When art flows back into politics

When art flows back into politics
Posted by Barry Johnson, The Oregonian March 30, 2009 04:00AM


Pablo Picasso's "Guernica"
The world of art is constantly intersecting with the world of politics. It just can't help it, primarily because the artist and the audience live in both worlds.

We all arrive at "Guernica" -- Picasso's depiction of the German bombing of a Spanish town in 1937 during the Spanish Civil War (you can almost hear the scream of the wild-eyed horse in the middle of the painting) -- with a political point of view. We may not remember the details of that particular conflict, but we do come with thoughts about war and politics, and they are going to color how we think about "Guernica."

"Guernica" is an explicitly political painting; Picasso created it at the request of the Spanish government to show at the world's fair in Paris in 1937. But we bring along our political concerns to art works that aren't intentionally political, too.

A few days ago, "The Hudsucker Proxy" happened to roll into view in one of the deeper recesses of my cable "package." A 1994 box-office bomb, it's a pastiche of 1930s movies and Sunday funnies, with cardboard characters and a simple little plot. But given our current conditions, I found myself engrossed (also because Jennifer Jason Leigh is great as a fast-talking reporter).


The villain is a big American company that sucks the lifeblood out of its employees. As the movie begins, the company's board of directors (led by Paul Newman) decides to replace its lately departed founder and CEO with a naive young fellow from the mailroom (Tim Robbins). That will drive down its stock price so the board members can get it for a song.

Silly? Not with CNBC host Jim Cramer's interview with "Daily Show" host Jon Stewart on my mind, specifically the part where Cramer talked about how investors routinely manipulate the share prices of companies (which also are often trying to manipulate their own stock prices). And certainly not during this particular economic collapse, when we are inclined to see Wall Street as a rolling, three-card Monte con game.

I could go on, but the idea is straightforward: We bring our politics and our concerns with us when we see art.

But does the process work the other way? Can art affect our politics?

Maybe not directly -- "Guernica" did not alter the outcome of the Spanish Civil War, after all. But the possibility of the reverse process was one of the premises behind "24/7: 24 concerts in 24 hours marking 7 years of war," organized by Thomas Lauderdale and Bill Crane, which was last weekend in the atrium of the Wieden+Kennedy building in Northwest Portland.

In the last hour of that mostly classical music marathon, a scaled-down orchestra and choir crammed into the atrium and performed Beethoven's "Ode to Joy."(If you don't remember it, YouTube offers many versions.) And in doing so, they demonstrated how the reverse process works.


It's not complicated: A community of musicians working together to re-create one of the high points in Western music suggests how profound our common aspirations can be and how much we can achieve together. Surrounded by a community of listeners, equally alert both to Beethoven's play with his theme and the musicians attempting to convey it, those aspirations start to find names.

In his remarks before "Ode to Joy" began, Crane didn't tell us what those aspirations should be (though given the title of the event, peace was surely one of them). He simply said, "Go out and do what you must do."

"Go out and do what you must do." We listened to "Ode to Joy," so stately and so wise. We listened closely -- I've never heard it quite the way I did on Sunday -- and that led me somewhere I didn't expect to go.

I couldn't help but think, "That's the way I want my politics to be" -- that wise and that measured. And then, "That's the way I want our country to be."