Loneliness, pain, humiliation and defeat are central to life.
112. Stained Glass. Chartrcs Cathedral, с. II50
of presenting its most central figure in situations of misery and despair (112). The aim was to remind us that pain and sadness are not the results of getting life wrong in some way, but the ordinary accompaniments of trying to do the right thing.
Although it is now a prestigious object of art, Poussin's Landscape with a Man Washing his Feet at a Fountain has a sobering message about all kinds of work (113). The man on the left, washing his feet in the fountain, is representative of labour. We don't know exactly what his job may be, but it is highly unromantic. We sense that he has walked far already and that he must push on much further. There is no guarantee of any special reward when he gets there; he must fight against his own weariness. The younger man on the right is being upbraided by his wife for not working hard enough. In this picture, labour is the unavoidable and unexciting condition of life. It is painted with the hope of getting us to share this attitude, and therefore to be less dismayed, less angry, when life feels continually difficult. Poussin is challenging our excessive expectations, our fantasy that somewhere, over there, round the corner, is the easy, well-rewarded, exciting, pleasurable existence, which is unfairly denied us, or which we just haven't been smart enough to locate. By making this a visually grand picture, with majestic trees, ruins and a quiet sky, the artist gives emphasis and stature to a message that might otherwise strike us as a tiresome lesson.
This is not to say that it does not matter what job you do, but the message from Poussin is that most worthwhile work, administrative positions, ambitious commercial enterprises or creative endeavours - irrespective of how they are seen from the outside - do not feel or look glamorous from the inside. Poussin is trying to tell himself and his friends that life is not elsewhere, and that trouble and toil are the inescapable accompaniments of the human condition. The picture is the visual equivalent of a striking line from T.S. Eliot's 'Little Gidding' in Four Quartets, 'History is now and England'. Eliot is working against the powerful inclination to underestimate the significance of what is going on in the present. The things that are happening now may seem messy, confusing, slow, banal, frightening, but, argues Eliot, this is what even the most revered and catalogued historical periods would have felt like when they were actually happening. And so too with work: it is likely to feel repetitive, uninspired, inadequately appreciated and under-paid, even when it is entirely worthwhile and on course.
Life is not elsewhere.
113. Nicolas POussin. l andscape with a Man Washing his Fret at a Fountain. i .1648
What Should Political Art be Aiming At?
What is There to be Proud of?
Who Should We Try to Become?
A Defence of Censorship
Politics
And Now... to Change the World
What
Should
Political
Art be
Aiming
At?
Until now, we have largely been looking at art in relation to the problems of the individual. But throughout its history, art has also been involved with the issues of group life. It has recorded and, more ambitiously, attempted to direct how we live among each other in communities. In terms of its sympathies, political art - particularly in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries in the West - has tended to take the side of the weak against the strong. It has focused on economic and social injustices and sought to give a voice to marginalized communities, creating feelings of sympathy and outrage in the hope of prompting political change. Art has also periodically been employed by the powerful as an instrument of aristocracies or national governments. At their worst, these have harnessed the emotive power of art for tyranny, thereby tainting the very idea of political art in the eyes of some. So thorough has the corruption been that it occasionally looks as though art simply cannot remain honest unless it renounces all political ambitions, a stance embodied in the call that art should remain kfor art's sake', and in W.H. Auden's resigned yet proud declaration that 'poetry makes nothing happen;
Although political art can be abused, as can most good things, its potential for goodness deserves to be recognized at a theoretical level, and explored at a practical one. If artists are capable of helping individuals, they must also be allowed to exert the power to heal states.
Rural poverty was increasing in Belgium in the late nineteenth century. Emile Clauss The Beet Harvest is a huge painting - 4.5 metres wide - that makes the cold, heavy work of the farm labourer unforgettable (114). We cannot escape a powerful sense of how harsh and unrewarding it must have been to collect the sugar beet. However, Claus's painting wasn't meant to speak to the labourers themselves, but to affluent, well-established viewers in museums in towns and cities. The point of the picture was to bring attention to suffering that had been kept out of mind by vested interests. It aimed to make the sight of suffering unbearable to those who had the power to change things, if only their consciences could be stirred. Claus was doing in paint what Charles Dickens and Emile Zola had been doing in literature: he was giving poverty a human face. In this analysis, the task of artists is to pick on examples of maltreatment and immorality and make them unforgettable to the governing and powerful classes of society. Art's role is to generate guilt, and thereby change.
Emile Claus's ambitions live on. We encounter them in the street art of the Chilean-born, New York-based artist Sebastian Erra/uriz (115).
Art to help work be more humane.
114. Emile Glaus. The Bed Harvest. 1890
Shocked by the behaviour of bankers in the decade prior to the financial crisis of 2007, Errazuriz travelled around Wall Street creating dollar signs out of ordinary street markings, in the hope that these would help his audiences question the role of capitalism and to adopt a more equitable model of wealth creation and distribution. Consciousness- raising was the intended move, and Errazuriz, like so many political artists before him, hoped his work would allow us to see as problematic behaviour that, until now, we had regarded as no cause for alarm - and gird us for change.
Errazuriz s work is vulnerable to a criticism often levelled at political art: it may be outraged, but isn't in itself doing enough to bring about the change it longs for. It is shouting forlornly in the wind. In order to be effective, political art can't simply say that something is wrong; it needs to make this error feel vivid enough to generate the emotion necessary to stir us into reform. What this requires, artistic talent aside, is an original understanding, whether psychological, social or economic, of the problem in question.
The other kind of bad political art isn't only ineffective, its plain dangerous. It gets us to fight for the wrong causes, for motherlands that don't deserve sacrifice and regimes that torture the innocent. It persuades us to think well of villains.
These failings help point us towards a notion of what good political art should be about. It should take the pulse of a society, understand some of what is wrong with group life, arrive at an acute and intelligent analysis
of its problems, then push the audience in the right direction through supreme mastery of a chosen artistic medium. If this is the goal, we should be ready to stretch our conception of what political art includes. For a start, abuse doesn't only involve economic injustice; it may lie in any number of small intra-personal behaviours that corrupt daily life. For example, one might argue that one of the leading problems of affluent societies is that their citizens are becoming ever more aggressive and impatient. Therefore, one mission for modern political art might be the encouragement of serenity and forgiveness.