Amnesty International (1961 ~ )

Prisoner Of Conscience, 1977 (US)
Poster by Joan Miró to mark the Amnesty year.

Over at The Guardian you can find this slide show of posters designed for Amnesty International for its various campaigns over the past half century. The slide show is part of a series the paper is running called Amnesty at 50. Conveniently enough, this collection of political graphics also gives me the chance to renew my campaign in defense of Joan Miró.

Yet Another Follow-Up on "Today, we are all Joan Miró" - On Art & Politics

"If people are willing, in extreme situations, to shed their own blood for freedom,
they have a greater chance of actually gaining that freedom than if they are not
willing to do so . . . But I would immediately add another important thing: such
decisions cannot be made for others. If you wish to sacrifice your life for our
common freedom, you may. If I wish to sacrifice my life, I may. But neither of
us have any right to compel anyone else to do it, or not to ask him and simply
sacrifice his life." ~ Václav Havel (1986)

In The Guardian today you can find this longish, sympathetic primer for the Miró exhibition opening soon at The Tate Modern. This gives me an opportunity to follow up on two earlier posts - here and here - that I wrote a short while back in reply to a column by Jonathan Jones, also in The Guardian. Jones admonishes Miró (and by extension everyone who voices political criticisms without setting off for the front) for lacking the courage of his political convictions. I thought his complaints were - politely - wholly unfair. I still do. I will resist the temptation to explain once again why that is so. But the article today gives me the opportunity to invoke this remark from Havel as yet another follow-up. Moralism of the sort Jones purveys is facile and politically dangerous.

Follow-Up on "Today, we are all Joan Miró" - On Art & Politics

Joan Miró. Plate 4 from the Black and Red Series, 1938.
Image © 1998 Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York/ADAGP, Paris.

A couple of days ago I posted some thoughts on this column at The Guardian by Jonathan Jones. In the piece Jones castigates "us" as being like Joan Miró who responded to the Spanish Civil War from afar rather than like George Orwell who went off to fight with the Republicans. Here are some more questions. Does art have to be activist to be political? The two are not the same, after all. Is "activist" even the best strategy? What would Jones make of the long series of paintings Robert Motherwell made over the course of decades, all entitled "Elegies for the Spanish Republic"?

Robert Motherwell. Elegy for the Spanish Republic, #126 (1965-75).

Or what about another visual cut at fascism - Leon Golub's series of canvases on torture and interrogation? Are we even in a position to know - even post- Abu Ghraib - about, let alone intervene in, such practices? At least one can ask if we know enough detail to intervene in practices like those Golub depicts that we generally suspect are occurring.

Leon Golub. Interrogation II, (1980-81).

More to the point, should we be criticizing artists like Golub, Motherwell, and Miró - holding them up for thinly disguised scorn - because they are not Orwell? After all, they "just" or "only" used their art to depict horrors and consequences. They didn't take up arms. And so ...?

And, of course, in an era where one's adversaries are likely enough to be mercenaries (ex-military paid, say, by Blackwater or its corporate offspring) or child soldiers (who are basically trained sociopaths) would taking up arms be anything other than more or less certain and largely pointless suicide? Jones would surely flinch at shooting down a twelve year old, even if the child were armed. And in that instant the boy would have shot Jones - to say nothing of you or I - for his trouble. The mercenary would've killed Jones before he had time to flinch. Nothing personal in this. But what is it that Jones expects of art?

Politics does not generally involve violence. And it cannot require intervention or action across time or space or absent some coordinated movement. Nor can it demand that essentially individual level activity like painting generate immediate, unambiguous action. That is the remit of the propagandist. The works I have lifted for this post are attempts to raise questions, provoke reflection, give voice to emotions and to do those things in response to violence and terror. It seems to me that we are in Miró's debt - and in Golub's and Motherwell's too. And it seems to me that Jones misses the point.

"Today, we are all Joan Miró."

So says Jonathan Jones in this essay in The Guardian. In so doing he places a finger on the moralistic types who condemn violence and oppression but, when the chips are down, are unprepared not only "to fight for justice but also to face and tell the truth." Miró, it seems, fell into that category during the Spanish Civil War. I'll take Jones's word for that since I don't know the actual history. So, let's assume that Miró both could've taken up arms in the Republican cause and didn't.

The hero of this piece is Orwell - the anti-Miró - who both set off to fight the fascists in Spain and (in Homage to Catalonia) frankly exposed the foibles and hypocrisies of the Republican coalition. I agree with Jones on the need to engage in politics not philanthropy or posturing. But I disagree that "fine words ... spoken in support of fine ideals" are necessarily empty or cheap. And I suggest too that it was difficult enough to set off to fight fascists in Spain - where it was relatively easy to tell the good guys from the bad. In many (perhaps not all) conflicts today the demarcation is murkier.

And the complicity is deeper too, I suspect. Mubarak, of course was our client; and so too was Saddam Hussein. Our Naval fleet, I believe, anchors in Bahrain. Ought we be taking up arms? Would doing so now be too late? Now, once the people in Tunisia, Egypt, Bahrain, Yemen, Libya and lord knows where else have taken to the streets, should we be there providing armed protection? Just what is Jones suggesting? Is he trading moralism for delusion?