CORY REYNOLDS | DATE 5/30/2018

Get ready for 'Protest: The Aesthetics of Resistance'

How we love Protest, Lars Müller's brilliant 448-page compendium of texts and images telling the story of international resistance movements, 1968–now, through the three lenses of aesthetics, politics and media. If we could give a copy to every college student in America, we would. "Protest takes place in (real or virtual) spaces and is carried out by (both real and virtual) bodies," Basil Rogger writes in his Introduction. "The spaces and the bodies to which a protest refers, against which it takes a stand, or of which it aims to gain control to use for its own purposes are the spaces of politics and society. Protest—even when it is of a purely aesthetic nature—is therefore always political. From a position of powerlessness, the foundations of power are shaken, its varnished surfaces scratched, and its legitimacy questioned. For protest to become effective, it depends on a community that generates, supports, and furthers it. No doubt there are protest movements that emanate from individual persons, and images of particular figures that become iconic, but in the end it takes a critical mass, a magnitude of scale, for a protest to have the capacity to take effect." Featured poster was produced anonymously in 1968.