Is Public Art Political?
In 2014, the art critic and author Jed Perl wrote an article for The New Republic titled “Liberals Are Killing Art.” In it, he bemoans our collective inability to appreciate art for art’s own sake without flinging ideological baggage into the mix.
His diagnosis includes a long list of hyphenated examples. The argument goes that the old ideal (or at least his old ideal) of art-as-art has been subsumed by our increasing obsession with categorization, rationalism, and the search for patterns; and so, a painting is no longer allowed to be merely beautiful, but must also be “art-and-society, art-and-money,” or even “art-and politics.”
According to Perl, we lost the plot somewhere along the way, when our dedication to framing eclipsed our ability to appreciate what’s plainly painted on the canvas. We can’t talk about prose in The Old Man and the Sea without talking about hyper-masculinity, even despite Hemingway’s claim that “there isn’t any symbolism. The sea is the sea. The old man is the old man. The boy is a boy and the fish is a fish.” We struggle to talk about Kanye without mentioning Trump, or Ai Weiwei without the Chinese government, or even da Vinci without the Medici family.
Okay, so maybe that last example doesn’t land quite as well. People talk about da Vinci all the time, without even recognizing the Medici name. Maybe the renaissance was a better time for art criticism?
Perl’s claim that art is borne from a pure imaginative space that shouldn’t need to reconcile with the right- or left-leaning politics of the artist, or the times they lived in, may be a comforting thought to some. The romantic aesthete might even insist on it, and it’s not hard to empathize with her; after all, why should our favorite artists have to bear asterisks for the communism, fascism, individualism, racism, intellectualism, or sexism of their times? Surely the quality of our art needn’t be limited by the quality of our artists as people, right?
Let’s take the central question – is public art political? – and deconstruct it.
What is Art?
Ask Google, and you’ll uncover six hundred and sixty-eight million answers to the question, many of them quotes, examples, and definitions which contradict one another. Some of our favorites include:
Art is either a plagiarist or a revolutionary
Art can be pretty much anything
My “drop in the ocean” will contribute to the enlightenment of Europe, so to speak
Art is a means of union among men
Art is harmony
Art is the byproduct of conscious and deliberate observation
Without cheating, can you tell which of these quotes is attributable to Tolstoy, and which is a random internet commenter on Quora.com? What about the impressionist painter Gaugin? And the murderous metal musician Varg Vikernes?
In spite of all the noise, there must be some way to approach a working definition, even if only by broadening the kinds of questions we ask. A few spectrums you might find helpful:
Is art contemporary, timeless, or some combination of the two?
Is art deliberate, accidental, or some combination of the two?
Is art pleasurable, painful, or some combination of the two?
Is art subjective, objective, or some combination of the two?
And to throw in one final hurdle, by way of Socrates’ dialogue with Glaucon:
Is art an imitation of things as they are, or as they appear?
If we’re ever going to get to the bottom of this question, I suspect it won’t happen here, in a virtual monologue. You’re going to have to close the computer, leave your comfortable sofa, and start a discussion, preferably in public.
What is Public?
In the information age of big data analytics, targeted advertising, and social media ubiquity, it can be easy to wonder whether our privacy hasn’t already been sold to the highest bidder. Nevertheless, even as the line between private and public becomes increasingly blurred, the public should at least be easier to define than art.
It is a collection of people, bound by an agreement to put aside private life for some undefined period of time. The agreement to share space may be explicitly vocalized, as in a town hall, but more commonly it relies on nothing more than tacit understanding – this is a public park, a public sidewalk, a public beach (quite possibly maintained by private contractors hired by the government, but that’s a whole another can of beans).
Although not everyone has to get along, the notion of shared space is necessarily inclusive. Hyde Park wouldn’t be much of a public park if it disallowed, or even discouraged, Romanian grandmothers under the age of 63. Those people constitute at least some part of the public, and so their public parks must reflect their existence. But what about freedom of expression in a public space? In Hyde Park’s famous Speakers’ Corner, there is a tradition of public speech and debate that goes back well over a hundred years, and includes such speakers as Karl Marx, Vladimir Lenin, and George Orwell.
How should freedom of speech be dealt with in a necessarily inclusive space?
And, to bring the question back to art, does the artist have a responsibility toward the public, to challenge or confirm or even just reflect their experience? Should a mural speak to the public’s values? How have the platforms for public art changed?
And if you could distill your art to <140 characters @twitter, w/matching image, could you call it graffiti?
What is Political?
Again, triangulating a clear and succinct definition isn’t the easiest task. Take just two well-known examples:
The personal is political
There are no personal sympathies in politics
Regardless of whether you prefer the famous second wave feminist Carol Hanisch’s definition or Margaret Thatcher’s, it’s not particularly difficult to make an argument in favor of the other.
The second, you might say, is a pragmatic approach to governance. It assumes that politics are those things which relate to government, and that governing a large and diverse population requires less personal sympathy and a more utilitarian approach, seeking the greatest good for the greatest number. The most powerful political actors are not everyday people, but politicians. Your state senator is a political figure, his policies fit into a particular political agenda, and the laws he passes (or doesn’t) make up his political achievements.
Discussions of politics like these, which revolve around figures in government and the work that they do, can sometimes feel quite removed from our public lives, particularly if you’re watching the results of election night unfold on cable news. The amount of money and time devoted to advertising, punditry, and flashy technology reminds one more of a spectacle than of government; and yet the results do have at least some impact on your life. How does one reconcile a perpetually-breaking news cycle with some of our oldest struggles: war, education, health, environment?
The idea that “the personal is political” doesn’t deny the importance of strong governance, but more broadly suggests that political discourse should center on individual perspectives. Yes, government affairs still figure largely, as in the question which political party do you support? But the shift in size and focus means less emphasis on celebrity leaders and more on personal points of view. While election results still hold sway, the most important results are the ones which play out at your place of work, in the relationships between you and your neighbors, and on your body.
Much like public art, the political is here a snapshot of public affairs; it suggests that since you’re a part of the public, your personal affairs are necessarily political.
Conclusion
If we leave the answer wide open – if anything can be art, and anything political – then what is political art? What are its defining characteristics? Is a definition worthless if it can’t provide a counterpoint?
Or if we leave the answer wide open, but in a different direction – if art is a pure creative expression, worth appreciating regardless of its context – then how does one go about distinguishing between two works of art? Are such distinctions even necessary?
Written by Nelson Disla
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