Art as Counter-Revolutionary Toilet Paper
The Death of Marat, oil on canvas by Jacques-Louis David, 1793. Courtesy of Wikimedia Commons.
It’s September 1st, and I’m in the Museum of Modern Art (MoMA). David Wojnarowicz’s Fire welcomes me into the sixth story gallery, and I think to myself whether there could ever exist a more overt critique of capitalism. Discrete natural symbolisms, the Ouroboros circling wanted fugitive advertisements, and an all-time classic: red-white commercial stickers. The entire “conflicted artist” bundle. Later, I encounter Toba Khendoori’s Doors, an enormous piece depicting what appears to be an abstract rural motel—a landscape of doors, mostly identical to one another. Just upstairs, an off-puttingly similar Warhol’s Campbell's Soup Cans. The only difference between these two was the bigger crowd at Warhol’s sermon. There in the same room is Wolf Vostell’s Lipstick Bomber. The point became clear eventually. MoMA is a fort of liberation against the status quo, built by critics addressing issues such as rampant consumerism, the pressures of standardization, and various forms of societal oppression.
Contemporary art is among many fields whose practitioners and audiences heavily lean toward the political left. And I can understand why. I felt a temporal zeal for the revolutionary spirit, tightening the room that I shared with Wojnarowicz’s painting. The aesthetics of discontent and revolution are profoundly attractive—perhaps too attractive for their own good. It becomes harder to engage with revolutionary art as such when one is reminded of the structural stagnation facing our economic framework. Though it is likely that our artists would not be content with a revolution––a fundamental change of our relations to property—bound solely by MoMA’s ticket booths, there remains a clear gap between the sentiments that lie inside and outside the walls of art galleries. In examining this contradiction, one obvious question presents itself: How can there be an unusual interest in revolutionary art and yet, no revolution? How can the excitement for progress paint so many paintings but no political banners?
On the Production of Art
The everlasting bond between artisthood and revolution has a prolonged history. Walter Benjamin addresses this early in the 20th century, as written in Pierre Naville’s famous 1927 pamphlet The Revolution and the Intellectuals. Both argue that although art had been an aesthetic and moral tool of the ruling class for much of written history, the ruling class’s hostility toward radical intellectual freedom began pushing the artist bourgeoisie to the left in Europe, especially as they abandoned classical aesthetics. This process was exacerbated by the turn of political events at the time, notably France’s war against Morocco which saw tremendous criticism by the journal La Révolution Surréaliste.
It is a common topic of debate within leftist circles—as is almost every phenomenon, existent or not—what a revolutionary art movement or revolutionary art looks like. For Benjamin, it’s on the MoMA’s fifth floor, the Debra and Leon Black Gallery. It is Giorgio de Chirico, Leonora Carrington, and René Magritte:
“Surrealism has come ever closer to the Communist answer. And that means pessimism all along the line. Absolutely. Mistrust in the fate of literature, mistrust in the fate of freedom, mistrust in the fate of European humanity, but three times mistrust in all reconciliation: between classes, between nations, between individuals. And unlimited trust only in I.G. Farben and the peaceful perfection of the air force.”
Precisely, the complete eradication of morality in relation to the sphere of politics. The great revolution in the medium of arts is to snatch away the card of morality from the hands of the ruling bourgeoisie, to look at the system and laugh at its illegitimate self-justification. This is the noble task to which many contemporary artists hold themselves. Benjamin concludes his essay by reminding the reader that while revolution is prepared in contemplation, it is not sparked by that contemplation. It is then clear that artists cannot be burdened with the entire guilt of lack of a political revolution, because the artist’s primal concern is instead the aesthetic revolution.
Leon Trotsky is a lot more skeptical of art’s strength to cause an aesthetic revolution, let alone a political one. The central claim in Art and Politics in Our Epoch is that “art, which is the most complex part of culture, the most sensitive and at the same time the least protected, suffers most from the decline and decay of bourgeois society.” Modern artistic movements become subjects of the crisis of the bourgeoisie and are unable to complete their development. This is to say that their conventions limit them from being able to actualise their potential as an aesthetic form of expression. As this irresolution exists due to structural dynamics, the resolution of revolutionary art to its final form is impossible through art. This speaks to Trotsky’s larger thesis in Literature and Revolution, which is that revolutionary-proletarian art is only possible in the broader context of revolutionary property relations. Therefore, just as Benjamin points out, the meaningless and petty calls for “proletarian art” that would organize the masses into action misses the larger point.
Trotsky characterizes all art prior to the revolution as “pre-revolutionary” and holds them susceptible to counter-revolutionary sentiments. The most dangerous product of pre-revolutionary art, as he accentuates, is melancholy. This is because melancholy, in its mystification—its display of capitalist reality as a natural inevitability—of the societal problems surrounding the individual, prescribes a sense of bourgeois reconciliation with suffering as a solution to those problems. In other words, in the melancholic pre-revolutionary art, the oppressed becomes identified with its oppression. This is a problem by contradiction, simply because the only self-identifier for the Marxist proletariat is that it despises its identifier in relation to the system. It is also a problem in the functional sense because it leads the individual to a form of pacifism and withdrawal from society, distancing them from the revolution.
This is exactly what Benjamin writes at the end of his most famous essay, Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction. Fascism encourages the proletariat to express its grievances, its noble self-sacrifice to the system, weaving party banners made of its sweat and blood-stained uniforms. However, this aesthetic emancipation comes at the expense of any real transformation of the property relations that give cause to such grievances. Instead, the proletariat embraces its oppression and identifies with it while the bourgeoisie remain at their material position, theatrically “representing” the masses. Thus, the status quo is adorned, not dismantled. Fascism mystifies the revolution and reincarnates it in the aesthetic realm.
It is debatable whether the art in MoMA falls into the trap of romanticization of suffering. For the most part, it is not as apparent as it was in Nomadland, the Oscar-winning movie that became an opium-induced nightmare for Marxist aestheticians because of this very problem. It is, however, not a feasible argument to generalize this criticism to all art. Could there be an alternative analysis—an analysis of our engagement with art as opposed to its production—that could unveil certain truths that interest us?
On the Consumption of Art
An interesting comparison which would further our understanding of art’s function in our society is the comparison between art exhibitions and “Liberated Zones” in public protests. Columbia University students are particularly familiar with these, but by no means are they unique to our campus. Numerous examples have appeared throughout the 21st century: in Greece’s 2011 anti-austerity protests, and more recently, during the Black Lives Matter movement. These “Liberated Zones” are geographical areas that are socially and politically occupied by the people in the name of liberation.
Slavoj Žižek gives examples of “occupied zones” from the Occupy Wall Street Movement, arguing that unless they are part of a larger political project that brings about systematic change, the movement may fall into the same mystification trap whereby the oppressed identifies with its oppression. “Class-struggle essentialism,” a form of false consciousness, in the absence of a feasible structural alternative, as he coined the term, is the real danger behind such “Liberated Zones.”
Is this not precisely the manner in which we exercise our artistic tendencies in our contemporary system? We attend our “Liberated Zones” and art exhibitions to reflect upon our experience of exploitation within the system, only after completing our exhaustive exploitation within the system. You know, after paying our full tuition fee or attending our underpaid nine-to-five jobs? And instead of heightening and exacerbating our rage against the system, these circles function as an exploitation-free safe zone of pacification. We reward ourselves with aesthetic entitlement, call each other honorary comrades, and take pride in our gathering before dispersing shortly after. Thus, we end up using these art exhibitions as toilets where we shit out our revolutionary anger so that what’s left in us is a mere passive sadness that needs no expression in the medium of Realpolitik.
And in this formal dynamic by which we engage with art, we can observe a fascinating phenomenon. The process of mystification is not within the production of art, but within its consumption. This is to say that even if the art itself avoids the sin of mystification, we experience the mystification as though it pertains to us in our engagement.
The object of analysis at stake here is the “rating systems” of art, most predominant in its acoustic spheres. Mainstream music critique sites such as RateYourMusic and Pitchfork use rating systems that subjugate the quality of a work of art to a number between 0 and 10. More famously, we may find the same concept in IMDB. Although the idea of a 0–10 rating placed next to the artist’s name in MoMA sounds degenerate and extremely distant, this is not far off from how we personally engage with its collections. We often find ourselves asking whether an art piece is “good,” and for the reasons why it could and couldn’t qualify as “good.”
The idea of a 0–10 rating system as it pertains to the objective value of art is a dialectical product of the personalization of art. Such “objective” criticisms cannot exist unrelated to their dialectical opposite, subjective criticisms of art. Is it through observing artistic discourse through the lens of personal preference and against the lens of technical preference that such rating systems retain their very existence. The reproduction of 0–10 rating systems is a result of us asking ourselves what art piece speaks to us on a personal level, what our “favorite” album is, which songs are in our top 10 list, and more.
Hence, the true parallels between Benjamin and Trotsky appear in our dialogue. This discourse over the personalization and depersonalization of art results in its mystification. To engage with art through this discourse is to be blind to the non-totality of art and the contradictions it carries in its relation to the wider system. As Benjamin’s surrealists snatch the cards of morality from the hands of the bourgeoisie and rip them apart, we the people collect and glue the pieces together, to pretend that they were made for us all along. Benjamin never wanted those cards in the proletarian hands because he knew the exact problem that would emerge: the aestheticization of politics. This is art as anti-politics.
On the Domestication of Art
Before leaving the museum, I decide to return to Wojnarowicz’s painting to explore why it was making me uncomfortable. After I spend a good deal of time staring at it, it comes to me. This confusion, a sort of resentment I had for art itself. From the oblique geometry, to the arbitrary allegory, to the not-quite-pop-art style, the predictable unpredictableness of the painting—the overtness of it was too much. The further I looked into it, the emptier the canvas became. Why was anything on it? The painting was a parody of itself, of artmaking, and of art consumption. Whether it did this intentionally or unintentionally, I do not care; it doesn’t matter. It was the death of political art.
All of this points to one inescapable conclusion: the domestication of revolutionary art. Art is, perhaps more so than ever, no longer a tool of revolution because the way in which we engage with art is a source of mystification. What, then? Is our alternative creation a sort of depersonalized Stalinist social realism, whereby the individual artistic integrity is diminished for the sake of popular accessibility? No! Isn’t this already the aesthetic of conservative art?
For now, we must turn all the paintings in MoMA against the walls. What we need is a good old-fashioned Montaignian “gazing inwards,” a complete transformation of our relation to art itself. Instead of questioning the quality of art, we must question its possibility. How can such an expression of individuality emerge in our status quo in the first place? As Trotsky points out, it is ambiguous whether we will reach our aesthetic ambitions without political transformation. Perhaps a starting point could be to stop asking ourselves how there can be an unusual interest in revolutionary art and yet, no revolution.
Yunus Akdal (GS ’26) is a political science major and critical theory enthusiast. Contact if you disagree at ya2545@columbia.edu.