I really struggled with the previous post. I mean, up all night get no sleep struggled with.
I had written it during the same time I got the following tweet:
3-day old corpse of 5 month baby from massacred Samouni family found half-eaten by dogs/Red Cro ss #Gaza #Israel
How on earth could I be trying to find something hopeful when there is no hope? How could I think there could be hope in the middle of hell?
Arrogance?
Naivete?
It is the eternal conflict of artists working within the framework of violence, resistance, hatred and humanity.
What place does the artist have in the middle of hell?
Those who don’t struggle with this question may not immediatly get it’s complications, so let me expand:
Who gets centered in the work of an artist? The artist? The people? Which people? Think of the work of Kara Walker–think of how she often intermixes imagery of slave women with masters. Think of how uncomfortable that makes us.
How will ‘the people’ be represented? What repercussions will there be for ‘the people’ who are being represented? Think about Henry James Fennimore Cooper here. Think about his book, The Last of the Mohicans. About how the story basically tells the world that genocide has been completed and that the noble savage is gone. It’s a matra we still believe to this day, even as Native peoples have resisted for 500 years. What roll did the belief that Native peoples were gone play in the building of Manifest Destiny?
Art has power, no matter what our noble right wing conservatives will tell us. It has the power to wake people up, destroy entire peoples, remind people to love, give hope, document…There is power there.
And with that power comes responsibility (to quote spider man).
I’ve been thinking about the advice of so many radical women of color that came before me and are my contemporaries. About the woman who said the responsibility of the artist is to make revolution irresistible. About the other woman who said, hold up, there is no poetry, no words in this.
I’ve been thinking of the heated debate in an English class over the image created by a writer: a mother throws her baby against an electrical fence because she knows what is in store for her. In the image, the baby turns into a butterfly and the mother sucks on the same blanket the baby had been seen sucking on earlier in the story.
It was a beautiful image, a horrible image.
And the question came out–what right does this writer have to put words, beautiful words, to that hell?
Because in the end, writers, musicians, sculptors, zinesters, artists–we draw on the life around us, the life we see in the distance, to do our work.
And what right do we have to use others pain to work? What right do we have to use others pain? Even if it is in service of ‘liberation’?
Who is the artist responsible to?
Who is the artist accountable to?
What is the artist accountable to?
The conflict I feel for the previous post has not gone away since I posted it, took it down and reposted it. My specific gnawing question–what right do *I* have to write about hope when other mother’s children are being eaten by dogs?
But I reposted it because I felt like it would provide a lead in to a hopefully productive conversation about the place art has in this world. Art that moves beyond survival–but recognizes that survival is only a dream, a violently destroyed dream, for far too many of us.
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January 12th, 2009 at 1:04 pm #
bfp,
I won’t get into too many details, but yesterday I spoke to someone who knows of what she speaks when she talks about hope in the face of hopelessness. She said that what gives her hope is the people who keep hope, and who keep going, even when there is no reason to have hope. She said that the people with hope become her reason to hope. But, she said, it’s not people who have naive hope who keep her going. It is, as she put it, people who have hope ‘with eyes open.’ I’m going to write more about what she said when I get back to the U.S., but thought that might be helpful to you now. How it relates to art is up for interpretation, I suppose.
January 12th, 2009 at 2:58 pm #
Not done reading, but one important correction: The Last of the Mohicans was James Fennimore Cooper, not Thoreau.
January 12th, 2009 at 3:42 pm #
oh, GEEZ!!!!! Thank you SO much!!! I knew that, I just got finished reading it!!! DOh!
Thanks for pointing taht out woman!!!!
January 12th, 2009 at 4:56 pm #
So heavy.I hadn’t read the story of the bombing of the fence until you posted it and in fact it did bring me a moment of hope, so thanks.
January 13th, 2009 at 8:09 am #
i think the questions about who and what artists are responsible to are important.
i also come from a very different place on this. why *wouldn’t* an artist have a right to put words to hell? why shouldn’t we shed a little light in the darkness?
January 13th, 2009 at 12:40 pm #
“And what right do we have to use others pain to work?”
The more I think about this question, the farther I feel from having an answer. One of Arundhati Roy’s first articles was a protest against a film’s (“The Bandit Queen”)portrayal of the gang rape of a prominent Indian woman. Even though the film was sympathetic to her plight, Roy argued that it was a second violation of her person because it showed her ordeal without her permission. What is an artist to do when there is such a fine line between empathy and exploitation?
January 13th, 2009 at 3:47 pm #
BFP – is the story you mention Cynthia Ozick’s “The Shawl”? because if so (or if not since the issue is the same) yeah I had a weird feeling reading that story. or with something like the photography from the Vietnam War – we discussed this in my protest literature class, where the professor said part of what made them effective was that they were technically stunning photographs, and it’s true, there is something beautiful in the composition and the contrast (I’m not a photographer, so I don’t know if that’s the right way to describe it).
And I’m just not sure if I agree with him that part of their power comes from their success as art. I mean maybe I’m just unusually squeamish but me personally, I think when I see children running from napalm attacks that is always going to hurt (or jeez, I hope it’s always going to hurt), regardless of the quality of the image. And furthermore I think the “beauty” of art can become a distancing factor. James Agee writes in the introduction to Let Us Now Praise Famous Men “for god’s sake, don’t think of it as art” because once you start thinking of something as art, you start engaging with at as art instead of as reality, which was a sentiment that rang very true to me. Like those photograph series in Time or the NYTimes Magazine about homeless people, I get this uncomfortable image of people of considerable privilege staring at them and feeling good about themselves for being socially conscious, talking about “the power of the image” instead of the power of horrors to move us because we are people and we care.
but art can also create empathy, and I don’t know how I feel about that either, because it’s like, why SHOULD we need art to make us feel this, to make us care? especially when it seems like so often the “power of art” as seen on a SOCIETAL level is really the power of art made by people of privilege – former slaves had been writing their autobiographies, telling of the true horrors of slavery, for DECADES before white Harriet Beecher Stowe came around and wrote a novel that finally got people to start listening. Is that really the power of fiction to make us truly see reality, and if so, what the fuck does that say about us as a species? or is that at least partly the power of art – the power of giving people a message in a way that makes it pleasurable to experience, if unpleasant to hear. and I mean, it worked, and Frederick Douglass himself publicly hailed it as the most important book ever, or something (though privately he chided Stowe for its pro-colonization ending) because he knew that she could succeed where generations of black abolitionists speaking their truth had failed. And it’s good that she did that (and also just for the record, the book is racist, but not as racist as you would expect if you haven’t read it but are aware of the meaning of Uncle Tom as an epithet; at least, I was surprised) but it sucks that she needed to.
but then back to “The Shawl,” written about something already over – that story makes me uncomfortable, but one of my favorite movies in the world is The Pianist. is it because I know that “The Shawl” is fiction, whereas The Pianist is a true story, made into a movie by someone who was a Holocaust survivor himself? or is it because I don’t really like “The Shawl” as art, and I do like The Pianist as art, in which case I’m making exceptions for things I like which is kinda messed up? or is it because I think The Pianist succeeds where The Shawl fails? I don’t know.
January 14th, 2009 at 6:01 am #
i talk about this book all the time but susan sontag’s ‘regarding the pain of others’ is a very short easy to read book that is relevant to this conversation and relevant to anyone struggling with what place images and art have in documenting extreme horror, and what place the viewer of images/art has.