Change Must Come - Art, Politics and Society

I started another City Lit art class last week.  4 x 2 hour lectures with James Mansfield as tutor.  His specialist interests are 20th C art, Tate Modern, German Art, Collecting.  Art is used to express and question political and social ideas. Artists have critiqued their societies and manipulated viewers by the propaganda within their work.  Art has an uneasy relationship with politics and this course aims to explore it.

"Art is not a mirror help up to reality, but a hammer with which to shape it".  Bertolt Brecht.

We looked at how power and status were depicted.  James noted how in Britain, our royal family portray themselves with medals on every state occasion (accorded to them not by their actions, but by their status?) and travel in landaus which makes them noticeable because of their rarity. Then we looked  Napoleon in his finery and Lenin in mundanity.

Ingres, Napoleon on his imperial throne

Isaac Brodsky, Lenin in Smolsky

This focussed my attention on what I like and dislike.  I love the detail of Napoleon and would be happy to sit and draw the detail on his shoes, but intensely dislike the pomp, status and ego that it displays.  I find the mundanity of Lenin much more to my taste - it was categorised as Social Realism.  This term has come up several times recently, and my focus on the domestic and mundane appears to indicate this might be my field.

We had a discussion about Karl Marx and his critique of the emerging capitalist economy.  He argued that artistic production is merely another form of economic production via the commodification of labour.  This labour force held the seeds of its own destruction - 60% of low grade people could overthrow the Bourgoise.  In capitalism the benefits go to the owner.

The avant garde made subversive, questioning art.  Visual communication - done by creative thinking.  Queried why the Bolshovists were in charge.  Stalin did not want these questions.  State patronage art in the USSR went back to technical accomplishment.  Moved away from abstraction.  Social Realism came in to vogue - restricted range - humble and mundane.

Antonio Gramsci - cultural hegemony (a control system).   The soft power of cultural influence is just as important as the hard power of force.

Georg Grosz - The artist must try to express the workers battle idea and measure the value of his work by its social value and effectiveness.

Look at John Berger Ways of Seeing.  He had a Marxist interpretation.