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God. This thread is absolutely ridiculous! So many poorly thought out ideas about art to puncture, so little time...
A good friend of mine recently wrote about this on his blog, and I refer you to that post, because his argument is especially well-considered/articulated.
This is the essay, but you should go to the blog itself for footnotes and links to references.
Thinking on this stuff a bit more: the fact that Harm and I both felt it necessary to say otherwise is a good indication of the cultural capital that's accrued around the idea that a repressive social and political environment produces good, or better, art. The theory goes that under a totalitarian regime (although this usually doesn't extend to religious repression, interestingly), artists are compelled or forced to create works of greater power, beauty, meaning, etc. Art under repression, art created dangerously, is better than that created at leisure by soft milksops such as m'self. Moreover, the art created by citizens after the repressive regime has been removed is inevitably less good, because there is now more moral ambiguity and so forth. Of course, this theory is highly debatable, if for no other reason than "good art" is a pretty subject proposition; if you like socialist realism, you're going to think art-under-repression is hogwash. But for now, let's accept that aside from the fact that the theory itself is widely accepted in the West, it also lines up pretty squarely with the Western critical viewpoint circa 2003. (The PCCS, or Post-Colonial Critical Sensibility, let's call it, with more than a small wink.)
The question this all begs, of course, is why art-under-repression (AUR--let's go a little acronym-batshit here) is better. I think the fairly vague notion most people have in their head when they're making this argument is a sort of reductive moral calculus: if someone has to deal with the negative consequences of living under a repressive government, then they should at least be able to use this to make better art, although this isn't exactly the fairest of trades. Of course, that's clearly not the case--talent doesn't work like that--and so asked for a more lucid explanation, I suspect the best anyone would be able to come up with (after working through a litany of ideas about the corrupting influence of commercialism that would skirt neo-primitivism) is that it's just true--that demonstrably more good works are produced under repressive governments than not.
Of course, that just gets us back to the point above that we're now working with subjective opinion-making, and a subjective viewpoint that I don't necessarily agree with. So the explanation I would advance is this: it's not that living under a repressive government causes you to produce good art, it's that making art in the context of repression causes the art you make to be regarded as good, and that it is thus easier to make good art under repression. Now, I'm not saying that it's easier to live in a totalitarian state than not--sometimes it is, sometimes it isn't, kind of depends whether you're a white American or a black Ethiopian and whether you're comparing yourself with a Soviety party elder or a North Korean peasant--and I'm not even saying that it's easier to make AUR than not, since clearly that's not the case most of the time. However, if you do manage to make yourself some AUR, it's much easier to have that work regarded as good, for a couple of reasons.
One is simple economics, of a sort: if the government is severely limiting what pieces of cultural production make it to the outside world, those that actually do so have a greater value, both monetarily and critically. While indie-types might like to rail against certain artists becoming the exemplars of a genre or movement or geographical area because it causes so many others to be overlooked, in this case if there's a demand to know what it's really like to live under a totalitarian system, or what kind of art that produces, any that do get noticed can't be overshadowing other works because there usually aren't any other works. If you manage to not only create but produce a work of art--that is, to get it distributed, in a weird resistance variation of the indie-film struggle-to-find-a-distributor tragic fable--then its emblematic status with an audience will cause many flaws in its artifice, the ostensible point, to be overlooked in favor of trying to puzzle out insights into the reality behind it. And that very reality is the other factor at play. The AUR artifact's status as samizdat or as official-government-art-with-subversive-message-revealing-the-individual-sensibility-behind-the-faceless-etc. inevitably suffuses the actual content of the art and becomes the critical viewpoint from which it is almost always interpreted; it places an additional layer of meaning there that might not otherwise be justified, and what's more, that layer of meaning is one that almost all readers will be intensely interested in. So your simple little love story couched in terms of traditional folk tales becomes a desire to reclaim the human and the community's past from the unifying, faceless bureaucracy. Set the love story in 1950's America to avoid any implication that it's a statement on your country's condition and it becomes a metaphor for the yearning for freedom or something. Write in the first paragraph "THIS HAS NOTHING TO DO WITH REPRESSION" and it's a ironic diversionary tactic, a gleeful tweaking of the censors. The sort of rebellious gleam the object d'art has as a samizdat allows it to appear as a kind of culmination of a private joke, a way of being in-the-know, of being inside a conspiracy or a resistance, and that lines up squarely with the values of the PCCS.
So again, living under totalitarianism isn't easy, and actually getting art out there under totalitarianism isn't easy, but having that production viewed as quality is demonstrably easier. Look at the fact that's so often used to demonstrate the validity of the pro-AUR viewpoint: that the art produced after the repressive conditions are removed is viewed as not as good. And that's the case because the artists have had more of a free ride in this regard. Undeniably they worked hard and won victories, but these victories were political, triumphs of negotiating the laws and underground distribution systems and cultural climate. They are rarely artistic. And that's why it's easier. Removed from that context, they quickly find they don't have anything to hang their art on anymore, and without that base, it suffers.
None of this is meant to imply that I think the AUR standards are necessarily bad, even if they're wrong--but only if they're applied to actual situations of repression. Personally, I'd rather read Pinter's contextless evocation of life under totalitarianism than Vaclav Havel's, but I also recognize that the publicity well-executed works of AUR accrue can do a lot of good both internally and externally to bring a repressive regime down; you only need look as far as Havel himself to understand that. AUR fetishization becomes a problem, however, when it starts becoming such a dominant standard that it becomes a consideration of artists in free societies.
Like...well, like this one. (I.e. America, for my filthy foreign readers, although if you're reading blogs it's likely your country qualifies, too.) I think it's clear that due, I suppose, to the dominance of the mainstream pop culture over our perceptions and sensibilities, members of almost every subculture have adopted the standards of AUR toward their own work, and to do this, of course, they must believe they are repressed (repression, after all, sadly being a semi-positive thing under the PCCS; if you're winning, you must be doing something wrong). Thus, lit buffs loudly declaim that the artform is dying and things must be done to preserve it; undie hip-hoppers talk about "keeping it real"; rock fans herald any rockers who achieve prominence as the saviors of the genre; indie kids talk about preserving the ethics of the scene; etc., etc., and I assume such arguments also go on in artforms with which I'm less familiar. The subtext of such statements is a clear argument that a) said subculture is engage in some sort of battle, usually with the mainstream, and b) it is losing; thus, loyalists must rally to its cause and spread the samizdat [1] around to new converts and not give in to statist pressure. In other words, they make a political effort similar to the one subjects of a totalitarian regime do in seeking to produce their art.
The only problem, of course, is that by and large me and my first-world brethren are not particularly repressed. How do they claim this repression occurs? The two agents usually (indirectly) cited in arguments of this sort are capitalism ("Man, the major labels just have so much more money than us that we can't compete!") and mass culture ("Man, people are just so stupid that they'll accept any crap shoved down their throats and real genius never gets recognized!"). Let's take 'em in turn. Capitalism can definitely be repressive, but I'm way more likely to be sympathetic to your complaints if you're, you know, an African with AIDS who can't get medicine or a worker in an unregulated third world economy. If you can't find a job and are forced to endure the hardship of crashing on friends' couches for a while, or if you can't make a living as a musician, i.e. performing a service that serves no useful purpose in anyone's lives aside from film/TV producers and wedding planners, I just have a hard time seeing how you're being really repressed. I've seriously encountered very few people who are making art that aren't doing, at the very least, OK. Maybe they have mental or physical disabilities that cause problems, but this is rarely the market's fault. It's especially hard to be sympathetic to complaints about capitalism when it's that very bounty that has allowed us to become a culture with enough leisure time to make "professional entertainer" a viable career choice.
As for the oppressive nature of mass culture, this is sort of too much to get into now, as a critique of this particular view is something I've directed a lot of attention to elsewhere, but not here. But let me just point out that if your solution to the harmful omnipresence of consumer culture is to make your own fucking brand of sneakers, you may want to reexamine your critique a bit. And yes, I know that's glib, but lemme relegate that whole argument to a later post; I think enough bits of my point have popped up in my various screeds about anti-pop bias that you sort of know what I'm getting at here.
This all leads to various negative effects, most of which have been endlessly hashed out elsewhere: the emphasis on "authenticity" as a prime determinant of artistic worth, the multicultural interest in finding works that accurately (or appealingly) depict some "outside" culture instead of present a unique artistic viewpoint, the "rockist" (hee hee) valuation of rebellion and transgression over beauty and craft, the whole bullshit idea that "the personal is political" (the personal is artistic, maybe, but only the public is political), etc., etc., etc. But the reason I object to this slight-of-hand association of American subcultures with Chinese peasants is different than most people's, I suspect. Most people, when confronted with, say, a white college freshman girl who just discovered her lesbianism comparing herself directly or indirectly with Chiapas rebels, would say that her main problem is appropriation, that she's seeking to take this authentic culture and use it for her own privileged needs. But fuck that; I care about as much about appropriation as I do for authenticity. No, the reason I find invoking AUR in non-R situations objectionable is because it's ineffective.
It goes something like this. I do believe that there are legitimate problems both in our own societies and in foreign societies than we can address and work to change through our political and economic power; we are richer and freer than most of the world, and that's an advantage. And I do think art can and should address these problems, to participate in this discourse and to try and make change, whether in the policies of the government or in the standards and values of the culture at large. The problem is that when members of a subculture takes the AUR line, they are very explicitly rejecting that opportunity, because they are trying to claim that they have no power; that they are weak and oppressed. Bullshit. The slam poet down at Bar 13 ain't got nothing on a subject of Stalin. They have voices, votes, money, time, and freedom, and that's a whole lot more than 90% of the people in this world. Why not use that in a way that acknowledges your advantage and uses it in the most effective way possible? Maybe I'm a sap for believing in the political system, but fuck it, I do.
But isn't the whole point of AUR, which I acknowledge above, that it worked? Well, yeah, but it was invoking oppression in order to gain freedom, whereas the goals of my subcult cohorts are a lot more nebulous and morally difficult, if no less valid. So it's ineffective because it's exclusionary. The goals of anyone trying to overthrow a dictatorship is to build a popular movement, whereas here we have people explicitly excluding most people ("because they all have such bad taste"); in making that anti-mass culture argument, in saying, among other things, that there are Nike ads everywhere and so I can't paint right, you find yourself invoking arguments like "We don't really care about the morons who watch Will & Grace anyway," and how does that help your cause? If your cause is so obvious, why do you feel the need to dismiss the opinions of the mainstream, who apparently don't think so? Why feel the need to invoke "subversion" as a justification for your grade-school graffiti shit (thank you, Adbusters) when you do, in fact, possess the power to clearly and unambiguously talk back?
Worst of all, when you deny the real power that your group has, you are essentially sacrificing that power, and the good it could do, for individual gain, because rolling over like a puppy and yelling "oppression!" is the surest way to appeal to the PCCS. You further your own career, but you ruin the argument you're trying to make. Your artifact might take on that gleam of the AUR object, but robbed of the context of actual oppression, it just adds to the noise of political life, of people all trying to appeal to this new standard that seems, ultimately, to be self-defeating; we now have Republicans claiming they're oppressed because they get into losing arguments on college campuses and saying that affirmative action is wrong because it's biased against white people. Even worse, we have Democrats trying to claim that they live in a police state that silences dissent because it makes their dissent somehow more noble than it would be if it were simply normal political speech--which, of course, it is. Speaking out in America won't get you shipped off to the gulag, kids.
It's hard to fight the temptation, especially if you're not very talented, to appeal to some standard of abuse in order to raise the worth of your product, but I think it's vital to fight it if you supposedly care about the issues you're trying to raise, whether it be about globalization or about the vapidity of network TV. However, while I'm strongly in favor of finding effective ways for citizens to participate in politics (appearances here to the contrary, perhaps), I'm not one of those morons who thinks that a sophomore politics major has the same authority as Richard Armitage to speak on issues of foreign policy. (Thank you, Noam Chomsky.) Things like experience and knowledge matter; efficacy, in other words, is a factor. So while I'd like to see us start to expand our notions of what constitutes political speech, and to form more useful ways of interpreting and using said speech, I also don't mean that to imply that I think those new recognitions should necessarily have a huge impact. I think there should be more voices in politics (and art), but I don't think that means that those voices should necessarily all have equal weight.
In other words: respect the discourse. The discourse is a thing to itself, a self-perpetuating thing[2], and by trying to unduly influence it you only end up blocking and corrupting it. In many ways, you're simply going to have to sublimate yourself to it; even if you care deeply about an issue, you may have to settle for simply strengthening a particular angle within the discourse, or contributing an unattributed idea, or simply being one of many saying "me too." I see people sometimes getting discouraged about their efficacy within the political system simply because something they want doesn't happen--feeling impotent, in other words, because they didn't win. Well, of course not. It's a democracy, so by definition you're not going to win all the time. And even if, say, you don't get that gay marriage bill passed, you've still got a country that's far more tolerant of homosexuality than it was just 50 years ago; if you're disappointed because the country isn't being run according to Biblical law, you've still got a country in which Biblical arguments can still be deciding factors in major political issues (c.f. "partial-birth abortions"). Same goes for art. You can, ultimately, do whatever you want artistically, even if you're not necessarily recognized for it; you're not, ultimately, repressed. And if you want to use that freedom to indeed make something that no one will care about, go for it; lord knows I have. But if you are going to make arguments about the mainstream, then you need to recognize that you have the same power as everyone else to craft something that might appeal to the mainstream, that might advance your argument, whatever it may be. You are not impotent; the power is there. Let's see if you use it. |
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