Revisiting the Notion of Political Art

Several years ago, I was advocating without hesitation for the idea of a “political” art: an art whose content I deemed progressive (feminist, antiracist, etc.) created by artists whose approach I considered honest in terms of its given historical context.¹ After several years of research in the United States, I was on the verge of defending the thesis that was going to allow me to become a professor of national art schools in France.

Shifting from the position of doctoral student specialising in contemporary art to that of a teacher in a French art school had quite simply obliged me to adopt a materialist position and a non-dominant perspective. Talking about art with young people in the region who are asking the question of how to pay rent in the capital after their studies has little to do with conducting interviews with established artists in their New York studios.

For a long time I had conceived of the work (labour) of art as the creative process – and its narrative. Nowadays, after several years as an insider rather than an observer, when I hear the word “work”, I understand it to refer to: unpaid work; fixed-term contract disguised as an internship with a miserly stipend; residency where the artist is asked (with no training whatsoever) to intervene in a school or an EHPAD² to save the cost of a relief teacher; artists’ residency where nothing is provided for women³ with young children; unpaid exhibitions (for the exhibiting artist); informal work in the form of high-society libations; moral harassment, intimidation, and/or ostracisation of individuals resistant to an economy of vocation… I could go on! When I hear the word “work”, I take out my revolver – sorry, my checkbook – I mean my MistressCard – or is it my menstrual cup? My sledgehammer? – I don’t know anymore.⁴

In these conditions, attempting as I did in 2012 to provide a definition of political art⁵ that contents itself with surpassing the basic opposition between the kind of art that is mainly concerned with visual and plastic forms and artistic activism, now strikes me as untenable. After seven years of practice that has given me pause, I have observed that, paradoxically, previously, I had developed an almost formalist approach to political art, by focusing on the artworks, their intentions, and their context of reception. At the risk of taking this example in an allegorical way – as American artist Michael Asher literally did at the Claire Copley Gallery in Los Angeles in 1974 – it is important to decompartmentalise art and extract it from its administration and, more broadly, from its context of production and distribution.

Viscerally: there are too many abusive and structural⁶ professional practices of exclusion, racism, sexism, masculinism, and classism in visual and plastic art institutions⁷ to allow us an unproblematic analysis of political artworks without taking into account the systems that bring them about – and the people supporting this system.

As a teacher, one of my responsibilities towards the students I teach consists, at the very least, of informing them about the working conditions they can expect (without depressing them). This means denying the myth of progressivism of the (tiny) milieus of contemporary art of overdeveloped democratic countries. However, this myth is also fuelled by political art.

I am not targeting the artworks in themselves, but the way in which their message is contradicted by the system they circulate within. Showing political art in a context of institutional violence and abusive work practices is not incoherent; on the contrary, it contributes to the tolerance of repression.⁸ Allowing a few voices to express themselves, granting criticism or dissidence (including institutional) a delimited role, allows deep, structural transformation to be avoided. One example among many others, the third and last chapter of the Agitprop! ⁹ exhibition at the Brooklyn Museum of American Art, including A People’s Monument to Anti-Displacement Organizing. This piece had been created by an activists’ coalition, MTOPP (Movement to Protect the People) and by some of the political artists’ collectives that had been invited to participate in the exhibition, such as Not An Alternative, The Illuminator, Occupy Museums, Ultra-Red. It contained video and textual documents revealing the process of gentrification behind advertisements for “development” and “affordable” access to property in Flatbush and Crown Heights, made by the mayor Bill DeBlasio and the city council – and duly relayed by the mass media. It was thus a matter of explaining the real implications of re-zoning:¹⁰ giving residential status to the spaces in question, far from resolving the housing crisis in New York as the official discourse claimed, would allow the construction of huge luxury apartment blocks that would be financially inaccessible to the current residents of the neighbourhood. Monument also rendered the leaders of working-class Afro-American activist movements against gentrification visible, while also showing the police violence perpetrated against them.

The Monument was included in Agitprop! following talks between the artist-activists coalition and the museum’s curators and director.¹¹ The negotiations had taken place after protest marches organised several months prior, to denounce the Brooklyn Museum’s hosting of a real estate summit.¹² While the institution was obliged to present the issues raised (the monument was found in a narrow corner near the exhibition’s exit) thanks to the pressure exerted by the activists and artists that it had invited, the activists’ demands (namely that the museum no longer rent out its premises for real estate summits) were left unanswered.

Institutions do not always put up with their criticism. Political art therefore has this political barometer effect – be it intentional or otherwise. Just as it is in moments of profound crisis such as ours that the government’s mask falls and shows its true violent and repressive¹³ face by gassing, beating up, and “arresting” masses of peaceful protestors and minors; it is when a work is slighted, cancelled, withdrawn, or censored that cultural institutions show their limits, in both the literal and figurative sense.  The more lightweight the criticism is, the more the power that strives to neutralise it reveals its illegitimacy, or even its fragility.

Initially, this article was based on a bitter observation of political art. Yet, as it has developed, by dint of reviewing examples of virulent reactions rejecting political art or even works that did not aim to awaken consciences especially, I have eventually come to ask myself the following question: but WHAT is it that they’re so afraid of? I’m not talking about the attempts by the far right – as systematic as they are hypocritical – to censor contemporary art, as was recently the case again for the exhibition L’aube des rigueurs molles by Laura Bottereau and Marine Fiquet at the Espace Les Limbes in Saint-Étienne. Nor am I talking about the inflexibility of certain city councils regarding “public space”, as was the case when a group of students invested a square in Lorraine that is listed as UNESCO world heritage, in order to create a very inoffensive performance devised in collaboration with Palestinian artist Khaled Jarrar.¹⁴ No, I’m talking about the resistance emanating from art schools, where the works by students that attest to certain political positions – notably feminist – are sometimes disqualified, or even met with open hostility or the signs of an indifference so insistent that it becomes suspect – and not only on the part of teachers, but also other students. If, as soon as a young woman affirms convictions and a commitment not shared by the majority, she must be silenced, does this means that hetero-patriarchal culture is very unsure of itself or that it is so repressive that it does not even tolerate points of view that differ from its own? And if simple shifts in the order of representations encounter such animosity, this is surely because art is an instrument of power. 

Which leads me to this – unstable – definition of political art: art that makes a non-hegemonic perspective heard in an unexpected place. In this regard, the practices undertaken outside of artistic circuits – according to the old, post-conceptual methods of infiltration and subversion – have proven to continue to be pertinent: evidence lies in the work of Angela Washko, who launched a debate on ordinary sexism with players of World of Warcraft.¹⁵ Or art that expresses the right of existence, self-determination, and the same rights and dignities of all individuals, based on a principle of self-representation. I’m thinking of a comic that is already over thirty years old, but whose osmosis between political sophistication and the rage of its expressive line remains unrivalled: Hothead Paisan, Homicidal Lesbian Terrorist, by Diane DiMassa.¹⁶

I therefore remain convinced that motivated artists and cultural workers are precious drivers of positive change. Artists can draw attention to realities rendered more or less invisible in a way that is surprising enough to make them memorable; art allows us to keep a sense of humour and a sense of the absurd while the mass media maintains a state of demoralisation – essential to psychological warfare. Artists can testify to practices and/or sites that are – or that were – outside of controlled territories. Here, I will cite the very recent and local example of the Forêt de la Corniche at the Fort de Romainville. Within this framework of the gentrification of cities in eastern Paris, a wild forest was massacred in favour of a “leisure complex” project, disregarding laws protecting forests and biodiversity. Shot urgently between two phases of the construction site, the black-and-white photographs of Morgane Ély recall at once the power of living organisms (a jungle had sprouted from a quarry-turned-landfill) and its fragility: the construction work was to continue. In the specific case of the struggle to preserve the site, these elegiac photographs counter the propaganda images promoted by the elected representatives who were imposing this “development project”, which represent in CAD¹⁷ a neo-nature as idealised as it is sterile. 

And even more directly, artists can apply their (perfectly) visual and plastic knowledge and expertise to actions in favour of causes that matter to them, thus contributing their singularity to collective activism.¹⁸

I will add that the artists and workers of the contemporary art field are not necessarily more politically responsible than other citizens and have no duty to engage politically: art does not have to compensate for the absence of political debate or culture. Artists are not summoned to invest some “thematic” or other. And if a political responsibility of artists does exist, it is – to paraphrase American writer Sarah Schulman – that of taking part in political movements, like everyone else, and of “confronting the structures that oppress us in a manner that is most threatening to those structures. That means in person and in print.”¹⁹ It is not the numerous, poignant images of the Forêt de la Corniche that interrupted – for several weeks – the chainsaws and chainsaw operators: it was the citizens (including individuals working in the art field) who formed human chains.²⁰

Art does not save lives (plant, animal, or human) but it does prevent us from dying inside. And for those who have had enough of experiencing the isolation of social injustice, of suffering from or witnessing global and local exploitation and destruction without intervening, we have a need for “political” art now more than ever. Once we enter the fray, we need art to give us courage. So I would like to offer you a song from childhood, that I rediscovered by chance while researching Schulman’s activism and her roots in American anarchism: Inno della rivolta (“Hymn to the Revolt”).²¹