By Leónidas Martin, (Colectivo Enmedio)
“Artivism” was conceived by Alan Kaprow, an artist active in the 1970s and one of the creators of Fluxus, an artistic movement that has to do with the idea of mixing art and life and freeing artistic practices from strictly artistic spaces in order to interact with life in all its facets. Kaprow believes that art needs to stop being “art” in and of itself in order to be art as something else. He talks about the idea of “un-learning” and of the “un-artist” and suggests that the best way — or one of the possible ways — to be an artist today is to be an “un-artist,” someone who does not work within the traditional logics that link art to kings, popes and other representations of power. And right now, in large part, art is also linked to the people with money, to hegemonic political systems. Even during WWII, for example, “social realism” and “abstract expression” went hand-in-hand with hegemonic forms of representation or to the market. In the end, the idea of the “un-artist” as well as the idea of “Fluxus” — creating art that doesn’t seem like art, that people might not identify as art — is a way to deactivate the impact that art can have in certain contexts but that disappears when it’s already identified as art. We always like to think of ourselves as artists even though what we do isn’t recognized as actual art, almost never, within the art world.