NEW PROTESTS
Constraints on the political nature of artwork, then, lie most heavy on the shoulders of professional artists. For students in anthropology, a socially-motivated film might lend some legitimacy to a broader political project. For full-time artists, on the other hand, there exists a tension between the freedom that imagination allows and the compartmentalization that occurs in the public consciousness when a particular piece of art is identified as having specific political goals. Inevitably, the broader societal aspersion of political art filters into the creativity of Harvard students. And although this complex algorithm of consumer concerns and public perception may deter students from making explicitly political work, Harvard provides VES concentrators with ways of employing their critical eyes similar to those of other concentrations.
"Harvard is proving itself to be an incredibly productive crossroads for someone making art—an institution immersed in the universe of words and numbers, which has opened its rich ocean of ideas to young artists pursuing a different kind of path to the same set of human truths," Libeskind wrote via email.
Maybe the change lies less in perceptions of art, then, and more in political realities. "It’s a complicated time right now, so a lack of political art can reflect that—that it’s just hard to know what’s right and wrong. The issues aren’t super clear," says filmmaker Sam Green, whose film "The Weather Underground" about the radical anti-Vietnam War youth group was nominated for an Academy Award in 2004 and who recently visited Robb Moss’s class VES 51a: "Fundamentals of Video." "[There are] wars going on most people don’t think about anymore, the economic meltdown. In the sixties, anti-war movement or civil rights movement were these very clear cut, easy to see, right and wrong issues." Political commentary, then, comes easily in times of social clarity.
"[T]he young people in Egypt, they were very clear that … they wanted nothing to do with the older activists. And they did that—it obviously was smart—because they wanted to come up with their own new way of doing things and they did it," Green says. "So I think in some ways, it may not be happening now, that younger people will come up with their own ways of talking about the world, representing the world, but also trying to make changes in the world." The efforts of Harvard student artists may not look like our traditional idea of political art, but that might be because our idea is outdated.
—Staff writer Beryl C.D. Lipton can be reached at blipton@fas.harvard.edu.