Can Art Save the World?
Exceptional art raarely speaks a one-note message, but rather provokes and compels us to think. Historically art plays a part in speaking the unspeakable, opting for change over status quo, protest over assimilation, vision over blinders. And it is still possible to create an art that incites this type of curiosity in viewers. Artists investigating our apocalyptic choices – Nigel Cook, Angela Durfresne, and zerodegrees’ Samantha Fields for starters - through imagery about environmental catastrophe. And many artists continue to interrogate issues about the body, sexuality, rights, and prejudices including recent exhibitions by Hunter Reynolds and Andrea Bowers. This spring will see a handful of exhibitions by and about feminist artists in tandem with MoCA’s exhibition, WACK: Art and the Feminist Revolution. But beyond the intention of an artist to engage specific issues lies the uncanny ability of an image, moving or still, to communicate what words cannot. And herein lies the capability of art to intercept the engrained and numbing thought trails in individual viewers and thus, potentially, in their community.
In the last month of 2006, I had the opportunity to hear a woman from South Africa speak about an art piece she made together with others from her small village in South Africa. The Keiskamma Altarpiece, on display at UCLA through February 2007, was designed and sewn over the course of a year by some one hundred women. To read about it, to see it even, is to consider it in context of a different art world, apart from international biennials and auction houses. And yet this incredible, collaborative piece represents a variety of interpretations of the current HIV/AIDS epidemic. Economics and social barriers set this piece apart from what we know of as the art world, but wouldn’t it be amazing if artists interrogated that that very separation? What would that art – or that art world - look like?
Given the recent spate of disastrous events worldwide in comparison to the lavish eccentricities of the art market, it is easy to posit the question of world-saving in the most traditional terms – to complain that art is too pretty or costly or exclusive and beg a return to the poignant if obtuse message of, say, Dadaism or, more dishearteningly, to crystal clear but creatively deadening overtly political art. To criticize the rise of international art fairs and biennials galore is to miss the opportunity of this phenomenon. For one thing, even the most banal art-fair staple is still going to alter the thinking of the average American. More art is a good thing. But what will we do with it? Where will we go from here?
There are already rumblings of a shift in the market and increased attention to nonprofits and grants as a source of funding. But how much more viable if both were true - a thriving art market and a slew of grants – and why not? What would an international art scene that embraced the magnificent variety of artists worldwide and simultaneously engaged a Western vision and booming market look like? Maybe it’s naïve, idealistic, missing the point - we export McDonalds and import stuff made for almost nothing by people who need a job so they do it anyway - how can we possibly include all this in the art world as we know it? But that’s the beauty or art after all, to imagine the impossible into existence. And maybe, in the process, provoke us to take action to alter the course of catastrophe and promote peace.
Annie Buckley is an artist and writer living in Los Angeles, CA
(Copyright Annie Buckley, January 2007)
Click Images To Enlarge
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Hunter Reynolds, Patina Du Prey's Memorial Dress, 1993-2006
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The Keiskamma Altarpiece, artists from Hamburg, South Africa, 2006
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Samantha Fields, "Curtain", acrylic on canvas, 2006
