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Harold Pinter—Nobel Lecture: Art, Truth & Politics

Harold Pinter, a famous playwriter, won the Nobel Prize for Literature in 2005. His acceptance speech, which is below, was vehemently critical of the US and its war on terror and Iraq policy. You can see the original speech at http://nobelprize.org/literature/laureates/2005/pinter-lecture.html , which includes a video recording.

Nobel Lecture: Art, Trush & Politics

By Harold Pinter

At the Nobel Prize awards

December 8, 2005

© The Nobel Foundation 2005

In 1958 I wrote the following:

There are no hard distinctions between what is real and what is unreal, nor between what is true and what is false. A thing is not necessarily either true or false; it can be both true and false.

I believe that these assertions still make sense and do still apply to the exploration of reality through art. So as a writer I stand by them but as a citizen I cannot. As a citizen I must ask: What is true? What is false?

Truth in drama is forever elusive. You never quite find it but the search for it is compulsive. The search is clearly what drives the endeavour. The search is your task. More often than not you stumble upon the truth in the dark, colliding with it or just glimpsing an image or a shape which seems to correspond to the truth, often without realising that you have done so. But the real truth is that there never is any such thing as one truth to be found in dramatic art. There are many. These truths challenge each other, recoil from each other, reflect each other, ignore each other, tease each other, are blind to each other. Sometimes you feel you have the truth of a moment in your hand, then it slips through your fingers and is lost.

I have often been asked how my plays come about. I cannot say. Nor can I ever sum up my plays, except to say that this is what happened. That is what they said. That is what they did.

Most of the plays are engendered by a line, a word or an image. The given word is often shortly followed by the image. I shall give two examples of two lines which came right out of the blue into my head, followed by an image, followed by me.

The plays are The Homecoming and Old Times . The first line of The Homecoming is What have you done with the scissors? The first line of Old Times is Dark.

In each case I had no further information.

In the first case someone was obviously looking for a pair of scissors and was demanding their whereabouts of someone else he suspected had probably stolen them. But I somehow knew that the person addressed didn’t give a damn about the scissors or about the questioner either, for that matter.

Dark I took to be a description of someone’s hair, the hair of a woman, and was the answer to a question. In each case I found myself compelled to pursue the matter. This happened visually, a very slow fade, through shadow into light.

I always start a play by calling the characters A, B and C.

In the play that became The Homecoming I saw a man enter a stark room and ask his question of a younger man sitting on an ugly sofa reading a racing paper. I somehow suspected that A was a father and that B was his son, but I had no proof. This was however confirmed a short time later when B (later to become Lenny) says to A (later to become Max), Dad, do you mind if I change the subject? I want to ask you something. The dinner we had before, what was the name of it? What do you call it? Why don’t you buy a dog? You’re a dog cook. Honest. You think you’re cooking for a lot of dogs. So since B calls A Dad it seemed to me reasonable to assume that they were father and son. A was also clearly the cook and his cooking did not seem to be held in high regard. Did this mean that there was no mother? I didn’t know. But, as I told myself at the time, our beginnings never know our ends.

Dark. A large window. Evening sky. A man, A (later to become Deeley), and a woman, B (later to become Kate), sitting with drinks. Fat or thin? the man asks. Who are they talking about? But I then see, standing at the window, a woman, C (later to become Anna), in another condition of light, her back to them, her hair dark.

It’s a strange moment, the moment of creating characters who up to that moment have had no existence. What follows is fitful, uncertain, even hallucinatory, although sometimes it can be an unstoppable avalanche. The author’s position is an odd one. In a sense he is not welcomed by the characters. The characters resist him, they are not easy to live with, they are impossible to define. You certainly can’t dictate to them. To a certain extent you play a never-ending game with them, cat and mouse, blind man’s buff, hide and seek. But finally you find that you have people of flesh and blood on your hands, people with will and an individual sensibility of their own, made out of component parts you are unable to change, manipulate or distort.

So language in art remains a highly ambiguous transaction, a quicksand, a trampoline, a frozen pool which might give way under you, the author, at any time.

But as I have said, the search for the truth can never stop. It cannot be adjourned, it cannot be postponed. It has to be faced, right there, on the spot.

Political theatre presents an entirely different set of problems. Sermonising has to be avoided at all cost. Objectivity is essential. The characters must be allowed to breathe their own air. The author cannot confine and constrict them to satisfy his own taste or disposition or prejudice. He must be prepared to approach them from a variety of angles, from a full and uninhibited range of perspectives, take them by surprise, perhaps, occasionally, but nevertheless give them the freedom to go which way they will. This does not always work. And political satire, of course, adheres to none of these precepts, in fact does precisely the opposite, which is its proper function.

In my play The Birthday Party I think I allow a whole range of options to operate in a dense forest of possibility before finally focussing on an act of subjugation.

Mountain Language pretends to no such range of operation. It remains brutal, short and ugly. But the soldiers in the play do get some fun out of it. One sometimes forgets that torturers become easily bored. They need a bit of a laugh to keep their spirits up. This has been confirmed of course by the events at Abu Ghraib in Baghdad. Mountain Language lasts only 20 minutes, but it could go on for hour after hour, on and on and on, the same pattern repeated over and over again, on and on, hour after hour.

Ashes to Ashes , on the other hand, seems to me to be taking place under water. A drowning woman, her hand reaching up through the waves, dropping down out of sight, reaching for others, but finding nobody there, either above or under the water, finding only shadows, reflections, floating; the woman a lost figure in a drowning landscape, a woman unable to escape the doom that seemed to belong only to others.

But as they died, she must die too.

Political language, as used by politicians, does not venture into any of this territory since the majority of politicians, on the evidence available to us, are interested not in truth but in power and in the maintenance of that power. To maintain that power it is essential that people remain in ignorance, that they live in ignorance of the truth, even the truth of their own lives. What surrounds us therefore is a vast tapestry of lies, upon which we feed.

As every single person here knows, the justification for the invasion of Iraq was that Saddam Hussein possessed a highly dangerous body of weapons of mass destruction, some of which could be fired in 45 minutes, bringing about appalling devastation. We were assured that was true. It was not true. We were told that Iraq had a relationship with Al Quaeda and shared responsibility for the atrocity in New York of September 11th 2001. We were assured that this was true. It was not true. We were told that Iraq threatened the security of the world. We were assured it was true. It was not true.

The truth is something entirely different. The truth is to do with how the United States understands its role in the world and how it chooses to embody it.

But before I come back to the present I would like to look at the recent past, by which I mean United States foreign policy since the end of the Second World War. I believe it is obligatory upon us to subject this period to at least some kind of even limited scrutiny, which is all that time will allow here.

Everyone knows what happened in the Soviet Union and throughout Eastern Europe during the post-war period: the systematic brutality, the widespread atrocities, the ruthless suppression of independent thought. All this has been fully documented and verified.

But my contention here is that the US crimes in the same period have only been superficially recorded, let alone documented, let alone acknowledged, let alone recognised as crimes at all. I believe this must be addressed and that the truth has considerable bearing on where the world stands now. Although constrained, to a certain extent, by the existence of the Soviet Union, the United States’ actions throughout the world made it clear that it had concluded it had carte blanche to do what it liked.

Direct invasion of a sovereign state has never in fact been America’s favoured method. In the main, it has preferred what it has described as low intensity conflict . Low intensity conflict means that thousands of people die but slower than if you dropped a bomb on them in one fell swoop. It means that you infect the heart of the country, that you establish a malignant growth and watch the gangrene bloom. When the populace has been subdued—or beaten to death—the same thing—and your own friends, the military and the great corporations, sit comfortably in power, you go before the camera and say that democracy has prevailed. This was a commonplace in US foreign policy in the years to which I refer.

The tragedy of Nicaragua was a highly significant case. I choose to offer it here as a potent example of America’s view of its role in the world, both then and now.

I was present at a meeting at the US embassy in London in the late 1980s.

The United States Congress was about to decide whether to give more money to the Contras in their campaign against the state of Nicaragua. I was a member of a delegation speaking on behalf of Nicaragua but the most important member of this delegation was a Father John Metcalf. The leader of the US body was Raymond Seitz (then number two to the ambassador, later ambassador himself). Father Metcalf said: Sir, I am in charge of a parish in the north of Nicaragua. My parishioners built a school, a health centre, a cultural centre. We have lived in peace. A few months ago a Contra force attacked the parish. They destroyed everything: the school, the health centre, the cultural centre. They raped nurses and teachers, slaughtered doctors, in the most brutal manner. They behaved like savages. Please demand that the US government withdraw its support from this shocking terrorist activity.

Raymond Seitz had a very good reputation as a rational, responsible and highly sophisticated man. He was greatly respected in diplomatic circles. He listened, paused and then spoke with some gravity. Father, he said, let me tell you something. In war, innocent people always suffer. There was a frozen silence. We stared at him. He did not flinch.

Innocent people, indeed, always suffer.

Finally somebody said: But in this case innocent people were the victims of a gruesome atrocity subsidised by your government, one among many. If Congress allows the Contras more money further atrocities of this kind will take place. Is this not the case? Is your government not therefore guilty of supporting acts of murder and destruction upon the citizens of a sovereign state?

Seitz was imperturbable. I don’t agree that the facts as presented support your assertions, he said.

As we were leaving the Embassy a US aide told me that he enjoyed my plays. I did not reply.

I should remind you that at the time President Reagan made the following statement: The Contras are the moral equivalent of our Founding Fathers.

The United States supported the brutal Somoza dictatorship in Nicaragua for over 40 years. The Nicaraguan people, led by the Sandinistas, overthrew this regime in 1979, a breathtaking popular revolution.

The Sandinistas weren’t perfect. They possessed their fair share of arrogance and their political philosophy contained a number of contradictory elements. But they were intelligent, rational and civilised. They set out to establish a stable, decent, pluralistic society. The death penalty was abolished. Hundreds of thousands of poverty-stricken peasants were brought back from the dead. Over 100,000 families were given title to land. Two thousand schools were built. A quite remarkable literacy campaign reduced illiteracy in the country to less than one seventh. Free education was established and a free health service. Infant mortality was reduced by a third. Polio was eradicated.

The United States denounced these achievements as Marxist/Leninist subversion. In the view of the US government, a dangerous example was being set. If Nicaragua was allowed to establish basic norms of social and economic justice, if it was allowed to raise the standards of health care and education and achieve social unity and national self respect, neighbouring countries would ask the same questions and do the same things. There was of course at the time fierce resistance to the status quo in El Salvador.

I spoke earlier about a tapestry of lies which surrounds us. President Reagan commonly described Nicaragua as a totalitarian dungeon . This was taken generally by the media, and certainly by the British government, as accurate and fair comment. But there was in fact no record of death squads under the Sandinista government. There was no record of torture. There was no record of systematic or official military brutality. No priests were ever murdered in Nicaragua. There were in fact three priests in the government, two Jesuits and a Maryknoll missionary. The totalitarian dungeons were actually next door, in El Salvador and Guatemala. The United States had brought down the democratically elected government of Guatemala in 1954 and it is estimated that over 200,000 people had been victims of successive military dictatorships.

Six of the most distinguished Jesuits in the world were viciously murdered at the Central American University in San Salvador in 1989 by a battalion of the Alcatl regiment trained at Fort Benning, Georgia, USA. That extremely brave man Archbishop Romero was assassinated while saying mass. It is estimated that 75,000 people died. Why were they killed? They were killed because they believed a better life was possible and should be achieved. That belief immediately qualified them as communists. They died because they dared to question the status quo, the endless plateau of poverty, disease, degradation and oppression, which had been their birthright.

The United States finally brought down the Sandinista government. It took some years and considerable resistance but relentless economic persecution and 30,000 dead finally undermined the spirit of the Nicaraguan people. They were exhausted and poverty stricken once again. The casinos moved back into the country. Free health and free education were over. Big business returned with a vengeance. Democracy had prevailed.

But this policy was by no means restricted to Central America. It was conducted throughout the world. It was never-ending. And it is as if it never happened.

The United States supported and in many cases engendered every right wing military dictatorship in the world after the end of the Second World War. I refer to Indonesia, Greece, Uruguay, Brazil, Paraguay, Haiti, Turkey, the Philippines, Guatemala, El Salvador, and, of course, Chile. The horror the United States inflicted upon Chile in 1973 can never be purged and can never be forgiven.

Hundreds of thousands of deaths took place throughout these countries. Did they take place? And are they in all cases attributable to US foreign policy? The answer is yes they did take place and they are attributable to American foreign policy. But you wouldn’t know it.

It never happened. Nothing ever happened. Even while it was happening it wasn’t happening. It didn’t matter. It was of no interest. The crimes of the United States have been systematic, constant, vicious, remorseless, but very few people have actually talked about them. You have to hand it to America. It has exercised a quite clinical manipulation of power worldwide while masquerading as a force for universal good. It’s a brilliant, even witty, highly successful act of hypnosis.

I put to you that the United States is without doubt the greatest show on the road. Brutal, indifferent, scornful and ruthless it may be but it is also very clever. As a salesman it is out on its own and its most saleable commodity is self love. It’s a winner. Listen to all American presidents on television say the words, the American people , as in the sentence, I say to the American people it is time to pray and to defend the rights of the American people and I ask the American people to trust their president in the action he is about to take on behalf of the American people.

It’s a scintillating stratagem. Language is actually employed to keep thought at bay. The words the American people provide a truly voluptuous cushion of reassurance. You don’t need to think. Just lie back on the cushion. The cushion may be suffocating your intelligence and your critical faculties but it’s very comfortable. This does not apply of course to the 40 million people living below the poverty line and the 2 million men and women imprisoned in the vast gulag of prisons, which extends across the US.

The United States no longer bothers about low intensity conflict. It no longer sees any point in being reticent or even devious. It puts its cards on the table without fear or favour. It quite simply doesn’t give a damn about the United Nations, international law or critical dissent, which it regards as impotent and irrelevant. It also has its own bleating little lamb tagging behind it on a lead, the pathetic and supine Great Britain.

What has happened to our moral sensibility? Did we ever have any? What do these words mean? Do they refer to a term very rarely employed these days—conscience? A conscience to do not only with our own acts but to do with our shared responsibility in the acts of others? Is all this dead? Look at Guantanamo Bay. Hundreds of people detained without charge for over three years, with no legal representation or due process, technically detained forever. This totally illegitimate structure is maintained in defiance of the Geneva Convention. It is not only tolerated but hardly thought about by what’s called the international community . This criminal outrage is being committed by a country, which declares itself to be the leader of the free world . Do we think about the inhabitants of Guantanamo Bay? What does the media say about them? They pop up occasionally—a small item on page six. They have been consigned to a no man’s land from which indeed they may never return. At present many are on hunger strike, being force-fed, including British residents. No niceties in these force-feeding procedures. No sedative or anaesthetic. Just a tube stuck up your nose and into your throat. You vomit blood. This is torture. What has the British Foreign Secretary said about this? Nothing. What has the British Prime Minister said about this? Nothing. Why not? Because the United States has said: to criticise our conduct in Guantanamo Bay constitutes an unfriendly act. You’re either with us or against us. So Blair shuts up.

The invasion of Iraq was a bandit act, an act of blatant state terrorism, demonstrating absolute contempt for the concept of international law. The invasion was an arbitrary military action inspired by a series of lies upon lies and gross manipulation of the media and therefore of the public; an act intended to consolidate American military and economic control of the Middle East masquerading—as a last resort—all other justifications having failed to justify themselves—as liberation. A formidable assertion of military force responsible for the death and mutilation of thousands and thousands of innocent people.

We have brought torture, cluster bombs, depleted uranium, innumerable acts of random murder, misery, degradation and death to the Iraqi people and call it bringing freedom and democracy to the Middle East .

How many people do you have to kill before you qualify to be described as a mass murderer and a war criminal? One hundred thousand? More than enough, I would have thought. Therefore it is just that Bush and Blair be arraigned before the International Criminal Court of Justice. But Bush has been clever. He has not ratified the International Criminal Court of Justice. Therefore if any American soldier or for that matter politician finds himself in the dock Bush has warned that he will send in the marines. But Tony Blair has ratified the Court and is therefore available for prosecution. We can let the Court have his address if they’re interested. It is Number 10, Downing Street, London.

Death in this context is irrelevant. Both Bush and Blair place death well away on the back burner. At least 100,000 Iraqis were killed by American bombs and missiles before the Iraq insurgency began. These people are of no moment. Their deaths don’t exist. They are blank. They are not even recorded as being dead. We don’t do body counts, said the American general Tommy Franks.

Early in the invasion there was a photograph published on the front page of British newspapers of Tony Blair kissing the cheek of a little Iraqi boy. A grateful child, said the caption. A few days later there was a story and photograph, on an inside page, of another four-year-old boy with no arms. His family had been blown up by a missile. He was the only survivor. When do I get my arms back? he asked. The story was dropped. Well, Tony Blair wasn’t holding him in his arms, nor the body of any other mutilated child, nor the body of any bloody corpse. Blood is dirty. It dirties your shirt and tie when you’re making a sincere speech on television.

The 2,000 American dead are an embarrassment. They are transported to their graves in the dark. Funerals are unobtrusive, out of harm’s way. The mutilated rot in their beds, some for the rest of their lives. So the dead and the mutilated both rot, in different kinds of graves.

Here is an extract from a poem by Pablo Neruda , I’m Explaining a Few Things :

And one morning all that was burning, one morning the bonfires leapt out of the earth devouring human beings and from then on fire, gunpowder from then on, and from then on blood. Bandits with planes and Moors, bandits with finger-rings and duchesses, bandits with black friars spattering blessings came through the sky to kill children and the blood of children ran through the streets without fuss, like children’s blood. Jackals that the jackals would despise stones that the dry thistle would bite on and spit out, vipers that the vipers would abominate. Face to face with you I have seen the blood of Spain tower like a tide to drown you in one wave of pride and knives. Treacherous generals: see my dead house, look at broken Spain: from every house burning metal flows instead of flowers from every socket of Spain Spain emerges and from every dead child a rifle with eyes and from every crime bullets are born which will one day find the bull’s eye of your hearts. And you will ask: why doesn’t his poetry speak of dreams and leaves and the great volcanoes of his native land. Come and see the blood in the streets. Come and see the blood in the streets. Come and see the blood in the streets! *

Let me make it quite clear that in quoting from Neruda’s poem I am in no way comparing Republican Spain to Saddam Hussein’s Iraq. I quote Neruda because nowhere in contemporary poetry have I read such a powerful visceral description of the bombing of civilians.

I have said earlier that the United States is now totally frank about putting its cards on the table. That is the case. Its official declared policy is now defined as full spectrum dominance . That is not my term, it is theirs. Full spectrum dominance means control of land, sea, air and space and all attendant resources.

The United States now occupies 702 military installations throughout the world in 132 countries, with the honourable exception of Sweden, of course. We don’t quite know how they got there but they are there all right.

The United States possesses 8,000 active and operational nuclear warheads. Two thousand are on hair trigger alert, ready to be launched with 15 minutes warning. It is developing new systems of nuclear force, known as bunker busters. The British, ever cooperative, are intending to replace their own nuclear missile, Trident. Who, I wonder, are they aiming at? Osama bin Laden? You? Me? Joe Dokes? China? Paris? Who knows? What we do know is that this infantile insanity—the possession and threatened use of nuclear weapons—is at the heart of present American political philosophy. We must remind ourselves that the United States is on a permanent military footing and shows no sign of relaxing it.

Many thousands, if not millions, of people in the United States itself are demonstrably sickened, shamed and angered by their government’s actions, but as things stand they are not a coherent political force—yet. But the anxiety, uncertainty and fear which we can see growing daily in the United States is unlikely to diminish.

I know that President Bush has many extremely competent speech writers but I would like to volunteer for the job myself. I propose the following short address which he can make on television to the nation. I see him grave, hair carefully combed, serious, winning, sincere, often beguiling, sometimes employing a wry smile, curiously attractive, a man’s man.

God is good. God is great. God is good. My God is good. Bin Laden’s God is bad. His is a bad God. Saddam’s God was bad, except he didn’t have one. He was a barbarian. We are not barbarians. We don’t chop people’s heads off. We believe in freedom. So does God. I am not a barbarian. I am the democratically elected leader of a freedom-loving democracy. We are a compassionate society. We give compassionate electrocution and compassionate lethal injection. We are a great nation. I am not a dictator. He is. I am not a barbarian. He is. And he is. They all are. I possess moral authority. You see this fist? This is my moral authority. And don’t you forget it.

A writer’s life is a highly vulnerable, almost naked activity. We don’t have to weep about that. The writer makes his choice and is stuck with it. But it is true to say that you are open to all the winds, some of them icy indeed. You are out on your own, out on a limb. You find no shelter, no protection—unless you lie—in which case of course you have constructed your own protection and, it could be argued, become a politician.

I have referred to death quite a few times this evening. I shall now quote a poem of my own called Death .

Where was the dead body found? Who found the dead body? Was the dead body dead when found? How was the dead body found? Who was the dead body? Who was the father or daughter or brother Or uncle or sister or mother or son Of the dead and abandoned body? Was the body dead when abandoned? Was the body abandoned? By whom had it been abandoned? Was the dead body naked or dressed for a journey? What made you declare the dead body dead? Did you declare the dead body dead? How well did you know the dead body? How did you know the dead body was dead? Did you wash the dead body Did you close both its eyes Did you bury the body Did you leave it abandoned Did you kiss the dead body

When we look into a mirror we think the image that confronts us is accurate. But move a millimetre and the image changes. We are actually looking at a never-ending range of reflections. But sometimes a writer has to smash the mirror—for it is on the other side of that mirror that the truth stares at us.

I believe that despite the enormous odds which exist, unflinching, unswerving, fierce intellectual determination, as citizens, to define the real truth of our lives and our societies is a crucial obligation which devolves upon us all. It is in fact mandatory.

If such a determination is not embodied in our political vision we have no hope of restoring what is so nearly lost to us—the dignity of man.

* Extract from I’m Explaining a Few Things translated by Nathaniel Tarn, from Pablo Neruda: Selected Poems , published by Jonathan Cape, London 1970. Used by permission of The Random House Group Limited.

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• Posted: Monday, December 12, 2005

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Harold Pinter (1930-2008) on “Art, Truth and Politics”

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• Harold Pinter 2005 Nobel Prize speech

Harold Pinter, the Nobel Prize-winning British playwright, screenwriter, poet, actor and political activist died last week at the age of seventy-eight after a prolonged battle with cancer. In his 2005 Nobel Prize acceptance speech, Pinter excoriated US foreign policy. “The invasion of Iraq was a bandit act, an act of blatant state terrorism, demonstrating absolute contempt for the concept of international law,” Pinter said. We play an excerpt from his speech. [includes rush transcript]

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How Important is Art as a Form of Protest?

A survey of more than 50 respondents from over 30 countries.

Given the current political climate, we here at frieze have been reflecting on the role of art in responding to conflict. With this in mind, we invited a cross-section of artists, curators and writers to answer two deceptively simple questions: ‘How important is art as a form of protest?’ and ‘How effective is it as a conduit of change?’ Responses could take the form of a statement, an image, a film or a combination of all three. The submissions, by more than 50 respondents from over 30 countries are provocative and enlightening. Further contributions to the print version are included here, from around the world. (Click on the artist’s name below to jump to their entry.)

Vernon Ah Kee Jonathas de Andrade Daniel G. Andújar Andreas Angelidakis Leonor Antunes Kader Attia Walead Beshty David Birkin Daniel Boyd Adam Broomberg & Oliver Chanarin Paulo Bruscky Tania Bruguera Banu Cennetoğlu Kudzanai Chiurai Adam Chodzko   Neha Choksi Alice Creischer and Andreas Siekmann Abraham Cruzvillegas Minerva Cuevas Michael Dean Jeremy Deller Jimmie Durham Ibrahim El-Salahi Cevdet Erek John Gerrard Mariam Ghani Núria Güell Khaled Hafez Hands Off Our Revolution Lubaina Himid Hiwa K Adelita Husni-Bey Khaled Jarrar Bouchra Khalili Bose Krishnamachari Leung Chi Wo Fred Lonidier Helen Marten Kristian Mondrup and Liu Shiyuan Shana Moulton Eva and Franco Mattes Naeem Mohaiemen Shahryar Nashat Brian O’Doherty Ahmet Ögüt Uriel Orlow  Trevor Paglen Kameelah Janan Rasheed Claus Richter Doris Salcedo Dread Scott  Marinella Senatore Amy Sillman SUPERFLEX Slavs and Tatars Luca Vitone   Vernon Ah Kee Vernon Ah Kee lives in Brisbane, Australia. Earlier this year, he had a solo show, ‘Not an Animal or a Plant’, at the NAS Gallery, Sydney. He is participating in the inaugural Honolulu Biennial, which runs until 8 May.

Jonathas de Andrade Jonathas de Andrade lives in Recife, Brazil. His video The Uprising will be on display at the Museum of Modern Art, New York, as part of ‘Unfinished Conversations: New Work from the Collection’ which runs until 30 July. His solo show, ‘O Peixe’, at the New Museum, New York, runs until 9 April. His work is included in the Sharjah Biennial until 12 June.

Daniel G. Andújar Daniel G. Andújar lives in Barcelona, Spain. His work is included in documenta 14.

Art must be a sign of resistance to a political model that is increasingly hierarchical, diffuse, global and standardized. The public stage has become a sort of orchestrated video game – a frivolous, ridiculous operetta with a few recited parts that are performed daily before a people overwhelmed by the consequences of the crisis. The audience is immediately proscribed by the mass media and, therefore, defused before its fellow citizens dare ‘boo’ from the stands. This is the criminalization of protest, which leads to the brutalization of audiences implemented by refined political techniques – in short, to audiences that dare practise disobedience to the rules imposed by the institution, such as transgression, insubordination, the creation of new political experiences or the rehearsal of new voices. Democracy has become an aesthetic matter. I want to get away from unilateral, closed discourses affording no possibility for response, participation or interaction. We artists have a political function that requires clear ethical positions. Language can change the world – or should. This is one of the artist’s most effective tools.

Andreas Angelidakis Andreas Angelidakis lives in Athens, Greece. His work is included in documenta 14. In November, he is curating Regionale 17 at Kunsthalle Basel. Until the end of the year, he will continue to work on Kalejdohill, an experiment in citizen participation in Stockholm.

For the last five years, I’ve been working with the legendary transgender activist Paola Revenioti. Originally, my aim was to make her work known to a broader audience outside of Greece, so we began in 2013 with an interview in Candy magazine and then organized a show of her photographs at Breeder Gallery. Her work is pure protest; her magazine Kraximo (Gay Bashing) was the only outlet for reports of police brutality against LGBT+ citizens in the 1980s. There is a transcendent quality to her work, even if it’s just a Facebook post, a YouTube video or an archival photograph. I don’t know if showing her work in an art context would qualify as protest, but it certainly shed light on the history and current state of the fight for trans visibility and human rights. Last month, Revenioti’s documentary about Dimitra, a trans woman living on the island of Lesvos, was broadcast on national television: that’s a long way to go for someone whom society only expected to prostitute for a living. Change takes time, but every effort is worth it.

Leonor Antunes Leonor Antunes lives in Berlin, Germany. Earlier this year, she had a solo show at Air de Paris, Paris. This year, her work will be included in the 57th Venice Biennale.

Two weeks after the election of Donald Trump, I held a small event in Amsterdam in a place called the Hubertus House, which was designed by the architect Aldo van Eyck in 1959. I called it An Open House . I have been working on this project for quite a long time; I was invited to do it by the curating collective If I Can’t Dance I Don’t Want to Be Part of Your Revolution. Van Eyck designed two interconnected buildings to host single mothers and their children in a private foundation that provided day care, as well as other support. Initially, I didn’t plan to work on this project in the way that I did but after the shock of the election, I couldn’t think of anything else apart from reacting somehow. 

The project included 12 women, myself included, from different backgrounds and origins – we all look very different from each other. Tess van Eyck, the architect’s daughter, joined us, sitting on a sofa reading her newspaper. For one hour, we all stood on the balconies of the building and behind the windows. The public was told nothing about what they might see; they were allowed access to one of the two buildings, but not the one we were occupying. We were all dressed in the 12 different colours that Van Eyck used.

Kader Attia Kader Attia lives in Berlin, Germany. His solo show at theMuseum of Contemporary Art Australia, Sydney, runs from12 April to 30 July; his solo show at S.M.A.K, Ghent, Belgium, runs until 1 October. This year, his work will also be included in exhibitions at Lehmann Maupin, New York, Mary and Leigh Block Museum of Art, Northwestern University, Evanston, and Galleria Continua, San Gimignano.

Walead Beshty Walead Beshty lives in Los Angeles, USA. His solo show at Petzel, New York, USA, runs from 20 April to 17 June; his solo show at Rat Hole Gallery, Tokyo, runs until 29 April. ‘Picture Industry’, a provisional history of the technological image (1860 to the present), curated by Beshty, will be on view at the Hessel Museum of Art, Center for Curatorial Studies, Bard College, from 23 June to 10 September.

Art is a discourse about aesthetics staged through aesthetics. (I use that word in the original Greek sense, referring to perceptible things, the study of which concernsthe means by which something becomes knowable to the senses.) Art’s political potential derives from expanding the conditions of aesthetics, of what can be perceived, and distributing this perception in new configurations while being grounded in a set of parameters, i.e. its history, its venues and its conventions. In this sense, art modifies what is held in common, and it does this by tweaking and thereby challenging aesthetic conventions a few at a time; its movement is an improvisation within tradition, and its effect is gradual.

Art’s most potent political impact is achieved by its ability to intervene within conventions that are intertwined with histories of dominance and subordination, inclusion and exclusion, denaturalizing them and, by extension, democratizing experience. But, to exist, art requires infrastructure – to call something art is to assume a massive system of institutions and professionals, buildings and bureaucracies, histories and discourses. For this reason, art can rarely, if ever, intervene in civic life on its own terms. Instead, it acts within the systems it is inextricable from – and these systems are slow to evolve. Protest, on the other hand, is an expression of institutional crisis. It is a civic act in both production and execution. Protest is quick, fluid, forceful and, by definition, it eschews the solidity of institutions. Protest appears when the social contract has been violated in some way; it defies the institution’s authority to decide who has permission to speak and who does not, and the form that speech can take. Protest arises when institutions can no longer adequately contain the flow of the polis. It is a rupture and is evidence of a failure of institutions, thus it acts outside of and in opposition to institutional strictures. Protest circumvents the orderly arrangements of institutions; it does not negotiate with institutional parameters as art does; it does not tweak its rules, it refuses them on the basis of their corruption. Protest is a means to become a public, a citizenry, outside of the avenues prescribed by institutions.

In the face of crisis, art often reverts to the false promise of institutional inclusion, for it claims, albeit tacitly, that the institutional voice can speak for the excluded: the very failure that gives rise to protest. In the moments that necessitate protest, the voice of art is insufficient at best and oppositional at worst: for, the institutional system through which it speaks is the very thing that protest questions. When art masquerades as protest, it undermines its own capacities to expand perception; but, more troublingly, it nullifies protest by creating a false representation of it, institutionalizing that which is opposed to the institution itself. The former is relatively harmless – it just results in mediocre art – but the latter is insidious, since it forecloses the pathways that only protest can open up, offering a placebo where real action is required.

David Birkin David Birkin lives in New York, USA. His project ‘Cyclura nubila’, about the iguanas of Guantánamo, was recently published in Cabinet. Later this year, his work will be included in ‘Looking for the Clouds: Contemporary Photography in Times of Conflict’ at Casino, Luxembourg.

In ‘Art, Truth and Politics’, his acceptance speech for the 2005 Nobel Prize in Literature, Harold Pinter observed that there is no one truth to be found in drama – there are many. ‘These truths challenge each other, recoil from each other, reflect each other, ignore each other, tease each other, are blind to each other.’ Not so in politics. There, he argued, truth and falsehood are mutually exclusive. Weapons of mass destruction either exist or they do not. The Bowling Green massacre either happened or it didn’t. GB£350 million a week will either be spent on the National Health Service or it won’t.

But, political truth can be mercurial and fragile – never more so than now, in this climate of fake news and alternative facts. Artists, like journalists and activists, need to define the truth and defend it. If protesters get shut down, we need to amplify their voices, as Mark Wallinger did by reconstructing Brian Haw’s censored Iraq War placards at Tate Britain in 2007. If governments engage in Orwellian doublespeak, we need to uphold the Quaker creed of the late US civil rights leader Bayard Rustin and ‘Speak Truth to Power’. We need to do this with anger, joy, beauty and wit. Because, in the words of bell hooks: ‘We cannot have a meaningful revolution without humour.’

It’s time to look beyond the Eurocentric constraints of art for art’s sake. The poet, cultural theorist and first Senegalese president, Léopold Senghor, described an alternative perception of art that ‘assimilates beauty with goodness and especially with efficacy’. We shouldn’t be afraid to be polemical. We all have a dog in this fight. Or, if we don’t, we should be supporting people who do.

For me, art is first and foremost about a personal relationship to truth. Any notion of beauty springs from that premise. We cannot separate ethics from aesthetics. In this age of moral relativism, John Keats’ 1819 ode has never felt so political:

‘Beauty is truth, truth beauty, – that is all Ye know on earth, and all ye need to know.’

Daniel Boyd Daniel Boyd lives in Sydney, Australia. His work has been selected for the 3rd National Indigenous Art Triennial, ‘Defying Empire’, which will take place from 26 May to 10 September at the National Gallery of Australia.

Adam Broomberg & Oliver Chanarin Adam Broomberg and Oliver Chanarin live in London, UK, and Berlin, Germany. Earlier this year, they had a solo show at Lisson Gallery, Milan, Italy. Their project documenting the demolition of 100 migrant boats will be displayed in London in September as an Art on the Underground commission.

Last week, we were in Italy filming the official demolition of 100 migrant boats. They arrived laden with refugees from north Africa and, while their human cargo was either sent home or absorbed into the asylum system, the vessels themselves were never returned to their owners. There has been much debate within local government about how to deal with these hulking craft that lie beached like giant mammals on the concrete forecourt of Porto Pazzallo in Sicily. It’s a striking and melancholic scene. The decision to demolish them was both pragmatic as well as political. The boats are no longer sea-worthy and they are taking up valuable space in the port. But watching them being dismantled was oddly emotional. A digger can be remarkably tender when it wants to be, as it scans the wreckage for human debris, shoes, clothes and juice cartons. The demolition of these boats took a biblical 40 days and felt like an act of violence, undertaken by the state against objects that speak of culture and loss. We have forensically recorded this destruction. It may not be art. Perhaps it’s just a memory of something. 

Tania Bruguera Tania Bruguera lives between Havana, Cuba, and wherever art takes her. She researches ways in which art can be applied to everyday political life, focusing on the transformation of social affect into political effectiveness.

To resist is not enough. Use chants as if they were drums to spread the waves of commitment and slogans to highlight all the things that are wrong. But the streets are not enough. Be an active individual: it shows them you are not afraid. Learn the language of power, use the verbs they are scared of, publicly unveil their worst nightmares – act for them, not for us. Behave on a one-to-one scale with those you consider to be responsible. Laugh intelligently but never before you begin. Laugh after your goal is achieved, after your opposition is tricked, conflicted and incoherent because you took their power away with a simple human gesture. Don’t laugh about what they do, laugh about what you were able to do to them. What we know is not enough. Be persistent without tiring others. Use forms and actions that are legible for the resistance but new to the repressors. The time you have is the time they are using to figure out how to respond. Feeling good is not enough: create a political moment.

Kudzanai Chiurai Kudzanai Chiurai lives in Harare, Zimbabwe. He has a soloshow at Goodman Gallery, Johannesburg, in August; in September, a survey of his work will open at the Zeitz Museum of Contemporary Art Africa, Cape Town.

Adam Chodzko Adam Chodzko lives in Whitstable, UK. In recent years, his work has been included in exhibitions at Tate Britain and Raven Row, London, and the Benaki Museum, Athens.

All art is a form of protest. Artists find the urgency to make art by identifying something in the world that doesn’t yet exist, filling that fissure with images, actions or matter, and then sharing that vision with others. Whether the work is celebratory or critical of the world, if it is really art, if it is new, it must always emerge from a challenge to a world that was blindly carrying on without it, all off-kilter. Each artwork protests a lack, an imbalance, an excess in realitywhilst it performs a wonderful but awkward leap in the dark in order to ‘fix’ it, hoping never to be complicit with, or repeat, the reality that lay before it.

Does this mean that, by extension, today’s art is always a protest against yesterday? As a conduit of change, art is highly effective but on a slow, barely perceptible level. Art changes reality by proposing new realities. Unfortunately, politicians and big business have now got wise to art’s magical properties and have begun to shape new and increasingly bizarre realities, disregarding empirical truths but also – through megalomania – human rights, equality, etc. As a result, art is increasingly in the few impatient hands of the very powerful. Art as a conduit of change only functions if it is made by the powerless artist.

Neha Choksi Neha Choksi lives in Los Angeles, USA, and Bombay, India. This year, she will have solo exhibitions at Commonwealth and Council in Los Angeles, Los Angeles Museum of Art at Occidental College, and Manchester Art Gallery; in 2018 her work will be included in the Dhaka Art Summit, and 18th Street Art Center, Santa Monica.

Art began when humans stood up. We rose from all fours, looked each other in the eye and saw visions. We opened our diaphragm to air and song; freed our hands, our most important natural tool, and got to work: the work of art. 39,900 years ago in Sulawesi, Indonesia; 37,300 years ago in El Castillo, Spain; 34,000 years ago in Chauvet, France and 9,300 years ago in Rio Pinturas, Argentina. A single handprint in Indonesia becomes a cacophony of protesting hands in Argentina. Stop. I am here. I am making a mark. I am saying I exist. I matter. We matter. We matter together.

Alice Creischer and Andreas Siekmann Alice Creischer and Andreas Siekmann live in Berlin, Germany. Creischer’s solo show at Culture Gest, Lisbon, Portugal, runs until 30 April. Earlier this year, Siekmann had a solo show at Barbara Weiss Gallery, Berlin.

We think appropriation works like a cocoon that wraps itself around contents and their promises. We see how academic cocoons – Migration Studies, Gender Studies, Queer Studies – wrap themselves around formerly activist contents, and how the same system weaves our former collective practice of research and self-organization into the cocoons of Artistic Research or Artistic Curating. We see how political and artistic practices are rigidly dissected into administratively traceable elements, surrendered for tenure-track points and fed into a register of academic property long since turned over to the efficiency Terror of economized knowledge. At the same time we see the way politically engaged art, weaved into ‘Art and Activism’ cocoons, finds a niche in Documenta, the biennials and issue-based exhibitions. The ‘engaged’ huddle at conferences in an imaginary polyphony that’s really just inflationary: ten minutes of speaking time and / or three-day speech marathons, each locked into its own genre and padded for standard polemics (Israel / Palestine, Anitcapitalist / Antisemitic, utilitarian / idealistic ...). A blueprint for the politically correct Codes of Conduct of the new exploitation regime: NGO-ized, sentimentalized, wholly drained of sense, turned cynical.

‘Salons, the Utopian Salon and Substantial Shops’ by Alice Creischer and Andreas Siekmann, in  Utopian Pulse Flares in the Darkroom, e dited by Ines Doujak and Oliver Ressler (2015).  

Abraham Cruzvillegas Abraham Cruzvillegas lives in Mexico City, Mexico. He had a solo show at Carré d’art musée d’art contemporain de Nîmes in 2016.

Protest is important as a form of art because it can change the effectiveness of all conduits. It’s our responsibility; it’s our right. Now.

Minerva Cuevas Minerva Cuevas lives in Mexico City, Mexico. Her proposal has been shortlisted for the 2017 High Line Plinth sculpture  in New York.

As part of human culture art has the power to influence society. We artists enjoy the privilege of having dedicated audiences and infinite aesthetic resources to cultivate intellectual processes that can potentially generate positive social change. An artwork doesn’t necessarily have to present political references or enter a separate classification to be a part of that process. The kind of social transformation that art can generate is not measurable, as with activism. Protest is human dialogue: we can experience symbolic artworks but the final exchange comes from that dialogue, not from objects. Art is a hammer.

Michael Dean Michael Dean lives in London and Newcastle upon Tyne, UK. This year, he will exhibit new work as part of Skulptur Projekte Münster, which runs from 10 May to 1 October, and Portikus, Frankfurt, from 1 July to 3 September.

Jeremy Deller Jeremy Deller lives in London, UK. His work will be included in Skulptur Projekte Münster 2017, which runs from 10 June to 1 October.

‘How important is art as a form of protest? 

Very. 

‘How effective is it as a conduit of change?’ 

It’s not clear to me, to be honest, but it has to help.

Jimmie Durham Jimmie Durham lives and works in Berlin, Germany. His solo show at the Hammer Museum, Los Angeles, runs until 7 May.

Where there is injustice, it is necessary that we protest. But, seeing that making art is neither a job nor a profession, protesting injustice by using art is really difficult. For me, no more difficult than trying to make art for decorating a room. What do we want in life, individually? It would be good for me if everything I do is on the side of liberation. An interesting and full way to live.

Ibrahim El-Salahi Ibrahim El-Salahi is a Sudanese artist based in Oxford, UK. His work is currently on view at the Museum of Modern Art, New York; in ‘Art After Catastrophe’ at Tate Modern, London. Earlier this year, his work was included in ‘Postwar: Art between the Pacific and the Atlantic, 1945 – 1965’, at Haus Der Kunst, Munich. His work will be part of ‘Treasures of Islam in Africa from Timbuktu to Zanzibar’ at Institut du Monde Arabe, Paris, which runs from 14 April to 30 July.

Cevdet Erek Cevdet Erek lives in Istanbul, Turkey. He is representing Turkey at the 57th Venice Biennale, Italy.

Listen here to an excerpt of Cevdet Erek’s, Room of Rhythms - Long Distance Relationship, channel no: 5 , 2016, a four-minute excerpt from one of the eight sound channels used in Room of Rhythms - Long Distance Relationship (2016) for the 20th Biennale of Sydney, Australia, a work that tries to connect dance beats, and the stopping or slowing down of work, as a means of protest.

John Gerrard John Gerrard lives in Dublin, Ireland, and Vienna, Austria. His commission for Channel 4, Western Flag, will be broadcast across the UK this month.

Protest in art is particularly powerful when it engages the poetic. 

Less a call to arms than a challenge to feel. A whispered reminder of what may be lost.  And what may yet be discovered.

Mariam Ghani Mariam Ghani lives in New York, USA. Her work will be featured in ‘Outcasts: Women in the Wilderness’ at Wave Hill, New York, from 4 April to 25 June. Later this year, it will be shown in ‘Waste Lands’ at San Telmo Museoa, San Sebastian, and ‘Field Research’, Garage Museum of Contemporary Art, Moscow. I’ve said before that I believe an artwork only effects lasting change when it acts as the thin end of a wedge. By this, I mean that artists whose work engages difficult, complex places, issues and ideas – like structural inequities in particular cities – often find their engagement spatiallyand temporally limited by the rules of the current art system. When the artist leaves, often the network of relationships built through the artwork fades out of existence. So, artists either have to exit market-driven cycles and work over much longer durations or they need to collaborate with individuals and groups that have a longer-standing and deeper-rooted engagement with the place, issue or idea the artwork is addressing – people who can enter into the temporary autonomous zone or space of possibility created by the artwork and transform those possibilities into actions on the ground.

Similarly, for art to be an important form of protest, artists have to consider what it might mean to be artists working within movements – to make and circulate work not from positions of autonomy, but from a network of positions in solidarity. What would this look like? We could follow the example set by past solidarity movements (for Palestine, against Augusto Pinochet, against apartheid) and use artworks strategically, creating shows that generate both revenue and attention. Artists could be asked to create graphics and identities for specific campaigns. Artists might also have to take uncomfortable stands against patrons who support or enact policies antithetical to free expression. Some artists may choose to use their work, exhibitions or public appearances to transmit or reinforce the messages of their movements, or to invite those movements to address spaces and audiences to which they would not otherwise have access. Some of this is already happening, of course, but in order for it to take on greater significance, disparate efforts would need to be connected, overlaps reconciled and intersections amplified: institutions will need to join individuals in building this network, though the positions they stake out within it may be quite different. So much activism has been reconfigured around intersectionalityin recent decades, not just in theory but in practice, precisely because long-term advocacy campaigns found renewed strength in connecting to other struggles; these are the examples we should be looking towards if we want to make an art of protest (or even just a protest of art, by turning the present rage for reform onto our own structural inequities) now.

Núria Güell Núria Güell lives in Vidreres, Spain. Her work is on show in ‘Vocales’ at CAC Brétigny, until 23 April. She is currently in residence at MUAC, Mexico City. For me, art itself is a form of protest: it voices a feeling of unrest. This discomfort is related to structures that tie our subjectivities to the norm. Art can open them to other affective and perceptive possibilities. The transformation it can bring depends on how it affects, interpellates and generates ethical questions around consequences – not intentions, which is why I avoid slogans. Communities approve the public denunciation of an injustice, but positive approaches rarely change or break with the establishment. I seek to create unexpected alliances, opening the cracks of that which is imposed upon us, thus forcing us to take a position.

Khaled Hafez Khaled Hafez lives and works in Cairo, Egypt. His work will be shown in the 57th Venice Biennale.

As a child, I never experienced protest: my parents were doctors in the army. When I was five years old, my father would tie my arms behind my back for two hours whenever I drew or painted on the walls of our family apartment. He had been posted to Algeria in 1966; at the time, he was working for the Egyptian secret service. I never protested, nor did I ever stop drawing on walls. Today my father is 90; we are best friends and we laugh about the hand-tying days. In my adolescence, my revolt was silent: I was forced to study medicine, which I did, but during those six years I also secretly studied at the evening classes of the Cairo Fine Arts School. Only my younger brother knew about it.

Throughout my career, I have protested with my ‘politically incorrect’ videos and films. I was born in Cairo and we never demonstrated; we were programmed not to revolt. But, in 2011, I broke my protest virginity: I demonstrated – along with a few million other people in Egypt – after an artist friend lost his life while protesting.

Today, I am 53 years old and politically disappointed. I prefer to change the world through painting and filmmaking, fuelled by my memories of a revolt unfulfilled.

Hands Off Our Revolution Hands Off Our Revolution is a not-for-profit coalition of over 200 artists, theorists, curators, writers and educators. It is based in New York, with satellites throughout Europe, Latin America and Africa.

We affirm the radical nature of art. We believe that art can help counter the rising rhetoric of right-wing populism and fascism, and its increasingly stark expressions of xenophobia, racism, sexism, homophobia and unapo­logetic intolerance.

We know that freedom is never granted: it is won. Justice is never given: it is exacted. Both must be fought for and protected, but both have never before been so fragile, so close to slipping from our grasp, as at this moment. 

As artists, it is our job and our duty to reimagine and reinvent social relations threatened by right-wing populist rule. It is our responsibility to stand in solidarity. We will not go quietly. It is our role and our opportunity, using our own particular forms and public spaces, to engage people in thinking together and debating ideas, with clarity and openness.  

Hiwa K Hiwa K lives in Berlin, Germany. His work is included in documenta 14.   

Lubaina Himid Lubaina Himid lives in Preston, UK. Her solo show at Modern Art Oxford, runs until 30 April. Her work is included in the group show ‘The Place Is Here’ at Nottingham Contemporary, until 30 April, and will feature in the Folkestone Triennial, in August. In October, she will curate an exhibition at the Walker Art Gallery, Liverpool.

If we do not protest, can it be assumed that we concur?

Most of the work I have made during the past 40 years exists because of my desire to protest against the injustice of inequality and invisibility. Protest must lead to conversation then, inevitably, to compromise, but change happens eventually and the freedoms of contemporary art in tandem with the constraints of the museum have been a central part of that shift for me during the past 35 years.  

Adelita Husni-Bey Adelita Husni-Bey lives in New York, USA. Her work will be included in the 57th Venice Biennale .

Trying to measure the efficacy of art as a form of protest denotes a shared metre / conduit for change, but I don’t think there’s a common metrology for that kind of flux. I think however you experience art, it can provide solace, healing, a space away / to / in.

Neoliberalism functions through holding a monopoly on so-called moderate and centrist positions so that it can refer to everything that lies outside / in contradiction with / in refusal as immediately ‘radical’, ‘extreme’, ‘dangerous’ or ‘off-centre’. Yet, neoliberalism’s own extreme foundations are constantly in the process of being hidden and denied. Any resulting privilege is founded on colonialism, misogyny, racism and incarceration and is the outcome of that very complacency / denial. In order to uncover or circulate a vision that shifts neoliberalism away from a monopoly on the centre, I’d ask you / myself to judge how to act through the means you / I have: Is it your art? Are they your fists (real / imagined)? It is your privilege / power / citizenship? Is it all of these means? How do you really avoid pandering to the ongoing political project of devaluing and reducibility? How are you implicated in it?

Khaled Jarrar Khaled Jarrar is a Palestinian artist who lives in Tucson, USA, where he is researching Donald Trump’s proposed US/Mexico wall. He is also working on a series that documents his month-long journey with a group of Syrian refugees, who travelled to Europe in 2016. Jarrar is a recipient of the 2016 Anni and Heinrich Sussmann Award, which recognizes artists who are committed to the ideals of democracy and antifascism. In May, Jarrar’s work will be included in ‘The Restless Earth’ at the Trussardi Foundation, Milan. I lived under occupation in the West Bank. Access to the sea, to mobility, to every autonomous aspect of my life, was taken away from me from the moment that I left my home. Therefore, art for me is about access and the artist is a witness. I believe that protesting is a form of witnessing before it’s a form of resistance.

For me, the encounter with art was transformative: from being employed as a professional soldier, I became a professional artist. Art on its own cannot do anything for society.

Bouchra Khalili Bouchra Khalili lives in Berlin, Germany. Earlier this year, she had a solo exhibition at Lisson Gallery, London. Her work will be included in documenta 14. In Imider, southeast Morocco, a coalition of seven rural villages and their Amazigh inhabitants (the native population of North Africa) has organized a long-running protest camp, Movement on the Road ’96 (Amussu Xf Ubrid N 96, in the original Tamazight language), in opposition to Imider Metallurgical Society (SMI) – the biggest silver mine in Africa – which exploits local water resources and pollutes its environment.

On 1 August 2011, the villagers – women at the forefront – cut off access to the mine’s main water valve and occupied it. The occupation gradually became a permanent camp. Over the years, the population has developed forms of resistance decided upon by an Agraw: a traditional Amazigh egalitarian assembly. For more than 300 weeks now, the inhabitants of Imider take turns day and night to guard the camp.

During the United Nations Climate Change Conference, COP22, which was held in Marrakech in November 2016, the Imider delegation expressed its ‘unwavering solidarity’ with the Standing Rock Sioux protesting the Dakota Access Pipeline: ‘Like you, we are part of a confederation of native tribes. Like you, we resisted courageously. Like you, we have suffered and continue to suffer from the expropriation of our land. And, like you, we have set up a protest camp to prohibit access to our lands and resources.’

A protest that can be expressed through silence is the final word in artistic language. It was propounded by Mahatma Gandhi who was, and is, the greatest Indian thinker since Buddha. Creativity stems from silence: it can stun people into silence and, with all of its ebbs and tides, begins and ends in silence. Gandhi knew that art is an act performed in solitude so that the audience is silenced and moves towards withdrawal, boycott or non-action. Khadi – or Khaddar as we Malayalis in southern India call it – is a hand-woven cloth. It is spun into yarn on a wheel called a charkha: a silent, productive object which, during the fight for independence, became a symbol of resilience to undemocratic rule and oppression by colonizers. It was art-making in its finest form. The spinning of the yarn had a simple message: let me be, so long as I let you be.

Leung Chi Wo Leung Chi Wo lives in Hong Kong. Earlier this year, he had a solo exhibition at Rokeby, London, UK.

Imagine you were an anti-colonial proletarian. Imagine you were angry. Imagine you were in a protest against authority. Play The Beatles’ A Hard Day’s Night at a relatively low volume, pretending it is from the military speakers 200 metres away. 

Fred Lonidier Fred Lonidier lives in San Diego, USA. Earlier this year, he had a solo show at Silberkuppe, Berlin. In 2016, his work was included in ‘The Uses of Photography: Art, Politics, and the Reinvention of a Medium’ at the Museum of Contemporary Art San Diego.

Protest is a big part of my documentary photo/text/video works for, and about, class struggle. Just as important is the representation of unions in the face of invisibility, which includes pedagogy around history, current struggles and the diversity of the modern working class: it’s a long list. The effectiveness of any form of protest to push for change is always a question and is not always easy to answer. But, doing nothing usually gets you nothing or worse. My view is largely from the USA, and I focus here on a host of responses to the latest rightwards move in politics. Very little protest in the arts appears to be directly connected to movement organizations. With few exceptions, there is a disconnect between groups that have been working for decades for change. Most of them relate to, use and/or commission art, but not from those with standing in our field(s), although I think we need to build bridges to other cultural workers. I recognize that making these connections can be difficult and I ought to know; for all the experience I have as an artist working with unions, it is still an uphill struggle most of the time. It would help if artists would also recognize themselves as citizens, even if undocumented.

Helen Marten Helen Marten lives in London, UK. In 2016, she was awarded both the Hepworth Prize for Sculpture and the Turner Prize.

Protest in any form visualizes conditions of precarity: in art, in language, in action, in metaphor – it’s as vitalas blood. We’re endlessly squinting to peer through life’s pitiless fog and, whether as philosophers or policemen, every human body on this planet should juggle with problems of lost morality and hidden judgement. The contemporary global condition is a dreadful spectacle that cannot be rescinded, images that cannot be cajoled into language pleasant enough to act up with conventional restraint. How can violence take shape and consider itself flirtatious, breaking into brand new feelings that rape attention into balancing chequebooks? For those who say an artwork is not political enough: look harder, think further. We cannot live with teeth marks neatly on the median of absolutism but, instead, permit strategies of vocality that inflate and burst beyond our personal comfort zones. Protest does not implement solutions, but it does mobilize thinking beyond the chromatically ill-engaged, the etiolated and the miserly: even the provisional is a soaring proposal for re-evaluation.

Kristian Mondrup and Liu Shiyuan Kristian Mondrup lives and works between Copenhagen, Denmark and Beijing, China. Liu Shiyuan lives in Copenhagen, Denmark. Their work is included in the exhibition ‘.COM/.CN’ at  K11 Art Foundation, Hong Kong, which runs until 30 April.

For this work, we thought about the problem of the art world and its institutions as an obstacle for art to really engage with politics. Just as artworks often mock the political and economic powers, these powers mock art by placing artworks within an exclusive and elitist context, thus often disarming whatever critical content there might be. When asked to respond to a question about how art functions as a conduit of change, we felt that this issue somehow had to be addressed.

Eva and Franco Mattes Eva and Franco Mattes live in New York, UK. Their work is currently on show as part of the Biennale Internationale Design Saint-Etienne, which runs until 9 April.

We hired several, anonymous, crowdsourced workers through an online marketplace and asked them to protest in front of their webcams. We do not know who or where they are, and we couldn’t ultimately predict what would result from our request. We couldn’t disagree more with some of the protesters, particularly those sympathetic to the US president, and yet we could not ignore them. Maybe the internet itself has become a form of protest to preconceived ideas of class, public space and employment?

Naeem Mohaiemen Naeem Mohaiemen lives in New York, USA. His work will be included in documenta 14.

Global information flows are unpredictable and multi-directional. Each nation has a local Reynard figure – bamboozling the origin as much as the recipient. Events occur in adjacency to remind us that double standards are global. Every community is cursed with inversion of sight: ever-larger areas of blindness.

And what is a ‘Muslim’, anyway? Are you one? Am I? It’s now the 21st century’s all-purpose container for every form of other: black, brown, migrant, woman, queer. But the definition is also always changing, while the expulsion impulse stays constant – just ask Polish Jews, Iraqi Kurds, Bengali Hindus, Turkish Armenians, Japanese Americans.

‘Muslim’ is not an empty container. All-purpose is not the same as empty, I think; better to say infinitely elastic, enough to be occupied positively, and hijacked negatively by, respectively, light and dark. Statistics tell another story. Thirty percent of American Muslims are white, 23 percent are African-American; 76 percent of Arab-Americans are Christian and other religions. As the poet Shame-e-Ali Nayeem says: ‘Islamophobes don’t care how pious you are. They don’t even care if you are Muslim!’

Shana Moulton Shana Moulton lives near Yosemite, California, USA. Recent solo shows include Kunsthaus Glarus, Galerie Crevecoeur, Paris, The Museum of Fine Arts, St. Petersburg Florida, and a long-term installation at the Palais de Tokyo, Paris.

While studying performance art, I imagined staging actions like Julia Butterfly Hill’s 738 days tree-sit (1997–99). She effectively saved the 1,500 year-old California Redwood and surrounding trees from being logged and I saw it as a durational performance.

I haven’t figured out how to respond to the Trump crisis with my brand of humorous/surreal/ambivalence and I’m compelled to direct all activist energy into concrete actions: calling representatives and showing up at marches and protests. But artist Rachel Mason has managed to bring some inspiring absurdist-comedy to the US’s current crisis with her Future Clown persona, protesting at airports and lip-syncing the inauguration.

Shahryar Nashat Shahryar Nashat lives in Los Angeles, USA. This year, his work will be on show the ICA, Philadelphia; Kunsthalle Basel, and David Kordansky Gallery, Los Angeles. Earlier this year, he had a solo show at Rodeo Gallery, London.

It’s 4 February at the Getty Center in Los Angeles. I’m here to attend a tribute to David Antin, who passed away three months ago. Family and friends are gathered to pay homage to his poetry and his brilliant mind. His voice is omnipresent – talk-poems. He will be missed, I think, because though his written words will survive him, his argumentative voice was just as important a conduit for his stance on art, literature and politics.

A day later, at a movie theatre in Hollywood, I hear the voice of James Baldwin. He stands gamely at Cambridge University, debating civil rights with a conservative stiff. His dissident eloquence is a disarming weapon. The voice of the artist, again.

Art is a unique witness. It is a repository for observation. It is a mirror of the unrest and the struggle of a troubled, sometimes desperate, society. It is important for the conversations it will inspire and the conversations that inspired its making. It is a subjective time capsule. It is effective and yet, often, its greater impact will be recognizedin retrospect, when political activism and organized dissidence will have paved the way for change. 

Brian O’Doherty Brian O’Doherty is an artist, critic and novelist who lives in New York, USA. Earlier this year, he had a solo show hosted by P! and Simone Subal Gallery, New York.

I published this statement in 1972, after 26 British soldiers shot dead 15 unarmed civilians in Derry, Ireland:

I will sign my work ‘Patrick Ireland’ until such time as the British military presence is removed from Northern Ireland and all citizens are granted their civil rights. Signed, Brian O’Doherty

This being accomplished by the Good Friday (and other) Agreements, in 2008 Patrick Ireland was ceremoniously buried in the grounds of the Irish Museum of Modern Art, Dublin, in his 37th year.

Ahmet Ögüt Ahmet Ögüt lives in Berlin, Germany, and Amsterdam, the Netherlands. His exhibition with Goshka Macuga will run at Witte de With Center for Contemporary Art, Rotterdam, from 17 June to 31 December.

I don’t think it’s a given that art is a form of protest, but every creative protest is a form of art and every platform for art can be a powerful stage for creative and effective acts.

Uriel Orlow Uriel Orlow lives in London, UK, and Zurich, Switzerland. This year, he will have solo presentations at Corner College, Zurich; Tyneside Cinema, Newcastle, Parc Saint Léger, PAV, Turin, and LaVeronica, Modica. His work is also included in Sharjah Biennial 13, until 12 June, and the Schwarz Foundation, Samos.

Seeing world events unfold from South Africa, where I am currently working on a film project, provides a useful historical perspective on the question of art as a form of protest and as a conduit for change. I am reminded of the rich history of artists who took up the camera or a brush as weapons against oppression: Omar Badsha, Dumile Feni, David Goldblatt and Thami Mnyele, to name but a few. I recently visited the South African History Archive, an independent human rights organization dedicated to documenting and supporting past and contemporary struggles for justice. The incredibly rich collection of artwork as part of protest posters, pamphlets and T-shirts is a timely reminder that public space is an important exhibition space. And Bongiwe Dhlomo-Mautloa’s starkly beautiful linocut for a flyer promoting a national women’s unity movement shows us how necessary it is to connect different struggles and fight on all fronts at once.

Trevor Paglen Trevor Paglen lives in Berlin, Germany. This year, he will have solo exhibitions at Kunsthalle Winterthur, and Metro Pictures, New York.

Over the last few months, my thoughts keep returning to an unexpected artwork. As an instrument of provocation and dissent, Andres Serrano’s Piss Christ (1987) is about as blunt as it gets. I’ve become more and more haunted by Piss Christ ’s crystal-clear protest, despite the fact that the piece is at odds with my own sense of aesthetics and politics. The rising authoritarianism in the US and Europe is characterized in no small part through a rejection of facts and a destabilization of norms. In that context, I wonder whether the unambiguous provocation that is Piss Christ might be a more effective response to the political situation than the subtleties, prevarications and studied ellipticism that is the aesthetic bread-and-butter of so many critical artists.

Claus Richter Claus Richter lives in in Cologne, Germany. He staged Wonderland Avenue, a play for actors and animatronic figures, in collaboration with the writer Sibylle Berg at the Frieze Art Fair, London 2016. His solo show at CLAGES, Cologne, will open 6 April.

To protest in the streets assures me that I am not alone in my anger. As old as this form of protest may seem, its still very empowering. As it is generally difficult to measure the sociological impact of contemporary art, it is even more challenging to think of art as something that must have an effect on systems beyond its own strange inherent codes and rules. Art as a form of protest is, in the worst case, a paper tiger patting itself on the back. But at its best, it has some great tools to counter injustice: caricature and farce, for example. There have always been, and still are, great and even funny options to protest in a way that only art can provide. Art can and should be much more than a comment on day-to-day politics, and I guess that’s where its strength lies. From time to time it can reveal the ludicrousness of the ones who think they stand above everyone else – and that’s not too bad!

In chaotic times, like the ones we are experiencing now, art in a public space can be an important form of protest.Art questions established truths and fake beliefs. It can promote a break with certainties and hierarchies. It allows us to re-invent and to discover viewpoints that are beyond the accepted discourse.

Politically charged public artworks that are presented in conventional, familiar spaces can temporarily transform the meaning of these sites. When they are altered, the narratives of power that have been assigned to them are also changed and so become debatable.

Art has its own tempo; it operates in a kind of geological time. It is through time that art nurtures a sense of discernment and endurance. Fortunately, art does not always have a direct and immediate effect on its viewers/participants. Art as protest encourages a critical view; it problematizes established interest, approved truths and immobile identities. Events and narratives that have been taken for granted can be questioned through art. The current political situation prioritizes simplistic discourse, polarizing worldviews and uncritical thinking. For this reason, it seems to me that, nowadays, art’s immemorial role as a producer of critical thought should be the basic element of political protest.

Dread Scott Dread Scott lives in New York, USA. He is currently working on Slave Rebellion Reenactment, a project that will reenact the largest rebellion of enslaved people in North American history.

Marinella Senatore Marinella Senatore lives in Paris, France. Her solo show at Queens Museum, New York, runs from 9 April to 30 July. Later this year, her work will be part of MOVE, at Centre Pompidou, Paris, and ‘ACTION!’ at Kunsthaus Zurich.

Amy Sillman Amy Sillman lives in New York. She will have a solo show in September at Capitain Petzel, Berlin.

Dear Jennifer,

I am so sorry, but since you asked me to write about art as a form of protest, I just didn’t have time to sit down and write anything. It’s crazy-making, but added to an already bursting schedule and set of deadlines for an artist/professor-who-also-writes-and-makes-animations, in the past two weeks I found myself needing to participate in multiple-times-weekly actions: marches, protests, meetings about art professors in a state of emergency, meetings with students who have immigration issues, and all this on top of being asked to do other normal things (working on a book, writing another essay, doing an interview, and writing a million letters of recommendation for students.) I apologize. But I’m also in the studio every afternoon, trying to carve out space for my own work, which is shape-shifting in the contemporary political scenario – or, at the very least, it’s under new pressures and vexations. But I also still deeply believe in and practise a form of art that is open, porous and questioning on many levels, yet is a distinctly different thing from political action per se. I feel privileged to be able to pursue such a form, which is filled with pleasures, problems and contradictions that are not quite the same as politics. It brings me to the heart of matters to welcome these problems.

Slavs and Tatars Slavs and Tatars live in Berlin, Germany. Their mid-career survey opens at the Pejman Foundation in Tehran, Iran on 5 May and then travels to Salt, Istanbul, Turkey; CAC Vilnius, Lithuania; MOCA, Belgrade, Yugoslavia; and Albertinum, Dresden, Germany.

In attempt to ape and shape history, art as protest often revolves around the explicitly political gesture: the demonstration, the boycott, the mobilization, amongst others. ‘To focus on the visible coastline of politics and miss the continent that lies beyond,’ in the words of James C. Scott. His book Domination and the Arts of Resistance (1990) argues for an often over-looked area of dissent and protest: the infrapolitical jokes, folk-tales, songs, rituals, rumours – as invisible to the naked eye (like infra-red), but no less important in giving a voice to subordinate groups and challenging the official narratives of power. 

SUPERFLEX SUPERFLEX is an artist group based in Copenhagen, Denmark. In the past year, they have had a solo show at von Bartha, Basel; staged ‘One Year Project – The Liquid State’ at 21st Century Museum of Contemporary Art, Kanazawa, and created a billboard for the Hayward Gallery, London.

Luca Vitone Luca Vitone lives in Berlin, Germany. He teaches at the NABA (Nuova Accademia di Belle Arti) in Milan, Italy, and has a retrospective at PAC (Padiglione d'Arte Contemporanea) in Milan later this year.

Protest as disobedience is a sign of vitality, the becoming aware of the state (State) that you are in.

Art is politics. I believe that both as an individual and as a public figure every artist has a duty to take a position. Doing that as a rebel or by following the status quo is just his or her personal choice. Translation by Massimo Palazzi

Art & Politics

With the tactics of dissenting groups ever-growing, Natalie Nzeyimana and Derica Shields share their insights on the Police & Crime Bill and why, in an increasingly authoritarian climate, people are still willing to risk protest

The artist speaks with Olamiju Fajemisin on the legacy of Rock Against Racism in the UK

With tens of thousands of pro-democracy, anti-monarchy protestors on the streets, should the second Bangkok Art Biennale have opened?

Curator Natalia Sielewicz speaks with Pablo Larios about the fight for women’s rights in Poland

Berlin’s new meta-institution was set to open this month; instead, artists and cultural workers are taking to the streets in protest

The late playwright and novelist galvanized the fight against HIV/AIDS

The art world is not the world, but what the world needs, artists need, too

From school strikers at the Royal Shakespeare Company to a Trojan horse at the British Museum, protests over oil sponsorship have gripped the arts

The inspired demonstrations include singing, dancing, poetry readings, impromptu exhibitions and a monumental fluorescent light sculpture

In further news: staff at LA MoCA take steps to unionize; Hetain Patel wins Film London Jarman Award

The artist and Tiona Nekkia McClodden discuss grounding their work in African Diasporic histories

How Blackness shaped the look of queer modernism

One of the longest running art institutions in Ghana, founded in 2006, thrives by building networks between artists and the local community

The gallery, based in Accra and London, aims to connect local and international artists amidst a critical and commercial surge of interest in Ghana

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Pinter's 'Art, Truth & Politics'

Arts and Culture Writer

Harold Pinter, who died two days ago at 78, received the Nobel Prize in Literature, in 2005. Too sick to travel to Stockholm to accept the award, he gave his Nobel Lecture on video. The lecture begins with a quotation:

In 1958 I wrote the following: 'There are no hard distinctions between what is real and what is unreal, nor between what is true and what is false. A thing is not necessarily either true or false; it can be both true and false.' I believe that these assertions still make sense and do still apply to the exploration of reality through art. So as a writer I stand by them but as a citizen I cannot. As a citizen I must ask: What is true? What is false?

The invasion of Iraq is just its latest crime. He notes:

The United States supported and in many cases engendered every right wing military dictatorship in the world after the end of the Second World War. I refer to Indonesia, Greece, Uruguay, Brazil, Paraguay, Haiti, Turkey, the Philippines, Guatemala, El Salvador, and, of course, Chile. The horror the United States inflicted upon Chile in 1973 can never be purged and can never be forgiven.

Inexplicably, Pinter never mentions the war in Vietnam, a crime against humanity even greater than the war in Iraq.

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• DOI: 10.1632/003081206X142904
• Corpus ID: 153527378

Art, Truth & Politics

• Published in Pmla-publications of The… 1 May 2006
• Art, Political Science

17 Citations

Counterbalancing the pendulum effect: politics and the discourse of post-9/11 theatre, continental philosophy: a grounded theory approach and the emergence of convenient and inconvenient ethics, postmodernism: surviving the apocalypse, “something is happening”: medical realism and the problem of acting in harold pinter’s a kind of alaska, harold pinter's anti-war poetry: a critique of war, 'an occult geometry of capital': heterotopia, history and hypermodernism in iain sinclair's literary geography, real theatre, the linguistic functions in king abdullah ii of jordan speeches, harold pinter’s the homecoming and postmodern jewish philosophy, a psychoanalytical approach to harold pinter’s plays :old times, the homecoming and the birthday party, related papers.

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• Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy - The Definition of Art
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One of the things that has been alleged to be the purpose of art is its cognitive function: art as a means to the acquisition of truth . Art has even been called the avenue to the highest knowledge available to humans and to a kind of knowledge impossible of attainment by any other means.

Knowledge in the most usual sense of that word takes the form of a proposition, knowing that so-and-so is the case. Thus, it can be learned from sense observation that the sun is setting, and this is knowledge. Is knowledge acquired in this same sense from acquaintance with works of art? There is no doubt that there are some propositions (statements) that can be made after acquaintance with works of art that could not be made before: for example, that this performance of Beethoven’s Eroica Symphony was 47 minutes long, that this painting predominates in green, that this piece of sculpture originated about 350 bce . The question is whether there is anything that can be called truth or knowledge (presumably knowledge is of truths, or true propositions) that can be found in works of art.

Literature is surely the most obvious candidate, for literature consists of words, and words are combined into sentences, and sentences (at least declarative sentences) are used to convey propositions—that is, to make assertions that are either true or false. And works of literature do certainly contain many true statements: a novel about the French Revolution conveys facts about the series of events; in a verse of the English scholar and poet A.E. Housman , it is said, “The tears of all that be / Help not the primal fault.” Since literature contains statements, it would be surprising indeed if at least some of them were not true.

But the relevance of this fact to literature as an art is extremely dubious . If an 18th-century novel gives a true picture of English country life of that time, this makes it useful to read as history, but does it also make it a better novel? Many, at any rate, would say that it does not: that a tenth-rate novel might give more facts about 18th-century life than a first-rate novel of the same century. For that matter, many of the propositions in a novel are, taken at face value , false; it is false, for example, that there was a foundling named Tom Jones who had an uncle named Squire Western. The thousands of pages of description in novels of fictional characters, ascribing to them thoughts and actions, are all false, since these characters never actually existed. (Some philosophers have preferred to say that propositions about fictional or nonexistent entities are neither true nor false.) Yet this fact in no way impugns their value as literature. Shakespeare, in The Winter’s Tale , sets part of the action on the seacoast of Bohemia, but the fact that Bohemia has no seacoast does not damage The Winter’s Tale as literature, though it would as geography. The fact that Milton used the outdated Ptolemaic astronomy does not make Paradise Lost less valuable, nor does the nonexistence of the lands described in Gulliver’s Travels (1726) in any way diminish Swift’s work. There is no doubt, then, that works of literature can contain true statements and false ones. But it is tempting to ask, What does their truth or falsity matter? Literature is not astronomy or geography or history or any branch of knowledge, particular or general.

Many would hold that the above statements are indeed irrelevant, as are any that encroach upon the domain of science, but, they would add, there are other assertions that matter a great deal: for example, the statements in which a worldview is presented in a poem or drama or novel. The main burden of the ancient Latin poet Lucretius ’s De rerum natura (“On the Nature of Things”) is a presentation of the materialism of the Greek philosopher Democritus , and an embodiment of the worldview of medieval Roman Catholicism is the very warp and woof of Dante ’s The Divine Comedy (written c. 1308–21)—and such considerations, it would be contended, are relevant to these works as literature.

In reply, however, it might be said that while it is true that these worldviews must be understood and taken into consideration in the reading of these poems and that they cannot be understood or appreciated without knowing them, the truth or falsity of these views still does not matter aesthetically. If Lucretius’s view is true, then Dante’s must be false, and vice versa, since they are incompatible, but, in order to appreciate the poem, it is not necessary to know which (if either) is true. Appreciating art, unlike taking a stand for or against a cause in life, does not require a yes or no to statements. It requires only that the viewers look and appreciate, that they experience as richly and fully as possible the feeling and attitudes involved in the worldview that is presented. Philosophers and scientists are concerned with whether the Democritean materialism of Lucretius is true; appreciators of art are concerned only to capture the feeling appropriate to the worldview in question.

Many statements in works of literature are not explicitly made at all but are implicit: Thomas Hardy never tells in his novels what his worldview is, but it emerges rather clearly before the reader is halfway through any of them. Probably the most important points made in works of literature that contain a central thesis are implicit rather than explicit. How, in that case, can it be determined what thesis it is that is implied? In a court of law , if someone says, “She didn’t say it exactly, she just implied it,” the judge would be likely to rule that this was insufficient evidence of slander , since the person did not actually say it. Still, many statements in daily life are not stated but implied—in the sense that they are intended. The trouble lies in proving that the speaker intended them, since no one else is in a comparable position to say what the speaker’s intentions were, and in the case of deceased authors there is no evidence of their intentions other than what they said. One is doubtless on safer ground, therefore, saying that many statements are implied in the sense that they are suggested (whether the speaker intended to do so or not) by the tone of voice and the juxtaposition of the words used. Thus, “They had children and got married” suggests, though it does not state, that they had the children before they were married; any normal user of the English language would tend to construe it thus. And it is surely no overstatement to say that Swift’s Gulliver’s Travels suggests that the author was misanthropic or that the novels of the French author Marcel Proust suggest a pessimistic view of love and other human relationships close to that of the German philosopher Arthur Schopenhauer . Serious readers of literature will become increasingly sensitive to what is suggested in the works they are reading.

But, once again, the importance of the suggested statements, even when they are true, in no way shows that they must be accepted as true by readers if they are to value them as works of art. Are sincere Roman Catholics who find Dante’s worldview congenial and Lucretius’s repellent committed to saying that Dante’s is the better poem? If so, they may be accused of confusing his moral and theological judgments with his aesthetic ones. Still, it should be noted that there are some critics who believe that if two works of literature are both equal in excellence on all counts yet one presents a true view of reality and the other fails to, the one presenting a true view is better—better even as a work of art—than is the other one.

There is, however, another way of talking about truth in literature that is not or is not as obviously connected to propositions. A characterization in a novel or drama is spoken of as being true to human nature , true to the way people actually speak or behave or feel. No matter that Becky Sharp —in the English novelist William Thackeray ’s Vanity Fair (1847–48)—is a fictional character, it would be said, as long as she is depicted as a person of a certain type would behave, she is being depicted truly; truth in fiction does not mean truth of the statements (for the statements in Thackeray’s novel describing her are false) but truth to human nature.

But what exactly does “truth to human nature” mean? The criterion is as old as Aristotle, who wrote that poetry is more true than history because it presents universal truths whereas history gives only particular truths and that poetry (dramatic fiction) shows how a person of this or that kind probably or necessarily would behave (or think, or feel). This criterion, however, is too vague as it stands: what is probable or plausible behaviour in one person is not in another, and what is probable in one set of circumstances is not so in another. The test of truth to human nature would be roughly as follows: Would a person such as has been described thus far (in the novel or drama) behave (or think or feel or be motivated) in the way that the author depicts this character as behaving in the circumstances described? It is often very difficult to decide this question, because knowledge of human beings is insufficient or because the dramatist has not provided enough clues. Still, once readers or critics are convinced that the character described would not have behaved as depicted by the novelist, they may criticize the characterization (at least with regard to this bit of behaviour or motivation) as implausible. If a character who has been described as spending years working toward a certain goal is represented by the novelist as abandoning it once it is within sight, the reader will have considerable reservations about this delineation unless the author has depicted the character as being unstable or masochistic or in some way as being the kind of person who might in these circumstances do this kind of thing. It is true that there are people in the world who abandon their goals within sight of them after years of labour, but the conviction must be implanted that the character already presented by the novelist belongs to this classification or the behaviour will seem reasonless and unmotivated.

Is truth to human nature aesthetically relevant? That is, when present does it make the work of literature better and when absent or flawed does it make the work worse as literature? Here again there would be some difference of opinion, but a very large number of critics and aestheticians, in the tradition of Aristotle, would say that it matters aesthetically a great deal. Novelists do not have to be true to geography or history or astronomy, but they must be, as the 19th-century American author Nathaniel Hawthorne said of all literary artists, true to the human heart. A literary artist may tamper with all the other truths with impunity but not this one: the characters the artist creates must be convincing, and they will not be convincing if they are not depicted as having anger, love, jealousy, and other human emotions that real people have and in pretty much the contexts in which real people have them. If a novelist’s characters are not motivated in much the way that human beings are motivated, the reader will not even be able to understand them—they will be alien and unintelligible. Even when a writer—such as the British author Kenneth Grahame in The Wind in the Willows (1908)—depicts animals as central characters in novels, however much they may differ from human beings in external appearance , they must psychologically be presented as human beings—how else and in what other terms could their behaviour and their motivation be understood? Such, then, are the reasons for saying that whatever else literary artists do, their depictions must be truthful to human nature.

Can works of art other than literature possess truth to human nature? It would seem that in a limited degree they can. Motion pictures and operas and other mixed arts clearly can, but they employ words, and literature is a principal ingredient in them. But what of arts that employ no words at all? Painting and sculpture, not being temporal arts, cannot depict action, and action is all-important in the representation of human character. These arts, as noted earlier, contain depictions of persons (real or imaginary) only on a knife-edge of time. Still, sometimes something may be inferred even from a knife-edge. The late self-portraits of the 17th-century Dutch artist Rembrandt do seem to reveal an agonized yet sometimes serene inner spirit, suggesting that there are flashes of human insight to be found in depictions of human beings in visual art. As for musical art (music without the accompaniment of words), it contains nothing that could be called depiction, not even depiction on a knife-edge of time, and, if this is so, there can be no such thing here as true depiction or false depiction. Music may be expressive of human feelings, in the sense already described, but this is a far cry from saying that it contains depictions that are true to human nature.

Even if truth to human nature in the depiction of character is aesthetically relevant (which many would question), to say this is still far from saying that it is the only criterion for excellence in works of art, or even that this is the principal thing that art gives or its main excuse for being. To go so far would be to discount colour and form and expressiveness as criteria for excellence in art, and this virtually no one is willing to do. It would seem, then, that in no case is truth (even truth to human nature) necessary in works of art, seeing that entire genres of art, such as music , exist without it and that, even when it is present and when its presence increases the merit of a work of art (which again many would deny), it is only one virtue among many. Thus, the view that the purpose or function of art is to provide truth is quite surely mistaken; perhaps the person who wants truth and is indifferent to the presence of anything else had better turn to science or philosophy rather than to the arts.

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Role of Art in Politics: Popper and Marcuse

• Published: 20 June 2015
• Volume 32 , pages 257–272, ( 2015 )

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• Biraj Mehta Rathi 1 , 2  

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The aim of the paper is to explore the role of art in politics and understand the limitations of the liberal model of state with respect to aesthetic freedom. This paper critically engages with the claim that political action should be directed towards specific goals that can be rationally justified. It argues that this approach is exclusionary in nature as it leaves little room for art and creative communication. It attempts to do so through the contrasting philosophies of Popper and Marcuse.

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Introduction

Rethinking the Social Turn: The Social Function of Art as Functionless and Anti-Social

Beyond the politics of reception: Jacques Rancière and the politics of art

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• Artificial Intelligence

Ibid., p. 158

Ibid., 33–39. According to Popper, to call a theory falsifiable is not to say that it is false; rather, it means that the theory has definite predictions that are capable of being tested against experience. If these predictions turn out to be wrong, then the theory has been falsified or disapproved.

This is the argument of his work The Open Society and its Enemies: The Spell of Plato (Vol. 1) and The Open Society and its Enemies The High Time of Prophecy: Hegel, Marx and The Afetrmath (Vol. 2)

Popper uses the term “criticism” and not “interest.” I have taken the liberty to express it as an interest as it seems to be more relevant to the context.

Though Popper uses the term “criticism” earlier, while explaining this distinction, he uses the term “interest.”

Ibid., p. 226

Ibid., p. 227

Ibid., p. 228

Ibid., p. 231

The text of this lecture is available in Popper’s book (Popper 1984c ).

Ibid., p. 217

The text of this lecture is available in Popper’s book (Popper 1984d ).

Ibid., p. 224

Ibid., p. 225–227

Ibid., p. 230

This is summarized from introduction to Samir Amin’s book ( 1988 ).

Ibid., p. 3

Ibid., p. 168

Ibid., p. 9

Ibid., pp. 5–6

Ibid., p. 163

Ibid., 63–65

Ibid., pp. 178–180

Popper dismisses Freud and Marx’s theories as pseudo sciences.

In his reconstruction of Freud, Marcuse believes that past experiences of freedom and happiness could put into question the painful performances of alienated labor and oppression. He links emancipatory interests of memory with fantasy and argues that human beings and tradition contain resources that can be mobilized. Memory, according to Marcuse, reconstructs past experiences to construct future images of freedom and happiness. Civilization has made it one sided and made it such that it only remembers duties rather than pleasures. It is constantly linked with bad conscience, guilt, and sin. Fantasy is a crucial mode of thought that is suppressed right from the beginning even in children games, etc. since fantasy is disassociated with the objects of the real world; along with memory, it can work effectively in imagining a better world where pleasure principle makes the demands of gratification and refutes the limitations imposed on freedom (Kellner pp. 84–85).

A key category in Marcuse’s theory is domination. According to Marcuse, domination can be external and internal. External domination takes place through force, social repression, and institution systematic restraint (labor, market, etc.). Internal repression is the internalization of prohibitions, values, and social demands through which the individuals discipline themselves, to act out social roles and behavior. This, in Marcuse’s view, is repression which is a subcategory of domination. It originates from labor and technology. The regularities and mechanical movements make the individuals submit to social authority, and the individuals tend to internalize their behavior. While Freud concentrates on the latter, Marx emphasizes on the former, producing a false consciousness responding to and contributing to the false order of things (Marcuse 1966c ).

Marcuse ( 1969f ). In the 1974 lecture entitled Marxism and Feminism , Marcuse notes for the first time the constitutive role of gender, while theorizing the difference between men and women in terms of categories of eros and civilization. It is notable that the conception of the feminine is associated with the traits he ascribes to the new sensibility while the masculine is associated with the features of the ego and rationality of domination that Marcuse criticizes. This lecture generated a significant debate and Marcuse was criticized by the feminists for essentializing gender. But this criticism may sound weak because Marcuse makes it clear that the distinction is not essential; rather, it has been the outcome of the historicity of Western society (Kellner 91).

Ibid., p. 90

Ibid., p. 91

Ibid., p. 92

Ibid., p. 93

Ibid., p. 85

Marcuse’s subjectivity differs from post modern and post structuralist conception of subjectivity that similarly stressed on a fragmented subject that reproduces aspects of crisis of contemporary society. It defies overwhelming big corporations, new technology, and seductive media and forces of globalization (Kellner, 93). But Marcuse suggests a unified subject who is free of repression as a response to such a crisis.

Ibid., p. 67

Ibid., pp. 67–69

Plato, in the dialogue The Republic Book VI, discusses the nature and role of art, science, and its role in politics.

Hume ( 2007 ). The difference between ideas and impressions lies in their degree of forcefulness and the liveliness they strike in the mind. More forceful are impressions, sensations, passions, and emotions while ideas are faint images of thinking and reasoning. Hume also distinguishes between simple and complex ideas. Simple ideas are those that cannot be distinguished into parts while complex ideas can be distinguished into parts (pp. 12–17).

Kant understands them as not static, pure subjective, or metaphysical concepts; rather, they are principles that are a priori in nature.

Ibid., p. 42

Ibid., pp. 42–43

Ibid., 47–48

Marcuse 1969j

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Acknowledgements

I am deeply indebted to Prof. Dr. Kanchana Mahadevan for her help and insights at various stages of this research.

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Rathi, B.M. Role of Art in Politics: Popper and Marcuse. J. Indian Counc. Philos. Res. 32 , 257–272 (2015). https://doi.org/10.1007/s40961-015-0025-7

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Lying in Politics: Hannah Arendt on Deception, Self-Deception, and the Psychology of Defactualization

By maria popova.

“The possibilities that exist between two people, or among a group of people,” Adrienne Rich wrote in her beautiful 1975 speech on lying and what truth really means , “are a kind of alchemy. They are the most interesting thing in life. The liar is someone who keeps losing sight of these possibilities.” Nowhere is this liar’s loss of perspective more damaging to public life, human possibility, and our collective progress than in politics, where complex social, cultural, economic, and psychological forces conspire to make the assault on truth traumatic on a towering scale.

Those forces are what Hannah Arendt (October 14, 1906–December 4, 1975), one of the most incisive thinkers of the past century, explores in a superb 1971 essay titled “Lying in Politics,” written shortly after the release of the Pentagon Papers and later included in Crises of the Republic ( public library ) — a collection of Arendt’s timelessly insightful and increasingly timely essays on politics, violence, civil disobedience, and the pillars of a sane and stable society.

Out of the particular treachery the Pentagon Papers revealed, Arendt wrests a poignant meditation on the betrayal we feel at every revelation that our political leaders — those we have elected to be our civil servants — have deceived and disappointed us. With the release of the Pentagon Papers, Arendt argues, “the famous credibility gap … suddenly opened up into an abyss” — an abyss rife with the harrowing hollowness of every political disappointment that ever was and ever will be. In a quest to illuminate the various “aspects of deception, self-deception, image-making, ideologizing, and defactualization,” she writes:

Truthfulness has never been counted among the political virtues, and lies have always been regarded as justifiable tools in political dealings. Whoever reflects on these matters can only be surprised by how little attention has been paid, in our tradition of philosophical and political thought, to their significance, on the one hand for the nature of action and, on the other, for the nature of our ability to deny in thought and word whatever happens to be the case. This active, aggressive capability is clearly different from our passive susceptibility to falling prey to error, illusion, the distortions of memory, and to whatever else can be blamed on the failings of our sensual and mental apparatus.

A defender of the contradictory complexity of the human experience and its necessary nuance, Arendt reminds us that the human tendency toward deception isn’t so easily filed into a moral binary. Two millennia after Cicero argued that the human capacities for envy and compassion have a common root , Arendt argues that our moral flaws and our imaginative flair spring from the same source:

A characteristic of human action is that it always begins something new, and this does not mean that it is ever permitted to start ab ovo , to create ex nihilo . In order to make room for one’s own action, something that was there before must be removed or destroyed, and things as they were before are changed. Such change would be impossible if we could not mentally remove ourselves from where we physically are located and imagine that things might as well be different from what they actually are. In other words, the deliberate denial of factual truth — the ability to lie — and the capacity to change facts — the ability to act — are interconnected; they owe their existence to the same source: imagination. It is by no means a matter of course that we can say , “The sun shines,” when it actually is raining (the consequence of certain brain injuries is the loss of this capacity); rather, it indicates that while we are well equipped for the world, sensually as well as mentally, we are not fitted or embedded into it as one of its inalienable parts. We are free to change the world and to start something new in it. Without the mental freedom to deny or affirm existence, to say “yes” or “no” — not just to statements or propositions in order to express agreement or disagreement, but to things as they are given, beyond agreement or disagreement, to our organs of perception and cognition — no action would be possible; and action is of course the very stuff politics are made of. Hence, when we talk about lying … let us remember that the lie did not creep into politics by some accident of human sinfulness. Moral outrage, for this reason alone, is not likely to make it disappear.

Since history is a form of collective memory woven of truth-by-consensus, it is hardly surprising that our collective memory should be so imperfect and fallible given how error-prone our individual memory is . Arendt captures this elegantly:

The deliberate falsehood deals with contingent facts; that is, with matters that carry no inherent truth within themselves, no necessity to be as they are. Factual truths are never compellingly true. The historian knows how vulnerable is the whole texture of facts in which we spend our daily life; it is always in danger of being perforated by single lies or torn to shreds by the organized lying of groups, nations, or classes, or denied and distorted, often carefully covered up by reams of falsehoods or simply allowed to fall into oblivion. Facts need testimony to be remembered and trustworthy witnesses to be established in order to find a secure dwelling place in the domain of human affairs. From this, it follows that no factual statement can ever be beyond doubt.

In a sentiment that calls to mind Maria Konnikova’s fascinating inquiry into the psychology of why cons work on even the most rational of us , Arendt adds:

It is this fragility that makes deception so very easy up to a point, and so tempting. It never comes into a conflict with reason, because things could indeed have been as the liar maintains they were. Lies are often much more plausible, more appealing to reason, than reality, since the liar has the great advantage of knowing beforehand what the audience wishes or expects to hear. He has prepared his story for public consumption with a careful eye to making it credible, whereas reality has the disconcerting habit of confronting us with the unexpected, for which we were not prepared. Under normal circumstances the liar is defeated by reality, for which there is no substitute; no matter how large the tissue of falsehood that an experienced liar has to offer, it will never be large enough, even if he enlists the help of computers, to cover the immensity of factuality. The liar, who may get away with any number of single falsehoods, will find it impossible to get away with lying on principle.

Arendt considers one particularly pernicious breed of liars — “public-relations managers in government who learned their trade from the inventiveness of Madison Avenue.” In a sentiment arguably itself defeated by reality — a reality in which someone like Donald Trump sells enough of the public on enough falsehoods to get gobsmackingly close to the presidency — she writes:

The only limitation to what the public-relations man does comes when he discovers that the same people who perhaps can be “manipulated” to buy a certain kind of soap cannot be manipulated — though, of course, they can be forced by terror — to “buy” opinions and political views. Therefore the psychological premise of human manipulability has become one of the chief wares that are sold on the market of common and learned opinion.

In what is possibly the finest parenthetical paragraph ever written, and one of particularly cautionary splendor today, Arendt adds:

(Oddly enough, the only person likely to be an ideal victim of complete manipulation is the President of the United States. Because of the immensity of his job, he must surround himself with advisers … who “exercise their power chiefly by filtering the information that reaches the President and by interpreting the outside world for him.” The President, one is tempted to argue, allegedly the most powerful man of the most powerful country, is the only person in this country whose range of choices can be predetermined. This, of course, can happen only if the executive branch has cut itself off from contact with the legislative powers of Congress; it is the logical outcome in our system of government when the Senate is being deprived of, or is reluctant to exercise, its powers to participate and advise in the conduct of foreign affairs. One of the Senate’s functions, as we now know, is to shield the decision-making process against the transient moods and trends of society at large — in this case, the antics of our consumer society and the public-relations managers who cater to it.)

Arendt turns to the role of falsehood, be it deliberate or docile, in the craftsmanship of what we call history:

Unlike the natural scientist, who deals with matters that, whatever their origin, are not man-made or man-enacted, and that therefore can be observed, understood, and eventually even changed only through the most meticulous loyalty to factual, given reality, the historian, as well as the politician, deals with human affairs that owe their existence to man’s capacity for action, and that means to man’s relative freedom from things as they are. Men who act, to the extent that they feel themselves to be the masters of their own futures, will forever be tempted to make themselves masters of the past, too. Insofar as they have the appetite for action and are also in love with theories, they will hardly have the natural scientist’s patience to wait until theories and hypothetical explanations are verified or denied by facts. Instead, they will be tempted to fit their reality — which, after all, was man-made to begin with and thus could have been otherwise — into their theory, thereby mentally getting rid of its disconcerting contingency.

This squeezing of reality into theory, Arendt admonishes, is also a centerpiece of the political system, where the inherent complexity of reality is flattened into artificial oversimplification:

Much of the modern arsenal of political theory — the game theories and systems analyses, the scenarios written for imagined “audiences,” and the careful enumeration of, usually, three “options” — A, B, C — whereby A and C represent the opposite extremes and B the “logical” middle-of-the-road “solution” of the problem — has its source in this deep-seated aversion. The fallacy of such thinking begins with forcing the choices into mutually exclusive dilemmas; reality never presents us with anything so neat as premises for logical conclusions. The kind of thinking that presents both A and C as undesirable, therefore settles on B, hardly serves any other purpose than to divert the mind and blunt the judgment for the multitude of real possibilities.

But even more worrisome, Arendt cautions, is the way in which such flattening of reality blunts the judgment of government itself — nowhere more aggressively than in the overclassification of documents, which makes information available only to a handful of people in power and, paradoxically, not available to the representatives who most need that information in order to make decisions in the interest of the public who elected them. Arendt writes:

Not only are the people and their elected representatives denied access to what they must know to form an opinion and make decisions, but also the actors themselves, who receive top clearance to learn all the relevant facts, remain blissfully unaware of them. And this is so not because some invisible hand deliberately leads them astray, but because they work under circumstances, and with habits of mind, that allow them neither time nor inclination to go hunting for pertinent facts in mountains of documents, 99½ per cent of which should not be classified and most of which are irrelevant for all practical purposes. […] If the mysteries of government have so befogged the minds of the actors themselves that they no longer know or remember the truth behind their concealments and their lies, the whole operation of deception, no matter how well organized its “marathon information campaigns,” in Dean Rusk’s words, and how sophisticated its Madison Avenue gimmickry, will run aground or become counterproductive, that is, confuse people without convincing them. For the trouble with lying and deceiving is that their efficiency depends entirely upon a clear notion of the truth that the liar and deceiver wishes to hide. In this sense, truth, even if it does not prevail in public, possesses an ineradicable primacy over all falsehoods.

She extrapolates the broader human vulnerability to falsehood:

The deceivers started with self-deception. […] The self-deceived deceiver loses all contact with not only his audience, but also the real world, which still will catch up with him, because he can remove his mind from it but not his body.

Crises of the Republic is a spectacular and spectacularly timely read in its totality. Complement it with Arendt on the crucial difference between truth and meaning , the power of outsiderdom , our impulse for self-display , what free will really means , and her beautiful love letters , then revisit Walt Whitman on how literature bolsters democracy and Carl Sagan on why science is a tool of political harmony .

— Published June 15, 2016 — https://www.themarginalian.org/2016/06/15/lying-in-politics-hannah-arendt/ —

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D. H. Melhem

eBook $9.95s | 9780815651185 Add to cart

"Her primary focus, her point of departure, is New York City, about which she has written with unsparing and humorous vision, in love and in sorrow, for decades. It is her unerring vision of the immediate that gives this New York poet a global voice."— Marilyn Hacker, author of Names: Poems "Belying all of prior literary history, a currently fashionable critical dictum holds that any poetry engaging the real world is necessarily impure and unworthy of respect or admiration. D. H. Melhem’s powerful Art and Politics / Politics and Art kicks down the door of that comfy salon and lets in the fresh air of heroism, of racial equality, of courageous feminism, of social conscience, of pacifism."— Philip Appleman, author of New and Selected Poems, 1956–1996 "Especially now, when most of the world is suffering, this is the kind of poetry I am looking for. It is so rare—engaged, grappling with issues, and deeply human—in short, political."— Edward Field, author of After the Fall: Poems Old and New

Description

Probing, wide-ranging, brimming with passion and outrage, Melhem’s eighth collection of poems grips the reader with accounts of individual triumphs and the ongoing catastrophic conflicts of our world. The author draws on her years as a painter and sculptor to bring a distinct visual and tactile quality to her poetry.

In this volume, Melhem proceeds from robust individual portraits through observable terrains to traumatic visions of war. “Certain Personae” ranges from black writers to Abraham Lincoln, from a portrait of the suffragist Elizabeth Cady Stanton to the poetry of John Updike, and finishes with paintings of Hannibal crossing the Alps. In “Mostly Political,” the poems traverse the local and the universal: melting polar ice caps, capitalism, a painting by Max Ernst interpreted in antithetical ways, and a poem surveying Manhattan’s Upper West Side in the context of international events. “Wars,” the third and last section, gives intimate and searing glimpses of the Trojan War, World War I, the Gulf War, the Iraq war, and the conflict over Palestine.

About the Author

D. H. Melhem has won an American Book Award and the RAWI Lifetime Achievement Award, and has been nominated for the Pushcart Prize three times. She is the author of seven books of poetry, a trilogy of novels, and three nonfiction books. New York Poems, Blight, and Stigma & the Cave are all available from Syracuse University Press.

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Truth and Politics

The New Yorker , February 25, 1967 P. 49

An essay on the antithesis of truth and politics. While probably no former time tolerated so many diverse opinions on religious and philosophical matters factual truth, if it happens to oppose a given group's profit or pleasure, is greeted today with greater hostility than ever before... Even in Hitler's Germany and Stalin's Russia, it was more dangerous to talk about concentration and extermination camps, whose existence was no secret, than to hold and to utter "heretical" views on anti-Semitism, racism, and Communism. What seems even more distrubing is that to the extent to which unwelcome factual truths are tolerated in free countries they are often, consciously or unconsciously transformed into opinions -as through the fact of Germany's support of Hitler or of France's collapse before the German armies in 1940 or of Vatican policies during the Second World War were not a matter of historical record but a matter of opinion.

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Hannah Arendt

Truth and politics.

The New Yorker,  February 25, 1967.

An essay on the antithesis of truth and politics. While probably no former time tolerated so many diverse opinions on religious and philosophical matters factual truth, if it happens to oppose a given group’s profit or pleasure, is greeted today with greater hostility than ever before… Even in Hitler’s Germany and Stalin’s Russia, it was more dangerous to talk about concentration and extermination camps, whose existence was no secret, than to hold and to utter “heretical” views on anti-Semitism, racism, and Communism. What seems even more distrubing is that to the extent to which unwelcome factual truths are tolerated in free countries they are often, consciously or unconsciously transformed into opinions –as through the fact of Germany’s support of Hitler or of France’s collapse before the German armies in 1940 or of Vatican policies during the Second World War were not a matter of historical record but a matter of opinion.

Online: The New Yorker

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Trump Reposts Crude Sexual Remark About Harris on Truth Social

Though the former president has a history of making crass insults about opponents, the reposts signal his willingness to continue to shatter longstanding political norms.

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By Michael Gold

• Aug. 28, 2024

Former President Donald J. Trump used his social-media website on Wednesday to amplify a crude remark about Vice President Kamala Harris that suggested Ms. Harris traded sexual favors to help her political career.

The post, by another user on Truth Social, was an image of Ms. Harris and Hillary Clinton, Mr. Trump’s opponent in 2016. The text read: “Funny how blowjobs impacted both their careers differently…”

The remark was a reference to Mrs. Clinton’s husband, former President Bill Clinton, and the Monica Lewinsky scandal, and a right-wing contention that Ms. Harris’s romantic relationship with Willie Brown, the former mayor of San Francisco whom she dated in the mid-1990s while he was speaker of the California State Assembly, fueled her political rise.

Mr. Trump’s repost was the second time in 10 days that the former president shared content from his personal account making sexually oriented attacks on Ms. Harris. Though he has a history of making crass insults about his opponents, the reposts signal Mr. Trump’s willingness to continue to shatter longstanding norms of political speech.

The image Mr. Trump shared on Wednesday morning was another user’s screenshot of a post on X, and it was a reply to an unrelated video clip Mr. Trump had posted on Tuesday night.

Mr. Trump reposted the image as part of a series of 30 reposts he made on Truth Social between 8:02 and 8:32 a.m. on Wednesday, including several posts with references to the QAnon conspiracy theory movement and its slogan. Mr. Trump also reposted photos that called for the prosecution or imprisoning of top Democrats and members of the House committee that investigated the Jan. 6, 2021, attack on the Capitol. The former president has vowed to direct federal prosecutors to investigate his political enemies if elected.

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