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On the Very Idea of a “Political” Work of Art*

2020; Wiley; Volume: 29; Issue: 1 Linguagem: Inglês

10.1111/jopp.12217

1467-9760

Diarmuid Costello,

Law in Society and Culture

Art can be “political” in a variety of ways. Mobilizing these differences offers correspondingly many ways for artists producing “political art” to understand themselves, and the activity in which they are engaged. To demonstrate this, I focus on a particular work of art (The Battle of Orgreave, 2001), by a particular contemporary artist (Jeremy Deller), seeking to locate it within this broader possibility space. The work consists in a re-enactment, as art, of a notoriously bloody confrontation that took place between police and picketing miners during the 1984–5 National Union of Mineworkers (NUM) strike. I went to a number of historical re-enactments, and they mostly seemed drained of the political and social narratives behind the original events … I wanted instead to work with re-enactors on a wholly political re-enactment of a battle … one that had taken place within living memory, that would be re-staged in the place it had happened, involving many of the people who had been there the first time round.1 In what follows, I aim to show that these seemingly contradictory attitudes towards the value of political art, and whether (and if so how) his own art should be considered “political,” can be rendered consistent by distinguishing carefully between a variety of ways in which art may be political, and locating Deller’s work within this wider space. Before proceeding, there is one worry I want to lay to rest at the outset, and doing so should clarify the debts that I do and do not mean to take on in what follows. Deller talks about a wholly political re-enactment, not a wholly political work of art. These need not come to the same thing: there are re-enactments that are not works of art (most re-enactments); and there are works of art that are not re-enactments (most works of art). So what justification could I have for running them together so casually here? The reason is straightforward: while re-enactments in particular will have many features that works of art in general do not share—notably re-enactment itself—qua art, they must nonetheless partake of whatever is generally true of works of art. The latter is not a topic I offer any view on here. Even so, the following problem then arises: what if it were to turn out that it is precisely those features that distinguish re-enactments in particular from works of art in general that make The Battle of Orgreave so interesting as political art? Indeed, I believe this to be true. Were I trying to frame a general theory of political art this would be a serious problem, but I am not: my claims are restricted to what makes this work (as I shall say) “strongly political.” While this has implications for the general conditions that have to be fulfilled for a work to count as such, how these are fulfilled in a particular case will have everything to do with the nature of the work in question; what renders The Battle of Orgreave strongly political may, but need not, generalize to what renders art in general strongly political, if and when it is. Rather than offering a general theory as to what makes art strongly (or weakly) political, I want to bring out what is significant, politically, about this particular work of art. Proceeding in this way is part of a methodological project I call “philosophical criticism,” which proposes a new way of doing substantive aesthetics that departs from dominant models in recent philosophy of art.2 My strategy is to reach a kind of reflective equilibrium between the (maximally general) ways in which works of art can, in principle, be considered political, and the (highly specific) ways in which The Battle of Orgreave is in fact political—given the specific social, economic, and political circumstances to which it responds. On the assumption that my more abstract remarks succeed in characterizing the available conceptual space, at least in broad outline, my hope is to illuminate not only what is original about The Battle of Orgreave—relative to this broader possibility space—but, thereby, the source of its exemplarity as a political work of art. Understanding the relation between the maximally abstract and the maximally concrete is necessary to bring this out. What has come to be known, colloquially, as “The Battle of Orgreave” took place in South Yorkshire on 18 June 1984, during the 1984–5 NUM Strike. Orgreave, a small suburban village east of Sheffield, was the site of a coking plant that British Steel used to power its mills in Scunthorpe. During the strike, the NUM had an informal arrangement with British Steel, known as a “dispensation,” that it would supply just enough coal to keep the mills ticking over—to prevent damage to the furnaces should they be forced to shut down entirely—but not enough to produce steel. British Steel broke this agreement unilaterally, when it starting running additional coke, in defiance of the strike, from Orgreave. The NUM responded with mass picketing in an attempt to prevent trucks getting in and out of the coking plant, and the resulting conflict became a flashpoint that took on a strategic and symbolic importance far in excess of the material significance of the coke produced by this particular site. Symbolically, it spoke to the miners’ capacity to retain control over their own production; strategically, it spoke to their ability to mobilize other sectors of the industrial working class to come out in solidarity with the striking miners.3 It is estimated that as many as 15,000 people were caught up in the historical event, which involved more than 8,000 police and 6,000 miners, and resembled territorial warfare more than an industrial dispute. Deller titled the book of source material and documentation that he published to accompany the re-enactment of the events of 18 June 1984 The English Civil War: Part II. Like a Civil War, it split communities, pitching striking miners against working miners, and local miners against local police. The day culminated in a mounted police charge intended to disperse the miners from a confined field that compelled hundreds to flee over a parapet and down a steep railway embankment onto a live railway line: 70 miners were hospitalized as a result, and a total of 95 were arrested on charges of riot, unlawful assembly, or affray.4 All 95 were later acquitted due to “unreliable” (which is to say, fabricated) police evidence. South Yorkshire Police were eventually forced to pay out £425,000 in compensation for assault, wrongful arrest, unlawful detention, and malicious prosecution in an out of court settlement, thereby avoiding any formal admission of liability or guilt.5 Unlike the battle itself, this payout went largely unreported in the mainstream media.6 The confrontation itself was a massive show of state force, employing tactics previously reserved for non-domestic colonial use, tweaked in light of the recent Brixton and Toxteth riots.7 It has since emerged that many of the police used on the day were “Met” (that is, Metropolitan or Greater London Police) officers, specifically trained up for the purpose, and it has been alleged that the army was deployed in unnumbered, non-identifiable police uniforms—under strict instruction not to arrest anyone as they would be unable to do so legally. As this suggests, the stakes were extremely high, both politically and ideologically. The senior Labour politician and one-time leadership candidate, Tony Benn, described it a civil war launched by Margaret Thatcher against sectors of the industrial working class. Thatcher herself saw defeating the unions as a prerequisite to liberalizing the British economy, branding the miners fighting pit closures as “the enemy within,” a phrase lifted directly from Enoch Powell’s hugely divisive “Rivers of Blood” speech about post-war immigration. Setting aside the racist implications of invoking Powell at all, regarded as off-limits even by mainstream Conservatives, many miners or their immediate families had seen active service in the armed forces as recently as the 1982 Falklands War. Those who had, unsurprisingly, bitterly resented being described as the “enemy within.” In addition to its political significance, then, it was a hugely acrimonious dispute. The amount of disinformation in circulation at the time is still shocking: the BBC, supposed bastion of impartial broadcasting, was found to have edited evening news footage in such a way as to portray the miners as rioters, launching an unprovoked attack on the police with missiles, to which the police responded with a horse charge to disperse them. The raw, unedited footage clearly shows the true order of events to have been the reverse: a largely unprovoked mounted police charge caused a riot.8 Commentators on the left have long believed that the stakes were perceived to be so high politically because various Conservative ministers had experienced first-hand the consequences of Edward Heath’s failure to face down the 1972 miners’ strike, when Arthur Scargill (then an obscure Barnsley union official) had successfully used mass picketing to close the Saltley coal depot.9 Failure to defeat the 1972 strike is widely regarded as a significant factor in bringing down Heath’s government, with the outbreak of a second NUM strike in 1974. As a result, many Conservatives, not least Thatcher herself, believed they could not afford to lose another confrontation with the NUM, and were prepared to do whatever it took, including stockpiling coal and (allegedly) deploying the army in unnumbered police uniforms, to defeat it.10 Under Scargill, the NUM was regarded as the vanguard of militant trade unionism, such that defeating the miners would go a long way to breaking the resolve of the unions. And so it proved. I remember watching it on TV when I was 17 or 18 and it made an impression on me there, seeing the horses going through, all those iconic images of riots … it was a moment of realisation for me looking at that, just thinking: well there is something seriously wrong with this country if this is what we have to do to people.12 I was not so much trying to recuperate the recent past as dig up a festering body and give it a proper post-mortem … I was not interested in healing the wounds of the strike, as some commentators have subsequently speculated; rather I wanted to re-open the wounds if anything, and the miners who participated in the re-enactment knew this, as it was always a part of our discussions.13 The sheer scale of the resulting work bears remarking: Deller’s restaging involved some 1,000 participants, including 800 members of over 20 different re-enactment societies, including the specialist English Civil War Society and the Sealed Knot, all reporting to a single “Re-enactment Director,” Howard Giles, a re-enactment specialist and pioneer of “living history” at English Heritage for over 15 years.14 In addition to the re-enactors, some 200 participants from the original events were recruited through local advertising, mainly miners, but also a few policemen and paramedics. Some even cross-dressed; with miners appearing as police and vice versa. Deller’s use of re-enactment societies was undoubtedly pragmatic, but it was also highly strategic: by employing re-enactment societies, Deller situated the event within a lineage of notable battles in British history, the stock-in-trade of such societies. The title of his accompanying book, The English Civil War: Part II, makes this intention plain, as does the perhaps less obvious fact that the work was realized by bringing together demographics with polarized political sympathies. Bringing these individuals and organizations together, and working out the logistics of staging such an event, required the participation of a major arts commissioning body, and 18 months of preparation, including over 30 site visits.15 More than its physical scale, however, it is the artistic ambition of the work that is most impressive. Mike Figgis’s eponymous film, documenting both its making and the re-enactment itself, was first broadcast in the UK on Channel 4 on 20 October 2002. I can still recall being amazed that a contemporary artist had not only the ambition, but also the moral and political seriousness, to tackle an event of this magnitude as art—given the market-driven triviality of so much of what passed for contemporary “young British Art” at the time.16 Delivering on the claim that art could still be an appropriate vehicle to address a topic of such significance in recent political history would already be enough to make the work (what I shall call) “weakly” political art of the highest order: roughly, art that addresses a topic of political significance and is thereby political at the level of its subject-matter or thematic content. But the fact that it does so by enlisting the help of various collaborators, including participants in the original events, and then dealing with the significant additional organizational and ethical complexity that this throws up, is what makes the work “wholly political” in Deller’s terms, and “strongly” political in mine. That is, political through and through—down to its internal “principles of construction.” To show this, I now want to survey some of the most general ways in which art might, in principle, be considered political. Start with arguably the most general claim that might be made for the political significance of art, namely, that the very activity of making art is political. How so? Well, perhaps the refusal to be a productive member of society, where this is taken to involve conceiving of oneself as a well-oiled cog in the social institution of making a living through salaried labour, is political. So understood, making art might centrally involve the refusal of a certain kind of instrumental means–end rationality—“It’s a shit job, but, hey, it pays the rent”—as the only, let alone the best, way of understanding a productive life. So conceived, the implied counter-conception of what it is to live a flourishing life, consisting of doing something for its own sake, irrespective of likely financial reward, is itself political. Unfortunately, the view that art as such is political provokes more questions than it answers. On the one hand, if the very activity of making art is political, then what distinguishes making art from engaging in political activity more obviously (protesting, lobbying or campaigning, forming political parties, contesting elections, and the like)? On the other, if art is intrinsically political, how should we make sense of the evident differences between art that is manifestly political, in terms of its subject-matter, and art that certainly appears apolitical? In what follows, I am going to focus on the latter question. What, if all art is political, distinguishes between art that clearly addresses a theme of political interest or adopts a political stance towards some issue, and art that seems to do no such thing? Perhaps what we need is a distinction between work that is explicitly political and work that is only implicitly so. This would be to concede that all art is political, at least in some sense, but not that all art need wear either its politics, or indeed its political nature, on its sleeve. Prima facie, this does not seem like an outrageous concession to make to the “art as such” is political view. But, one might ask: why accept that all art is political in the first place? Indeed, if all art is (either explicitly or implicitly) political, can it be political in a sense that does not generalize to all social relations and cultural activities? Once one understands the political this broadly, it ceases to distinguish between some activities and others, thereby ceasing to mean anything determinate. This renders the designation “political art” tautologous, since it effectively reduces to art full stop. For reasons of this kind, it may be better to give up on the thought that all art is political, after all. So consider an alternative way of carving the field. Perhaps what I have been calling “explicitly political” art just is political art, and what I have been calling “implicitly political” art is not political at all. Perhaps there is instead political art, apolitical art and non-political art, where this distinguishes between art that recognizes itself as political, art that is indifferent to this description, and art that actively rejects being understood in these terms. In that case only some art would be genuinely political, and what appears to make the most obvious difference is the work’s content. But why accept that we sort between the political and the non-political solely by examining the content of various works of art? This is to assume not only that whether or not a work of art is political is manifest, but also that this will hold irrespective of context. Were that true, whether or not a work of art “is political” would be akin to whether or not it is made with certain materials, say, “is paint on canvas.” Both claims are true of Pablo Picasso’s Guernica, for example, and both can be confirmed by examining the work directly. Moreover, if either is true today, it will remain true tomorrow. This is, at least implicitly, to conceive what determines whether or not a work is political as an empirical feature of the work that is open to inspection and taken to hold in isolation. This may be to look for what it is that makes a work political in the wrong place. Perhaps what makes a work political is not some feature internal to the work itself but, rather, a feature of its relation to a background context or condition that obtains independently of the work. This would be to conceive the predicate “— is political” differently to (one place) predicates such as “— is rectangular,” “— is monochrome,” or “— is made of canvas.” It is to conceive it as a two-term rather than a one-term relation. As a two-term relation, determining whether or not such a predicate obtains will depend on factors other than just the work (and the meaning of the predicates applied to it). If so, the question cannot be resolved simply by examining the work itself. Call this a “relational” property. If this is true, a work may be political in some contexts but not others or, at least, a work may be perceived as political in some contexts but not others, or as having quite a different political value or meaning in one context than in another. Painting the portrait of a particular individual—living or dead—or making a work commemorating a certain event, for example, might be completely conformist or banal in one context, yet highly provocative in another, and so on. If this is right, the question needs to be reformulated. Perhaps we should ask not “What is political art?” but “When (or perhaps even Where) is art political?”. And answering it would require considering not only the work itself, but the historical and social circumstances in which it was made, the context for which it was intended, and the circumstances in which it is actually received. And something like this assumption does seem to be implicit in our everyday notion of political art, for the reasons just given. We recognize, without self-conscious reflection, that carrying a placard depicting the portrait of a particular individual, perhaps a dissident, may be extremely dangerous in some contexts, yet entirely on message in others.17 It is worth making this feature of our everyday folk notion of political art explicit, since it makes clear that simply scrutinizing the work, no matter how closely, will not—indeed cannot—settle the matter; since whether or not a work is political is not a fact about the work itself taken in isolation. While I am sympathetic to this proposal, note that, even if true, it cannot be the whole story. For it does not yet provide an answer capable of sorting between works of art relative to the same context, just as the “all art is political” view failed to do. Both views are unsatisfactory to the extent that neither speaks to our sense that certain works make a manifestly political claim, relative to a given socio-historical context (such as here and now), while other works do not. I have now considered and rejected two ways to go here: the implicitly versus explicitly political art route, and the political versus non-political art route. What they have in common is that both appeal to the work’s content, conceived non-relationally. I am going to try out a different response. Could it be instead that some works are “strongly” political, while other works are only “weakly” so? Note that this cannot be the distinction between “explicitly” and “implicitly” political art (as understood by those who think all art is political) rebadged, since explicitly political art will turn out to be only weakly political on this account, while implicitly political art will not count as political at all. Note that what has not figured in the dialectic at all as yet is any consideration of the work’s form. Could it be that whether or not a work of art is political, and if so how, is best addressed by examining the work’s form, or at least not solely in terms of its content alone? In that case it would pertain not (or at least not solely) to what the work is about, but also to how it is realized—or what I shall term the work’s “principles of construction.” Roughly, the form a work takes on in virtue of how it comes into being. One of the main merits of the relational considerations just rehearsed may be to direct our attention in this way to just such questions of genesis.18 A few clarifications may be in order before unpacking the distinction between weakly and strongly political art, as I understand this, in greater detail. First, I want to remain neutral, for present purposes, on the issue of whether making art is, as such, a political activity and, if so, in what sense. While this may be true in some sense of the term “political,” it could only be in a sense other than the one I have in mind here. So set this to one side. Second, although I will not argue for this claim here, I believe there are examples of both “strongly” and “weakly” political art, as I understand these terms, in Deller’s oeuvre and, to my mind, they tend to line up with whether his work is good or bad as art. But the salient point here is that this is not because I have any theoretical investment in art being strongly political; I neither believe that art should be political, nor that it should be strongly so, if and when it is. Rather, it is a strictly critical judgement. [It] changed everything for me. It was the first time I had worked on a project with a group of people … Acid Brass made clear to me that I did not actually have to make things by myself any more—that I could collaborate with people instead, which was a relief as my technical abilities were always limited.19 Or, as he has expressed it more pithily elsewhere: “when you don’t have technical skills, you have to survive on your wits.”20 For reasons of this kind—though not only for reasons of this kind—Deller is at his best when his practice animates diverse groups, by bringing together unusual combinations of people (such as ex-miners and amateur re-enactors here) to work on collaborative projects that are not only distinctly odd, but that often provoke questions as to whether the activity in question should even be considered art.21 Finally, “weak” and “strong” as I use these terms here are descriptive rather than normative. No evaluation is intended and none should be assumed: a work is not better as art simply by virtue of being strongly rather than weakly political, though it will certainly be different; not least, it will have additional layers of complexity. In so far as its complexity is a virtue, and it is not always, this may make it better. But being good or bad as art, and being strongly or weakly political, are in principle independent: a work can be weakly political and great as art, or strongly political and meretricious as art. Examples are numerous. A work is weakly political in so far as it has political subject-matter, but takes the conventional form of art for granted in the realization of that subject-matter. A work is strongly political, by contrast, if it not only has a political subject-matter, but subjects the principles of construction underlying its own form to political critique. A work is weakly political in so far as it has — subject-matter, but takes the conventional form of art for granted in the realization of that subject-matter. A work is strongly political, by contrast, if it not only has a — subject-matter, but subjects the principles of construction underlying its form to — critique. The account is no longer circular, but it is still uninformative—indeed much more profoundly so. What’s more, it lets in far too much. What kind of subject-matter? What kind of critique? Any work with subject-matter—at least arguably, any work at all—would count as weakly political so construed, forcing us back into the “all art is political” view rejected at the outset. But would we really want to say that Edouard Manet’s Moss Roses in a Vases (1882) or Jean-Baptiste-Simeon Chardin’s Basket of Strawberries (c.1761) are even weakly political? Similarly, any work that challenges conventional artistic form in any way would count as strongly political so construed. But do we really want to say that Pollock’s Number One (1948) or Richard Serra’s Throwing Lead (1971) are strongly political, despite possessing no political content in the everyday sense? A work is weakly political in so far as it has political subject-matter, but takes the conventional form of art for granted in the realization of that subject-matter. A work is strongly political, by contrast, if it not only has a political subject-matter, but subjects the principles of construction underlying its own form to political critique. Clearly, this does not say what it is that makes something a political work of art. But nor does it aspire to: I am not trying to answer that question here. Because I am not trying to provide a theory of the political, or of what makes art political, my proposal is intended to be neutral on both the intension and the extension of the concept of the “political.” If it succeeds in this, one should in principle be able to plug in one’s preferred theory of the political at this point. That said, my proposal regarding The Battle of Orgreave not only draws attention to, but will also trade upon, the different scope the idea of politics can take on, depending on how permissively or restrictively political relations are conceived. Most narrowly or restrictively conceived, “politics” concerns the use of formal state mechanisms to exert coercive authority over its own citizens. The role of the police (and army) at Orgreave was political in this sense, and Deller clearly recognizes this fact: “The Battle of Orgreave is a political work without a doubt … It’s about the state and the power of the state. And also, the lengths the state will go to in order to see its aims through.”22 At the level of its subject-matter, then, Deller’s The Battle of Orgreave is political in the strict sense; it documents the sanctioned use of state violence. Less strictly or more permissively conceived, “politics” can be taken to include an ever-wider sphere of activities, such as lobbying by various non-governmental bodies, industries, and agencies. At its most permissive, it can be taken to include any exercise of power by an individual or group in more or less any familial, domestic, or workplace setting. The horror of departmental politics springs to mind. So understood, domestic violence would count—perhaps even paradigmatically—as political. Note that on this more informal or permissive conception of politics, Deller’s relation with his collaborators also counts as political, albeit in a less strict sense than the work’s content. There is what one might call a “politics of collaboration” at stake in the work. Rather than treating his collaborators as mere hands, paid to execute his will remotely, Deller engages with his collaborators at some length. In doing so, he grants them considerable responsibility for the final form the work takes on, and relinquishes at least part of his authorial control in the process. This point is widely acknowledged by commentators. In “Jeremy Deller’s Political Imaginary,” without doubt one of the most insightful accounts of Deller’s politics, Stuart Hall notes that, despite not making protest art, or even being especially political in the conventional sense of the term, Deller is first and foremost an “animator” of others, and this is a political fact about his practice.23 In a similar vein, Claire Bishop takes The Battle of Orgreave to be an exemplary case of “participatory art,” that is, art in which people are the primary material mobilized by the artist.24 If either is right—and I believe both are—then how Deller relates to his collaborators will prove crucial. This brings me to the relation between the two conditions that strongly political art needs to fulfil on my account: that it not only have political content, but that it also embody that content at the level of the work’s form, by subjecting the principles of construction underwriting its own form to political critique. Are these two independent requirements, or does the way in which a work subjects its principles of construction to critique need to leverage its own content in some way? More specifically, does a strongly political work need to bring its political content to bear, internally, on the construction of its artistic form? If it does, the resulting unity of form and content would be the locus of its real political significance as art, since it would be achieved through its internal construction as a work. Recall my opening citations: with The Battle of Orgreave Deller se