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ESSAYS
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What if political art
doesn’t have the politics to back it up?
Good politics,
bad art?
Josie Appleton
Artists are dealing with political issues –
the short-listed pieces in this year’s Turner Prize include
Langlands and Bell’s war art from Afghanistan, reflecting on
the mythical status of Osama bin Laden and the ineffectiveness of
Western NGOs; and Jeremy Deller’s critical video of George
W Bush’s home state of Texas. Veteran political artist Peter
Kennard has two London shows critiquing the Iraq war; while in Manchester,
Jai Redman staged a nine-day re-enactment of the US internment camp
at Guantanamo Bay.
However, there is evidence that at least some
of today’s political art lacks bite. The fact that ‘anti-capitalist’
art has found the patronage of Tory Party supporter and adman Charles
Saatchi suggests that it isn’t exactly dealing serious blows
to capitalist ideology. The Chapman brothers’ sculptures of
indigenous totems with McDonalds hamburgers for faces take pride
of place in the Saatchi Gallery; early on, Saatchi bought up Mark
Wallinger’s series of photographs named after Marx’s Capital,
showing his friends dressed up as tramps standing in bank doorways.
More recently, Britartist Michael Landy took on consumerism by having
all his possessions ground to dust at the former C&A on Oxford
Street.
In fact, not withstanding some artists’
activist intentions, much of the work addressing today’s big
political issues is pretty innocuous. The verve and the passion
of political art of old is missing – attempts at exposing social
inequalities tend to lapse into either opinionated outrage or cynical
irony. We would be hard-pushed to point towards a celebration of
popular defiance in the league of Delacroix’s Liberty Leading
the People or Diego Rivera’s revolutionary murals. Nor are
there condemnations of elite violence comparable with Picasso’s
Guernica or David’s The Death of Marat.
This isn’t simply about the failings of
contemporary artists. Instead, it is a direct consequence of a period
in which there are no longer any mass political movements opposing
Western intervention, standing up against oppression or putting
forward an alternative to capitalism. While Delacroix drew his inspiration
from the French masses, and Picasso expressed the outrage of the
Spanish republican movement at the massacre of Guernica, contemporary
artists have to work in more of a vacuum.
Three forms of political art
We can highlight three different breeds of
contemporary political art. First, there is a trend towards naturalism:
simply reproducing the details of a particular political subject.
Second, there is opinionated political art, which promotes the artist’s
view of political or material inequality. Third, there are ironic
works that take up inequalities with a wink and a grin. Instead
of passionate exposures of injustices that inspire people to action,
these brands of art are more likely to deaden political events and
make them seem farcical.
Naturalism. Instances of elite repression and
past popular rebellion have been reproduced by artists. Jeremy Deller’s
Battle of Orgreave re-enacted the 1984 pitched battles between Sheffield
miners and police, bringing together former miners and police officers,
as well as members of historical re-enactment societies more accustomed
to playing Vikings or Cromwell’s troops. The two sides were
coached in their performances – for the police to bang on their
shields and launch a cavalry charge; for the miners to throw rocks
and chant slogans. Instead of producing an artistic interpretation
of the miners strike, looking back with pride or regret, Deller
merely recreated the strike as a series of actions. He took the
surface reality of an event – the shouts, the chants, the missiles
– and said that we should ‘not be afraid to look at it
again’.
Jai Redman’s Guantanamo re-enactment involved
nine volunteers – one for each of the British detainees at
Camp X-Ray. They were fed Halal soup, beans and rice, interrogated
in sessions that were broadcast live on local radio and played the
US national anthem and the Islamic call to prayer over loudspeakers.
The recreated camp was modelled on the original, with a guards’
mess, a dormitory, a parade ground and a perimeter fence topped
with barbed wire. Redman said that he hoped to raise awareness of
conditions in the Cuban camp, and to assist the campaign of British
detainees’ families.
These are examples of what the Hungarian Marxist
Georg Lukács called ‘naturalism’ – meaning
the reliance on surface detail and description, rather than revealing
a subject’s inner significance. Camp X-Ray and the Battle of
Orgreave are being made to speak for themselves, as if it was enough
to show people bent over in orange jumps suits or the police in
a cavalry charge. Iconographic political art from the past would
better fit Lukács’ notion of ‘realism’: bringing
to light the reality lying beyond surface impressions. Rather than
showing bombs falling, people screaming, buildings shattering, Picasso
captures the horrifying core of these experiences.
But events don’t really speak for themselves;
surface detail on its own means nothing. For the police, the Battle
of Orgreave was a necessary challenge to what Thatcher described
as ‘violence and intimidation’ from the ‘enemies
of democracy’; for the miners, it was a threat to their livelihoods.
The same event means different things depending on your political
point of view. The studied muteness of today’s naturalism signals
a reluctance to take a stand, to interpret an event’s significance.
The result is to confirm people’s prejudices and assumptions
rather than challenge them. While this art raises big political
issues, it immediately kills debate over them with its non-committal,
non-interventionist stance.
In fact, these re-enactments have a neutering
effect. In 1984, the battle was one of life and death, in 2001 it
was a performance staged for the cameras. Anger, pride and regret
endures to this day among those who took part. ‘People there
were prepared to kill us, and we were prepared to kill them’,
said one participant; ‘we were fighting for our jobs, our livelihoods’,
said another. Deller’s event turned tragedy into farce. Participants
were warned about getting carried away, reminded that the aim was
to ‘put on a good show for all the cameras’ and ‘go
home safely’ at the end of the day. While in 1984 the miners
had torn up a stone wall for ammunition, now they were given a limited
number of Channel 4-issue ‘stones’. (That it is bad political
art doesn’t necessarily make it bad art. One could say that
this neutering, staged effect was precisely the point with Deller’s
piece. Although those days of left-right confrontation were a mere
20 years ago, they indeed seem a world away, as safely distant as
the Civil War. It’s a powerful gesture to conjure up the taste
and sound of a real political fight, only to dispel it to the ranks
of the recreational Roundheads.)
Opinionated art. Political art that does try
to take a stand on social inequality often comes across as harsh
and opinionated. Peter Kennard’s exhibition ‘Decoration’
shows a series of US and UK medals, with flags fraying and medallions
replaced with the heads of war victims. Kennard’s point about
the connection between nationalism and suffering is driven home
from every possible angle, showing the medals’ flags in various
states of disintegration, and victims of every age and gender. But
the victims’ faces are blank and unfeeling, appropriately so,
given that they are merely ciphers for Kennard’s message. The
experience is akin to being accosted with a man with clipboard,
determined to tell you how it is. A set of prints accompanying the
Kennard show, ‘Award’ (with Cat Picton Phillipps), includes
a photomontage of a scowling Muslim woman superimposed on the backs
of an embracing Blair and Bush; another shows Bush and his wife
grinning through the window of an aeroplane smeared in blood.
Ironic art. Alternatively, art addresses oppression with a wry wink.
Here we could include the Chapman brothers’ remake of some
of Goya’s war etchings with plastic shop dummies, recasting
military brutality as horror-show kitsch. The Chapman brothers’
McVodoo sculptures work on similar lines; in spite of the piece’s
allusions to global capitalism, it is really a light-hearted gag
that you are supposed to ‘get’ then move on. Meanwhile,
the graffiti artist Banksy takes on the authorities with adolescent
glee, thumbing his nose at officialdom before disappearing into
the night. One recent intervention was a statue of Justice dressed
as a prostitute in Clerkenwell Green, apparently to criticising
the criminal justice system’s bias. Like a disruptive schoolboy,
Banksy knows that his provocations are just gestures of protest,
rather than attempts to change things. Ironic public art raises
political issues only to trivialise them.
Political movements and political art
In order to explain the present predicament
of political art it helps to look back at the past relationship
between political movements and political art. Political movements
provided the lifeblood for artists such as Kennard in the 1970s
and Diego Rivera in the 1920s. The inequalities they sought to expose
in their work were being exposed in people’s day-to-day struggles;
the pride and anger they depicted was drawn from those around them.
Art also fed back into the movement, hoping to inspire and guide
political struggle. At a time of mobilisation, the artist operates
at the crest of a huge wave. By contrast, it is when artists are
isolated, as they are today, that they lapse into clichés
and naturalism.
In his autobiography My Art, My Life, Rivera
said that his aim was to ‘reflect the social life of Mexico
as I saw it, and through my vision of the truth to show the masses
the outline of the future’. (1) His epic mural series at the
Ministry of Education and the National Palace showed every aspect
of Mexican life as part of a national populist destiny – the
festivals, the revolutionary heroes, the war against France and
America, workers’ struggles. The message is often obvious and
didactic, but unlike today’s opinionated art it is infused
with genuine sentiment. There’s nothing forced about Rivera’s
noble, lolloping figures when they’re scowling at the bosses
or the intellectuals, or mocking the indulgences of the rich. It
wasn’t just that Rivera was a passionate man (though he was
that); he was painting during the final stages of the Mexican Revolution,
when a new government was setting about nationalising industry,
collectivising fields and universalising education. His work expresses
the optimism and conviction of the times.
Peter Kennard, meanwhile, switched from painting
to photomontages after the events of 1968, and throughout the 1970s
and ’80s took up Vietnam, nuclear proliferation and General
Pinochet’s coup in Chile. He aimed to expose official deceit
and point a new way forward; he said that he hoped his images reflected
‘deep human desires’ and could help to ‘ground these
desires in visual fact’. (2) ‘The photo-montages are not
only reports on events and possibilities but become part of those
events themselves when they are used by the people campaigning for
change.’ His pieces were taken up by political movements, reproduced
on banners, postcards and t-shirts. In contrast to his recent work,
many of Kennard’s early photomontages were biting and harrowing.
In one, a Japanese crowd was shown looking up at an atomic explosion,
surprised in their realisation that they are all about to die.
While Kennard’s convictions may have remained
the same, times have changed. The popular mobilisation that fed
his work is no longer there. The break up of the Soviet Union in
1991 sealed the collapse of the left; the battle between opposing
ideological visions, which had structured political life for some
150 years, was declared over. Once there was ‘no alternative’
to capitalism, political life lost its raison d’etre –
cynicism towards politics increased, voting declined and popular
movements waned.
Popular mobilisation still goes on, such as
the anti-capitalist movement that burst on the scene in 1999; or
the recent ‘million man’ anti-war march in London, the
largest demonstration in British history. But this mobilisation
is actually a sign of political malaise rather than health –
they are individualised demonstrations of powerlessness rather than
a political movement with coherent aims and goals. The anti-capitalist
movement expressed a sense of being ‘anti-everything’,
a disgruntled lashing out against the unfairness of the world. The
antiwar movement’s slogan – ‘Not in my name’
– symbolised individuals opting out of a situation that they
didn’t like .
Political action has become reduced to theatrical
exhibitionism. Anti-capitalist demos of the late 1990s were called
‘carnivals’, entailing great attention to costumes, self-presentation
and protest methods. A ‘successful’ demo was when marchers
managed to outwit the police and put on an impressive show; the
protest became an end in itself. Similarly, many of those I spoke
to on the recent London antiwar march said that they just wanted
to ‘show Tony Blair how I feel’. The march was about individuals
demonstrating their displeasure then going home, rather than people
taking a collective stand against war. It is for this reason that
the demonstration had so little effect and just seemed to melt away
afterwards.
Because there are no political movements exposing
and mobilising against inequality and injustice, phenomena such
as capitalist exploitation become naturalised: they just are as
they are. Everybody can get angry and cynical about things, but
nobody expects to change them. This explains the different forms
of contemporary political art. Without a political critique or ideology,
it is difficult for artists to grasp the meaning of an event, so
they instead reproduce it in re-enactments. Lukács argued
that in the absence of ideology ‘a writer can neither narrate
or construct a comprehensive, well-organised and multifaceted epic
construction. Observation and descriptive detail are mere substitutes
for a conception of order in life’. (3)
Opinionated art such as Kennard’s arises
when artists try to substitute themselves for the political movement,
making solitary statements about the brutalities of war. Because
the artist has to do all the exposing, the work lacks the nuances
of that which channels collective experiences. And ironic political
art results from the fact that pointing out capitalism’s inadequacies
is inconsequential. If there are no alternative ways of organising
things, and no hope for improvement, then the inequalities of wealth
or power stop being serious – everybody, even a Tory adman,
can get the gag.
Looking forward
When art tries to take a stand on big issues
such as inequality or war, it tends to come out as clichéd
or ironic. Instead of weighty political art, we end up with artists
posturing. This isn’t due to artists’ personal failings
– it is due to the apolitical times we live in.
Perhaps a more genuinely political kind of
art is that which concentrates on telling the truth about contemporary
experience – be that love, depression, scientific progress
or whatever. Art’s attempt to capture reality in all its complexity,
to probe beneath everyday experience, is actually an inherently
political task – more political, in fact, than posturing about
the Iraq War. Raymond Williams and others have noted how art developed
in self-conscious opposition to capitalism. (4) While capitalism
looked at the world from the point of view of mechanical utility,
art aspired to be a sphere of ‘imaginative truth’. While
capitalism weighs all things in terms of market value, art looks
at the object from its many angles. In his 1844 manuscripts, Marx
wrote: ‘the dealer in minerals sees only the mercantile value
but not the beauty and the unique nature of the mineral – he
has no mineralogical sense.’ (5)
And while capitalism involves people selling
their labour power, giving up their creativity and time for goals
that they have no part in, art has to be sincere. In a letter to
André Breton, Trotsky argued that it was art’s sincerity
that made it a potentially revolutionary force: ‘The struggle
for revolutionary ideas in art must begin once again with the struggle
for artistic truth, not in terns of any single school, but in terms
of the immutable faith of the artist in his own inner self. Without
this there is no art. “You shall not lie!” – that
is the formula of salvation.’ (6)
It is especially important that art play this
role now, at a time when individuals are more isolated than ever.
In the absence of collective engagement, individuals often understand
their problems as something peculiar to them that they have to bear
on their own, rather than something that can be worked through with
others. Art can help to expose social reality, and to create a common,
humane culture. To do this it will need to oppose the dead hand
of official cultural policy, which demands that projects meet official
criteria such as social inclusion goals.
There were no political utopias or slogans
in ‘Edge of the Real’ at the Whitechapel, only art that
sought to penetrate experiences such as death, depression, institutionalisation
and commoditisation, as well as to look forward. One work that seemed
to convey a sense of future possibilities was Good People by David
Thorpe, which featured a mysterious, space ship-style house in the
woods. Meanwhile, Santiago Sierra’s recent show at the Lisson
Gallery involved spraying Iraqi immigrants with polyurethane, creating
rough sculptures that bore the imprint of people on the inside –
a much more powerful take on the assertion of Western power than
more upfront political art. The gallery looked like the scene of
a terrorist attack or a murder – with scattered overalls and
empty canisters attesting to Sierra’s act of violence. Instead
of painting his subjects, Sierra arranged them only to turn the
nozzle on them, obscuring their human form. Sierra’s act elaborated
the dark ambiguities of the assertion of power, and the clinical/industrial
modes it employs.
So perhaps the future of political art is to
come down off its soap box and stop trying to prove its radical
credentials. Just trying to tell the truth about today’s society
is political enough.
Notes
1 My Art, My Life, Diego Rivera, Dover, 1992
2 Images for the End of the Century, Peter Kennard, Pluto Press,
1990
3 Writer and Critic and Other Essays, Merlin, 1975
4 Culture and Society, 1780-1950, Raymond Williams, Penguin 1971
5 Marx’s Theory of Alienation, I Meszaros, Merlin, 1970
6 Art and Revolution, Leon Trotsky, Pathfinder 1970
Josie Appleton is culture editor of spiked (www.spiked-online.com),
and has written for a variety of publications, including
the Spectator, Independent and The Times.
She is author of 'Museums for "The People"?', a
critical look
at contemporary museums policy.
josie.appleton@spiked-online.com
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