Picketing the Zeitgeist: Crisis Art

This guitar kills fascists.

—Woody Guthrie

On September 5, 1981, the Welsh group that called itself “Women for Life on Earth” arrived on Greenham Common, in Berkshire, England. They had marched from Cardiff, Wales, with the intention of challenging the decision to site ninety-six US cruise nuclear missiles on Greenham Common. On arrival they delivered a letter to the Base Commander which said, “We fear for the future of all our children and for the future of the living world.”

When their request for a debate was ignored, they set up a “Peace Camp” just outside the fence surrounding the Royal Air Force Greenham Common Airbase. This surprised the authorities and set the tone for an audacious, lengthy protest that was to last nineteen years.

The protesters refused to allow authorities to enter the camp, which became known as the Women’s Peace Camp and gained international recognition with imaginative images such as eggs, spiders webs. and children’s toys with which they decorated the chain link fences and contested area. In the end, the UK and US withdrew their attempt to site the cruise missiles in Greenham Common.

During the Augusto Pinochet dictatorship, a number of Chilean working-class women created complex tapestries depicting the harsh conditions of life and the pain resulting from the disappeared victims of Pinochet’s repression. These tapestries, or arpilleras, get their name from the Spanish word for the burlap backing they used.

Working quietly and using traditional methods, the women’s arpilleras came to have a wide influence within Chile and internationally. The tapestries preserved the memory of los desaparecidos and the dictatorship’s brutality, as well as the unemployment, food shortages, housing shortages, and other hardships of daily life attributed to Pinochet’s rule. Preserving this collective memory was itself an act of art-as-protest, but creating the arpilleras also empowered the women, many of whom experienced a liberation through their work and became involved in further protests against Pinochet’s regime.

Krzysztof Wodiczko, born in Poland, emigrated to Canada, and currently lives in the US. He is particularly well known for his guerrilla projections on official buildings purported to embody public values. Guerrilla, because his images were subversive and often projected without official permission. He sought, he explained, to unmask the buildings’ existing rhetoric.

One of his first projections was a swastika on the façade of the South African embassy in London during Apartheid to implicate the British government and align them with the white Apartheid regime in South Africa. And to implicate the public building itself, which presented itself as an architectural emblem of moral value.

Rirkrit Tiravanija is a Thai artist. One of his installations consisted of the following: he bicycled around looking for space—empty warehouse or aircraft hangar, deserted K-Mart, abandoned Rite-Aid, haunted Burger King.

He rented the space and furnished it with stoves, cooking gas, freezers, fridges, microwaves, counters, bowls, cups, glasses, plastic cutlery, chopsticks, Tupperware, folding tables, chairs.

He purchased food: noodles, rice, potatoes, bread, soup, salad, tofu, fruit, green tea, bottled water, cocoa, curry spices. Comfort food.

He engaged the homeless as helpers.

Food prepared, he invited the homeless helpers along with the lined-up homeless to eat.

Continued through the day, into the night. Clean up, close for the night. Sleep on the premises.

Do the same thing for sixty days.

After sixty days, he closed the space, got on his bicycle and looked for another empty warehouse or aircraft hangar, terrorized Rite-Aid, spooked McDonald’s, gutted Gap, bombed-out Home Depot.

Select the space, rent it.

Feed the homeless for sixty days.

Close up, move on, find another space, repeat.

The preceding represents four examples of creating art in times of conflict. In every instance, the art is problematic; not esthetic, as such; not even palpable in the instance of Tiravanija feeding the homeless.

What is the difference between art as it is usually constructed and what might be called crisis art, or cultural activism: the use of cultural means to effect social change or a wider social awareness?

Crisis artists must swallow the poison in order to...