Arts and culture are one of the few areas in society in which we can see the world in radically different ways and cross social boundaries. Artists have engaged audiences for centuries by tapping into traumatic events in history, turning grief into artistic expression.
Art has always been a powerful means of storytelling and engaging with art is simply not a solitary event. For centuries the aristocracy and religion were the primary patrons of artists and even today, one of the main purposes of art is still religious or ceremonial. But more recently art has been used as a social commentary or means of propaganda to persuade the public towards a particular viewpoint, take action or follow a particular leader or government. Contemporary art addresses current and historical events and their impact. The artist as social commentator gives an insight, both personal and collective, into the human condition as he/she perceives it, sometimes without taking action. The power of visual images can be seen in the use of propaganda art in China, Germany, Russia and by Allies during World War I. and during World War II. The development of modern art in the late 20th and early 21st century brought about a major shift in how the general public viewed art and introduced different mediums that could be produced and distributed on a larger scale. With the advances in printing, literature became more readily available and photography gave audiences a closer look at the outside world. In contemporary arts, visual art includes a number of modern art forms, such as : mixed-media, assemblage, conceptual art, installation, performance art, along with film-based disciplines such as video art, animation and photography, or any combination thereof.
Artists throughout history have written, painted, sculpted and performed as a result of trauma either personally or as a consequence of trauma from historical or cultural atrocities that affected them. Art is, after all, a representation of life. It is widely understood that the word ‘trauma’ describes stress, shock, fear, violence, grief and loss associated with these experiences. Intensely shocking experiences have a long-term impact and it is important to make a distinction between ‘trauma’ and encounters with danger. Avoiding danger is an automatic response to avoid a perilous situation. This fight or flight response consists of a physical arousal of the sympathetic nervous system and feelings of pain, hunger or fatigue are no longer sensed. Instead immediate action is taken with the aim of reaching safety. After the danger has been avoided and an initial period of time has elapsed to get over the shock, people can usually recall and talk about the event. But in the case of trauma, whether caused by abuse, human atrocities or natural disasters, victims cannot show normal responses to danger and are rendered helpless at the moment of the occurrence. The long-term impact of the traumatic experience varies for every individual, most people become preoccupied by the event and have involuntary intrusive memories that serve as a function of modifying the emotions associated with the trauma. However, some people are unable to integrate the awful experience and cope by developing specific patterns of avoidance and hyper arousal, Van der Kolk, Bessel A., Alexander C. McFarlane, and Lars Weis”th (1996). As a result, many artists who experienced deep trauma have been regarded as reclusive or completely misunderstood. On some occasions these misunderstood souls found great acclaim for their portrayal of the world around them and the darkness which can lie within the recesses of the imagination.
Francisco Goya created a tremendous range of paintings in his lifetime. Early paintings like The Disasters of War and The Third of May showed the horrors of conflict as a reaction to Napoleon’s occupation of Spain. His most powerful and disturbing images, known as the ‘black paintings’, were magnificent and terrifying scenes of humiliation, cannibalism, war and degradation and are his most arresting works. Unfortunately, they were only published in 1863, 35 years after his death, but will always remain in social memory. The painting The Face of War by famous surrealist artist, Salvador Dali, produced in 1940 during the Spanish Civil War and World War II. depicts a grotesque, brownish face with three smaller, similar looking faces in the eye sockets and mouth to represent the ugliness of war and how it affects people and society. (Moorhouse, 2002). Salvador Dali created many paintings depicting the struggle he felt on a personal level and tapped into the collective consciousness with paintings like The Persistence of Memory ,with the famous melting clocks symbolising time being anything but persistent in life or dreams and The Burning Giraffe which he painted before being exiled to the United States and shows his personal struggle with the conflict in his home country. American painter, Winslow Homer, originally created landscape paintings and illustrations for magazines, but some of the earliest paintings he created were from the Civil War which he painted to come to terms with the momentous events associated with the Civil War. Some of his works include Veteran in a New Field and Prisoners from the Front. Norwegian artist, Edvard Munch also explored traumatic themes and painted using his inner turmoil to create art. Munch suffered from deep depression and his painting, The Scream, a figure with an agonized expression against a landscape with a swirling and chaotic orange sky, shows how he explored intense psychological themes. Vincent van Gogh may have suffered from bipolar disorder, and his artwork reflects his emotional pain. Throughout his life Van Gogh struggled with mental illness and even stayed in a mental asylum while still remaining productive and creative. His last words were reported to be: ‘The sadness will last forever.’
It is not, unfortunately, a gap between two poles, positive and negative, wherein the other side might be readily seen and attained; it is, rather, a gap that one falls into, grabbing on the way down at this sack of flour or that window edge, failing to pull oneself up short of intensely difficult, virtually rebellious work, work cutting across the grain of trauma, be it personal or more broadly social, to face that pain over and over again until it fails to look back. This is work that under the best conditions socializes trauma. (Saltzman and Rosenberg, 2006, p46)
Collective and personal histories are intertwined and very complex in nature, an ongoing development of the other. Individual accounts and understanding are perpetually required, repeated and eventually merge with the narratives and retrospective judgments that cumulatively produces the recognition of a common past. The Dada movement was founded in 1916 in Zurich, Switzerland and arose as a reaction to World War I and the nationalism that many thought had led to the war. The movement had a powerful impact on artists in many cities and mocked materialistic and nationalistic attitudes with a diverse output of painting, sculpture, performance art, poetry, photography and collage. The most famous being an artwork by Marcel Duchamp, The Fountain, a porcelain urinal which was displayed and photographed and a symbolic rejection of the prevailing standards in art through anti-art. Photography has been a means of documenting millions of atrocities from all over the world. A photo taken by photographer Don McCullin of the battlefields of Somme where over one million men were wounded and killed, is a powerful reminder of World War I. Seventy years after the battle, it seems like nothing more than a dirt road through fields, and yet the image is far from quiet and neutral, imbued with the knowledge of what took place there. The public projection of social memory has a heightened urgency for groups whose immediate histories are carved by major loss and disruption. Whether it is due to natural disasters or social conflict. The impetus to recount these experiences has been used to help communal healing and challenge accepted truths, to engage those who were also affected by socially inflicted trauma. Palestinian artist, Kamal Boullata, created paintings in an abstract style reflecting the cultural dispersion and exile of hundreds of thousands of Palestinians during and after the the events that culminated the foundation of the State of Israel. Recently art from North Africa and the Middle East, from countries and states that include Iran, Jordan, Lebanon, Saudi Arabia, Palestine, Egypt, Algeria and Afghanistan have been exhibited in New York at the third edition of the Guggenheim UBS MAP Global Art Initiative, titled But a Storm Is Blowing from Paradise, although the show is fairly tame and aesthetically pleasing, it examines issues of colonialism and migration and depicts a reality that cannot be ignored. In South Africa, political prisoners sketched pictures of their lives during the time they were incarcerated and the results were astonishing. Nelson Mandela sketched over twenty pictures during his time on Robben Island, one of which depicts a view of Table Mountain through the bars in his prison cell. Table mountain is not actually visible from the prison cell windows, but the view Mandela depicted in his sketch idealises one that resembles freedom. During the anti-apartheid struggle, mural paintings were created by African communities to beautify their surroundings and express a narrative to communicate messages of hope, loss and struggle. Many of these murals still remain and are re-painted by the community every year to educate younger generations and in remembrance of Africans affected by the Apartheid regime.
Individuals from a culture or a group that has sustained such a social/collective trauma involving a major rupture in the integrity of its social system are often moved to tell the story of what their people encountered, even when their own narratives are distant from the actual events. The contemporary need, therefore, to make the dreadful social consequences of the injuries inflicted by one group upon another a subject of art can be understood both as an answer to specific historical and political conditions and as an effective personal response to a group trauma of which the artist has experience and knowledge.(Machida, 2008)
Artist, Joseph Beuys challenged societies perceptions and pushed the boundaries of what constitutes as art. Beuys volunteered for the Luftwaffe in 1941 and survived a plane crash two years later, which had a lasting affect on him in later life and caused him to question everything in life. A performance artist as well as a sculptor and installation artist, Beuys used different mediums to suggest how art may exercise a healing effect. One of his most famous performances is Pictures to a Dead Hare. In the performance Beuys sits in a chair with his face covered in honey and gold leaf, cradling a dead hare in his arms. He would them wander around the exhibit whispering to the dead animal in his arm. The Jewish born film producer, Gerald Green, created Holocaust, an American four part television miniseries in 1978 which gained critical acclaim and brought the World War II genocide into widespread public attention in a way that had never been accomplished before. The series was watched by nearly 120 million people and had a tremendous impact on the culture of remembrance. The miniseries was successful in the United States and Europe and was surprisingly popular in West Germany. Film making has taken the visual arts and storytelling a step further, encapsulating a moving and breathing narrative with no bounds.
‘I think art is the only political power, the only revolutionary power, the only evolutionary power, the only power to free humankind form all repression. I say not that art has already realized this, on the contrary, and because it has not, it has to be developed as a weapon, at first there are radical levels, then you can speak about special details.’ (Joseph Beuys, 1973)
Artistic expression is such an incredibly powerful medium that is part of the tapestry of every generation, constantly shifting and changing with every new idea and attempting to reconcile an irreconcilable past.