Shouts & Murmurs

I’ve had a lot of conversations recently about what exactly constitutes activism in relation to art. It’s obviously not a simple discussion: in recent years, there have been countless exhibitions, books and symposia around the subject. Most debates tend to get tangled up with the word ‘activism’ itself, which usually implies some kind of collective endeavour. But I like to think of it in a more expanded way; after all, there are more ways of being active and socially engaged than organizing a meeting.

Although art production has always had a relationship to politics – either bluntly, as a form of propaganda, or more subtly as a product of patronage – in the last century or so its use as a tool for critiquing society has become more explicit. Yet for some, the idea that art can effect real change is laughable; after all, even at its most radical, it’s part of a massive, unregulated market awash with money and funded, on the whole, by very rich people, many of whom aren’t as liberal or as left-leaning as their buying tastes might suggest. Art, say the doubters, is simply a reflection of its times; it’s a response not a solution, and change is brought about not by performance or images (as if art were simply surface) but by direct political action. This is a line of argument that runs the risk of being prescriptive about art’s function – and thus limiting its potential for transformation.

Witness, for example, the woeful statements that emerged from ‘Forget Fear’, the 7th Berlin Biennale, earlier this year, a largely state-funded exhibition that purported to be about the intermingling of politics and art but that in many ways ended up perpetuating the kind of thinking it claimed to be complaining about. As curator Artur Żmijewski stated in his introduction: ‘My critique of my own field is ultimately very simple and can be summarized in one sentence: art doesn’t act, and doesn’t work.’ By this, I assume he means that he can’t gauge art’s efficacy, which strikes me as a very narrow way of thinking about art’s myriad functions. Associate curators of the Biennale, the Russian art collective Voina (War), told the following anecdote in one of the show’s accompanying publications: ‘Kazimir Malevich, after the revolution in Petrograd, armed with a pistol, passed through artists’ studios asking who was still painting birches and demanded real art. Armed with a weapon. That is real art.’ Reading this immediately made me want to reach for a brush to paint a picture of a birch tree. The moment vehemence and violence go unchallenged is the time to start ringing the warning bells. Right-wing rhetoric disguised as activism – for this is what Voina is spouting – is always bizarrely simplistic: it implies that the world isn’t large enough to accommodate a multitude of responses to its many problems. I prefer to ask: How can change be manifested if it can’t first be imagined? And who would ever assume that imaginations run along straight lines?

What might be seen as an innocuous creative act in one country can be seen as a threat to national security in another. For many artists, the simple act of expression can be a radical gesture of defiance: one that refuses to allow the imagination to be censored, whatever the consequences – and thousands of artists are jailed as a result. In this issue of frieze, Elizabeth Rush looks at performance in Burma, a country brutalized by decades of military rule and censorship. She concludes: ‘The most tenacious and telling art in Burma isn’t painted, printed or hewn. It simply takes place.’

dOCUMENTA (13) is about to close in Kassel, Germany. Curated by Carolyn Christov-Bakargiev, it is possibly the most admired large exhibition I have visited – its complexities an antidote to the over-simplifications that took place in Berlin. In her response to the exhibition in this issue, Kaelen Wilson-Goldie cites the career of octogenarian Lebanese artist and writer Etel Adnan as being symbolic of the show’s intentions. She notes: ‘Adnan has been responding to wars and unconscionable acts of violence with great sensitivity and steadfastness for more than half a century. Her commitment to her role as an increasingly endangered species of public intellectual, and her belief in the capacity of her art not only to make sense of the world but to allow her to fall in love with it over and over again – these are the qualities [...] that give Christov-Bakargiev’s exhibition its heart.’ Adnan’s paintings, one of which is on the cover of this issue, might not appear initially particularly radical: they are modest, delicate, thoughtful things. And yet, for so many people, the simple act of being able to respond to the world they find themselves in is an enormous privilege, and one that Adnan embodies, declaring: ‘I write what I see, I paint what I am.’

I interviewed the American artist Suzanne Lacy for this issue, an artist who – despite the fact that for over four decades she has worked tirelessly for social justice – still makes art ‘for what some might consider quite romantic reasons: to invent, to give shape through imagination, to play’. I asked Lacy how she gauged the success or failure of a work of art. She replied: ‘The best I can hope for is to relate a set of experiences that move us in a direction of understanding each other better, understanding social systems better, thinking about new ways to make art.’ I can’t think of a more timely way to define what activism is, or could be.