Session 7: The Need for Art in Representing Violence

Session 7: The Need for Art in Representing Violence
Chair: Karen Lysaght

Being Hit Artistically
Maria Jose Alcaraz León
Department of Philosophy, University of Murcia, Spain

Contemporary art has become more and more engaged with the representation of violence. This increasing concern is related to different aims that get usually mixed in art practice and reception. I will focus in two of the various kinds in which violence enters art production, which seems to me particularly contemporary: in the first place, violence that some artists commit against themselves. In the second, and as a contrast with the former, the case in which artists have taken violent episodes of their own life as subject of their works. The former group is characterized by the building up of an identity through inflecting on their own bodies a specific harm; the later way of treating violence characterises the sadder group of those who, having been inflected a harm, try to reconstruct their own identity through their art. In both cases, identity, violence, and art power as a reconstructing activity are in play.
I do not mean to deeply analyse some contemporary art production in terms of art criticism. Rather I hope to show what may be some of the intended goals of these artistic works. I mean also to assess whether their aims are successfully achieved or whether, on the contrary, the results are far from producing the desired effect.
Violence is not a foreign subject for art production. However, a shift from representation to presentation, from representation to literalness, can be detected as a proper feature in contemporary art. This shift and its consequences for art reception will be explored in this paper as a way to deal with a proper understanding of these works. This feature, which may be explored in its relationship to other aspects of contemporary art, such as the autonomy of the artwork, will be analysed here in terms of its capacity for conveying artistic effects.
The outcome of this paper aims at sketching some of the features, goals, and effects of some works of contemporary art whose engagement with identity and violence is evident.

Download Conference Paper –

Gendered Expressions of Violence and Symbolic Speech: Afghanistan “War rugs” and “Western Burqas”
Gary Wheeler
Center for American & World Cultures, Miami University, Oxford, OH, USA

My presentation examines the experience and visual expression of artists responding in a framework of violence regarding two intertwined formulations of gendered work in domestic and public spheres. The linkage involves Islamic artists and artisans on the one hand and Western artists and collectors focusing on Islamic themes on the other. The first formulation involves symbolic imagery used in woven rugs created by female artists, including representations of objects of war. These rugs emerge from earlier styles, yet, beginning in1979 and
continuing throughout the post-September 2001 period, they give form to how Islamic women resolve the potency of violent warfare. The second instance of gendered expression involves the visible speech of the hijab and its most repressive instance, the burqa.
Contemporary artists reflect and respond to the environment of conflict and political discourse through creative products. In the case of this presentation, the artists incorporate the realities of war in domestic and for trade woven rugs (primarily Afghanistan and refugee camps in Pakistan) and the element of public expression through the symbol of the burqa. The expression is gendered in the sense that the expression of creative work by women (rugs) is followed by consumption through capitalist art markets controlled largely by men; by the domestic allegiance to religious laws regarding clothing of women on the one hand and the appropriation of this image for political speech issues by Western male artists on the other. Additionally, Islamic women artists are reclaiming and reinterpreting the positioning of the symbolism of veiling through artistic production and performances. This presentation contrasts the representations and appropriations back and forth between the domestic and the commercial spheres and the ways artists describe how it is to live in the presence of violent power.

Download Conference Paper –

This study questions the need for certain types of visual representations of violence by examining changes in the way it is represented in the visual arts from the early Renaissance period through to World War II.
The image analysis shows the changes in the relationship of perpetrators and victims, which also indicates the diverse perspectives of understanding violence in different times. These images are chosen from Western European historical events painted by a contemporary artist of the period: these are Paolo Uccello’s The Battle of San Romano (1438-40), Francisco Goya’s The Execution of the Rebel on 3rd May 1808 (1814), and Pablo Picasso’s Guernica (1937). Each visual representation of violence was created with clear aims and functions which I intend to compare as snapshots of possibilities.
The study argues that, to understand violence, one does not need literal images of violence. It also raises questions about the increased usage of violent images today without concern for the victims. Our twenty first century society no longer treats visual representations of actions of violence as a grievous phenomenon to be regretted or even mourned.