Vince Carducci blogs about art and culture in Detroit at Motown Review of Art. He has written for many publications, including Artforum, Art in America, the Brooklyn Rail, and PopMatters.
The term “agitprop” has a negative connotation among American thinkers in the Western liberal tradition, a residue of the high-culture/mass culture debates of the Cold War era. In his DC post on the Belarus Free Theater, for example, Jeff Goldfarb writes:
“They [the actors] create a free space in a repressive society. They do so not just to make a political point, but a cultural one, creating art, not agitprop.”
Part of the anxiety rests in the hermeneutics of suspicion, the perception that ideology, which agitprop is at the service of, ultimately deals in false consciousness, that it’s a veneer that serves vested interests and thus occludes “true” knowledge. Critical theory awards a privileged position to “art” as resistant to ideology due to its ostensible autonomy. And yet even Theodor W. Adorno, arguably the most mandarin of the Frankfurt School meisters, acknowledges a dual nature for art, characterizing it in Aesthetic Theory as both autonomous object and embedded social fact. (Early on in that famously gnarly tome he writes: “Art perceived strictly aesthetically is art aesthetically misperceived.”)
Clifford Geertz offers a solution to the problem in “Ideology As a Cultural System.” For Geertz, ideology isn’t necessarily deceptive (in the service of what he calls “interest”) or symptomatic (a manifestation of what he calls “strain”) but instead is a semiotic system that uses metaphor to “grasp, formulate, and communicate social realities that elude the tempered language of science” (and I would add formalist aesthetics). From that perspective, what is called agitprop might be less normatively called visual culture, part of a semiotic system in which art is simply one aspect, if a culturally privileged one. I think of this with respect to the work of Dylan Miner, which was on view in Detroit last fall.
An assistant professor in the Residential College at Michigan State University, Miner is also a member of the Justseeds Artists’ Cooperative, a group of 26 artists working in the US, Canada, and Mexico who use printmaking as a form of activism. Among the materials in the exhibition was a collection of relief prints, mostly in black and red, on recycled grocery bags that featured imagery based on the Mexican Dia de los Muertos, during which people remember family and friends who have passed on, and in this case a metaphor for Karl Marx’s idea of capital as dead labor, the remains of surplus value appropriated by the bosses during the working day.
The work that best summed this up was Damos Gracias (Wal-Muerto). The image’s central skeletal figure is wearing a store clerk’s smock with an “un-smiley” face pin above the employee (oh, I’m sorry, I mean “associate”) nametag. She stands before a big-box store facade bearing the slogan “Siempre Pobre” (Always Poor), a reference to Walmart’s advertising tagline “Always Low Prices” and its direct connection to the immiseration of workers both within and outside of the company in the global economic race to the bottom driven by the enormous retailer’s ruthless cost-cutting business model. The neoliberal ideology of so-called free markets (which in fact are rigged to give advantage to the haves and even more to the have-mores) is represented in a prayer at the bottom left that translates to the effect of “Let us give thanks to the Virgin of Capitalism for delivering us from poverty,” a statement of false consciousness that the dead laborer reveals, along with the shopping cart she pushes representing commodity consumption as the reproduction of the inequality low wages initiate.
Miner’s use of humble handcrafted and recycled materials and indigenous-based imagery are an act of resistance to the alienation at the core of the modern capitalist system. Together, form and content constitute a semiotic communication, a meme (the basic unit of communication similar to the gene in biology) that can be replicated and transmitted, released into the cultural idea pool so that it might have a chance of changing our way of thinking. Call it agitprop if you want. But I for one, hope it goes viral.
Vince,
I wonder about the effectiveness of this type of art. Is it just preaching to the choir, or does it communicate a message that is actually convincing to those opposed to that line of thinking or those apathetic about those types of issues? The message does not seem very profound: Wal Mart keeps people poor. Perhaps this type of art will expose some people to these types of ideas for the first time. Perhaps this exposure will lead them to think about the issue for the first time. A world with a lot of this type of art might be a more political world. Yet, it’s less likely that this type of art will lead to in-depth dialogues exploring the complexities of the issues, with participants from various points of view. What type of art would indeed lead to this?
A couple of thoughts. First, I see this work functioning as a visual representation of a social movement, in this case the continuing struggle of labor in the face of global capitalism, something I think we might agree is a pressing concern now more than ever. (See all the posts on Madison, Wisconsin.) Working from Jean Cohen and Andrew Arato’s work in (a href=http://mitpress.mit.edu/catalog/item/default.asp?ttype=2&tid=9036″>Civil Society and Political Theory, it starts the ball rolling in terms of the first “I”, identity, that people might see these images and recognize some aspect of themselves in them. It would be up to the movement to extend it into the next steps, i.e., inclusion, gathering a collectivity of like-minded subjectivities, and then influence, gaining the critical mass (the threshold between what Nancy Fraser calls weak and strong publics) to eventually achieve institutionalization, that is, change that becomes certified as the new paradigm. (As Cohen and Arato put it, “Laws are frozen politics.”) This is basically what the labor movement did in the first half of the 20th century. You yourself note that the image might be the first step in getting someone to think about the issue. Isn’t that an important aspect of engaging the public sphere? Doesn’t someone need to start the conversation? If that’s also preaching to the converted, so what? Isn’t that another part of what needs to be done? The reinforcement of collective consciousness is not an insignificant thing. It’s the reaffirmation of solidarity, a ritualized mechanism that’s essential to maintaining a social order. What’s more, there’s more going on in the image than simply the message that Walmart keeps people poor. There’s the visual culture of indigenous people that’s being brought to bear and the various components of the print medium that provide a reinforcement of artistic intention. It’s a more sophisticated piece of work than you give it credit for. I refer you to Walter Benjamin’s essay “The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction.” Therein is part of the answer to your question about what type of art is needed. None. There’s the idea that “art” is an ethnocentric notion, it’s an 18th-century European Idealist philosophical concept whose utility may have run its course. Its ritualist display function is over, in Benjamin’s estimation, and politics now comes into play. (See also Arthur Danto and Regis Debray, as well as Julian Stallabrass’s excellent little essay Contemporary Art: A Very Short Introduction.) The fact that we have appropriated the visual culture of all humanity over the millennia under the rubric “art” is a form of semiotic colonization. Finally, I don’t see where the image prevents anyone from engaging the complexities of ideas. Have at it as you will.
Could very well be that art is beside the point. That may be the reason why so many politically minded artists or art critics of the molecularist persuasion (Lazzarato, Holmes, Wright, etc.) latch onto contemporary protests (intermittents, zapatistasidnignados, occupy, yosoy132, Arab Spring, etc.) and see them as art. They have the life, passion and commitment that it is hard to find in contemporary art.
But sometimes art works and provides a power for expression and creativity that can’t be done by other means. I think a recent case in point is the film Lincoln, much more than what its political critics and supporters imagine.