|
It feels dishonest to title this essay “on politics and culture” while the reality is beyond politics and culture: we are talking about colossal violence that has left many of us powerless. Maybe I wanted to ask “can culture stop violence,” weary even to put a question mark at the end of my sentence, as if I already knew the answer and feared it. I remember on 18 March 2006, prior to the premiere of Variations for vibes, strings & piano by Steve Reich and Akram Khan in Köln, which I attended with a group of journalists, Reich said during the press conference that art had absolutely no power in stopping violence, that it never had. He gave Pablo Picasso’s Guernica as an example, a topical, passionate and political work of art made in response to the 26 April 1937 bombing of Guernica during the Spanish Civil War. The painting did not stop the bombs, Reich stated. Like a fact. He didn’t seem disappointed by this reality. His acceptance of art’s passive role in the face of violence made me wonder at the time: the painting may not have stopped the bombs, but it created awareness as it was seen the year it was made, at the heart of its urgency. Did that awareness stop the violence of war, though? And do we connect that past violence to our present time when we look at the painting now? Steve Reich is a highly celebrated composer, and I have admired his music for as long as I’ve been working in the arts and culture, a time spanning more than two decades. Only as I started researching for this essay did I learn about ethically problematic aspects in Reich’s oeuvre concerning cultural appropriation. Following the resurfacing in 2020 of racist remarks Reich made in the 1970s, many people have been investigating the racial politics of the composer’s canonic minimalist music, like Sumanth S Gopinath, associate professor of music theory at the University of Minnesota, who has discussed in an episode of Will Robin’s Sound Expertise Podcast the history of Reich’s engagement with civil rights in works like “Come Out”, asking if the influence of African music on his compositions represent a form of cultural appropriation? I invite you to listen to the conversation for a nuanced take on art and politics from this particular subject’s point of view. Learning about Reich’s opaque political views on important questions such as race, while his work is influenced by the context of civil rights and racism, makes me question his statement about art in the face of violence even more today than I had sixteen years ago. Does art become a shield of apoliticality between the political reality in which it is created and a non-politicized imagination we all are supposed to have as artists? Even for artists who have inherited trauma and violence, like Reich himself, who is an American of Jewish descent? (In Different Trains, Reich compares and contrasts his childhood memories of his train journeys between New York and California in 1939–1941 with the very different trains being used to transport contemporaneous European children to their deaths under Nazi rule). What are we protecting when we strip art of its politicalness? In the current context of Israel’s genocidal retaliation to the horrific attacks perpetrated by Hamas on 7 October 2023, built on decades of occupation and violence, don’t we all have the moral imperative to stop hiding behind art as depoliticized? In “Enough With the Solidarity Statements. Why Art Institutions Should Stop Taking Positions on Geopolitical Events They Have Nothing to Do With” published on Artnet (16 October 2023), Sascha Freudenheim shares his frustration in response to all the statements made by some arts organisation about Israel and Palestine. I find the title of the piece a shameful example of clickbait and don’t wish to engage with it. It also doesn’t entirely reflect what Freudenheim is trying to do in this piece. Instead, I’d like to dive into the reflection some of his points ignited in me and in relation to my initial query: can culture stop violence? Freudenheim speaks from his point of view as a PR expert, not a curator or someone artistically involved, so his urgency regarding the role of arts and culture in our societies may differ from mine. I disagree, for instance, that arts space shouldn’t state opinions on geopolitical questions, not only the existence of arts spaces is political (how they are funded, where they are, their history etc), so is their curation and in extend, the way they communicate with the world. No space can claim neutrality, that claim in itself is political. (In issue ten of this newsletter, On Curating Literary Programmes, I shared the book Culture Strike: Art and Museums in an Age of Protest by Laura Raicovich, a former director of the Queens Museum in New York, in which she shows how art museums arose as colonial institutions bearing an ideology of neutrality that masks their role in upholding capitalist values, and she suggests how museums can be reinvented to serve better public ends.) What I find valuable in Freudenheim’s piece is his advice about what to do concretely as an arts institution, which I found also contradicts his initial opening point that politics isn’t the art world’s business. My take is that he is speaking against the performative aspect of all the statements (especially the social media ones, which many times don’t say much). If we take the murder of George Floyd and Black Lives Matter as an example, he makes a relevant point. Remember how the literary world and publishers had posted black squares all over social media condemning systemic racism, and when it came to translate the work of an African American poet to Dutch, the publisher chose a famous white writer who wasn’t even a translator? It took the voice of a Dutch black activist, Janice Deul, to call them out on their hypocrisy and start igniting change in the sector (and we’re still not there yet when it comes to diversity in the literary field). Freudenheim’s advice to combine a statement with a tangible action particularly spoke to me: “[it] does not have to be complicated—but it should also not be self-serving. Waiving admission fees for a day is self-serving. Offering an auditorium or gallery space to a local group that might want or need a place to gather and grieve is a gift. Noting your collection of Judaica or art by Black artists is self-serving. Inviting a Black or Jewish artist to give a talk about their work or their connection to the situation, or their own related experiences, can be a source of emotional sustenance and aid in communal grieving.” In the Netherlands where I am based, but also in Germany, Belgium, France, the UK, all places where I share communities and follow the news closely, we are in urgent need of hearing a wide variety of Palestinian voices, especially in the face of the shameful and dangerous censorship currently being put in place in many organizations (writer Adania Shibli’s cancelled award ceremony at the Frankfurt Bookfair is only one example). Art has forever been part of my life, and I have never looked at the world from any other perspective than in the presence of art, literature, film, poetry… of culture of any kind. Artists, writers, poets create and present their work in a context which is always political. Being able to write poetry about birds and flowers in a peaceful environment is political in itself. Especially when that peace has been built on the back of others’ suffering. Having privilege is political. Not politicizing a situation is a privilege which is deeply rooted in political context. Me writing this newsletter and sharing my photography and words with you, is political, even if I wish I did not have to politicize my creative space. But I don’t create in a vacuum, I am part of this violent world. I vote, I spend money, I make money, I participate in cultural policy, in funding of cultural events and artists, I sit in the board of a writers’ guild, I pay taxes, I have two passports, I write, I make art. My existence is set in a political world, my actions cannot exist outside this reality. While culture cannot stop violence in a direct way, the people and institutions creating the spaces for arts and culture to meet with the public can make sure our politicians know we all yearn for nonviolence. Maybe that is why politicizing the arts is for now an urgency so that political discourses within culture can move beyond the performative. And maybe culture is the only space right now where the possibility to exist without being erased from history is real, and even if that won’t stop violence now, it may help us all get there.
|
