An article by Michael Kane (”Politics Influencing The Arts”, OffBeat, Jan 2009) which referenced the work of various disparate creators such as the likes of Picasso, Michael Moore, the ‘Speak Out’ exhibition in New Mexico and others, was interesting in that it framed the issue around these artists’ work as examples of how art and artists are influenced by politics.

Perhaps the more relevant question regarding these and numerous other works of a similar vein is not so much one of understanding the influence that politics has upon the arts, but rather one of understanding how the arts serve to influence politics.

Art has been in the service of politics since the days of antiquity, for which examples are numerous, particularly amongst the the great works commissioned by the Church over it’s many centuries of political dominance of Europe. Our modern understanding of art as a form of individual or group expression could be said to have begun with the use of the literary arts, with the rise of the Lutheran Reformation and the use of the printed word to challenge the prevailing sovereign authority of the Church. This was a tradition which extended up through the English Civil War and the Cromwellian revolution, and perhaps most importantly to us as Americans, the publication of Thomas Paine’s Common Sense, the galvanizing document of the American Revolution. This short pamphlet served to take what was a collection of grievances and define them into a unified cause, and which was by all accounts a literary blockbuster whose reach and influence on the politics of the day has no compare by modern standards. It was a work whose distribution was surpassed globally only by Paine’s later treatise The Rights of Man, the most published work of the 18th century (possibly sans the Bible).

In the visual arts, an artist’s drawing of the British slave ship Brookes was perhaps the single most important act of public expression to turn the tide of Abolitionism in Britain. From the time of the illustration’s first publication in 1789, the cause of the Abolitionists went from being one of a politically marginalized and almost universally neglected movement to being one which succeeded in permanently banning slavery throughout the entire Empire within the span of only a couple of decades.

The plays of Bertolt Brecht, the music of Woody Guthrie and Bob Marley, the literature of Upton Sinclair and George Orwell, the Gilded Age photography of Jacob Riis, the political graffiti of British artist Banksy, the aforementioned films of Michael Moore and countless other documentarians: the ad infinitum through every form of artistic medium, these are creations designed to generate social and political change by, in the terms of Mohandas Gandhi, “making the injustice visible.”

Kane’s piece also referenced Picasso’s classic anti-war portrait of an atrocity, Guernica, as an example of art being influenced by political events. Certainly it was, but the power of this work to influence politics was well-understood by the Bush administration and then-Secretary of State Colin Powell who, when giving his press conference at the UN after presenting his pseudo facts to the world regarding the supposed threat of Iraqi WMD’s February of 2003, had the painting (which hangs on the second floor of the UN building where the press conference was held) completely covered in blue drapery. This was very consciously done by political operatives who understood the power of the visual image and the effect it would likely have in providing a stark and revealing counterpoint to their own desired agenda of initiating military operations against another society.

The works of the Russian artists Komar & Melamid were some of the most provocatively humorous exhibitions of artistic response to the oppressive nature of the Soviet regime, eventually leading to a violent government crackdown of their publicly displayed work. This incident was then cleverly promoted around the world as the “Bulldozer Exhibition” (because bulldozers were used to destroy the outdoor displays) resulting in severe international embarrassment for the Soviet regime, and eventually liberalizing changes in official state policies towards artistic freedom.

But if art is utilized in order to influence political events, then what distinguishes such work as actually being ‘art’ as opposed to simply being considered propaganda, or even merely a form of public relations? (’Public relations’, or ‘PR’, being our market society’s more palatable euphemism for PRopaganda).

And what exactly is propaganda? It is certainly one of the more elusive concepts to concretely define, akin to Supreme Court Justice Stewart’s famous attempt to describe obscenity by declaring that he ‘knows it when I see it”. So should propaganda legitimately be considered art, or is it some diminished or prostituted form of it not worthy of the status and recognition that other, more universally recognized mediums of artistic expression receive?

In order to better understand this, there would first seem to be a need for some shared baseline consensus on defining what exactly art is. There are of course a wide multitude of perspectives and opinions on the topic, but one characteristic that I would propose needs to be inherent in any work to be legitimately defined as art is that it expresses truth. It may be an individual truth, a perception or an interpretation of a truth, the documentation of one’s honest search for it, but it is truth and nothing less than, as the artist understands and/or experiences it.

Whether a work of art is created in an effort to share a truth, or is rather a conscience attempt to direct the audience towards an already pre-determined conception of what that truth is, may very well be the line which defines whether a work of art is a form of propaganda. This is important to understanding the influence of the arts on politics because does this then inherently imply that all forms of artistic expression geared to directly addressing political concerns are then by definition a form of propaganda?

What did George Orwell mean when he stated that “all propaganda is a lie, even when it is telling the truth”? Could it be that any communication that is designed to elicit a certain specific response by it’s audience, which is in essence what propaganda is, is inherently deceitful to both the audience and the artist? And what is the role and responsibility of an artist when addressing issues of social and civic importance, both to their own artistic integrity as well as to their place in the society that they live in?

These are questions which will be addressed in the next edition of OffBeat as we continue this discussion on the role and effects of the arts in politics.

- Andy Valeri

(First published in the February 2009 edition of “OffBeat”, a student publication of the University of Dayton)