Week 8 - Art and Resistance

Dr John Crossley

#8

HSFC FOUNDATION SEMINAR

Situationist International - France 1957 -

The Situationist International (SI) was an internationalist group of revolutionaries based mainly in Europe with very restricted membership. Founded in 1957, it reached its peak of influence in the May 1968 protests in France.

With their ideas rooted in Marxism and the 20th-century European artistic avantgardes, they advocated experiences of life

alternative to those admitted by advanced capitalism, for the fulfillment of human desires. For this purpose they suggested and experimented with the “construction of situations�, namely the setting up of environments favorable for the fulfillment of such desires. Using methods drawn from the arts, they developed a series of experimental fields of study, including unitary urbanism and psychogeography.

Under the Pavement the beach (above) Never Work (left)

Andy Warhol The riots at Birmingham, Alabama, in the spring of 1963 were notorious across America, and with this wide publicity the event was one of the climaxes of the Civil Rights Movement. Supporters of Martin Luther King, protesting at segregation at lunch counters, were attacked by the police with dogs and water hoses, and King himself was arrested. Warhol contributed this small print to a portfolio of work by ten artists, published the year after the riot.

The image is changed only in size and status from a newspaper photograph. In the form of a print in this portfolio it commemorates the tensions in American popu-

lar life at the time, and forcefully illustrates the distance of the arts from such events.

The work of Andy Warhol signals the coming of the consumer age and the development of a mass culture that both reflects and shapes contemporary life. This image is drawn from a newspaper photograph of a riot in 1960s America where black people were still segregated from white people. It has been recreated as a silkscreen print that typifies Andy Warhol’s adaptation of the medium of mass communication for his work and his questioning of the boundaries of art.

Electric Chair 1964 Birmingham Race Riot 1964

Week 8 -

Art as Resistance

Mary Kelly - Post-Partum Document 1973-79 Post-Partum Document is a six-year exploration of the mother-child relationship.

When it was first shown at the ICA in London in 1976, the work provoked tabloid outrage because Documentation I incorporated stained nappy liners. Each of the six-part series concentrates on a formative moment in her son’s mastery of language and her own sense of loss, moving between the voices

of the mother, child and analytic observer. Informed by feminism and psychoanalysis, the work has had a profound influence on the development and critique of conceptual art.

Kelly has made works that examine complicated social issues such as the ramifications of war, and the politics of how our identities are constructed. In Post Partum

Document, she was engaging in a discussion that was happening at the emergence of secondwave feminism about the way in which women worked in the home. At a time where many feminist artists were looking at reclaiming the body through performance – such as Marina Abramovic and Carole Schneeman – or revising history in order to incorporate our foremothers – such as Judy Chicago – Kelly looked more directly at the invisible daily experience of women engaged in domestic labour. long-term critique of conceptualism, informed by the feminist theory of the early womenʼs movement in which she was actively involved throughout the 1970s

Film and Politics

Ai Weiwei

Chinese contemporary artist, active in sculpture, installation, architecture, curating, photography, film, and social, political and cultural criticism

Ai Weiwei has spoken out eloquently for the universality of human rights and the worldwide hunger for freedom. Even if all the charges China are apparently raising were true, it would not alter anything – and given his brutal detention it is reasonable to assume they are false.

Something historically obscene is happen-

ing here. It is as if different times exist simultaneously. In one time-stream, democracy is in global demand and artists including Ai Weiwei are revealing the richness of China’s culture to the world. Yet in the sinister second stream it is 1950, and dissidents can be blackguarded and bullied with total impunity by a system that takes Orwell’s 1984 as a handbook.

As a political activist, he has been highly and openly critical of the Chinese Government’s stance on democracy and human rights. He has investigated government corruption and cover-ups, in particular the Sichuan schools corruption scandal following the collapse of so-called “tofu-skin schools” in the 2008 Sichuan earthquake.

[4] In 2011, following his arrest at Beijing airport on 3 April, he was held for over two months without any official charges being

filed; officials alluded to their allegations of “economic crimes” (tax evasion). In October 2011 ArtReview magazine named Ai number one in their annual Power 100 list. The decision was criticised by the Chinese authorities. Chinese Foreign Ministry spokesman Liu Weimin responded, “China has many artists who have sufficient ability. We feel that a selection that is based purely on a political bias and perspective has violated the objectives of the magazine”.

Discuss Does Art have a role in changing society?

Is the purpose of Art to change society: for example a lower status for women or ethnic groups??

Is art just a small part of a wider project to transform society?

Should art not challenge how things are?

Is there nothing that needs changing?

Are young artists interested in the politics behind art?

Are the problems to big for culture to overcome?