Art with a Political Point of View
Socially conscious artists have long used their art to express their opinions against war to enlist sympathy for oppressed people and causes. The artists’ messages against political and social oppression and human suffering cuts across time and knows no geographical boundaries. Their works of art are meant to provoke and call attention to the victims of social upheaval and inequality, particularly those who suffer during war and armed conflicts.
War in all its forms is about power and control and the violent means to enforce it. The earliest work exhibited, Francisco de Goya’s Esto es Peor (This is Worse), from his Disasters of War series, 1808-1814, depicts, in horrific detail, atrocities committed by occupying French troops against Spanish townspeople to avenge the death of two of their soldiers. The artist learned of the brutalities from his brother who witnessed them. A century later, artist Käthe Kollwitz created a series of seven prints, including Vergewaltigt (Raped), 1907, inspired by the German Peasants’ War of the 16th century in which 100,000 to 300,000 farmers and laborers were killed in a populist uprising against the aristocracy. Looking back historically, artist Dan Mills presents in Contest – Africa (with nationalist colors) a map with swooping brush marks showing the 19th century European colonization and fracturing of Africa which reverberates in ethnic conflicts today. Known for his anti-war prints of the Vietnam era, Sigmund Abeles was commissioned to create a print about contemporary terrorism, and he too, looked to the past. His 2010 etching Deadly Dancers likens suicide bombers to KKK members who in the 1950s enforced segregation in his hometown in North Carolina by intimidation and through their wanton actions.
These politically-charged prints and paintings challenge people’s points of view raising awareness of injustice, critiquing unfair treatment, and protesting abuses by the government. Several of the works of art express pain, grief, and dismay based on the artists’ first-hand experiences, while other artists created work from afar aghast at the forces shaping the world and calling for change. Leon Golub an outspoken activist who opposed the segregationist policies of South Africa’s National Party government, created South Africa, 1985, depicting the brutality of the apartheid regime which routinely used military tactics and weapons against the majority-black citizenry. Ambreen Butt’s Daughter of the East, 2008, depicts an uprising that is more complicated and, as many conflicts are, multi-layered. The series was motivated by the 2007 Siege of Lal Masjid, a mosque, and Jamia Hafsa, a madrassa (or religious school) for women, both in Islamabad, Pakistan. Islamic fundamentalist members of the mosque and seminary occupied a neighboring children’s library in protest against the government’s destruction of mosques illegally built on public land. Tensions rose, leading to an assault on the library and compound by Pakistani armed forces, killing more than one hundred men and women who fought to defend their beliefs. The siege galvanized opposition to Pakistan’s military-led government, inspiring Islamic extremism throughout the country.
The work of Vietnamese artist-activist Dinh Q. Lê who with his parents fled the purge of the Khmer Rouge often references the Cambodian genocide in his work. The protest movement Occupy Wall Street and its call for political and economic reforms was an outgrowth of related global protests that inspired his print Tibet from the portfolio Fragile Springs, 2013. Fueled by social media and widely shared images, from which these prints are based, the protests challenged existing power structures, and in many instances government crackdowns on the protests led to civil war. Ahmed Alsoudani knows war all too well. He fled to Syria from Iraq to escape the first Gulf War before seeking asylum in the United States. Having escaped one repressive regime, he later saw Syria erupt into civil war, and then was outraged by the United States’ treatment of Iraqi detainees. In his Untitled portrait, 2018, a fleshy raw head explodes into blobs, barely recognizable as human, expressing how in war lives are shattered.
While the subject matter may be dark and the criticism biting, the work of these artist-activists make their agenda known; using their art to challenge our understanding of established authority and to bring about change.
