The artist signs her work “Megrit.” An attempt, one figures, to align herself with Magritte, that master of surrealism and bowlers who captured on canvas one of the great moments of post-modern relativist (heck, even phenomenologist) philosophizing, a painting of a pipe labelled “Ceci n’est pas une pipe” (“This is not a pipe”).
But it ain’t so. The press release claims the painting was accomplished “in a most conservative and traditional style,” an unlikely turn for a fan of Magritte and his dreamscapes and sometimes disturbingly fractured nudes. Megrit is conservative and traditional not in the art historical sense, but rather the modern American political sense—she plans to cash in on the desire to dress up the walls with reminders of tea bags stuffed full of powdered political angst.
Visual art is hardly a pure medium. Megrit can’t be faulted for using it politically any more than anyone else can; art gets infected by all sorts of factors beyond an uncluttered need for individual expression. The stuff has filled cathedrals for many hundreds of years, silently reinforcing the world view of Catholicism. It’s delivered iconography designed solely to stir deep longings for hip breath mints and novel antidepressants.
Art has also, of course, served to bolster political movements of every stripe. In places where communism took hold, artists even employed a state-sanctioned style, that bland inflation of the real called Socialist Realism. We’ve got our own versions of differently flavored propagandistic efforts, of course. The current president’s campaign poster has been enshrined in the contemporary visual lexicon, and who hasn’t seen the painted image of Washington crossing the Delaware like Napoleon gone colonial (and taller)?
What surprises about Megrit—whose real handle is Meg Michael—is not that she would try, as her press release says, to create something “that happens to serve as an ideal symbol for the new movement dedicated to a reformed conservative government,” one “intended as an apt common focus for loyal tea party members who wish to emphasize their power of unity and to encourage active party participation.” It is rather that she would do so with a painting that might, if proudly hung in the parlor, induce an afternoon snore in even the hardiest of caffeinated tea party revolutionaries. Her canvas, well-rendered though it is, manages to stir nothing, though one imagines the teaspoon in the foreground recently did.
It may be that Socialist Realism’s obvious politicism makes it comical at worst and uninteresting at best, but Megrit’s attempt to create in “a most conservative and traditional style” (“her works represent unique realism”) seems, like the tea party movement itself, uninformed and poorly defined. Not only does the solidly “traditional” in art often receive the ire of conservatives (see former Attorney General John Ashcroft and the covering of the bare-chested “Spirit of Justice” statue); her expressly political artwork contains no expressly political content, unless tea itself has been co-opted while Darjeeling lovers slumbered. The cloth backdrop is “bright lively orange,” with purple peeking around the edges—a peculiar choice in an American political piece, but one which is expressly anti-republican in certain quarters: the sashes of Northern Ireland’s Protestant Orangemen are bright lively orange, trimmed in purple.
There’s no reason artwork shouldn’t be employed politically, of course, no matter whose cause it supports. But Megrit’s painting, like much that arrives from the tea party world, seems the product of a nebulous movement, one that appears to know its brand of conservatism when it sees it, but never quite defines itself coherently.
A ready answer is at hand, but it might require a kind of humor not often observed on the signs of tea party protesters: perhaps Megrit should fully embrace her namesake, and, rather than dub her work “Tea Party,” inscribe it “Ceci n’est pas une mouvement politique.”