In May of 1982, Budapest-born artist Agnes Denes congregated with a small group of volunteers at Lower Manhattan’s Battery Park Landfill. They planted wheat berries onto the plot of land, which, once grown, created a lush field of wispy stalks juxtaposed against the city’s skyline. Visually striking, the ecological artwork was in part a protest against exploitation, greed, and the destruction of people and the environment. The paltry $158 spent on seeds stood in stark contrast to the $4.5 billion evaluation of the land itself.
Denes’ “Wheatfield—a Confrontation” is one of ten case studies presented in Lauren O’Neill-Butler’s timely new book. Released on the heels of this weekend’s mass mobilization against the Trump administration, The War of Art: A History of Artists’ Protest in America comes at a moment when many of us are considering what tools we have to create the world we want to live in. Artists have long grappled with this question, O’Neill Butler reminds us, as many have even fused their aesthetic inclinations with their desires for justice.
The War of Art is in the lineage of books like Nicolas Lampert’s A People’s Art History of the United States, which chronicles grassroots approaches to art and social change across 250 years. For her text, O’Neill-Butler shortens the timeline and begins with the 1960s. Early projects include Benny Andrews’ co-founding of the Black Emergency Cultural Coalition, or BECC, and the creation of a prison arts program at the Manhattan House of Detention following the Attica riot.
O’Neill-Butler is wary of dictating exactly what activist art is, instead leaving the genre open-ended. The defining characteristics she does offer are that these types of projects are “always a means to an end” and tend to collapse the already frail boundary between politics and art. Many of her case studies utilize art to gain attention from the media and, therefore, the public, a combination that often proves more efficacious than either protest or artistic presentation alone.
For example, David Wojnarowicz’s work to end the AIDS pandemic with ACT UP and Nan Goldin’s Prescription Addiction Intervention Now (P.A.I.N.) were both movements that utilized spectacular tactics like the “die-in,” a public performance that originated during the Vietnam War. These actions involve protestors lying on the ground or floor, and in the case of Goldin’s work, took place in institutions like the Metropolitan Museum of Art in objection to the Sackler family’s wing.
Wojnarowicz is also famous for his now-iconic jean jacket saying, “If I die of AIDS—forget burial—just drop my body on the steps of the F.D.A.,” an image of which has widely circulated and come to symbolize the movement. These projects aren’t simply art created with activist concerns but rather inextricable from the positions they argue for.
Of course, it’s important to acknowledge that the problems these artists rail against—a lack of affordable housing, public health crises, discrimination in the art world, to name a few—are ongoing, and like most socially engaged projects, the examples the book includes are not without criticism.
In 1993, seven African-American artists established Project Row Houses in Houston’s historic Third Ward by renovating a block of derelict shotgun houses and creating a welcoming gathering space in an underinvested neighborhood. Although Project Row Houses did revitalize the area through various artist-driven efforts like the Drive-By exhibition shown below, today, gentrification and the effects of the climate crisis continue to displace the residents whom organizers sought to serve.
O’Neill-Butler doesn’t suggest that artists should be tasked with identifying and implementing solutions to the world’s ills and notes that Houston’s Third Ward would likely have gentrified even without artist intervention and subsequent attention. She does, however, offer a nuanced consideration of each project’s successes and struggles and acknowledges the limits of endeavors like those she outlines. Art provides what the book refers to as “a crack in the wall,” a rupture in the flimsy veneer of power and oppression that, once exposed, threatens their foundational structures.
The War of Art is out today from Verso. Find your copy in the Colossal Shop.
