This afternoon, while I was walking to the subway from work, I ran into a group of union workers raising awareness that their pay was not commensurate to the amount of profit they bring in to the company, thus their labor was undervalued. They handed me this flyer:
I took one look and thought, “Tell AT&T/Cingular?.. How?” I stopped and asked the next flyer-wielder how I could make a difference, and pointed out that there was no contact information on the flyer. She explained that they’d been in a rush to print them, that they wanted to flyer the same day the iPhone was released.
To their credit, they’re drawing on a clear analogy. Whether I like the aesthetic is a matter of choice. Their first and foremost thought was that they needed to convince us to take action, and this is clear from the flyer. So urgent was their need, however, that they failed to tell us how to take action. Their website is plagued with similar problems.
I mention this to illustrate just one role that design can play in activism. Without considerable thought about design, we can very easily fail to meet our mission. It’s a rudimentary observation, but one that we can’t ignore if we mean to make a difference.
If you like this post, please see our spot on design activism, and our response to Alix Rule, titled “Designing the Revolution.“
Without mirrors, lightboxes, or other things that glow in the dark, Alfredo Jaar constructed one of his most minimal, yet emphatic projects. One million fake Finnish passports.
His artist’s statement explains further:
“This great collection symbolized the restrictive nationalism of Finland. Compared to other European nations, Finland has the lowest number of immigrants and refugees. Maintaining inhospitable, restrictive policies, Finland has guarded its status quo at a time when other countries are re-examining their moral and political positions on refugees and exiles. The one million documents were, of course, replicas of actual passports. With their dimensions slightly altered, they could not easily pass for the real document. It was an ironic reflection of the nation’s exclusive immigration policies.”
He realized this project in 1995.
Dan Colen has some work that is implicitly, and other work that is explicitly political. I know very little about him, except that you can view some of his work at his website, and that it’s hilarious, heartwarming, and absurd all at the same time. I’ve include a few examples below:
The title of Tom Meacham’s second solo exhibition of recent paintings and sculpture at Oliver Kamm/5BE Gallery is “the greater good.” It suggests both the altruistic motto of a liberal democrat and the self-convincing rhetoric of a vigilante. Meacham offers an uneasy equation of extremes through a body of work that employs grid motifs on canvas, wood sculptures of “specific object” lineage, consumer objects and mundane materials.
Pretty provocative work, I’m into it. Check out a couple of installation views, and more info on the exhibit.
Cliff Evans uses Guy Debord as a starting point. That’s always a good sign that you’re in for something amazing. He’s part based in Australia, part in New York. He uses images from Google searches and morphs them into a sort of photomontage. Like Debord, he’s examining the politics of media, only Evans is using video instead of the pen. Check out ‘Bare Life: Booth Girls and Stormtroopers-Accumulation,’ and ‘The Road to Mount Weather’ (2006). You’ll either love it or hate it entirely more than you ought to.
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