Art Is a Weapon That Workers Can Use

by Mike Alewitz

The following are remarks given by muralist Mike Alewitz at the “Celebration for Economic Justice” at the Thomas Merton Center in Pittsburgh, October 21, 1999.

I recently had a chance to experience the show ‘Sensation,’ at the Brooklyn Museum. This is the show that has been condemned by such luminaries as Mayor Rudolf Giuliani, Cardinal O’Connor and a host of politicians. They have threatened to revoke the museums occupancy of their building, in essence putting them, and the one and a half million piece collection of some of the most important art in the world, out on the street.

Hillary Clinton had a more enlightened view. She condemned the show and announced that she would not attend, but felt the eviction was a bit much.

None of them has actually seen the show.

In threatening the second largest museum in New York, Giuliani is exhibiting a profound ignorance about art, even on the simplest of terms. In order to even visit the Sensation show, you have to walk full a museum crowded with sexual imagery, engorged breasts and giant erections. The walls are filled with art demeaning to non-white peoples as well as women. It all reflects the ragged history of humanity.

It’s unlikely that the ruling classes of New York are going to allow Giuliani to destroy the museum. Too many of them have a financial interest in maintaining the art market. But this still remains a serious assault on artistic expression. Defense of artistic freedom is a working-class issue. The creation of art is a social process involving thousands or even millions of people. Workers are forced to consume corporate culture, but it is not a passive process. We take their culture, digest it, and reinvent it. We take their music and rewrite it. We take their logos and make cartoons. Artists take human actions and emotions, and in a myriad of complex ways, regurgitate it as art.

This is what Chris Olfini did. He took the staid images of Christianity and reinvented them as a glorious black madonna, surrounded by floating ethereal buttocks, and resting firmly on some elephant dung.

It’s a very African image, and that is why it was singled out for attack. What is going on is not Catholic bashing, but racism. For that reason too, we should defend this show.

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The writers and artists here this evening go beyond digesting and giving voice to the ideas of working people. They do not just use workers as their subject matter, they are out on the picket lines with them. Their art is a weapon that workers can use to advance the struggle. Anne Feeney uses her songs like that, Gary Huck and Bill Yund their cartoons.

We are not there to just help mobilize. The job of the artist is to be critical. Critical both outside and within the labor movement. As a muralist, it is clear to me what unions are giving voice to their members. They are the ones who want murals. They have something to say. If you are not doing anything, then you don’t need a mural. Or a singer.

Over the recent years the Labor Art & Mural Project has sponsored numerous mural projects with that same goal in mind. We painted murals in Mexico City and Chicago on the theme of cross-border organizing. We painted in Los Angeles against police violence. We traveled to Baghdad in defiance of the US-UN sanctions. Like the defense of artistic freedom, these too are labor issues.

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Which brings me to my final point. I cannot come to the state of Pennsylvania without saying something about the attempt to murder our fellow-worker and fellow-artist Mumia Abu-Jamal.

The governor of this state is a murderer. Ridge has signed 176 death warrants, more than all of his predecessors of the last twenty-five years combined. He may not throw the switch, but he is the murderer just the same. Nor is he the only one responsible. When a case takes on national importance, as this one has, we must recognize that the decision to kill comes from the highest authorities. Clinton and Gore are just as responsible as Ridge.

When they grabbed Mumia, framed him and threw him in jail, they picked the wrong guy. He is an eloquent spokesperon for the poor. Mumia has more dignity than all the politicians in Washington put together.

The labor movement should be giving millions of dollars to his defense, not to his jailers in the Democratic Party. When Mumia refused to be interviewed by scab crews during the CBS strike, at the risk of his own defense, he did more to illuminate the concept of labor solidarity than the meaningless activity of a thousand pork-chop labor bureaucrats.

Ridge and Clinton believe that killing Mumia will make him go away, but Mumia is already immortal. We will paint his image, reproduce his words and sing about his example. We will create a thousand Mumias. We artists and workers have the power to do that.

We have the power to free Mumia. And we must redouble our efforts to do so.

We can follow the example of Mumia. We, who produce everything, have the ability to create a new culture of solidarity.