Thoughts about art and the culture it emerges from

"Art expresses the life of a culture." These words spoken by John Dewey back in the 1930s , I believe still resonate with us today ....Visual art can play a part in helping us to see and understand what kind of culture we are a part of...and the artists response to the world around him/her, observing and then articulating her/his response through visual art. We can think here of Piccaso's Guernica, and Kathe Kollwitz work( based on the hardship of those in poverty and the grief of those suffering loss of loved ones to war) and the influences these works have on individuals, society and the state - Picasso was responding to the bombing of Guernica through the culture he was a part of. If we allow ourselves to be open to the world and culture around us, and in particular when there are times of turmoil and conflict the artist can bring an alternative view point to the contestations in particular of those who are marginalised and oppressed... the artist can bring an alternative perspective to that given via mass media which so often is from the one sided view point of  state and corporate interests. The artist questions this top down portrayal enabling the viewer options to question and debate.
I would suggest in particular if we desire the world to be a fairer place where each person is seen as equal and is respected for their unique individuality. The work of the artist can co run alongside the citizen's responses to situations that arise.... enabling the rights for the individual to be acknoweledged and sustained.....to be continued....

 

    Some recent charcoal works based on events and experiences  concerning the consequences of conflicts,and its effects on civilian populations.
                                                                        

Displacement of indigenous people caused by deforestation

It is a known fact that as time has gone on in modern warfare those who are most effected are the       lives of  innocent civilians, more civilians than ever are victims of war.                                                 

I am reminded of Picassos Guernica 1937 painting which emerged from the impact of the air
raid Bombing of Guernica. Leon Golub and many artists in the late 1960s
protested at the MOMA in the US comparing the My Lai massacre of civilians to Guernica
In effect one could also compare the bombing of civilians in Baghdad, where at the time of this bombing the mean age of the civilians was 15 years old, knowing this leaves one speechless lost for words.
Susan Sontag wrote in her book No one after a certain age has the right to this kind of innocence of superficiality....to this degree of ignorance, or amnesia (Sontag,2003,p102, Regarding the pain of others.New York , Farrar,Strauss and Giroux..Also Sociologist Judith Butler states "There is an ethical responsibility to respond to the appearance of others especially to their cry of suffering." ( Butler ,2010 ,cited in Apel , 2012,pp8-9) War Culture and the Contest of Images,New Brunswick,NJ:Rutgers University Press.
 This sums up the belief in a humanity that defends and up hold the rights of others. I have seen in the works of Leon Golub , Martha Rosler, William Kentridge, Kathe Kollwitz, Barbara Kruger,and Susan Crile a passion to express through their work a need to make social comment through visual art, to communicate alternative perspective to what is told and portrayed. Sociologist and philosopher,Herbert Marcuse observes the control of the one dimensional portrayal of the dominant discourse, in his book One dimensional man .Marcuse points out, " One dimensional thought is systematically promoted by the makers of politics and their purveyors of mass information , their universe of discourse populated by the self validating of hypothesis which incessantly and monopolistically repeated become hypnotic defintions of dictations ." (Marcuse,1991,p 14) One dimensional man. London,Routledge.
Hope springs up when one remembers the collapse of the Berlin wall,The fall of the Romanian dictatorship in the 1980s, Nelson Mandela  and the fall of apartheid, Martin Luther Kings stand for human rights, Ghandi and Aung San Suu Kyi in Burma the on going move towards a better place.



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