Abstract: The radical formalism of art constitutes a critical resource for activism, weapon for political/cultural battles and tool for subverting various notions of power. As a revolutionary mechanism, art activism was pivotal in anti-colonial movements from the 1900s and the Civil War of 1967 in Nigeria, yet this is under-researched in contemporary scholarship. Adopting historiography and contextual analysis, this paper explored the changing paradigms of protest art in Nigeria, as well as identified factors responsible for its decline in postcolonial practice. The paper puts forward the theory that the phenomenon of Democratic-Dictatorship in Nigeria and West Africa has created a culture of ‘Attacks on Art’, which is responsible for subduing subversive art and problematically re-contextualising contemporary art into ‘passing amusement’ and tool for political sycophancy in Nigeria. The findings of this paper corroborate Herbert Marcuse’s theory that the use of art activism only flourishes in societies that uphold freedom of expression.
Keywords: Protest art, Art activism, Avant-garde, Activist art, Artifactuality, Renaissancism, Negritude, Contemporary.
Title: The Changing Paradigms of Art Activism in Nigeria and the Problematic Context of Contemporary Art
Author: Dr. Clement Emeka Akpang
International Journal of Social Science and Humanities Research
ISSN 2348-3156 (Print), ISSN 2348-3164 (online)
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