The star of ‘engaged art’ is on the rise. The number of artists creating, performing, and exploring in the world of social and political reality is mushrooming. Or maybe that’s the way it has always been, and new technologies are allowing us to do end-runs around gate-keeping curators and mainstream media. Either way, we are discovering whole worlds of politically engaged and celebrated artists that not so long ago would just as likely have been escorted from the hallowed houses of high art for disturbing the peace.
Call it what you will — engaged art, social practice, avant-garde, dialogical aesthetics, community art, public art, activist art, radical art — audiences for the confounding, beautiful, horrible and hilarious kinds of symbolic dissidence these practices describe are growing. When Art Threat started three years ago there was only a few websites like us. Now there are dozens. This is a very good thing.
A top 10 (or 9) list is a necessarily troubled compromise made up as it is by hierarchy and exclusion. On the up side it’s like a map — something to help navigate an increasingly complicated and at times overwhelming volume of cultural choices. So here’s my map of people and organizations to watch for, some better known than others, but all involved in making art that gets under the skin and changes — at least I hope it does — in some undeniable way those who encounter it.
This past week, the Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles commissioned Blu, an international street art rock star, to paint a mural on a nearby wall in conjunction with their upcoming Art in the Street exhibition.
Less than 24 hours later, the same museum ordered the work destroyed.
For an uncomfortably long time, MOCA remained mum as to why they rushed to cover up the work, which featured rows of coffins draped in dollar bills. Then, they finally issued a response, stating that the work was “inappropriate” given that their neighbourhood included a war monument and a veterans’ hospital.
Whether MOCA believes the needless deaths of young soldiers and civilians is inappropriate in unclear.
(Via Hyperallergic. Image by Casey Caplowe of GOOD Magazine.)
If you visit the Metropolitan Museum of Modern Art’s website today, you won’t find your visual senses tingled by their regularly shown artwork-of-the-day. A black square is shown instead, in observance of World AIDS Day and the Day With(out) Art. Today, many art distributors will be making a conscious decision to show nothing, while others expand outwards to use art to tell the story of the impact of AIDS.
The Day With(out) Art is an annual day of action and mourning in response to the AIDS crisis which began December 1, 1989 (as simply, ‘the Day Without Art’). In 1997 the name of the day was modified so that rather than excluding cultural programming, the day could highlight the art projects of artists living with HIV/AIDS and art that explores the challenges experienced around the world as a result of AIDS could be celebrated. The name “was retained as a metaphor for the chilling possibility of a future day without art or artists.”
“Operation Exposure: War is Trauma” hit the streets of Chicago on Monday November 15th. This collaboration between the Justseeds Artists’ Cooperative and veterans and supporters from Iraq Veterans Against the War (IVAW) is a direct response to the suicide epidemic and violation of GI’s right to heal within the GI and veteran community.
Veterans, artists, and supporters met in Rogers Park in Chicago and split into teams. They divided up posters that Justseeds had designed for IVAW and then wheatpasted the city. Teams hit advertising spaces and boarded up buildings with messages of GI resistance and “Operation Recovery” – a new IVAW campaign aimed to stop the redeployment of traumatized troops and focus public attention towards Post Traumatic Stress Disorder (PTSD), military sexual trauma (MST), and Traumatic Brain Injury (TBI).
In just a few days (on Nov 25) begins one of the most remarkable festivals in Canada, Etat d’Urgence, a cultural gathering for the homeless in the heart of one of North America’s finest urban playgrounds – Montreal, Quebec. The event – as this year’s promotion suggests – is an all inclusive vacation for Montreal’s homeless. And, for the other 14,000 regular Montrealers expected to attend, Etat d’Urgence is a cultural festival that is entirely unique.
For four days, the homeless of Montreal will have access to three large tents offering 24-hour food service and medical aid, psychological counseling, more than $50,000 in donated clothing (including some nice all-weather gear from Mountain Equipment Coop), haircuts, sleeping facilities, information tables for services offered year round by community organizations, three hot meals daily and a surprisingly world class roster of cultural and musical performances by artists and musicians.
The Department of Canadian Heritage announced yesterday that it would not renew funding for Montreal’s Etat d’Urgence, now in its 12th year, one of the largest festivals for the homeless in North America. The announcement comes less than two weeks before the festival begins prompting organizers to accuse Canadian Heritage of a politically motivated attack on Quebec culture.
ATSA co-founder Annie Roy compares the recent cuts to last summer’s decision by Canadian Heritage to cut funding to Festival FrancoFolie, one of the largest French music festivals in the world. She suspects the minority Conservative government of growing hostility to Quebec arts. Says Roy, “Heritage Canada cut our funding from $43,000 to zero, and we don’t know why because our funding has increased over the 12 years we have organized the event. I think it’s ideological.”
This upcoming Friday, November 26 the 5th Freedom To Create Prize will be announced in Cairo, Egypt. The prize celebrates the courage and creativity of artists who promote social justice and who are “the voices of courage, unity, strength, reconciliation healing and hope.”
The Freedom to Create Prize so closely aligns with what we do here at Art Threat, I’m going back in time this week to highlight the two winners from 2009 before fast forwarding to this year’s inspiring artists.
Mohan Makhmalbaf is, by any definition of the term, a remarkable man. He was granted the 2009 Freedom to Create Main Prize for his years of dedicated work creating films which explore and comment on the Iranian state and its people. Raised in Iran, Makhmalbaf left the country in protest against Iranian dictatorship in 2005 when Ahmadinejad came into power.
This weekend marks the 5th annual Honk festival in Somerville, MA, a celebration and gathering of activist street bands from across North America. These are the musicians who protest with instruments, costumes and rowdy improvised dance beats – the marching bands who put festivity into political resistance and a little bit of order into boisterous crowds. It is an often overlooked and yet vital aspect of protest gatherings around the world.
When I was still a student at Simon Fraser University the city and working at The Peak I managed to get my hands on a copy of plans for the Woodward’s development a full year before the official announcement that the SFU School for Contemporary Arts would make a home there.
I’ll admit, I snuck it from the student union offices because I’m nosey and have to know everything. But what I saw made me excited. Excited that the School for the Contemporary Arts at SFU would FINALLY have a home that wasn’t a set of trailers placed helter skelter behind campus. Excited that they’d be getting a real home after 40 years of promises. Excited even though I wasn’t a contemporary arts student.
It’s impossible to escape the heated rhetoric around Park51 in lower Manhattan. The proposed community center for some of the city’s Muslim population has been called everything from the Ground Zero Mosque, which is the preferred term of the right wing media, to labels more appealing to the left, such as the Cordoba Center — though the developer prefers to call it Park51. No matter your political preference, the fact is you probably have an opinion about the issue.
Contributors
Stefan Christoff, Colin Horgan, Julia Pyper
Michelle Siobhan Reid, Valerie Cardinal, Race Capet
Laurence Miall, Terry Fairman, Tyler Morgenstern
This past week, the Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles commissioned Blu, an international street art rock star, to paint a mural on a nearby wall in conjunction with their upcoming Art in the Street exhibition.
When I was still a student at Simon Fraser University the city and working at The Peak I managed to get my hands on a copy of plans for the Woodward’s development a full year before the official announcement that the SFU School for Contemporary Arts would make a home there.
