By Elisha Buttler and Michele Stockley
People have been talking about the relationship between art and change for a long time. Art as an agitator for change, a messenger for change; art as an act of activism or assertion. These days, this relationship may feel like a natural one; however, this hasn’t always been the case, with many of the artistic practices and theoretical concepts linking art and change having shifted over time but especially within the last two decades. Dr Geoff Hogg, Adjunct Professor in the School of Art at RMIT, notes:
The last twenty years have seen a growth in socially engaged art as an accepted field of creative practice. Today this feels normal, and it is becoming harder to remember that for much of the twentieth century this was highly controversial. The concept of ‘art for art’s sake’ was a nineteenth-century philosophy that extolled the intrinsic value of art independent of political, moral or educational purposes. In the twentieth century, these ideas were still influential amongst people interested in the arts.