Political Art & Lip Kissing
Lately I’ve been pondering this quote from author and podcaster J.F. Martel’s book Reclaiming Art in the Age of Artifice. And I've decided its wrong.
Our prints so far are certainly political and moral. Does this mean they’re not art? Perhaps they’re not behind-the-velvet-ropes Art with a capital A. But they look like art to me. And I think to make political art, especially without being polemical, is a brave act. Even a liberating one. Especially now. But I want an opinion from someone smarter than me about these things, so I reached out to pulp horror author and self proclaimed “spectator and word-counter” Nathan Waard to get his take. - Andy
Here is what Nathan had to say:
“Martel’s statement is provocative, since it appears to be wrong on its face. Most of us can conjure up a political artwork we find both galvanizing and beautiful, from Picasso's Guernica to Keith Haring and Barbara Kruger and Shepard Fairey to the ad-hoc site-specific de-installations of Black Lives Matter activists.
Art liberates by an absence of the political and the moral? Martel is wrestling with how, in a world of hyper-messaging, in which our psyches are bombarded by total marketing, maximum media, ideological pornography and retail propaganda from every vector, all of which dresses suspiciously like art—how can we restore to ourselves art's incantatory, exalting sublimity? That numinous blade that cuts to the very soul?
There is magic in art that produces astonishment, and—above all—recognition. Whether we stand in a cave looking at thirty-thousand year-old paintings or in the Louvre or in the mural-covered alleyways of San Francisco's Mission District, we feel the brush in our hand. Time collapses into the collective unconscious, which is all of us. We feel the stillness and silence of vision, vision that sees through the ages and sees us as we see those before us, and after us.
Art makes us feel seen, even in the act of seeing. Even among the chaos of modern life, our eyes scattering across the planes of the visible before us, we catch glimpses of the thrumming realm of truth and beauty beyond the edifice. We collect them, like beachcombers, to remember that it's there.
And so art touches us deeply, because it connects us to our common humanity. That power, though, can also be invoked with a purpose. Not merely a species, we are also a polity. Not mere watchers, we are also moral actors. Our collective vision can be harnessed to these qualities to create movement, like a great transcendental machine.
We must decide what this machine will do. Its function. Being is one thing; doing is more.
Here is a philosophy, then, for a kind of functional magic.
Not merely political. Not exclusively moral. But a community of human beings, reaching through time, to recognize one another, and create, together, a vision for our future.
But do we know whether this kind of art works?
Did Fairey's Hope poster, as ubiquitous in its time as his breakout Andre the Giant sticker (Obey), elect Barack Obama? Did Guernica topple fascist Spain?
How about this one, a plastic bag produced by a branch of Britain's National Health Service handed out at London's Gay Pride in 1997.
A spoof of both Coke and Pepsi sloganeering, it might not rise to the level of Justice Potter Stewart's threshold test for obscenity, and it might not be so terrifying as to deserve the name propaganda, but we know art when we see it. Did this shopping bag stop AIDS in its tracks?
Do we really expect art to do these things?
Well, no. But also, maybe, yes? Art isn't going to stop climate change. People are. But, then again, art is people. That collective unconscious, speaking through the artist's brush, but directly to us, our polity, our moral center. It changes us, maybe just a little, but maybe in exactly the right way. It lives in us, adds fuel to our fire. And the light reveals to us a path forward.
What do you think? Can art in the service of solutions inspire us just a little, and maybe nudge us in exactly the right way to change us all?”
