And So Forth conference reportback
Posted January 23, 2005 by in Events
Had a great time at the AI Firefly conference yesterday. Met a lot of great artists and activists and listened on some great panels. At our discussion, we talked a little bit about our experiences working on the No RNC Poster Project and our inspirations for doing political street art and poster campaigns. The back-and-forth afterwards was interesting and useful, but we ran up against out time limit far too soon.
So, whether you were there or not, some of the questions that are still swirling in around my head are: Does political art change people's minds? Or is it meant more to create/strengthen communities? Who is the intended audience? How do you avoid preaching to the choir? Should artists try to "bomb the suburbs" or at least the red states?
Thanks to everyone who contributed to the conversation. Special thanks to Swoon and John Emerson for coming out. Big, big thanks to Esy and the rest of AI Firefly for the invite and the opportunity.
For those of you who were at the conference and are coming to the site for the first time, take a look around, add your comments, and drop us a line at visual.resistance@gmail.com.
Oh, and we'll try to get version of our zine up on the site sometime this week.
Comments
One idea that I was hoping to comment on before our time ran out was about preaching (propaganda) to the quire.
When working on the poster project this summer, someone (I don’t remember who) attempted to dismiss our posters as “leftist propaganda.” The statement stuck with me and compelled me to reevaluate the word as well as my work. Were we simply producing propaganda? What is propaganda anyway?
These days I think of propaganda as a means toward indoctrination. Propaganda dominates discourse and discourgages interactive dialogue. It is a lecture as opposed to a discussion, leaving little room for interpretation or questioning.
The objective of the poster project was not to produce propaganda. We were trying to promote and participate in a free public dialogue about the RNC. By displaying posters illegally, we were liberating public space from the authority of capital and the state. Right away we noticed that when posters were displayed illegally on private property (city or state regulated “public space” is still private property) people began to comment on the poster with a markers, stickers, stencils, other posters and what not. The dialogue was interactive!
I would say that graffiti is inherently anti-propaganda because it challenges the privitazation or regulation of public discourse. Instead of just disseminating (or propagating) information through a controlled or regulated medium, graffiti encourages a free exchange of ideas that doesn’t need to obey external authorities of the state or private business.
Also, the voices we chose to include as our contribution to this public dialogue were relatively diverse. We tried to promote a multiplicity of views while at the same time acknowledging and embracing our anti-RNC convictions.
To this day, many people have commented that some of the posters we published were not clear enough or effective enough in communicating a unified and convincing message. Many of the posters were dismissed as “too abstract.”
I think this frustration with “abstract” political art is grounded in a desperate and fearful reaction to the daunting amount of power and influence that the right wing has been exercizing recently. There’s a lot of talk these days about learning tactics of hegemony from the right wing in order to strategize a resurgence of liberal politics in America. Many on the left are thirsty for power and influence. This thirst has led to a desire to create art that is simple, clear and persuasive. These days, people want answers, not more questions.
But, in these crucial moments, I think it is important to bear in mind the relevance of thought provoking art, art that asks questions and elicits dialogue instead of just providing answers or barking orders. There is a powerful value to art with a meaning that is somewhat obscured. When a message is not completely direct we are compelled to slow down our thinking, to really read, examine and ruminate over a poster instead of glossing over it with a superficial understanding based on common (cliché) symbols.
Now I’ll stop. A lot of this is just ranting and raving. But, let me know what you think.
Peace
-canek
to see some fotos of the video slide show chek out our photolog!
Post a comment
I had a great time at the conference and was surprised to see so many people considering that political street art is - at least in my mind - a niche of a niche of a niche.
I had a cool conversation with a photographer about street art in her hometown and NYC. I'll transcribe some of it and post it to this site.
I was also asked by someone from New School if we'd be interested in talking about political street art. I told her to get in contact with us.
With that in mind, I think that since we're being contacted as a reference - of some sort or other - about political street art, that street artists should take advantage of us. Send us suggestions of things that you'd want us to bring up at discussions or conferences. ie. ideas, personal stories, rants, etc. What does the rest of the collective think of this?
Again, it was a lot of fun and hopefully folks were inspired.
The zine and video were fucking great. Big ups to the creative minds and hands behind these projeccts.
Would it be possible to put up PDFs of the zine on the site?
I'll write more stuff about the conference tomorrow and about the issues that were brought up, tomorrow. Right now I got work on some pieces of my own.
-Frank
Posted by: Frank at January 23, 2005 7:05 PM