Death of the Liberal Class - Chris Hedges [66]
“My disappointment with the drift of official contemporary art is bound up with my admiration for certain movements and artists that were part of early European modernism—Dada, and German Expressionist art and film, for example—but all the arts seemed to soar in the 1920s and early ’30s,” he said. “And much of early modernism was moral, as John Gardiner used the term, even though, and because, it was brazenly coarse and defiant. Those modern artists, like early Christians, were outsiders. That sense of dissidence may be what attracts me to the graphics, poetry, film, music, and literature from that time and place.
“I have had to rewrite art history for my own purposes,” Magee concluded:Maybe we all have to do that. I have to disregard the hierarchies of the art world to make space for artists in all fields who give me something authentic and who occasionally change my life. Some of these artists are well known. Others are like secrets completely invisible to those we call “art professionals.” Among the artists in what I call “my working history of art” are the Czech animator and sculptor Jan Švankmajer, the Italian sculptor Giacomo Manzù, the Spanish painters Antonio López García and Cristóbal Toral, the French sculptors Louis Pons and Jacques Clavé, and the Swiss artist of “poetic machines,” Paul Gugelmann. Then there are the Germans: Adolph Menzel, Otto Dix, Hannah Höch, and especially Käthe Kollwitz. I try to spread the word about these people rather than speaking negatively about the enormous mass of well-funded contemporary art that doesn’t help.
“It seems to me that the biggest obstacle to the artist of conscience today is not, perhaps, the art world,” said painter Rob Shetterly12:It’s the mainstream media. When the corporate media chooses to ignore serious political art, it marginalizes it. Millions of people who might see, read, hear that art, don’t. Their questions, ideas, feelings are not then validated by witnessing them portrayed accurately in art. Art tells many people it’s OK to think and feel unpopular things. Without that assurance, people are often isolated with their own perception of reality and will retreat to official conformity and the comfort of patriotism, even when it betrays the ideals it is meant to support.
“I often think of the music of the 1960s—Phil Ochs, Dylan, Joan Baez, Odetta, Peter, Paul & Mary, etc,” Shetterly said:That music about civil rights and the illegitimacy of the Vietnam War was everywhere. The corporate media had not yet learned that simply by not playing that music they could severely limit the spread of ideas. Millions of young people were radicalized to act for political causes, not by reading essays and taking courses, but by the spurring of art. Art told them their consciences were right. They could trust Bob Dylan and not LBJ or Nixon. Try to imagine the civil-rights or the antiwar movements without the music.
“This lesson was not lost on the corporate media after the ’60s,” Shetterly said:If their intent was to build a consensus good for profit, and that profit derived from war, exploitation, and imperialism, all they had to do was not report on or play art that carried a message of peace and resistance. It’s not censorship. The artists are free to speak and produce. But not many people will know about it. And, because the corporate media, our sanctified free press, is now clearly part of the mechanism of propaganda for the military-industrial-congressional complex, artists have to attack the press as much as the war profiteers and elected liars, and thus have even less likelihood