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.

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.