Protest art
[1] Protest art helps arouse base emotions in their audiences, and in return may increase the climate of tension and create new opportunities to dissent.
[1] Protest art acts as an important tool to form social consciousness, create networks, operate accessibly, and be cost-effective.
Protest artists frequently bypass the art-world institutions and commercial gallery system in an attempt to reach a wider audience.
There are many politically charged pieces of fine art — such as Pablo Picasso's Guernica, some of Norman Carlberg's Vietnam War-era work, or Susan Crile's images of torture at Abu Ghraib.
The aim of activist artists is to create art that is a form of political or social currency, actively addressing cultural power structures rather than representing them or simply describing them.
It aims to affect social change by engaging in active processes of representation that work to foster participation in dialogue, raise consciousness, and empower individuals and communities.
The need to ensure the continued impact of a work by sustaining the public participation process it initiated is also a challenge for many activist artists.
Many active artists have been addressing the issue of climate change in their works, but this is just an example of one of many political artworks being created through activist art.
Such strategies often involved “collaboration, dialogue, a constant questioning of aesthetic and social assumptions, and a new respect for audience”[8] and are used to articulate and negotiate issues of self-representation, empowerment, and community identity.
[citation needed] In practice, activist art may often take the form of temporal interventions, such as performance, media events, exhibitions, and installations.
By making use of these commercial distributive channels of commerce, this technique is particularly effective in conveying messages that reveal and subvert its usual intentions.
Creative expression empowers individuals by creating a space in which their voices can be heard and in which they can engage in a dialogue with one another, and with the issues in which they have a personal stake.
It is an affiliation of artists, arts professionals and women, children and teenagers living in NYC shelters, the A & HC believe that their work in a collaborative project of art-making offers the residents a “positive experience of self-motivation and helps them regain what the shelter system and circumstances of lives destroy: a sense of individual identity and confidence in human interaction.”[9] The process of engaging the community in a dialogue with dominant and public discourses about the issue of homelessness is described in a statement by its founder, Hope Sandrow: “The relevancy of art to a community is exhibited in artworks where the homeless speak directly to the public and in discussion that consider the relationship art has to their lives.
Critics argued that the very works of art whose purpose was to provoke political, social and cultural conversation were confined within the exclusive and privileged space of galleries museums, and private collections.
By contrast, the A & HC was an attempt to bridge the gap between art production and social action, thus allowing for the work subjects that were previously excluded and silenced to be heard.
Much of the art was public, taking the form of murals, banners, posters, t-shirts and graffiti with political messages that were confrontational and focused on the realities of life in a segregated South Africa.
