Artistic activism

Artistic activism is the use of creative arts as a means of promoting social and political causes. The primary goal of art activists is to bring attention to important issues and energize social movements through the combination of protest and art. As such, artistic activism is intimately linked to social media campaigns as the ability to make an image or creatively frame an ongoing social debate helps to publicize causes. Traditional thinking argues that the more attention brought to an issue, the more likely that the public will become drawn into the debate and perhaps ultimately seek resolutions.

The rise of artistic activism has coincided with the age of the Internet, in which viral photos and memes have the capability of being shared around the world within hours. Viral videos and images, when used in conjunction with a social cause, have the capability to be the ultimate grassroots campaign. A single viral image uploaded for free onto an image-sharing service has the potential, if harnessed properly, to completely transform public awareness about an issue. Art activism can be an effective tool for activist campaigns with only limited resources.

Background

Artistic activism can be considered to be an outgrowth of related civil disobedience movements such as protest art and dissident art. These movements sought to raise social awareness of public issues through artistic expression. While protest art used individual works to highlight political and social struggles, activist art is largely centered upon the idea of using social media platforms to quickly spread a socially conscious viral message. As such, activist art may use a variety of artistic forms to promote the desired effect. Artistic activism campaigns may include public performances like flash mobs or nudity to spread a message by creating a public spectacle in hopes of capturing the attention of the masses.

Pablo Picasso’s Guernica (1937) is a classic example of art being used as an expression of social consciousness. The painting was created in response to the bombing of the Basque town of Guernica in northern Spain during the Spanish Civil War (1936–1939). The town had been used to relay communications to rebel forces. At the request of Spanish nationalists, the town was bombed by Nazi planes on April 26, 1937, resulting in the deaths of more than one hundred civilians. In response, Picasso created an abstract portrait of the bombing featuring a gored horse in the painting’s center, frozen in the middle of a silent scream, while abstract chaos swirls around the injured animal. The painting attracted mass attention to both the Guernica bombing and the brutality of the ongoing Spanish Civil War.

While the need to spread a social message has retained the same sense of immediacy among activists since Picasso’s time, the method of spreading content has shifted to embrace new media platforms. As a result, the expression of contemporary protest art has evolved to capitalize on the communal interests of the internet audience. Artists must create a balance between the appeal of the artistic campaign and the types of expression that receive the most attention. While some art activists have relied upon outrageousness and spontaneity as a means of expression, other campaigns are more deliberate in their articulation. Two examples of contemporary artists who have balanced art with public appeal include Shepard Fairey, the creator of the “Hope” campaign poster that was a centerpiece of Barack Obama’s presidential run in 2008, and British graffiti artist Banksy, whose spray-painted murals of corporate greed and social suffering often appear overnight in public spaces. Both artists have created critically appreciated art that has also spread social messages that are accessible to a broad audience.

Overview

In 2012, American director Jason Russell created a half-hour documentary film called Kony 2012 that documented a campaign to capture Ugandan Joseph Kony by Invisible Children, a non-government organization co-founded by Russell. Kony was a notorious guerilla leader known for his use of kidnapped children as soldiers and enslaved sex workers. Over the course of the short film, Russell is shown speaking to victims of Kony’s Lord’s Resistance Army and making promises to seek out his capture. The video received eighty-three million hits two weeks after it was posted, a number that observers found astounding for a low-budget documentary about a conflict that had otherwise received little press within the United States.

While Russell received some negative reactions from people who accused him of featuring himself too prominently in the video, the video nonetheless proved effective. The release of the video was intended to coincide with a number of foreign policy decisions awaiting decisions by the Obama administration. The public attention helped push through the passage of the Lord's Resistance Army Disarmament and Northern Uganda Recovery Act. In addition, the US military agreed to collaborate with Invisible Children through various initiatives. Though internal problems led to the dissolution of Invisible Children in 2014, many of the basic goals of the group had been met in creating the video.

Pussy Riot is another well-known example of a group seeking to use artistic activism as a means of spreading a social message. The group is a Russian punk band composed entirely of women clad in traditional Russian balaclavas. These balaclavas both cover the faces of the band members while providing them with a signature look with great appeal to a younger audience. Pussy Riot became famous for staged “guerilla concerts” in which the group would perform a series of socially-charged songs in public spaces. The performances were recorded and posted onto the band’s social media sites. In 2012, one such guerilla performance by Pussy Riot inside Moscow’s Cathedral of Christ the Savior drew outrage from the Orthodox Church. The performance had been intended to show the alleged collusion between Russian President Vladimir Putin and leaders of the Russian Orthodox Church. Three Pussy Riot members were later arrested for staging the concert within the church. After a well-publicized trial, all three were sentenced to prison. The group received global media coverage, though some critics questioned whether their relative fame had come as a result of true art or whether it was merely an effect of the political machinations against them by the Russian government. Some critics believed it may not have mattered, given that the concerts had effectively brought global attention to their issues. Regardless, the group became a public example of the effectiveness of using art to create viral moments that spread a political message.

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