The Medium and the Message

When Oscar Wilde wrote in his 1891 preface to The Picture of Dorian Gray that ‘all art is quite useless’, he probably never imagined that people would be arguing over his provocative saying for more thana century to come.¹ He later expanded: ‘Art is useless because its aim is simply to create a mood. It is not meant to instruct or influence action in any way.’²

Wilde’s claim is powerfully rebuked by contemporary activist artists who make work that instructs, influences action and creates a mood, all at once. In her performance Tatlin’s whisper #3 2006, theCuban artist Tania Bruguera showed a Madrid gallery audience how to build homemade bombs. For her subsequent piece Tatlin’s whisper #6 (Havana version) 2009, at the 2009 Havana Biennial in Cuba, she invited viewers onstage to speak freely and uncensored for one minute, before they were escorted off by actors in military uniforms.

Bruguera has developed the category of arte útil (useful art), an idea that builds on a project from 1969 by the Argentine artist Eduardo Costa which proposed useful art for the city of New York, including repairing signs and repainting a subway station. In 2013 Bruguera established the Asociación de Arte Útil, an online platform which includes in its archive projects by diverse groups including a cooperative producing clothing in Kenya, a language workshop for migrants in Italy and Autonomy cube 2014, a free, anonymised, open-access internet hub designed by US artists Trevor Paglen and Jacob Appelbaum.

The irony is that even in Wilde’s day, art’s potential usefulness was shaping some of the most progressive work of the period. William Morris, the English artist, designer and theorist, had equally strong views on the role of art. In later life he retreated from the apolitical ‘art for art’s sake’ position held by the Aesthetic Movement (of which Wilde was an advocate) and became entrenched in socialist political activism. He aspired to liberate the working class from mechanised labour in soul-crushing factories; he celebrated the value of handcrafted objects and well-designed, affordable applied arts for the home.

In 2013 the artist Jeremy Deller featured Morris in his exhibition for the British pavilion of the Venice Biennale. In his mural, a giant Morris stands ankle-deep in the Venice lagoon, hurling Russian oligarch Roman Abramovich’s mega yacht Luna into the water. (Abramovich and other billionaires often ostentatiously anchored their yachts outside the biennale’s gates.) To Deller, a conceptual artist whose work has often focused on working-class culture, Morris is a hero, a man of action.

Whether or not Deller is an activist artist, however, depends on your definition of the term. I would argue that he is not, for a couple of reasons. While his work is undoubtedly political, it is usually about political ideas and forms rather than straightforwardly embodying them. (A trade union banner in an exhibition by Deller is very different from a trade union banner carried in a parade.) As with much contemporary art, it aims to ask questions rather than to propose answers. Though provocative, it is not designed to manifest in concrete results.

Activist art — which has roots in the nineteenth century but which really took off in the 1960s — is not the same as political art, nor is it the same as socially engaged art, Relational Aesthetics, New Genres art or other adjacent and occasionally overlapping movements. Activist art aims to make a tangible change, whether a change in governmental policy, in legislation or even simply in public opinion.

It is also not necessarily the same as protest art. One definition of protest art is art that addresses its ideological opponents. Some activist art does this, but much does not; by addressing their own community, artists can mobilise sympathetic viewers to become active participants — or ‘users’, as Bruguera has put it.

Not all aesthetic objects designed to effect political change are art however — unless you cast such a wide net that you include agitprop posters, pamphlets, handbills, stickers, billboard or televisionadvertisements, satirical cartoons, graffiti, lapel badges, protest apparel like placards, banners or pussy hats, or performative actions like supergluing yourself to a painting. Nevertheless, it is also the case that many activist art projects don’t look like art at all; many even look like the things I just listed. Confused? That’s sometimes the point.

A 1994 book about activist art edited by Nina Felshin is wittily titled But is it art? In her introduction, Felshin writes that the properanswer to her title is: ‘But does it matter?’ The artists featuredin her book, she says, ‘are creatively expanding art’s boundaries and audience and redefining the role of the artist.’³ The book was written only a few years after the deaths of Keith Haring and Andy Warhol, artists who famously expanded definitions of what an artist could do and be. In the 1990s art that sailed piratically outside the art world’s institutional borders was bracing and refreshing; these days, the expanded field in which art is permitted (even expected) to operate is already presumed to be wide open. Unlike the activist art of the 1990s, which prioritised process over product and tended to exist only in the public sphere — rather than in museums or galleries — the best activist work today succeeds in making compelling art works and effecting political change. Sometimes, activist art works are made by people who don’t consider themselves activist artists at all — still less ‘artivists’, to use the cheesy portmanteau that, for the purposes of this essay, I prefer to leave on the shelf. The Irish artist Richard Mosse’s recent film installation, Broken spectre 2022, viscerally documents the destruction of the Amazon rainforest and is an urgent call to arms. (Mosse calls it his ‘first activist project’ and has shown it to US and Brazilian government officials.)⁴ The US artist Theaster Gates has leveraged sales of his gallery art, which often consist of paintings made from reclaimed materials, to invest in his community in South Side, Chicago. Sculptor Simone Leigh, in 2014 and 2016, set up medical clinics in New York, offering free services — such as HIV tests, health check-ups, yoga classes and acupuncture — primarily to Black women. In 2007 in the wake of the devastation caused by hurricane Katrina, the Hong Kong-born artist Paul Chan, known for his animated film projections, staged four outdoor community performances in New Orleans of Samuel Beckett’s play Waiting for Godot 1953.

Such artists work in the legacy of influential figures such as Los Angeles-based artist Suzanne Lacy, who has been making politically engaged art since the 1970s. For one of her most famous early projects, Three Weeks in May 1977, she installed a large map of Los Angeles in a shopping mall below City Hall. For three weeks she requested police reports of sexual violence each day and stamped the word RAPE on the map where the crime took place. (She applied nine fainter stamps around it, signifying the estimated additional rapes that went unreported.)

Three Weeks in May, like all of Lacy’s projects, had multiple components and collaborators, including public events such as a self-defence demonstration in the mall, guerrilla interventions in the city’s streets and a harrowing art performance in a gallery. Each addressed a different audience. The most famous part of the project, however, is undoubtedly the map which, in 2012, entered the collection of the Hammer Museum in Los Angeles. It continues to devastate, but due to its preservation by an institution, telegraphs its strident message far beyond the context of May 1977.

A ‘message’, by the way, is not an attribute that is widely appreciated in contemporary art. (Back to Wilde’s assertion that art is ‘not meant to instruct’.) Often, message-driven art is critically dismissed as ‘didactic.’ Nato Thompson, former curator of the non-profit Creative Time, acknowledges this problem in his excellent book Seeing power: art and activisim in the 21st century (2015): ‘In the artworld’, he writes, ‘a strange land that appreciates loose metaphors, elusive meanings, complexity, and conceptual ideas — the word didactic is the ultimate epithet, sending shivers down the spines of studio artists during critiques and reviews.’ ⁵ Activism, to some people, can seem antithetical to the very qualities that qualify something as art in the first place.

Over the decades, Lacy’s work has come to be less message-driven and more open-ended. That does not mean it has lost any of its activist power. The objective of most of her projects is to facilitate conversation and discussion among participants, often from communities that have not communicated well in the past. Lacy’s The Oakland Projects 1991–2001 brought together young people from the city of Oakland, California, with local police; in The Circle and the Square 2015–17 she gathered Lancastrian shape-note singers and Pakistani migrants to sing together in the now-closed northern English textile mill where many used to work. Before establishing how her projects will look, or even what media they will use, Lacy conducts extensive research and conversation in the communities in which she’s working; she identifies pressure points and fault lines and works with her collaborators to find a form for the eventual art work. Much of her activism happens invisibly, before the work is eventually presented in a gallery.

Didactic, message-driven art may be frowned upon by many sectors of the contemporary art world, but what about when the message in question is widely agreed upon? The AIDS epidemic of the 1980s is a case in point. At that time, especially in the United States, the division between the socially liberal left and the Christian right was so stark that virtually the entire artistic avant-garde was aligned with the left, fighting for AIDS awareness. The only debate, among political artists, was how best to achieve their activist ends. Many messages were stark: in 1987 Haring designed a poster proclaiming ‘Safe Sex!’ above a cheerful cartoon penis holding a condom. That same year, a collective of artists and designers produced a poster featuring a pink triangle — a reference to the symbol for LGBTQ people used in Nazi concentration camps — and the slogan ‘SILENCE=DEATH’ on a black background. The Silence=Death Project, as the collective became known, wheat-pasted their poster around New York City; it was soon adopted by the activist collective ACT UP (the AIDS Coalition to Unleash Power) which disseminated it across North America.Haring even incorporated the slogan into his own posters.

The urgency of the moment led to myriad ad hoc collectives and artistic solutions to activist problems. ‘Art, though, was never the point,’ writes Jennifer Kabat in an article about the collective Gran Fury. ‘Action was.’ ⁶

Gran Fury, today one of the best known of these collectives, grew out of ACT UP but eventually peeled away to become an autonomous art group and was included in the 1990 Venice Biennale. Its work was scrappy but at its best was effective; in 1989 members interrupted trading at the New York Stock Exchange to protest the Burroughs Wellcome & Company’s high retail price of the antiretroviral drug AZT. Two days later, the company dropped the drug’s price by 20 per cent.Gran Fury’s actions and interventions may be well remembered, but its visual artworks are less so. Contrast that with an iconic work from 1986 by the Canadian art collective General Idea (Felix Partz,Jorge Zontal and AA Bronson) which subverted Pop artist Robert Indiana’s signature image LOVE 1965–2018 with the word ‘AIDS’. While Partz and Zontal were living with AIDS at this time, General Idea had existed since the 1960s and was not primarily an activist group nor a collective specifically focused on AIDS.

They were conceptualists interested in subverting established forms of popular media, like advertisements, shop window displays and magazines — ‘redefining the role of the artist’ as Felshin put it. The virality (their own intentional pun) of their AIDS image — which they titled Imagevirus 1986–91 and which, like Indiana’s LOVE, they transmitted through diverse media — made it one of the most recognisable art works of the era. It was also uncomfortably ambiguous, a quality that may have made it a better art work (in the traditional sense) but which made it controversial among activists. Gran Fury issued a rejoinder — the group’s only painting, titled Wall Street Money 1988 — replacing the word AIDS with RIOT. Imagevirus, however, is the piece that transcended its historical moment and its short-term usefulness.

The 1980s saw many artists distance themselves from the mainstream art world, not just by exhibiting their work in the public sphere but by actively critiquing the museums and commercial galleries which they felt did not represent their interests. The Guerrilla Girls formed in 1985 after an exhibition at New York’s Museum of Modern Art titled An International Survey of Painting and Sculpture included 165 artists from 17 countries, only 13 of whom were female and eight artists of colour. At a picket line outside the museum, feminist protesters saw that museum visitors paid them little notice. They agreed on the need for a new kind of attention-grabbing activism.

Despite having existed now for nearly four decades, with over 60 members having participated at various times, the Guerrilla Girls’ graphic aesthetic remains as recognisable as the members themselves remain anonymous, always disguised in publicity photographs and performances by hairy gorilla masks. The group’s primary medium is posters, often wheat-pasted around the cities in which they work.

Their masterpiece, perhaps, is a 1989 advertisement, initially designed for buses, appropriating Ingres’ painting Grande Odalisque 1814, with the reclining nude woman’s head replaced by a gorilla mask. ‘Do women have to be naked to get into the Met. Museum?’ the poster demanded, in the Guerilla Girls’ trademark sans serif font. ‘Less than 5% of the artists in the Modern Art sections are women, but 85% of the nudes are female.’ Guerilla Girls’ images are witty as well as informative and eye-catching; they use the same strategies as good advertising.

Some artists choose to critique the structures of the art world from within, instead of from the streets. Since the 1970s the German-born artist Hans Haacke has sought to expose ordinarily invisible systems of financial and political machination which often underpin ostensibly left-leaning institutions of art. In 1970 he conducted a poll of visitors to the exhibition ‘information’ at MoMA: ‘Would the fact that Governor Rockefeller has not denounced President Nixon’s Indochina Policy be a reason for your not voting for him in November?’ asked a wall text. ‘If “yes”, please cast your ballot into the left box, if “no”, into the right box.’ Yes ballots visibly outnumbered the no ballots. This was awkward for the museum, as Rockefeller was its former president, and his brother David was chair of its board.

David Rockefeller remained on the board and Nelson Rockefeller was re-elected in New York’s 1970 gubernatorial election. Does that make Haacke’s MoMA poll ineffective as activism? Haacke would say not. One enduring consequence of his work (and that of other artists, including Marcel Broodthaers and Michael Asher) was the coining of the artistic term ‘institutional critique’ — a progressive strategy that, today, is not only tolerated by art institutions but often actively welcomed.

A notorious, recent example of such institutional critique was the video submitted by the London-based research agency Forensic Architecture to the 2019 Whitney Biennial. Following protests led by the activist coalition Decolonize this Place against Whitney Museum vice-chairmanWarren B Kanders, Forensic Architecture produced a film detailing the use of tear gas canisters made by Kanders’ company Safariland against civilians around the world, from migrants at the US–Mexico border to Palestinian protesters in Gaza. In July 2019, following inaction by the museum, Forensic Architecture and seven other artists withdrew their work from the biennial. A week later, Kanders resigned from the board.

While the work of Forensic Architecture can easily be understood as activism, its status as art is trickier to parse. If it is seen as academic research or investigative journalism, its reliance on its own aestheticised presentation (often in art galleries) seems to undermine its integrity; if it seen as art, that undermines its objectivity. The British Israeli architect Eyal Weizman, who is the group’s founder, has argued that aesthetics are involved in all forms of investigation and reporting, whether in a courtroom or a newspaper.

Haacke’s piece The freedom fighters were here 1988 underscores Weizman’s position. A news photograph shows three Nicaraguan relatives of a child killed in a battle by the US-sponsored Contras; one man carries a tiny coffin, another a wooden cross. While the appropriated image was taken by a supposedly objective photojournalist, it remains heart-rending, especially when topped by Haacke with an illuminated marquee, which advertises the piece’s ironic title.

Activism in art is a global phenomenon. Often its causes — such as environmentalism, decolonialism or indigenous rights — are global issues which engender critical artistic positions outside of the institutions of Western imperialism. Since the 1960s, Aboriginal artists in Australia have increasingly engaged broad audiences through art that deals with Indigenous social justice, land rights and sovereignty.The artist Richard Bell, a descendent of Kamilaroi, Kooma, Jiman and Gurang Gurang peoples, came to art through political activism. Art, he saw, could deliver activist messages more powerfully and poignantly than other forms of visual culture; furthermore, he considered the art hanging in most Australian museums to be manifestations of Western colonialism. Appropriation is a mainstay of Bell’s work, whether he is incorporating Pop art targets, Jackson Pollock-style paint drips or stereotypes of traditional Aboriginal art. (Bell often asserts that the invention of Aboriginal art as a category only serves the white artistic establishment.) Bell’s paintings, such as From little things big things grow 2019–20, typically feature explicitly activist messages, in this case borrowed from protest signs. That work’s title is borrowed too — from a song by Kev Carmody and Paul Kelly telling the story of the Wave Hill Walk-Off, the seven-year protest begun by Vincent Lingiari in 1966 which led to the establishment of the Aboriginal Land Rights (Northern Territory) Act 1976.

In 1984 the theorist Lucy Lippard wrote an influential essay on ‘activist art and power’ titled Trojan Horses. Bell’s paintings, hanging inside white-established museums, are Trojan horses. So too are the works of Vivienne Binns, an Australian feminist artist who moved away from an almost psychedelic, ribald early painting style in the 1960s to focus on collaborative, cross-disciplinary community projects the following decade. Between 1979 and 1981, Binns worked with women at the University of New South Wales and later in the western Sydney suburb of Blacktown, documenting their stories in images and text. As with Suzanne Lacy’s projects, a vast amount of discursive material remains unseen, but in Binns’ sculpture Mother’s memories, others’ memories, postcard rack 1980 she archives some of those stories in the form of postcard-sized prints on steel panels, displayed on a postcard rack which now lives, like a Trojan horse, in the collection of the National Gallery of Australia.

To simplify art’s purpose to the fulfilment of prosaic, measurable outcomes — such as repairing a street sign or lowering the cost of a medicine — would be a loss for culture at large. Art can be ‘useful’ on many levels, even if that usefulness is sometimes not easy to identify. Activism’s recognition of art as a uniquely useful tool, however, to me is joyful and affirmative of visual art’s power to hold attention, to capture the imagination and to transmit meaning. The best art changes the world, whether or not we choose to call it ‘activism’ — or, indeed, whether we call it ‘art’.

This story was first published in The Annual 2023.