Responding to Crisis ...

[Dave Monroe]

>From Anne Midgette, "Responding to Crisis, Art Must
Look Beyond It," NY Times, Sunday, March 3rd, 2002 ...

On Sept. 11, catastrophe struck. By Sept. 19, one
critic was asking why artists had not responded yet.

"Art has lost the facility for rapid reaction or even
considered response," wrote Norman Lebrecht, a
columnist for The London Daily Telegraph, who is known
as a provocateur. "What Picasso achieved in `Guernica'
and Brecht in `Mother Courage' is no longer
acceptable, or perhaps available, to painters and
playwrights of the postmodern age."

On the surface, this is a little silly. For an artist
to process the events of Sept. 11, respond to them and
promulgate the resulting work on a stage large enough
to attract Mr. Lebrecht's notice, all within a space
of eight days, would have been remarkable even with
the speed of modern technology. The examples he cited,
"Mother Courage" and "Guernica," created in response
to the Nazi invasion of Poland and a brutal episode in
the Spanish Civil War, respectively, each took several
months to complete.

But Mr. Lebrecht's assumption that art has a
responsibility to respond to crisis is common currency
today. In fact, Sept. 11 did inspire an outpouring of
artistic response: photographs and poems; the composer
Steve Reich's work-in-progress, "9-1-1"; and the play
"The Guys" by Anne Nelson, to name a fraction of the
new works. It also set off critical debate about the
need for response and the inadequacy of that response.


In his column, Mr. Lebrecht went on to say that
artists have not fulfilled that responsibility. Other
critics have echoed his position. "The fine arts have
not been particularly responsive to the major crises
of American history," wrote Karal Ann Marling, a
professor of art history, in these pages in October
(in a tone of observation rather than criticism)....

One reason people think that art must respond to
crisis is that there are many instances, historically,
when a work of art has gained iconic status because of
the appropriateness of its response. Whether as an
image — from Délacroix's "Massacre at Chios" to
Picasso's "Guernica" — or a longer piece (like "Mother
Courage"), these works of art successfully
encapsulate, and articulate, something that is both
essential to the crisis and that lasts beyond it. 

A quintessential example from the 20th century is
arriving this week on Broadway, like a reminder: "The
Crucible" by Arthur Miller.... Mr. Miller wrote the
play in 1952 in reaction to the burgeoning power of
the House Un-American Activities Committee, which was
cutting a swath of fear through large sections of
America's intellectual elite. 

[...]

"The Crucible" has become an American classic, but for
all of its wide dissemination in the schools, it is
not American history. A retelling of events in
17th-century Salem, a comment on McCarthyism, it
literally recounts neither. Many students who read it
may not understand what McCarthyism means. In short,
the play successfully transcends its origins to make a
larger statement about the human condition.... 

This kind of liberation from the merely literal is one
of the whole points of the exercise, whatever the
art....

[...]

At face value, response to a crisis would seem to
involve a more direct, journalistic form of reaction
.... The epitome of modern art born of crisis is
"Guernica." Pablo Picasso, commissioned to create a
painting for the Spanish pavilion at the 1937 Paris
World's Fair, was at a loss for a subject until news
arrived in Paris of an April 27 attack by Franco's
forces....

But for all the speed of his response, the painting
was not completed until November, nearly half a year
later. And there is a lot more to "Guernica" than
simply documentation; like "The Crucible," it has a
wide audience of people who hardly remember the
original event that inspired it.... 

[...]

These examples are comparable to art about the World
Trade Center disaster: direct reactions to specific,
one-time events. With "The Crucible," Mr. Miller had a
somewhat different challenge. The crisis he was facing
was personal (although he was not called before the
House committee until 1956, he knew he was a potential
target) and open-ended. His need to find a metaphor
was not just artistic conceit; it was essential. 

A better comparison for that kind of long-term crisis
is Soviet Russia, which drove many artists into a kind
of hiding, concealment behind metaphor or irony.... 

[...]

Crisis, in fact, became a defining element for more
than one artist's work in the Eastern Bloc — which has
only strengthened the concept of art's need to
respond. Protest artists — Shostakovich, Aleksandr
Solzhenitsyn, Vaclav Havel — become heroes in, and of,
their crisis. And when the crisis lifted and the iron
curtain opened, more than one artist was left
searching for a direction.

[...]

In a sense, long-term crises — like the Depression and
World War II — shaped Mr. Miller and his generation,
as well. Today, there is a fundamental difference in
outlook between his generation and the one that came
of age in the relatively easier period that followed.
The sense of crisis in contemporary art and letters
has often been translated to the realm of the
individual (witness the current appetite for personal
memoirs like "Angela's Ashes"), and responses often
aim more directly at emotional effect.

You could measure the difference by comparing "The
Crucible" with the most significant American political
play of the 1990's, Tony Kushner's "Angels in America"
....

[...]

Meanwhile, the actual events of crisis are
communicated far more directly today than at any
previous period in history. In 1937, it took a couple
of days for Picasso to hear the news of Guernica;
today, he would have watched it unfolding live on
television. This immediacy and its accompanying glut
of images and information is itself a challenge to
artists. One difficulty in making art about Sept. 11
is that it is hard to create anything that rivals in
magnitude the live images that so much of the world
spent days obsessively watching on television.

In the face of this new reality, the demand that art
respond literally, directly and rapidly to crisis
contains an underlying note of panic: an urge to
demonstrate to a broader public, through a definitive
statement on something of great social moment, that
art is indeed necessary, that art can still make a
difference, despite a growing fear that it is not and
cannot. 

And this demand proceeds from a fundamentally
romanticized view of art. In fact, a large part of
this demand for art about crisis is a demand for a
certain kind of romanticized response. When critics
cite great crisis works of the past, they tend to
mention eulogistic memorials: "Guernica," Richard
Strauss's "Metamorphosen," or even "The Crucible,"
which, if not a eulogy is certainly a tidy summation. 

BUT people don't necessarily want art that deals with
crisis in a contemporary manner. John Adams's opera
"The Death of Klinghoffer" is an honest attempt to
deal thoughtfully and provocatively, in a time-honored
artistic tradition, with a crisis episode ....

The Holocaust is the enduring example of a crisis that
defies artistic response: memorials seem inadequate;
analyses, disrespectful. The philosopher Theodor
Adorno's statement that "to write poetry after
Auschwitz is barbaric" has been endlessly repeated and
misquoted as an expression of the helplessness of art
confronting catastrophe.

Ironically, in light of its subsequent dissemination,
Adorno later retracted this statement. "Suffering has
as much right to be expressed as a martyr has to cry
out," he wrote in 1973. "So it may have been false to
say that writing poetry after Auschwitz is
impossible."

One reason he may have changed his mind is that
somebody did it. In his poem "Todesfugue" (Death
Fugue), Paul Celan, a survivor of the concentration
camps, gave an anguished encapsulation of the
Holocaust experience, evoking the agony and death, the
gas chambers and the cold relentless tread of marching
feet, in remarkably few lines, draped with tatters of
a kind of wistful beauty. Difficult to get across in
translation, it is familiar to virtually every citizen
of Germany. 

And whatever Adorno originally decreed, many artists
have grappled in their own way with the Holocaust.
With hindsight, another statement he made in that same
1949 essay, "Cultural Criticism and Society," is more
telling. In today's total society, he wrote, "even the
most extreme consciousness of doom threatens to
degenerate into idle chatter."

That "idle chatter" is what artists really have to
worry about: the cloud of effusive, emotional
responses that arises, like dust, in the wake of a
crisis event.

The task of the artist is to find, train and shape a
voice strong enough to rise above that idle chatter —
which is a process that is as highly individual as
artistic inspiration. One person may be moved to paint
a "Guernica." Another may be motivated to paint a
still life. That choice is free of moral judgment and
outside dictates. "Guernica" was a singular work.
Picasso did not respond in a similar fashion to World
War II; and in his oeuvre, nudes, still lifes and
portraits far outnumber political statements.

Which is to say that, while there are many examples of
great art born of crisis, there are many more of great
art born without it. To preach to artists about their
choice of subject matter is to miss the whole point of
what art is about.

http://www.nytimes.com/2002/03/03/arts/03MIDG.html



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