Search results
Using political and critical theory, this article identifies in James Baldwin a model for citizenship unique to the Black artist who assumed the dual responsibilities of art practice and political activism. I engage with Baldwin’s fiction and his writing about other Black artists working in theater, film, dance, and music during the period of the civil rights movement. Across his career, Baldwin’s prevailing view was that, because of their history, Black artists have the singular, and indeed superlative, capacity to make art as praxis. Baldwin explains that the craft of the Black artist depends upon representing truths, rather than fantasies, about their experience, so that they are at once artists pursuing freedom and citizens pursuing justice. This article pays particular attention to the tension between living a public, political life and the need for privacy to create art, and ultimately the toll this takes on the citizen artist. Baldwin demonstrates how the community of mutual support he finds among Black artists aids in their survival. In his writings on Sidney Poitier and Lorraine Hansberry, his friendships with Beauford Delaney and Josephine Baker, as well as his reviews of music and literature, Baldwin assembles a collective he refers to as “I and my tribe.”
,” in the Marcia Tucker Papers, 1957–2004, Getty Research Institute Special Collections (from box 84, file 4: The Decade Show, notebooks 1 and 2). 26 William Olander, contribution to “MASS” Brochure (New York: New Museum, with Group Material, 1986), http://archive.newmuseum.org/index.php/Detail/Object/ Show/object_id/7912. 27 Alison Green, “Citizen Artists: Group Material,” Afterall 26 (Spring 2011): 1–8, www.afterall.org/journal/issue.26/citizen-artists-group-mat. 28 Parts of this chapter and the Renée Green analysis in Chapter 1 have been published in “The
research project, please see www.oise.utoronto.ca/dr/global-youth-digital-citizen-artists .
imagination of the 1940s into a new rhetoric of citizen-artist and national-modern aesthetic sans idioms of resistance.19 The radical importance of Mao in the visuality of post-independence India was to return in stark terms in the late 1960s, in new modes of mobilising margins, this time at the head of a Maoist grassroots peasants’ movement – the Naxalite struggle – that inscribed rural India, and eventually urban Calcutta, with a new mode of political intervention. The iconicity of Mao and Maoism was active in the ways in which a ‘cultural revolution’ was imagined in
and in any case imperialist notion in an ostensibly humanist and democratic direction? As an alternative, critical theory in conjunction with legal theory offers the possibility of a coming citizen-artist. Gramsci makes a convincing case for the idea that everyone, not just academics and party leaders, is an intellectual, whilst Benjamin shows that modern industrial societies offer everyone, not just
-wing political party, and from 1990 until his death in 1999, he was the President of Croatia. During his regime, the Croatian media were heavily controlled and infused with nationalist rhetoric, while the public sphere was tightly monitored as well. Prompted by the lack of civil mechanisms to respond to these developments, Grubić sought to fill that gap, embracing the role of the ‘anonymous, dissatisfied citizen-artist’. 63 In 1998, thirty years after the Red Peristyle group staged its intervention on the floor of Diocletian’s Palace in Split (see chapter 1 ), Grubić painted
of the term ‘intellectual’ as a noun, and also with the idea of mobilizing the prestige of public intellectuals in political and social causes. Tavernier’s anti-clericalism and his conception of the citizen-artist evoke Zola, as does his desire to demystify power and expose injustices. In his Le Roman expérimental (1880), Zola explains how he conceives of the ‘Naturalist’ novel as an application of scientific methods to literature. Basing his reflections on Claude Bernard’s treatises on experimental medicine, Zola illustrates