Creative Rebellion for the Twenty-First Century: the Reinvigoration of American Political Life Through Public Art

ABSTRACT Title of Dissertation: CREATIVE REBELLION FOR THE TWENTY-FIRST CENTURY: THE REINVIGORATION OF AMERICAN POLITICAL LIFE THROUGH PUBLIC ART Diana Zsuzsanna Boros, Doctor of Philosophy, 2010 Dissertation directed by: Professor James M. Glass Department of Government and Politics Drawing on the work of Tocqueville, Nietzsche, Camus, and Marcuse, this work argues that there is an urgent political and societal need for greater support of public art projects and better access to these sources of funding. More art in public spaces would revive and animate communal environments, create new relationships between the individual and the public, strengthen feelings of community, and foster the desire to participate in the public. All art creates participatory desire and behavior, but visionary art is how political progress through individual rebellion can be best accessed and articulated. This work defines visionary artistic creation as the union of instinctual creative energies and rational reflection. Mainstream art, despite its aesthetic rearrangements, fails to connect the viewer with questions that will engage them over time. Visionary art, especially the public and social, is needed to seek out and materialize the newest, alternative possibilities for our individual lives, for our societies, and for the political systems under which they abide. CREATIVE REBELLION FOR THE TWENTY-FIRST CENTURY: THE REINVIGORATION OF AMERICAN POLITICAL LIFE THROUGH PUBLIC ART By Diana Zsuzsanna Boros Dissertation submitted to the Faculty of the Graduate School of the University of Maryland, College Park, in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy 2010 Advisory Committee: Professor James M. Glass, Chair Professor George Ritzer Professor Jillian Schwedler Professor Vladimir Tismaneanu Professor Ian Ward © Copyright by Diana Zsuzsanna Boros 2010 All Rights Reserved ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS I owe my gratitude to all those people who have made this dissertation possible and because of whom my graduate experience has been one that I will cherish forever. My advisor, Dr. James Glass, opened my mind to so many thinkers and books that have changed me. Without him, I'm not sure that I would have discovered my love for political philosophy, nor may I have had the confidence to pursue what I was truly interested in within this field. Likewise, the intellectual passions of Drs. Vladimir Tismaneanu and Jillian Schwedler have both inspired and enlivened my scholarly development during my years of graduate study. My parents have not only always provided every sort of moral and material support during the long years of my education, but have throughout my life surrounded me with a love of books and the arts, and I am truly grateful to them. I am also deeply appreciative of the support and help that both my sister, and my love, have provided me over these years. I would also like to mention my two grandmothers, and the memories of my grandfathers, who have inspired me from afar. The passing of my maternal grandmother in Hungary this spring, before I was able to visit her post-dissertation, was a painful reminder of “the problem of the time of writing.” At varying times, she has been both a welcome break from my studies, and an invisible presence during the writing of this work. ii TABLE OF CONTENTS Acknowledgements …………………………………………………………………….ii Table of Contents ...…………………………………………………………………….iii List of Figures…………………………………………………………………………..iv Introduction…………………………………………………………………………….1 1 Everyday Rebellion: Using Tocqueville to Argue the Need for a Revitalization of American Society and Democracy through Art……………………………………….33 2 The Coupling of the Dionysian and the Apollonian: The Evolution of Nietzsche’s Definition of Transcendent Art………………………………………………………..83 3 Camus and the Transformative Nature of Art: Art, and Public Art, as Invigorating Encounter……………………………………………………………………………..115 4 Visionary Artistic Rebellion: Rimbaud, de Sade, and the Progression from Chaotic Creation to Conscious Political Action………………………………………….158 5 Recent Experiments with Public and Social Art: New York City and Beyond….186 Bibliography………………………………………………………………………….238 iii LIST OF FIGURES Figure 1……………………………………………………………………………….102 iv INTRODUCTION Instinctual revolt turns into political rebellion. – Herbert Marcuse, An Essay on Liberation Even the most realistic oeuvre constructs a reality of its own: its men and women, its objects, its landscape, its music reveals what remains unsaid, unseen, unheard in everyday life. – Herbert Marcuse, Art as Form of Reality It is difficult to get the news from poems yet men die miserably everyday for lack of what is found there. – William Carlos Williams, Asphodel, That Greeny Flower. The Argument We generally take for granted that the foundation on which American democracy rests is the interactive, ever-evolving landscape of civil society – the social and civic associations of Tocqueville’s (1835/2002) observations. But whether or not we agree with Putnam (1994, 2001) that American civic associations have for decades been on the decline, we must confront the question of whether these types of political and social activities are enough to sustain the health of our system of democratic representative government and the culture it engenders. Do our associations harness a collective of truly 1 free and involved voices, or is civil society’s sincerity threatened by the excessively self- interested and conformist tendencies that underlie American democracy? Do our civil organizations sustain democratic life? And if they do keep democracy alive, do they allow only sporadic breaths, heavy with dust? The Left of today, however diluted within mainstream America, contend that true democracy – of, by, and for the people – has gone the way of free love and Marxist revolution. What remains is the subject of debate. Some say all of our institutions are façades for domination by the powerful few; others go only so far as to complain about the ineffectiveness of the Electoral College system or of our voting booths. That Americans are in crisis is a foundational assumption of this work. Regardless of the extent to which some Americans feel alienated from the governing system, most would likely agree that democracy in the United States is not only far from a direct political mechanism, it often lacks sincere connection with the average citizen. It is not a logical stretch to conclude that a person who does not feel involved or needed will likely not wish to participate. It is an easy conclusion that in America one can be quite comfortable – politically, emotionally, materially – and “free” without exerting individual political will. This “free rider” problem (Putnam, 2001) enables the "gentle herd" mentality that is inherent in American life. We must seek new solutions to this lack of public participation by the average American by attempting to draw them from their individualistic tendencies into a more interested and dynamic public life. 1 The sincerity, or genuine 1 Hannah Arendt ( 1998) describes the public in several ways: the very appearance of the public creates the public; the public is all that is not our private worlds; it is created by humans, not Nature; the public realm is fundamentally political (an arena in which to discuss social ideas), free (from private 2 belief in and involvement in, of any system, particularly a political system, which is by nature social and interactive, should not be undervalued or avoided because of the difficulty involved in attempting to define and evaluate elusive levels of "sincerity". A society, seen as a machine with moving parts, is only a stale collection of those parts if the machine’s movements fail to convey meaning to the user. Still, we must be wary even when "meaning" is conveyed, because meaning in a post-Foucauldian (1991) and post- Baudrillardian (Baudrillard & Glaser, 1994) world – where even desires can be reproduced by the Establishment in a way that they become "hyperreal" simulations of their essence, or what we can call sincere or genuine meaning – can take on new forms. In the late 20 th century, Baudrillard wrote that in the world of simulation, reality disappears, and from its ashes rises the hyperreal. This conception of information in the late 20 th and 21 st centuries introduced the possibility that when concepts, meanings, and creative forms are co-opted by the ruling Establishment, not only are they simplified and sterilized of both their natural emotional force and their uniqueness, but they may actually cease to exist. It is this sort of process that has enveloped public life, associations, and general notions of both local and universal community today. concerns), and based on action (the private realm, for Arendt, being that of property, which comprises labor and work, and the basic functions of our families and our bodies). Although her definitions of the public are comprehensive and useful (albeit sexist), I disagree with her stringent characterization of the public as altogether divorced from the private realm, where everything messy – emotions and bodily functions - remain outside the consideration of public life. This denial of the private within the public is both unrealistic, and possibly detrimental to political life. Despite her understandable concerns that work and labor have taken the place in importance of political discussions, her conclusion that the political must proceed freely and “uncorrupted” by the equalizing effects of property and the

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