ART : Some Thoughts on Artists Who Abandon Easel for Soapbox

Artists tend to feel even more passionate than the rest of us about the purpose of life and the crises we face. Many concerned visual and performing artists of our time have developed work primarily conceived as outcries against AIDS, censorship, war, environmental neglect, abusive treatment of women, the anti-abortion movement and the unfair treatment of minorities.

It’s possible that there also are artists making work specifically intended to promote conservative political agendas--in the mold of Christian pop singers, say--but I’ve never heard of them. It seems that artists who hold such beliefs generally stick to making traditional work--landscapes and portraits and genre scenes--that deliberately have no connection with contemporary realities, political or otherwise.

Magical things happen when an artist’s imagination, technical abilities and deep conviction combine in a successful work of art, whatever its subject. The best recent example of this, for my money, was Karen Finley’s performance, “We Keep Our Victims Ready,” at UCLA last fall. She whisked her audience from raucous laughter to lulled attention and finally to hushed sadness by means of her superb timing, coolly self-possessed physical presence and mesmerizing incantations.

Finley’s messages--about violence toward women, censorship, the AIDS crisis and the personal crisis of growing up knowing you are different from people around you--emerged clearly in this performance, and those messages were all the more powerful because of the show’s visceral and emotional appeal.

Problems surface, however, when artists insist on baldly haranguing us about their pet causes, rather than presenting their ideas in the stylized framework of art. Several weeks ago, Rachel Rosenthal, the celebrated Los Angeles performance artist, gave a two-hour talk for the free, weekly Art Forum lecture series, sponsored by the art department at Rancho Santiago College in Santa Ana.

I covered the talk because I expected Rosenthal to discuss her rich background, her friendships with well-known figures in the art world, the development of her style and allied matters. Instead, she devoted the entire time slot--except for showing a videotape of her brief work “Was Black”--to a diatribe about what she perceives as the bleak future of the Earth.

I don’t quarrel with Rosenthal’s honesty or the depth of her despair. But I’m damned if I’m going to get my nuts and bolts information about ecological problems secondhand, from an admitted non-expert who is given to speaking with a bizarre aura of authority about “pre-history” and quoting bits and pieces from books she read.

Why should I believe her, for example, when she says that “the diversity of the species is depleting at a rate 10,000 times greater than any great extinction in the past”? Who is her source for this information?

Rosenthal’s solutions for trying to combat ecological disaster are extreme, so much so that they inspire derision or outrage in unconvinced listeners. People should “stop eating animals” because they are “not ours to eat,” she says.

Rosenthal also claims that “cancer-like proliferation and breeding is suicide.” What an unbelievably cavalier comment, inadvertently recalling eugenic solutions for humankind! Is the implication that Rosenthal’s two large, shaggy dogs (who follow her everywhere, even into the college classroom) are somehow more valuable to the planet than somebody’s children, born or unborn? (Rosenthal referred to her pets--which replaced her previous constant companion, a rat--as “role models,” countering what she sees as humans’ dismaying habit of “getting further and further away from animals.”)

When someone in the audience asked Rosenthal whether she considers herself an activist, she replied candidly that she is “not a very good politician. . . . If I’m to be helpful, it’s more in my teaching of students and my artwork.”

Indeed. In ecologically inspired performance pieces like “Was Black,” Rosenthal calls upon stylized verbal and visual imagery, her imposing physical presence, and--most impressively--her resonant, powerful voice. A message transformed into art becomes something more durable, more open to personal interpretation (and possibly more persuasive) than a set of instructions as to how to live your life or a litany of complaints and protests.

The alchemy of good art creates a bond with its audience that surpasses knee-jerk agreement or disagreement with the sound-bite level of political issues. This alchemy also tends to override the fantastic line of reasoning and illogical conclusions that so often bedevil radical social positions on both the Left and the Right. If there is any way that art-with-a-message does preach to anyone but the converted, it must be in its ability to create empathy through humor, pathos and the sheer abstract beauty and terror of skillfully chosen and employed images, words and movements.

On the face of it, it seems absurd that Rosenthal should appoint herself ecological spokeswoman when she already has a field--performance art--in which she is an unquestioned expert. Yet she is hardly alone. Artist Barbara Kruger, speaking last winter at UC Irvine, eschewed any discussions of the genesis or development of her work in favor of answering questions from the audience. No matter what the query, she had a snappy comeback that hammered home her political views.

So often, what seems to happen at such forums--oddly enough, even when they are held on college campuses, which are supposed to be bastions of free speech--is that no one challenges the speaker on his or her facts, no one offers an opposing view. On the contrary, a revival-house spirit flows from one and all, apparently united against the common enemy of right-wing bigotry.

What’s missing is the middle ground of reasoned analysis, a more neutral arena cleansed of hyperbolic reactions and sweeping assumptions. When artists--who work in the gorgeously intangible world of metaphors and images--seize the microphone and start making flat pronouncements about the state of the world, passion has a way of overriding fact and logic.

Certainly, there are also politicians who let passion override their grasp of facts and logic. Part of the inspiration for the latest wave of politically minded artists has come from the wild-eyed statements of Sen. Jesse Helms (R-N.C.), Rep. Dana Rohrabacher (R-Huntington Beach) and others bent on inflaming constituents with the notion that the National Endowment for the Arts is funding carloads of sinful stuff with our tax dollars.

Still, it’s hard to buy the argument that shrillness on the Left is the answer to scare tactics on the Right. That doesn’t mean artists are not as entitled as anyone to take a stand against clear and present dangers--whether they are perceived as war, unprotected sex, men who batter women, or anything else.

But we do need to separate the artist from the message and realize that expertise in one field is no guarantee of expertise in another. And I think we also need to register our sincere disappointment, if it is warranted, when an artist gives us a rant instead of a work of art.