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 . . .

Read more: The Art of Dead Labor