Catalogue essay: See You At The Barricades
‘Well then, see you at the barricades’.
My grandfather said this to me in the parking lot of his local shopping mall, conjuring scenes of the French Revolution. I’m not sure where he came across the phrase, but he has used it all my life. For him the saying was a way not only to identify himself as an ‘old lefty’, but also to invite amity through shared resistance.
I have borrowed his phrase as the title of this exhibition, which studies the complex entanglements of art and protest after the ‘year of the barricades’, 1968. Recently many contemporary artists and curators have used the materials common to protest, from banners and sandwich boards to demonstration re-enactments, repositioning protest within the white walls of contemporary art spaces and major museums. This raises several questions. Where do the boundaries between protest and art lie? Is there a difference between protest art and art that uses protest’s symbols? If so, do the latter simply manifest nostalgia, neutralising the impact of such symbols by aestheticising them and relegating them to history? Or are they more complex attempts to make sense of the relationship between past and present?
See you at the barricades is a speculative exhibition that explores some of these ideas through a selection of works in the collection of the Art Gallery of New South Wales. The exhibition ranges from historical protest works through to contemporary reflections of dissent. There are four sections, each with a thematic title: Declarations (political posters and slogans); Screenings (television, archives and documentary); Left-wing melancholy and finally a single work titled Revolutionary love: I am your worst fear, I am your best fantasy. The first section opens with protest works such as the technicolour posters that flowered in Australia in the late 1970s and ’80s. These images provide historical context for the subsequent section, which turns to the role of screen-based media in protest: Peter Kennedy and John Hughes’s remixed footage of Prime Minister Gough Whitlam’s dismissal and Billy Maynard’s reprinted images of protestors both show the ubiquity of the dissident figure on screen. Following this are contemporary works that explore our culture’s romantic and often nostalgic depictions of protest movements. These include Marco Fusinato’s gutsy yet silent images of rioters and Raquel Ormella’s banners declaring, ‘I’m worried I’m not political enough’. The exhibition concludes with Sharon Hayes’s multi-screen installation overflowing with balloons and raucous chants, which brings together many of these themes. Together these works traverse the emotional terrain of protest, revealing the complexity of art’s relationship to political change.
* * *
In May 1968, Paris erupted in demonstrations. Photos from the time show thousands of students and workers in the streets, waving flags and clambering over upturned cars. Elsewhere, the Vietnam War raged, Russian troops invaded Czechoslovakia to crush the Prague Spring uprising, and Martin Luther King was assassinated. At the Mexico City Olympic Games, two African-American athletes won medals and famously held their clenched fists aloft in salute to the Black Panthers.
Such images are burned into collective memory. They have become cherished symbols that represent a build-up and release of baby boomer dissent. Essayist Isaac Balbus captures the feeling of this generation: ‘For many of us who cut our political teeth on the civil rights, antiwar and student movements, the sixties live on as a longing for a golden age that has been lost to a permanently pallid present.’[1]
Of course no one can top such a heroic, if fictionalised, past. As political theorist Jean-Philippe Mathy suggests, ‘Before, the story goes, people believed in revolution and national identity; after, amid the crisis of the future, the era of emptiness opens up’.[2] [my emphasis] Those of us born after the 1960s, too late to be part of this so-called ‘golden age’ of counterculture, grew up in this ‘crisis’.
The world is no longer simple. The year 1968 remains a talisman of transnational resistance, after which the idea of revolution becomes gradually more complex and less viable. With the fall of the Berlin Wall and the dissolution of the Soviet Union in 1989, the totalitarian nature of many communist governments, which had long been suspected, became truly undeniable and their rehabilitation impossible. What we now call postmodernity – with all its attendant contradictions, shades of grey and apparent nihilism – set in.
For my grandfather, who found his political community in the labour movement, the ‘golden age’ was earlier, in Australia’s early history of revolt – the red ribbon rebellion in Bendigo in 1853, the Eureka Stockade of 1854, even the ill-fated ‘New Australia’ socialist colony set up in Paraguay in 1893. His ideal past was different from that of today’s ‘left’. Though he taught me values of social justice, his were far more masculine (predominantly white and working class) than those of my own political communities. Yet his heartfelt nostalgia for an apparently more radical time that antedates the 1960s shows that each generation has its irretrievable golden age. My parents, who came of age later, in turn yearned for the 1960s.
Our tendency to lionise past rebellions was articulated long before the 1960s. In his Theses on the philosophy of history (1947), Walter Benjamin coined the term ‘left-wing melancholy’, which describes an individual who prefers to lament the passing of a struggle rather than transform the present. Benjamin’s phrase captures the mood of many of the works in the third section of this show – an almost irrational attachment to revolutionary idealism and the camaraderie that comes with it.
Arguably, artists who draw upon the imagery of protest manifest left-wing melancholy in its most material sense: constructing banners and waving flags, putting slogans in the museum and staging marches that are documented as artworks. Perhaps this is what Alana Jelinek meant by ‘clichés of resistance’ in her book This is not art (2013).[3] Arguing that political art and activism are not the same, she criticises the ‘the endless re-staging of once effective and once interesting art events and the reproduction of tropes, now worn threadbare’.[4] Jelinek’s attack on the habitual imagery of activist art echoes Benjamin’s concept. Her concern rests on the old binary between art that engages with the world in order to change it and art that seeks to retain the autonomy and critical distance traditionally afforded to artists. Here this means the subtle but important difference between protest art and art about protest.
Yet the boundaries between these positions continue to erode. Protest has been the subject of many recent exhibitions. These include Direct democracy (2013) at Monash University Museum of Art, Melbourne; Hereby make protest (2014) at Carriageworks, Sydney; and Protest! (2014) at the University of Melbourne Archives. Internationally, the Victoria and Albert Museum’s Disobedient objects (2014) made the roles of creativity in contemporary protest plain (this exhibition will be staged at MAAS in October 2015 as part of their ‘Season of disobedience’.)
And just as many artists have deployed their skills in aid of protest movements, images of protest have become material for artists. While the first section of See you at the barricades features posters that try to persuade us with colour and humour (artists using their skills to protest), other sections show the work of artists who reflect upon the material aesthetic that has come to define protest movements. Many of these works comment on the circulation of political imagery, rather than being a form of activism themselves.
On the surface, See you at the barricades is a ‘protest show’. But it is also about nostalgia for protest. Though many artists are suspicious of nostalgia, I don’t believe that we can simply dismiss its power. The yearning for another time is a feeling familiar to many. John Stezaker defends nostalgia as being, ‘… not a comfortable form of reverie but the opposite: it is a way of living with loss. It is not about an imaginary retrieval of the past but about the impossibility of return: a condition of exile’.[5] We may be exiled from the past but we are also defined by our relationship to it.
Yes, nostalgia can lock us into outmoded patterns of behaviour. But this emotional attachment to time is part of the human condition, a way to process its irrecoverable nature. We also define our present by how we deal with our past. As Sharon Hayes says in the culminating work of this show, ‘I know that you’ll get mad at me for looking to the past but I can’t understand the present, or believe in the future, if I can’t look back at where we’ve been’.
Declarations
In May 1968, amid the fray in Paris, a group of radical art students from the École des Beaux-Arts took over the printing studios and produced a series of posters that they pasted up all over the city. While the political poster has a long and rich history, arguably the graphics in France at this time served as an antecedent for political poster collectives around the world in the late 1970s and ’80s.
This first section of the exhibition, titled ‘Declarations’, offers historical context. The works do not consider protests past but engage with the political issues of their time, from youth unemployment to the poor representation of women in art galleries to Aboriginal land rights (many of them remain issues in our time). Bound together by their declamatory style, these posters represent a directly political form of art.
Plastered across two walls in a dense grid of statistics and bright colours, the posters on display are by turns funny, angry and earnest. The cacophony of voices, slogans and statistics vying for attention plays out the confusion of contemporary political life.
Unlike the French posters of 1968, which were strikingly simple, later Australian political posters sought to persuade a less united audience using humour and comic strip narratives. Printed in the 1970s and ’80s either in cheap black and white or lurid colour, they were designed to shout at viewers on busy streets. They were often souvenired. I remember a poster that graced the door of a share house toilet during my childhood; it declared, ‘For the man who said life wasn’t meant to be easy, make life impossible’.
One of the most well-known Australian poster collectives was Redback Graphix, an organisation that made posters for political causes as well as benefits, film nights and conservation services, so long as they were broadly sympathetic to the group’s political ideals. One image in particular has always captured my attention: a poster produced under the rubric of Redback by Alison Alder. A woman holds a sign high over her head that reads, ‘When they close a pit they kill a community’. It urges viewers to ‘support the KCC women’s auxiliary’ because ‘community action will save our jobs’. With her weathered face and yellow apron-style dress she is an idealised version of the working class mother: practical, politically active, salt of the earth.
Around the same time, many poster collectives were actively campaigning for environmental causes (for example, Red letter press’s Save the Franklin, Damn the Government). These issues were often at odds with each other. The left-wing movements of my grandfather’s time valued solidarity. Yet in this section we can see that the protest landscape is more complex at closer view. The many causes represented here don’t always align.
Many poster collectives at this time spoke out for Aboriginal land rights. The women’s domestic needlework group, for example, produced a poster titled ‘Land rights not mining’ (making the aforementioned tension between mining workers and other social justice issues plain). ‘Land rights dance’ by Chips Mackinolty recalls several paintings of the French Revolution with its image of a group hoisting an Aboriginal flag into the blue sky. Another poster by Marie McCahon, who was in both Redback and Women’s domestic needlework group, pictures an Aboriginal woman and says, ‘Pay the rent. You’re on Aboriginal land’. Opposite this poster is a large painting by Richard Bell which recalls American abstract expressionism with Pollock-like paint splatters and a Jasper Johns target yet it delivers the same demand: ‘Pay the rent’.
These two works make the same political message but they speak from different perspectives and times. McMahon is an artist of European ancestry who has worked extensively with Aboriginal communities. She sees Aboriginal land rights as an issue for all Australians.[10] Bell is an Aboriginal man whose work sharply critiques Australia's treatment of Aboriginal people and cultures. The time between these two works - a gap of some 28 years - proves the continuing relevance of this message. Yet side-by-side these two works bring out the vexed question of solidarity: who has the right to speak for whom, and equally, do any of us have the right to remain silent about such important issues?
Redback also made posters that addressed political situations in countries like Chile, South Africa and Vietnam. One work, a calendar, commemorates a victory for communist Vietnam on each page. The image for January, February and March represents the fall of the French colonial government in 1954 by showing peasants tearing town a tattered French flag in front of a tangle of barbed wired. Two communist Vietnamese propaganda posters sit alongside this calendar. These images show similarly heroic figures with arms raised, holding guns in one hand and barbed wire in their clenched fist. The pairing conflates two different worlds, yet foregrounds the symbols and visual style common to an international communist (or communist sympathiser) movement.
* * *
Many of these posters emerged out of male dominated narratives of the political ‘left’. Yet feminism often drives in the works in this exhibition and is the particular focus of two collectives: The Women’s Domestic Needlework Group and Guerrilla Girls. The former was an Australian group founded in 1976. Their posters are large and elaborately illustrated, celebrating the aesthetic of lace whilst highlighting the labour conditions of women who worked in textile industries in the 19th and 20th centuries. They look to the historical roots of feminism, linking it to broader socialist and class agendas by foregrounding the communal possibilities of women’s work.
We often assume the art world to be socially progressive. Yet the Guerrilla Girls, a New York-based collective, targets its frequent sexism and discrimination. Founded in 1984 in response to an exhibition at the Museum of Modern Art, their blunt typography, witty catchphrases and occasionally lurid colours are legendary. Posing questions such as ‘Do women have to be naked to get into the Met Museum?’, their posters publish statistics that prove widespread inequality. This suite provides the Art Gallery of New South Wales the opportunity to deliberate on its own history as an exhibiting institution during this period. The Guerrilla Girls might have something to say about the fact only 17% of our collection is by women artists.
Screenings
The works in ‘Screenings’, the second section of See you at the barricades, capture the transformation of protest through the screen into something simple and alluring. One step removed from direct activism, these works explore what it means to view world events through a medium that gives us no direct way to change those events. Unless you can get on television, it is a one way medium. In this way, they question our agency when looking at distant suffering or social injustice.[6]
While it is a commonplace to ask whether the mass exposure of suffering can do any good, the screen has arguably played a dramatic role in shaping the nature of protest. As philosopher Susan Buck-Morss wrote in her book Dreamworld and catastrophe (2000), during the fall of the Soviet Union ‘Satellite TV played an unprecedented role as witness, attesting to the reality of change, a situation that encouraged the staging of “revolutionary” events, as if massive social transformation were a matter of gaining access to airtime’.[7] Of course protests only function when they capture attention. This has traditionally been achieved through the press, and is today complicated by the increasing role of mobile devices and the internet.
Peter Kennedy and John Hughes’s video November 11 1979 shows footage of protests and speeches surrounding the dismissal of Australian Prime Minister Gough Whitlam in 1975. The work was made well after the dismissal took place and thus it invites viewers to ponder the nature of the incident. Crowds cross the screen chanting ‘We want Gough’, as the colours flicker from glowing pink to acid green. Projected at right angles onto the wall, this reshaped 1970s news footage acts as an evocative, almost hallucinogenic, lens onto Australia’s biggest constitutional crisis.
In their related video work November 11 – work in progress 1981 the story becomes more complex. News footage overlaps and interrupts itself., gradually drifting into information overload. Amid the chaos, Kennedy inserts a staged conversation between two young would-be revolutionaries. Following the events of the world from their living room, they argue about Soviet Russia, their sunburnt faces superimposed over televisual footage of riots and tanks in Czechoslovakia. The woman asks: ‘What could be more evidence of Soviet imperialism than this?’ Her companion defends the movement of Russian troops by citing instability in the Middle East, the Vietnam War and CIA provocation in Czechoslovakia. ‘Socialism was under threat … In order to survive against America [the Soviet Union] has to do certain unpleasant things.’ We have all heard such euphemistic lines and it brings me back to my grandfather, who guarded against this sentiment by repeatedly stating that ‘the ends must never justify the means’.
Kennedy and Hughes’s work is undeniably political. Yet other artists here are drawn less to a political message and more to the alluring aesthetics that the screen offers. Richard Hamilton’s screenprint Kent State 1970, for instance, shows a bloodied body photographed during a BBC television broadcast about the shooting of student protestors on a university campus in May 1970. Hamilton said, ‘It had been on my mind that there might be a subject staring me in the face from the TV screen’. [8] Might the image equally have been an ad for Coca Cola or a still from Happy Days? Hamilton has commented that while he was reluctant to aestheticise an image of this tragedy, he eventually decided that a large scale print edition might act as an indictment (perhaps in the same way that a television broadcast might).
In 2014 the young Australian photographer Billy Maynard undertook a similar project on a far larger scale. Over 12#000 hand-printed cyanotypes rests in a random scatter on a long table. They portray people running, throwing stones and bottles, holding flags and sometimes guns, always with their faces covered by caps, balaclava’s or hoodies – ‘the tracksuit and sneakers – the uniform of the oppressed and the migrant.’[9] The icon of the dissident, who might also be seen as a terrorist, multiplies into the tens of thousands.
Maynard’s images are rephotographed from archives, newspapers, TV and computer screens. While Richard Hamilton sat with his camera in front of the TV, Maynard searched the wealth of videos and images that are now available on demand – broadcast, self-cast and viral. In rephotographing these figures Maynard takes each image out of context. In this show we can leaf through the pictures – a surprisingly tactile experience in a museum – but we cannot tell who or what they really depict. Maynard does not try to make sense of them. Instead he lets them rise to the surface and fall away like a collective unconscious of televisual memory.
Maynard’s work, then, marks the next step in the narrative of this exhibition. Whilst the posters and related material in the first section feature slogans and clear messages (easily digested if not easily acted upon), this archive falls in love with the compelling aesthetic of protest itself.
Left-wing melancholy
Two hand-embroidered banners lean against the wall. One of them reads, ‘I’m worried I’m not political enough’, the other ‘I’m worried this will become a slogan’. These works by Raquel Ormella are wry, with a note of self-conscious anxiety. They are aware of the problems of political art while embracing and repurposing its style.
The works presented in this section appropriate the materials associated with activism such as flags and banners, along with iconic historical and contemporary images of dissent. There are two concurrent themes here: the nostalgic lens through which protest is often viewed, and popular culture’s romanticisation of contemporary dissent.
Drawn from a newspaper photograph, Marco Fusinato’s Double infinitive 5 (2009) represents one such troublingly romanticised image of protest. A figure stands in the street with his arm pulled back, taking aim at someone off camera. Reflecting on the relationship between the press and counterculture, Fusinato says ‘This series is about media construct. What we don’t see in these images is not just the row of police, but the even larger row of photographers [waiting] for you to throw that rock.’[i] Indeed if we were to see them the image would be completely different, not a seductive ‘hero image’ but a bizarre reflection on the conditions of contemporary televised protest where rioters are outnumbered by the press who are all eager for the ‘money shot’.
Fusinato elevates this grainy newspaper image to the heroic scale of a history painting – a genre that tends toward the universal. In much the same way, Fusinato doesn’t provide any contextual information to ground these images of dissent, since his point is that they are ubiquitous. The photographs that this series are from different places and times, yet ‘all of the protagonists look the same: jeans, hoodie and their face covered. International style.’[ii]
I find myself wondering whether this image perhaps amplifies the media construct that the artist sets out to critique. In the end these works engage in a tense pas deux between critique and celebration.
Next to Double infinitive 5 stands Thomas Hirschhorn’s The subjector 2011. This female plastic shop mannequin has been pierced with screws and nails as though shot through with a thousand bullets. Prickling like a threatened animal, The subjector appears simultaneously dangerous and vulnerable, a martyr and a weapon, armoured and yet penetrated by metal objects. Together with Double infinitive 5, this sculpture revels in the violent and seductive nature of revolutionary imagery.
Referring to himself as an artist, worker and soldier, Hirschhorn is self-consciously militant. His work often consists of room-sized installations full of homemade protest materials, images of horrific violence collaged from current conflicts and projects that aim to reach out to local communities. His artist’s statements read as manifestos: ‘Art reaches beyond solutions, art can confront problems, art is the problem and art can give form to the problem’.[10]
Japanese photographer Yasumasa Morimura’s works, on the other hand, give form to the difficulty of fully re-entering the past. He poses as the figures in famous images, here both related to the history of protest in the 20th century. A requiem: spinning a thread between the light and the earth/1946, India 2010 restages Margaret Bourke-White’s 1946 portrait of Gandhi for Life magazine. Morimura’s photograph appears almost indistinguishable from the original, but the artist inserts a subtle twist by replacing the magazines that ‘Gandhi’ studies with publications that date from long after the photograph was first taken. He looks down at images including the original portrait of Gandhi and a photograph from 1968 titled ‘Saigon execution’ – one of the pictures widely thought to have turned the public against the war in Vietnam.
In the adjacent piece, Slaughter cabinet II 1991, Morimura restages that same execution photograph. Shown on a television set in a wooden cabinet, this work was made in response to the Gulf War in the early 1990s. It was produced not only much later than the original, but in Osaka near where the artist lived at the time, rather than in Saigon.[11] Casting both backwards and forwards in time, the two images weave these histories into a single neat sequence.
Performance theorist Rebecca Schneider argues that, ‘paradoxically, perhaps it is the errors, the cracks in the effort, the almost but not quite, that give us some access to sincerity, to fidelity, to a kind of touch across time…’[12] By including images from the future Vietnam War in the pages of Gandhi’s magazine, Morimura attempts to inhabit the past. Schneider calls this kind of re-enactment ‘critical homage’.[13]
In another form of homage, Australian artist Mathew Jones’s work New York Daily News on the day before the Stonewall Riot 1996 revisits 28 June 1969. This was the day after the death of Judy Garland, an icon of the queer community. Mourners gathered in bars across Manhattan. Later that night, New York police raided the Stonewall Inn, a popular gay hangout in Greenwich Village, triggering a riot which was widely credited as a turning point in the development of the gay liberation movement in America.
Jones’s work consists of the thick tabloid newspaper hand drawn from microfilm. It takes several forms: the original drawings are pinned to the wall – sheets of paper with tidy but not photorealistic pictures of each newspaper spread. Below rest a bundle of newspapers that were printed from the drawing and originally handed out in the streets of New York. The painstaking labour that has gone into this piece invests what might otherwise be seen as a casual, transitory object – a daily newspaper – with significance. It can be read as a meditation on the ways in which Stonewall changed gay culture and it would be easy to frame it as homage to those who took part in the riots.
However, the artist made the work with a different intention. Jones feels that the Stonewall Riot aligned gay culture with mainstream politics. He holds that this uprising lost its subversive edge by mimicking heterosexual social structures. Through New York Daily News on the day before the Stonewall Riot, he yearns for a time when queer politics was not trying to get into the mainstream.[14] Jones says that he sees this piece as a ‘time capsule of the last day before the gay-lib revolution’ – a moment he had missed ‘by a hair’s breadth’.[15]
This sense of just having missed out underpins many contemporary protest works. In her recent reprisal of Walter Benjamin’s concept of left-wing melancholy, political scientist Wendy Brown warned against the backward looking, conservative nature of this melancholy, which she sees as alive in much contemporary political debate. She describes Benjamin’s target as ‘attached more to a particular political analysis or ideal – even to the failure of that ideal – than to seizing possibilities for radical change in the present’.[16]
But is this longing for the past really conservative in the way that Brown posits? The suggestion that nostalgia is inherently so implies that progressive politics is – or should be – a consistent march forward without setbacks or swings of the political pendulum. Such a vision assumes that the present always improves on the past – that we must jettison the movements that didn’t make it, forget about old ideas (even good ones) and march relentlessly forward.
Jones and Morimura, among many other artists included in this exhibition, show that looking back might be positive; it can be an attempt to extract something valuable from the past. Theirs is an active remaking, inhabiting the past and identifying a lineage for themselves. Not everything that they remember or historicise is entirely factual –indeed many of their pasts are embellished or romanticised accounts of much more complex events. However, their work knowingly contrasts the dry documentary facts of history with deeper emotional truths.
Revolutionary love
In 2008, during the national conventions held by both the Republican and Democratic parties in America, a crowd of queer activists gathered to read aloud from a fictional love letter. Dressed in sparkling cowboy hats, hotpants or a t-shirt that reads ‘lesbian avengers’, they read this message to a former lover, someone seemingly bound up in American political life. At one moment during their performance protest, they encounter a group of anti-gay protesters with their own signs – ‘homo sex is sin’ – a moment that shows that the work of protest is never confined to any one political persuasion.
These actions were then transformed into a video installation accompanied by many voices shouting together through PA speakers. Colourful balloons bob against the ceiling, gradually drifting down to the floor like the remains of a wild party. Titled Revolutionary love: I am your worst fear, I am your best fantasy 2008 this work by New York-based artist Sharon Hayes fills an entire room.
Hayes’s work is underpinned by a constant engagement with the history of protest. Many of her works harvest speeches, texts and images from historical protests, and this work takes its title from an historical photograph of a girl holding a handmade sign in a 1970s street. The letter that is at the core of this work echoes famous and lesser-known speeches from many different moments in history, here revisited and adapted for the expansive present. ‘The whole project of archiving, of documenting that “we have a past” is, in actuality, a desire for a future’, she has said.[17]
Revolutionary love casts a festive light back across the works in this exhibition.
Against the sometimes solemn pieces in the ‘Screenings’ and ‘Left-wing melancholy’ sections, this installation is loud and colourful. Its celebratory balloons are printed with the word GAY, and in this context make full use of the double entendre of the word itself, which means both homosexual and ‘having or showing a merry mood’ as in ‘we’ll have a gay old time’.
In her essay on the ‘festive principle’ feminist film theorist Meaghan Morris writes of ‘the pragmatic, survival-oriented, and world-changing energy of being “festive”’.[18] She contemplates the casual photographs of her own past – images of women and men who treated protests like parties. Their joy is political in and of itself: they celebrate love in all its forms and claim desire and personal and erotic fulfilment as rights.
The empowering nature of participatory experiences complement, and even account for, the romantic and nostalgic images seen in the earlier sections of this exhibition. In one way or another, many of these works are bound up with the communal aspects of protest. Indeed the excitement of being with other people and the performance of protest is part of its persuasive apparatus.
It’s not what my grandfather would have imagined, but ‘see you at the barricades’ might be said by one of Sharon Hayes’s performer-protestors while putting on their lashes and deliberately smeared lipstick, getting ready for the action. The phrase encompasses both struggle and friendship. It can travel across political affiliations and make room for different agendas, with all the emotional and political complexities this entails.
Much of this exhibition is about the emotions that drive protest, whether anger and humour or anxiety and melancholy. With its emotionally fraught yet articulate love letter, Revolutionary love encompasses all these feelings. It’s a street party at the barricades.
[1] Isaac D Balbus, ‘Mourning the movement’ in Mourning and modernity, Other press, New York, 2005, p 80.
[2] Jean-Philippe Mathy, Melancholy politics: Loss, mourning, and memory in late modern France, Pennsylvania State University Press, Pennsylvania, 2011, p 25.
[3] Alana Jelinek, This is not art: activism and other 'not-art', IB Taurus and Co, London, 2013
[4] Jelinek 2013, p 9.
[5] John Stezaker quoted in Blanche Craig, Collage: assembling contemporary art, Black Dog Publishing, London, 2008, p 27.
[6] For a well-known discussion of this subject see Susan Sontag, On Photography (1977) and her later book Regarding the pain of others (2003).
[7] Susan Buck-Morss, Dreamworld and catastrophe: the passing of mass utopia in East and West, MIT Press, Cambridge, Massachusetts, p 228.
[8] Richard Hamilton, Collected words, 1953–1982, Thames & Hudson, London, 1982, p 94.
[9] Correspondence with Billy Maynard, 19 March 2015
[10] Thomas Hirschhorn, ‘Crystal of resistance: artist’s statement’ 2011, Maska, vol 28, no 151–52, Winter 2012, p 73.
[11] This strategy of displacement has often been used by artists and activists to remind people that something just as terrible could happen to them, in their own neighbourhood. This is also the point of Martha Rosler’s photomontages Bringing the war home 1967–72, see pp.
[12] Rebecca Schneider, Performing remains: art and war in times of theatrical reenactment, Routledge, New York, 2011, p 112.
[13] Schneider 2011, p 112.
[14] Correspondence with author, 4 Feb 2015.
[15] Matthew Jones quoted in Vince Aleti, ‘Art flash news’, Village Voice, 27 Feb 1997, p 81.
[16] Wendy Brown, ‘Resisting left melancholy’, Boundary 2, vol 3, no 26, Fall 1999, p 19.
[17] Julia Bryan-Wilson, ‘We have a future: an interview with Sharon Hayes’, Grey Room 37, Cambridge, Fall, 2009, p 92.
[18] Meaghan Morris, ‘Sustaining the festive principle: between realism and pleasure in institution-building’, Lola journal, issue 2: Devils, 2011–12, np.
Published in association with the exhibition See You At The Barricades at the Art Gallery of New South Wales, Sydney, Australia 2015. Download the catalogue as a pdf here.