9.5 Theses: Art and Politics – Chapters Three, Four and Five

I want to begin with looking at chapter 3, ‘What Good is Political Art in Times Like These?’ In this chapter, Davis is setting up the idea that “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 an activist” (p. 48). It is in chapter 5 that Davis specifically challenges the mis-use of the critical platform of ‘aesthetic politics’, so in chapter 3, we see him taking on art history’s place in setting up how artists have idealized and become idealized.

Davis’ examples of Tatlin, Picasso, and Oiticica are meant to shatter the mythic narratives of these artists’ famous works (Monument to the Third International, Guernica, and Tropicália, respectively). Davis is right to exhume these artists and their works. We need to be careful about the ways in which we idealize our shared pasts. We ought not quote without understanding context. His method of undercutting their idealistic notions of unity, progress, and revolt in horrors of war, however, somehow turns their contributions into glossy and unstable syrup: with each artist, he ends on an ironic note of how their work achieved a limited function (Picasso’s membership in the communist party being Davis’ example of how an artist takes part in a political movement at odds with the content or outcome of the artwork politically).

Reading Davis is like taking bad medicine: I cannot disagree with much of his conclusion, but the taste is sour and omits so much. I would posit that much of the meanings attendant with making and consuming art has very little to do with direct political action and that looking to that alone does more harm than good. It appears that Davis’ criteria of judgement for the effectiveness of art in the political arena relies on how artists directly transform political discussion. Davis’ scope is limited here: The criticism of how effective these artists are in affecting political change relies on the artists making concerted, repeated and public attempts to use their art as a direct political tool. I would argue that none of the artists mentioned (Wooloo Productions and Thomas Hirshhorn included — reading interviews with Hirshhorn affirms this) aggressively state that their work should result in direct political action. Is Davis possibly utilizing a false premise?

My frustrations with Davis will not be resolved in this chapter, or in this blog comment. He is right to quote Martha Rosler about the importance of organizing. Davis’ next chapter on the limits of collectivity as an artmaking strategy is an interesting one that I will come back to.

What is at stake here is the assumption that art that aims to be political must have some direct political outcome. I would like to put this out there: Radicalization through the making and consumption of artworks that subvert dominant paradigms, through formal or political/social means, is one of the primary functions of art. Sure, it may not result in the passing of a bill through Congress, but artworks function on a different plane. The sublime grandeur of Maya Lin’s Vietnam Veterans Memorial or the chaotic overload of Hirshhorn’s public installations are not meant to make direct appeals to the public the way a demonstration or presidential candidate might. They are meant to function as provocative spaces for contemplation, discussion, and a kind of quiet change that has no direct equivalent in the way Davis sketches politics.

What I’m talking about is culture and the social. These things can be political — I think everything can have a political dimension — the important context here being the individual’s role in making and consuming art. As an educator and sometimes public art facilitator/maker, I’ve seen this radicalizing effect in my students and in members of my audience. The individual can be transformed. The individual can be transformative. I resist any prerequisite of direct political change through art as a condition for a work to be political in essence. I think we start with ourselves, and the countless examples of how the self has been transformed through art, and how that changed self moves into the world and in a chorus of resistance, can change others. . . that is political, too. To quote Joseph Mashek writing in his essay Carpet Paradigm, quoting Arts Magazine Editor Richard Martin, “Art has spiritual value, not because it can be used to escape sublunary reality but because in displacing only a little of the world it can implicate the world so generally.”