Thinking back to our last discussion that seemed to pivot on the role of activism as an embedded part of one’s research and/or practice, I came across something I penned back in 1999 fyi:

 

“For [Lucy R.] Lippard, who was a co-founder of  several important collectives

including: the feminist art collective Heresies, Political Art

Documentation and Distribution and Women’s Action Coalition,

activist art is the opposite of those aesthetic practices that, however

well-intentioned or overtly political in content, remain dependent on

the space of the museum for their meaning.  Think of Picasso’s

Guernica which despite the artist’s personal abhorrence toward

fascism and war, is in its first and last instance an oil painting

entirely dependent on an institutional frame . To produce activist art

is therefore to put one’s political commitment to the test, first

through non-institutional forms of cultural distribution and

interaction –art for demonstrations and picket lines, mail art, on city

walls or on the sides of buses, art in the middle of shopping malls

and crowded plazas –and second to use that form of dissemination

to speak about social injustices with an audience who presumably

has little patience for refined aestheticism but does care about war,

inequality, political freedom and protecting the environment.

Yet, activist art harbors its own unexamined idealism. This is most

evident when the committed artist presumes to speak to those who

lie “outside the defiles of art world.”

Thinking back to our last discussion that seemed to pivot on the role of activism as an embedded part of one’s research and/or practice, I came across something I penned back in 1999 fyi:

 

“For [Lucy R.] Lippard, who was a co-founder of  several important collectives

including: the feminist art collective Heresies, Political Art

Documentation and Distribution and Women’s Action Coalition,

activist art is the opposite of those aesthetic practices that, however

well-intentioned or overtly political in content, remain dependent on

the space of the museum for their meaning.  Think of Picasso’s

Guernica which despite the artist’s personal abhorrence toward

fascism and war, is in its first and last instance an oil painting

entirely dependent on an institutional frame . To produce activist art

is therefore to put one’s political commitment to the test, first

through non-institutional forms of cultural distribution and

interaction –art for demonstrations and picket lines, mail art, on city

walls or on the sides of buses, art in the middle of shopping malls

and crowded plazas –and second to use that form of dissemination

to speak about social injustices with an audience who presumably

has little patience for refined aestheticism but does care about war,

inequality, political freedom and protecting the environment.

Yet, activist art harbors its own unexamined idealism. This is most

evident when the committed artist presumes to speak to those who

lie “outside the defiles of art world.”