Between Avant-Garde and Kitsch: Deconstructing Art And/As Ideology

In a now infamous speech to the US House of Representatives on August 16, 1949, Congressman George Dondero (Republican from Michigan) railed against modern art, particularly abstraction, as a communist threat to true American values. "What are these isms that are the very foundation of so-called modern art?" he asked. "I call the roll of infamy without claim that my list is all-inclusive: dadaism, futurism, constructionism, suprematism, cubism, expressionism, surrealism, and abstractionism. All these isms are of foreign origin, and truly should have no place in American art. While not all are media of social or political protest, all are instruments and weapons of destruction…."¹ Meanwhile, working covertly and independently of Congress and using secret funding provided by a number of CIA front organizations (most notably the Congress of Cultural Freedom under the leadership of Michael Josselson), these so-called "weapons of destruction"—specifically Abstract Expressionism— were being harnessed by the United States Information Agency (USIA) as the epitome of American freedom of expression against totalitarian Soviet state propaganda and its officially sanctioned artistic style, socialist realism. The innate contradictions of art's role in the Cold War context—modernism as both quintessentially American and sub-versively communist—are further complicated when one considers Clement Greenberg's distinction between avant-garde and kitsch in his eponymous 1939 essay in which he lionizes abstract painting as the ultimate realization of modern art's historical mission—i.e., absolute artistic purity whereby, following the tenets of Gotthold Lessing's Laocoön (1766), painting can only be about painting as the subject of its own innate process.² Work with an overt political or social message cannot be considered art but is instead kitsch or propaganda, which, drawing upon the simula-crum of genuine culture, merely imitates art's effects. In Greenberg's eyes, the latter's cultural philistinism would conveniently relegate socially conscious artists such as Ben Shahn, Diego Rivera, and Philip Evergood to the same level as Stalinist hacks such as Isaak Brodsky.

Clearly, given these examples, any attempt to create a clear-cut opposition between "political" or "activist" art on the one hand (Greenberg's kitsch) and "purely autonomous" art on the other (Greenberg's avant-garde) is not only spurious but also irresponsibly unhistorical. In his brilliantly incisive new book, Art and Politics: Between Purity and Propaganda, Joes Segal sets out to deconstruct this false binary by showing that "politicians and government agencies may project their own ideas, interests and fears on artworks. This is due to the fact that the visual arts cannot easily be reduced to unambiguous statements or clear-cut arguments" (8). In contrast, he argues, the political meaning of art "is in no way restricted to artworks with a declared political intention. The most interesting cases tend to be those works which at first sight are politically ambiguous or have no political meaning at all" (9). In short, "In this collection of essays I use another perspective by analyzing the political implications of the very idea of a pure and apolitical modern art" (9).

Using a carefully considered case study approach, Segal traces the ambivalent relationship between art and politics over a hundred-year span from 1914 to 2014. Obviously, given the book's limited length (a very tight 136 pages of text), Segal has been highly selective and acknowledges some key omissions: the relationship of Futurism to Italian Fascism; art during the Spanish Civil War (Picasso's Guernica is thus conspicuously absent); the clash between modern, socialist, and religious imagery in 1970s Iran; the competing art traditions in North and South Korea; as well as issues of identity in post-apartheid South Africa. Nonetheless, his choices raise enough key points that they can be easily cross-referenced into other artistic and nationalist contexts, both within and outside the confines of the book. Thus Segal covers a wide range of nationalist paradigms, including the public debates on art and identity in...