Here and Now: From “Aestheticizing Politics” to “Politicizing Art”

The relationship between art, law, and politics reached its zenith in the 1930s. This essay takes as its point of departure Walter Benjamin’s celebrated essay on the subject, and draws it into a dialogue with two key events that occurred at the same time and that shed new light on Benjamin’s work. This intersection has not previously been explored. A year before Benjamin’s essay was published, the Mexican mural movement was already wracked by a debate that prefigures his central themes and concerns. A year after Benjamin’s essay, the Paris World’s Fair perfectly exemplifies his thesis and his prognosis. Yet both these episodes invite us to reconsider Benjamin’s too-reductive contrast between ‘fascism’ and ‘communism.’ Instead, the interplay between 1935, 1936, and 1937 reflects a much more universal shift in the dynamic between aesthetics, nation, politics and law. In particular, the real distinction lies in how the work of art relates to the ‘here and now’, to time and place. Reading these three events together illuminates the importance of different modes of temporal and spatial instantiation if we are to resist an ‘aestheticizing politics,’ by ‘politicizing art’.