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