SARAH GREEN (VOICEOVER):
This episode
of "The Art Assignment" is
supported by Prudential.
[MUSIC PLAYING]
You may be unhappy
about the recent US
presidential election.
You may be elated about it.
Or you may not care
at all, because you
live in a different
country and have
political issues of equal
or greater importance
to think about.
But regardless of the
politics that occupy your mind
and populate your
Twitter feed, I
would imagine you have
thoughts about them.
And if you're lucky enough
to live in a country that
affords you freedoms
of speech, I
believe you should
exercise them and
that our various and
dissenting opinions
should form a loud and
cacophonous and dissonant
symphony.
And artists are part
of that symphony
and have been
throughout history,
using a wide range of
materials and techniques
to explore ideas that
relate to the government
or public affairs of a country.
Their art has been in support
of a movement or leader.
It's been resistance
to prevailing powers.
And it has addressed a
huge expanse of issues.
I'm calling this political art.
But it's not art that
is only political.
It's other things, too,
and you can call it
by many other names.
Now, you can easily
argue that all art is
political in some way,
and I'd agree with you.
Even a pile of yarn or
a landscape painting
can be interpreted through
a political context.
But the artworks I'm
going to talk about today
from various moments
of the 20th century
are political in an obvious way.
And in each case,
I'd like for us
all to consider how each of
these works is political,
how each artist used the
materials and platforms
of their own times to make
unforgettable statements,
and how these approaches
might inform our own modes
and means of expression.
These are "Cases
for Political Art."
German artist Kathe
Kollwitz turned
to printmaking in
the early 1890s,
depicting oppressed,
poverty-stricken, and yet still
defiant workers.
She realized the
print's potential
for social commentary.
They were inexpensive
and easily reproducible,
and her work was widely
circulated and admired.
Kollwitz bore witness
to both world wars,
losing a son in the first
and a grandson in the second,
fusing her own
experience of tragedy
with the suffering
of those around her.
Women and children often take
center stage in her prints,
showing in graphic, intimate
detail the realities of war
and the incommensurate toll
it takes on society's most
vulnerable.
A socialist an outspoken
pacifist, Kollwitz in 1933
was forced by the
Nazi government
to resign her post as the
first female professor pointed
to the Prussian Academy, and she
was forbidden to show her work.
She died in 1945, just two
weeks before German surrender.
And the power of
her work has not
diminished in the
ensuing decades.
Her images are of universal
human experiences--
familial tenderness,
mourning, and death.
And the pain they depict is so
raw and so real and so present.
Looking at her work, I
can't dismiss these agonies
as long past but instead
feel their urgency--
the fact that parallel
moments are playing out now
throughout the world.
This is anguish that
happened then which
must be avoided at all costs.
But it's also
anguish happening now
that we must be awake to and
do all in our power to remedy.
Kazimir Malevich, a Russian
artist of Polish descent,
took a vastly different approach
from Kollwitz and pretty much
everyone else who
were using realism
to address the horrors of
the early 20th century.
Malevich wrote, "In the year
1913, trying desperately
to free art from the dead
weight of the real world,
I took refuge in the
form of the square."
He unveiled his
painting "Black Square"
to the St. Petersburg
public in 1915.
And it was just that-- a black
square on a white canvas,
part of a new language
of shapes and forms
he called suprematism,
whose radical
simplicity presented a challenge
to all art that came before.
But he hung the painting in
a top corner of the gallery,
in the place
traditionally reserved
for the display of Russian
icons in many homes.
Russia in 1915 was firmly
entrenched in World War I
and hurdling toward the
Bolshevik uprising and October
Revolution of 1917.
The world as people knew
it had been upended,
hierarchies overturned,
and Malevich
felt that art should be
overturned as well, beginning
at what he called
the zero of form.
It wasn't an escape
from reality.
For him, it was its own reality.
And he called the painting
an icon of our times--
in a sacred spot, darkness.
After the revolution,
Malevich's abstract approach
was put to use by
the Bolshevik regime,
creating propaganda
for the new government.
Other artists like
Vladimir Tatlin
answered Lenin's call
to replace the monuments
of the tzarist period with art
more fitting of the revolution.
Tatlin's proposed monument
to the Third International
was never built, but
his model and plans
for the abstract sculpture
ignited generations
of artists eager to explore
ways other than figuration
to express their ideals.
Perhaps the best
known indictment
of the horrors of the war,
Pablo Picasso's "Guernica"
is the artist's response
to Germany's April 1937
bombing of the small
village Guernica
in the Basque region of Spain.
The country was
embroiled in a civil war,
and Hitler had
aligned in support
of General Franco and the
right-wing nationalists,
who sought to overthrow
Spain's left-leaning Republican
government.
Understood to be a training
mission for the German Air
Force, the bombing
of Guernica, not
of strategic military value,
lasted for three hours
and killed or wounded
1,600 civilians.
The news reached
Paris soon after,
and the atrocity was
well-documented in the papers.
Picasso's monumental painting
represents the horror
of what had transpired, but not
in specific or realistic terms.
And when it was presented in the
Spanish pavilion of the Paris
Exposition later that year, it
served as a powerful protest
to the atrocities perpetrated
by Germany's Third Reich,
whose own pavilion was on
display not far from Spain's.
Complex and
much-debated iconography
is at play in this
work, whose careful
composition echoes more
traditional European history
painting.
But it veers decisively
away from that
in its abstraction and depiction
of war as thoroughly unheroic.
Presented in the context
of a fair celebrating
new technologies, this
25-foot-wide painting instead
confronted the public
with the brutalities
that new technologies
had made possible,
compounding the growing
aggression of Hitler's
fascist regime.
After the fair, the painting
traveled through Europe
to help raise funds
for Spanish refugees
and was loaned to
the Museum of Modern
Art in New York for
safekeeping until it
returned to Spain in 1981.
It remains an incredibly potent
and memorable image of not just
the tragedy that
occurred at Guernica
but of all that
was about to occur
and all that still may
happen in the future.
Have you gotten the
idea that war is bad?
No?
Let's continue.
Iri and Toshi Maruki entered the
city of Hiroshima, Japan just
days after it had been
destroyed on August 6, 1945
by an atomic bomb dropped
by the United States
during the final
stages of World War II.
The Marukis stayed for weeks
to tend to the injured and dead
and three years later began
painting a series of panels
that described the trauma
of that experience,
engaging the long tradition
of Japanese screen painting
and using a style that blended
sumi-e, or ink wash techniques,
with a more Western
style of illustration.
At first they intended
to create just one panel.
But as soon as survivors
saw it and began
to share their own
experiences with the artists,
they were determined
to make more.
Over the course of 32 years, the
couple painted 15 large panels,
over which unfolds a
narrative of unimaginable pain
and suffering.
Photographs of the actual
devastation in Hiroshima
and Nagasaki were
often censored,
and a number of people
who viewed the panels
were seeing images of the
catastrophe for the first time.
After they were shown
in the US in 1970,
the artists went on to
create further panels that
offered an even
wider view, showing
the American prisoners of war
and Korean forced laborers
who were also victims.
But the Hiroshima
panels are not simply
an indictment of
wartime atrocities.
They're also images of
remembrance and hope,
as well as continuing
protest against the use
of nuclear weapons.
Nominated for a Nobel
Peace Prize in 1995,
the Marukis
dedicated their lives
to an intensely
thoughtful working
through of a disaster and
loss of epic proportions.
They visited and
revisited this subject,
incorporating the views
and experiences of many,
chronicling an event whose
consequences are still
playing out.
Jumping forward to the 1960s,
American artist Martha Rosler
began collecting
images from magazines
and creating a series
of photomontage
she titled "House Beautiful--
Bringing the War Home."
The war in question
was the Vietnam War,
which, by 1967, the year she
began making the collages,
was reaching the peak
of US involvement,
and public opposition
to the war was growing.
That year, over 100,000
anti-war protesters
gathered at the
Lincoln Memorial,
and Martin Luther King Jr. made
public his objection to the war
on moral grounds.
Using the technique of collage
pioneered by the Dadaists, who
were also responding
to war in their time,
Rosler brought together
images from "Life" magazine
of the warfront with
advertisements and photo
features of pristine US
homes from "House Beautiful."
The Vietnam War was called
the "living-room war"
and marked the first conflict
in which journalists were given
near-unlimited access
to combat zones,
and their reporting and
photography permeated the news
in print and on TV.
Rosler said, "The images we
saw were always very far away,
in a place we couldn't imagine."
And her incongruous
images take us
immediately there--
Pat Nixon smiling
beneath a gilt frame
featuring a twisted body;
a well-dressed woman
vacuuming her damask drapes,
parting them to reveal
soldiers in the field.
The home here is not a space
of escape but of engagement,
of confronting the
realities of war
in a place usually
understood as separate.
Rosler published the
images in anti-war journals
and distributed them as
photocopies and flyers,
keeping them out of an art
context for a number of years.
But no matter
where you see them,
the images retain
their ability to shock,
to compel us to confront
and try to reconcile
the jarring barrage of
images we look at every day,
whether within a magazine
or browser window.
What does it mean to
look at these images?
And what do we do
with that information?
There is a lot of political
art that is not explicitly
about war.
And there are so many
superlative works of art
that I'd like to talk about that
engage with political ideas--
Elizabeth Catlett's
woodblock prints that
forged powerful images of
the Civil Rights Movement;
Group Material's 1989 "AIDS
Timeline"; Alfredo Jaar's
earth-shattering, we'll never
look at the world the same way
"Rwanda" series; Emily
Jacir's "Where We Come From,"
for which she enacted the wishes
of Palestinians who lacked
the freedom of movement between
Israel and the West Bank;
the Women on Waves health care
advocacy group that docked
a floating clinic in
international waters
to provide access to abortions
in areas where it was illegal;
the Yes Men's Bhopal
disaster Dow Chemical hoax;
and the Cause Collective's
ongoing "Truth Booth,"
which travels around the world
to record people's responses
to the prompt, "The truth is."
Each of these are works that
have made an indelible impact
on the way I see the world and
remind me of a statement artist
Tania Bruguera made in 2010.
She said, "Political art
is the one transcending
the field of art, entering
the daily nature of people,
an art that makes them think.
Political art has
doubts, not certainties;
it has intentions,
not programs; it
shares with those who find
it, not imposes on them.
Political art is
uncomfortable knowledge."
Personally, I want the
creative output that comes out
of this time to be
carefully considered
and not a confirmation of what
I already think or know or think
I know.
I want art that helps
me to understand
the motivations of
people other than myself
and that calls me to be an
attentive, well-informed,
and compassionate person.
It's that
uncomfortable knowledge
that sticks with us when
we're not in front of the art.
It's the tiny seed
of doubt and reminder
that informs and shapes
and frames our values.
What I appreciate
about political art
is the way it encourages us to
constantly reframe our values,
to reconsider what we hold to
be right and wrong and true
and false at every turn.
For me, that is an art that
is undeniably worthwhile.
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