European Art Activism and Dance as Activism - Essay Example

Art Activism Activism in the Arts can be viewed from a variety of different angles and has exemplified itself in myriad of forms throughout the lasttwo-hundred years. While art has carried within it a message as long as it has existed, explicit uses for political strategies have emerged in different forms throughout the years. In the medieval era much art was commissioned on the grounds that it glorifies the Christian faith. Later Renaissance incarnations are famous for breaking these boundaries and often commenting on them – Botticelli’s Birth of Venus incorporated religious imagery to obscure its almost completely nude subject. This is a form of progressive activism in reaction to the church restrictions. One also can consider Michelangelo’s famous inclusion of Cardinal Carafa’s likeness displayed as flayed skin in the Sistine Chapel in reaction to his censorship of the project. However, activism as a self-reflective political message seems to emerge as a later characteristic of art. This essay examines a number of forms of art activism from the 19th and 20th centuries to identity and contextual the practice within the spectrum of modern art. Early American Incarnations Although art activism is now generally viewed as being closely related to progressive politics, this wasn’t always true. At the beginning of the 20th century, Mass Pageant community art events were organized to promote American virtues. In the first act of these events participants were depicted in traditional clothing, singing sings and practicing customs from their home lands; in the second act, they were show to transform to ‘American’ clothing, demonstrating the melting pot ideals that are fundamental to the American experience. In contrast, the 1913 Paterson Strike Pageant organized participants in the wake of a strike for working conditions. When analyzing the event Linda Nochlin writes, "In participating in the pageant, they became conscious of their experience as a meaningful force in history and of themselves as self-determining members of a class that shaped history." Another great example of American art activism can be seen in the Harlem Renaissance. This literary movement has been identified by historians as lasting from 1919 until 1929, as an early venue for minority art in mainstream America. In Transforming Images of Blackness, Patricia Schroeder wrote that Angelina Grimkes play, "Rachel," was the "first attempt to use the stage for race propaganda" (107). The play engaged the sympathy of black and white women alike by appealing to shared gender inequalities. W.E.B. Du Bois called for an African-American theater that would tackle pertinent issues in racial inequality. This contrasts with other depictions of black culture around the time, such as Alain Locke and the Howard Players who portrayed black folk culture without a political activist message. In the wake of New Deal reforms, the United States experienced movements of workers creating theater for workers. This culture "presupposed that the conflicting economic and political interests between workers and their employers necessitated a different cultural expression by the conflicting classes (Stevens).” The most popular forms were major recitals that "pitted a chorus of workers against a capitalist or a representative of the capitalist class, such as a foreman or policeman." This arts activism was in-debted to agitprop and inspired the audience towards a political platform; it was also performed for people that already agreed with the ideas, or for education that represented art activist strategies that people incorporated into their daily lives. European Art Activism In the early 19th century Henri de Saint-Simon suggested that to change modern society it would be only necessary to organize intellectuals and artists and join then with engineers and inventors. Saint-Simon valued artists very highly because they were capable not of only foreseeing the future but also of showing others what the future ideal state would be like. In Burger’s Theory of the Avant-Garde (1974) he identifies two divergent strands of art. Burger sees the critical in twentieth-century art the Second World War. He believes that art before the war still carried with it the revolutionary charge that early 19th century artists had imbued it with, while the post-war avant-garde suffered from the failure of this movement. Kryzstof Wodiczko Indeed, many writers have identified the early connections between artistic and intellectual movements and the desire to institute progressive social reforms. In Homeless Projection: A Proposal for the City of New York (1986) Kryzstof Wodiczko fuses historical avant-garde standards with the detournement destructuring strategies of the Situationist International in developing convincing activist art (Finkelpearl 2000). In this work Wodiczko projects images of homeless people onto the government statues in New York City’s Union Park. In these projections we see a statue of George Washington with a wheelchair and a can of window cleaner projected onto him; another statue of Abraham Lincoln is projected onto with a crutch; the Marquis de Lafayette is seen with a cast on his leg and a sick person’s head band; finally, the Charity statue was superimposed with a low-rent building. While Wodiczko has constructed over seventy projections onto monuments across the world, Homeless Projection: A Proposal for the City of New York is unique in its structural form that molds to the person-based statues, where other work is generally projected onto buildings of relevant architecture. It seems this technique is heavily influenced by the Situationist International’s use of detournement effects in attempting to disrupt mainstream signification. The process of détournement involves the capturing of mass cultural images and co-opting them in a new presentation in order to subvert the authority of the sign and the significations it sets in order. In the instance of the statues in Union Park, Wodiczko is clearly detourning them for political means. Wodiczko himself seems particularly tied to the revolutionary Situationist International, often referencing them in regards to his work. Also known as International Situationism, the Situation movement incorporated Marxist in ideology and it combines the sense of political ideology and art (Ford 2004). It originated in the late 1950s as a critique to capitalism, and incidentally Einstein’s Theory of Relativity. Dance as Activism Many art theorists have discusses the means by which dance can function artistically as a political tool. While contemporary performance art is clearly in-debted to this functional viewpoint, even traditional forms of dance can are ripe with possibilities. Dance incorporates questions of self and identity into the equation and the artist and viewer must investigate these issues in appreciating the performance. The functional use of the body allows for situations where participants act as subjects who define themselves and their environment. Multiple intelligences are used within dance and it creates opportunities for creating politically engaged participants and activists. Stylistically dance requires remembering calling forth step sequences from cultural and social activities of history and allows for the opportunity to affirm, question, rethink history. While art activism has been viewed from the perspective of the artist acting out a poltical agenda on the audience, the converse is sometimes true. In these instances the social and political pressures of society function in ways that cast the artist and the art object in a critical light. In “Society and the Dance: The Social Anthropology and Process of Performance,” anthropologist Peter Davidson identifies dance as an important tool in the analysis of society (207-215). Harkening back to earlier discussions on the Harlem Renaissance, Zora Neale Hurston used dance as one of her primary tools for critical social and cultural inquiry of the United States’ South. Since then researchers have noted that dance constructs a lens through which to view society and contemporary thinking. Conclusion Clearly the shape of activism in the arts has changed and taken on a myriad number of forms throughout the years. The early 20th Century American Mass Pageants demonstrated a unique brand of activism in that that contributed the promotion of the state. This was later altered during the strikes that incorporated the pageant framework in protesting poor working conditions in the newly industrialized nation. Later incarnations of American arts activism are seen in the Harlem Renaissance, where novels and plays written by participants in the movement functioned as objective criticism against the dominating and oppressive social standards, and attempted to develop a uniquely black cultural identity. Political engagement and artistry is noted within European art during the 19th century, as theorists and writers discuss the ways that avant-garde art has a political agenda. Peter Burger goes as far as arguing that important art in the 20th century can be viewed by its adherence to these idealistic goals of revolutionary change and criticizes post-World War II art because he believes it falls short of these activist standards. However, some artists such as Krysztof Wodiczko are successful political artists as they effectively encourage the mainstream public to consider a marginalized political agenda. Finally, some dance can be seen as politically active art in that embodies questions of culture and identity and can serve as a means of analyzing the active effects of society on the artists, as Zora Neale Hurston discusses. Works Cited Peter Bürger. Theory of the Avant-garde, Univ. of Minnesota Press, 1984 Brinson, P. Society and the Dance: The Social Anthropology and Process of Performance. Cambridge/New York: Cambridge University Press, 1985. Finkelpearl, Tom. Dialogues in Public Art. Boston: MIT Press, 2000. Ford, Simon. The Situationist International: An Introduction. Black Dog, 2004. Nochlin, Linda, "The Paterson Strike Pageant of 1913," in "Theatre for Working Class Audiences". Stevens, Daniel, "Workers Theatre of the 1930s", "Theatre for Working-Class Audiences:1830- 1980" (Westport, Colo.: Greenwood Press), 1985. Read More