All Art Is Political
A quiz to see if your art is political:
Are you a human being?
Do you live in the world?
Do you make art?
If you answered yes to all three of these, congratulations! You’re not an art-hating dog who lives in space.
Also, your art is political. Work doesn’t have to be overt protest art, identity art or anything that directly addresses a political or social question to be political. In fact, if you’re intentionally not making a political statement… you’re making a political statement.
That’s ok. There’s a difference between work that responds to its environment and is, as a result, inherently political, and protest art. You do not have a moral obligation to make protest art. Protest art can be incredibly powerful, timely, and change-making. It can also suffer from too little craft at the hand of too much good intention and too little time, which ultimately dates it.
James Baldwin, a political artist if ever one walked the earth, took protest art to task in his powerful essay “Everybody’s Protest Novel,” in which he eviscerated works ranging from Uncle Tom’s Cabin to Richard Wright’s Native Son. His attack on Wright is still controversial, but this observation on the genre of protest art resonates:
“The ‘protest’ novel, so far from being disturbing, is an accepted and comforting aspect of the American scene, ramifying that framework we believe to be so necessary. Whatever unsettling questions are raised are evanescent, titillating; remote, for this has nothing to do with us, it is safely ensconced in the social arena, where, indeed, it has nothing to do with anyone, so that finally we receive a very definite thrill of virtue from the fact that we are reading such a book at all. This report from the pit reassures us of its reality and its darkness and of our own salvation; and ‘As long as such books are being published,’ an American liberal once said to me, ‘everything will be all right.’”
In the context of this essay, Baldwin tells us that protest art indicates, rather than embodies, the crux of a struggle and the humanity of the players involved. It comforts the audience and the creator because it assumes a position of moral authority. It cannot disturb.
To Baldwin, not to disturb is an elemental sin for an artist. He observed in “Mass Culture and the Creative Artist” that art exists to disturb the peace, “which is still the only method by which the mind can be improved.”
Augusto Boal, Brazilian theatre artist and creator of Theatre of the Oppressed, considered political art to be the highest, purest form of art. Theatre of the Oppressed blurs the lines between audience and performer, giving non-actors the power to shape a narrative and a place on the stage. He said, “The poetics of the oppressed is essentially the poetics of liberation: the spectator no longer delegates power to the characters either to think or to act in his place. The spectator frees himself; he thinks and acts for himself! Theatre is action!"
He also famously noted, “The theater itself is not revolutionary: it is a rehearsal for the revolution." This is important to remember — no matter how political our art… it’s still art. Change comes from action. It comes from putting our money and our bodies where our art says they are.
Aharon Applefield was a Jewish novelist and Holocaust survivor whose lifelong topic was the atrocities of the Holocaust and the crippling emotional scars it left on survivors. When the Paris Review asked him why he didn’t write about contemporary life in Israel, he replied, “I am not a man who doesn’t see the current reality, but this reality is not good material for writing … this is for journalism.” He added, “I can only see things I have absorbed deeply and that are very close to me. I am limited.”
Here we have a babushka doll of an identity — the political artist who chooses not to be a political artist about some things, which is in itself a political statement.
On the other end of the spectrum, a catastrophic event can cause an artistic reaction that never directly addresses that catalytic moment. For example, All Aunt Hagar’s Children, the book of short stories by Edward P. Jones, coalesced after the Oklahoma City bombing. Jones told the Paris Review,
“One day I was watching morning TV. The Oklahoma City bombing had just happened, and among the talk shows there was this one with a very nice British guy, and he had a woman on who was singing ‘I Will Survive’ … I don’t know if it was the emotions of the Oklahoma City bombing or the emotions that came through with her voice and the words, but all of a sudden I could see the woman in the title story from Lost in the City — Georgia, the woman who went to Israel — and I could see a story developing with her.”
As creators, we are bound to react to the world around us. But there is no rule book for how we must react. A work doesn’t have to be Guernica or The Things They Carried or I Am Not Your Negro or Evil Empire to be political.
Jazz was political. Saxophonist Charlie Parker was political without singing or saying a word. Ross Russell said of Charlie Parker, “For urban black people of his generation, Charlie was a genuine culture hero … the revolutionary nature of his music was explicit. Implicit in his lifestyle was a defiance of the white establishment.”*
Your art doesn’t have to explicitly address current events to be a valid political statement. It doesn’t even have to be overtly political to be a valid political statement. If it is authentic, true to your values, and an honest expression, it is, by its nature, a valid political statement.
If you feel somehow lesser-than right now because your work isn’t overtly political, you are not. We are in a moment where many, emboldened by social media shields, feel encouraged to shame anyone whose work doesn’t fit their stringent rulebook for valid art. Only you can know what your work needs to look like.
Virtue signaling and performative acts of allyship are hollow, and that rings as true for paintings, novels and films as it does for black squares and hashtags.
The only sin here is to pretend to live in a world where your work is not influenced by current events, injustice or unrest. That is an expression of great naivety, ignorance or indifference — and none of these do you any service.
We are the inheritors of the legendary curse, “may you live in interesting times.” We do. Don’t squander this opportunity to make change in lives and to create true, meaningful beauty.
It doesn’t have to be a banner. It can be a love letter.
*This quote may actually have come from a review of Russell’s book Bird Lives! I sourced it from Lewis McAdam’s Birth of the Cool: Beat, Bebop and the American Avant Garde
Need help defining your voice or reaching your audience? Give me a shout. I offer consulting and services for all kinds of individual artists and arts organizations.
