At first glance, a work of art may not appear political from the outside. However, seeing it only for aesthetic purposes is not enough. Art requires us to pay attention to, question and appreciate what we look at, but also to see what lies beyond it. Take textiles, an art form that has historically been considered “decorative” by the establishment because of its association with women’s work. However, this classification actually reveals a deep political subtext: the struggle for women’s rights over the last 500 years.
Excluded from the high arts in the Renaissance, the low status of textiles was reinforced by the Royal Academy in 1769, when the newly founded society banned embroidery in its exhibitions. This influenced women to reject this medium if they wanted to be taken seriously as artists. The Bauhaus school marginalized women in the weaving workshop, and while some female artists of the 1970s used the needle as a form of protest, it’s telling that even though it’s 2024, a group exhibition dedicated to this art form still feels like a big deal. Rare.
Abstract expressionism also has politics; A style that emerged during the cold war.
Unravel, which opened at the Barbican last week, is an exhibition that explores how threads are woven in a web of “gendered labour, marginalisation, colonization and trade”, as its curator Wells Fray-Smith told me. For example, Two-sided Work Clothes Quilt: Bars and Blocks (1960), written by an African American women’s group of Gee’s Bend quilters, conveys a violent history: the working life expectancy of enslaved people on plantations that provided indigo dye for denim was 2,000 years. Seven years.
Landscape painting is also an art form that dates back to a wide variety of histories; This is exemplified by Soulscapes, a new exhibition at Dulwich Picture Gallery in London, which brings together the art of people from the African diaspora. Politics can also be found in abstract expressionism, which emerged after World War II in an environment of cold war politics. Ukrainian-born Janet Sobel began painting in 1938, when she was 45, and turned to gestures and drips because it was the only way to make sense of her emotions and the horrific actions of the Nazis.
Art is not a one-dimensional entity. It involves different responses, purposes, and possibilities. It exists for the power of communication, as a voice for the underrepresented, as a form of resistance, and as an outlet for both the maker and the audience.
So I found it worrying that Arts Council England announced it was updating its policies, warning that “political statements” made by people linked to an organization could “cause reputational risk and breach funding agreements”. Funding for the arts should not depend on artists adopting a particular political line. ACE is supposed to be a distanced organization that distributes funds, not one that aims to politically interfere with what artists do. This isn’t the first time governments have cracked down on arts communities. In the UK, during the first world war, the Defense of the Realm Act legislated for the censorship of artworks representing naval or military imagery (in 2014 Arts Council England funded a program responding to this). And of course, totalitarian governments have always tried to censor artists; One infamous example of this is when the Nazis confiscated 15,000 works by artists they deemed “degenerate”, mostly Jewish, and displayed them in order to mock them.
Relating to: Unraveled review – a spectacularly overcomplicated knot of spectacle filled with blood, pain and pleasure
Recently, artists have been prevented from making statements about the Israel-Hamas war. In Berlin, Joe Chialo, the senator responsible for culture, threatened to adopt a clause requiring anyone receiving government funding to pledge against “all forms of anti-Semitism”, which he saw as a rejection of expressions of support for Palestine by many artists. More than 4,000 artists signed an open letter objecting to the proposal, but it was rejected.
In times of crisis, sometimes expression is all we have to hold on to. For many, this is the only form of resistance and a way to highlight injustices and inequality. Artists are not a dangerous species, they do not destroy lives or usurp people’s rights. Artists hold up a mirror to the world and, in the words of Emily Dickinson, they tell the truth, but they tell it crookedly.
Art history is the social history of the world shaped by the context and conditions in which it was made. To deny someone the right to freely make their work – whether in textiles, landscapes, or abstract painting – is to deny expression, the act of making and looking at art itself.