Art &/or Politics

So, it has been a while, and I'm still working on trying to figure out how I feel about the issue. The issue, broadly, being art and politics. Though this resolves into a number of directions: Should artists make art with a political agenda? Can artists make art without a political agenda? Do we, as art historians (or just viewers) look for political agenda in art? How do we even define political content in a work of art? What is/should be the relationship between aesthetics and politics, and is this the same question as the relationship of art to activism?

To catch you up on where this ball of yarn started:

• I went to see two of the three lectures by Boris Groys, in which he outlined a pseudo-Benjaminian theory of artistic development, updating "The Work of Art in the Age of Technical Reproducibility" (or whatever the translation flavor of the week is) to include digitalization and the internet. He posited that in the battlefield of today's digitalized, wired world, the individual artist has lost position; everyone is now an artist and nobody is a viewer.
• The Kandinsky prize (Russia's baby-Turner) was awarded to the hard-right nationalist Alexei Belyaev-Gintovt, leading to some interesting developments in the local art camps. Some artists, leftist activists, and critics came out vocally against him, protesting the ceremony itself and publishing rebuttals online. Others, including some local critics/art functionaries and some non-Russian members of the jury came out for the winner, through a combination of either outright political support, claiming to have not known his political leanings, or to have ignored them intentionally in favor of his other "aesthetic" merits. A winner of one of the other awards at the ceremony defended her acceptance by saying that, when all's said and done, artists need institional support in the form of materials and studio-space, and rejecting it would mean not doing her primary job of being an artist. A sense of urgency and discussion seems to have overtaken things; people seem to be working together to find ways of making sense of things, responding...
  
• I went to a meeting put together (somewhat hastily) by Chto delat'? and Vpered!, both leftist groups, to discuss the issues surrounding the prize. While everyone (who spoke) at the meeting opposed the prize, there was a range of positions regarding further action/reaction. Some were puzzled why this even mattered: since art is created for a rarefied audience of gallery patrons anyway - protesting the prize does nothing for working conditions or society as a whole. Others defended art as a viable space for critical reflection within society, and therefore still valuable and in need of defending.

I don't particularly like talking about my project in this space for a whole slew of reasons, one of which is that I have not really figured out its purpose (the space, not the project!) and therefore probably have a number of different kinds of readers.* But insofar as it relates to the thought process that accompanied my experience of the above-mentioned events, the fact that one major part of my project involves assigning political value or a political understanding of aesthetic action has both upped the ante and somewhat paralized my own reaction to these recent events.

In the comments section of the previous post, I tried to make a distinction between works of art as they are experienced by their primary audiences and works of art as they enter what I called "the art world" (by which I meant the system in which art works begin to circulate as commodities). I said that to me, the most interesting part (the primary meaning) remains at the level of physical/temporal experience, prior to the system of circulation in which other (secondary) meanings become assigned. For example, I was interested more in the audience who attended a performance than an audience who read about a performance at an exhibition of documentary materials.

kg objected, saying quite rightly that:

"[...] I very much think that even the most underground, insular and communal of art practices do exist with a larger audience in mind, both geographically and temporally, even if this audience is entirely imagined - and to deny that institutions mediate between the original moment and these audiences is not fair to the work first and foremost..."

Agreed. Artists indeed imagine themselves in a number of contexts/histories/traditions and certainly expect to be received not only by thier immediate circles, but by future audiences for sure. They make decisions based on these expectations, which we as viewers can take into account.

However, this is not the same thing as "institutions mediating between the original moment and these audiences." What I am disagreeing with is a reading of artworks that takes institutional context as the primary location of the artwork's meaning, that an artwork's entry to the market or the art system more generally defines what it is about.

Now, I am not going to defend this position, because I know that it is somewhat mistaken. (To say so would mean that the only kinds of artworks that I can truly experience or glean meaning from are ones made by my friends in their back yards before they've gotten their solo shows at the Guggenheim, which is, of course, not quite right.) But I will try to explain the reason I came to this conclusion in hopes of starting to answer some of the questions posed at the beginning of this post (and, um, my project).

The reason I was so riled up by Groys's talk was, as I may have said, because he seemed to tell a story about art that disregarded the particular effects of artworks on viewers in favor of a bird's eye view of things, where art just seems to occupy positions vis-à-vis mass culture/religion/the internet within some kind of system populated by stupid people with short attention spans. What really got my goat were his absolutely dispassionate comments that 1) the ethical dimensions of art have to do with a pollyanna-ish "let's make the world a better place" planting of trees attitude to what art is, and 2) that Belyaev-Gintovt's winning the prize make sense, since it reflected what was happening in the current, contemporary culture, which is imploding economically, tired of Communism, and turning broadly to nationalistic/fascistic forms as anchors of meaning.

What I felt was missing from both his positions was a feeling that an artwork can have a real effect - positive or negative - on a viewer or a group of viewers (a public). That, for example, people today can still be affected by an artwork at a visceral level (despite the feeding tubes stuck into our spinal cords); or that allowing hate speech or nationalistic or fascist rhetoric to gain such a prominent platform may have an actual effect on viewers. To just speak about the way that the artwork functions within a discursive system or an institutional system the way Groys does allows, it seemed to me, a completely dispassionate reaction to what was far from a neutral event.

Anyway, I know I'm smushing a lot of different ideas together, and the line of reasoning is not exactly linear here. There'll be time for that, I just wanted to lay some of it out while the "corpse is still warm" (to quote BG himself). One other thing I wanted to share, which I ran across today that made me finally sit down and write this all out. (It won't make it any more clear, but it struck me, nonetheless.) It's Toni Morrison's response to being asked about the way certain canonical American authors have depicted blacks. The exchange follows (note the sarcasm):

Interviewer: Haven't you been critical of the way these authors depicted blacks?

Morrison: No! Me, critical? I have been revealing how white writers imagine black people, and some of them are brilliant at it. Faulkner was brilliant at it. Hemingway did it poorly in places and brilliantly elsewhere.

Interviewer: How so?

Morrison: In not using black characters, but using the aesthetic of blacks and anarchy, as sexual license, as deviance. In his last book, The Garden of Eden, Hemingway's heroine is getting blacker and blacker. The woman who is going mad tells her husband, I want to be your little African queen. The novel gets its charge that way: Her white white hair and her black, black skin...almost like a Man Ray photograph.

Mark Twain talked about racial ideology in the most powerful, eloquent, and instructive way I have ever read. Edgar Allan Poe did not. He loved white supremacy and the planter class, and he wanted to be a gentleman, and he endorsed all of that. He didn't contest it or critique it.

What is exciting about American literature is that business of how writers say things under, beneath, and around their stories. Think of Pudd'nhead Wilson and all these inversions of what race is, how sometimes nobody can tell, or the thrill of discovery?

Faulkner in Absalom, Absalom! spends the entire book tracing race and you can't find it. No one can see it, even the character who is black can't see it. I did this lecture for my students that took me forever, which was tracking all the moments of withheld, partial, or disinformation, when a racial fact or clue sort of comes out but doesn't quite arrive. I just wanted to chart it. I listed its appearance, disguise, and disappearance on every page - I mean every phrase! Everything, and I delivered this thing to my class. They all fell asleep!

But I was so fascinated, technically. Do you know how hard it is to withhold that kind of information but hinting, pointing all of the time? And then to reveal it in order to say that it is not the point anyway? It is technically just astonishing. As a reader you have been forced to hunt for a drop of black blood that means everything and nothing. The insanity of racism.

So the structure is the argument. Not what this one says or that one says...it is the structure of the book, and you are there hunting this black thing that is nowhere to be found and yet makes all the difference. No one has done anything quite like that ever. So, when I critique, what I am saying is, I don't care if Faulkner is a racist or not; I don't personally care but I am fascinated by what it means to write like this.

(Paris Review interview, 1993)

Amazing, right? The key for me is when she says "a drop of black blood that means everything and nothing. The insanity of racism" - that she finds politics in a peculiar aesthetic structure is brilliant. That's kind of where I was trying to go; Belyaev-Govnovt (as he was called at the Vpered!/Chto delat'? meeting) was clearly of secondary importance here.

Man Ray, Juliet and Margaret Nieman, 1945

*So if you are here for cooking, tattoos, or chimps on ice updates, you may guiltlessly stop reading now. Oh, oops, too late...