WHAT IS „POLITICAL“ ART?
My friend Rudolph Baranik is at Boston University for the opening of an exhibition of his paintings, and the discussion concerns the nature of „political“ art. Yet, in Rudolph’s comments, it is not so much politics that is the subject, but words like „sensual“ and „mysterious“… which, indeed, describe the paintings themselves, whose „politics“ are rarely, if ever, on the surface, but which live, rather, at the level of iconography and landscape, a kind of mythos of texture and the interplay of light and dark.
And it are Rudolph’s very words‑‑ sensual, mysterious‑‑ which cause me to reflect on the nature of the political within the aesthetic, on what makes one sort of so‑called „political“ artist merely a polemicist, while the other remains wholly an artist… on what makes Rilke and Eliot (in Rudolph’s opinion, and mine) better „political“ poets than, say, Whitman or Wendell Berry. For it seems to me that there is a distinction to be made between what is merely willed ideology and what is felt… between what is merely wished for and held (i.e. at a distance) to be correct, and what has been truly internalized and unified with one’s very being.
For it is in the very nature of the felt to be both sensuous and mysterious, whereas the willed is always harsh, insistent, trivially transparent… fundamentally insincere, however ardently it may be wished for. So that‑‑ in art, as in love‑‑ what is sincere is always sensuous and credible, always beyond the control and domination of the will. And, therefore, the first criterion that must be met by so‑called „political“ art (if its very name is to be something more than an oxymoron) is the same as for any other kind of art‑‑ namely, the depth and quality of its sincerity, the extent to which which has become internalized as nature.
What good then, I ask you, are my „politics“ (in our bed, on the page, on the canvas) if I can no longer make you tremble with them? And whom would you prefer‑‑ the impotent lover full of willfulness and good intentions, or the sincere sensualist who, hardly knowing what he actually stands for, makes you weep with the authenticity of his confusion? The devious rose, with its hidden nest of thorns, or the good serpent you can truly rely on?