FRANCES  NEWMAN - A WORLD AT  WAR

War, Art, Artists and Society

Mike Gonzalez
Continued from previous page

This war is neither moral crusade nor pre-emptive attack against terror. It is terrorism – it is one face of a many-headed hydra, a combination of economic, political and military power; “A world at war”.

Can the art work offer a refuge to those who flee from bombing and occupation ? The truth must be that art cannot provide a place of safety – but it can help to generate the emotions that will draw us together to build such a place. The general laws that the warmongers hide behind conceal particular histories, real names, lived stories. Private rage can be shared through a common response to a single image or a moment of collective understanding.

Those whose olive groves and orange trees are torn out of the ground to be replaced by military highways and high security fences will fight back with whatever weapons they have – and under whatever banners can best express their rage and their resistance, whether the Palestinian scarf or the red bandannas of Mexico’s Zapatistas.

The enemy is everywhere – but increasingly so is the
movement that rejects the violence of the powerful and knows full well that a better world is possible.

Art can be a weapon of resistance. In a sense, the facts – the statistics, the documents, the truths they can no longer conceal from us – have an enormous power to drive change forward. But what makes resisters of us is a process through which we make those facts our own, turn them from objective certainties into emotional truths that can compel us to act.

Picasso’s Guernica is not a representation of the bombing of a small Basque town in 1937 but a response to that cynical act of political vandalism. It is a cry of protest and an expression of solidarity with those who are in pain. Goya’s extraordinary, disturbing ‘Disasters of War’ expose that moment when all humanity is lost as human beings become agents of a violent force outside themselves. This is the violence of the oppressor, though the oppressed may sometimes be recruited to be its instruments.

A child crouches behind his father’s protective hand. The bullets of an occupying power do not acknowledge their love, their shared fear, their solidarity with others beyond the frame who are – like themselves – trying to shield the people they care for from the blind ruthlessness of an advancing tank. But across the breakfast table, we too are within their world and we too are embraced in their appeal for solidarity and support.

Here art and politics meet. The brute fact and the lived, emotional response. This is the most effective and the most moving art of war.

In different ways, each of the works in this exhibition calls on us to respond – unashamedly, personally, with our understanding and our pain. We are, after all, bounded by the same horizons, threatened by the same system. And we are, after all, joined by the conviction that this world of war and violence is their world not ours. The point now is to change it.

Mike Gonzalez Columnist for Socialist Review
(monthly magazine of the Socialist Workers Party)

‘It was an outrage, an obscenity. The severed hand on the metal door, the swamp of blood and mud across the road, the human brains inside a garage, the incinerated, skeletal remains of an Iraqi mother and her three children in their still smouldering car.

Two missiles from an American jet had killed them all - by my estimate, more than 20 Iraqi civilians, torn to pieces before they could be ‘liberated’ by the nation that destroyed their lives.

Who dares, I ask myself, to call this ‘collateral damage’? Abu Taleb street was packed with pedestrians and motorists when the American pilot approached through the dense sandstorm that covered northern Baghdad in a cloak of red and yellow dust yesterday morning.

It is a dirt poor neighbourhood, of mostly Shia Muslims, the same people whom Messrs Bush and Blair still fondly hope will rise up against President Saddam Hussein...”

Robert Fisk writing in the Independent Newspaper 27 March 2003

 ‘Freedom from Tyranny II’ Installation; child’s hospital cot, drip set & stand, engine oil and oil on board 2003.

 ‘Freedom from Tyranny I’ Oil on board 45 x 123cm 2003.

  ‘Seeds for the Planting Must Not Be Ground I’

4 x 61cm 2003.  Sienna wash and text on pape

Above: ‘Raven on the Road to War’ Oil on canvas 102 x 87cm 2001.

Below: ‘I Saw It’ (detail) Oil on canvas 91 x 80cm 2001.

For further information please contact us on +44 (0)207 359 2019

Next page

Catalogues available £5 plus P&P

email art@millineryworks.co.uk

back to Home page

Return to Forthcoming Exhibitions