28 July 2022. Democracy | Art

Tearing down the walls of power // All the things that art is for.

Jul 28, 2022

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1: Tearing down the walls of power

A couple of weeks ago the Sri Lanka President resigned and fled the country after a wave of large-scale peaceful protests. There was a bit of an interregnum after that when public buildings were—informally—opened up to the public.

(Anti-government protests in April this year. Photo by AntanO via Wikipedia. CC BY-SA 4.0))

The writer Indrajit Samarajiva had a reflective piece about the experience of that democratic moment.

I went to the President’s House, where I’m not allowed, which is strange. I thought he worked for me... A few days later my wife and I bicycled into the city, to visit Temple Trees. It’s more the traditional center of power, the Prime Minister’s residence. Never been there before either. Now the barricades are broken down and the protestors have broken in. ‘Open To The Public’ is written on the wall, so we went in.

People were playing the piano, or card games. Others, of course, were taking selfies. A community kitchen had set up in the garden and was feeding people. The police were there, but not attacking people or arresting people.

These are fleeting moments, these revolutionary interregnums. Soon enough there’s another reign, the people get chased out, and some other elite closes the door, kicks out the people, and takes his seat. But it’s a moment nonetheless. It shows how things could be done differently.

Samarajiva has posted a series of articles on Medium on Sri Lanka and democracy, and is interested in the history of democracy and its relationship with the forms of liberal democracy that predominate now. It’s fair to say that he’s not so keen on how this tends to work in practice:

Today we still have these different forms (aristocracies, dictatorships, oligarchies) but we just refuse to talk about them. We have these weird public bribery festivals called elections and act like that gives representative democracy this great legitimacy. We have two-party states, both paid off by the same oligarchs, and call it this great freedom. Our idea of democracy is philosophically flaccid. It’s a religious belief, used to justify priests and rulers taking your grain quite piously.

One of the versions he prefers is sortition, where citizens are assigned to Parliament randomly for a period of time, in the same way that juries are selected in the UK (though obviously they would serve for longer). As he observes, this would certainly be more representative:

We might as well carry the spirit of the Sri Lankan Aragalaya (struggle) into actual governance and put random people in power. Honestly, how could it be worse. A Parliament selected by sortition would immediately have 51% women, young people, minorities, and most vitally the poor. The Parliament would be mostly poor people for the first time anywhere, not rich people pretending to give a shit about them.

I used the analogy of juries above, but he uses a different analogy: of sharing the chores:

Why shouldn’t most political offices be a chore we all share—like chopping up onions in the community kitchen—and not some gilded privilege that we pass onto our idiot sons? Representative democracy claims it gives power to the people, but that’s a marketing ploy. I don’t see us anywhere.

And one of the things I took away from the piece was the power of utopian moments to show that there are possibilities beyond the present. Even in the most constrained situations, even if the moment fades and the everyday routines of power are re-imposed, there are glimpses of a more open future:

Now that Sri Lankans have taken over the seats of power I can physically see that another way is possible... I saw it, however briefly. It was there. People can have power beyond a President, beyond a Parliament, we can even take over these seats of power and rule ourselves, taking turns, and sharing. I’m sure it will get beaten back by rich people that want to keep their own stuff safe behind their walls, but there is another way.

2: All the things that art is for

The artist Claes Oldenburg died last week, and was probably a pop artist. He was of that generation, and certainly he associated with pop artists after arriving in New York from Sweden, and he was interested in using his art to make the everyday seem extraordinary, in the same way that Warhol did with his baked bean cans. I first came across his work in the 1970s. In Oldenburg’s case, his most famous medium was the soft sculpture, larger than life floppy versions of everyday objects, although he also did the same thing in other media as well.

Sculpture Claes Oldenburg. Image: © Pulitzer Arts Foundation Museum.

This plate of chips with ketchup, from a 2016 exhibition, “The Ordinary Must Not Be Dull” in the Pulitzer Arts Foundation Museum, gives an idea of his oeuvre. The exhibition note on their website describes his work like this:

Oldenburg’s work often disrupts the functionality of common objects—challenging our perceptions and unsettling our routines. Drawing its title from an assertion by the artist that “The ordinary must not be dull,” but be made “excruciatingly, excruciatingly banal,” this exhibition features works that reference everyday items such as clothespins, light switches, and food, which Oldenburg intensifies through abstraction. Noted for their exaggerated scale, bold colors, and daring playfulness, these soft sculptures stand out as a provocative mix of the ubiquitous and the unruly.

Mason Currey, who writes a newsletter on the theme of creativity, although that makes it sound less fun than it usually is, marked Oldenburg’s death with some snapshots from his creative process. Currey quotes Oldenburg as saying “Every time I start a show I start as if I never made a show before and absolutely from nothing”, which he connects to a line from Nina Simone, that“people came to see me because they knew I was playing close to the edge and one day I might fail.” To which he adds:

I think Oldenburg’s soft sculptures are a good example of this. It’s easy to imagine them coming across as silly or gimmicky or just ho-hum. A big floppy ice-cream cone on the gallery floor? Sure, I guess. Instead, they are utterly delightful and weirdly poignant. As Deborah Solomon wrote last week, “their sagging, lumpy presence feels invested with the pathos of the human body.”

Oldenburg with his Floor Cone (1962) in Los Angeles, via the Walker Art Center

But the piece I wan’t to mention here is not his sculpture, but a piece of writing for a 1961 exhibition. It reads like a manifesto, although Oldenburg insisted that it was just “a literary effort”. It’s much longer than this—I’m sharing only a section here—but the language captures the energy and the excitement of early 1960s when the world seemed open to new demotic and more democratic possibilities. It’s called ‘I Am For’.