To be sure, much of the Trump administration's actions call forth angry commentary. But this is not art. This is not sublimating tragedy into monuments and testimonies to the memory of the people lost or harmed. It is mere reaction, however understandable. It does not go any deeper than the propaganda it is trying to defeat. It does not dig beneath the official bluster, but echoes it. And the war in Yemen, for its part, has called forth almost no response in our public sphere of any kind -- not even much commentary and outrage. It has sparked no real interest among Americans, even among writers and readers -- even as our government is actively abetting a war that is dismantling an ancient society and creating yet another crisis of death and displacement.
The rise of 1930s fascism was met with the photo-montages of John Heartfield. The Spanish Civil War brought forth immortal artistic testaments from Picasso, Siqueiros, Motherwell (however delayed in the last case). Where is our Heartfield? Where is our Guernica?
With all that has happened of human pain and injustice at the U.S. border -- with all the children taken from their parents and all the people who have died of thirst and hunger and exhaustion in the Arizona desert because our government offers no safer path to life in the United States -- why, after all that has befallen us, is it still Goya's "No llegan a tiempo," from his Disasters of War, that seems the most apt and timeless depiction of this reality -- the woman's deceased body held by her relatives as if she were just taken down from a cross -- a reverse-pietà -- with Goya's haunting, gut-wrenching caption: "They didn't come in time" -- and the poem of Harold Pinter coming to mind:
Did you bury the body
Did you leave it abandoned
Did you kiss the dead body
Former atrocities of the U.S. government have been documented and decried. Picasso's "Massacre in Korea," about the U.S. involvement in the Korean war... Penderecki's "Threnody for the Victims of Hiroshima." Where is the painting of the massacre in Sana'a? Where is the threnody for the victims of white phosphorus?
Many of those earlier works just named were of course made by people ideologically committed to -- or living under the sphere of influence of -- a global superpower that had committed its own unspeakable atrocities. The Polish government that could tolerate the production in 1960 of a "Threnody to the Victims of Hiroshima" was a satellite of a Soviet government that had just developed its own hydrogen bombs, capable of destroying thousands of their own Hiroshimas. Picasso denounced U.S. killings of civilians in Korea, but he had little to paint about Soviet show trials and liquidations.
There was thus an element in much of the great political art of the twentieth century of what Arthur Koestler described as compensatory indignation. There was a kind of psychological relief to be found in denouncing American crimes, or the crimes of the Western European powers, if it allowed one to displace one's moral discomfort over the crimes that one's own favored cause -- international Communism -- was committing in the world. It formed a sort of safety valve for rage at atrocities and evils that one also detected in oneself, one's "side," one's party.
Today there is no compensatory indignation. There is no worker's state we want to pretend to defend. We are going to have to summon our indignation solely through a genuine feeling of revulsion -- through a true wish that the world might not be like this. The suffering of the innocent itself is going to have to call from us some kind of artistic response.
I've tried to fill the void myself. The problem is, I have no talent.
Inspired in 2016 by an artist's updating of Guernica to reflect the horrors of the Syrian war, I thought -- after the "Muslim Ban" was announced in 2017 -- that I might similarly update Otto Dix's "Seven Deadly Sins." Later on, I tried my hand at a drawing of the four horsemen in Yemen -- depicting Trump, the Saudi monarchy, Omar Bashir, and death itself (the noble "multinational coalition"), riding horses of pestilence and famine -- bringing with them, that is, the four warning signs of the apocalypse: War, Death, Pestilence, and Famine (the illustration of one of which I shamelessly lifted from Fuseli) -- all of which have come to Yemen -- more than that, have been brought in part by our own government, under both Obama and Trump.
But whatever I drew could only be cartoonish. It couldn't capture within it the real disgust and horror I felt, and which these events in human history ought to summon forth. "I wish I was a Goya," writes the character Miranda in John Fowles' The Collector. "Could draw the absolute hate I have in me[.]" This is what I too was wishing.
Another character in The Collector also -- later on -- gave me reason to hope. An intolerably pretentious artist type, he offers nonetheless an artistic theory that appealed to me greatly (seeming to justify my own obvious lack of capacity). According to him, technical skill is irrelevant. He denounces what he calls the "good-at" approach to art. The important thing is not simply being "good at" making something -- it is not "deftness and a flair and good taste and what-not." Rather, art is characterized by the honest expression of individuality -- through whatever medium it may come: "[I]f your desire is to go to the furthest limits of yourself then the actual form your art takes doesn't seem important to you. Whether you use words or paint or sounds."
I had individual ideas that I knew I wanted to express. On these rare occasions, they happened to be visual ideas. If it turned out that this was needed to make art, I was in great luck. It was after reading Fowles' novel, therefore, that I set out to carve my versions of the Ernst Barlach Refugee statue. Never in my life had I carved anything before. But I thought -- the "good-at" school be damned. I shall express my self, if that's what is demanded -- in this case through basswood and dove soap.
But the pretentious artist's theory has its limits. It cannot thrive in the total absence of technical skill. It implies some at least basic dexterity in an artistic medium. Individuality needs to find expression through a form external to itself -- something rigid that is imposed upon it -- if it is going to be sublimated, rather than simply vomited forth. It has been observed before that it is precisely this dialectical interplay between freedom and form that makes for all art -- and that too much of freedom on its own destroys it. Postmodern video artist Matthew Barney -- in Calvin Tomkins' telling -- chose Houdini in chains, for this reason, as his symbol of the artist -- wrestling with the limitations imposed by form, but capable of wriggling free of them in places. Houdini was, to Barney, "the Character of Positive Restraint," writes Tomkins -- "the personification of self-discipline as a catalyst to creativity." (Whether postmodern video artists took the road of too much freedom, ultimately, and whether tighter chains than Houdini's might not have been salutary, is for the viewer of this genre -- which does not include me -- to decide.)
John Berger, in his book on Picasso, similarly suggests that the worst temptations of modern art stem from its relative freedom from constraints. The premodern artist often worked for a patron, and was told what subjects to paint. By contrast: "[w]hen a culture is in a state of disintegration or transition," writes Berger, "the freedom of the artist increases -- but the question of subject matter becomes problematic for him: he, himself, has to choose for society."
Since the skilled artist needs, in some sense, to be told what to do, therefore-- and since I am not a skilled artist -- perhaps I should do the telling. I shall, today, "choose for society."
Hear me, artists, if you are there, this is the subject your society demands. This is the "positive restraint" we lay upon you. We need your help. We need your creation. We do not need more arguments. There is nothing clever that can be said in argument against kidnapping children from their parents at the border; against selling chemical weapons to war criminals. We do not need commentaries on these subjects. We need works that condemn, enrage, ignite, console -- and forgive. We need reckoning. We need redemption. We need art. We need, in short, political art for our time.
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