s):  
Jonathon Hutchinson
Keyword(s):  
Social Media ◽  
National Culture ◽  
Public Service ◽  
Cultural Production ◽  
The Public ◽  
Social Tv ◽  
Content Consumption ◽  
Social Media Platforms ◽  
Cultural Intermediaries ◽  
The Public Sphere

The public service media (PSM) remit requires the Australian Broadcasting Corporation (ABC) to provide for minorities while fostering national culture and the public sphere. Social media platforms and projects – specifically ‘social TV’ – have enabled greater participation in ABC content consumption and creation; they provide opportunities for social participation in collaborative cultural production. However it can be argued that, instead of deconstructing boundaries, social media platforms may in fact reconstruct participation barriers within PSM production processes. This article explores ABC co-creation between Twitter and the # 7DaysLater television program, a narrative-based comedy program that engaged its audience through social media to produce its weekly program. The article demonstrates why the ABC should engage with social media platforms to collaboratively produce content, with # 7DaysLater providing an innovative example, but suggests skilled cultural intermediaries with experience in community facilitation should carry out the process.

Sociosonic Interventions: Distributed Authorship in Socially Engaged Sound Practices

2020 ◽  
Vol 30 ◽  
pp. 109-113
Author(s):  
Tullis Rennie
Keyword(s):  
Art Practice ◽  
Community Settings ◽  
Art Making ◽  
Creative Processes ◽  
Socially Engaged Art ◽  
Collaborative Art ◽  
Ethics And Politics

How do creative sound practices function in the context of socially engaged art? Toward developing a practical methodology, this paper focuses on sound-led projects that stage socially engaged art practice in community settings, including some involving the author. Aesthetics, ethics and politics are employed as interrogative lenses for distributed creative processes. Methods for collaborative art-making that facilitate a balance between these lenses are discussed, with the author further arguing the necessity of artistic “disruption.” Such sociosonic interventions are demonstrated to occur most effectively when sound practices challenge the paradigm of unidirectional audial reproduction: rupturing traditional hierarchies of creator and listener.

Modes of Feminine Resistance and Testimony in the Wake of the Mudawana Reform and the Arab Uprisings

2019 ◽  
pp. 192-224
Author(s):  
Naïma Hachad
Keyword(s):  
Cultural Production ◽  
Easy Access ◽  
Women's Activism ◽  
Major Transitions ◽  
The Public ◽  
Arab Uprisings ◽  
Collective Representation ◽  
Moroccan Women ◽  
The Public Sphere ◽  
Vagina Monologues

Chapter 6 analyzes Qandisha, A Collaborative Feminine Magazwine, a webzine founded by Moroccan journalist and blogger Fedwa Misk in 2011 and Naïma Zitan’s Dialy (2012), a play in colloquial Moroccan-Arabic (Darija), as exemplars of how women’s activism and cultural production reinvigorated and gendered contemporary discourses of contestation. Dialy, originally conceived as an adaptation of Eve Ensler’s The Vagina Monologues (1996), uses testimonies collected during encounters and workshops involving a hundred and fifty Moroccan women of different ages and from different socioeconomic backgrounds to inscribe in the public sphere major transitions in a woman’s life such as menstruation, sexual relations, marriage, pregnancy, and childbearing. Qandisha has attracted a significant number of writers, readers, and commentators who post their texts in French, Arabic, Darija, and English from all over Morocco as well as from Algeria, France, and Tunisia about sexuality, rape, sexual orientation, and individual freedom. Anonymity, easy access, the dissolution of boundaries (between locales, languages, readers, and writers) have all provided women with endless possibilities for self and collective representation. This chapter analyzes the content and the reception of Dialy and Qandisha to illustrate contemporary divisions around women’s rights and sexuality in the Moroccan context, as well as the uneasy cohabitation between the Moroccan society’s diverse make-up and transnational feminist discourses and global technologies.

#M5S (Five Star Movement) and the National Political Campaign

2020 ◽  
pp. 217-234
Author(s):  
Alessandra Micalizzi ◽  
Alessandra Nieli
Keyword(s):  
Social Media ◽  
Political Campaign ◽  
Political Movement ◽  
Second Republic ◽  
The Public ◽  
Show Evidence ◽  
Social Media Platforms ◽  
Five Star Movement ◽  
The Public Sphere ◽  
Use Of Social Media

In 2009, a new political movement was born in Italy. It is called “Five Star Movement” (M5S) and it was positioned as a new voice of Italian people: alternative, populist, against élites, and against the traditional “way of doing” politic in the First and Second Republic Age. The power of this new political subject is linked with the use of social media platforms to communicate and share information, opinions, and positions with its “base” in a participative democracy perspective. In the last national political campaign, the M5S obtained 32% of the votes with a peak in the South of Italy. The chapter aims at presenting the main results of an empirical research focused on Sicilian voters of the East coast, in order to verify if and how digital communication helped in obtaining this success. Data show evidence about the relevance recognized to social media as first direct sources for collecting political information. The respondents express a large consent for traditional media that maintain in the public opinion a strong reputation in construction and share the public-sphere.

What if we think of the classroom as a work of art? Performance, collaboration, and social engagement considered as pedagogic practices

2020 ◽  
pp. 147402222096694
Author(s):  
Theron Schmidt
Keyword(s):  
Performance Studies ◽  
Social Engagement ◽  
Visual Art ◽  
Art Practice ◽  
Work Of Art ◽  
Performance Practices ◽  
Arts And Humanities ◽  
Socially Engaged Art ◽  
The Arts ◽  
Pedagogic Practices

This article brings into relation critical perspectives and practical tactics from a range of different fields—performance studies, visual art practice, pedagogy and educational theory, and activism and community organising—in order to create some space for re-imagining what might be possible within the dynamics of the Higher Education classroom. It proceeds through a series of speculative modes: ‘what if we think of the classroom as a market?’, which for many is the currently dominant metaphor under neoliberalist economies; ‘what if we think of the work of art as a classroom?’, which traces the recent ‘pedagogical’ or ‘educational’ turn in visual art practice; and finally, ‘what if we think of the classroom as a work of art?’, in which the creative impulses and tactics drawn from performance practices, activism and community organising, and socially engaged art are speculatively applied to the arts and humanities classroom.

scholarly journals THE AVANT GARDE AS EXFORM

Tempo ◽  
2018 ◽  
Vol 72 (286) ◽  
pp. 7-16
Author(s):  
Lauren Redhead
Keyword(s):  
Experimental Music ◽  
Art Practice ◽  
Political Movement ◽  
Avant Garde ◽  
The World ◽  
Work Concept ◽  
Capitalist Ideology ◽  
Critique Of Ideology

AbstractPeter Bürger's critique of the historical avant garde (in Theory of the Avant Garde) accounts for its ineffectual nature as a political movement because of its relationship with institutions. He argues for hermeneutics to be employed as a critique of ideology, and as a facet of the understanding of the ‘historicity of aesthetic categories’. The influence of institutions on music since 1968 has served as a central part of its critique: the work concept itself seems to enshrine political ineffectiveness and the bourgeois nature of art practice that ought to be critiqued by an avant garde. In contrast, Nicolas Bourriaud's concept of the ‘exform’ re-conceives the avant garde as outside of institutions and an idea of ‘progress’ that is aligned with a dominant capitalist ideology. He frames the task of the avant-garde artist as giving energy to ‘waste’, outside of political and ideological institutions. This type of avant-garde practice functions to ‘bring precarity to mind: to keep the notion alive that intervention in the world is possible’. This article explores the exform with respect to the work of the British composer Chris Newman and the Swiss composer Annette Schmucki, and considers how Bourriaud's approach to re-thinking the avant garde might apply specifically to contemporary and experimental music in the present.

feminism and ancient literature

2019 ◽  
Author(s):  
Helen Morales
Keyword(s):  
Queer Theory ◽  
White Supremacy ◽  
Community Life ◽  
Equal Opportunities ◽  
Power Structures ◽  
Political Movement ◽  
Ancient Greek ◽  
Gender Binary ◽  
Ancient Literature ◽  
And Gender

Feminism does not refer to one coherent theory, doctrine, or political movement. The range of movements and ideologies that thrive under the term feminism, however, are all committed to political and social change. Feminism recognises that we live in a patriarchal world, that is to say a world in which women are, and have historically been, oppressed by and unequal to men. It opposes this, and strives to change existing power structures so that people of all genders and races have control over their own bodies, have equal opportunities and value, can participate fully in community life, and are allowed to live with dignity and freedom. What has this to do with ancient literature? There are several significant ways in which feminism and ancient literature interact. Ancient literature, particularly ancient Greek tragedy and myth, has played a formative role in shaping feminist theory. Feminism encourages scholars to uncover and reevaluate a tradition of women’s writing. Feminism has provided the tools for us better to understand how ancient literature functioned to promote, and sometimes to challenge, the misogynist practices of ancient Greek and Roman societies. Scholars have detected feminism, or proto-feminism, in ancient writing. Queer theory and feminism join forces to mine ancient literature for alternatives to hetero, cisgender, and gender binary models of identity. Feminism has changed the field of ancient literary studies by valuing authors and genres that are sensitive to the perspectives of women of all ethnicities and statuses. Finally, ancient literature is used to serve contemporary activism: Greek and Latin texts are used by modern feminist authors who rewrite and creatively adapt ancient literature, and classicists resist the use of ancient literature to promote misogyny and white supremacy.

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