A work of art is always intertwined with its society’s social and political environment. It is a mirror reflecting our time with the medium of a teacher showing us the essence of our lives. The manipulation of an object in contemporary artworks typically function either as critical commentaries or as expressions of personal psychology and experience. Art is about the power to take ordinary things and arranging them to produce a transcendence of their standard appearances. The originality is what one chooses and how it is presented.
Political art is a significant form of political communication - artistically produced messages challenging status quo and thinking on politics, consumption, economics, and culture.
HILLBILLY
Essay by Mark Vallen at art-for-a-change.com
History provides abundant examples of how social relations impact art. Traditionally the church, state, and wealthy patrons have funded the arts in order to increase their political power and prestige. Clearly that paradigm is overloaded with political relationships. But today it is largely market forces that determine the success or failure of art, and who among us will declare capitalism is not free of politics. Since labor and commerce are realms understood to be political spheres, then art, which is inextricably bound to those fields, is automatically part of a political process.
Content or message notwithstanding, artists manipulate and transform raw materials into art. The fact that those supplies are created from the toil of others makes for a political construct. Who makes your art materials, how much are they paid, and under what conditions do they work? Seen in such a context, can any work of art truly be above politics?
Artists do not create in a vacuum, they are indisputably coupled to the society and times in which they work. It may well be that an artist can realize aesthetic triumphs while ignoring society, but willful unconcern regarding social matters is also a political position.
But what about the transcendent qualities of art, doesn't that universality place the arts soaring above the corrupt world of politics and the vulgar materialism of society? Doesn't the spirituality of art keep it free from the constraints of avarice? Doesn't the mystical aspect of art place it above earthly and mundane concerns? Yes and no. Art will always strive to be free of society's manacles, and it will forever serve as a conduit to humanity's higher self, but the questions posed here imply an intrinsic relationship between art and material reality. It is an ironclad fact that an artist must eat and pay rent, and so it is also an irreducible fact that we are bound to political arrangements.
The Line Up series by Nora Ligorano and Marshall Reese depicts people from the Bush administration in fake mugshots.
BUSH DOESN'T SHOW
From Art News Blog by Dion Archibald
Art prints at the New York Public Library have created a mild stir. The NY Times has reported that a number of library patrons have protested because of a series of 8 digital prints in the "Multiple Interpretations" exhibition called "Line Up."
The Line Up series by Nora Ligorano and Marshall Reese depicts people from the Bush administration in fake mugshots. The slates that they hold have the dates of lies or exaggerations about Iraq spoken by the holder. For example, President George W Bush in his State of the Union address on January 28 (my birthday!), 2003, reported, "Saddam Hussein recently sought significant quantities of uranium from Africa…. He clearly has much to hide."
"It is at first mildly shocking to come upon such bluntly partisan artwork on a New York Public Library wall. Biting political satire is deeply a part of printmaking history — see Goya, James Gillray and Daumier — but handmade prints are no longer a significant form of political communication, and we don’t expect anything so brazenly tendentious in the public library context." New York Times
My opinion on the situation is that politics and art don't happily mix, but I do love a good political cartoonist. I think artists should have the right to say things that are political though, without it costing them their freedom. Most political art has a very short shelf life, just like the politicians they depict. The best way to make political art live a little longer is to hire a bunch of protestors to march at the exhibition or to have the artist put in prison.
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