ART AS POLITICAL COMMUNICATIONAdditional Notes from Week 13 in COMM 292

Art as Political CommunicationEric Triantafillou’s comments about public poster art (in Paper Politics) are important for thinking about the prospects and limitations of art as a form of political communication:

We could view this form of public communication not as constituting a consensus, but as proof that we can have dissensus and yet still coexist. After all, no one has to listen to or agree with anyone's opinions; they simply need to tolerate them being expressed. Any idea, any image, can simply be covered over by another, ad infinitum. We could celebrate the wall as a bastion of diversity and dissent, a toehold in a society whose public space is increasingly privatized and con trolled. But we also have to recognize that the wall can represent a norm for controversy in a society that has not found a way to resolve its conflicts, a society that easily recuperates (i.e. appropriates) the meaning of experiments like these and then sells them back to us as aesthetic commodities.

Thinking Critically About Art Practices

He offers a pointed assessment of his previous work that represented gentrification as an opposition between those perpetrating it and those fighting it. He offers a critique that encourage artists (and others) to ask important self-reflexive questions about the purpose/function of art itself:

“Since we tend to affirm symbols of resistance as authentic expressions of suffering, joy, and indignation, we rarely question the thinking or the politics that are bound up with these symbols.”

Thinking Critically About Art (Cont.)Triantafillou elaborates:

The image of colonizing yuppies in search of authentic cultural interaction flattens [a] complex set of actors and interests into an easy-to-digest call to action. The more complex challenge of addressing gentrification and anti-gentrification struggles as systemic, as part of a process in which capital moves in and out of the built environment is something these symbols cannot communicate, and, in fact, obfuscate […]

At the same time artists are working through problems of representation, we must also think about how we produce images. What are the contexts in which our images are made? Who are the images for? Are they just preaching to the converted? […]

Let 's investigate our own thinking. Let's look at our practices. Let’s collectively reflect on the images we make, and how and for whom we make them. Let’s ask if they could do more – if they could reveal the abstract barbarity of our social

reality, and still incite and inspire us.

OTHER EXAMPLES

Performance Art

Example: Couple in a Cage

In March 1992, performance artist and MacArthur Fellow, Guillermo Gómez-Peña and writer/artist Coco Fusco locked themselves in a cage, presenting themselves as aboriginal inhabitants of an island off the gulf of Mexico overlooked by Columbus. Enacting rituals of “authentic” daily life such as writing on a laptop computer, watching TV, making voodoo dolls, and pacing the cage garbed in Converse high-tops, plastic beads, and a wrestler’s mask, the two “Amerindians” conveyed a hybrid pseudo-primitivism that struck a nerve. Nearly half the visitors that saw the cage believed that the two were real captives and true natives somehow tainted by technology and popular culture.

Mural Paintings• As canvases for political expression

(ex. Diego Rivera’s work)• As documentations of political

history and/or embodied signifiers of struggles over territory (ex. Northern Ireland)

• As tools for community building

Illustration and Comics• Interview with

graphic artist Emory Douglas, the former Minister of Culture of the Black Panthers, who you read about for today’s class.

• Marjane Satrapi’s stellar book, Persepolis was also turned into a movie of the same name. Click here to learn more about her work.

• The illustrated/cartoon journalism of Joe Sacco. An interview with him on NPR aired in 2013, following the publication of his book, The Great War.