Review: Daniel Herwitz, ‘The Political Power of Visual Art: Liberty, Solidarity, and Rights’
Review of Daniel Herwitz’ The Political Power of Visual Art: Liberty, Solidarity, and Rights (Bloomsbury, 2021), 216 pages.
Abstract
A review by Eva Díaz of Daniel Herwitz’ book The Political Power of Visual Art: Liberty, Solidarity, and Rights (Bloomsbury, 2021). Herwitz calls the vitality of potential change for political art a “process of becoming” in which art plays a central role in fashioning new perspectives by way of aesthetic innovation. The book’s central ambition, to tease out “the proper role of art in relation to politics,” is an exceptionally difficult task, adjudicating, from some outside place, where “art” should sit on a spectrum of political/non-political practices.
Reviewed by Eva Díaz
In her work on aesthetics, cultural theorist Chantal Mouffe distinguishes between the concepts of “politics,” and “the political.” Politics is “the ensemble of discourses and practices, institutional or even artistic practices, that contribute to and reproduce a certain order,” whereas “the political” is the dynamic of antagonism that can emerge out of any relation (Mouffe 2001, 99). To Mouffe all art has a political dimension, but not all art is politics. In this vein I often think of politics as the sphere of maintaining or contesting hegemony, and “the political” as the techniques by which one does so.
Daniel Herwitz’ book The Political Power of Visual Art initially seems to ascribe to Mouffe’s notion of the ever-present possibility of “the political” to create friction, to open up difference, to work in the zone of passion and antagonism. Herwitz calls this vitality of potential change a “process of becoming” in which art plays a central role in fashioning new perspectives by way of aesthetic innovation (6). And yet the book’s central ambition, to tease out “the proper role of art in relation to politics,” seems an exceptionally fruitless task, not only because of its emphasis on adjudicating, from some impossible outside place, where “art” should sit on a spectrum of political/non-political practices (6).
Considering the methods and organization of this book, the first word that comes to mind is “interdisciplinary.” With all its attendant problems. When a scholar takes on too much, and ends up falling between chairs, likely overweaning interdisciplinarity is to blame. (I wrote a book that took up interdisciplinary collaborations—in visual art, music, and architecture at Black Mountain College—and I have to say it was exceedingly hard to keep all those balls in the air for the approximately ten year period of the College’s history I focused on; in the hundreds of years at play in Herwitz’ book, balls are dropping left and right.) The Political Power of Visual Art contains a chapter that sketches a comparison between the 19th century painter Eduard Manet and the contemporary street artist Banksy, to the benefit of neither. Following this, a chapter on Mozart’s opera “Marriage of Figaro” that includes weird anachronisms such as “the wonderful feminist idea (first stated by Carol Hanisch in 1969) that ‘the personal is political’ already found expression in this eighteenth-century opera” (169). Later, a chapter on cinema digresses into Aboriginal animism, Woody Allen, and travel and the Grand Tour to make an argument about a film as auratic presence and evanescence. It’s all as confusing as it sounds.
Some of the best passages in the book focus on contemporary South African art, and I was relieved when the abundance of generality was arrested by clear passages of description of photographs by David Lurie in which actual works of art were discussed with accuracy at some length. In his close observations of the details of Lurie’s work, Herwitz argues that the artist’s focus on graffiti and signage in poor areas of Cape Town shows public dissent to be a process of subaltern voices striving for visibility, in one of the most stratified and unequal societies in the world. In this discussion, Herwitz’ strong observational powers emphasize how Lurie creates a sense identification on the part of the spectator, and how the compositions of the photographs and their subject matter join.
Unlike when, in the following chapter on fellow South African artist William Kentridge, Herwitz claims that Kentridge works like a Disney animator (48). Yes, both are forms of 2-D frame-by-frame animation. But no, producing transparent cel animation on a light table is not all that similar to making a film by drawing on paper in charcoal then adding frames of the erasures and redrawings. Animation just happens to have many diverse techniques of production; it’s not all Disney, in any case Disney films are now largely computer animations. The main casualties of bad interdisciplinarity are precision, focus, and depth, as if by roaming around many topics one can make broad claims about general themes like art, solidarity, autonomy, sublimity, and politics, without having to be accountable to a close study of any one subject.
A central problem of this book is not merely the amount of factual errors about art it makes, but also the sweeping generalizations about centuries of cultural history it puts forward. On page 28: “For the eighteenth century, aesthetic experience is, we have already seen, apolitical, because an encomium detached from the world outside it, a way for the free agent to celebrate their capacity for free choice by deploying it in an experience that shares the absolute autonomy that their freedoms demands.” Herwitz’ argument becomes particularly wooly when he leans heavily on concepts on freedom, personal judgment, and autonomy derived from John Locke and Immanuel Kant that posit art as a zone of “taste” and “individual experience” (9). Like Mouffe, or Althusser, Bourdieu, or Adorno, or any number of Marxist philosophers, some of which Herwitz also mentions, one could argue that such an “apolitical” vision of art is an ideological construction that falsely cleaves art from its own powers: neglecting its formal experimentation, its diverse audiences, its complex forms of display. This definition of art as individual taste ultimately serves to reproduce the existing political order, in which art is made to seem disconnected from the social world, and separate from struggles for social change. At the level of aesthetic theory what Herwitz presents is a definition of politics as something art can dabble in, as opposed to a materialist vision of political contestation as constitutive of the social, of the economic, of the artistic, or of any relation. A more rigorously defined notion of the political in art would trouble some of these whimsical speculations about the autonomy of art. Returning to Mouffe, one can see the space of critique in visual art as occupying a counter-hegemonic zone of “the political,” as opposed to a politics of presumed neutrality that tacitly supports the ideology of the current hegemony.
The brief trip around Kant and Locke in the book’s introduction is not proof (as “we have already seen”) that aesthetic experience is apolitical. At what time was this the case, ever? But if so, when exactly in the eighteenth century? In what media? Where? What about the French Revolution? What about Neo-Classicism, say, Jacques-Louis David’s 1784 work Oath of the Horatii? Which is among the most famous paintings of the eighteenth century, a work that celebrates collective action and self-sacrifice in the name of duty, hardly a vision of “absolute autonomy and personal freedom.” These lapses are when interdisciplinarity, and perhaps another academic catchphrase, trans-historicism, can be blamed.
In the field of art history, one’s “evidence” in making arguments is analysis of the material constitution and appearance of a work, which are understood through its means of production, as well as its distribution forms, reception, and the criticism and scholarship about it. If you neglect those aspects of the work in your haste to make statements about, for example, a work’s political propriety, you do a disservice both to the work and to your reader. The woman in Duchamp’s installation “Étant donnés…” is not “curled in a manger” (146). She is naked, lying spread-eagle on a bed of dried twigs and leaves. How can Duchamp’s “Fountain” have an “uncanny likeness to sculpture” when it IS in fact a sculpture? (147). And at least acknowledge arguments Thierry de Duve and others have presented that a revolutionary aspect of Duchamp’s readymade was its nominative power, that is to say, the ability of the artist to select an object (a urinal in this case) not traditionally understood as a sculptural object, and then insert it into the “framework” of art: its display, the conversations about it, and its circulation in the art market. Hans Haacke did not, as the book claims, make “a career in New York from the time of his Museum of Modern Art exhibition of 1970, by exposing art markets in relation to the growth of real estate” (151). Actually, in 1970, in an influential group show of conceptual art called “Information,” Haacke presented the participatory work “MoMA Poll” about the brothers’ Rockefellers support of the Vietnam War (Nelson and David Rockefeller, that is; the former was then governor of New York State and is explicitly mentioned in Haacke’s piece, the latter is suggested implicitly in his role as president of MoMA’s board of trustees). It was later, in 1971, in a notorious act of censorship Herwitz does not mention, that Haacke’s one-man show at the Guggenheim was canceled by the museum’s board of trustees because it included “Schapolsky et al. Manhattan Real Estate Holdings, a Real-Time Social System, as of May 1, 1971,” a work about shell corporations and Manhattan tenements that Herwitz does not name.
Doesn’t seem to matter what the work is, when it was made, or where or why it was shown. Haacke is no doubt biting in his critique of slumlords. But is he prophetic? “His fierce critique was of the way real estate and financial investment led to the frenzy of buying and selling in the 1980s” (151). How can a work made in 1971 possibly be a proleptic appraisal of the real estate market of the 1980s?
Andreas Serrano’s 1987 “Piss Christ” did not involve the artist “drenching a canvas in his own urine” (79). Serrano’s work is a color photograph of a crucifix in a glass vessel containing the artist’s urine. To be fair, in the image’s caption Herwitz does state that this work is a photograph, but these factual inconsistencies are careless and confusing. Andy Warhol, for example, had his studio assistants and others piss on canvases in the 1977-78 “Oxidation Paintings,” but there are drastically different implications between peeing on a canvas and taking a photograph of pee in a jar. Peeing on a horizontally-oriented canvas and hanging it on the wall, in which Warhol makes parodic reference to Jackson Pollock’s drip paintings by way of a story about Pollock peeing into Peggy Guggenheim’s fireplace, has been argued by art historians such as Yves-Alain Bois and Rosalind Krauss to trouble, as Pollock also did, the vertical orientation of human vision and traditional forms of artistic composition by evoking horizontality as the plane of bodily abjection, formlessness, and even death. Drenching a canvas in urine is not what Serrano did. He put pee in a glass jar (the male privilege of answering nature’s call without a urinal nearby, perhaps) that either contained a plastic crucifix or one he later dropped in. Serrano photographed this object at close range, and then printed the image at a dramatically larger scale. The differences between media, process and display imply very different but related critiques of heroic, masculine creation. Nor was “Piss Christ” ever in the exhibition “The Perfect Moment,” as Herwitz claims, a show that was cancelled in 1989 by the Corcoran Gallery of Art in Washington D.C. and was soon after caught up in Senator Jesse Helms’ attempts to cut funding for the NEA; that exhibition was in fact a retrospective of Robert Mapplethorpe’s work organized by ICA Philadelphia curator Janet Kardon (78).
I enumerate these among many other mistakes not to quibble with the book’s egregious lack of fact checking, but to convey the disregard with which it sometimes treats the specificity of making and showing work, which are after all the “evidence” by which we can interpret an artwork. A book that ranges throughout history, and among various visual, musical and written cultural practices, has to have its shit together at the level of truth else it become a baggy collection of half remembered aspects about very well known works that are much better researched and studied by scholars in their respective disciplines. If you don’t understand how a work is made or how it is shown, then the arguments you make about it are likely weak. Stringing together brief anecdotes about art you like or admire, without bothering to attend to the decisions the artist made about its appearance or materiality, or considering the factors that affected its display or circulation in the work, while ignoring previous scholarship on the topic, effectively uses art as an illustration, or a symptom, of whatever generalizations you want to deploy around it. In its most banal incarnation, this leads to overbroad statements like “Art is a beautiful instrument for thinking about politics, because it spans the personal and the political, the private and the public, the transcendent and the engaged” (159). We have an art stan in the house.
What this glossing doesn’t take seriously are the visual qualities a work possesses that can be observed and accurately described, the historical evidence that can be researched with diligence, and the discursive field around the work. As a scholar you are accountable to all of these aspects of a work. To give agency to an art without artists or audiences is to personify “art” as a transcendent practice outside history: “Visual art properly thinks from the inner, instinctive mind whose talent is to find ways of framing its inner, largely unconscious or intuitive thoughts in ways that allow them to appear” (59-60). Really? Visual art thinks that?
Art appreciation is individual and capricious—we all enjoy certain things and perhaps not others. Art history, in contrast, posits not only that all form has meaning, but that certain meanings are more historically-accurate, and more persuasively-argued, and it undertakes the translation of visual experience into language, to create new forms of understanding, and perhaps new politics too.
References
Mouffe, C. ‘Every Form of Art Has a Political Dimension’. Grey Room 2001; (2): 98–125.
Eva Díaz is a writer and art critic living in Rockaway Beach, New York. Her writing has appeared in magazines and journals such as The Art Bulletin, Artforum, Art Journal, Cabinet, Frieze, Grey Room, Harvard Design Magazine, and October. She has recently completed the manuscript to her new book After Spaceship Earth, which delves further into the fraught relationship between art, technocratic utopianism, and social justice first explored in her 2015 book The Experimenters: Chance and Design at Black Mountain College. Sections of the new project have been published in New Left Review, Aperture, e-flux journal, and Texte zur Kunst. She received her B.A. from UC Berkeley, her Ph.D. from Princeton, attended the Whitney Museum Independent Study Program (ISP), and was on the ISP faculty for nearly ten years. She teaches art history at Pratt Institute in Brooklyn.
