It's a question on which I've been reflecting lately, for totally
other reasons to do with a theatre company with which I'm involved.
To be brief, the company started four years ago in a (working)
furniture warehouse run by the Brotherhood of St Laurence, with no
money at all, and has since been blighted by success.  The plays are
as far from agit-prop as it is possible to get.  Some of the conflict
is between company members who understood and perceived the political
aesthetic of the company from the beginning, which ranges far beyond
concerns with the underclass, and others who did not understand it,
and just thought the plays (not mine) were simply "beautiful and
moving".

Of course the work is "committed".  It does, however, forebear
didactism, and it does seek primarily to reach the "complications and
depths" of its concerns.  (I might add, re the "proletariat", that it
does not assume that the "proletariat" is lumpen and incapable of
complexity or even gasp philosophical depth, and neither does it
heroicise or romanticise).  Because of these qualities, it is also
possible for the work to be framed in a way which attempts to
showcase it as a kind of bourgeois tour through the slums -ah, the
frisson of poverty, social justice as a fashion accessory.  A kind of
prophylactic for middle-class conscience.  The work is powerful and,
yes, committed enough to transcend this, but it does cheapen and
could ultimately compromise it, and this seems to me more of a
dilemma than "accessibility".

I have to say that the desire to reduce art to either the "beautiful
and moving" or the black and white terms of class struggle seem to me
both very bourgeois impulses, and fundamentally anti-intellectual.
Both obscure the discomforts of much more difficult questions.  And
saying that the "proletariat" is incapable of intellect must be one
of the most classist statements of all: it certainly keeps the proles
in their place.  (Criticising Ulysses for being "inaccessible"?  Have
you tried to read it out loud?  It's just the story of one day in the
life of a very ordinary and as it happens Jewish man.)  As Paz said,
the bourgeois hates poetry, and seeks always to destroy it.

Best

Alison


At 11:33 AM +0000 12/12/2001, Jon Clay wrote:
>I was walking around the Tate Modern on Sunday and it struck me how
>difficult it was for "commited" art to really work as art; it seemed to
>reduce itself to slogans. It was also therefore reducing the politics to
>slogans; surely the opposite of what is should be doing. Doesn't mean of
>course that politics should be kept out of art, but it should at least try
>to reach the complications and the depths of whatever it's talking about.
>Great stuff by Denise Riley and Douglas Oliver spring to mind. But still,
>often the greatest political art is the least obviously political - Celan,
>Beckett etc. I'm not explaining this very well; my mind is full of this
>stuff at the moment and it's not very well ordered at the moment. I could
>probably have a better go at it after Xmas (though I couldn't guarantee it).
--


Alison Croggon

Home page
http://users.bigpond.com/acroggon/
Masthead
http://au.geocities.com/masthead_2/