At first glance, an artwork might not appear outwardly political. Yet it is not enough to see it for aesthetic purposes only. Art requires us to pay attention, to question – and appreciate – what we are looking at, but also to see what lies beyond it. Take textiles, an art form historically deemed as “decorative” by the establishment, because of its association with women’s work. But what this categorisation actually reveals is a deep political subtext – the struggle for women’s rights of the last 500 years.
Relegated from the high arts in the Renaissance, the lowly status of textiles was cemented by the Royal Academy in 1769, when the newly founded society banned embroidery from its exhibitions. This influenced women to reject the medium if they wanted to be taken seriously as artists. The Bauhaus school marginalised women in its weaving workshop and, while some female artists of the 1970s used the needle as a form of protest, it is telling that, despite this being 2024, a group show dedicated to this art form still feels like a very rare treat.
Unravel, which opened at the Barbican last week, is a show that explores how threads are woven in a web of “gendered labour, marginalisation, colonisation and trade”, as its co-curator Wells Fray-Smith tells me. For instance, Two-sided Work Clothes Quilt: Bars and Blocks, 1960, by Loretta Pettway, a member of the female African American group of Gee’s Bend quiltmakers, conveys a violent history: the enslaved people in plantations that supplied the indigo dye for denim had a working life expectancy of seven years.
Landscape painting, too, is a genre of art rooted in multitudinous histories, as exemplified in Soulscapes – a new exhibition at the Dulwich Picture Gallery in London bringing together art by people from the African diaspora. There are politics to be found in abstract expressionism too – a style which emerged in a climate of cold war politics after the second world war. The Ukrainian-born Janet Sobel took up painting aged 45 in 1938, turning to gestural drips because it was the only way she could make sense of her emotions, and the horrific acts of the Nazis.
Art is not a one-dimensional entity. It involves different responses, purposes and possibilities. It exists for the power of communication, as a voice for the underrepresented, as a form of resistance and as an outlet for both maker and viewer.
This is why I found it alarming when Arts Council England announced it had updated its policies, warning that “political statements” made by individuals linked to an organisation can cause “reputational risk and may breach funding agreements”. Funding for the arts should not be dependent on artists taking a particular political line. The ACE is supposed to be an arms-length organisation that distributes funds, not one that seeks to make political interventions into what artists do.This is not the first time governments have clamped down on artistic communities. In the UK during the first world war, the Defence of the Realm Act legislated for the censoring of artworks that represent naval or military images (in 2014, Arts Council England funded a programme that responded to this). And, of course, totalitarian governments have always sought to censor artists, one notorious example being the Nazis’ seizure of 15,000 artworks of mainly Jewish artists who they deemed “degenerate”, and exhibited for the purpose of mocking them.
Recently, artists have been discouraged from making statements about the Israel-Hamas war. In Berlin, senator for culture Joe Chialo threatened to adopt a clause that required any recipients of government funding to commit themselves against “any form of antisemitism,” which many artists saw as denying expressions of support for Palestine. More than 4,000 artists signed an open letter objecting to the proposal, which was overturned.
In times of crisis, expression is sometimes all we have to hold on to. For most, it is the only form of resistance, and a way to highlight injustices and inequality. Artists are not a dangerous species, they do not destroy lives and deny people their rights. Artists hold up a mirror to the world, and, in the words of Emily Dickinson, tell the truth but tell it slant.
Art history is the social history of the world, steeped in the context and conditions in which it is made. To deny someone the right to make their work freely – whether in textiles, landscape or abstract painting – is to deny expression, and the act of making, and looking at, art itself.
