Art and the Re-Invention of Political Protest Paper presented at the 3rd ECPR Conference, Budapest, 8 - 10 September 2005 By Simon Teune 1 Abstract The involvement of artists in social movements that can be witnessed today is just one aspect of the interconnection of arts and political activism. This paper traces the inspiration social movements have gained from artist practices. In western post-war societies the trends developed in the realm of arts have deeply influenced the reper- toire of action, social movements have adopted. In a broader sense it was the altered kind of expression visible in new forms of staging, performance art and alike that in- spired protesters to develop forms of action they considered to be more effective and appropriate to a modified understanding of politics. In the western world, happen- ings, street theatre, fakes and other disruptive forms of action have been incorpo- rated in the repertoire of protest by anti-authoritarian movements of the 1960s. To- day, these modes of contention are deployed by any social movement actor ranging from faith communities to right-wing organizations. The bearing central to this en- hancement of protest is a quasi-artistic relation to social reality. The cultural stock of shared symbols and meanings is regarded as material, disposable to re-invent com- mon interpretations of reality. The global justice movements challenging neo-liberal hegemony have been enforced by many artists. By the means of arts they have illus- trated the movements’ framing of reality and made their contribution to colourful and diverse protest events. But neither has the connection between artists and movements reached a new quality - as suggested by some observers - nor did artists enrich the action repertoire of global justice activism contributing new forms of con- tention. Introduction In current discussions about political activism the role of art is being stressed as an important support and addition (Amann 2005, Raunig 2003a). This is a reasonable assumption consid- ering the colourful and diverse manifestations of dissent that can be witnessed in the frame- work of the global justice movements. Still the connection of artists and political movements in an historical and more focussed context is worth examining. In this paper I will offer some tentative considerations about artists as pioneering predecessors of social movements. Artists’ theories and practices can be taken up by social movements. In this way the unique ap- proaches artists take to dissent might be introduced into a discourse shared by a broader pub- lic. The perspective I choose concentrates on movements’ repertoires of action. The set of 1 Research fellow at the Social Science Research Centre Berlin (WZB), research group Civil Society, Citi- zenship and Mobilisation; e-mail: teune@wz-berlin.de