Sunday 25 November 2012

for the mind. the politics of art.

The  second Kathmandu International  Art Festival opened today.  I had been a part of the first edition -  in 2009.  Came back and came across this essay. Good food for thought - material for the Mind ,which is the last  part of  a Festival that is about  Earth  Body  Mind .





The Politics of Art


Tolerance toward that which is radically evil now appears as good because it serves the cohesion of the whole on the road to affluence or more affluence. The toleration of the systematic moronization of children and adults alike by publicity and propaganda…the impotent and benevolent tolerance toward outright deception in merchandizing, waste, and planned obsolescence are not distortions and aberrations, they are the essence of a system which fosters tolerance as a means for perpetuating the struggle for existence and suppressing the alternatives.
—Herbert Marcuse, Repressive Tolerance, 1965
Reviewing current art, both locally and globally, it appears that much of it has or purports to have a political content. One reason for this focus is that technological advances encourage snatching digitized fragments from reality that document the persistent global nightmare of human inhumanity. This process thus duplicates in art the same nightmare we see every day on TV or the Internet. Very little of this work, whose apology is that it is “consciousness raising,” amounts to more than superficial agitprop, often executed in the same slick style as the publicity and propaganda it presumably criticizes.



However, today subversion as a tactic no longer works as museums compete to do exhibitions of earthworks, installations, conceptual art, et. al. that seemed so radical at the time. Art can no longer be politically or culturally subversive because we live in a society of such absolute tolerance that the Mormon Church made no objection to the obscene and scatological satire of its practices in a tawdry Broadway musical.


This is not to say that contemporary art can have no valid political meaning. At the opposite end of the spectrum from Sierra’s manipulated pornography is Alighiero e Boetti’s collaboration with the Afghan weavers who produced the beautiful and complex tapestries and carpets exhibited in his recent MoMA retrospective. The Arabic phrases embroidered into their borders are in fact highly subversive to Western values but integrated as they are into the aesthetic texture of the works they are not simply slogans but expressions of a cultural identity opposed to them. As much as Santiago Sierra denies and obliterates the aesthetic dimension, Alighiero Boetti exalts it, incorporating a political theme within poetic imagery that reconnects the Western conception of a decorative style with its Islamic roots. 





Disillusioned with art as politics, Marcuse separated himself from his now much quoted Viennese colleagues. He suggested that the authentic artist may escape being penned in by the velvet ropes of the illusion of liberty through poetry and the aesthetic dimension. Art which aspires to this difficult, complex, and elusive level of achievement may thus elude the increasingly effective techniques of accommodation and neutralization employed to repress any genuinely dangerous dissent by the society of total tolerance.



http://brooklynrail.org/2012/11/editorsmessage/the-politics-of-art

0 Comments:

Post a Comment

Subscribe to Post Comments [Atom]

<< Home