“If I could only forget the notion of art entirely. I really don’t think you can win. Duchamp is ultimately labeled art too. The bourgeois scheme is that they wish to be disturbed from time to time, they like that, but then they envelop you, and that little bit is over, and they are ready for the next. There even exists within the b. values a code of possibilities for disturbance, certain ‘crimes’ which it requires some courage to do but which will eventually be rewarded within the b. scheme. B. values are human weakness, a civilization built on human weakness, non-resistance. They are disgusting. there are many difficult things to do within the b. values, but I would like to find some way to take a totally outside position. Bohemia is bourgeois. The beat is bourgeois – their values are pure sentimentality – the country, the good heart, the fallen man, the honest man, the gold-hearted whore etc. They would never thing f. ex. of making the city a value of good.
Possibly art is doomed to be bourgeois. Two possible escapes from the bourgeois are 1. aristocracy and 2. intellect, where art never thrives too well. There again I am talking as if I want to create art outside b. values. Perhaps this can’t be done, but why should I even want to create ‘art’ – that’s the notion I’ve got to get rid of. Assuming that I wanted to create some thing what would that thing be? Just a thing, an object. Art would not enter into it. I make a charged object (‘living’). An ‘artistic’ appearance or content is derived from the object’s reference, not from the object itself or me. These things are displayed in galleries, but that is not the place for them. A store would be better (Store – place full of objects). Museum in b. concept equals store in mine” p. 744

“I am for an art that is political-erotical-mystical, that does something other than sit on its ass in a museum.
I am for an art that grows up not knowing it is art at all, an art given the chance of having a starting point of zero.
I am for an art that embroils itself with the everyday crap and still comes out on top.
I am for an art that imitates the human, that is comic, if necessary, or violent, or whatever is necessary.
I am for an art that ties its form from the lines of life itself, that twists and extends and accumulates and spits and drips, and is heavy and coarse and blunt and sweet and stupid as life itself.” p. 744-5

Oldenberg presents some of the same challenges identified in other authors – the dangers of being identified as ‘art’, particularly the depoliticiziation into the commodity form that occurs in bourgeois capitalism. The label ‘art’ – like the label ‘politics’ – imposes a set of confined meanings on the work. Oldenberg wants to find an outside position that cannot reduce back to the co-ordinates of capitalism, by developing an object-creation that mirrors and venerates real life. The measure of success is the difficulty of commodification into a ‘store’ – even if this non-bourgeois art requires violence or stupidity.

The question reading this bit of Oldenberg raises is the idea of an ‘outside position.’ It’s telling that his radical position – ‘making the city a value of good’ – is now a key engine for capitalism in the form of gentrification and ‘urban’ culture (from rap to sneakers to graff artists in galleries). It shows how every supposed leap outside of meaning gets drawn back into the ideological coordinates despite the efforts a producer may take to erase the traces of other symbolic systems.

This is really interesting

“This is a magazine of artists and writers who ‘practice’ in their work their own experience without seeking to transcend it in academic, group or political formulas.
Such practice implies thathe belief that through conversion of energy something valid may come out, whatever the situation one is forced to begin with.
the question of what will emerge is left open. One functions in an attitude of expectancy. As Juan Gris said: ‘You are lost the instant you know what the result will me.’
Naturally the deadly political situation exerts an enourmous presure.
The tempotation is to conclude that organized social thiking is ‘more serious’ that the act that sets free in contemporary experience forms which that experience has made possible.
One who yeilds to this tempotation makes a choice among various theories of manipulating the knwn elements f the so-called objective state of affairs. Once the political choice has been made, art and literature ought of course be given up.
Whoever geniuinely belives he knows how to save humanity from catastrophe has a job before him which is certainly not a part-time one.
Political commitment in our times means logically – no art, no literature. A great many people, however, find it possible to hang around in the sampace between art and political action.
If one is to continue to paint or write as the political trap seems to close upon him he must perhaps have the extremest faith in sheer possibility.
In his exremism he shows that he has recognized how drastic the political presence is” p. 659

Poltiical art kind of politics that accepts limitations of human perception and tries to create art as a non-instrumental response to the world. The ‘deadly political situation’ here refers to the developing cold war that made aesthetics and art a battleground – I don’t believe this section ties to defend the sanctity of art as apolitical, but instead wants to identify a kind of open politics that doesn’t support the efforts to instrumentalize art by forces acting purely in self interest. It also suggests that human beings don’t live in a way that would reduce art to determined, meaning-bound statements. The open-ended approach to art responds to the Cold War by refusing to create meanings that could be used to purpetuate a conflict that would destroy the world.

Which leads us to the question of how this concerns thinking about the efficacy of political art. In the terms of Motherwell and Rosenberg, political art works when it can’t be readily identified as political (insofar as this would show associations with parties, states, etc.), and/or creates its own politics that cannot be understood except in the process of doing.

“In art, rebellion is consummated and perpetuated in the act of real creation, not in criticism nor commentary. Revolution, in its turn, can only affirm itself in a civilization and not in terror or tyranny. The two questions posed, henceforth, by our times to a society caught in a dilemma – Is creation possible? Is the revolution possible? – are in reality only one question which concerns the renaissance of civilization.” p 626

“Language destroyed by irrational negation becomes lost in verbal delirium; subject to determinist ideology it is summed up in the word of command. Half-way between the two lies art. If the rebel must simultaneously reject the frenzy of annihilation and the acceptance of totality, the artist must simultaneously escape from the passion for formality and the totalitarian aesthetic of reality. The world today is one, in fact, but its unity is the unity of nihilism. Civilization is only possible if, by renouncing the nihilism of formal principles and nihilism without principles, the world rediscovers the road to a creative synthesis. In the same way, in art, the time of perpetual commentary and reportage is at the point of death, it announces the advent of creative artists.” p. 626-7

“But the fact that creation is necessary does not perforce imply that it is possible. A creative period in art is determined by the order of a particular style applied to the disorder of a particular time. It gives form and formulae to contemporary passions.” p. 627

“”Modern conquerors can kill, but do not seem to be able to create. Artists know how to create but cannot really kill. Murderers are only very exceptionally found among artists. In the long run, therefore, art in our revolutionary societies must die. But then the revolution will have lived its alloted span. Each time the revolution kills a man the artist that he might have been, it attenuates itself a little more. If, finally, the conquerors succeed in moulding the world according to their laws, it will not prove that quality is king but that this world is hell. In this hell, the place of art will coincide with that of vanquished rebellion, a blind and empty hope in the pit of despair.” p. 628

“History may perhaps have an end; but our task is not to terminate it but to create it, in the image of what we henceforth know to be true. Art, at least, teaches us that man cannot be explained by history alone and that he also finds a reason for his existence in the order of nature. For him, the great god Pan is not dead. His most distinctive act of rebellion, while it affirms the value and the dignity common to all men, obstinately claims, so as to satisfy his hunger for unity, an integral part of the reality whose name is beauty. One can reject all history and yet accept the world of the seas and the stars. The rebels who wish to ignore nature and beauty are condemned to banish from history everything with which they want to construct the dignity of existence and of labour. Every great reformer tries to create in history what Shakespeare, Cervantes, Moliere, and Tolstoy knew how to create: a world always ready to satisfy the hunger for freedom and dignity which every man carries in his heart. Beauty, no doubt, does not make revolutions. But a day will come when revolutions will have need of beauty. The procedure of beauty, which is to resist the real while conferring unity upon it, is also the procedure of rebellion. It is possible eternally to reject injustice without ceasing to acclaim the nature of man and the beauty of the world? Our answer is yes. This ethic, at once unsubmissive and loyal, is in any event the only one which lights the way to a truly realistic revolution. In upholding beauty, we prepare the way for the day of regeneration when civilization will give first place, – far ahead of the formal principles and degraded values of history – to this living virtue on which is founded the common dignity of man and the world he lives in, and which we now have to define in the face of a world which insults it.” p. 628-9

‘Creation’ provides the measure of effective art for Camus. He simultaneously recognizes creation as a historical process, limited by material events (see the secton on conquerers and their relationship to art), but also an organic, almost mystical impulse. The tension between these two explains why truly revolutionary ‘effective’ art happens so rarely – it must contend with the intersections of history and the machinations of politics, as well as embody a universal creative genius that makes humanity human.

The first quote says that art embodies rebellion as an act of pure creation, similar to the ‘affirmation’ of rebellion, instead of engageing in criticism or commentary. To me, this makes sense in terms of the last section copied out here – creation connects to the universal appreciation of beauty that all humans have, and the polemic style of commentary limits the potential of art within divisive narrow bounds. So, effective art exists primarily for itself, insofar as this means that it attempts to unite people in their appreciation of beauty. Here Camus demonstrates how political art differs from normative conceptions of how politics works (discussion, debate, power struggles) – by refusing discussion and instead creating an aesthetic object which can/should be appreciated by all.

Camus discussion of nihilism and realism expands this further. Merely realistic art is confined to engaging with what already ‘is’ and must limit within the frames created by power – the “acceptance of totality.” Simuntaneously, the artist should avoid the self-destructive fervor of a radical who destroys themselves (or in this case, destroys intelligibility) for what they believe to be true. Effective political art attends to what is, but only in the hope of changing it by way of affirming universal human creative capacities. In a way, Camus explains effective political art as that which skirts the dual traps of being merely “political” or merely “art.” One keeps the artist from producing new forms of communication and being because it is trapped by the what proceeded it and a narrow way of thinking about human nature; the other ignores how states of war and revolution led to its possibility, losing its potential to create by falling on deaf or incarcerated ears.

With two others

“A picture lives by companionship, expanding and quickening in the eyes of the sensitive observer. It dies by the same token. it is therefore a risky and unfeeling act to send it out into the world. How often it must be permanently impaired by the eyes of the vulgar and the cruelty of the impotent who would extend their affliction universally!” p. 573

Rothko explains the meaning and efficacy of art as a function of the public in which it operates. Each viewing enables and endangers the meaning of the particular work, and any real meaning/efficacy must be renewed and re-instated with each moment. For this reason, the efficacy of art can be measured only contextually, and rhetorically in terms of its micro-politics, rather than in terms of a sweeping, larger political change.

Adoph Gottleib “Statement” 1947 reprinted in Art in Theory: 1900-2000. ed. Harrison and Wood pp. 573

“the role of the artist, of course, has always been that of image-maker. Different times require different images. today when our aspirations have been reduced to a desperate attempt to escape from evil, and times are out of joint, our obsessive, subterranean and pictographic images are the expression of the neurosis which is or reality. To my mind, certain so-called abstraction is not abstraction at all. On the contrary, it is the realism of our time.” p. 573

Gottleib proposes thinking about art as the condensation of aspirations of a time in the image. It seems his understanding of effective art is somewhat historical and post hoc, whereby a distanced critic who discerns whether the artist effectively captured the spirit of their time with a particular work of art.

Barnett Newman “The Ideographic Picture” reprinted in Art in Theory: 1900-2000. ed. Harrison and Wood pp. p. 573-574

“The Kwakiutl artist painting on a hid did not concern himself with the inconsequentials that made up the opulent social rivalries of the Northwest Coast Indian scene, nor did he, in the name of a higher purity, renounce the living world for the meaningless materialism of design. the abstract shape he used, his entire plastic language, was directed by a ritualistic will toward metaphysical understanding. the everday realities he left to the toymakers; the pleasant play of non-objective patter to the solemn basket wavers. to him a shape was a living thing, a vehicle for an abstract thought-compels a carrier of the awesome feelings he felt before the terror of the unknowable. The abstract shape was, therefore, real rather than a formal ‘abstraction’ of a visual fact, with its overtone of an already-known nature. Nor was it a purist illusion with its overload of pseudo-scientific truths.
The basis of an aesthetic act is the pure idea. But the pure idea is, of necessity, an aesthetic act. Here then is the epistemological paradox that is the artist’s problem. Not space cutting nor space building, not construction nor fauvist destruction; not the pure line, straight an narrow, nor the tortured line, distorted and humiliating; not the accurate eye, all fingers, nor the wild eye of dream, winking; but the idea-complex that makes contact with mystery – of life, of men, of nature, of the hard, black chaos that is death, or the grayer, softer chaos that is tragedy. For it is only the pure idea that has meaning. Everything else has everything else.” p. 574

Newman provides a larger frame for thinking the symbolic process that explains what both Gottlieb and Rothko understand as the purpose or meaning of art. the connection of the pure idea in relation to chaos shows how aesthetic expression confronts the unknown by giving it definite form and at least temporary stability. Newman abstracts from the varying forms of expression the notion of pure idea that confronts the unknowable and makes it intelligible to the artist and human form.

“People seize on a painting to cover up their nakedness. They get what they can wherever they can. in the end I can’t believe they get anything at all Theyve’ simply cut a coat the measurement of their own ignorance. They make everything, from God to a picture, in their own image. That is why the picture-hook is the ruination of a painting – a painting which has always a certain significance, at least as much as the man who did it. As soon as it is brought and hung on a wall, it takes on quite a different kind of significance, and the painting is done for” p. 509

“How can you expect an onlooker to live a picture of mine as I lived it? A picture comes to me from miles away: who is to say from how far away I sensed it, saw it, painted it; and yet the next day I can’t see what I’ve done myself. How can anyone enter into my dreams, my instincts, my desires, my thoughts, which have taken a long time to mature and to com out into the daylight, and above all grasp from them what I have been about – perhaps against my own will?” p. 510

I think these quotes from Picasso are actually really rich for thinking about efficacy, despite Picassos oblique stance on politics – there’s a vague sense of anti-establishement feel in his words, but generally he undermines the basis for traditionally political interpetations of his work.

I think Picasso rejects goal-oriented thinking about the effectiveness of art. In my mind, the first quote echoes the Pink Faries: Do it. Making meaning via art is an active, fluid process, to be effective, you have to do art and act, because the meaning cannot be decided before hand, and analysis only takes you so far. Action should be primary, and the fact of taking action to change the nature of discourse is a kind of effectiveness in its own right, simply because all meaning or change created by art is a product of a time-bound, physical process, and overcoming inertia against change to act is the biggest step towards effective art.

Additionally, his arguments about the incomisurate distance between the mind of the artist and their viewers suggest that an artist has next to no power over how their art is seen – insofar as it is ‘political’ and ‘art’. The parallel between his discussion of his work to more political art is his comment about the ‘picture hook’ – essentially, the process of turning an image into ‘art.’ The hook imposes a frame that encourages intepretation and opinion formation, in the same way that talking about art as politics encourages a discussion about goals, opinion and effectiveness, all of which distance the image from the intent of the artist. Thus, one way to think about effectiveness of poltiical art is how well it disguises its political-ness, and avoids being ‘hung’ on the ‘political’ hook.

“To reject art as a means of picturing and imaging knowledge because of one’s opposition to the contemplative and impressionistic bourgeois art of the last few decades , is to strike from the hands of the class which is building a new society its most important weapon. Art, it is said, is not a mirror, but a hammer: it does not reflect, it shapes. But at present even the handling of a hammer is taught with the help of a mirror, a sensitive film which records all movements. Photography and motion-picture photography, owing to their passive accuracy of depiction, are becoming important educational instruments in the feild of labour. If one cannot get along with mirror, even in shaving oneself, how can one reconstruct oneself or one’s life, without seeing oneself in the ‘mirror’ of literature? Of course no one speaks about an exact mirror. No one even thinks of asking the new literature to have a mirror-like impassivity. The deeper literature is, and the more it is imbued with the desire to shape life, the more significantly and dynamically it will be able to ‘picture’ life.” p. 443

“When one breaks a hand or a leg, the bones, the tendons, the muscles, the arteries, the nerves and the skin do not break and tear in one line, nor afterwards do they grow together and heal at the same time. So, in a revolutionary break in the life of society, there is no simultaneity and no symmetry of processes either in the ideology of society, or in its economic structure. The ideological premises which are needed for the revolution are formed before the revolution, and the most important ideological deductions from the revolution only appear much later” p. 444

“It is not true that we regard only that art as new and revolutionary which speaks of the worker, and it is nonsense to say that we demand that the poets should describe inevitably a factory chimney, or the uprising against capital! Of course the new art cannot but place the struggle of the proletariat in the centre of its attention. But the plough of the new art is not limited to numbered strips. On the contrary, it must plough the entire feild in all directions. Personal lyrics of the very smallest scope have an absolute right to exist within the new art” p. 445

“The proletariat has to have in art the expression of the new spiritual point of view which is just beginning to be formulated within him, and to which art must help him give form. This is not a state order, but a historical demand. Its strength lies in the objectivity of historical necessity. you cannot pass this by, nor escape its force” p. 445

I wanted to include Trotsky’s theories on art for its relative sympathy towards traditional art comparted with other Marxists, particularly in his treatment of art’s interpersonal function, representing ourselves in the ‘mirror’ that shapes how we use the ‘hammer’ of more explicit political action and produces new images of society that both reflect and change it.

So, for Trotsky effective art must create a new ‘spirit’ of proletarian life capable of initiating the revolution against capital. The quotes above show that Trotsky treats this central goal with some subtlety- his bone/tendon analogy suggests that revolutionary art may not have to perfectly or totally acomplish its goals to be worthwhile or effective – new art offers a starting point for revolutionary action that comes in fits and bursts, and contributes towards an eventual rev. Art contributes to the ideological remaking of society that eventually culminates in revolution. The ‘plough the feilds in all directions’ quote speaks also to this more general revolution in thought that begins in art.

Trotsky’s version of ‘new art’ essentially is a form of sympathetic realism, a “preoccupation with our life of three dimensions” p. 446, but his description of it here is not very compelling.

“Fascism is a style of life: it is life itself for Italians. No formula will ever succeed in completely expressing it, let alone defining it. Similarly, no formula will ever succeed in in expressing, let alone defining, what is understood as Fascist art, that is to say, an art which is the plastic expression of the Fascist spirit.
Fascist art will be created little by little and will be the result of the slow labour of the best people. That which can and must be done straight away is to free artists from the numerous doubts which linger on.
In the Fascist state art acquires a social function: an educative function. It must translate the ethic of our times. It must give a unity of style and grandeur of contour to common life. Thus art will once again become what it was in teh greatest of times and at the heart of the greatest civilizations: a perfect instrument of spiritual direction” p. 425

“From mural painting will arise the ‘Fascist style’ with which the new civilization will be able to identify. The educative function of painting is above all a question of style. The artist will succeed in making an impression on popular consciousness by the style, by the suggestion of climate, rather than by the subject-matter (as the Communists think).” p. 425

Sironi follows some of the thoughts I already posted from Siqueiros and others. The term ‘Fascism’ literally derives from the make of Roman axes that lashed or bundled together small sticks to form a stronger axe handle. That etymological history can be seen in Sironi’s program for political art, which in Fascist Italy ‘acquires a social function’; ie manufacturing a unified Italian people and state. ‘Social’ art focuses on creating a sense of collective identity and worth, specifically through the use of a style of grandeur and religious/spiritual import.

“The metropolis began its race-annihilating work. the coffee-houses of the asphalt men became studios; theoretical bastardized dialectics became laws for ever-new ‘directions’. A race-chaos of Germans, Jews and anti-natural street races was abroad. The result was mongrel ‘art’.” p. 412

“Impressionism, which originally was borne by strong, talented artists, became a battle-cry of decomposing intellectualism. An atomistic world-view atomized even the colors; the dull level of understanding of natural science achieved its apogee in the practitioners and theoreticians of Impressionism. A mythless world procreated a mythless sensuousness. men who desired inwardly to break free from this were broken. Van Gogh is a tragic example of one who longed and went mad. Gauguin is another example of the attempt to break free from intellectualism. Only the Paul Singnacs painted on, uninhibited, unconcernedly, gluing their bits of colour next o one another.” p. 412

“Men no longer wanted intellectualism; they began to hate the endless dissection of colour and to despise the brown gallery-colours and copies of Titian. With correct feeling, they began to search for redemption, expression and strength. And the result of this powerful tension was – the abortion of Expressionism. A whole race had cried out for expression and now had nothing that it could express. It called for beauty and no longer had an ideal of beauty. It wanted to search for life in a revived spirit of creativity and it had lost every true ability to create form.” p. 413

Rosenberg offers an interesting perspective on what act means, and what makes it good. As with Hitler’s piece (below), Rosenberg carries on a meta-discussion about the meaning and purpose of art, contextualized within a historical narrative about the urbanization and then bastardization of art. I think it’s important to recognize many of his conclusions about ‘good’ or effective art as a construction of his time and place (obviously), and that the meta-discussion is carefully constructed to appeal to the German people following WWI.

So, Rosenberg:

Effective art provides self-evident, complete meaning that requires very little interpretation, but rather speaks to the essential character of the German people. Rosenberg seems to deal with with what Marx would call alienation – the condition of an urbanized people, in an ‘un-natural’ built environment. The reaction against ‘intellectualism’ could be interpreted as a response to the abstracted thought enabled by a division of labor between intellectuals and other forms of work. The desire to empower the ‘race’ also speaks to the state of disenfranchisement of the urbanizing masses, and the sense of castration felt by unemployed or menial laborers of industrial capitalism.

Taking these structural realities into account, Rosenberg makes a calculated meta-argument about how to think about effective art. He puts words in people’s mouths, then tells them to believe those words, knowing that they speak generally to the conditions under which the Germans lived.

Adolf Hitler, 1937 ‘Speech Inaugerating the ‘Great Exhibition of German Art’” trans Falk. Reprinted in Art in Theory: 1900-2000. ed. Harrison and Wood pp. 439-441

“On (these) cultural grounds, more than on any others, Judaism had taken possession of these means and institutions of communication which form, and thus finally rule over public opinion. Judaism was very clever indeed, especially in employing its position in the press with the help of so-called art criticism and succeeding not only in confusing the natural concepts about the nature and scope of art as well as its goal, but above all in undermining and destroying the general wholesome feeling in this domain…
Art, on the one hand, was defined as nothing but an international communal experience, thus killing altogether any understanding of its integral relationship with an ethnic group. On the one hand its relationship to time was stressed, that is: There was no longer any art of peoples or even of races, bot only an art of the times.” p. 439

“When, therefore, the cornerstone of this building was laid, it was with the intention of constructing a temple, not for so-called modern art, but for a true and everlasting German art, that is, better still, a House for the art of the German people, and not for any international art of the year 1937, ’40, ’50, or ’60. For art is not founded on time, but only on peoples. It is therefore imperative for the artist to erect a monument, not so much to a period, but to his people. For time is changeable, years come and go. Anything born of and thriving in a certain epoch alone, will perish with it. And not only all which had been created before us would fall victim to this morality, but also what is being created today or will be created in the future.
But we National Socialists know only one mortality, and that is the mortality of the people itself. Its causes are known to us. As long as a people exists, however, it is the fixed pole in the flight of fleeting appearances. It is the being and the lasting permanence. And, indeed, for this reason, art as an expression of the essence of this being, is an eternal monument.” p. 440

“‘Works of art’ which cannot be understood in themselves but, for the justification of their existence, need those bombastic instructions for their use, finally reaching that intimidated soul, who is patiently willing to accept such stupid or impertinent nonsense – these works of art will no longer find their way to the German people.
All these catchwords: ‘inner experience,’ ‘strong state of mind,’ ‘forceful will,’ ‘emotions pregnant with the future,’ ‘heroic attitude,’ ‘meaningful empathy,’ ‘experienced order of the times,’ ‘original primitivism,’ etc. – all these dumb, mendacious excuses, this claptrap or jabbering will no longer be accepted as excuses or even recommendations for worthless, integrally unskilled products.” p. 440

“I have observed among the pictures submitted here, quite a few paintings which make one actually come to the conclusion that the eye shows things differently to certain human beings than the way they really are, that is, that there really are men who see the present population of our nation only as rotten cretins; who, on principle, see meadows blue, skies green, clouds sulfur yellow, and so on, or, as they say, experience them as such. I do not want to enter into an argument here about the question of whether the persons concerned really do or do not see or feel in such a way; but, in the name of the German people, I want to forbid these pitiful misfortunates who quite obviously suffer from eye disease, to try vehemently to foist these products of their misinterpretation upon the age we live in, or even with to present them as ‘Art.’
No, here there are two possibilities: Either these so-called ‘artists’ really see things this way and therefore believe in what they depict; there we would have to examine their eyesight-deformation to see if it is the product of a mechanical failure or of inheritance. In the first case, these unfortunates can only be pitied; in the second case, they would be the object of great interest to the Ministry of the Interior of the Reich which would then have to take up the question of whether further inheritance of such gruesome malfunctioning of the eyes cannot at least be checked. If, on the other hand, they themselves do not believe in the reality of such impressions but try to harass the nation with this humbug for other reasons, then such an attempt falls within the jurisdiction of penal law” p. 441

Hitler takes an overstated, reductive approach to art, to the point of reducing the styles of modernism to a criminal or biological state. All this from a once-artist too.

Effective art, for Hitler, embodies the qualities of a pure race, which is a biologically pure group that transcends historical time and offers its members a shot at immortality. Effective art would remain relevant through the ages, as long as the race exists. Good art provides a reference point and index for the noble qualities of a race in its pure state. The emphasis must be on permanence and self-evident meaning.

What I find most interesting about these bits are the threats of the last clip, and its relationship to the clip immediately before it. It shows the true content of the supposedly self-evident meanings that ‘real Germans’ take from art. First of all, it shows that obvious meaning often is constructed, in this case by the very real threat of being turned over to the ‘Ministry of the Interior of the Reich” or prosecuted for your aesthetic choices. It also reveals the vast apparatus that goes into building legitimacy for speaking about ‘true’ meaning. Think about it: anyone making similar claims as an individual, causally about ‘eye disease’ might themselves be the target of ridicule, but Hitler’s claim clearly carries weight. Its legitimacy comes from context. Doubtless this speech was given before the immense bold banners of the Nazi Party, in uniform, flanked by other dignitaries of the party (also in uniform), all echoing the great images from massive rallies and torchlight parades. the legitimacy of his bizarre interpretation in fact lies on the larger tools used to build the image of Hitler’s power – his discourse on art merely turns artistic interpretation into another site of legitimacy-production.

“In recent years, one catchphrase has motivated the present generation of creative artists. it urges them to “Find new forms of expression!” I very much doubt, however, whether such a thing is possible. Anyone who looks at the paintings of the Old Masters, or immerses himself in the study of their works, will surely agree with me.
As I see it, at any rate, the new element in painting lies in the extension of its subject area, an enhancement of those forms of expression already present in essence in the Old Masters. Tor me, the object is primary and determines the form. I have therefore always felt it vital to get as close as possible to the thing I see. ‘What’ matters more to me than ‘How’. Indeed, ‘How’ arises from ‘What’.”

Dix avoids questions of form, but rather looks to art as a way of revealing new objects in the world. For Dix, effective art uses conventions of self-expression as a way to examine objects not previously seen, the expansion of critical examination through art onto new issues. Art is a space of revelation to the world, rather than personal exploration/introspection – the “object is primary” potentially means that what is seen by the viewing public is primary to what the author tries to see.

“We side with those who demand the disappearance of an ancient, cruel system in which the farm worker produces food for the loud-mouthed politicians and bosses, while he startes; in which the industrial workers in the factories weave cloth and by the world of their hands make life comfortable for the pimps and prostitutes, while they crawl and freeze; in which the Indian soldier heroically leaves the land he has tilled and eternally sacrifices his life in a vain attempt to destroy the misery which has lain on his face for centuries.
The noble work of our race, down to its most insignificant spiritual and physical expressions, is native (and essentially Indian) in origin. With their admirable and extraordinary talent to create beauty, peculiar to themselves, the art of the Mexican people is the most wholesome spiritual expression in the world and this tradition is our greatest treasure. Great because it belongs collectively to the people and this is why our fundamental aesthetic goal must be to socialize artistic expression and wipe out bourgeois individualism.”

“We repudiate so-called easel painting and every kind of art favoured by ultra-intellectual circles, because it is aristocratic, and we praise monumental art in all its forms, because it is public property.
We proclaim that at this time of social change from a decrepit order to a new one, the creators of beauty must use their best efforts to produce ideological works of art for the people; art must no longer be the expression of individual satisfaction which it is today, but should aim to become a fighting, educative art for all.”

I include Siqueiros because he provides a voice from outside the European-American focus of the posts so far, and because he presents some interesting questions about the relationship between physical spaces of art and its effectiveness.

Siqueiros sees effective art as images that can embody and represent the specific struggle of the Mexican people, as a way to create collective action against the conditions of oppression imposed by capital and colonialism. Art can condense and represent the intellectual history of a people, and in the process of representing that history recognize collective oppression, providing the terms for liberation from it.

Second, He suggests that who sees art determines the effectiveness of its political content. Because of his stated goal of building capacity for collective action, art must be public to be effective. “Monumental art” exists in the public sphere, where it can become a unifying symbol for people. Art that is accessible to only a few, behind closed doors or sold loses its political capacity to unite people as a class.