During a roundtable discussion in Seoul last week, the artist Ernest A. Bryant III was invited to respond to a question from the audience that has become increasingly familiar in recent years: namely, what should artists do in an historical moment so saturated with horror as to make everyone feel helpless? His reply was refreshingly blunt: “Artists should make art.”
Like Bryant’s own work, the statement is subtly complex, considered in its political commitments, and switches the dynamic between observer and observed, artist and audience. To agonize about whether it is now ethically responsible to make art begs the question, after all, of during which historical period it was ethically responsible to make art. A decade ago? In the wake of Auschwitz, or during the colonization of the Congo? Perhaps in the medieval period, or the Neolithic? Besides which, who sets the threshold of horror beyond which art cannot be made? Is the everyday subjugation of women and minority communities enough violence? Is the unhoused person at the entrance to the subway enough injustice?
To assert that art has always been made in the context of barbarism is not to relieve the artist of the responsibility to look at what is happening in Palestine, in Sudan, in Washington D.C., at the end of their own street. But it does challenge the implication that the making of art is a luxury that can only responsibly be indulged when all the problems of the world have been righted. Any presumption otherwise is itself an indicator of privilege, predicated on the idea that art might be insulated from the injustice that structures the societies in which we live. In a world that is always imperfect, the decision is straightforward: it is either ethically responsible to make art, always and everywhere, or it is not.
What’s more, as a forthcoming piece by Oliver Basciano on the work of Dana Awartani points out, the suppression of culture is a key strategy in any reactionary program. This principle is enforced at every level: from the targeted destruction of historical sites in the prosecution of a genocide, through to the more insidious erasure of indigenous cultures and, as is now apparent in western societies, the undisguised intention of authoritarian governments to defund the cultural sector or to transform it into a propaganda machine. To stop making art risks succumbing to the same forces that succeed through the production of despair.
As this month’s program demonstrates, artists have continued to work through every imaginable circumstance, and their work might help us to better understand situations that might seem, but are not, unprecedented. Kaelen Wilson-Goldie reviews a show tracing the development of Iraqi art from the country’s liberation a century ago through the traumas of recent decades. A profile by Jacob Korczynski of Banu Cennetoğlu demonstrates how attention to the aesthetics of our politics might illuminate the particular horrors that they authorize, while Ladi’Sasha Jones reflects on how Mavis Pusey transmuted the social issues she observed in her own neighborhood into abstractions that are no less politically committed for being non-representational.
In her appraisal of an exhibition of women artists and activists working through the social upheavals of industrialized modernity, Mary Walling Blackburn makes the case for art as a tool of resistance and reform. These are reminders that artists will always continue to make art, because that is their prerogative, regardless of the conclusions formed in the course of roundtable discussions or, for that matter, in magazine editorials.
