Activist Art

activist art

ms talisa salmon

ReBar‘Our goal was to transform a parking spot into a PARK(ing) space thereby temporarily expanding the public realm and improving the quality of urban human habitat, at least until the meter ran out.’

JRParisian photographer JR pastes gigantic format portraits up on walls in the city. He directly challenges advertisement posters where models are passive because the people in his photos actively look out at us.

Dan WitzA NYC based artist who pastes stickers on buildings around the city.

Robert KnothA Dutch artist who photographs ordinary people who have grown up near Chernobyl and other sites of nuclear devastation.IMAGE: Annya Pesenko, Chernobyl certificate no. 000358/2005

Fiona Hall

An installation called ‘Tender’ was made by the artist mimicking a variety of actual nests using American dollar bills, raising questions about the value of profit over wildness and diversity.

Lisa Solomon‘Coagulent Rifle Targets’ flowers painted in watercolour on vintage rifle targets in 2005. The flowers depicted were used traditionally to stop bleeding and in wound care.

Seed BombsGuerilla Gardeners in NYC and London throw balls of clay containing seeds into vacant lots in order to green the city.

Judy ChicagoFeminist artist in the 1970’s installation The Dinner Party inviting outstanding women from history overlooked by patriarchal historians.

Fluxus Meaning ‘to flow’ is an art movement that began in the 1960’s influenced by Dadaism. An international network of artists interested in blending different artistic media and disciplines. Trust is a sculpture by Yoko Ono.

Lee MillerSurrealist photographer and model, lee Miller was a photojournalist for Vogue Magazine during WW2. IMAGE: Piano by Broadwood London, 1942

Surrealism

Developed out of Dada in the 1920’s in Paris, artists and writers expressed the Surrealist philosophy or manifesto. Art as protest was political and experimental. IMAGE: Le Violon d’Ingres by Man Ray

Man Ray

Indestructible Object 1923, is an assisted readymade.

LHOOQ

Marcel Duchamp painted a moustache on the Mona Lisa in 1919, poking fun at the world’s most famous painting.

Marcel Duchamp

Readymade art was revolutionary in the early 20th century. Bicycle Wheel was assembled in 1913.

DadaAn informal art movement in Europe and North America. Protesting bourgeois values, war and capitalism and rejecting traditional cultural aesthetics.

Hugo Ball

Writer of the dada manifesto performs a cut-up poem.

Dada PoetryTo make a dadaist poemTake the newspaper.Take a pair of scissors.Choose an article as long as you are planning to make your poem.Cut out the article.Then cut out each of the words that make up this article and put them in a

bag.Shake it gently.Then take out the scraps one after the other in the order in which they left

the bag.Copy concientiously.

Tristan Tzara 1918