Here at The Art Assignment, we're
big fans of not breaking the law as we point it
out several times when signing off.
Please don't break the law.
And please don't break the law.
Don't break the law.
SARAH URIST GREEN (VOICEOVER): After the Meet in the Middle
and Stakeout episodes, many of you
expressed concern about trespassing or violating
privacy.
So we asked you to try to execute the assignments
without breaking the law because, you know,
we don't want anyone get hurt or arrested.
And most of all, we don't want anyone to sue us.
But in fact, art history has seen many occasions
where good art involved breaking the law.
As commenter ljmasternoob4 asked, what about civil
disobedience?
Breaking the law can be socially and artistically constructive.
So today I'm going to share with you a few stories of artists
who did break the law.
OK, let's begin with modernism, by which I don't mean up
to date or clean line furniture, but the historical period
from about 1850, industrialism, et cetera, to about 1960.
During that time, art changed a great deal along
with the world.
Everything from war to mass production
to Freudian psychology shaped art making.
And we sell more abstract art work
and the use of new technologies like photography.
Modern artists were those whose ideas reflected the realities
of a changing world.
And sometimes it went beyond reflecting that world
and can be seen as actively pushing society
in a new direction.
And sometimes that means breaking the law.
OK, so before avant-garde was used
to describe like experimental music and fancy coffee,
it was a military term describing the first soldier
out in battle who valiantly put themselves out there
and risked death.
When it started being used to describe artists,
it was in the early 1820s and it referred
to someone whose work served the needs of everyday people
rather than the rich and powerful.
And then avant-garde started to be
used to describe people who weren't breaking the law
but were breaking the rules of art.
You know, using abstraction, putting a urinal
in an exhibition, and so forth.
Well, capital m modernism did end, and what is helpfully
called postmodernism began.
Artists continued to push the boundaries
of acceptable behavior and they still do.
You can think of artists like Chris Burden whose
most famous work, Shoot, was a performance in which he
stood in a gallery and had his friend shoot him
in the arm with a 22 rifle.
This was, needless to say, not legal, but the ethics of it
are complicated and worth thinking about.
Burden did this in 1971 during the height
of the Vietnam War, the first so-called living room
war when extreme violence was broadcast
in homes across the US.
The performance can be thought of as a commentary
on accountability.
When is violence entertainment and when is the audience
obligated to intervene?
I'm going to go ahead and go on record discouraging you
from having someone shoot you.
Or actually just any kind of shooting of anyone.
And this brings us to something important.
Law breaking art isn't necessarily good art.
In fact, I'd say it's usually quite bad.
Provocative maybe, but not very interesting.
But when it is good and it brings attention
to questionable ideas and systems of government,
then it's extremely important.
It's not something you should immediately
embrace and celebrate, but it's something that can open up
conversations about injustice.
In 1975, Burden defined art as a free spot in society,
where you can do anything.
But that does depend on which society you live in.
Let's take two contemporary examples,
starting with Pussy Riot, the Russian feminist punk
band and art collective that stages guerilla-style protest
performances.
Three of their members were arrested and imprisoned
for a 2012 performance in which they danced on a church
altar in Moscow and later turned it
into a music video entitled "Punk Prayer
Mother of God, Chase Putin Away!"
There's a lot going on here.
Pussy Riot was challenging what they
see as an unjust law about protecting
religious spaces in a supposedly secular society.
It's also a criticism of the patriarchal Russian Orthodox
Church and some of its leaders who
interfere in Russian politics by doing things
like supporting a third term for president Vladimir Putin.
Nadya Tolokonnikova described it well in her closing statement
at trial.
"Pussy Riot's performances can either
be called dissident art or political action
that engages art forms.
Either way, our performances are a kind
of civic activity amidst the repressions
of a corporate political system that
directs its power against basic human rights
and civil and political liberties."
Now released from prison, Pussy Riot
continues their work of protesting anti-protest laws
themselves and exposing the stifling of speech
in contemporary Russia.
As they said in their first English language tweet,
"Russia is not China or Iran YET,
so we can still use Twitter."
But speaking of China and Twitter,
my second example is Ai Weiwei who
has completely blurred the lines between artist and activist.
His life was politicized from a very young age
as his father was the well known poet Ai
Qing who was labeled an enemy of the people
during the Cultural Revolution and was exiled with his family
to a labor camp where Ai Weiwei spent most of his childhood.
As an adult, Ai has involved himself
in a wide and varied program of challenging
the practices of Chinese government
and advocating for democracy and free speech.
He is an accomplished artist who has
built a stunning body of conceptual artwork using
sculpture, installation, photography, and video.
But one of his greatest artworks can
be seen is his blog which he started in 2006
and used as a platform to voice a stream of social commentary
and political critique.
Through the blog, he started a citizen's investigation
to collect the names of the more than 5,000 school
children who were killed in the May 2008 Szechuan earthquake.
Not just an act of memorial, this
was also a way of openly questioning the government who
refused to admit any responsibility for the shoddily
built schools that caused a disproportionate number
of young people to die.
Shortly after he published the list of names on his blog,
it was shut down by authorities.
In 2011, Ai Weiwei was stopped at the Beijing Airport
and placed into detention for 81 days for vaguely
defined economic crimes.
Since his release, he has remained
under constant surveillance and still
hasn't been given his passport back.
But he continues to make work and is
an extremely vocal activist on social media
and in the international press.
A year after his release, Ai Weiwei
said, "I'm just a citizen: my life is equal in value
to any other.
But I'm thankful that when I lost my freedom
so many people shared feelings and put such touching effort
into helping me.
It gives me hope: stupidity can win for a moment,
but it can never really succeed because the nature of humans
is to seek freedom.
They can delay that freedom but they can't stop it."
So these are all very complicated and nuanced issues
and there's a lot of great reading
to do on these subjects.
You'll find some suggestions in the video info.
But for now, I'll leave you with this thought.
When making art, and also when not making art,
it's important to consider which laws to break
and how to break them.
In fact, the whole question of breaking the law
is a pretty interesting lens into that old question
of what art even is.
Is it art when a bunch of criminals
pull off a stunningly beautiful and complex bank robbery?
I'd argue no.
But a Russian art collective that forms of punk band
and performs on an altar for clearly stated reasons
and with the intention of it being a form of protest art?
To me, that's art.
It's avant-garde in the true sense of the term
and it's art I would never want to discourage.
Let's continue this conversation in the comments.
Thanks for watching, and could you guys
please suggest a sign-off for us?
[MUSIC PLAYING]
And please don't break the law unless you must,
and you have a very good reason, and you don't sue us.