Art and the Utopian Impulse

Art Doesn't Always Change the World for the Better

Niall John Brown

Comissioned by Tijdschrift Journal, May 28 2020

Whether to mix art and politics is a dilemma that many artists today are struggling with. Not only artists living in real dictatorships like Russia and China, who can face imprisonment for their work, but many artists living in liberal democracies now face the question of how to imbue their art with some kind of social purpose.

Confronted with an obviously repressive government, many would find it appalling to suggest that art should be anything other than political. The Chinese artist Ai Weiwei (1957) expresses this sentiment when he decries much of humanity as ‘cowardly’ for failing to address the real problems of the world like climate change and immigration. Many western artists today similarly believe that their democracies face existential threats and that their art should be used to mobilise against this.

The problem is that — unlike journalism — it is difficult to see how art can actually be used to mobilise politically, and how one could hope to measure its success if it could be.

Over the last twenty years or so, contemporary art has developed a form of participatory art. Best known through the work of artists like Tania Brugera (1968), Thomas Hirschhorn (1957), and Theaster Gates (1973). These artists often combine installation with mass performance, using participation of the audience themselves to ‘raise social issues’ as Hirschhorn puts it. But this sub-genre of contemporary art raises an interesting question. Can art actually be used to effect meaningful social change?

An uncomfortable fact is that art is primarily the domain of the middle and upper-classes and not lower income groups. This isn’t just a preconception, UK government statistics over a ten year period reveal that low income groups make up at most a third of gallery visits, in spite of the fact that most UK museums are free. Similar research in other countries bears out this pattern elsewhere. This is something that artists who claim to be working for the masses need to face up to, a majority of the lower income population it seems, are simply not that interested in going to art galleries.

One other thing to consider is that when surveyed, most people generally do not believe that art should serve some higher purpose. In one of the largest public opinion surveys on art ever conducted by Marttila & Kiley in 1995, it was found that a majority of the European and North American population prefer traditional art that is generally realistic, depicts nature, and something imaginative. The vast majority (above 70% in most countries) supported the statement ‘paintings don’t have to teach us any lessons but can just be something a person likes to look at.’ In the Netherlands 90% surveyed supported that statement. Interestingly Russians and Chinese at the time were more likely to admire non-traditional art than their western counterparts, the opposite of what might be expected, and may have something to do with their societies having much less of it. All of this however suggests that contemporary political art has a rather limited audience.

Artists today may console themselves that even though their work may not be enjoyed by a majority of the masses, it could help to change the social attitudes of the middle classes, and thereby effect social change in the long run. To see if this is true, we can examine some of the art movements of the past that explicitly sought political change and see what the result actually was.

Unfortunately when we look at the record of many of these movements, it turns out that throughout many periods in history, artists were not always the good guys fighting for social progress.

When we think of art under dictatorships, we imagine the many dissident artists imprisoned for standing up against authoritarianism, but we often forget that the dictators themselves come to power through social movements supported by artists. It seems that present in many artists is something that could be described as a utopian impulse, that seeks to use state power to enact their utopian visions on society.

There is a story about Picasso while he was a painter in Nazi occupied Paris. He was confronted by Nazi officers who showed him a picture of his painting Guernica (1937) that depicted the bombing of his hometown. They asked him ‘did you do this?’ Picasso responded ‘No, you did.’ The story is supposed to evoke an image of the great individualist artist, bravely standing up against an oppressive dictatorship.

In reality of course, Picasso was a Communist, and remained a card carrying member of the Communist Party until his death in 1973 even while his paintings were banned under the Iron Curtain. He even made a portrait of Stalin and maintained support for the dictator throughout his life, and he is one of countless artists that embraced the policies of the USSR.

The Constructivists in Russia and the Realists in China were happy to follow Stalin and Mao in their belief that art should serve the ‘right course of development’ which in practice meant glorifying the ideal Soviet worker, and banning art that was abstract or critical of Soviet ideals. Later under Stalin, artists like Mikhail Sokolov (1885-1947) were sent to the Gulag if their art was deemed bourgeois, while under Mao, Zhu Zhaoxue (1893-1962) was commissioned to demolish more than 50,000 buildings in the centre of old Beijing as part of the ‘New China’ that was supposedly being created.

Hitler’s architect Albert Speer (1905-1981) was similarly charged with creating a new city in the centre of Berlin called Germania (1938) that was supposed to rival Ancient Babylon and Rome.

Neither were artists in democracies immune from similar utopian impulses. The most famous example is probably Le Corbusier, whose desire to create a more perfect society led to his Plan Vision (1925) that aimed to demolish the entirety of central Paris and replace it with a series of giant cruciform skyscrapers. Something that was thankfully never allowed to take place.

In our time, Chinese president Xi Jinping denounces China’s unusual architecture like the buildings of Zaha Hadid (1950-2016) and proclaims that fine art should ‘inspire minds’ and ‘clean up undesirable work styles’. In Vladimir Putin’s Russia, art schools like Glazunov Academy now teach a form of right-wing realism in contrast to what is denounced as regressive contemporary art. And many artists in these countries are happy to go along with it.

The point of all of this is that it is often difficult to tell who really stands for social progress, and who does not. Many artists naively believed the false promises of political ideologies and saw in them an opportunity to promote their creative visions.

Others before them, aided what they thought was a virtuous cause, only to find that their movement had the opposite result. Such as the neoclassical artists who aided the Jacobins during the French Revolution and were later guillotined under the Reign of Terror. Or the Futurists who joined forces with the Italian fascists who were later to ban all exhibitions that did not receive government approval.

In spite of these failures though, there are many examples of artists who were able to effect positive social change, but upon closer examination we can see that most of them were not overtly political but more concerned with the technical, spiritual and aesthetic aspects of art which eclipsed its political dimension.

The most highly regarded artists in history, the Renaissance painters, the romantics, impressionists, and 60s avant-garde were actually quite happy to work within the political structure they found themselves in, and it is very difficult to find any celebrated artists who devoted a majority of their time to politics. The idea of art as social activism is actually quite a recent historical phenomenon, made popular because of the influence of social media.

None of this is to say that there is no such thing as good political art, or that it can never serve social change in some way. But the issue is that so many modern gallerists or writers would have us believe that the only art and literature produced in history worth mentioning, is the kind that promotes the interests of progressive politics. Recent years have seen a wave of wokeism sweeping art history that has resulted in the removal of contemporary paintings of black slaves because the artist was not themselves black, and the renaming of hundreds of paintings in the Rijksmuseum as the original names were considered culturally insensitive. It was evident recently in Yale University’s decision to abolish its art history course after criticism that it was ‘overwhelmingly white’. Which makes one wonder how the cause of diversifying art history is served by giving Yale students fewer courses to choose from.

Above all this line of thought ignores the fact that artworks communicate to people in a way that goes beyond their social identity, and can be admired by people from all cultures and walks of life. People do not need to be Japanese to appreciate Hokasai’s prints, or gay to appreciate Leonardo da Vinci’s paintings.

Art history is obviously littered with political artworks. JMW Turner championed the cause of slavery abolitionism with The Slave Ship (1840), Francisco Goya (1746-1828) the massacre of Spanish civilians in The Third of May (1808), and Jacques-Louis David (1748-1825) political assassination with The Death of Marat (1793). But these are all examples of political artworks from painters who are not primarily known for making political art, and would have been remembered as great artists without these examples. This is because there are many things that make artworks valuable that are separate from their social connotations.

Today artists like Peter Doig (1959), Yayoi Kusama (1929), and Olafur Eliasson (1967) rank highly both in terms of sales and gallery visits, but are not especially political artists. They evoke something that was discovered in the 18th Century and was partially lost in the 20th. This was the Aesthetics movement that championed art for art's sake and the idea that beauty in art is valuable above all else. Associated with the Pre-Raphaelites who built on a tradition inherited from the romantic painters. In literature it is best known through the writings of Oscar Wilde (1854-1900) who remarked that ‘A work of art is useless as a flower is useless. A flower blossoms for its own joy. We gain a moment of joy by looking at it. That is all that is to be said about our relations to flowers.’

Doubtless, many artists today would reject the idea that art should primarily seek to be aesthetically pleasing on the grounds that this renders it meaningless, but it may be that people receive far more meaning from something that is beautiful because they enjoy looking at it, rather than a form of activism that is dependent on a fleeting moment in time.

There are many career options open to people with artistic talent who want to serve a humanitarian cause. These include making documentaries, photo-journalism, or illustrating for news organisations. But there should be a broader recognition that this is a separate discipline from what most of art is engaged with, which is an individual pursuit of aesthetic creation, and that the purpose of artistic institutions should be to cultivate this rather than to train activists.

The utopian impulse has always been present in the arts. As every individual has their own aesthetic taste, the impulse is always to try to shape society and move it in a direction that is more appealing to certain interests, and that is precisely why the impulse should always be resisted.

There will always be artists that see their mission as the creation of a utopia, but it would probably be far better for humanity if they are never allowed to act on their wishes.