Is Political Art Possible - Essay Example

? Political Art Political art works on the realization that artistic efforts can function as useful tools for the study and understanding of sometimes very complicated or abstract concepts that may apply to a variety of fields of study including politics, society and cultural issues. Even when they seem to be simply presenting an image of a given time period, using as their subject some form of 'snapshot' image for example, the artist captures some element of the culture, politics and ideas that were dominant during the time period in which the artist lived and worked. Particularly when the artist chooses to depict recognizable subjects, future generations of viewers are able to glean some sense of how the people lived by thoroughly examining changes in depictions from one generation of artists to another, watching for deliberate misrepresentation of images and juxtaposition of elements, all of which can provide clues as to the underlying social and political structures of the era. Attempts to understand these deeper elements of art can be improved by coming to a greater understanding of literature, whose expression is closely connected to the concepts underlying artistic practices. Social theorists and academics commonly look to literature as a means of achieving greater understanding of events such as massive cultural shifts like that experienced during the post-war period and cultural hybridity. Because these concepts are difficult to define or explain, literature offers the necessary examples and analogies which bridge gaps in understanding and pose new questions to be watched for in the artworks produced. The idea of cultural hybridity has taken on great significance since the mid-20th century as social and cultural shifts prompted by globalization have had increasing impact on our world. Although commonly employed to refer to the effects of pre-war colonialism, in which a technologically dominant society overpowers a less developed nation, the concepts that have emerged from studies into cultural hybridity have taken on new significance in light of globalization and transnationalism as the artist attempts to depict the mood of an entire nation. The concepts and aftereffects of colonialism became a subject of great consideration during the postwar period particularly within the academic world and have recently, within the past few decades, become the focus of a number of political artworks and artists. “Colonialism is a practice of domination, which involves the subjugation of one people to another” (Kohn). Originally, colonialism was thought to apply only to the specific action of moving people from a dominant territory, like England, to a new territory, like Africa, for permanent purposes. This type of relocation effort is also commonly characterized by the expectation that those relocated individuals will continue to cling to their home rule standards of living even within the bounds of the new location. In other words, settlers were expected to adhere to their former modes of dress, behavior styles and observe the cultural standards of their original home country rather than attempt to in with or adopt the standards of the people already living in the area. Regardless of their status in the home country, these settlers were given the impression that it was their task to convince the local people to change their ‘heathen’ or ‘uncivilized’ ways so they might come into compliance with the colonizing culture’s ideals and thus be able to compete on the 'higher' or 'better' level. Although there were reasons why this deliberate attempt to replace entire cultures was considered justifiable, the attempt was also perhaps unavoidable. The practice of colonization was considered to be important to the global community because “a temporary period of political dependence or tutelage was necessary in order for ‘uncivilized’ societies to advance to the point where they were capable of sustaining liberal institutions and self-government” (Kohn). As the world engaged more and more readily in the process of colonialism, this ‘temporary’ arrangement became much more permanent. Never was it truly considered that these undeveloped nations would be capable of developing their own systems, or that they already had their own systems in place. “In the nineteenth century, the tension between liberal thought and colonial practice became particularly acute, as dominion of Europe over the rest of the world reached its zenith” (Kohn). The tension finally broke during the postwar period, and this tension has since become an important theme in the political art of the periods to follow. Cultural hybridity was once considered to evolve completely out of societies characterized by colonization but has become more and more associated with the effects of the people of the developing nations moving into and affecting their colonizers. The common belief is that a dominant culture can be ‘laid over’ a native culture like a blanket, eventually smothering the (presumably weak) native culture and replacing it with the stronger, 'richer' culture of the dominators. The idea of cultural hybridity, however, suggests within the term a less controllable blending of cultures in which aspects of each become welded together, eventually leading to the creation of an entirely new society. “According to Roland Barthes, a ‘third language’ evolves that is neither the one nor the other” (Raetzsch). Barthes' theory suggests that although individuals continue to live within the language and customs of their familiar social realm, they also develop new language usage and customary behavior in order to function more effectively within the greater world. “Between these two languages we have to negotiate meaning, structure impressions and define our own personalities” (Raetzsch). Although it was believed that the dominant culture would have sufficient influence over the other to replace it and force the higher technology society back into prominence, the important take-away message is that the symbols and codes people use to judge their place in society and artists use to express their ideas are altered regardless of which culture they are in because each adapts to meet the other somewhere in the middle. Thus, the process of cultural hybridity is not confined to only those cultures that have been the subject of colonialism, but continue to apply to everyone living in an increasingly globalized and transnational world. These concepts are widely illustrated by artists such as those who created the Great Wall of L.A. The art of the postwar period was characterized by an attempt to convey a single perspective ideology analogous to the pre-war colonialist beliefs. In creating the Great Wall of L.A., the artists provide a similar single perspective, but its purpose is rather to expose the dominant ideology and its weaknesses. The artwork is located in an area known as the Tujunga Wash in the San Fernando Valley. It is a half mile section of a manmade watershed control channel. The concrete walls of this channel were an ugly blight on the local landscape that became frequent targets of graffiti and vandalism. Today, these same walls are covered with the collective mural painting now known as The Great Wall of L.A. Overall, the painting consists of a series of murals that are purposefully designed and executed by local citizens of minority ethnicity and is an effort to preserve and recognize their cultural and political role in California’s development. The painting contributes greater community benefit in the development of small community parks along the entire length of the mural, now considered to be an active part of the overall artwork, and offering biking and walking trails to connect them. Since many of the images depicted in the mural are complex, conveying a great deal of history in a short amount of space, the tendency to drive quickly past the kind of low-income residential areas where this mural is located is not sufficient to gain a full appreciation of the message while the associated community parks encourage the kind of longer-term speculation the artwork requires as the postwar segment entitled 'Sububria.' This segment begins with the removal of the popular war-time image of Rosie the Riveter as society shifted out of war into the suburbs of the 1950s. The image shows the popular female factory worker of the war years being sucked backward into the screen of the television which was quickly replacing the fireplace as the center of the home. To reinforce to women that their proper place was in the home and that she needed to give up her job at the factory to make way for the returning soldiers, numerous shows that played on the television continuously depicted shows in which the woman was the homemaker and the man went to work each day. To illustrate this connection, Rosie the Riveter is sucked into the TV screen, losing her wrench in the process, and the well-manicured lawns and white orderly house fronts of the suburbs emerge below her. The independent woman of the war years becomes overwhelmed by the messages conveyed in TV advertisements and shows like Leave it to Beaver, Father Knows Best or the Donna Reed Show. To make sure this message and the audience it was directed to is understood by the mural viewer, the stereotypical suburban family is seen standing behind the television in the mural. The mother and daughter are both blonde and slim, indicating the California female ideal. The father is dressed for business and the son seems ready for action, again reinforcing the white American ideals. The rows of identically white suburban houses seen below are divided through the middle by a column of yellow moving trucks. They are presumably bringing more blonde, blue-eyed perfect suburban families away from the distant city in a trail of hope and promise to the white-washed perfect neighborhoods. What is finally noticed along the edge of this segment of the mural is a deep ditch that separates these perfect neighborhoods from the darkly rural wilderness. Coming out of this wilderness are the poor, rural black people. Unwelcome in the suburbs, these workers pass by traveling in broken down cars and on bare feet heading into the city obviously looking for work. They are permitted to look at the promise, but not to stop for a talk or to stay. There are no people of clear Hispanic origin in appearance in this segment, revealing the white people's attitudes toward the minority races - the black people are outsiders and workers only while the other races are completely ignored. The complexity of cultural hybridity as expressed in political artworks such as this can be discovered by looking into the various signs and symbols the artist used to communicate with a given audience and then analyzing how these same signs and symbols are interpreted differently by another group (Chirolla & Wang). There are many examples available of this evident in political works such as the artwork of Kerry James Marshall. In his painting “Better Homes, Better Gardens,” Marshall also highlights the minority point of view, this time by their inclusion rather than exclusion from the scene. As a painting, this artwork does not have the same advantage of the Great Wall of L.A. that cannot be moved and thus stands in direct association with the lower class, mostly minority audience for which it was intended. The background of this painting consists of a vividly blue sky, a rising sun, bluebirds, a flower-strewn courtyard, some trees and a housing area. These are all created in such a way as to also indicate the ideals of the American suburban lifestyle captured and supposedly duplicated within the inner city projects. The available view on the left side of the painting is hidden behind an ominous red brick wall which announces the name of the housing project, “Wentworth Gardens.” A small bunch of white flowers appears to be growing in front of this sign in clear mimicry of a suburban neighborhood's entryway. The circular flower garden area in which these flowers are planted is surrounded by the suburban obligatory green lawn as was seen in the Great Wall. A blue splash of color toward the center of the painting could almost be interpreted as the spray of a fountain. The full trees and brightly colored flowers dotting the lawn help to convey a sense of an innocent summer suburban morning. Heavy white, almost chalklike lines drawn on the sidewalk invoke the spirit of the happy child and a bright yellow toy ball is clearly depicted on the bottom right hand corner of the painting. A coiled up hose lying on the grass brings in the suburban ideal of working in the yard on the weekend or of children playing in the sprinklers. Like the Great Wall, though, the image reveals a darker perspective as these happy suburban appearances fail to stand up to closer scrutiny. Through his depiction, Marshall manages to convey more than the single point perspective that had dominated earlier works and tries to break his viewers out of a sense that the entire world shares a single ideal image in mind. Despite the bright hues and innocent nature of so many elements in the painting, closer attention allows hints of falsity to emerge. This impression begins with the entrance sign which instructs residents to “Drive Carefully” and to “Watch Your Children.” The uneven, wandering lines of the sidewalk reveal the shoddy craftsmanship that went into creating the housing district. The white flowers dotting the lawn quickly morph themselves, through this new perspective, into signs of neglect as they become either fully developed weeds or carelessly strewn trash. The idle hose lying in the grass suggests no effort is truly being made to improve the property and also conveys a sense of the serpent, a long-held Christian symbol of evil in the heart of the garden. Each of the visible doors of the apartment complex within the wall is created with a series of horizontal bars crossing the entryway, emphasizing the idea that this is a governmental institution and that the residents are prisoners to this lifestyle. The institutional orange color of the complex can be interpreted to indicate governmental control rather than a reflection of the joyous bright colors inherent to a tropical culture. The depiction of children's toys without any children being present indicates the landscape is indeed full of danger. The only two people in evidence in the scene are a young man and woman clasping hands as they attempt to avoid tripping over the banner of 'promise' as they try to make their escape. The horizontal bars depicted in the girl’s shirt seem to indicate the additional restrictions that have been placed on her gender as well as the relative hopelessness that they will be any more successful than those who have gone before. The dual meaning of signs and symbols such as these have been interpreted to mean that political art can no longer be produced because there are no clear and distinct meanings available within the largely mixed viewing public. “But whereas Baudrillard describes this as the vanishing point of meaning, it could also be inverted and stated as the explosion of meaning. Signs from any place in the world are open to further combination, variation and subversion the moment they become mediated” (Raetzsch). In other words, Baudrillard’s ideas in which the meanings of signs and symbols are rendered entirely meaningless by the cultural hybridity of the modern age may also open new avenues for nuances of meaning within art as direct result of the possibility for multiple interpretations. This is largely the focus of much of Barthes’ work on semiotics. Essentially, the term ‘semiotics’ describes how a person analyzes the ‘signs’ of a given culture for clues as to what it might mean at varying levels of understanding. An example of this concept can be found in the depiction of a simple blue sky. In the Western tradition, this can simply be referring to a clear day, but it can also be used to suggest heaven, God, purity of thought, clarity of spirit, infinity or any other possible interpretation the viewer wishes to associate with it depending on their understanding of the overall work. “Semiology therefore aims to take in any system of signs, whatever their substance and limits; images, gestures, musical sounds, objects, and the complex associations of all these, which form the content of ritual, convention or public entertainment: these constitute, if not languages, at least systems of signification” (Barthes 64). Therefore, the term can be used to refer to any combination of language, expression, image, color, shape, placement and other contextual clues which the artist can bring together through his or her own interpretation of the signs and symbols within their body of knowledge so as to convey a sense of meaning to a particular cultural group who shares the artist's outlook. Some of the primary elements used in artworks of various types include the triple threat of signifier, signified and sign. These words can actually be envisioned as a verbal math equation in which signifier plus signified equals sign. The signifier is defined as “the form which the sign takes” and the signified is “the concept it represents” (Chandler 6). Although these terms may be thought of slightly differently depending upon the artist and the medium, the signifier essentially refers to the actual image depicted to a viewing audience which makes it the most basic part of the equation. A signifier could be the image of an apartment complex, the picture of a suburban neighborhood or the faces of a group of people. The particular shape in which these images are presented, including the width of the lines or the apparent strokes of the brush, can also be considered part of the signifier. The broader meaning of these images is the signified - the apartment complex comes to represent a jail, the suburban neighborhood can be interpreted as heaven and the people's faces can convey worlds of meaning depending upon their facial expressions. Together, the depicted image and the underlying meanings it can convey create the sign that stands as a unified symbol of meaning for a given audience. To the middle class white parent, the image of suburbia can mean heaven, but it could also mean a prison to their 'perfect' child or hell to the community-oriented, country-loving farmer. For every word or image that can be depicted, there is a deeper meaning associated with it. The meaning and the form combined are thus two halves of the sign. Although the sign can be deliberately constructed through the use of signifier and signified, it can also grow to take on greater significance on its own as it is used in combination with other images or placed in unusual contexts, such as the image of a heaven-like suburbia splashed across the eyesore of a lower-class neighborhood. The combination of signs created in such an endeavor conveys much deeper meaning through the use of connotative and denotative meaning. These terms create yet another verbal equation in which the connotative and denotative elements combine to form ideological myth. It is through ideological myth that the culture to which the presentation is intended to communicate is identified. “Barthes’ notion of myth is that of a socially constructed reality that is passed off as natural. Myth is a mode of signification in which the signifier is stripped of its history, the form is stripped of its substance, and then it is adorned with a substance that is artificial, but which appears entirely natural” (Ryder). Through this process, the concept of suburbia can be stripped of its common meaning of the ideal society to present an image of the ultimate in flawed social structures. The depth of the meaning communicated depends entirely upon the degree to which the artist and the audience share the same cultural myths and symbolisms as well as the artist’s ability to successfully select and combine the images of this cultural group so as to connect with a particular ideological concept (Chandler, 2006). Semiotics is revealed through this investigation as the means by which images identify with a particular culturally similar audience, reinforcing their similarities and providing a sense of shape and meaning and also provides the avenue through which political artists are able to question and explore some of these myths. With this ‘scavenger map’ of images, the culturally different society is able to begin adapting their signs and symbols more toward the center in the process of cultural hybridity or to convey their own interpretations to help the dominant group come into closer understanding of the differences. References Barthes, Roland. (1964). Elements of Semiology. New York: Hill and Wang. Chandler, Daniel. (2006). Semiotics for Beginners. Wales: The University of Wales. Chirolla, Amberly & Wang, Ellen. (Fall, 2005). “Chinese Weddings: The History Behind Them.” Vis a Vis. Cultural Awareness International. Web. June 1, 2011. “Great Wall of LA.” July 9, 2008. Web. June 1, 2011. Kohn, Margaret. (2006). “Colonialism.” Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy. University of Stanford. Web. June 1, 2011. Marshall, Kerry James. “Better Homes, Better Gardens.” Denver Art Museum, 1994. Art21 Web. June 1, 2011. Raetzsch, Christoph. (May 15-17, 2003). “Cultural Hybridity.” Multiple Cultures, Multiple Perspectives. Berlin: Annual Students Conferences at Humboldt. Web. June 1, 2011. Read More