Art As A Weapon meeting: Report Back

Art as a Weapon: Art and Anarchism

The London group of the ACG welcomed Martyn Everett to its regular series of public discussion meetings. He presented a very informative talk about how art is related to anarchism, including anarchist artists, art with anarchists as its subject and art used by anarchists to get their message across. He started with art used to stereotype anarchists as bomb throwers or people of suspicion. Since then, however, anarchist artists such as Courbet in France in the 19th century and more recently Clifford Harper in Britain have given us positive examples of the engaged artist.

Art has been used as a key way of getting the anarchist message across. Martyn showed us a range of examples from all over the world: book covers, posters, leaflets etc. In the discussion that followed we all felt that we need to use art more, bringing together people in struggle and artists who can support us. However, some argued that artists in Britain seem unwilling to get involved with struggles and more interested in furthering a career in the style of artists like Damien Hirst or by working in the ad industry. This industry is an example of art used for a purpose but to support capitalism. We need perhaps to learn some lessons from this in order to become more effective in getting our own message across without aiming to brainwash.

Art can be more than just a weapon in the class struggle. Martyn mentioned the views of Herbert Read who argued that teaching art to children is important in helping them to develop as free individuals. So often there is a hierarchy in art, keeping art in the hands of an elite and not something that everyone can do and appreciate. It was also stressed that it is not just visual art but music, poetry, literature and films that can inspire.

One conclusion came out of the meeting: we would like to gather together anyone who might be called an artist- people capable of doing work that we could use to get anarchist messages across. This could also include work on the internet, for example memes. It would be great to have a list of people who are willing to design posters, write music or poetry etc that would support our struggles.