Political art. Who says so? Several years ago I sent an exhibition proposal to university gallery and received a cordial reply (rejection), congratulating me for keeping the honored tradition of political art alive, though my work wasn’t a good fit for their kind of audience (human beings). The gallery was not accepting political art, or rather, what the curator subjectively categorized in her mind as such. She must have preferred apolitical art, which is any creative act or production on earth that does not matter to human beings. Maybe the gallerist was looking for sailboats or sunsets, hiking monks, a rainy boulevard, dogs playing poker, literally anything under the sun that appeared pleasing enough yet didn’t reflect on how groups living amongst one another make decisions in order to live peacefully together, which is the definition of politics. I believe art is a mirror of culture, all of it, the good, the bad, the food we eat, the hiking monk, the authoritarian “caught with his pants down and money sticking in his hole” (Lou Reed, Strawman). However, the latter image is downgraded to the least influential, mentioned rarely, if ever, in Artnews for Millionaires, which has done what it can to relegate visual art to the same irrelevance dungeon where the Paris Review locked poetry in chains over 50 years ago. In capitalism, people only matter to the degree that they can be influenced. I make for a horrible capitalist. I paint a four star general with a mushroom cloud eye and give him a failed prostate. He knows that I know all the powerful nations on earth are authoritarians reaping the material benefits of annihilation capitalism (Yes, even “communist” China). Likewise he understands that if people made sane group judgements about maniacal power, then he’d suffer his cancer agony in loneliness and shame rather than uptight in the decoration of a starched uniform and medals awarded to him by the mostly fraternal society of cowardly killers. See? Political. For me it can’t be helped. The general has the medals and the power on his side. Which means he and his ilk control the propaganda, like the New York Times, The New York Post, and Artnews For Millionaires—publications that would never print a painting that smeared the cancerous prostate of a nuclear general. Not even to save themselves and a 30th birthday for their grandchildren. Power can make effective propagandists believe in their own propaganda. Self-annihilation ain’t just a river in Armageddon, you know.
Political art is not outside art, yet that is what power and art historians rising through the ranks of power want you to believe. You have heard of Michelangelo. I once wrote a blurb about his fame and misfortune:
Michelangelo the Brown-Noser
It’s true. He was a kiss-ass. The greatest renderer of all time. But no artist. Not like the queer Seneca boy with the gift of the seer who carved an ugly French monster in the clay. Some tribal elders nodded their heads. The rest just laughed and laughed until the smallpox decorated their tribe with oozing pustules. Michelangelo was a pompous servant-user. A Pope’s boy. But not an artist. Popes didn’t want art, they wouldn’t know what to do with it if it slapped their cheese with a brick. Michelangelo was the greatest of the great copiers. His fame is the church. He is iconic because he was the establishment’s choice, and all the other great renderers of his time, not quite as technologically sound, were lucky for a nightly loaf of moldy bread. Those wild ones, the intensely expressive of meager talent, the feelers, were lying about in dungeons and dung heaps gibbering away like mad. Today’s Michelangelos are a PhD a dozen, and their reward is a $1500.00 mortgage and occasional self-assurance. I imagine the Medici gopher, the Pope’s stooge, the man who today is known as the Great Michelangelo, losing sleep in fear that God would not deliver that perfect color in the morning, the one to please his patron, the exact one to insure another gold coin.
So the million dung heap feelers alive today are still dragging their feet over the old earth, carrying an immense chip on their shoulders. Because of Michelangelo, all painters pine for the success of this man who no doubt in my mind was nothing more than a constipated middle-management aristocratic sissy who would have had his own mother drink the hemlock if the bankers told him to. Michelangelo was the best drawer and colorer available to Pope Julius II (Raphael was busy on another astounding commission). And the huge majority of real people on earth at the time were fearing for their lives a God who on a heavenly whim, would wipe away their hard-fought harvest. We know nothing about the people’s artists. Nothing because it would have been impossible for them to exist in an economy of “everybody shrink and starve except the golden circle of God’s chosen few”. The Pope would have had his soldiers run a blade through any peasant who dared attempt a sitting for service at the Sistine Chapel. Hence dungeons and the dung heap for all expressionists of the 1500’s.
But the lowly artist did exist, even if no brush ever wiped egg paint on a flat stone.
Today we suffer the legacy of absolutist art, which garners the people’s first private critique. After that, they wait with their mouths open for the great galleries and museums (more PhD’s) to tell them what is worthwhile. Sometimes just money decides, and that brings control back to the absolutist.
Oh well, as low as I sit in these modern times, at least my bread isn’t moldy.
Sycophantic bourgeois blood relative to Michelangelo, Winston Churchill, painted pictures. He once wrote that history is written by the victors. In 1952 he ushered in the nuclear age at the Queen’s ball, presented his atomic “destroyer of worlds” to humanity, and went home and painted a pretty French landscape. I drew the lowly killer-artist with his friends in Yalta. It’s painted over a prized naval print owned by Franklin Roosevelt, who did not use art to influence people, yet gave them a functional weapon to test and retest bringing breast cancer to earth women for the next 20 thousand years.
I suppose the ancients lived and breathed politics. What are the Lascaux cave paintings if not the political aesthetic of the Dordogne in 18,000 BCE? The horses and bulls were some part of an every day life that influenced group decision-making. What if the artists were sounding the alarm on over-hunting, bolstering a religion, or helping the winter community at large to deflect Seasonal Affective Disorder with reminders of the lighter days to come? Perhaps half the people of the Dordogne were vegetarian and thought of horses and bulls as rats with hooves, while the clan of the cave painters were operating free range CAFOs and pretending “clean meat” with pretty pictures on the walls. How is cave art different from a modern painting supporting/degrading the auspices of Planned Parenthood? Yesterday and today we must find ways to live peacefully together, else we perish. Shall we continue to allow the sociopaths and propagandists to dictate debate? Or can we tap into the highly sensitive among us to show the community at large what could happen if courses aren’t changed? Will it be peace or portents? What might the cave artists paint if the horses and bulls were blocking nuclear silos with manure piles?
Flowers and fruit?
One ancient day, some lowly business freak of nature opened a sugared coffee and doughnut stand in the back of the clan cave. Would the ancient artist have painted this?
Yes, probably. And the business freak of nature would receive his just deserts, some cruel and unusual form of punishment to warn others off temptations of profit for profit’s sake.
There are literally millions of contemporary creative tools/fools pointing out political realities and remedies to the planet clan each and every day, though the powers that be have whitewashed the cave walls spick-and-span to project a bittersweet music video for tonight’s entertainment.
And now for the cave painter’s rebuttal of ground up mineral and nut juice:
It’s a painting about power holding up goodness for its flower. Artnews won’t print it nor its like from the hearts and hands of a million other sensitive human beings. It knows art’s potential. It knows art can make an Artnews as relevant as moon crater dust. It publishes its politics from time to time, telling us to shut up and archive the memory of George W. Bush to the library of the victors. He painted innocuous portraits of every day people from photographs after killing thousands of every day people and their kids with awesome brute force.
A nagging question repeating in the back of my skull—How can I not become a political painter if I don’t want to remain a crappy human being? I think I’ll need to turn up the flow to a hot and steady stream since the lukewarm has dripped me into the running for an Artnews legacy. I can do better. I can change the course of human history, and off-set power’s death game until the very end, which is my demise, your demise, and also that other nasty guy’s… Politics is how groups living amongst one another make decisions in order to live peacefully together. My art better remember that because caves won’t be drawn in horses and bulls anymore, unless they’ve been rendered hooves pointing to the sky, smoking in ash and radioactivity.
Happy Election Day!
Ron
This being a lonely genius with empathy and scruples business bites the proverbial big one sometimes, doesn't it? As long as that big one doesn't end up being moldy bread, we shall/must endure... 💚