On Acts of Resistance

A new book, an excerpt and a party...

Hi there. It’s been a while, hasn’t it? A lot of life has been happening, not least of all - getting my new book ready! ‘Acts of Resistance’ has been a true labour of love, and I’m delighted that it will be emerging into the world IN ONE WEEK - on 27th June 2024.

It’s a book about the power of art to create a better world, and it takes in the artists who have treated the protest site as their canvas and contributed to movements that have transformed history - from the musicians in Auschwitz to the four-year Siege of Sarajevo, from ACT UP's 1989 invasion of the New York Stock Exchange, to the Niger Delta and indigenous communities in Bolivia.

Including stories and artists from across the globe, including Susan Sontag, Ken Saro-Wiwa, Billie Holiday and Claude Cahun - alongside collectives, communities, amateurs and anonymous creators who have used their art as an expression of resistance - in the book I ask what is the purpose of art in a world on fire? Why are artists compelled to paint, write, dance and make music, even when the odds are stacked against them? And how can artistic creation be a genuine form of political resistance?

Below, I’ve included a taster - from the opening of the book. If you like the sound of it, it’s available to preorder now - and preorders really do make a huge difference to authors. You can do that here. And you know, spreading the word really helps too…

I’m also throwing a small soiree to celebrate the book’s launch at 7pm on Monday 1st July at Omnibus Theatre Clapham. I’ll give everyone a free glass of wine, do some readings from the book and have a chat with my friend, the theatre journalist Tom Wicker. I would love you to join me! I’ve saved 10 spots for my newsletter subscribers, if you’d like to nab one please email me ambermblomfield@gmail.com and I’ll dish them out to the first people to reply.

Anyway, without further ado… ‘Acts of Resistance’:

Imagine, for a moment, that art can change the world. Not only that it can, but that it has, over and over again, and that it will do still – in a manner that can be as explosive as a battle or as creeping as a whisper. Acknowledging this fact would be the beginning of something: it would help us to recognise the power that each of us has in our own hands. Creativity isn’t the preserve of those trained in academies, or whose work is hung in marble halls. If you’ve ever sketched a picture, baked a cake, sung karaoke, made a protest placard, written a limerick, planted a flower, boogied to your favourite tune, you possess it.

I have carried this belief with me for a long time. As a child, I remember watching a news report about the levels of pollution in the ocean. Incensed and certain I had to do something, I fetched my crayons and crafted a poster featuring a whale vomiting various bits of rubbish I’d gleaned from the recycling. I sent it off to the iconic children’s TV show Blue Peter where, thrillingly, it was shown on national television. Nothing was changed then, at least nothing I could put my finger on, but looking at the screen and understanding that – if only for a moment – my slipshod artwork, which even now looked messier than I’d intended and had possibly lost an important bit of crisp packet in transit, was being beamed into millions of homes around the country, gave me a sense of possibility. The next day a friend at school came up to me. She’d seen my poster and wanted to know what she could do to help.

I spent my teens ferociously trying to express my sense of righteousness through my creativity, staging plays to raise money for former child soldiers in Uganda and crafting feminist sculpture from dismembered Barbie dolls. I was very serious about art, in a way that was unfashionable then and perhaps is still unfashionable now. Later, when I went to drama school, the tendency among some of my peers was to see the ‘industry’ we were preparing ourselves for as a money-making business like any other, no different to advertising or hotel management. But I was certain that art’s purpose was more significant, though I was still figuring out the reasons why.

Once, an artist called Jo Wilding came in to speak to us. She was a human rights lawyer, and she was also a clown. She first visited Iraq as a foreign observer during the war in 2003, but when she returned, she brought the circus with her – a juggler, a stilt walker and a roadie. They’d spent months touring squatter camps and orphanages, blowing bubbles and performing magic tricks for children who were at risk of forgetting how to smile. During the siege of Fallujah, they got trapped at an under-resourced medical centre, and ended up going out in the battered-up ambulance, fetching the injured and using their foreign privilege to get medical supplies past the US troops. In between, she made handkerchiefs disappear and crafted balloon animals for the injured children.

A clown in the middle of a war zone is a Daily Mail headline waiting to happen. We had all seen Fallujah on our TV screens, the rubble where the buildings used to stand. How could her actions have made a difference? And yet, that day, no one in the class was talking about box-office takings or sponsorship deals. The image of those soap bubbles in the air of the ruined streets stayed with me. Amid all the mess my government had made in that place, they struck me as something gracious and good.

***

Could I have believed it, if I hadn’t experienced certain transformations myself? In those years I was almost breathless with it, the exhilaration of being twenty years old and living in London for the first time, making experimental art with my mates and feeling new horizons open up to me. The live art scene was unapologetically queer and sometimes grotesque and sometimes unbelievably tender, creating intimacies between strangers for which I was unprepared. I’d stay out all night at art raves in disused railway arches or go to cheap matinee screenings of old indie movies, my expanding sense of the possibilities of culture muddling with the elation of kissing strangers outside gallery bars or crossing the city with my head nodding against the night bus window as dawn broke, the pulse of the small hours music still throbbing in my chest.

I spent the summer of 2005 in New York, working as the assistant to interdisciplinary artist Joe Shahadi, making a short film based on the Oedipus myth called – of course! – Motherfucker. He sent me home each evening with dense theory books to mark up for him. That July was unbelievably hot, and I’d sunbathe on the roof of the tiny Williamsburg studio I’d rented, reading and scribbling notes, before heading out to shows at cool Off-Off-Broadway venues. I saw legends of the New York scene – The Wooster Group, Laurie Anderson, Richard Foreman. Performance art collective La Pocha Nostra created ‘Chicano cyberpunk performances’. In the show I saw, they invited their (mostly white) audience to inscribe their ‘racial fantasies’ upon their bare bodies in lipstick. I watched, transfixed and horrified, as those around me stepped forward. There wasn’t anything I could possibly write, I told myself, lingering on the fringes of the room and refusing my part in the performance. When I returned home that autumn I carried the show with me, unable to shake the feeling I’d got something wrong.

A couple of years later I volunteered to take part in a dance show at London’s Barbican Centre. Trilogy was about how women’s bodies are typically presented in the media – airbrushed, sexualised – and how rarely we see them as they really are – functional, wobbly, powerful, lazy, individual, ordinary. When our cue came, those of us who had volunteered invaded the stage – all 120 of us – completely naked, and for six minutes performed a dance routine to over 1,000 audience members.

I watched a video of it again recently. Line after line of us streaming on to the stage as Pixies’ bone-shaking Into the White blasts from speakers. Bodies fill my screen. The audience roars; a single peal of laughter soars upwards, climbing in a note of disbelief and delight. The dance routine is simple: a series of arm gestures, almost akin to those of an air steward. Head bangs and floor rolls and 240 feet stamping. Plenty of wobbling. But the energy is nearly tangible. Pure unalloyed joy, an energy to make the ground rattle. I tried to spot myself, but it was impossible. As soon as I alighted on a figure that might be me, she’d vanish again, into the crowd. By the end, the entire audience is on its feet, screaming, whooping and cheering. Later that evening, many of them would strip off themselves and join us on stage.

As I forged a sense of who I was and how I related to the world, these encounters turned the abstract argument for art as a political force into something tactile, worn on the skin and carried beneath its surface.

Of course art could be a force for change. It had changed me.