The most provocative topic in the art world this year is once again the relationship between politics and art. Instead of speculating on suspected artist-dealer-curator-collector-critic-media conspiracies - although there is, of course, still plenty of talk about that - citizens of the fastest and most fashion-plagued art world anywhere are now talking about social responsibility, ideology, nuclear war and changing the world.
Why this has happened now, and whether the quality of the political art that is the subject of widespread critical and curatorial attention is commensurate with the sound and fury that has surrounded it are two of the questions raised by the latest art and politics revival.
Evidence of art that is political in content or ambition is everywhere. It was featured in the two winter exhibitions at the New Museum of Contemporary Art: ''The End of the World: Contemporary Visions of the Apocalypse'' and ''Art & Ideology.'' It has been or is being featured in a number of university art galleries in Boston and New York. Many of the major figures identified with political art, including Robert Colescott, Leon Golub, Barbara Kruger and Nancy Spero, have recently had one-person exhibitions in New York. The first retrospective devoted to Leon Golub, who is the cornerstone of the present interest in political art, will open at the New Museum next fall.
There have also been articles, benefit exhibitions and group exhibitions presenting artists' responses to the threat of nuclear war, as well as a symposium on ''War in Art'' at Cooper Union last February. The poster for ''Artists Call Against U.S. Intervention in Central America'' contained a petitition signed by well over 1,000 artists, poets and performers. Artists Call also organized benefit exhibitions at more than 20 New York exhibition spaces, including the prominent Leo Castelli, Paula Cooper, Terry Dintenfass and Marion Goodman Galleries.
Such political issues, however, as well as political involvement on the part of artists, are hardly new phenomena. What is new both in the current political art and the debate which surrounds it - is that the definition of ''politics'' has expanded to the point where, at the moment, it seems as if it might supercede and swallow up all artistic criteria. Within some art and art-critical circles, ''political'' now applies to cultural imagery, the functioning of the art market, the artist's attitude towards any subject and the creative process itself. In other words, the word ''political'' has become a filter through which all art can be perceived and judged.
Although the intense debate about politics and art has produced insights into the intersection of culture and art and experiments in new forms of expression, it has also unleashed a potential for dogmatism and intellectual intimidation that poses real dangers for art and artists. For example, it can lead some artists to mistake moral outrage or a correct ideological stance for artistic achievement; it can lead others to pull back from the issues of the day altogether. An attempt to sift through current political art is therefore essential.
Since the road to first-rate art has never been paved with good intentions, or good theory alone, the first question is what makes for good, or great, political art. Historically, examples of such art are surprisingly rare, testifying to the difficulty of transforming political outrage or themes into work that has anything but the most perfunctory effect. It is a telling paradox that the most enduring political art has probably been made by those who were not primarily political artists. When Goya etched his ''Disasters of War'' and in 1814 painted his ''Third of May 1808,'' whose theme is the savage reprisals of the occupying French forces to the Spanish resistance, he was more than 60 years old, with a lifetime of art and the broadest experience of people behind him. Picasso, like Goya, was steeped in the history of art and concerned throughout his life with the entire human condition. When he painted ''Guernica,'' he was 56, and all that he had lived and painted and thought about up to then went into it. ''Guernica'' and the ''Third of May'' remain such huge moral statements - such strong reminders of the need for a vigilant political conscience - because of the human and artistic wisdom that went into them.
In the 20th century, perhaps for the first time, schools and even entire directions in art emerged from and rremained in the service of a specific ideology. Of all the examples of 20th century political art, none was more wholly political than Agitprop, the art of revolutionary propaganda in Russia after the Revolution. Agitprop involved a great many artists, including Kasimir Malevich, Liubov Popova and Alexander Rodchenko, who produced all kinds of work for use in daily life, from posters to porcelain to buses and trains.
At about the same time, a number of artists in Germany were making political protest art that grew not out of a revolutionary dream but the nightmare of the Great War and which could hardly be more disabused. The work of George Grosz and, to a much greater degree, Otto Dix and Max Beckmann, has aged well because of its independence and the artistic intelligence behind it. In part because of the corrosiveness with which someone like Dix exposed the face of war and the social and political life of post-World War I Germany, Expressionism will continue to be an essential language of rage and protest. It informs the work of the contemporary American artists Peter Saul and Robert Colescott, who have been making art with political content since the 1950's. It is also present in the paintings of a younger artist like Sue Coe, who builds her jagged compositions and distorts her figures in order to communicate her outrage at violence to women.
The 1930's also produced American Social Realism, which was, in part, a response to the oppressive political and social conditions of the Depression. Artists such as Ben Shahn, Raphael Soyer and Jack Levine wanted their work to be an indictment of society and an instrument of social change. They tended not to preach but to try to use their realistic technique to convince the public of the violence of power and the plight of the common man.
Social Realists considered realism the language of hard truth, and with it produced a body of modest but admirable work. However, a very similar style was used for very different purposes in Soviet Social Realism, which followed in the wake of Agitprop, but which remains the epitome of art serving a monolithic state ideology.
Very little political work being produced today suggests either broad artistic or human knowledge. Of the many dangers of political art, one of the most lethal is that it grants artists the license to believe that what matters is only the immediate outrage of the present.
The claim of one prominent political artist, Hans Haacke, that ''so- called political art is scrutinized much more carefully'' and that it is much harder for political artists to ''get away with mediocre works'' is patently unjustified. There is no better evidence of this than the high visibility of his own factual commentaries. His ''Isolation Box,'' displayed at the Graduate Center of the City of New York Mall as part of Artists Call, is an eight-by-eight-by-eight-foot wooden box with a sign on it saying: ''isolation box as used by U.S. troops at Point Salines Prison Camp in Grenada.'' This kind of simplistic piece tells us far less about troubled United States Caribbean waters than the searching non-political paintings by Eric Fischl, which use a black-white tension in the Caribbean as a starting point for an exploration of turbulent emotional and sexual currents.
It is impossible to cover the entire territory of contemporary political art. However, it is clear that the most global political issue, the danger of nuclear arms, has produced the broadest range of work. A 1983 painting-sculpture by Robert Morris, called ''Untitled,'' which wound up on the covers of both Arts and Art in America this month - a highly unusual coincidence - is rare in its combination of commitment and introspection. By giving the painted conflagration in the center of the work a lyrical majesty, Morris makes clear that the idea of a definitive holocaust is also, from a visual artist's point of view, fascinating and compelling. Because of the seductive beauty of the fire storm beginning to build in the central panel, the skulls in the relief above the painting and the defiant fists in the relief below have a complexity and impact that otherwise they would not have.
Beverly Naidus's ''This Is Not a Test,'' an installation in ''The End of the World'' exhibition, is an example of the kind of sophomoric good will with which so much anti-nuclear art is informed. Consisting of the most primitive kind of ramshackle shelter, with a bed and a lamp inside, it is almost a strong work. The care and craft with which the hut has been pieced together in the service of a transient and troubling statement is undermined, however, by a writing stand in front of the hut on which visitors can write down their thoughts. Suddenly we are back in college and the work becomes tacky.
A major impetus for political art now is feminism. Feminist artists tend to reject existing political and artistic systems and, as a result, to produce work in alternative artistic media. Perhaps the most prominent feminist art depends heavily upon photographs and words, in part in an attempt to expose what is seen as this culture's ideological brainwashing through advertisements and the popular media; in part to create works that are not beautiful objects and therefore less capable of being ''coopted'' into the art world gallery, museum and commercial system. One of the assumptions in the commercial-art based work of Erika Rothenberg and Barbara Kruger is that what goes on in advertisements is instrumental to the repression of women and to the national tolerance for such events, let's say, as the invasion of Grenada or the mining of Nicaraguan ports.
Barbara Kruger, whose work is presently touring Europe, is the most forceful feminist artist working with the techniques of commercial art. Kruger takes stereotyped photographic images, then blows them up and crops them. Then she adds words. Her works are attempts to question not only general cultural attitudes, but also the conditions in which art is made and sold. She is most involved with questions of class. ''I am not concerned with issues if they are not going to be anchored by some kind of analysis or consideration of class,'' she has said.
In the work of hers that has been acquired by the Museum of Modern Art, the words ''You Invest in the Divinity of the Masterpiece'' appear in three sections across a photograph of Michelangelo's ''Creation of Adam'' on the Sistine Ceiling. The painting is a work by a man, of men, that has come to symbolize the divine spark for everyone. Kruger's work is angry and mocking of what some artists and critics see as a mythology of the masterpiece and the genius. The ''You'' in the work is both declarative and accusatory. Rubbing the two together is clearly intended to create a spark that will make viewers reflect on their own position with regard to the work and to the conjunction of words like ''invest'' and ''masterpiece.''
The work of Nancy Spero, another feminist artist and a founder of the women's art movement, has far greater breadth. Spero studied art and makes use of it, particularly the Primitive and Oriental art traditions. For some time, she has been involved with scrolls which often tell stories about the mistreatment of women. Her 125-foot long ''Torture of Women'' scroll includes many Amnesty International reports of the brutalization of women alongside an ancient Sumerian myth which expresses, in the artist's words, ''what must have already been the timeless fear, hatred and cruelty directed toward women.''
Juxtaposed with the words, in different-sized type and in what appear to be disordered and even disoriented patterns, is a lot of empty space and a number of Spero's confused, victimized or defiant figures. In Spero's art, the mistreatment of women and human violence in general is identified with men. Despite her rage, however, and a tendency toward overstatement, her work is not as dogmatic, not as superior in its viewpoint as it may seem. These are works which cry out at us, but which also cry out to us. The balance between outrage and need, defiance and silence is almost impossible to maintain. As much as what she is saying, her attempt to maintain that balance makes her work important.
The best political art has always been art first and politics second. Picasso knew, for example, that it was only by making the bombing of the Spanish town of Guernica into art that people could relate to the bombing enough to experience it as a terrible political act. It is too early to know whether the Swiss painter Gregoire Muller will produce first-rate political art, but the way he used his esthetic intelligence against a political subject in his recent exhibition at the Oil & Steel Gallery makes him an artist worth following. His images of violence in the Middle East and the Philippines create a sense of familiarity on two normally mutually exclusive levels: political events and the history of art. In a painting such as ''The Death of Ninoy,'' based on a newspaper photograph of the assassination last year of Philippine opposition leader Benigno S. Aquino Jr., (known to his supporters as ''Ninoy''), esthetic intelligence is used against the content to make people feel something strong and terrible, which is a prerequisite to inspiring any political action.
Because of his recent political paintings, Leon Golub has become a subject of widespread interest and even reverence after being virtually ignored for around 15 years. Since 1976 he has been making paintings of terrorists, interrogators and mercenaries. They are big, bold and sometimes beautifully painted canvases with a texture that is raw and sensual at the same time. The paintings usually contain a group of men either just standing around, like men in a bar waiting restlessly for a television football game to begin, or involved in acts of depersonalized violence. In one painting, someone is being stuffed into a car; in another, a naked man is masked and bound in front of what looks like a torture machine. There are no buildings or landscapes in these paintings and the background is usually just one color.
Because the people in these works seem human and there is no specific sense of person and place, Golub's works are not morality plays. Although the images and titles bring to mind images of violence in Africa and Central America, there is no feeling of superiority on the part of the artist toward the victimizers and the subject matter. These works do not present evil as the property of one system, one sex, one race. The thugs in his paintings could be him, and they could be us.
What gives Golub's works their timeliness is that many of the threads not only of current political art but of important contemporary art in general are woven into them. Along with their immediacy and their political subject matter, they are rooted in the history of art - they bring to mind 19th-century history painting, Color Field painting and Abstract Expressionism. They are also rooted in the popular media: trying to understand the mechanisms of sadism and torture, Golub rummages through newspaper photographs, sports pages and pornographic magazines. It is there that he finds his faces, postures, gestures and many of his compositional ideas. Ordering different aspects of our culture by means of a hard-won knowledge of pictorial composition gives his work a scope that almost no other body of contemporary political work in this country has or even seems to feel it needs.
And yet, it is only from such a synthesis of immediate observation, craft and the lessons of time - from the testing of political facts against one's own experience - that convincing and forceful political art can emerge.