Duck and Dive, Bob and Weave: Manoeuvres to Enhance Opportunities for Audience Critical Engagement in Activist Art and Design

Abstract

This research addresses the difficulty of critically engaging audiences in activist art and design, investigates ways to enhance opportunities for audience critical engagement and develops engagement strategies for art and design practitioners. This project aims to nurture direct involvement with social change by prompting reflection about injustice across three presentation sites: museums and galleries; public space; and social movement protests. The practice-led research has been carried out through sculpture, multi-media installations, public interventions, and protest actions. There are challenges to publicly presenting activist art and design, and the 'Duck and Dive, Bob and Weave' research strategy was developed as a means to negotiate these difficulties and to enhance opportunities for audience critical engagement. This strategy is about adaptability and agility and consists of responsive moves that evade or escape the difficulties of censorship, depoliticisation, privatisation, state oppression, and heterogeneous audiences by moving around, under, above and through them. In addition, moves across multiple sites enhanced opportunities for audience critical engagement by cultivating contested spaces, creating works that embody politics and injustice, temporarily intervening in public space, stoking debate, using chance encounters and legally occupying public space.