Why is political art such elitist twaddle?
|
Version 0 of 1. Politics is responsible for some very bad art. Or is it that art is responsible for some really dumb politics? Two of the artists on this year’s Turner prize shortlist claim political credibility for their work. Ciara Phillips created her prints and texts in collaboration with a protest group, Justice for Domestic Workers. Yet nothing coherent about how to change the world comes out of her Turner exhibit. Maybe it worked better on the streets, with the people. Duncan Campbell – currently favourite to win the prize – takes a very different approach. His politics is analytical. The French social theorist Pierre Bourdieu as well as Marx’s theory of value are among his references in a 54-minute film that also includes an attack on the British Museum’s director Neil MacGregor for being a wishy-washy liberal who defends the museum’s ownership of Benin sculptures stolen from this west African state in 1897. I know one thing – MacGregor’s liberal history of cultural encounters and global diversity, which he communicates through books and radio as well as British Museum’s displays, has taught people a lot more about global art than anyone will learn from Campbell’s film. I found the use of African sculpture in his film offensively and wifully ignorant, so obsessed with ideological point-scoring that it treats African art as a mere prop. It is Campbell, not MacGregor, who refuses to look at African art as a meaningful human creation. His commentary insists that western modern eyes cannot “see” the true nature, the real and lost context of these objects. Instead we imagine them as “art” to be bought and sold. This sounds deep but is both cliched and glib. In reality, history can excavate the cultures of 19th-century Africa as intimately as it can recreate any past – and MacGregor tries to do just that. The British Museum displays African artefacts well. It invites visitors to explore them in depth. By contrast, Campbell uses them to score debating points in a film that reduces politics to an elitist pseudo-philosophical rant. I would rather reread the complete works of the structuralist Marxist theorist, murderer and self-confessed fraud Louis Althusser than see it again. Political art used to be real and urgent. Now it is an art world fashion. In our Russell Branded days, being angry is being hip. Instead of truly cogent political statements, artists throw in ideological references that have no real relevance. Richard Tuttle even claims his big floppy kite at Tate Modern is intended “to raise the issue of genocide”. How exactly? What an empty bit of posing. So who is doing political art that matters? Jeremy Deller, it’s well known, is a good political artist because his works are not just passive or elitist - he can involve people in a real theatre of belief and idealism, while revealing the poetry of communal action. And Banksy is a good political artist because he makes incisive visual statements that engage people in laughter and argument. His recent censored satire on bigotry in Clacton-on-Sea really said something pertinent. Banksy is the most effective political artist of our time but where is his Turner prize nomination? To put it bluntly, radical art has to have some human warmth and passion. Otherwise it is elitist masturbation. Opaque films that quote Marx have absolutely no purchase on the real world and no hope of changing it. As John Lennon pointed out “I you go carrying pictures of Chairman Mao/ You ain’t gonna make it with anyone anyhow.” The one thing art can give to politics is the very thing Campbell’s posturing lacks – a bit of soul. |