It takes little imagination to create a global state of terror and control. That is the basic dream of every dictator and of the dictator inside all of us. It takes much greater imagination to act upon the idea of a world beyond that.

— Stephen Duncombe and Steve Lambert[i]

An art that engages with self-empowerment, then, is about unleashing a sense of being in common, of being part of something bigger than a discrete human body, and of feeling a sense of saying both “I can” and “we can” at the exact same moment.

— Charles Esche[ii]

Give us grace to heed the prophets’ warnings …

— Collect for the Second Sunday of Advent[iii]

 

Holocaust survivor Elie Wiesel observed that there were three kinds of people in the twentieth century: killers, victims, and bystanders. But there were also resisters, who blended conscience and imagination to subvert the inevitability of controlling ideologies and plant the seeds of new possibility—even in the winter of despair.

Now, sixteen years into this new century, when the foundations of American democracy are being shaken and shattered by an authoritarian blitzkrieg, resistance is needed more than ever. It must be our civic duty, moral obligation, and spiritual vocation to question, challenge, mock, outmaneuver, and obstruct the monstrous axis of bigots and billionaires who are about to take power.

Sitting back and “giving Trump a chance” would be fatal. It is already perfectly clear who he is and where he is headed. Like the right-wing populists of Europe, he practices a politics of antagonism, channeling resentment, bigotry and hate into a movement fictionalized as “the people.” Anyone outside his movement, or critical of it, will be scapegoated and denounced. Argentinian philosopher Ernesto Laclau has described such populism as “a form of constructing the political through the division of society into two camps.”[iv]

So with the killers in charge, how do we act like resisters rather than victims or passive bystanders? Timothy Snyder, a Yale historian who has studied the lessons of the Holocaust, has written a 20-Point Guide to Defending Democracy, suggesting practical ways to work within the system before we lose it altogether. And I recently posted a Spiritual Survival Guide for staying grounded on a daily basis in the “time of trial.”

But since this blog’s ongoing theme is transformative imagination, let us also consider another kind of resistance, one which employs art and creativity to awaken people from their passive slumber and empower them with alternative visions. In a 1924 novel, Upton Sinclair made the case for an activist art:

“The artists of our time are like men hypnotized, repeating over and over a dreary formula of futility. And I say: Break this evil spell, young comrade; go out and meet the new dawning life, take your part in the battle, and put it into new art; do this service for a new public, which you yourself will make . . . that your creative gift shall not be content to make artworks, but shall at the same time make a world; shall make new souls, moved by a new ideal of fellowship, a new impulse of love, and faith—and not merely hope, but determination.”[v]

The problem with living within a particular “social imaginary” is that alternative ways of constructing our common life are not just utopian, they are literally inconceivable. As Slavo Zizek noted in a famous speech at Occupy Wall Street: “Look at the movies . . . It’s easy to imagine the end of the world. An asteroid destroying all life and so on. But you can’t imagine the end of capitalism.”[vi]

Art activism doesn’t just critique what is wrong, inadequate or incomplete. By enabling us to imagine alternatives, it breaks the spell of inevitability which the dominant hegemony has cast over us. A recent book, Truth Is Concrete: A Handbook for Artistic Strategies in Real Politics, provides many provocative examples. Here are some of my favorites:

• When mathematician-philosopher Antanas Mockus became mayor of Bogotá in 1995, he borrowed strategies from activist art to help citizens re-imagine their city. He mocked the mythology of leadership by wearing a “super-citizen” costume, and cut a heart shape out of his bulletproof vest to demonstrate his shared vulnerability. He created an exchange of guns for toys in which the city’s children pressured parents to turn in their weapons. And he replaced the notoriously corrupt traffic police with 400 mimes, who used humor instead of fines to manage the flow of vehicles. In one of the world’s most dangerous cities, traffic fatalities were cut in half, and the homicide rate declined 70%.

• During the oppressive regime of Slobodan Milosevic, Serbian “laughtivists” painted the dictator’s face on an oil drum and left it on a crowded shopping street along with a bat. Passersby took the opportunity to bash the drum image until police finally “arrested” the drum and put it in their van, a comic scene widely covered by the media. “Laughtivism derives its power from the ability to melt fear, the lifeblood of dictators . . . and help to cut away at the leaders’ authority, which often stems from intense narcissism.”[vii]

• In 2013, Enmedio, a “media prankster collective” in Barcelona, made striking posters of individuals whose homes were being foreclosed by a Spanish bank, and pasted them onto the façade of the bank’s central downtown branch. The invisible victims, and their stories, were thus made dramatically visible at the scene of the crime.

• Large inflatables can create “tactical frivolity,” turning “a grim protest situation into a playful event,” making it “poetic, joyful, and participatory.”[viii] Who can resist a large inflatable? A tense standoff between police and protesters in Berlin became a game when an inflatable was tossed between them, and the two sides began to bat it back and forth.

• The Yes Men impersonate the powerful with fake press releases and public appearances to create a “what if?” situation. For a brief moment they pranked the media into believing that DuPont was actually going to act justly by compensating the 100,000 victims of the Bhopal chemical spill. “Before the hoax is revealed, we think, ‘Am I dreaming? Could I possibly be living in such a world?”[ix] Such deception is not meant to last, but rather to make us wonder for a moment: Why don’t we live in such a world? And whenever “reality” is restored, it is never quite as absolute or secure as before. Maybe the evil we know does not need to be “the truth” after all.

• Reverend Billy of the Church of Stop Shopping employs an evangelistic preaching style to target the consumerism and greed laying waste to the earth. With choral singing, preaching, masks and dance, his community occupies bank lobbies to proclaim a hectic judgment upon the sins of the system, troubling the sleep of customers and bankers and disturbing the complacency of business as usual.

• The UK’s laboratory of insurrectionary imagination “merges art and life, creativity and resistance, proposition and opposition.”[x] Believing that collective action is enhanced by a shared sense of identity, they create temporary affinity groups which work together in the course of a protest. Masks and black clothing to create visual unity are one example. Another is “the rebel clown army,” using clowning to subvert any serious regard for the pretensions of the powerful. As was overheard on a police radio at a demonstration in 2003, “The clowns are organizing … the clowns are organizing … over and out.”[xi]

• The Choir Project was founded in Cairo by Salam Yousry, inspired by Finland’s Complaint Choir. Both professional and amateur singers collectively write and compose songs about daily struggles, political conflict, and human hope. Then they take their voices to the streets, sometimes walking backward as well as forward, penetrating public spaces with vital questions. Unlike spoken or written protest rhetoric, their message is delivered in a medium that charms and allures. The practice has spread to other cities such as Paris, Beirut, London, Berlin, Istanbul and Warsaw. Imagine American cities radiant with the voices of such prophetic singers moving in our midst, making their psalmic laments an urban soundtrack for our desperate time:

I have a question
If I don’t voice it if I suppress it
My head will explode
What’s going on?

Who’s setting us back?
Who’s starving us?
Who’s destroying our joy?
Who’s calling us traitors?
Who’s dividing us?
Who’s repressing us?
What’s going on?[xii]

Art activism is as old as the Bible, from the prophets’ performance art to Jesus’ dramatized subversion of worldly power when he made his “kingly” entry on a donkey. The Book of Revelation, in its radical critique of Empire and its vision of a redeemed and restored creation, is a vivid counternarrative to encourage the faithful in a time of persecution.

In dark times, we can, we must, still live as children of the light—the custodians of hope—enacting rituals and images, as well as daily practices of kindness, solidarity and justice, to express and anticipate the emergent world of divine favor and human flourishing. As for the powers, God laughs them to scorn, and God’s friends, thankfully, are in on the joke.

So let the Resistance begin, in as many forms as we can imagine. May it always be courageous, creative, revelatory, empowering, passionate, constant, artful—and, by all means, alluring.

 

Related posts

Donald Trump and the Rise of Authoritarianism

Top Ten Reasons to Stop Trump Now

“Rise Up” poster image by Brooke McGowen under Creative Commons License
http://occuprint.org/Posters/RiseUpSun

[i] “The Art of Activism,” in Truth Is Concrete: A Handbook for Artistic Strategies in Real Politics, ed. Steirischer Herbst & Florian Malzacher (Berlin: Sternberg Press, 2015), 57 This book, based on a 170 hour 24/7 teach-in, may be hard to find in the United States. I bought my copy this fall at one of my favorite bookshops, The Literary Guillotine in Santa Cruz, California. A more easily available book on the same subject may be Beautiful Trouble: A Toolbox for Revolution by Andrew Boyd and Dave Oswald Mitchell, to be published on St. Lucy’s Day, Dec. 13, 2016.

[ii] “Self-Empowering,” in Truth Is Concrete, 98

[iii] Episcopal Book of Common Prayer, 211

[iv] Truth Is Concrete, 151

[v] Mammonart, q. in Truth, 63-65

[vi] Truth, 123

[vii] Srda Popovic, Truth, 120

[viii] Artúr van Balen, Truth, 138-9

[ix] Andrew Boyd, “Reality Bending”, in Truth, 154

[x] Truth, 185

[xi] John Jordan, Truth, 246

[xii] The Choir Project, Truth, 142-3 You can see the choir at work in Budapest on YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1RKC7zSgdyc