8.6 Contemporary art suffers from a narrow audience. Access to art education is largely (and increasingly) determined by income level and privilege; art education should be defended and made universal (this point itself involves a critique of the notion that art is a luxury).
8.7 There is no reason why the immense quantity of artistic talent that currently exists, unable to find purchase within the cramped confines of the professional “art world,” could not be put to work generalizing art education, thereby providing itself with a future audience.
8.8 This kind of common identity could form the basis for organizing artists as something more than individual agents, each working on a separate project; it therefore would also lay the foundation for a more organically political character for contemporary art.
8.9 Creative expression needs to be redefined. It should not be thought of as a privilege but as a basic human need. Because creative expression is a basic human need, it should be treated as a right to which everyone is entitled.
9.0 The sphere of the visual arts is an important symbolic site of struggle; however, because of its middle-class character, it has relatively little effective social power [4.5].
9.1 Achieving the reform objectives of thesis 8, therefore, entails that the sphere of the visual arts transcend itself and purely “art-world” concerns; such reforms will be best achieved by linking up with struggles outside of the sphere of the visual arts (for instance, linking the fight for art to the fight for education [8.6]).
9.2 Whatever these specific struggles are, it is an organized working class that is best placed to challenge dominant ruling-class relations [4.6], which is the precondition for challenging dominant ruling-class values of art and improving the situation of art.
9.3 The dual working-class values for “art” [4.8, 4.9]—as the subject of normal labor and as free expression in surplus of the demands of day-to-day labor—seem to imply a contradiction; this contradiction, however, is based on the current economic setup, in which a ruling-class minority dictates the conditions of work.
9.4 Such a contradiction is transcended in a situation in which laborers democratically control the character of their own labor, and, consequently, the terms of their own leisure; it is only such a state of affairs that offers the potential for the maximum flourishing of human artistic potential.
9.5 It is toward such a perspective, which involves changing the material basis of society, that those who care about art should turn. In the absence of such a perspective in the sphere of the visual arts, its representatives will turn in circles, responding to the same problems without ever arriving at a solution. Art’s situation will remain fraught and contradictory; its full potential will remain unrealized.
Art and Politics
Trevor Paglen, N5177C at Gold Coast Terminal, Las Vegas, NV, Distance ~ 1 mile
C-Print, 40 x 50 inches, 2007. Courtesy of the artist.
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