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FREE, 2016, Doug Aitken
FREE, 2016, by LA artist Doug Aitken, currently at the Victoria Miro gallery in London. Photograph: Courtesy 303 Gallery, New York; Galerie Eva Presenhuber, Zürch; Victoria Miro, London; and Regen Projects, Los Angeles
FREE, 2016, by LA artist Doug Aitken, currently at the Victoria Miro gallery in London. Photograph: Courtesy 303 Gallery, New York; Galerie Eva Presenhuber, Zürch; Victoria Miro, London; and Regen Projects, Los Angeles

Power to… the art of protest

This article is more than 7 years old

Politically engaged art is thriving again, finding new ways to challenge in a complex digital world. We look at the rich history of protest art and, on the eve of a new group show, talk to radical artists about their work

In repressive states, the role of the artist is unambiguous: to assert the individual imagination, the singular power that all dictatorships fear. I remember once talking to the Czech dissident and writer Ivan Klima, who had been subject both to the arbitrary horror of a Nazi concentration camp as a child and the long grinding years of Soviet occupation in which he had become a “non-person” for two decades, harassed constantly by secret police and unable to speak or write in public. He survived by “living in truth”. “I have always pursued inner freedom,” he said. “I have never been censored.”

Klima was part of that group of artists and writers who gathered in the Magic Lantern theatre in Prague in 1989 to orchestrate the “Velvet Revolution” and see their dreams of liberation realised. And how did it feel to experience freedom, to have the external world finally correspond with that interior life for the first time?

Czech writer Ivan Klima: ‘I have never been censored.’ Photograph: Eamonn McCabe/The Guardian

“It is interesting that a man very quickly accepts freedom as a normal thing,” Klima said. “Though we had fought for it for so long, after a few weeks or months we did not think about it. Rather you start to see things you would like to change, things that make you angry, corruption and so forth, environmental problems, the obsession with the market…” Habits of protest die hard.

There are, of course, many courageous artists across the world with Klima’s stubborn courage. Ai Weiwei is only the best known, but he remains a crucial figure, one irrepressible man living in truth who reveals the billion lies attending China’s advance into the world. Weiwei used to reject the idea he was a political figure, insisting that he was only an artist (as if the two were distinguishable). After his imprisonment in 2012, his tone seemed to change. “People are always wondering if I am an artist or politician,” he said. “Maybe I’ll just clearly tell you: whatever I do is not art. Let’s say it is just objects or materials, movies or writing, but not art, OK?”

In Russia, Pussy Riot have acquired something of Weiwei’s power – the power to prove the futility of censorship and the integrity of protest. They took their inspiration from the Voina, a group which, like all the best art political movements, trailed a manifesto. Point one read: “Create the rebirth of heroical behavioural ideals of an artist-intellectual… the artist as romantic hero, who prevails over evil. Produce lively romantic models in contrast with today’s soulless commercial conceptual art.” Voina’s most famous performance was a protest against the 2008 election of President Medvedev. This “lively romantic” act took place in the Moscow Biological Museum, beside a stuffed bear. Five couples from Voina undressed and had vigorous sex in the hall. One of the participants, Alexei Plutser-Sarno, described the work as the only honest portrait of pre-election Russia: “Everybody fucks each other, and the puppy bear” [a nickname for Medvedev] “looks on with an unconcealed scorn.”

Pussy Riot perform in Moscow’s Christ the Saviour cathedral to protest Putin’s return to the Kremlin, 2012. Photograph: Sergey Ponomarev/AP

In the west, where freedoms of speech are, theoretically at least, guaranteed in law, the challenge for an artist to make an effective political statement is more complex. Where anything goes, where we are flooded daily with millions of uncensored images, what honestly gives us pause, or makes a statement? Perhaps as a result of this, the art world, that moving spectacle of expos and fairs and biennials – Voina’s “soulless commercial conceptual art” – can appear to exist in a self-referential bubble. The suddenly hardening political moment, however – where across Europe and in the US, liberal certainties feel under threat – seems to call for a different kind of artistic engagement. What that might look like is still under construction.

Street art and the outlaw sloganeering of Banksy was one effort to test the in-house freedoms of the gallery in less permissive spaces. Another, more rigorous attempt would be the inspiring project of the American Theaster Gates in Chicago’s South Side. Gates is using the material of his historically blighted neighbourhood, repurposed as art, to regenerate entire blocks of that community and connect its residents with a radical civil rights past, making black lives matter in bricks and mortar. His 2011 collection, In the Event of a Race Riot, coiled a series decommissioned fire hoses from the civil rights era in gilt-frame boxes. They sold for hundreds of thousands of dollars and Gates ploughed the money directly back into community projects.

A Banksy mural of Steve Jobs on a wall that demarcates the former border to the migrant camp, in Calais, 2016. Photograph: David Levene/The Guardian

Other artists pursue different strategies. Protest, which opens later this month at the Victoria Miro gallery in London, will dramatise some of them. It is a show, in some ways, nostalgic for the dualities of 60s protest (currently celebrated in the V&A exhibition You Say You Want a Revolution?). Taking as a starting point the American painter Alice Neel’s prophetic 1936 painting, Nazis Murder Jews, which depicts a Communist party torchlight parade through the streets of New York City, it collects new and recent pieces that address in different ways our own disorienting political moment. Work that confronts, often obliquely, the struggles around migration, censorship, Black Lives Matter, the rise of surveillance and the re-emergence, across Europe and in the US, of the populist right.

Speaking to some of the artists involved in the show in the past week, I found a consensus about two things. The first was that, with the phenomenon of Trump in America and the threats to cohesive democracy in Europe, the need for a politically engaged art has rarely been more urgent. The second was that the means to that end are necessarily nuanced. It is harder to challenge power if, in a globalised world, you don’t know precisely where power lies. How do you stick it to the man, when the man in question is not a state or a corporation, but, increasingly a tax-dodging global network of information systems run by smart former hippies with untold wealth?

Nazis Murder Jews, 1936, by Alice Neel. Photograph: Courtesy the Artist’s Estate and Victoria Miro, London

Western artists are generally uneasy at being viewed as political in the way that Weiwei has come to accept; they see it as a limit on their asserted freedom. Michael Elmgreen, one half of the celebrated provocateur duo Elmgreen & Dragset, winced a little when I used the phrase “protest art”. He doesn’t, he said, feel comfortable under that banner. “I feel that more political activists like Pussy Riot have a different kind of approach. Our statements are more influenced by ideas of infiltration.”

Why not something more direct?

“Take something like Occupy Wall Street,” he says. “You’re making yourself as an otherness, an opponent, you try to fight power in that way. Unfortunately, in 99% of cases you lose because you are not strong enough to fight an established power structure. So we prefer to go in and try to clarify how easily these existing structures could be changed. Show how fragile and unstable they are.”

Most famously, with this project in mind, the duo built a replica Prada shop in the middle of the howling Texas desert, to suggest even artful capitalism would pass.

Elmgreen & Dragset’s adobe Prada Marfa store in Texas, 2006. Photograph: Matt Slocum/AP

When showing work in China, some western artists have had a small taste of what Ai WeiWei encounters daily. Sarah Sze, the American sculptor, who creates wonderful, unsettling mind maps of consumerist detritus that spill across the gallery floor, fell foul of the Chinese censors in Guangzhou. While in no way comparing her situation to that of Ai Weiwei, in some ways confronting the blunt instrument of censorship gave her work extra force and clarity, she suggested.

“Protest requires focus,” she said. “If the Occupy movement could have focused around one moment or image – like John and Yoko in a bed – it would have helped that movement a lot. My work really reflects the sense, I think, that we have masses of information coming at us from sources we don’t know, and the speed of that makes the hierarchy of what to protest against very slippery all the time.”

Sze is somewhat wistful for the simple visual protests of her student years. “At my American college the entire main campus was filled with shanty towns protesting apartheid. A lot of students were kicked out as a result. Those are the kinds of things where art can be dangerous to power.”

In our digital age did she feel that any solid act of making becomes a political act?

“There’s an incredible longing for stillness,” she said, “in the way that you stand in front of a Vermeer and are having a physical conversation with Vermeer across time and place. The idea of the hand-made itself can be quite conservative. But what seems important to me is how you create a moment where you feel the presence of the maker, a live conversation. You see it in the growth of live events and talks and happenings. The premium on storytelling. Museum attendance rates even have gone through the ceiling.”

Ai Weiwei’s installation depicting a scene from his time in prison. Photograph: Andy Rain/EPA

That one-to-one connection in itself might suggest a form of protest at the way culture and relationships are now mediated – the acceptance that conversation and intimacy are structurally eavesdropped by corporations and government.

One of the motivations for American Doug Aitken’s ongoing Station to Station project, which took groups of artists coast to the coast in the States by train, making spontaneous 60s-style happenings on the way, was to avoid any mediation at all.

“I wanted something that existed outside any system,” he said. “I wanted a living platform for the artists to experiment. To be open to what crosses your path.”

What were the moments in that journey that he enjoyed most?

“I think of an artist like Ed Ruscha, famous for his painting. His response was to make 300 cactus omelettes out in the desert,” he said. “Or a musician like Beck who said he had always wanted to work with, like, a huge choir of gospel singers but he had never been allowed to do it in the commercial sector. So we were able to do that in an abandoned drive-in theatre in the middle of the desert where the train stopped, and the sound of this vocal was like a huge turbine engine, at dusk, and the warm wind blowing and you are in the middle of nowhere in America. It feels untethered to any existing system. Those kinds of situations are very special.”

Station to Station, Doug Aitken’s journey through modern creativity. Photograph: Doug Aitken

At a time of political insanity such as that which is unfolding in this American election, Aitken suggested it was an artist’s role to create alternative visions of society, or just to create for the hell of it. It is an honourable tradition. The abstract painter Joan Miró was never a political activist in a conventional sense, but he was always his own man. When he was asked late in life what he had done to oppose General Franco, he didn’t hesitate to reply: “Free and radical things.”

Aitken agreed. “Any worthwhile art is never optional,” he said. “It’s not a political strategy. It’s an extension of who you are and how you see the world. It’s always non-negotiable.”

Michael Elmgreen: ‘The internet has made us very egocentric individuals… we have lost our sense of belonging’

Michael Elmgreen, left, with Ingar Dragset: ‘Art can make people less fearful.’ Photograph: Getty Images

The Danish artist Michael Elmgreen has worked in a partnership with the Norwegian artist Ingar Dragset since 1995. Their 2012 bronze of a boy on a rocking horse occupied the fourth plinth in Trafalgar Square, as a comment on the surrounding statues commemorating war heroes. For the Protest show, they will display a replica prison cell, broken up as if by an earthquake, which they first showed in São Paulo.

We are living at a time when the freedom to offend - and to protest - is widely under threat. Is it ever more important as an artist to make those statements?
Fear is a very unfortunate thing for a culture if you want to make it vibrant and dynamic. And fear of offence shows you are scared of what happens if people express their opinions. That often ends up in a kind of stagnation, with everyone holding each other at gunpoint. It also ends up giving men like Nigel Farage or Donald Trump their popularity, because people are fed up being told what they can or cannot say in public. They vote as a protest, no matter what the consequences of it.

How do we process these things? Can art create that space?
Art can work with it in a different way than a sensational news way. Art is not just some loose information that you get on the internet. You are confronted with something physical and hopefully the art statement is a bit more nuanced and even profound. We recently did a show in Israel at the Tel Aviv museum. In their main hall, we put a full-scale replica of a section of the Berlin Wall. We moved to Berlin soon after the wall came down, so we felt we could speak about walls in general and hoped that it would make people think about the wall that had been built between Palestine and Israel. We come from outside, we don’t live with that conflict. But we could speak about our experience of how important it was for us that the Berlin Wall came down

What response did you get?
People were moved by it, I think, especially because we did no finger pointing. It was something for them to stand in front of a wall as a single person being blocked in their movement. And we were of course also speaking about Donald Trump’s idea of building a wall at the Mexican border. It is not uncommon to try to solve problems by putting up a physical barrier. But it doesn’t often work.

Powerless Structures Fig 101, by Elmgreen & Dragset, on the Fourth Plinth in Trafalgar Square, 2012. Photograph: David Levene/The Guardian

Given the fevered political moment across Europe and in the States, is there more of an urgency for artists to have a position?
Absolutely. We have lost our sense of being good citizens, of having a wider vision. That sounds quite old school and nostalgic, but it is true. Politics has just become economics – how much do I pay in tax, how much do I get? The internet has made us very egocentric individuals. We are no longer proud of, say, being part of a third generation of steel workers that built a country. We call ourselves “working class” or “artist” or “feminist” or “homosexual” in a very different way from the way we would have said those things in the 1960s. We have lost our sense of belonging.

What are the consequences of that?
We have a very cynical media landscape and the internet fuels that. We don’t hear enough: how can we make this in a different way? The really frightening thing is that the generation now in their 20s, they don’t believe things can be better. That is not only very unusual, it is also super-fucking-dangerous.

How can art help in that?
Press and politicians focus on fear-mongering. People are easy to control if they are fearful. That’s how art can make a difference, I think: it can make people less fearful.

Sarah Sze: ‘ I just gave an artwork to Hillary Clinton’s campaign’

Sarah Sze: ‘The powers that be here are more aware [than in China] that the moment you shut something down you make it radical.’ Photograph: Suki Dhanda/The Observer

Sarah Sze’s intricate installations were described by the New Yorker as “changing the potential for sculpture”. She has been awarded a MacArthur “genius” grant and represented the US at the 2013 Venice Biennale.

What’s the history of the piece you have made for this Protest show?
I originally made a version of the piece for a show in Philadelphia. Every day, I kept the front page of the New York Times and cut out the pictures and replaced them with pictures that were vast in terms of time and space – there could be an image of the ocean, an image from 500 years ago… I was interested in contrasting what was newsworthy with these timeless images. That piece was then accepted for a triennial in Guangzhou. When we were shipping it we were contacted by the Chinese authorities saying they wanted specific front pages to be removed.

What was the problem?
It turned out that every front page I was being asked to remove said something about China; it could be just a phrase or something. So I made a new version for China. The piece was actually on the floor, like it was protecting the floor, spattered with paint and so on. So I took black paint and painted out the parts they wanted redacted and then mentioned the fact in the wall note. For this show, I have done the opposite. I left in all the pieces I had redacted and painted black all the rest of the text.

Third Wednesday, 2016, from Sarah Sze’s Calendar Series. Photograph: Courtesy the artist/Victoria Miro, London

So it wasn’t conceived as a narrowly political work, but the Chinese censors gave it that edge?
Yes. It was amazing to me that the Chinese government actually paid such attention. It suggests a belief that art has a major influence on society.

Have we become complacent about these things in the west?
Perhaps. But the powers that be here are more aware that the moment you shut something down you make it radical. Those things backfire on politicians.

We are living in quite extreme political times, suddenly. Does that feel like something that you feel you need to respond to in a direct way?
Artists respond in different ways. I just gave an artwork to Hillary Clinton’s campaign and a lot of artists are doing that. Some of the artworks that have been given are demonstrably anti-Trump but you have to be careful making direct statements because it can be turned on its head very quickly.

Why did you donate to Clinton?
We’re at a very critical point in the US and I wanted to do anything I could to see things move in a better direction. Everyone needs to do something. There is this great sense still of: oh, of course that won’t happen, but at each point so far it has been predicted very poorly.

Can artists lead that action? Is it a moment where culture needs to assert its values?
The conversation is going on certainly. I think campuses got very deradicalised in the US in the first 10 years of this century; I don’t know why.

Over here, the money became so absurd for young artists in the public eye that it became difficult to see them as radical. I suppose the sense grew that being an artist was a career option, and a lucrative one, in the way that it had really never been…
Absolutely. I’m a professor at Columbia. I find I’ve had to remind students a few times that making art is not like going to business or law school. You are not guaranteed an outcome.

Isaac Julien: ‘There’s always more than one story going on’

Isaac Julien: ‘It doesn’t help to resort to the clichés of protest.’ Photograph: Graeme Robertson/The Guardian

London-born Isaac Julien began to explore the crisis of migration into Europe in 2007 with his prophetic film, Western Union: Small Boats, which explored the perilous crossing from North Africa. He was speaking from Rio where he is installing his follow-up work, 10,000 Waves, about the world of the Chinese cockle pickers who drowned on Morecambe Bay in 2004. Brazil is the 30th country in which it has been shown.

Does your work always have a journalistic impulse in the beginning?
Yes, it’s usually connected to something in the real world. I read the news all the time, like everyone does, but when you make art you are trying to see how to move beyond the headline. How do you make a work that will stand the test of time? You need to give some visceral and emotional relationship to the story. As soon as I read the cockle-picker story I knew I would make something. The problem is how to shape it. It haunts you.

Your first film looked at the black artist Langston Hughes and the Harlem renaissance that was a forerunner of the civil-rights movement. Is it harder for artist activists to find a focus for protest now?
At the moment art is seeking to find the right questions rather than come up with answers. And that is an important role. We’re in a much more complex world now. As artists it doesn’t help to resort to clichés of protest. Oddly, there is a lot of new interest in Looking for Langston. It is partly because of Black Lives Matter. As the political culture of Trump has brought about a nostalgia for very conservative values, there’s a sort of balancing re-engagement with civil rights.

The current situation in Britain seems to be parallelling what happened in the 1980s with the collapse of a coherent left and the dominance of a xenophobic Tory party. The strongest critique of Thatcherism came from writers and film-makers. Are we not crying out for something like that?
Culture can provide a place for thinking things through in opposition, which is desperately needed at the moment. There is a crisis. I was very influenced by the thinking of [the cultural theorist] Stuart Hall. Those people were very good at looking at the political scene and providing a language to discuss it.

Isaac Julien’s Western Union Series no. 10 (Sculpture for the New Millennium), 2007. Photograph: Courtesy the Artist and Victoria Miro, London

It makes no sense in many ways for us to think in national terms in art or politics or anything else any more - our world is characterised by interdependence - but is the “international” artist in danger of becoming unmoored in some ways, of losing a connection with the audience?
I wouldn’t say that Western Union: Small Boats was unmoored. I have a background in London, but my parents were from the Caribbean, so you have that internationalism into your DNA.

Is creating art that has a global range of reference in itself a protest against the advance of Little England rhetoric?
I think so. The Ukip stuff is nostalgia. I can understand it. The nostalgia is for England to become great again. But that “greatness” was intimately connected to empire, you can’t forget that. The OBE is still not the Order of British Excellence. It is the Order of the British Empire.

Is the multicultural ideal advanced by Hall and others more under threat than ever?
There is always more than one story going on. At the same time as we had Brexit, London voted for a mayor with an Indian and Muslim background. There is a double movement between the metropolitan idea of England and the reaction against that. But it’s not clear which one is winning just now.

Doug Aitken: ‘There’s a constant river of images from millions of iPhones. The question is: what has potency?’

Doug Aitken: ’The Station to Station project was born out of a desire for action.’ Photograph: David Levene/The Guardian

Doug Aitken is an American artist and curator, best known recently for his creation Station to Station, which invited a 100 artists from all disciplines – including musician Beck and conceptual artist Olafur Eliasson – to take a train from coast to coast across America and stop along the way to create a series of 60s-style “happenings”. He lives, inevitably, in California.

Did you see Station to Station in the tradition of the great American road trip of the 50s and 60s?
I did, but the project was born out of a desire for action. It’s really interesting how segregated music, art, cinema, books and so on are. With Station to Station, instead of critiquing this, we tried to create something that erases the separation, that allowed many artists to be in motion together.

Do you think that fragmentation is a way of controlling those cultural forces?
I’m not sure it’s a conspiracy. Different mediums create infrastructures and infrastructures slow down the possibilities for change. It’s funny. When I was talking to the gallery about Protest it conjured those ideas of a feminist rally in 1978 and people standing out in the cold with placards. The tools we have to work with now are so different. The power of an image to transmit an idea coherently is so much reduced. Take those seminal images from Vietnam – the monk setting himself on fire or the child running from the napalm. Those images were disseminated by conventional media. Now there’s a constant river of images from millions of iPhones. The question is: what has potency? Technology is opening up incredible new possibilities but also dangers, not least a sense of the loss of self. It is a twilight that we are living in right now, which is very unpredictable and also very stimulating.

On a political level, that twilight sense seems to have led to the rise of these populist political leaders who promise control. What do you make of the Trump phenomenon?
The whole presidential race in America right now is like an enormous hologram projected on the sky. We all look up at it. It is like a cloud that will never leave us but it has no meaning or substance.

At some point soon, though, it might have real meaning for a lot of lives. Do we not need to find a direct way to engage with it?
It’s an interesting question and a strange time to ask it. What I see mostly is an incredible political apathy. By and large, the political system appears so corporate-driven that people have a hard time seeing how they can affect it. When you get to that point, real change comes from secession. The most interesting projects or groups or actions now don’t exist in opposition in a traditional protest way, but as something entirely separate from the mainstream, for example, the Slow Food Movement, which is people following something they believe in ethically but also taking away the capital that is funding the existing system. They are voting with what they purchase or don’t purchase.

Can art work in the same way?
I don’t separate social and political work as different from any other art. The value of any art is to be curious and to forge new languages and questions. The whole landscape has changed. You don’t have to wait for a single critic in New York to come to your exhibition or hear your music. We don’t have those high peaks of culture and dark valleys of culture – everything is eroded down to this kind of universal jungle. We are all our own critics and sponsors now.

Protest is at Victoria Miro gallery, London N1, 23 Sep-5 Nov

The title 10,000 Lives was amended to the correct title 10,000 Waves on 12 September 2016

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