https://www.brooklynmuseum.org/calendar/view/2016/02/20
This lecture was a conversation between three artists from the Agitprop show at the Brooklyn Museum. This is an evolving, changing exhibition that showcases activist protests and different forms of encouraging social change through visuals and performance. The show has three phases in which the artists nominate the next wave to come in. This conversation was with Martha Rosler, Nancy Buchanan, and Andrea Bowers. One thing that stood out the most was the artist’s use of achieving in many of the projects. I find research and achieving extremely important in art, especially art that makes bold statements because before one can make a statement if they want it to have an validity to it, there must be some knowledge and history behind the work to support what is being said. The artists also mentioned their uses of collaboration with different communities and touched on the importance of working with people that come from and really know certain communities. A quote I liked was, ” I like to create a platform for voices to be heard, but a lot of times it isn’t my voice because I don’t come directly from these places” — building platforms and connections to other human beings. This quote specifically stood out to me because even though I am interested in addressed social justice issues in my work, many times I question if I am in a position to do so because of my privileged position. It is one thing to act on issues in a community you are apart of, but I think it gets complicated once you go into communities you don’t know much about from other perspectives and attempt to infiltrate change. Even if it is positive change, if you are not apart of that community I don’t think you can really understand if it is positive change. Gentrification is a huge example of this, the people doing the gentrifying may have good intentions for the communities, (along with personal intentions of wealth) but because they don’t really understand the dynamic of the community they disregard the fact that many are forced to be displaced because of them. But, I liked that in the projects of these artists many a lot of times they fully immersed themselves in these communities struggling with social issues and gave them a platform to speak out on their concerns and what they want for change.
After mapping out my ideas, I don’t think I will be doing a final project directly related to social change, but I am using a lot of this conversation addressing position and perspective to spark my ideas behind my final project.
