At the Edge (11-13 November 1999)

AT THE EDGE
Towards 21st Century Internationalism

TNI 25th Anniversary (1974-1999)

Talking Art and Contemporary Politics

Artists around the world are catalysing "Culture Wars" among politicians, pundits and public groups through provocative aesthetic representations of religion, gender, race, class, sexual orientation, war and politics. Does art/can art help alter power inequities that imperil the lives of ordinary people? Can you dance/paint/sing/rhyme a new and better world? "Talking Art and Contemporary Politics" challenges each of us to engage artists, art and our artistic sensibilities and talents in the struggle for peace, justice, human creativity and social progress in local and global spaces.

Animated by: Ariel Dorfman, Ari Sitas, Saul Landau, Hein Marais and James Early

Ariel Dorfman: Writer of the award-winning Broadway hit Death and the Maiden, Dorfman has written plays, novels, short stories and poetry and co-authored the famous How to Read Donald Duck: Imperialist Ideology in the Disney Comic. He has taught at the University of Chile, the Sorbonne and the University of Amsterdam and is currently professor of literature at Duke University, USA. His most recent plays are Widows and Who’s Who, both produced with his son Rodrigo, as are his latest films My House on Fire and the Channel 4 production DeadLine. Dorfman’s newest novels are Heading South, Looking North: A Bilingual Journey and The Nanny and the Iceberg.

I would like to present a number of stories about different aspects of the relationship between art politics. According to how society changes and how you consider the artist and the politics, the relationships tend to be of a different nature, so it is very difficult to generalise. It is also dangerous to prescribe what that should be. Let’s take an extreme case, such as a dictatorship. You have a concentration camp on the coast of Chile [called Ritorche ??? 65], which previously was a resort for workers under the Allende government, holding people from all over Chile who have been tortured in different places. One day the prisoners were met by a strange spectacle. There was a man in a top hat and with coat tails who said to them, "Hello, I am the mayor of [Ritorche]. I greet you all. I’m glad you have had this wonderful tour of Chile, which has been free. Think how free you are. If you continue to persist in your attitudes you may be in for many more years of this wonderful free tour of Chile! Meanwhile you are here. We here are free, I am the mayor, you are the inhabitants of [Ritorche], and those people up there think they are the guardians but we are guarding them. We are the only free people because we can say whatever we want." This man was an actor and director called Oscar Castro who was himself in the camp because he’d dared to create an ambiguous play straight after the coup in which a captain went down with his ship promising better days. So here you have a situation of an extreme nature: there is a dictatorship in which everything is forbidden and yet you cannot stop that spirit of resistance. We can speak of this being a similar situation to the Gdansk shipyards, the situation in South Africa, or the US during the civil rights movement when there are extreme moments of social agitation and social movements. The relationship of the artist to the politics becomes relatively one-way in the sense you feel you are part of a movement and your words are immediately taken in a political sense. Strangely, when things become normal, democratic, you have to search for what you are going to do with yourself.

To put this into perspective, a year-and-a-half before the coup, I was writing a novel about a dictatorship in Chile ten to fifteen years in the future. The leader was called El Grande who was immortal in a way because he had a mask on, so he was always changing in a way. He had turned the country into a kind of Disneyland since he’d kept everything as it was but modernised everything at the same time. Then I thought to myself, don’t write a defeatist novel, El Grande will never happen, we are going to win. I therefore stopped and wrote a different book. I was wrong to have stopped because I had decided ahead of time, politically, whether something was right or wrong, and had stopped my imagination from saying what it was seeing deep inside the Chilean situation. I was a prophet of the coup, but I didn’t allow myself to accept that. This means I didn’t respect an aspect of art which is very essential, which is its "transgressive aspect". Often the transgression is not one only against the dictator or the corporations or the mediocrity of people, it may be a transgressions against one’s own ideas and deepest hopes. Due to this lesson most of the work I did afterwards is very transgressive - it says things which make people feel uncomfortable.

I want to use the example of a detective novelist who was a monarchist, a reactionary and a retrograde Catholic called [Hnorario Basak ??? 140]. His political ideas turned out to be ones nobody would agree with and yet if you read his work you will see how society worked because he was true to what he was seeing. It is not easy to categorise. The best artist is not always the one who is "politically correct". This difficulty in categorising is precisely what is so nice about art.

As a final remark, what is the major cultural contradiction of the age? The major problem art has today is its commercialisation. Commerce is a machine which devours everything, compresses everything and uses everything. One solution is to engage that machine by doing products which allow you to reach as many people as possible. The dilemma is how to relate that to obscurity and experimentation at the same time.

Ari Sitas: Founder of the pioneering Junction Avenue Theatre Company in Johannesburg and of the workers’ theatre movement in South Africa in the ‘80s. Sitas has received numerous awards for his literary work. He has produced six plays and two collections of poetry, the latest beingSlave Trades. He is Professor of Industrial and Labour Studies at the University of Natal and sits on the executive of the International Sociological Association. His latest work, co-edited with Maria de Silva, is Gathering Voices: Perspectives in the Social Sciences in Southern Africa.

It was a wonderful experience to have been centrally involved in one of the most remarkable mobilisations of human cultural and political effort over the last thirty to forty years. And it was incredible to see how on the factory floor, in a workers’ compound, in a little church hall, how in every little space where people gathered, they started getting infused with cultural creativity. Poetry began to come alive and oral tradition started to revive. Poets had to go out there and meet thousands of eyes looking at them, wanting to communicate. An experimental space was created which rapidly moved thousands to believe that art, culture and politics were equally important.

Undoubtedly, the relationship between artists and social movements or political movements is complex, and has always been disturbing and disturbed. This has partly to do with political movements. This was not the first time there was an instrumental usage of artists by political vanguards. Increasingly you would be called on to perform this and that, to make money for this cause or that. This began to cause a problem among some creative people who began to withdraw and started reconfiguring themselves towards what is seen these days as art that can allow them to survive. Unfortunately this reconfiguration is a global one. The old colonial relationships of what is good or bad are still present. Furthermore what "is" or "isn’t" is buttressed by the publishing industry, the CD industry, etc, who increasingly define what space an artist may have. Today you not only need cultural capital, but you need to have collections and you have to conform to standards established elsewhere. Sadly a lot of creative people did not quite make it in South Africa. There was, however, a small window of opportunity when the capitalists decided that "difference" was important. Other packagings became quite possible. "Difference" became fashionable, and quite a few successes came out of this. If difference is the game, a lot of artists can give an authentic difference to the full.

Despite the lack of celebration of artists as political beings, and despite their withdrawal, you are beginning to hear all over the world the unprompted voicing of all kinds of social, economic, displacement-based issues. By themselves or in groups, they can’t escape the responsibility of the social sphere, and those voices are there.

Furthermore, if you go to Africa today, do not read any sociologist, economist or political scientist if you want to find out the mess is that we are in. Read a novelist, listen to a poet instead. Very few people these days have the courage to say what is happening because they are involved in being consultants and engineers of the new technical relations being put into place - the social scientists are all trying to participate in a bit of the World Bank, IMF and UN agendas to change the structures. But artists and writers have been writing consistently in Africa over the last 30 years about the shame of a lot of the transitions, the promises, what has been delivered, what has happened to women, children, communities.

There are four processes that make the new situation unique at the moment. Firstly, there is a decline of international solidarity. In the past you knew there were other artists writing in other networks, whether they were from the Communist Movement, the Fourth International, the Non-Aligned Movement, etc. You knew about works even if they weren’t published for another twenty years. These solidarity movements communicated literature to us. Secondly, the ability of sources of creativity to regenerate themselves is declining. Structural adjustment has seen to it that art is now not on the agenda as a priority in any of our countries. This is happening systematically and persistently. They can produce dances forever by restructuring communities, breaking them down, making them vocationally sound, and shifting them around according to monetary logic. Thirdly, while commercialisation has made us aware for the first time there is a world out there of multiculturalism, world music and so on, it is driven on a basis that it only allows one group to represent South Africa in world music (Ladysmith Black Mambaza). There are hundreds of groups like that. Fourthly, there is a tendency to avoid the big questions in artistic communities. What is the relationship between expression, self-expression, group expression, and the politics of the day? Nobody is asking this globally anymore.

Finally, however crushing the process of the resistance in South Africa was for many people, most would do it all over again. It was a lesson learnt and the forms of creativity that developed out of it have nourished a new generation that will hopefully take those hopes forward.

Saul Landau: Senior TNI fellow and former director, Landau is an award-winning filmmaker, journalist and author. He received five awards, including the Edgar Allen Poe Award for Assassination on Embassy Row about the murder of TNI Director, Orlando Letelier. Landau is also fellow of the Institute for Policy Studies (for 27 years) and is currently the Hugh O.Bounty Chair of Applied Interdisciplinary Knowledge at California State Polytechnic Institute. His most recent book is Red Hot Radio Sex, Violence and Politics at the End of the American Century. The latest of his 40 films is Labouring on the Border’s Edge, a documentary about export processing zones on the Mexican-US border.

We are a long way from the era "art is the echo of necessity".

What is the difference between art and commerce? For example, Andy Warhol paints dozens of Campbell soup cans. The message of that perhaps is, we have reached the point where commerce and art are no longer distinguishable. Art becomes an echo of commercial necessity for the purpose of sales and marketing. That is the modern transformation which reverberates in Andy Warhol. It’s repetition, because that’s how advertising works.

Art now not only becomes an indistinguishable form but actually worships technology. I’m teaching a course called "ethics and environment", and several of the students say proudly that they love their car more than anything else. In California it seems you can’t live without a car, but you can do without a hand or foot. Every single day people are stuck in jams for hours, mostly one person per car. One day, in the car, Cuban poet Carlo Fernandez described this as institutionalised loneliness. There is an aesthetic to this, it is art. People begin to relate to their cars. It’s the place where they hear some ignorant talk show host ranting and raving on the radio about all sorts of important issues. You are detached from any kind of organic life. You are reconditioned, and the reconditioning is commercial grammar. An example is that children from six weeks old are placed in front of the baby sitter, which is the tv, absorbing commercial grammar. It’s slick, it’s shiny, and it’s lacking in ambiguity. Everything is handed to you. Even educational shows turn learning into fun - if learning isn’t fun then it isn’t good learning. In our lifetime we have undergone a major cognitive shift. The days when people learn how to read and write as a method of absorbing information are basically gone. Essentially, in our lifetime we have seen the detachment of art from life. This has been the most successful export of the US.

A major task is, how do we re-attach what comes out of peoples struggles and past to the language of their own suffering and of their own struggles in an era in which the commercial media have blanketed the sensory apparatus. How do we combat the bombardment we receive every day, re-attach the organic stuff, which comes out of the soul and intuition of writers?

Hein Marais: South African journalist and political analyst, Marais writes on a range of issues from neo-liberalism to the war in the Congo to the latest in local youth culture. In the 1980s Marais edited a leading political magazine
Work in Progress and in the early 1990s was a senior programmer for the South African Broadcasting Corporation’s top current affairs radio programme Morning Live. He is also a researcher and author, most recently publishing South Africa Limits to Change: The Political Economy of Transition. Marais is South African animator for the World Forum for Alternatives.

In early 1998 there was a huge party in a rich Johannesburg suburb to launch a so-called new black empowerment firm which had been created out of virtually nothing with borrowed money. Attending were many senior ANC figures. They thought it would be nice to invite one of the hip poets [name is at 428] to open the drinking and hobnobbing. This artist had not quite learnt the lesson there are certain periods in history when your transgressive impulses have to be put in check. In other words, we have achieved democracy, liberated our country, and there’s not much space for transgression now. He wrote a poem called point-four-five, eluding to a handgun, which is basically a litany against the new elites who were in the trenches less than a decade before. Each refrain ends with "point-four-five". He was herded out straight after his presentation. Four years before he would have been cheered for that poem. He stuck to being a transgressive artist, seeing things he didn’t like, things he wouldn’t countenance and keep quiet about until the time is right to speak, and he spoke it in the faces of the people that it should be spoken to. In the South African context, during the period of struggle, almost any transgression was accepted because your series of targets was so wide. In a national liberation struggle you can broaden the roots of iniquity and oppression.

When you go though that interregnum which South Africa will still have for some time yet, it becomes hackish if you decide we are going to tow the line of the party, because in general there was a real fermentation of artistic expression in the 70s and 80s. Artists are caught up in a problem. They have become severed from the movements that carried that tradition forward into the transition. Artists these days are literally rolled in suits and ties to act as decorations for ANC success for the launch of a new TV station, a new corporation, or whatever. The organic link of ten years ago is no longer there. Artists are now in a twilight zone in which to practice their arts and express their anger.

This is just one example. On one hand you are a loner but on the other there is an audience. What’s missing is that sense of being part of a political thrust, a political movement towards something. This will not be easy to re-create until the left in a place like South Africa rethinks its way of dealing with culture. We don’t know what to do with artists if we can’t control them...

Another problem is we don’t know how to relate to what gives people a sense of fun. One should not buy the distinction between art and mass culture, popular culture. That’s not to say there are no differences, but where are the thresholds and lines? Kwaito music, which is a spin-off of traditional African music, hip-hop and house music, and has become a mania, speaks to South Africa’s black youth in a way no other art or cultural form does right now. It understands what it is like to be young, black, and living in a city in South Africa. Three out of every ten school leavers won’t get a job, perhaps not even for the next ten years. You are going to be poor and you are going to want things. Kwaito is a popular tool, a mass cultural tool which has been appropriated by the capitalist entertainment industry, but it is a tool millions of people are using to navigate through their very difficult lives.

We cannot avoid the fact we are in competition with many other products, unfortunately. There is no other way round than to try and make what you do compete. The one thing you cannot do if you want to be successful at competition is to retain the art as cultural dichotomy or attach too much value to it.

Discussion

Many of the questions and comments revolved around the situations in Chile and South Africa or compared the two countries. One comment was that South Africa and Chile have the same problem, namely that during the dictatorship in Chile the solidarity movement and resistance created fantastic happenings both inside and outside the country. Once democracy arrived art collapsed like a wet blanket. The question is, where are the artists now. When asked what they are going to do with the forthcoming presidential elections, many artists just say they haven’t been asked to do anything.

Cuba was also the source of a comment from the audience. There is criticism emerging there and that comes from the Union of Writers and Artists (UNIAC). For example, they pointed out to Fidel Castro that they don’t intend to present him with a whole lot of proposals concerning race, suggesting instead that he simply turn on his TV and look at how Afro-Cubans are portrayed.

The panel then proceeded to react to points raised by the public.

Saul Landau began by citing a letter he once wrote to John Berger in 1986 asking, what am I going to write after Pinochet is gone? John replied, you must write as if he had already been defeated, as if the future is already happening. This was a lesson in the sense you should not wait until things are to transgress - you have to transgress now.

Regarding the difference between mass culture and the elite of vanguard culture, we can have it all. We should not put them in opposition to each other, but at the same time, we should not necessarily fuse them either. It’s not a matter of whether you like or understand mass movements like Ska or Rap. The problem is the mass media produces Hollywood-like products. In the back alleys they are appropriating this music in different ways. We are also trying to appropriate different forms that are valid and trying to give them a different direction. The audience is there, they have these things in their head.

As for the question of the party line on art, whether it concerns the Nazi line, the Communist line, whether it is in South Africa, or whatever party line it is and no matter how it is stated, all tell artists what they can and should not do. For forty years three major questions have not surfaced in Cuba: race, gender and religion. They have not been allowed to surface because each one is potentially divisive. Historians will later ask why did people take such trouble to create or maintain a nation state at a time when the economy had become global and the nation state effectively had no real power. None of us asked this question while we fought for the liberation of this or that or the creation of this or that. All these struggles seemed appropriate at the time.

In the US ideas are worth less than anywhere else. The best sellers make a lot of money, therefore these are the ideas that count most. Essentially, ideas in a market situation are worth exactly what they will sell for. But as soon as you introduce censorship, ideas become important! People will do anything to read a forbidden manuscript. The moment you say publish anything, the shiniest cover will sell the most. This is one of the problems Chile is now facing - the market trivialises ideas.

Ari Sitas addressed the questions in an international context. While there used to be international solidarity, for a long time there has been no internationalism of the imagination. Artists themselves have to link to their immediate patronage systems in order to produce their craft. The energy is there and continues to be there in interesting ways at the grassroots, whether is South Africa, Chile or anywhere else. If we are serious about solidarity we have to start working on that. The market cannot be the mediator. Perhaps it is possible to re-negotiate a kind of international imagination which has to be [polycentric], generous, understanding, raise questions, and reconnect with things that make sense. For politicians it is the opposite. Artists can always be found to be adjunct to various causes, especially the immediate ones. However, a deeper connection to the new forms of social movements is the challenge, in which you create a space in which people are not treated in an instrumental way, in which their transgressive energy will be appreciated and criticised if need be.

Hein Marais answered the questions regarding patronage. Painters, sculptors and architects sustain themselves through patronage networks. What has happened through structural adjustment is that the source of patronage has dried up and has been replaced by the state. In South Africa there is a Department of Arts and Culture. If you want money you have to produce something that really looks hip and sexy. As an artist you are a video maker - if you want your programme aired on tv it has to have certain production values, and these cost money. If it is about women in rural areas, for instance, you run around from one fund to the other, but you never raise enough, so then you begin to sell yourself to sponsors. A Land Rover is used conspicuously throughout your video, for example. The patronage fountain has been depleted. The Minister of Arts and Culture has a very limited budget determined by the Finance Minister. Therefore, we cannot pretend the market is something we can just step around. Somehow we have to traverse it without becoming a slave and hostage to it. Music is perhaps a good example: it can be produced cheaply with a bit of sweat and blood.

In conclusion Saul Landau said there are many similarities between South Africa and Chile, but I found myself much more comfortable in South Africa than in Chile. In South Africa the whole country is in crisis and they don’t know who they are, while in Chile they think they think know who they are but they don’t have the foggiest idea of who they are. South Africa is most fascinating because people are really searching for who they are in all senses.