Democracy and the Arts

Meredith Ann Palmer

Art Dealer, Foreign Service Art Specialist, Independent Filmmaker

“Cultures get transformed not deliberately or programmatically but by the unpredictable effects of social, political, and technological change, and by the random acts of cross-pollination.”

--Louis Menand, The Free World: Art and Thought in the Cold War 

For those of us in the U.S. and the Free World, art for art’s sake seems to be a given.

We can extol the virtues of art to transport us to a spiritual level, to capture the sublime, to reflect the critical ideas of our time, to anticipate the rhetoric and social changes of current society, and yes, to provoke us to think outside of the norms.  In democratic societies, artists can freely paint, or write, make films, dance or act as they wish. However, when art bumps up against the restrictions of totalitarian societies, creative expression becomes all about freedom of the individual, or rather the lack thereof.  The state mandates what the artist can say, even the technique and subject matter that is acceptable or not in support of the current political position and propaganda of the state.  (In the People’s Republic of China during the Cultural Revolution, artists were not even allowed to paint plum blossoms because the plum is the first of the trees to flower even amidst the snow of winter.  Symbolically, this was equated with hardiness and “revolutionaries,” so the Communist state forbid artists from painting these subjects.) In a totalitarian state, the individual can no longer freely express his or her own ideas as in a democracy, but must follow the mandates of the state or seriously jeopardize his/her own well-being. 

It was in my first job directly out of college, as an art specialist in the Foreign Service in Washington, D.C., that I witnessed firsthand this inseparable notion of art and politics firsthand when I was asked to manage the first official art exchanges for the Department of State between the U.S. Government and China (P.R.C.).   In 1974-75, “The Chinese Archeological Exhibition,” took place and reciprocally in 1981, “American Paintings from the Boston Museum,” after we signed a Cultural Accord with the opening of diplomatic relations in 1979.  I learned what it meant for art and politics to be intertwined in a way that one rarely sees in the democratic U.S., i.e. until the Culture Wars of the 1970s raised its ugly head when Congressional funding for the National Endowments questioned what the artists were allowed to paint or perform.

Of course, there are those courageous artists in these societies who stand up to the edicts of the current political state, who risk being accused of sedition or insurrection, even treason if they express ideas that are contrary to the state mandates -- or that are judged by authorities to challenge the political positions of the current leadership.  Naturally, out of a sense of survival and with savvy experience, many such artists can become adept at maneuvering around the government’s mandates by couching their rhetoric in subtle or more obscure ways so as to avoid the authorities.  (Filmmakers often depict everyday life as it appears to them in their narratives, sometimes showing the corruption of elements in the society, and even daring to illuminate the injustice of the government punishing its citizens who buck the system.  As long as the work of art is not viewed as direct criticism of the state, they can often avoid government interference.  However, when political winds shift, what is acceptable and what is not, can change just as quickly.

One of the most successful films that the USG sent to Poland and to other E.European countries--where filmmaking stands at the top of the intellectual artistic hierarchy--was One Flew Over the Cukoo’s Nest.  Couched in this brilliant film of 1975 by Milos Forman, the psychiatric hospital served as a metaphor for power over the vulnerable, for the repressive society under Soviet control.  Thus, it was indirect enough to get through the censors, but electrifying for the public and artists in Eastern Europe who saw implications for their own situation.

In 1980, when Poland and other E.European countries were coming out from under the Soviet bloch and developing new political structures, encouraged by our State Dept., my office in Washington sent a festival of films to several of these countries (E. Germany, Poland, Hungary, and Romania if my memory serves me correctly) by the prominent film director Sidney Lumet.  His programs were sponsored jointly by the American Embassy and the new progressive labor union Solidarity.  It included the recently released Prince of the City (a criticism of the NY Police Dept. and its corruption), among his other socially-relevant films, including even The Wiz with its black cast.

I recall that at Lumet’s debriefing in our office, he commented that he used to “give lip service to cultural exchange”, but now he “recognized how important these exchanges were” and said that every question he was asked by his peers on this trip was about “freedom” down to what lens he was allowed to use in making his films.  He offered to go overseas again for the U.S.G. any time and anywhere that we wished, but sadly we did not sponsor him again, which was unfortunate.  His films continued to champion the freedom of the individual, and I often wondered how that overseas trip had influenced him with new insights.

In the visual arts, renegade artists in China during the violent, volatile and repressive time of the Cultural Revolution (1967-1976), would secretly meet in the parks to paint intuitive small, expressionist landscapes, not the mandated social realism of workers in the factories, farmers in the fields or soldiers fighting to uphold Communist ideals. They would make these “experimental” paintings only big enough so that they could quickly hide them in their small “army” bags should authorities come upon them in practice.  This first rebellious group in the late 1970s and early 1980s was known as the “No Name” group, who also held private, surreptitious exhibitions for each other in their own apartments, thus later dubbed by scholars “apartment art.”  In 1979, the first group of “avant-garde” artists, titled Stars (XingXing), was not allowed to hang their paintings even on the fence around the National Gallery in Beijing, so in protest they joined the famous “Democracy Wall” marches, espousing creative freedom as a democratic right.

By the time the Dept. of State/USIS  sent the landmark “American Paintings Exhibition from the Boston Museum of Fine Arts” to China in 1981, the Chinese were starved for information from the West after 10 years of being cutoff from the world during the Cultural Revolution.  While their own art schools had reopened in 1978, original American paintings had not been seen, except in small postage-stamp-sized reproductions in a few of the art publications.  Thus the Boston Show was “culture shock” to the artists and to the public.  At the last minute before it opened, even with a Congressional delegation and Chief Justice Warren Burger in Beijing as the opening U.S. delegation, the Chinese objected to one dozen abstract paintings of the 70 paintings in the collection.   In a diplomatic success, but not without some tense days before the opening in which I participated, our Embassy guided the Boston Museum who managed to keep all of the paintings in the show, avoid censorship, and display a unique, unfiltered picture of American history and its art from Colonial times through Color Field painting. Many would agree that this was one of the most successful cultural exchanges ever presented by the U.S.  Coming from places as far as Xinjiang province in the West, nearly 300,000 Chinese saw the exhibition in Beijing and 250,000 attended the show later in Shanghai over only two months.We sold out 30,000 catalogs in the first week and printed a second run of the same number which also sold out quickly.  To this day, they have not forgotten it.

As a result of the impact of these programs in Communist and other authoritarian countries, I paid even closer attention to the way to respect the arts in developing the State Department program.  Despite the program’s mission to influence our country’s effectiveness in foreign relations, I established a policy to keep the arts independent, by presenting them for themselves first, before making any political gains in our international arts program.  We made sure that we selected the artists and exhibitions for their merits in achievement and quality, calling on museums and their curators to organize these exhibitions, thus keeping selection at an arm’s length from the government official.  This also reflected how our professional arts community -- museums and galleries --was structured, highlighted the staff’s expertise and well-honed practices, and gave a picture of how our professional arts community actually worked.  Public diplomacy, indeed, was established to “tell America’s story,”  (especially after the Cold War of the 1950s), and we wanted to tell it accurately and dynamically as part of a free and democratic society.  To many of us, this was the best way to show our values and support other aspects of our foreign relations.