How art can be political has been a vexed question since High Modernism. Walter Benjamin said that reproductive technologies have delivered the means for a transformative art by making images widely available and therefore endlessly fungible, but also, at times, indistinguishable from the circulation of commodities. Theodor Adorno said art's freedom was a rebuke to the unfreedom of our lives in a bureaucratized society, which is a good way to think about how artistic form, as opposed to its agitprop content, can be political, but Adorno also reduced political art to a recondite conceptual gesture.
Images are now more widely available than ever, and protest art can be found everywhere from MoMA to the streets of the West Side of Chicago. But the question of political art remains just as pressing as it was 80 years ago. Michael Kimmelman suggests an interesting solution, one that works in the context of Houston, at least. For the past 12 years the artist Rick Lowe has been running Project Row Houses in the city's Third Ward. The project is a combination of artists' residency and a self-help program. Artists are invited to stay in the Third Ward and create artworks for a group of houses owned by the project. The primary beneficiaries of the rehabbed houses, many of them shotgun homes, are enrollees in the Young Mothers Residential Program.
I don't know that transformative art magically emerges from the confluence of mobile artists and immobile urban poor. On the one hand, Lowe seems to realize of Foucault's demand to destroy the historical separation of art and life. (This is a favorite theme of Kimmelman's, too). On the other hand the project can be seen as a kind of Oprah-styled self-improvement program where, as Lowe puts it, "encourages in the women who come here a state of mind, a way of thinking about how to live, which you could call the work of art." For their part the artists get to feel good about escaping from "Euro-ethnic art institutions," as one artist calls them. They also get to leave the Third Ward.
The positive effects in attitudes is undeniable, but does any this really change material circumstances? Arguably, yes. Lowe introduces history and aesthetics, not to mention the history of aesthetics, into bureaucratized public services. He tells Kimmelman,
People interested in housing and social services have a narrow focus. From a developer’s standpoint, the houses we’ve built are not cost-effective. But to me, they’re not just housing. They tell a story about a community. The process by which we arrived at the design involved looking at the history of shotgun houses, out of which came the desire to preserve traditions like having the houses be off the ground and use pier-and-beam, not slab-on-grade, foundations. Everybody I used to work with when I did carpentry and house painting, which was how I earned a living years ago, told me the design was crazy. But to me, it translates the symbolism that [the African-American muralist] John Biggers painted into another visual form, which is architecture.
Most of the artworks produced under the auspices of Project Row Houses are varieties of installation art, but by stabilizing a neighborhood in which residents can trace their family histories going back a century, Lowe has discovered a means by which transient art forms can preserve social permanence. All those twinkling lamps and video installations may be functionally useless, but at least they'll fend off gentrification.
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