In deteriorating political contexts, artists—and not just artists—begin again to grapple with the question of how to engage effectively with the structures of their society. Successive conservative victories at a parliamentary level, not to mention obscure alternatives, tend to evaporate any sensible person’s faith in the electoral process, in opinion polls and the rare opportunity to have their say should they been deigned suitable to offer their wisdom to a market research campaign or television vox pop. Over time the language of state power reveals itself as more and more unilateral. How should art—or, more precisely, artists—respond?
The story of modern art is full of moments when the imbrication of art and politics, of art and life, seemed complete. If we are to track a certain trajectory, we might start with the Jacobins’ commissions of David in Year Two of the French Republic; take in his illustrious scions as they negotiated the tumultuous century that followed; mention Zurich in 1916, Berlin in 1919, Moscow in 1920, Paris and Tokyo in 1968; perhaps even broaden the standard account a little by acknowledging the role played by poetry in revolutions in Mexico, Cuba, the Congo. But are these oft-invoked, oft-romanticised examples really relevant to the present context? Here, now, in Howard’s Australia? Or are they limit-cases, real moments in time and space of course, but moments when the question of art and politics was not a question at all but an imperative?
One might recall here Marx’s etymological dictum that ‘to be radical is to grasp things by the root’, that ‘for man the root is man himself’.1 Society is founded not in economic or juridical structures, but in relationships between... The rest of this article is available to subscribers of Eyeline