Protest Art: Mediums & Museums

-- By FelizSmith - 25 Apr 2024

Protest art, due to its often ephemeral nature and its artists’ desire for broad accessibility, largely bypasses art-world institutions like galleries and museums. Certain types of protest artforms, however, benefit from the curated and arguably sterile environments of these traditional spaces. Assemblage and collage are two such forms. Assemblage is a three-dimensional form of sculpture or installation art that commonly uses a variety of found objects. Similarly, collage works are created by arranging paper, fabric, and other materials on a supporting surface like wood panels. Protest art, which relies on stirring emotions and encouraging dissent, must inspire audience engagement in order to be successful. By removing everyday objects from their usual context and using them in unexpected ways, the assemblage and collage mediums offer artists the ability to capture visitor attention, disrupt the museum environment, and shine light on the darkest parts of society.

Sawdy by Ed & Nancy Kienholz

Known for his realism, installation artworks, and controversial subject matter, Edward Kienholz was an assemblage sculptor whose works provide “windows, unavoidable portals, into our blackest, our unruliest, inner worlds and their exterior manifestations.”1 His interest in questioning humanity’s failings is evident in his 1971 piece, Sawdy. Sawdy is a mixed media assemblage that consists of a car door with a mirrored window, a fluorescent bar of light, and a partially obscured black-and-white screenprint portraying a horrific act of anti-Black violence. The unusual sight of a standalone car door hanging on a museum wall, paired with the hint that something is lying behind the door’s window, invites museum visitors to pause and take a closer look at the piece. The screenprint is a crucial part of the piece and introduces _Sawdy_’s dark subject matter. In the image, three masked men hold down a prone figure as a fourth man castrates the victim. Two other men can be seen holding shotguns as they observe the attack. Three of the masks are stretched into smiles to express the pleasure they derive from the violence. The victim has one ankle bound with a stretch of rope that is held by one of the attackers.

While the interactive nature of the piece gives viewers the option to roll up the car door window and turn off the light, those trying to escape the violent scene are forced to confront their own mirrored image, and consequently, their own role as a bystander to the injustice in front of them. Sawdy_’s interactive properties help articulate one important truth about racial violence: although there are opportunities for individuals to remain bystanders to violence, the violence itself continues to occur in the darkness and beyond the car window. From the thick walls required to hang a heavy door to the availability of electrical outlets to power the light strip, pieces like _Sawdy require display support that museums are well-suited to provide.

The spectacle of anti-Black violence has been used to advance anti-discriminatory platforms and ideals. Activists wishing to eradicate lynching widely shared black and white photographs of lynchings to inspire sympathy in their constituents.2 They attacked the notion of African-Americans having “innate criminality, essential barbarity, [and] wanton lasciviousness” by instead focusing on the White perpetrators’ fulfillment of these negative characteristics.3 They accentuated the vulnerability of the Black victims and juxtaposed their innocence with their murderers’ brutality. This artistic approach, however, is contentious in that it puts Black “trauma on display for non-Black audiences to interact with.”4 Artists like Theaster Gates produce potent protest pieces that still use common objects in fresh ways, but take a more subtle approach to activism.

Dirty Red, Civil Tapestry series by Theaster Gates

By repurposing decommissioned fire hoses to create abstract works that reference the Birmingham Campaign of 1963, Theaster Gates’ Civil Tapestry collage series ensures that activist work of the Civil Rights Movement remains visible in the traditional art world space. The sheer scale of the Dirty Red piece “requires the viewer to distance oneself, making it more difficult to see the material and make the connection between the fire hose and its associations with civil rights struggles.”5 This distance is enhanced by the Dirty Red_’s imitation of an abstract painting. By seeming to blend in with aesthetic-focsed works, Gates’ protest pieces rely on their innocuous first impression to draw viewers in. Similarly, fire hoses are often viewed as innocent and potentially-life saving devices. _Dirty Red instead reminds audiences that fire hoses can be brutal instruments of injustice when commanded by the wrong forces. Dirty Red and the rest of the Civil Tapestry series take an unusual material and amplify its historical meaning by placing it in the museum context and forcing viewers to consider Gates’ reliance on it.

Conclusion

Studies suggest that museum visitors spend an average of 15 to 30 seconds looking at a work of art.6 Dirty Red and Sawdy are examples of assemblage and collage works that inspire audience engagement and force museum visitors to confront societal ills. Sawdy relies on the unusual sight of a mounted car door to invoke the human investigative instinct to see what lies behind closed doors. Dirty Red uses physical space and abstraction to appear harmless while recalling the violent Birmingham attacks of 1963. Both works are potent pieces of protest art that capitalize on the museum environment to advance their respective messages. Both challenge the idea that museums are pristine, unsullied spaces just as senseless acts of violence challenge America’s concept of justice for all.

I think the way to improve this essay is to update its context: you are now a law student writing about art as a way to address questions of your becoming a lawyer, no longer the author of the essay from which you drew. So the focus should shift, away from the work and the museum, and towards you. You have expressed here a sensibility, not only towards paintings and painters. You wish to express the continuance of that sensibility into this process of becoming a lawyer. So the essay becomes stronger, performing the work of an essay—a try at self-understanding as Montaigne says—by bringing the next draft closer to the experience of the particular viewer you are.

Footnotes

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1) Sherrill, Steven, 1961-. "Ed Kienholz: Expert." Modern Painters 17, no. 2 (Summer2004 2004): 72-77. Art Full Text (H.W. Wilson), EBSCOhost (accessed December 14, 2015).

2) Raiford, Leigh. "No Relation to the Facts about Lynching." In Imprisoned in a Luminous Glare Photography and the African American Freedom Struggle, 41. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2011.

3) Id.

4) 20th Century & Contemporary Art Evening Sale in Association with Poly Auction, Phillips (Jun. 8, 2021), https://www.phillips.com/detail/theaster-gates/HK010121/21.

5) Theaster Gates Dirty Red 2016, Nasher Sculpture Center (Feb. 17, 2018), https://www.nashersculpturecenter.org/art/exhibitions/object/id/3197-623.

6) Isaac Kaplan, How Long Do You Need to Look at Art to a Work of Art to Get It?, Artsy (Jan. 25, 2017), https://www.artsy.net/article/artsy-editorial-long-work-art-it.

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