BmoreArt

There is a grim and discernible reasoning behind such persecution. As Eve Ewing noted in 2017, artists can “play a distinctive role in challenging authoritarianism. Art creates pathways for subversion, for political understanding and solidarity among coalition builders.”

Think, for instance, of the Brigada Ramona Parra, a Chilean collective founded by young Communist muralists in 1968. After Augusto Pinochet seized power in a 1973 coup, the collective responded with small, quickly executed street paintings of the letter R in a circle: resistance, framed by a symbol of unity. Pinochet, in turn, ordered them arrested, tortured, and exiled. Seeking to stifle free speech and to sow fear and distrust, tyranny resents artists’ ability to imagine alternatives, to unify, and to speak truth to power.

And yet, artists have repeatedly ignored the possibility of reprisal and made work envisioning change in trying circumstances.

Probably the most famous example is Guernica, Pablo Picasso’s bitter response to the 1937 bombing of a Basque village by Nazi war planes supporting Francisco Franco, who was seeking to establish a fascist dictatorship. Urged by colleagues to address the massacre of civilians, and given extensive support by his partner Dora Maar, an antifascist activist, Picasso filled a huge canvas with a chaotic jumble of injured figures in stark black and white: a harrowing vision of a shattered order. Exhibited abroad, the painting drew global attention to the Spanish Civil War, and was used to raise significant funding for war relief.

Others concentrated on the inhuman ideologies of Hitler’s regime. Over the course of the 1930s, the artist John Heartfield produced a remarkable series of photomontages lambasting Nazi propaganda.

In 1935’s Hurrah, die Butter is alle!, he mocked the warmongering rhetoric of Herman Goering, who had suggested that weapons were even more important than food (“We have no butter, comrades, but I ask you, would you rather have butter or guns? … Butter only makes us fat!”).

A German family munching on scrap metal swallows such rhetoric in a show of unthinking obedience and animalistic appetite. Nazi propaganda, in Heartfield’s hands, appeared frankly ludicrous. It’s not surprising that he was twice forced to flee from German authorities, eventually landing in London.

Even when working from exile, though, artists have called attention to abuses of force and power. Born in Cape Town’s District Six in 1948, Gavin Jantjes was one of the few non-white students admitted to the Michaelis School of Fine Arts in the 1960s. Surveilled, threatened, and all too familiar with the brutal racism of Apartheid, Jantjes left South Africa in 1970—but remained committed to the idea that artists ought to aid in fomenting collective resistance to unjust regimes.

Following the shocking police response to the 1976 Soweto uprising, in which more than a hundred Black students protesting the imposition of Afrikaans as a language of school instruction were shot and killed, he produced Freedom Hunters, a screenprint designed to be shared in British schools.

Featuring a jagged, doubled image of a young Black man wielding a stone and using a trash can lid as a shield, Jantjes’ image conveys the futile position of the students, who were confronted with a mass of police artillery. But through the use of a lively red ground, multiplied elements, and collaged photographs featuring raised hands, he also created a potent, indignant tribute to collective resistance.

Strikingly, too, he included a hand-lettered poem by Steven Smith that directly addressed the country’s ruling white minority (“White South Africa, we’ll come down upon you as an epidemic of Black Freedom Fighters”). Jantjes’ image thus spoke to the unpictured oppressor even as it concentrated on, and drew attention to, the plight of the oppressed. His work thus formed part of the larger body of imagery through which (as the V&A Museum notes) “people in Britain came to know of events in South Africa.”

But of course repressive governments do not only act in openly violent ways. They can also impose silence, insist upon conformity, and censor artistic activity, requiring artists to develop oblique or allusive responses. Jiří Menzel’s Closely Watched Trains, a 1966 Oscar-winning Czechoslovak film, offers a useful example.

Superficially, it can seem like a gentle coming-of-age comedy: a young man in Nazi-occupied Bohemia loses his virginity while working in a minor position at a train station. A critical turn of events near the end of the film, though, positions him as a symbol of resistance against a stifling, imposed regime—and reminds us that Czechoslovakia, in 1966, was part of the icily repressive Eastern Bloc. As Peter Hames has thus noted, the film’s clever attack on ideological dogmatism struck broader targets than the period of Nazi occupation.

It’s worth thinking here, too, of responses to the AIDS crisis in the U.S. By 1987, more than 40,000 Americans had died of HIV-related causes—and yet, as Jim Hubbard has remarked, “the government, when it wasn’t being openly hostile, was simply ignoring the situation.”

HIV-positive individuals were banned from entering the country, the Supreme Court upheld sodomy laws that effectively criminalized homosexuality, and the government refused to establish needle-exchange programs or to check drug profiteering at a time when AZT, the first anti-HIV drug approved by the FDA, cost more than $10,000 a year. “I think,” the playwright Matthew Lopez once said, “the AIDS crisis was a genocide of neglect.” 

Certainly, artistic responses to the government’s tragic indifference took many forms. Larry Kramer’s The Normal Heart was an outraged play that likened America to a war zone; bright posters designed by Gran Fury and Keith Haring compared silence to death; ACT UP staged die-ins to shame governmental officials; and the AIDS quilt functioned as a tragic testimony to the number and variety of lives lost.

In the midst of this sharp cacophony, a series of billboards designed by Felix Gonzales-Torres and erected throughout New York City used a different strategy. Featuring photographs of rumpled, uninhabited beds, they hinted at intimacy while also evoking absence and disappearance. Pairs of dimpled pillows suggested the possibility of same-sex love, even as the quiet, unpeopled scene spoke of the ghastly consequences of President Reagan’s policies.

A final example brings us even closer to the present. In 2014, city officials in Flint, Michigan switched its water supply to the industrial, waste-filled Flint River, in a cost-cutting measure. Soon residents in the majority-Black and economically disadvantaged city began to report hair loss and skin rashes, and urged the city council to find an alternative—only to watch as the state ignored emerging evidence of lead and other contaminants and insisted on the safety of the water. For years, residents were forced to use bottled water. And in 2017, a Michigan Civil Rights Commission report concluded that “historical, structural, and systemic racism” had perpetuated the crisis.

In 2016, the photographer LaToya Ruby Frazier traveled to Flint to create a photo essay on the water crisis for Elle. Struck by the plight—and dignity—of residents and activists she met there, Frazier spent much of the next five years in Flint, eventually producing Flint is Family in Three Acts. Comprised in part of her photographs, it also features texts, poems and interviews developed in collaboration with Flint community members.

Offering a rich, polyvocal alternative to accounts that had appeared in the mass media, the work constitutes a condemnation of political and economic injustices while also celebrating the community’s resilience. But Frazier’s images remind us, too, of our fragile dependence on water, of the trust that we put in those who nominally serve us, and of our precarious relationships with power and life.

Certainly, there are more examples that come to mind. Nicky Nodjoumi’s caustic drawings of the sadistic power of the post-revolutionary Iranian government; Tania Bruguera, forced to leave her native Cuba following pressure and harassment by governmental officials; Artists at Risk, which has been lending aid to artists whose human rights or freedom of expression are being violated since 2013.

In the face of governmental persecution or abuses of power, there are many ways in which artists can, as Gavin Jantjes put it, “function as verbs in the grammar of culture.” But in dire times simple inaction may not be a viable option. For, as the South African playwright Zakes Mofokeng observed, “trying to avoid politics in art is like trying to dodge raindrops on a rainy day.” We may get wet; the question is how we respond.