The Art of an Uprising

As Bob Dylan iconically declared, the times, they are a-changin’—and so are our mediums of expressing discontent. Dylan is today not only recognized for his distinct, throaty melodies, but also for his protest songs, which gave a voice and a persona to protest movements across 1960s America. While his songs are still repurposed for a variety of contemporary social ills, Dylan’s music is only one form of protest art that has captivated and mobilized activism throughout American history.

“The way that I define protest art is some form of art, literature, or music that offers some kind of critique of something wrong in the culture, something troubling to the artist or writer, and often that seeks explicitly or implicitly to offer a solution,” says Timothy P. McCarthy ’93, a program director at Harvard’s Carr Center for Human Rights Policy. McCarthy recently co-taught a General Education class on American protest literature with English and African and African American Studies Professor John Stauffer. What differentiates protest art from art that simply makes a statement, he says, is a certain element of political intentionality.

That intentionality results in what Classics Professor Richard F. Thomas calls “finger-pointing songs.” Thomas taught a freshman seminar focusing on the literary and cultural impacts of Bob Dylan’s music, and he believes that one of the key features in a successful work of protest art is its ability to connect emotionally with the masses. “A protest song appeals to the group mentality....which is working towards something that it’s obviously crying out against,” Thomas says, “Some either real or perceived injustice.” This connection, he says, allows the viewer or listener to link the artist with the message being shared.

The very nature of protest art, which is meant to influence or effect change in society in some manner, lends itself to changes in form as well. With the expansion of social media, mediums of modern protest art have changed greatly in appearance and function from older art forms such as protest literature. Protest art has evolved not only in the mediums used but also in the manner of production, shifting from the work of renowned artists to a mass-driven instrument of change that has flourished in the digital age.

PREACHING TO A DIFFERENT CHOIR

While it may not be recognizable at first glance, American protest art has existed since the foundation of the colonies. “If you go back to the Puritans, some of the Puritan sermons that were preached in the early 17th century have a Jeremiah tradition,” McCarthy says. “These were meant to be sermons that both critiqued the things that were wrong in society.…but also [were] a kind of celebration of the possibility of society living up to its heavenly ideals and aspirations.” Limited literacy meant that these protests were predominantly oral, and were thus able to reach a wide audience within the community.

Beginning in the mid-18th century with the growing availability of printed materials and a higher literacy rate, however, the oral tradition of protest art shifted to a focus on literary publication, such as the works of Thomas Paine and Walt Whitman. Of particular note is the case of Upton Sinclair, McCarthy says, adding that Sinclair is a perfect example of the sometimes unintentional impacts of misinterpreted protest art. Sinclair’s “The Jungle” was originally meant to incite conversions to socialism by raising awareness of the working man’s plight. However, instead of focusing on the main character’s struggles, as Sinclair intended, readers were more interested in the repulsive conditions within the slaughterhouse, which led to expanded regulation of the meat and drug industry. Sinclair famously said of his book’s reception, “I aimed at the public’s heart, and by accident I hit it in the stomach.”

Despite the rapidly growing literacy rate, literature as a form of protest art was and is limited in its impact. “I tend to think that the genres that have the most impact are those that are readily accessible and impactful to the broadest possible public,” McCarthy says. “Whether or not you interpreted it in the way it was meant to be interpreted is another question.

“Songs, sermons, speeches and visual art of all kinds, particularly visual art that is available to a broad public—not visual art that is rarefied and placed on display in a museum and costs you $25 to enter—those forms are the most impactful,” he adds.

PEOPLE’S ART

Part of the process of making art available to a wider public is the democratization of the art-making process itself. One group working towards that end is the Guerrilla Girls. Since their first protest of the Museum of Modern Art in 1985, these women have been donning gorilla masks and protesting the absence of female artists in many museums across the country. Their 2012 protest against Boston’s own Museum of Fine Arts is a prime example of publicly displayed art outside the walls of an institution. Instead of making a series of paintings about sexism in the art industry, the group posted a billboard in front of the entrance reading, “Do women have to be naked to get into Boston museums?” and displaying a nude figure reclining while wearing a gorilla mask.

Democratization of American protest art may link back to the development of a “people’s art” in the 1930s. “In the 1930s there was a movement to make a ‘people’s art’....This was also at a time when the ideas of [philosopher] John Dewey were very popular,” Patricia Hills, an art history professor at Boston University, says. “His conception of art is that art should be for the people, it should relate to the people, and that everyone should learn how to be an artist and develop their own creativity through the arts.”

American society continued to influence the way art was created throughout the rest of the 20th century. To combat unemployment during the Great Depression, President Roosevelt implemented the Federal Arts Project, designed to pay artists for their work in visual art, music, theater, and writing. Although the Federal Arts Project was eventually abandoned after the Depression ended, and many artists were being condemned during the concurrent Red Scare, American artists continued to create protest art. “In the 1950s there were certain artists who protested the Cold War,” says Hills, who is also currently a fellow at the W.E.B. Du Bois Institute for African and African-American Research. “Many artists just became abstract artists, because if you were an abstract artist, no one could see what your subject matter was.”

Following the end of the Federal Arts Project, there seems to have been a distinctive shift in art forms away from traditional methods such as painting and writing. This shift may have been the result of the rapid development and dispersion of new technology, such as personal cameras, which allowed anyone to create art in a shorter amount of time. “I would say that a lot of the artists today are photographers and filmmakers. You have documentary filmmakers, and you see very strong, powerful statements against the International Monetary Fund and the World Bank,” Hills says. “There is also a certain amount of performance art, of street art. You don’t see a lot of oil paintings that have to do with protest [anymore], but you do see some.”

The rise of photography as a form of protest art has been crucial in expanding the genre to the wider public. “There was an enormous amount of great photojournalism that was taken and published during the busing crisis in Boston, which of course was an extension of the larger civil rights movement and black freedom struggle,” McCarthy says. “There was one photo in particular of a guy named Teddy Landsmark, who was an African-American who was literally stabbed with an American flag through his stomach. It’s a terribly grotesque but also deeply moving picture.”

Part of the growing weight of photography and filmmaking in modern protest art is a product of new technology that has created channels of mass distribution more than changes in the methods or subjects of protest. “So much of the art and protest that we see is emerging in our contemporary movement right now is happening through social media, where images are produced and disseminated and consumed through Instagram and on Facebook, and printed text is part of that too,” McCarthy says. Today, in an era where nearly every phone comes equipped with a camera, almost anyone who witnesses an event he finds troubling can make his own form of protest art at the touch of a button. If his image achieves the balance of emotional connection and aesthetic appeal, the image may go viral—all with very little effort from the artist himself.

The immediacy of social networking in conjunction with art raises serious questions for the value and impact of the art itself. “It’s probably made it sort of too easy—in a way too generic, less convincing,” Thomas says. “It depends on the context.” McCarthy poses the same question as Thomas about the impact of social media on protest art, but his outlook is more hopeful.

“I think that it’s hard to predict because every generation creates its own form of protest art for its own protests, for its own political realities,” he says.  “I hope that your generation produces its own sort of outstanding protest art.... Based on historical precedent, I predict that your generation will produce these things.”

ART OR ACTION?

One of the major values of expanded social media is its ability to quickly unify and organize large and diverse groups. This impact has spilled over into protest art, notes Carrie Lambert-Beatty, professor of History of Art and Architecture and of Visual and Environmental Studies. “I would say [social media] is crucial in mobilizing groups of people,” she says, but adds that she feels the term “protest art” in itself is misleading in the modern context. Lambert-Beatty suggests that modern protest movements, such as the Occupy movement, focus more on creating alternatives to problems than on explicitly pointing out social ills. “It’s not really so clear that protest is the most useful term, because then the question is, ‘Protest what?’” she says. “The motives for social unrest and critical expression of this time takes the forms like modeling an alternative community, which is pretty different than writing a song that tries to change your mind about something.”

One of the key examples Lambert-Beatty notes is the Yes Men, a group of activists started by Jacques Servin and Igor Vamos. Most notably, the Yes Men conned their way onto BBC news in 2004, impersonating representatives from Dow Chemical Corporation. During the BBC interview, the Yes Men claimed that Dow intended to liquidate Union Carbide, which had caused a major chemical disaster, to use the profits to reimburse victims’ medical care. This form of media intervention, says Lambert-Beatty, falls inside the growing realm of staged activism that is developing as a form of protest art in itself. “There seems [to be] a lot of effort now to develop constructive practices rather than protest. [These practices] imply a model of trying to stop something, and that’s a pretty palpable shift,” she says. “An expanded model of performance is really important to thinking about what protest art can look like now.” The expanded model Lambert-Beatty discusses suggests that modern protest art is as much about action as it is about the art itself. “The idea of intervention is something that came up in the early 2000s as an important crossing point for the idea of performance and activism,” she says.

This does not mean, however, that the old forms of protest art are dead. According to Thomas, Bob Dylan songs such as “Masters of War” remain popular because they are timeless. “[Protest music] evolves so it’s appealing to the music of the moment aesthetically, and its message therefore is being helped by that medium, which is a medium that changes,” he says. While the traditional forms retain their impact, the very act of recreating and re-appropriating these songs and images to renew their relevance suggests a continued responsiveness of art to the people. Dylan’s songs, after all, were still being covered during the recent Occupy protests across the country. In some ways, the very act of changing the art may even be a protest in and of itself—a protest of historical stagnation in artistic meaning.

—Staff writer Devony B. Schmidt can be reached at devonyschmidt@college.harvard.edu.