Arts and Politics

“How do we define the relationship between arts and politics?” is the question Yonathan Listik presented to the Lazar Justice team on the 28th April ; with the help of famous pieces of art, we discussed the consonance between artistic value and political messages and what effect their relationship has on our society. Firstly, the Lazar Justice team perceived and discussed art’s purpose, coming to believe that art not only revolves around being fun or aesthetic, it revolves around our emotions, our relations, it helps us see the world through different lenses. We took a step further and saw the characteristics that link arts and politics : both arts and politics strive to make human life better, to create something new, they constantly try to find significance of our surroundings, both work with the combination of something real, something that already exists and something fictional, an utopia or dystopia. We came to the conclusion that art becomes political because of the struggle it illustrates and we did a short comparison of pieces of art that serve only an aesthetic purpose and show no propositional meaning , such as Juno Ludovisi and The Belvedere Torso, and pieces of art that carry a deeper, more political meaning and challenge social norms, their main purpose not revolving around being beautiful, such as Martha Rosler’s “House Beautiful: Bringing the War Home” , Bay Yiluo’s “The people” and Krzysztof Wodiczko’s “Homeless vehicle”. After that, we tackled the issue of propaganda art, whether it should be truly considered art, arriving at the conclusion that even though propaganda tries to manipulate people into believing a certain scenario and does not reflect reality, as we’ve stated before, every piece of art has its own fictional element. The last section of our lecture revolved around the question of where does the artistic value end when we integrate politics into art. Here, we discussed multiple modern artists : Guerilla Girls (a group of feminists, whose art is devoted to fighting against sexism and racism), Banksy (a pseudonymous street artist and political activist, based in England), Jenny Holzer (a neo-conceptual artist). Their simple form of art manages to deliver an aesthetic role and to confront the system’s problematic views and discriminating behaviours at the same time, demonstrating that art can hold political power. After the course, Lazar Justice’s students were left with a different outlook on art and the influence it has on our society ; through the examples we analyzed and the questions posed, we learned that even though it’s hard to define the relationship between arts and politics, art that delivers a meaningful political message is powerful.

Nadia Murariu