Beyond a dogmatic narrow-mindedness Art’s Restlessness is Revolutionary
Beyond a dogmatic narrow-mindedness
Art’s Restlessness is Revolutionary
By Cesare A.X. Syjuco
Published in: The Manila Times, November 04, 1987
SIXTY years ago, in the summer of 1927, Mexican muralist Diego Rivera — the world’s most celebrated revolutionary painter arrived in Russia as an official guest of its communist leadership. Rivera’s own credentials as a Marxist were impeccable, but his rebellious spirit had made him far too outspoken for party protocol. He publicly denounced the arrid “bureaucratic sameness of Soviet art,” urging in its place “a bolder, more colorful style based upon Russia’s rich heritage of folk art.” As might be expected, the Russians were outraged; and the long-standing love affair between the Comintern and its most illustrious Latin American son of that day had been shattered.
Immediately upon his resignation from the communist party barely two years later, leftwing critics began to condemn Rivera’s paintings as “crude,” “slovenly,” and even “anti-revolutionary.” When Rivera dared to offer his home in Mexico as sanctuary for the great Soviet exile Leon Trotsky, he became a pariah virtually overnight despite years of excessive party praise. Thenceforth,Rivera felt compelled to wear a pistol in his belt even while he worked, to guard against the threat of political assassination.
Faced with our own art’s quest for social relevance, I think not only of the irrepressible restlessness of Diego Rivera, but of all truly revolutionary artists in general. Indeed, the tendency of most totalitarian states to force their own brand of dogmatic conformity on the arts cannot possibly be called a revolutionary recourse. Rather, radical politics has often subverted art to propagate its own narrowminded ideals. Hitler’s Third Reich drew strict guideliness for a blatantly propagandistic art, the slightest deviation from which was punishable with sterilization and imprisonment. And as we already know, the repressive Union of Artists exercised a virtual dictatorship on all matters and standards relating to creativity in the USSR, mandating a painterly style called “Socialist Realism” – ironically enough, a manner now widely discredited as a creative ideal even in a majority of socialist states.
John Berger, in his comprehensive study on “Problems of Socialist Art,” stresses that “there is no evidence to suggest that (Realism) is the style’ of the people. The essential of proletarian art is that it reveals the truth, and makes people more aware of the potentiality of the world in which they live. The styles it can use are variable, and largely a question of convention.”
In Cuba, Fidel Castro ushered in an era of unprecedented liberalism by declaring that the social-political revolution would “in no way interfere with the freedom of the artist,” and that the arts served the people best by following their own pursuits. In fact, our own recent exposure to contemporary Cuban art and music confirmed the veracity of this declaration, much to the delight of local scholars.
While assembling an exhibition of recent Polish painting for the Museum of Modern Art in New York, Peter Selz wrote that he “found free expression not only a goal but a reality. Having rebelled against Socialist Realism in the mid-fifties, painters were (now) free to explore all manners and styles and media.” Selz also noted that in Yugoslavia, many artists were openly evolving “an experimental (kind of) conceptual art greatly interested in optical phenomena and kinetics.”
Based on Berger’s wider definition of true proletarian art, it is not inconceivable to conclude that our regenerated interest in local indigenous materials and motifs, regardless of subject matter, may be at least as socio-politically significant’ as, say, Social Realism — particularly in consideration of that trend’s ability to arouse widespread awareness in local “potentialities,” vis-a-vis classical western references. The argument that much proletarian art in the Philippines today is artistically barren and tragically doomed to tireless reworking is almost certainly the result of our own stubborn notions regarding the prescribed “form” that sociopolitical relevance in the arts should take. And we forget that it is art’s special power to escape the literal and to persuade in secret.
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Cesare A.X. Syjuco, “Beyond a dogmatic narrow-mindedness Art’s Restlessness is Revolutionary” (page 1 of 1), The Manila Times, November 04, 1987
