Art to change the world

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Art to change the world

Art and Politics: A Small History of Art for Social Change Since 1945 by Claudia Mesch

Claudia Mesch has subtitled her latest book ‘A small history of art for social change since 1945’, which suggests that it has quite modest aspirations in regard to what is a wide-ranging and, in some quarters perhaps, a contentious topic.  It is, however, a book which is likely to prove extremely useful, both for students and the interested general reader, as an introduction to the complex interaction between art and politics since the Second World War.  In particular, the theoretical issues Mesch addresses, in a clear but succinct way, could be valuable to the non-specialist visitor to exhibitions of modern and contemporary art in making sense of many of the works they encounter there and in public spaces – amongst her many examples are Ed Kienholz’s Portable War Memorial (shown on the cover of the book), the work of the Border Film Project, and Sokari Douglas Camp’s Memorial to Ken Saro-Wiwa.

Each of the book’s seven chapters and its epilogue introduces a different topic, covering the period from the start of the cold war right through to the Occupy movement at the beginning of the present decade.  Each chapter starts with a clear and well-structured introduction to its topic. Parts of the earlier chapters of the book, such as the first chapter, ‘State sponsored art during the Cold War’, evoke Mesch’s earlier contribution to the art history of this period, her 2008 volume Modern Art at the Berlin Wall: Demarcating culture in the Cold War Germanys. The chapters that follow each take up one theme or issue, although many of these of necessity intersect and overlap, such as post-colonialism, globalization and environmental issues, and the identity politics of gender and ethnicity.  For example, in her chapter on ‘The anti-war and peace movements’, Mesch notes that ‘feminist artists were among the early initiators of anti-Vietnam War art’, citing in particular the work of Nancy Spero and Martha Rosler, and using Spero’s Soldiers Pushing Victims from Helicopter (1968) as an illustration of this.

One criticism that might be levelled at Art and Politics is that it is illustrated by rather small and limited black and white images.  Mesch does, however, compensate for this with some exemplary close analytical description of her chosen visual material.  Mesch’s clear exposition throughout the book of the historical, as well as the art-historical, context of the last 70 years would be especially valuable to younger readers, for whom the 20th century is indeed ‘history’ now.

Art and Politics: A Small History of Art for Social Change Since 1945  by Claudia Mesch is published by IB Tauris, 2013. 240pp., 73 mono illus,  £16.99 (ppb).ISBN 978-1-84885-110-8