"Art is truth"; but can truth be political?
Andy Sturdevant of South 12th posted an excellent essay about John F. Kennedy’s assertion that “art is truth,” which comes from a speech Sturdevant excerpts, compares to Glenn Beck’s remarks on art, and partially disputes.
If art is to nourish the roots of our culture, society must set the artist free to follow his vision wherever it takes him. We must never forget that art is not a form of propaganda; it is a form of truth… In free society art is not a weapon and it does not belong to the spheres of polemic and ideology. Artists are not engineers of the soul. It may be different elsewhere. But democratic society—in it, the highest duty of the writer, the composer, the artist is to remain true to himself and to let the chips fall where they may.
Kennedy was likely contrasting the art of the West with Socialist Realism in particular, the Russian movement directed by the Soviet government to support official party policy. Art that didn’t directly support Communist principles or “inspire” the “workers” was considered not merely useless but bourgeoisie and reactionary. What was personal, individual, interior was deplored: “The private life is dead in Russia for a man with any manhood,” and this was true for the scribe as well as the soldier.
To be preoccupied with such a scale of life -love, death, family- in a time of global proletarian struggle was clearly anti-social solipsism, and therefore anti-Socialist sabotage. So Bulgakov is censored while Gorky thrives.
For many, particularly survivors of Soviet domination like Milan Kundera, the idea that politics is incompatible with art is axiomatic. But Sturdevant notes several artists, and there are many, who exemplify his claim that “Art canbe an ideological weapon in a free society, obviously, and there have been plenty of times in American history where it has been used as such.”
While I tend to dislike political art -which is not exploratory but expository, which does not seek truth but rather tells us where to find it, which is not existential but teleological (and therefore often dull and dated)- I am interested in what seems to follow from Kennedy’s claim. If art is truth and art cannot be political, is it fair to say that what is political is necessarily untrue?
I think it perhaps is, since what is political is aggregatory, reductive, and systematic, all qualities I associate with the subtle falsity of reason run amok. Kennedy seems to suggest as much when he says that truth emerges when the artist “remain[s] true to himself and… let[s] the chips fall where they may.”
That is: undirected fidelity to the individual, concern with the human, yields meaningful artistic truth. As all politics are teleological and subordinate the individual to theory, the chips cannot fall where they may. Their artificial arrangment may be moving, moralistically affecting, beautiful, but tied to the moment it won’t be enduring.
But that is just one view, and the point is: Sturdevant’s post is awesome.
