THIRD TEXT Critical Perspectives on Contemporary Art and Culture July 2013 Reclaim The Streets! From Local to Global Party Protest Julia Ramírez Blanco If I can’t dance it’s not my revolution. 1 Over the years, we have become used to experiencing works of art instead of merely watching them. As spectators, we are asked to become participants in what are considered to be artistic ‘situations’. The institutional and academic worlds propose terms such as ‘relational art’ or ‘community art’. 2 A certain neo-situationist theoretical current introduces quotes of Guy Debord, Jean Baudrillard, Raoul Vaneigem and Michel de Certeau into the texts that deal with these practices. In considering these developments, Claire Bishop has spoken of a ‘social turn’ in contemporary art. However, in the introduction to her book Artificial Hells (2012), she states that this might actually be a return, and that such a return belongs to a certain tradition: From a Western European perspective, the social turn in contemporary art can be contextualized by two previous historical moments, both synonymous with political upheaval and movements for social change: the historic avant-garde in Europe circa 1917, and the so-called ‘neo’ avant-garde leading to 1968. The conspicuous resurgence of participatory art in the 1990s leads me to posit the fall of communism in 1989 as a third point of transformation. Triangulated, these three dates form a narrative of the triumph, heroic last stand and collapse of a collectivist vision of society. Each phase has been accompanied by a utopian rethinking of art’s relationship to the social and of its political potential – manifested in a reconsideration of the ways in which art is produced, consumed and debated. 3 As had happened with previous explosions of participation in the art field, the renewed interest in participation of the 1990s cannot be fully understood without looking at what was happening at the same time in the field of activism. During these years a variety of social movements – both existing and new – start to join forces in what, at the end of the decade, the press would call the anti-globalization movement. All political movements develop their own aesthetic strategies, and this new social agent explicitly reflects on its own visual forms from the beginning of the nineties. I want to introduce the idea that, in a sense, alongside the ‘social turn’ of art, there is also a certain ‘artistic’ or ‘creative turn’ of activism. Symbolic gestures, performative actions, visual language and aesthetic creativity have become a common trait of extra-parliamentary politics. Theorists such as Nina Felshin use the term ‘activist art’, 4 while others refer to ‘artivism’. 5 While it is certainly true that various artists and collectives show an ‘artistic’ consciousness in their activist practice, in most cases activists do not have an ‘artistic’ upbringing or dedication. So, if they are not artists, why do they behave as such? One explanation could be utilitarian: in a society where mass media play such an important role in the creation of meaning, activism becomes spectacular in order to reclaim attention. However, as important as this ‘media trigger’ might be, things are not so simple. Activists are also moved by their purely creative and utopian urges. In this sense, outsider art provides a useful framework for understanding the creativity of non-artists. I would like to introduce the concept of a tradition of protest aesthetics, where practices are not meant to be perceived as art, but nevertheless