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  • Rules of Engagement:Art, Process, Protest
  • Jonathan P. Eburne (bio), Amy J. Elias (bio), and Melissa Karmen Lee (bio)

In 2015, the writer Arundhati Roy returned the National Award she had received in 1989 for her screenplay In Which Annie Gives It Those Ones, as a protest against state-sanctioned violence following the election victory of India's Hindu nationalist party, Bharatiya Janata (BJP). Roy's act of publicly refusing the earlier award allowed her, she wrote, "to be a part of a political movement initiated by writers, filmmakers and academics in this country who have risen up against a kind of ideological viciousness and an assault on our collective IQ that will tear us apart and bury us very deep if we do not stand up to it now."1 Roy had previously turned down the prestigious Sahitya Akademi award in 2005, in protest against the congressional government's U.S.-inspired policy of "violently and ruthlessly pursuing policies of brutalisation of industrial workers, increasing militarisation and economic neo-liberalisation."2 A fundamental, if subtle, aspect of her belated National Award refusal was its gesture of solidarity with other artists, writers, actors, and intellectuals in condemning right-wing terror. Today, as violence and ideological viciousness spread throughout the world, artists, teachers, students, and culture workers have responded by withdrawing from presidential councils; by creating artist-run super PACs; by running protest street theater; by using digital technology to muster and amplify insurrection through campaigns such as @TahrirSupplies, #BlackLivesMatter, and #MeToo; by creating new institutional forms and strategies for artistic participation; by repurposing public space and public exhibitions; by refusing silence.3 [End Page 173]

Protest has been most commonly defined as an action or statement expressing dissent; considered more broadly, the term invokes a public form of assertion and witnessing (testari) on behalf of political transformation. Much has been written today about protest art, particularly in terms of its resurgence in the wake of past oppressions and in the face of rising fascism and neoliberal hegemony worldwide. In the most effective protest art, however, assertion is never merely theoretical: often unarchived, moving from criticism to activism, this art is performed on the ground, in the flesh, at the moment, and in relation to a specific set of historical and social circumstances. Activist art remakes oppressive systems through the process, tools, and locations of art itself. It happens on the streets, in museums, in subway terminals, and in performance halls. It happens as painting and as musical score. An event: it happens. Its final meaning sometimes is revealed after the fact, or not at all: the very fact of its happening is its impact and the possibility of change.

This is hardly to suggest that "effectiveness" be singled out as the sole, or even the primary, criterion for understanding or defining protest art. The means and temporalities of political transformation are legion; so too are the affordances of artistic creation and the means of forging solidarities through art. Protest art—whether in the form of posters, puppetry, workshops, street performances, exhibitions, or networked interventions—is as much an index and iteration of historical transformation as it is a medium for collective organization or agonistic deliberation. For this reason, protest art always runs the risk of belatedness or naiveté—one thinks of Micah White's post-Occupy contention that protest is now "broken."4 And so whereas the question of art's relation to the political has fueled critical and practical debates throughout modernity, the discussion has taken on renewed urgency in an era of intensifying right-wing nationalism, white supremacy, and corporate cronyism around the world. Arts activism continues to be beset with debates about the perils of the neoliberal culture industry, as public art operates on an aestheticized world stage that co-opts the strategies of Western-style democratic governance (and protest itself) to produce the consumable spectacles of late capitalism. Reality TV produces presidents, prime ministers, and petty dictators these days, and so-called "slacktivism" mimes political action; such tin-pot figures and the institutions that sustain them nonetheless carry out devastatingly real political effects, dismantling or eradicating altogether the cultures and cultural forms they mimic. Culture can...

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