Article Archive
Political Art Now
On September 3 and 4, 2004, members of the Mellon Discovery Fellows group met with Mieke Bal for a seminar discussion on the topic “Political Art Now.” The purpose of the seminar was to discuss the state and possibilities of political art with reference to a larger concern about interdisciplinarity in scholarship. The articles we discussed in the seminar included two pieces by Theodor Adorno, “Commitment to Theory” by Homi Bhabha, and “Grassroots Globalization and the Research Imagination” by Arjun Appadurai, as well as recent work by Bal on the topic of political art.
What follows is an attempt to sketch out the ideas we discussed, though this reconstruction will inevitably lack the movement and definition of these themes as they appeared in our conversation. We began with Adorno’s provocative essay “Cultural Criticism and Society.” In this essay, Adorno notes, “What distinguishes dialectical criticism is that it heightens cultural criticism until the notion of culture is itself negated, fulfilled, and surmounted” (Can One Live After Auschwitz: A Philosophical Reader, 156). In our discussion of this article, we addressed the ways in which cultural criticism may be complicit with the culture it attempts to oppose, or with the culture that critics naively think they transcend. Following Adorno’s analysis, as summarized in the pithy quote given above, we sought to make sense of dialectical criticism and negative dialectics as theories and practices potentially leading out of the illusion of transcendent criticism.
In the course of our discussion of a second article by Adorno, “Commitment,” we also considered some of the stylistic modes in which political artistic practices may fail to operate with sufficient complexity. For example, this may occur when a work’s content is too recognizably political and is thus read as didactic or propagandistic. We discovered a different possibility when we turned to Professor Bal’s work on the Colombian artist Doris Salcedo—who uses materials such as furniture, domestic artifacts, animal skin, and hair to make sculptures that reflect her consciousness of violence, social conflict, and trauma: works without an immediately recognizable political message may result in a more effective and profound political intervention while maintaining their aesthetic integrity or independence. This is not to suggest a return to an autonomous or apolitical art, and any confrontation with Salcedo’s or Adorno’s work would make this readily apparent. We were left to consider whether cultural criticism or scholarhip in the humanities relates in any analogous way to its cultural or political context. While each of us could follow up on these questions individually, it became apparent in the course of our discussion that our theoretical commitments and discourse require a commitment to rationality. This commitment is particularly urgent if we wish to preserve our ability to contribute critically to the cultural or political context in which we all live.
Dean Krouk is a Ph.D candidate in the Scandinavian Department and was a Mellon Discovery Fellow from 2003 to 2006.