with brutal images of the ongoing war in a visceral way to force a reaction, and thereby seemed to acknowledge the problem posed by the lack of clear positions and general esoteric character of most political art, which allows critics to praise it as radical without taking any real position of practical consequence. But of course the idea that forcing viewers to confront the facts of brutality somehow prevents pundits and politicians from equivocating was (and is) simply wrong. As Susan Sontag put it: “In fact, there are many uses of the innumerable opportunities a modern life supplies for regarding—at a distance, through the medium of photography—other people’s pain. Photographs of an atrocity may give rise to opposing responses. A call for peace. A cry for revenge. Or simply the bemused awareness, continually restocked by photographic information, that terrible things happen.”12
In fact, Hirshhorn’s own take on the vital questions then being debated about the war (should the United States withdraw from Iraq?) was not at all clear from Superficial Engagement—despite how the theory of “superficial engagement” itself seemed to be an elaborate way of saying that Hirshhorn felt that he, as an artist with political convictions, should make work that approached the condition of propaganda. In the end, it was as if he was more comfortable in creating a theory about what he should do than doing it.
Maybe this type of tortured attempt to occupy some ideal political-aesthetic space has merit in a period where there are few political movements in evidence; the intellectual hothouse of art is a place where radical ideas can be kept alive in some kind of coded form (although in 2006 there was, in fact, an antiwar movement, just as there was an immigrant rights movement). But the truth may as well be admitted outright: there is no elegant fit between art and politics, no ideal meld of the two. What is needed for effective political activism relates to the demands of a living political movement, which may or may not call for something that is particularly aesthetically refined, just as what “works” best aesthetically in the context of a gallery or museum is not usually a slogan or a placard. This lack of fit is an ugly condition for professional artists—but it will remain with us as long as we live in a world that is as ugly as this one.
“The work of ‘political artists’ usually harms no one, and I would defend their right to make it; what I cannot support is their self-serving assumption that it ‘somehow’ has a political effect in the real world,” the artist Victor Burgin said in a 2007 interview. “In a university art department, I would prefer as my colleague the artist who makes watercolours of sunsets but stands up to the administration to the colleague who makes radical political noises in the gallery but colludes in imposing educationally disastrous government policies on the department.”13 Expanding things beyond the university milieu, I think this is a fine way to frame the question of art and politics today.
What do these reflections mean, practically? They definitely do not mean “Don’t make political art.” I hope that we will have much more politically inspired art—and inspired political art—in the near future. What they do mean, though, is that with new and important struggles all around, we should once and for all ditch the bad art-theory habit of looking for a “political aesthetic,” of judging an artwork’s righteousness in philosophical or formal terms, divorced from its significance to what is happening in the world. Not even the most committed art practice can, on its own, be a substitute for the simple act of being politically involved as an organizer and activist. Perhaps in this context one’s talents as an artist might find a place, or perhaps an experience of this kind of activity might be processed, later, into something of enduring creative significance—but the need to engage comes first. This is a lesson I take from the Egyptian artists and their struggle.
In a 2008 contribution to the journal October’s issue on artistic responses to the war in Iraq, Martha Rosler—who has made her share of “political art” and is probably considered an exemplary “political artist”—addressed the question of what artists could and should do. Her final word: “organize, organize, organize.”14 This was the correct starting point then and it is definitely the correct starting point now.
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