The following writing sample is a collaboration for a course at the University of Central Florida - ARH 4450, 20th Century Art History.
The following sample is about activist art in the 20th century. Collaborators on this project include myself, Andres Montenegro, Ryan Black, Ashley Weaver, Alfonso Ruiz, and Kayla Ferro. Images have been omitted from the sample due to copyright restrictions and limitations with Behance. The sample begins after the break.
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Characterized by using public spaces and community awareness, Activist art challenges socio-political issues by inviting others to draw out opinions and ask questions about major issues in modern society. Whether the medium be public installation, technological media, or even traditional painting and sculpture, activist art gives onlookers the ability to better understand societal issues and raise awareness for change and progress. Artists that make up this movement are varied in gender, ethnicity, and medium, but they all share the common goal to empower people to continue to talk about these issues and make things known to others who may not know, or may not be as educated on such matters. The artists we’ve studied span a large window of time periods and nationalities, including Young British Artists Christopher Ofili and Marcus Harvey, Mexican artist Gabriel Orozco, Chinese artist Ai Weiwei, and American artists Nan Goldin and Robert Mapplethorpe. What these artists all share in common is a drive and courage to spread the word of the issues plaguing society from the 80s to the present day.
Born on April 27, 1967 in Mexico, Gabriel Orozco is a mixed media artist that became known for his work in sculpture in the early 90s. Son of a communist mural painter, most of his art and instruction from early age was very classical and mostly related with painting. His studio work was the same as well; since his father had him help with the murals and other artwork, the studio space was something he was very exposed to as well as an older child. He attended the Escuela Nacional de Artes Plásticas in Mexico, but after a few years of instruction believed it to be too conservative on its practices and moved to Madrid, where he enrolled at the Circulo de Bellas Artes. It is there, in Madrid, where he was introduced into the many different, post war artists and the range of materials and media used. After finishing his studies Orozco moved back to Mexico where he started a series of gathering called “Friday Workshops”, where contemporary artists collaborated on projects together. These meetings, although mixed with plenty of beer and spiced conversations, helped several of these artists’ careers moving into the 21st century. The bridge that has implicitly made Orozco an activist is the fact that in Mexico an artist is held to a public figure status, and the conceptual strength Orozco places on his work glorified that status. Figure 1 depicts a stone made by Orozco out of plasticine and covered in debris. The debris that collects on the stone comes from the ground it rolls on. Perhaps the stone was meant to pick up debris in the sense that it is “yielding” to the area around it, collecting the scraps and dust of the places it travels, lending itself to the reality and realness of daily life in Mexico. Orozco’s path through life after Madrid has been somewhat nomadic, in the fact he has never until recently, had a set studio for work. In this environment although he believes that art doesn't have to be related with good intentions of morals, statements are made about life and our reality, and they are carried through culture to everyone, similar to how the stone collects the leftovers of the places it also travels. Even when approached about being an activist, Orozco has stated, “The role of the outspoken activist is occupied by celebrities like Angelina Jolie; she does the job that in France would be filled by Jacques Derrida, or in Mexico by Frida Kahlo” (The Economist, 2011). Orozco’s truth is left to the eyes and ears of the ones who observe and make a move on what they’ve observed.
Perhaps some of the most prolific activist artists of the past thirty years are members of the Young British Artists, or YBAs, who were categorized by their practice of exhibiting together in London in the late 1980s. These artists were known for utilizing the element of shock in their works to reach their audience and continued to make waves in the British art scene through the 1990s. One of these artists was Marcus Harvey, born in Leeds in 1963. He graduated from Leeds College of Art in the mid-80s and became friends with fellow YBA Damien Hirst. Figure 2 depicts an image of a woman named Myra Hindley, half of a notorious duo of criminals responsible for the Moors murders of Greater Manchester. Myra is a large 9’ x 11’ painting that was first displayed at the Notorious Sensation exhibition put on by the YBAs in 1997. Intending to resemble a newspaper clipping of Myra Hindley who along with Ian Brady were responsible for a series of heinous murders in the UK, Harvey created this work using casts of an infant’s hand to build a mosaic of black, grey, and white handprints. Harvey once said, “The whole point of the painting is the photograph. That photograph. The iconic power that has come to it as a result of years of obsessive media reproduction.” The painting shows the relationship of the child from the handprints and the image of Myra who was responsible for the murders of five young children. The Sensation exhibition was extremely controversial across the board however; the Secretary of the Royal Academy had described Myra as being the single most important painting of the show. The message here is clear with Harvey, however. He has created a work of art depicting a person so vile and deranged, and made it in such a large scale that it is almost overwhelming when looking at it. Once the viewer begins to approach the work they begin to realize that it was created using a child’s handprints, and that sense of evil becomes overpowering and almost unbearable.
Like Harvey, activist artist Christopher Ofili, born in 1963, became famous for his controversial paintings that utilized the colors of the pan-African union flag (red, black, and green), and a rather unusual material – elephant dung. Figure 3 depicts a couple of African descent, embracing and in love, with the man’s hands resting on the woman’s pregnant stomach. Ofili reclaimed many racial and sexual stereotypes against African-British and African-American people in his works, making light of them or making his viewers question their viability, raising awareness to the power and unity of African culture in the face of adversity. Ofili has accomplished this goal in using the elements used so loosely and demeaningly decades prior by bringing them back to light in the present day – not to punish people with them, but to unite people under the cause that such things can be used to display something romantic and beautiful and pleasing to the eye. With these methods of reclaiming the wrongdoings to make a right – the murdered victims of the Moors and the past transgressions against people of African descent, the Young British Artists bring public attention to the community and raise awareness and cooperation in making sure history does not repeat itself.
Even at home, activist art is alive and thriving, depicted here by the highly controversial works of American artists Robert Mapplethorpe and Nan Goldin. Starting with Mapplethorpe, born in 1946, Mapplethorpe challenged societal norms of male and female by blurring the lines between them in his series of controversial self-portraits. Figure 4 depicts Mapplethorpe in partial drag, naked with his hair curled, eyebrows and eyes primped and covered in makeup, and his lips likely covered in lipstick, suggested by the look of his lips and rest of his face also having makeup. Mapplethorpe’s works were charged several times for being grossly obscene, being often homoerotic in nature, and sometimes graphically sadomasochistic. The works in question led many to question the public funding of art, which became naturally challenged by other artists of the time for displaying obscenities in a non-obscene way. He would later pass away due to complications with AIDS, though his works live on through perhaps his most famous benefactor, Sam Wagstaff.
Likewise in the same vein of sexual art challenging the norm, female artist Nan Goldin, born in 1953, became most famous for her photographs that read as a diary of her life and events. Figure 5 depicts a self-portrait with the artist and her then-lover. In this picture one can clearly sense the sexual and emotional tension between “Nan” and her then-lover, “Brian.” From the man’s drug use and possible disdain to possible aggression, and the potential fear and discomfort in the Nan’s face, there is also somehow a glimmer of hope. The man is appears to be someone she loves, supported by the picture of what appears to the same man above her bed frame. The emotion Nan displays is hard to gauge because of the context of the area around them. They could just be talking, but they could also have had sexual intercourse, or maybe even woken up out of bed. The work is a part of her famous 800-image slideshow installation in the mid-1980s known as The Ballad of Sexual Dependency. Goldin describes it as a diary of people from her “tribe.” The image is meant to show the harsh and emotionally, magnetically troublesome life of drug use, violence, and life-changing events. Most of the people Goldin photographed from this series were her close friends, whom she usually used in her photography. Sadly, many of the subjects of her works fell victim to drug overdoses and sexually transmitted diseases. Mapplethorpe and Goldin display a harsh and uncensored look into the lives of those that society tries to stifle, the dark and grueling side of sex, relationships, addiction, and more.
Born on August 28, 1957 in Beijing, China, Ai Weiwei is a Chinese contemporary artist who is well known for his collaboration with Swiss architects Herzog & de Meuron as the artistic consultant on the Beijing National Stadium for the 2008 Olympics. His father, Chinese poet Qing, was denounced during the Anti-Rightist Movement, and in 1958, at the age of one, Weiwei’s family was sent to a labor camp. Afterwards the family was exiled to Shihezi, Xinjiang in 1961, where they lived for 16 years. With Mao Zedong's death and the end of the Cultural Revolution, the family finally returned to Beijing in 1976. These events are what lead him to follow the path of a political activist, who has been highly and openly critical of the Chinese Government's standpoint on democracy and human rights. In 2014, Weiwei had a piece labeled "illuminations" which is located in an old prison hospital. For this piece, Weiwei installed recordings of Tibetan and Native American Chants in two psychiatric evaluation rooms. This exhibition was meant to expose the issues of freedom of speech and human rights by creating artistic possibility within and about a broken system. In November of 2010, Chinese authorities announced that Ai's new studio would be demolished after he had been given the okay for its construction. In response to the news, he had invited guests via Twitter to a feast of over ten thousand river crabs in protest to the government’s control of information. Weiwei was placed under house arrest for his actions and was unable to join in on the feast. To demonstrate this protest, in his piece He Xie, depicted in Figure 6, Weiwei metaphorically represents the restrictions of freedom of speech and individual expression placed on the people of China. He Xie, literally meaning “river crab,” has come to represent the online censorship that the Chinese society is placed under. All in all, Ai Weiwei is seen as one of the greatest Chinese artists and political activists of his time, and although all of his work is dealt through the artistic field, he is very much involved and fights for his people's rights.
The power and perseverance displayed by activist artists comes at the cost of socio-political scrutiny of oneself. Artists worldwide are bringing attention to restrictions and weights hurting human society in the veins of race, sex, technology, and governmental control to empower the people around them to take a stand for themselves and become more educated in the issues that don’t always make it into the daily newspaper or through word of mouth around the town. Artists like Mapplethorpe and Goldin challenge the stigma against sexual freedom by putting them in plain view for the viewer, while artists like Orozco and Ofili put their cultures’ daily lives and struggles in the limelight by creating art that reclaims transgressions of the past and collect the real events of the days that pass that often go unnoticed by outsiders. Activist art spans many mediums and nationalities. Activist art can be as simple and poignant as propaganda posters, or as transcendental and abstract as the chronicles of an entire race of people through paintings and photographs. The beauty of activist art is its accessibility – activist artists are everywhere, and whether they’re painting, filming, or just telling a story by mouth, their stories are easily spread worldwide and understood by millions.
