Attempts to overthrow or undermine the established social order, government, authority or other heirarchy are often expressed through art. Please share your favorite examples of creative rally cries here. I’ll start with an assortment:
James Joyce describes an academic grown weary by the long-standing clash between Ireland and her ruling England in his short story “The Dead”. Each character represents a different attitude, faction, or tradition of either Irish or English culture and an entire revolution is played out over a civilized dinner. Director John Huston’s version is available on Veoh.
Rage Against the Machine offers a complaint about the unequal treatment of minorities by those in law enforcement in Killing in the Name of.
Although originally conceived to encourage homemakers to temporarily join the labor force and support the boys fighting oversees until their victorious return. These days, Rosie the Riveter graduated from patriotic propaganda to feminist icon of equality, and is often found tattooed on the biceps of strong, skilled women.
The works of George Grosz, painter, and John Heartfield, photo-montageist. They were German leftist artists in the 1920s and early 30s whose work was incisively satirical at a time when Germans as a whole were still a very authoritarian society, and about to become more so.
I’ve also met George’s son, Marty, a jazz guitarist and singer. He’s a delightful cat.
Really powerful examples, Beware of Doug. I was only vaguely aware of a few of their popular works before your post, thank you for sharing.
There is something very cool about the power of artists and authors, vocations not generally associated with the archetypical war hero. It is brave to risk prosecution, persecution, and in Grosz’ case: the destruction of his work in order to give a voice to the outvoted.
Speaking of Madonna, would Like a Prayer, Lady GaGa’s Judas and Sinead O’Conner’s SNL stunt qualify as subversion proper, or publicity stunts by design?
TheFree Tibet campaignpicked up speed when co-opted by pop culture in the 90’s and early 00’s, though we later discovered that the Dalai Lama preferred to concede the geographic loss to China and argued for freedom to practice. Subversion gone wrong? Subversion with good intent? Subversion which ultimately brought attention to a call for freedom so the means-justified-the-end?
Agreed, it’s a scary world out there and neither politicians nor the media are trying to help us gain a clearer understanding when agenda trumps truth.
So help me understand Ballard, Burroughs, Hunter S and the genre a little better. Is there a clear goal when the only obvious objective is to make the reader/viewer feel uncomfortable and shake up their ideas of normalcy and peel back the facade? (YMMV of course, I’m generalizing for lack of a more coherent way to phrase the question) Does Ballard have a target, or a target audience? Is it the mainstream? The right? The devout? All of the above?
I can’t really comment on Burroughs because I haven’t really read him except for bits and pieces of Naked Lunch, which, after reading Ballard, struck me as pretty overhyped. I’m not saying he’s not a great writer, just that I don’t know about him.
Hunter Thompson was much more focused on humor than Ballard and would appeal more to the mainstream. Hunter was kind of the opposite of Ballard; an adventurer and someone who lived a wild life, traveling all over the world and doing all sorts of outrageous things, and was constantly inserting himself into all of his writing. Ballard was more the type of guy who preferred to hide out sequestered in one area (in his case, Shepperton) and lived much more inside his own head. Both of them were Air Force veterans (Ballard in the RAF) and they both used LSD, but that’s pretty much where their similarities end.
When I say Thompson was more mainstream: college students read Thompson. The average uneducated person could probably pick up Thompson and find his writing entertaining. The average person would not find Ballard entertaining or even understand him at all; he appeals to a far narrower group of people. But I think that it was his intention to preach to whoever would listen.
Ballard was deeply affected by his experiences as a child in World War II China (the movie Empire of the Sun, with Christian Bale, is about his childhood.) Everything about Ballard’s work seems to be fixated on the desperate need to find a sense of order and logic in life. The opposite of Thompson. Everything in Ballard’s writing is mechanical, technological, clinical and highly detailed. Ballard is much more educated and his writing feels more academic.
One of my favorites is Jasper Johns’ White Flag. To me, it’s very subversive.
I also liked the novel Fight Club by Chuck Palahniuk. I thought the movie ending ruined the story, but the novel is a fine piece of subversive literature.
Phil Dick’s Valis books are also great subversive lit, as is the novel A Scanner Darkly.
I watched a documentary on them long ago; a friend of my dad’s was involved with them and is now some high up Czech politician. I got to see the premiere of the documentary and meet all the people involved. Very interesting.
Judas doesn’t really subvert religion. It’s just a song about liking a bad boy with religious metaphors.
However, I do think that Lady Gaga’s work is subversive of established gender norms. This includes her outfits, which are very much a part of her performance. She often wears outfits that either exaggerate feminine fashion (thereby mocking it), or outfits that make her look androgynous.
“If you make people think they’re thinking, they’ll love you; but if you really make them think, they’ll hate you.” – Don Marquis
I probably have more occasion to cite this than any other quotation I know. So much art fancies itself subversive, but really just advocates overthrow of an existing paradigm to be replaced by a new, not-much-different one (presumably run by the artists themselves, or at worst, their representatives).
Never whistle while you’re pissing. One can’t forget the Illuminatius! Trilogy of Robert Anton Wilson.
But the greatest subversive literature of the last few hundred years… Robert Heinlein’s Juveniles. Delivered right to unmolded minds. All of them, a mandate to think.
The difference between Gaga and the artists you’ve mentioned is that Gaga doesn’t just wear androgynous clothes. She also wears clothes that mock standard feminine fashion. The other artists don’t go out of their way to mock standard conventions.
Gaga also has the theme of gender neutrality in most of her music videos and performances.
