SOCIRL MOVEMENT CULTURES: RN INTRODUCTION
SOCIRL MOVEMENT CULTURES: RN INTRODUCTIONDara Greenwald and Josh MacPheeWhat you hold in your hands is avisual historyof social movements from the 1960s to thelate 2000S. The posters, flyers, photographs,and other ephemera in these pages were rreated by participants in the movements represented, often at the height ofstruggles andmass mobilizations. We've collected this material, first in an exhibition, and now as abook,in order to create a large-scale overview-thebeginnings of a map-which illustrates howpeople have organized across the globe for liberation and equality. Each ofthese movementsis one ofthousands of points on this map.Even though there is not sufficient space herefor an in-depth analysis ofanyone grouping,we felt it was more important to err on theside ofbreadth. We have visited many archivesand collections, and with each visit, this project grew. We wanted to take these materialsout of the drawers, closets, and basementsand bring them back into the light. Signs ofChange spotlights just some of the evidenceof the decades ofstruggle, effort, and creativeexpression produced by movements organizedto build a new and better world.We are indebted to the committed peoplewho have built the important collections atthe Center for the Study of Political Graphicsand the International Institute ofSocial History,Where we began our research. We also depended on avast networR ofindividuals who havekept afew posters rolled up under their bed,or could tell us who had a copy of a protestvideo. The materials were borrowed from overeighty lenders. Many of the videos includedin the exhibition hadrit been shown since thetime of their production (see page .158 for alist offilm and video that screened in Signsof Change). Our research was not just aboutmovements and the culture they produce, butalso about what happens to the works whena movement demobilizes. Who picks up theplacards after the protest? Who stores themand catalogs them? Who makes them publicagain for research and understanding?Signs of Change is intended to do manythings: make visible histories of social movements, teach us about collective cultural prodUction, challenge us to think more deeplyabout communicative activity in the publicsphere, ask us what the role ofaesthetics canbe in the context of social struggles, and reveal innovative grassroots visions for new soCieties. There were over one thousand piecesIn the Signs of Change exhibition, and therewhich we live now. Some of the images andgraphics in this book may look familiar be"cause artists and advertisers have used themover the years (the bold silk-screened graphics ofthe 1968 student and worker revolt inFrance have been particularly popular, see pages 40-41). RiJrely in those contexts is therean acknowledgment of the images' origins oran explanation of the movements that produced them. While researching, we have beenshocked by how little we actually know aboutthe struggles from which many iconic imagesemerged. At the same time, we discovered somany struggles we knew nothing about. Theartifacts collected here are evidence of theexistence of movements and deserve attention. Although we both were familiar with theAmerican Indian Movement (AIM), posters produced by AIM and its supporters introducedus to many Native political prisoners we hadHISTORICAL AND SOCIAL CONTEXTAll art develops within a social and historical previously never heard of(fig. U).ln this way,context, but the work we are examining was Signs ofChange contextualizes familiar imagescreated consciously as a means to participate and at the same time reveals little-known orin astruggle tochange that context. The more under-represented histories.With this in mind, we hope this book willwe unearthed and studied these materials,the more important it became to distinguish act as a pedagogical tool. Hundreds of stubetween popular conceptions of political art dents have toured the exhibition. The postersand what we are callingsocial movement culture.Generally, the work collectedin Signs ofChange does notmerely have political content, nor was it originallycreated for a galIery, or byan individual artist reflecting on their world. Rather,it was born fnm acontextin which large numbers ofpeople mobilized to achievetransformative goals. Theindividuals who comprisethese struggles generateculture rrom a need toexpress, represent, andpropose alternative waysofexisting, both within themovements and to societyat large.Understanding the social and historical contextof art and media production is important to comprehending both the worksthemselves and their relationship to the world inare over four hundred images in this book.They are from different movements spanningclose to fifty years and across the globe,but presenting them together allows us tosee the resonances and dissonances amongstruggles. We can catch aglimpse ofsome ofthe commonalities across the national, ethnic,and linguistic borders that many ofthe movements attempted to breakdown. Several keyideas related to the histories and objects represented here emerged as we organized thisproject: the importance of the historical andsocial context of each piece and movement,social movement as autonomous activity, thegeneration of alternative social formations,prefigurative politics, using and inventing newtechnologies, and the development of newconceptions ofthe artist.11
and videos introduced many viewers to certain histories and politicalideas for the first time. For example,we were surprised by how few of thehigh school or undergraduate college students had been taught aboutapartheid in South Africa (see pages88-91). We hope that students of allages and educators of all types willuse this bOOR as a starting point forunderstanding social movements andtheir aesthetic histories.12AUTONOMOUS ACTIV/lYThis book focuses almost exclusively on"autonomous social movements." Theseare movements that emerge from the1960s onward that define themselvesas separate from traditional modesof political organizing, such as socialdemocratic electoral politics, authoritarian communist and socialist parties,or top-down and bureaucratic unionstructures. None ofthe worR here wasproduced by governments, but insteadwas created by grassroots and bottomup social organizations, collectives, andindividuals. Although we were producing the exhibition during the US presidential election season of 2008, wedecided not to include material relatedto voting and electoral politics. Votingis only one way to politically participatein a society; we wanted to show thousands of other ways that people haveengaged since the 1960s.Many of the movements and cultural expressions explored in Signs ofChange have an overarching critique ofseveral aspects of society; this complex critique is "radical" in the senseof attempting to get to the root ofoppression and our current system ofgross inequality. These movements donot simply want to replace one ineffective ruler with another, or one versionof capitalism with a less virulent one,but to change the entire system, tobuild a completely different world andcompletely different way oflife.posters, graphics, and videos we foundwere produced through collective processes with little concern for authorship. In addition, movement art production is often asynthesis ofprocess andproduct, where the form of productionmust manifest the anti-authoritarianand anti-capitalist values ofthe movements; this is sometimes referred toas prefigurative politics. Feminist mediacollectives are good examples ofenacting or prefiguring political values. TheChicago Womens Graphics Collective'sprocess of poster production involvedinput from all members. 1llis processis documented in the video the members produced entitled It Can Be Done(1973). This approach can be seen as ameans to a means as well as a meansto an end; the creative process of production rontrbutes to the development ofnew social relationships amongthose involved, all the while potentiallycreating new cultural forms.The culture of movements is notsolely posters, media, or graphics. Itsresonance can be found in the socialformations movements create, suchas public protests, demonstrations,encampments, affinity groups, collectives, and solidarities. At shorter-termdemonstrations and longer-term encampments (tent villages set up atcontestational sites, such as militarybases, airports, or borders), concernswith many aspects of life, includingfood preparation, housing, group decision maRing, and visual production areinfluenced by egalitarian movement values. This can be seen particularly wellin the peace encampments ofthe womens movement, such as the GreenhamCommon and Seneca Womens PeaceEncampment (see page 127), that influenced the Climate and No BordersCamps (see pages 138-139, 156-157)oftoday.12. United Damretir; Front (artist unlmown). forwardto Freedom, offset lithograph poster, 1984. SouthAfrica.Originall designed and printed in South Africa,this poster was reprinted in the United States as asolidarity gesture with the entl-eperthehl movementALTERNATIVE SOCIAL FORMATIONSThe cultures that movements produceare created through acomplex interplaytn the 1980s, many South African posters were reamongst available resources, forms of printedin the US and Europe to raise awareness andexpression and organization, and aes- money for the movement.thetic decisions. In contrast to culture 13. Hong Sung Dam, 6wangju Uprising, wood. blucRprint. c. 1983-1989, South Korea,produced, preserved, and celebrated in 14,Still from Women's lib Demonstration I (1970 the mainstream art world, many ofthe 05:00 mbutes, Videofreex), USA.J.3
UTOPIAN PROPOSALSIn order for groups of people to consciouslychange the world, port oftheir struggle mustbe envisioning and experimenting with whatthis new and changed world will 100R liRe. Byimagining and practicing what could be, socialmovements often develop ideas and innovationsabout society that transform the status quo.Movement experiments and proposals, which atthe time oftheir inception might seem absurdto outside observers, are often later adopted,in port or whole, and eventually are thought ofas common sense. Early environmental activistswho pushed for transforming our relationshipto the earths resources are now seeing manyof their ideas widely practiced, including thegrowth of organic food production, recycling,and eliminating toxins in the environment. Thewomen\; liberation movement fundamentol transformed the status quo understandingofwomerls roles in society. Participants in themovement proposed, prefigured, and enacteddifferent gender relations and roles, and nowmany related aspects ofsociety have changed.Unfortunately the more anti-capitalist aspects of these ideas are often lost in theirshift from margin to center. In the mid-1960sin Amsterdam, Provo developed aseries ofproposals for better urban planning and existence,including the White Bicycle Plan (see pages 9495), which proposed that thousands offree andunlocRed white biRes be left around the cityfur everyone to shore.' TodaY this strategy forconvenient and accessible urban transportationhas been adopted in avariety ofmunicipalitiesby for-profit companies that rent fieets oftourist bicycles, which can only be released fromtheir parRing spaces by credit cord. After Provodissolved in 1967, the Kabouters (literally translated oS the Gnomes, or Gnome Party) formed;one of the initiatives they developed and putfurward was aGreen City Plan. They proposed tosinR the roods and mandate gardens be createdon top ofall cars so that pedestrians walRingcity streets would only see green space passingthem by.' The ideo ofthe green city is now amainstream concept, even if some ofthe morecreative, anti-capitalist, and visionary ideaS ofearlier social movements that infiuenced today'sgreen urban planning have been ignored.COMMUNICATION AND TECHNOLOGYAll social struggles have hod important relationships to the media oftheir day, from thenewspapers ofthe radical labor movements atthe turn of the how movement actors areoften quick toadopt new technologies and use them inways that were perhaps not intended.NEW SUBJECTS/NEW ARTISTSParticipation in the social movements we are examining produces new subjects, people who are capableof enacting history rather than simply having historyhappen to them. Part of becoming an agent of changedevelops from the sharing of skills among movementparticipants, which, in the case ofart and media skills,gives expression to voices that may not have been public befure. Out ofboth desire and necessity, people who.previously did not consider themselves media or artproducers emerge from struggles as artists, designers,and video makers-as well as organizers, communications specialists, public speasers, caretakers, carpenters, group facilitators, electricians, and dozens ofothernew identities. This process challenges the common notion of the individual artistic genius and creates morefiexible definitions ofwho is or can be an artist.Signs of Change is flush with examples ofthese newmovement artists, from the womerisliberation movementto the anti-apartheid struggle to the resistance to thePinochet dictatorship in Chile. The Cape Town CommunityArts Project and many similar popular silkscreen wor shops in South Africa taught people with little or no artexperience to produce effective posters for their unions,student groups, and womeris organizations. Media andvideo access programs, which teach anyone who wantsto learn how to make their own media, have sprungup in many movements, from Womeris Liberation in the1970s to the Zapatistas in the 1990S. In Chile duringthe dictatorship in the 1970s and 1980s, women withno formal art training began making arpilleras (see15 pages. 82-83). Arpi/leras are small hand-sewn pictorialpieces offabric on which women represented the brutality ofthe Pinochetregime. Countering the repression ofpublic expression in Chile during these years, anetworksupported by the left-wing Catholic Church set up craftworkshops and then distributed these arpilleras internationally.' The movements we are looking at transformwhat it means to be an artist, as well as what participation in civil society can be.ARCHIVES: OUR COLLECTIVE HISTORYBELONGS IN THE COMMONSWhat happens or should happen to all of the culturalmaterial produced by social mcvements? There is noquestion that the majority of the material is createdfor specific uses, including education, communication,political expression, and/or creating visual spectacles atprotests, rallies, and marches. Most of it is destrcyad,but some of it ends up in the personal collectionsof participants and makers, other pieces are kept by16
people who want a reminder ofhistory or areinterested in aesthetics and design. Much ofwhat is saved eventually ends up in archives,ranging from large personal collections, suchas Michael Rossmaris All ofUs or None Archivein Ber eley, California, to institutions that developed directly out of specific social movements, such as the Lesbian Herstory Archivein Broo lyn, to giant art institutions and university libraries' special collections.'Although often made anonymously or bygroups wor ing collectively, and created to beused openly, publicly, and for free, much ofthiswor ends up being controlled by institutions,which have the resources to store it, but notthe means or the will to ma e it truly public.The problem of storage and preservation creates complex issues in relation to copyrightand ownership. Additionally, many institutions are not sympathetic either politically oraesthetically to the social movement materialthey own. One archive we visited at a majorart museum contained a Post-It note in oneofthe drawers holding social movement posters, which said, "Not cool enough to catalog."Institutions li e this one may have larger budgets than independent spaces, but the wor remains uncataloged, sitting stagnant in fiatfles, because no one Rnows it's there.Meanwhile, there are places li e the Centerfor the Study ofPolitical Graphics (CSPG) in LosAngeles, which exclusively focuses on the collecting and preserving of political posters andsurvives with minimal institutional funding.Not affiliated with any major educational or artinstitutions, CSPG has been able to collect oversixty thousand posters, the largest collectionofpost-war political posters in the US. Withlimited resources, they have done an impressive amount of wor , cataloging fifteen thousand ofthese posters and preparing asearchable database they hope to ma e public.-----We firmly believe the images and informationcollected in this book belong in the commons,where we can all share, value, and attempt touse them to understand our past. With theadvancements in web technologies and digitaldata storage, we are at apoint where we canenvision a massive free and public archive, awi i of social movement culture. But that isanother pruject!CONCLUSIONMoments of social upheaval generate largescale aesthetic and creative outpourings. Inlocation after location, intense eruptions ofartproduction can be seen. In ashort six wee s inFrance in 1968 during the student and wor rrevolt, the walls ofParis and other cities werecovered with hundreds of thousands of slogans and posters. One group alone, the AtelierPopulaire at Beaux-Arts, produced over 350 different poster designs and printed up to twothousand copies of each poster' In Portugalduring the brief three years ofthe Revolution ofthe Carnations, thousands ofwalls were painted with murals expressing the political beliefsand desires of the people ma ing them (seepages 84-85). When portable video was firstavailable in the late 1960s and early 1970s,video collectives formed and began documenting their actions and the events around them,producing thousands oftapes. In recent years,with wider access to the tools ofdigital mediama ing, the amount ofmedia and art producedby movement actors is overwhelming.There is an incredible diversity and richness in the cultural material produced by social movements. We found very little overlapamong the archives and personal collectionswe visited, and many of these containedthousands of items, .Choosing an extremelysmall sampling of this material might havemade for avery tight and easy to digest exhibit and catalog, but we feel that the sheervolume of wor produced is as important asanyone particular piece. We hope to havedocumented not just individuals creatingthings, but networks of people in connectionto each other, merging their collective ideasand sRills toward something exciting andnew. In many ways Signs ofChange is itself aconceptual project, attempting to convey thedizzying array of what movements produce.15.1ndymedia (atst unRnown), lndymedla, sticker, 2000, USA.16. Promotional image from the video Un Paquito de TantaVerdad/A little Bjt ofSo Much Trut (2007. 93:00 minutes, produced by Icrrugated Films in rollaboralicn with M J1 de Ojo),Mexico end USA, photograph by Pablo Specas Castells.IT Lincoln Cushing, Michael Rossman (RIP, 1940-2008) sharinghs All ofUs orNone lester Archive, poolDgraphic documentation.2002, USA.17That said, we are not suggesting that all ofthese materials are equally effective or evencapable of succeeding at accomplishing thechanges their creators aspired to. Althoughsome important changes have occurred duetothe worR ofthese movements, injustice remains, including the grossly unequal distribution ofwealth. As people engaged with questions ofculture and social change, we want toRnow what the successes and failures ofthistype of worR have been, so that this historycan inform the wor we do now. We turneda spotlight on social movement culture, andnow we can collectively begin amore in-depthanalysis. We hope this next step will be takenby many. Each piece included here, as well aseach movement, deserves more attention: politically, historically, and aesthetically-let uscontinue the journey together.EndnotesRichard Kempton, Provo: Amsterdam's Anarchist Revolt(Brooklyn, Autonomedia. 2007), 71.z Ibid, 132-1351Steven Kasher, The Civi! Rights Moveml:!nt: A Photographic1954-1968 (New Yor , Abbeville Press, 2006), http'!jwww.steven asher.[Qmlhtml/exhibinfo.asp?exnum"'297 (October4,2009).4 Todd Tevares, "Kwangju Against the State 1980," Paper delivered It enewing the Anarchist Trodition Conference (Montpelier,VT), November 9.2008.3Hjstor 5totter Bllssant, Do-It-Yourself Geopolitics: Cartogr lphies ofArt in the World, y/Holmes.htm (May 20, 2009).6Indymedia, 'I\bout lndymedia," http://www,indymediil.org/en/staticjabout.shtml (May 25, 2009).7 Jacqueline· AdiJrns, 'I\rt in Sodal Movements: ShantytownWomen's Protest in Plncchets Chile:' Sociologicaf ForUm, Vol 17,No 1 (March 2002)' 29.8 We visited Michael Rossman (1939-2008) at hs rolectlonand borrowed seea pieces from it for the exhibit. Sadly, hepassed away before the show opened.9 Rebecca DeRoo, The Museum fsfubrishment and ContemporaryArt: the Politics ofArtistic D;spla in Fr[jnce After 1968 (NewYorR: Cambridge University Press, 2006): 48.
Dara Greenwald and Josh MacPhee What you hold in your hands is avisual history ofsocial movements from the 1960s to the late 2000S. The posters, flyers, photographs, and other ephemera in these pages were rre ated by participants in the movements repre sented, often at the height ofstruggles and mass mobilizations. We've collected this mate
All Movement Types in SAP –Pavan Golesar What Is a Movement Type? When you enter a goods movement in the system, you must enter a movement type to differentiate between the various goods movements. A movement type is a three-digit identification key for a goods movement. The following table contains examples of movement types.
3 les langues et cultures de l’antiquitÉ 5 l’apport des langues et cultures de l’antiquitÉ au franÇais 6 l’apport des langues et cultures de l’antiquitÉ aux langues vivantes 8 l’apport des langues et cultures de l’antiquitÉ aux mathÉmatiques 10 l’apport des
of different cultures within a culture (e.g. youth cultures, cultures of migrants, regional cultures, business culture, soccer culture, alternative culture etc.) German culture, for the purposes of this class, refers to this multi-layered understanding of culture. !
Positive Cultures N 129 Positive Cultures N 56 Pre-Intervention Post-Intervention Positive Cultures N 67 Positive Cultures N 61 Sxs No Sxs Sxs No Sxs Sxs No Sxs Sxs No Sxs . Antimicrobials prescribed . 40 32 26 3 26 8 36 5 . Antimicrobials not prescribed . 8 49 2 25 3 30 1 19 . Sensitivity (95% CI)
shared that funding of Native arts and cultures needs to be more robust. Moreover, grants that are made rarely reach Native artists at the community level. A Native arts and cultures fund would direct critically needed support to Native American artists and communities. Informed by this research, the Native Arts & Cultures
Culture Clash: Can Corporate Cultures and Latino Cultures Be Reconciled? "La preservación de la propia cultura no requiere desprecio o falta de respeto hacia otras culturas." Preservation of one's own culture does not require contempt or disrespect for other cultures. —César Chávez, American labor activist H
Just what is a Web Movement? ACBL director John “Spider” Harris invented it in the 1970’s. (The name of the movement is apparently a play on Harris’ nickname.) Basically, the Web Movement is an enhanced Mitchell Movement that divides the game (or particular section of a game if there are multiple sections) into an upper half and a lower .
224 Communicating in the 21st Century Essay writing ‘The essay is a form of refined torture. Discuss.’ You almost certainly will never encounter such an essay topic, but you might think it.
