Artists as Activists
24th July (detail) 2021
Art does not show people what to do, yet engaging with a good work of art can connect you to your senses, body, and mind. It can make the world felt. And this felt feeling may spur thinking, engagement, and even action.’ – World Economic Forum, Why art has the power to change the world, 2016.
When you think of artists activists, the name Banksy springs to mind. Banksy is an ‘anonymous’ British artist whose street art contain both messages of hope and of despair. He asks viewers to look at the world through the lens of “what if”.
The history of art is full of artist activists. Think of artists like Théodore Géricault (1791 – 1824) whose painting The Raft of the Medusa caused an national scandal for its indictment of corruption or William Hogarth (1697 -1764) who turned a mirror on upper class English society. Francisco Goya’s series of etchings, The Disasters of War condemned the violence of the 2nd of May uprising during the Spanish Peninsular War (1808 – 1814) and were deemed to be too politically charged and so were not published until 35 years after his death.
Artist activists also inspire positive community change by embedding themselves in a culture and changing it from within. This week I have been thinking about Australian artist George Gittoes who was a founder of the Yellow House Collective in Sydney in 1970.
He went on to become an international traveller, reporting on and making work about regions of conflict including Somalia, Cambodia, Nicaragua and also Afghanistan. He set up the Yellow House Jalalabad in Afghanistan to be a safe house where artists, film makers, musicians and performers could gather and create independently. The slogan of the Yellow House is “Declare love on war!!!!” with a philosophy that artists can use culture to counteract destructive forces that threaten to destroy their very creative spirit.
And so to my 24 July artwork responding to the theme of independence and freedom. I wrote a blogpost in July about the Occupy movement and bearing witness to history.
There I was in Syntagma Square, Athens adjacent to the Greek parliament, the birthplace of democracy in July 2011, witnessing an extraordinary event. Protesters camped out, occupying this central square in Athens. I took down one of the posters erected on the lamppost, with its slogans of Bread, Education Freedom.
This week I used this poster as the basis for a new artwork about freedom and independence. The two things people the world over strive (and die) for. Before I arrived in Athens, I was on the Greek island of Skopelos, at a printmaking residency and created a series of etchings based on the front page of a Greek newspaper about the financial crisis and Greek government’s austerity measures that the people were protesting against.
Putting this etching inside a black frame reminds me of the 6 months in 2020 when I made small daily artworks and added a black frame around them to reference the death notices and telegrams received by families of soldiers who died in the two world wars.
Reframing Freedom is about the constant striving of people to live an independent, free life. It is also about the need to establish social justice, political stability and economic freedom for the interconnected citizens of the world while taking responsibility to care for all life on planet earth. Citizens who owe the word democracy, to its birthplace in Greece.
Now a new wave of refugees and people displaced by war and oppression will call on the world for assistance. As artists we bear witness, we call for activism, we make work about injustice and shine a light on hope.
Reframing Freedom (detail) 2021
24 th July poster , Syntagma Square, July 2011
