Art as Activism

As bell hooks suggests in her essay, "Movies Making Magic", "changing how we see images is clearly one way to see the world" (hooks, 6). The power of movies is that they "do not merely offer us the opportunity to reimagine the culture we most intimately know on the screen, they make culture" (hooks, 9). In order to combat the racist and sexist, constricting, singular narrative that dominates mainstream cinema, Catherine Saalfield, in her essay "Art as Activism", supports hooks' theories of the power of movies and adds that "filmmaking is the most efficient, creative and satisfying form of activism" (Saalfield, 66). For Saalfield, art as activism is not only a political stance in actively resisting the gender and sexual norms that have been mandated upon society, but is also a natural action - "you can't separate your activism from your art any more than you can separate your sexuality from your identity" (Saalfield, 70).

Though there have been progress in the emergence of women in the forefront for the film and visual art industry, Linda Nochlin, in an interview with Barbara A.MacAdam of ArtNews, speaks of how despite the progress, "the problem is to make collectors, museums, and curators who aren't really up on things to see that there are many great woman artists...there are collectors and curators who -- out of habit, laziness, or even misogyny --simply don't bother with women". Instead, women have turned to run "alternative spaces or small museum galleries". In following with this tradition, collectives like Media + Idea LabFest have been founded by a group of students to showcase original, student-prroduced videos that are against the mainstream, white hetero-patriarchal narrative. The mission statment reads as: "The Media + Idea Lab explores critical issues of ideneity and community through innovative visual storytelling. With the Media+Idea LabFest we aim to foster public discussion on media diversity and serve as a catalyst for interrogating the status quo.

Still from Raquel Rodriguez's Pa Mama

Some of the videos that have been showcased in the past have included Soleil Grant's "The Life that Chose She" - "an experimenta; music video exploring the relationship between hip hop + feminism". Raquel Rodriquez's Pa Mama, which the director describes - "In this collage, I desparately weave together memories with my grandmother, the ones she is forgetting". 

Still from Bora Kim's I'm so Sorry

Bora Kim's I'm so Sorry, is a creative take on the Korean culture and tradition which socially mandates a female Korean celebrity who is involved in a sex tape scandal to apologize to the mass audience. As the director notes, "the event of the apology becomes a perfomance in which the audience must be convinced of their sincerity in order for her to be accepted again". The director hired actors on Craigslist who read a script of actual interviews and press releases made by korean female celebrities. In her film, Kim wanted to "recreate these mediated spectacle using the people who strive for success in the enterinament business. I wanted their desires to clash with the desires of the text".

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Works Cited

"Dialogue between bell hooks and Julie Dash April 26, 1992", Dash, Daughters of 

The Dust, pp. 27-67. 

hooks, bell. "Introduction: Making Movie Magic." Reel to Real: Race, Sex, and Class at the Movies. United Kingdom: Psychology Press, 1996. 1-9.  

Media and Idea LabFest. "http://www.columbia.edu/cu/cser/media_fest.html". 

Saalfield, Catherine "Art and Activism".