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.