One
Five decades ago Brecht warned that to talk of beauty in the face of global crisis was
tantamount to a crime. But what of today's uneasy relationship between art and politics?
Sebastian Smee
Saturday November 16, 2002
The Guardian
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 Arturo 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 (over 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?
"Politics are like a stone tied to the neck of literature which, in less than six months, will
drown it." This was Stendhal, writing in the 19th century - a long time before the
catastrophes of the 20th century, which some say changed the moral landscape for ever,
and with it the possibility of art existing in isolation from politics. ("There can be no poetry
after Auschwitz," as Theodor Adorno famously said.)
Stendhal was, however, the father of the realist novel, and perhaps the most socially
engaged writer of his day. To this extent one could see him as a precursor of sorts to
Brecht. It is worth remembering, too, that although the world had not yet seen Hitler,
Stendhal was writing in the wake of Napoleon; Europe had not for centuries been thrown
into such tumult, such insecurity.
And yet Stendhal's position on politics was very different to Brecht's. "Politics in the
middle of things that concern the imagination," he continued, "are like a pistol-shot in the
middle of a concert. The noise is ear-splitting and yet lacks point. It does not harmonise
with the sound of any instrument."
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".
In Philip Roth's I Married a Communist, one of the characters, a professor of literature,
tries to impress on his pupil that there is a crucial difference between art and politics.
Where art is a realm of specific engagement, politics is an arena of general seduction.
Not only, he says, are politics and literature "in an inverse relationship to each other", they
are in an antagonistic relationship. To politics, literature is decadent, irrelevant, dull -
something that doesn't make sense and that oughtn't to be. Why? Because the
particularising impulse is literature. "You want to rebel against society?" he concludes
with a flourish. "I'll tell you how to do it - write well."
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 after the Oslo accords. "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."
Of course, Brecht, like Darwish here, was offering a lament when he asked the question
with which I began: "What times are these when a talk about trees is almost a crime?"
Likewise, whenever South African writers who lived through the apartheid years, such as
JM Coetzee or André Brink, made politics the explicit or even implicit subjects of their
writing, they usually did so with an elegiac tone, an undertow of regret, as if this were not
their proper calling.
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 even if we don't buy the rhetoric of Roth's
professor in I Married a Communist, 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, of which he was by no means unaware. "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.
Guardian Unlimited © Guardian Newspapers Limited 2004
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This article originally appeared in the Guardian (UK) Nov. 16, 2002
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