The Artist as Activist

Front cover of High Performance #25, Spring 1984. Collage includes image of Nancy Buchanan in An End to All Our Dreams, from videotape by Nancy Buchanan, 1982 (Photo: Kira Perov). Silhouette from We Are All Drafted into Reagan's War, a Los Angeles Artists Call event, organized by Kristin Bonkemeyer, Jane Dibbell and Lin Hixson, 1984 (Photo: Mary Collins)

This essay was written as an introduction to Part II: The Artist as Activist section of "The Citizen Artist."

Ideologies can usually be found at the crux of activist art—both ideologies that artists hold dear and ideologies that artists seek to change—so an awareness of the construction of ideology can be essential to the activist artist's work. We begin our section on the artist as activist with Adrian Piper's 1981 essay "Ideology, Confrontation and Political Self-Awareness," in which she puts forward an understanding of how ideologies are developed and maintained, and how the activist artist can recognize and address them. Piper's conceptual performance work of the '70s included street performance focused on the interchange between the "self" and the "other," in which she appeared in public with her clothes smeared with food, paint and bubble gum, or carried tape-recorded burps with her to the library. There were also stage performances confronting audiences with their own roles as manipulated spectators. The essay operates as theory, rooted in Piper's background in philosophy and her interest in human behavior, and, as we discover toward the end, it is also an essay-as-artwork that practices her aesthetic as a politically aware conceptual artist.

In California, Latino artists were among the first to come to activist art. Latino politics was a growing presence in the state throughout the '80s, and many artists cut their teeth on activism in collaboration with the United Farm Workers. Our interview with playwright Luis Valdez traces the rise and influence of El Teatro Campesino, from its birth in the fields of the San Joaquin Valley to opening night on Broadway. Emily Hicks, in an article from our 1986 "Nuevo Latino" issue, profiles four extremely influential artists working in southern California, Mexico and the border region in between: border animateur Guillermo Gómez-Peña, community muralist Judith Baca, guerrilla organizer Felipe Ehrenberg and Chicano activist David Avalos. Hicks details the activist-art strategies of these binational postmodernists to change their culture and broaden the definition of "artist."

In the mid-'80s, the domestic and foreign policies of the current U.S. administration caused artists to rise to activism in rapidly increasing numbers. In 1984, we published a special section of High Performance called "Artists & Issues," featuring articles about the New York movement "Artists Call" and its focus on U.S. Intervention in Central America; Venezuelan artist Rolando Peña and his work about oil politics; Vietnam veteran Kim Jones' street performances as Mudman, an image about the experience of war; and a tour of Northern Ireland and artists' attitudes about the conflict there. Nancy Buchanan had just returned from a tour of Nicaragua, and here we excerpt our interview with her about how the trip would impact her work.

Contragate was dominating the news when Robbie Conal began blanketing the cities of the U.S. with his political posters. These satirical portraits of celebrities and political figures, underscored with one-liners, became interactive artworks, with comments and additional art adorning them everywhere in no time. Here Conal talks about his motives in the one-man postering campaign, and his excitement in getting people to think about people in power.

High Performance was the first art magazine we know of to devote an issue to AIDS. Among our writers was Max Navarre, a New York playwright (now deceased) whose "Art in the AIDies: An Act of Faith" brought up issues that still resonate more than ten years later: What is the artist's best response in a time of personal, cultural and planetary crisis? Is art an appropriate tool for education, for grieving, for healing? What are we willing to look at on stage?

Five years after our 1986 AIDS issue, ACT UP (AIDS Coalition to Unleash Power) had come out full force in support of more research and funding for AIDS. During that same period computer technology proliferated and became much more accessible to artists and to everyone. It was only a matter of time before the artists in ACT UP starting using the new technologies to attract attention to their cause. Lucy Lippard wrote for us about Michael Nash, an artist member of ACT UP Denver, who used billboards and a computer disk to open up issues he thought the country ought to be discussing related to the epidemic.

Artists were using many different forms to register protest in the '80s. The Korean-American artists of Theatre 1981 added a new element when they created a shamanic theater of protest against the massacres of students in Korea, and the use of mass violence against peoples everywhere. Our interview with them reveals that images of protest can vary widely from culture to culture. It also has some unexpected things to teach us about the nature of shamanism, so popular among artists of the west-coast U.S.

By the end of the decade artists' concerns were becoming intensely culturally specific. We were going out of our way to learn a great deal about each other. Pearl Cleage's "No Time for the Blues (Aesthetic)" appeared in our "Blues Aesthetic" issue of 1990. The idea for the issue arose from "The Blues Aesthetic: Black Culture and Modernism," the title of a show at Washington Project for the Arts in Washington, D.C. Guest-edited by Los Angeles-based artists Keith Antar Mason and Wanda Coleman, our issue included articles, comments and artwork by African-American artists examining the blues not just as music, but as painting, photography, fiction, politics, social condition and cultural force.

1992, for many artists and their communities, was a year of infamy: the 500th anniversary of the year Columbus "discovered" America. The discovery was being celebrated across the country, but not by everyone. We published a number of accounts of the artists' response: protests and demands for a recognition of the real history of our hemisphere, in all its shame and ancient glory. Many institutions who wanted to comment on the issue did so by involving American Indian artists, in a special brand of "outreach." In our interview here with California performance artist James Luna, "Call Me in '93," Luna echoes the frequent complaint by minority artists that they are kept on a special ethnic shelf in art history, and only brought out during Cinco de Mayo, Black History Month, Hiroshima Day and other ethnically appropriate times, instead of being treated like artists at all times. In Luna's interview, he responds to his distorted popularity during the Columbus anniversary year as a spokesperson for American Indians.

As artists became more and more vocal, and more effective in their activist art strategies, the power structure began to take notice, and take action. Soon the so-called Culture Wars were raging in earnest, with artists and artspaces being attacked by right-wing politicians for blasphemy, desecration of religious symbols, insult to family values and promotion of homosexuality.

The attack on the work of Andres Serrano was one of the first shots across the bow. In High Performance Coco Fusco interviewed him about the death threats, loss of funding and notoriety he was experiencing—and what brought him to photograph members of the Ku Klux Klan. Serrano was a reluctant soldier in the Culture Wars. By his own admission, there was no activist intent to his work, and taken at his word he is an unusual inclusion in this anthology. Yet the public reaction to his work by the public made him a symbol in the "freedom of expression" debates, and his reflections on the impact of that phenomenon are useful in the examination of the mixture of art and politics.

Performance artist Karen Finley was another artist who received the wrath of the right. One of four artists whose NEA grants were rescinded for what appeared to be political reasons, Finley stood out in her ferocity and contempt for the games politicians play. A regular in the pages of High Performance since its early issues, Finley has for 20 years been confronting audiences with the taboos of our culture. Ironically, the provocative nature of her work has often made Finley herself taboo as a performer. Her unwillingness to compromise her material has excluded her from all but the bravest late-night clubs and alternative spaces, and yet her reputation stretches far beyond those who have seen her in person. Media reports of vile language, nudity and orifices filled with foodstuffs have led some to assume her work exists for its shock value. But this is not exhibitionism, this is anger. Voyeurs who like to see women humiliated could find safer places to indulge their prurient interests. This performance isn't done for them, it's done at them—with a vengeance. Karen Finley is an archetypal example of the artist as warrior.

The Culture Wars did more damage than expected. When the dust began to settle, artists found themselves isolated from and unsupported by their culture. The climate for art in America was chilly. Many artists began addressing this gap of understanding by turning to their own communities to try to rekindle the fires of creativity. They joined a small cadre of artists who had been doing that job, in communities everywhere, all along...

This essay was originally published in 1998 as part of "The Citizen Artist 20 Years of Art in the Public Arena: An Anthology from High Performance Magazine 1978-1998."

Original CAN/API publication: September 2002