Art and politics: representation, production, and reproduction

In this program, we are studying art and politics: the political context, implications and potentialities of art, and the art of political ritual, performance, representation and criticism. These practices intersect richly in the context of recent and deep Peruvian history. Though the desire to congeal experiences and memories into objects seems common to most humans (who like to build things, create words, take pictures, write blogs, etc), in Peru in particular I can sense a passion for committing oneself to creating community and history by the process of self-objectification: pouring ones time, energy, personality, skill, ideology, desires, thoughts and emotions into an object that reflects the convergence of these activities. Such “objects” are nearly always artistic and political, regardless of whether they take the form of an artisanal retablo (seen above), repeated performances for tourists, abstract aesthetically-motivated paintings or propaganda scrawled on a wall; they are all artistic for their intent to represent, to produce and share meaning; they are all political as they are produced by actors enmeshed in transforming social-historical processes and the objects themselves change the world by their existence.

As reflections of and reactions to social realities, art can reproduce or revolutionize politics; as producer/product of these same realities, politics can reproduce or revolutionize art. Art is an intentional, self-conscious act of production that serves to re-present the context from which it is produced; politics is a historically emergent, frequently unconscious act of social reproduction that represents an imagined collective reality. For this reason, studying art is essential to studying politics (and vice versa). Though each produces and becomes produced by the other, art’s conscious nature (as apparently absurd, irrational, instrumentally useless, a purely social-psychological phenomena that must justify itself) distinguishes it. From within this conscious act of creating meaning, we can identify and extract the unconscious historical/political/social representations which it reflects and/or reacts against.

For example, in “Aguas Profundas”, a theatrical work we experienced in the impoverished but self-made Villa El Salvador district of Lima, the overt theme of water crisis mirrored the anger and anxieties surrounding local/global environmental catastrophe and the inefficient, unequal distribution of water in Lima. Specific elements further reflected the social realities of life in Villa El Salvador: the props buried within the set echoing the ubiquitous piles of garbage lining the streets; absurd performances by white devils and sonorous politicians; a pervasive sense of loss, grief, hopelessness but also solidarity and struggle as the only possible course of action. By producing this work, Teatro de Vichama has changed Villa El Salvador itself, perhaps granting it some prestige as an artistic haven and even hope for more “bread and beauty”.

affirming artisan pride, a political position, and a football club (Alianza Lima) 

More than anything so far, I’ve loved the rich sense of representative responsibility (i.e. a consciousness of the power of symbolism and the necessity of sharing meaning) When walking through Lima, street art of various forms (mostly graffiti, election slogans and some murals) decorates most open or unprotected walls; in many areas it dominates the visual-symbolic content of the space (over advertisements). Political strife and moments of solidarity painted onto the surface of the city, reflecting an election that reflected the convergence of greater historical processes (anxieties surrounding war, race, property). Other forms of symbolism lie behind and around the paint, in the government buildings, monuments, and the general city layout – each reflections and in a sense, collective representations of a history of colonialism transformed and camouflaged into the story of neoliberal progress – a story and reality that, according to sociologist Victor Vich, Peruvian artists have been reacting to for the past decade.

How should I react to these reflections? What is my purpose and position as the observer of these processes? (I’ll reflect on these questions in future posts, hopefully in more concrete, less obscure ways…)