wrote the first version of this essay during the explosion of revolutionary energy in early 2011. A mass uprising had just toppled a dictator in Tunisia. In Egypt, the hated thirty-year reign of Hosni Mubarak had just been overthrown, and Tahrir Square was poised to enter popular mythology as a symbol of the heroism of ordinary people standing up for themselves. The civil wars in Libya and Syria were still in the future, as were the ongoing struggles in Egypt that followed the fall of the tyrant.
In Wisconsin, the lessons of Tahrir were not lost on US workers. Faced with a right-wing attack on the rights of public-sector workers, protesters carrying signs that read “Fight Like an Egyptian” or that branded their governor “Scott ‘Hosni’ Walker” flooded the capitol building in Madison and occupied it. In retrospect, the occupation in Madison—which went down in defeat—set the stage for the Occupy Wall Street movement that erupted in the fall, also inspired by the sit-ins in Tahrir. Its forms multiplied themselves across the world, holding the center of discussion for months and transforming the discussion of inequality. For the three decades I have lived, it was the most consequential chain of political events I had witnessed.
If it seems trivial to think about aesthetic affairs amid such epoch-shaping political events, that is indeed part of my point. As images of Tahrir Square filled the airwaves around the world, I found myself writing to artists in Egypt for an article about how they were responding to the uprising. An Egyptian painter wrote back, chiding me via email and questioning the terms of the inquiry. “It’s not about artists now,” she wrote. “It’s about all Egyptians.” She was right.
Of course, many artists lent their passions to the struggle in Egypt. The occupation of Tahrir Square itself had a creative dimension that went beyond the participation of professional artists, at some moments taking on the aspect of the “carnival of the oppressed” about which students of revolutionary literature have read, with quickly conceived street theater and plucky graffiti helping to maintain spirits or simply expressing participants’ newfound sense of self-confidence. But professional artists were indisputably a part of the drama. Participating in the streets, some even gave their lives in the fight to bring down the dictator, as was the case with thirty-two-year-old sound artist Ahmed Bassiouny, who was felled by Egyptian security forces in the early days of the uprising and became one of the martyrs of the struggle. (His work—both his art and video he had taken of the protests—represented Egypt at the 2011 Venice Biennale.)
The crucial thing about that Egyptian artist’s emailed objection for me, however, was the way it clearly laid out the stakes of the rift between art and politics, a rift that becomes all the more stark during moments of high political drama. Amid the fury and urgency of revolt, the most important questions are not artistic ones. This may seem obvious. But it is light-years away from how the perennial subject of “political art” has been approached in the visual arts in the recent past.
Art-making can take place within political movements, certainly. But an overemphasis on the creation of individual, signature forms—a professional requirement—can just as often make it a distraction from the needs of an actual movement, which are after all collective, welding together tastes of all kinds. The art-historical celebration of the touchstones of “political art” often has altogether too little to say about the complexities of the political questions in which artists were involved and, therefore, becomes a kind of static hero worship.
Let’s begin by taking a look at three of these touchstones to see what they tell us about just how art has related to politics in practice.
• Vladimir Tatlin’s Monument to the Third International has entered the history books as the classic symbol of the optimistic spirit of the early Russian Revolution. Never realized, the proposal for a spiraling tower was meant to be a triumphant three hundred feet taller than the Eiffel Tower, every inch of it imbued with industrial-esoteric symbolism. The spiral represented Marxist dialectical materialism; the tilt of the tower mirrored that of the Earth and was to aim the structure at the North Star; the massive buildings cradled within its scaffolding were meant to reflect the forms of the primary Platonic shapes—square, circle (cylinder), and triangle.
Tatlin himself coined the Russian Constructivists’ motivating motto, “Art Into Life,” a slogan meant to indicate art’s new and progressive engagement with practical problems to match the revolutionary moment. It is notable, then, that the poetic, megalomaniacal Monument to the Third International was completely impossible to realize and could definitely not be put “into life.” In fact, the years when he was engaged in propagandizing for it, between 1918 and 1921, coincided closely with the savagery of the Russian civil war, when Russian industry was wiped out, millions of lives were sucked into the fratricidal vortex, and desperate shortages of basic foodstuffs afflicted city and countryside alike. The Third International, the organization for which the tower was proposed as a headquarters, was a coordinating committee of world Communist Parties meant to spread the revolution internationally—an urgent and immediate task, since the Bolsheviks were keenly aware that without a like-minded workers’ revolution in Germany, they could not sustain their own tenuous social gains.
While Monument to the Third International reflects the amazing optimism inspired by the revolution in some sectors of the Russian intelligentsia, it equally reflects the isolation of their art from the practical problems of the moment (which is exactly how revolutionary leader Leon Trotsky spoke of it in his Literature and Revolution.1) As for Tatlin himself, though he served in the revolutionary socialist government as director of public monuments, he seems to have been as inspired by the mystical numerology of poet Velimir Khlebnikov (who believed that the secret to the universe was the number 317) as he was by Marx and Engels.
• Pablo Picasso’s Guernica almost certainly takes the prize as the most iconic work of political art of the twentieth century, its imagery synonymous with the antiwar movement and perennially reborn on placards at protests everywhere. The frieze-sized painting was imagined as a response to one of the inaugural atrocities of modern warfare, the 1937 air raid by German bombers in support of the fascist general Franco against the culturally important Basque hamlet of Guernica. This calculated slaughter of a civilian population was intended to cow the Spanish Republicans and made an indelible impression on the Spanish artist, then living in France. At the time of the massacre, Picasso—already the world’s most famous painter—had been asked by the Republican government to make a piece in support of the cause for the World’s Fair in Paris. The bombing gave him his subject.
The result was, indeed, a propaganda coup for the Republicans. After its appearance at the fair, partisans sought to leverage the fame of Guernica by touring it to England to raise support for the cause in 1938. Its display at the Whitechapel Gallery, which is supposed to have drawn some fifteen thousand curious visitors, provoked the following scene, one of the more moving footnotes in modernist history: “The most remarkable addition to the Guernica exhibit was the serried ranks of worker men’s boots that were left like ex-votos at the painting’s base: the price of admission was a pair of boots, in a fit state to be sent to the Spanish front, a generous gesture that considering Barcelona’s imminent fall now seemed increasingly futile.”2
All this makes Guernica an indubitably heroic example of political art—but what still has to be reckoned with is the much-remarked-upon fact that the content of the painting seems to have remarkably little in it that is specific to the bombardment of the town of Guernica itself. Picasso had developed the motifs and even specific passages of the work in previous, apolitical works. The miasma of screaming figures, while admirably evocative of the anguish of war, contains not a single reference to the terrors of modern warfare—a bare lightbulb is the only suggestion of the present day at all. Guernica, therefore, is above all a vivid example of how, in the relationship of art and politics, the political movement of which an artwork is part determines its overriding power, trajectory, and meaning. (For his part, the still-basically-apolitical Picasso would join the French Communist Party after the war, in blissful ignorance of Moscow’s role in undercutting the cause of the Spanish Revolution during the civil war.)
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