A little while back, The Organizer made the rather controversial and unsettling statement that socially driven artwork is not helpful to the political campaigns they might indirectly relate to. I’m not backpedaling from that point, but I would like to extend the subtext of that post a little bit. The subtext was this: socially conscious work is only relevant as art, but art that is made as a part of and a contributor to a campaign and its actions really can help (you just have to compromise your work to an external objective if you want it to matter politically, which will inevitably make it less credible artistically).
If you want to make art (or creative work) that fits into a campaign, we could use you.
In fact, I’m going to get really real here for a minute, and I might just piss some people off. We could really use more artists who do a good job of communication to low-literacy communities.
We Organizers draw up a lot of fact sheets and text heavy fliers. It isn’t even that we lack the skills to make more visually driven fliers and handouts, necessarily. We don’t have the time for it, and it’s that simple. We all type fast so we type and we change some fonts and slap our logos on and run them to Kinko’s, you know?
Screenprinters, draughtsmen, graphics designers, comic artists — we could really use you guys in the movement. If you could help us make materials that we can give to people directly on the street that communications the issues in a less text heavy way, it could be very good.
There are good groups out there doing some nice work. The Indy Media effort is really growing by leaps and bounds. One of my favorite things that I see the Indy Media folks doing is making a lot more video. This is good in campaigns where you reach a lot of people who have breached the digital divde (and more and more folks are breaching it every day). They are making a lot of great YouTuble’able and Email’able videos.
Still, though, the best of organizing is still face to face and you don’t want to sit someone in front of computer screen during a first time housemeeting. We need more old media, 8.5″ X 11″, duplicatable media that we can just hand people. That grabs them or makes them laugh.
That’s the art that could really help the effort to organize people into larger campaigns that mean something.
It’s not that artists aren’t contributing now, but the Organizer sees most of them contributing to the political efforts with hipster cred. Efforts like the anti-war movement, vegetarianism, bicycling… all good stuff, all important stuff. I can’t remember the last time I saw an artist really getting involved in helping turn people out in a poor people’s campaign.
As an organizer of the poor and disenfranchised, the Organizer is going to argue to his friends in the arts community that we need you more here than the hipster causes do. We need you to help communicate the complex economic issues to the folks with the least education, to help them see the need to turnout and speakout against the force that degrade their neighborhoods.
The vegans and the bike couriers all have a copy of “The Beat Reader” in their shoulder bags, you know? Those efforts just don’t need your skills as badly as we do.
Find us. Help us communicate. If you come to the cause and plug your art directly into the campaign, you can help. You really can.
Sometimes solving a problem for low-income people is as easy as getting a story in the paper. You see a problem out there, you know it sort of sucks, you find some individual who’s been hurt by it and convince them to talk.
Then, if you’re really smart, you sit on it for a little while until an opportune time to get some political stuff covered arises. Any time after major legislative bodies (such as your state legislature or your local city council) have adjourned for a few weeks is good. You just don’t want to compete with fampus-people-news, so wait till the famous-people are on break.
Then you do a press conference. Press conferences are easy. Anyone who’s got a decent media list and a little know-how can pull one off in less than a week. You don’t even need to do much turnout. Four or five people holding signs is all the more they are likely to show in the photo anyway, so why bother turning out 50?
Even easier: if it’s a great personal story, offer a reporter an “exclusive.” The harm or foul play has to have happened recently and you may lose the essential demands of your campaign in the final piece – but if it’s a crazy enough story you can use it when you go after the relevant decisionmaker. Just promise them that your campaign is the one that reporters will link to the exclusive as you keep pushing the issue and that should do it. Decisionmakers can usually write the headlines in their heads themselves and assess the likelihood of it seeing print/air time. If they can imagine a lousy headline, they’ll listen.
The problem is that it’s almost too easy. It doesn’t take much leadership for an organization to do good press. If you come to rely on press to win your campaigns for you, you may win. You may win a lot. You can probably raise some good money off of it.
But press work is ultimately staff work. You’re not really going to develop leaders out of it (maybe you’ll develop a good speaker or two), and you won’t really serve your larger organizational mission to build the sort of social capitol in low-income communities that allows them to advocate for and defend themselves
against the predations of our economy.
