Disobedient Objects

From political activism comes the art of protest, symbols, and designs that defy standard definitions. This timely book shows how objects can change the world by out-designing authority. Included are items from protest movements over the past three decades from around the globe: papier-mache and cardboard puppets made by the Bread and Puppet theater in Vermont to protest the first Iraq war, buttons from the 1980s in solidarity with an imprisoned Nelson Mandela, “Silence = Death” posters from the AIDS activists Act Up, and banners, defaced currency, designs for barricades and blockades, political video games, an inflatable general assembly to facilitate consensus decision-making, experimental activist-bicycles, and textiles bearing witness to political murders. Included too are earlier inspirational objects of protest such as a suffragette tea set and the barricades and balloons of the Paris Commune. Disobedient Objects focuses on the period from 1980 to the present, a time that brought new technologies and political challenges to protest movements. Provocative and engaging, this book showcases how artists have produced work within the context of social movements, which become the vibrant engines for ingenuity and collective creativity.

Catherine Flood is a curator in the Word and Image Department at the Victoria and Albert Museum. Gavin Grindon is visiting research fellow at the V&A and postdoctoral fellow in Visual and Material Culture at Kingston University, London.