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.

“I believe that intellectuals have played crucial roles in the making of democracy and in the ongoing practices of democratic life.” With this sentence, I opened my book Civility and Subversion. Motivating the writing of that book was a developing misinformed (to my mind) consensus that intellectuals played an important role in the democratic opposition to the Communist order, but they would be relatively unimportant for the post Communist making and running of democracy. I thought that this was a terrible mistake, and I tried to show that in the book. In short, my argument was that intellectuals play a democratic role, not when they purport to provide the answers to a society’s problems, but when they facilitate deliberate discussion. Intellectuals are talk provokers. Discussions at Deliberately Considered over the past week demonstrate my point. We have considered and opened discussion about important problems.

On Monday, Vince Carducci introduced and analyzed the photography of John Ganis, art that confronts the damage we do to our environment, showing beauty that displays destruction. Carducci observes that “Ganis describes himself as a ‘witness’ rather than an activist. And yet his subject matter and its treatment clearly indicate where the artist’s loyalties lie.” But it is the ambiguity of the work, its internal tension that provokes and doesn’t answer political questions that facilitated a discussion between Felipe Pait and Carducci, comparing the destruction of the BP oil spill with the devastation in Japan. This could inform serious discussion about my reflections on man versus nature. We are present. We have our needs. How does it look when we satisfy them? What are the consequences? I think that this reveals that the power of the witness can sometimes be more significant than that of the activist. Carducci and I have an ongoing discussion about the value of agit prop. He likes it. I abhor it. I think Ganis’ work, with Carducci’s analysis of it, as the devastation in Japan was unfolding, supports my position.

On Tuesday afternoon and Wednesday morning, I reported on and reflected upon some local happenings in my hometown: the closing of an A&P and threatened budgetary cuts at a community center in a primarily African American neighborhood. Logical business decisions and business as usual local governance were having profound unjust effects. I was particularly impressed by the replies to the posts. First, my Town Supervisor responded, asking if he could pass my criticisms of the A&P closing on to A&P. Then a series of replies to my post on institutionalized racism, which pointed to analogous situations. Rafael reported from Texas about the schools there. Regina Tuma’s noted how the conflicts in Wisconsin and the experiences in Ohio are a manifestation of the same problems. And Scott made the general point: “The powerless throughout the country are being asked, or more properly forced, to bear a disproportionate cost for a problem that was, by and large, not of their making,” and speculates about the likelihood of “a counterpoint to the Tea Party.” I also had discussions at the community center about the post. Staff and community members think that the protest I reported on may be having an impact. They seem to have a sense of empowerment, as they try to figure out how they are going to buy their daily bread, along with their other groceries. I’m struck how two parts of my life, one embedded in the academic world, the other in my hometown, met virtually through the post.

I tried hard to facilitate a careful response to the Japanese catastrophes.  I have difficulty responding to natural disasters.  To use a silly cliché, they are beyond my pay grade. I generally listen to the experts, turn off the cable news and try to act as a responsible citizen. Intelligent public deliberation and discussion are difficult.

The complaint of Pait in his response to Fine’s post on joking about Japan underlines the point. “This conversation is too much about the talk and too little about the act. There are people who like it. As an engineer, I don’t.” I am a man committed to talk, but I know that sometimes talk is cheap.  Pait is right, action is imperative in the face of earthquakes, tsunamis and nuclear disasters. Talk is secondary. But eventually it is important.

We need to confront the relationship between the human and the natural world.  We need to know when we can tame nature, when we must accept its overwhelming destructive force, and we need to be aware when we are the destructive force, as it is connected to our pursuit of oil and our attempt to create easy alternatives in the form of nuclear power. That requires informed talk, when intellectuals, including artists, not only experts, are necessary.

And then there’s Gary Alan Fine, Deliberately Considered’s intellectual provocateur, mixing high and low brow insight. He established his learning by presenting a classic reflection by Adam Smith on distant suffering. Fine, in his first post this week, highlights that Smith recognizes both the problem of empathy at a distance, but also reflects on how reason and principle reach out, leading us to do the right thing. But, in his second post, he explains the humor in horror, justifying the politically incorrect jokes of: “Mr. Gottfried, Mr. 50 Cent, and Mr. Haley Barbour’s press secretary.” Fine in his appreciation of troubling humor, makes a classic conservative point about the human condition, “let us treasure those who begin the process by which we realize that we cannot change the world, but must distance ourselves from it, amused. We can wallow in the pain of others or we can recognize that our life continues.” Have I found an intelligent conservative intellectual within our midst?

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 Carducci blogs about art and other aspects of culture in Detroit at Motown Review of Art. He has also written for Artforum, Art in America, The Brooklyn Rail, and many other publications.

On January 3, the online culture news service Flavorwire ran an item on a new book of photographs by Yves Marchand and Romain Meffre titled “The Ruins of Detroit.” Marchand and Meffre are French photographers who worked in the city over the last year or so as part of Time magazine’s “Assignment Detroit” in which a cadre of journalists took up local residence and reported on what they discovered. Detroit has long been a poster child for urban disinvestment and Marchand and Meffre discovered plenty of evidence of it.

The genre Marchand and Meffre mine is known locally as “ruin porn” and artists of all media here have been ruminating on the city’s gradual return to the state of nature for decades. (For a couple of the more interesting examples, see the work of Scott Hocking and the blog of painter Stephen Magsig “Postcards from Detroit.”) But while the city”s deliquescence holds an admittedly romantic allure, there is another potentially more fertile tendency emerging that I’ve come to call “the art of the commons.”

The art of commons has sprouted up in spaces created by the erasure of the distinction between public and private as part of the city’s wholesale abandonment over the last forty years — there are upwards of 80,000 vacant buildings and lots in Detroit and the population is less than half the postwar peak of approximately 1.9 million. Artists and other social entrepreneurs are using this preternatural environment to rethink notions of community and the role of art and other aspects of culture.

Perhaps the most well known is The Heidelberg Project, begun in 1986 by Tyree Guyton. Working with his grandfather Sam Mackey, Guyton began cleaning up vacant lots in his neighborhood and used the castoffs collected to create dozens of outdoor art installations. As with other examples of the art of the commons, The Heidelberg Project can’t strictly speaking be considered public art because no sanctioning body has approved it, and indeed municipal officials have demolished parts of it more than once only to see new iterations appear almost immediately.

A more recent example is The Imagination Station, a collaborative project that purchased two adjacent burnt-out houses for $500 a piece with an eye toward creating a media center, living quarters, and an art gallery with a surrounding green space for public use. As the structures are being refurbished, the group has invited artists to create temporary installations from salvaged materials. Imagination Station uses a Kickstarter model as part of its fundraising strategy.

Microfinancing is also part of the relational-art tactics of Detroit Soup. Artist Kate Daughdrill and singer/songwriter Jessica Hernandez host monthly dinners at which artists and other social entrepreneurs present proposals for various community and creative projects. Patrons pay $5 to attend and then vote on which proposal will receive proceeds from the evening. Funded projects have included global-thinking activities like transcontinental video art transmissions to more local-action initiatives like neighborhood pocket parks.

As with any bottom-up endeavor, scale is an issue when it comes to what the future may hold for the art of the commons. For example, Detroit needs a new international bridge crossing to Canada for trade purposes. The estimated cost is US$1.8 billion, which using the Detroit Soup model would require everyone in America to attend dinner and unanimously vote in favor of the project. Whatever its limitations, the art of the commons has a lot to more offer as a practice than the gratification from ogling ruin porn.

There was an interesting profile of the politics of small things in the New York Times. A report on The Belarus Free Theater, which is in New York, performing at La Mama. This theater resembles the kinds of theaters I have studied. They 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. It is not surprising that one of their major admirers and supporters is Tom Stoppard whose work fits in a similar tradition of serious philosophically informed politically significant work.

But I noticed in the Times account and in other reviews and reports of their work an approach that I find problematic: the notion that great art is correlated with bad politics. Great art in the face of repression is heroic and certainly worthy of notice, but I think it is far from clear that repression is a particularly good basis for artistic achievement. To the contrary, I believe it is distance from repression, after the fact, from exile or in spite of repression, that political problems are best confronted artistically. Consider Stoppard’s work as an important case in point.

As a very specific confirmation of my point that good politics promises to make particularly great art, I thought about a theater – cultural group I know in the neighborhood of the Belarus Free Theater, Pogranicze (Borderlands) of Sejny. It is a foundation, community center, social service agency, social movement, cultural institute, art center, music school, and theater, among other things, with its roots in the Polish Student Theater Movement. Its founders were active in that movement. In 1989, the fall of the Communist order challenged them. What is the role of an alternative movement, when in a very real sense the alternative won? The victory was unanticipated even by the leaders of the political opposition, as it was with the rest of the world. The founders of Pogranicze came up with a novel idea, they moved from Poznan, to the small town of Sejny, on the Polish Lithuanian border, just down the road from Belarus as well.

Jeff, second from left, with the director and cast of "The Sejny Chronicles" on the set in Sejny, Poland

They established their foundation in the old Jewish quarter of the town. One step at a time, they engaged the culture of the borderland, as it was manifested in this remote town on the Polish border with Lithuania and Belarus. They continue to make theater and they have a documentary center. They produce a cultural magazine and have a publishing house. They offer cultural heritage classes for students in the secondary school, and they take the students on trips to cities and regions where multiculturalism is very much alive. They have a Klezmer band, with an ongoing relationship with great contemporary musicians from New York. And they organize a New Agora program devoted to developing intercultural practices on a large transnational stage. All of this because of a positive post-communist political situation, not a bad one.

Working with young people in this isolated town and with some of the most prominent artists and intellectuals on a global stage, with the endorsement Czeslaw Milosz and in the spirit of poetry and prose, in a remote part of Poland, a major international cultural center and center of artistic creativity has been established.

I think one of their greatest achievements is a high school student play, “The Sejny Chronicles,” in which students of the town worked on creating a diorama of the town in the interwar period and tell through song, dance and poetry the stories of the people who have lived there. I first saw the work in Sejny, but also saw it at La Mama in 2008, in the same theater where Belarus Free Theater is now performing. That performance also was reviewed in The New York Times. The performance noted by the reviewer revealed that positive political developments make great art.

The simple proposition, “there is a time and place for everything,” which I take to be not only a popular saying but a fundamental condition of modern life,  is challenged in our present media environment.  Now on different fronts, the significance of the challenge is becoming most apparent.

I’ve already observed this in thinking about the spread of economic logic to more and more spheres of our social life (link), (compactly named by Jurgen Habermas as the “economic colonization of the life world”  in his Theory of Communicative Action) And clearly the issue arises in the case of WikiLeaks.  But it also appears in surprising moments and locations.

There is the strange case of Steve Martin’s latest visit to the 92nd Street Y in Manhattan, leading to the embarrassment of all involved. (link)  Martin went to an institution known for serious discussion about all sorts of issues, but was not permitted to have such a discussion with Deborah Solomon, a writer for The New York Times and art historian and critic.

At the Y, the demand for the entertainer silenced the collector and writer.  I think the primary reason for this was that the event was telecast nationwide and the email messages from that electronic audience did not permit the live event from developing as it otherwise would have.

Solomon is an expert interviewer, Martin an expert performer.  The interview apparently started unsteadily.  They wanted to frame their discussion about art and not entertainment.  They needed to reframe audience expectations.  In that Martin and Solomon are accomplished professionals who have worked together before, it is predictable that they would have succeeded.  And this was important for all involved, given what they have in common, and the character of the location of the event.  But because they were not permitted to freely work their audience, the event was derailed.

Martin in an op.ed. piece described how he experienced the event:

When I arrived for Monday’s talk, I was informed that it would be telecast on closed-circuit TV across the country. What I wasn’t told was that the viewers were going to be encouraged to send in e-mails during the discussion; what I didn’t expect was that the Y would take the temperature of those e-mailed reactions, and then respond to them by sending a staff member onstage, mid-conversation, with a note that said, “Discuss Steve’s career.”

This was as jarring and disheartening as a cell phone jangle during an Act V soliloquy. I did not know who had sent this note nor that it was in response to those e-mails. Regardless, it was hard to get on track, any track, after the note’s arrival, and finally, when I answered submitted questions that had been selected by the people in charge, I knew I would have rather died onstage with art talk than with the predictable questions that had been chosen for me…

I have no doubt that, in time, and with some cooperation from the audience, we would have achieved ignition. I have been performing a long time, and I can tell when the audience’s attention is straying. I do not need a note. My mind was already churning like a weather front; at that moment, if I could have sung my novel to a Broadway beat I would have.

People sending the email messages were outside the situation. They could observe Martin and Solomon, but Martin and Solomon couldn’t in turn perceive them and their reactions.  The interaction between performer and interviewer with their audience was stifled.  Because the electronic audience, the audience present, and the performers could not work together to calibrate the framing of the event, the event failed.  The place and time for discussion about art and writing couldn’t be established in the face of a demand for entertainment .

Being concerned with the time and place for things seems old fashioned.  But without it, I think, many valuable activities can be reduced to mass entertainment and spectacular display, from world diplomacy to an evening at the “Y.”