Art in spirit of protest meets RNC

On Sept. 2, the last day of the Republican National Convention in New York City, there will be a gathering of the Brooklyn Orgastic Politics Collective. Somewhere in Brooklyn (the location is undisclosed), these followers of the radical early 20th century psychologist Wilhelm Reich will attempt to “suck the fascism from Madison Square Garden,” the site of the convention. If successful, the group expects to redirect the flow of “Life Energy” in such a way as to “reduce the entire convention floor to a quivering Saturnalia.”

Good luck, rational people might say with a dismissive wave, hardly bothering to wonder whether the “Anti-Convention Cloudbuster Project” is art, political protest, social experiment, mystical rite or a bunch of kooks in search of an orgy. In fact, it may be a little bit of all of the above, but on some level it qualifies as art, at least of the conceptual and anarchist varieties. It will be among the culminating events of one of the most curious, unruly, remarkable arts festivals this country has witnessed. And one of the largest.

To welcome the Republican convention to the arts capital of the country, if not the world, New York’s arts community has pretty much closed shop and taken the week off, as it does every year at this time. Not that the Republicans seem to mind. By choosing the week before Labor Day, they picked the deadest time of the year, arts-wise, for their convention.

The major performing arts institutions are dark. The Mostly Mozart Festival will end this weekend. There will be no opera, ballet, symphony. After Labor Day, all that will change as the fall season swings into action, too late for arts-minded conventioneers or the huge international press corps.

But into the fray has jumped a diverse group of mainly lesser-known artists to form their own ad hoc festival. Most are young and most are rebellious, as young artists usually are. The spirit of the festival is protest, but there does happen to be a long and honorable tradition of that in the arts. Nor are all the participants defiant kids looking for a good time. Among the more establishment figures will be filmmaker Robert Altman, who will screen his 1984 Nixon-parody film, “Secret Honor,” at Symphony Space on Sunday and take questions from the audience afterward.

Not all the events will necessarily be politically charged. On Wednesday, Alec Baldwin, Chuck Close, Joanne Woodward and other celebrities will gather at Cooper Union to read the Constitution. And the classics will not be ignored. One artist, Marshall Weber, promises a marathon public reading of Homer. To attract attention, he will, of course, do it in an artist’s way. He plans to start Tuesday morning at sunrise (5:32 a.m., to be exact) at the Vietnam Veterans Plaza in Lower Manhattan with “The Iliad” and then continue on the Staten Island Ferry with “The Odyssey.” He expects to finish about the time the convention does -- two days later, at sunset.

No one should be surprised that what is essentially an anarchistic outpouring of art will typically take the form of political satire and protest on the part of actors, poets, dancers, visual artists, filmmakers and musicians. Saturday night, for instance, raunchy comedian Margaret Cho will do her thing at Harlem’s Apollo Theater. A new organization, the Imagine Festival, has stepped in to create a semblance of order by listing more than 100 concerts, plays, exhibitions and happenings of one sort or another over the six-day period and even trying to give each day a theme.

But any attempt at governance is likely to annoy some artists, and a great deal will be happening outside the Imagine umbrella, from contributors as diverse as the wonderful meditative composer and peace activist Pauline Oliveros, who will stage a mass bell-ringing at ground zero on Saturday, and a shadowy group, Billionaires for Bush, whose members will attempt to impede convention-goers trying to get to Broadway shows.

The most intriguing question about all this art is, why? What purpose can it possibly serve? In such a chaotic festival, most of the individual works will get little attention. The festival will be competing with the larger news stories of the convention and protests. It may even be competing with the protests aesthetically if they turn into street art. The audiences could end up being small, what with New Yorkers leaving town in droves. Since the big shots of the art world certainly won’t be around, young artists can forget about using this forum as a way to get noticed. And, of course, the work will be preaching to the converted. No one, including the organizers of Imagine, expects delegates to forgo a Broadway show or lovely dinner to be hectored in a crumbling loft in some iffy neighborhood in Brooklyn.

Still, the sheer outpouring of creative energy from artists is impressive. Historically, artists have long been stimulated by being in the political opposition, and that has influenced how they and their audiences think about the world.

One example is the composer Richard Wagner. In his attempt to reform opera, Wagner became involved in revolutionary politics, participating in the Dresden Revolution of 1849 and coming under the spell of Russian anarchist Michael Bakunin, who famously proclaimed, “The urge for destruction is a creative urge.” It was about the same time in Italy that Verdi’s music became part of the call for political change.

Might the Republican National Convention give rise to a budding Wagner or Verdi? Or might it inspire a new kind of Dada movement like the original, which seemed to rise out of nowhere in Zurich, Switzerland, in the wake of World War I and is still with us, one way or another, nearly a century later? Probably not. The art of the 21st century, so far, appears to be, like our increasingly multicultural societies, the result not of movements but of ever-shifting interactions of styles.

The real value of this ad hoc festival may be the massed energy of creativity. If the work preaches to the converted, so be it. But if it in any way proves inspiring to whatever audience it finds (and let’s hope that audience includes young, enthusiastic protesters), then it offers an example of channeling defiant outrage into something constructive and potentially life-affirming.

Certainly one thing the sterile, overproduced Democratic convention already demonstrated is that artistic creativity, to say nothing of a bit of Reich’s “Life Energy,” is desperately needed in our public life.