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.”
