‘You’re Either with Me or Against Me’:The Lethal Morality Of Political Art

Jorge M. Benitez

What is political art? More importantly, what does it achieve? Political art is as varied, nuanced, and contextual as its makers, patrons, and viewers. The questions become even more complex when the art itself begins as one genre and ends as another. Is Michelangelo political? Did not his religious sculptures and paintings serve the political ends of the Catholic Church to the same degree that they inspired the faithful? Did Holbein merely paint portraits of Henry VIII and his court, or were they professions of Tudor power and English aspirations? Was not Versailles built to impress French glory upon the rest of Europe? By the twentieth century the questions would become too complex and lethal to be answered casually.

The only certainty with political art is that it depends upon a mesh of symbols and signs. It represents and promotes abstract ideas and aspirations while simultaneously pointing to goals. Unfortunately, symbols and signs require prior knowledge in the audience. Without an understanding of the symbolic and semiotic fullness of the painting, The Death of Marat is only a visually powerful portrait of a dead man in his bath. In this sense, is The Death of Marat a political painting or a work of art inspired by a concrete political event? The same could be asked of Guernica or even Goya’s Disasters of War. Such works transcend their titles along with the events that inspired them. They rise to the level of art precisely because they are larger than politics, symbols, and signs. They move the viewer because their formal and expressive qualities bypass the need for prior knowledge. They assert the power of the gaze as a tragic vehicle beyond the reach of language alone. They speak to the pain of our shared animality. Conversely, political art provides a transgressive frisson not unlike soft porn. There is enough naughtiness for a sense of rebellion. But who is the rebel? Is it the political artist, the party, or the viewer who finds the orgy arousing but declines the invitation to participate? How many Christian Nationalists know Leni Riefenstahl despite their desire to emulate the grandeur of Triumph of the Will? How many Iowa farmers or South Carolina autoworkers have ever heard of the Guerrilla Girls and their consciousness-raising activism?

Political art mostly succeeds in authoritarian and totalitarian societies where the stakes drive the authorities and their victims to increasingly desperate measures. In liberal democracies, political art must compete with entertainment. Consequently, FOX News and Joe Rogan succeed because they provide performance pieces masquerading as news and serious editorial content. The pseudo-intellectual punditry of FOX finds its progressive analog in the histrionics of Stephen Colbert and the condescension of Sunny Hostin, performers with a veneer of political depth. Their mix of ideology and entertainment in front of a mass audience upstages the pretensions of a self-identified avant-garde.

Outside of authoritarian systems, political art suffers from the self-cancelling contradictions of both the modernist avant-garde and its emasculated postmodern descendants. In other words, when everything is art, nothing is art; or, as Marcel Duchamp said, “What I have in mind is that art may be bad, good or indifferent, but whatever adjective is used, we must call it art, and bad art is still art in the same way as a bad emotion is still an emotion.” The same holds true for politics. If every human action is political, then nothing is political while even bad politics is still politics. Those qualities that shape the mystery of art and those actions that define the truly political lose their meaning in the pseudo-democratic morass of inclusive mediocrity. Everyone has agency because the meaning of the word is false. Like the Anglo-centric misreading of Michel Foucault, the reduction of human interactions to vulgar power dynamics negates the possibility of kindness, affection, or any expression of genuine altruism. Tragedy is reduced to an excuse for agitprop. Life becomes a Stalinist struggle for survival within the confines of party-driven theory. Under the circumstances, it makes sense that the National Socialist jurist Carl Schmitt should still be influential on American campuses given the following assertion: “The equation state = politics” becomes erroneous and deceptive at exactly the moment when the state and society penetrate each other. What had been up to that point affairs of state become thereby social matters, and, vice versa, what had been purely social matters become affairs of state – as must necessarily occur in a democratically organized unit. Heretofore ostensibly neutral domains – religion, culture, education, the economy – then cease to be neutral in the sense that they do not pertain to state and to politics.” A few pages later, Schmitt adds: “The political is the most intense and extreme antagonism, and every concrete antagonism becomes that much more political the closer it approaches the most extreme point, that of the friend-enemy grouping.” Perhaps because he was a Nazi, Schmidt understood the true meaning of the avant-garde as the bayonet of politics: the most courageous and fanatical soldiers in a war without mercy. It explains, as Marinetti posited years earlier, why the modernist desire to move forward is inseparable from its need to destroy what came before. Like Jacques-Louis David, who was a signatory of the death sentence of Louis XVI, it is not enough to depose the king; he must be physically erased.

Although he did not address art directly, Schmitt’s “friend-enemy” binary forms the core of political art. The viewer must choose a side. Neutrality is not an option. By its very nature the avant-garde cannot distinguish between art and politics or art and the state. The artistic act becomes an act of war that can only be sustained through aesthetic and intellectual violence. Its revolutionary nature demands the destruction, or at least the denigration, of all that came before. Yet that is also the germ of its demise. By achieving power, the avant-garde commits suicide. University art schools bury the avant-garde by turning political art into an academic exercise that degenerates into propagandistic kitsch. As Clement Greenberg observed in 1939: “Where today a political regime establishes an official cultural policy, it is for the sake of demagogy. If kitsch is the official tendency of culture in Germany, Italy and Russia, it is not because their respective governments are controlled by philistines, but because kitsch is the culture of the masses in these countries, as it is everywhere else. The encouragement of kitsch is merely another of the inexpensive ways in which totalitarian regimes seek to ingratiate themselves with their subjects.”If conservatism is the fate of every revolution, then the political art that promoted it is destined to become “an official cultural policy.” Like revolution, propaganda is inherently reactionary and kitschy.

The Protestant Reformation invented propaganda, but the Catholic Church gave it its name when it responded with the establishment of the Sacred Congregation for the Propagation of the Faith as part of a slow response that came to be known as the Counterreformation.

Thanks to the printing press, the scatological vulgarity of Martin Luther and his followers blindsided the papacy with images of demons defecating popes and priests. Protestant pamphlets and broadsides seduced the illiterate majority as their literate friends read the texts aloud. The combination of word and image multiplied the power of the message. Despite being a doctor of theology, Martin Luther understood the language of the common folk and was not above polemical raunchiness. By joining forces with artists such as Lucas Cranach, he converted the printing press into a weapon that unleashed resentment, exaggeration, misinformation, and occasionally truth with a power that would not be seen until the rise of social media in the 21st century. The ensuing Wars of Religion killed one third of the German and Central European population. Political art had proven its worth.

It had also proven that it was impotent without the technology of mass communication. A political drawing, no matter how powerful, was useless without a means of dissemination. A single painting or sculpture could not move the masses unless it was reproduced in print with accompanying text. The press was more dangerous than the brush.

By the outbreak of the French Revolution in 1789, propaganda was beginning to assume its modern form as an instrument of mass mobilization. Armed with reason and virtue, the disciples of Jean-Jacques Rousseau had learned to go beyond Lutheran crassness while still appealing to the people. Indeed, the revolutionaries held the moral high ground, a delusion that still serves would-be saviors. Albert Camus expressed the concept succinctly with a warning: “Morality, when it is formal, devours. To paraphrase Saint-Just, no one is innocently virtuous.”

Political art cannot be divorced from the devouring nature of formal morality. Camus understood what every revolution has amply demonstrated since 1789, namely, that virtue, far more than power or corruption, is the soul of political violence. Political art, no matter how innocent it may appear, is the aesthetic expression of that violence. It leaves no room for nuance or doubt. It demands absolute loyalty with a straightforward pronouncement: “You’re either with me or against me.” It serves the thuggery of virtue with Robespierre-an inhumanity. Those lethal qualities are once again asserting their authority as the radioactive printing press of social media and universal misinformation threaten liberal democracy and the rule of law with the dictatorship of chaos.