It Won't Be OK

Widewalls - Protest Art 

What is the scope and impact of protest art? As Adorno famously wrote, ‘all art is an uncommitted crime’, meaning that art challenges the status quo by its very nature. Thus it can be argued that all art is political in the sense that it takes place in a public space and engages with an already existing ideology and dominant discourse. Yet, art can often become dangerously and explicitly political and serve as a powerful weapon. Throughout the history of social movements and social revolt, art has always reacted against oppression, violence, injustice and inequalities. Addressing socio-political issues and challenging the traditional boundaries and hierarchies imposed by those in power, art can open up the space for the marginalized to be seen and heard and contribute to the social change by producing knowledge and solidarity or simply raising awareness. In this way, the personal life and work of the artist transcends the individual and speak meaningfully to a larger audience bringing together the political and human functions of art.

NYT:

...Nadya Tolokonnikova of the Russian punk band and activist art collective Pussy Riot. The group’s 2012 guerrilla performance at the Cathedral of Christ the Savior in Moscow, which viciously mocked Vladimir Putin and the Russian Orthodox Church, resulted in a two-year prison sentence for Ms. Tolokonnikova and another of its members.

--and--

Leading up to Ms. Tolokonnikova’s trial, Russian news reports carried suggestions that she and her bandmates were pawns of Hillary Clinton’s State Department or witches working with a global satanic conspiracy — perhaps linked to the one that was behind the Sept. 11 attacks, as lawyers for one of their offended accusers put it. This is what we now call “fake news.”

Pussy Riot became an international symbol of Mr. Putin’s crackdown on free speech; of how his regime uses falsehood and deflection to sow confusion and undermine critics.

Now that the political-media environment that we smugly thought to be “over there” seems to be arriving over here, Ms. Tolokonnikova has a message: “It’s important not to say to yourself, ‘Oh, it’s O.K.,’” she told me. “It’s important to remember that, for example, in Russia, for the first year of when Vladimir Putin came to power, everybody was thinking that it will be O.K.”

 

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