For a long time, politically engaged art was label as “didactic” or “boring”. “Is this really art?” question has been addressed quite often in the last two decades. The curator Nato Thomson has recently argued that the question for political art is no longer “But is it art?” but a different one: “Is it useful?” Many activists claim that it does not even matter if political art is art or not, as long as it fulfills its political function effectively. There is also a tendency to question art’s political effectiveness on the grounds that art is powerless or functionless and “it would never stop a war” Yet, even if this assertion is something heard frequently, I don’t think is accurate. A revolution or a revolt has to be done when abuses of power and injustices are at stake, even if its chances to change that state of affairs are small or limited. The fact that a revolution is not successful in changing something does not mean that it is completely “ineffective” politically.
This paper attempts to explain what it means for art to be politically effective. I claim that art can be effective politically qua art and sometimes it can have a revolutionary potential qua art. Art can have a revolutionary potential in terms of insurrection and resistance to hegemony but this does not mean that artistic practice and political action are one and the same (or that they are not separable on any grounds). Political action and art practice have different ontologies but they can become linked activities which overlap for a limited period of time, without turning out in indistinguishable entities. Gerald Rauning would say that this overlapping is a temporary and limited “concatenation” of art and revolution in which the two still remain open.
