Blurred Boundaries
As part of our Modernist legacy, the art, that referred to itself as avant-garde placed itself in the service of the idea of a more humane society and audaciously proclaimed resistance. From 1916 onwards, Dada artists protested the Wilhelminian German Empire and the First World War. George Grosz, Otto Dix, Hanna Höch and others organized events, such as Dada expositions, through which they denounced the horrors of war and which led to criminal procedures for slander of state authorities. John Heartfield was made infamous by his collages ridiculing Hitler. Nearly all artists of 20th century Modernism were either branded “entartet” (degenerate) and persecuted, or opted for either exile or so-called “inner emigration.” After World War II, the Fluxus movement led to further political controversies. The Vietnam War – the first war to be broadcast “live” – entailed a storm of indignation and protest. Wolf Vostell became known for his activities and collages both denouncing the slaughter in the Far East and criticizing consumption-oriented Western Civilization. Klaus Staeck used post cards and posters to protest the destruction of the environment and social inequality. Joseph Beuys, finally, defined art in general as a practice acting as a model for social change. Society in its entirety should be formed like a mould, with every member encouraged to contribute to the design of the “Social Sculpture.”
It is nearly becoming a platitude that art displaying itself as new, innovative and committed should stand in contrast to established conditions. This, however, often involves a certain self-staging based on wishful thinking, because Late Modern Society has made it increasingly difficult to discern whom to protest against for a more humane world. Faces of evil such as “capitalism,” “the ruling classes,” “neoliberalism” etc. must necessarily be constructed first, before they can be resolutely attacked. 
Liberal western democracies appear to value critical attitudes, individualism or simply clever marketing schemes over inconspicuous assimilation. For instance, after his 1997 call, “Tötet Helmut Kohl” (Kill Helmut Kohl), although Christoph Schlingensief was arrested at first, it did not perceptibly harm his career: He directed Wagner’s Parsifal in Bayreuth in 2005, and was chosen for the German Pavilion at the 2011 Venice Biennale, which was awarded the Golden Lion. Who would be willing to denigrate Bob Marley for ingeniously simplifying the idiosyncratic music of his homeland of Jamaica, thus making it intelligible to an international fan base, surely not without the desire of achieving commercial success? Artistic mise-en-scène, political agendas and marketing strategies have become inseparably enmeshed in works of contemporary art.
It is an entirely different story in parts of the world not following the western world’s mechanisms of public perception and sophisticated reporting, with artistic productions not yet conforming to the rules of the international art market. In the countries of the so-called Arab Spring, as well as in economic powerhouses such as China, Russia and India, both artists and journalists often become subjects of criminal suspicion. No matter whether they expressly desire to demonstrate resistance or not, they instantly enter into conflict with ruling powers. The production “Radio Muezzin” by the famous authors’ collective Rimini Protokoll in collaboration with Cairo protagonists was immensely successful in Europe, but was forbidden in Egypt, although it “only” told its protagonists’ life stories.
In the following, several examples of artistic practice identifying itself as a form of resistance or opposition shall be presented.
Born in Belfast, Ireland in 1977 and having emigrated to New Zealand at an early age, video artist Alex Monteith works with a group of Māori fighting for compensation for the wrongs done to their people during the colonization period in the 19th and 20th centuries. Ignoring previously sealed contracts, British settlers robbed New Zealand’s indigenous people of lands and thus of their livelihood. It wasn’t until 1975 that a powerful protest movement committed to the rights of the Māori came into being and managed to achieve the opening of a government office in charge of addressing claims of compensation. The spark of the Māori Renaissance of 1975 was the trek of an elderly woman, Dame Whina Cooper, from the utmost north of the Northern Island to its southern tip and the capital of Wellington. Dame Whina Cooper began the trek together with her granddaughter and reached Wellington with 5,000 followers in her retinue, to proffer 60,000 signatures to the government and demand justice.This walk, a so-called “hikoi,” began a tradition of protest walks, which Alex Monteith addresses, for instance, by effecting a complete blockade of a central traffic bottleneck, Auckland’s Harbour Bridge, by means of an automobile convoy on New Zealand’s national holiday in her aptly-named 2008 work “1020 meters in 26 minutes Waitangi Day Auckland Harbour Bridge Protest.” Her vehicle is equipped with fore and aft cameras to film the cars’ slow procession. The production is presented as a twofold projection. In this manner, the video installation documents the protest, which is, at the same time, a work of art captured on camera. The result is a tight-knit duality of art and political action: art as resistance – resistance as art.
Lebanese-Egyptian artist and historian Bahia Shehab responded to an invitation to contribute to the exhibition “The Future of Tradition – the Tradition of Future,” to take place one hundred years after the exhibit “Masterworks of Mohammadan Art” in Munich’s Haus der Kunst in 2011, by producing a mural entitled “No.” She showed a thousand different Arabic glyphs representing the word “no” – a kind of silent protest of the exhibition, which she feared would reiterate clichés of Islam. A year later, the demonstrations and insurrections began in Egypt, prompting Bahia Shehab to redress her idea of a thousand-fold “no” by spraying the characters on walls all over Cairo. She complemented it by five templates representing, in simplified form, the head of a dying man, a bra, an eye, prison bars and a combination of a red crescent and five rhombi. These were accompanied by the statement: “There are people whose heads have been pressed down, so that you can carry yours high; there are people who have been stripped naked so that you can live in dignity; there are people who have lost their sight, so that you may see; there are people who have been incarcerated, so that you may live in freedom; there are people who have died, so that you may live.” After the graffiti were painted over by the establishment, the Internet was awash with images of them and, three weeks later, a newspaper printed an article on the initiative right below the photograph of Mubarak following his trial from the sickbed.
Krishnaraj Chonat from Bangalore, India, employs a diversity of media to design art objects telling stories of compressed experiences and reminiscences that are personal, while at the same time being relevant to all. In the course of his effort to understand and express social and ecological conflicts of a rapid urbanization of society, Chonat has developed a specific virtual language uniting opposites in material and conception. As part of the 2010 New Delhi group exhibition “48 Degrees” on the topic of “public, art, ecology,” he showed an uprooted sandalwood tree hanging upside down from a tall crane. Without any further comment, this clear and drastic installation was understood as an indignation at and objection to the senseless cutting down of valuable trees. Simultaneously, however, it was also an aesthetic and sensual experience.
Madrid-born artist Santiago Sierra, who studied in Hamburg and spent much of his life in Mexico, became a household name due to his scathingly satirical and polarizing actions. He drives the mechanisms he wishes to criticize to macabre extremes to show how debased and inhuman they are. Most commonly, his work addresses paying people for useless or degrading tasks: paying the unemployed to lie under benches or in cardboard boxes for days on end, black immigrants in Venice to dye their hair blond, or heroin addict prostitutes to have a line tattooed on their backs – the recompense was a shot of heroin. When Sierra pays wage workers to assemble in a line according to the colour of their skin, thus connecting a formal idea – that of a continuous colour gradation from white to black – with the process of hiring and firing workers ready to perform any kind of absurd labour for any amount of payment, it becomes clear that Sierra sees any art that does not follow political intentions as obscene. It is not primarily his productions that run counter to sophisticated taste (although they do that as well), but, rather, the social situations against which they raise their voices are presented as demeaning and improper. Sierra’s most recent controversial work was a convoy of luxury cars carrying upside down photographs of politicians with the word “NO” through the streets of Madrid, to protest the austerity measures imposed upon Spain.
NO in crisis-torn Europe and LA=No in the Arab Spring: Nowadays, as Frantz Fanon writes, nothing can any longer count as exclusively European, American, Chinese, Indian or African. “The entire world is our heritage; cultural expression, creativity and innovation no longer mean adhering to dead customs, but coming to terms with different pathways, inhabiting the world,” writes African intellectual and philosopher Achille Mbembe. Art is a part of this process of coming to terms. If it does not rebel against established grievances, it is worthless in Sierra’s opinion. Accusing him, Bahia Shehab, Alex Monteith or other artists of hypocrisy, because the system they criticize is also the system keeping them alive, is a cheap ploy. This stance disregards the fact that the difficulty in a global world is specifically taking a justified stand in a maze of contradictions and dialectics. Indeed, revealing these conflicting forces that often manifest themselves in times and regions of social crisis as well as tenaciously pointing out injustice and wrongs in totalitarian states is exactly the endangered position often occupied by artists. If they should fail at times, the blame is not to be laid solely upon them. Conversely, any effort they make in their endeavour is to be lauded.
