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This week you learned about using art as a form of protest. Your discussion with your classmates is about which of those artists were able to “speak to you” the best. In this paper I’d like you to take that idea further. You don’t have to choose the same artist whom you talked about in the discussion, but you will choose one of the artists from this week and take some time to get further into their work.
Objectives
This activity is designed to support the following Learning Objectives:
Research a relevant work of art and its artist.
Instructions
Choose one of the artists from this week to research a little further:
Richard Bell
Graciela Iturbide
Ai Weiwei
Shirin Neshat
Jaune Quick-to-See Smith
Guerilla Girls
After you have chosen an artist, choose 1-2 of their works (see below for some help with this).
Once you have chosen and artist and an example or two of their work, write a paper that explains why they create works in protest and how that intention is demonstrated in the look of their artwork.
Make sure you include images in your paper.
Give good descriptions of the work(s) you include
Remember that the goal is for you to connect the artist’s intention with how the art looks. Think about what attracted you to their work and why it is so potent. Use visual analysis if you need help getting started with this.
Please present the information in the following format:
12 point font, double spaced.
Length-3 pages (700 words).
Include a Works Cited page at the end as well as in-text citations where required.
Tools to Help You
Where to Find SourcesStart by finding the artist’s personal website (you can Google it).
Check YouTube, there are lots of great videos there and you will likely find some interviews with the artist as well.
Use the website Art21 (Links to an external site.). There are a lot of contemporary artists profiled there and good videos and information.
Check on Smarthistory as they have some great content that you have been interacting with throughout this semester.
Check out the museum websites where the artist’s work has been, or is, on display
Cite Your SourcesYou MUST cite your sources. This assignment requires that you use MLA formatting and properly cite both in-text and on the Works Cited page. The MSJC Library’s “Research Help” page has a link at the bottom to “Citation Help Handouts”.
I suggest using Purdue University’s Online Writing Lab (Links to an external site.) where they have instructions for MLA style and proper citations, as well as samples.
When you use sources in your writing, you need to cite whenever you use information from a source, even if it’s not a quote. We definitely cite quotes all the time, but when you put things in your own words, it’s still not your information, so a citation is required.
Plagiarism will not be tolerated. You will receive a ZERO for this assignment if you plagiarize. Cite your sources and do your own work.
Using art as a form of protest is one of the richest forms in the field of art as works done in protest tend to have lasting power and often affect social change. In studying these artists I am introducing you to this poignant and thought-provoking aspect of art, but my hope is that you will go further and take the time to learn about these artists, their backgrounds, and their motivations because that is where the richness and depth of these works really takes shape. As always, it was difficult to choose which artists to include in this module so keep in mind that these are only a few.
Protesting a Specific Instance
A General Protest
This group of works is about specific protests; works created in response to an incident or some event. We start with a famous Art Historical example from the 18th century by Theodore Gericault and then we come to the present day and look at works by Jaune Quick-to-See Smith, Shirin Neshat, and Ai Weiwei.
Gericault’s Raft of the Medusa
This is the oldest work we are going to look at but no less radical in its function for protest. In fact, at the time of creation something like this was absolutely unheard of. It is certainly not the beginning of Protest Art, but it is one of the most important historical examples.
A Non-Celebration
As a response to the 500th anniversary of Christopher Columbus’ arrival in North America in 1992, the artist Jaune Quick-to-See Smith, from the Confederated Salish and Kootenai Tribes of the Flathead Indian Nation, created a large mixed-media canvas called Trade (Gifts for Trading Land with White People). Trade, part of the series “The Quincentenary Non-Celebration,” illustrates historical and contemporary inequities between Native Americans and the United States government.
Trade references the role of trade goods in allegorical stories like the acquisition of the island of Manhattan by Dutch colonists in 1626 from unnamed Native Americans in exchange for goods worth 60 guilders or $24.00. Though more apocryphal than true, this story has become part of American lore, suggesting that Native Americans had been lured off their lands by inexpensive trade goods. The fundamental misunderstanding between the Native and non-Native worlds—especially the notion of private ownership of land—underlies Trade. Smith stated that if Trade could speak, it might say: “Why won’t you consider trading the land we handed over to you for these silly trinkets that so honor us? Sound like a bad deal? Well, that’s the deal you gave us.”1
Jaune Quick-to-See Smith, canoe (detail), Trade (Gifts for Trading Land with White People), 1992, oil paint and mixed media, collage, objects, canvas, 152.4 x 431.8 cm (Chrysler Museum of Art, Norfolk, Virginia) © Jaune Quick-to-See Smith
For Trade, Smith layered images, paint, and objects on the surface of the canvas, suggesting layers of history and complexity. Divided into three large panels, the triptych (three part) arrangement is reminiscent of a medieval altarpiece. Smith covered the canvas in collage, with newspaper articles about Native life cut out from her tribal paper Char-Koosta, photos, comics, tobacco and gum wrappers, fruit carton labels, ads, and pages from comic books, all of which feature stereotypical images of Native Americans. She mixed the collaged text with photos of deer, buffalo, and Native men in historic dress holding pipes with feathers in their hair, and an image of Ken Plenty Horses—a character from one of Smith’s earlier pieces, the Paper Dolls for a Post Columbian World with Ensembles Contributed by US Government from 1991-92.
Jaune Quick-to-See Smith, toys and souvenirs (detail), Trade (Gifts for Trading Land with White People), 1992, oil paint and mixed media, collage, objects, canvas, 152.4 x 431.8 cm (Chrysler Museum of Art, Norfolk, Virginia) © Jaune Quick-to-See Smith
She applied blocks of white, yellow, green, and especially red paint over the layer of collaged materials. The color red had multiple meanings for Smith, referring to her Native heritage as well as to blood, warfare, anger, and sacrifice. With the emphasis on prominent brushstrokes and the dripping blocks of paint, Smith cited the Abstract Expressionist movement from the 1940s and 50s with raw brushstrokes describing deep emotions and social chaos. For a final layer, she painted the outline of an almost life-sized canoe. Canoes were used by Native Americans as well as non-Native explorers and traders in the eighteenth, nineteenth and early twentieth century to travel along the waterways of North America. The canoe suggests the possibility of trade and cultural connections—though this empty canoe is stuck, unable to move.
Jaune Quick-to-See Smith, toys and souvenirs (detail), Trade (Gifts for Trading Land with White People), 1992, oil paint and mixed media, collage, objects, canvas, 152.4 x 431.8 cm (Chrysler Museum of Art, Norfolk, Virginia) © Jaune Quick-to-See Smith
Above the canvas, Smith strung a clothesline from which she dangled a variety of Native-themed toys and souvenirs, especially from sports teams with Native American mascots. The items include toy tomahawks, a child’s headdress with brightly dyed feathers, Red Man chewing tobacco, a Washington Redskins cap and license plate, a Florida State Seminoles bumper sticker, a Cleveland Indian pennant and cap, an Atlanta Braves license plate, a beaded belt, a toy quiver with an arrow, and a plastic Indian doll. Smith offers these cheap goods in exchange for the lands that were lost, reversing the historic sale of land for trinkets. These items also serve as reminders of how Native life has been commodified, turning Native cultural objects into cheap items sold without a true understanding of what the original meanings were.
The Artist
The artist was born on January 15, 1940, at the St. Ignatius Jesuit Missionary on the Reservation of the Flathead Nation. Raised by her father, a rodeo rider and horse trader, Smith was one of eleven children. Her first name comes from the French word for “yellow” (jaune), a reminder of her French-Cree ancestors. Her middle name “Quick-to-See” was not a reference to her eyesight but was given by her Shoshone grandmother as a sign of her ability to grasp things readily. From an early age Smith wanted to be an artist; as a child, she had herself photographed while dressed as Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec. Though her father was not literate, education was important to Smith.
National Bison Range (near St. Ignatius, Flathead Reservation) (photo: Jaix ChaixLinks to an external site., Check All Home Inspection Corp., CC BY-SA 2.0)
She received a bachelor of arts from Framingham State College in Massachusetts in 1976 in art education rather than in studio art because her instructors told her that no woman could have a career as an artist, though they acknowledged that she was more skilled than the men in her class. In 1980 she received a master of fine arts from the University of New Mexico. She was inspired by both Native and non-Native sources, including petroglyphs, Plains ledger art, Diné saddle blankets, early Charles Russell prints of western landscapes, and paintings by twentieth-century artists such as Paul Klee, Joan Miró, Willem DeKooning, Jasper Johns, and especially Kurt Schwitters and Robert Rauschenberg (see image below). Both Schwitters and Rauschenberg brought objects from the quotidian world into their work, such as tickets, cigarette wrappers, and string.
Robert Rauschenberg, Canyon, 1959, oil, pencil, paper, metal, photograph, fabric, wood, canvas, buttons, mirror, taxidermied eagle, cardboard, pillow, paint tube and other materials, 207.6 x 177.8 x 61 cm (The Museum of Modern Art, New York) © 2014 Robert Rauschenberg Foundation
In addition to her work as an artist, Smith has curated over thirty exhibitions to promote and highlight the art of other Native artists. She has also lectured extensively, been an artist-in-residence at numerous universities, and has taught art at the Institute of American Indian Arts in Santa Fe, New Mexico the only four-year university dedicated to teaching Native youth across North America. In her years as an artist, Smith has received many honors, including an Eitelijorg Fellowship in 2007, a grant from the Joan Mitchell Foundation to create a comprehensive archive of her work, a Lifetime Achievement Award from the Women’s Caucus for the Arts, the College Art Association’s Committee on Women in the Arts award, the 2005 New Mexico Governor’s award for excellence in the arts, as well as four honorary doctorate degrees.
Smith’s art shares her view of the world, offering her personal perspective as an artist, a Native American, and a woman. Her work creates a dialogue between the art and its viewers and explores issues of Native identity as it is seen by both Native Americans and non-Natives. Trade (Gifts for Trading Land with White People) restates the standard narratives of the history of the United States, specifically the desire to expand beyond “sea to shining sea,” as encompassed in the ideology of Manifest Destiny (the belief in the destiny of Western expansion), and raises the issue of contemporary inequities that are rooted in colonial experience.
1. Arlene Hirschfelder, Artists and Craftspeople, American Indian LivesLinks to an external site., New York: Facts On File, 1994, page 115.
Dr. Suzanne Newman Fricke, “Jaune Quick-to-See Smith, Trade (Gifts for Trading Land with White People),” in Smarthistory, September 7, 2018, accessed April 24, 2022, https://smarthistory.org/jaune-quick-to-see-smith-trade-gifts-for-trading-land-with-white-people-2/Links to an external site.
Dangerous Art
All art is political in the sense that all art takes place in the public arena and engages with an already existing ideology. Yet there are times when art becomes dangerously political for both the artist and the viewers who engage with that art. Think of Jacques-Louis David’s involvement in the French Revolution—his individual investment in art following the bloodshed —and his imprisonment during the reign of terror. If it were not for certain sympathisers, David may well have ended up another victim of the guillotine. Goya is another example of an artist who fell foul of government power. There are instances in the 20th century when artists have faced down political power directly. Consider the photomontages of John Heartfield. Heartfield risked his life at times to produce covers for the magazine A/Z, which defied both Hitler and the Nazi Party.
Ai Weiwei
The Chinese artist, Ai Weiwei, offers is an important contemporary example. In 2011, Weiwei was arrested in China following a crack down by the government on so-called “political dissidents” (a specific category that the Chinese government uses to classify those who seek to subvert state power) for “alleged economic crimes” against the Chinese state. Weiwei has used his art to address both the corruption of the Chinese communist government and its outright neglect of human rights, particularly in the realm of the freedom of speech and thought. Weiwei has been successful in using the internet (which is severely restricted in China) as a medium for his art. His work is informed by two interconnected strands, his involvement with the Chinese avant-garde group “Stars” (which he helped found in 1978 during his time in the Beijing Film Academy) and the fact that he spent some of his formative years in New York, engaging there with the ideas of conceptual art, in particular the idea of the readymade. Many of the concepts and much of the material that Weiwei uses in his art practice are informed by post-conceptual thinking.
Ai Weiwei, Sunflower Seeds, 2010, one hundred million hand painted porcelain seeds (Tate Modern)
An International Audience
Handpainted seeds (detail), Ai Weiwei, Sunflower Seeds, 2010, one hundred million hand painted porcelain seeds (Tate Modern)
Weiwei has exhibited successfully in the West in many major shows, for example, the 48th Venice Biennale in Italy (1999) and Documenta 12 (2007). He also exhibited Sunflower Seeds (October, 2010) in the Turbine Hall in the Tate Modern. In this work, Weiwei filled the floor of the huge hall with one hundred million porcelain seeds, each individually hand-painted in the town of Jingdezhen by 1,600 Chinese artisans. Participants were encouraged to walk over the exhibited space (or even roll in the work) in order to experience the ideas of the effect of mass consumption on Chinese industry and 20th-century China’s history of famine and collective work. However, on October 16, 2010, Tate Modern stopped people from walking on the exhibit due to health liability concerns over porcelain dust.
“…a natural disaster is a public matter.”
Perhaps the work that contributed most to Weiwei’s current imprisonment and the destruction of his studio was his investigation of corruption in the construction of the schools that collapsed during the 2008 earthquake in Sichuan, China. Like many others, Weiwei investigated how improper material and the contravention of civil engineering laws led to the wholesale destruction of schools (which led in turn to the deaths of thousands of children trapped within them), Weiwei has produced a list of all the victims of the earthquake on his blog. This act is typical Weiwei’s use of the internet to communicate information. This information is his “art”, in much the way that American artists of the late 1960s used words and ideas as art.
Visitors entering the Ai Weiwei show So Sorry in the Haus der Kunst (detail), Ai Weiwei, Remembering, 2009, backpacks on the facade of the Haus der Kunst* (Munich)
So Sorry
In his retrospective show So Sorry (October 2009 to January 2010, Munich, Germany), Weiwei created the installation Remembering on the façade of the Haus der Kunst. It was constructed from nine thousand children’s backpacks. They spelled out the sentence “She lived happily for seven years in this world” in Chinese characters (this was a quote from a mother whose child died in the earthquake). Regarding this work, Weiwei said,
The idea to use backpacks came from my visit to Sichuan after the earthquake in May 2008. During the earthquake many schools collapsed. Thousands of young students lost their lives, and you could see bags and study material everywhere. Then you realize individual life, media, and the lives of the students are serving very different purposes. The lives of the students disappeared within the state propaganda, and very soon everybody will forget everything.
The title of the show referred to the apologies frequently expressed by governments and corporations when their negligence leads to tragedies, such as the collapse of schools during the earthquake. Two months before the opening of this exhibition Weiwei suffered a severe beating from Chinese police in Chengdu in August 2009, where he was trying to testify for Tan Zuoren, a fellow investigator of the shoddy construction and the student casualties. Weiwei underwent emergency brain surgery for internal bleeding as a result of the assault.
The Arrest
Blue, yellow, and red backpacks (detail), Ai Weiwei, Remembering, 2009, backpacks on the facade of the Haus der Kunst* (Munich)
On April 3rd 2011, Weiwei was arrested at Beijing’s airport while while waiting for a flight to Hong Kong. While his detention is broadly believed to be linked to his criticism of the Chinese government, the Chinese Ministry of Foreign Affairs declared that he is “under investigation for alleged economic crimes.” Weiwei’s participation in the Jasmine Rallies, a series of peaceful protests which took place all over China in February, no doubt contributed to his arrest.
JP McMahon, “Ai Weiwei, Remembering and the Politics of Dissent,” in Smarthistory, August 9, 2015, accessed April 24, 2022, https://smarthistory.org/ai-weiwei-remembering-and-the-politics-of-dissent/
The artists in this group also create works in reaction to specific situations, but the information I have available lends itself to a more general understanding of what they protest and why. You might find someone you really like and want to look up some of their individual works. These are all contemporary artists; Richard Bell, Graciela Iturbide, and the Guerilla Girls.
Richard Bell
This man is an indigenous Australian artist whose work highlights the inequality that exists between the White population of Australia and the indigenous Aborigine. I see a lot of parallels between his arguments and that of the Native American population here in the U.S.
Graciela Iturbide
The video below is an excellent teaser for Iturbide’s photographic work. She creates an image of Mexico that people don’t often see.
Shirin Neshat
In Rebellious Silence, the central figure’s portrait is bisected along a vertical seam created by the long barrel of a rifle. Presumably the rifle is clasped in her hands near her lap, but the image is cropped so that the gun rises perpendicular to the lower edge of the photo and grazes her face at the lips, nose, and forehead. The woman’s eyes stare intensely towards the viewer from both sides of this divide.
Shirin Neshat’s photographic series Women of Allah examines the complexities of women’s identities in the midst of a changing cultural landscape in the Middle East—both through the lens of Western representations of Muslim women, and through the more intimate subject of personal and religious conviction.
While the composition—defined by the hard edge of her black chador against the bright white background—appears sparse, measured and symmetrical, the split created by the weapon implies a more violent rupture or psychic fragmentation. A single subject, it suggests, might be host to internal contradictions alongside binaries such as tradition and modernity, East and West, beauty and violence. In the artist’s own words, “every image, every woman’s submissive gaze, suggests a far more complex and paradoxical reality behind the surface.” [1]
Shirin Neshat, Rebellious Silence, Women of Allah series, 1994, black and white RC print and ink, photo by Cynthia Preston ©Shirin Neshat (courtesy Barbara Gladstone Gallery, New York and Brussels)
The Women of Allah series confronts this “paradoxical reality” through a haunting suite of black-and-white images. Each contains a set of four symbols that are associated with Western representations of the Muslim world: the veil, the gun, the text and the gaze. While these symbols have taken on a particular charge since 9/11, the series was created earlier and reflects changes that have taken place in the region since 1979, the year of the Islamic Revolution in Iran.
Islamic Revolution
Iran had been ruled by the Shah (Mohammad Reza Pahlavi), who took power in 1941 during the Second World War and reigned as King until 1979, when the Persian monarchy was overthrown by revolutionaries. His dictatorship was known for the violent repression of political and religious freedom, but also for its modernization of the country along Western cultural models. Post-war Iran was an ally of Britain and the United States, and was markedly progressive with regards to women’s rights. The Shah’s regime, however, steadily grew more restrictive, and revolutionaries eventually rose to abolish the monarchy in favor of a conservative religious government headed by Ayatollah Khomeini.
Shirin Neshat was born in 1957 in the town of Qazvin. In line with the Shah’s expansion of women’s rights, her father prioritized his daughters’ access to education, and the young artist attended a Catholic school where she learned about both Western and Iranian intellectual and cultural history. She left, however, in the mid-1970s, pursuing her studies in California as the environment in Iran grew increasingly hostile. It would be seventeen years before she returned to her homeland. When she did, she confronted a society that was completely opposed to the one that she had grown up in.
Looking back
One of the most visible signs of cultural change in Iran has been the requirement for all women to wear the veil in public. While many Muslim women find this practice empowering and affirmative of their religious identities, the veil has been coded in Western eyes as a sign of Islam’s oppression of women. This opposition is made more clear, perhaps, when one considers the simultaneity of the Islamic Revolution with women’s liberation movements in the U.S. and Europe, both developing throughout the 1970s. Neshat decided to explore this fraught symbol in her art as a way to reconcile her own conflicting feelings. In Women of Allah, initiated shortly after her return to Iran in 1991, the veil functions as both a symbol of freedom and of repression.
The veil and the gaze
The veil is intended to protect women’s bodies from becoming the sexualized object of the male gaze, but it also protects women from being seen at all. The “gaze” in this context becomes a charged signifier of sexuality, sin, shame, and power. Neshat is cognizant of feminist theories that explain how the “male gaze” is normalized in visual and popular culture: Women’s bodies are commonly paraded as objects of desire in advertising and film, available to be looked at without consequence. Many feminist artists have used the action of “gazing back” as a means to free the female body from this objectification. The gaze, here, might also reflect exotic fantasies of the East. In Orientalist paintingLinks to an external site. of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, for instance, Eastern women are often depicted nude, surrounded by richly colored and patterned textiles and decorations; women are envisaged amongst other beautiful objects that can be possessed. In Neshat’s images, women return the gaze, breaking free from centuries of subservience to male or European desire.
Shirin Neshat, Faceless, Women of Allah series, 1994, black and white RC print and ink, photo by Cynthia Preston ©Shirin Neshat (courtesy Barbara Gladstone Gallery, New York and Brussels)
Most of the subjects in the series are photographed holding a gun, sometimes passively, as in Rebellious Silence, and sometimes threateningly, with the muzzle pointed directly towards the camera lens. With the complex ideas of the “gaze” in mind, we might reflect on the double meaning of the word “shoot,” and consider that the camera—especially during the colonial era—was used to violate women’s bodies. The gun, aside from its obvious references to control, also represents religious martyrdom, a subject about which the artist feels ambivalently, as an outsider to Iranian revolutionary culture.
Poetry
The contradictions between piety and violence, empowerment and suppression, are most prevalent in the use of calligraphic text that is applied to each photograph. Western viewers who do not read Farsi may understand the calligraphy as an aesthetic signifier, a reference to the importance of textLinks to an external site. in the long history of Islamic art. Yet, most of the texts are transcriptions of poetry and other writings by women, which express multiple viewpoints and date both before and after the Revolution. Some of the texts that Neshat has chosen are feminist in nature. However, in Rebellious Silence, the script that runs across the artist’s face is from Tahereh Saffarzadeh’s poem “Allegiance with Wakefulness” which honors the conviction and bravery of martyrdom. Reflecting the paradoxical nature of each of these themes, histories and discourses, the photograph is both melancholic and powerful—invoking the quiet and intense beauty for which Neshat’s work has become known.
As an outspoken, feminist and progressive artist, Neshat is aware that it would be dangerous to show her work in conservative modern-day Iran, and she has been living in exile in the United States since the 1990s. For audiences in the West, the “Women of Allah” series has allowed a more nuanced contemplation of common stereotypes and assumptions about Muslim women, and serves to challenge the suppression of female voices in any community.
[1] Shirin Neshat, “Artist Statement,” Signs Journal Links to an external site.(accessed July 2015)Dr. Allison Young, “Shirin Neshat, Rebellious Silence, Women of Allah series,” in Smarthistory, August 9, 2015, accessed April 24, 2022, https://smarthistory.org/shirin-neshat-rebellious-silence-women-of-allah-series/Links to an external site..
The Guerilla Girls
These ladies have been around for almost 40 years and they have a knack for making very good points. I think the art world needs more people like this to push back and show them how exclusive they are being about which types of people actually get noticed and represented in the world of art.
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