Art and Propaganda, by Toby Clark

Introduction


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The neutrality of the word "propaganda" was lost in the First World War, when the collision of obsolete infantry tactics with advanced military technology - especially the machine gun and fast-loading artillery - killed soldiers in such large numbers that traditional methods of recruiment were no longer adequate to replace them. The government at war were required to view public opinion as a matter of national importance, and through the developed media of mass communication such as cheap newspapers, posters, and cinema, individuals became aware of being addressed by the message-making insititutions of the state on a more or less daily basis. The wartime perception of propaganda's links with censorship and misinformation was compounded by its incresed application as psychological warfare waged against the morale of enemies.

After the First World War, government propaganda continued in democratic countries, though official agencies now preferred to refer to it with euphemisms such as "information servies" or "public education". This avoidance of the word, caused by a new sense of its incompatibility with the ideals of democracy, meant that " propaganda" was increasingly associated with the emergent one-party states, such as Sovient Russia from 1917 or Nazi Germany from 1933, which both used it unashamedly in official terminology. In the Western democracies "propaganda" became linked with "totalitarianism", a largely polemical term, which until 1945 was used in the main to describe fascist dictatorships and thereafter, during the Cold War, was frequently applied to the Soviet Union and other communist states.

The present-day connotations of "propaganda art" in the West were to a great extent shaped in the Cold War climate of the United States. From the mid-1940s, New York emerged as the leading centre of modern art, just as the United States now led the world economy. The dominant artistic values of the period were most influentially voiced by the critic Clement Greenberg (1909-94) who since 1939 had warned against the corrupting effects of what he called "kitsch", which he saw both in American mass culture and in the populist official art of Nazi Germany and the Sovient Union. To defend true art against this, artists, should attend to purely artistic concerns; to make, in effect, abstract art which would be immune to political exploitation. The idea that the artistic imagination should remain uncompromised by ideological commitments was not new, but, as argued by critics such as Greenberg in the decades which followed the Second World War, the view gained a special force by its reiteration throughout a growing system of museums, galleries, and publications devoted to modernist art.

These supported a persuasive historical account which implied that the highest achievements of Western art since the mid-nineteenth century were the result of art's liberation from its traditional patron groups: church, monarchy, aristocracy, and government. Freed from serving these patrons, art could be devoted to the progressive development of its formal qualities and paid for by consumers who appreciated artistic innovation as evidence of the natural creativity of the human spirit.

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The numerous international exhibitions which exported Abstrat Expressionism were coordinated by New York's Museum of Modern Art (MoMA) in the late 1940s and 1950s and accompanied by curators' statements in which nationalist rhetoric contrasted the "mark of freedom" in American painting with the regimented kitsch of Soviet communism. The realization that some of these exhibitions had been secretly funded by the CIA, a fact widely known by the mid-1970s, made a deep impression on a generation of artists and critics radicalized by the Vietnam War and the Civil Rights movement, some of who, challenged the idea that art should or even could remain separated from political concerns. Among these was the critic Lucy Lippard (b. 1937), who in 1980 wrote an artical for the feminist magazine Heresies called "Some Propaganda for Propaganda". She argued for the rehabilitation of the word, and encouraged artists to try to make "good propaganda": "Such a 'good propaganda' would be what art should be - a provocation, a new way of seeing and thinking about what goes on around us." This positive use of the word has not caught on widely, but the question of whether art can be both political and "good" remains a live issue ofr contemporary artists.

Beyond the controversies provoked by modern motions of propaganda, the use of art in the service of politics has a deep and enduring history. Rulers of the city-states, kingdomes, and empires of the ancient world used art on a monumental scale to reiterate their power, glorify their victories, or to intimidate and defame their enemies. The political symbols and rituals of imperial Rome were highly elaborate under the first-and second-century emperors, whose images were commemorated in monumental statues and a flow of coins and medals distributed throughout the empire. Architectural spaces in Rome were designed for spectacular ceremonies of triumph, obedience and unity, and for parading the booty and captives of war.

Throughout the Middle Ages, art was closely bound to politics because the spheres of religious and worldly authority were largely indivisible. Medieval works of art that ostensibly represented Christian themes were often intended primarily to support the ideological interests of the church bodies or secular powers who commissioned them. Under these conditions, the artist's arims were invariably subsumed within those of their patrons. From the early sixteenth century, particularly in Renaissance Italy, a few artists achieved personal fame, but even the most celebrated were sometimes required to use their skills to design their masters' political accessories, such as heraldic devices for banners, clothing, and armour.

The idea that artitic production might be motivated by the artist's own political convictions barely existed until the late eighteenth century. The French painter Jacques-Louis David (1748-1825) stands out as an early example of an artist who chose to unite his aesthetic and political principles. he fervently progagated the ideals of the French Revolution, painting portraits of its leaders and designing itspageants. He also becaume a powerful politician in his own right, though he was imprisoned for his acitivities after the fall of his hero, the French revolutionary Robespierre (1758-94).

In contrast, the work of David's contemporary Francisco de Goya (1746-1828) exemplifies that of an artist paintfully divided by the transition between traditional and modern conceptions of the artist's role. Goya had been appointed First Painter to the King of Spain in 1799, and as a court artist he made portraits of Charles IV and other members of the Spanish and Bourbon royalty. Yet he was also a liberal-minded intellectural, critical of the repressive and corrupt policies of his employers, and in his own privately made graphic works he attacked the abuse of power and the barbarism of war.

Goya's ambiguous position was not unusual during the period of Romanticism, which lasted until approimately the mid-nineteenth century. Romanticism asserted the artist's individualism and social independence, as evoked in Shelley's famous pronouncement in 1821 that poets "are the unacknowledged legislators of the world." For the future of political art, this new notion of the "genius" had two crucial and conflicting effects. While it might imply that the artist could be a critic of society, it also promoted the idea that self-expression is the true function of art, and one which should not be reduced to everyday social or political concerns.

This conflict has reverberated throughout twentieth-century debates on the relationship between art and politics. These ebates have centred on questions which are still hightly relevant: Does the use of art for propaganda always imply the subordination of aesthetic
quality to the message? Alternatively, can the criteria for judging aesthetic quality ever be separated from ideological values? If propaganda art aims to persuade, how does it do this? And to what extent does it succeed?

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We can assume that each individual understands an image in a different way, and that sometimes the meanings inferred by viewers have been entirely at odds with those intended by the propagandist.

Propaganda in art is not always inherent in the image itself, and may not stem from the artist's intentions. Rather, art can become propaganda through its function and site, its framing within public or private spaces and its relationshup with a network of other kinds of objects and actions. The means of making an ideological statement are almost limitless: Architecture, theatre, music, sport, clothes, and haircuts can communicate a political view, as can spectacles of violence, such as book-burning, assassination, suicide, and terrorism. The aerial bombing ofcivilians, which has become a tourine feature of modern warfare, maybe often be conceived as a communicative action rather than a military one. Usually, the various modes of communication used by a government or political movement cohere to form a more or less systematic programme. And often, art operates within this system through a close relationship with compatible images in films, magazines, advertisements, popular music, and, more recently (and most potently), television and computer networks.

The history of modern propaganda is therefore intimately linked with the rise of mass culture. "Mass culture" is equally hard to define. While it connotes an old-fashioned and authoritarian idea of "the masses", it also implies the mass-production of images and messages by industrial techniques. Both Lenin in Soviet Russia and Hitler in Nazi Germany recognized that the cinema would be a far more effective instrument of persuasion than paintings. But they also placed great importance on art. In their differeny ways, Soviet communism and German Nazism were both viewed by their leaders as movements with a cultural and not just a political mission. Only hand-made works on art in the traditional forms of painting and sculpture could fully convey the prestige of high culture. However, under these regimes propaganda art was often produced in such large quantities and required to conform with guidelines so rigid, that even if made by hand, the results could be described as mass-produced art.

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Chapter One - radical traditons of art in the early decades of the twentieth century.
- Marxist ideas
- early feminist art and its links with avant-garde movements.
Chapter Two - art under fascism, the Third Reich.
Chapter Three - Sovient Union.
Chapter Four - wartime propaganda under Western democracies.
Chapter Five - protest since the Vietnam War.



Extra reading:
现代主义 on wiki
Political Science 312 by St. Francis Xavier University

Art and Propaganda, by Toby Clark
ISBN 0-297-83614-5