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.

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.