Art for politics: reflections on the Whitney Biennial.

The title of this essay is of course a play on the title of the Whitney Museum of American Art Biennial for 2006--"Day for Night," which ran March 2-May 28. These phrases--this for that--suggest to us that two seemingly contrasted, even contradictory, ideas have become difficult to tell apart. As Adam D. Weinberg, the director of the Whitney, states in the Biennial catalog, "Today's artistic situation is highly complex, contradictory, and confusing. It is an environment few can make sense of." (1) Much of this confusion is regrettable perhaps, but confusion itself is not something to avoid. Yes, it is admittedly dangerous, but it is also a source of tremendous creativity. We live in confusing times and we find ourselves forging complex maps across this exciting and terrifying terrain. The artists in the Biennial are helping us to imagine these maps.

To be frank, much of the challenging terrain before us is explicitly political terrain. We live in a time of war. We live in a time of political divisiveness. We live in a time when the struggles for power at home--over issues of race, of corporate power, of the environment, of faith matters, of gender, and of so much more mirror similar struggles that span the globe.

Enter the curators and artists of the Whitney Biennial. Art is made in the world and of the world, not in some distant isolated space of quiet reflection. If these are confusing times, then the works of the Biennial are perplexing as well. If we face rocky terrain, then these works give us a disconcerting map that is hard to read, and on which the roads are hard to find. If our troubles are in part political, then so too are the works of "Day for Night."

In response to the political dimensions of the current Biennial, I want to raise five questions that we need to consider as we try to make sense of the art of our time. First, can art ever be political? On one level, the answer to the question is a resounding yes, simply because we have so much political art. But what I really mean is: are we willing to allow art to be political? Will we tolerate political art coming into our lives, our ways of thinking, our museums? Politics always forces us to think about power--a tough issue to be sure. We rarely see or acknowledge all the ways that we benefit from the existing power structure of the world. But political art demands that we think differently about the world of power. It demands that we acknowledge our privileges and calculate how much we are willing to sacrifice to give more freedoms and privileges to more of our neighbors. So if we allow art to be political, we will also have to allow our world to change, perhaps quite drastically.

Second, is art ever not political? This question turns the last topsy-turvy. To put it another way, is all art political and is it always political? Given that power always brings us into issues of danger--the danger that the powerless face at the hands of the powerful--we could ask whether there is any art that is safe. Is there art that we need not be suspicious of? Art that has no agenda? Art that is not produced within the structures of power (whether near the top or the bottom of those structures)? Do we need to find a political slant to every work of art?

Third, does politics cheapen art? It is common, though by no means universal, to think of art as one of humanity's noblest pursuits. We tend to treat art as sacred, as evidenced by the enormous and beautiful temples we build as houses for the arts (such as the Whitney). When we introduce issues of power and policy into our artistic practices, is the sacredness lessened? What if an artist said that he created a work that was strictly political and that he really had no artistic goals in mind at all? Would we think less of the work? That is precisely what Richard Serra says of one of his works in the Biennial. In fact, he says so on the audio commentary. So again, does politics cheapen art?

Fourth, does art cheapen politics? As I have said, we live in confusing and dangerous times. The way that we respond to this confusion has consequences for the lives of real people. Is it appropriate to deal with these issues through art? Is it proper to be inspired by inequality? What happens if we aestheticize violence or evil? If we make these things beautiful, is there not some danger that we will get so caught up in the beauty that we will fail to address the real problems posed by the work? To illustrate the point with an example, the Biennial includes a film installation called "Door" (2005) by Jim O'Rourke. The installation is three-sided. On opposing sides of the room appear a projection of the knob and lock of a door. A very different and more abstract film appears on the third wall in between. The audience generally stands at the fourth wall, though that norm is easily broken. So how, we might ask, might a film of a door help us in dangerous times? Have the real political issues that underlie this show been somehow cheapened by the determination to address them through art?

Fifth and finally, what is the cost or gain of political art? Will the world we live in be transformed in any way through the individual works that appear in the Biennial; or through the collection of these works together? As an individual, can we look at works of political art and then walk away unchanged? What do we get out of such an experience? What benefit will we derive from seeing the Biennial or similar shows?

Logically, this is the point in the essay when I would begin to answer the questions that I have posed. But I know better. The artists and curators of this Biennial have offered some answers worth considering, but each must come to their own conclusions. Who am I to tell anyone how to answer such difficult and troubling questions? Instead, I will illustrate how these questions have been addressed in the past.

Contemporary artists, audiences, and curators are not the first to engage questions of the relationship between art and politics. The particular politics we face are unique, as every historical epoch faces its own conflicts and crises, but the method of using art to address our political questions is perhaps as old as art itself. I do not wish to reach back to the beginnings of art, whatever they might be, but a more recent example will suffice.

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I think particularly of a speech that W.E.B. DuBois delivered when Carter G. Woodson was awarded the Spingarn Medal by the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP) in 1926 (a speech that was published later that same year in The Crisis). DuBois was a sociologist and is credited by many for founding the field of urban studies. He was also a political leader who helped to found the NAACP. He was a champion of women's rights and, most notably, the author of The Souls of Black Folk (1903), as well as many works of poetry, prose, and scholarship. The speech I am thinking of is called "Criteria of Negro Art" (2) and it makes some stipulations about how Americans might think about the bourgeoning art forms of black artists who were gaining such prominence in that time, particularly those identified as part of the Harlem Renaissance. DuBois begins the essay by comparing the ways that African Americans are represented in the arts of Anglo Americans, and the ways that they represent themselves in their own art. He also laments the fact that many great works by black artists have been lost from historical memory But for DuBois, the question of art and politics--particularly racial politics--ultimately turned on a question of beauty. So he says:

  It is the bounden duty of black America to begin this great work of
  the creation of beauty, of the preservation of beauty, of the
  realization of beauty, and we must use in this work all the methods
  that men have used before. And what have been the tools of the artists
  in times gone by? First of all, he has used the truth not for the sake
  of truth, not as a scientist seeking truth, but as one upon whom truth
  eternally thrusts itself as the highest handmaid of imagination, as
  the one great vehicle of universal understanding. Again artists have
  used goodness--goodness in all its aspects of justice, honor, and
  right--not for sake of an ethical sanction but as the one true method
  of gaining sympathy and human interest. (3)

It is important to note that DuBois has chosen to critique the representation of blacks by white artists and the white supremacy that has quieted so many black artistic voices, but he does not critique beauty itself. As a concept, beauty is actually affirmed by DuBois. This puts DuBois at odds with some artists and art critics who suggest that political aims necessitate dispensing with beauty in art. Beauty, the argument goes, is an illusion. Its value has been invented by those in power to distract us from the truth. Or, as a variation, beauty is a leisure afforded to the rich and powerful, which is simply not available to the disenfranchised.

At first glance, all this language about beauty from DuBois would seem to weaken the strength of his political aims, situating him somewhere in a muddy middle in terms of the possible answers to the art/politics question. But that would be a mistaken interpretation. DuBois's real aim is to claim beauty as the rightful terrain of black artists--not something they learn or borrow from Europeans and white Americans, but rather that which is already theirs. Beauty is not a privilege of the leisured, but rather a powerful weapon employed by all artists in their efforts to shape the world itself.

And I would suggest that beauty is on our side today as we view the works of the 2006 Whitney Biennial--or at least, it can be, if we wish it. What I mean is simply that we may keep the issue of beauty at the front of our minds tonight; that politics, if we are to believe DuBois, does not require us to forget about beauty. DuBois continues:

  The apostle of beauty [which may be, for our purposes, the artists of
  "Day for Night," and even, if we dare, ourselves] thus becomes the
  apostle of truth and right not by choice but by inner and outer
  compulsion. Free he is but his freedom is ever bounded by truth and
  justice; and slavery only dogs him when he is denied the right to tell
  the truth or recognize an ideal of justice. (4)

We see immediately that beauty, for DuBois, cannot be abstracted away from truth, and that the relationship between truth and beauty is, always and already, a political relationship. The artist is compelled to tell the truth, and at the same time, compelled to produce beauty. It follows then that the beautiful cannot be deceitful--the deceitful, the unjust, cannot be beautiful. My point is to suggest that our starting point be an assumption that beauty is always the domain of those who seek justice. I suggest visitors look for beauty in the Biennial, and I implore viewers to recognize the artist as one who seeks after justice.

I return to DuBois, in another section of "Criteria of Negro Art," where he reminds us why this matters:

  After all who shall describe Beauty? What is it? I remember tonight
  four beautiful things: 1) the cathedral at Cologne, a forest in stone,
  set in light and changing shadow, echoing with sunlight and solemn
  song; 2) a village of the Veys in West Africa, a little thing of mauve
  and purple, quiet, lying content and shining in the sun; 3) a black
  and velvet room where on a throne rests, in old and yellowing marble,
  the broken curves of the Venus de Milo; 4) a single phrase of music in
  the South utter melody, haunting and appealing, suddenly arising out
  of night and eternity, beneath the moon. Such is beauty. Its variety
  is infinite, its possibility is endless. In normal life all may have
  it and have it yet again. The world is full of it; and yet today, the
  mass of human beings are choked away from it, and their lives
  distorted and made ugly. This is not only wrong, it is silly. Who
  shall right this well-nigh universal failing? Who shall let this world
  be beautiful? Who shall restore to men [and women] the glory of
  sunsets and the peace of quiet sleep? (5)

Perhaps the artists of the Biennial have taken on this task. Perhaps we, in our own strivings, have taken up this burden. Perhaps in viewing "Day for Night" one will find dialogue with the artists of our time.

In order that one might do so, I wish to propose five aesthetic principles. By aesthetic I mean any system that helps us to produce meaning from the arts. Some may have learned certain aesthetic principles in college art classes, but college professors have no monopoly over the aesthetic. Our religious beliefs, our philosophies of life, our personal experiences, and even our politics are all ways that we interpret the art with which we engage. So we may call them aesthetics as well. I use the word broadly. The principles I suggest are not likely to be found in any book of art theory, but I hope they are empowering.

First, for it to count as art, one has to be able to make it. Art is less of a miracle than we tend to assume. It comes from humans--hard-working humans who have capacities and potentialities similar to our own. In graduate school, I had a roommate who frequently decried, as a lament against modern art, that "it can't be art if I can make it." But this view is utterly bankrupt. Under this view, for instance, we would never take seriously the art produced by children. And we would always assume that art comes from some world other than our own. This view leads to alienation of art from its audience. Instead, I would challenge viewers to wonder quite deliberately about the methods by which the work is produced. For many of the works at the Biennial at least some of that information is available on the placards. We often ignore information like "oil on canvas" because we think it is relevant only to other artists. But if we pay attention to this information, we begin to learn more about how art is made, also realizing that we have access to many of these same materials.

Second, the arts are visiting us. Leading up to our engagement with the Biennial, we may think of the coming experience as one in which we are going to visit the Whitney, and by extension, to visit the arts. In fact, it is the art that is doing the visiting and the art that is most uncomfortable. The works of art in the Biennial are visiting a party where they know very few of the guests. And everybody is looking at them. We tend to assume that art museums are spaces where artists feel at home, but nothing is further from the truth. Apart from a small handful of the safely established, most artists feel quite frightened by museums. For them, having their works on display is something akin to public speaking and can be nerve-wracking. When stepping into the Whitney, we should recognize that we are on home turf and should in no way feel that we have something to prove. Rather, the art has come to prove something to us.

Third, the best response to challenging art is more art. To put it bluntly, some things at the Biennial may annoy you. This could lead impulsively to a desire to discard that work--to dismiss it. To suggest another remedy, when looking at a work that challenges us, or creates a problem, we should look for other works that remedy that problem. There are over 200 works of art in this show, so one can literally spin around the room in search of that additional work that will calm the senses. This gives an opportunity to put these works of art into a conversation with each other.

Fourth, the arts are ours. The arts are mine. The works seen in the Biennial will make some demands upon our lives, and we have the right to demand reciprocity, to demand something back from the arts--to demand beauty, if one wants it--to demand with DuBois the glory of sunsets and the peace of quiet sleep. The arts are rich, though many artists are not, and they can afford to give us what we wish.

Similarly, and finally, my fifth principle is that one must trust his or her intuition. This is a big and busy exhibit. Equal time cannot be given to each work. Trust instincts when they say to stop and admire and soak it all in, or to move on to the next work. Trust the body when it needs a break, says it is tired or thirsty. Trust the heart when it says a particular work of art is too dangerous just now. Art can be risky and we do neither the artists nor ourselves a favor when we pretend otherwise.

I hope and trust that these questions and principles give the empowerment to engage in a complex exhibition of art. Stepping back onto Madison Avenue, as day turns to night, I pray that the art imparts peace to the viewer, but not a peace that blinds the eyes from the still rocky and political terrain of the world ahead.

DUSTIN KIDD is an assistant professor of sociology at Temple University in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania.

NOTES

1. Adam D. Weinberg, "Foreword," in Whitney Biennial 2006: Day for Night (exhibition catalog), Chrissie Iles and Philippe Vergne, eds. (New York: Whitney Museum of American Art, 2006), 15.

2. W.E.B. DuBois, "Criteria of Negro Art," the Crisis 32 (1926), 290-97.

3. Ibid., 296.

4. Ibid.

5. Ibid., 292.