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THREE

What Good Is Political Art in Times Like These?

It is one thing to argue about the relationship between art and politics when social movements are at a low tide, when political struggle is episodic or mainly defensive—as it has been for the last three decades or so. But it is quite another to take up the question when there are movements in the streets, when political struggle is back on the agenda. Who knows what the future may hold, but one can at least seize the moment to look at the question again, letting new events shake up old certainties.

I wrote the first version of this essay during the explosion of revolutionary energy in early 2011. A mass uprising had just toppled a dictator in Tunisia. In Egypt, the hated thirty-year reign of Hosni Mubarak had just been overthrown, and Tahrir Square was poised to enter popular mythology as a symbol of the heroism of ordinary people standing up for themselves. The civil wars in Libya and Syria were still in the future, as were the ongoing struggles in Egypt that followed the fall of the tyrant.

In Wisconsin, the lessons of Tahrir were not lost on US workers. Faced with a right-wing attack on the rights of public-sector workers, protesters carrying signs that read “Fight Like an Egyptian” or that branded their governor “Scott ‘Hosni’ Walker” flooded the capitol building in Madison and occupied it. In retrospect, the occupation in Madison—which went down in defeat—set the stage for the Occupy Wall Street movement that erupted in the fall, also inspired by the sit-ins in Tahrir. Its forms multiplied themselves across the world, holding the center of discussion for months and transforming the discussion of inequality. For the three decades I have lived, it was the most consequential chain of political events I had witnessed.

If it seems trivial to think about aesthetic affairs amid such epoch-shaping political events, that is indeed part of my point. As images of Tahrir Square filled the airwaves around the world, I found myself writing to artists in Egypt for an article about how they were responding to the uprising. An Egyptian painter wrote back, chiding me via email and questioning the terms of the inquiry. “It’s not about artists now,” she wrote. “It’s about all Egyptians.” She was right.

Of course, many artists lent their passions to the struggle in Egypt. The occupation of Tahrir Square itself had a creative dimension that went beyond the participation of professional artists, at some moments taking on the aspect of the “carnival of the oppressed” about which students of revolutionary literature have read, with quickly conceived street theater and plucky graffiti helping to maintain spirits or simply expressing participants’ newfound sense of self-confidence. But professional artists were indisputably a part of the drama. Participating in the streets, some even gave their lives in the fight to bring down the dictator, as was the case with thirty-two-year-old sound artist Ahmed Bassiouny, who was felled by Egyptian security forces in the early days of the uprising and became one of the martyrs of the struggle. (His work—both his art and video he had taken of the protests—represented Egypt at the 2011 Venice Biennale.)

The crucial thing about that Egyptian artist’s emailed objection for me, however, was the way it clearly laid out the stakes of the rift between art and politics, a rift that becomes all the more stark during moments of high political drama. Amid the fury and urgency of revolt, the most important questions are not artistic ones. This may seem obvious. But it is light-years away from how the perennial subject of “political art” has been approached in the visual arts in the recent past.

Art-making can take place within political movements, certainly. But an overemphasis on the creation of individual, signature forms—a professional requirement—can just as often make it a distraction from the needs of an actual movement, which are after all collective, welding together tastes of all kinds. The art-historical celebration of the touchstones of “political art” often has altogether too little to say about the complexities of the political questions in which artists were involved and, therefore, becomes a kind of static hero worship.

Let’s begin by taking a look at three of these touchstones to see what they tell us about just how art has related to politics in practice.

• Vladimir Tatlin’s Monument to the Third International has entered the history books as the classic symbol of the optimistic spirit of the early Russian Revolution. Never realized, the proposal for a spiraling tower was meant to be a triumphant three hundred feet taller than the Eiffel Tower, every inch of it imbued with industrial-esoteric symbolism. The spiral represented Marxist dialectical materialism; the tilt of the tower mirrored that of the Earth and was to aim the structure at the North Star; the massive buildings cradled within its scaffolding were meant to reflect the forms of the primary Platonic shapes—square, circle (cylinder), and triangle.

Tatlin himself coined the Russian Constructivists’ motivating motto, “Art Into Life,” a slogan meant to indicate art’s new and progressive engagement with practical problems to match the revolutionary moment. It is notable, then, that the poetic, megalomaniacal Monument to the Third International was completely impossible to realize and could definitely not be put “into life.” In fact, the years when he was engaged in propagandizing for it, between 1918 and 1921, coincided closely with the savagery of the Russian civil war, when Russian industry was wiped out, millions of lives were sucked into the fratricidal vortex, and desperate shortages of basic foodstuffs afflicted city and countryside alike. The Third International, the organization for which the tower was proposed as a headquarters, was a coordinating committee of world Communist Parties meant to spread the revolution internationally—an urgent and immediate task, since the Bolsheviks were keenly aware that without a like-minded workers’ revolution in Germany, they could not sustain their own tenuous social gains.

While Monument to the Third International reflects the amazing optimism inspired by the revolution in some sectors of the Russian intelligentsia, it equally reflects the isolation of their art from the practical problems of the moment (which is exactly how revolutionary leader Leon Trotsky spoke of it in his Literature and Revolution.1) As for Tatlin himself, though he served in the revolutionary socialist government as director of public monuments, he seems to have been as inspired by the mystical numerology of poet Velimir Khlebnikov (who believed that the secret to the universe was the number 317) as he was by Marx and Engels.

• Pablo Picasso’s Guernica almost certainly takes the prize as the most iconic work of political art of the twentieth century, its imagery synonymous with the antiwar movement and perennially reborn on placards at protests everywhere. The frieze-sized painting was imagined as a response to one of the inaugural atrocities of modern warfare, the 1937 air raid by German bombers in support of the fascist general Franco against the culturally important Basque hamlet of Guernica. This calculated slaughter of a civilian population was intended to cow the Spanish Republicans and made an indelible impression on the Spanish artist, then living in France. At the time of the massacre, Picasso—already the world’s most famous painter—had been asked by the Republican government to make a piece in support of the cause for the World’s Fair in Paris. The bombing gave him his subject.

The result was, indeed, a propaganda coup for the Republicans. After its appearance at the fair, partisans sought to leverage the fame of Guernica by touring it to England to raise support for the cause in 1938. Its display at the Whitechapel Gallery, which is supposed to have drawn some fifteen thousand curious visitors, provoked the following scene, one of the more moving footnotes in modernist history: “The most remarkable addition to the Guernica exhibit was the serried ranks of worker men’s boots that were left like ex-votos at the painting’s base: the price of admission was a pair of boots, in a fit state to be sent to the Spanish front, a generous gesture that considering Barcelona’s imminent fall now seemed increasingly futile.”2

All this makes Guernica an indubitably heroic example of political art—but what still has to be reckoned with is the much-remarked-upon fact that the content of the painting seems to have remarkably little in it that is specific to the bombardment of the town of Guernica itself. Picasso had developed the motifs and even specific passages of the work in previous, apolitical works. The miasma of screaming figures, while admirably evocative of the anguish of war, contains not a single reference to the terrors of modern warfare—a bare lightbulb is the only suggestion of the present day at all. Guernica, therefore, is above all a vivid example of how, in the relationship of art and politics, the political movement of which an artwork is part determines its overriding power, trajectory, and meaning. (For his part, the still-basically-apolitical Picasso would join the French Communist Party after the war, in blissful ignorance of Moscow’s role in undercutting the cause of the Spanish Revolution during the civil war.)

• Hélio Oiticica, grandson of an anarchist professor and son of one of Brazil’s first experimental photographers, has the unique distinction of having sparked an entire political-cultural movement. Affiliated with the Neo-Concretist group, he came of creative age amid the very specific conjunction of forces of Brazil in the 1960s. A dictatorship had seized power in 1964 and set itself the task of capitalist modernization. In Latin America, such developmentalist philosophies found a cultural parallel with elites’ fascination with the streamlined forms of European modernism. Brasília, the purpose-built modernist capital, had opened at the beginning of the decade, a powerful symbol of this fusion. Radicalizing against this backdrop, Oiticica set himself the task of articulating a defiantly indigenous form of avant-garde art, looking to meld European aesthetic traditions with a romanticized vision of the popular participatory spectacle of Brazil’s Carnival.

The result was a prescient series of projects that made a virtue of participation: artworks that were meant to be worn (his cape-like Parangolés), handled (his box-like Bólides), or walked through (his proto-environmental artworks, known as Penetráveis). Such interactive art struck “against everything that is oppressive, socially and individually—all the fixed and decadent forms of government, of reigning social structures,” he declared.3 In 1967, he showed his landmark installation Tropicália in the “New Brazilian Objectivity” show at Rio’s Museum of Modern Art, a labyrinth-like environment that invited viewers to explore “a tropical scene with plants, parrots, sand, pebbles” (in his own words),4 semi-ironic totems of Brazilian identity. In most other contexts, Oiticica’s political claims for his art would be absurd hyperbole. In late-sixties Brazil, against the background of worldwide youth rebellion, they landed like a match on dry tinder. Much to the artist’s own surprise,5 his messianic project for a popular/avant-garde fusion of Brazilian culture actually came to be when a radical pop singer, Caetano Veloso, adopted the name of his artwork “Tropicália” for one of his anthems. In a few momentous months, the term blossomed into a brand name for an entire countercultural movement.

Lest there by any doubt about Tropicália’s anti-establishment aura in its moment, after the increasingly paranoid Brazilian dictatorship issued its infamous Fifth Institutional Directive in 1968, consolidating power and sanctioning censorship, it immediately moved to jail the movement’s musical leaders, Veloso and Gilberto Gil. Oiticica, for his part, went into exile. Yet the powers-that-were were also too canny to simply repress a style with so much mass cachet; they simply insisted that Tropicália’s representatives eschew the radical sentiments associated with its inaugural moment. (“There is no more hope in organizing people around a common ideal,” a resigned Veloso was compelled to say in 1972.6) As it made its way into official culture, Tropicália morphed into what Oiticica viewed as a defanged, commercialized simulation, and from exile he spilled much ink trying to defend the original critical potential of his cultural movement.7 And so the final irony is that a man whose entire project was promoting interactivity and merging the avant-garde with popular art ended up decrying how his most celebrated creation was used almost as soon as it truly became popular art.

What can be generalized from such examples? Each at least illustrates an artist trying to work through how a very esoteric program might relate to the popular struggles of the day. The results have had lasting significance—in fact, in each case, the works in question have contributed decisively to our images of the struggles of which they were a part, and are known to people who have neither interest nor knowledge of the steel shortages in Russia during the civil war, the dilemmas of the United Front in revolutionary Spain, or the hardening of military rule under the Costa e Silva dictatorship. Our political icono­graphy would be poorer without them. Yet the record also shows that it would be too much to consider any of these men political visionaries; their art has been an eccentric component part of political struggle, carried along by its larger machinations. This doesn’t mean they aren’t to be greatly celebrated; just that some sense of proportion is required in doing so.

In more recent decades, as the global tide of social protest that marked the 1960s receded, there have been fewer examples of vibrant mass movements for art to plug into. At the same time, art theory was one of the places within the university where some of the radical energy of the sixties found some continued life (to be a feminist, a queer theorist, or even a Marxist of some kind are relatively mainstream positions within cultural theory, and musings on such subjects are common enough in art magazines like Frieze and Artforum). One of the paradoxical results of this isolation within the academy is that, while the idea that art has some political role attached to it still has robust support among many art professionals, the conversation about what it means to be a “political artist” has become completely compacted into the question of artistic practice itself. The question of what, if any, relation artists might have to activism has receded into the background.

“Political art”—of a certain stripe, at least—was even a sort of mainstream in the recent past, though by the end of the 1990s its evident lack of attachment to a real political public had managed to elicit a kind of public backlash. New Yorker art critic Peter Schjeldahl coined the term “festivalism” to describe the kind of facile, posturing radical art made for international art biennials and museum shows—academically infused conceptual or environmental works of great liberal pathos and self-righteousness directed toward an uncertain audience (as Schjeldahl defined his term: “Installation art . . . used to nurture a quasi-political hostility to ‘commodity capitalism’”).8 More recently, such attitudinizing has become less fashionable as “festivalism” has become displaced by the “conceptual bling” favored by the ascendant culture of art fairs, where edgy baubles reign—but for those enmeshed in the debate about art, it remains important as the symbolic other pole to market-based aesthetics, soaking up a great deal of the energy of politically curious artists.

For me, one of the clearer examples of the paradoxes of this type of political art came in 2006, when the Danish art troupe Wooloo Productions staged a project called AsylumNYC at the generally progressive White Box space in New York City. The piece was meant to draw attention to the plight of immigrants and the cruelties of US immigration policy through a faux reality competition in which Wooloo invited a group of foreign-born artists to live in the gallery, while attempting to construct art installations using only materials they could convince visitors to bring to them. The “winner” would get a rarely granted O-1 visa granting them “creative asylum.”

The sensationalism and mock cruelty of this weeklong stunt (“It’s sort of a gladiators’ arena in a sophisticated setting,” one of the contestants told the New York Times9) was justified by the need to generate a media spectacle that would call attention to the issue of immigration—a justification that was considerably undercut in that the show happened to coincide with the massive May Day marches of 2006 in the United States, in which literally millions of undocumented workers flooded the streets of Los Angeles, Chicago, and New York City in a stand against the shameful Sensenbrenner Bill, which would have criminalized the undocumented to an unprecedented degree. Set against the historic May Day supermarches, this art project looked completely gratuitous or even distracting because of its deliberately provocative moral ambiguity.10

A much more prominent example might be the work of Swiss installation artist Thomas Hirshhorn, who has staged numerous projects that purport to be some kind of righteous experiment in artistic consciousness-raising. In 2006, at the Gladstone Gallery in New York, he created a bracing installation featuring fashion mannequins riddled with nails, festooned with gory, graphic images of casualties from the war in Iraq. The title of this spectacle, Superficial Engagement, was connected to a rather messianic theory about how Hirshhorn’s art praxis represents a needed model of intervention. As the press release explained it:

The events of the world, both the violence and glamour, cannot be cast aside; the imagery that stares back from the news reflects and creates the collective view of the world. This form of “superficial engagement,” as the artist dubs it, keeps the argument on the surface, not giving room to pundits or politicians to equivocate. As he puts it in his own formulation of the show, “To go deeply into something, I first must begin with the surface. The truth of things, its own logic, is reflected on the surface.” The current climate of constant war and oppression worldwide particularly provokes Hirschhorn’s critical inquiry, as he considers his art and his political activism to be inseparable.11

Superficial Engagement was particularly illuminating because its motivating theory pushed the contradictions of festivalism to its limits. It confronted the viewer with brutal images of the ongoing war in a visceral way to force a reaction, and thereby seemed to acknowledge the problem posed by the lack of clear positions and general esoteric character of most political art, which allows critics to praise it as radical without taking any real position of practical consequence. But of course the idea that forcing viewers to confront the facts of brutality somehow prevents pundits and politicians from equivocating was (and is) simply wrong. As Susan Sontag put it: “In fact, there are many uses of the innumerable opportunities a modern life supplies for regarding—at a distance, through the medium of photography—other people’s pain. Photographs of an atrocity may give rise to opposing responses. A call for peace. A cry for revenge. Or simply the bemused awareness, continually restocked by photographic information, that terrible things happen.”12

In fact, Hirshhorn’s own take on the vital questions then being debated about the war (should the United States withdraw from Iraq?) was not at all clear from Superficial Engagement—despite how the theory of “superficial engagement” itself seemed to be an elaborate way of saying that Hirshhorn felt that he, as an artist with political convictions, should make work that approached the condition of propaganda. In the end, it was as if he was more comfortable in creating a theory about what he should do than doing it.

Maybe this type of tortured attempt to occupy some ideal political-aesthetic space has merit in a period where there are few political movements in evidence; the intellectual hothouse of art is a place where radical ideas can be kept alive in some kind of coded form (although in 2006 there was, in fact, an antiwar movement, just as there was an immigrant rights movement). But the truth may as well be admitted outright: there is no elegant fit between art and politics, no ideal meld of the two. What is needed for effective political activism relates to the demands of a living political movement, which may or may not call for something that is particularly aesthetically refined, just as what “works” best aesthetically in the context of a gallery or museum is not usually a slogan or a placard. This lack of fit is an ugly condition for professional artists—but it will remain with us as long as we live in a world that is as ugly as this one.

“The work of ‘political artists’ usually harms no one, and I would defend their right to make it; what I cannot support is their self-serving assumption that it ‘somehow’ has a political effect in the real world,” the artist Victor Burgin said in a 2007 interview. “In a university art department, I would prefer as my colleague the artist who makes watercolours of sunsets but stands up to the administration to the colleague who makes radical political noises in the gallery but colludes in imposing educationally disastrous government policies on the department.”13 Expanding things beyond the university milieu, I think this is a fine way to frame the question of art and politics today.

What do these reflections mean, practically? They definitely do not mean “Don’t make political art.” I hope that we will have much more politically inspired art—and inspired political art—in the near future. What they do mean, though, is that with new and important struggles all around, we should once and for all ditch the bad art-theory habit of looking for a “political aesthetic,” of judging an artwork’s righteousness in philosophical or formal terms, divorced from its significance to what is happening in the world. Not even the most committed art practice can, on its own, be a substitute for the simple act of being politically involved as an organizer and activist. Perhaps in this context one’s talents as an artist might find a place, or perhaps an experience of this kind of activity might be processed, later, into something of enduring creative significance—but the need to engage comes first. This is a lesson I take from the Egyptian artists and their struggle.

In a 2008 contribution to the journal October’s issue on artistic responses to the war in Iraq, Martha Rosler—who has made her share of “political art” and is probably considered an exemplary “political artist”—addressed the question of what artists could and should do. Her final word: “organize, organize, organize.”14 This was the correct starting point then and it is definitely the correct starting point now.