When a Chart Becomes a Knot
Many years ago – after I had worked for a long time as a community organizer, burned out, then started writing plays – I had reason and time enough to think about the differences between making social change and making art. I made a chart to lay out the differences. In one column, I listed the traits of an ideal artist and in the other I listed the traits of an ideal community organizer. I've lost the original; here's a reconstruction:
| The Artist | The Community Organizer |
|---|---|
| Able to surprise or shocks us with their shifts in style, content or even goals | Sticks to reliable principles and goals that are not subject to capricious shifts |
| Apt to shift the form they use suddenly; form and content can be arbitrarily matched | Should use tactics that bear some relationship to goals |
| Open to sacrilege | Respectful |
| Can keep process hidden | Transparent |
| Might employ obliqueness, even abstraction | Clear communicator |
| Independent | Accountable |
| Can just ask questions or even be entirely negative | Strives to be constructive |
| Success or failure of their work is subjective | Success or failure of their work can be determined, even quantified |
| Allowed to linger, be ambivalent | Should seek to win, reach a goal |
| Might make art for art's sake | Should be proposing and working towards concrete solutions |
| Whatever the foibles of the individual artist, at their best they make something that can transcend the muck of the present | No matter the nobility of the individual activist, whatever movement or institution they build it will always drift away from its inaugurating values, will always disappoint |
| We hope they never take over the state | We hope they take over the state |
Having laid out this chart, I saw immediately that there were many – primeval forests worth of – exceptions to each of the attributes listed, plenty of times that artists blurred these distinctions. My own trajectory as a writer included a stint on the spoken word scene – especially that corner of the scene populated by queer writers of color – and so time and again I had seen fierce poets demonstrate the shortcomings of my bisected chart. If you aren't born into full citizenship or into the shelter of affirming tribal bonds, then you need to create those conditions yourself, and many of those spoken word artists did just that on stage, live. Those writers made it impossible to untangle the performance of a poem from the building of an ontology; they were doing both, simultaneously. They did what the dispossessed often do: create new conditions for themselves through art.
So I added a heading to the chart and dotted the dividing line between the two columns to make clear I intended not a binary, but a continuum. The revised chart looked like this:
If my own experience as a young writer presented me with such an emblematic example of the potency of politicized art, you might wonder why I am bothering to hold out for a sphere of artistic production that functions independently of activism. Why not dispense with the left-hand side of my chart and focus on producing art that works in service of the noble goals of the community organizer? Many in our current epoch seemed to have considered this very question and (just before dusting their hands) resolved they were convinced of the importance of politics, but ambivalent over the value of art. Given our longstanding national penchant for the practical, this is not a new development. Coco Fusco has described a dynamic in the early 1970s when the expectation was that African American painters would make work that was figurative and didactic. The result was bracing, inspiring work and the marginalization of Black abstractionists.1 Such a narrowing of possibility is what happens when we borrow a set of strategies developed for the political realm and apply them too seamlessly in the aesthetic domain.
We are once again in an era in which the ability of art to transcend any current political moment is viewed with marked distrust. The burden of that distrust falls most heavily on artists of color. In our most anxious moments, we risk turning identity from something that enables into something that restricts. I hope it is not controversial to point out that dynamics in which the identity of an artist means that their work cannot be recognized, rewarded or even understood, unless it employs certain aesthetics or deals with certain content, is a dynamic that is not free. That such constraint might develop from the best of intentions is immaterial. With depressing alacrity, a stated goal of our politics (let's call that goal freedom) warps itself into an expectation of uniformity.
To get a better sense of what we lose when artists grip a political program too tightly, it would be useful to turn to the thinking of a German philosopher and a Marxist by the name of Herbert Marcuse. He wrote an indispensable book titled “The Aesthetic Dimension” and throughout its pages he keeps noting problems that are best addressed by art because they are problems politics can never fully resolve. Here are some of those problems:
- our mortality
- love and its complications
- the tension between an individual and a society
- the irreversibility of time
- conflicts between human beings and nature
- the reconciliation of the Dionysian and the Apollonian
- etc....
These are perennial concerns and they live most fully, they can best be wrestled with, in the realm of art.
Devoting some of our attention to these concerns does not entail the abandonment of politics, quite the contrary. Marcuse emphasizes this point: he believed that art absolutely has a political function – but – and this is the crucial point – not because it champions or even mentions any political program. The revolutionary capacity of art resides in the way it can function as largely autonomous from existing social relations, the way it transports us away from our stifling status quo. It's this capacity for transcendence that constitutes a protest, not the content of any particular play. Marcuse sums this up when he declares that there may be more revolutionary potential in the poetry of Rimbaud than in the didactic plays of Brecht.
We've honed our talent for reviewing art to make sure it doesn't threaten our political effectiveness, but the more immediate risk is that we will diminish our politics if we turn away from the emancipatory potential of art. Politics is indispensable – at its best it's a tool that can alleviate suffering – but it can only ever be an approximation of our values; it can never fully account for the vast expanse of who we are and who we might yet become. This disconnect between art and politics is the reason conflict between the two is inevitable. No amount of planning can preempt that conflict – but if we're brave enough, we can become better at navigating it.
This inevitable conflict between art and politics brings me to another problem with my impulse to design a chart. For artists of color, moving between the two poles on my chart is rarely effortless. On a good day, it can feel as though the distance between the two is entirely constituted by friction, and on a bad day that distance becomes something of a minefield. The double-headed arrow I added to the top of my chart – and the ease of movement it suggests – seems glib to me now given how volatile I've learned the terrain is.
If I were a better visual artist, I would draw you not a chart but a knot. It would be a knot made of two strands, one for art and one for politics. How better to visualize the way art and politics both mutually constitute each other and at the same time pull against each other? It would be a tight knot; there would be places where it might be impossible to distinguish one strand from the other, but even at their most entangled the two strands never dissolve into each other, not completely. Even in the worst crisis, art continues to exist as an ideal. Art continues to offer us a realm in which the weight of the status quo can sometimes be lessened.
When describing what motivated Black abstractionists to work against the grain of their epoch, the historian Darby English said that “art served them, as a place to go, where things were airy-er.”2 That neologism, “airy-er,” works because it describes a sensation as old as art itself. We know what he means because we've all felt it – whether as creators or as audience members – we've felt it. If we afford that liberating sensation the value it deserves, then art becomes not a retreat from politics but a fuller realization of its promise.
2https://hyperallergic.com/352161/how-black-modern-artists-defied-a-singular-narrative-in-1971/
Jorge Ignacio Cortiñas's plays include Recent Alien Abductions (Humana Festival, Tripwire Harlot Press), Bird in the Hand (Fulcrum, NY Times Critics Pick) and Blind Mouth Singing (NAATCO, NY Times Critics Pick). His many awards include fellowships from the Guggenheim Foundation, United States Artists, and the National Endowment for the Arts.
