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This is an interactive work. You could enter the code into the computer and you could create a new body. You could change some parts of your body that you are not satisfied with. And you can imagine this new one could replace you socialize.

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For years, visual artist Ansley Adams created artwork that she liked but didn't love. Her graduate school thesis consisted of a series of 55 oil paintings that ranged from the size of a postage stamp to eight inches by 10 inches and depicted her empty living room - an expression of the loneliness and solitude she felt at the time. After that, she produced a collection of still life paintings of objects that carried a personal connection, such as an item given to her by a loved one who had passed away.

"I was passionate about both of them," Adams says of the aforementioned projects, "but when I finished both series, I didn't want to do it anymore. I reached a point where I was like, 'I'm done with this series. What's next?' I had no passion to continue working on it. It was like, I like it and I think it's important, but I'm not inspired to keep working on this."

And that was because deep down, Adams had known what she wanted her art to focus on: body positivity and body image. But they were personal, vulnerable subjects that she was reluctant to explore.

"I have always struggled with being body positive," Adams explains. "I have struggled with low self-esteem and really just being down on myself with my inability to be some body weight that I thought I should be. ... I have struggled with that and been very embarrassed by my weight and have been hesitant to draw attention to it also. So for a long time, I didn't make work that had anything to do with body positivity or body image at all."

But ultimately, the persistent creative frustration Adams felt - along with some encouragement from her husband - pushed her to produce the work that she would find most fulfilling, both artistically and personally. Adams' figurative paintings of women who are confident and comfortable in their own skin will be showcased in the exhibition Weightless, which opens this week at Tapp's Arts Center.

"Once I started making it, all these fears and all these things I thought I would feel ... started to go away," Adams says. "I started feeling empowered by it. I realized that the figures I was painting were beautiful and nothing to be embarrassed of. It changed my direction and my art but also my perception of myself."

The show's title, Adams says, was inspired by six of her paintings that portray women floating amidst assortments of flowers.

"I kind of realized this idea of them being weightless was kind of tied back to my ideas of the fact that your weight doesn't determine your beauty, and it doesn't matter if you're skinny or fat; you can still be beautiful," she offers. "It's not a determiner of your value. The idea of Weightless is it doesn't matter, and I can do anything ... and there's nothing holding me down, and I don't have to continue feeling bad about myself or feel worth less than other people because of my weight."

This concept is not only celebrated through the depiction of women's bodies but also in the floral imagery that is a constant symbolic presence in many of Adams' paintings. For each, she picked a dominant flower to include and then titled the work after the specific flower's meaning. New Beginnings, for example, features daffodils, spring flowers connected to rebirth and rejuvenation.

"Flowers are beautiful and all different, and they come up every spring, and they weather the storms," Adams says of her affinity for incorporating floral images. "But they keep coming back, and they come back stronger. I think that that's something women do as well."

Adams' outlook regarding weight and self-acceptance is one that has positively resonated with many who view her work.

"I get messages all the time on social media, and someone will be like, 'Oh my God, you painted me, and it's beautiful, and I never thought of myself as beautiful until I saw that painting.'" she says. "I get those messages a lot. I think it's been empowering for a lot of people to see women that look like them that's celebrating it."

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Ansley Adams' Evocative Art Trumpets Body Positivity

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For years, visual artist Ansley Adams created artwork that she liked but didn't love. Her graduate school thesis consisted of a series of 55 oil paintings that ranged from the size of a postage stamp to eight inches by 10 inches and depicted her empty living room - an expression of the loneliness and solitude she felt at the time.

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Artist: Ansley Adams

Since Ansley grew up and overweight, she has struggled with low self-esteem and a damaged sense of self-worth. Ansley felt embarrassed and disgusted with her body. Despite the fear, she still started the work of making body images, portraying fat women, and releasing her negative self-identification of "fat".

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When I was a young girl, the word "fat" was already a part of my identity. Along with this awareness that I was fat, was the shame and guilt at not being able to lose the weight, and a profound sense of fear and hopelessness that I would never have enough self-control or resolve to stick to a diet long enough to ever be beautiful. More than the extra pounds, these feelings of self-loathing, fear, and hopelessness weighed me down and affected almost every aspect of my life. When I finally decided that I was going to accept my body, and no longer allow myself to feel guilt or shame, I felt free! 'Weightless' is a depiction of the freedom and empowerment that comes from accepting and loving every inch of yourself. Instead of being weighed down by negative thoughts, I know now that women are fat OR skinny, young OR old, scarred OR smooth... AND we are beautiful, AND we are strong, AND we are powerful, AND we are fearless. We are WEIGHTLESS.

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When I was a young girl, the word "fat" was already a part of my identity. Along with this awareness that I was fat, was the shame and guilt at not being able to lose the weight, and a profound sense of fear and hopelessness that I would never have enough self-control or resolve to stick to a diet long enough to ever be beautiful.

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In order to achieve the beautiful image that the society considers, Jody feels a lot of pressure. Body shaming has always existed, and people have been fighting for body image. Therefore, she created this video to illustrate this struggle.

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This artist's unusual art shows the harsh realities of body image

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Jody Steel's body is her canvas, and her unusual work has resulted in a massive social media following. Her most recent piece, " Body Image," is meant to highlight the body-shaming issues people face. Story and editing by Alana Yzola

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“There’s a split between us and our bodies that happens when we body shame ourselves — ‘I’m against my body, I need to whip my body into shape, I need to change my body.’ And that is antithetical to a sense of well-being.”(Rocklin, 2020). I couldn't agree more with Rocklin, because we can't love ourselves until we have a sense of identity with our bodies.

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One tip for fighting negative self-talk is to make a list of all the things your body does for you. (iStock)

Katie Sturino says she spent 6 million hours wishing she could shrink herself and disappear, and approximately 850 years considering how much exercise she had to do to cancel out the calories she'd consumed. The estimates are tongue-in-cheek, of course, but they underscore her more serious point: What a waste of time.

"You pay so much money, then go on vacation - or take a day off and go to the beach - and spend it, what, hiding? Feeling uncomfortable and looking at yourself saying, 'Oh, I need to go to the gym more?' " said Sturino, author of " Body Talk," which published in May and is part memoir, part manual on body acceptance. "No! Go swimming."

Sturino started body shaming herself at a young age: She was voted "heaviest kid" in her class at age 5 and spent decades feeling like the biggest person in the room. Throughout her adult life, she worried that she wouldn't fit into her seat: at the movie theater, at tiny trendy restaurants, at the dentist or on an airplane. But in her 30s, she had a eureka moment: "My body is not the problem," she realized - a stunning concept after a lifetime of feeling like something was wrong with her, and that her size determined her worth.

Why do so many of us, like Sturino, engage in such negative self-talk? And what can we do about it, especially as we emerge from a global pandemic during which so many of us have put on weight?

Do you have questions about home improvement or homeownership?

Nina Savelle-Rocklin, a Los Angeles-based psychoanalyst who specializes in food, weight and body-image issues, says it's difficult for many Americans not to internalize the "pervasive sense that there's something wrong with you" given the near-constant stream of toxic messaging in our culture, much of which is tied to the multibillion-dollar weight-loss industry. Consider the obsession with "skinny" everything, including lattes; the focus on "beach-ready" bodies; the endlessly popular before-and-after diet photos. In June, for example, photos of the singer Camila Cabello at the beach went viral, with droves of social media users making spiteful comments about how she looked in a bikini. And on TikTok, thousands of "What I Eat in a Day" videos, often posted by thin young women, promote the idea that if you eat like them, you'll be able to look like them, even though genetically, we can't all achieve specific body types.

Self-shaming is a destructive mind-set, Savelle-Rocklin said. "There's a split between us and our bodies that happens when we body shame ourselves - 'I'm against my body, I need to whip my body into shape, I need to change my body.' And that is antithetical to a sense of well-being."

A. Janet Tomiyama, an associate professor of health psychology at the University of California at Los Angeles, said some medical ethicists think fat shaming can be used to motivate people to lose weight. The idea is that it provides a "kick in the pants" to exercise more and eat better - but her research shows the opposite is true. "We know that people who experience body shaming are at a much higher risk for both depression and anxiety disorders," she said. "It's easy to see how feeling bad about yourself could lead to more serious emotional troubles."

Self-shaming can start in young children, as Sturino's story illustrates, and persist through old age. Both men and women are susceptible, Tomiyama said. But if you inflict body shame on yourself, there is hope. "It's never too late" to start overcoming your shame, or too early to start working toward body acceptance, Sturino said.

Here are tips on how to start the process.

Cultivate curiosity and compassion. The next time you start criticizing yourself, "take a split-second pause, step back and ask yourself where it's coming from," said Jenny Weinar, a Philadelphia-based licensed clinical social worker and therapist who specializes in disordered eating and body image. Whose voice are you hearing? "That voice could be someone specific in your life, like a caregiver or partner, or it could just be the male gaze or patriarchy," she said. "But starting to put that distance between ourselves and the voice helps us recognize that, okay, that's not me, that's something I learned - and if I can learn it, I can unlearn it."

Another emotion to work on, Weinar said, is compassion: Even when her clients are in the process of unlearning their shaming tendencies, they often feel extra bad about their bodies. "Channeling that super compassionate voice that we needed at some point in the past can be really powerful," she said.

Write down everything your body does for you. Ragen Chastain, a Los Angeles-based fat activist who holds the Guinness World Record for heaviest woman to complete a marathon, spent a long time feeling angry at her body for not looking like a Photoshopped image on the Internet. Then, she realized she hadn't spent a minute being grateful for its powers. "I just listed off everything I could think of that my body did for me," she said. "On a granular level, even breathing and blinking and waste management, but also smiling or hugging."

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Going forward, every time she experienced a negative thought about her body, she replaced it with something from her gratitude list. If she started to spiral into shame, she'd quickly correct herself: " 'No, actually, thank you for breathing, because you're knocking that out of the park, and I really appreciate it,' " she said. "It sounds super hokey, but in a period of months it fundamentally changed my relationship with my body."

Say "nope." One of Sturino's favorite ways to combat body shaming is to simply yell "nope!" inside her brain. If, for example, you're standing in front of the mirror bemoaning the too-big hips that are "ruining" your life, cut that thought off with a big "nope" instead. "It's all about stopping that continued negative dialogue so that you can break the habit," said Sturino, who hosts the Boob Sweat podcast. She's also the founder of Megababe, a skin care line devoted to solving problems she was once embarrassed about, such as thigh chafe.

Fight back against fat stigma. Chastain recalls realizing that she had spent decades fighting her body on behalf of fat phobia. She decided that instead, she was going to fight weight stigma on behalf of her body. "Fat phobia is real," she said. "This is not in our heads. We are living in a world that says a thinner body is a better body."

Tell us about the hardest parts of life after social distancing

In addition to not body shaming yourself or anyone else, ask yourself what assumptions you make about fat people - and then dismantle those beliefs. Think carefully about what language you use; for example, "good" and "bad" moralize food. Other ways to fight fat phobia include no longer supporting media that run headlines about the worst bikini bodies or dole out harmful weight-loss content. Boycott companies that peddle "detox" products, and don't buy clothes from shops that exclusively use rail-thin mannequins. Consider getting involved with the Health At Every Size movement, which promotes weight neutrality. "Understand that [diet] culture is toxic, and stop participating in it," Chastain said.

Clean out your closet. Sturino had what she calls a "failure dress" - a very expensive garment that barely zipped. She kept it for a long time, hoping she would eventually fit into it, because we often nurture "the expectation that our current body is a temporary body," she said. But every time you see something that doesn't fit you anymore in your closet, it can make you think, "I need to lose weight, I need to go on a diet." Instead, donate the clothing that no longer fits you, and fill your closet with selections you love that fit you in your current size, Sturino suggested.

Consider getting support from a therapist. Some people can overcome body shame on their own; others need to work with a professional (there are therapists who specialize in body image issues). People who underwent trauma that contributed to their body shame - which can include growing up in a larger body or being put on a diet as a child - often benefit from the structure and support of therapy, Weinar said, because such experiences "can have lasting effects on someone's sense of safety and acceptability in their body." Other people simply get stuck in their journey to body acceptance, and having dedicated time and space to address it can be useful.

Treat yourself like you would treat another person. The next time you lash out at your stomach, arms or legs, ask yourself: "Would I ever say that out loud to another person?" As Cindy Bulik, founding director of the University of North Carolina Center of Excellence for Eating Disorders, put it: "Would you ever go up to another person and say, 'You're so fat,' or 'Your arms are so flabby'?" Most likely, she said, "you're infinitely more rude to yourself than you ever would be to another person."

Angela Haupt is a freelance writer and editor. Follow her on Twitter @angelahaupt.

Updated February 12, 2021

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Body shaming yourself: How to fight the 'pervasive sense that there's something wrong with you'

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Katie Sturino says she spent 6 million hours wishing she could shrink herself and disappear, and approximately 850 years considering how much exercise she had to do to cancel out the calories she'd consumed. The estimates are tongue-in-cheek, of course, but they underscore her more serious point: What a waste of time.

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It was exactly what I had been hoping for because it is emotional and clear. If I had given myself more time, I could have made more notes of my presentation to make it more specific. The next time I do this activity, I will use more link words and body language.

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Today I was working on the photography of the migrant mother and I tried 6 times to finish it. About the first picture I took, unfortunately, I didn’t achieve what I set out to because of the unpersuasive composition—the oldest daughter doesn’t notice camera and mother turns away, defensive. To deal with this problem, I talked to them and rearranged them then took the second picture. However, the results weren’t what I was expecting, because the eldest daughter in foreground gave impression of lack of family planning and contradicts narrative required in brief. To achieve a better result, the third picture I need to cut the daughter out and use image of breast feeding, playing off religion. Nonetheless, it didn’t turn out the way I hoped, because the picture is too extreme for viewers at that time and made the mother uncomfortable. At that time I can see that the mother was the key to the scene. Therefore, I alter the angle and ask one of the children to come back in in my forth picture. But I still felt quite disappointed with the outcome, because the older child looks awkward and post is blocking baby’s head. Consequently, I took the fifth picture and it was exactly what I had been hoping for because it is symbolic of family’s struggle and nomadic lifestyle. Finally, I took my last picture where the children’s faces turned behind mother’s shoulders and mother is main focus and I had mother put her hand on chin.  For me, I felt it was successful as a result of the process of  trying again and again. I enjoyed the process of learning how to take a perfect picture because I really got a lot.

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By: Sizuo Chen
Ins: dahepangbian

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I wanted to know the trigger for Guerrilla Girls decide to start to fight sexism and racism. Now I understand that it is because they discovered that there are only a few women in the art world. It seemed like only white men have access to art. Afterwards, Guerrilla Girls fought for the women and minority groups.

By understanding Guerrilla Girls, I realize that sometimes discrimination is right in front of people, but they don't see it. We couldn’t accept what we see at institutions, and we have to think more about that and make fun of the unfair system.

I am interested in researching some artworks about feminism. And I wish we could share the artworks.

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Who are they?

Guerrilla Girls are an all female collective who remain anonymous by wearing gorilla masks and naming themselves after famous dead women. In 1998 the Guerrilla Girls' new book, The Guerrilla Girls' Bedside Companion to the History of Western Art, they wrote:

We are a group of women artists and art professionals who fight discrimination. We're the conscience of the art world, counterparts to the mostly male traditions of anonymous do-gooders like Robin Hood, Batman, and the Lone Ranger. We have produced over 80 posters, printed projects, and actions that expose sexism and racism in the art world and culture at large... We use humor to prove that feminists can be funny... We could be anyone; we are everywhere.

How did they form?

The group famously began in reaction to MoMA's An International Survey of Recent Painting and Sculpture 1984 exhibition. Although the exhibition was supposed to represent the top artists in the world, out of the 169 artists shown only 13 were women. To add insult to injury the curator, Kynaston McShine, stated in interviews that "any artist who wasn't in the show should rethink 'his' career."

A group of artists protested outside on the opening night. However, they noticed the onlookers weren't interested in their message, so a year later Guerrilla Girls formed with the aim of finding new ways to revolt using street art.

Why show in the places they attack?

Although Guerrilla Girls began as an activist group, they have gradually been embraced by the artworld and have shown their work in galleries such as MoMa and Tate Modern. This is how they reconcile their popularity with their work:

What do you do when the art world you've spent your whole life attacking suddenly embraces you? Well... you take your critique right inside the joint. We dissed MoMA at its own symposium on feminism. We criticized the Tate Modern and the Istanbul Modern.... The response? After we made fun of the National Gallery of Art, they vowed to change their ways. Ditto the Tate Modern and MoMA.
Guerilla Girls, Interview magazine

What are their key works?

The original of Do Women Have to Be Naked to Get Into the Met. Museum? was produced in 1989 after members of the group walked through the Met and counted the ratio of female artists to female nudes. What they discovered was that 'less than 5% of the artists in the Modern Art Sections are women, but 85% of the nudes are female'.

The figure in the image is taken from Odalisque and Slave painted by Jean-Auguste-Dominique Ingres. In order to reach their audience, the group rented advertising space on the New York buses. However, soon after 'the bus company cancelled [their] lease, saying that the image ... was too suggestive and that the figure appeared to have more than a fan in her hand.'

Guerrilla Girls' 1986 Report Card lists 17 Galleries, comparing the figures of female artists exhibited between 1985-6 and 1986-7 in their recognisably bold monochrome style. This poster, and others from their portfolio Guerrilla Girls Talk Back, borrow elements from advertising and fly-posting. Many of these posters were pasted up on New York's streets at night, following in the tradition of street-artists and activists.

Another motif used by the Guerrilla Girls, is this girly handwritten letter, Dearest Art Collector 1986. The pink paper and sad faced flower appear only to enhance their sarcasm. They have used this template for other public letters, most of which sign off with 'We know that you feel terrible about this and will rectify the situation immediately'. As usual the joke is on the art collector.

What the critics say ...

The posters were rude; they named names and they printed statistics. They embarrassed people. In other words, they worked
Susan Tallman, Arts Magazine

...waging what they call cultural warfare...where the main ammunition is wit
CNN

Kick-ass
Walter Robinson, Artnet Magazine

Guerilla Girls in quotes ...

We don't need money. We just need bananas
Kollwitz, The Independent

Artists should stop making art only for the one percent and start making some art for the rest of us
Interview Magazine

How can you really tell the story of a culture when you don't include all the voices within the culture?
Kahlo, NY Times

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Who are Guerrilla Girls? A brief look at the activist female artists who are changing the world one poster at a time.

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Write a definition of art activism in your own words that covers all possible meanings.
Change the world through art by combining art with activism.

Create examples to illustrate these meaning

Some photography works that remind us of protecting the environment like Zaria Forman's works.

And some works of art that reflect social realities.

Research
Art activists try to change living conditions in economically underdeveloped areas, raise ecological concerns, offer access to culture and education for the populations of poor countries and regions, attract attention to the plight of illegal immigrants, improve the conditions of people working in art institutions, and so forth.

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Current discussions about art are very much centered on the question of art activism-that is, on the ability of art to function as an arena and medium for political protest and social activism. The phenomenon of art activism is central to our time because it is a new phenomenon-quite different from the phenomenon of critical art that became familiar to us during recent decades. Art activists do not want to merely criticize the art system or the general political and social conditions under which this system functions. Rather, they want to change these conditions by means of art-not so much inside the art system but outside it, in reality itself. Art activists try to change living conditions in economically underdeveloped areas, raise ecological concerns, offer access to culture and education for the populations of poor countries and regions, attract attention to the plight of illegal immigrants, improve the conditions of people working in art institutions, and so forth. In other words, art activists react to the increasing collapse of the modern social state and try to replace the social state and the NGOs that for different reasons cannot or will not fulfill their role. Art activists do want to be useful, to change the world, to make the world a better place-but at the same time, they do not want to cease being artists. And this is the point where theoretical, political, and even purely practical problems arise.

Art activism's attempts to combine art and social action come under attack from both of these opposite perspectives-traditionally artistic and traditionally activist ones. Traditional artistic criticism operates according to the notion of artistic quality. From this point of view, art activism seems to be artistically not good enough: many critics say that the morally good intentions of art activism substitute for artistic quality. This kind of criticism is, actually, easy to reject. In the twentieth century, all criteria of quality and taste were abolished by different artistic avant-gardes-so, today, it makes no sense to appeal to them again. However, criticism from the other side is much more serious and demands an elaborate critical answer. This criticism mainly operates according to notions of "aestheticization" and "spectacularity." A certain intellectual tradition rooted in the writings of Walter Benjamin and Guy Debord states that the aestheticization and spectacularization of politics, including political protest, are bad things because they divert attention away from the practical goals of political protest and towards its aesthetic form. And this means that art cannot be used as a medium of a genuine political protest-because the use of art for political action necessarily aestheticizes this action, turns this action into a spectacle and, thus, neutralizes the practical effect of this action. As an example, it is enough to remember the recent Berlin Biennale curated by Artur Żmijewski and the criticism it provoked-described as it was by different ideological sides as a zoo for art activists.

In other words, the art component of art activism is often seen as the main reason why this activism fails on the pragmatic, practical level-on the level of its immediate social and political impact. In our society, art is traditionally seen as useless. So it seems that this quasi-ontological uselessness infects art activism and dooms it to failure. At the same time, art is seen as ultimately celebrating and aestheticizing the status quo-and thus undermining our will to change it. So the way out of this situation is seen mostly in the abandoning of art altogether-as if social and political activism never fails as long as it is not infected by art viruses.

The critique of art as useless and therefore morally and politically bad is not a new one. In the past, this critique compelled many artists to abandon art altogether-and to start to practice something more useful, something morally and politically correct. However, contemporary art activism does not rush to abandon art but, rather, tries to make art itself useful. This is a historically new position. Its newness is often relativized by a reference to the phenomenon of the Russian avant-garde, which famously wanted to change the world by artistic means. It seems to me that this reference is incorrect. The Russian avant-garde artists of the 1920s believed in their ability to change the world because at the time their artistic practice was supported by Soviet authorities. They knew that power was on their side. And they hoped that this support would not decrease with time. Contemporary art activism has, on the contrary, no reason to believe in external political support. Art activism acts on its own-relying only on its own networks and on weak and uncertain financial support from progressively minded art institutions. This is, as I said, a new situation-and it calls for new theoretical reflection.

The central goal of this theoretical reflection is this: to analyze the precise meaning and political function of the word "aestheticization." I believe that such an analysis allows us to clarify the discussions around art activism and the place where it stands and acts. I would argue that today, the word "aestheticization" is mostly used in a confused and confusing way. When one speaks about "aestheticization," one often refers to different and even opposing theoretical and political operations. The reason for this state of confusion is the division of contemporary art practice itself into two different domains: art in the proper sense of the word, and design. In these two domains, aestheticization means two different things. Let us analyze this difference.

Aestheticization as Revolution

In the domain of design, the aestheticization of certain technical tools, commodities, or events involves an attempt to make them more attractive, seductive, and appealing to the user. Here aestheticization does not prevent the use of an aestheticized, designed object-on the contrary, it has the goal of enhancing and spreading this use by making it more agreeable. In this sense, we should see the whole art of the premodern past as, actually, not art but design. Indeed, the ancient Greeks spoke about " techne "-not differentiating between art and technology. If one looks at the art of ancient China, one finds well-designed tools for religious ceremonies and well-designed everyday objects used by court functionaries and intellectuals. The same can be said about the art of ancient Egypt and the Inca Empire: it is not art in the modern sense of the word, but design. And the same can be said about the art of the Old Regimes of Europe before the French Revolution-here we also find only religious design, or the design of power and wealth. Under contemporary conditions, design became omnipresent. Almost everything that we use is professionally designed to make it more attractive for the user. It is what we mean when we talk about a well-designed commodity: it is "a real work of art," as we say about an iPhone, a beautiful airplane, and so forth.

The same can also be said about politics. We are living in a time of political design, of professional image making. When one speaks, for example, about the aestheticization of politics in reference to, let say, Nazi Germany, then one often means aestheticization as design-as an attempt to make the Nazi movement more attractive, more seductive. One thinks about the black uniforms, nightly fakelzüge, and so forth. Here it is important to see that this understanding of aestheticization as design has nothing to do with the notion of aestheticization as it was used by Walter Benjamin, as he was speaking about fascism as the aestheticization of politics. This other notion of aestheticization has its origin not in design but in modern art.

Indeed, artistic aestheticization does not refer to an attempt to make the functioning of a certain technical tool more attractive for the user. On the contrary, artistic aestheticization means the defunctionalization of this tool, the violent annulation of its practical applicability and efficiency. Our contemporary notion of art and art aestheticization has its roots in the French Revolution-in the decisions that were made by the French revolutionary government concerning the objects that this government inherited from the Old Regime. A change of regime-especially a radical change such as the one introduced by the French Revolution-is usually accompanied by a wave of iconoclasm. One could follow these waves in the cases of Protestantism, the Spanish conquest of the Americas, or the fall of the Socialist regimes in Eastern Europe. The French revolutionaries took a different course: instead of destroying the sacred and profane objects belonging to the Old Regime, they defunctionalized, or, in other words, aestheticized them. The French Revolution turned the design of the Old Regime into what we today call art, i.e., objects not of use but of pure contemplation. This violent, revolutionary act of aestheticizing the Old Regime created art as we know it today. Before the French Revolution, there was no art-only design. After the French Revolution, art emerged-as the death of design.

The revolutionary origin of aesthetics was conceptualized by Immanuel Kant in his Critique of the Power of Judgment. Near the beginning of this text, Kant makes clear its political context. He writes:

If someone asks me whether I find the palace that I see before me beautiful, I may well say that I do not like that sort of thing ... ; in true Rousseauesque style I might even vilify the vanity of the great who waste the sweat of the people on such superfluous things ... All of this might be conceded to me and approved; but that is not what is at issue here ... One must not be in the least biased in favor of the existence of the thing, but must be entirely indifferent in this respect in order to play the judge in the matter of taste.

Kant is not interested in the existence of a palace as a representation of wealth and power. However, he is ready to accept the palace as aestheticized, that is, negated, made nonexistent for all practical purposes-reduced to pure form. Here the inevitable question arises: What should one say about the decision by the French revolutionaries to substitute the aesthetic defunctionalization of the Old Regime for total iconoclastic destruction? And: Is the theoretical legitimation of this aesthetic defunctionalization that was proposed almost simultaneously by Kant a sign of the cultural weakness of the European bourgeoisie? Maybe it would be better to completely destroy the corpse of the Old Regime instead of exhibiting this corpse as art-as an object of pure aesthetic contemplation. I would argue that aestheticization is a much more radical form of death that traditional iconoclasm.

Already during the nineteenth century, museums were often compared to cemeteries, and museum curators to gravediggers. However, the museum is much more of a cemetery than any real cemetery. Real cemeteries do not expose the corpses of the dead; they conceal them. This is also true for the Egyptian pyramids. By concealing the corpses, cemeteries create an obscure, hidden space of mystery and thus suggest the possibility of resurrection. We have all read about ghosts, vampires leaving their graves, and other undead creatures wandering around cemeteries at night. We have also seen movies about a night in the museum: when nobody is looking, the dead bodies of the artworks come to life. However, the museum in the daylight is a place of definitive death that allows no resurrection, no return of the past. The museum institutionalizes the truly radical, atheistic, revolutionary violence that demonstrates the past as incurably dead. It is a purely materialistic death without return-the aestheticized material corpse functions as a testimony to the impossibility of resurrection. (Actually, this is why Stalin insisted so much on permanently exhibiting the dead Lenin's body to the public. Lenin's Mausoleum is a visible guarantee that Lenin and Leninism are truly dead. That is also why the current leaders of Russia do not hurry to bury Lenin-contrary to the appeals made by many Russians to do so. They do not want the return of Leninism, which would become possible if Lenin were buried.)

Thus, since the French Revolution, art has been understood as the defunctionalized and publicly exhibited corpse of the past. This understanding of art determined postrevolutionary art strategies-until now. In an art context, to aestheticize the things of the present means to discover their dysfunctional, absurd, unworkable character-everything that makes them nonusable, inefficient, obsolete. To aestheticize the present means to turn it into the dead past. In other words, artistic aestheticization is the opposite of aestheticization by means of design. The goal of design is to aesthetically improve the status quo-to make it more attractive. Art also accepts the status quo-but it accepts it as a corpse, after its transformation into a mere representation. In this sense, art sees contemporaneity not merely from the revolutionary, but rather, the postrevolutionary perspective. One can say: modern and contemporary art sees modernity and contemporaneity as the French revolutionaries saw the design of the Old Regime-as already obsolete, reducible to pure form, already a corpse.

Aestheticizing Modernity

Actually, this is especially true of the artists of the avant-garde, who are often mistakenly interpreted as being heralds of a new technological world-as ushering in the avant-garde of technological progress. Nothing is further from the historical truth. Of course, the artists of the historical avant-garde were interested in technological, industrialized modernity. However, they were interested in technological modernity only with the goal of aestheticizing modernity, defunctionalizing it, to reveal the ideology of progress as phantasmal and absurd. When one speaks about the avant-garde in its relationship to technology, one usually has a specific historical figure in mind: Filippo Tommaso Marinetti and his "Futurist Manifesto" that was published on the front page of the newspaper Figaro in 1909. The text condemned the "passéistic" cultural taste of the bourgeoisie and celebrated the beauty of the new industrial civilization ("a roaring motor car which seems to run on machine-gun fire is more beautiful than the Winged Victory of Samothrace"), glorified war as the "hygiene of the world," and wished "to destroy museums, libraries, and academies of any sort." The identification with the ideology of progress seems here to be complete. However, Marinetti did not publish the text of the "Futurist Manifesto" isolated, but included it inside a story that begins with a description of how he interrupted a long nightly conversation with his friends about poetry by calling them to stand up and drive far away in a speedy car. And so they did. Marinetti writes: "And we, like young lions, chased after Death ... Nothing at all worth dying for, other than the desire to divest ourselves finally of the courage that weighed us down." And the divestment took place. Marinetti describes the nocturnal ride further: "How ridiculous! What a nuisance! ... I braked hard and to my disgust the wheels left the ground and I flew into a ditch. O mother of a ditch, brimful with muddy water! ... How I relished your strength-giving sludge that reminded me so much of the saintly black breasts of my Sudanese nurse."

I will not dwell too long on this figure of the return to the mother's womb and to the nurse's breasts after a frenetic ride in a car towards death-it is all sufficiently obvious. It is enough to say that Marinetti and his friends were hoisted out of the ditch by a group of fishermen and, as he writes, "some gouty old naturalists"-that is, by the same passéists against which the manifesto is directed. Thus, the manifesto opens with a description of the failure of its own program. And so it is no wonder that the text fragment that follows the manifesto repeats the figure of defeat. Following the logic of progress, Marinetti envisions the coming of a new generation for which he and his friends will appear, in their turn, as the hated passéists that should be destroyed. But he writes that when the agents of this coming generation try to destroy him and his friends, they will find them "on a winter's night, in a humble shed, far away in the country, with an incessant rain drumming upon it, and they'll see us huddling anxiously together ... warming our hands around the flickering flames of our present-day books."

This passages show that for Marinetti, to aestheticize technologically driven modernity does not mean to glorify it or try to improve it, to make it more efficient by means of better design. On the contrary, from the beginning of his artistic career Marinetti looked at modernity in retrospect, as if it had already collapsed, as if it had already become a thing of the past-imagining himself in the ditch of History, or at best sitting in the countryside under incessant post-apocalyptic rain. And in this retrospective view, technologically driven, progress-oriented modernity looks like a total catastrophe. It is hardly an optimistic perspective. Marinetti envisions the failure of his own project-but he understands this failure as a failure of progress itself, which leaves behind only debris, ruins, and personal catastrophes.

I have quoted Marinetti at some length because it is precisely Marinetti whom Benjamin calls as the crucial witness when, in the afterword to his famous essay about "The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction," Benjamin formulates his critique of the aestheticization of politics as the fascist undertaking par excellence-the critique that still weighs heavily on any attempt to bring art and politics together. To make his point, Benjamin cites a later text by Marinetti on the Ethiopian War in which Marinetti draws parallels between modern war operations and the poetic and artistic operations used by Futurist artists. In this text, Marinetti famously speaks about "the metallization of the human body." "Metallization" here has only one meaning: the death of the body and its turning into a corpse, understood as an art object. Benjamin interprets this text as a declaration of war by art against life, and summarizes the fascist political program with these words: "Fiat art-pereas mundi" (Let there be art-let the world perish.) And Benjamin writes further that fascism is the fulfillment of the l'art pour l'art movement.

Of course, Benjamin's analysis of Marinetti's rhetoric is correct. But there is still one crucial question here: How reliable is Marinetti as a witness? Marinetti's fascism is an already aestheticized fascism-fascism understood as a heroic acceptance of defeat and death. Or as pure form-a pure representation that a writer has of fascism when this writer is sitting alone under an incessant rain. The real fascism wanted, of course, not defeat but victory. Actually, in the late 1920s and 1930s, Marinetti became less and less influential in the Italian fascist movement, which practiced precisely not the aestheticization of politics but the politicization of aesthetics by using Novecento and Neoclassicism and, yes, also Futurism for its political goals-or, we can say, for its political design.

In his essay, Benjamin opposes the fascist aestheticization of politics to the Communist politicization of aesthetics. However, in Russian and Soviet art of the time, the lines were drawn in a much more complicated way. We speak today of the Russian avant-garde, but the Russian artists and poets of that time spoke about Russian Futurism-and then Suprematism and Constructivism. In these movements we find the same phenomenon of the aestheticization of Soviet Communism. Already in his text "On the Museum" (1919), Kazimir Malevich not only calls upon his comrades to burn the art heritage of previous epochs, but also to accept the fact that "everything that we do is done for the crematorium." In the same year, in his text "God is Not Cast Down," Malevich argues that to achieve the perfect material conditions of human existence, as the Communists planned, is as impossible as achieving the perfection of the human soul, as the Church previously wanted. The founder of Soviet Constructivism, Vladimir Tatlin, built a model of his famous Monument to the Third International that was supposed to rotate but could not, and later, a plane that could not fly (the so-called Letatlin). Here again, Soviet Communism was aestheticized from the perspective of its historical failure, of its coming death. And again in the Soviet Union, the aestheticization of politics was turned later into the politicization of aesthetics-that is, into the use of aesthetics for political goals, as political design.

I do not want, of course, to say that there is no difference between fascism and Communism-this difference is immense and decisive. I only want to say that the opposition between fascism and Communism does not coincide with the difference between the aestheticization of politics rooted in modern art and the politicization of aesthetics rooted in political design.

I hope that the political function of these two divergent and even contradictory notions of aestheticization-artistic aestheticization and design aestheticization-has now became more clear. Design wants to change reality, the status quo-it wants to improve reality, to make it more attractive, better to use. Art seems to accept reality as it is, to accept the status quo. But art accepts the status quo as dysfunctional, as already failed-that is, from the revolutionary, or even postrevolutionary, perspective. Contemporary art puts our contemporaneity into art museums because it does not believe in the stability of the present conditions of our existence-to such a degree that contemporary art does not even try to improve these conditions. By defunctionalizing the status quo, art prefigures its coming revolutionary overturn. Or a new global war. Or a new global catastrophe. In any case, an event that will make the entirety of contemporary culture, including all its aspirations and projections, obsolete-as the French Revolution made all the aspirations, intellectual projections, and utopias of the Old Regime obsolete.

Contemporary art activism is the heir of these two contradictory traditions of aestheticization. On the one hand, art activism politicizes art, uses art as political design-that is, as a tool in the political struggles of our time. This use is completely legitimate-and any critique of this use would be absurd. Design is an integral part of our culture, and it would make no sense to forbid its use by politically oppositional movements under the pretext that this use leads to the spectacularization, the theatralization of political protest. After all, there is a good theater and bad theater.

But art activism cannot escape a much more radical, revolutionary tradition of the aestheticization of politics-the acceptance of one's own failure, understood as a premonition and prefiguration of the coming failure of the status quo in its totality, leaving no room for its possible improvement or correction. The fact that contemporary art activism is caught in this contradiction is a good thing. First of all, only self-contradictory practices are true in a deeper sense of the word. And secondly, in our contemporary world, only art indicates the possibility of revolution as a radical change beyond the horizon of our present desires and expectations.

Aestheticization and the U-Turn

Thus, modern and contemporary art allows us to look at the historical period in which we live from the perspective of its end. The figure of Angelus Novus as described by Benjamin relies on the technique of artistic aestheticization as it was practiced by postrevolutionary European art. Here we have the classical description of philosophical metanoia, of the reversal of the gaze -Angelus Novus turns his back towards the future and looks back on the past and present. He still moves into the future-but backwards. Philosophy is impossible without this kind of metanoia, without this reversal of the gaze. Accordingly, the central philosophical question was and still is: How is philosophical metanoia possible? How does the philosopher turn his gaze from the future to the past and adopt a reflective, truly philosophical attitude towards the world? In older times, the answer was given by religion: God (or gods) were believed to open to the human spirit the possibility of leaving the physical world-and looking back on it from a metaphysical position. Later, the opportunity for metanoia was offered by Hegelian philosophy: one could look back if one happened to be present at the end of history-at the moment when the further progress of the human Spirit became impossible. In our postmetaphysical age, the answer has been formulated mostly in vitalistic terms: one turns back if one reaches the limits of one's own strength (Nietzsche), if one's desire is repressed (Freud), or if one experiences the fear of death or the extreme boredom of existence (Heidegger).

But there is no indication of such a personal, existential turning point in Benjamin's text-only a reference to modern art, to an image by Klee. Benjamin's Angelus Novus turns his back to the future simply because he knows how to do it. He knows because he learned this technique from modern art-also from Marinetti. Today, the philosopher does not need any subjective turning point, any real event, any meeting with death or with something or somebody radically other. After the French Revolution, art developed techniques for defunctionalizing the status quo that were aptly described by the Russian Formalists as "reduction," the "zero device," and "defamiliarization." In our time, the philosopher has only to take a look at modern art, and he or she will know what to do. And this is precisely what Benjamin did. Art teaches us how to practice metanoia, a U-turn on the road towards the future, on the road of progress. Not coincidentally, when Malevich gave a copy of one of his own books to poet Daniil Kharms, he inscribed it as follows: "Go and stop progress."

And philosophy can learn not only horizontal metanoia-the U-turn on the road of progress-but also vertical metanoia: the reversal of upward mobility. In the Christian tradition, this reversal had the name " kenosis." In this sense, modern and contemporary art practice can be called kenotic.

Indeed, traditionally, we associate art with a movement towards perfection. The artist is supposed to be creative. And to be creative means, of course, to bring into the world not only something new, but also something better-better functioning, better looking, more attractive. All these expectations make sense-but as I have already said, in today's world, all of them are related to design and not to art. Modern and contemporary art wants to make things not better but worse-and not relatively worse but radically worse: to make dysfunctional things out of functional things, to betray expectations, to reveal the invisible presence of death where we tend to see only life.

This is why modern and contemporary art is not popular. It is not popular precisely because art goes against the normal way things are supposed to go. We are all aware of the fact that our civilization is based on inequality, but we tend to think that this inequality should be corrected by upward mobility-by letting people realize their talents, their gifts. In other words, we are ready to protest against the inequality dictated by the existing systems of power-but at the same time, we are ready to accept the notion of the unequal distribution of natural gifts and talents. However, it is obvious that the belief in natural gifts and creativity is the worst form of social Darwinism, biologism, and, actually, neoliberalism, with its notion of human capital. In his lectures on the "birth of biopolitics," Michel Foucault stresses that the neoliberal concept of human capital has a utopian dimension-and constitutes, in fact, the utopian horizon of contemporary capitalism.

As Foucault shows, the human being ceases here to be seen merely as labor power sold on the capitalist market. Instead, the individual becomes an owner of a nonalienated set of qualities, capabilities, and skills that are partially hereditary and innate, and partially produced by education and care-primarily from one's own parents. In other words, we are speaking here about an original investment made by nature itself. The world "talent" expresses this relationship between nature and investment well enough-talent being a gift from nature and at the same time a certain sum of money. Here the utopian dimension of the neoliberal notion of human capital becomes clear enough. Participation in the economy loses its character of alienated and alienating work. The human being becomes a value in itself. And even more importantly, the notion of human capital, as Foucault shows, erases the opposition between consumer and producer-the opposition that risks tearing apart the human being under the standard conditions of capitalism. Foucault indicates that in terms of human capital, the consumer becomes a producer. The consumer produces his or her own satisfaction. And in this way, the consumer lets his or her human capital grow.

At the beginning of the 1970s, Joseph Beuys was inspired by the idea of human capital. In his famous Achberger Lectures that were published under the title Art=Capital ( Kunst=Kapital), he argues that every economic activity should be understood as creative practice-so that everybody becomes an artist. Then the expanded notion of art ( erweiterter Kunstbegriff) will coincide with the expanded notion of economy ( erweiterter Oekonomiebegriff). Here Beuys tries to overcome the inequality that for him is symbolized by the difference between creative, artistic work and noncreative, alienated work. To say that everybody is an artist means for Beuys to introduce universal equality by means of the mobilization of those aspects and components of everyone's human capital that remain hidden and inactive under standard market conditions. However, during the discussions that followed the lectures, it became clear that the attempt by Beuys to base social and economic equality on equality between artistic and nonartistic activity does not really function. The reason for this is simple: according to Beuys, a human being is creative because nature gave him/her the initial human capital-precisely the capacity to be creative. So art practice remains dependent on nature-and, thus, on the unequal distribution of natural gifts.

However, many leftist and Socialist theoreticians remained under the spell of the idea of upward mobility-be it individual or collective. This can be illustrated by a famous quote from the end of Leon Trotsky's book Revolution and Literature:

Social construction and psychophysical self-education will become two aspects of the same process. All the arts-literature, drama, painting, music, and architecture will lend this process beautiful form ... Man will become immeasurably stronger, wiser, and subtler; his body will become more harmonized, his movement more rhythmic, his voice more musical ... The average human type will rise to the heights of an Aristotle, a Goethe, or a Marx. And above this ridge new peaks will rise.

It is this artistic, social, and political alpinism-in its bourgeois and Socialist forms-from which modern and contemporary art tries to save us. Modern art is made against the natural gift. It does not develop "human potential" but annuls it. It operates not by expansion but by reduction. Indeed, a genuine political transformation cannot be achieved according to the same logic of talent, effort, and competition on which the current market economy is based, but only by metanoia and kenosis -by a U-turn against the movement of progress, a U-turn against the pressure of upward mobility. Only in this way can we escape the pressure of our own gifts and talents, which enslaves and exhausts us by pushing us to climb one mountain after another. Only if we learn to aestheticize the lack of gifts as well as the presence of gifts, and thus not differentiate between victory and failure, do we escape the theoretical blockage that endangers contemporary art activism.

There is no doubt that we are living in a time of total aestheticization. This fact is often interpreted as a sign that we have reached a state after the end of history, or a state of total exhaustion that makes any further historical action impossible. However, as I have tried to show, the nexus between total aestheticization, the end of history, and the exhaustion of vital energies is illusionary. Using the lessons of modern and contemporary art, we are able to totally aestheticize the world-i.e., to see it as being already a corpse-without being necessarily situated at the end of history or at the end of our vital forces. One can aestheticize the world-and at the same time act within it. In fact, total aestheticization does not block political action; it enhances it. Total aestheticization means that we see the current status quo as already dead, already abolished. And it means further that every action that is directed towards the stabilization of the status quo will ultimately show itself as ineffective-and every action that is directed towards the destruction of the status quo will ultimately succeed. Thus, total aestheticization not only does not preclude political action; it creates an ultimate horizon for successful political action, if this action has a revolutionary perspective.

×

Boris Groys (1947, East Berlin) is Professor of Aesthetics, Art History, and Media Theory at the Center for Art and Media Karlsruhe and Global Distinguished Professor at New York University. He is the author of many books, including The Total Art of Stalinism, Ilya Kabakov: The Man Who Flew into Space from His Apartment, Art Power, The Communist Postscript, and, most recently, Going Public.

© 2014 e-flux and the author

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Current discussions about art are very much centered on the question of art activism-that is, on the ability of art to function as an arena and medium for political protest and social activism. The phenomenon of art activism is central to our time because it is a new phenomenon-quite different from the phenomenon of critical art that became familiar to us during recent decades.

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Write a definition of activism in your own words that covers all possible meanings.

Make some effort to solve some social problems and meet the expectations of changing the society.

Create examples to illustrate these meanings.

Rallies, marches and other forms of demonstration, strike, sit-in and hunger strike.

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Activism consists of efforts to promote, impede, direct, or intervene in social, political, economic, or environmental reform with the desire to make changes in society. Forms of activism range from mandate building in the community (including writing letters to newspapers), petitioning elected officials, running or contributing to a political campaign, preferential patronage (or boycott) of businesses, and demonstrative forms of activism like rallies, street marches, strikes, sit-ins, or hunger strikes.

Activism may be performed on a day-to-day basis in a wide variety of ways, including through the creation of art ( artivism), computer hacking ( hacktivism), or simply in how one chooses to spend their money ( economic activism). For example, the refusal to buy clothes or other merchandise from a company as a protest against the exploitation of workers by that company could be considered an expression of activism. However, the most highly visible and impactful activism often comes in the form of collective action, in which numerous individuals coordinate an act of protest together in order to make a bigger impact. Collective action that is purposeful, organized, and sustained over a period of time becomes known as a social movement.

Historically, activists have used literature, including pamphlets, tracts, and books to disseminate or propagate their messages and attempt to persuade their readers of the justice of their cause. Research has now begun to explore how contemporary activist groups use social media to facilitate civic engagement and collective action combining politics with technology.

The Online Etymology Dictionary records the English words "activism" and "activist" as in use in the political sense from the year 1920 or 1915 respectively. The history of the word activism traces back to earlier understandings of collective behavior and social action. As late as 1969 activism was defined as "the policy or practice of doing things with decision and energy", without regard to a political signification, whereas social action was defined as "organized action taken by a group to improve social conditions", without regard to normative status. Following the surge of so-called "new social movements" in the United States in the 1960's, a new understanding of activism emerged as a rational and acceptable democratic option of protest or appeal. However, the history of the existence of revolt through organized or unified protest in recorded history dates back to the slave revolts of the 1st century BC(E) in the Roman Empire, where under the leadership of former gladiator Spartacus 6,000 slaves rebelled and were crucified from Capua to Rome in what became known as the Third Servile War.

In English history, the Peasants' Revolt erupted in response to the imposition of a poll tax, and has been paralleled by other rebellions and revolutions in Hungary, Russia, and more recently, for example, Hong Kong. In 1930 under the leadership of Mahatma Gandhi thousands of protesting Indians participated in the Salt March, as a protest against the oppressive taxes of their government, resulting in the imprisonment of 60,000 people and eventually independence of their nation. In nations throughout Asia, Africa and South America, the prominence of activism organized by social movements and especially under the leadership of civil activists or social revolutionaries has pushed for increasing national self-reliance or, in some parts of the developing world, collectivist communist or socialist organization and affiliation. Activism has had major impacts on Western societies as well, particularly over the past century through social movements such as the Labour movement, the Women's Rights movement, and the civil rights movement.

Activists can function in a number of roles, including judicial, environmental, internet (technological) and design(art). Historically, most activism has focused on creating substantive changes in the policy or practice of a government or industry. Some activists try to persuade people to change their behavior directly (see also direct action), rather than to persuade governments to change laws. For example, the cooperative movement seeks to build new institutions which conform to cooperative principles, and generally does not lobby or protest politically. Other activists try to persuade people or government policy to remain the same, in an effort to counter change.

Activism is not an activity always performed by those who profess activism as a profession. The term ″activist″ may apply broadly to anyone who engages in activism, or narrowly limited to those who choose political or social activism as a vocation or characteristic practice.

Judicial activism involves the efforts of public officials. Arthur Schlesinger, Jr. - American historian, public intellectual, and social critic - introduced the term "judicial activism" in a January 1946 Fortune magazine article titled "The Supreme Court: 1947". Activists can also be public watchdogs and whistle blowers, attempting to understand all the actions of every form of government that acts in the name of the people and hold it accountable to oversight and transparency. Activism involves an engaged citizenry.

Environmental activism takes quite a few forms:

The power of Internet activism came into a global lens with the Arab Spring protests starting in late 2010. People living in the Middle East and North African countries that were experiencing revolutions used social networking to communicate information about protests, including videos recorded on smart phones, which put the issues in front of an international audience. This was the one of the first occasions in which social networking technology was used by citizen-activists to circumvent state-controlled media and communicate directly with the rest of the world. These types of practices of Internet activism were later picked up and used by other activists in subsequent mass mobilizations, such as the 15-M Movement in Spain in 2011, Occupy Gezi in Turkey in 2013, and more.

Internet activism may also refer to activism which focuses on protecting or changing the Internet itself, also known as digital rights. The Digital Rights movement consists of activists and organizations, such as the Electronic Frontier Foundation, who work to protect the rights of people in relation to new technologies, particularly concerning the Internet and other information and communications technologies.

Activism in literature (not to be confused with literary activism) includes the expression of intended or advocated reforms, realized or unachieved, through published, written or verbally promoted or communicated forms.

Economic activism involves using the economic power of government, consumers, and businesses for social and economic policy change. Both conservative and liberal groups use economic activism to as a form of pressure to influence companies and organizations to oppose or support particular political, religious, or social values and behaviors. This is typically done either through preferential patronage to reinforce "good" behavior and support companies one would like to succeed, or through boycott or divestment to penalize "bad" behavior and pressure companies to change or go out of business.

Consumer activism consists of activism carried out on behalf of consumers for consumer protection or by consumers themselves. For instance, activists in the free produce movement of the late 1700s protested against slavery by boycotting goods produced with slave labor. Today, vegetarianism, veganism, and freeganism are all forms of consumer activism which boycott certain types of products. Other examples of consumer activism include simple living, a minimalist lifestyle intended to reduce materialism and conspicuous consumption, and tax resistance, a form of direct action and civil disobedience in opposition to the government that is imposing the tax, to government policy, or as opposition to taxation in itself.

Shareholder activism involves shareholders using an equity stake in a corporation to put pressure on its management. The goals of activist shareholders range from financial (increase of shareholder value through changes in corporate policy, financing structure, cost cutting, etc.) to non-financial ( disinvestment from particular countries, adoption of environmentally friendly policies, etc.).

Design Activism locates design at the centre of promoting social change, raising awareness on social/political issues, or questioning problems associated with mass production and consumerism. Design Activism is not limited to one type of design.

Art Activism or Artivism utilizes the medium of visual art as a method of social or political commentary.

Activists employ many different methods, or tactics, in pursuit of their goals. Decisions over what tactics to use or not may be planned carefully in advance, result from negotiations with law enforcement such as when and where to hold a rally, or be made in the heat of the moment. The tactics chosen are significant because they can determine how activists are perceived and what they are capable of accomplishing. For example, nonviolent tactics generally tend to garner more public sympathy than violent ones and are more than twice as effective in achieving stated goals.

Charles Tilly developed the concept of a " repertoire of contention," which describes the full range of tactics available to activists at a given time and place. This repertoire consists of all of the tactics which have been proven to be successful by activists in the past, such as boycotts, petitions, marches, and sit-ins, and can be drawn upon by any new activists and social movements. Activists may also innovate new tactics of protest. These may be entirely novel, such as Douglas Schuler's idea of an "activist road trip", or may occur in response to police oppression or countermovement resistance. New tactics then spread to others through a social process known as diffusion, and if successful, may become new additions to the activist repertoire.

Many contemporary activists now utilize new tactics through the Internet and other information and communication technologies (ICTs), also known as Internet activism or cyber-activism. Some scholars argue that many of these new tactics are digitally analogous to the traditional offline tools of contention. Other digital tactics may be entire new and unique, such as certain types of hacktivism. Together they form a new "digital repertoire of contention" alongside the existing offline one. The rising use of digital tools and platforms by activists has also increasingly led to the creation of decentralized networks of activists that are self-organized and leaderless, or what is known as franchise activism.

Common methods used for activism include:

Some groups and organizations participate in activism to such an extent that it can be considered as an industry. In these cases, activism is often done full-time, as part of an organization's core business. Many organizations in the activism industry are either non-profit organizations or non-governmental organizations with specific aims and objectives in mind. Most activist organizations do not manufacture goods,[citation needed ] but rather mobilized personnel to recruit funds and gain media coverage.

The term activism industry has often been used to refer to outsourced fundraising operations. However, activist organizations engage in other activities as well. Lobbying, or the influencing of decisions made by government, is another activist tactic. Many groups, including law firms, have designated staff assigned specifically for lobbying purposes. In the United States, lobbying is regulated by the federal government.

Many government systems encourage public support of non-profit organizations by granting various forms of tax relief for donations to charitable organizations. Governments may attempt to deny these benefits to activists by restricting the political activity of tax-exempt organizations.

Paul Rogat Loeb, Soul of a Citizen: Living With Conviction in a Cynical Time (St Martin's Press, 2010). ISBN 978-0-312-59537-1.

Brian Martin with Wendy Varney. Nonviolence Speaks: Communicating against Repression, (Cresskill, NJ: Hampton Press, 2003).

Randy Shaw, The Activist's Handbook: A Primer for the 1990s and Beyond (University of California Press, 1996). ISBN 0-520-20317-8.

David Walls, The Activist's Almanac: The Concerned Citizen's Guide to the Leading Advocacy Organizations in America (Simon & Schuster/Fireside, 1993). ISBN 0-671-74634-0.

Deflem, Mathieu. 2019. "The New Ethics of Pop: Celebrity Activism Since Lady Gaga." pp. 113-129 in Pop Cultures: Sconfinamenti Alterdisciplinari, edited by Massimiliano Stramaglia. Lecce-Rovato, Italy: Pensa Multimedia.

Victor Gold, Liberwocky (Thomas Nelson, 2004). ISBN 978-0-7852-6057-8.

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Activism consists of efforts to promote, impede, direct, or intervene in social, political, economic, or environmental reform with the desire to make changes in society. Forms of activism range from mandate building in the community (including writing letters to newspapers), petitioning elected officials, running or contributing to a political campaign, preferential patronage (or boycott) of businesses, and demonstrative forms of activism like rallies, street marches, strikes, sit-ins, or hunger strikes.

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Hi this is Leela🤪!

I am from Huangshan, china. It is a beautiful city with mountains crowed. It is a wonderful place for vacation🤓.

I am interested in watching movies. These days I am watching Why Women Kills2 and Desperate Housewives. And I am a groupie of a Chinese team😍.

I will study graphic design in UCA, and my campus is epsom.

I think the most challenging thing for me is the problem of language…especially the listening and the speaking.😭

I think it is great if I could be a designer of some artists’ studio!! We could discuss everything about art and work together to finish some fantastic works!! What’s more, when I am 50 years old, I’d like to run an airbnb with a cafe!!

The Pre-Sessional is really interesting I think!! We could talk about everything we want. And we could find some great friends!! However, sometimes I still feel nervous to answer the questions. I should practice my skills of speaking I think. 🤔

Thanks for everyone I met in the Pre-Sessional!! I am very glad to be friends with you all!!!😇