Dedicated to clever and innovative trends of art and design in activism.

As I’m working on a poster for the Just Seeds Celebrate People’s History poster project, I’m finding more inspiration in the roots of creative activism.  This July 12 marked Pablo Neruda’s 104th birthday, and although he passed away in 1973, it remains a worthy cause for celebration.  Below is a video by 4SeasonsProductions, a montage that features an English translation of Neruda’s “Standard Oil Co.”

Of Standard Oil, one of the most remembered corporations of the robber baron era, Neruda wrote:

They buy countries, people, seas, police, county councils,
distant regions where the poor hoard their corn
like misers their gold:
Standard Oil awakens them,
clothes them in uniforms, designates
which brother is the enemy.
the Paraguayan fights its war,
and the Bolivian wastes away
in the jungle with its machine gun.

Via

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The latest edition of the Upstream Journal is now available, with a special focus on the small arms trade. More than half a million people are killed by small arms each year. To promote the issue, the publishers (Montreal’s Social Justice Committee) produced a PSA:

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Richard Reynolds is not a radical. With his mild mannered Britishisms and unassuming style, one wouldn’t take him for a law-breaker. And to him this is all for the better. As a leading guerrilla gardener, he’s been spreading the gospel, planting seeds and saplings around his native South London, and networking diverse compatriots into a united global front. But don’t think for a moment that his project is an explicitly political one. He simply sets out to “fight the filth with forks and flowers.”

On Guerrilla Gardening is Reynolds’ new book, already on shelves in the UK, and available stateside May 31. Given the author’s dedication to the subject, one would expect a polemic, something apocryphal and stirring - the “Our Bodies, Our Selves” of guerrilla gardening. Reynolds, however, intentionally and neatly avoids this, depoliticizing the subject in favor of casting the net far and wide. Whoever you are, whatever your motivations, you can be a guerrilla gardener.

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Stephen Duncombe is the author of 2007’s Dream: Re-imagining Progressive Politics in an Age of Fantasy, wherein he argues that in order to explore new political frontiers, progressives need to start dreaming. The wide-eyed idealism and humanity that informs the perspective has been waning, and it’s necessary to re-imagine the goals and the tactics used to achieve them, both to gain clout and re-gain the passion that started a movement.

Duncombe suggests the notion of an ethical spectacle, which has me wondering how his book might inform the work we do as activist artists?

Rather than the spectacles of commercialism and fascism that have historically dominated, what would it look like to create participatory spectacles? In Duncombe’s view:

…our spectacles will be participatory: dreams the public can mold and shape themselves. They will be active: spectacles that work only if people help create them. They will be open-ended: setting stages to ask questions and leaving silences to formulate answers. And they will be transparent: dreams that one knows are dreams but which still have power to attract and inspire. And, finally, the spectacles we create will not cover over or replace reality and truth but perform and amplify it.

Ever since Debord, I’ve been wary of any kind of spectacle, but this article has me thinking differently this morning.

Is it possible or necessary to create an ethical spectacle?

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Groundswell occupies a unique niche of the blogosphere.  There are only a few other blogs out there covering similar topics, and I wonder what else you’re reading?  Do you spend more of your time reading about art & design, or activism?

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