Nato Thompson Seeing Power, Art and Activism in the 21st Century

“My hope is that this book will help readers take stock of the capacities and resources of everyone involved in order to construct worlds collectively. Building new worlds requires patience, compromise and conviviality. It is a process of working in the world and with people.” Nato Thompson in Seeing Power, Art and Activism in the 21st Century, Melville House, 2015, 165 pp.

In this brief book, almost a manifesto, Thompson leads us to concepts that enable artists to intervene in the capitalist system without being co-opted. He starts with Theodor Adorno and Max Horkheimer (the conservative elitists of the Frankfurt School) who warned against mass culture (Thompson does not mention that their impetus was their horror with Hitler’s success in using mass media.) Adorno’s ideas were familiar to Clement Greenberg’s in New York City in 1939, as he was formulating his “avant-garde and kitsch” essay that obliterated the socially engaged, politicized and revolutionary culture of the 1930s. Thompson’s reference to Adorno sets the stage for his concern that capitalism co- opts culture. Of course, Walter Benjamin and Bertolt Brecht also from the Frankfurt School, were offering the opposite argument, that mobilizing the masses to revolution could be realized through mass culture. We have certainly see that today with social media!

Thompson touches on the historical background of 19^th century materialism and industrialization as the foundation of the culture industry, the production of products to be consumed, and its implications for the production of art,  then turns to his crucial theme:  the long running critical debate on art and politics. Thompson comes up with two terms “ambiguity” and “didacticism” as a way of delving into the issue. One can translate these terms into aesthetics and politics, of course, but ambiguity and didacticism suggest the problem more obviously, that artists who rely on aesthetics avoid direct statements, and artists who rely on direct politics alienate us with preaching.

Of course the whole argument is a red herring, in my opinion, if you take the position, as I do, that all art is political. The question is what is the engagement of the artist with the issue, is it superficial, self-aware, or profound? For example, Thompson went on the road with Jeremy Deller  for his “Conversations about the Iraq war.” (Although not acknowledged, the piece was sponsored by Thompson’s Creative Time organization). Deller is a white British artist. He knew a lot, he engaged Iraqis and US veterans in the project.  He became known in the first place for a film that recorded a recreation of a miner’s strike. But his primary interest is spectacle itself as clearly revealed in his pavilion at the 2013 Venice Pavillion.
Thompson provides a breakneck overview of the second half of the twentieth century, including Guy Debord and the Situationists, as well as the Beat generation. He omits at this point the radical revolution in art produced by artists affected by AIDS as a primary moment when the shift to political art began (he does mention it finally near the end of the book as an example of political art that “gained momentum by the sheer political imperative: friends and lovers were dying.”  A newly opened exhibition at the Tacoma Art Museum, “Art AIDS America” examines in depth the ways in which art about AIDS shifted the trajectory of formalist American art. I will be reviewing it shortly on this blog.

Thompson identifies two types of production that connect art and politics successfully “social aesthetics,”  based on personal relationships and “tactical media” which recognizes “power in every aspect of life” and “disturb[s] political structures.”  He groups Judy Chicago, Suzanne Lacy and Meirle Laderman Ukeles together as second wave feminist examples of “social aesthetics,” the only reference to feminism in the book.  The example for “tactical media” is the Critical Art Ensemble, who moved outside the art world to larger systems of power. The Yes Men are, of course, another great example. Paul Chan’s project in New Orleans “Waiting for Godot,” (also sponsored by Creative Time) is discussed at length by Thompson, as an example of successful “social aesthetics.”  That is the only time that African Americans are given a voice in the book.

While many chapters recount all the ways in which capitalism and the culture industry make it difficult for artists to act outside that system, his conclusion focuses on the idea of creating space for actions, such as occupations that address the issues that concern us, “ rent control, housing, minimum wage, child care…” His citation of Trevor Paglen as a model of this emphasis resonates with me. Paglen as a geographer who also holds an art degree has long been a radical pioneer in intervening in public spaces, both conceptually and through photography.

Nato Thompson’s book documents the capitalist morass that confronted him as an elite young white curator of the 1990s. At some point, he woke up to the possibilities for art to intervene in systems of power.  But, he carefully avoids specific political ideologies entirely or even their terminology, such as revolution, class, dialectics, or even Marxism, Communism, Socialism, Anarchism.  Perhaps he was afraid of being “didactic.”  He also fails to explore the work of artists of color, which is intensely political. Instead he quotes well-known theorists like Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri, Antonio Gramsci, and Slavoj Žižek. His call to action, cited at the beginning of this review, calls for “patience, compromise and conviviality,” terms that are pretty weak as a means to realize the power of art to change the way people think. His more productive idea is in the preceding sentence, the idea to “construct worlds collectively.”

When Thompson states on p 23 that the activism of the WTO ‘”ended” during the Bush years, I was surprised. I have written an entire book on the subject of Art and Politics from 1999 – 2009, and barely scratched the surface. It was, in fact, an era of passionate oppositional art that specifically addressed political issues. It actually died when Obama was elected, but happily, it is now returning to the fore, and might even be said to dominate the art world. Creative Time itself has also evolved into a dynamic and exciting place to consider art and politics. What could have been more confrontational than inviting Amy Goodman to be keynote speaker at their recent conference in Venice.

What we really need, and we are getting closer to it all the time, is to stop even discussing “problems” with politics in art and support artists, who, creatively frame condemnations of capitalism, globalism and war. With climate change a reality, we can’t afford to be “patient” or “convivial” anymore. I am not as concerned about capitalism corrupting art, as I am concerned about capitalism ending the world as we know it.

Artists are already contributing to making that reality visible. Our critical responsibility is to make sure their actions are acknowledged and supported that they are encouraged to be understandable as well as aesthetic.  Art and politics joined together offers a vast range of possibilities to confront the system.