“Everything is political.” This statement is both an acknowledgement of the inherently political nature of existence in a hierarchical world and a direct quote from every person interviewed for this article. “Everything is relational, and everything has a power relation,” Amy Elizabeth Alterman, a PhD candidate in Culture and Performance at UCLA, explained in an interview with the HPR. “So, everything is political.”
Art is no exception. Although there are artists who insist that their work is not political, this claim ignores the stakes of representation; for any artist to deny that their actions have political implications is to deny the fact that media and entertainment shape the way that people view the world and everyone inhabiting it.
It is important to acknowledge a distinction between bursts of protest and sustained activism. Both play crucial roles in political progress, and art can function as either depending on its implementation, but the two styles of advocacy serve different purposes. Protest often consists of sporadic, individual instances of critiquing injustice and is fundamentally an attempt to raise awareness about an issue. Art is therefore a natural fit; its emotional resonance is indispensable in efforts to grab the public’s attention and to change hearts and minds. Activism, on the other hand, requires continued engagement, with a focus on solutions rather than just calling attention to an issue’s existence. That is not to say that art is no longer a suitable tool — in fact, the reality is quite the opposite. Art is most often thought to be politically powerful because of its ability to reach new audiences; in this capacity, art is comparable to political protest as primarily a method of raising awareness. However, an often-overlooked capability of performance art is its potential to arm audiences who are already sympathetic to a cause with the specific knowledge necessary to take action, serving as a sustained form of activism. Two organizations that exemplify the latter strategy are Abortion Access Front’s comedy tour and UCLA’s Sex Squad.
Art as an Educational Tool
Beyond performance art’s power to touch people emotionally, it can be a very effective educational tool, especially when dealing with stigmatized topics.
In an interview with the HPR, co-creator of The Daily Show Lizz Winstead highlighted the importance of going beyond providing information: “If you’re going to point out what’s wrong and just let people sit with that, if you don’t give them a call to action, it’s creating quicksand.” Especially with the proliferation of social media, the number of injustices in the world can easily become overwhelming. As Winstead points out, from an activist-artist’s perspective, it is not enough to simply draw attention to political problems; clear explanations of specific, actionable solutions are necessary to channel the audience’s energy into productive next steps. Following this principle, Winstead founded the reproductive rights nonprofit Abortion Access Front in 2015 to combine her expertise in political satire with “the freedom to say, ‘And here’s what you can do about it.’”
AAF’s year-round comedy and music tour serves as a prime example of the potential for art to arm audiences with the tools for continued activism. “Abortion AF: The Tour” is a component of AAF’s work that brings feminist comedy shows to cities across the country to destigmatize abortion. The effect of comedy in this setting is three-fold: it attracts people to the event, it breaks the stigma surrounding abortion by getting the audience to relax, and it allows a conversation to begin. “There’s something specifically about humor and comedy that loosens people up,” affirmed Alterman, whose dissertation is an ethnographic study of AAF’s tour as a new model of performance activism. “It resonates for people in a way that other formats, other forms of communicating, don’t.”
AAF’s tour is not designed for bipartisan appeal. With a topic as divisive and inflammatory as abortion, there is no such thing as material that pleases everyone. “I think too many progressive organizations are trying to reach across the aisle,” commented Alterman. Instead of focusing on changing perspectives, AAF is “taking people who kind of already have a perspective, and they’re offering them more education and tools of things to do.”
Importantly, the shows feature talkbacks with local abortion providers, giving audience members information about abortion access in their region, as well as ways to support independent clinics through donating, volunteering, and voting. To Winstead, “it completes the evening” to end in dialogue: “You’ve learned something, you’ve learned what you can do about it, and you can do it right there in the room, and then you can sign up to continue being part of the solution.”
Above all, this comedy tour captures the unique power of art to be emotionally compelling. Unlike traditional methods of consuming information, like reading articles and watching the news, decidedly political art informs viewers without feeling like a mental chore. Viewers are more likely to retain information and follow up with action after an enjoyable experience rather than a dry one, which is why it is key to give the audience concrete next steps in order to capitalize on this energy.
The Power of Participation
AAF is not alone in prioritizing action. “Knowledge is powerful; power is power,” Bobby Gordon, a performance artist and sexual health educator with an M.A. in Applied Theatre Arts from UCLA, told the HPR. “It becomes less about just knowing the information but collective strategizing about how to push back against these oppressions.” Like AAF, Gordon’s approach to sex education is focused on going beyond providing information. He believes that interactive forms of performance in particular encourage students to retain more information than traditional styles of teaching.
To address this unmet need in the field of sex education, Gordon founded Sex Squad, a UCLA student group that uses participatory theater to educate at-risk youth about sexual health. It is not enough, Gordon argues, for students to be able to regurgitate answers on a test — especially not for an issue as personal as sexual health. “You have to be able to translate it for yourself and put it into action in your own life,” he explained. And for him, nothing is better positioned to achieve this than interactive art: “Active participation and engagement, especially in a way that requires creativity and rewriting things for our own contexts, pushes us to learn in a way that we can actually use.”
Similarly to AAF’s comedy tour, Sex Squad leverages the art of humor to break the stigma surrounding sexual health, which allows a fruitful conversation to occur. Taking it one step further, Sex Squad encourages students to participate in the performance in order to practice handling challenging scenarios by themselves. This active engagement is a key benefit of using theater and comedy and is particularly effective for education. “‘We transform when we actively participate in transformation,’” Gordon quoted from Augusto Boal. “I can’t transform you. … I can make an invitation and an offer to you, but you have to be the one to do it.”
Where Ideology Meets Reality
But of course, neither of these organizations could pursue the work that they do without funding, which frequently comes from institutions that uphold hierarchical systems of oppression. Academia in particular provides many activists with the opportunities that they need to pursue their art, yet universities in the United States often unintentionally perpetuate institutionalized racism in a variety of ways, from the application process to the challenges that historically marginalized students and professors face on campus. Gordon struggles with the tension between artists’ aspirations to do good work and the competitive nature of grant writing. “Whereas the rest of society underestimates the power of the arts for social change,” he said, “we in the arts, because we need to make a case for it, get really good at making a case for it.”
In an ideal world, seeking funding from ethically questionable sources would not be necessary, but in reality there must be room for nuance. Nonprofits don’t have to betray their morals to ensure financial security; while monetary incentives may encourage artists to exaggerate the projected effects of their proposals, the core goals of the art remain the same. As Winstead stated, “The funders fund us because of our mission, not in spite of it.”
The following metaphor enables Gordon to persevere despite this contradiction: “One hand being full doesn’t empty the other.” In other words, the unethical nature of working in institutions that reinforce supremacy does not negate the knowledge and positive impact that the resulting art creates; rather, the two truths coexist.
Imperfect progress is better than no progress at all. Society benefits from political art, and very few artists could financially or emotionally afford to pursue their work in addition to a full-time job without supplementary monetary support. If morally objectionable funding sources enable artists to educate and inspire audiences, to introduce them to activism in an inviting and feasible way, then more is gained than lost.
As long as artists are conscious of the unjust systems in which they work — “productively suspicious,” in Gordon’s words — flawed circumstances should not prevent them from engaging in activism with the best intentions. Artists cannot remove themselves from politics if they are unsatisfied with surrounding institutions; everything is political, after all.