As we have seen from various recent expressions of political protest, including the current protests in Hong Kong and, looking slightly more historically, the Occupy protests throughout the United States, resistance against a particular system can stimulate the creation of art for the sake of that movement. This art leverages grievances of protesters in order to add another dimension to the mechanism of sending messages to the government, or forms aesthetic representations of the movement’s ideas.
However, it is currently a worry of preservationists that once the movement is over and the protesters have been cleared from the streets, the art will disappear. We will have lost both the art as it was created and as the objects as historical artifacts. Some methods of preservation include digital recording through pictures, which have appeared on social media and news sites.
Attempts at preservation, though, have not been strictly digital. New initiatives, like the Umbrella Movement Visual Arts and Research Collection, aim to collect as many pieces as possible before it all gets destroyed in the clearing of streets. This particular collection will end up distributing pieces for exhibition in various international museums. Pieces are also being folded into Disobedient Objects in the Victoria and Albert Museum in London.
This sort of preservation – the act of taking the street art out of its political and geographic context and placing it in a museum – is problematic. In the context of what it means to be the sort of art that is displayed in international museums, pulling protest art from the streets and putting it next to pieces of “high art” diminishes its ability to make political impact.
In the past, we generally perceived art as part of a high tradition, transcendent of the ungodliness and impurity of humanity. This sort of art is distinct from a tradition of art as propaganda: political art that can be critically regarded as not having the same aesthetic impact or respect for a tradition of artistry. The tradition of artists and art critics following Théophile Gautier’s slogan, “Art for art’s sake” might argue that true “Art” is and ought to be separate from any political or social details of its context. This implies that art ought to be distanced from any sort of necessitated functionality.
Since Art has so long been characterized this way, we’ve developed a separate term to qualify works that can be considered aesthetic but have a political message: propaganda. Political propaganda isn’t devoid of worldly influences and certainly doesn’t transcend the human situation. It has a specific purpose and thus cannot fall under the category of Art for the sake of itself.
Taking propaganda, like that which has come out of the protests in Hong Kong, out of an environment where it is accessible to any and all, and placing it in a space (like a museum abroad) that can only be accessed by a small elite, will soften its political impact. This is not necessarily because of the fact that we’re moving the art from its original location. It is more a function of the fact that we’re moving it to a location with particular social and cultural weight, removed from the context which gave birth to it.
Juxtaposing art that has expressly political purposes with art that is literally inaccessible to many is unfair to those who cannot afford to travel to the museums. What’s more dangerous though, is that putting protest art next to Monets or Pollacks or Picassos would put the protest art in a similarly removed category, demanding expertise to achieve a full understanding. One of the common critiques of high Art is that it is marketed as intellectually inaccessible to much of the population. Placing protest art alongside such art that one needs expertise to unpack could lead to a likening of the two forms, lessening the political impact.
Further, if people begin to deconstruct protest art based on art theory or an analysis of medium or technique, the political messages of the pieces is more likely to get lost, especially if the intent to a political end is not constantly referred back to in the critics’ deconstruction and analysis of the pieces. These concerns would not be so much of an issue if we had a tradition of recognizing that high Art can be (and sometimes ought to be) political. Unfortunately, this is not the framework in which we exist.
Until we break down this barrier between this idea of high Art and political art, a good way to proceed would be to leave the art in the possession of those who created it. If the desire to preserve it and spread it further – to impact as many as possible – persists, digital preservation and dissemination seems to be a prudent solution.
Contact Mina Shah at minashah ‘at’ stanford.edu.