Last night at the panel discussion Innovation, Collaboration & Human Rights during Correlations: Law, Language and Culture. Third International Osnabrück Summer School on the Cultural Study of the Law, I got to wax philosophically without having to use footnotes.
I mostly came away with more questions than answers, so if it looks like I am making a statement, make sure to add a question mark. So, here they are … notes transcribed from the proverbial napkin:
- Cartoonists or cartoon journalists as the quintessential citizen journalists?
- Even liberal, progressive journalists have better protection than artists doing the work of activists … see a recent dispatch I included in a blog piece about Ai Weiwei where I begin to develop this idea.
- What does the Arab Spring have to do with the London Summer or the Syrian Year (my terms)? Why do we accept the corporate media’s framing and packaging snippets of life as our narratives?
- Culture is an object of control in the capitalist system.
- Censorship is a tool of the status quo power system, and its form and the ‘member’ of power who activates it are always arbitrary … its unpredictability is what makes it so dangerous. Beware of generic campaigns against censorship; look for unique and innovative responses to it, ones which are ‘site’ specific and respond in context.
- The intricately woven threads of art, culture, and creativity are the patchwork universe in which [the vocations of] media and communication exist … not vice versa.
- Is art ever elite or is it the institutions, which are the vehicles whereby one audience is privileged over others?
- Can ‘art for social change’ as a construct transcend agitprop art in a western context?
- ‘Art for art sake’ vs. communitarian art as a false dichotomy that is oft foisted upon the artist … if forced to choose one or the other, artists oft react strongly. I think part of the strong reaction is dissatisfaction with having to choose. What is a less false multiplicity? Do artists do the work of activists (or community organizers) in a more fluid way that may never be in opposition to aesthetic, but only have time constraints which can retrospectively be equated with standards of quality (by the critic)? In one of his essays, Africa and Her Writers, Achebe puts it very bluntly that , “art for art’s sake is just another piece of deodorized dog-shit” … here, I think Achebe is confronted with the false dichotomy.
- What does this have to do with the professionalization of activism? Whereas artists do sometimes see themselves as activists, would they ever see themselves in the more narrowly defined construct of a human rights defender? And, if they needed the protection and support that human rights defenders can (barely) rely on in times of unrest and danger, would they have the time to articulate how their work was intended and/or seen as political, and thus led to their danger? If a tree falls in the forest and no one is there to listen, does it actually make a sound?
- What is political art? In this context, I equate danger with activism and activism with challenging power. And, I don’t necessarily think it matters whether the artist intended her/his work as a challenge to power. This goes back to the arbitrary nature of censorship I spoke of above.
- In following, I would never want to force the artist to self-identify as an activist.
- I like to think that artists and activists (who can often be the same people wearing two different hats) are concerned citizens … and that art nor activism are purely vocational.
I wish I could be in Berlin right now with the HB Build folks … I hope this is worth a read.
PS, the picture I start with is by Kianoush Ramezani, Iranian cartoonist and chronicler of the Green Movement. I’m trying to get Kianoush to join the HB Build cohort sometime in September. I love this cartoon b/c I secretly think he was drawing a picture of me!
