Out now, the sixth issue of Dissolve is titled Pre/histories of Protest, a four-part issue addressing the long history of activism and feminism on the anniversary of the 2017 Women's March protests around the globe.

In “The Fishwives March! On the Historicization of Women in the French Revolution,” Kathryn Barulich turns her eye to an earlier and far more unruly congregation of women driving political change. In 1789, thousands of women marched on the palace at Versailles, changing the course of the French Revolution. Barulich presents the events of the October Days, the context in which they occured, and muses on how stories continue to affect each other, outside of linear constructs of time.

“Scattered Light: Ephemeral Action, Protest, and Circulating Imagery” by Christopher Squier describes the ephemeral acts of protest that activist groups like the Illuminator Art Collective have spurred using projectors and fog, a video recording, and the turbulent currents of digital networks. The result is a fleeting physical event with a long digital train, akin to the historicization of Allan Kaprow’s performed actions he termed happenings and the disintegrating and evaporating ice structures he built for his 1967 performance Fluids under the Los Angeles sun.

A third contribution by an anonymous writer known as the Undertaker takes the comedic form of an ode to the all-male exhibition. The Undertaker is a critic who only writes about exhibitions that are dead. Responding to articles and databases mapping the persistence of testosterone-heavy gallery rosters and museum exhibitions that exclude women and nonbinary artists from their scope, the Undertaker issues a eulogy for one such exhibition alongside a postmortem autopsy: “Apathetic All-Male Exhibition Tragically Joins the Heavenly Angels After Rapid Potato Chip Consumption.”

Harper Brokaw-Falbo contributes our final essay “Not Our Mascot” in a piece tracing art feminist icon Judy Chicago’s recent resurgence alongside the corporatization and popularization of an essentialist brand of second-wave feminism in the Pussy Hat project. These “advances” of feminism represent a triangulation of social justice at its most superficial and approachable level, the art world’s attempt to answer the calls of its constituents—namely the white, educated and middle-class liberals—for art that reflects their politics, but in a way that no longer ruffles any feathers and the pressures of the market.