In “Grounds for Action: Landscape and Protest,” a feature essay published in the September 2015 issue of Artforum, David Gissen argues that contemporary political protest has evolved a wholly new and underexamined form: the “protest landscape.” “The metropolis is not simply a stage for these heaving crowds but the very stuff of strikes,” he writes. This is a new political medium in which “interventions into the urban environment”—informal blockades and barriers made from found objects, as well as the protesters themselves—“materialize a political will.”
 
This week, amid demonstrations against ICE in Minneapolis and beyond, Artforum revisits Gissen’s 2015 essay, which provides a conceptual framework for understanding how contemporary protest exceeds representation, operating simultaneously as image, infrastructure, and action.

“In this Artforum Dossier, we have gathered texts that focus on artistic practices that reflexively engage with the specific materiality of celluloid—the transparent plastic that served as the most common substrate for moving images before the advent of analog and digital video. These practices typically focus less on storytelling than on the aesthetic possibilities of directly manipulating celluloid film stock, creating sequences of celluloid film frames, or running celluloid film strips through projectors. The results usually emphasize our perceptual experience of light, color, sound, pattern, movement, and space—that is, those elements that provide the language of all moving-image experiences.”
—Tina Rivers Ryan