ABSTRACT
This chapter explores art practitioners’ responses to violence. It considers how artists have used art practices to rethink the nature of violence and non-violence, and it examines how intellectual and material contexts have affected and shaped art interventions. Its premises are that art is not only able to contest prevailing norms about violence but that contemporary artists are consciously engaging with publics through their practice in order to do so. The close relationship of art and politics elicits a plurality of views about the incidence of violence, its harms and effects and appropriate strategies for its resistance. Artists have long deployed a range of strategies to expose both physical and symbolic violence through representational, performative and interventional means. One solution, found in the 1960s and 70s, was to reject representational approaches altogether along with traditional artforms and, instead of producing an art object, create environments, durational events and performances.
