Recently, thanks to some targeted reading, I have come across the slogan ‘The personal is political’ a bunch of times, a feminist motto popular in the second half of the 1960s, then the title of an essay by Carol Hanisch in 1970. Although perfectly set in the frame of the protests of those years, I would like to try to take it out of its precise context and to use it as a starting point for a personal reflection on the relationship between art and politics, as I was asked by Miguel Ángel, whom I thank for this invitation.
Artists have always done nothing more than transform a personal vision of the world into a possible discourse that expands to address shared themes: the transition from the individual to the collective, from the subjective to the universal, is what gives strength to artistic practice in all eras. In this sense, art is already intimately political, i.e. the political root of art is not to be sought in the specificity of certain themes or discourses, but in its actual posture that recovers the very meaning of the word ‘political’, insisting particularly on its public dimension. Still sourcing from the 1970s, we could say with Lucy Lippard - in dialogue with Yvonne Rainer - that the artistic act is in itself a political act: “And then it becomes political even if the art itself isn't directly political in subject matter. Making other people aware is a political act”. [Lucy Lippard, From the Centre. Feminist essays on women's art, New York 1976]
In my opinion, art becomes all the more political when it transfigures the directly political subject; this is made possible precisely by autobiographical narratives in which the centrality of artists and their experience is taken as a possible model and made the object of a sharing useful for raising questions and reactions. I am thinking, for example, of a visionary artist like Carol Rama (1918-2015), who was capable of starting from her own life story to transform it into denunciation, awareness and social message. Her drawings, so provocative that they were censored in her first solo exhibition at the Faber gallery in Turin in 1945, are indeed fragments of an exploded unconscious, but they manage to embody some absolute truth. In the process they trace from a private territory to a public one, they function as a picklock to suggest a hypothesis of change and transformation on a broader level.
As Carol Rama’s example states, the body is political. What is most personal, individual, specific becomes in the work of many artists a surface on which to inscribe strongly socio-political messages, ranging from the feminist claims of the 1970s to those, more recently, of the LGBTQ+ community - and not only. To speak about oneself, through one's body, is to be political, although without adopting the language of politics.
From this point of view, art is distant from activism and I consider this separation to be necessary; even if the common goal were to stir consciences and direct choices, the languages cannot overlap precisely because art has - and must maintain - the ability to transfigure the real datum, read it through a poetic approach and leave open the possibility of interpreting the message according to one's own sensitivity. An artist like Nan Goldin, ranked number one on Art Review's Power 100 list in 2023, embodies exactly that difference: on the one hand, The Ballad of Sexual Dependency again represents ‘the personal becoming political’, giving voice to a visual diary through the language of art; on the other, her actions in museums and public statements hit precise targets, resorting to a different vocabulary and visual choices.
In referring only indirectly to political facts or events, I believe art is political in the way it interrogates the world, stimulating questions, freely traversing space and time, short-circuiting the private with the public. In an era such as ours in which the relationship between politics and ideology seems irretrievably compromised, artists do not offer solutions - something we continue to expect from governments - but a different gaze, capable of helping us navigate the complexity of reality by tracing new trajectories able to connect the individual consciousness to a collective one.
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Alessandra Troncone is an art historian, curator and a Ph.D. in History of Art. She is currently a Professor of History of Art at the Academy of Fine Arts in Naples and she is one of the curators of the 18th edition of La Quadriennale di Roma in 2025. Since 2018, she has been the co-founder and Artistic Co-Director of Underneath the Arches, a program for contemporary art that takes place at the archaeological site of Acquedotto Augusteo del Serino in Naples. In 2019 she co-curated the 12th Kaunas Biennale in Lithuania. Her curatorial projects have been taking place at a number of art institutions and galleries, including the Madre Museum in Naples, the National Gallery of Modern and Contemporary Art in Rome, Fondazione Arnaldo Pomodoro in Milan, Fondazione Morra in Naples, Izolyatsia in Kyiv. She authored and edited several articles and essays in art magazines, academic journals, books and catalogues. She is a member of IKT–International Association of Curators of Contemporary Art.
