The Subversive Imagination

The Artist, Society and Social Responsiblity

Carol Becker

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2014
• ISBN:
  9781136642968
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Art
• Subtopic: History of Art

In The Subversive Imagination, professional writers, artists and cultural critics from around the world offer their views on the issue of the artist's responsibility to society. The contributors look beyond censorship and free speech issues and instead emphasize the subject of freedom. More specifically, the contributors question the ethical, mutual responsibilities between artists and the societies in which they live. The original essays address an eclectic range of subjects: censorship, multiculturalism, the transition from communism to capitalism in Eastern Europe, postmodernism, Salman Rushdie, and young black filmmakers' responsibility to the black community.

PART ONE

Personal Responsibility and Political Contingencies

1

THE PREHISTORY OF ART

Cultural Practices and Athenian Democracy

Page duBois

We think we know art when we see it. But our understanding of the nature of art is historical, determined by the horizon of our own residence in the late twentieth century. Much of the resistance both to the postmodern erasure of the boundaries between art and other cultural practices and to a humanist nostalgia for art for art's sake or as a cure for societal woes comes from our historical situation as late heirs of the Enlightenment, Romanticism, and modernism. As Jürgen Habermas recalls, “The project of modernity formulated in the 18th century by the philosophers of the Enlightenment consisted in their efforts to develop objective science, universal morality and law, and autonomous art according to their inner logic.”¹ My theme in this essay is that ancient democracy, the culture and society of ancient Athens, knew no such category as “autonomous art.” For citizens and inhabitants of the ancient city, most cultural practices were “politics,” matters of the polis, of the city-state.

The character Socrates, in the Platonic dialogue called the Protagoras, describes the way in which the ancient city-state of Athens made decisions about what we now might call art:

I hold that the Athenians, like the rest of the Hellenes, are sensible people. Now when we meet in the Assembly, then if the state is faced with some building project, I observe that the architects are sent for and consulted about the proposed structures, and when it is a matter of ship-building, the naval designers, and so on with everything which the Assembly regards as a subject for learning and teaching. If anyone else tries to give advice, whom they do not consider an expert, however handsome or wealthy or nobly born he may be, it makes no difference; the members reject him noisily and with contempt, until either he is shouted down or desists, or else he is dragged off or ejected by the police on the orders of the presiding magistrates. That is how they behave over subjects they consider technical. But when it is something to do with the government of the country that is to be debated, the man who gets up to advise them may be a builder or equally well a blacksmith or a shoemaker, merchant or shipowner, rich or poor, of good family or none (319b-d).²

Socrates's complaint is that the democractic city relies on experts for technical knowledge, yet does not consider the matter of government to be a matter for experts, something that can be taught. What strikes the modern reader, however, is the extent of public, democratic participation not only in government but also in every decision about architectural enhancement of the city–and that decisions about ships are made in the same place, in the same way, by the same people, as decisions about buildings. What we now call the arts, although performed in fact in the classical age in Athens by “artists,” that is, architects, tragedians, poets, painters, and sculptors, were not until the time of Plato differentiated from other activities of the city. The citizens considered artistic projects together, debated them, argued, disagreed, voted, financed, and supervised their production.

I often find it difficult, when teaching the ancient world, to convey a sense of the unity of ancient cultural practices. Even though it may be analytically and pedagogically useful to talk about “Greek religion,” there is no such thing. To talk about the practices of the citizens of ancient Athens that involved worship of the gods, one must discuss Greek tragedy, Greek architecture, sculpture, and painting, as well as what we would now consider to be politics, since the very city itself was under the guardianship of the goddess Athena and all the practices of its citizens implicate her.

I would here like to take three examples–building of temples, the sculptural programs, and the ancient theater festivals of the city–to demonstrate that these features of ancient Athenian life cannot be considered “art” and “literature” as we now know them, as vocations with their own generic histories and institutions. They are rather part of the cultural practices of a democratic state, one that concerned itself with its past, its future, the prosperity of its citizens, and the fate of the city among other cities. The provision of buildings for worship of the gods, as well as for political, religious, and historical education, is inseparable from the other functions of the state such as policing the city and waging war. Similarly, even to speak of “religious,” “political,” or “historical” education, when considering Greek tragedy, is falsely to categorize and differentiate among kinds of activity that were not differentiated until the work of Plato. His remarks on specialization and expertise belong to a long process of differentiation among human activities, and to a gradual narrowing of human possibility in the domains of cultural practices and expression. Plato's efforts to categorize and establish differences among kinds of human activity are linked to his antidemocratic strategies, his efforts to ensure that “governors” governed, while shoemakers stuck to their lasts.

Architecture

Architecture was, in the archaic age, before the founding of the democratic city Plato finds so distasteful, a matter inseparable from religious, cultic practices and was addressed in mythic and legendary terms. The ancient city of Thebes was said to have been walled by Amphion and Zethus, sons of Antiope and Zeus. Antiope, daughter of the river Asopus, or in another version of her story, of the king of Boeotia, was courted by Zeus, who appeared to her as a satyr. The boys were abandoned by their mother at birth and raised by a shepherd. Zethus became a herdsman, while Amphion, given a lyre by the god Hermes, was a gifted musician. He walled the city through the power of his music, placing the stones by means of his lyre (Apollodorus 3. 43–45). The story exemplifies the magical powers attributed to the builders of the past, constructing cities, carving out a protected and humanized space in the midst of the Greek landscape. The story of the construction of Troy similarly exhibits mythic features. Joseph Rykwert recalls that “Greek literature is full of echoes of how a kredemnon, a magical veil of battlemented walls was established: as at Troy, as at Thebes and Athens.”³

Sarah Morris's book Daidalos and the Origins of Greek Art recounts in fascinating detail the mythicization of the first architect, his representation in ancient culture from the Bronze Age into the classical period.⁴ Morris points out how the figure of Daedalus, the artist, grew out of the vocabulary of epic poetry:

Daidalos himself emerges as a movable beast, a creature most natural to the habitat of Greek myth. Born in an epic simile with enigmatic adjectives for parents, he was overshadowed by them for centuries. Dramatic changes in Greek art and life helped rediscover him and adapted him happily to far more numerous accomplishments than his poetic origins promised. Every feat claimed for him illuminates those occasions and attitudes that sponsored it, particular to a specific Greek city or tradition.⁵

Daedalus, the architect of the Cretan labyrinth, constructor of wings to fly across the Aegean, was a figure constructed retrospectively to justify the existence of the techniques and specialization of the artist. His history demonstrates the inseparability of the archaic artist from religious, mythic concerns.

The second-century A.D. travel writer Pausanias recounts in detail the mythical building techniques of Trophionios and his brother Agamedes:

They say when these two grew up they showed a genius for the sacred buildings of gods and the royal palaces of men: for instance, they built the temple of Delphi and Hyreus' treasure-house, in which one stone could be removed from the outside. They were always taking something from the deposits; Hyreus was speechless, seeing the locks and seals untouched and the quantity of money always getting less. He put some kind of trap over the pots of gold and silver to catch anyone who came in or touched the money. Agamedes came in and was snared, so Trophonios cut his head off, for fear that when day came Agamedes might be tortured and he might be involved himself. The earth split open and swallowed Trophonios in the sacred wood at Lebadeia at what they call the pit of Agamedes with the stone tablet beside it (9.37.3) .⁶

The site of Trophonios's swallowing up by the earth became an important oracle, in which the consultant of the oracle was himself carried off to the underground and received revelations. This legend too provides an aura of magical or spiritual authority to the master builder, who is especially dear to the gods, or who possesses unusual gifts in his ability to manipulate the material world and create spaces for human use out of stone, the bones of the earth.

The master builders of the democratic city, however, were no longer mythical, divine, or semi-divine characters from the prehistoric past. They were often citizens of the ancient cities in which they worked, and although their labors might have been colored by the high esteem in which those figures from the past were held, they were also tainted by their association with labor in a culture which often related labor to slavery.⁷ Nonetheless, building in the ancient city was conceived as integral to governance, inseparable from the functions of politics. In architecture, for example, the great buildings of the classical age, the temples, the structures on the Akropolis–Parthenon, Erechtheum, temple of Nike-were buildings erected by the city, for the city, in the city. J. J. Coulton describes the mechanism through which architectural structures were built under the direction of the democratic city:

A typical public project might run something like this. An initial proposal to build would be made in the assembly…by a statesman like Perikles with a political purpose in mind, by somebody who wished to gain prestige by association with a notable building, or simply by a person who felt a special interest in the cult or project concerned. The assembly would discuss the desirability of the proposal and the way it could be financed and might suggest modifications. Then if the proposal was approved, a supervising committee would be appointed, and an architect selected to draw up a specification. The committee would organize a work-force and construction would start….⁸

Financing of these projects might include profits from the city-owned mines, or money gained in military victories; those pan-Hellenic projects such as the temple at Delphi were funded by contributions from many different cities. In general, the projects within a city were financed through the funds of the city itself or from the contributions of private citizens to the public good. “We know that under Perikles (c. 450–429 B.C.) the great buildings of Athens were financed from public funds, from the 460 talents or more which the Athenians collected annually from their ‘allies.’”⁹ The Athenian Council, a democratic body, would modify the preliminary plans for buildings, if necessary. Coulton points out that, from what we know of payment for labor in the ancient world, payments made to architects seem rather low.

However, these payments were probably not an economic salary, but a conventional living allowance, comparable to those paid for other state duties; the chief motive for an architect accepting responsibility for a new temple would be the prestige he would gain by ensuring that it was a credit to his city¹⁰

The magnificent buildings of fifth-century Athens continue to stand as monuments to the democratic process that led to their construction.

The Parthenon, the great temple of Athena on the Akropolis in Athens, is one of the most impressive buildings ever constructed in the ancient world. It could be said to exemplify the ideology of democratic Athens, its pride, its ambition, its contradictions, and its resolution of those contradictions. Donald Preziosi has recendy offered a careful reading of the architecture and sculpture of the entire Akropolis that takes it as a whole, considering the many different representations of Athena there, and the ways in which they sum up a complicated and multifaceted relationship between city and goddess:

The Periclean building program for the Athenian akropolis, begun in the middle of the fifth century B.C., engendered and worked to sustain a matrix of complementary and interrelated narratives: an ideology of the polis and its relationships to the individual. It operated as a prism through which the contradictions of Athenian social and political life might be resolved into an imaginary homogeneity…. [I]t was a theory of the city, a theatron for seeing the city and its history, a machine for the manufacture of a history.¹¹

More than adornment of the city, more than the construction of functional buildings at its center, the building program of the Akropolis exemplifies the unity of artistic, political, and religious practices in the ancient city, and exposes the inadequacy and ahistoricism of our categories of “art” and “artist” when applied to a radically different social formation.

Sculpture

Sculpture, of course, is almost inseparable as an artistic practice from architecture, since the master builders of the ancient city adorned their temples and public buildings with sculpture, that is, reliefs, friezes, and metopes, which were integral to the architectual fabric. Like the architect, the sculptor had a mythic past and first emerged in Bronze Age culture with a divine, semi-divine, or legendary persona. Sometimes the gods themselves seemed to have created the precious images of themselves worshipped by the early Greeks. The famous sanctuary of Artemis at Ephesus was said to have been founded at the spot where a figurine of the goddes...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication
• Table of Contents
• Acknowledgments
• Introduction: Presenting the Problem
• Part One Personal Responsibility and Political Contingencies
• Part Two Decolonizing the Imagination
• Part Three Theorizing the Future
• Index