Keeping the rock rolling: Art activism and the avant-garde

Much recent critical and philosophical thinking on the relationship between art, politics and society chronologically grounds itself on linear understandings of the transformations of art and history. The first two decades of this century witnessed a wave of socially engaged artistic practices confused with activist strategies of political revolt. This article is an examination of the relationship between recent forms of art activism and the discontiguities of the different revolutionary claims of the history of the avant-garde. Counterposing the ideas of ‘a pure world of art’ – of art conceived as an autonomous domain from society – and of the ‘self-suppression of art in life’, or art’s identification with society, the article distinguishes recent forms of art activism from both political uses of artistic devices and artists’ individual commitment to politics in order to question what kind of art and what kind of politics art activism actually is.