“Artists should get involved in what they see and its consequences.” (Doris Salcedo)
Doris Salcedo (b.1958)
Space between two buildings with 1,550 chairs. (2003 Istanbul Biennial)
The piece above was described by the artist as “Evoking the masses of faceless migrants who underpin our globalised economy.”
“Doris Salcedo makes sculptures and installations that function as political and mental archaeology, using domestic materials charged with significance and suffused with meanings accumulated over years of use in everyday life. Salcedo often takes specific historical events as her point of departure, conveying burdens and conflicts with precise and economical means.” (overview of artists work:White Cube Gallery London)
Video below: Doris Salcedo is an artist who lives and works in Bogotá, Colombia. Here she explains her response to the experiences of those affected by the politics of her own country.
https://www.tate.org.uk/context-comment/video/doris-salcedo-on-bogota-artist-cities
18th / 19th Century
For some artists reflecting the society in which they live, involves responding to and in some cases, taking part in or opposing the political events of the day.
Jacques-Louis David (1748-1825)
Jacques-Louis David La Mort de Marat (1793) Brussels, Royal Museums of Fine Arts of Belgium,
© RMFAB, photo : J. Geleyns / Ro scan
More below: Jacques-Louis David and the French Revolution:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Death_of_Marat
Politics or Romanticism?
Théodore Géricault (1791-1824)
Radeau Meduse Théodore Géricault (1819) Louvre Paris
Was this painting a literal depiction of the reality of an event made famous at the time or an analogue for the expression of emotional feelings about events in the artist’s life? Can these two elements be separated?
Sometimes the political and the emotional state of the artist meet. See video below:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6e8PBhhS_Bo
20th/21st century
Art and War
“War is the most destructive activity known to humanity. Its purpose is to use violence to compel opponents to submit and surrender. In order to understand it, artists have, throughout history, blended colors, textures and patterns to depict wartime ideologies, practices, values and symbols. Their work investigates not only artistic responses to war, but the meaning of violence itself.
Frontline participants in war have even carved art from the flotsam of battle -- bullets, shell casings and bones -- often producing unsettling accounts of the calamity that had overwhelmed them. Tools of cruelty have been turned into testaments of compassion and civilians have created art out of rubble.
Art, according to Izeta Gradevic, director of Sarajevo-based Obala Art Centre, can be more effective than news reportage in drawing international attention to the plight of ordinary people at war.”
"When you face an art form," she told journalist Julie Lasky, "it is not easy to escape death."
(Paintings, protest and propaganda: War and Art: A Visual History of Modern Conflict." Joanna Bourke)
Joanna Bourke is a professor of history at Birkbeck, University of London, and the editor of "War and Art: A Visual History of Modern Conflict." The following is an edited excerpt taken from her introduction.
https://edition.cnn.com/style/article/depicting-war-through-art/index.html
Pablo Picasso (1881-1973)
Picasso in his studio working on the painting Geurnica
Geurnica Pablo Picasso (1937)
Perhaps Picasso’s most famous piece. The atrocity of war depicted through the slaughter of innocent victims.
”Eighty years after Picasso completed the mural, on June 4th, 1937, not only does Guernica still draw crowds, but it reminds the modern world of the atrocity that inspired it – the bombing of the Basque town of Gernika by the German Luftwaffe during the Spanish civil war – as well as the horrors of more recent events.”
(Irish Times Jun 3, 2017)
Read more here:
In 1965, as the Vietnam War escalated overseas amid civil unrest at home, abstract artists as accomplished as Philip Guston wondered whether they were doing the right thing. “What kind of man am I,” he wondered, “sitting at home, reading magazines, going into a frustrated fury about everything—and then going into my studio to adjust a red to a blue?”
(How American artists engaged with morality and conflict during the Vietnam war. Smithsonian Museum.)
Leon Golub (1922-2004)
"Monsters exist because we create them, through war and violence, and distortion, and the way we handle people and so on.”
Gigantomachy II. Look Golub (1966)
More about Leon Golub’s work below:
https://www.theguardian.com/artanddesign/2018/feb/06/leon-golub-art-new-york-raw-nerve
Dan Flavin (1933-1996)
Monument 4 those who have been killed in ambush (to P.K. who reminded me about death) Dan Flavin (1966)
More below about Dan Flavin’s work:
https://www.huffpost.com/entry/dan-flavin-and-can-minima_b_6139966?
Tim Shaw RA (b.1964)
Casting a dark democracy Tim Shaw RA (2008)
Read more about this piece below:
https://www.dazeddigital.com/artsandculture/article/2759/1/casting-a-dark-democracy
Equality Issues
“If Valhalla exists in Britain, then it can be found in St Stephen’s Hall in the Houses of Parliament. A neo-classical gallery designed by Charles Barry in 1842, it is lined with statues of venerable men and framed by famous scenes from British history. To stand in its centre, on its intricately pattered encaustic floor, beneath the 29-metre-high ceiling, is to experience a strident, opulent lesson in male imperial power – one so commanding it might well compel a radical act of defiance from those it disregards. Such an action was taken by Sylvia Pankhurst in 1913 when, while waiting for the labour MP Keir Hardie, she threw a lump of concrete at one of the pictures.”
The Role of Artists in Promoting The Cause of Women’s Suffrage by Jessica Lach https://frieze.com/article/role-artists-promoting-cause-womens-suffrage
Emily J. Harding Andrews (1850-1940)
Convicts, lunatics and women! Have no vote for parliament She: Is it time I got out of this place - Where shall I find the KEY?
Emily J. Harding Andrews
Barbara Kruger (b.1945)
We don’t need another hero (1985)
More out about Barbera Kruger below:
https://www.thebroad.org/art/barbara-kruger
Elizabeth Catlett (1915-2012)
Elizabeth Catlett Colour linocut "Sharecropper" (above, detail) from the 1950s. Source: Harvard Gazette.
“At Iowa, Catlett was encouraged to make work about the subjects she knew best – the reality of being an African-American woman, raising children, being at once dispossessed yet also proud and dignified. Women became the subject of much of her work, women with broad hips and angular faces, standing proudly, sometimes raising their fists, sometimes nursing children, but almost invariably depicted from a slightly lower angle, so that the viewer is forced to look up at them.”
Claudia Marinaro The Heroine Collective 2019
Full article below
http://www.theheroinecollective.com/elizabeth-catlett/
Barnett Newman (1905-1970)
Barnett Newman Lace Curtain for Mayor Daley, 1968 Art Institute of Chicago
https://www.timeout.com/chicago/art/the-art-world-was-watching
Background into the event that led to Barnett Newman’s artwork below:
Kara Walker (b.1969)
“But frankly I am tired, tired of standing up, being counted, tired of ‘having a voice’ or worse ‘being a role model.’ Tired, true, of being a featured member of my racial group and/or my gender niche.
It’s too much, and I write this knowing full well that my right, my capacity to live in this Godforsaken country as a (proudly) raced and (urgently) gendered person is under threat by random groups of white (male) supremacist goons who flaunt a kind of patched together notion of race purity with flags and torches and impressive displays of perpetrator-as-victim sociopathy. I roll my eyes, fold my arms and wait. How many ways can a person say racism is the real bread and butter of our American mythology, and in how many ways will the racists among our countrymen act out their Turner Diaries race war fantasy combination Nazi Germany and Antebellum South-states which, incidentally, lost the wars they started, and always will, precisely because there is no way those white racisms can survive the earth without the rest of us types upholding humanity’s best, keeping the motor running on civilization, being good, and preserving nature and all the stuff worth working and living for?”
The Katastwof Karavan. Kara Walker 2018 (photo: Alex Marks)
A recipient of a MacArthur Foundation "genius" grant, Walker is best known for her murals in silhouette and the 2014 installation of A Subtlety, or the Marvelous Sugar Baby, a giant sphinx-like figure with the face of a black woman constructed in a former Domino Sugar refining plant in New York. It referenced the history of slave labor in the production of sugar in the Western hemisphere. The Katastwof Karavan also addresses the history of slavery, and is placed at Algiers Point because enslaved peoples were held there before being sold at locations on the East Bank of the Mississippi. "Katastwof" is the Haitian Creole word for catastrophe, and it refers to the institution of slavery and its role in bringing Africans to European colonies. The wagon has figures in silhouette on its sides and a 32-note steam calliope that resembles those on Mississippi River steamboats. The wagon will be used for musical presentations Feb. 23 to Feb. 25. Some of the music is already programmed and includes songs by Jimi Hendrix, Jimmy Cliff, Aretha Franklin, Prince, Sam Cooke, traditional jazz, hymns and protest songs. There also are live performances by pianist Jason Moran, who was commissioned to create music for Karavan.
More about Kara Walker’s work below:
https://www.christies.com/Features/Kara-Walker-9955-1.aspx
Hank Willis Thomas (b.1976)
Raise Up Hank Willis Thomas 2014
More about Hank Willis Thomas below:
Refugee
Refugees are persons who are outside their country of origin for reasons of feared persecution, conflict, generalized violence, or other circumstances that have seriously disturbed public order and, as a result, require international protection. The refugee definition can be found in the 1951 Convention and regional refugee instruments, as well as UNHCR’s Statute.
--United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees
Ah Xian (b.1960)
“Ah Xian fled China in 1990 to Australia after the Tiananmen Square massacre at age 30. Now, Xian continues to explore his native cultural identity despite this relocation from his roots. His particular works in the Metaphysica series (2007) and Concrete Forest series (2008/2009) articulate the representation of the body through his intricacy of skill and meaning.”
More below:
China China-Bust 81 Ah Xian 2008
Khadim Ali Khadim (b.1978)
“I was born as a displaced person in a displaced family, and now four decades later, I belong to a community of the displaced people. When I was attending school in Pakistan I was referred to as an outsider as the school was located outside my town. And then attending college as an art student at a national level, I could still feel the displacement and was not able to root myself as a local artist with a history and a future. And now in Australia, my convenient title is ‘refugee artist’ – although I did not come to Australia as a refugee – but I am seen from the community of the displaced and the refugees. Hence, displacement and migration are inseparable from my being.”
http://www.artnowpakistan.com/in-conversation-with-khadim-ali/
UNCR: 7 art initiatives that are transforming the lives of refugees
“Artolution supports Syrian refugee artists by providing capacity-building workshops and opportunities to work in their field and to engage the youth in their community. In Za’atari Camp, the Syrian artist collective Jasmine Necklace has co-facilitated community mural and sculpture projects. In Azraq Camp, an artist team led by Mohammed Hassan Ibrahim has engaged dozens of children and teens through public art, and is now developing an arts-based mentorship program with Artolution and the International Rescue Committee (IRC).”
Joel Artista/Artolution. More below:
https://joelartista.com/syrian-refugees-the-zaatari-project-jordan/
Za’atari Syrian refugee camp Jordan 2017
Mural Za’atari Syrian refugee camp Jordan 2017
The Jasmine Necklace Art Collective. Syrian artists in Za’atari camp
Climate Change
Olafur Eliasson (b.1967)
“Interestingly, when I did ‘the weather project’ at Tate Modern back in 2003, climate change wasn’t on anyone’s agenda. at the time, the work was received as being about the museum as a stage, about sociality, embodiment, being singular plural. only later did people start thinking about it in relation to the climate – and I think that’s just fine. The work is open to this shift in attention. it welcomes it. even when I did ‘your waste of time’ in 2006, which anticipated ‘ice watch’ in some respects, climate change wasn’t really on the global agenda. it was also not what drove me to bring chunks of hundreds-of-years-old Icelandic ice into an art gallery for visitors to touch them. the focus then was on direct, visceral experience – which has long been central to my art practice.
From this, I realised that encountering old ice may have extraordinary effects, and in 2014 I did ‘Ice Watch’ in city hall square in Copenhagen with Minik Rosing, a geologist and great friend. When you touch an old block of melting greenlandic inland ice, you physically feel the reality of time passing and climate change in a way different to reading the newspaper or through numbers and scientific data. This is where the arts speak a strong, direct language. in two minutes, ‘Ice Watch’ can communicate more than can be said in 700 pages of a scientific report.”
https://www.designboom.com/art/olafur-eliasson-interview-artist-designboom-02-16-2015/
Olafur Elliasson Ice Watch Ice Watch. Bankside, outside Tate Modern, London, 2018
Twelve large blocks of ice cast off from the Greenland ice sheet are harvested from a fjord outside Nuuk and presented in a clock formation in a prominent public place. The work raises awareness of climate change by providing a direct and tangible experience of the reality of melting arctic ice. Ice Watch has been installed in two locations so far.
The first installation was in Copenhagen, at City Hall Square, from 26 to 29 October 2014, to mark the publication of the UN IPCC’s Fifth Assessment Report on Climate Change. The second installation took place in Paris, at Place du Panthéon, from 3 to 13 December 2015, on the occasion of the UN Climate Conference COP21, and the third version of Ice Watch was on view from 11 December 2018 to 2 January 2019 at two locations in London – outside Bloomberg’s European headquarters and in front of Tate Modern.
More below:
https://olafureliasson.net/archive/artwork/WEK109190/ice-watch
Yi Dai (b.1989)
Tide Tables / 6pm Yi Dai 2016