Protest: The Aesthetics of Resistance

Resistance: aesthetic tactics from the suffragettes to 1968 to our tumultuous present "Make Love Not War," "Soyez réalistes, demandez l'impossible," "Keine Macht für Niemanden," "We are the 99%": the history of the last 50 years has been accompanied by a constant flow of statements, practices and declarations of dissatisfaction with regard to the prevailing order. These slogans mark moments when dissent has been able to reach from the margins of society into its very center—beginning as something mostly unorganized and unruly in real or virtual space, sometimes violent, rarely controllable and suddenly erupting into the mainstream. Masterfully and creatively drawing on contemporary signs and symbols, subverting and transforming them to engender new aesthetics and meanings, the legendary moments of 20th-century protest opened up spaces that eluded control. Irony, subversion and provocation pricked small but palpable pinholes in the controlling systems of rule. Protest takes a wide-rangi