Responding to War
Image: by Bev Thomas.
Recently the Cornish contingent of writers met and discussed what role artists have during a war.
Institutions like the Tate plan ahead and do not react quickly to anything.
Picasso’s Guernica was made as the artist already had a commission to produce a work for the Spanish pavilion at the Paris World’s Fair and he was able to respond to the outrage of Franco’s bombing of the small town of Guernica within a month of it happening in 1937. He also issued a clear political statement
“ … I clearly express my abhorrence of the military caste which has sunk Spain into an ocean of pain and death.”
Picasso had learnt of the Guernica destruction from newspaper reports.
Thus did an artist of genius take an opportunity to make a powerful political painting which was then toured in order to raise money for the Spanish Republican cause.
Are artists responding to the wars in Ukraine and Gaza?
Immediately all we could think of were Banksy images as he has a long history of works about the wall built in Israel and a recent image of a Palestinian has been online.
However, I can think of work clearly supporting Ukraine in amongst the usual seascapes at my local St Ives Arts Club.
I remember that Brian Haw’s protests in London’s Parliament Square against UK and USA foreign policy from 2001 for several years were recreated as a work of art at the Tate by Mark Wallinger in 2006 as ‘State Britain’ after Haw’s protest camp was removed under new legislation.
I remember an anti Guantanamo Camp protest I saw in Trafalgar Square a few years ago that used the tactics of performance art with people dressed in orange prison uniforms to call for release of these prisoners of war.
We recalled the works Yoko Ono and John Lennon did to advocate peace in Vietnam.
African Artists from 1882 to Now (2021) (Phaidon Editors, with introduction by Chika Okeke-Agulu and glossary by Joseph L Underwood, £49.95) has examples of art in many forms reacting to war situations.
Pro Palestine activists were reported March 25th unfurling a giant quilt on the steps of the Metropolitan Museum of Art and DC museums. 64 artists produced a 30 x 50 foot work entitled ‘From occupation to Liberation’, using the colours of the Palestinian flag. A Levantine folk dance was performed.
Art News has reported that there has been a wave of actions at cultural institutions in New York. In February hundreds of pro Palestine protesters went into MOMA with banners such as ‘Cultural Workers Stand With Gaza.’ 1,000 mock museum printed guides were given out accusing certain board members of funding Zionist occupation of the West Bank.
As Petersen and Wilson in their book Women Artists found art by women wherever they went to seek it out, I think the same will apply to art about present wars.
If we don’t know of current art about war it is because we have not found it and mainstream media have not brought it to the fore, but it is being made.