When you were young, before getting on this cynical carousel we are all in, I’m sure there were moments you imagined that there are no countries, nothing to kill or die for and that all the people live in peace. I have and sometimes I still do, you see I’m a dreamer, but I’m not the only one, just hope someday you’ll all join us and the world will be as one. Of course these are not my words or better these are my words just John Lennon expressed them much better than I would have ever done, he added music as well and often sang it. John Lennon made art with a political statement.

One of the most dramatic moments in European history of the last century was the bombardment of Guernica from the Nazi forces, they literally flatten the city killing thousands and destroying a beautiful city. Some years later Pablo Picasso painted the memorable Guernica making a simple statement, a political statement, never again. In this painting where surrealism meets cubism and reality, there is the death of the people and the history of a country not just the town from the worst the humanity had seen till then. So what the relationship between art and politics? Symbiotic or parasitic and even worse, in this relationship who is the symbiotic and who is the parasite?

This is the third time I’m writing this article or at least I’m trying to do so and every time the same question drops and it’s always coming after an example. After thinking of Bob Dylan and Verdi for example I was sure that it is a symbiotic relationship but then contemporary news got on me to make me feel like it is parasitic. Reading that the US television superstar Oprah Winfrey is following presidential candidate Barack Obama in his campaign tour in Iowa it was seeing this parasitic role.

Oprah Winfrey is known for her TV chat-show that sometimes reaches the limits of trash TV, however the very same woman in her past proved to be a superb actress in the film The Color Purple that nearly gave her an Academy Award. I’m not sure how I would call her today but her past for a lot of people show an artist. And this woman uses her TV popularity and her identifiable persona to promote a politician. Parasitically the politician is using all that to make sure his success!

But again that’s one side; Bono uses his popularity, something he earned as artist, to save Africa or at least to show us what’s really going on in Africa. Politics again, but in this case Bono’s politics and art have a symbiotic relationship. Wagner was openly racist and perhaps you might have excuses thinking of the era and the semantics of the time, still Wagner was Nazis’ favourite composer, they loved Wagner so much that when they were sending their victims to the gas champers they were accompany them with Wagner’s music. Again art in the service of the parasitic politics.

Please be careful I’m not regarding all politicians as parasites, on the contrary I was very happy when all Hollywood stars, writers and all kind of artists stood next to the democratic candidate against George W. Bush and they did so openly hoping that their public faces will give an end to this administration. And I don’t want to stop in what happens in USA today.

There is an artist in Greece who has put himself at the service of the people and democracy after the WWII, Mikis Theodorakis. Mikis is a well known international composer and his career is well known, even for his more …pop style compositions like "Zorba's Dance". The same time the man has lived exiles, torturing even the firing squad after the civil war in Greece. A lot of his compositions talk about the people of Greece during these difficult times and a lot of them were composed while he was in prison. One of the most beautiful poems of the Greek Nobel awarded poet, Odiseas Elitis is about Cyprus and the unfair destiny of the island either under the British or Under the Turks. All these are political.

I can go further; Vladimir Mayakovski was all about politics, all about the revolution until …he committed suicide disappointed! And it was Jean Paul Sartre, a supreme philosopher of the 20th century. Even further, Aristophanes; the ancient master of comedy where politics dominated every single of his plays and the Sophocles who writes for the beauty of democracy. But then with all the above examples is art that turns to politics in a symbiotic state and never politics that turns to art. When politics turns to art is to use art. The birth of the posters and graphics design stands in the Soviet Union and especially Stalin’s period. Major soviet designers at the service of the revolution, people who wouldn’t even dare to mention their names in these pieces of modern art. All for the glory of the worker. That doesn’t mean that the other side stayed behind, who had the inspiration of the poster, ‘I want you’ with the American marine …unknown!

The only thing remaining is to end ones more with John Lennon lyrics, so it is Xmas, war is over!

Click here to download 'Art in Politics' theme PDF

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'Art in Politics' includes:

Poetry by Mbizo Chirasha & Alexander Mikhaylov
Artwork by Sarah Beetson, Steve Cartwright & Jan Sand
Articles and essays by Asa Butcher, Thanos Kalamidas, Emanuel L. Paparella & Rene Wadlow