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ON POLITICAL AUDIENCES: AN ARGUMENT IN FAVOUR OF PREACHING TO THE CHOIR

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  10 March 2021

Uri Agnon
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Abstract

A critique of politically engaged art is that gallery-dwellers, concert-goers and theatre-lovers share the same political inclination as the artists. Often known as ‘preaching to the choir’, the critique holds that art's power to challenge and persuade is rendered valueless when it is experienced only by people who already hold the same (typically leftist) ideas. In this article I suggest three distinct yet interconnected responses to this critique: namely, ‘expanding’, ‘galvanising’ and ‘activating’ the choir. In the first part I explore ‘expanding’ and ‘galvanising’ through works by Stefan Prins, Sarah Nicolls, Pamela Z and Soosan Lolavar. In the second half I discuss how I ‘activate’ the choir in my own work.

Type
RESEARCH ARTICLE
Information
Tempo , Volume 75 , Issue 296 , April 2021 , pp. 57 - 70
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Copyright
Copyright © The Author(s), 2021. Published by Cambridge University Press

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References

1 See for example: Leppert, Richard and McClary, Susan, eds., Music and Society: The Politics of Composition, Performance and Reception (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1987)Google Scholar; and HaCohen, Ruth and Ezrahi, Yaron, Composing Power, Singing Freedom: Overt and Covert Links Between Music and Politics in the West (Jerusalem: Van Leer Jerusalem and Hakibbutz Hameuchad, 2017)Google Scholar.

2 Rousseau, Jean-Jacques, Politics and the Arts: A Letter to M. D'Alembert on the Theatre, trans. Bloom, Allan (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1959)Google Scholar.

3 Rousseau, Politics and the Arts, p. 26.

4 Adorno writes ‘Sartre's frank doubt whether Guernica “won a single supporter for the Spanish cause” certainly also applies to Brecht's didactic drama. Scarcely anyone needs to be taught the fabula docet to be extracted from it – that there is injustice in the world; … the trappings of epic drama recall the American phrase “preaching to the converted”’. See Theodor Adorno, ‘On Commitment’, in Aesthetics and Politics, trans. Francis McDonagh, ed. Frederic Jameson (London: Verso, 2007 [1961]), p. 185. Rancière, when stating his objection to politically engaged art, cites Rousseau's letter. Jacques Rancière, ‘The Paradoxes of Political Art’, in Dissensus – on Politics and Esthetics, ed. and trans. Steven Corocan (London: Continuum International Press, 2010), p. 136.

5 Rousseau, Politics and the Arts, p. 21.

6 Bourdieu most notably in Pierre Bourdieu, Distinction: A Social Critique of the Judgement of Taste, trans. Richard Nice (Cambridge MA: Harvard University Press, 1984 [1979]). See also Serge Denisoff, ‘Protest Songs: Those of the Top Forty and Those of the Street’, American Quarterly, 22/4 (1970), pp. 807–23, and Richard A. Peterson, ‘Understanding Audience Segmentation: From Elite and Mass to Omnivore and Univore’, Poetics, 21 (1992), pp. 243–58.

7 Martha Rosler, ‘Lookers, Buyers, Dealers and Makers: Thoughts on Audience’, in Decoys and Disruptions: Selected Writings (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2004), pp. 9–52.

8 Rosler, ‘Lookers, Buyers, Dealers and Makers’, p. 28.

9 Rosler, ‘Lookers, Buyers, Dealers and Makers’.

10 As quoted in Denisoff, ‘Protest Songs’, p. 243.

11 See for example Bernice Johnson Reagon, ‘Let the Church Sing “Freedom”’, Black Music Research Journal, 7 (1987): pp. 105–18; Kerran L. Sanger, ‘When the Spirit Says Sing!’: The Role of Freedom Songs in the Civil Rights Movement (New York: Garland Publishing, 1995).

12 Richard A. Lee, ‘Protest Music as Alternative Media During the Vietnam War Era’, in War and the Media: Essays on News Reporting, Propaganda and Popular Culture, ed Paul M. Haridakis, Barbara S. Hugenberg and, Stanley T. Wearden, (Jefferson: McFarland & Company, 2009), pp. 24–40.

13 Nadeem Karkabi, ‘Staging Particular Difference: Politics of Space in the Palestinian Alternative Music Scene’, Middle East Journal of Culture and Communication, 6/3 (2013), pp. 308–28.

14 Hettie Malcomson, ‘Contesting Resistance, Protesting Violence: Women, War and Hip Hop in Mexico’, Music and Arts in Action, 7/1 (2019), pp. 46–63.

15 John Street, ‘“Fight the Power”: The Politics of Music and the Music of Politics’, Government and Opposition, 38/1 (2003), pp. 113–30.

16 Avi Mugrahbi, Screening of Between Fences (2016) at Imbala – activist community centre, 20/03/2018.

17 Denisoff's division of protest songs into magnetic and rhetorical is an interesting starting point. It is limited both in its specificity to songs, and in a loyalty to a Leninist approach that understands political community only in organisational and class-consciousness terms. Desinoff argues that songs from the so-called ‘New Left’ are ‘reflective of individual rather than collective consciousness’, ignoring collectiveness on the basis of political action, ideology, and most importantly race. This in turn misses the variety of ways art can strengthen and construct communities. Denisoff, ‘Protest Movements: Class Consciousness and the Propaganda Song’, Sociology Quarterly, 9/2 (1968), pp. 228–47.

18 When discussing political songs that became anthems of Black political movements Shana L. Redmond highlights the ‘call-and-response that lies at the heart of Black music’. See Shana L. Redmond, Anthem: Social Movements and the sound of Solidarity in the African Diaspora (New York: New York University Press, 2013), p. 3.

19 Evan Wright, Generation Kill (New York: Putnam Adult, 2004).

20 Tomasz Biernacki, ‘Alien Bodies, Stefan Prins’ Aesthetics of Music’, Dissonance, 125 (2014), p. 38.

21 For example, Alex Ross, ‘Blunt Instruments’, New Yorker, 12 November 2012, available at www.therestisnoise.com/2012/11/donaueschingen-review.html; Biernacki, ‘Alien Bodies’, pp. 38–9; Max Erwin, ‘Stefan Prins – Stefan Prins: Augmented. Nadar Ensemble, Klangforum Wien, Yaron Deutsch, Stephane Ginsburgh. Kairos, 0015044 KAI’. TEMPO, 73, no. 290 (2019), pp. 81–3.

22 Celeste Oram claims Prins's approach to technology in this piece is paradoxical: showing technological scepticism through pointing the critical gaze at technology (rather than those who use it), while simultaneously engaging positively with it as a composer and programmer. Celeste Oram, ‘Darmstadt's New Wave Modernism’, TEMPO, 69, no. 271 (2015), pp. 60–62.

23 Martin Iddon examines the relation between critiquing and repeating politics in new conceptualism pieces. While his article focuses on Kreidler's Fremdarbeit and mentions Generation Kill only in passing, it still has relevance to this debate. Martin Iddon, ‘Outsourcing Progress: On Conceptual Music’, TEMPO, 70, no. 275 (2015), pp. 36–49.

24 For silence as a compositional and dramatic device in film see Danijela Kulezic-Wilson,‘The Music of Film Silence’, Music and the Moving Image, 2/3 (2009), pp. 1–10.

25 Valery Masson-Delmotte et al., ‘IPCC, 2018: Summary for Policymakers’, in: Global Warming of 1.5°C., p. 32. www.ipcc.ch/sr15/chapter/spm/.

26 ‘My two main characters, sisters, could be informal, offhand and spiky and this combination gave me a good range for teasing out some of the stickier personal issues for people. Should you really be flying on that mini-break? As an audience member, listening to the one-sided conversations, you are not only filling in the gaps of what is not being said, you're also placing yourself on a spectrum and hopefully questioning, empathising with other viewpoints’. See Sarah Nicolls. ‘12 Years and a Piano’ in Dark Mountain, April 2020. https://dark-mountain.net/12-years-and-a-piano/ (accessed 28 July 2020).

27 Received in private communication, 15 July 2020.

28 See Prins's website www.stefanprins.be/eng/composesChrono/comp_2012_03.html (accessed 28 July 2020) and Nicolls's podcast ‘The Musical Activist’ https://themusicalactivist.podbean.com/ (accessed 28 July 2020).

29 Oram, ‘Darmstadt's New Wave Modernism’, p. 61.

30 ‘The audience's responses explained how they felt it useful and powerful to experience this narrative with the emotional exploration of music, rather than just the more intellectual reading the news by itself’, Nicolls, ‘12 Years and a Piano’.

31 This is reflected in the responses to the questionnaire, with one audience member writing: ‘I'm currently putting together a workshop series based around the idea of climate change – so this performance resonated with all of the emotions I have’.

32 Z. has worked both within and outside the new music scene. See George E. Lewis ‘The Visual Discourses of Pamela Z’, Journal of Society for American Music, 1/1 (2007), pp. 57–77.

33 This resonates with Rancière's understanding of politics as ‘a way of framing, among sensory data, a specific sphere of experience’. Politics is that which makes things visible, audible and so on. ‘The Politics of Literature’, in Dissensus: On Politics and Aesthetics, trans. Steve Corcoran (London: Continuum, 2010 [2004]), pp. 152.

34 Marie Thompson, ‘Whiteness and the Ontological Turn in Sound Studies’, Parallax, 23/3 (2017), pp. 275–8.

35 Yates McKee, Strike Art: Contemporary Art and the Post-Occupy Condition (London: Verso, 2017).

36 McKee, Strike Art, p. 26.

37 McKee, Strike Art, p. 237.

38 While some artist activist groups started after the international political unrest of 2011, many others date back to the early 2000s and earlier. Reviewing McKee's book, Paloma Checa-Gismero writes that its ‘risky account of Occupy Wall Street's centrality in enacting a change of paradigm in contemporary art practice is an enthusiastic and New York-centric attempt to expand the historical canon of Western avant-garde art from one of its centers’. Paloma Checa-Gismero, “Strike Art’, Filled: A Journal of Socially-Engaged Art Criticism, 4 (2016). http://field-journal.com/issue-4/review-yates-mckee-strike-art (accessed 31 July 2020).

39 For the list of RoR bands see www.rhythms-of-resistance.org/about-us/bands/ (accessed 13 August 2020).

40 See for example Rude Mechanical Orchestra, https://rudemechanicalorchestra.org/, Brass Liberation Orchestra http://brassliberation.org/ (accessed 7 August 2020) and the ‘irresistible spectacle of creative movement and sonic self-expression directed at making the world a better place’ of Honk! http://honkfest.org/about/ (accessed 7 August 2020); for the history of the Brass Band see Trevor Herbert, The British Brass Band a Musical and Social History (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000), p. 39.

41 Carmen L. McClish, ‘Activism Based in Embarrassment: The Anti-Consumption Spirituality of the Reverend Billy’, Liminalities: A Journal of Performance Studies 5, no. 2, (2009); Max Ritts, ‘Environmentalists Abide: Listening to Whale Music – 1965–1985’. Environment and Planning D: Society and Space, 35/6 (December 2017), pp. 1096–114; Damian Gayle, ‘Greenpeace Performs Arctic Requiem in Effort to Touch Hearts Over Shell Drilling’, The Guardian, 3 August 2015.

42 Damien Gayle, ‘Climate Activists Bring Trojan Horse to British Museum in BP Protest’. The Guardian, 7 February 2020; Aaron Walawalkar, ‘Activists Try to Occupy British Museum in Protest Against BP Ties’, The Guardian, 8 February 2020; Rebecca Speare-Cole, ‘Climate activists leave British Museum after three-day protest over BP sponsorship’, The Evening Standard, 9 February 2020; ‘Climate Activists Stage British Museum Protest with Trojan Horse’, ArtForum, 7 February 2020, www.artforum.com/news/protesting-bp-climate-activists-sneak-trojan-horse-at-british-museum-82127.

43 McKee includes in his study anything that interacts with what he understands as the ‘art system’. This then means for him that any action which includes artists can be considered as art. He argues for this approach by claiming that the merging of ‘art’ and ‘non-art’ is ‘recurring and essential’ in the history of modern art. McKee, Strike Art, pp. 26–7. While this approach is not without merit, it is also limited. The book analyses cardboard signs and gallery exhibitions with exactly the same tools. To me the objects of discussion can at times seem arbitrary, especially as my experience has taught me that non-artists can sometimes be much better at designing signs than professional artists.

44 On the fruitfulness of using Affordance Theory to discuss the politics and aesthetics of art see Levine, Caroline, Forms: Whole, Rhythm, Hierarchy, Network (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2015), pp. 6–11Google Scholar.

45 On the relations between art and creativity see Bishop, Claire, Artificial Hells: Participatory Art and the Politics of Spectatorship (London: Verso 2012), p. 16Google Scholar.

46 For more a more elaborate overview see Uri Agnon, ‘How Settler Groups Could Use Anneation to Deepen Palestinian Disposition’, +972 Magazine, 24 June 2020). www.972mag.com/settlers-annexation-jnf-elad-palestinians/ (accessed 2 August 2020).

47 For instance an article in Haaretz newspaper, Nir Hasson, ‘The Judge Said This Is Not The Theatre Nor The Circus, So What If She Said?’ Haaretz, 28 October 2018. (Hebrew).

48 Bishop, Artificial Hells, p. 18.

49 I am referencing these terms as they appear in ‘The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction’. Miriam Hasen argues that Benjamin's usage of the ‘aura’ in ‘The Work of Art’ is narrower than elsewhere and that in this essay he sees the ‘aura’ as a ‘fetishitic cult of beautiful semblance’. Benjamin, Walter ‘The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction’ in The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction, trans. Underwood, J.A. (London: Penguin Books, 2008 [1936]), p. 11Google Scholar. Hasen, Miriam Bratu, ‘Benjamin's Aura’, Critical Inquiry, 34/2 (2008), p. 355Google Scholar.