In Acts of Resistance (Norton, Nov.), theater producer Amber Massie-Blomfield argues that art is a powerful political force.
How did you begin thinking about political art?
In 2018, I was running an experimental studio theater in London. We did a festival about air pollution and environmental issues, and I learned that in the wake of Brexit and the election of Donald Trump, things just seemed to be going from bad to worse. I started to interrogate whether this fringe political art-making that I was involved in really mattered. I wanted to find examples of artists who used their art as a means of political resistance, as a frame for thinking about what I’m doing with my own life. I also started to think that there’s something about the experience of the protest march that has a lot in common with the theatrical experience; they both involve experiencing something in the moment together.
What are some examples of art that brought about political change?
There’s Edward Abbey and his novel The Monkey Wrench Gang, which was a big influence on the founding of the Earth First movement. A huge national road-building project in the U.S. was ended by protests inspired by that book. There’s also the 1969 Bolivian film Blood of the Condor, a drama which featured as a plot point the forced sterilization of Indigenous women by the U.S. Peace Corps. It resulted in the Peace Corps getting kicked out of the country.
What about the idea of art for art’s sake?
I think that actually there are contexts in which the practice of art becomes political even when it doesn’t have an explicit political intent. The origin of the phrase “art for art’s sake” is from within the Victorian-era Aesthetic Movement, which offered a home for people who were queer, who were living differently, who wanted to find different forms of personal expression; so it was in some ways political. I also write about the Plastic People of the Universe, a Czech prog rock band who grew their hair long and wore extravagant costumes. They just wanted to create a space to express themselves and play the kind of music that they love; but that expression of freedom wound up inspiring the 1989 Velvet Revolution in Czechoslovakia.
And what about Theodor Adorno’s saying that it’s barbaric to speak poetry after a catastrophe?
As Adorno added, an injured soul has as much right as any to scream. There’s an impulse towards silence in art, and I think that’s a valid form of creative expression and a meaningful one. But there’s this tendency I think to treat what’s happening in Gaza, for example, as unspeakable. Like there aren’t words for it. But there is a greater risk in silence than in speaking.
