Positively Protest Aesthetics Revisited

The relationship between picturing and politicking has long been a concern of political movements, as well as of politically minded artists. And so both asked: how to make representations political without being caught up in the politics of representation? How to be politically “correct” in one’s production of images? These were, famously, the problems posed by Walter Benjamin’s essay on the artist as producer, a text that Hito Steyerl deliberately mirrors, if not quotes, in her polemical essay “The Articulation of Protest.” Her text also gained notoriety almost instantaneously when it was first published on the by-now-legendary republicart website shortly after the WTO protests in Seattle in 1999, an event—most crucially, one that was broadcasted through Indymedia—that became one of the two examples employed by Steyerl in her investigation of two terms: articulation and montage.1