The Art of the Protest
One person’s ‘scandal’ is another’s bid for freedom
“What is worth more, art or life?” declared Phoebe Plummer, kneeling below a painting dripping with Heinz tomato soup. While her actions scandalised many a politician, journalist and Twitter commentator, her words also speak to how art can be used to object. To protest. A medium for saying, “enough is enough!”
Art and protest go hand in hand, and in today’s interconnected world, we can see how it can scandalise and, crucially, terrify oppressive regimes and apathetic governments. As I write this, the regime in Iran is being rocked by revolutionary fervour, and artists are popping up everywhere to aid the drive for change.
Meysam Azarzad is one, whose art is a clever combination of traditional Persian verse and today’s struggle for autonomy, flushed with quintessentially revolutionary colours — black, white and red. Meysam is one of many using her artistic talent and her desperation for change to defy the Orwellian censorship of the Ministry of Guidance (aka the infamous “morality police”). Artists across Iran, as well as those living abroad, have found all sorts of ways to scandalise the hard-line government in Tehran, ranging from concept art to a version of Rosie the Riveter and a Queen of Spades cutting her hair. One artist even filled the fountains of Tehran with red dye, naming it “Tehran sinking in blood”, roughly translated.
According to Pamela Karimi, a historian of art and architecture based in Massachusetts, Iranian protest art is steeped in tradition, from the revolution of 1979 to the demonstrations against Mahmoud Ahmadinejad. Iranian protest art has always found a way to break through the wall of suppression — deploying camouflage tactics or posing as orthodox works to circumvent detection — and, according to Professor Karimi, recent works will “undoubtedly set a new tone for Iranian art” going forward.
Much like Iran, Tunisia experienced its own artistic renaissance out of a wave of civil unrest that gripped the country in 2011, leading to the toppling of its long-time autocrat, Zine El Abidine Ben Ali. While social media received a lot of the credit for the success of the revolution, some commentators, like the author and Tunisophile Luce Lacquaniti, believe that it was the new-found durability of graffiti which indicated that change was imminent. “It seemed like the city filled with words overnight,” said Luce, who has noted that areas of suburban Tunis that saw spikes in protest graffiti in the early 2010s are now centres of a vast array of expressive street art — demonstrating the empowering influence democracy has. In contrast, at the height of the regime, such expressions would have scandalised the authorities, as well as private citizens, and been hastily scrubbed off.
Far away from the capital in the town of Erriadh in southern Tunisia, the effects of the ending of Ben Ali’s regime on art can still be seen. In 2014, the town’s plain white facades became awash with colourful murals and graffiti — a testament to the creativity being embraced by a nascent democracy.
Art is often used as an expression of protest, to scandalise an oppressive regime or a docile populace; whether it is a Van Gogh dripping in soup, a Monet splattered with mashed potato, or a fountain filled with blood-red water, the motivation is the same. Art is a liberalising medium, and the real scandal is any attempt to change that.
Words by: Edward Draper
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