Answer:
Explanation:
Several years ago we had the good fortune to ask the renowned activist artist Hans Haacke a
question:
How can you know when what you’ve done works?
He thought for a moment, and then replied,
I’ve been asked that question many times, and that question requires one to go around it
before one really avoids it.
Haacke’s response was meant to be humorous, but beneath it lay a serious problem: a general
aversion to conceptualizing the relationship between art, activism and social change. To be fair,
on the spectrum of artistic activism Haacke’s place is more toward the pole of the artist, and thus
his refusal to be pinned down by such a question merely conforms to the modern tradition that
valorizes art’s autonomy from society. Yet, even as we slide down the scale from expressive
artist to the more instrumental activist, the answer to the questions of how artistic activism works
to bring about social change and how to assess that impact remains elusive.1
This is a shaky foundation upon which to construct a rapidly growing field. Art schools have
devoted whole programs to the practice of arts and activism. Since Portland State University
launched the first of such programs, Art & Social Practice in 2007, the School of Visual Arts in
New York has added a department of Art Practice; CalArts: Social Practice & Public Forms; and
Queens College: Art & Social Action. New York University has two graduate programs devoted
to the intersection of arts and activism: Arts Politics in its performing arts school, and Art,
Education and Community Practice in its school of education and fine arts. Regardless of
program and department, university courses on arts and politics abound. In the Fall of 2010
alone, NYU offered over twenty courses, across four schools and colleges, exploring the
interconnections between arts, politics and social activism. This academic interest has prompted
a slew of recent books on arts and activism, with a cursory search on Amazon.com under “art
and activism” returning a staggering 1,345 results.
Museums curate entire exhibitions around the practice. In recent years, in New York City alone,
the Brooklyn Museum staged their monumental AgitProp show, the Whitney Museum, offered
up An Incomplete History Of Protest, and the Museum of the City of New York hosted AIDS at
Home, Art and Everyday Activism. Over the past decade, the Queens Museum has centered their
curatorial and educational mission around socially engaged arts, while Creative Time, the
1
“Artistic Activism,” a term first popularized in scholarship by Chantal Mouffe and in the field by the Center for
Artistic Activism, goes by many names: political art, creative activism, activist art, artivism socially engaged arts,
social practice arts, community based arts, artivism, arte útil, etc., each with slightly different emphases, and a
different place on the art/activism spectrum. What unites them all is the mobilization of both affect and effect.
2
ambitious NYC-based arts institution, organizes yearly “summits” which bring together artistic
activists from around the world. Around the world, from the Disobedient Objects show at the
Victoria and Albert Museum in London to The Art of Disruptions at Iziko South African
National Gallery, arts and activism has become an integral part of the arts scene. No global
Biennale is complete these days without its “social interventions” and the requisite controversy
surrounding the place of activism in the art world.
More important than academic and artistic institutions, however, is the attention turned to the
artistic activism by NGOs and philanthropic funders. Large organizations like the Open Society
Foundations have created new programs like the Arts Exchange to integrate arts into all levels of
their social programming, and smaller foundations like A Blade of Grass, Compton,
Rauschenberg, Surdna, et al. have made the support of arts and activism central to their mission.
Research groups like Americans for the Art’s Animating Democracy, and The Culture Group
produce reports and user guides for a range of actors in the field. Training institutes like the
Center for Artistic Activism, Beautiful Trouble, The Yes Labs, Intelligent Mischief, Center for
Story-Based Strategies, Backbone Campaign, to list just a few US examples, work with activists
who aspire to create more like artists and artists who would like to strategize more like activists.
But probably most critical of all is the attention paid to the practice by activists themselves. It is
now common in global activist NGOs like Greenpeace to local grassroots groups working on
immigration reform such as the New Sanctuary Coalition in NYC to develop “creative
strategies” alongside more traditional legal, electoral and mobilization approaches
