In the late 1940s, in the wake of the most profoundly altering catastrophe of the 20th century, the communist playwright Bertolt Brecht returned to his native Germany and offered this rhetorical lament: ”What times are these when a talk about trees is almost a crime because it implies silence on so many wrongs?”
Today Brecht — along with the kinds of global insecurities that shaped his vision of art as a political medium — would seem to be making a comeback.
In New York, Al Pacino has just finished his turn as the mobster and demagogue in Brecht’s allegorical play about the rise of Hitler, The Resistible Rise of Arturo Ui. Although it refrains from making an explicit connection, Simon McBurney’s production has been interpreted by some as implying a link between Ui and George Bush. It certainly cautions against the seductions of demagoguery, and its sinister final warning is intended to strike a note of contemporary alarm: ”The bitch who bore him is on heat again.”
Meanwhile, the art world has just seen its most prestigious art event, the Documenta in Kassel, transformed by its guest curator, Okwui Enwezor, into a forum for the screening of politically motivated documentaries. These predominated over more traditional forms of art, which were included only when they contributed to the general theme — the insecure, perilous and unjust state of the world today. Enwezor’s strategy was criticised by some, but Documenta has never before attracted so many visitors (more than 650 000), and various people praised the curator’s deliberate turn away from the much discredited ”cul-de-sac” of ”art for art’s sake”.
Brecht himself would no doubt have been pleased to hear Enwezor talk about the radical redefinition of art heralded by the end of the colonial world-view. He might also have applauded Enwezor’s controversial reference in his catalogue to the attacks on the World Trade Centre as ”revenge for the values of the West”.
But all this raises a broader question: just how keen are we to welcome the politicisation of art today? What do we hope to achieve by it? And do we really want to be in a situation where we feel compelled to see an appreciation of trees, or of any other kind of beauty, as tantamount to a crime?
Today, there is no doubt that people in the art world get excited by art that shows overtly political tendencies. It bolsters their sense of agency in the world and makes them feel less peripheral, less redundant. But one could persuasively argue that the vast majority of self-consciously political art made in the affluent West is itself an exercise in redundancy. Almost invariably it is a case of preaching to the converted, since the audience for political art — that tiny minority who will bother to see a political exhibition — is usually already on side. The pleasure of seeing such work seems to be in having one’s convictions confirmed, one’s moral indignation given the legitimising stamp of art and thus transformed into the realm of ”finer feelings”.
Still, we all know that there are times, tragically, when art and politics cannot viably be separated. How, for instance, can we consider the art that came out of concentration camps such as Theresienstadt if not in a moral and political context? Or the contemporary flourishing of Aboriginal art in Australia, or the art and poetry that is coming out of war zones such as Gaza and the West Bank?
William Dalrymple recently reported on a Palestinian cultural centre that was set up in Ramallah. ”It was very exciting,” one artist said, ”but the Israelis soon became aware of the importance of these exhibitions … Some of us were imprisoned, usually on charges that they were painting in the colours of the Palestinian flag. They would say, ‘You can paint, but don’t use red, white or black.”’
In the face of such absurdity, the pursuit of art and meaning becomes indescribably moving — and yes, profoundly political. The celebrated Arabic poet Mahmud Darwish told Dalrymple: ”I know they’re strong and can invade and kill anyone. But they can’t break or occupy my words.” Darwish would prefer not to be making political art: ”In a different situation, I would like to give up my poetry about Palestine. I can’t keep writing about loss and occupation for ever … When my country is liberated, so shall I be. But until that time, our duty is clear.”
Asked in 1998 what he thought the social responsibility of the artist was, the South African artist William Kentridge replied: ”I don’t think there is a social responsibility for an artist. I think it’s their responsibility to work as well as they can and as far as they can with what they’re doing. Then I think the nature of what emerges will be much more complicated.”
That is telling, given that the high international standing of the man who said it rests, in large part, on his engagement with the themes of recent South African life. Kentridge speaks fluently about politics, and his art has been influenced by Brecht’s theatre, the German expressionists and Soviet cinema. So it is becoming clear that, to some extent, the artistic impulse and the political impulse are felt by artists themselves to be inherently at odds.
The contrast between the 20th century’s two greatest painters, Matisse and Picasso, is illuminating here. Matisse has often been ridiculed for his apolitical stance, his contentment with making an art of radiance and beauty, despite having lived through a period that saw some of worst horrors in history. His attitude makes for a stark and fascinating contrast with the story of Picasso’s political involvement. Before Guernica, Picasso’s famous painted protest against the Spanish civil war, Picasso too was a largely apolitical beast. But by 1945 he had become a poster boy for the French Communist Party, a highly conformist organisation that operated under the watchful eye of Stalin’s Soviet Union. He turned a blind eye to Stalin’s infamous show trials. ”Painting is not after all the most important thing and it is better to be mistaken there than about the revolution,” he said.
The story of this period of Picasso’s life — far from his greatest in artistic terms — surely contains a salutary lesson. Just as the many thousands of intellectuals and artists who supported Stalin, even with the best of intentions, were made to look like the worst kinds of fools when the horror of Stalinism became apparent, art that willingly turns itself into a tool of politics inevitably ends up looking foolish and strained. Alongside Picasso’s posturing, Matisse’s approach begins to look altogether more mature and realistic.
In our own current global predicament, it is all too easy to fall for the idea that for art to be relevant, it must address the global situation; it must be didactic and edifying and morally imploring. But perhaps art is most ”relevant” when its relevance is most easily put in question? ”It is extremely important,” wrote Robert Rauschenberg, ”that art remain absolutely unjustifiable.”
Of course, great art will doubtless emerge that does directly respond to the defining events of our anxiety-filled age. One noteworthy composer, the American John Adams, has already written a piece of music responding to September 11. The music, apart from working as a sort of sonic memorial to those who died, is an attempt to bring back a sense of reality to that terrible event. It uses electronic sounds and a recording from the mobile phone call of one of the hijacked passengers to a loved one. ”I see water and buildings” are the words Adams has chosen to use, and there is something at once concrete and transcendent about this simple, almost banal affirmation. It is not rhetoric. Nor is it political.
Art that tries to get to grips with tragedy or loss — whether on a personal or a grand, national or even global scale — is just doing what art has always done, and to a great purpose. But perhaps it is the poetic evocation of that loss, the ”getting to grips”, that makes it art (and worthwhile as that) — not the fact that it might be about terrorism, or the fight for sovereignty in the West Bank.
”Art,” wrote Jean Dubuffet, ”does not lie down in the beds that are made for it.” Politicians, on the other hand, are always trying to make beds for people to lie in. Where art is a transaction that deepens, lending richness and, as Kentridge put it, complications, politics reduces, flattens and hollows out, the better to control.
Of course, art does not and cannot exist in isolation. But neither should it be reduced to the status of a means to an end, which is the trap most political art falls into. If ”a talk about trees” in times of great political uncertainty is ”almost a crime”, as Brecht would have it, one could perhaps acquiesce to this, but counter in the same breath with Edgar Degas’s assertion: ”One commits a work of art in the same way one commits a crime.” If talking about trees is criminal, then art, whatever the situation, must continue to break the law. — Â