Social Justice

Editors' Introduction: Art, Power, and Social Change

Counterrevolution, the Spectacle, and the Situationist Avant-Garde

Among the post-World War II artistic movements, the Situationist International stands out with its persistent, grandiloquent claim to transcend art in a revolutionary act. The critical commitment of the Situationists has resulted in their omission from art history. Rasmussen discusses the way the Situationists, especially Guy Debord, conceived the role of the avant garde, and focuses on the conflicting views on the role of art that characterized the group from 1957 to around 1962, when more o...

Situating Situationism/Supporting Its Legacy: Reply to Mikkel Bolt Rasmussen

Hunter comments on Mikkel Bolt Rasmussen's article regarding the Situationist International. He shares that Rasmussen's account is overly pessimistic and that the value of Guy Debord's text lies less in its argument and more in the possibilities that it opens despite itself. If one is to measure these possibilities, then the focus should be on those tangential visual practices and evidences that Debord seeks to close off, but which his thinking nevertheless propagated and continues to propaga...

(Not) Being On Time: The Legacy of the Situationist International-a Response to Simeon Hunter

Rasmussen offers his response to Simeon Hunter's commentary on his article about the Situationist International. He comments that the Situationists tried to come to terms with the moment of symbolic appropriation and with the way in which postwar society exercises ever-subtler self-control through images, slogans, representations and emblems. Any assessment of the Situationist project must start with this aspect, the fact that it seems as if society is no longer able to imagine anything that ...

Formalist Art Criticism and the Politics of Meaning

From the 1940s until the late 1960s, formalist criticism functioned to appropriate modernist art to the market interests and conventional sensibilities of the art world. By its judgments of taste, it certified the worthiness of art objects for markets, facilitating processes of the reception of artworks as commodities. Tekiner explains how the formalist art criticism associated with Clement Greenberg function symbiotically with art marketers to uphold conservative agendas and to mask the prog...

Deconstructing U.S. Arts Policy: A Dialectical Exposition of the Excellence-Access Debate

McNeely and Shockley examine the impact of the "excellence versus access debate" on arts policy in the US. They contend that "although political rhetoric might posit goals of diversity and democratization, access to the arts is held moot without attendant 'cultural capital' for meaningful participation and consumption."

The Politics of Culture and the Art of Dissent in Early Modern Japan

Farge explores the legacy of Baba Bunko, an important critic of the Japanese military government who confronted the centralized power of the state apparatus by strategically maneuvering between censorship laws through the public presentations of satirical literature. He notes that because these public expressions of opposition, saturated with elements of humor and satire, threatened the stability of the military government, the authorities responded with increased arts censorship, surveillanc...

Deploying Weapons of the Weak in Civil Society: Political Culture in Hong Kong and Taiwan

Lo et al examine the discursive elements of civil speech through an analysis of political cartoons in Hong Kong and Taiwan. They contend that the cynical civic engagement is "the practice of resorting to arts of resistance as a means of civil expression, which facilitates a form of civic participation registered with criticisms of and disbelief in such participation."

'All I Need Is One Mic': Mobilizing Youth for Social Change in the Post-Civil Rights Era

Clay analyzes the relationship between youth of color and hip-hop cultures concerning collective identity formations in what she describes as a "post-civil rights era." She asserts that hip-hop cultures function as mechanisms to organize community and motivate activism among youth of color, especially through the utilization of historical, personal, and social movement narratives. She also contends that hip-hop culture becomes a tool that allows youth of color to transform their individual an...

Images From the Streets: Art for Social Change From the Homelessness Photography Project

Miller explores the social justice potential for unsheltered homeless individuals to communicate the important aspects of their lives through photography. She emphasizes the creative potential for homeless individuals to express their worlds to a broader community through photography collaborations, as well as the concerted efforts made to build relationships between these individuals, students in university classrooms, and wider community groups.

Mnemonic Hauntings: Photography As Art of the Missing

Tandeciarz discusses photography and the preservation of social memory in the context of post-dictatorship Argentina. Tracing the use of photography by the Mothers of the Disappeared at Plaza de Mayo, she links state-issued identification photographs as proof of citizenship to artist Marcelo Brodsky's work and its efforts to complement contemporaneous memory narratives in Argentina. She argues that, like the Mothers who use images of the disappeared as reminders of state violence, Brodsky use...

Notes On Mexican Art, Social Movements, and Anzaldúa's 'Conocimiento'

McCaughan explores art, memory, and knowledge production through several examples of artists engaged in contemporary Mexican movements. Grounded in Gloria Anzaldua's provoking notion of subversive knowledges, or conocimientos, acquired in a state of nepantla, he explores the artistic places in-between rational thought and the liminal recovery of indigenous thought. He suggests that these artists imagine and execute the work in an "interdisciplinary pursuit of knowledge" and "engage the public...

New Transdisciplinary Visualities As an Alternative to Redistribute the Power of Thought

Human action is always dependent on social and economic systems generated by individuals, and it is limited by the evolution of the ability and flexibility of those individuals to change course and take actions different from traditional ways. Bustamante believes that creating new ways of thinking through visuality and through transdisciplinarity could transform the modes of interpreting, reproducing, and constructing the reality to which everyone have had access as a species. Here, she explo...