Counseling Art and Politics

St. Christopher

About ten years, ago, my wife Harriet and I spent part of a summer with my parents-in-law at their house in Burnham-Overy-Staithe, on the North Norfolk Coast of England. One sunny, July day we decided to walk into Burnham Market, about two miles away, to buy groceries. The footpath cuts though a field planted with potatoes, jogs right between hedgerows composed of climbing roses, hawthorn, brambles and nettles, and passes a small junkyard with rusted farm machinery and broken skips and pallets. After that, you turn left and hug the perimeter of a churchyard busy with chickens owned by residents of the row of flint and brick cottages adjacent. We stopped, as we often do, to enter the Norman church of St. Clement. There are about a dozen medieval churches in “the Burnhams,” but this is my favorite because of its unusual central tower and belfry, finely carved 17^th c. grave slabs inside, and remnants of a 15^th c. mural showing a bare-legged St. Christopher carrying Jesus on his right shoulder.

According to Jacobus de Voragine, author of The Golden Legend, (c. 1260), Christopher – originally named Reprobus – was a servant in the court of the king of Caanan. Eager to improve himself, he decided to find a greater king to whom he might pledge service. His search led him first to the devil. Certain he had reached his desired station, Reprobus served him, but one day, seeing Mephistopheles shrink before a cross, he realized there must be a still more powerful king. That’s when he met a hermit who told him about Jesus Christ. Swearing allegiance to Christ, the courtier vowed – as a token of humility – to carry on his shoulders anyone who wished to cross a particular river.

The promise was not made casually. Measuring five cubits (7’5”) — an inch taller than the current, tallest NBA player – Reprobus was well suited to his new profession. Everything went smoothly until one day, a little boy asked to be carried across the unusually fast flowing waterway. Reprobus found the going difficult and his burden surprisingly heavy. When they finally arrived on the opposite shore, the passenger identified himself as Jesus and said the ferryman had borne on his shoulders the weight of the world.

Shouldn’t Christ at least have declared his luggage before requesting transport? What about a gratuity? (Was Christ a bad tipper?) The Golden Legend makes no mentions of complaint and Reprobus thereafter became known as Christopher (Christóphoros), or Christ-Bearer. For his trouble, he was soon martyred (beheaded) for refusing the tyrannical king of Lycia’s demand that he worship pagan gods.

Because of his profession, St. Christopher has long been considered patron saint of travelers. There’s many a stranded air passenger who has prayed for saintly intercession after a delay due to mechanical issues, absent crew members, traffic control slow-downs or bad weather. I’ve personally never sought Christopher’s help, preferring the solace of airline lounges, gin and tonics and if necessary, hotel beds.

A chance meeting and a key question

I mention all this to explain the foolish question I asked my dear friend David James (the great scholar of avant-garde film), when Harriet and I met him by chance that bright, summer day about ten years ago in Burnham Market. I saw his wife Joanne before him; she’s tall and Black and stood out among the pasty white people (a few sun-burned a lobster-red) standing outside Humble Pie, the local delicatessen. “Joann!” I shouted, “what are you doing here? Is David with…” at which point David saw me, lunged forward, and gave me a powerful embrace, lifting me in the air. He’s about 6 inches taller than me, so I felt at that moment, like the baby Jesus I had just seen carried by St. Christopher. We all walked over to The Hoste, a pub a few meters from Humble Pie, to sit at a canopied, round picnic table, chat and drink beer — in Harriet’s case lager-shandy (a beer and lemonade concoction).

David, English by birth, told me that he and Joann had flown in from Los Angeles just a couple of days before, and decided to spend some time by the sea and walking the North Norfolk footpaths. He also told me he was planning to retire soon from USC. Still thinking about the patron saint of travelers, I asked David, “Will you remain in L.A.? Or will you travel abroad?” To which he replied, “It isn’t a question of where I go, but what I’ll do.”

A decade later, I silently rehearsed that conversation when I retired after almost 40 years of university teaching. Harriet and I moved first from Chicago to a small town in rural Florida, and then, in 2024 to Norwich, UK, to be closer to Harriet’s elderly parents and escape the emergent, American fascism. Self-exile was easy, but I experienced the predictable symptoms of PASD (“post-academic stress disorder.”) I started a novel, saw a therapist, and spent ridiculous amounts of time cooking. My dreams were ones familiar to members of my profession: standing in front of a packed auditorium with neither trousers nor lecture notes; dashing madly across a maze-like college campus, unable to find the correct classroom or building; sitting anxiously on a bench outside the university provost’s office, my feet dangling well short of the floor.

Ministry of art and politics

Lately, I’ve been spending a lot of time at the University of East Anglia, where I have an honorary appointment. I’ve given a few lectures and gotten to know some terrific faculty members, all of them pressed by the university’s scandalously declining support for the humanities and social sciences. I’ve spoken at other, equally skint art history departments in the U.K., and traveled frequently to London to see exhibitions and attend gallery openings. But it’s another activity that’s providing an answer to my friend David’s question: I have been offering colleagues advice — more like pastoral counseling — on the timely subject of art and politics.

These discussions have taken place in pubs, offices, seminars and my living room. Here’s a typical interrogative:

“I’ve read some of your columns, and agree with you, of course, about Trump, neo-fascism, Gaza, the climate crisis, and all the rest. But when it comes to art, I prefer to judge it on its own terms, not according to a political metric. Can’t I still enjoy and champion art – past and present – that’s all about line, form, color, space, and plane? Or that represents places and stories that have nothing to do with politics? Is there no place in your world for the likes of Agnes Martin and Robert Ryman?”

I reply by saying that I like those artists too, and that, of course, people are free to enjoy and write about whatever they please, but don’t suppose that doing so engages the unfolding catastrophe. Moreover, every work of art, no matter how politically neutral it appears to be, is inevitably infected by the ambient ideology, in the current U.S. case, neofascism. Politically disinterested artists and viewers are engaging politics without acknowledging it.

“So, are you saying that every work of art today should be a protest against current injustice? Doesn’t that sound terribly tedious?”

“That does sound boring,” I reply. “But I’m not arguing that art should represent or even protest current politics. Only that genuinely political art intervenes into the domain of power.”

“How often does that happen?!”

“Not often,” I admit. “But sometimes it does, especially during periods of political ferment, like the revolutions of 1789, 1848 and 1871 in France, and 1917 in Russia. Even in Washington, D.C. in 1967, when Allen Ginsberg, the Fugs, Norman Mailer and thousands of others tried to levitate the Pentagon in protest against the Vietnam War. That was great, political art! As Marx wrote, “ideology becomes a material force when it grips the masses.”

“But that’s cheating,” my interlocutor replies. “In those cases, you already had a revolution, or at least a powerful movement. You didn’t need art to help make one.”

“In some instances,” I answer, “artists did help create radical consciousness. For example, the French artists Jacques-Louis David, Honore Daumier and Gustave Courbet, and the Russians Kasmir Malevich and El Lissitsky. Their works were revolutionary!”

“In the latter two cases, the artworks you say contributed to the revolutionary cause weren’t even representational. They were completely abstract! Doesn’t that prove my point about the value of non-political art?”

“Yes,” I agree. “Some art can affect you at the level of fundamental ideas. It can shape or change consciousness, making the viewer more receptive to critical, even revolutionary thought.”

“Now, I’m lost. So, you agree with me that art doesn’t have to be political?”

“Yes, so long as it’s deeply political,” I say.

“Isn’t this a case of you wanting to have your cake and eat it too?”

At this point, we’d typically begin to ventriloquize key writers on the subject: Theodor Adorno, Walter Benjamin, Bertolt Brecht, Herbert Marcuse and Jean Paul Sartre. And we’d bring in some well-known art critics and historians who have written about art and politics, especially John Berger and T.J. Clark.

Sometimes, roles are reversed; I act the aesthete, and my congregant the one who insists on the necessity of art marrying politics. A few weeks ago, I had a discussion with Patrick Creedon, registrar at the Pippy Houldsworth Gallery in London, about their current exhibition of works by the renowned, feminist artist Mary Kelly. It’s called We Don’t Want to Set the World on Fire and comprises a sort of mini retrospective. I told Patrick, somewhat cheekily, that it seemed to me Kelly’s art looked best when its politics was most hidden, and worst when it was most visible. Patrick, who began a Ph.D on J.P. Sartre’s Critique of Dialectical Reason and is obviously no slouch, proposed instead that Kelly’s collages, made largely of compressed lint collected from her clothes dryer over months and years, are physical residues of memory and experience and thus are a kind of embodied politics. He also claimed that the works bridged the space between the public and the private; they show public or political events – wars, protests, social movements – but are composed of the intimate residue of our clothes, households and even bodies. Study for Life, April 1945 reproduces in lint the cover of an issue of Life Magazine that shows the Battle of Iwo Jima, though comparison with the actual cover reveals that Kelly’s subject has been highly abstracted. (1945 was also the year of the artist’s birth.) I think it’s the best work in the exhibition, but I’m unconvinced about its contemporary, political salience.

The Politics of St. Christopher

There’s a reason images of St. Christopher were so common on the walls of medieval churches in the British Isles. He was the people’s saint: a worker, unlettered, and physically abnormal. He was a monster, but both pious and generous. His image, it was believed, had apotropaic powers. One look could protect you from plague or other disease; a glance could fend off the devil and stop the angel of death in his path. He thus conferred immortality on ordinary people. (It was a belief that can’t easily be disproved; on their day of death, most people are too unwell to visit church.) Frescoes of St. Chistopher were almost always located just opposite the entrance door of churches – usually on the north wall of a narthex or transept — so a busy visitor could crack open the door, look at the saint, and get away.

About 1430, an anonymous German artist made a woodcut of St. Christopher. It is one of the first European woodcuts ever made, and a few years later was the basis of the fresco at St. Clement and dozens more across the U.K. (By my reckoning, at least nine in that format still survive.) For the itinerant painters, this print was lightening in a bottle — a template both vivid and imaginative. It shows a giant of a man, bearded, swathed in flowing drapery, carrying a crowned Christ bearing the globus cruciger. The saint’s staff is a palm tree with dates — or coconuts? A fish swims between the giant’s legs, and peasants carry grain to a mill at bottom, and from it at left. At right, a hermit lights the way – it was a hermit who introduced Reprobus to Christ — and below him a secretive rabbit, a symbol perhaps of the Resurrection, emerges from the ground. The Latin text at bottom reads “On any day when you look upon the face of Christopher, on that day you will not die an evil death.”  Most of these details have disappeared from the damaged, St. Clement fresco.

St. Christopher must have lent courage to generations of English peasants determined to break the shackles of vassalage. He first appeared on frescoed walls about the time of the great English Peasant’s Revolt of 1381. By the time of Jack Cade’s Rebellion in 1450, he was everywhere. Though there is no indication that St. Christopher was used as a symbol during either uprising, he was part of the background of empowerment and growing self confidence that led to the overthrow of English feudalism.

Representations of St. Christopher impacted successive generations of peasants and other working people at the level of basic ideas. His story – of a poor man who used his strength to resist royal tyranny and help others — gripped the masses. We don’t know if the now damaged fresco of Chistopher in Burnham Overy Town, and the many others like it in Norfolk, was visited by the rebels who waged Kett’s Rebellion in 1549, but it’s likely. That’s when an army of 16,000 challenged the enclosure of common land that forced many into reviled wage labor or else destitution. The revolt was eventually put down and its leaders executed in Norwich, but memory of that uprising inspired Gerrard Winstanley and the Diggers during the English Revolution a century later. And they, in turn, inspired the English Jacobins on the 1790s, including the poet and artist William Blake, who spoke to the counterculture of the 1950s and ‘60s and so on down to today.

That’s what makes the study of political art so difficult; it may cause an earthquake, but in its own time be felt only as a tremor. Still, the challenges of the present are so great and so immediate, that artists – just like the rest of us – need to take immediate measures to fend off calamity. That counsel — easy to give but difficult to enact – remains the order of the day, here in the U.K., the U.S. and almost everywhere.

The post Counseling Art and Politics appeared first on CounterPunch.org.