"cultures In Contention" Timid

GRAFFITI

"Cultures in Contention" Timid

a book review by Bob Black

"Cultures in Contention" consists of 24 articles describing a wide variety of politically motivated cultural projects. Lavishly illustrated - a necessity, to do justice to the visual-arts activities - the book nonetheless is dense with text, three columns per page. The merit of a collection like this is that it introduces to the general public and even, in many cases, to the mainstream art world a diverse array of projects which would otherwise likely remain obscure. If, as the editors maintain (but I doubt), an art-for-art's-sake aesthetic is prevalent today, this book at least shows that politically committed art persists as a dissenting current.

The collection is ambitious in scope, designedly embracing many countries and many media of expression. Topics include billboard artists in Britain and Australia, popular theatre in Jamaica and Kenya, Chicano muralists in Los Angeles, and pirate radio in Japan. In most cases the creators themselves describe their creations, usually in a congratulatory tone. Most of the authors are not very well known, and the few celebrities among them are by no means the most interesting. Thus Nobel Prize-winning novelist Gabriel Garcia Marquez provides a slight and uninformative piece on the making of a Nicaraguan film which unwittingly reveals how the Sandinista regime subsidizes - and supervises - culture. Archie Shepp, the jazz saxophonist who is also a university professor, declaims against the dominant white culture for demoralizing Black artists. But is it so easy to assign the blame for the situation where audiences, Black and white alike, prefer shallow pop musicians, Black and white alike, to the more challenging genres like jazz and even blues music?

A majority of the projects described are collective in nature and involve women and/or Third World peoples. These include a history of Sweet Honey in the Rock, a sort of secularized Black women's gospel singing group from Washington, D.C.; "Los Angeles Lesbian Arts"; and Suzanna Lacey and Leslie Labowitz's "Feminist Media Strategies for Political Performance," which unabashedly advocates the aesthetic/emotional manipulation of imagery to advance a rigid ideological agenda. The authors explain how to manipulate the mass media into favorably covering feminist media spectacles, which for them mean basically anti-pornography actions. The report of the Meese Commission, which calls for precisely the sort of vigilante protests favored by Lacey and Labowitz, is a measure of the "success" the media feminists have had in again making censorship respectable.

Viewed as art, as many will view them regardless of the artists' intentions, some of these efforts are very interesting. "The Changing Picture of Docklands" describes a billboard project which for several years documented and dramatized the depressed conditions in the Docklands area of London. The components of the billboard collages were changed, piecemeal, sometimes in response to current events, so that at any given time there was continuity with previous images yet also forward movement. The book reproduces some of these (literal) signs of the times. And Klaus Staeck, a German left photomontage artist in the traditon of John Heartfield, in "Beware Art!" reproduces political art at once visually arresting and funny, coupled with a lucid precis (for some reason phrased in the third person) of the artist's aims and methods. The trouble is that many of the projects described in the book, those depending on movement or the ear, just cannot be rendered in words alone with authenticity. We pick up on the political purposes of Sistren, a Jamaican women's theatre group, for example, but we feel nothing because the experience of art, even ideologically urgent art, is something over and above its moral. The article on Sistren is thus only of value as a history of the performing group.

Some ambiguity attends the editors' definition of what it is these artists (or "cultural workers" as some of them unfortunately prefer to regard themselves) have in common. All are leftist - the politically motivated art of, say, P. J. O'Rourke is emphatically absent - but ranging from mild reform (such as Fred Lonidier's "Photo/Text" exhibits for labor unions) to raging revolution (Torn Ward's "The Situationists Reconsidered"). The incompatibility - indeed the virulent antagonism - between the perspectives of the avante garde Situationist International (1957-1971) and the Sandinista regime is impossible to exaggerate. But the politically committed intellectuals who wrote this book have nothing to say about one another's politics. They engage in a sort of cultural counterpart to the Popular Front politics of the 1930s when it was said that "there is no enemy to the left." They are mostly uncritical about their own efforts, and still more so about each other's. The authors may not be at fault for this - it is enough, perhaps, for them to get some hearing for their aims and accomplishments - but the editors must have made a conscious decision to smooth over differences as great, in some cases, as those dividing left and right. The book is the poorer for their timidity.

Several articles don't seem to belong in the book at all. One of these is possibly the most intriguing to appear there, "The Coup Merchants" by German investigative reporter Gunter Wallraff. In an exploit worthy to rank with Woodward and Bernstein's Watergate exposés, Wallraff, impersonating a representative of a right-wing German political group, entrapped Portuguese General Antonio de Spinola in 1975 into disclosing both his fascist sentiments and his plans for a coup. Publication of the article in Germany not only aborted the coup but reacted adversely on the political fortunes of some right-wing West German politicians (such as Franz-Josef Strauss) who had expressed sympathy for the attempt. It's a great cloak-and-dagger story (Walraff has pulled off other sting operations also), but what does it have to do with cultures in contention?

The editors and their contributors seem to be uncertain just what their complaint against culture is about. Some seem to be complaining that they are left out of the dominant culture and want a piece of the action, a place in the sun, a slice of the pie. When Hispanics in Los Angeles get government subsidies to paint murals, they appear to be satisfied, except perhaps about the size of their grants. The Docklands artists got funding from labor-controlled local government bodies for their leftist billboards, then voiced indignation when a conservative national government abolished some of these bodies and otherwise refused to subsidize socialism. Many of these anti-establishment artists depend on government for the costly resources their projects require, but none of them notice the irony of their position. Often they start out, as did Sistren and the Docklands project, in Jamaica and London respectively, promoting their private political viewpoints with funds extracted from taxpayers who didn't necessarily agree with them. When later the wheel of fortune turned against them, they complained of political persecution. Do they want the govemment to finance and manage the arts, as in Nicaragua, or don't they?

"Cultures in Contention" is a good vehicle for its contributors: their work deserves to be noticed and now it is more accessible. lts infirmities are editorial. Those who contend with the dominant culture ought to be at least as pitiless with their own, unless what they want is not a cultural revolution but a palace coup.

Edited by Douglas Kahn and Diane Neumaier. Seattle: The Real Comet Press, 1985. 287 pp., pbk. ISBN 0-941104-06-0.