-1A DARK ART FOR A DARK TIME?

JOHN A. WALKER (COPYRIGHT 2009)

'If works of art are to survive in the context of extremity and darkness which is

social reality, and if they are to avoid being sold as mere comfort, they have to

assimilate themselves to that reality. Radical art is the same as dark art.' (T. W.

Adorno, Aesthetic Theory).

The representation of suffering

Recently [1985], I visited an exhibition held in a local church publicizing the work

of Amnesty International. It consisted of printed texts, photographs and paintings

concerning political prisoners and torture. The texts describing torture were the

most disturbing and upsetting; the photographs were less powerful and, least

disturbing of all, were the paintings. This exhibition set me wondering what the role

and value of artworks was in relation to such an issue. Is it possible for art to depict

horrendous experiences of war and torture convincingly, as powerfully as written

descriptions and photographs? Assuming that it is possible, is this a worthy social

function for art?

At first sight the idea of combining aesthetic pleasure with scenes of death and

torture seems obscene and contradictory. And yet, depictions of Christ dying in

agony on the cross have been central to Western European art for centuries; they

have been objects of worship. We also know from the existence of sadism and

masochism that pleasure and pain are not mutually exclusive entities in human
experience. However, is the effect of such art to aestheticize human suffering and

thus make it slightly more tolerable? Can a work of art depict suffering in such a

way that its reality is communicated to the viewer? But if this can be done, would

not the compassionate viewer turn away in horror and disgust as they might from

witnessing the real event? And if a work of art produces a sense of disgust, will not

this negate its very existence as a work of art?

If one examines the writings of the Frankfurt School philosophers - in particular

Adorno and Marcuse - on the question of art and suffering one finds that the

autonomy of art is often stressed. (I would rather say relative autonomy because if a

work of art is completely autonomous then, presumably, it stands outside society

altogether). For example, Adorno writes: 'the image of suffering remains

fundamentally uninvolved in suffering ... the autonomy of art tends to diminish the

scope of suffering' (Aesthetic Theory). Marcuse makes a rather different point: 'a

representation of the most extreme suffering still contains the potential to wring out

enjoyment ... Art cannot represent suffering without subjecting it to aesthetic form,

and thereby to mitigating catharsis, to enjoyment. Art is inexorably infested with

this guilt.' (The Aesthetic Dimension).

So, it would seem the relative autonomy of art necessarily imposes a distance

from reality: an image of torture is not the same as actual torture. This

distance/difference has advantages and disadvantages: on the one hand it may

encourage indifference or voyeurism, while on the other hand it may permit critical

reflection upon events which would otherwise be unbearable to contemplate. High

illusion representations - such as horror movies strive to close the gap between
representations and their referents. When a horror film succeeds in this aim, the

audience can no longer bear to look at the screen. Modern art generally eschews

illusionism preferring instead to foreground its materials and methods of

production and its artifice. Modern representations of pain are, therefore, often

highly stylized. Picasso's 1937 Woman Weeping is a case in point. This painting, it

seems to me, will not cause any viewer to cry in sympathy with the depicted

character. The angular shapes and distortions of the woman's face certainly signify

unhappiness but the viewer's emotions are not stirred and manipulated as they are

by a Hollywood weepie. Stylization is a way of keeping a distance between actual

human pain and its pictorial depiction. In the case of Picasso this seems a healthy,

positive achievement, whereas in the case of Roy Lichtenstein's war comic images it

seems cold and inhuman.

Frankfurt School philosophers have pointed to the affirmative function which

art can play in modern society a compensation for the stress and banalities of

everyday life, art as comfort and consolation. Matisse's refusal to deal with the dark

side of human experience, his conception of the artwork as a soothing armchair

after a day's work exemplifies this attitude. (Though T.J. Clark's Open University

video on Matisse argues that there are tensions and conflicts underlying many of

Matisse's paintings.) However marvellous, an oeuvre of beauty and harmony is a

one-sided account of human experience. As Adorno once put it: 'dissonance is the

truth about harmony'. In contrast, Francis Bacon's work suffers from the opposite

fault. And there is something disturbing about the success of his work: why do

wealthy people want as wall decoration suave, elegant, gold-framed images of blood
and pain, one wonders?

However, in spite of their recognition that art elicits enjoyment from suffering,

the Frankfurt School were not in favour of artists avoiding such subject matter.

Indeed, Adorno has remarked: 'it would be better for art to vanish altogether than

to forget suffering ... suffering is the humane content of art'. (Aesthetic Theory). And

Marcuse has commented that while the horror portrayed in Goya's etchings of war

'remains horror', it is also eternalized as 'the horror of horror'. (Eros and

Civilization).

So, horror and suffering are made visible and preserved in works of art. In this

way they are memorialized and, for as long as the works exist, they testify to the

brutality of the human species. A case in point are the drawings and paintings

done by the Japanese survivors of Hiroshima. Art is not usually thought of an

effective source of knowledge about the world: today we tend to rely upon the

news media and scientific and social studies. And yet, in this instance, art supplies

a unique kind. of knowledge: the value of these works - over 2,000 done by non-

professionals long after the event - is that not only do they provide objective

information about the effects of atomic bombs, they also supply a subjective

account of those events as lived experience. Photographic records are too

detached and clinical to capture these feelings. (See Guy Brett's account in Art

Monthly (88) July-August, 1985).

Representing modern war: Picasso's Guernica

Guernica is perhaps the most famous depiction of war in the modern era. It is a
twentieth century history painting prompted by a fascist air attack on an

undefended Spanish town. Max Raphael, in his book The Demands of Art,

discusses the discord of form and content in Guernica but his essay begins with

some more general reflections on the problems of modern history painting:

'The objective style of historical painting that served as a vehicle for ideas

had become inadequate because new powers had arisen to dominate both society

and the individual - capitalism and technology. Technology put to capitalist uses

led to a new alienation of man from himself and from his group, an alienation

that could not be overcome but only camouflaged by hollow concepts of nation,

freedom, equality, etc ... Behind all these masks a transformation took place in

the ultimate resource of politics: warfare. In modern wars man no longer

confronts his fellow man but, rather, the abstract powers of money and the

machine, powers which serve his progress only for a time, the better to destroy

him in the end. No representational style is adequate, perhaps, to portray these

new powers which have degraded mankind to mere material and have elevated

bombs to the metaphysical status of a new omnipotent devil; at all events, no such

style has as yet been invented' .

Despite his respect for Picasso's imagination and creative powers, Raphael

judges Guernica a failure. However, his analysis is an internal one. What he does

not consider is the role the mural-scale picture played in publicizing the

destruction of Guernica, the fact that it was exhibited in various European cities

and in the USA where it served as a rallying point, a focus for anti-Franco

campaigns. In this way it helped to raise money and support for the Government
cause. This suggests that a work of art's social and political value cannot be

estimated in purely aesthetic terms. Nevertheless, the problems of representing

war and suffering remain.

Representing nuclear war

The advent of atomic and hydrogen weapons poses unprecedented problems of

representation for artists: the sheer scale of destruction and pain a nuclear war

would produce staggers the imagination. Recently, fictionalized accounts in the

form of documentary-style TV programmes have attempted, with mixed success, to

depict nuclear war and its aftermath. Peter Watkins' film The War Game (1965)

banned from TV for so long, was a notable pioneering venture in this genre. And

because it was virtually an 'underground' film shown in public places with

discussion following the viewings, it was probably more effective in terms of

persuading people to oppose nuclear weapons.

When we turn to two-dimensional representations, the mushroom cloud of an

atomic explosion is probably the commonest image. Even Andy Warhol has

employed it in a silk-screened, red-black repeated image. As the image is repeated

across the canvas it becomes progressively darker and darker. Thus it depicts the

elimination of light and life from the planet Earth. Guy Brett has rightly criticized

this representation for its fatalism and political immobility. One could also add that

most mushroom cloud images imply an external vantage point, that is, the

viewpoint of a distant observer who may indeed be the pilot who dropped the
bomb!

Aesthetic pleasure is not absent from such representations for, as Peter

Kennard points out in his Photo-montage video, posters of mushroom clouds are

sold in print shops as bedsit decor. Like skulls and skeletons as emblems of death,

the mushroom cloud is a visual cliché. Its potential for communicating the reality

of the nuclear holocaust has, in my view, been exhausted. Artists who continue to

use such symbols argue that they constitute a language familiar to the public and

that this facilitates communication. This argument carries some weight -

communication is vital - but there comes a time when no one attends to tired

rhetoric.

For apocalyptic visions of the last moments of mankind one has to turn,

paradoxically, to pre-atomic age images such as John Martin's The Deluge (1834)

or The Great Day of his Wrath (1852). It is only in such extravagant confections that

the catastrophic release of energy associated with nuclear explosions is anticipated.

These paintings once seemed absurd fantasies; today, they appear increasingly

plausible.

In his Open University TV programme on Jackson Pollock's One Serge

Guilbaut argues that this drip painting is a representation of the atomic

disintegration of matter. To see Pollock's work in this new way certainly alters

one's view of its significance and meaning. Yet there is no directive towards

political protest in such paintings.

Another instance of the link between beauty and war are the decorative

embellishments found upon swords and armour. Our ancestors, it would seem,
 thought nothing odd about beautifying their implements of killing. And, of course,

one should not overlook the aesthetic appeal of military uniforms, badges, flags,

close-order marching, public parades of weapons, etc. Such military spectacles

were carried to their ultimate conclusion in the Nazi party rallies at Nuremberg

during the 1930s. (The phenomenon of 'mass ornament' was analysed by Siegfried

Kracauer in an essay of 1927 ).

Modern military weapons are not usually ornamented. This is because they

obey the modernistic engineering dictum 'form follows function'. Even so, beauty is

not incompatible with such weapons, as the caption to a photograph of a nuclear

submarine in John Heskett's book Industrial Design indicates: 'The organic form of

the nuclear powered USS Ray is the manifestation of a functional harmony with its

natural element that contrasts strongly with its destructive capacity'.

Heskett's book discusses some weapons of war but most texts on the history of

design do not. There is a need for design historians to make a contribution.

Consumer goods, such as typewriters and automobiles, have been studied by them

ad nauseam. It is time they paid some attention to the design of weapons of war,

systems of surveillance, riot control, instruments of torture, and so forth. All these

items are designed by somebody even if they are not 'name' designers. Design

historians generally ignore such disturbing topics; they prefer to concentrate on

safe, homely subjects.

Art as protest and resistance

In the writings of the Frankfurt School, art's relationship to radical political praxis
is a constant problem. Adorno saw modern art's social value precisely in its

independence, its refusal to perform utilitarian tasks, in its very uselessness. For

Adorno, making authentic art was in itself a practice of resistance and protest

irrespective of political content and political intervention. The problem for me, with

this formulation, is that it seems to imply that art cannot contribute positively to

political struggles. Perhaps one can call the pursuit of art without political

intervention a form of passive resistance, and an art with political intervention

active resistance.

Let us take a swift glance backwards. For most of history artists have been

dependent upon the rich and the powerful for patronage. It is hardly surprising

therefore that artists have, until recently, glorified and celebrated the rich and the

powerful. And this celebration included their countless wars of conquest and

subjection. Since the advent of the modern era, artists have enjoyed greater

independence. They can now decide to align themselves with the exploited rather

than with the exploiters, with the victims or war rather than with the victors. They

can even decide to criticize militarism - as George Grosz and Terry Atkinson do -

rather than to glorify it. British official war artists no longer find it possible to

glorify warfare and to identify wholeheartedly with their country's forces, hence the

studied neutrality and matter-of-factness of Linda Kitson's drawings of the

Falklands conflict.

Today, humankind at last faces the possibility of a war to end all wars. A war

which will mean the end of the human species including, one is gratified to note, the

rulers, the warmongers themselves. In this unprecedented situation artistic

indifference becomes suicidal because the continued existence of art itself is in

question. And if art cannot even contribute to its own self-preservation then it

hardly deserves to survive. But, regretfully, I have to report that in Britain meetings

of groups like 'Artists Support Peace' attracted a tiny response and no major 'name'

artist appeared to lend a hand.

Some tribute ought to be paid here, however, to Peter Kennard who has

contributed many memorable photomontages to the anti-nuclear campaign, to the

demonstrators of the Greenham Common Women, and to Brian Barnes for his

South London mural Nuclear Dawn.

At this point I would like to return to the issue of aesthetic pleasure. No one is

likely to pay attention to a message or information unless it is presented in such a

way

as to give pleasure to the viewer. This suggests that the aesthetic pleasure

associated with art can be used as a positive factor. I will cite two examples from

the realm of Pop music: in Laurie Anderson's multi-media performance United

States there is a section on the minutemen missiles hidden in grain silos in the mid-

West, the breadbasket of America. By the poetic use of language, music and

images Anderson makes this somewhat dry information vivid and memorable. In

Frankie goes to Hollywood's Two Tribes song/video (by Godley and Creme) the

conflict between East and West is humorously dramatized in terms of a no-holds

cockfight between the aged leaders of the USA and the USSR. Of course, it is

difficult to estimate what effect such records and videos have - whether they reach

the already converted, whether they are consumed merely as entertainment. But
equally we should not assume they have no persuasive effectivity.

Conclusion: the discipline of art history

A continuing weakness of British art history is its ignorance of the history of the

discipline itself, the achievements of its European founders. If one considers the

intellectual project of an art historian like Aby Warburg for example, what is

extraordinary compared to most present day conceptions, is its remarkable

ambition. For example, he once observed: 'Sometimes it seems to me as if, in my

role as psycho-historian, I tried to diagnose the schizophrenia of Western

civilization from its images.' (E. Gombrich's Aby Warburg). Warburg conceived of

his atlas of images - a late visual display called Memory - and his library and

research institute (now part of London University) as 'a receiving station that

registers the give and take between past and present … that can thus assist us in

containing the chaos of unreason by means of a filter system of retrospective

reflections'. Hence, a kind of cultural early-warning system.

I should explain that Warburg was fascinated by the pathos formula in art,

that is, the ways in which powerful expressions of emotion are represented. And

civilization, according to Warburg, depended upon a gap being established

between impulse and action. The gap allowed time for reflection in which we could

bring our primitive impulses to kill or rape under control. Interestingly, Warburg

was worried by the inventions of telephone and telegrams because they threatened

to destroy the distance upon which civilization relied. And now we live in an age of
computers with almost instant reaction times. In the command centres of the USA

and the USSR, military decision are based upon computer information, computer

representations of what is happening outside. The closure of distance feared by

Warburg has become a reality. If the computers detect a missile attack, is there

now time to check that an attack is actually taking place, or does the response

have to be immediate? The irony of nuclear war is that the human species will

probably be exterminated not by an act of aggression but by computer error.

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Books cited:

T. W. Adorno, Aesthetic Theory (London: Routledge, 1984).

H. Marcuse The Aesthetic Dimension (London: Macmillan, 1979).

H. Marcuse Eros and Civilization (London: Sphere Books, 1969).

M. Raphael The Demands of Art (London: Routledge, 1968).

E. Gombrich, Aby Warburg (London: Warburg Institute, 1970).

J. Heskett, Industrial Design (London: Thames & Hudson, 1980).

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This article is a revised version of a talk given at the AIR Gallery in London in

November 1985 at a seminar organised by HAND (Historians of Art for Nuclear

Disarmament). The article was first published in the art magazine Aspects, (32)

Spring 1986.

John A. Walker is a painter and art historian.