The Comment Factory

Since the seminal 1999 anti-World Trade Organisation protests in Seattle there has been a resurgence of forms of art engaged in social and political protest. After a period where money appeared to rule all forms of creativity — viz. the canonisation of Jeff Koons and Damien Hirst — artists across the world, especially younger ones, felt the need to reflect on the chaos of global events through their art.

The results have taken many forms – from activist work on the street to more contemplative installation work in galleries. In the exhibition ‘Signs of Revolt’, curated by Noel Douglas, at The Truman Brewey on London’s Brick Lane, there was an enormous range of this kind of work — designed to act as the visual element to social struggles.

(By Rodchenko)

This is work that does not engage with the world retrospectively but seeks to become part of ongoing struggles and be used to bring about real change. It relates back to the work of the Russian Constructivists, such as Alexandra Rodchenko and El Lisitski, who wanted to make an art of constructed abstract elements that represented the movements in society and of the Bolshevik revolution.

They stopped making one-off art works to produce printed material, posters, pamphlets, placards, that could be instrumentalised by the Russian people. Their work was later banned under Stalin who wanted a much more dictatorial form of art, or pure propaganda that didn’t engage in more avant-garde ideas of abstraction.

(By Lisitski)

We don’t have Stalin now, but we do have corporations who own all the available space in our public arena to advertise their products. Therefore, artists who want to directly reach people outside the gallery have to develop new strategies for engaging with the public on the street. It’s important that the Internet, where the space is non-hierarchical, doesn’t become a substitute for images of resistance to be shown directly to people non-digitally.  This also brings in the question of working illegally.

(By Heartfield)

Political artists following on from the Constructivists include German anti-fascist artist John Heartfield, who devised a form of photomontage which became a weapon against the rise of Nazism. His work was so powerful that he was high on the Nazi hit-list and had to flee Germany. In one of his most famous montages he showed Hitler doing his customary salute and big business, in the form a giant businessman, handing him money. In this way montage managed to show that behind all Hitler’s socialist rhetoric it was big business that was supporting his rise to power. The image wasn’t shown in an art gallery: it was on the front cover of the German weekly magazine, AIZ.

Artists like Banksy, who wasn’t involved in this show, haven’t been able to resist to zombification of their art by the mainstream. His work has become neutered and merely decoration for the rich and famous. This process was called “repressive tolerance” by Herbert Marcuse and “the society of the spectacle”, by Situationist, Guy Debord. It is a danger to all artists trying to subvert capitalist economic inevitabilities while working within a capitalist system.

Work which initially starts off as being a critique of war and social inequality can be bought into the mainstream and commodified and sold back to the people to which is was initially critical, emptied of its message. Banksy is the sine qua non of this tendency but its insidious dynamic has eaten up and spat out many creative endeavours since the age of mass consumerism took hold. Naomi Klein mentions in her book No Logo, which was published in the weeks following Seattle, that Nike had begun employing young people who painted graffiti in the streets to graffiti their own posters to give them more street-cred. With these corporate behemoths inhaling all creativity and co-opting any anti-establishment ideas it’s a struggle for the artists who don’t want to end up making decoration for Goldman Sach’s lobby.

These are the artists who make up ‘Signs of Revolt’ and their art is an overt attempt to link aesthetics and politics – which breaks down many lazy assumptions and prejudices about what art should be and should do in society.

There was work by the Reclaim the Streets collective who had produced spoof newspapers which while appearing to be the genuine article, were in fact full of information critical of the prevailing economic order. The first is a spoof of London paper, The Evening Standard, called The Evading Standard: it was given away free in the streets and was published for the march for social justice in 1997. It announced that the general election due a fortnight later had been cancelled. All 10,000 copies were confiscated by the police and the distributors illegally arrests. A second edition was published a week later.

(By kennardphillipps)

The collective kennardphillipps have been making work since the onset of the invasion of Iraq that utilises the technique of photomontage to upset the shiny surface images we are bombarded with every day. “We want it to be used by people as a part of their own activism, not as pictures on the wall to contemplate,” they say. Their main work, which appeared on the window of the gallery as a giant poster, depicted Gordon Brown stuck in the Gherkin, a building symbolic of City excess and greed, throwing cash down to overexcited bankers. Framing the scene is a picture of a grim housing project in Scotland.

David Gentlemen, who is well known as an artist and illustrator in the UK, showed his iconic Stop the War posters which were designed to be pasted up all over the country to advertise the protest demonstrations against the war in Iraq. The dates of the demonstrations are splattered with blood and this motif became the anti-logo of the movement.

Jess Hurd, the British photojournalist, for over 12 years has been working around the world photographing movements of social change. She has photographed the Bolivarian revolution in Venezuela, the Zapatistas in Mexico, and urban social movements in Brazil, India, China and Africa. Her most arresting image is of the dead body of activist, Carlo Guiliani, who was killed by the Italian police in the Genoa protests in 2001. His bloodied body is viewable through a phalanx of stern-looking policemen who stare the other way.

The exhibition tried to break down the barrier between the artists and the audience by making the work take over the whole space; for example, pictures were strung on wires overhead forcing the audience to navigate their way through the exhibition. The preciousness of the art as object was deconstructed in a way reminiscent of early Constructivist exhibitions in 1920’s Russia.

It is interesting that in the year 2000, only a stones throw from Brick Lane, where this exhibition was put on, armed British police raided the Kurdistan Workers’ Association Community Centre in Dalston during a dress-rehearsal of Mountain Language, a play by Nobel laureate Harold Pinter about the oppression of the Kurds in Turkey. The police mistook the rehearsal for a real hostage siege. Pinter was well aware of the vital link between the creative expression and political necessity. In 1985 he went to Turkey, with American playwright, Arthur Miller, to highlight the plight of the Kurdish people. Both artists, both activists for human dignity.

What Signs of Revolt shows, and Pinter believed, is that the active repression of totalitarianism and the slow-burn repression of corporate control should be challenged by artists with integrity enough to continue to stand outside of the mainstream. Art and creative expression, because it stands outside of the normal coordinates of control, has the power to scare those at the top.

It scared the Americans when they asked for the tapestry of Picasso’s anti-war masterpiece Guernica, which is on permanent display at the UN, to be covered up with a blue curtain. This happened when Colin Powell made his notorious speech of lies about Iraqi weapons of mass destruction and the need for invasion in 2003.

(Room by Goshka Macuga)

This tapestry is now on display, for the next year, down the road from Brick Lane at the Whitechapel gallery, where it is commemorating the showing of the real painting of Guernica in the gallery in 1939. It was bought to London then to help enlist volunteers for the Republican cause in the Spanish civil war. The admission charged at the exhibition in 1939 was either a small financial contribution or a pair of leather boots that could be sent to the front in Spain. By the end of the show 400 pairs had been collected.

The room is designed by artist Goshka Macuga, Turner-prize nominated artist, who set up a roundtable which for the duration of the exhibition can be used as a discussion area by any groups or individuals who want to book it. At the end of the room stands the tapestry giving context to all the discussions taking place in front of it. The roundtable has a glass top under which are displayed news cutting and leaflets which document the anti-fascist struggles in East London which took place around the corner from the gallery in Cable Street.

The effete art-industry intellectuals and academics who have proposed for so long that political art is merely crude agitprop or literary doggerel are being made to look stupid by a new generation of artists who don’t think see their role as making pretty pictures and designing clever concepts for boardrooms. They are using creativity as an integral part of a justice movement that is inchoate but growing in substance and definition. They have internalized Brecht’s timeless dictum that “Art is not a mirror held up to reality, but a hammer to shape it”.