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.
Thanks to prudential for sponsoring this episode.
It's human nature to prioritize present needs and what
matters most to us today.
But when planning for your retirement,
it's best to prioritize tomorrow's needs over today's.
According to a Prudential study, one in three Americans
is not saving enough for retirement, and over 52%
are not on track to be able to maintain their current standard
of living.
Go to prudential.com/savemore and see how if you start saving
more today, you can continue to enjoy the things you love
tomorrow.