Q&A with protest art expert Mark Tribe

Mark Tribe, chairman of the MFA Fine Arts program at the School of Visual Arts in New York City, focuses on the relationship between media technology and politics, using photographs, videos and performances in his artwork. Tribe is the author of “The Port Huron Project: Reenactments of New Left Protest Speeches” and co-author of “New Media Art.”

Tribe, who also founded a nonprofit organization that supports and encourages art involving technology called Rhizome, will talk about his work as part of the Hanes Visiting Artist series today.

Staff writer Juanita Chavarro spoke with Tribe about his work.

DAILY TAR HEEL: When did you get interested in protest art?

MARK TRIBE: I’ve been exploring these issues probably since about 2006.

When I was first teaching at Brown University, I noticed — it was about two years into the war in Iraq — and I noticed that there wasn’t a lot of protest visible on campus, protest against the war, and my students didn’t seem particularly eager to talk about what was happening in Iraq at the time.

I had gone to Brown University as an undergraduate 20 years earlier, and at that time there were a lot of protests against Brown’s investments in companies that were doing business in South Africa.

In fact, when I first got there as a freshman in September of 1985, the students had erected a shantytown in the middle of campus as a kind of a protest, and so I started thinking about how things had changed so much in the intervening 20 years and was thinking about how the role of protests had changed a lot and how the relationship between how people expressed their politics and the media had changed.

I started this project (the “Port Huron Project”) to reenact protests from the Vietnam era at the same locations where they were originally given and cast actors to do it, and my work has continued to focus on those kinds of questions in different ways since then.

DTH: Do you have a specific artistic medium that you enjoy using more than others?

MT: I wouldn’t say so. I do use photography and video a lot in my work, and often times, my work ends up being exhibited in installations. Sometimes I also work with performers like dancers or electric guitarists or actors in my work.

DTH: What role do you think art plays in politics?

MT: There is a lot of political art. I’m not sure that art plays a role in politics per say.

I would say that politics plays more of a role in art. There are lots of different kinds of political art. There’s art that’s kind of didactic or propagandistic. It’s art that tries to change people’s minds. There’s critical art — art that tries to reveal hidden truths.

There’s a whole genre of contemporary art known as social practice or socially engaged art, where artists try to work directly with communities and collaborate with people in ways that help change their lives or change the way they relate, for example, to a city that they live in.

I think what I do for the most part is not really political art. It’s more art about politics, so in the work I’ve done since 2006 — not all of it but most of it — I think I’m reflecting on the role of politics in our culture, reflecting on how people express their politics in public.

One way in which some of us perform our politics is by voting, but there are lots of other ways that you can perform your politics from going down to a protest or occupying a square. In a lot of my work I’ve explored what those look like.

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