Art with a Social Conscience
Where does art with a social conscience fit into the contemporary art world? We are living in a time where postmodernisms key ideas are being strongly embraced. Belief that there is not merely one inherent idea behind a work of art, that the viewer is responsible for assigning meaning to it or even that the work has no meaning and no purpose, artworks that play with the disassociation of meaning have been incredibly popular for the last few decades, whether due to the controversial nature of the work or genuine appreciation for the straightforward and satirical approach to art. Art critic Harold Rosenberg put it best, ‘the kind of modern art that makes us uneasy because of uncertainty as to whether we are in the presence of a genuine work of art or not. Faced with an anxious object, we are usually challenged, and may even find ourselves baffled, disturbed, bewildered, angered, or just plain bored’, (Gablik, 2004).
But how does art with a social conscience fit into this world, work that by its nature definitively juxtaposes these ‘anxious objects’? And how can artists evoke empathy from their audience in a time when we are so inundated with images of violence and injustice in mass media imagery, that studies have shown that people are becoming deeply desensitised to distressing images. Artist like Jenny Holzer, Dorothea Lange and Ai Weiwei have used their influence to bring attention to injustices, support causes, and galvanise spectators to create social change. The result of creating such work can be staggering, in Lange’s case, the publication of her photograph Migrant Mother (1936) in a national newspaper had such an impact on readers across the country that the federal government sent 20,000 pounds of food to aid the poor that were suffering through the Great Depression in America, in the camp for seasonal agricultural workers that the photograph was taken in. The image of an exhausted and weather-worn mother, sat despondently with an infant in her lap and two children leaning on her shoulders, has become an iconic image of the Great Depression in America.
This sort of reaction to an image seems to be less common nowadays, as anyone with access to visual media cannot help but be confronted with countless images of tragedy and human suffering on a daily basis. This barrage of information has been said to create a more apathetic response from the viewer has been compared to exposure therapy, a process in which a patient is gradually and systematically exposed to the cause of their distress, until they become desensitised to the cause of their anxiety. A delicate balance must be kept for an artist to evoke a strong reaction from the viewer, whilst keeping the distance of an emotionally invested observer and treating the situation with respect. One artist that has towed the line between treating human-rights crises with gentle and thoughtful care and crossing the line into a somewhat distasteful and disrespectful territory is artist and activist Ai Weiwei. Ai sparked controversy in 2016 after he recreated the heartrending photograph of the body of three-year-old Syrian refugee Alan Kurdi, washed up on a Turkish beach after his family’s inflatable boat capsized and he sadly lost his life on September 2, 2015. The image made international headlines and left a horrifyingly immutable effect on those who witnessed it. Four months later Ai restaged the image with himself in the place of Alan Kurdi. The photograph was met with a great deal of reproach from the public, with many viewers taking to social media to express their disappointment and disgust toward the artist, by those believing that Ai was attempting to capitalise on the death of a toddler. The thought process behind recreating this type of image was also confusing to many as Ai made clear in an interview that he believed that the negative reaction had no value, “I think the so-called criticism I have received has no merit, where does this anger come from? They can’t accept this reality? When people try to guard certain topics, it only shows the weakness of their minds and their own moral standings.” (Jacoba Urist, 2017). But one questions what Ai was hoping to achieve, the original image had already profoundly rattled the public, what sort of reaction were we expected to have from a photograph of one of the most powerful and influential men living today substituting himself with a young victim of war and calling it art?
Despite what many regard as a faux pas, Ai has continued to engage with and aid the global refugee crisis, he has wrapped the columns of Berlin’s Konzerthaus with 14,000 salvaged refugee life vests with the help of high-profile celebrities, set up a piano in the muddy field of a refugee camp to allow an aspiring Syrian pianist a brief reprieve from her emotional and physical displacement, has wrapped thermal blankets around his bronze animal heads, meant to recreate the traditional Chinese zodiac to protest the situation of the migrants coming to Europe, closed an exhibition in protest of the Danish law that enables authorities to seize assets of asylum seekers when they enter Denmark, along with his team carefully collected, cleaned and displayed 2,046 items left behind by refugees on their pilgrimage and has recently displayed one of his largest installations; a 70-metre-long inflatable boat with life-size figures of 258 refugees to coincide with the release of his 2017 documentary about the refugee crisis, Human Flow.
Jenny Holzer is a political activist and artist that has used her scepticism toward power to explore anti-authoritarian themes within her art and exploit what she views as misuse of power. While Holzer’s political and sociological stances had always translated well throughout her work, she became much more visibly involved in portraying the psychological effects trauma and violence throughout the 1990’s.
Power dynamics and sexual violence had been important subjects in Holzer’s work for many years, subjects that she had explored within her text-based work, but in her works Lustmord (1993-6) Holzer took a much more literal and raw approach in her portrayal of the devastating consequences of war. The title of Holzer’s series, Lustmord, a German word that translates loosely as rape-murder, encapsulates the artists candid and unfettered response to the barbaric, systematic rape, torture and murder of women during the Bosnian war. While rape had been considered an unfortunate consequence of was in the past, it became clear that the Serbian army were not merely treating the Bosnian women as spoils of war, the coordinated assaults were being used as a weapon of war in a country that valued female purity, the rapes were a calculated attack on the country as a whole.
In Lustmord Holzer uses text to portray the perspectives of the women suffering the attacks, the male perpetrator and due to the public nature of the rapes and murder, the observer. Three examples include:
“With you inside me comes the knowledge of my death.”
“I excite myself so I stay crazy.”
“I want to brush her hair but the smell of her makes me cross the room. I held my breath as long as I could. I know I disappoint her.”
Holzer displays these short but jarring poems in a series of close-up photographs of the text hand-written in ink on skin, LED text boards and in the engravings of bands of silver that adorn the accumulation human bones that lie carefully on a wooden table.
By using such different formats to tell the same harrowing stories Holzer is able to create a fascinating incongruity in the way that the viewer experiences the piece. Reading the poems from the photographs feels much more confrontational, as though you are facing the storyteller directly and that there is no option to look away or misconstrue the texts meaning. The use of hand-written text on skin creates the impression that the words are confessional, the fact that only a small portion of skin is visible adds to the feeling that this is an anonymous cry for help or confession of shame from a real person.
The LED text boards, while conveying the same messages evoke a very different response, the poems glow in a uniform, artificial sequence that would look more fitting as a news bulletin or an advertisement than the words suggest. This way of portraying the text highlights the way that our constant exposure to information displayed like this in the media creates a numbed response to the issues presented. The lights, colour and movement of the installation distract from its meaning, making it the antitheses of the photographs that relied entirely on its message.
Holzer’s most literal piece within Lustmord is her installation composed of human bones that Holzer had purchased from anatomist suppliers in New York, laid out meticulously on a wooden table and adorned with silver rings engraved with the artists poems. An unnerving element of the installation is that the bones used represent the body parts that are generally associated with sensuality and feminine attractiveness; thighs, pelvic area, fingers, shoulders, teeth, ribs and the back. The impression of the installation has been compared to a coroners table, with the silver bangles substituting identification tags, but it could also be considered a shrine to honour the women that suffered unimaginable loses due to abhorrent misuses of authority. This piece also casts a dramatic contrast when compared to the other elements in Lustmord, while Holzer’s photographic contribution to Lustmord is profoundly engaging and her LED text boxes encapsulate modern medias effect on tragedy, Holzer’s table of bones forces the viewer to face not only the results of the mistreatment of others, but their own mortality and the simple truth that had circumstances been different it could have been their bones on that table and their story summarised on a ring of metal circling their bones.
Despite Holzer inserting herself into the place of the victim, rapist/murderer and spectator to these crimes, using only the information that she garnered through reading, news articles, eye witness reports and UN and Amnesty International reports and her own imagination for frame of reference, Holzer’s work resonates a strong sense of empathy with whomever she is portraying, the use of text as the primary source of storytelling no doubt creates a sense of distance that allows the viewer a sense of safety and objectivity that could explain Holzer’s positive reception to subjects of a delicate nature.
Art with a social cause is an incredibly tricky subject, especially now that the internet allows anyone the information required to potentially dissect and debunk an artist, should they make any sort of miscalculation within their work, however there may be some merit to the old proverb, “there’s no such thing as bad publicity” as any attention that goes to the issue that the artist is trying to support was the original intention, regardless of the method used to generate the attention. The fields of art and political activism are more similar than they are different, they share the intention of engaging the public and prompting them to broaden their perspectives and are constantly pushing boundaries in an effort to evolve and create something that matters. Artist can and will continue to portray crises within their own aesthetic sensibilities and use their individual platforms to bring awareness and different perspectives on tragic events, ideally without sensationalizing or normalizing the crisis. While critics and viewers don’t always respond warmly to works about human rights, the use of art as a means of communicating more serious issues that people may otherwise shy away from, in a way that is more palatable and invites thoughtful introspection is an entirely valid and astute form of activism.