The censorship of two recent art exhibits in the United States points not only to widening threats against free speech, but also to a deep crisis and malaise within the art world. As reported on May 3, 2006 on “Democracy Now,” a current affairs news show on leftwing Pacifica Radio, Brandeis University in Massachusetts closed an exhibit of Palestinian art:…
The Peace Tower is a powerful statement of protest. By constructing it outside the museum’s entrance for all to see, Mark and Rirkrit remain true to the spirit of the original. The tower gives us a chorus of artists’ voices in a public reminder that art is being made in a world that is, in the words of Antonin Artaud,…
On February 16, 2006 Australia’s Special Broadcasting Services (SBS) program Dateline aired previously unpublished video and photos taken by US troops at Abu Ghraib prison in 2003. The damning pictures show Iraqi prisoners bound, naked, wounded, some covered in blood or excrement – undergoing abuse at the hands of their American jailers. Caution: this essay contains violent imagery not suitable…
August 6th, 2005, marks the 60th anniversary of the atomic bombing of Japan. August 9th, marks the bombing of Nagasaki. Those who survived the blasts became known as hibakusha (Atom Bomb Survivors), and in 1974 the hibakusha began contributing artworks to an unusual project that would preserve for the world their memories of atomic fire. The Nippon Hoso Kyokai (NHK…
Virtually unknown in the west, the Hiroshima Panels are as profound an antiwar work as Pablo Picasso’s famous mural, Guernica. The creation of Japanese artists, Iri and Toshi Maruki (both now deceased), the panels depict the atomic holocaust wrought upon Japan when the U.S. dropped nuclear bombs on the cities of Hiroshima and Nagasaki. The monumental panels, which are actually…
An important antiwar mural painted in Mexico by famed Japanese modern artist, Taro Okamoto (1911 – 1996), has been rediscovered after thirty five years. In Spanish the work is known as Mito del Mañana (Myth of Tomorrow), and in Japanese, Ashita no Shinwa – but like all great works of art, Okamoto’s painting speaks a universal language. The gigantic mural…
At sixteen I became aware of those artists who lived and worked throughout Germany’s dreadful years of war and fascism. German Expressionist artists like George Grosz, Conrad Felixmüller, Gert Wollheim, and Max Pechstein had enormous influence upon me – not so much for how they painted… but what they painted. They were unafraid to tell the truth about their society,…
The US State Department has crowned Pop art legend, Ed Ruscha, as America’s representative at the 2005 Venice Biennale, allowing me the perfect opportunity to bring attention to the reader the ways in which art and politics are bound together. My contention has long been that all art is political, since it is the result not just of imagination but…
