InDecline
photo by Jason Goodrich
Art as Resistance
The activist art collective InDecline occupies a complicated, necessary space in today’s discourse on both art and society. Much of their work is technically illegal, at least from a trespass and vandalism perspective. They paint trains, dumpsters and walls, alter billboards, and install massive pieces overnight on public and private property. Because of this, an InDecline representative spoke with Outer Voice on condition of anonymity.
InDecline’s work sparks dialogue on inequality, systemic racism, police brutality, political corruption and environmental crisis through shocking, bold works of protest art that are typically taken down by the authorities nearly immediately — but after they make the news. Whether these are the famed naked Trump statues that mysteriously appeared on city streets in 2016, or mannequins of clowns dressed as Klan members hanging from a tree in a Richmond park, these artists are bold and organized.
This fall, they will premiere a new documentary, The Art of Protest. Featuring interviews with Shepard Fairey, Tom Morello, Nadya of Pussy Riot and many others, the film digs into the role and responsibility of art as resistance.
“If you're more outraged about the sticker that we put on the billboard, or the Halloween props that we put in a tree … than you are the issue that prompted us to go do that, then you need your moral compass recalibrated.”
InDecline was born in California in 2001 amid the unrest around the contested 2000 election, the national trauma of 9/11 and the enduring, problematic wars it spawned. “9/11 was a bigger than anything we’d ever dealt with at 18-19 years old,” the InDecline representative says. “Watch the world change in a matter of two minutes. I don’t think we were adequately prepared to really go toe-to-toe like we were [later] with Trump. You know, we felt like ‘ok, we got this, we’ve been at it for a while. This dude, he’s easy. We can run circles around this guy.’ But with 9/11, when you’re 19, it’s like ‘ok, we need to pay attention to what our punk rock community is doing, to what our journalists are doing … the learning point was, ‘just sit back, shut the fuck up and just listen, and then ultimately you’ll have the proper tools to go out and make a statement.’”
InDecline rapidly found a savvy, piercing voice to add to the American conversation, and grew into a multi-disciplinary punk rock guerrilla art powerhouse.
“We call ourselves an activist art collective,” the InDecline rep says. “The work that we do highlights environmental injustice, racism, police brutality, capitalism, and we attack those issues from a wide array of different mediums … In short, you're talking about a few dozen people scattered throughout the United States and some over in Mexico and Europe as well, who will periodically band together in whatever configuration necessary to address an issue … we like to use our tools, whether it's aerosol cans or video cameras, to focus and draw attention and create awareness around the issues that we think are crucial to our to our existence.”
Since 2016, InDecline has heavily targeted Donald Trump, seeing him and his allies as a malignant force against human rights, racial equity, the environment and, with the onset of COVID-19, the American people as a whole. InDecline’s Trump period is most famously defined by the series of naked Trump statues they placed in cities across the United States. Dressed as road crew workers, InDecline artists installed many of these in broad daylight, using industrial adhesive to make it a little harder for the police to remove them. The statues, titled “The Emperor Has No Balls,” were taken down swiftly, but not before there were thousands of selfies taken beside them, and they’d flooded the news outlets.
Anti-Trump pieces from there grew both in sophistication and snark. The collective managed to transform an entire suite at the New York Trump hotel into a rat-infested prison cell, complete with a caged Trump impersonator gorging on fast food, surrounded by protest art made by a number of artists. InDecline transformed the room, documented the piece, and completely restored the room with the hotel none the wiser. They did leave one small present behind. “At one point we had put one of the rats up in the chandelier that was hanging into the cell, for just a photo, and the rat just shit all over the chandelier,” the InDecline rep laughs. “And so that was the only thing we left in his room was rat shit in the chandelier. The rats were taken away as well, and we made sure they were taken care of.”
Other Trump pieces include another naked Trump statue painted like a clown (with a judiciously placed clown nose), standing on a billboard painted with a quote from serial killer John Wayne Gacy — “A clown can get away with murder.” InDecline orchestrated an anti-Trump piece in Tijuana that became a tourist destination. Among their many anti-Trump pieces, a progressive mural portrait is their most strangely beautiful — an eerie black-and-white portrait gradually changed over several days into a kind of post-nuclear zombie.
Many might argue that Trump is easy pickings for artists these days, and InDecline wouldn’t disagree. It’s in their other work that a strangely magical blend of cunning and bluntness really makes its mark.
After the Parkland school shooting, InDecline altered a Las Vegas billboard advertisement from a shooting range from saying “Shoot A .50 Caliber Only $29” to read “Shoot A Kid Only $29.” A desert mining facility that had been abandoned and half-heartedly cleaned up by the government was transformed into a massive environmental art piece called “Death Metals.”
InDecline doesn’t pull its punches. To protest white supremacist violence against Black Lives Matter protesters, the collective hanged eight clown mannequins dressed as KKK members from a tree in Richmond’s Bryan Park. The installation was condemned by local leaders, including local NAACP representatives, who disapprove of lynching imagery in any capacity.
Whether viewers find the art offensive, provocative, funny or frightening, InDecline creates dialogue. “What we're really good at is getting your attention,” the InDecline representative says. “Getting you to stop at the end of it and think, ‘yeah I might not exactly condone climbing a billboard and vandalizing an advertisement, but, you know, they did it for the sake of the kids that got shot at Parkland, and we might not be talking about the accessibility of the assault rifles in the media today if it weren't for them going out and putting a sticker on that billboard.’”
He adds, “If you're more outraged about the sticker that we put on the billboard, or the Halloween props that we put in a tree when we trespassed into the park, if you're outraged by those petty misdemeanors more than you are the issue that prompted us to go do that, then you need your moral compass recalibrated. I think it's a reminder, and we're seeing that today with what happened to Jacob Blake and what happens subsequently to businesses, you're watching a lot of Americans kick and scream about businesses being hurt. Business doesn't have a beating heart. I can understand why, because they can identify with property. They own cars, they own homes. They can empathize with what it might be like for one of their own citizens to lose a business that they've worked so hard. I get that. But as long as you're not Black, and you're not making an effort to understand what it might like might be to be Black in America … you’re never going to know what it's like to be shot by the police in the back seven times. This is nothing new.”
It might be easy for some to dismiss InDecline’s work as juvenile, crass or offensive. And it can be just that. It’s also incisive, intelligent, wry and brutally honest.
“We go to a lot of art shows, and we and we go to a ton of museums, and we consume all of these things,” the InDecline rep explains. “But the one thing that we're always reminded of, especially living on the west coast, is the tendency for these galleries to be echo chambers for a bunch of wealthy liberal people who really don't help to progress our message. It's hard to hear echoes in the streets, so what we like to do is get our hands dirty out there, because … one, it's much more fun and two, you’re making art that's directly accessible to the people. Not everybody is posed to go to a museum or an art gallery opening.”
It’s also important to note that the collective doesn’t sell works or seek profit. They sell merchandise through their website, but the proceeds go to fund the next project.
“We don't have a curator we need to please. We don't have someone paying us tens of thousands of dollars to make something specific to their tastes. We don't have a TV show on Netflix. We have the legacy we’ll leave behind, whether it's a hardcover photo book or a documentary, and all that truly matters is that we are reaching people, and as long as we've been able to continually identify that, then it validates everything we do, whether you love us or hate us. I mean that's the fuel we need to keep going. And so, yeah we’ve got to get day jobs. That's cool, that's fine because we'd rather work day jobs and have like the dream situation of going out with your best friends … and just leaving a path of political destruction along the way and taking photos. I mean it's a fucking blast.”
This fall, InDecline will release a documentary titled The Art of Protest. It’s a departure for the media savvy collective in that it doesn’t focus solely on InDecline and their work, but rather on the relevance and responsibility of protest art in this moment. If features interviews with Shepard Fairey, Nadya of Pussy Riot, Chali 2NA of Jurassic 5, Ron English, Tom Morello, Monica Canilao, Fat Mike, Winston Smith, Emory Douglas and more — all discussing the use of art as a tool of resistance.
“Once Trump was elected … we realized how big of a year 2020 was going to be,” InDecline’s representative says. “And so about halfway through his election we started really digging in and conducting interviews and starting to tell the story. And it's gone through a lot of different changes. It’s evolved a lot because, you know, we made the mistake of thinking that a documentary about resistance or including, you know, Pussy Riot and Shepard [Fairey] and all these people, leading up to an election would be a no-brainer for someone like Netflix or Hulu. And we found along the way that they have either deemed it too risky, too over the top, or they've or they've kind of put it in a niche category … even though it's resistance art and that's for everybody … So we just financed it ourselves. We had done a little bit of a fundraiser in 2019 made a little bit of money, and we decided, okay it's not going to be feature length it's going to be maybe closer to 45 minutes, but the one that we put out ahead of the election is going to be more of a call to action. It's not going to be a deep dive into the history of resistance art because that's not necessarily the conversation we need to be having right now, as much as putting something out ahead of this election that really galvanizes people, and inspires them, not just prior to the election but also after the election.”
InDecline hopes the documentary can inspire new generations of resistance artists, providing reference and context that they weren’t fortunate enough to have in their own rough beginnings. Most importantly, InDecline hopes that the documentary can further catalyze a political sea change in America.
“I think it really explores the importance of resistance art right now, its effectiveness,” the InDecline rep says. “We're hoping that in November, we can celebrate a Trump loss, and then lean back and say ‘look, this was four years of resistance art. We had to vote and do a lot of other things to get there, but you couldn't sit there and tell me that the amount of protests, and the amount of resistance art that was created and executed during that four years, didn't play a role in galvanizing people and changing the course of history.’ And so we're hoping that's the case and if it's not the case, then we get back to work.
