tag:theconversation.com,2011:/fr/topics/political-art-8576/articles
Political art – The Conversation
2024-01-03T20:26:36Z
tag:theconversation.com,2011:article/214959
2024-01-03T20:26:36Z
2024-01-03T20:26:36Z
My life as a ‘Jillposter’: the radical feminist poster group that pasted prints around Melbourne in the ‘80s
<figure><img src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/558196/original/file-20231107-22-8znndt.JPG?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&rect=10%2C10%2C1822%2C1242&q=45&auto=format&w=496&fit=clip" /><figcaption><span class="caption">
</span> <span class="attribution"><span class="source">Carole Wilson</span></span></figcaption></figure><p>Jillposters was a self-funded radical feminist poster group active in Melbourne from 1983 until 1988. I was a founding member.</p>
<p>I’m in the process of donating archival material and records to the RMIT Design Archive, so I’ve had cause to reflect recently on what impressive achievements we had for such a small and unstructured group.</p>
<p>We had no government funding, no management committee, no governing structure and no workshop. The group lasted just five years. Yet we produced an amazing range of posters and postcards, most of which are held in Australia’s national collection.</p>
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<a href="https://images.theconversation.com/files/558262/original/file-20231108-15-i63c16.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=1000&fit=clip"><img alt="Carole Wilson looking at posters in a mask." src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/558262/original/file-20231108-15-i63c16.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/558262/original/file-20231108-15-i63c16.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=450&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/558262/original/file-20231108-15-i63c16.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=450&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/558262/original/file-20231108-15-i63c16.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=450&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/558262/original/file-20231108-15-i63c16.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=566&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/558262/original/file-20231108-15-i63c16.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=566&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/558262/original/file-20231108-15-i63c16.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=566&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px"></a>
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<span class="caption">Carole Wilson was among the founding members of the Jillposters group and produced many prints during the 1980s.</span>
<span class="attribution"><span class="source">Carole Wilson</span></span>
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<hr>
<p>
<em>
<strong>
Read more:
<a href="https://theconversation.com/from-duchamp-to-ai-the-transformation-of-authorship-in-art-210059">From Duchamp to AI: the transformation of authorship in art</a>
</strong>
</em>
</p>
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<h2>A medium for political messages</h2>
<p>Political posters grew out of 1970s feminism. Women were at the forefront of postermaking in Australia in the early 1980s. </p>
<p>Silkscreen printing, as it was taught at art schools, was and is a laborious, hand-driven process. You have to print with a squeegee through a screen; each colour separately.</p>
<p>It isn’t taught much anymore – we worked with pretty toxic oil-based inks, and to clean up the screen, you just flooded it with turps. Now posters can be whipped up digitally and distributed online. </p>
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<a href="https://images.theconversation.com/files/558190/original/file-20231107-25-2x75fz.JPG?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=1000&fit=clip"><img alt="A Jillposters print asks women to reflect on how much housework they do." src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/558190/original/file-20231107-25-2x75fz.JPG?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=237&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/558190/original/file-20231107-25-2x75fz.JPG?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=869&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/558190/original/file-20231107-25-2x75fz.JPG?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=869&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/558190/original/file-20231107-25-2x75fz.JPG?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=869&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/558190/original/file-20231107-25-2x75fz.JPG?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=1091&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/558190/original/file-20231107-25-2x75fz.JPG?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=1091&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/558190/original/file-20231107-25-2x75fz.JPG?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=1091&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px"></a>
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<span class="caption">A Jillposters print asks women to reflect on how much housework they do.</span>
<span class="attribution"><span class="source">Carole Wilson</span></span>
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<p>But our posters were ideal as a medium for conveying political messages and disseminating information. Many poster workshops and groups were born in the 1970s and 80s in various locations; including <a href="https://www.megalo.org/classes-workshops">Megalo Workshop in Canberra</a>, <a href="https://www.sydney.edu.au/architecture/about/tin-sheds-gallery/about-the-gallery.html">Tin Sheds</a> and <a href="https://www.mca.com.au/artists-works/artists/earthworks-poster-collective/">Earthworks Poster Collective</a> in Sydney, and <a href="https://blogs.slv.vic.gov.au/such-was-life/the-politics-of-poster-making-the-redplanet-archive/">Red Letter Press</a> and <a href="https://www.printsandprintmaking.gov.au/artists/11160/">Another Planet Posters</a> in Melbourne.</p>
<h2>Off to a flying start</h2>
<p>Jillposters got off to a flying start in February 1983 when a group of friends met at the University of Melbourne student union to discuss forming a political poster group. </p>
<p>We each contributed the grand sum of A$10 to get things started and to open a bank account.</p>
<p>Initially these funds were spent on inks, paper and workshop hire as Melbourne University union had a screenprinting studio available for use by students and friends.</p>
<p>Members, in the spirit of collectivism, chose not to have their own names on their posters but to name everything as Jillposters.</p>
<p>The first poster, a simple black and white version titled ‘A Change is as Good as Holiday’ was produced to coincide with the 1983 federal election, which saw Labor’s Bob Hawke elected. This was a cause for great celebration and hopes for a new era after the conservative Malcolm Fraser government and a period of high unemployment.</p>
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<a href="https://images.theconversation.com/files/558194/original/file-20231107-27-zvban6.JPG?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=1000&fit=clip"><img alt="Jillposters printed anti-apartheid posters over their active period during the 1980s." src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/558194/original/file-20231107-27-zvban6.JPG?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=237&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/558194/original/file-20231107-27-zvban6.JPG?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=819&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/558194/original/file-20231107-27-zvban6.JPG?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=819&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/558194/original/file-20231107-27-zvban6.JPG?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=819&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/558194/original/file-20231107-27-zvban6.JPG?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=1029&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/558194/original/file-20231107-27-zvban6.JPG?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=1029&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/558194/original/file-20231107-27-zvban6.JPG?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=1029&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px"></a>
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<span class="caption">Jillposters printed anti-apartheid posters over their active period during the 1980s.</span>
<span class="attribution"><span class="source">Carole Wilson</span></span>
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<p>We printed posters, and later postcards, in many locations, including the University of Melbourne Student Union printmaking room and Phillip Institute of Technology (now RMIT) printmaking studio, where some Jillposters members were students. Occasionally we printed in sheds and individual artist’s studios.</p>
<p>Our initial plan was to paste up all of our posters around the streets of Melbourne.</p>
<p>Going out late at night with a bucket of sloppy wallpaper paste, large brushes and a roll of posters was all very exciting.</p>
<p>Pasting up was illegal so there was always the risk of arrest. Our aim was to find walls where our political posters wouldn’t be covered up by other groups pasting up band posters. </p>
<p>Occasionally, we’d find a passerby would like our poster so much they’d peel it off the wall still dripping in paste to take home for themselves. </p>
<p>Another early poster, printed just in time for Easter, conveyed the message that Easter was the patriarchal theft of a pre-Christian fertility festival.</p>
<p>This, perhaps not surprisingly, generated a lot of interest and some outrage when pasted up around the streets of Fitzroy. It led to some articles in local suburban newspapers and contact from alternative and left-wing bookshops who were keen to stock our posters for sale.</p>
<h2>Shifting gear</h2>
<p>We then shifted gear slightly and allocated a smaller portion for street paste up and the larger portion for sales through retail outlets such as galleries and bookshops in Australia and New Zealand.</p>
<p>Poster production soon increased and our designs became more detailed and colourful.</p>
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<a href="https://images.theconversation.com/files/558261/original/file-20231108-19-2odnw7.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=1000&fit=clip"><img alt="Carole Wilson in a mask creating Jillposters prints" src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/558261/original/file-20231108-19-2odnw7.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=237&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/558261/original/file-20231108-19-2odnw7.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=800&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/558261/original/file-20231108-19-2odnw7.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=800&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/558261/original/file-20231108-19-2odnw7.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=800&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/558261/original/file-20231108-19-2odnw7.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=1005&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/558261/original/file-20231108-19-2odnw7.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=1005&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/558261/original/file-20231108-19-2odnw7.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=1005&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px"></a>
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<span class="caption">Carole Wilson produced many Jillposters prints, including this call to abolish ANZAC Day.</span>
<span class="attribution"><span class="source">Carole Wilson</span></span>
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<p>The 1980s really was a different era and most capital cities in Australia had a range of left-wing and women’s bookshops and alternative galleries keen to stock our work. </p>
<p>We were also contacted by mainstream galleries wanting to acquire our posters for their collections. </p>
<p>Both the National Gallery of Australia and the Art Gallery of Ballarat bought posters in 1983 and then continued to collect all the posters we produced. </p>
<p>The State Library of Victoria also collected them and, in more recent years, the Ian Potter Museum at the University of Melbourne collected a range of posters.</p>
<p>One of the posters stating “We are marching for all women exploited and raped in war” was exhibited in the National Gallery of Australia’s Know My Name exhibition in 2021-22. </p>
<p>Over time, members of the group moved onto other pursuits and the remaining members shifted their focus to printing postcards, which were also very popular and sold well.</p>
<p>The final posters and postcards were produced in 1988 and then Jillposters officially wound up. </p>
<hr>
<p>
<em>
<strong>
Read more:
<a href="https://theconversation.com/where-has-melbournes-political-graffiti-gone-85537">Where has Melbourne's political graffiti gone?</a>
</strong>
</em>
</p>
<hr>
<img src="https://counter.theconversation.com/content/214959/count.gif" alt="The Conversation" width="1" height="1" />
<p class="fine-print"><em><span>Carole Wilson received government arts funding from federal and state arts bodies when she worked for Another Planet Posters between 1988 and 1990. She was a founding member of Jillposters and then went on to work at Another Planet Posters.</span></em></p>
We had no government funding, no governing structure and no workshop. Yet we produced a huge range of political posters, many of which are now in national collections and have been exhibited often.
Carole Wilson, Associate Professor in Visual Arts, Federation University Australia
Licensed as Creative Commons – attribution, no derivatives.
tag:theconversation.com,2011:article/204589
2023-04-27T12:11:48Z
2023-04-27T12:11:48Z
Why the Turner prize shortlist is a cultural barometer of our political times
<figure><img src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/523177/original/file-20230427-546-yyopwc.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&rect=6%2C4%2C1431%2C640&q=45&auto=format&w=496&fit=clip" /><figcaption><span class="caption">Shortlisted artist Barbara Walker's work explores issues of racial identity and interrogates Britain's past. </span> <span class="attribution"><a class="source" href="https://artuk.org/discover/artworks/boundary-ii-310577">Arts Council Collection, Southbank Centre, London</a>, <a class="license" href="http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/4.0/">CC BY-NC</a></span></figcaption></figure><p>The UK’s biggest prize for contemporary art is back. <a href="https://www.tate.org.uk/whats-on/towner-eastbourne/turner-prize-2023">The 2023 Turner prize</a> <a href="https://www.theguardian.com/artanddesign/2023/apr/27/turner-prize-pandemic-problems-and-windrush-scandal-among-shortlist">shortlist</a> has been announced featuring British artists <a href="https://bravenewwhat.org/">Jesse Darling</a>, <a href="https://www.rorypilgrim.com/%5D">Rory Pilgrim</a>, <a href="https://artreview.com/ghislaine-leung-balances-maxwell-graham-review/">Ghislaine Leung</a> and <a href="https://www.barbarawalker.co.uk/">Barbara Walker</a>. </p>
<p>An exhibition of the artists’ work will go on show at <a href="https://townereastbourne.org.uk/whats-on/exhibitions/turner-prize-2023">Towner Eastbourne</a> from 28 September to 14 April 2024 with the winner announced on 5 December.</p>
<p>A prize awarded for an outstanding presentation of an individual artist’s work is not only a chance to pick favourites but an opportunity to discuss the issues it explores, the people involved, the funders, formats and contexts.</p>
<p>My research often focuses on how art and politics have intersected during the past few decades. With a whirlwind 40-year socio-political history this lens can be applied to the prize. </p>
<h2>From Thatcher’s 1980s to Channel 4’s 1990s</h2>
<p>The Turner prize began in 1984 against the backdrop of <a href="https://www.theguardian.com/politics/2013/apr/08/what-is-thatcherism-margaret-thatcher">Thatcherism</a>. An annual competition to draw media interest and private sponsors made sense in the context of reduced public funding for the arts and an era of competitive individualism.</p>
<p>A civilised affair pitching established painters and sculptors and conceptual artists against each other – the first six winners were white men, as were 28 of 32 the artists shortlisted. </p>
<p>Things changed in 1991 with Channel 4 as a hip new sponsor and a ban on artists over 50. The prize would raise interest in a newly youthful, increasingly fashionable area of UK culture.</p>
<p>The 1990s prizes are remembered for <a href="https://www.tate.org.uk/art/art-terms/y/young-british-artists-ybas">Young British Art</a>. Graduating from art school in the Thatcher era, Young British Artists (YBAs) were well aware of the limited opportunities to build state-funded careers so acted like entrepreneurs and experts in self-promotion.</p>
<p>They staged their own exhibitions in empty warehouses, made “shocking” art with unconventional materials (<a href="https://www.theguardian.com/artanddesign/2003/nov/01/20yearsoftheturnerprize.turnerprize8">sharks</a>, <a href="https://www.tate.org.uk/whats-on/tate-britain/turner-prize-1998/turner-prize-1998-artists-chris-ofili">dung</a>, <a href="https://www.tate.org.uk/whats-on/tate-britain/turner-prize-1999">unmade beds</a>) and sensational subject matter (pornography, violence, tabloid sleaze). Faux outrage from the tabloid press made artists into household names (Damien Hirst and Tracy Emin).</p>
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<p>Much of this felt Thatcherite, but there was something youthful and trendy and edgy about art that jarred with the warm beer and cricket pitches neoliberalism favoured by early 1990s Tories. It sat much more comfortably in New Labour’s
“<a href="https://www.theguardian.com/books/2014/dec/12/cultural-capital-rise-fall-creative-britain-robert-hewison-review">Creative Britain</a>”.</p>
<p>This was still a nation of entrepreneurial individuals with no interest in 1970s things, like collective bargaining or common ownership of utilities. But Creative Britain was modern and hip – it was Britpop, football and contemporary art.</p>
<p>The televised celebrity-strewn Channel 4 under 50s version of the Turner prize was part of this – feeding the feel-good 1990s vibes, fuelled by PR and underwritten by a debt-driven boom.</p>
<h2>2000’s third way</h2>
<p>New Labour soon gave up on looking hip – remember the introduction of <a href="https://www.theguardian.com/education/2004/jan/27/tuitionfees.students">university tuition fees</a>, deregulated markets and the invasion of Iraq. Some of the tax income from a seemingly buoyant economy was spent on the arts, which were newly redefined as consumer services and required to prove value and efficiency using metrics.</p>
<p>Increased public arts spending provided artists with a sort of freedom. No longer required to whip up controversy or appeal to collectors like Saatchi, Turner prize art came to feel more insularly artistic with <a href="https://www.tate.org.uk/art/artists/michael-raedecker-2693">abstract painting</a> and installations like <a href="https://www.theguardian.com/artanddesign/jonathanjonesblog/2013/sep/03/martin-creed-lights-on-off">light bulbs going on and off</a>.</p>
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<p>Occasionally it was political. Mark Wallinger, <a href="https://www.tate.org.uk/whats-on/tate-liverpool/turner-prize-2007/turner-prize-2007-artists-mark-wallinger">2007’s winner</a>, meticulously replicated <a href="https://www.theguardian.com/uk/2011/jun/20/brian-haw-protesting-to-end">Brian Haw’s peace camp</a>, which the campaigner had lived in for 10 years in Parliament Square, at Tate Britain.</p>
<p>Titled <a href="https://www.tate.org.uk/art/artworks/wallinger-state-britain-t14844">State Britain</a>, it was created when Tony Blair passed a law to make it <a href="https://www.theguardian.com/politics/2006/oct/12/houseofcommons.comment">illegal to protest within a mile of Parliament</a>. Positioned across the perimeter of the one mile from Parliament no-protest-zone, it probed a line between art and politics.</p>
<h2>2008’s financial crash and a new outlook</h2>
<p>In 2008, the <a href="https://www.investopedia.com/articles/economics/09/financial-crisis-review.asp#:%7E:text=The%202008%20financial%20crisis%20began,their%20savings%2C%20and%20their%20homes.">credit-fuelled</a> capitalism championed by Blair and Thatcher crashed the global economy and the Turner prize couldn’t find a corporate sponsor.</p>
<p>The coalition government formed in 2010 <a href="https://www.theguardian.com/politics/2010/oct/20/arts-cuts-spending-review-council">cut arts funding by a third</a>. Shortlisted Turner prize art from that time didn’t say much about austerity or that moment, instead looking a lot like the art of the early 2000s.</p>
<p>For historians <a href="https://www.waterstones.com/book/hegemony-now/alex-williams/jeremy-gilbert/9781786633149">Jeremy Gilbert and Alex Williams</a>, the period after the 1990s was marked by a feeling of stasis linked to the widespread acceptance that <a href="https://www.theguardian.com/books/2016/apr/15/neoliberalism-ideology-problem-george-monbiot">neoliberal capitalism</a> was here to stay. What Thatcher imposed, Blair accepted. It became difficult to imagine alternatives.</p>
<p>But the art prize was changing as Britain was. Collectives, community and a gentle critique of the traditional Turner prize format all became important.</p>
<p>Anti-austerity movements found a home alongside trade unions in a Labour Party reimagined under the radically social democratic leadership of Jeremy Corbyn. The movement for Black Lives pointed to a history, culture and economy of institutionalised racism.</p>
<p>The 2015 winner, <a href="https://assemblestudio.co.uk/projects/turner-prize-exhibition">Assemble</a>, were not artists at all, but a collective of architects who worked with communities to create imaginative housing and buildings and resources.</p>
<p>The shortlisted artists in 2019 asked to <a href="https://news.artnet.com/art-world/2019-turner-prize-winner-1721373">share the award</a>, using “the occasion … to make a statement in the name of commonality, multiplicity and solidarity” and turning themselves into a collective.</p>
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<p>The 2021 shortlist <a href="https://www.wallpaper.com/art/turner-prize-2021-shortlist-announcement#:%7E:text=Tate%20Britain%20has%20just%20unveiled,Radical%2C%20and%20Project%20Art%20Works.">consisted only of collectives</a>, many of which worked with communities in ways that felt more like education or outreach than what some people call art.</p>
<p>The prize also became more aware of its past limitations, prejudices and oversights. <a href="https://www.tate.org.uk/art/artists/lubaina-himid-cbe-ra-2356/turner-prize-2017-biography">Lubaina Himid</a>, aged 62, was named winner in 2017, after the Turner prize <a href="https://www.theguardian.com/artanddesign/2017/may/03/older-artists-on-turner-prize-shortlist-after-it-axes-upper-age-limit">age cap was dropped</a>. In 2022 it was <a href="https://www.tate.org.uk/whats-on/tate-liverpool/turner-prize-2022/veronica-ryan">Veronica Ryan</a>, aged 66. Ingrid Pollard, aged 69, was also shortlisted in 2022.</p>
<p>All three had been active since the 1980s, making work that engaged, often playfully and poetically, with colonialism and racism and identity. None of them featured in shortlists from the 1980s or 1990s or 2000s.</p>
<p>The 2023 shortlisted artists share a concern with the experience of hostile, exhausting and strangely fragile systems: the late-capitalist demand to be constantly productive while continually undervalued, the absurd cruelty of bureaucratic governance and the precarity of climates and bodies. </p>
<p>A lot of their art is about the effort to stay afloat or even just to cope. By implication, the work conveys something about the failure of institutions to provide either basic support or transformative change. Hope is found instead in a politics of community and care, vulnerability and interconnection, which offers occasional glimpses of better worlds.</p><img src="https://counter.theconversation.com/content/204589/count.gif" alt="The Conversation" width="1" height="1" />
<p class="fine-print"><em><span>Benedict Burbridge does not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organisation that would benefit from this article, and has disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond their academic appointment.</span></em></p>
From the shock tactics of 90s artists starved of public funding to a pivot towards an art based in community and activism today.
Benedict Burbridge, Head of Art History at University of Sussex, University of Sussex
Licensed as Creative Commons – attribution, no derivatives.
tag:theconversation.com,2011:article/175840
2022-02-28T19:24:37Z
2022-02-28T19:24:37Z
Politics, pioneers, performance: 50 years of Australian women’s art and feminist ideas
<figure><img src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/447983/original/file-20220223-13-umhyj9.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&rect=523%2C49%2C4193%2C1895&q=45&auto=format&w=496&fit=clip" /><figcaption><span class="caption">Soda_Jerk TERROR NULLIUS, 2018
digital video/duration:54 minutes
</span> <span class="attribution"><span class="source">Courtesy the artists</span></span></figcaption></figure><p>In the first century of the third millennium, art by women is finally being regarded with the seriousness it deserves. Last year the National Gallery of Australia presented <a href="https://knowmyname.nga.gov.au">Know My Name</a>, a mammoth exhibition in two parts. Anne Marsh covers similar territory in <a href="https://www.mup.com.au/books/doing-feminism-hardback">Doing Feminism</a>, her compilation of women’s art and feminist ideas made, for the most part, in the last 50 years.</p>
<hr>
<p><em>Review: Doing Feminism: Women’s art and feminist criticism in Australia - Anne Marsh (The Miegunyah Press)</em></p>
<hr>
<p>She describes her book as “the history of the relationship between avant-garde positions and feminism as it emerged in the visual arts in Australia”. Marsh does not claim to have written an all encompassing history of the complex nature of art by women, which was <a href="https://www.daao.org.au/bio/joan-kerr-2/biography/">Joan Kerr</a>’s great undertaking in <a href="https://catalogue.nla.gov.au/Record/2011519">Heritage</a> (1995).</p>
<p>Nor does the book seek to retrieve forgotten women artists hidden away in storage rooms of public galleries, which was <a href="https://sites.research.unimelb.edu.au/cova/home/people/centre-fellows/janine-burke">Janine Burke</a>’s achievement in the 1970s. Rather Marsh is tracking the contribution of her own generation of artists and writers to feminist avant-garde art and ideas. </p>
<figure class="align-center zoomable">
<a href="https://images.theconversation.com/files/447989/original/file-20220223-23-1nhnspr.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=1000&fit=clip"><img alt="" src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/447989/original/file-20220223-23-1nhnspr.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/447989/original/file-20220223-23-1nhnspr.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=444&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/447989/original/file-20220223-23-1nhnspr.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=444&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/447989/original/file-20220223-23-1nhnspr.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=444&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/447989/original/file-20220223-23-1nhnspr.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=557&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/447989/original/file-20220223-23-1nhnspr.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=557&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/447989/original/file-20220223-23-1nhnspr.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=557&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px"></a>
<figcaption>
<span class="caption">Judy Watson the guardians 1986-87 5 figures each 180 x 58 cm (irregular) powder pigment on plywood.</span>
<span class="attribution"><span class="source">Art Gallery of NSW - purchased 1990.© Judy Watson: Licensed by Copyright Agency</span></span>
</figcaption>
</figure>
<p>Those who doubt the extent of the change that has swept through our culture need only look at <a href="https://www.ngv.vic.gov.au/exhibition/the-field-revisited/">The Field</a>, the exhibition that opened the 1968 National Gallery of Victoria building. Of the 40 artists shown in this celebration of colour field abstraction, only three were women. </p>
<p>It is unfortunate that Marsh has made a significant error in her description of The Field, which implies that it came from the curatorial vision of <a href="https://about.unimelb.edu.au/__data/assets/file/0029/15788/mccaughey.pdf">Patrick McCaughey</a>, author of one of the catalogue essays. The exhibition curators, who are not named, were Brian Finemore and John Stringer. She also writes that McCaughey was then the gallery director. McCaughey did become director of the NGV, but that happened in 1981, not 1968.</p>
<p>In 1973, five years after The Field, the Art Gallery of NSW celebrated the opening of the Sydney Opera House with a large survey exhibition <a href="https://www.daao.org.au/bio/event/recent-australian-art/">Recent Australian Art</a>. The only work by a woman was Ewa Pachucka’s <a href="https://searchthecollection.nga.gov.au/object?keyword=Ewa%20Pachucka&searchIn=artistOrCulture&searchIn=title&searchIn=medium&uniqueId=14870">Landscape and Bodies</a>. The catalogue misspelt her name.</p>
<p>Neither of these exhibitions included work by Aboriginal artists, nor artists of non-European descent. The world, including the world of art, has indeed changed. </p>
<p>While Marsh maps these changes as they concern women artists, she does not ignore the other changes swirling in Australian culture concerning women. Significantly she charts the importance of those Aboriginal artists including Brenda L. Croft, Fiona Foley Judy Watson and Julie Gough whose art also makes them visual historians, recovering the past through art.</p>
<hr>
<p>
<em>
<strong>
Read more:
<a href="https://theconversation.com/julie-goughs-tense-past-reminds-us-how-the-brutalities-of-colonial-settlement-are-still-felt-today-118923">Julie Gough's 'Tense Past' reminds us how the brutalities of colonial settlement are still felt today</a>
</strong>
</em>
</p>
<hr>
<h2>Walking and chewing gum</h2>
<p>The 1975 visit to Australia of the American critic <a href="https://www.theartstory.org/critic/lippard-lucy/">Lucy Lippard</a> is sometimes claimed to be the “official” beginning of the Australian feminist art movement. Marsh rightly refutes this. </p>
<p>Second wave feminism in Australia emerged during the 1960s within a culture that also saw opposition to the war in Vietnam, conscription of young men to fight that war, sexual liberation and access by women to contraception and abortion. </p>
<figure class="align-center zoomable">
<a href="https://images.theconversation.com/files/447987/original/file-20220223-25-8frcry.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=1000&fit=clip"><img alt="" src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/447987/original/file-20220223-25-8frcry.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/447987/original/file-20220223-25-8frcry.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=797&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/447987/original/file-20220223-25-8frcry.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=797&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/447987/original/file-20220223-25-8frcry.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=797&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/447987/original/file-20220223-25-8frcry.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=1001&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/447987/original/file-20220223-25-8frcry.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=1001&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/447987/original/file-20220223-25-8frcry.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=1001&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px"></a>
<figcaption>
<span class="caption">Vivienne Binns Vag Dens, 1967 122 x 91.5 X 2.5 cm. painting: synthetic polymer paint and enamel on composition board.</span>
<span class="attribution"><span class="source">National Gallery of Australia. Courtesy the artist and Sutton Gallery</span></span>
</figcaption>
</figure>
<p>Vivienne Binns’ 1967 solo exhibition at Sydney’s Watters Gallery was the first exhibition by a woman artist to fully enrage the art critics, all of whom were male. </p>
<p>Binns’ works <a href="https://searchthecollection.nga.gov.au/object?keyword=Vivienne%20Binns&searchIn=artistOrCulture&searchIn=title&searchIn=medium&uniqueId=177495">Phallic Monument</a>, <a href="https://searchthecollection.nga.gov.au/object?keyword=Binns&searchIn=artistOrCulture&uniqueId=116421">Vag Dens</a> and <a href="https://searchthecollection.nga.gov.au/object?keyword=Binns&searchIn=artistOrCulture&uniqueId=40748">Suggon</a> threatened their fragile egos. While Marsh notes that Binns was close to fellow Pop artist <a href="https://www.portrait.gov.au/people/mike-brown-1938">Mike Brown</a>, sadly there is no mention of <a href="https://www.daao.org.au/bio/pat-larter/personal_details/">Pat Larter</a>, another friend of Binns who operated in the same context and whose own performance art was even more anarchic. Larter was a <a href="https://www.wikiart.org/en/artists-by-art-movement/mail-art#!#resultType:masonry">mail artist</a>, who coined the term “Femail art” for her postal adventures. </p>
<hr>
<p>
<em>
<strong>
Read more:
<a href="https://theconversation.com/hidden-women-of-history-pat-larter-pioneering-femail-artist-who-gave-men-the-playboy-treatment-119804">Hidden women of history: Pat Larter, pioneering 'femail' artist who gave men the Playboy treatment</a>
</strong>
</em>
</p>
<hr>
<p>Marsh concludes that Binns was “more clearly a pioneer of the pop avant-garde” than a feminist pioneer. Bearing in mind the range of other artists celebrated throughout the book, this is a tricky argument.</p>
<p>Feminism has always flourished alongside other concerns – including politics and the environment. Some of the most interesting images in Marsh’s book come from those women artists who protested against the US intelligence gathering installation at Pine Gap.</p>
<p>The ability of women artists to walk and chew gum at the same time is described in Lippard’s 1997 essay on the late feminist activist <a href="https://theconversation.com/australian-art-has-lost-two-of-its-greats-vale-ann-newmarch-and-hossein-valamanesh-175435">Ann Newmarch</a>, which is reprinted in full. The feminism of this generation of women artists was never separate from either rigorous philosophical debate or activism in other fields.</p>
<p>By moving the bulk of her concerns to the period after 1975, Marsh is able to focus on artists whose careers coincide with the time-frame of her own professional life. Even so it is a huge task to map both feminist art and feminist writers over such a long period, at time when the world changed and the once marginal became mainstream.</p>
<p>Marsh’s research methodology is best described as organic, reaching out through known networks and associations to collate records of art, events and ideas. This could reasonably be described as an academic incarnation of the approach used by the collectives that were the driving forces in 1970s feminist movements.</p>
<figure class="align-left zoomable">
<a href="https://images.theconversation.com/files/447993/original/file-20220223-17-7zl0u7.jpeg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=1000&fit=clip"><img alt="" src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/447993/original/file-20220223-17-7zl0u7.jpeg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=237&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/447993/original/file-20220223-17-7zl0u7.jpeg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=735&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/447993/original/file-20220223-17-7zl0u7.jpeg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=735&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/447993/original/file-20220223-17-7zl0u7.jpeg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=735&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/447993/original/file-20220223-17-7zl0u7.jpeg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=924&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/447993/original/file-20220223-17-7zl0u7.jpeg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=924&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/447993/original/file-20220223-17-7zl0u7.jpeg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=924&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px"></a>
<figcaption>
<span class="caption"></span>
</figcaption>
</figure>
<p>At times the material is so rich in content that it threatens to overwhelm. Because of her history as an activist both in the Women’s Art Movement in Adelaide and later as a part of the Lip collective in Melbourne, Marsh has a long association with many of the artists and writers included. A number of archival photographs place her at some of the more interesting events in women’s art activities in both cities during the 1970s and 80s. </p>
<p>In order to correct this bias towards the personal, Marsh has made a conscious effort to include artists from Tasmania, Fremantle, Perth and Brisbane. Some of these inclusions are uneven. </p>
<p>While political poster art as nurtured by artists at Sydney’s Tin Sheds, is given due prominence, there is no mention of the very lively poster art fostered by Griffith University’s Margaret Bonnin. Yet the Brisbane political posters were a crucial part of the creative response to Joh Bjelke-Petersen’s oppressive political regime.</p>
<p>Marsh rightly identifies the significance of Ngurra (camp/home/country), a collaboration between Dolly Nampijinpa Daniels and Anne Mosey. This is listed as being exhibited at the Biennale of Sydney and the University of South Australia. Yet the work was first developed when the two artists worked together at Yuendumu’s Night Patrol and was exhibited at Alice Spring’s very lively women’s collective, <a href="https://www.wts.org.au">Watch This Space</a>.</p>
<h2>Old friends and absences</h2>
<p>Readers who visited the NGA’s Know My Name exhibitions will recognise many old friends on the pages. <a href="https://knowmyname.nga.gov.au/artists/frances-budden-phoenix/">Frances Phoenix</a>, who spent most of her life in relative obscurity, is again recognised as the pioneering feminist of sexual and political activism that she was. </p>
<hr>
<p>
<em>
<strong>
Read more:
<a href="https://theconversation.com/beauty-and-audacity-know-my-name-presents-a-new-female-story-of-australian-art-150139">Beauty and audacity: Know My Name presents a new, female story of Australian art</a>
</strong>
</em>
</p>
<hr>
<p>Ann Newmarch’s iconic poster Women Hold Up Half the Sky is once more reproduced – this time matched with a photographic record of Nat Thomas’s tribute performance, mimicking the subject matter.</p>
<p>There are some great photographic records of past events and performances, including Jo Darbyshire and Michelle Elliot’s Chile’s Art Stains Bond’s Art: Guerrilla Girls Say Boycott, a record of the 1989 protest against Alan Bond’s links to Chile’s Pinochet regime. <a href="http://www.barbaracleveland.com.au">Barbara Cleveland</a>, from a later generation of activist performance artists, continues to show how the personal can become political.</p>
<p>Because of the range and variety of artists and writers whose work is discussed, the book presents an organisational challenge. The chosen solution has been to divide it into two parts, listing all names at the beginning of each section, then subdividing further by decade and theme. Sometimes this works, as with the Bad Mothers’ Collective of the 1980s who happily contest any sentiment concerning mother and child relationships in the chapter “Mother and child: discourse and dialogue since 1979”.</p>
<figure class="align-center zoomable">
<a href="https://images.theconversation.com/files/447988/original/file-20220223-23-1xqscyd.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=1000&fit=clip"><img alt="" src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/447988/original/file-20220223-23-1xqscyd.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/447988/original/file-20220223-23-1xqscyd.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=431&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/447988/original/file-20220223-23-1xqscyd.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=431&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/447988/original/file-20220223-23-1xqscyd.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=431&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/447988/original/file-20220223-23-1xqscyd.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=542&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/447988/original/file-20220223-23-1xqscyd.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=542&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/447988/original/file-20220223-23-1xqscyd.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=542&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px"></a>
<figcaption>
<span class="caption">Bad Mothers at their group exhibition at the Tin Sheds, Sydney, 1987. Raewyn Turner, Charlotte Clemens, Diane Beavers, Nicole Newman.</span>
<span class="attribution"><span class="source">Photographer unknown. Digitization and compositing: Eliza Dyball. Courtesy: Charlotte Clemens</span></span>
</figcaption>
</figure>
<p>Other sections are less satisfactory, especially as most art movements don’t easily divide by gender. The section on murals privileges Geoff Hodge’s 1981 Parkville community based mural projects, rightly seeing the way such events could evolve into projects breaking down barriers of gender and culture.</p>
<p>Yet there is no mention of some of Australia’s most interesting urban community based murals, those made by Merilyn Fairskye and Michiel Dolk in consultation with the people of <a href="https://www.cityartsydney.com.au/artwork/15-women-woolloomooloo/">Woolloomooloo</a>, planned in 1979 and finally completed in 1982. These tributes to the ordinary people of what was once a slum, who fought to save their suburb from the developers – and won, are so well known as public works of art that their omission is surprising.</p>
<p>It is however understandable that oversights will occur when dealing with such a mass of material, and there are pleasures to be found within these pages. </p>
<p>Works illustrated are discussed either by the artists themselves or by the critics who have written most memorably on them. But despite a rough division of chapters into chronological and theoretical frames, the experience of reading is a bit like viewing a kaleidoscope. There are many possible patterns and no easily identifiable path.</p>
<p>The second section consists mainly of extended extracts from archival texts. Some of these key critiques, first published many years ago, make this book a very useful research tool.</p>
<p>Marsh is not dogmatic in her feminism, and where they make a contribution, men’s voices also discuss the women who have reshaped our culture. Scott Mitchell’s account of the women from <a href="https://warlu.com">Yuendumu</a> who visited Sydney in 1982 describes how they came to understand the western art market could work for their community.</p>
<p>The radicalism of the late 1970s is beautifully encapsulated by “White Elephant or Red Herring?” Ian Milliss and Vivienne Binns’ account of the artists revolt against the international focus and gender bias in the 1979 Biennale of Sydney. It is a reminder that activism can work. </p>
<p>Then there is the extract from an article by Julie Ewington, that erudite curator and critic, whose career has spanned the 1970s to the 2020s. Present in the first 1977 Adelaide Women’s Show, held at the Experimental Art Foundation, she wrote that the </p>
<blockquote>
<p>collective was so huge, so large in fact that there was every possibility that it might collapse under its own weight; yet in some ways it was one of the best and most rewarding collectives.</p>
</blockquote>
<p>It is a description that could also fit this book, which has so much rich content, yet often fails in details, including the spelling of people’s names. There are many people listed in the acknowledgements, but no mention of a copy editor. This is not a surprise.</p><img src="https://counter.theconversation.com/content/175840/count.gif" alt="The Conversation" width="1" height="1" />
<p class="fine-print"><em><span>Joanna Mendelssohn has in the past received funding from the Australian Research Council</span></em></p>
Over the past half a century, Australian women’s art has gone from the margins to the mainstream. A new book mapping this story is a flawed, colourful kaleidoscope.
Joanna Mendelssohn, Principal Fellow (Hon), Victorian College of the Arts, University of Melbourne. Editor in Chief, Design and Art of Australia Online, The University of Melbourne
Licensed as Creative Commons – attribution, no derivatives.
tag:theconversation.com,2011:article/170786
2021-11-03T19:07:03Z
2021-11-03T19:07:03Z
Artists are not at the negotiating table at COP26 but art is everywhere. What can they accomplish through their work?
<p>At COP26 in Glasgow, a public artwork intervention stands at Govan Graving Docks, directly opposite the main delegate zone. <a href="https://stillmoving.org">Still/Moving</a>’s unmissable NO NEW WORLDS is a text and light-based piece that alternates between nine iterations of the three words in its title.</p>
<p>As artist Leonie Hampton <a href="https://fadmagazine.com/2021/10/29/no-new-worlds-massive-artwork-set-to-transform-govan-graving-docks-for-cop26/">explains</a>, the re-writable quality of NO NEW WORLDS </p>
<blockquote>
<p>embodies the idea that if we want to change the future, we need to address the stories we tell ourselves about our past, present and future.</p>
</blockquote>
<p>This artwork echoes and responds to David Buckland’s powerful <a href="https://www.art-almanac.com.au/david-bucklands-ice-texts-the-effects-of-climate-change/cenlf25uuaaol5t/">Cape Farewell project</a>, done for the Paris COP21 in 2015, in which “Another World is Possible” was projected onto a melting iceberg.</p>
<p>It perfectly sums up the tensions playing out between broader society and the world leaders visiting this conference, and is a desperate plea for substantive political commitments to action. </p>
<figure>
<iframe src="https://player.vimeo.com/video/640759389" width="500" height="281" frameborder="0" webkitallowfullscreen="" mozallowfullscreen="" allowfullscreen=""></iframe>
</figure>
<p>Art is now a permanent fixture at UN climate conferences. In Paris, ArtCOP21 saw some 400 events that took place in 46 countries. This year, the artists’ presence is gathered in the <a href="https://climatefringe.org/">Climate Fringe</a>, its title referencing the Edinburgh Fringe Festival. </p>
<p>Climate Fringe, its organisers claim, is “<a href="https://climatefringe.org/">run by civil society for civil society</a>”, and the in-person events are joined by an online hub with community-generated content including lectures, exhibitions, public artworks, film screenings and poetry readings.</p>
<p>But what can art accomplish at a high-stakes political meeting? Everything and nothing, depending on whom you ask.</p>
<h2>An existential threat</h2>
<p><a href="https://twitter.com/kathykijiner">Kathy Jetn̄il-Kijiner</a>, a poet and Climate Envoy of the Marshall Islands is currently reporting from Glasgow <a href="https://au.news.yahoo.com/day-cop26-fight-countrys-survival-170248012.html">for Yahoo</a>. She is no stranger to climate activism. At COP21 in Paris, she recited her poem <a href="https://www.kathyjetnilkijiner.com/poem-2-degrees/">2 Degrees</a>, explaining, in no uncertain terms, what difference half a degree would make for her peoples’ survival and sovereignty.</p>
<figure>
<iframe width="440" height="260" src="https://www.youtube.com/embed/mc_IgE7TBSY?wmode=transparent&start=0" frameborder="0" allowfullscreen=""></iframe>
</figure>
<p>For those unfamiliar with the arcane theatrics of climate diplomacy, voices like hers are crucial to understanding what’s at stake. But artists are not at the negotiating table. They’re not actually making the decisions. So what can they hope to accomplish?</p>
<p>Artists can raise awareness, making complex scientific reports accessible and tangible. </p>
<p>For instance, Waanyi artist Judy Watson’s painting, australian mean temperature anomaly (2021), washes statistical bar graphs with an expressive, regenerative and hopeful hue of green to reference the regrowth of K’gari (Fraser Island) following the Black Summer bushfires. At Brisbane’s Institute of Modern Art’s recent show <a href="https://artguide.com.au/curator-tim-riley-walsh-on-using-art-to-comprehend-crisis/">On Fire</a>, Watson’s work sat in contrast to a lump of coal on a plinth.</p>
<figure class="align-center zoomable">
<a href="https://images.theconversation.com/files/429887/original/file-20211103-25-gl0bx9.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=1000&fit=clip"><img alt="" src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/429887/original/file-20211103-25-gl0bx9.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/429887/original/file-20211103-25-gl0bx9.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=450&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/429887/original/file-20211103-25-gl0bx9.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=450&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/429887/original/file-20211103-25-gl0bx9.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=450&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/429887/original/file-20211103-25-gl0bx9.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=566&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/429887/original/file-20211103-25-gl0bx9.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=566&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/429887/original/file-20211103-25-gl0bx9.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=566&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px"></a>
<figcaption>
<span class="caption">Judy Watson, australian mean temperature anomaly, 2021 (installation view)
. Acrylic, graphite, pastel, chinagraph on canvas, and coal, 269 x 179.5 cm, assisted by Leecee Carmichael. Courtesy of the artist, Milani Gallery, Brisbane, and Tolarno Galleries, Melbourne.
Installation view: ‘On Fire: Climate and Crisis’</span>
<span class="attribution"><span class="source">IMA Brisbane. Photo: Carl Warner.</span></span>
</figcaption>
</figure>
<p>Artists do more than simply tell us there’s a problem. They can add nuance to the complex web of interconnected issues we face. They can tell stories about loss, about possibility and transformation, <a href="https://climarte.org/">inside and beyond the art world</a>. </p>
<p>Some, like the Brandalism collective, aim to influence political action. After Australia’s devastating Black Summer fires in 2019-2020, they created <a href="https://www.theguardian.com/artanddesign/2020/feb/04/bushfire-brandalism-australian-artists-replace-bus-shelter-ads-with-political-posters">How’s the Serenity?</a>, a guerrilla art intervention with posters linking the fires, climate change, and political inaction. These posters were pasted up as caustic “anti-advertising” across Melbourne, Sydney and Brisbane. </p>
<p>In Glasgow and other towns and cities across the UK and Europe, billboard campaigns target the greenwashing propaganda of COP’s principal sponsor <a href="http://brandalism.ch/carbon-offsets-dont-work-billboard-takeover-spotlight-natwests-climate-policies-ahead-of-cop26-climate-talks/">NatWest</a>. Hundreds more unsanctioned satirical posters have taken over bus stops and billboards, targeting corporate carbon offsetting schemes and the questionable climate policies of <a href="http://brandalism.ch/barclays-fossil-bank-blog/">Barclays</a>, <a href="https://www.thedrum.com/news/2021/10/11/london-s-biggest-ad-agencies-targeted-anti-advertising-climate-protests">Shell</a> and <a href="http://brandalism.ch/17-year-old-snorkel-instructor-in-australia-inspires-uk-spoof-ad-campaign-against-hsbc-greenwashing/">HSBC</a>.</p>
<p>These interventions are pungent reminders of the existential challenge we face. </p>
<h2>A journey, not a destination</h2>
<p>But while they may highlight the threats, these artworks don’t quite help us to imagine pathways to a sustainable future.</p>
<p>One problem is that the challenges of climate change have been reduced to a handful of simplified proxies. We should not exceed 350 parts per million of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere – though <a href="https://www.washingtonpost.com/weather/2021/04/05/atmospheric-co2-concentration-record/">we have reached 420ppm</a> and remain on a frightening upward trajectory. </p>
<figure class="align-center zoomable">
<a href="https://images.theconversation.com/files/429883/original/file-20211103-17-1ibcdqk.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=1000&fit=clip"><img alt="A red house sinks into a lake." src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/429883/original/file-20211103-17-1ibcdqk.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/429883/original/file-20211103-17-1ibcdqk.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=400&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/429883/original/file-20211103-17-1ibcdqk.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=400&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/429883/original/file-20211103-17-1ibcdqk.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=400&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/429883/original/file-20211103-17-1ibcdqk.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=503&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/429883/original/file-20211103-17-1ibcdqk.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=503&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/429883/original/file-20211103-17-1ibcdqk.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=503&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px"></a>
<figcaption>
<span class="caption">Too often, climate art imagines the future – but not the paths we must take.</span>
<span class="attribution"><span class="source">Shutterstock</span></span>
</figcaption>
</figure>
<p>We should keep global warming below 1.5 degrees - but most recent policies are still projected to lead to a <a href="https://climateactiontracker.org/global/cat-thermometer/">2.9 degree increase</a>. </p>
<p>We must meet a “net-zero” target by 2050. But what do such abstractions and distant targets mean for our daily lives?</p>
<hr>
<p>
<em>
<strong>
Read more:
<a href="https://theconversation.com/climate-scientists-concept-of-net-zero-is-a-dangerous-trap-157368">Climate scientists: concept of net zero is a dangerous trap</a>
</strong>
</em>
</p>
<hr>
<p>Climate artists also face another dilemma. </p>
<p>Climate-related apocalyptic art now speaks to audiences largely familiar with global warming’s threats and projected impacts. Though at its best still starkly confronting, such art is heavily “message-laden”. Often saying little new, it is increasingly banal and, paradoxically, begins to naturalise the awful future it wishes to avert.</p>
<p>Alternatively, arcadian images of a climate-safe future seem in deep denial about the turbulence of the coming transition. Contending futures have become increasingly difficult to construct visually, and to rally people behind or against. </p>
<p>We believe the way forward for climate art is not to imagine our fatalistic or idyllic futures, but instead to sketch out pathways that can get us there. </p>
<p>Without Molly Crabapple’s rapid-fire captivating drawings, visualising and making accessible Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez’s complex proposal for a Green New Deal, would people have listened? Would they have understood?</p>
<figure>
<iframe width="440" height="260" src="https://www.youtube.com/embed/d9uTH0iprVQ?wmode=transparent&start=0" frameborder="0" allowfullscreen=""></iframe>
</figure>
<p>On Friday 5 November, in the fringes of the COP, artists collective Julie’s Bicycle is hosting <a href="https://juliesbicycle.com/event/culture-the-missing-link/">The Missing Link</a>. This event “explores the vital role that arts and culture must play in climate transformation”, and will give attendees online from all over the world a handle on this issue. </p>
<p>At their best, artists are still uniquely able to add meaning and generate empathy and perspective to the tangled web of climate discourse. In doing so, they help imagine and illuminate the complex and ultimately radical voyage we’re on together.</p><img src="https://counter.theconversation.com/content/170786/count.gif" alt="The Conversation" width="1" height="1" />
<p class="fine-print"><em><span>Christiaan De Beukelaer receives funding from the Australian Research Council and the ClimateWorks Foundation. He previously received funding from the European Cultural Foundation, the European Science Foundation, and the Royal Society Te Apārangi. </span></em></p><p class="fine-print"><em><span>Peter Christoff was a Chair and board member of the arts organisation, CLIMARTE.</span></em></p><p class="fine-print"><em><span>Eloise Jane Breskvar does not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organisation that would benefit from this article, and has disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond their academic appointment.</span></em></p>
Artists do more than tell us there’s a problem. They can add nuance to the complex web of interconnected issues we face and tell stories about loss, possibility and transformation.
Christiaan De Beukelaer, Senior Lecturer, The University of Melbourne
Eloise Jane Breskvar, Tutor, The University of Melbourne
Peter Christoff, Senior Research Fellow and Associate Professor, Melbourne Climate Futures initiative, The University of Melbourne
Licensed as Creative Commons – attribution, no derivatives.
tag:theconversation.com,2011:article/167163
2021-09-13T14:55:22Z
2021-09-13T14:55:22Z
How Zimbabwean artist Kudzanai Chiurai has reinvented the idea of a library
<figure><img src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/421011/original/file-20210914-23-1m5i8g1.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=496&fit=clip" /><figcaption><span class="caption">The Johannesburg version of the library.</span> <span class="attribution"><span class="source">Anthea Pokroy/Courtesy Kudzanai Chiurai</span></span></figcaption></figure><p>Zimbabwe born artist <a href="https://www.goodman-gallery.com/artists/kudzanai-chiurai#bio">Kudzanai Chiurai</a> is a phenomenon. He is one of the most challenging and inventive <a href="https://mg.co.za/article/2017-09-01-00-evolving-cynical-and-everything-in-between/">figures</a> in contemporary African art. From large scale photos of fictional African dictators to experimental films and protest posters, rich oil paintings and minimal sculptures, his work is housed in the world’s top galleries and collections.</p>
<p>Chiurai, though, frequently shrugs off gallery spaces to show in warehouses, on the street or in urban locations. His latest project, <a href="https://kudzanaichiurai.com"><em>The Library of Things We Forgot to Remember</em></a>, is <a href="https://www.44stanley.co.za/the-library">housed</a> in a boutique shopping complex, 44 Stanley, in Johannesburg. It is built around his collecting practice focused on preserving archives and memorialising social and cultural history from southern Africa. He’s turned his own personal library and archive into a public art project. </p>
<p>It’s an idea informed by Chiurai’s obsessive <a href="https://www.riotmaterial.com/archive-fever-kudzanai-chiurai/">interest in history</a> and accumulation of artefacts such as books, pamphlets, zines, newspapers, vinyl records, political <a href="https://www.moma.org/artists/38241">posters</a>, audio recordings and other ephemera – materials that explore the relationship between cultural production and social movements. </p>
<p>The work takes a pointedly nontraditional approach to <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Archivist">archivism</a>. The selection and acquisition is determined by interaction. It is managed as a kind of commons where people can share and benefit from the artist’s collection and what is donated by others. Whereas most archives and libraries stress the preservation of materials, Chiurai’s library promotes access, physical engagement, and active use of the materials to maintain their continued relevance.</p>
<hr>
<p>
<em>
<strong>
Read more:
<a href="https://theconversation.com/how-artists-have-preserved-the-memory-of-zimbabwes-1980s-massacres-143847">How artists have preserved the memory of Zimbabwe's 1980s massacres</a>
</strong>
</em>
</p>
<hr>
<p>The library reflects Chiurai’s artistic repertoire, which deploys the use of mixed media to address social, political and cultural issues. It calls to mind his groundbreaking 2011 exhibition <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=q-4lRJrgwRw"><em>State of the Nation</em></a> which explored conflict by constructing an African utopia that enabled him to merge forms and mediums, juxtapose political ideas, evoke historical figures – like a speech by slain Congolese independence leader <a href="https://www.britannica.com/biography/Patrice-Lumumba">Patrice Lumumba</a> delivered by artist Zaki Ibrahim – alongside a performance by contemporary musician Thandiswa Mazwai. </p>
<p>In his work Chiurai imagines new ways to activate, share, present and reinvent the archives, as he does with his latest project, the library. </p>
<h2>The library</h2>
<p>Initially, in 2017, <em>The Library of Things We Forgot to Remember</em> was of no fixed abode, usually incorporated into the artist’s own exhibitions. But the concept of a mobile library was altered by the COVID-19 pandemic, which restricted movement and live events. The library is about gathering, not just materials, but people. It is supposed to be a meeting place.</p>
<p>Now, Chiurai also invites others to curate this archive, to re-arrange it for regular public viewing in a rented space. He <a href="https://www.apollo-magazine.com/kudzanai-chiurai-goodman-gallery/">considers</a> the library to be: </p>
<blockquote>
<p>Itself a form of liberated zone. It functions independently – I find a different librarian every time … and different people see the process of cataloguing differently. Some look at it visually, and some aurally – and so different librarians bring different things to my attention.</p>
</blockquote>
<figure class="align-center zoomable">
<a href="https://images.theconversation.com/files/421012/original/file-20210914-15-7sj3x.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=1000&fit=clip"><img alt="a structure within a room, two smaller rooms. One contains a large filing cabinet and the other a couch, record player and political posters. A man sits on the couch listening to a record." src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/421012/original/file-20210914-15-7sj3x.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/421012/original/file-20210914-15-7sj3x.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=400&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/421012/original/file-20210914-15-7sj3x.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=400&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/421012/original/file-20210914-15-7sj3x.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=400&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/421012/original/file-20210914-15-7sj3x.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=503&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/421012/original/file-20210914-15-7sj3x.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=503&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/421012/original/file-20210914-15-7sj3x.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=503&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px"></a>
<figcaption>
<span class="caption"></span>
<span class="attribution"><span class="source">Anthea Pokroy/Courtesy Kudzanai Chiurai</span></span>
</figcaption>
</figure>
<p>The library includes the artist’s extensive collection of vinyl records associated with liberation movements in southern Africa from the 1970s-80s, notably Zimbabwean <a href="https://www.britannica.com/art/chimurenga">Chimurenga</a> and South African anti-apartheid <a href="https://theculturetrip.com/africa/south-africa/articles/5-anti-apartheid-songs-you-should-know/">struggle music</a>. There are also recordings of speeches by historical political figures such as <a href="https://www.britannica.com/biography/Ian-Smith">Ian Smith</a>, <a href="https://theconversation.com/how-kwame-nkrumah-used-metaphor-as-a-political-weapon-against-colonialism-129379">Kwame Nkrumah</a>, <a href="https://www.britannica.com/biography/Mobutu-Sese-Seko">Mobutu Sese Seko</a>, <a href="https://www.britannica.com/biography/Martin-Luther-King-Jr">Dr Martin Luther King</a> and even a dramatic re-enactment of the trial of <a href="https://www.archives.gov/research/african-americans/black-power/black-panthers">Black Panther Party</a> co-founder <a href="https://www.britannica.com/biography/Bobby-Seale">Bobby Seale</a>.</p>
<p>The collection has continued to grow. In 2018 it obtained digital recordings from the US-based educational project, <a href="https://freedomarchives.org/">Freedom Archives</a> – radio interviews with political figures and women involved in the liberation movements in Zimbabwe, South Africa, Namibia, Guinea- Bissau, as well as the US civil rights movement. Other materials are donated by individuals and institutions.</p>
<p>Accordingly, Chiurai treats these traces of struggle with great care. Some of these historical documents and posters are now framed and hung on the white walls. Once, these materials chronicled life in Black Africa or Black America as it happened. Now, they are artefacts of frozen moments in history. His library is conceived as a place of contemplation and reflection. There is a big green couch and listening stations.</p>
<figure class="align-right zoomable">
<a href="https://images.theconversation.com/files/420214/original/file-20210909-13-ewn3i4.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=1000&fit=clip"><img alt="against a backdrop of angular colour block paintings, a bald bearded man in glasses smiles as he talks into a microphone." src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/420214/original/file-20210909-13-ewn3i4.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=237&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/420214/original/file-20210909-13-ewn3i4.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=397&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/420214/original/file-20210909-13-ewn3i4.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=397&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/420214/original/file-20210909-13-ewn3i4.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=397&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/420214/original/file-20210909-13-ewn3i4.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=498&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/420214/original/file-20210909-13-ewn3i4.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=498&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/420214/original/file-20210909-13-ewn3i4.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=498&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px"></a>
<figcaption>
<span class="caption">Kudzanai Chiurai in Accra, Ghana, 2018.</span>
<span class="attribution"><span class="source">Linus Petit</span>, <a class="license" href="http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0/">CC BY-SA</a></span>
</figcaption>
</figure>
<h2>The art of remembering</h2>
<p><em>The Library of Things We Forgot to Remember</em> is part of an effort to <a href="http://designinglibraries.org.uk/index.asp?PageID=222">expand ideas</a> of what a library can be and its decolonisation. It is an extension of new ways people are using the ‘library’ as a place of inquiry and conversation with the past. </p>
<p>Perhaps, what is fascinating is that Chiurai’s library is not static, but re-arranges in the hands of a guest librarian, and has travelled from its first iteration in Harare, to Cape Town, Kalmar, Södertälje and Johannesburg. Previous librarians have been the political writing platform <a href="https://chimurengachronic.co.za/about/">Chimurenga</a> in Harare, writer and DJ El Corazone in Cape Town, and film director and deejay <a href="https://www.encounters.co.za/guest/sifiso-khanyile/">Sifiso Khanyile</a> in Johannesburg.</p>
<figure class="align-left zoomable">
<a href="https://images.theconversation.com/files/420614/original/file-20210912-21-19wr5nn.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=1000&fit=clip"><img alt="A depiction of The Last Supper with a black female Jesus figure." src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/420614/original/file-20210912-21-19wr5nn.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=237&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/420614/original/file-20210912-21-19wr5nn.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=382&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/420614/original/file-20210912-21-19wr5nn.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=382&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/420614/original/file-20210912-21-19wr5nn.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=382&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/420614/original/file-20210912-21-19wr5nn.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=480&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/420614/original/file-20210912-21-19wr5nn.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=480&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/420614/original/file-20210912-21-19wr5nn.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=480&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px"></a>
<figcaption>
<span class="caption">A still from Kudzanai Chiurai’s film Iyeza.</span>
<span class="attribution"><span class="source">Screengrab courtesy Kudzanai Chiurai</span></span>
</figcaption>
</figure>
<p>What Chiurai is doing is to incubate a new model for artistic creation and knowledge production that interferes with the circulation, display and preservation of cultural objects. Who has a right to assign value? Who decides what is history? What kinds of materials should be collected? How can access be expanded to new publics?</p>
<p>Visitors also have a responsibility. They are not just passive observers, but collaborators, interpreters, and readers. The library becomes a place of provocation that allows multiple registers of value, because value is negotiated. It’s also about the reinvention of the library as a space for multiple forms of contemplation. It is still a destination for artists, scholars, curators, and collectors to research and engage with southern African history.</p>
<p>Remembering is a virtue that Chiurai extols. In Black communities it is often an expensive luxury, a privilege. But through this new space arranged in the form of a hybrid gallery, community center, library and archive, remembering is translated into a collective process of reimagining and of sharing heritage. It is also testament of the generosity behind Chiurai’s art practice, of care and community.</p><img src="https://counter.theconversation.com/content/167163/count.gif" alt="The Conversation" width="1" height="1" />
<p class="fine-print"><em><span>Tinashe Mushakavanhu does not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organisation that would benefit from this article, and has disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond their academic appointment.</span></em></p>
With vinyl records, zines and political posters instead of just books, The Library of Things We Forgot to Remember offers a way to reimagine African history.
Tinashe Mushakavanhu, Post-Doctoral Fellow, University of the Witwatersrand
Licensed as Creative Commons – attribution, no derivatives.
tag:theconversation.com,2011:article/140161
2020-09-25T05:39:00Z
2020-09-25T05:39:00Z
Art and online activism amid the pandemic: lessons from around the world
<figure><img src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/359979/original/file-20200925-16-17185er.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&rect=0%2C376%2C3990%2C2610&q=45&auto=format&w=496&fit=clip" /><figcaption><span class="caption">Artwork at the site of George Floyd's memorial in Minneapolis, Minnesota.</span> <span class="attribution"><span class="source">(Unsplash/Jean Beller)</span>, <a class="license" href="http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/">CC BY</a></span></figcaption></figure><p>During the COVID-19 pandemic, arranging protests and political movements in the streets has proven challenging due to social distancing orders.</p>
<p>Campaigns around the world such as the #ClimateStrike movement initiated by <a href="https://www.theverge.com/2020/3/11/21174674/greta-thunberg-coronavirus-climate-change-protests-online-covid19">Greta Thunberg</a> have moved online through the use of social media. The movement has now turned into <a href="https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2020/apr/22/climate-strikes-continue-online-we-want-to-keep-the-momentum-going">#ClimateStrikeOnline</a>, where hundreds of social media posts pour in every week.</p>
<p><a href="https://twitter.com/hashtag/climatestrikeonline?src=hashtag_click">Artistic posters</a> on Twitter and <a href="https://www.abc.net.au/news/2019-09-19/tiktok-youth-led-climate-activism-school-strike/11520474">dance choreography</a> on TikTok have helped increase appeal for the movement among young people around the world and continue it in a more light-hearted way. </p>
<figure>
<iframe width="440" height="260" src="https://www.youtube.com/embed/qIBFOx0ZiYk?wmode=transparent&start=0" frameborder="0" allowfullscreen=""></iframe>
<figcaption><span class="caption">Students are fighting climate change, one TikTok video at a time.</span></figcaption>
</figure>
<p>This movement’s sustainability and its ability to captivate audiences suggests these kinds of artistic approaches can be a great medium for activism in the digital space.</p>
<p>Arts activism — traditionally <a href="https://c4aa.org/2018/04/why-artistic-activism">performed offline</a> in the pre-social media era — combines the creative and emotional capacity of the arts with the strategic planning of activists to push for meaningful change in society online.</p>
<p>These three examples highlight how digital arts can help spark and sustain political engagement as it moves online amid the pandemic.</p>
<h2>Stirring emotions to build political participation</h2>
<p>Digital arts activism has the power to help people <a href="https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/abs/10.1080/14781700.2016.1190944">channel suffering</a>, <a href="https://cjds.uwaterloo.ca/index.php/cjds/article/view/469/711">trauma</a> or their <a href="https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/07421656.2017.1420124">outrage</a> into persuasive messages.</p>
<p><a href="https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/abs/10.1080/02615479.2014.885008">Many studies</a> have indicated this can help increase community engagement and political participation — from <a href="https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/abs/10.1177/1206331217729509">human rights advocacy</a> to campaigns <a href="https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/abs/10.1525/irqr.2011.4.1.3">against discrimination</a> and economic inequality.</p>
<p>Twenty-five-year-old <a href="https://www.instagram.com/ohhappydani/">Danielle Coke</a> from Atlanta, for instance, is an illustrator who posts digital drawings on Instagram to advocate for important issues such as ending systemic racism.</p>
<p><div data-react-class="InstagramEmbed" data-react-props="{"url":"https://www.instagram.com/p/B_AzK35FhJ7/?utm_source=ig_web_copy_link","accessToken":"127105130696839|b4b75090c9688d81dfd245afe6052f20"}"></div></p>
<p>Although she has criticised people for <a href="https://observer.com/2020/06/instagram-social-posts-stealing-work-by-black-artists/">not crediting her appropriately</a>, her work has been cited and shared by many people and to support a number of political movements such as #BlackLivesMatter.</p>
<p>For instance, some of the art she created discusses the cases of Ahmaud Arbery and George Floyd — two African-American citizens killed by local police on separate occasions. These artworks have since been <a href="https://www.insider.com/ohhappydani-illustrations-stolen-without-credit-social-media-2020-6">used by thousands of people</a> to voice outrage against institutional racism in America’s law enforcement system.</p>
<p>The iconic poster of the <a href="https://www.micahmwhite.com/read/#/new-yorker-profile">“ballerina and the bull”</a> is another example.</p>
<p>The artwork, created by <a href="https://www.micahmwhite.com/">Micah White</a> through his anti-consumerist magazine Adbusters, played a significant role helping initiate the <a href="http://occupywallst.org/">Occupy Wall Street movement</a>.</p>
<p><div data-react-class="InstagramEmbed" data-react-props="{"url":"https://www.instagram.com/p/B2haNDYnFKI/?utm_source=ig_web_copy_link","accessToken":"127105130696839|b4b75090c9688d81dfd245afe6052f20"}"></div></p>
<p>The poster contrasted the image of the Wall Street Bull statue — meant to symbolise <a href="https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2011/11/28/pre-occupied?currentPage=all">the dynamics of capitalism</a> — with the “<a href="https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2011/11/28/pre-occupied?currentPage=all">zen stillness</a>” of a ballerina.</p>
<p>These details, along with the shrouded figures in the poster’s background helped evoke a <a href="https://jacobinmag.com/2020/01/micah-white-occupy-wall-street-davos-grifter-scam">sense of fear and shared urgency</a> regarding the country’s state of economic inequality. This helped pushed some to participate in, or at least become aware of, the #OccupyWallStreet movement.</p>
<p>The New York Times noted <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2011/11/28/business/media/the-branding-of-the-occupy-movement.html">in an article</a> that although the magazine through its poster did not come up with the frustrations felt by the movement’s protesters, it significantly shaped the movement’s aesthetic brand.</p>
<h2>Sustaining the complexity of theatrical performances</h2>
<p>The COVID-19 pandemic has caused many artistic movements to migrate into the digital space. </p>
<p>One example is “<a href="https://www.conexionoax.info/">Conexion: Art and Activism in Oaxaca</a>”. Originally planned as a showcase at the Newcomb Art Museum in Louisiana, United States, Conexion Oaxaca is an interactive digital exhibition by <a href="https://registrar.tulane.edu/news/1648036/digital%20exhibition%20%E2%80%98conexi%C3%B3n:%20art%20and%20activism%20in%20oaxaca%E2%80%99%20showcases%20work%20by%20latin%20american%20studies%20students">Latin American Studies</a> students.</p>
<p>The digital exhibition highlights issues such as gender-based violence, access to education, family separation, and economic inequality.</p>
<figure class="align-center zoomable">
<a href="https://images.theconversation.com/files/351257/original/file-20200805-22-n43y4k.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=1000&fit=clip"><img alt="" src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/351257/original/file-20200805-22-n43y4k.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/351257/original/file-20200805-22-n43y4k.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=374&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/351257/original/file-20200805-22-n43y4k.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=374&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/351257/original/file-20200805-22-n43y4k.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=374&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/351257/original/file-20200805-22-n43y4k.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=470&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/351257/original/file-20200805-22-n43y4k.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=470&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/351257/original/file-20200805-22-n43y4k.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=470&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px"></a>
<figcaption>
<span class="caption">The digital Coaxaca exhibition was curated by Tulane University students and faculty staff trough a Zoom meeting.</span>
<span class="attribution"><a class="source" href="https://www.conexionoax.info">(Screenshot from Conexion Oaxaca)</a></span>
</figcaption>
</figure>
<p>Due to the pandemic, the exhibition has transformed into a fully interactive website that guides viewers throughout its four navigable themes which contain magazines, quilted art and documentary films. </p>
<p>However, it wasn’t always this easy.</p>
<p>The practice of staging art exhibitions online was once criticised for lacking what <a href="https://ceasefiremagazine.co.uk/walter-benjamin-art-aura-authenticity/">German philosopher Walter Benjamin</a> calls an “aura of authenticity” — a sensory experience that results from an artwork being uniquely present in time and space.</p>
<p>However, the growth of social media has helped online exhibitions fulfil the basic principles of art; that it should be visible, versatile, suggestive and transmissible.</p>
<p>In fact, I argue that the viewing experience is enhanced as now artworks can be played back, examined thoroughly and intensively studied, on demand, by a diverse range of audiences.</p>
<h2>Universities must teach arts activism to students</h2>
<p>An effective way way to start making digital arts activism prevalent among students and young people is by incorporating it within higher education. </p>
<p>In most developing countries, however, art is currently still a highly specialised program in college. Activist movements, on the other hand, are often only studied only under faculties teaching the social sciences or humanities. </p>
<p>In order to complement the scientific methodology used in most natural and social science programs, universities need to incorporate art in each of their department’s <a href="https://languageacts.org/events/art-and-activism-digital-age-event/">curricula</a> as part of the intellectual tradition of higher education.</p>
<p>King’s College London, for example, has been developing an interdisciplinary module titled “<a href="https://languageacts.org/events/art-and-activism-digital-age-event/">Art and Activism in the Digital Age</a>” to be implemented across its study programs. </p>
<p>The university also collaborates with local artist and <a href="https://www.kcl.ac.uk/cultural/projects/arts-in-society">provides grants for digital art projects</a> that are accessible even to students outside the Faculty of Humanities.</p>
<p>If we want higher education to have impact, students need to learn how to <a href="https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/abs/10.1080/07421656.2011.578028">absorb experiences</a> from events happening in their environment and channel them into meaningful initiatives. Digital art activism is a great way to help them do this.</p><img src="https://counter.theconversation.com/content/140161/count.gif" alt="The Conversation" width="1" height="1" />
<p class="fine-print"><em><span>Kandi Aryani Suwito tidak bekerja, menjadi konsultan, memiliki saham, atau menerima dana dari perusahaan atau organisasi mana pun yang akan mengambil untung dari artikel ini, dan telah mengungkapkan bahwa ia tidak memiliki afiliasi selain yang telah disebut di atas.</span></em></p>
Digital artwork has helped campaigns such as the #ClimateStrikeOnline thrive on social media. Through three examples, I explore why digital arts can sustain political engagement amid the pandemic.
Kandi Aryani Suwito, Lecturer at the Department of Communication, Universitas Airlangga and PhD Candidate in Digital Humanities, King's College London
Licensed as Creative Commons – attribution, no derivatives.
tag:theconversation.com,2011:article/111392
2019-02-13T11:49:18Z
2019-02-13T11:49:18Z
Ivanka and her tower of crumbs
<figure><img src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/258528/original/file-20190212-174890-rwe25c.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=496&fit=clip" /><figcaption><span class="caption">Artist Jennifer Rubell hired a model to vacuum for two hours each night from Feb. 1 to Feb. 17.</span> <span class="attribution"><span class="source">Ryan Maxwell Photography</span></span></figcaption></figure><p>For two hours each evening, an Ivanka Trump lookalike has been vacuuming a hot pink carpet at the Flashpoint Gallery in Washington, D.C. </p>
<p>As she appears to be on the cusp of completing the task, spectators soil the carpet with bread crumbs. She vacuums them up. The audience tosses more crumbs onto the carpet. The pattern repeats itself. </p>
<p>Jennifer Rubell’s installation, titled “<a href="https://www.culturaldc.org/ivanka-vacuuming-by-jennifer-rubell-press-release">Ivanka Vacuuming</a>,” has already elicited a response from the subject.</p>
<p>Following the Feb. 1 opening, <a href="https://www.washingtonpost.com/entertainment/museums/the-performance-piece-ivanka-vacuuming-seems-to-irk-the-first-daughter-even-more-than-fake-news/2019/02/05/fe70801c-296c-11e9-984d-9b8fba003e81_story.html">Ivanka Trump tweeted</a>, “Women can choose to knock each other down or build each other up. I choose the latter,” to which <a href="https://twitter.com/jenniferrubell/status/1092826529791426561">Rubell parried</a>, “I would encourage you to see the piece and form your own direct response. … Not knocking anyone down. Exploring complicated subjects we all care about.”</p>
<p><div data-react-class="Tweet" data-react-props="{"tweetId":"1092826529791426561"}"></div></p>
<p>As a historian of contemporary art, I wanted to learn more about this <a href="https://forward.com/schmooze/418831/ivanka-trump-family-slams-jewish-artist-sexist-ivanka-vacuuming/">headline-grabbing</a> work. So I followed Rubell’s directive and saw it myself.</p>
<p>The piece certainly pops: It’s pink. Very pink. And the Ivanka double has a plastic sheen that borders on surreal. </p>
<p>It took a moment to adjust to the saccharine visuals. But it soon became apparent that Rubell was drawing from a rich tradition of performance art. She seems to be compelling viewers to think about the huge numbers of women who perform invisible labor – all in exchange for a few crumbs from the great American pie.</p>
<h2>Repetitive, relentless work</h2>
<p>The work of art has been staged at the back of the gallery, in a space surrounded by three white walls. In the foreground, there’s a white cube, approximately three-and-a-half feet high and topped with a two-foot mound of Panko bread crumbs. Text invites the viewers to scatter the crumbs onto the pink carpet to keep the Ivanka doppelgänger busy.</p>
<p>Fortunately, the night I visited, Rubell was in the gallery observing the performance. She told me that she has witnessed the live performance in Washington, D.C., a few times. Otherwise, she’s been watching it on a live feed from her home in New York City.</p>
<figure class="align-center ">
<img alt="" src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/258530/original/file-20190212-174887-1n8dbft.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/258530/original/file-20190212-174887-1n8dbft.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=456&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/258530/original/file-20190212-174887-1n8dbft.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=456&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/258530/original/file-20190212-174887-1n8dbft.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=456&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/258530/original/file-20190212-174887-1n8dbft.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=573&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/258530/original/file-20190212-174887-1n8dbft.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=573&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/258530/original/file-20190212-174887-1n8dbft.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=573&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px">
<figcaption>
<span class="caption">Artist Jennifer Rubell’s work has already elicited a response from her subject, Ivanka Trump.</span>
<span class="attribution"><span class="source">Ryan Maxwell Photography</span></span>
</figcaption>
</figure>
<p>The Ivanka lookalike is a model whom Rubell hired through an agency. In my brief conversation with Rubell, she mentioned that although she had to make some minor adjustments to the model’s hair color and makeup, it was relative easy to mimic Ivanka’s look because she is already so doll-like.</p>
<p>Rubell cited <a href="https://books.google.com/books?id=4bcwswEACAAJ&dq=art+since+1900+1945+to+present&hl=en&sa=X&ved=0ahUKEwimmtW3rrTgAhXwmuAKHWdfAKEQ6AEIKjAA">pioneering performance artist</a> Vito Acconci as an inspiration for her interest in the medium. You can see his stamp on “Ivanka Vacuuming” in works like “<a href="http://www.medienkunstnetz.de/works/step-piece/">Step Piece</a>.” Over a performance period of one month in 1970, Acconci documented himself, each day, stepping on and off a stool in his apartment at the rate of 30 steps per minute until he was unable to continue. He wanted to highlight the absurdity of certain repetitive tasks.</p>
<h2>Invisible female labor</h2>
<p>In her work, Rubell is also tackling the seeming endlessness of mind-numbing labor. But she’s doing it in a way that aligns herself with artists such as Judy Chicago and Miriam Schapiro, who co-founded the California Institute of Arts’ Feminist Art program. </p>
<p>In 1972, Chicago and Schapiro collaborated with other feminists to create installations, performances and discussion groups concerned with the invisible labor performed by women, especially in the home. </p>
<p>Titled “<a href="http://www.womanhouse.net">Womanhouse</a>,” this influential exhibition criticized prevailing attitudes towards femininity and domesticity that had been instilled through a range of cultural messages, from <a href="https://www.pinterest.com/pin/232216924508831346/?lp=true">advertisements for home appliances</a>, to toys like the <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9hhjjhYGQtY&annotation_id=annotation_660006&feature=iv">Barbie doll</a>.</p>
<figure class="align-right ">
<img alt="" src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/258561/original/file-20190212-174870-1tmb7f5.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=237&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/258561/original/file-20190212-174870-1tmb7f5.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=840&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/258561/original/file-20190212-174870-1tmb7f5.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=840&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/258561/original/file-20190212-174870-1tmb7f5.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=840&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/258561/original/file-20190212-174870-1tmb7f5.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=1056&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/258561/original/file-20190212-174870-1tmb7f5.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=1056&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/258561/original/file-20190212-174870-1tmb7f5.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=1056&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px">
<figcaption>
<span class="caption">Describing their motivation for the exhibition, Chicago and Schapiro wrote, ‘Womanhouse became the repository of the daydreams women have as they wash, bake, cook, sew, clean and iron their lives away.’</span>
<span class="attribution"><a class="source" href="http://blogs.getty.edu/pacificstandardtime/files/2011/08/gri_2000_m_43_b29_f9_326031ds_d1.jpg">The Getty Research Institute, 2000.M.43.1.</a></span>
</figcaption>
</figure>
<p>The exhibition was set up in a dilapidated Los Angeles mansion. A group of 23 artists refurbished the residence prior to installing their work to make the familiar spaces of the home seem strange. For instance, the walls of the kitchen were pockmarked with fried egg sculptures that resembled eyes or breasts, while the shelves of a linen closet were merged into the body of a life-size mannequin doll.</p>
<p>In “Ivanka Vacuuming,” I also see echoes of New York-based artist Mierle Laderman Ukeles. In 1973, Ukeles got down on her hands and knees <a href="https://www.khanacademy.org/humanities/special-topics-art-history/seeing-america/work-exchange-and-technology/v/ukeles-washingtracksmaintenance">to scrub the floors and steps of the Wadsworth Atheneum museum</a>. <a href="https://hyperallergic.com/355255/how-mierle-laderman-ukeles-turned-maintenance-work-into-art/">In another famous work</a>, Ukeles shook the hand of every New York City sanitation worker.</p>
<p>Like “Ivanka Vacuuming” and “Womanhouse,” Ukeles wanted to bring attention to the drudgery of everyday tasks that are crucial to our well-being but go largely unrecognized and unrewarded. </p>
<h2>The viewer as enabler</h2>
<p>There’s a twist to “Ivanka Vacuuming,” however: It requires audience participation. In order to complete the work, viewers must grab from the pile of crumbs sitting on an abstract cube in the darkened half of the gallery and toss them into the brightly lit performance space.</p>
<figure class="align-center ">
<img alt="" src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/258538/original/file-20190212-174851-o2sbch.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/258538/original/file-20190212-174851-o2sbch.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=400&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/258538/original/file-20190212-174851-o2sbch.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=400&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/258538/original/file-20190212-174851-o2sbch.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=400&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/258538/original/file-20190212-174851-o2sbch.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=503&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/258538/original/file-20190212-174851-o2sbch.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=503&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/258538/original/file-20190212-174851-o2sbch.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=503&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px">
<figcaption>
<span class="caption">Audience members are invited to make a mess – and then grapple with what it feels like to have someone else clean it up.</span>
<span class="attribution"><span class="source">Ryan Maxwell Photography</span></span>
</figcaption>
</figure>
<p>Rubell’s invitation to viewers made me think of Yoko Ono’s famous “<a href="http://imaginepeace.com//archives//2680">Cut Piece</a>” from 1964. In it, Ono sat on the floor with her legs folded beneath her body and a pair of scissors by her side. Viewers were invited to approach the artist, one by one, and cut off a piece of her dress. The performance continued until the artist was almost naked. </p>
<p>I was also reminded of the 1990 work “Untitled (USA Today),” in which artist Felix Gonzalez-Torres <a href="https://hammer.ucla.edu/take-it-or-leave-it/art/untitled-usa-today/">piled a large mound of candy</a> wrapped in red, blue and silver foil against the corner of a gallery and invited visitors to help themselves. Torres was prompting the viewer to think critically about the sugary news dished out by mainstream newspapers like USA Today and the way many readers uncritically gobble it up. </p>
<p>Likewise, Rubell’s work challenges her audience to engage and to think critically.</p>
<p>Vacuuming isn’t inherently degrading or abject. But it’s difficult to imagine Ivanka, at any point in her privileged upbringing, wielding a vacuum. </p>
<p>The artwork is jolting in the way that it juxtaposes Ivanka’s public image – pristine, professional, camera-ready – with tasks performed by the maids and housekeepers who labor in Trump’s homes, hotels and resorts.</p>
<p>But Rubell slyly subverts the dynamics of control. Who’s in charge? Is it the wealthiest one percent whose needs power the vacuums, start up the hotel laundries every night and turn on the kitchen fryers at 4 a.m.? </p>
<p>Or, perhaps it’s us – the public, the spectator – who keep the crumbs coming, participating in a system that privileges the few at the expense of the many.</p><img src="https://counter.theconversation.com/content/111392/count.gif" alt="The Conversation" width="1" height="1" />
<p class="fine-print"><em><span>Preminda Jacob does not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organization that would benefit from this article, and has disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond their academic appointment.</span></em></p>
A new piece of performance art features a lookalike Ivanka Trump vacuuming crumbs. Not only is it a cutting commentary on labor and gender, but it also highlights the complicity of the viewer.
Preminda Jacob, Associate Professor of Art History and Museum Studies, University of Maryland, Baltimore County
Licensed as Creative Commons – attribution, no derivatives.
tag:theconversation.com,2011:article/85537
2018-04-25T19:13:42Z
2018-04-25T19:13:42Z
Where has Melbourne’s political graffiti gone?
<figure><img src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/202394/original/file-20180118-122949-1nqc3qt.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&rect=13%2C287%2C907%2C868&q=45&auto=format&w=496&fit=clip" /><figcaption><span class="caption">Graffiti comment adorning an image of a woman in Brunswick. The comment was quickly erased, nearby tags stayed up much longer</span> <span class="attribution"><span class="source">Author provided</span>, <span class="license">Author provided</span></span></figcaption></figure><p>On my daily commute from Brunswick to Hawthorn, I often look out the train window and ask myself, “Where has Melbourne’s political graffiti gone?” Growing up in Sydney in the 1970s, political graffiti was part of my everyday urban landscape. Organised groups like Billboards Utilising Graffiti Against Unhealthy Promotions (<a href="http://www.bugaup.org/">BUGA UP</a>) systematically sprayed billboards advertising alcohol, tobacco or anything with sexist content.</p>
<p>Their statements were witty, satirical and clearly left wing: “BEER KEEPS WORKERS IN THEIR PLACE” was emblazoned on an <a href="http://www.bugaup.org/gallery_autumn.htm">advertisement</a> for the now almost obsolete KB lager; “CANCER KNOWS NO CLASS” adorned a <a href="http://www.bugaup.org/gallery_b_h.htm">billboard</a> for Benson and Hedges cigarettes. </p>
<p>Our family remembers with fondness the response to the declaration from another graffitist, “GOD HATES HOMOS”, at the corner of Missenden and Parramatta roads in Camperdown. “BUT DOES HE LIKE TABOULI?” someone sprayed back. </p>
<p>The walls of public and private buildings still provide a canvas for political voices but in Melbourne, where I now live, there is less of this overtly political graffiti and it is more ephemeral. What little remains is up against stiff competition from taggers (who could be read as making an oblique statement against draconian graffiti regulation). </p>
<h2>Hunting for what’s left</h2>
<p>The legacy of political graffiti lives on through stick-ups, short-lived slogans and officially sanctioned political content. Stick ups are rogue poster campaigns drawing on the artistic tradition of poster art born in Paris in the 1850s. They resemble collage by 1920s <a href="https://www.moma.org/collection/terms/28">Dadaists</a>, Russian <a href="https://www.moma.org/collection/terms/26">Constructivist</a> posters or 1960s <a href="https://www.moma.org/collection/terms/79">Pop Art</a> but are more politically charged.</p>
<figure class="align-center zoomable">
<a href="https://images.theconversation.com/files/215803/original/file-20180422-75104-11smisv.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=1000&fit=clip"><img alt="" src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/215803/original/file-20180422-75104-11smisv.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/215803/original/file-20180422-75104-11smisv.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=268&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/215803/original/file-20180422-75104-11smisv.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=268&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/215803/original/file-20180422-75104-11smisv.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=268&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/215803/original/file-20180422-75104-11smisv.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=337&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/215803/original/file-20180422-75104-11smisv.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=337&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/215803/original/file-20180422-75104-11smisv.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=337&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px"></a>
<figcaption>
<span class="caption">Political Posters on Sydney Road, Brunswick, April 2018.</span>
</figcaption>
</figure>
<p>In recent times, stick ups have spoken out against issues such as Islamophobia, racism, police violence, environmental destruction and domestic violence. Others target individual politicians, like Peter Dutton, who <a href="https://www.pedestrian.tv/news/posters-slamming-peter-dutton-have-popped-up-around-sydney-melbourne/">became the object of “FAKEWIT” posters </a> from early 2017. There is something sweetly ironic about how much these posters resemble <a href="http://www.tate.org.uk/art/artworks/warhol-mao-tse-tung-65355/5">Andy Warhol’s screen print portrait of Mao Tse-Tung</a>. </p>
<figure class="align-right zoomable">
<a href="https://images.theconversation.com/files/216043/original/file-20180424-94118-7ihn2l.jpeg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=1000&fit=clip"><img alt="" src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/216043/original/file-20180424-94118-7ihn2l.jpeg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=237&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/216043/original/file-20180424-94118-7ihn2l.jpeg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=450&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/216043/original/file-20180424-94118-7ihn2l.jpeg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=450&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/216043/original/file-20180424-94118-7ihn2l.jpeg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=450&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/216043/original/file-20180424-94118-7ihn2l.jpeg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=566&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/216043/original/file-20180424-94118-7ihn2l.jpeg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=566&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/216043/original/file-20180424-94118-7ihn2l.jpeg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=566&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px"></a>
<figcaption>
<span class="caption">‘Fakewit’ a poster of the #dumpdutton campaign, near Glenferrie Station.</span>
<span class="attribution"><span class="source">Author provided</span></span>
</figcaption>
</figure>
<p>Stick-ups are quick and easy to produce but as ephemeral as the promotional campaigns for concerts, bars and universities they compete with. Still, at least they are there. </p>
<p>Recently in Brunswick, graffiti advocating for Indigenous land rights and the slogan “MAKING BRUNSWICK WHITE AGAIN”, a comment about gentrification that played on the name of a real estate franchise, were gone in under 24 hours. Yet tags on the same wall were left there for weeks. </p>
<p>In another case I witnessed in Brunswick, an expression of protest sprayed on a mural of a woman’s face that covered the side of a chemist shop: “WOMEN ARE NOT ORNAMENTS”. These words were painted over in less than a week. Whoever covered them was apparently not bothered by the tags further along the street - they are still there. </p>
<p>In 2016, meanwhile, the graffiti artist Nost <a href="https://i-d.vice.com/en_au/article/9kbmep/the-strange-and-frustrating-case-of-the-destroyed-northcote-womens-mural">“capped” (ie sprayed graffiti over) a 30 year-old mural in Northcote</a> painted by the artists Eve Glenn and Megan Evans, which celebrated local women. Feminists responded, in turn, by graffitiing over Nost’s work, writing “FUCK THE PATRIARCHY” and “NOST IS A DICKHEAD [LOVE] THE LADIES. </p>
<p><a href="http://www.theage.com.au/victoria/notorious-graffiti-tagger-nost-has-his-name-up-on-sites-but-now-hes-carrying-the-can-20170602-gwj8ve.html">Nost was later charged</a> with a range of offences including criminal damage, burglary, trespass, and theft and remanded in custody. However, while the feminist protests were quickly painted over, Nost’s tag remained on the Northcote mural. </p>
<h2>The 21st Century landscape of graffiti</h2>
<p>The everyday urban landscape of 21st century Melbourne has been largely taken over by tags and non-political graffiti. Overt political graffiti is quickly erased, while officially sanctioned pieces or work with little or no political content is celebrated. </p>
<p>One example is that of graffiti production houses like <a href="https://thehundreds.com/blogs/content/everfresh-studio">Everfresh Studios</a>. Members of the Everfresh crew do a wide range of interesting (and sometimes politically engaged) work but their Instagram feed also depicts the kinds of idealised <a href="https://www.instagram.com/p/yL3bZXGLRn/?hl=it&tagged=everfreshstudio">women with parted lips</a> typical of the advertising that BUGA UP used to protest about. </p>
<p>Rone, who recently <a href="https://www.instagram.com/p/BdTNc1aHBFW/?hl=en&taken-by=r_o_n_e">painted silos in Geelong</a> to celebrate Wadawarrung traditional owner Corinna Eccles, also has their work as a backdrop to models advertising Victoria’s Secret <a href="http://www.everfreshstudio.com/blog/rone-x-victorias-secret/">lingerie</a>. </p>
<p>Other wall space is taken up by the work of graffiti artists for hire who create corporate graffiti to promote <a href="http://90degrees.graffitiartistsforhire.com.au/uploads/o_19k6djho11l0r1la0jg1no31et36g.jpg">brands and businesses</a>. In the case of Fitzroy, graffiti "brands” much of the suburb as in the “Welcome to Sunny Fitzroy” piece that covers the entire side wall of the iconic Night Cat club on Johnston Street. The brand of the suburb and the brand of the graffiti artists merge into one and the same image.</p>
<figure class="align-center zoomable">
<a href="https://images.theconversation.com/files/216035/original/file-20180424-94118-ppqr7h.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=1000&fit=clip"><img alt="" src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/216035/original/file-20180424-94118-ppqr7h.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/216035/original/file-20180424-94118-ppqr7h.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=600&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/216035/original/file-20180424-94118-ppqr7h.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=600&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/216035/original/file-20180424-94118-ppqr7h.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=600&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/216035/original/file-20180424-94118-ppqr7h.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=754&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/216035/original/file-20180424-94118-ppqr7h.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=754&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/216035/original/file-20180424-94118-ppqr7h.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=754&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px"></a>
<figcaption>
<span class="caption">Graffiti is part of Fitzroy’s brand.</span>
<span class="attribution"><a class="source" href="https://www.flickr.com/photos/redefinition_au/9005260211/in/photolist-eHLj86-7BhR4q-9FV6Qg-gcMyg1-86qSS2-8Fr8tJ-4jb4n3-86uaYA-7Be1M2-7Be2z4-7Be1ya-7Be23k-7Be2c2-7Be2jx-4DqyhW-6XP7LP-7BhPn5-7Be1ik-5jSfyz-86u7T7-8Fr7Gy-6XT9ns-7jmwMg-6XT8Mh-6XT8Xw-b1BGbr-6XP7bx-5jSfN8-QMPN6e-PygZtc-6XT81q-5jWw4C">Adrian R. Tan</a>, <a class="license" href="http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nd/4.0/">CC BY-ND</a></span>
</figcaption>
</figure>
<p>Graffiti is a paradox. Often criminalised with heavy penalties, it is also part and parcel of the hype of corporate promotional campaigns or as an urban stage set for wedding photos. All this leaves less space and visibility for spontaneous political expression and begs the question: has political conversation moved online?</p>
<p>Elsewhere in the world, politics has played out on the walls of Rome (in ancient, Fascist, and <a href="https://www.academia.edu/34895033/Epi-graffiti_Arenas_of_Conflict_in_Romes_Public_Realm_during_the_Bullet_Years_1968-1982">modern times</a>), <a href="https://books.google.com.au/books?id=iSmWMQEACAAJ&dq=olberg+west+bank&hl=it&sa=X&redir_esc=y">Israel</a>, <a href="https://books.google.com.au/books?id=YwXEBAAAQBAJ&printsec=frontcover&dq=graffiti+in+antiquity&hl=it&sa=X&ved=0ahUKEwjinPH1rPvWAhWGkpQKHbucB4YQ6AEIJzAA#v=onepage&q=graffiti%20in%20antiquity&f=false">Egypt</a> and other northern African and Middle Eastern nations during the <a href="http://www.academia.edu/11080796/Interrogating_the_Dynamics_of_Egyptian_Graffiti_from_Neglected_Marginality_to_Image_Politics">Arab Spring</a>. </p>
<p>Ironic or perverse as it may seem, the lack of political content in most of Melbourne’s graffiti means it adds up to a singular branding exercise. The city and its cultural image meld together - an image that appeals to those who like their culture free of politics.</p><img src="https://counter.theconversation.com/content/85537/count.gif" alt="The Conversation" width="1" height="1" />
<p class="fine-print"><em><span>Flavia Marcello does not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organisation that would benefit from this article, and has disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond their academic appointment.</span></em></p>
A walk down Melbourne’s streets reveals more commercial street art than the spontaneous politics of years past.
Flavia Marcello, Associate Professor of Design History, Swinburne University of Technology
Licensed as Creative Commons – attribution, no derivatives.
tag:theconversation.com,2011:article/71583
2017-01-19T13:29:35Z
2017-01-19T13:29:35Z
Shepard Fairey’s inauguration posters may define political art in Trump era
<figure><img src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/153423/original/image-20170119-26577-3pvath.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=496&fit=clip" /><figcaption><span class="caption">From despair to where?</span> <span class="attribution"><span class="source">We the People</span></span></figcaption></figure><p>The American street artist Shepard Fairey created a poster for Barack Obama’s presidential election campaign. It was 2008 and the simple red, beige and blue stencilled image of Obama’s face over the word “HOPE” quickly became the iconic image of the election, the rallying cry around which it was fought and won. It remains the enduring image of his presidency. </p>
<p>But it is also now a reminder of promised hope ultimately unfulfilled, and many artists might have concluded they would stay away from politics in future as a result. Instead, Fairey has been at the centre of a <a href="https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/amplifierfoundation/we-the-people-public-art-for-the-inauguration-and">Kickstarter initiative</a> to finance a protest poster campaign against Donald Trump’s presidential inauguration called “We the people: public art for the inauguration and beyond”. It has been a great success, <a href="https://qz.com/887358/the-story-behind-shepard-faireys-powerful-posters-for-donald-trumps-inauguration/">raising</a> US$1.4m in a week. This will see the posters printed as full page adverts in the Washington Post; as placards to be distributed for the inauguration; and as postcards to send to the new president.</p>
<figure class="align-center zoomable">
<a href="https://images.theconversation.com/files/153425/original/image-20170119-26567-x7ghc1.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=1000&fit=clip"><img alt="" src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/153425/original/image-20170119-26567-x7ghc1.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/153425/original/image-20170119-26567-x7ghc1.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=280&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/153425/original/image-20170119-26567-x7ghc1.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=280&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/153425/original/image-20170119-26567-x7ghc1.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=280&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/153425/original/image-20170119-26567-x7ghc1.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=352&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/153425/original/image-20170119-26567-x7ghc1.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=352&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/153425/original/image-20170119-26567-x7ghc1.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=352&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px"></a>
<figcaption>
<span class="caption">Fairey’s new images.</span>
<span class="attribution"><a class="source" href="https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/amplifierfoundation/we-the-people-public-art-for-the-inauguration-and">We the People</a></span>
</figcaption>
</figure>
<p>The new images do not feature Trump or even refer to him directly, concentrating instead on the ethnic groups that campaigners fear face being excluded from this new president’s America. It’s a radical shift in focus that nevertheless retains the colours from the Obama image and Fairey’s signature stencil style. What does this tell us about his journey as a commentator – and about political art in 2017?</p>
<h2>Lost illusions</h2>
<p>Fairey’s Obama poster was not about a man but rather a heroic, idealised, abstracted icon. It showed Obama thoughtfully looking upwards and to the right, into the distance towards the future hopes of the nation. It symbolised the promise of things yet to come, yet to be imagined – in keeping with other leaders elected on aspirations for change, such as Tony Blair or John F Kennedy. In Fairey’s image, hope is promised but nothing is specific. It invites the viewer to project their own desires into the icon’s imagination. </p>
<figure class="align-right zoomable">
<a href="https://images.theconversation.com/files/153422/original/image-20170119-26582-1qyrjy2.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=1000&fit=clip"><img alt="" src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/153422/original/image-20170119-26582-1qyrjy2.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=237&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/153422/original/image-20170119-26582-1qyrjy2.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=916&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/153422/original/image-20170119-26582-1qyrjy2.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=916&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/153422/original/image-20170119-26582-1qyrjy2.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=916&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/153422/original/image-20170119-26582-1qyrjy2.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=1151&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/153422/original/image-20170119-26582-1qyrjy2.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=1151&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/153422/original/image-20170119-26582-1qyrjy2.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=1151&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px"></a>
<figcaption>
<span class="caption">‘No we didn’t.’</span>
<span class="attribution"><a class="source" href="https://www.flickr.com/photos/arcticpenguin/3290575942/in/photolist-61M4zY-9CgPXu-4REwkG-5Ts6jZ-91byPd-9YoDfi-5JeawY-5Twnk1-6RzFcD-bHQKnz-buVYyJ-bHQKhe-buVYsw-675FXh-5KFx3X-5K7Dfq-5UjB6F-e33iMt-5K7Da1-5K3o14-9sp2R3-ecmL1D-5uKsq7-5uYPtg-7sEZ68-5TwmUb-5Twr5h-9RGBzo-dYB6Zr-ez76s6-5Twnbd-foeoGs-5Ts268-dTUJwo-hzcH5k-5Twnuq-5Ts62R-aD7ZNz-5TwnfQ-9z38Be-gSrXae-4qindR-5Yf5xE-5Nyt7J-51yqnA-5ZBfYz-dyWUTX-6WM1Vz-5Yx1SE-615fWc">Yvette Wohn</a>, <a class="license" href="http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0/">CC BY-SA</a></span>
</figcaption>
</figure>
<p>For all its inspirational power, the poster set itself up to fail by making a personal promise it could not keep. How could one man fulfil the individual hopes of millions of citizens? Once held up as an example of how a political poster could help bring about positive change in the world, now it perhaps serves as a warning that it’s all just propaganda in the end. </p>
<p>Fairey certainly counts himself among those disappointed by Obama’s eight years in office. When asked in <a href="http://www.esquire.com/news-politics/interviews/a35288/shepard-fairey-street-art-obama-hope-poster/">an interview</a> in 2015 whether he thought Obama had lived up to the promise of his poster, Fairey answered bluntly:</p>
<blockquote>
<p>Not even close … Obama has had a really tough time, but there have been a lot of things that he’s compromised on that I never would have expected.</p>
</blockquote>
<figure>
<iframe width="440" height="260" src="https://www.youtube.com/embed/Npd5sLbwedQ?wmode=transparent&start=0" frameborder="0" allowfullscreen=""></iframe>
</figure>
<h2>We the people</h2>
<p>Fairey’s three new posters are only superficially similar to the Obama image. Choosing not to feature the incoming president as either hero or villain, they show members of the public that represent marginalised groups within society. <a href="https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/amplifierfoundation/we-the-people-public-art-for-the-inauguration-and">According to</a> the Kickstarter pitch, it is about creating “a series of images that capture the shared humanity of our diverse America”. Two other images have been contributed by fellow artists Ernesto Yerena and Jessica Sabogal. </p>
<figure class="align-right zoomable">
<a href="https://images.theconversation.com/files/153426/original/image-20170119-26539-1j2lv6o.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=1000&fit=clip"><img alt="" src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/153426/original/image-20170119-26539-1j2lv6o.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=237&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/153426/original/image-20170119-26539-1j2lv6o.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=797&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/153426/original/image-20170119-26539-1j2lv6o.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=797&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/153426/original/image-20170119-26539-1j2lv6o.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=797&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/153426/original/image-20170119-26539-1j2lv6o.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=1002&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/153426/original/image-20170119-26539-1j2lv6o.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=1002&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/153426/original/image-20170119-26539-1j2lv6o.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=1002&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px"></a>
<figcaption>
<span class="caption">Ernesto Yerena.</span>
<span class="attribution"><a class="source" href="https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/amplifierfoundation/we-the-people-public-art-for-the-inauguration-and">We the People</a></span>
</figcaption>
</figure>
<p>While the central themes of <a href="http://www.artnet.com/artists/shepard-fairey/">Fairey’s art</a> have always been propaganda and power, the “Hope” poster was very much about a conventional traditional propaganda approach that operated in the future tense. There is no unspecified hope in his new images; the figures do not make promises about the future. They know what they want now. </p>
<p>Over the text “We the People are greater than fear” a Muslim woman wearing a US flag hijab piercingly locks eyes with the viewer. By staring directly in this way, the poster becomes a personal confrontation. It is a direct challenge to consider what it means to be a member of the “We the People” of the <a href="https://www.archives.gov/founding-docs/constitution">American constitution</a> and to uphold common values such as freedom from fear within this society. </p>
<p>Fairey’s image of the dreadlocked African-American boy inverts Obama’s distant upwards dreaming pose by looking downwards to the left. He is not looking for a hero to save him. His eyes are not fixed on a vague dream of hope, but resolutely on the realities of living as a black American citizen today. </p>
<figure class="align-right zoomable">
<a href="https://images.theconversation.com/files/153427/original/image-20170119-26577-1ei2b4z.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=1000&fit=clip"><img alt="" src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/153427/original/image-20170119-26577-1ei2b4z.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=237&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/153427/original/image-20170119-26577-1ei2b4z.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=797&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/153427/original/image-20170119-26577-1ei2b4z.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=797&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/153427/original/image-20170119-26577-1ei2b4z.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=797&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/153427/original/image-20170119-26577-1ei2b4z.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=1001&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/153427/original/image-20170119-26577-1ei2b4z.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=1001&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/153427/original/image-20170119-26577-1ei2b4z.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=1001&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px"></a>
<figcaption>
<span class="caption">Jessica Sabogal.</span>
<span class="attribution"><a class="source" href="https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/amplifierfoundation/we-the-people-public-art-for-the-inauguration-and">We the People</a></span>
</figcaption>
</figure>
<p>This work demonstrates that Fairey has learned and matured as a political communicator since 2008. By shifting the tense from future-imaginary to present-reality, and the power from the heroic politician to the individual citizen, his 2017 posters become more than propaganda. They have the potential to become, as <a href="https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/amplifierfoundation/we-the-people-public-art-for-the-inauguration-and">they said</a> on Kickstarter, “symbols of hope”, offering a positive strategy to “disrupt the rising tide of hate and fear in America”. </p>
<p>As Fairey <a href="http://www.pbs.org/newshour/art/shepard-fairey-launches-people-poster-campaign-trumps-inauguration/">said recently</a>, “We have Trump, so what’s the antidote? The antidote is not attacking Trump more.” These are protest posters which attack hate by refusing to attack. In doing so, they offer new hope for the role and relevance of political art in Trump’s America.</p><img src="https://counter.theconversation.com/content/71583/count.gif" alt="The Conversation" width="1" height="1" />
<p class="fine-print"><em><span>Peter Buwert does not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organisation that would benefit from this article, and has disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond their academic appointment.</span></em></p>
The posters that have become the voice of protest against Trump.
Peter Buwert, Lecturer, Graphic Design, Edinburgh Napier University
Licensed as Creative Commons – attribution, no derivatives.
tag:theconversation.com,2011:article/53411
2016-02-22T11:22:47Z
2016-02-22T11:22:47Z
How Indian artists are fighting against the Modi-fication of history
<figure><img src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/111857/original/image-20160217-19260-1qyyot1.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=496&fit=clip" /><figcaption><span class="caption">Secular Meat, 2016, Sajan Mani.</span> <span class="attribution"><span class="source">Courtesy Diptej Vernekar</span></span></figcaption></figure><p>The student president of Jawaharlal Nehru University in Delhi, a major Indian university, was <a href="https://theconversation.com/university-freedoms-in-india-under-threat-as-student-leader-charged-with-sedition-54793">recently arrested</a> after a speech later deemed an insult to “Mother India”. This is simply the latest event in a trend of <a href="https://theconversation.com/creative-and-academic-freedom-under-threat-from-religious-intolerance-in-india-43743">regressive actions</a> from the Indian government – a similar agenda can be seen from unfolding events at <a href="http://qz.com/619620/how-the-professors-of-jadavpur-university-kept-the-peace-in-kolkata-at-their-own-personal-risk/">Jadavpur University</a> and <a href="http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-asia-india-35349789">Hyderabad Central University</a>. </p>
<p>As <a href="http://indianexpress.com/article/opinion/columns/jnu-sedition-case-kanhaiya-kumar-arrest-afzal-guru-event/#sthash.nCOuQf9i.dpuf">commentators</a> have suggested, “the government does not want to just crush dissent; it wants to crush thinking”. Intellectual whitewashing is gaining momentum. And in response, Indian artists are increasingly delving into history in order to critique the present.</p>
<p><a href="http://www.aljazeera.com/indepth/features/2014/11/hindu-right-ideology-indian-textbooks-gujarat-20141147028501733.html">School curriculums</a> and education schemes are being streamlined, used to justify and fuel Hindutva campaigns – the right-wing ideology that views the Indian subcontinent as belonging to the Hindus. Some school books printed by prime minister Narendra Modi’s home state of Gujarat go so far as to teach children that aeronautics originated in Ancient India under Hindu gods. And in 2014, <a href="http://www.theguardian.com/world/2014/oct/28/indian-prime-minister-genetic-science-existed-ancient-times">Modi claimed</a> that genetic science existed in the same period.</p>
<p>It is in response to the danger of this “<a href="http://timesofindia.indiatimes.com/home/education/news/Fears-grow-about-Hindu-Modi-fication-of-education/articleshow/45227687.cms">Modi-fication</a>” of knowledge that Indian artists are taking a historical turn. Artists are amassing another body of knowledge which scrutinises and challenges the unnerving cultural censorship and monolithic narratives which are being promoted. While this interest in pulling at the past and playing with ideas of heritage is not new, this contemporary movement marks a change, and was particularly clear at this year’s India Art Fair. </p>
<h2>Strange flowers, strange stories</h2>
<p>Dayanita Singh’s current show, “<a href="http://www.knma.in/node/924">Conversation Chambers Museum Bhavans</a>” is in part a representation of overflowing state archives and towers of publicly accessible papers. The work emphasises how the preservation of history, particularly in 19th-century India, carves an expansive path for younger generations.</p>
<figure class="align-center ">
<img alt="" src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/111836/original/image-20160217-24635-155dz5c.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/111836/original/image-20160217-24635-155dz5c.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=653&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/111836/original/image-20160217-24635-155dz5c.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=653&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/111836/original/image-20160217-24635-155dz5c.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=653&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/111836/original/image-20160217-24635-155dz5c.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=821&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/111836/original/image-20160217-24635-155dz5c.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=821&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/111836/original/image-20160217-24635-155dz5c.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=821&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px">
<figcaption>
<span class="caption">Floods Rats White Ants All Seem To Conspire Against Us (2016) Cooking Sections, Delfina Foundation at India Art Fair Delhi.</span>
<span class="attribution"><span class="source">Courtesy of Cooking Sections</span></span>
</figcaption>
</figure>
<p>The artist collective <a href="http://www.cooking-sections.com/">Cooking Sections</a>, are perhaps more sceptical. They use history to poke holes in the past. Their installation Floods, Rats, White Ants, All Seem To Conspire Against Us (2016) is a vast dusty tangle of thorny plants, potted shrubs and young trees surrounding two broken chairs. Peering into the piece, the artists described to me how this was the product of long visits to the British Library India Office Records. Here they spent weeks reading the library’s files and discovered the Indian Salt and Sugar Hedge, a former tax boundary, which was 4,000km long and guarded by over 12,000 British forces between 1840-1870. </p>
<p>While in itself intriguing, the research more importantly showed how past decisions have deeply affected contemporary India. Pointing to one of the plants with red flowers, the artists explained that since its introduction by the British, the species had ruined India’s local agriculture. To them, it represents the continuation of the damages of the Salt and Sugar Hedge. </p>
<p>The historical research might be more obscure in this piece, but the same is hardly true of the work of <a href="http://sahejrahal.tumblr.com/">Sahej Rahal</a>, a young performance artist. He leads his audiences through ruins and installs sculptures made from found clay and straw. At the fair’s closing discussion, he reflected on how India’s colonial port cities have become cultural hubs. Having shown at <a href="https://www.facebook.com/The-Heritage-Hotel-Art-Spaces-1495971024002273/">The Heritage Hotel</a>, Goa, and <a href="http://www.kochimuzirisbiennale.org/">Kochi-Muziris Biennale</a> in Aspinwall House, an old British warehouse, he described how the history of these places seeps into his work and “allows for re-examination of the contemporary”. </p>
<figure class="align-center zoomable">
<a href="https://images.theconversation.com/files/111805/original/image-20160217-19239-5ov91i.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=1000&fit=clip"><img alt="" src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/111805/original/image-20160217-19239-5ov91i.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/111805/original/image-20160217-19239-5ov91i.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=428&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/111805/original/image-20160217-19239-5ov91i.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=428&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/111805/original/image-20160217-19239-5ov91i.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=428&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/111805/original/image-20160217-19239-5ov91i.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=538&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/111805/original/image-20160217-19239-5ov91i.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=538&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/111805/original/image-20160217-19239-5ov91i.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=538&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px"></a>
<figcaption>
<span class="caption">HARBINGER (detail) 2014, Sahej Rahal.</span>
<span class="attribution"><span class="source">Courtesy Sahej Rahal and Chatterjee & Lal</span></span>
</figcaption>
</figure>
<p>Consulting local oral histories and literature allowed Rahal to develop characters and intervene in these heavy spaces. Using recollections of Portuguese slaves, mystics and “displaced beings”, he takes these people as “fellow travellers” and helps them to reconcile their injustices. </p>
<p>But this is not only about the fantastical. Putting the past into his work has, as Rahal candidly discussed, become vital: “Right now in India, there is a violent restricting of the past taking place.” Speaking about the “absurd fictions” being created and popularised, other histories have become his tool and a way to “confront these strange tales with stranger ones”. </p>
<h2>Faked history</h2>
<p>This forms parallels with the work of <a href="http://sajan-mani.tumblr.com/">Sajan Mani</a>, an art activist who insists that history increasingly contains “so much fake information” and is troubled by the way it is built within the structure of the caste system. Mani uses old police reports, visual encyclopedias and current media portrayals as a backdrop for his performances, focusing on knowledge production and caste politics.</p>
<figure class="align-left ">
<img alt="" src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/111858/original/image-20160217-19241-zytkk1.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=237&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/111858/original/image-20160217-19241-zytkk1.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=900&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/111858/original/image-20160217-19241-zytkk1.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=900&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/111858/original/image-20160217-19241-zytkk1.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=900&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/111858/original/image-20160217-19241-zytkk1.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=1131&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/111858/original/image-20160217-19241-zytkk1.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=1131&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/111858/original/image-20160217-19241-zytkk1.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=1131&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px">
<figcaption>
<span class="caption">#MakeInIndia (2016) Sajan Mani.</span>
<span class="attribution"><span class="source">Courtesy Sanjid Mahmud</span></span>
</figcaption>
</figure>
<p>Indian art is easily coated with an oriental gloss. Moving away from this and scrutinising the present is a collective and deep-rooted concern for contemporary artists. And, ironically, exploring records of the past in their many forms is an increasingly popular and effective means of doing this. </p>
<p>As <a href="https://theconversation.com/museums-have-long-overlooked-the-violence-of-empire-51269">Deana Heath</a> recently wrote, using art to address uncomfortable dialogues is necessary. This is even more so as we move towards the 2017 UK-India year of culture. With the British Library’s South Asian archive digitisation set to be completed and emphasis placed on cultural exchange, it will be interesting to see whether a platform is created for these artists. Given that this is an act of political diplomacy, it is fair to suspect that any critical voices will be “celebrating” alone.</p><img src="https://counter.theconversation.com/content/53411/count.gif" alt="The Conversation" width="1" height="1" />
<p class="fine-print"><em><span>Cleo Roberts receives funding from UKIERI, INTACH and University of Liverpool. </span></em></p>
Faced with fake history, Indian artists are digging up the past.
Cleo Roberts, PhD Candidate, University of Liverpool
Licensed as Creative Commons – attribution, no derivatives.
tag:theconversation.com,2011:article/47177
2015-09-17T10:10:54Z
2015-09-17T10:10:54Z
Major Ai Weiwei exhibition champions the visual power of dissent
<figure><img src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/94836/original/image-20150915-29639-ut805j.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=496&fit=clip" /><figcaption><span class="caption">Ai Weiwei, Coloured Vases, 2006. Neolithic vases (5000-3000 BC) with industrial paint, dimensions variable.</span> <span class="attribution"><span class="source">© Ai Weiwei</span></span></figcaption></figure><p>In Chinese, the term “dissident” is translated in two different ways. The first (持不同政见者) has a very clear political connotation and literally refers to a person who supports a heterodox political opinion. The second (异己) indicates a more general alterity and non-conformism, the first character (异) alluding to something that is uncanny, out of the ordinary. </p>
<p>Chinese artist Ai Weiwei, whose latest <a href="https://www.royalacademy.org.uk/exhibition/ai-weiwei#">exhibition</a> opens at London’s Royal Academy of Arts on September 19, is labelled as a dissident in both senses: criticised by both his government and fellow artists since he has so openly positioned himself in the midst of this minefield.</p>
<figure class="align-center ">
<img alt="" src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/94834/original/image-20150915-29648-dauqby.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/94834/original/image-20150915-29648-dauqby.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=432&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/94834/original/image-20150915-29648-dauqby.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=432&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/94834/original/image-20150915-29648-dauqby.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=432&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/94834/original/image-20150915-29648-dauqby.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=543&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/94834/original/image-20150915-29648-dauqby.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=543&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/94834/original/image-20150915-29648-dauqby.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=543&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px">
<figcaption>
<span class="caption">Ai Weiwei in his studio in Beijing, taken in April 2015.</span>
<span class="attribution"><span class="source">© Harry Pearce/Pentagram, 2015</span></span>
</figcaption>
</figure>
<p>Most contemporary artists in China produce their work in a very careful manner: considerate of the boundaries in place between their subjective artistic search for expression and an extremely sensitive political public sphere. Not Ai Weiwei. As such, the Chinese government considers him a political dissident, while his fellow artists see him as an artistic defector, someone who has given up the pursuit of rigorous aesthetic search and opting instead for naked politics. </p>
<p>He has also been called an “American running dog”, accused of exploiting the manipulation of the West and of only speaking truth to power because of his celebrity. Such definitions are not confined to China – he was also embarrassingly <a href="http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/entertainment-arts-33714740">denied a visa</a> by the UK government (since granted) so that he could join the opening of the RA’s exhibition. But beyond bureaucracy, Ai Weiwei is acknowledged as a star.</p>
<figure class="align-center zoomable">
<a href="https://images.theconversation.com/files/94840/original/image-20150915-29607-g9ulux.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=1000&fit=clip"><img alt="" src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/94840/original/image-20150915-29607-g9ulux.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/94840/original/image-20150915-29607-g9ulux.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=388&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/94840/original/image-20150915-29607-g9ulux.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=388&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/94840/original/image-20150915-29607-g9ulux.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=388&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/94840/original/image-20150915-29607-g9ulux.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=488&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/94840/original/image-20150915-29607-g9ulux.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=488&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/94840/original/image-20150915-29607-g9ulux.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=488&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px"></a>
<figcaption>
<span class="caption">Visa denied.</span>
<span class="attribution"><span class="source">Instagram</span></span>
</figcaption>
</figure>
<h2>Early work</h2>
<p>Born in Beijing in 1957, Ai Weiwei’s artistic, and one could say political, experience started in 1978, when he became a member of “The Stars”, an avant-garde Beijing art group. Like other members, he emigrated, in his case to the United States in 1981, living in New York until 1993 when he returned to Beijing because his father (<a href="http://www.independent.co.uk/news/people/obituary-ai-qing-1348347.html">Ai Qing</a>), one of China’s most famous poets, was seriously ill. </p>
<p>It was in New York that Ai Weiwei became familiar with international artists, ranging from Marcel Duchamp to Andy Warhol. He also became obsessed with photography and was dismayed when he returned to China to discover anew the difficulty of accessing the international art scene. Once back in Beijing he published a <a href="https://www.moma.org/interactives/exhibitions/2012/printout/category_works/ai_weiwei/">trilogy of art books</a> featuring images, essays and interviews with artists. The first, The Black Cover Book, focuses on iconic international works of the 20th century, whilst the second two, The White Cover Book and The Grey Cover Book, are inspired by China’s underground art movement.</p>
<p>In 1995 and 1996 he became famous for the thought-provoking performances he called <a href="http://www.newyorker.com/business/currency/the-case-of-the-million-dollar-broken-vase">Dropping a Han Dynasty Urn</a> and Breaking of Two Blue-and-White Dragon Bowls, in which he smashed a 2,000-year-old urn and 200-year-old vases (respectively). Allegedly, this was to echo the Red Guards’ vandalism during the Cultural Revolution as well as our attachment to materiality.</p>
<figure class="align-center zoomable">
<a href="https://images.theconversation.com/files/94832/original/image-20150915-16977-fzehin.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=1000&fit=clip"><img alt="" src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/94832/original/image-20150915-16977-fzehin.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/94832/original/image-20150915-16977-fzehin.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=212&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/94832/original/image-20150915-16977-fzehin.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=212&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/94832/original/image-20150915-16977-fzehin.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=212&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/94832/original/image-20150915-16977-fzehin.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=267&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/94832/original/image-20150915-16977-fzehin.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=267&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/94832/original/image-20150915-16977-fzehin.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=267&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px"></a>
<figcaption>
<span class="caption">Ai Weiwei, Dropping a Han Dynasty Urn, 1995, 3 black and white prints, each 148 x 121 cm.</span>
<span class="attribution"><span class="source">© Ai Weiwei</span></span>
</figcaption>
</figure>
<p>Another famous work is Ai Weiwei’s Study of Perspective series (1995-2003), which includes photographs of the <a href="http://www.moma.org/collection/works/117097?locale=en">White House</a>, the <a href="http://www.moma.org/collection/works/117095?locale=en">Eiffel Tower</a>, <a href="http://www.moma.org/collection/works/117096?locale=en">Piazza San Marco</a>, the <a href="http://www.moma.org/collection/works/117094?locale=en">Mona Lisa</a> and <a href="http://www.moma.org/collection/works/117098?locale=en">Tiananmen Square</a>. In all these images the artist’s middle finger is upraised in the foreground. The climax of these artworks could be considered the 2000 exhibition <a href="http://www.aaa-a.org/collection/fuck-off/">Fuck Off</a>, which Ai Weiwei curated as an alternative to the Shanghai Biennale.</p>
<p>In the meantime, Ai Weiwei designed both his house and architecture studio FAKE Design (opened in 2003) in Caochangdi, a farming village on the outskirts of Beijing. This has since become an artists’ colony.</p>
<h2>Earthquake</h2>
<p>Despite the political nature of much of his work up to this point, 2008 was the year he really became a “dissident”. This was prompted by <a href="http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/science-environment-22398684">the earthquake</a> that struck Sichuan province on May 12 2008 and resulted in the death of 69,180 people. Among the victims were thousands of children who were schooled in very poor quality buildings that became known as “tofu-dregs schoolhouses”: built cutting corners, allegedly with the involvement of corrupted government officials. Echoing the childrens’ parents outcry, Ai Weiwei got to work on a series of performances and photographic artworks drawing attention to government corruption. He also used social media to denounce the government’s campaign to silence angry parents.</p>
<p>In May 2009 his blog was <a href="http://www.afterall.org/online/ai-wei-wei/#.VflzIp1Viko">shut down</a>. On April 3 2011, he was <a href="http://www.theguardian.com/artanddesign/2011/apr/03/ai-weiwei-detained-chinese-police">arrested</a> at Beijing Capital Airport. His passport was confiscated and he was detained incommunicado for 81 days on alleged charges of bigamy and tax evasion. Once released on bail he remained under strict surveillance. In 2012 he was fined <a href="http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/entertainment-arts-33714740">15m yuan</a> (£1.55m) for tax evasion in a civil case, but had never been convicted for any crime. </p>
<p>On June 22 2012, exactly a year after his release, Ai Weiwei launched a project drawing attention to government surveillance. He set up four cameras in his home and broadcast it as a live stream at <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vU2vq2aXOHM">weiweicam.com</a>. The site received five million hits before being shut down by the government. In 2010 he took this further, constructing marble CCTV cameras and presenting them as artworks. </p>
<figure class="align-center ">
<img alt="" src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/94833/original/image-20150915-16966-nwfx1r.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/94833/original/image-20150915-16966-nwfx1r.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=600&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/94833/original/image-20150915-16966-nwfx1r.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=600&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/94833/original/image-20150915-16966-nwfx1r.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=600&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/94833/original/image-20150915-16966-nwfx1r.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=754&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/94833/original/image-20150915-16966-nwfx1r.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=754&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/94833/original/image-20150915-16966-nwfx1r.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=754&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px">
<figcaption>
<span class="caption">Ai Weiwei, Surveillance Camera, 2010, Marble, 39.2 x 39.8 x 19 cm.</span>
<span class="attribution"><span class="source">© Ai Weiwei, courtesy of Ai Weiwei Studio</span></span>
</figcaption>
</figure>
<p>Ai Weiwei has called the internet his motherland. He now uses Twitter to make everything visible, in an attempt to defeat the surveillance-obsessive paranoia of State policing.</p>
<h2>Past and present</h2>
<p>Ai Weiwei is already well known in the UK. In 2012 he collaborated with Herzog & de Mueron to design that year’s <a href="https://www.herzogdemeuron.com/index/projects/complete-works/376-400/400-serpentine-gallery-pavilion.html">Serpentine Gallery Pavilion</a>, excavated beneath the lawn of Kensington Gardens. </p>
<p>His 2010 <a href="http://www.tate.org.uk/whats-on/tate-modern/exhibition/unilever-series-ai-weiwei-sunflower-seeds">installation</a> at the Tate Modern’s Turbine Hall also caused a splash: he had commissioned the production of one hundred million ceramic seeds, all seemingly identical but nevertheless unique, created over two and a half years by 1,600 artisans in Jingdezhen (Jiangxi province), where the kilns to produce the Imperial porcelain were located starting from the Song Dynasty Jingde Emperor’s reign onwards. The sunflower seeds were acclaimed as “the seeds of hope” and encouraged a critical reflection on the geo-politics of cultural and economic exchange in light of the “Made in China” phenomenon.</p>
<p>But his wider and more explicitly political work has not yet received a dedicated airing in the UK and so his first major exhibition in London is especially of interest. This year Ai Weiwei was nominated as the recipient of the <a href="https://www.amnesty.org/en/latest/news/2015/03/joan-baez-and-ai-weiwei-to-receive-top-award/">Amnesty International Ambassador of Conscience Award 2015</a> (together with American folk singer and writer Joan Baez), but he couldn’t participate in the ceremony. His passport was finally returned to him on July 21 2015, but his struggle with surveillance is still not over. </p>
<p>At 10am on September 17, Ai Weiwei <a href="http://www.independent.co.uk/news/people/ai-weiwei-and-anish-kapoor-to-walk-through-london-to-raise-awareness-of-refugee-crisis-10502245.html">joined hands</a> with another Royal Academician, the world-renowned sculptor Anish Kapoor, to reinforce the link between art and politics. </p>
<p>They <a href="http://www.theguardian.com/uk-news/2015/sep/17/ai-weiwei-anish-kapoor-london-walk-refugees">walked</a> from the Royal Academy east out of London, each carrying a blanket in solidarity with refugees the world over: a clear demonstration of the visual power of political engagement.</p><img src="https://counter.theconversation.com/content/47177/count.gif" alt="The Conversation" width="1" height="1" />
<p class="fine-print"><em><span>Maurizio Marinelli does not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organisation that would benefit from this article, and has disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond their academic appointment.</span></em></p>
What you should know about Chinese artist Ai Weiwei.
Maurizio Marinelli, Senior Lecturer In East Asian History (History) and Co-Director of Sussex Asia Centre, University of Sussex
Licensed as Creative Commons – attribution, no derivatives.
tag:theconversation.com,2011:article/39818
2015-04-10T13:13:15Z
2015-04-10T13:13:15Z
Meet the artist running for election with absolutely no policies
<figure><img src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/77544/original/image-20150409-15236-1rdkvzi.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=496&fit=clip" /><figcaption><span class="caption">Small party politics just got smaller.</span> <span class="attribution"><span class="source">Gordon Shrigley</span></span></figcaption></figure><p>Art and politics have long been bed-mates – perhaps most notoriously from a perspective of protest, but also through visionary modes as well. Art is a vehicle through which “what is” can be replaced by “what could be”, whether through an angry violent voice or an optimistically utopian one. </p>
<p>But more recently art has developed a more nebulous relationship to politics. This May, there are two artists running in the general election. One, known as <a href="http://bobandrobertasmith.co.uk/why-im-standing-against-michael-gove/">Bob & Roberta Smith</a> (Patrick Brill) has a clear message: he wants art and art education to be recognised and promoted as a valuable part of society. Artists in the constituency of Surrey Heath will no doubt vote for him for obvious reasons. </p>
<p>But the artist/architect <a href="http://gordon-shrigley.com/campaign/">Gordon Shrigley</a> is also running in Hackney South and Shoreditch. And Shrigley, in his own words, has nothing to offer but offer itself. </p>
<figure class="align-center ">
<img alt="" src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/77531/original/image-20150409-15223-gt53ae.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/77531/original/image-20150409-15223-gt53ae.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=415&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/77531/original/image-20150409-15223-gt53ae.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=415&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/77531/original/image-20150409-15223-gt53ae.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=415&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/77531/original/image-20150409-15223-gt53ae.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=522&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/77531/original/image-20150409-15223-gt53ae.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=522&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/77531/original/image-20150409-15223-gt53ae.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=522&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px">
<figcaption>
<span class="caption">The candidate.</span>
<span class="attribution"><span class="source">Gordon Shrigley</span></span>
</figcaption>
</figure>
<p>So who would vote for a candidate that admits he has absolutely nothing to offer? What is enticing about a candidate with nothing to say? Is this about some gloomy comment being made about the state of our society? I caught up with Shrigley at Hackney’s The Laundry (his choice) and asked him why now is the moment for an artist to be running a content-less campaign. </p>
<hr>
<p><strong>Lois Rowe</strong>: Why now? Is there something about this moment that feels timely for an artist to be running?</p>
<p><strong>Gordon Shrigley</strong>: Well it was a reaction to the amazing energy and creativity of all the different protest movements that came out of the banking crisis. Apart from the obvious ones like Occupy there were lots of sub-groups. There was a group coming out of Greenwich University that used to give lectures on economy in bank foyers on an ad hoc basis. There was so much going on. It was noticed by commentators at the time that a lot of alternative narratives being used were coming from the 19th century. So, you know, the sales of Das Kapital went through the roof. I speak as a former member of the Communist Party.</p>
<p><strong>Rowe</strong>: And how did your reaction to those movements and their concerns lead to your current campaign?</p>
<p><strong>Shrigley</strong>: Obviously I don’t have any policies because I’m not a politician. And also there is a history of the independent maniac standing up and thinking they have all the answers for the world and they either go and live in a shed and write some long manifesto and start blowing people up or they stand as some crack-pot in the election. And obviously there is a history of that which you could fall into, but that would be to limit the possibilities in a way. The idea with the campaign is to create a clearing where the possibility for new narratives is open. It creates a question really. Because the question is not really there. It is and it isn’t in a sense.</p>
<figure class="align-center ">
<img alt="" src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/77556/original/image-20150409-15219-1tfifoj.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/77556/original/image-20150409-15219-1tfifoj.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=424&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/77556/original/image-20150409-15219-1tfifoj.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=424&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/77556/original/image-20150409-15219-1tfifoj.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=424&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/77556/original/image-20150409-15219-1tfifoj.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=533&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/77556/original/image-20150409-15219-1tfifoj.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=533&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/77556/original/image-20150409-15219-1tfifoj.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=533&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px">
<figcaption>
<span class="caption">Something to vote for?</span>
<span class="attribution"><span class="source">Gordon Shrigley</span></span>
</figcaption>
</figure>
<p><strong>Rowe</strong>: Are you sincere about this desire to create or provoke new narratives or is the campaign ironic? The reason I ask is that for me there is a confusion for me around the agenda of the campaign. I know that Jonathon Jones <a href="http://www.theguardian.com/artanddesign/jonathanjonesblog/2015/jan/13/gordon-shrigley-art-uk-election-2015-hogarth-ukip">took a swipe at it</a> and said if you were to win it would mean one less Labour MP and one more expression of nihilism … And I can see where he’s getting that from because one of your campaign slogans is “I have seen the future and it doesn’t exist”.</p>
<p><strong>Shrigley</strong>: I mean that in the sense that the future has not yet been written …</p>
<p><strong>Rowe</strong>: Well that statement for me says “there is no future” … which is nihilistic.</p>
<p><strong>Shrigley</strong>: That isn’t a problem. And I know people will read and misread things and that is part of the discourse.</p>
<p><strong>Rowe</strong>: So you don’t really have a strategy or ambition towards actually having a seat per se. I mean, what would you do if you won? Would you be interested in getting more funding for the arts? That would make me vote for you because I could say here is someone who is going to stand our corner.</p>
<p><strong>Shrigley</strong>: Patrick Brill is standing on a classic arts left-wing ticket. And I think that’s totally fine but I think it’s very archaic in a way. And I think it would be very shortsighted of me just to promote my own social group. In a way that would be a very simple way of deconstructing the whole thing. So I’m not standing for artists.</p>
<p><strong>Rowe</strong>: So you’re standing for “the people”?</p>
<p><strong>Shrigley</strong>: No, I’m standing for the potentiality of the space of the imagination that we all have … So let’s just say that I’m shot to fame on a whirlwind of whatever and I find myself in parliament. What would I do? I think I’d do exactly what I’ve done all the time. I think I’d just practice art. Because art – well good art – is the production of new possibilities, new ways of thinking. I think that would be what I would do.</p>
<hr>
<figure class="align-center ">
<img alt="" src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/77558/original/image-20150409-15219-al3tbb.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/77558/original/image-20150409-15219-al3tbb.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=424&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/77558/original/image-20150409-15219-al3tbb.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=424&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/77558/original/image-20150409-15219-al3tbb.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=424&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/77558/original/image-20150409-15219-al3tbb.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=533&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/77558/original/image-20150409-15219-al3tbb.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=533&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/77558/original/image-20150409-15219-al3tbb.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=533&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px">
<figcaption>
<span class="caption">Gets you thinking.</span>
<span class="attribution"><span class="source">Gordon Shrigley</span></span>
</figcaption>
</figure>
<p>I left the interview somewhat bewildered as to who will understand enough of the Shrigley <a href="https://www.academia.edu/9923762/Campaign_Project_for_an_Unidentified_Political_Object">manifesto</a> to care about his political intentions. How will phrases like the “potentiality of the space of the imagination” appeal to potential voters? Surely it’s better to cast your vote on a candidate that promises something rather than the certainty of nothing at all?</p>
<p>For Shrigley it is the form of the campaign – the form which is his mere status as a contender occupying a place in which conversation can happen – that is of greater value than filling that space with agendas or policies. Like protests such as Occupy it is the facilitation of dialogue and the promotion of new possibilities that activate the work. </p>
<p>But who will vote for him? What would he do about the real problems in politics like immigration and education funding? I asked Shrigley directly what he would say to a mother asking him about childcare reforms and he said he would predict a reply along the lines of: </p>
<blockquote>
<p>I don’t want to answer that question but have you thought about this … Your question is motivated by a structural narrative that we all fall into. </p>
</blockquote>
<p>I don’t think dialogue gets much more political than that. The audience for Shrigley’s campaign therefore is questionable. I expect him to alienate the most patient of potential voters. He is interested in facilitating a space for new narratives. Good art – and I agree with him – does this. It provokes viewers to question assumptions and produces new possibilities. It provokes its audience to do so. But whether an artist can do so with an empty campaign? I’m not convinced.</p><img src="https://counter.theconversation.com/content/39818/count.gif" alt="The Conversation" width="1" height="1" />
<p class="fine-print"><em><span>Lois Rowe does not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organisation that would benefit from this article, and has disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond their academic appointment.</span></em></p>
Gordon Shrigley is running for election with nothing to offer ‘but offer itself’ – Lois Rowe met up him to discuss.
Lois Rowe, Course Leader and Fine Art Programme Director, University of the Arts London
Licensed as Creative Commons – attribution, no derivatives.
tag:theconversation.com,2011:article/21640
2014-01-29T01:25:20Z
2014-01-29T01:25:20Z
Refuge and refusal: why theatre about asylum seekers matters
<figure><img src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/39380/original/qy7fx87t-1390191847.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=496&fit=clip" /><figcaption><span class="caption">The Tampa showdown in 2001 prompted playwrights to tackle the topic of asylum seekers.</span> <span class="attribution"><span class="source">AAP Image/Wallenius Wilhelmsen</span></span></figcaption></figure><p>When, some eight or nine years ago, I began researching the responses of Australian and refugee theatre makers, filmmakers and writers to asylum seeker debates it was very easy to share the hopes for political change that underpinned much of their work.</p>
<p>Theatre is a fundamentally ephemeral art, and one of my aims in editing the new collection, <a href="http://www.currency.com.au/product_detail.aspx?productid=2788">Staging Asylum: Contemporary Australian Plays about Refugees</a>, was to account in some way for theatre’s unique role in heated and ongoing cultural conversations about how Australia treats asylum seekers. </p>
<p><a href="http://www.actorsforrefugees.org.au/">Theatre movements</a> that opposed the baldly punitive asylum seeker policies introduced by the Keating Labor government and fortified under Howard’s conservative coalition tended to coalesce around many of the same imperative verbs as activist organisations: Change! Stop! Free! Support!</p>
<p>There’s a habit we English speakers have of turning to French for neat epigrammatic flourishes: how apt, for instance, is that Gallic philosophical shrug, <em>plus ça change, plus c’est la même chose</em> (the more it changes, the more it’s the same thing), to the subject of refugees in this country?</p>
<h2>What can political theatre do?</h2>
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<img alt="" src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/39080/original/p9g4zvjy-1389750260.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=237&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/39080/original/p9g4zvjy-1389750260.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=918&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/39080/original/p9g4zvjy-1389750260.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=918&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/39080/original/p9g4zvjy-1389750260.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=918&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/39080/original/p9g4zvjy-1389750260.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=1154&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/39080/original/p9g4zvjy-1389750260.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=1154&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/39080/original/p9g4zvjy-1389750260.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=1154&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px">
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<span class="caption">Staging Asylum, edited by Emma Cox and published by Currency Press.</span>
<span class="attribution"><span class="source">Currency Press</span></span>
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<p>Theatre is unique in this context because of its peculiar capacity to inspire subjective (personal) and intersubjective (collective) meaning-making. </p>
<p>And while I’m sure plays about asylum seekers’ plights tend to generate discussion among those already sympathetic more often than they provoke conversions, they nevertheless push discussion forward – crucially, within the public sphere, where critics who are <a href="http://www.sievx.com/articles/twobrothers/">for or against a play’s politics may enter the fray</a>. </p>
<p>Staging Asylum is, perhaps surprisingly, the first of its kind, and it complements academic work that has <a href="http://www.doubledialogues.com/in_stead/in_stead_iss03/Hazou.html">painstakingly archived plays</a> that might otherwise have faded from memory.</p>
<p>The purpose of political arts is sometimes assumed to be broadly akin to that of activism – certainly, <a href="http://www.theguardian.com/stage/theatreblog/2010/jul/15/verbatim-theatre-aftermath">politically-inflected theatre is frequently evaluated in terms of what it might <em>do</em></a> – even though few theatre practitioners would wholly subordinate the functions of imagining, communicating, questioning, reflecting and crafting to the aim of efficacy. Anyhow, intention isn’t a zero-sum equation.</p>
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<img alt="" src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/39590/original/pvgjpvch-1390344360.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/39590/original/pvgjpvch-1390344360.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=402&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/39590/original/pvgjpvch-1390344360.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=402&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/39590/original/pvgjpvch-1390344360.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=402&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/39590/original/pvgjpvch-1390344360.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=505&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/39590/original/pvgjpvch-1390344360.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=505&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/39590/original/pvgjpvch-1390344360.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=505&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px">
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<span class="caption">A scene from version 1.0’s A Certain Maritime Incident.</span>
<span class="attribution"><span class="source">Heidrun Lohr</span></span>
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</figure>
<h2>Doubts and limits</h2>
<p>I’m sure that, in the last two or three years, a good many of us involved in Australian theatre, in whatever role, have had to recalibrate our beliefs in the cumulative capacity of theatre about refugees to trouble consciences and topple policies. </p>
<p>Obviously, this hasn’t happened. </p>
<p>The current global neoliberal consensus dovetails all too elegantly and adamantly into moral arguments for why political leaders of wealthy nations have an obligation to guard against errant and burdensome foreigners. </p>
<p>That <em>some</em> foreigners of the impoverished variety <em>are</em> both errant and burdensome is convenient; certainly this seems to be a far easier discursive pill to swallow than less digestible statistics on net benefits (and here the diet of Australians seems broadly similar to that in Britain, where the BBC has just screened a <a href="http://www.bbc.co.uk/mediacentre/proginfo/2014/01/hidden-world-of-britains-immigrants.html">documentary on criminality and addiction among undocumented immigrants</a> in Ilford, north-east London).</p>
<p>Even though refugees are owed protection from <a href="http://www.unhcr.org/pages/49da0e466.html">UN Convention</a> signatory nations irrespective of their economic value, their presence is nevertheless weighed in popular discourse in terms of contribution versus burden. Refugee advocates themselves frequently orient their arguments around this ledger, presenting <a href="http://welcomerefugees.org/facts/">myth-busting arguments</a> for why refugees are not only economically “viable”, but also morally deserving.</p>
<h2>Why these plays?</h2>
<p>In selecting plays for Staging Asylum, I wasn’t interested in resurrecting the moral standing of asylum seekers and refugees – after all, a presumption of generalised “innocence” serves characters in plays far less well than it does the accused in our criminal justice system. I chose plays that staged the consequences of Australia’s dominant narratives on asylum in the lives of refugees and Australians.</p>
<p>What might surprise readers is the book’s preponderance of ironic and satiric work. </p>
<p>The first play, CMI (A Certain Maritime Incident), created by Sydney political theatre collective <a href="http://www.versiononepointzero.com/">version 1.0</a> and performed in Sydney and Canberra in 2004, pushes verbatim theatre beyond naïve transparency to “remix” the 2002 Senate Select Committee on the <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Children_Overboard_affair">Children Overboard incident</a> and <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SIEV_X">SIEV X disaster</a>. </p>
<p>Two darkly funny plays by young playwrights, both of which premiered at Brisbane’s Metro Arts Theatre in 2006, Victoria Carless’s <a href="http://www.abc.net.au/local/videos/2008/11/11/2416959.htm">The Rainbow Dark</a> and Ben Eltham’s <a href="http://dro.deakin.edu.au/view/DU:30057994">The Pacific Solution</a>, reimagine Australian suburban homes as sites of petty anxieties over the right to belong, and the power to exclude. </p>
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<img alt="" src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/39591/original/x22dq5s5-1390344440.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/39591/original/x22dq5s5-1390344440.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=407&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/39591/original/x22dq5s5-1390344440.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=407&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/39591/original/x22dq5s5-1390344440.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=407&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/39591/original/x22dq5s5-1390344440.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=511&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/39591/original/x22dq5s5-1390344440.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=511&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/39591/original/x22dq5s5-1390344440.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=511&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px">
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<span class="caption">A scene from version one point zero’s A Certain Maritime Incident.</span>
<span class="attribution"><span class="source">Heidrun Lohr</span></span>
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</figure>
<p>Linda Jaivin, something of an expert in the obscure genre of <a href="http://www.theage.com.au/news/book-reviews/the-infernal-optimist/2006/05/05/1146335910962.html">refugee satire</a>, injects the odd wry exchange into an otherwise sombre short play, Halal-el-Mashakel, inspired by young detainees she got to know as a visitor to <a href="https://www.immi.gov.au/About/Pages/villawood-immigration-detention-centre-idc.aspx">Villawood IDC</a>. Jaivin’s play was performed in Sydney, Canberra, Wollongong, Newcastle and Adelaide in 2003 and 2004.</p>
<p>Two plays in Staging Asylum were written by refugees. </p>
<p>The collaborative community production, <a href="http://rizamanalo.com/Video/Pages/Journey_of_Asylum_-_Waiting.html">Journey of Asylum – Waiting</a>, devised by members of the Asylum Seeker Resource Centre in Melbourne in 2010 and directed by Catherine Simmonds, presents a series of vignettes based upon members’ experiences before, during and after their arrival in Australia. </p>
<p>Towfiq Al-Qady’s <a href="http://www.realtimearts.net/article/67/7890">Nothing But Nothing</a>, performed by the writer at Brisbane’s Metro Arts Theatre in 2005, is a solo, stream-of-consciousness narrative that distils Al-Qady’s experiences and those of other Iraqi refugees. </p>
<p>It was Al-Qady’s play that pushed me most insistently to question my investment in <a href="http://journals.hil.unb.ca/index.php/tric/article/view/7096/8155">the argument</a> that tropes of refugee victimhood reinforce political powerlessness and risk voyeurism. Al-Qady’s text, with its direct (and yes, earnest) account of victimisation and suffering, reminded me that when it comes to certain stories about one’s own life, any register other than distress may be a luxury.</p>
<p>That the relationship between theatre and political change is neither direct nor inevitable doesn’t mean people are going to stop making politically motivated work. </p>
<p>The six plays in Staging Asylum register the fact that the precipitous erosion of asylum seekers’ rights in the post-<a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tampa_affair">Tampa</a> era has not gone unremarked in Australian theatre.</p><img src="https://counter.theconversation.com/content/21640/count.gif" alt="The Conversation" width="1" height="1" />
<p class="fine-print"><em><span>Emma Cox does not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organisation that would benefit from this article, and has disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond their academic appointment.</span></em></p>
When, some eight or nine years ago, I began researching the responses of Australian and refugee theatre makers, filmmakers and writers to asylum seeker debates it was very easy to share the hopes for political…
Emma Cox, Lecturer in Drama and Theatre, Royal Holloway University of London
Licensed as Creative Commons – attribution, no derivatives.