The School Responds
Artists in Crisis
By Heidi Broadhead
9.21 SAIC student government hosted a panel discussion called "Art in Crisis" on Friday, September 21, to give students a chance to hear from faculty members how they have dealt with crises of various kinds - artistic, historical, political, personal - in their art. The panel, along with the 50 or so in attendance, proposed and tried to answer the question: What do we do now?
Panel members included: Frank Piatek, Painting and Drawing; Deborah Boardman, Painting and Drawing; Jim Elniski, First Year Program; Cathy Moon, Art Therapy; Claire Pentecost, Photography; and Lisa Brock, Liberal Arts.
Piatek opened the discussion with his experiences as a student when President John F. Kennedy was assassinated, and the shock of it, as well as growing up out of the cusp of WWII and going through Vietnam, which all helped him learn how to carry on under difficult circumstances. "It's about processing shock on a number of levels," he said. "We are called to respond to a shock within us. It's a time to really pay attention to how we process and respond."
Boardman raised the question: Now that we have an actual crisis, can art speak? She referred to Walter Benjamin's call to artists not to be removed from the collective struggle, not to be elitists working in studios. She also reminded us that these things take time to process, and that Maya Lin's memorial of the Vietnam War was made years later by a woman who was too young to have direct experience with the suffering and repercussions of that war. The question she posed in light of that was how to have dispassion or the distance necessary to make art.
"A lot of us want to do something immediately," she said. "With art it's complicated - that issue of time."
Elniski concurred and added that the condition pushing us in the direction to want to react is that of a state of helplessness and fear, which is all part of the creative process and to rush that process is to come to some premature resolution. He talked about a crisis he had in his own art while living in Africa in the 1980s, while making sculpture. There was so much turmoil around him, he found it difficult to continue "painting sticks"; it was difficult to see the point. Then he talked to a friend who reminded him, "Somebody has to paint the sticks."
Moon approached the discussion with a definition of shared tragedy, which can take the form of something that happens to everyone at once or can accumulate over a sustained period of time. She showed her response to the latter, a painting and a sculpture, both of which arose out of her ongoing work with abused patients. She also said, "Making something beautiful is important right now."
Pentecost approached the discussion starting with a question: "What is the crisis? It's imperative for us to think about it." She talked about the crisis last week as a "crisis of language, a crisis of the signification itself," which she described in three parts: the unspeakable catastrophe, the way language has been appropriated in the media, and the resulting effect of robbing us of all language. "Do we speak? Can we speak? And, of course, we must," she said. "These events make us feel the most appropriate response is silence. I think that's a dangerous place to fall. ...I want to proceed in my life as a meaning maker, which we all are."
Brock read a letter she has been writing to George W. Bush, which described in detail the people who are in crisis everyday - from refugees to the homeless and many other oppressed groups - and asked for a thoughtful response. She encouraged us to let ourselves feel the pain of others, and cited examples of pain expressed through spirituals and hip-hop. "It's about engagement, talking to people, trying to win people to a peace initiative, either through your art or talking," she said during the question/answer period."Don't hold back. Don't be censored. Do what you need to do."
|
