Many will remember the seizure of four paintings by Konstantin Altunin depicting Russian officials Vladimir Putin and Dmitry Medvedev in women’s lingerie. But few know that the artist fled the country after his work was said, by the police, to have breached “unspecified legislation,” according to the BBC. The St. Petersburg Museum of Power in which the paintings were displayed has yet to reopen.
These images were a response to Medvedev and Putin’s recent backing of controversial anti-gay laws, and their forced removal speaks to a threat to the role art deserves to play in politics.
Art is one of the few truly universal forms of communication — it exists in each of the world’s cultures regardless of time or place and doesn’t seek to ignore or eliminate the differences and biases of its viewers but embraces them instead. It’s a powerful social instrument in the way it speaks to everyone who encounters it.
One of the most notable examples is Situationist International, a group of social revolutionaries based in France who were active during the 1950s and 60s. These intellectuals and political theorists, heavily influenced by Dadaism and Surrealism, adamantly rejected the idea that advanced capitalism benefits outweigh its setbacks.
Through the use of highly charged pamphlets and street posters, the SI helped trigger the May 1968 revolt which ultimately brought the French capitalist economy to a grinding halt.
Historically artists and intellectuals are often the first to harbor revolutionary ideas, and as such, they tend to encounter the most censorship when it comes to the social and political messages their art contains. Friedrich Schiller’s poem “Ode to Joy,” upon which Beethoven’s Symphony No. 9 is based, was originally entitled “Ode to Freedom” but was changed because of Napoleonic sensors.
On Christmas of 1989, a month after the fall of the Berlin Wall, American conductor Leonard Bernstein led a performance of Beethoven’s Symphony No. 9 at the site of the former East-West border in which he substituted “freedom” for “joy.” According to the New York Times, Bernstein did this to relay a personal message, and his performance was “timed to end at midnight Saturday, when West Germans were allowed to travel without visas into East Germany for the first time.”
Music has long attracted notice for its social and cultural influence. Protest music in America traces its roots as far back as the 18th century, and popular musicians of the 1960s such as Bob Dylan and Pete Seeger are also known for using their medium to speak out against war, racism and industrialization.
More recently street artists like Banksy are known for their use of city streets as canvases, and performance art has also become a powerful tool for political expression. Moscow-based radical art collective Voina has staged several performances directed against homophobia and the ill treatment of prisoners, their latest stunt protesting the abuses of power by Russian police.
Each of these instances demonstrates art’s organic ability to make us think, and our state is no stranger to this. Utah-based artist Jon McNaughton has recently attracted international attention for his use of politics and religion in his work, such as “The Demise of America,” which depicts Obama playing the violin while the Capitol smolders behind him. And last February, Utah State University featured 16 artists of varying political views paired together at random to create pieces in an exhibition entitled “E Pluribus Unum.”
Art and politics are too intricately bound to be extricated or separated. Dutch-American author Hendrik Willem van Loon once said, “The arts are an even better barometer of what is happening in our world than the stock market or the debates in Congress.” This barometer gives us valuable insight into the lives of those around us. Without it we lose each other and ourselves.