You do not have to think a lot about it. It is what you understand as such. It is a socially engaged art of any kind and any form. Or, conversely, it is a protest that uses aesthetics to reach its audience. One would argue, does not every art have a social and political meaning, if only through its integration into a particular social and political context? The answer is not easy; The most reliable response to such a question probably is “Who knows”? Who in fact knows a creator’s intentions (if not clearly articulated)? Or who could measure the audience’s ability to receive to a potential political message though art (and, moreover, its reaction)? Ok, but somebody else would ask what happens when the political message (either in content or in form) is clear? Hmm, maybe this is not actually art… this is exposed politics (or, in the worst scenario, didactic art).

 

Politics is not what we believe it is. It does not deal only with parties, elections and government decisions or protests. Everything we do has to do with politics: from waking up from bed to the time we fall asleep, our decisions (conscious or not), our actions and interactions, even our oversights create political interesting meaning. How is this possible? We decide for example to buy a particular vegetable to prepare our today’s dinner and not another one; do you believe that this goes with no consequences? What if the rejected vegetables come from an unstable politically, sometimes exotic country, the economy of which counts on these vegetables’ exports? With our not-buying, the crop stays indisposed and unsold, the poverty rises, a revolution outbreaks, people are killed, the government changes… But do not worry, not every not-buying of some tropical fruits on our behalf will lead to blood and pain in some corner of the planet. Because, alone, every one of us, has no actual power at all to create any social and political developments - or to be more modest and sincere, every one of us has the exact amount of power of what truly is: a cut-off unit; only if this unit is integrated into a group, a formation consisted of units, our abstention from tropical fruits’ buying is possible to influence the social, economic, and political environment in our exemplary exotic country. The same is accurate for art.     

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Art is meant to express our contemporaneity; it looks for creating order into the chaotic environment around us and, why not, somehow to interact with it. What “to interact” means? Perhaps “to describe” it... Perhaps, “to reveal” some of its hidden qualities, which are not obvious. Perhaps also “to change” it? Hmm… Maybe. But only if it manages to reach an indefinite audience. A poem written and locked into my drawer, no matter how influential it could be, it cannot create social and political chain-reactions. The truth is that we still wonder if it would affect social and political contexts when it is published... But, publishing, sharing, traveling from mouth to mouth, is the only way art can dispatch its message.     

So, buying whatever you desire for dinner (in principle; it is not, for example appropriate or even legitimate to buy some meat coming from an… elephant) is not against social and political activism, in the same way that everything we do is not art, even though it has a political meaning (e.g., it is not art the way we brush our teeth, although some performance artists surely would have tried to demonstrate the opposite). The combination of an aesthetic form (of any kind) with socially interesting message and, perhaps most importantly, the emerging artwork’s ability and inherent necessity to be rocketed in the political and social space, that is Artivism. 

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Artivism is against. There are no restrictions on against what. Originated from the great tradition of counter-culture during the ‘60s (or, even, earlier), Artivism wishes to mobilize. To make people hear a different voice. To provide the public with alternative perspectives. To help us conceive and express a different world. So, for Artivism, we are as important as the artist him/her/itself.  A painter e.g., would be a painter, even though nobody wants to be exposed to his/her/its paintings. An Artivist, on the contrary, exists and creates through, with and for the public. And this is an essential differentiated approach to think about. Because, someday, the lone painter will also understand that he/she/it truly needs us. And he/she/it should invent something important to tell us.