Geometer magazine calls for essays
responding directly or obliquely to the theme of politics and art -
whether historical or contemporary, subversive or establishment.
www.geometer.org.uk
Art and Politics have long had an uneasy relationship - from Plato's dismissal
of the artists from his republic, through the dangerous politics that infused
literary modernism, right up to recent revelations and accusations concerning
the tangled involvements of Gunter Grass and Milan Kundera in their respective
countries' darker days.
When we think about political art we tend to pick out specific involvements and
often see political art as a separate species - the preserve of protest
singers, polemicists, and self-proclaimed social "realists" - but to
some degree it has to be true that all art is political. In what it assumes as
much as what it questions, and in what it makes visible as much as in what it conceals
art cannot but involve itself in the conditions of the wider world. Does the
properly political role of art lie in the intricate working out and tracing of
these tangled interconnections - as in J.H. Prynne's mingling of the
etymologies of economics, science, love, and desire, or is it enough to testify
to the conditions of our immediate experience without such heavy excavation?
And what of supposedly abstract art? What are we to think of the promotion of
Jackson Pollock and abstract expressionism by the CIA? Weren't the furthest
extremes of John Coltrane's interstellar free jazz inspired by dreams of
liberation? Even so celebratedly abstract an art form as music cannot escape
it's roots in the world. From Bartok and Ralph Vaughan Williams through to
Black Metal, musicians have mobilised folk forms in the service of nationalism
and ethnic identity, American tanks rolled into Baghdad blaring out Metallica's
Enter Sandman, and musicians and thinkers as diverse as Adorno, Brecht, Cardew,
Black Flag and the rave sound systems of the 90s have questioned the politics
of the site, means and material of musical performance. To quote the title of
Eddie Prevost's most recent book - "No Sound is Innocent".
The questions proliferate endlessly: If the relationship between politics and
art is inevitable, structural, innate, then what does that mean for the artist,
or for the reader. Can art's past transgressions in the political arena be
redeemed – should they be, how and on what terms? Most political art is
characteristically revolutionary, but need this be the case - is it necessary
and is it desirable that it be so?
Geometer Magazine calls for submissions in any format and from any discipline
engaging with these and related questions, whether directly as issues in your
own personal practice, or indirectly through discussion of the work of
particular artists, writers, musicians or movements. We welcome essay, artwork,
interview, fiction and poetry.
Please send a brief summary of your proposed submission to [log in to unmask]
Closing date for proposals: 30rd November. Closing date for submissions: 21st December
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