From "street-action.net", January 2001

Art Is Activism

by Tilman Baumgärtel

Current mergers and confrontations between artists and activists often include heated debates on the value, use, productivity and meaning of each, as terms and as activities. The problem with naming and drawing lines clearly deliniating each activity is that it can specialize, isolate and make more digestable a diverse range of productive activities. It may be more useful to look at the name game itself as a performance piece or an activist's action that varies depending on where one is viewing the "work".

On the Internet and alongside this theater of naming, a new kind of street performance has emerged. One recent example is the on-line collective action responding to the City of Rome's banning of a series of web pages hosted by the The Thing, Rome, an Italian art server, this past October. In response to the censorship, which included the removal of a book by Luther Blisset and an interview with artist Francesca Da Rimini, AKA doll yoko, protest e-mails were sent to the Roman city officials. This action was followed by a number of public requests by renowned artists and critics to buy the in-boxes of the recipients of the protest mail, arguing that the actions constituted a body of net art worthy of archiving and collecting. Simultaneously, The Thing Rome announced a first international competition of Net.protest, NO PROTEST NO PROFIT, a call for collective net protest/action/art for which the winners would be awarded small prizes from an international panel of expert judges.