We began by discussing the basic question What is a Political Artist? A difficult question that underlies most debate about Art and Politics, but which is rarely addressed head on.
'Philosophers have so far only interpreted the world in various ways; the point is to change it'
Karl Marx, Theses on Feuerbach
'Art is not a mirror to hold up to society, but a hammer with which to shape it'
Vladimir Mayakovsky
My suggestion was that a political artist is one who
Is to some extent unhappy with the status quo
Wants to change some aspects of the world
Attempts to do this through their art
Intends that his or her intentions are legible in the work
Controls, wherever possible, the context of presentation
So that these intentions are apparent
Others pointed out that political work may simply depict reality. This might be done in such a way that it implies that change is needed when the work is presented in a particular context. Or it may simply be that the artist is content with aspects of the social world that he or she portrays, celebrates, or alludes to.
Here's an example of an overtly political work of art - the artist, Mark Wallinger's, intentions are expressed towards the end of the video:
We also discussed the case of Giorgio Morandi as an example of an artist who, although he had strong political opinions (he was a fascist), seemed to have no political aspect to his art - he obsessively painted objects such as bottles on a shelf while Europe was in turmoil around him. For more about Morandi follow this link to information about a Tate exhibition. John Berger (in The Shape of a Pocket) has writen of Morandi:
'Today it is hard to imagine an art less political and more intrinsically opposed to fascism (because totally opposed to any form of demagogy) than Morandi's'
This is somewhat contradictory, as was pointed out in our discussion: to be opposed to fascism is in an important sense to be political. But Berger's point is that the man's politics and art seem in opposition. Yet, the choice of objects that Morandi depicted may not have been as arbitrary as they appear and that in context they had political significance: for more on this suggestion that Morandi's art had a political dimension read this article about Morandi from the Washington Times
In the Tate Modern collection we visited 'Architecture and Power' and discussed some of the ways in which a variety of artists used modernist architecture (sometimes unfairly) as a metaphor for political oppression.
This week we looked at an apparently apolitical artist Mark Rothko, and, specifically his Seagram Murals in Tate Modern. These large paintings, nine of which are illustrated here (7 others are in the Kawamura collection in Japan), are generally thought of as meditative and objects fit for solemn contemplation rather than political. The level of abstraction reduces the possibility of direct reference to time and place - many people will recognise a deliberately timeless quality about them. They are consistent with Rothko's expressed aim of dealing with large scale tragic themes, and can plausibly seen (in the light of his writing about Nietzsche) as his attempt to bring the Dionysian into painting:
These were originally commissioned to adorn the walls of the glamorous Four Seasons Restaurant in the newly-completed Seagram Building in New York City. Rothko later declared that with these paintings he hoped 'to ruin the appetite of every son of a bitch who ever eats in that room' - he wanted to emphasize a sense of claustrophobia, of being in a windowless room - and had been influenced in this respect by Michaelangelo's Laurentian Library with its blocked out windows. By a decision to break his commission and to ensure that 9 of these works were shown in an art gallery context in the Tate he did, however, make a political gesture of a kind using his paintings as the means. For more about the history of these remarkable paintings:
Watch Simon Schama's TV programme 'The Power of Art' on Rothko's Seagram Murals (broken into seven parts on YouTube, first part here
The Seagram murals will provide an interesting contrast with Joan Miró's 'Hope of a Condemned Man' series, which we'll be looking at in the final session of this course. You can watch a video about this triptych here:
In this session we discussed what I dubbed the Paradox of Propaganda:
To make propaganda you need to communicate your message in an unambiguous way
Art is essentially ambiguous
So if it's propaganda it isn't art
And if it's art it can't work straightforwardly as propaganda
The point of this discussion was to introduce thinking about questions about art with a message or closed interpretation. Propaganda aims to persuade people of a position whether overtly or subliminally (see some examples of Nazi propaganda posters ). 'Propaganda' need not be reserved for works that instill a position you detest: anti-Nazi posters are as much propaganda as pro-Nazi ones.
If there's a lack of clarity of message, it is to that extent less effective as propaganda. The second statement in the list above assumes that art is essentially open to more than one interpretation - this is something that can be challenged (though some people argue that it is a quality of great art that its meaning is not fixed, but leaves scope for interpretation by the viewer) - some felt that religious art is essentially unambiguous in its messages, yet no less great as art for that. Others pointed out that you could produce works with an unambiguous main message that still had elements that were open to interpretation - Picasso's Guernica is a case in point.
We also discussed the nature of documentary photography. My view is that with a documentary photograph the combination of causal (indexical) and pictorial (iconic) elements give it a distinctive relation to the world. Documentary photographs are in some sense traces of what they depict, even if reading off precise information about their causes requires extensive contextual information. Some philosophers, notably Kendall Walton, have even claimed that the directness of causal connection between object and image allows us to quite literarally 'see through' photographs. Without going that far, we can still recognize that the tradition of documentary photography (within which both Simon Norfolk and Taryn Simon's work largely falls) relies on a relationship of trust between photographer and viewer - we believe that the photographer is not misleading us about how the image was made. Contextual information aids the reading of the actual causes - in the case of Simon Norfolk's group portraits, seeing a video in which he instructed individuals on how to stand and where to look makes us realise the degree to which his portraits are constructed rather than found; contrast this with the family group photographs of Thomas Struth (soon to be shown at the Whitechapel Gallery) in which he deliberately lets the families select their own group pose. The information about how the group pose was arrived at is important to a reading in both cases. In the case of Taryn Simon, information about albinoism helps us to read the images in one 'chapter' of her work. In other words, to understand what a photograph is of typically requires additional information beyond what it containst visually.
But understanding what it is of does not exhaust its meaning. Photographers use photographs in complex communicative acts. Building from their referential aspect, photographers intend meanings through the way they use photographs in relation to other materials (and viewers often go beyond these intended meanings in their interpretations). Whereas in Simon Norfolk's exhibition (which we visited last week) juxtaposition (of his own work with Burke's) and information presented via a video (together with the use of an oriental rug in the exhibition space) were his principal means of amplifying the implicit anti-imperialist message, Taryn Simon, whose exhibition we visited this week, in 'A Living Man Declared Dead and Other Chapters' builds most of the information for interpretation into the works themselves. Dead-pan portraits of genetic descendants of people (and, in one case, rabbits) caught up in momentous and often horrific circumstances (photographed against a neutral background) combine with framed text and associated imagery (and also with absences) to produce a context of interpretation, one that is still sufficiently open-ended to require substantial engagement from the viewer. [listen to how another contemporary photographer Thomas Demand uses absence in his work here]
[If you are interested in the topic of intentions and meaning, there is a podcast on the Philoosphy Bites series that deals with this in relation to language: Stephen Neale on Meaning and Interpretation - there are also notes on artists' intentions from a previous Tate Modern course here]
Read reviews of Taryn Simon's exhibition here, here, and here.
For the first session we explored some of the ways in which photographers communicate a moral or political stance, starting from Susan Sontag's famous claim in On Photography that 'strictly speaking, one never understands anything from a photograph' - her claim that understanding involves appreciation of events unfolding over time, a sense of a narrative, and that individual still photographs characteristically reveal or portray moments and so cannot in themselves communicate or express a moral position [if you have access to an institutional online library you should be able to download my article 'Photographic Communication' that responds to Sontag].
[The 18th Century thinker Gotthold Lessing's discussion of the classical sculpture Laocoön could provide a way of answering Sontag to some degree on this point: Lessing argued that the visual arts are particularly good at implying narrative through the careful selection of the moment depicted - in his example, the expression on the dying man's face suggests the howl of anguish that is to follow. For more on this, see my (illustrated) brief note on Lessing from a previous Tate Modern course.]
Stuart Franklin's iconic image of the man standing in front of a row of tanks on the edge of Tiananmen Square in 1989 [illustrated and discussed here] served as an example of how much we owe to contextualisation. Much of the symbolic value of an individual standing up against a powerful force is, nevertheless, almost immediately legible.
If you want to understand more about the context of this iconic image, Franklin talks about his experience of Tiananmen Square and shows more images here, and a further video interview providing more context here. Seeing the iconic image in the context of a range of images of the surrounding events significantly affects our interpretation of the famous image. (I also interviewed Franklin for my weblog Virtual Philosopher here.) Charlie Cole, another of the photographers who took a similar image of the tank man describes his experiences of the events here. It is interesting that Cole's image excluded the large visual context of a burnt out bus and the full line of tanks.
The kind of contextualization provided by the links above explains far more about the photograph than is legible from the image alone. Without this background information the moral significance of the events that this image crystallizes is far harder to read. The scope and brutality of the suppression is easy to forget. Knowledge of the readiness of tank drivers to crush protestors makes the tank man's actions even braver than it first appears. Most viewers of the still image will have seen the BBC footage of the young man's actions too.
Documentary photographs correspond to some degree to the scene that was before the lens when the shutter fell (even if they interpret, distort, enhance or obscure). Paintings are more obviously interpretations, often incorporate symbolic elements, and, frequently are deliberately open to multiple, possibly conflicting interpretations (indeed, some would argue that a work of art that doesn't invite different readings would be a failure as art).
Picasso's Guernica (1937) probably the most famous and successful overtly political artwork ever. Emotionally there is no doubt that anguish, anger and outrage combine in Picasso's reaction to the brutal bombing and strafing of the inhabitants of Guernica by Italian and German planes. As a fund-raiser for the Spanish republican cause the image achieved a political aim through lack of ambiguity of stance. Yet at the same time, the complex image replete with symbols retains the kind of ambiguity that is characteristic of most art. There are some speculative thoughts about the meaning of various elements of the image - the bull, the horse, the woman with a child, etc., and the art historical allusions - ( in a tapestry version that hangs in the UN building) here - yet there is no simple key to its meaning that allows viewers to read off the 'true' interpretation of the narrative.
In the gallery we visited the exhibition of Simon Norfolk's 2010 photographs of Afghanistan shown alongside those of the 19th Century photographer John Burke. There is a review of this exhibition here and more about this 'collaboration' with a long-dead photographer here. The juxtaposition of an Irish photographer's take on the imperialist forces in Afghanistan 130 years ago with images of present day U.S. forces there carries a clear message of repetition of attitude and even means (many of the encampments visually echo their 19th century pre-cursors).
The video contextualizing the exhibition and revealing how some of the photographs were taken and providing a clear narrative structure within which to understand the images proved critical to most people's interpretation - view it here:
The key part of the audio of this video is from 14'10" where the photographer describes his attitude to the beauty of some of his photographs as just 'tactical' to seduce the viewer into considering his argument. He expresses his real anger and disappointment at the war in Afghanistan, the desstruction of the country, the loss of life, and 'Billions wasted, and nothing achieved. Nothing, nothing achieved.' Once you have heard the photographer's passionate statement of his position it is difficult if not impossible to read any ambiguity of moral stance in the images. It also creates an uneasiness in viewers who focus on the aesthetic aspects of some of the photographs, the beauty of the dusk light, the low horizon with two thirds sky with the recruits marching through sand towards a truck in the distance - these elements once revealed as merely 'tactical' aren't the point of the images at all, just a way of making us stop and think. Some in the group felt that there was a risk of caricaturing the events that led to American presence in Afghanistan - that visual similarity doesn't indicate similarity of cause and effect - the similarities in some visual respects between what Burke documented and Norfolk may mask important differences that may be worth exploring too (which reminds me of David Hume's point in his Enquiries: 'Nothing so like as eggs; yet no one on account of this appearing similarity, expects the same taste and relish in all of them.)
Next week. Taryn Simon's exhibition...Read a review of this here. Watch a short interview with her discussing this show: