Culture, freedom of art and the world capitalist crisis

BY DAVE PRINCE

The brutal realities of the world capitalist crisis are affecting artists — poets, writers, painters, sculptors and musicians. In a world where the dictatorship of capital threatens all culture and the future of humanity — and with the inevitable struggles of the working class to change that reality — the impact on artists will grow.

It is a development welcomed by the Socialist Workers Party.

The decision taken in May by the Walker Art Center in Minneapolis to cancel the exhibition of “Scaffold,” a sculpture by Sam Durant, is one of the recent examples of restrictions on artistic creation that are against the interests of working people.

Restrictions and conditions on artistic creation, closing down exhibitions and attacks on artists for so-called “cultural appropriation” have nothing do to with the fight against exploitation and oppression, in fact they undermine the fight.

The cancellation of the exhibition, widely reported in the Twin Cities area and nationally, was announced after a closed meeting of representatives of the art center, Dakota Sioux Elders, and the artist, who gave the rights to his sculpture to the Elders. The sculpture, created by Durant in 2012, had been exhibited internationally, including in The Hague, Netherlands; Edinburgh, Scotland; and Kassel, Germany.

The decision was a destructive one, including asking for, and getting, the agreement of the artist not only to take down the exhibit, but to never recreate it anywhere.

The Dakota Elders had the sculpture dismantled and destroyed. They argued that since the artist is not a Native American he could not understand the traumatic impact on Dakotas of a representation of the gallows used by the U.S. government to execute 38 Dakota men in Mankato, Minnesota, in 1862 — the largest government execution in U.S. history.

The Mankato gallows was one of seven that comprised the “Scaffold” sculpture by Durant, including ones that represent the gallows used for the execution of abolitionist John Brown in 1859, of the four working-class martyrs framed up for the 1886 bombing in Chicago’s Haymarket Square and others.

The action of the Art Center and Dakota Elders shut down a voice and closed off what should have been a welcome discussion and debate sparked by the sculpture. The justification for destroying the sculpture discounts the moral standing the struggles of Native Americans have won in the eyes of the working class, as a living reminder of the consequences of 400 years of U.S. expansion and genocide against the Native American peoples. Their justification separates this history of struggle and abysmal conditions into which Native Americans have been driven, from the brutal realities of the capitalist crisis faced by tens of millions of working people every day.

The reality of that carnage is at heart a cultural one, not economic. What is at stake in ending it is the future of humanity.

The liberals and petty bourgeois radicals who championed the decision to destroy the “Scaffold” cannot understand that the salvation of a culture that can become international and human lies in the hands of a mass working-class vanguard. They will open the door to advancing human culture in practice through the toilers conquering state power.

The Socialist Workers Party stands for freedom for art as an integral part of this fight.

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