Last month, a large-scale spoon sculpture was unceremoniously placed outside of Purdue Pharma’s Connecticut headquarters. Hand-delivered by gallerist Fernando Luis Alvarez, the metallic sculpture condemns the pharmaceutical company’s alleged involvement in the distribution of the widely-abused prescription painkiller Oxycontin, and its subsequent role in the US opioid epidemic. Tapping into what has become a painfully familiar narrative, sculptor Domenic Esposito was inspired to make the spoon following his brother’s battle with heroin addiction after experimentation with prescription opioids. The gargantuan sculpture takes the banal eating utensil and literally twists it out of proportion to resemble the bent and burnt spoons used for cooking heroin. Whilst the cynical amongst us might see the Purdue spoon debacle as a media stunt — it coincided with the opening of a related exhibition at Alvarez’s Connecticut gallery — it’s worth considering that this is more than an act of media provocation.
The sculpture, which was splashed across the internet and widely publicised in the press (not least because Alvarez was arrested for the act), prompts pertinent questions about the purpose of art — namely, has “art for art’s sake” had its day? No longer content to reside in a suffocating art world bubble, artists are venturing out into the “real world”, producing work that not only engages with, but actively protests against, the state of contemporary politics. This is certainly nothing new — actually, if anything, it’s old-hat. When we think of activist art, we look to the past: to Keith Haring’s politicised pop art, for example, or to the radical feminist art of the 1970s. When artists produce political works now, it’s all too easy to dismiss it as tired, reactionary, or just plain ugly.
What if 2018, however, was the year that we started to take protest art seriously again? With the rapid spread of right-wing politics and global tensions perpetually on the brink of boiling over, artists certainly have a lot to be up in arms about. As a result, they are responding to contemporary social ills with creative, conceptual works redeeming protest art’s reputation. Pushing the boundaries of what we consider art to be, protest art of recent years has collapsed boundaries between “high art” and popular culture, manifesting as politically-conscious Instagram accounts, t-shirts, public performances and installations, and even plain-and-simple demonstrations. Today’s politically-engaged artists are re-envisaging not only what art can do, but the forms it can take.
One such artist is Jonathan Horowitz. Riffing off the central role which social media played in Trump’s election campaign, he launched The Daily Trumpet in early 2017 — an Instagram platform showcasing a different piece of anti-Trump art every day. Although the account is still lagging behind Trump in terms of followers (@realdonaldtrump has 9.2 million followers whereas @dailytrumpet has, at the time of publication, a paltry 5,602) Horowitz is attempting to beat Trump at his own game; an impulse, I’m sure, which many of us can sympathise with. Whilst the platform’s politically-engaged art and no-frills captions might not be attracting followers in droves, Horowitz succeeds elsewhere. Unable to confront right-wing politics head-on, The Daily Trumpet serves as an ever-growing digital archive attesting to the sheer scale and diversity of art being made in opposition to the Trump Administration.
Away from the gallery space, The Daily Trumpet shuns the art-world enclave to directly engage the public via the most accessible platform possible. Of course, removing art from its art world context is a long established tactic of protest art. Jenny Holzer’s Truisms t-shirt series provides a shining example of this; the most famous being the t-shirt reading, “Abuse Of Power Comes As No Surprise”. Originally produced in 1980, the famous Truism was recently re-printed on t-shirts as part of a Virgil Abloh collab raising funds for reproductive health organisation, Planned Parenthood. Both Holzer and Horowitz are playing with how art — harnessed by mechanisms of mass consumption — can infiltrate the mainstream. Through the channels of Instagram and popular fashion, they reach a wider audience than within the confines of the museum or gallery. However, an essential element of their approach is that they subvert the commodification of creative work that these platforms enable. The curatorial approach of Horowitz’s hashtag-free haven isn’t bent towards gaining likes, nor is it plagued with sponsored content. Similarly, 100% of the proceeds from Holzer’s Planned Parenthood t-shirts go directly to the cause, meaning that her artwork is directly resisting conservative spending cuts rather than feeding a corporate agenda.
Whilst Holzer’s artistic protest recontextualises her most famous Truism for a new audience, Portuguese artist Leonor Antunes plays with the unknown. In 2016, the artist staged performance work An Open House at Amsterdam’s Hubertus House (which was designed in 1959 as a space for single mothers and their children) in defiance of the Trump Administration. Revealing nothing to the public beforehand, Antunes and eleven other women stood at the building’s windows and balconies. At time when women’s social visibility and agency is under threat from a self-professed “pussy grabber”, Antunes’ performance sought solace through a vision of female utopia. The element of surprise is essential: by suddenly throwing a spotlight on a space designed as a female refuge, the piece emphasises the ways in which safe-havens, such as this one, are vital in a climate of toxic masculinity.
Like the above artists, Ai Weiwei has not kept his distaste for the US government under Trump a secret. Whilst his work as an artist-activist began with Remembering (2009), which investigated the Chinese government’s role in student deaths during the Sichuan earthquake, recent times have seen him take to New York’s Central Park to voice his disagreement with US border control policies. His recent work, Good Fences Make Good Neighbours (2018) consists of fence-like structures installed in three high-profile New York locations. The placement of the structures in high-traffic areas, such as at Washington Square Arch, ensured that border control was an unavoidable topic. By disrupting the established image of these iconic NYC spots, Ai Weiwei created a rift in America’s self-image, one which drew attention to the inherent hypocrisy of a melting pot nation locking down its borders.
While these works clearly vary in form, they also vary in purpose: some serve as an educational source, others combat inequality through fundraising, while others force viewers to re-evaluate their opinions. What they all have in common, however, is the desire to reject the historical art space. Whilst this continues in the tradition of public-facing protest art, it also, perhaps, marks an increased awareness of art institutions’ complicity in social and political corruption.
Esposito’s spoon is not the first protest against Purdue Pharma. Earlier this year, cult photographer, Nan Goldin — a survivor of the opioid crisis — established the group P.A.I.N. (Prescription Addiction Intervention Now) to hold the makers of OxyContin accountable. Goldin’s group not only strives to put pressure on the company itself, but protests the art world’s apparent complicity with the pharmaceutical manufacturers, whose principal owners, the Sackler family, fund some of the world’s leading art institutions including, the Metropolitan Museum of Art, the Smithsonian, and the Serpentine Gallery. In spring, the group staged public protests at the Sackler Wing at the Met and the Smithsonian’s Arthur M. Sackler Gallery to call on the company to fund public treatment programmes to combat the crisis rather than — as Goldin stated — “continuing to wash their money in great institutions”.
Whilst statements from the Sackler family have recently cast doubt upon whether the family’s wealth can be attributed to OxyContin sales, Goldin is right to criticise art institutions’ tendency to turn a blind eye to social problems. Whilst we are all aware of the prejudices that keep museum collections overwhelmingly white and male, the bias doesn’t stop there. From the vast wealth of private donors to corporate sponsors, art institutions simply do not embody the countercultural, anti-establishment values which the best protest art possesses. In the age of the internet, the revolution might well be live-streamed, but it certainly won’t take place within gallery walls.