Political Art Research Articles

The Code of Presence: Belarusian Protest Embroideries and Textile Patterns

Since the fraudulent presidential elections of 9 August 2020, the Republic of Belarus has become a battleground between the women-led democratic opposition forces and the authoritarian regime of Alexander Lukashenka. Current forms of political oppression in Belarus make open public protest dangerous. This exhibition report highlights safer ways to express dissent in a dictatorial society by grounding it in the textile arts, collective labor, and participatory practices. “The Code of Presence: Belarusian Protest Embroideries and Textile Patterns” is a permanent digital exhibition that I curated in 2022 hosted by the University of Michigan Library. The exhibition features 12 textile projects created by professional female artists from Belarus, including the works of Rufina Bazlova, Masha Maroz, Varvara Sudnik, Anna Bundeleva, Nasta Vasiuchenka, Lesia Pcholka, Vasilisa Palianina, Dasha Sazanovich, Yuliya Tsviatkova and Da(r)sha Golova. The exhibition explores how Craftivism, a global trend in contemporary art associated with political activism, correlates with the artists’ perceptions of the country’s textile heritage. The purpose of this report is to introduce individual artists, their voices and projects. It is grouped into three distinct, albeit overlapping, categories: 1) individual craftivist strategies in Belarusian protest embroideries; 2) collective craftivist embroidery practices; and 3) traditional textile patterns in other media. Galvanized by the protests of 2020–2021, political artists’ embroideries and ornamental graphics emerged as a protest ritual of a new kind, igniting a powerful process of cultural heritage revitalization, and documenting the events of the protests, working with such themes as feminism, female labor, memory, and trauma.

Craftivism in the time of Covid: resisting toxic masculinity through feminized labor

ABSTRACT This study focuses on the social media discourse of craftivism between March 2020 and December 2020, coinciding the Covid-19 lockdowns across the United States and the US Presidential Election. The timeframe under examination also includes some of the most extensively covered Black Lives Matter protests to date in the United States, thus requiring an intersectional lens and attention to whose crafts are circulated and lauded. These three deeply intertwined events raised tensions on social media platforms to new extremes, resulting in shifting moderation policies, and reflecting the increased significance of online communities to sustaining all relationships and movements. During this time, we argue that a fundamental shift in the discourse of craftivism has occurred, rejecting previous assumptions of ”gentleness” while demanding a public recentering of the domestic and ”femininized” labor. We contextualize this shift through three case studies: global memorial project Covid-19 quilt; political art project Tiny Pricks; and activist mask-making collective Auntie Sewing Squad. At the same time, this revision must be understood alongside collective failures of labor valuation and widespread economic crisis disproportionately impacting women (particularly women of color). In these cases, we see important intersectional resistance, even as white femininity in craft continues to be centered.

Musical Amateur Performance in Ukraine of the 1930s as the Manifestation of Soviet Totalitarian Ideology

"The article comprehensively examines antinomies of the amateur performance development in Ukraine of 1930s. The factual basis of the research is the materials of the newspapers, magazines, and musical journals of this period. It is proved that the phenomenon of amateur performance, as one of the most significant phenomena of totalitarian society’s mass culture, consists in its contradictory nature: on the one hand, mass artistic movement, population’s sincere faith and enthusiasm, and on the other, politicization, ideological engagement, fear of physical destruction. The actions of the Soviet authorities in the one of most dramatic periods of the last century for Ukraine – the 1930s – regarding the dissemination and support of musical amateur music are analyzed (for example, regular financial support, awarding of bonuses, patronage, organization of public events, set-up of publishing activities, training systems for amateur performance leaders, which, in general, contributed to raising musical amateur movement in Ukraine to a professional level). At the same time, it is found that amateur performance was one of the tools for shaping the ideology of a totalitarian society. Keywords: Ukrainian culture of 1930s, amateur performance, totalitarian society, politicization of art. "

“New Others”

Abstract This article deals with mostly negative ideological images of refugees, as they erupted in political graffiti and street art (stickers, stencils, various inscriptions) in Slovenia during the so-called refugee crisis from the fall of 2015 on. Its basic questions are three: How is the ideological process of othering the refugees constructed in political graffiti? How does this relate to dominant discourses and practices in Slovenian society (from official politics to mass media)? What were the reactions against such sprayed hate speech (so pro-refugee graffiti)? The process of othering progresses in two steps: refugees are first imagined as an unified mass that is radically different from imaginary notions of “Slovenianism” and “Europeanism,” which then serves as the basis for differentiation between more and less acceptable of them. On these grounds, four different ideological images are created: a refugee as a criminal, a refugee as an uninvited visitor, a refugee as a powerless victim, and a refugee as a global proletarian. About 150 original photos of anti- and pro-refugee graffiti, mostly from Slovenia (but for comparative reasons also from the whole region), are analyzed using the semiotic method as developed by its classics and finally interpreted with Theodor Adorno and Alexander Mitscherlich's concepts of “displacement of hatred” and Seymour Martin Lipset's concept of “extremism of the center.”

The Chattering Mind: A Conceptual History of Everyday Talk

The Chattering Mind: A Conceptual History of Everyday Talk

Valentine Green's a Review of the Polite Arts (1782): War for Empire And the Campaigns to Promote Protestant Devotional Art

This essay emerges from an investigation into the degree to which one can interpret the works of eighteenth-century reproductive engravers as indicative of their own religious, political and moral values. It is the first account of the print business to claim that the personal values of such men mattered deeply to what they made and sold. Valentine Green, the mezzotint entrepreneur, was selected as a prime example largely because he left a substantial oeuvre of literary works and was also an early politician of the arts. He was deeply involved in the formulation of the policy, with regard to devotional images, which emerged from a succession of competing art institutions. Green's writings and his institutional activities allow us to know in detail his politics and churchmanship. The case here is that he was a High Church Tory who combined a strong sense of the importance of monarchical authority with an understanding that the prime role of the arts was to make a devout and politically obedient national community. In this essay, I claim that it was not just one person who thought this way. I claim, rather, that Green championed a hitherto unnoticed Tory aesthetic theory. This theory had at its core the necessity of breaking down prejudices against making devotional images that lurked in other quarters of Protestantism.

Agnès Varda’s cinematic writing as political art in Black Panthers

In Black Panthers, rather than identifying with or speaking for the Black Panther Party, Varda’s cinécriture – her shot choices, camera movement and editing – allows her to insert her commentary about the group’s revolutionary potential while the members determine themselves as subjects rather than accepting their definition by the state. Her film foregrounds the politics of social space, showing how the Panthers transform spaces of circulation like the courthouse and their neighbourhoods into spaces of contestation.

Cien años de muralismo: Enfoque comparativo de los manifiestos mexicanos y argentinos (1923-2021)

One hundred years after the creation of the first mural in Latin America, and based on the postulate that muralism is still alive, this article proposes to investigate the evolution of that artistic and ideological movement from the twentieth century to the present. More precisely, we have carried out a comparative analysis of a selection of four Mexican and Argentinean manifestos published in 1924, 1958, 2020, and 2021, thus opting for a double approach—temporal and spatial—with the aim of identifying the ruptures and continuities between the aesthetic-ethical projects of two generations of muralists who painted in countries where political art has always occupied a fundamental place.

Dispirited Away: The Peer Review Process

Dispirited Away: The Peer Review Process

The Artistry of Critical Thought

This article provides an analysis of the way in which contemporary forms of intelligence discourse (Jean Baudrillard), in similar fashion to political art (Theodor Adorno and Herbert Marcuse), function by delimiting critical thought. The intelligence discourse critiqued is extolled through things such as progressive intelligence acquisition (Flynn effect) and the supposed indispensability of Democratic reason (Hélène Landemore), amongst other qualities. In support of its argument, the article focusses specifically on Baudrillard’s analysis of the notion of the intelligence of evil, as well as on the Frankfurt School’s critique of massification. However, the article also notes limitations in these thinkers’ recovery and defence of critical thought in response to the delimitation posed by intelligence and massification, and argues for Rosi Braidotti’s evaluation of thought as nomadic as a necessary corrective.

Knowing Native Arts by Nancy Marie Mithlo

Reviewed by: Knowing Native Arts by Nancy Marie Mithlo Benjamin P. Davis Nancy Marie Mithlo. Knowing Native Arts. Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 2020. 272 pp. Hardcover, $34.95. Knowing Native Arts, an essay collection spanning thirty-five years of scholarship, makes several contributions. Scholars studying the art of Emily Arthur, Marie Watt, Tom Jones, Edward Curtis, and Jimmie Durham will gain from how Nancy Mithlo reads these texts with a focus on questions of political histories, Indigenous self-determination, and cultural authenticity. For instance, she highlights how Arthur’s screen print Re-Remembering (Not History), hosted first by the Crisp-Ellert Art Museum at Flagler College in Saint Augustine, “inserts the veiled histories of assimilation and imprisonment into Saint Augustine’s celebratory anniversary” (54). Accounting throughout for differences in theoretical [End Page 141] approaches as well as media, Mithlo underscores a different method in Watt’s Witness, a reclaimed wool blanket: “While Arthur brings the past forward into a contemporary Florida landscape, giving Southern Plains leaders a chance to return home, Watt has traveled backward in time, bringing along her two daughters to witness the deeply infused cultural protocols of First Nations peoples” (58–60). And in her chapter “Decentering Durham,” one of the multiple essays she has written on the Durham controversy over the years, she insists that “supporting a political cause does not require that you fabricate your identity” (200). Following the Native American and Indigenous Studies Association statement on “Indigenous identity fraud,” she adds that belonging is not merely a matter of who you claim to be; it is about who claims you (201). Through Mithlo’s perceptive lens, page by page Knowing Native Arts becomes more than a book about aesthetics. It operates less through a central claim and more as a constellation: taken together, the essays illuminate media, methods, and histories of fine arts often excluded from museum spaces and academic discussions. Read this way, Knowing Native Arts becomes about ethics and politics. The idea in art history that “aesthetics are nonpolitical,” Mithlo writes, “privileges the art object as separate and detached from considerations of statehood, nation, and citizenship” (102). But this is not to say that political art is “akin to a propaganda poster” (103). Rather than proceed via such an “unambiguous reading,” Knowing Native Arts offers a “broader reading,” arguing that “political art is art that is meant to disturb, question, and undermine social standards” (103). It is the way that Mithlo’s set of readings speaks to broader political questions today that I want to consider in the rest of this brief review. Perhaps more interesting to readers of this journal than continuing to summarize her discussion of the aforementioned artists, I think, will be a sense of the politics Knowing Native Arts both suggests and performs. Mithlo is an expert on material culture in more ways than one. “The field of Native arts is a tough gig,” she states in her conclusion. “There is a lack of recognition, a lack of resources, simply a lack” (229). Her chapters consistently attend to the material conditions that permitted or precluded her scholarship. She does this in a substantive, not symbolic way. Many academics, even and especially those trained to write about political economy, discuss the production of their books at most by citing a [End Page 142] prestigious grant in the acknowledgments section. Like many academic books, Mithlo’s emerged from a series of presentations she gave around the world. Unlike most academic books, Mithlo acknowledges this genesis, beginning her chapters by detailing where she first presented the materials. In her final chapter, she even includes a section of email correspondence, which shows the reader how ideas and interventions actually travel and gain traction (218–21). The effect of this writing style, chapter after chapter, is to provide a way into the actual proceedings of an academic’s life. It would be difficult to overstate the importance of Mithlo’s style with a view toward actual changes in the accessibility of the academy. She provides a point of relatable entry in what is otherwise a competitive and often demeaning context. “The academy is not neutral,” Mithlo says early on (9). She begins...

‘Don’t wait for permission’: Ava DuVernay as a Black female intellectual and political artist

ABSTRACT Black intellectualism, particularly in the public sphere, tends to be associated with male figures from the academy. This trend risks excluding a broader range of viewpoints and traditions – particularly the contributions of Black women, artists and community organisers whose intellectual praxis has been wrought from experiences outside the academic paradigm. This article argues that filmmaker and activist Ava DuVernay should be recognised as a Black female public intellectual. It demonstrates how DuVernay uses her work to grapple with the racial histories, philosophies and ideologies which have permeated American history and society. An artist-intellectual-activist, DuVernay sits in a historical lineage of Black artists employing visual cultures to interrogate and resist the operation of racism in the United States. Her work centres and explores Black lives, particularly women, rendering Black characters as complex and multifarious – an act of intellectual rebellion against a hegemonic narrative that centres whiteness, a narrative which has long dominated mainstream film. Through intellectual labour adjacent to her filmmaking, DuVernay also works to promote the perspectives of women and people of colour as interventions in the national imaginary. Ava DuVernay’s work and approach demonstrate that a multiplicity of intellectual identities exist beyond the academy.

When reason is not enough for social cohesion: rethinking the place of emotion and art in politics

Reason has often been defended as critical for the prudent harmonisation of competing interests, security and social cohesion in organised societies. Human rationality however, now appears inadequate to cope with the spate of conflicts and dysfunction in many societies, postcolonial Africa inclusive. Thus, imaginative approaches to fostering social cohesion are required. In this paper, I argue that the dichotomy that elevates reason (equated with logic) and derides emotion (equated with irrationality) is not only misplaced, but also unhelpful. I defend art as a valuable vehicle for creating the dialogic space that fosters empathy, make politics affective and promote social cohesion. I conclude by advocating a complementary integration of reason and emotion, with particular focus on empathy, as a remedy to dysfunctional, antagonistic politics, especially in societies confronted by the complexities of diversity.

“No hay tiempo para el amor”: Relaciones entre nacionalistas vascos radicales y republicanos irlandeses y el surgimiento de una cultura política compartida (1981-98)

Following the deaths of ten Irish republican hunger strikers in 1981, radical Basque nationalists and Irish republicans of the Basque izquierda abertzale (‘patriotic left’) and Irish republican movement respectively, began to develop ever closer ties of transnational “solidarity”. In addition to the relationship between Herri Batasuna and Sinn Féin, more ad hoc organisational links in areas such as youth, prisoner, and language advocacy, fostered a shared political culture at the intersection of both movements, which was periodically reflected through the prism of cultural expression (e.g., music, political art [murals], literature, audiovisual media). Utilising a wide array of primary sources, this article explores and analyses the emergence and development of this transnational nexus, from the hunger strikes of 1981 to the signing of the Good Friday Agreement in 1998.

Artivism in Maluku

Taking Eastern Indonesia as an example, this paper analyses alternative ways to maintain peace and fight social injustices. Arts and creativity are key in transformative justice approaches in post-conflict Maluku. The emerging arts scene was turned into a means to reintegrate society and resist disruptive outside forces, in direct contrast to use of the media and the arts to solidify group boundaries during the Moluccan conflict. This paper analyses these recent developments in Indonesia's periphery and how they are embedded in broader discourses on political art in Indonesia and beyond. In environments such as Indonesia, where the public articulation of protest and intergroup tensions have been suppressed for a long time, and where scholarly engagement with activist art (or artivism) has a strong focus on Indonesia's centre, such analyses are highly relevant for learning from the periphery, promoting a culture of dialogue and triggering positive change.

Our Land, Our People: A Reflection of Tibetan Buddhist Space in Contemporary Art

This article illustrates how a contemporary Tibetan artist disrupts expectations in the creation of his political art. Utilizing Robert Smithson’s dialogic of site and non-site, Tenzing Rigdol’s 2011 site-specific installation Our Land, Our People is interpreted as a reenactment of a culturally specific historical practice of moving space. This approach shares important similarities to historical cases in which physical spaces were relocated to and within Tibet, allowing for the application of 20th century theories arising in the spatial turn to contemporary Tibetan art.

The realist science of politics: the art of understanding political practice

Classical Realism represents a science of politics that is distinct from the conventional understanding of science in International Relations. The object of Realist science is the art of politics, which is the development of a sensibility based on practical knowledge to balance values and interests and to make judgments. Realism’s science and its object led to its tagging as “wisdom literature.” This article illustrates that reading Hans Morgenthau’s and Raymond Aron’s work shows how their hermeneutic form of enquiry provides insights into the character of international politics, which conventional understandings do not. Following the example of Morgenthau, the article, first, illustrates how Realism, rather than providing a theory of practice, builds on a science with the purpose to judge knowledge. Realism’s science analyzes the objective conditions of politics, theorizes them, and takes into account the requirements of political practice under contingencies and considerations of morality. The article, second, examines Aron’s take on political practice in the context of the Cold War and politics that built on knowledge without experience to judge knowledge. Morgenthau and Aron’s science helps to capture Realism’s take on politics as an art, how to explicate Realism’s epistemological foundation and value in studying international politics. Doing so, the article, third, contributes to practice theory by clarifying several aspects of Realism’s science. In particular, it shows how Realism captures the art of politics by conceptualizing practice as a form of human conduct thereby offering a more coherent notion of practice than current practice theory.

Mrs. Rockefeller’s Exquisite Corpse

AbstractThe “exquisite corpse” in this title refers to a gift book presented to Mrs. Abby Aldrich Rockefeller in December 1931, which contains signed notes from Rockefeller’s domestic employees, friends, ministers, art dealers, Museum of Modern Art (MoMA) employees, and also a signed painting by Diego Rivera. The book’s construction highlights the intersecting social networks and associations among a variety of religious, artistic, philanthropic, and domestic organizations and individuals that are more typically investigated as distinct or non-connecting. As such, the book invites an alternate reading of influences shaping MoMA’s earliest years. This interpretation takes inspiration from the surrealist games and conceits of ethnographic and artistic surrealism—an approach that is generatively suggested by the Tribute Book’s construction. Read in this way, I take the gift book to open up a range of associations that make possible modes of interpretation through which to consider the secular and the modern religious. I use the book’s intertextual qualities as an entry point into a new consideration of the presence and effects of liberal-protestant spiritual aesthetics in MOMA’s earliest years. I argue that such spiritual aesthetics shaped the secular museum’s curation, display, and interpretation of political artists including Rivera and European surrealists.

Artistic strategy and political communication

The main research narratives of the article are: the influence of artistic strategy on the political communication in the condition of post truth; political imagination and regime of post truth; art and regime of truth; rationality of illusions in the political communication; the techniques of artistic suggestion in public dialogue. It deals with the principle of reliability, the legitimacy rituals in the hunting for the voters. It is analyzed the mythological transformation, imitative mythology of the modern medias. It is discerned the technological integration of art in religion and politics, communication actions that make its “generic” feature and the “generic” burden at the same time. Such notions as poetry, art and technology are connected with the unfolding of the technological refinement in all spheres of human activity. The author explains the need of the mythological distortion as the basis for the building of reality. It deals with the PR- technology transformation as the particular case of the cultural-political project into undeniable social value. It is defined the role of the artistic and political projects as the communicative prosthesis. Simultaneously the author traces the ouster of illusion in public communication. He analyzes the modalities of the communicative practice and communicative experience reduction in the socialization process as well as the technological perfection in the mythological representation. The special features of the mythological absorption as the negation of law and social subject are determined here. It is also defined the sense of the law rationality regarding the rationality of myth.

BEETHOVEN THE EUROPEAN LUCCA, 4–6 DECEMBER 2020

Whilst Covid prevented so many of the year's promised commemorative activities, one positive outcome was the delay of the original ‘live’ Lucca event scheduled for March and its transformation into an online event in Beethoven's birth month. (Edited by his daughter Margaret O'Sullivan, this was part of his project ‘Beethoven's Irish Songs Revisited’, which sought to reconstruct those folksongs for which George Thomson never got around to supplying texts.) In his stimulating address, ‘Beethoven's Ninth Symphony as a Disputed Symbol of Community: From Thomas Mann's Doctor Faustus to the Brexiteers of 2019’, William Kinderman cast a wide intellectual net, developing themes from the final chapter of his most recent book, Beethoven: A Political Artist in Revolutionary Times (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2020). After this ingenious analysis we were then taken on a whirlwind video tour of performances of the ‘Ode to Joy’ in political events spanning almost a century, showing how – despite the movement's misappropriation by the Nazi regime and racist Rhodesia, and the way it is associated with aggression in Kubrick's A Clockwork Orange – Schiller's text was reinterpreted to suit each different historical context, whilst remaining ‘an untainted symbol’ of affirmation and resistance. The examples of performances included those given by Germans held in a Japanese prisoner-of-war camp in June 1918, the annual December ritual of massed choirs and orchestras in Japan, the Occupy Wall Street protests in New York in 2011, the struggle of Chilean opponents of Pinochet, the playing of cassette recordings with makeshift amplification by students protesting against martial law in China at Tiananmen Square in 1989, right up to Tan Dun's 2021 work Sound Pagoda – composed to be performed alongside the ‘Ode to Joy’ – for a concert dedicated to Wuhan's Covid victims.