The Times are Changing…and so is Protest Art?

Having your parents or grandparents sigh on and on about how the times have changed is probably a universal experience. It’s true. Time leaves its mark on everything; From our nation to its people, their struggles and their cultures—everything is bound to change, however subtle or direct it may seem. Consequently, as our struggles, lifestyle, and aspirations change, so do our means of expressing them. This directly translates to how protests work. People share a similar struggle, dream a shared aspiration and work collectively to achieve it. While their cause keeps changing with time, so does their primary method of expressing it—protest art.

Protest art’s history has always been incredibly broad which means an exact timeline of what shifts and changes took place in its expression are hard to track but its forms have always been diverse and numerous. Satire and non-rational discourse, posters and paintings, collages and now digital media are a few examples of protest art but what’s important here to note aren’t the shifts themselves but what exactly causes it.

"What's important here to note aren't the shifts themselves but what exactly causes it."

Protest has seen the use of various means of expression over the years. We all remember posters, pamphlets and placards; they’ve existed long before and will probably last us longer than we run out of agendas to push forward and issues to bring to light. They were brought about mostly in the mid-nineteenth century to the twentieth century due to a rapid increase in industrialisation and working class literacy. Art adapted to the changing circumstances of the middle class and gave us posters like "What a Woman May Be and Yet Not Have the Vote" (c. 1913) or Western Federation of Miners "Is Colorado in America?" (c. 1904).

With political cartoons, soon came along documentaries and photography that made television and films an integral part of protest art. Protest art is not confined to the traditional sense of art, rather, it is inclusive of literature, filmography, theatre and the likes. For e.g., Night and Fog (1956) is an age-old documentary covering the horrors of Nazi Germany and bringing to light war crimes committed against innocent jews.

I’m sure most of these methods of protest art are not unheard of or unseen. In fact we see them so often in our lives, we’re accustomed to them being a part of our lives. Some would even argue they no longer have the same impact or popularity as they did back then. You see a new movie released in the theatres on social mobility or labour-class struggles and you pass right by it thinking you’ll watch it when you have the money or the time. You're unimpressed.

What most people miss is the way protest art is hidden underneath the guise of everyday lifestyle choices like makeup or the kind of clothes we wear. In Heather Marie Stur's book Beyond Combat: Women and Gender in the Vietnam War Era, she shares the story of a nurse who wore Chantilly perfume because it "made her patients think of home." North Korea robs women of the right to wear makeup to clip their wings of self-expression before they have a chance to grow. And the most popular example of them all? Women donning a bright red lip and wearing their rebellion in blue, with eyeshadows that came to represent independence and radical identities. This too is art, although hidden in plain sight.

"This too is art, although hidden in plain sight."

The late twentieth century saw the rise of digital media which went mainstream over the span of just a decade. A relatively unheard of but classic example of this was the FloodNet (1998), developed by Electronic Disturbance Theater in response to the struggle of the Zapatistas. The use of performance, politics, and computers showed how a protest action can take place in cyberspace as opposed to just being advertised in cyberspace. In other words, Digital Media ran so Social Media could walk.

Hashtags, memes, short-form video, digitally coordinated campaigns—you name it, you got it. Social media is rapidly normalising resistance, laying more groundwork for a united front online than offline. What social media does is bring art that would otherwise have been accessible to only a few to a larger space, with a larger audience present to experience it. Its impact is amplified because it has a ‘share-ability’ and virality factor that other mediums before it lacked. In essence, social media protest art is bringing conventional means of protest art—designing placards/posters, yes, but online for many to view.

Time for me to contradict some of the things I’ve said until now but hold on, I’ll make it make sense. Protest art has never functioned in a fixed trajectory. It’s never been this way:

To explain simply, digital media did not kill the poster and social media did not kill digital or physical protest art. No medium of protest art is obsolete, they’re all still very much relevant. Time indeed has brought a shift from conventional to non-conventional mediums but they exist together. What changes, then, is not protest art itself, but the ways in which it reaches people. Every new medium adds another layer to the existing vocabulary of resistance, rather than replacing what came before it…like onion peels, you know? Protest art, therefore, evolves not by abandoning its past, but by adapting it to however people are willing to listen.