[custom_adv] Radicals in the country have created a permanent performance art display at the former US embassy. It depicts a make believe cemetery. What is the history of Performance Art The Angry Space, politics and activism? [custom_adv] Performance has always been interconnected with society more widely. Collaborative, participative and public, artists have fused comments on everyday life with political engagement, creating actions and performances that respond to and are fuelled by many of the activist movements throughout the twentieth century, as well as today. [custom_adv] The Beat writers and their work are a good example of this: specifically Allen Ginsberg’s Howl. Ginsberg was part of what came to be known as the Beat generation, (mainly) young men (including Jack Kerouac and William S. Burroughs) writing about their own lives, exploring and escaping the strictures of 1950s society through drink, drugs and sex. [custom_adv] Of course, politically motivated art and performance was not new in the 1950s. Before and between the first and second world wars in Europe, a number of art movements such as the Italian Futurists, had spread their political or anti-establishment ideals through various artforms, including performance. But after the Second World War, changing social mores, supported by mass media communication, and the rise of youth culture saw wide-spread protests against various parts of the political and social status quo. [custom_adv] The Civil Rights Movement in the US was gathering pace in the late 1950s and early 1960s. The use of non-violent protest methods and civil disobedience (based on the actions of Gandhi in India) to highlight and protest the racial segregation of public areas in the US, such as sit-ins or ‘freedom rides’ on segregated transport, set the model for protest and mass actions in public spaces. [custom_adv] French students were exposed to and took on anti-establishment Situationist ideas such as Guy Debord’s 1967 Society of the Spectacle, which argued (the Marxist idea) that consumer society had reduced everything from direct experiences to mere appearances, and that the avant-garde and mainstream life should be brought together.
