Lauren O’Neill-Butler’s Chronicle of US Artist Protest

Sun Tzu’s The Art of War (c.475–221 BCE) is famously a 13-part guide to military strategy. Lauren O’Neill-Butler’s The War of Art: A History of Artists’ Protest in America, which will be published by Verso this June, is a lively chronicle of artist-led protest that offers some strategies of its own. Informed by the author’s work as a writer, magazine editor, professor and longtime interviewer, the book traces lineages of direct action, interweaving the stories of groups like Women Artists in Revolution (1969–71), fierce pussy (1991–ongoing) and Prescription Addiction Intervention Now (2017–ongoing) with writings on such artists as Agnes Denes and Hock E Aye Vi Edgar Heap of Birds. Here, O’Neill-Butler discusses the impetus behind the book, instances of historical recurrence and the needs of our present moment.

Cassie Packard What led you to write a book about artist-led protest in the US?

Lauren O’Neill-Butler It wasn’t surprising to me that my first art history book would focus on this topic. My experience with activism goes way back – I first got involved through punk rock subcultures in high school. Writing this book was an effort to reconnect with that earlier version of myself, the one who was fearless. You could say I began The War of Art in 2017, shortly after Trump’s first inauguration. Around that time, I started working on an essay about fierce pussy [‘Labor of Love’, 2019], which was published in Artforum and eventually became a chapter in the book. After leaving my role as an editor at that magazine, I taught a course on legacies of artists as activists. While there was a lot of reportage on artist-led protests at museums at the time, I felt that only part of the story was being told. Figures we were discussing in the classroom began dying left and right; a sense of urgency took hold. I realized that if I didn’t start interviewing these artists soon, the opportunity to do so might be lost.

CP Conversations with artists are something of a specialty of yours, as evidenced by your collected interviews [Let’s Have a Talk, 2021] and your founding role in the interview-focused magazine November.

LOB Exactly. Each chapter of The War of Art was informed by interviews, but there’s also a significant amount of archival research underpinning the book. Artists like Benny Andrews, who cofounded the Black Emergency Cultural Coalition [BECC], knew that if they weren’t doing the work of building their own archives, no one else would. He collected all sorts of printed material and left behind a wealth of information about the times he lived through. Digging through archives is one of my favourite activities – it feels like detective work. For example, a question arose: Was the BECC an anti-feminist group? I read notes from Andrews’s diary about a meeting that Faith Ringgold called with members of the BECC to address this. It was helpful to have Andrews’s firsthand narrative as I pieced together what happened in that meeting.

CP There’s a lot of piecing-together in the book, particularly as you trace the ways in which activist organizations splinter and split off; for instance, the Art Workers’ Coalition [AWC] gave rise to Women Artists in Revolution [WAR] and Women Students and Artists for Black Art Liberation [WSABAL], both of which collaborated with the Ad Hoc Women Artists’ Committee [AHWAC].

LOB The acronyms alone are a lot to keep track of! The splintering is important, and you see it throughout the book in different chapters: WAR breaking off from AWC in 1969 mirrors fierce pussy doing the same from AIDS Coalition to Unleash Power in 1991, and Dyke Action Machine! [DAM!] doing the same from Queer Nation that year. This is something that activists on the left today would do well to keep in mind: It’s okay to disagree. You can create a splinter group and then still work with the bigger movement when it aligns with your principles. The point is not to abandon the work.

CP You chart connections between disparate movements and moments – say, suggesting links between the culture-jamming strategies of AHWAC, DAM! and New Red Order. At the same time, you highlight instances of antithesis: for example, around the same time that the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York removed the Sackler name from its walls in response to protests by Prescription Addiction Intervention Now [PAIN], the University of Kansas opened an Indigenous art gallery endowed by and named after Hock E Aye Vi Edgar Heap of Birds. Why was it important for you to draw out these parallels and contrasts?

LOB I felt that each artist or collective needed to have their own chapter, because I didn’t want to dissolve difference. Those differences matter – people are different, and activism doesn’t always take the same form. There’s no step-by-step playbook. That said, I also wanted to highlight effective activist strategies and trace connections across chapters. One of my favourite tactics is how artists speak through the media to get public attention. The BECC always maintained a list of sympathetic journalists to tip off about its actions – a strategy it adopted from Civil Rights activists. When I was at Artforum, we’d get tips alerting us to upcoming PAIN actions, and we’d send someone to cover them. While preserving difference, I wanted to bring these patterns or historical recurrences to the fore.

CP In the past few months – since your book went to print – there’s been a clear authoritarian turn in the US. I’m curious whether you’ve noticed any shifts in the forms that artists’ protests are taking: what lessons they seem to be drawing from mentors and predecessors, and where they’re beginning to experiment with new strategies.

LOB I’m interested in examples like Jewish Voice for Peace, which used ACT UP tactics during a 2023 protest at Grand Central Station in New York – essentially replicating a demonstration that ACT UP had staged there more than three decades earlier. It was highly effective in terms of media coverage. Artists today are also looking to the past and recognizing that the mass protest model can only do so much. We’re in a cataclysmic situation, and it calls for a range of approaches. I touch on this in the book’s introduction: We need to revisit what artists were doing in 2020, when the art market briefly shut down. In that moment, artists took risks and acted collectively out of urgency and necessity. But then things quickly reverted to business as usual. I want artists to be able to make a living – but the market isn’t helping them if they’re afraid to say something because of a collector. There’s a silencing that’s happening. I’m more interested in artists who say what they want to say. The Trump administration’s going to come for everyone anyway.

My hope is that artists read this book and feel like they don’t have to reinvent the wheel every time. They can look to the past to see what worked and what didn’t. I’d love to see more collective action around issues in the US like the housing affordability crisis. Project Row Houses addressed the issue and evolved into a major nonprofit – but what else can we do? This crisis is affecting people everywhere across the US, and the government is neglecting it. In the book, I’m not recounting history to memorialize; instead, I want to offer a road map.

Lauren O’Neill-Butler, The War of Art: A History of Artists' Protest In America will be published by Verso on 17 June

_{Main image: W.A.R., ‘Museums Are Sexist…’, c.1970. Courtesy: the author}