Art or propaganda? Both.

I just spent two late evenings at Matthew Barney’s massive studio in Long Island City watching grindcore and death metal bands play, along with a bizarre and hilarious “diarrhea humiliation” performance. (Not sure if coverage of this might turn up, though I don’t have a sense Artforum.com was there.) I also had to write two short reviews over the weekend: of Takahsi Hiraide’s For the Fighting Spirit of the Walnut for The Believer and Kerry James Marshall at Jack Shainman for Modern Painters.

This followed two days of meetings at my job working for the College Art Association to discuss an interesting—if unfortunate for my employer—legal case in which the College Art Association was sued for libel in the United Kingdom after publishing a review by Joseph Massad of Gannit Ankori’s book Palestinian Art. I learned a lot about “libel tourism.” On Thursday night I went to the Summer Mixtape opening at Exit Art, which included work by friends of mine. There are always plenty of things to read online, and two that caught my eye over the weekend were John Lundberg’s absurd “Ranking the Best Poets Ever” and Pollster.com’s map of Barack Obama’s projected presidential victory (yeah, but don’t forget those undemocratic electronic voting machines and the Republican Supreme Court) next fall (both accessed via The Huffington Post, which used to be a significant website for news coverage before it got bogged down in celebrity gossip and personal betterment crap). Before we went to sleep last night I read aloud to my girlfriend Kafka’s parable “Before the Law.” Her father currently won’t speak to her, so Kafka’s text somehow seemed appropriate. Besides, “Before the Law” never fails to stun me with how deeply its two compact pages resonate psychologically, philosophically, politically, and theologically.
As a result, I’ve been a bit out of the Harriet loop. But I wanted to touch on an Urban Word event at the Bowery Poetry Club last Wednesday night, which I’d previewed in a blog entry back in June. Founded by Bob Holman in 2002, the Bowery Poetry Club is among the most imaginative and diverse venues for poetry in the United States, although over the past year it’s begun to focus more on performance, concerts, and small-scale theater work. Not surprisingly, poetry doesn’t pay the bills, and with the closing of places like Mo Pitkin’s House of Satisfaction in downtown New York City, it makes sense that the Bowery Poetry Club would help fill the vacuum.
Urban Word is a New York City-based youth program offering education and support through poetry, spoken word, and hip-hop. They’ve teamed up with the Bowery Poetry Club (technically, with the Bowery Poetry Club’s non-profit umbrella Bowery Arts and Sciences) to host a series of writing workshops and public events during July and August called the Summer Institute of Social Justice and Applied Poetics (the latter phrase picking up on the alternative writing program named Study Abroad on the Bowery that Holman, Anne Waldman, Kristin Prevallet, and myself founded at the Bowery Poetry Club in 2004, but is currently on hiatus due to life’s interruptions). Last Wednesday’s installment of the Summer Institute of Social Justice and Applied Poetics was billed as a night with Amiri Baraka, but the latter turned the stage over to Theodore Harris to talk about his book Our Flesh of Flames. Harris read from his “manifesto” in the book, talked about some of the imagery he uses in his collages (the upside-down U.S. Capitol building as resembling a bomb), and then projected a PowerPoint slideshow of his work while Baraka read accompanying poems.
After Harris took a few questions, Baraka got back up to read his poem “Somebody Blew Up America.” Harriet readers will likely know that this poem instigated then-New Jersey governor James McGreevey to ask Baraka to resign his post as New Jersey poet laureate, as well as brought up old charges of anti-Semitism against Baraka. Personally, I prefer the poem’s moments of class critique (“Who own the oil / Who do no toil”; “Who don’t worry about survival”) to some of its other forms of condemnation (what about Mugabe?). But the poem’s vast historical sweep and social-documentary mode fit the spirit of the evening, which concerned art’s educational dimension. As I commented in a review of Lorenzo Thomas’s book of essays Extraordinary Measures: Afrocentric Modernism and Twentieth-Century American Poetry, art oftentimes serves as a form of supplemental—and even primary—pedagogy in marginalized and oppressed communities. It’s only within the leisured classes that the instrumentality of language is deemed such a bad thing; but, then, those classes are frequently affiliated with the ruling powers from which the worst effects of instrumental language emanate. That may ultimately be the point of Baraka’s poem. It reminds me of a George Orwell quote, cited during the course of the evening: “All art is propaganda, but not all propaganda is art.”