Art for Change

Do you mean political cartoons or this:

guernica.

?

Joe(Or this?)Nation

Art for Change
Any type of Art. Cartoons, Comics, Paintings.

AE

Art for Change
Here is an example of Comic Political art.

http://www.metropolismag.com/html/content_0302/ob/ob05.html

AE

I'll give you the best example I can think of without, I'm afraid, any links or pages to click, I don't know what you need in the way of proof, but I think the best example of political art making change was the nineteen sixties American tee-shirt.

I don't have time this morning to give you the full picture as I saw it, but prior to 1960 the tee-shirt was one thing, white and something you wore under a dress shirt. Wheaties and General Mills changed that by issuing a Breakfast of Champions tee-shirt in the late fifties. (It could have been earlier, but I don't think so.) Followed by Disney with their Davy Crockett, King of the Wild Frontier shirts. Other advertisers followed and soon the white tee-shirt was a movable billboard.

Click over to the anti-nuclear submarine protests in 1960 in Connecticut, the police said the protesters couldn't carry signs because they could be used as weapons, so the anti-nuke printed their on tee-shirts. Movable speech.

From then on there wasn't a speech or a rally or a protest that didn't have an official unofficial tee-shirt.

During the protests against the War in VietNam the tee-shirt grew from just something one wore at a protest, but in one's personal life. It was instant identification for friends and opponents alike. Tee-shirts were the easiest, most productive purveyors of the counterculture message: Stop the War, Stop the Bombing, Make Love, Not War , Give Peace a Chance,

the Woodstock Nation Bird on the guitar , you could walk down Main Street and fight the power.

Now, do I have proof that any of this changed a vote or saved a GI from dying? Nope.

Joe(Just food for thought)Nation

I agree the tee-shirt is a great billboard. I don't know enough about the rest of your statement to comment on it. It certainly is food for thought. Maybe the tee-shirt just identified certain beliefs/desires etc., but it really did not change anything for the best.

Thanks,

AE

Or maybe it did.


Did ten thousand women running by in pink t-shirts in Central Park raise awareness of the Fight against Breast Cancer? There are ways of finding out.

What kind of proof are you seeking?



Joe(Are you really seeking?)Nation

Political art
Maybe proof was the wrong word. Maybe the state of the world is the only proof there is.

Political art, political poetry, protest marching, voting, and the world is getting worse. I get a little frustrated.


Jo states:
"Did ten thousand women running by in pink t-shirts in Central Park raise awareness of the Fight against Breast Cancer? There are ways of finding out."

This is no what I meant. But, I understand what you mean.

AE

Sometimes it does seem that we are more the victims of marketing than the beneficiaries of real political thoughts and ideas. That's where art, and political art in particular, may be of value. Before the spin-meisters can repaint the picture, the artist has conveyed the idea.



Maybe you are talking to those who are already on your side. (Whichever side that is.)

Joe(Moving opinion is like trying to steer a sow. Difficult to get started and once moving in a direction even harder to re-direct. )Nation

Nice pic Santuary. What is that on the wall blood?

No, no, Tomatos.

This is a piece by my beloved Norman Rockwell, about Ruby - the first black girl to go to an all-white elementary school. The opposition was so fierce that the government had to provide security guards to walk her to school. People wanted to harm the girl!

http://www.hds.harvard.edu/news/article_archive/bridges.html

Shame.

Its a beautiful pic Sanctuary, love it! But my point was this (the tomatoes are symbolic to me): I'm not an expert of those times (wish I had participated). All the people, that did participate were important, but in my opinion, what really made the difference was the blood that was spilled for the cause. Many people were ready to kill, which they did, and many were ready to die for what they believed. I think it could have gotten worse if the government had not acted. Blood, not art.

AE

art than can change the world
It would be easy for me to say that, generally, politics in art seem to have more to with addressing/subverting/advocating power dynamics in general, rather than the established municipal, state, federal, or global instutions that hold power over the public. The Nazification of Art: Art, Design, Music, Architecture, and Film in the Third Reich, (Winchester: The Winchester Press, 1990), addresses the issue of art in the service of the government, or art that has as its ultimate goal a political purpose, and maintains that once art reaches this point, it ceases to be art and becomes propaganda.

I'll humor the traditional, conventional, usage of the the term 'politics' in relation to art, and suggest that it does not have direct influence on the beaurocracy behind it. I don't mean to say that it doesn't in any way change the world, but in my experience, I haven't read or witnessed 'art' as such that changed 'politics' as such.

The issue of politically controlled art programs, such as percent for art programs all over the world, contain collections of art that in theory are democratically selected, and therefore are not in the direct service of any one municipal party majority. And these collections of art, in the service of the general public, I think, do change the world. It changed me in that I chose to live in a place that has public art; its part of the city's municipal charter. It's a community value--that art Should be a art of life in this place, and that we are willing to pay taxes to support the program. This is a rather self-centered response to a global question, but I think it reiterates my point that the change begins within the realm of the individual, as opposed to a sway of mass opinion as the result of an experience with art.

I already feel like I wrote some things that aren't true. To argue that because the aim of a work of art is purely political in intention will reduce the ontology of the thing to propagandistic terms, disregards any interpretation of the work that is not 'politically' grounded. Can one not appreciate army recruiting commercials purely for their design content? Do the designers who create such things think of themselves as artists? What about non-English speaking viewer's interpretations?

Arno Breker and Albert Speer thought of themselves as artist and architect respectively, but art historians reduce them to slaves of the Nazi state.

If you were to show an exhibition of Breker's sculpture to the American public, it would be probably be unsurprising to find that a large percentage of viewers would think of the work as Classical. And this is just what the artist would want you to think. But once the context of Breker's relationship to Hitler is realized, everything changes. Hitler used this "art" to support his vision. He championed artists who employed anatomic proportions of Aryan supremacy.

Put Breker's work up-side down in a dumpster and throw a week old trash bag of baby diapers from a 12-story apartment complex on it. Then is it art? Probably.

The Ludwig Museum in Cologne, Germany: Look into the history of that name, the Third Reich, and the nature of its exhibitions over the years.

Arthur C. Danto's Transfiguration of the Commonplace sheds light on this ontological dilemma. He's a damned good writer too; I think I like him better than Matthew Collings, who is easier to read.

Some people don't consider photojournalism an art, but I do, and I think it has the power to change people's perception.

I think of Nick Ut's photo in Trang Bang, Vietnam. If you've ever seen it, you know the one I mean.

Really, almost every image that has won the Pulitzer for photojournalism has had a huge impact on public perception of whatever event it depicted.

Sadly, some don't. Kevin Carter's photo from 10 years ago of a child being stalked by a vulture didn't open many people's eyes to what was happening in Sudan.

Here's a great site where you can see them all: http://www.newseum.org/pulitzer/

Photo
Your right art liker, in my search I came up with many links of Third Reich art propaganda. You also say, that art has helped the world, how?

Thanks for the link boomerang! I consider photo journalism an art form too.

Here is one that a friend sent me:

http://www.philippinerevolution.org/specials/photo_sa/040329a.eng.shtml

He sent me the link because a few years ago I made a collage (windows to the world) for an earth day celebration, exhibition, and one of the images in the collage was about a boy (eight or nine) in another part of the world standing on a balcony holding a riffle. Picture #7 in this link shows a parent sitting by an infant and next to them is a riffle. Is this what the children of the world will have for toys? Anything can be used for propaganda. When will it end?

Thanks,

AE

photojournalism and art...
I recently helped put together an exhibition of photojournalism in a fine art gallery. The NYC MOMA did it back in the 60's or 70's too. It seems like once you put anything in a fine art context, i.e. gallery or museum, it can be considered as such. Not that I think photojournalism has to do this to be thus considered. I can hold a print in my hand in my apartment and say hey, this fine art. Even if some think it's not, like propaganda, it draws the critical attention that it usually reserved for discussing fine art.

An article in the paper today about
"Guerilla Gardeners" . They descend on vacant
and neglected parcels of land with seeds, soil etc., plant them, then leave signs saying "Please Water Me...a project by Guerilla Gardeners."

http://publicspace.ca/gardeners.htm

Benetons was rather revolutionary in its time for its use of photo journalism to advertise its company.....no product in sight.