The scattered archives of art and protest ~ Malinda Words

There’s an exhibition titled ‘Art, protest and the archives’ hosted by the Beinecke Rare Books & Manuscript Library of Yale University in New Haven, Connecticut. It will continue until January 7, 2024. It raises an interesting question: What is the place of art and protest in the archives?

Art can be an expression of protest and there are countless examples where this idea has been put into practice. Protest, one could argue, is an art. What of archives, then, and, more pertinent, what of the archiving of protest-art or elements of protests that have acquired artistic value, posters and pamphlets for example?

The collection is impressive and begs the question, ‘are museums, libraries and academies of every kind,’ the final resting places of protests and indeed should they rest in such places at all?

The note on the exhibition acknowledges the threat contained in the Futurist Manifesto of 1909, to ‘destroy the museums, libraries, academies of every kind,’ and the following thesis on protest-art, if you will, issued by students occupying the École des Beaux-Arts, Paris, May 16, 1968:

‘The posters produced by the Atelier Populaire are weapons in the service of the struggle and an inseparable part of it. Their rightful place is in the centers of conflict, that is to say in the streets and on the walls of factories. To use them for decorative purposes, to display them in bourgeois places of culture or to consider them as objects of aesthetic interest is to impair both their function and their effect. This is why the Atelier Populaire has always refused to put them on sale.’

The Beinecke Rare Books & Manuscript Library is hardly a centre of conflict. Its walls are neither in the streets nor factories. Thus the exhibition can be understood as a collection that has some aesthetic interest. It is of historical significance too. Whether or not it ‘impairs both function and effect,’ however, depends on what those who view it make of it. While it can be argued that the moments of protest that the exhibits represent have passed, rebellions don't necessarily end when the last rebel surrenders, is captured or assassinated; stories don't end when chapters close.

I had not known of most of the struggles that these exhibits spoke of. That history was a blank page in my consciousness. I am following up. I am learning. I am in fact manufacturing 'function.' I am embodying 'effect.'

Posters, photographs, pamphlets — words, lines, shadow and form — they are seeds that get planted in the mind. Seeds, by themselves, will not grow. They need the sunlight of truths that resist varnishing, the water of rains called forth by enforced poverty, the nutrients from the soils of resolve and oxygen for breath and breathlessness.

Well, all of that is all over the world. It’s just that those who impoverish, rob, insult and humiliate don’t want John to know what Siridasa did and does and vice versa. Everyday, every minute and moment there is art and protest outside of libraries, museums and other ‘bourgeois places of culture.’ The mainstream press, essentially the art critics kept by the powerful if you will, ignore or use a paragraph in small print on an inside page full of ‘other stuff’ when it comes to reporting objections. If you are skeptical, consider the fact that thousands of Jews in the USA have been protesting almost every day about the barbarism of the Israeli state. They brought the Grand Central Station to a halt. Not reported!

And all the while the work of those who came before live in and out of museums and libraries. They step out of exhibits. They walk away with those who pour over the literature and art enclosed in glass. Indeed it is the facsimiles of the rebel heartbeat that lie within, temporarily and spatially displaced from struggles that are the enduring, vibrant and eminently alive.

Today’s protest art and the art of today’s protests would no doubt be archived one day in one form or another, at Yale or some other university or maybe a museum. Their functionality will not be fossilised though. Their effect will not congeal into an artifact that interests no one but a pedantic historian. The art of protests and protest art do not have final resting places. They don’t flee to the lands of Decay and Forget; they simply get cloned, float over barricades and overpower forbidden cities. They even leave their pulse in every street corner and their smile at the entrances to exhibition halls that some may believe are archives that arrest and contain.

So this is how it is, I feel. The physicality of art and protest can be corralled into archives, ill-willed archivists can be tricked or trick themselves into believing that such containment is possible and that the spirit and soul of would be thereby congealed. What I witnessed was delusion peering into and out of some glass cases, perturbed by a song of defiance that had somehow cut through the solid walls of the Beinecke Rare Books & Manuscript Library.

['The Morning Inspection' is the title of a column I wrote for the Daily News from 2009 to 2011, one article a day, Monday through Saturday. This is the 261th article in the new series that began in December 2022. Links to previous articles are given below]

07 November 2023

The scattered archives of art and protest

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