[syndicate] PROTEST & THE WEB (& ART)

[MWP]

on 6/8/04 3:30 AM, fmadre at free.fr at fmadre at free.fr wrote:

> Here I kinda disagree
> art is and has always been apolitical at best
> and reactionay without knowing it
> at worse
> not specially on the net
> (if there can be art on the net, at all)
> 
> f.

While I certainly would agree that art is not intrinsically involved with
political issues, I also think that there are valid ways to bring art and
politics together without diluting their respective impacts. Whether this
can be done in as passive a medium as a webpage remains to be seen, but I
have already argued why I think it can't be so.

Perhaps it would be useful to distinguish between political art and
politicized art. The former attempts to integrate art and politics into a
coherent statement of purpose, whereas in the latter the two modes of
discourse are grafted onto one another with little to no regard as to
whether they serve the same ends.

Of course, protest does not always turn out to be an adequate political
response to the world's problems either. I was at a rather well-publicized
biotech protest in SF today, and it mainly appeared to be about the
protestors videotaping the cops videotaping the protestors, and so forth ad
infinitum. Everybody is looking for the perfect photo op at these events, it
seems: the news reporter champing for his prize Pulitzer catch; the cop
stalking fresh faces in the crowd that he can add to his covert op
portfolio; the activist seeking out a cop rendering a beating before his
camera that he can print into a poster to energize the cause; the corporate
employee looking to show his office buddies what a bunch of hyperbolic
wackos these lefties are; etc. Protest can be as much a forum for mixed
messages as art, which is why I suppose I showed up in SF today myself, in
part so that I could observe within this peculiar petri dish of humanity how
the messages and images of the various groups would clash and mate and
mutate, according to weird, unpredictable patterns. Naturally, I was there
with my camera as well, slave to the lens, as are we all.

m