This week, I’ve been thinking quite a lot about a book I read – Art Works: How Organizers and Artists are Creating a Better World Together by Ken Grossinger (New York: The New Press, 2023).
It is a short, richly researched book about – as the title suggests – the integration of arts and music into social movements in the US American context. The first four chapters lay out lots and lots of examples, from the Black freedom struggle to migrant justice organizing, from the importance of music to the uses of visual arts to the power of film. The last two chapters focus more on institutional infrastructure, namely museums and funders. And the afterword ties the book together by quoting at length from interviews that the author did with artists who have done important work in movement contexts.
I really appreciate any movement book that starts by asking what people are already doing, which this one does. I learned lots of new things from it, especially from the many examples it gives of arts as part of movements. That alone makes this a great resource for me as I think through some related questions for a potential future writing project of my own.
That said, the book has some limitations. For instance, it is intensely US American – there is a sort of sensibility to how a lot of movements happen in the US, and specificities of context, that differ even from the nearby and very similar context of Canada, where I’m based, and that was very, very evident here. And of course there’s nothing wrong with a book being grounded in a particular place, but there’s something a little eye-rolly about that specificity going mostly unmarked when it’s the globally dominant specificity. But, really, that’s a pretty trivial thing.
More serious is its relative lack of attention to negatives, to failure of attempts to integrate arts into organizing. I don’t know if this was the explicit intent, but it reads as if it’s trying to convince someone – organizational leaders and funders, perhaps – that it’s worth putting energy, time, and resources into having an arts element to campaigns, rather than thoroughly exploring both the strengths and the weaknesses, the possibilities and the limitations, of doing so. It doesn’t really talk about what it looks like for a campaign or a movement to invest huge amounts of effort or money into artistic things and then realize after, you know what, that was a waste, that was a bad choice. Or even to realize that it didn’t do any harm and it was nice to have, but it didn’t add much either. It is simply not plausible that those kinds of scenarios never happen, and I don’t think it does our movements any favours not to talk about them.
And the book doesn’t deal at all with the reality that a key feature of our neoliberal era is that there can sometimes be space for expression – for giving voice, for representing – but none for actual, material change, and it is sometimes an elite tactic to grant the former as a way of defusing demands for the latter. So what does that mean for how we relate to expressive (artistic, musical, etc.) practices in our organizing? That’s not to say that expression, even in the absence of other organizing, is necessarily bad, just that it is characteristic of our era that we often have space to blow off steam by putting radical content out into the world, by yelling (or singing or drawing or writing) militant-sounding things into the void, when neither that nor anything else we can easily do will change whatever oppressive circumstance is in question…and doing so sometimes makes us feel like we’ve accomplished some radical political something when we really haven’t. We need to think about that means for how we relate to arts/music in movements.
Related to this is the lack of attention to how to deal with assertions about the impacts of artistic and musical practices, or specific instances of art or music, that are made genuinely and in good faith, often by artists and musicians, but that just amount to a repackaging of common assumptions about what those things do in the world and are not a product of any critical thought or investigation…and are often not particularly grounded in knowledge of how change actually happens. It’s not just this book, either. As I’ve been reading and thinking about related questions over the last year, I’ve noticed that it is really, really common for people – again, particularly people who come from a background of arts or music or writing – to say things, sometimes quite grandiose things, about what making stuff can do in the world that are based on assumption and faith and little else. And I don’t say that to be unfairly dismissive of “Art and poetry and music can change the world!” claims, because I think sometimes they really can. But if we’re going to make good choices about the roles that arts and music play within movements, then we need to engage honestly and critically with such claims and also be able to say things about what art can’t do (or isn’t doing, or hasn’t done, or won’t do).
Finally, it was a bit frustrating how unsystematic the book’s analysis is, in some respects. I mean, I’m not looking for some sort of Social Movement Studies thing where it reduces movements to abstract variables – I hate that approach, and think it’s mostly a waste of time and energy. Unlike a lot of SMS, this book was clearly grounded in perspectives emerging from movements, which I think is valuable and important. But it feels, particularly given the density and richness of examples in the book, that there’s great possibility for starting from what’s here and building a sort of grounded abstraction from these examples into ways of thinking that could be of real use to organizers and artists as they contemplate if/how to bring their practices together. And I don’t think it does that nearly as effectively as it could.
Anyway. Despite all of the critical things I just said, I think this book was very interesting and very useful, it just has some limitations.