UD‘s been writing about an exhibit, in Austria, of North Korean propaganda paintings.
A New York Times reporter has described the event, and it turns out that UD‘s initial assumption about the art for art’s sake attitude of the organizers (Don’t know, don’t care, about politics; this is about art.) was ill-founded.
[The] catalog essay lament[s] that “our Western ideological lenses cloud, if not entirely distort, the view of other realities” and urg[es] museumgoers to “bid farewell once and for all to Eurocentric and culturally imperialistic attitudes.” The show … “proves that cultural differences can be bridged with mutual respect.”
Listen to this prose. Read it out loud.
It comes from the bellowing mouth of a beribboned teenager at a Pyongyang youth rally. BID FAREWELL ONCE AND FOR ALL TO CULTURALLY IMPERIALIST ATTITUDES.
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UD is about to teach a course called Aesthetics at George Washington University.
She has been collecting a file of current events in America and elsewhere that have a bearing on beauty and art and politics and morality. Stuff like the Italian Vogue oil thing …
Along these lines, the New York Times piece on the North Korean exhibit quotes the German paper, Die Welt, calling the show “obscene.”
[I]n a “terror regime” like North Korea there is “no perceptible visual art according to an acceptable understanding of any sort.”
In a sense, that’s the whole burden of my aesthetics course – maybe of any serious thinking about aesthetics. What sort of acceptable understandings are we talking about? Where does Die Welt get the confidence to call any public exhibit of created images obscene? How is it able both to declare this work not art, and to claim that a terror regime like North Korea’s cannot produce art?
I mean, let’s imagine a Western spectator of these big blow-up cartoon North Korean propaganda images who finds them a pleasing accompaniment to the very similar cartoon images – Asian and otherwise – she spends all of her time looking at, on screens, and in comic books. Her aesthetic life is entirely about moving from one hypertrophic set of cartoon images to another; the North Korean images are more of the same…
Or think of the character Molina in Kiss of the Spiderwoman, adoring the romance of his fascist propaganda tales.
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One thing to say about all of these examples – the Vogue oil images, the Nazi love stories, the North Korean paintings – is that they cast the aura of art over their content. They glamorize – aestheticize – make beautiful – ugly things, thereby both diverting our attention from the ugly things in their political and social actuality, and making the ugly things charismatic, alluring, chic, offbeat.
In the case of the Korean objects, exhibits like the one in Austria help make them sought-after consumer items as well. There’s already a hot market, among sophisticated European collectors, for Korean propaganda art; exhibits like this one, that honor and mainstream the work, strengthen the market for it. Similarly, the Vogue oil images are accompanied by ads for grunge chic, the look that goes with the Roseate Spoonbill corpse you carry with you.
As you know if you follow this blog, UD is about to teach a course on beauty. She has assigned, among other texts, this Oxford anthology.
As she thinks about this course, she’s writing a series of blog posts about art, aesthetics, ethics. Here are a couple of sample entries.
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The George Washington University School of Engineering, the Elliott School of International Affairs, Columbian College of Arts and Sciences — her students in this course come from all over.
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UD has also been gathering news articles of interest to people interested in beauty. There’s the Council Bluffs sculpture controversy, generating coverage from as far away as Australia. There’s the Vogue oil spread.
The wee story of the Wee Frees in Scotland isn’t about the visual realm. It involves efforts on the part of some congregants of this austere Presbyterian denomination to change the way they sing in church.
Which is acapella. And only the psalms. No hymns. No musical instruments. Just the Old Testament psalms, in unison, or sometimes with mild harmony. Sounds like this.
Here’s a whole page of their singing.
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What’s being held on to when people hold on to this as their sole musical worship?
Put the words art controversy into Google News at the moment, and you’ll be directed to a couple of articles about an exhibit in Vienna of North Korean paintings.
The canvases are all Socialist Realist propaganda: Kim Il-sung accepts the hysterically grateful embrace of a soldier; happy round-cheeked girls take up their brooms. The pictures burst forth from the walls, big and bright; and their titles tell you exactly what’s up: The Dear Leader Reassures the Nation of His Commitment to its Security and Well-Being.
There’s a pretty impressive market for North Korean Socialist Realist canvases in the west, I suppose because there aren’t many of them (NK releases some of this work to Chinese dealers, but it’s still a closed country, and not much gets out), and because virtually no other countries produce this sort of thing anymore. Sophisticated Europeans and Americans seem to have a taste for what some people call Communist Kitsch; and while one can certainly find postmodern ironists in Europe and America who experiment with the conventions of agitprop, the North Korean product is authentic, part of a living totalitarian world.
The Vienna controversy arises from the exhibit’s total lack of commentary. You go there and see the pictures. There’s no introductory statement from the museum about how these paintings are cult-of-personality propaganda, how they were painted by servants of the state who, should someone buy them, will receive no compensation, since all proceeds go to the state… Nothing at all, apparently, frames this collection of comically stultifying products of arguably the world’s most repressive state.
The exhibition does not include any background explanation on the totalitarian nature of the North Korean regime, a compromise by the museum with authorities in Pyongyang that came under fire from some politicians and artists. But the MAK forcefully denied it was giving a free pass to the regime’s propaganda.
“Visitors know very well that North Korea is the last dictatorship in the world. There is really no need to remind them of this fact. We just want to show North Korean contemporary art, not to talk about politics,” [the exhibit director] told France24.com
The director of the museum says the same thing:
I am neither a politician nor a political scientist. And besides, everybody knows what sort of a regime that is; we don’t have to explain this to anyone,” [he] said, sipping coffee in his office on the same floor as the North Korean artworks.
The exhibit, then, represents a collision of two aesthetic extremes: The most explicit message-bearing art imaginable meets art for art’s sake. The most dire expression of the reduction of human life to ideology meets the nonchalant gesture of the Vienna curator and director: We need say nothing by way of accompaniment to these images. They are art, and that is all.
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And yet they are arguably not art, since they are the entirely conventional work of anonymous hacks done at the behest of a propaganda machine. Further, since they present themselves as political objects with a message, a message intended to inspire the North Koreans and – I guess – convert outsiders, it’s a little strange for the museum directors to take them apolitically, a little unfair to their intention…
After all, the exhibitors’ aestheticist gesture is itself a political expediency, arising as it does from the museum’s compromise with the regime, its willingness to be silent about its nature in exchange for permission to mount the show.
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A Los Angeles Times writer asks:
[Is the show] merely a stage for a regime that uses art not only as a messenger of its political ideology but also as a source of international funding?
It’s not that, as the reporter worries, the museum is a kind of a dupe of the North Koreans, allowing itself to be used as a platform for their social philosophy. No one thinks North Korea is anything other than a nightmare, and bringing its nightmare images of itself to Austria only deepens the darkness. But there is the intriguing matter of the striking popularity of North Korean propaganda images among hip Europeans and Americans.
[The] work has apparently become a profitable export that is able to skirt North Korea’s international isolation, helping to bring cash back home.
Ardent collectors can travel to the country to shop for art, said Rudiger Frank, professor of East Asian Economy and Society at the University of Vienna. Or works can be acquired at specialized galleries in more easily accessible locations, such as Beijing. Art can even be ordered directly from North Korean artists or the associations they work for.
The North Koreans themselves “did not understand at first why we would want such an exhibition.” You bet. Why should their trash generate ardency and high prices among people you’d expect to want Rothko or Freud on their walls?
UD asks her readers.
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Update: “What some in the west would call propaganda.” The BBC points out that really it’s a matter of opinion. Some might say what the North Koreans are drawing is propaganda. Others, great art.