Aesthetics and values; art and politics

For college students emerging during the late sixties, their political consciousness galvanized by the Vietnam War, Rudolf Baranik, who died last March at the age of 77, was perhaps the best-known artist in the United States. The expressionist horror and strangely materialist poetics of his most famous series, the Napaim Elegies (1967-74), with their images of napaimed body parts rendered against stark black backgrounds, served as artistic parallels for the experiences of a newly politicized generation that otherwise had no relationship to the art of "New York." Baranik, along with the few politically committed artists of his era - among them May Stevens (his wife, who survives him), Leon Golub, and Nancy Spero - gave visceral form to what one could sense in and of the times but could not readily express.

Ironically, Baranik's works now are better-known through college exhibitions and collections than through the institutions, collections, and official histories of the mainstream art world in the nineties. One of the dirty little secrets of the more canonical art world is that it continues to claim for art the "aura" of social relevance derived from the early politicized history of the avant-garde while at the same time it marginalizes art forms such as Baranik's that are developed from fully-committed political positions.(1)

Yet, although people and human nature occupied a place at the core of his concerns, Baranik was not a populist. His art and ideas emerged through confrontations developed within the professional art world, thoughtful contact with modern political thinkers and activists, and an insistence on the differences that separate the realm of visual art from other forms of creativity. As Baranik argued and demon strated in his own work, artists cannot make good political art; they can only make good art that is political. As Village Voice critic and writer Elizabeth Hess points out in the foreword to David Craven's new book, Baranik gave his life and art to making public and intelligent "the impossible relationship of art and politics" (xi). For Baranik, the site for political art is in living a life that gives rise to expressive art forms rather than to more realistic or didactic representations. This is what he meant when he described himself as a "socialist formalist" rather than as a proponent of the "social realism" advocated by much of the early political Left, against which Baranik defined himself. Like many of the political thinkers he admired, his position offered no formulaic prescriptions, but it did require personal agencies.

A major part of this intelligibility came through the sophisticated level of his perceptions, writings, and political activities. Through his specific actions in every decade since the sixties Baranik spearheaded the largely unwritten history of contemporary politics in the art world. When he was part of the Artists and Writers Protest Group he was one of the first in the New York art world to raise his voice against the Vietnam War. He designed many of the sixties antiwar posters (an activity he considered separate from art), and he helped write statements of protest published in the New York Times. The political debates held regularly in his New York loft in the seventies helped form the Artists Meeting for Cultural Change (AMCC), a group dedicated to affecting realpolitik and examining the role of the artist in society. Elizabeth Hess, a participant, recalls that in the seventies the same Wooster Street loft where Baranik and Stevens lived provided an environment that contributed to the birth of Heresies: A Feminist Journal on Art and Politics. In the eighties, Baranik was a founding member of Artist's Call Against U.S. Involvement in Central America, a group that prominently supported self-determination in Latin America. In addition, over the years he wrote frequent commentaries that ranged from critiques of methodologies to the analysis of critics for such diverse publications as the New York Times, Artforum, Studio International, and Art Criticism.

Baranik's position and importance in the second half of the century is clear. What we need to ask ourselves is why the canons of historical narrative ignore him? And, are we willing to correct the text? The answers we give are more important than ever, since we now are charged with the responsibility of constructing the historical requiem for an artist who can no longer speak for himself.

David Craven, a professor of art history at the University of New Mexico, Albuquerque, is best known for his commitment to the examination of art from a sociological perspective, particularly through his critiques of the literature, historical relationships, and meaning of Abstract Expressionism. He also wrote one of the few books that examines the relation between the Nicaraguan revolution and the production of art. (Diego Rivera is the subject of his most recent book.) Craven and Baranik share a background in and a commitment to socialism and the critical theories of Western Marxism, much as they shared the construction of this book. Collaborative in form, the first half of the book is by Craven with the last chapter a presentation of Baranik's neoconceptual work from the eighties, A Dictionary of the 24th Century. The second half consists of an anthology of Baranik's essays, many heretofore unpublished. The result is an important restitution long overdue an artist for whom there has been no full consideration and who helped form an era only to be overlooked by subsequent mainstream accounts of the period. But this book is far more than an act of historical archaeology.