Art on Paper Feature: Activist Art Now?

Activist Art Now?

The 1960s-1980s was the golden age of activist art. Today, there is less pointedly political work around. But is art less socially engaged? We invited three artists—Walead Beshty, K8 Hardy, and Fia Backström—to answer the question: Are today's artists truly ambivalent, or is their work just more ambiguous and less polemical? Not surprisingly, their answers, which we are presenting largely unedited, pose different, arguably more appropriate, questions.

—The Editors

Walead Beshty

Tell It Like It Was (A Brief Note on the Appropriation of Radicality)

Life is too short to have sorrow
You may be here today and gone tomorrow
You might as well get what you want
So go on and live, baby, go on and live
Tell it like it is
—Heart

Debates about art and politics tend to boil down to a familiar rehearsal of the division between art and life, as though the political is something outside of art to begin with, something that requires a self-negating act of atonement to activate. It is true that the belief that art plays an important role in the world is, on some level, a bourgeois presumption, a filthy desire, but this means little when even the mundane material comforts of daily life are a testament to a collective ideological compromise millions of us are willing to make. Little is found in the look and feel of my laptop that points to the factory in Taiwan that produced it, nor, for that matter, is there evidence of migrant labor in the flavor of my latte; objects are made to actively conceal such processes, make them distant, so whatever liberal, democratic, humanist values we claim don't have to be questioned in every moment of use. This is the perverse absolution capitalism offers, a promise that every inequity has been smoothed out by the machinations of the market, and a comforting suppression of fragile compromise and distant conflict. But the desire to decorate compromise with nobility is how things get ugly, if for no other reason than that there is power in this deception. Prohibitions, ethics, convictions, rejections—these are the repressive tools of the purist. Righteous indignation is the most prevalent form of violence we perpetrate on one another, offering something around which to congeal the ideological compromises of everyday life and initiating cyclical revelations and counterrevelations of hypocrisy.

The legacy of political activism through art, and through the theoretical discourses that developed alongside it, has produced an untenable set of contradictions for any artist with an interest in a sphere beyond the white cube....