Iraq Inspires Surge of Protest Art

[babylonsister]

Iraq Inspires Surge of Protest Art
Young painters and sculptors join the Vietnam generation to produce works following in the footsteps of Goya and Picasso
by Peter Beaumont

It has inspired films, songs and writing. Now the war in Iraq is inspiring fine artists in numbers, perhaps, unprecedented in any war in history.In studios from London to San Francisco, artists are struggling to interpret images of the world’s most highly publicized war, in sculpture and canvasses, photographs and collages. And although artists responded slowly at first, the past 18 months has seen an explosion of art criticizing the conflict.

Last year one of the centerpieces of the Whitney Museum of American Arts Biennial in New York was a recreation of Mark di Suvero’s 1966 Peace Tower — a commentary on the Vietnam war — which invited a new generation of artists to contribute panels.



In November, the huge cycle of paintings inspired by the torture scandal at Iraq’s Abu Ghraib prison, by the Colombian figurative painter Fernando Botero, will be seen together for the first time at the American University Museum in Washington. It is one of a number of recent works dealing with Abu Ghraib, including a series of giant photographic reconstructions by the controversial West Coast artist Clinton Fein.

It is a sudden flowering of powerful protest art that has brought together artists of an older generation who can remember Vietnam, and a younger generation that on the whole has shied away from overtly political art. It is not just di Suvero who provides a link. The American collagist Martha Rosler has reimagined the work that she produced in the Sixties addressing the impact of the war on the home front, while Gerhard Richter, one of Germany’s most important living artists, has also tackled the war in a book of collages entitled War Cut

But it is, perhaps, Botero’s paintings, reminiscent in some respects of Francisco de Goya’s Disasters of War, that is likely to be the most visible of the works emerging in opposition to the Iraq war.

‘It is a testimony,’ Botero said. ‘I became obsessed with the paintings, spending 11 months doing nothing but work on them. When the first images emerged of Abu Ghraib I was so shocked that a country that presents itself as the model of human rights could do this. It is like a permanent accusation. In that respect art is both weak and strong.’

more...

http://www.commondreams.org/archive/2007/09/09/3724/

[urgk]

1. I thought I'd get in on the action.

Here's my own protest art:

[babylonsister]

2. I like! Thanks for sharing, and a belated welcome to DU! nt

[urgk]

3. Thanks.

For the welcome. And for the appreciation of my condensed history lesson :)