Editors' introduction: art, power, and social change.

• Date: 22 June 2006
• Author: David, Emmanuel A.,McCaughan, Edward J.
• Published date: 22 June 2006
• Author: David, Emmanuel A.

THE FOLLOWING ESSAYS EXPLORE MANY DIMENSIONS OF THE ROLE OF ART IN PROCESSES of social change. Some address the power of art as a voice of dissent, as a tool for advancing social justice and democracy, as the core of a revolutionary strategy, and as a source of memory and future ways of knowing. Other essays warn about the art of power, such as government and art world censorship, the co-optive ability of capitalism, and the blinding force of Western rationalization.

We begin with a fascinating exchange between Mikkel Rasmussen and Simeon Hunter about the legacy of the Situationists, a mid-20th century art movement committed to total revolution. According to Rasmussen, "the Situationist International tried to create a territory where art and politics were merged and transformed from specialized activities into a kind of holistic mega-text in which historical rationality expressed itself." The Situationists were extremely ambitious, impossibly ambitious in Rasmussen's view. "Unable to free themselves from history," he argues, the movement ultimately succumbed to capitalism's "counter-revolution." Hunter regards Rasmussen's assessment as overly pessimistic, arguing that "the legacy of this movement is still active, still providing a highly useable model for a transformative analysis of and through the visual world from which it is derived." The power of the Situationists, suggests Hunter, must be understood "at the level of the semantic instead of the programmatic." He asserts that the contributions of the Situationists and the art practices they inspired have been overlooked by those who "deny the poetic voice that may connote [social] change through form."

Yet, ironically, the focus on "form alone," according to Deniz Tekiner, permitted formalist art criticism--which dominated the U.S. art world from the 1940s through the late 1960s--to "obscure the relationships of art to social contexts and the socially critical implications of art." Tekiner's essay explains how the formalist art criticism associated with Clement Greenberg" functioned symbiotically with art marketers" to "uphold conservative agendas" and to mask the progressive content intended by "many modern artists [who] construed their transcendental subjects as signifiers of freedom, and their art works as expressions of liberated imagination" during the stultifying conformism of postwar North America. Tekiner acknowledges that significant transformation of the art world since the...