Art Loves Propaganda, Propaganda Loves Art

Statue of Liberty: Art? Propaganda?

Last class, we were discussing whether The Grapes of Wrath was art or propaganda. And I was bursting with the question: why art or propaganda?

Not only do I believe that the two aren’t mutually exclusive, I also believe that there needs to be some sort of overlap to make either medium successful. Artless propaganda has been dealt with before, legally and socially: everyone knows how to handle it. It fails to get at the guttural feelings of a human being. It is the information someone needs to be convinced, but without the convincing.

On the other side of the coin, art without motivation falls flat. If the artist didn’t even have a reason for showing me this, why am I looking at it? The purposes of both art and propaganda are to express and communicate; art might be more on the expression side of things, and propaganda more on the communication side, but they absolutely need each other to be successful.

I am reminded of Vladimir Mayakovsky, a futurist poet from Soviet Russia who wrote propagandist poetry still read today as glorious, ingenious literature. His poetry was named as art and propaganda from the start, and neither took away from the other. It didn’t even limit his audience… Americanized Eastern Europeans from former satellite states of Moscow like me are reading it in the year 2009.

In a more modern sense, I’m also reminded of IVAW, or Iraq Veterans Against the War, a group of veterans doing public performances and reenactments of brutal events in Iraq, in places like Times Square and at the DNC in Denver. They are loud, terrifying, disturbing, too real for comfort, and perhaps most importantly, performed by actual veterans who have experienced these things firsthand.

They lend their credence to the cause, rather than being rich college students (who would be easier to dismiss as disconnected, spoiled, misinformed and whiny.) On the other hand, they don’t present themselves as “artists.”

What they are doing is almost undeniably art, and undeniably propaganda. It is artful propaganda, or propagandist art. In today’s age of numbness, an ordinary protest (even if in uniform) would hardly phase anyone. Pamphlets certainly wouldn’t; people can choose to throw them away. Watching their performance is not voluntary; there is no choice.

The artfulness of this protest is what makes it effective. It is working outside of the normal language of protest, so people don’t know how to react and therefore aren’t immediately dismissive. It is engaging and immediately emotionally involving.

I feel as though all of this could be said about The Grapes of Wrath. True, writing has been a form of protest for almost forever, but The Grapes of Wrath presents itself as literature, not as propaganda or protest. Steinbeck uses his credence as an upper-class, skillful and reasonable man, to lend to the cause of the migrants.

The Grapes of Wrath was so dangerous because it got at the guttural feelings of human beings, it made people put their protest/propaganda-guard down, it made them experience the information before they realized what it was promoting. And because of this, I would argue that Grapes of Wrath was important and incredible because it was both art, and propaganda.