Political events, especially those in the USA, often seem to impose a stark choice on artists: confront politics or avoid it altogether. Philosophers have for a long time debated the value of art being separate from politics, and the topic is still alive and troublesome today. In the twenty-first century, the demand to ‘be political’ confronts artists via social media posts, press releases and gallery texts. At times this appears little more than liberal false consciousness, the price of admission to a financialized market. There are, however, political movements happening today - the inter-linked struggles for racial, economic, and climate justice - that few can afford to be indifferent to. The outcome of the 2020 election, and the pending Biden-Harris government, makes a big change in the style of American politics. What does it mean for art?
We asked artists and writers to respond these two questions, in text, image or sound:
What is the task of art today? Has the outcome of the US election affected how you think about your work?
Here are their responses:
Clementine Keith-Roach
The Efficacy of Gestures
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Kay Gabriel
I dunno if I like thinking about art in terms of a ‘task,’ which makes it sound like homework instead of a joyful, livid, enlivened, grieving or oversexed intervention into the world. The outcome of the US election has changed nothing about my practice: racial capitalism is still genocidal, organized abandonment and mass death are still present, and those present real tasks for everyone. Art is parallel to that somehow. My writing asks a series of questions and deploys a series of methods that somehow emerge out of that situation. The real difference that I've learned in the past six months is that art is an indispensable part of movement and organization in a way I hadn't thought about it previously. Spread out a banner or wheatpaste a wall and everybody looks, and that looking changes something about the language people use and the actions they take. Songs and chants are one way we teach each other new words for saying fuck the pigs, fuck fascists, and fuck Biden too.
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Nicolas G. Miller
A soundtrack
PRESS THE LISTEN BUTTON TO HEAR IT
When life feels far away and remote I often find solace in melancholy music. Somber tones have the unexpected effect of filling me with hope. For 2020, I have put together several pieces of music that continue to unglue me from the recurring madness of screens, notifications, and the relentless assault of data — and give me hope.
In order of appearance:
Antonio Vivaldi, Violin Concerto in B-flat major, RV 583, II. Andante. Performed by Venice Baroque Orchestra & Andrea Marcon & Giuliano Carmignola (composed ca. 1720, recorded 2007)
Hubert Laws, "Amazing Grace" (1972)
Nina Simone, "Baltimore" (1974)
Ludwig van Beethoven, String Quartet No. 15 in A Minor, Opus 132, III. "Heiliger Dankgesang eines Genesenen an die Gottheit, in der Lydischen Tonart". Molto adagio – Andante. Performed by The Budapest Quartet (composed 1825, recorded 1962)
Josquin des Prez "Mille Regretz". Arranged by Luys de Narvaez. Performed by Jordi Savall, Montserrat Figueras, Hespèrion XXI (composed ca. 1500, recorded 2001)
Four Brothers, "Greenfields" (1960)
June Christy, "I Had a Little Sorrow" (1959)
Ustad Sultan Khan, "Raag Sehra" (n/a)
Gavin Bryars, "Jesus' Blood Never Failed Me Yet" (1976)
Frieder Butzmann, "Wolfsburg" (1984)
Johann Sebastian Bach, Partita for Violin solo no 2 in D minor, BWV 1004, V. Chaconne. Performed by Itzhak Perlman (composed 1720, recorded 1990)
N.W.A., "Fuck Tha Police" (1988)
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Stacie Vos
America now believes by the household. Over the past several months, the lawns in affluent communities have come to display signs that begin “In this household we believe...”
The role of art in politics is to preserve the level of irresponsibility that is necessary when developing meaningful thoughts and beliefs. The development of belief involves a process of finding oneself to be wrong.
Undergraduate students are often offended when they find they are being asked to think independently in my writing classes. They have learned to “read” literature for correct and incorrect “answers.” Interpretation is something they often do not understand until asked to write about art. This past fall, I asked two art critics to visit my classes, Steve Kado and Kristina Kite. It wasn’t until the students heard the speakers describe the process of not understanding art, or understanding it incompletely, that they began to see what I was asking them to write. The lesson was not easily translated back into our reading of Virginia Woolf, but the seeds are there. They asked me and the speaker directly: “Do you mean there is no right answer?”
Social media has come to perform the lawn sign I describe here. A set of brief declarative sentences such as “Science is real,” is substituted for thought. No one is invited to ask, “what is science?” “What is real?” No one to inquire what is at stake when white families, in exclusively white neighborhoods, claim to “stand” with black communities.
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Melanie Jackson
It is the day of the 59th quadrennial presidential election and like many in the world, I can’t settle. Things are going badly here in the UK too, and I feel desperately sad for both countries, and scared. I feel hopeless and overwhelmed all day. I don’t want that face in my house, in my mind’s eye – I cannot bear the thought of four more years of having it burning on my retina. I am chatting to Tim at Matt’s Gallery. He says it feels as if we are all going to hell in a handcart. Funnily enough I have just started drawing a scene for an animation I am making to screen online with the gallery with a woman pushing a handcart full of dicks. (They are redrawn from a series of medieval badges I’ve been collecting for several years). We’re not going there I vow – I’ll make us a spell – a sacrifice, an offering to the fire – and an ending to the animation. With this new purpose, with this focus I spend the next 12 hours drawing furiously to save us from the flames. This was art’s task for me, for that day. To get me through it.
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Temitayo Ogunbiyi
I am still processing the impact of the elections on my practice—it will shift and is shifting without a doubt, and in part because of the US elections. I think about living in Lagos and all that I have seen through perspectives here, and the pandemic too. My main questions concern how my practice can help me out of those assumptions I had once felt were normative. How can I work from a place of discomfort rather than perform with those I have known for too long?
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Michal Murawski
Post-Troll Aesthetics
The first half of the 2010s rolled with the deadened, automatous monotony of hypernormalised mega-managerialism. Ed Milliband repeating the same anodyne cod-consensualist soundbite a half-dozen times to a rookie hack. David Cameron being passionlessly “passionate” about all things, from prison construction to low-cost renewables. The anthropologists Dominic Boyer and Alexei Yurchak predicted in 2010 that the “late liberal” bubble was over-inflated and something weird was going to show up to burst it – something akin to stiob, the viciously overidentifying form of satire which Yurchak argued had finally tipped the hyperhumourlessly hypernormalised late socialist USSR over the precipice. The rhetoric and aesthetic of late liberalism did indeed implode (c. 2015), but not in the way the anthropologists prophesied. Instead of the virtuous, empathetic, even post-capitalist stiob they had (slightly wishfully) summoned, we got – from Warsaw to Manila – a global gang of unfunny fascist trolls propelled to power not only by misfit meninists and incels but also by everybody else fed up with poverty, indignity and monotony. Now it’s 2020 and what do we do? What oppositional political-aesthetic stances do we develop? Are artists and critics going to form pedantic Bidenite platoons of positivist fact-checkers smoking out the last vestiges of the populist menace? Let’s hope not. The troll right (and the alt-right, and the art-right) is still meteorically ascendant in many places and has to be fought. But let us not forget the libs. The power vertical is at its most pernicious – when, in post-chaotic moments like these – it is able to successfully shift into a horizontalizing shape. Instead, let’s adopt the posture of irreverent stiobs, obsessively toppling the libs’ resurgent pyramid schemes and perverting their disavowed heteropatriarchies, guiltwashed racisms and greenwashed extractivisms.
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Christopher Carlton
To Avert
“Language is laden with world.” (Paul Celan, The Meridian)
Poetry is enmeshed in an economy of language, from which it can separate only word from word. Advertisement, and the universal war that underwrites it and is it, has vitiated and reanimated even the smallest units of language, perhaps these most of all. So thorough has this process been, one cannot speak or write the language without shame. Each expression is countersigned by a terror hidden and perpetuated by the word. Feel, as but one example, the panic that blanks the mind at the word “this”. Elias Canetti provided a formula for this reality and its mood of undifferentiated abandonment : every command can be reduced to the command to “flee” ; the animal bellows a warning as it falls upon its prey. And it is as if all language were made synonym of to flee, so little is imparted not as command. Yet the sheer dispossession of communication, the preponderance of objective force in language, awakens possibility in the present. Precisely because the linguistic edifice cannot be appropriated for real freedom, its surface lies exposed at every juncture to external elements ; to the generation of language tangential to it. In poetry as elsewhere.
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Mathura Umachandran
Who said anything about tasking?
I want to be a gorgeous reader of Marx a gorgeous reader of Marx I want to read Marx I want to gorge Marx wanton gorgeous Marx
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Oilibhéar de Brún
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Khuroum Ali Bukhari
After the summer, he chanced upon a new idea: he would get her to write a manifesto. After all, he needed a primer. It was the only way to get her love back. In their early days, she felt she had triumphed, and he could do no wrong though their affair had come as a surprise to everyone else. He was, more than anything or anyone else, fearful of her. Whilst they were unable to escape each other, he was scared that the grace he had collected would disappear as quickly as it had fallen upon him. One day at the lake - she spotted a glowing lotus. “Scented like the sun and velvet to touch, - oh what fruit I saw!” she claimed that night as he listened in silent agony. She needed that flower - desperately. He knew he had to act fast. At first, he nudged her politely. She ignored him. Then, he kicked her. She was shocked but impervious to his violence. She knew what he was capable of but all these attempts made her strangely dreamier. Unable to contain her desire, she decided she would retrieve the flower. “Don’t do this. You must write it now or I’ll kick you even harder,” he cried. Kick, kick, kick. In pain, she crawled to the centre of the lake and after some struggles with some angry monkfish, she ripped the lotus as hard as she could. She held it aloft and he cried something from afar. “Now I have you. What will I win in life?” she said peering at the tips of its taut leaves. Suddenly, a swell of water pulled her underneath, and she was gone. Hours later, he woke up in a stream of blood. Laying on her breasts, he glanced up to see the flower perched on her head. He wasn’t lame but he felt immobile; it was all beyond his care. The nurses picked him up, cleaned him, swaddled him and set him down in the cot.
He looked at his hands – pale, discarded globules of flesh. They were moving. He screamed for her. “Are you there? Well, are you? Speak to me you fucking bitch!” He cried again but stopped as soon as he saw a shadow cast on a wall. He had never seen one. “So, is this it? Is this how your world works?” he thought scanning the room. Some errant light hit a bowl of pockmarked fruit. The next morning - a man arrived to cart her body away in a stretcher. As he left, the porter stared at the baby left in the room. “He can’t eat apples, yet.” he said. “He’ll have to one day,” the nurse replied. “Best he looks at it now, alone, before he can taste them.”
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Kuba Szreder
The short response to the first question is: fight fascism. To the second: not really, even though I was genuinely satisfied, if not exhilarated, that Trump lost this election. His defeat gives us a bit of breathing space, even in a distant country like Poland. Just as his victory forged a key link in the international chain of authoritarian equivalence, his failure will hopefully contribute to its undoing. For four years we have witnessed here, in Warsaw, how our own, indigenous crypto-fascists parroted the style of their spiritual leader in Washington. When Trump started to scapegoat antifa, he was immediately followed by alt right pundits and politicians running this merry circus at the eastern flank of the European Union. Now their big, showy, blonde uncle from America is gone. Puff. Not there, no more trump. Who now will satisfy their cravings and cover their misdeeds? It is not surprising that they responded with denial. A funny titbit: Polish state TV has not yet conceded Trump’s defeat, a month after the election. They are so loyal, maybe they should offer him the crown. I doubt he would be interested. He has another election to win, in just four years. Maybe he would send Eric or Jared in his stead? In the end he wants to build a dynasty: Jared the First and Ivanka the Great. Anyway, coming back to the first question. While Trump was in the process of losing the election, Poland was rocked by the largest protest in recent history. Led by young women, the protest contested an anti-abortion law that would force women to give birth to foetuses with lethal defects. It was an eruption of social energy, one of those historical events that remix art, not art, not-not-art, and post-art, into an indescribable flurry of signboards, witty slogans, graphic images, sound systems, dancing bodies and angry mouths, shouting a crisp “fuck off” to the fascists of the world, small and large trumps included.
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Christopher Page
Artificial Skies, Uncertain Heavens
