The
presence of close to 2,000,000 people on the streets of London on 15th
February 2003, the day of demonstrations against the immanent war in Iraq,
elicited the following response from the British Prime Minister: "I
do not seek unpopularity as a badge of honour, but sometimes it is the
price of leadership and the cost of conviction." As a statement it
is ominous in confirming an emerging question as to the function of democracy
and the importance and validity of public opinion in the face of what
could be perceived as a single leadership. The demonstrations were the
largest of their kind in the UK, and were representative of a much wider
national and global mood: in the last days before the invasion of Iraq,
opinion polls showed that 52% of the British population officially opposed
war, and only 29% actually supported it.
The demonstrations and opinion polls might have had some effect in lightening the government's approach to the coming war and possibly securing a commitment to the so-called 'road map to peace'. However, the fact is that there was one direct demand, No War, and this was simply ignored. Shaken out of the complacent assumption that an elected government will always act according to the wishes of its majority, we are forced to re-evaluate our position to a leadership that might render its subjects mute. If the ballot box fails you, there is the picket line; there are the street marches, meetings, talks, badge-wearing and slogan-chanting, media campaigns, tactics for subversion and non co-operation. The question now is, how to express oneself from within this cacophony, or how to tune the larger chorus of voices to a closer harmony? Corporations, organisations, media bodies, and indeed governments, have become proficient at inverting criticism levelled against them by enveloping and swallowing the marginal causes that originally stood to oppose them; this is a survival strategy. Petrol companies might undermine the efforts of environmentalists by re-inventing themselves as not only conscientious, but actually active in their supposed ecological concern. The former 'power' tones of the red and blue service stations have been replaced with so much eco-friendly green and yellow, it's a wonder they don't disappear altogether into the background of our rolling verdant landscapes. This has become a confusion of tactics, where strategy itself is usurped and mimicked by the other, where B disguises himself as A, and so obscures the perimeters of battle. This question is important to artists: not what are your politics, but what is your strategy? Perhaps there is none - we can argue that art, in remaining pure and autonomous, should separate itself from social issues, that aesthetics should never be sullied by the dirty mouth of political debate. At the other extreme we could claim that as artists we aim to expose truth through a chosen medium, and so cannot forgo all sense of social responsibility, particularly in the immediate environment. Some say it's the duty of art to deal with these issues. |
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