Boycotts as Openings

Introduction to Assuming Boycott: Resistance, Agency, and Cultural Production (eds. Kareem Estefan, Carin Kuoni, Laura Raicovich), OR Books, 2017

Excerpt

In the past several years, there has been a remarkable surge in protest actions—especially boycotts—targeting art institutions and events that receive corporate or government support tied to politics which exhibiting artists find objectionable. This has been a particularly visible development at biennials, at least four of which faced boycotts in the year 2014 alone: the 19th Sydney Biennale, because of its financial ties to notorious migrant detention centers off the coast of Australia; the 10th Gwangju Biennale, after an exhibiting artist’s painting was pulled from the show due to political pressure; the 31st São Paulo Biennial, which received funding from the Israeli Consulate in violation of an ongoing cultural boycott of the state; and Manifesta 10, hosted at a Russian state institution in St. Petersburg shortly after Vladimir Putin’s anti-LGBTQ laws and aggression against Ukraine made global headlines. But the trend has not been limited to one-off global events. In 2011 the Gulf Labor Coalition—a group of artists that had been privately negotiating with the Guggenheim Museum to improve labor conditions for the workers that would build its new branch in Abu Dhabi—went public with a list of demands and announced a boycott, collectively refusing to have their artworks collected for the Emirati institution until such conditions were met. That same year, which saw uprisings spread from Tunisia and Egypt to Spain, the United States, and many other countries, also witnessed the emergence of Occupy Wall Street–affiliated collectives (such as Occupy Museums and Arts & Labor) that advocated on behalf of unpaid interns in the arts and exerted pressure on Sotheby’s and the Frieze Art Fair for their use of non-unionized labor.

In my view there are at least three reasons for the uptick in acts of protest, refusal, withdrawal, and boycott among artists. First, as suggested above, artists have been inspired by the revolutions and occupations of 2011, as well as the many social movements presently responding to enduring conditions of injustice and inequality, from #BlackLivesMatter to #NoDAPL. Second, as arts institutions have increasingly embraced politically engaged art, the conflict between artists’ social commitments and the often troubling financial ties and complicities of the institutions supporting them has at times become untenable. Fairly or not, an artist who makes video-installations about climate change will face more public pressure than an abstract painter to ensure the museum exhibiting her work does not have climate-deniers like the Koch Brothers on its board, or rely on donations from BP or Exxon-Mobil. Third, the internet and in particular social media not only facilitate and publicize such pressure, but also connect distant localities imbricated in the same global networks of art and politics, making visible the commonality of struggles “here and elsewhere” and giving artists tools to raise awareness and organize campaigns transnationally.