On political art

Abstract

The article deals with the crisis of contemporary political art. It is shown that this crisis results from the hypertrophy of the political function of art in the 20^th and early 21^st centuries. The author states that today political art is characterized by obsessive straightforwardness and simplicity of solutions to ambiguous social and political processes: all sorts of dousing paintings with paint, protest gluing, chaining, nailing, nudging, etc. cause indifference nowadays of mass consumers of works of art, growing into boredom. The phenomenon of boredom in the history of art was first described by the architect Adolf Göller, who claimed that boredom was the cause of a change of the dominant style in architecture, and then Ernst Jünger, who linked the emergence of boredom with “pain dissolved in time”. In this perspective, Jean-Luc Godard's words might be better understood: “One should make films politically, not make political films”. Once we realize this, we can conclude that the political function does not disappear at all, but dissolves in all genres and in all gestures of artists. We cannot ignore the political content of works of art, but at the same time we cannot help but oppose this political content being expressed openly and intrusively (political films and other political gestures by artists). To create means to overcome the dictatorship of dominant images and to destroy the old construction of the perspective, thereby testifying to the crisis of existing forms of representation. On the one hand, we have accepted as dogma that the world, losing its center, is decentralizing, each topos speaks its own language; on the other, the fame and price of an artist's work require universal criteria, a global market. An artist can find, strengthen and preserve his authorial style both in opposition to the state (German Expressionism, the Peredvizh­niki) and ideologically sharing its fundamental goals (the Soviet avant-garde, Pop Art).