In recent posts, Vince Carducci examining the urban environment in terms of psychogeography, derive and detournment, and the gift and potlatch, explored the art of Detroit, the city at the epicenter of Fordism and ground zero of post – Fordist devastation. While I think his inquiry is illuminating, showing art playing an important role in democratic society, I am skeptical about his political utopianism, as he stands on the shoulders of Marx and the Situationists and Ken Wark’s account of them. I don’t think that the full power of the artwork is captured as a critique of capitalism or that the full political significance of the work is in its message. We disagree, once again, on art as propaganda and how art becomes politically significant.

Artwork, and the world it creates when appreciated, is, in my judgment, more important than context. The art, its independent domain, is where the action is, which is then related to a variety of different contexts. To be sure, Carducci shows how this works. Detroit artists don’t only speak to each other, creating work that communicates for themselves and their immediate audience. They speak to the de-industrializing world, providing insights, suggesting an alternative way of living. But this can work in many different ways, not necessarily tied to political programs of the left or the right or the center.

Take an example drawn from two past posts: Ivo Andric novelistic depiction of The Bridge on the Drina inspired Elzbieta Matynia to reflect on the way that bridge, connecting Serbia and Bosnia, provided a space for interaction between people from elsewhere, at the kapia, the public square on the bridge, enabling civility. Her account, in turn, inspired me to reflect upon the bridges I observe on my daily run through the public park that was the Rockefeller estate, and provided me with critical perspective for thinking about the devastation of the earthquake and tsunami in Japan last year. Andric’s novel informed Matynia’s cultural theory, which gave me insight into everyday life, helping me confront a major natural and man made catastrophe in Japan, which, of course, was far from the world of Andric’s creation. The metaphor of the bridge opens up an imaginative field that moves freely.

I think it is this opening that is key to the role art plays in a democratic society. Art as art, art for art’s sake without elitism, is about the development of imagination, in form. It informs opinion, which potentially makes democratic deliberations more fruitful.

Thus, as Paul A. Kottman draws upon the works of Shakespeare to gain insight into the character of presidents past, he seeks to understand the birthers’ convictions about President Obama. “Just as nothing is going to count for Othello as evidence that Desdemona loves him, nothing will ‘prove’ to the ‘birthers’ that Obama and the civic world he represents are trustworthy.” Shakespeare is not a Republican or a Democrat, obviously, but he can inform democratic judgment, about the destructive power of skepticism of the other.

And Cecilia Rubino uses theater to remember and commemorate in a theater piece, dramatically confronting the Triangle Shirtwaist Fire, while Judy Taylor uses mural painting to remember and commemorate Maine’s labor history. Taylor was commissioned to do this work. Rubino is committed to the political project of labor. For one, the work is a result of a market transaction, for the other, a matter of political commitment. But in both, the work speaks beyond the market and commitment. It opens imaginative space. The removal of the Taylor’s mural from public display is a scandal because banishment closes. It is repressive, beyond left and right.

The opening of imagination that is art is sometimes tied to a political cause and sometimes it has little or nothing to do with politics. But the opening itself serves democratic ends. It battles against cliché.  It enriches public life and human capacity. Sometimes, this has immediate political meaning and consequence. Vince and I are different, but not really in opposition, in that he seems to especially value the immediate and I prefer distance.

In upcoming posts, we will explore art that informs public imagination more slowly, less directly: Daniel Goode on listening creatively in New York. What I find most striking about his mini-reviews is that they show how listening is a way of thinking, providing insight. The insight is politically significant, even without any specific political end. And this is not about elitist institutions and sensibilities, high art as the grounds for philistine status acquisition, as I think a post or two on the rap scene by another new DC contributor, Lisa Aslanian will show.

For most of this week, we have been exploring the relationship between art and politics, a topic with which I have been deeply involved, both personally and professionally. We started with a discussion of political censorship. We debated the distinction between art and propaganda. And we explored how aesthetic interpretation supports hope. The power and limits of art were debated. Memory, unexpectedly, at least for me, was central in the discussion. I turned to the reflections of a novelist, Milan Kundera, on the obligation of the artist in my post exploring the special quality of art as opposed to propaganda. And now I turn to Kundera again in confronting memory, a problem that also appeared in Benoit Challand’s post on a discussion between his New York students and colleagues in Gaza City.

Kundera opens his novel, The Book of Laughter and Forgetting with a depiction of an impressive event. He tells the story of the Communist leader, Klement Gottwald, giving a speech in February, 1948, to an audience of hundreds of thousands. It was cold and the snow was falling heavily. Next to Gottwald was Clementis. Gottwald was without a hat. “Bursting with solicitude, Clementis took off his fur hat and set it on Gottwald’s head.” The propaganda department took a photo of the historic event, of the Party leader addressing the masses, marking the beginning of “Communist Bohemia.” “Every child knew the photograph, from seeing it on posters, and in schoolbooks and museums.” Four years later, Clementis was charged with treason and hanged. The propaganda section purged him from all history. He was airbrushed out of the photo. “Ever since, Gottwald has been alone on the balcony. Where Clementis stood, there is only a balcony. Where Clementis stood, there is only the bare palace wall. Nothing remains of Clementis but the hat on Gottwald’s head.”

In presenting this event, Kundera sets the theme of his book: systematic forgetting, amusingly depicted. Note that in Kundera’s story what is remembered is determined by the needs of the present. This is the position of Maurice Halbwachs, the sociologist who presented the classical sociological position on collective memory. But the past resists manipulation in surprising ways, something that particularly interested the great critical theorist, Walter Benjamin. Yet, in Kundera’s account, these are not just two general tendencies. Under totalitarian conditions “The struggle of man against power is the struggle of memory against forgetting.”

This struggle is at work in the case of Judy Taylor’s labor mural, as we were able to consider it in the post by Vince Carducci, which was supplemented by photos of the work provided by the artist. Governor Paul LePage wielding his official powers, extending the unofficial power of the tea party, removed a memorial mural commissioned to remember highlights in Maine labor history. This is enforced forgetting, at one with the anti-union policies around the country today. Not only are specific labor unions under attack, there is an attempt to erase the memory of union struggles.

Yet, this controversy, from a sociological point of view, is complicated by the fact that every act of collective remembering involves forgetting as well. We pay attention to the moments in labor history that Taylor, with the assistance of a labor historian, chooses to depict, but we forget others that could have been portrayed. Michael Corey with local knowledge reminds us of this. There is a point of view in the work. It emphasizes labor management struggles and not cooperation. Other events point to a different story. The mural is a work that remembers and forgets. But, I wouldn’t call this propaganda, as Vince Carducci does, although I understand why he chooses to do so. The work illuminates from a position.

I am, though, more concerned with the special kind of forgetting and distortion as imagined by Kundera, suggesting that there aren’t just two political positions, each with its propaganda. LePage’s actions could have appeared in Kundera’s novel. It involves not just the human condition, as we remember some things, we forget others. But a more tyrannical condition, where forgetting is a force against memory, connected to a political project.

Art, unlike propaganda, is subtle and how it remembers and makes it possible for us to see things has more to do with metaphor and illumination than with facts. Thus, the story that Kundera tells in his novel, the fate of Clementis’s hat, is a work of imagination, though it is true as such.

Bridges are not novels. But when they are built in ways that don’t just get us from here to there (I think of bridges such as the Kosciusko Bridge in New York), they also tell stories, or at least they inspire us to tell stories. In a modest way, a few weeks ago in the wake of the Japanese catastrophes, two bridges on the old Rockefeller estate told stories to me, which I conveyed to you. More profoundly, Ivo Andric’s The Bridge on the Drina, told a story of hope which Elzbieta Matynia considered in her post this week. Althue Serre mistook artistic expression and imagination for a factual report, and in the process, dismissed the theoretical insight that art provides. He misses the vital link between memory and imagination.

How we remember as much as what we remember matters, in works of art and in everyday interactions.  When we talk to each other across political and cultural divides, we see things that we otherwise wouldn’t see. Benoit Challand’s class learned more profoundly about the political struggles in North Africa and the Middle East, by speaking to a group of Palestinians in Gaza. They heard first hand reports of a demonstration and its repression by those who were involved, or at least by those who were much more closely connected to the movement. In their conversation, the New Yorkers saw things that have been invisible to consumers of the mass media, including our great hometown paper (I say this with no irony intended), The New York Times. Those who took part in the discussion will not forget what those who observe Palestine through the media cannot even know.

“The struggle of man against power is the struggle of memory against forgetting.” But it’s complicated.

While Vince Carducci and I see the relationship between art and politics differently, we share a common judgment that art, or as Herbert Marcuse described it, “the aesthetic dimension,” provides an important way to think about and do politics in an informed fashion. Today I respond to Carducci. Tomorrow, I will post the third in a series on art and politics: the reflections by Elzbieta Matynia on how an aesthetic work, in this case the architectural form of a bridge, informs politics. -Jeff

Reading Carducci’s latest post, on the removal of Judy Taylor’s mural, “The History of Maine Labor,” from the state’s Department of Labor building, and his earlier posts on the art of John Ganis’s photography,  and his posts on the politically engaged art world in Detroit,  “The Art of Dead Labor,” and “Detroit and the Art of the Commons” brought to mind a remark by Milan Kundera and the artistic masterpiece situated at the New School, Jose Clemente Orozco’s A Call for Revolution and Universal Brotherhood.

Kundera expressed, compactly and vividly, his understanding of the art in the novel and all other artistic forms in his book The Art of the Novel: “The novelist needs to answer to no one but Cervantes.” The primary responsibility of the artist is to address the questions raised by those who precede her or him, to develop the artistic form, as many other issues along the way come up. Such issues may be addressed, including political ones, but the first obligation is to address the formal challenges of one’s predecessors. Ironically, Milan Kundera, this most anti-political interpreters of art, is a political novelist despite himself, author of such key politically significant works as The Joke, The Book on Laughter and Forgetting, and The Unbearable Lightness of Being. He witnessed the absurdity of the previously existing socialist societies, as he developed his ironic form with Cervantes on his mind. He and other artists from that part of the world didn’t ignore political issues, but in order to actually be an artist, form mattered – real art versus the art of officialdom, socialist realism. As I put it in my forthcoming book, Reinventing Political Culture, this involved the power of culture opposing the culture of power. In the relationship between art and politics, form is where the critical action is.

In Kundera’s understanding, Cervantes did not only invent the form of the novel in Don Quixote, he invented the modern. All novelists, all moderns in fact, have to address the questions that were first raised in this masterwork, either directly or indirectly through intermediaries, more recent artists and novelists. I believe such insight is crucial in trying to understand the relationship between art and politics in general and in specific cases of political controversy surrounding art. And this is so for great as well as lesser works.

Taylor’s mural is not propaganda, although it does favorably depict the heroic struggle of the labor movement. The mural does not have to be fair and balanced in its portrayal of unions and management. Rather, the artistic form honors. It was commissioned to do this work, and it does so. Governor Paul LePage ordered the removal of the murals from the Labor Department building after receiving an anonymous fax declaring that it was reminiscent of “communist North Korea where they use these murals to brainwash the masses.” I know socialist realism. I studied its aesthetic in the Soviet bloc. It was a politically mandated work, tied to a totalitarian power. I know this propaganda form, and Taylor’s work is not socialist realism. It is rather a gentle realism, like her paintings of the Maine coast. The work doesn’t trouble. It doesn’t agitate. Agitation is in the eyes of the tendentious viewer – in this case a Tea Party Governor and his anonymous fax sender.

Orozco’s frescoes present much tougher material. The work is a part of a larger artistic movement, of Orozco and the other great Mexican muralists, Diego Rivera and David Alfaro Siqueiros at the summit of the movement. These were broadly recognized masters of a popular artistic form. They served the Mexican Revolution, as they imagined and created an art audience which included the previously excluded. They also developed a distinctive art form, committed to a democratic polity, indentifying it with artistic innovation and insight. The New School Orozco expresses the artist’s progressive view of history with an odd mixture of mysticism. Heroes of the twentieth century are portrayed, some who came to be seen as villains, i.e. Lenin and Stalin. This turned controversial, but unlike the Rivera commissioned for Rockefeller Center, demolished for its offensive political content, previewing Governor LePage’s move, the work wasn’t destroyed. Rather, to the New School’s later shame, the offending images were covered with a cloth during the McCarthy era.

One mural depicts the promise of science and industry, another, the warmth of the home. The center piece, “Table of Universal Brotherhood,” presents a generic multiracial, multicultural group of men around a table, with a book. The other two murals present the sweep of history, the struggles of the Orient, the struggles of the Occident. Some Orozco scholars consider the work a formal failure: the artist experimenting with techniques which he later abandoned. Others note that it marked his last moment of revolutionary hope, followed by more brooding pessimism. For me, the continuing success of the work occurs when people enter the Orozco room.  They look around and if they have a moment, deliberate consideration comes naturally. It is a place where serious discussions occur when people take note, often interfering with a meeting’s formal agenda. It presents a living artistic challenge.

I had the honor to work with the New School curators, Silvia Rocciolo and Eric Stark, on an exhibit which highlighted this, Reimagining Orozco. The exhibit combined serious discussion about the work itself and the questions it raises, with artistic development inspired by the work, including an exhibition of the drawings of a featured artist, Enrique Chagoya. Chagoya answered the formal and political questions posed by Orozco and this facilitated a community discussion about the problems of times past and our times. The aesthetic dimension opened a public space.

It is the same aesthetic dimension which reveals in the removal of Taylor’s mural the Tea Party foolishness in Maine.

Over the last weekend in March, a mural depicting Maine’s labor history was removed from the lobby of that state’s Department of Labor building and put into storage at an undisclosed location by order of first-term Governor Paul LePage (R). Along with banishing the mural, LePage directed the renaming of several conference rooms, currently honoring prominent labor figures, to give them a more “neutral” connotation. The governor’s decision was based on complaints he reportedly received, including one asserting the mural constitutes propaganda akin to that of “communist North Korea, where they use these murals to brainwash the masses.”

In a written statement on her website, Judy Taylor, the artist who created the work, notes: “The purpose of the mural is historical, the artistic intent to honor.” This doesn’t necessarily preclude it from being propaganda, but it does beg the question as to what it all means.

The 36-foot long “History of Maine Labor” mural comprises 11 vignettes, starting with scenes from the nineteenth century when workers learned their trades as indentured apprentices, child labor was common, and young women were sent from home to toil in local textile mills. Other panels depict milestones such as the first state Labor Day in 1884 and the inauguration of the private ballot in 1891. While the figures are generally represented as character types, there is one noteworthy portrait, Maine native Frances Perkins, the first woman US Cabinet-level appointee and Labor Secretary under FDR. The mural cycle concludes on a somewhat uncertain note with the failed strike against International Paper begun in June 1987 in Jay, Maine, and a group of workers looking tentatively into the future as the last two panels. The mural was created over the period 2007-8 under the auspices of the Maine Arts Commission, which held an open competition to select an artist to complete the work. Taylor won the competition and consulted with historian Charles Scontras as to which signal events to represent.

The mural was unveiled three years ago to generally positive reviews. In anticipation of the public display, State of Maine Labor Department Deputy Commissioner Judy Gilbert was quoted as saying, “this is going to be a very important piece of art in the long haul, and it is going to be an accurate depiction of organized labor’s role in the history of Maine.” Nationally, The New York Times and The Daily Show with Jon Stewart, among others, have criticized LePage’s move, and locally a poll conducted by The Bangor Daily News shows more than 80 percent of respondents against the mural’s removal.

Governor LePage claims the action was based on the desire not to appear “one-sided” in the state’s dealings with both employers and workers, and yet it’s hard to believe that objectivity is the primary factor for someone who has repeatedly avowed an “Open for Business” stance on the part of his administration. Indeed, LePage has joined a number of other recently elected Republican governors in Wisconsin, Ohio, Michigan, Florida, and elsewhere who have acted swiftly and concertedly in instituting policies and legislation that roll back the very gains the “History of Maine Labor” celebrates.

The style of the mural, done in oil, is markedly different from the rest of Taylor’s work, which employs a highly naturalistic approach to noncontroversial subjects such as portraits, figure studies, still lifes, and landscapes. Her only other public commission, for Mesa State College, is a series of paintings of Maine coastlines that could have just as easily appeared on the cover of an LL Bean catalog.

The “History of Maine Labor” uses grisaille backgrounds, evoking vintage photographic archives, behind flat graphic color foregrounds to project iconic status for the images depicted. The vignettes have been selected to portray a narrative trajectory of a rise from servitude to a seeming emancipation that in the end may prove all-too fleeting. As the storyline reflects the interests of a particular group, in this case, workers, one might well argue for the mural as functionally propagandistic. But that doesn’t mean it’s bad or unworthy of public display. Anti-smoking advertising, as Harold Laswell noted more than 80 years ago, is also propaganda from a functionalist perspective, though these days we put a gloss on it by calling it “social marketing.” St. Peter’s Cathedral in Rome and Raphael’s fresco “The School of Athens” in the Apostolic Palace in the Vatican City are basically propaganda, too, though we call those things “fine art.”

To be sure, given the pressures on the public sphere in recent times with increased media concentration, the “History of Maine Labor” offers a much-needed counterpoint to the valorization of capital that continuously bombards us, starting with the Monday morning weekend box-office receipt reports, to the semi-daily monitoring of mercurial financial exchanges, to the 24/7 flow of pop-up ads and product placements, to the media rhapsodies on the lifestyles of the rich and famous, to the whole spectacle of what Leslie Sklair of the London School of Economics calls the culture-ideology of consumerism as well as what is now known as the military-entertainment complex, and so on, all of it propaganda.

The future of “History of Maine Labor” is undecided at this point. But in the debate over the representation of class power in these United States, it’s done its work wherever it ends up.