In May 1982, the artist Agnes Denes, born in Budapest, came together with a small group of volunteers at the Lower Manhattan battery park. They planted wheat berries on the piece of land, which, once grown, created a lush field of wispy stems next to the skyline of the city. Visually striking, the ecological artwork was partly a protest against exploitation, greed and the destruction of people and the environment. The meager $ 158 spent on seeds was in stark contrast to the evaluation of $ 4.5 billion in the country itself.
Denes’ ‘Wheatfield – a confrontation’ is one of the ten case studies presented in Lauren O’Neill-ButlerTimely new book. Released on the heels of this weekend massobilization against the Trump government, The War of Art: A History of Artists’ Protest in America Comes at a time when many of us consider which tools we have to create the world in which we want to live. Artists have long struggling with this question, O’Neill Butler reminds us, because many have even melted their aesthetic tendencies with their desires for justice.
The Art War is in the origin of books such as that of Nicolas Lampert An art history of the United States of the United StatesHe describes Grassroots approaches of art and social change for 250 years. O’Neill-Butler shortens the timeline for her text and starts with the sixties. Early projects include the co-founder of Benny Andrews of the Black Emergency Cultural Coalition, or BECC, and the establishment of a Prison Arts program in the Manhattan House of Detention after the Attica Riot.
O’Neill-Butler is on their care to dictate exactly what activist art is, instead to leave the genre open. The determining characteristics she offers are that these types of projects “are always a means to achieve a goal” and have the tendency to collapse the already vulnerable boundary between politics and art. Many of her case studies use art to get attention from the media and therefore the audience, a combination that often turns out to be more effective than protest or artistic presentation alone.
For example, the work of David Wojnarowicz to end the AIDS Pandemie with Act Up and Nan Goldin’s recipe addiction intervention now (pain) were both movements that used spectacular tactics, such as the ‘in’, a public version that arose during the Vietnam war. These actions include protesters on the ground or floor, and in the case of Goldin’s work took place in institutions such as the Metropolitan Museum of Art in objection to the wing of the Sackler family.
Wojnarowicz is also famous for his Nu-iconic Jeanjack who says: “If I die of AIDS recovery funeral, my body simply falls on the stairs of the FDA,” of which an image is widely spread and the movement comes to symbolize. These projects have not only been created art with activist worries, but rather with the positions they argue for.
It is of course important to acknowledge that the problems that these artists are concerned – a lack of affordable housing, crises for public health, discrimination in the art world, to name just a few – are constant and the most socially involved projects, the examples that the book includes are not without criticism.
In 1993, seven African-American artists founded Project Rewerhuizen in the historic third department of Houston by renovating a block of expired hunting rifles and creating a hospitable gathering space in an understill neighborhood. Although Project Row-Huizen have revitalized the area by various artist-driven efforts such as the Drive-by Exhibition shown below, today, gentrification and the effects of the climate crisis, the residents who wanted to serve organizers continue to serve.
O’Neill-Butler does not suggest that artists should be charged with identifying and implementing solutions for the ailments of the world and notes that the third neighborhood of Houston would probably have Gentrified, even without intervention and subsequent attention. However, it does offer a nuanced consideration of the successes and struggles of each project and acknowledges the limits of efforts as she sketches. Art offers what the book calls as ‘a crack in the wall’, a break in the thin veneer of power and oppression that, once exposed, threatens their fundamental structures.
The Art War Is from Verso today. Find your copy in the Colossal.
