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14 Chapter 14: Liberation, Freedom and Promises not fulfilled
Learning Objectives ~ Chapter 14 “Liberation, Freedom and Promises not fulfilled”
Explore abstract expressionism and its place in the progression of artistic genres
Define anti-colonialism as a movement within the construct of human rights
Describe and discuss the American Civil Rights movement and the Women’s Movement
Consider the ways artists used their medium to push for reform
“The permutations of English corruption in India were endless.”
~ Paul Scott The Jewel in the Crown
Francis Bacon. Head VI. 1949.
From the mid-century on, writers, thinkers, and artists sought modes of expression that were in many ways assaults on tradition and convention. Even the discipline of history, which was long held to be objective (as if that is even possible) was scrutinized. New methods of inquiry led to “revisionist history,” resulting in many myths and romanticized notions about historical events to fall away.
In the area of religion, Sartre’s atheist ideas sought to find a secular morality, one that was grounded in how we develop our sense of right and wrong that is not connected to some eternal reward (or punishment). All we have is right now. Shouldn’t we be good for the sake of goodness and not just because we get a reward for it? To Sartre, being “end game” oriented can separate a person from his/her own sense of morality.
Art at mid-century went in countless directions. Let’s listen to two art historians talk about Abstract Expressionism in the work of Jackson Pollock:
And one whose work can be very challenging, Mark Rothko:
Questions to consider:
Define Abstract Expressionism. What does it have in common with previous art genres?
In a mid-century world noted for its growing impersonal and mechanical modality, what were these artists seeking in work that was so very spontaneous? AND, odd?
Muhammad Iqbal ( 9 November 1877 – 21 April 1938), widely known as Allama Iqbal, was a poet, philosopher and politician, as well as an academic, barrister and scholar. in British India who is widely regarded as having inspired the Pakistan Movement. He is called the “Spiritual Father of Pakistan.” He is considered one of the most important figures in Urdu literature, with literary work in both Urdu and Persian.
His poetry covers a broad base of themes. He was skeptical of modernism and wary of imperialism. After living most of his life under the British Imperial yoke, he had an astute perspective that came through in his poetry:
“Revolution” (1938)
Death to man’s soul is Europe, death is Asia
To man’s will: neither feels the vital current.
In man’s hearts stirs a revolution’s torrent;
maybe our old world too is nearing death.
If you are interested, you may peruse more of Muhammad Iqbal poems.
The Indian Independence Movement was a series of activities with the ultimate aim of ending the British rule in India. The movement spanned a total of 90 years (1857–1947).
The Indian self-rule movement was a mass-based movement that encompassed various sections of society. It also underwent a process of constant ideological evolution. Although the underlying ideology of the campaign was anti-colonial, it was supported by a vision of independent capitalist economic development coupled with a secular, democratic, republican, and civil-libertarian political structure. After the 1930s, the movement took on a strong socialist orientation. The work of these various movements ultimately led to the Indian Independence Act 1947, which ended the suzerainty in India and the creation of Pakistan. India remained a Dominion of the Crown until 26 January 1950, when the Constitution of India came into force, establishing the Republic of India; Pakistan was a dominion until 1956 when it adopted its first republican constitution. In 1971, East Pakistan declared independence as the People’s Republic of Bangladesh.
The 20th century is noted for global independence movements. Khan Academy gives a quick synopsis:
After the American Civil War and the abolition of slavery in the 1860s, the Reconstruction Amendments to the United States Constitution granted emancipation and constitutional rights of citizenship to all African Americans, most of whom had recently been enslaved. For a period, African Americans voted and held political office, but they were increasingly deprived of civil rights, often under Jim Crow laws, and subjected to discrimination and sustained violence by whites in the South. Over the following century, various efforts were made by African Americans to secure their legal rights. In 1954, the separate but equal policy which aided the enforcement of Jim Crow laws was weakened with the United States Supreme Court‘s Brown v. Board of Education ruling and other subsequent rulings which followed.[1] Between 1955 and 1968, acts of nonviolent protest and civil disobedience produced crisis situations and productive dialogues between activists and government authorities. Federal, state, and local governments, businesses, and communities often had to respond immediately to these situations, which highlighted the inequities faced by African Americans across the country. The lynching of Chicago teenager Emmett Till in Mississippi, and the outrage generated by seeing how he had been abused, when his mother decided to have an open-casket funeral, mobilized the African-American community nationwide.[2] Forms of protest and/or civil disobedience included boycotts, such as the successful Montgomery bus boycott (1955–56) in Alabama; “sit-ins” such as the Greensboro sit-ins (1960) in North Carolina and successful Nashville sit-ins in Tennessee; marches, such as the 1963 Birmingham Children’s Crusade and 1965 Selma to Montgomery marches (1965) in Alabama; and a wide range of other nonviolent activities.
At the culmination of a legal strategy pursued by African Americans, the U.S. Supreme Court began, in 1954 under the leadership of Earl Warren, to find unconstitutional many of the laws that had allowed racial segregation and discrimination to be legal in the United States.[3][4][5][6] The Warren Court made a series of landmark rulings such as Brown v. Board of Education (1954), Heart of Atlanta Motel, Inc. v. United States (1964), and Loving v. Virginia (1967) which banned segregation in public schools and public accommodations, and struck down all state laws banning interracial marriage.[7][8][9] The rulings also helped bring an end to the segregationistJim Crow laws prevalent in the Southern states.[10] In the 1960s, moderates in the movement worked with Congress to achieve the passage of several significant pieces of federal legislation that overturned discriminatory practices and authorized oversight and enforcement by the federal government. The Civil Rights Act of 1964,[11] which was upheld by the Warren Court in Heart of Atlanta Motel, Inc. v. United States (1964), expressly banned discrimination based on race, color, religion, sex, or national origin in employment practices; ended unequal application of voter registration requirements; and prohibited racial segregation in schools, at the workplace, and in public accommodations. The Voting Rights Act of 1965 restored and protected voting rights for minorities by authorizing federal oversight of registration and elections in areas with historic under-representation of minorities as voters. The Fair Housing Act of 1968 banned discrimination in the sale or rental of housing.
African Americans re-entered politics in the South, and across the country young people were inspired to take action. From 1964 through 1970, a wave of inner-city riots in black communities undercut support from the white middle class, but increased support from private foundations.[12] The emergence of the Black Power movement, which lasted from about 1965 to 1975, challenged the established black leadership for its cooperative attitude and its practice of nonviolence. Instead, its leaders demanded that, in addition to the new laws gained through the nonviolent movement, political and economic self-sufficiency had to be developed in the black community.
Many popular representations of the movement are centered on the charismatic leadership and philosophy of Rev. Martin Luther King Jr., who won the 1964 Nobel Peace Prize for combating racial inequality through nonviolent resistance. However, some scholars note that the movement was too diverse to be credited to any one person, organization, or strategy.
How does King present his own character, his own ethical bias? What examples does he use and HOW DOES HE USE THEM?
Would you characterized this letter as an emotional appeal or a rational appeal? Why is a rational approach more effective?
In what ways does King use Christian ideas and mores?
So ultimately, if he is addressing this letter to “men of God” and using rationale ensconced in Christian values, how might it be possible for his audience to refute his argument?
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The Women’s Movement
“We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable rights, that among these are life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness. That, to secure these rights, governments are instituted among men, deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed. That, whenever any form of government becomes destructive of these ends, it is the right of the people to alter or to abolish it, and to institute new government, laying its foundation on such principles, and organizing its powers in such form, as to them shall seem most likely to effect their safety and happiness.” ~ Declaration of Independence
These words are a political stance, a reminder of a promise in the age of Enlightenment. When a tyrannical power is in place, and stands in the way of equality, life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness, it is not just a right, it is a duty to abolish that tyrannical power. Martin Luther King, Jr. reminded the United States of this promise. And, the women’s movement pursued the fulfillment of that promise as well.
The online Encyclopedia Britannica offers an excellent overview of the movement, its major voices, and its successes and failures. Please read here.
Questions to guide your reading:
When and why was the National Organization of Women (NOW) formed and how did it get its cue from the civil rights movement?
What were some various types of discrimination women experienced?
The Women’s Movement had several waves and manifestations. It wasn’t all radical. But, how did the “Bitch Manifesto” fit into all this?
The initial main goal for NOW was the passage of the Equal Rights Amendment (ERA). What did the ERA ensure?
with eyes that cut open without landfall or nightfall
upon some shellacked and grinning person,
eyes that open, blue, steel, and close.
Am I approximately an I. Magnin transplant?
I have hair, black angel,
black-angel-stuffing to comb,
nylon legs, luminous arms
and some advertised clothes.
I live in a doll’s house
with four chairs,
a counterfeit table, a flat roof
and a big front door.
Many have come to such a small crossroad.
There is an iron bed,
(Life enlarges, life takes aim)
a cardboard floor,
windows that flash open on someone’s city,
and little more.
Someone plays with me,
plants me in the all-electric kitchen,
Is this what Mrs. Rombauer said?
Someone pretends with me—
I am walled in solid by their noise—
or puts me upon their straight bed.
They think I am me!
Their warmth? Their warmth is not a friend!
They pry my mouth for their cups of gin
and their stale bread.
What is reality
to this synthetic doll
who should smile, who should shift gears,
should spring the doors open in a wholesome disorder,
and have no evidence of ruin or fears?
But I would cry,
rooted into the wall that
was once my mother,
if I could remember how
and if I had the tears.
In this poem, Sexton expresses how women are socialized to fulfill rolls. And these are often rolls to which they have no vocation, no interest or desire. But it’s much easier to just go with the flow, to be the perfect doll. The result of this “pretending” is a dislocation with the self. Before she knows it, she is looking at her life from the outside, as if she is watching a stranger.
You show me the poems of some woman
my age, or younger
translated from your language
Certain words occur: enemy, oven, sorrow
enough to let me know
she’s a woman of my time
obsessed
with Love, our subject:
we’ve trained it like ivy to our walls
baked it like bread in our ovens
worn it like lead on our ankles
watched it through binoculars as if
it were a helicopter
bringing food to our famine
or the satellite
of a hostile power
I begin to see that woman
doing things: stirring rice
ironing a skirt
typing a manuscript till dawn
trying to make a call
from a phonebooth
The phone rings unanswered
in a man’s bedroom
she hears him telling someone else
Never mind. She’ll get tired.
hears him telling her story to her sister
who becomes her enemy
and will in her own time
light her own way to sorrow
ignorant of the fact this way of grief
is shared, unnecessary
and political.
To Rich, certain words are just a part of women’s lives: oven, enemy, sorrow. But the most powerful one is love, and that may not be a good thing. Think of how she characterizes love and what it is supposed to promise women. The narrator of the poem sees herself from the outside, doing mundane things. But one of those things is calling her ex. The phone rings in his bedroom where he is with another woman. He paints a negative picture of her and this woman becomes her enemy. And on it goes. Women against women. Until this conditioning ends where women are taught and conditioned through various media to see themselves not on their own value but as they compare to other women, the women’s movement cannot get any real traction. At least that was one of the ideas that Simone de Beauvoir explored in her work, The Second Sex.
Questions to guide your reading of these two poems:
These are both considered feminist poems. Articulate what makes them part of that genre?
Are you surprised by their message? Did you imagine feminist concerns in another way?
One feminist credo was, “The Personal is Political.” What does that mean?
Painting Photography~ Rethinking models and beauty
The work of South African artist Marlene Dumas exists on a continuum between painting and photography. Simply put, she paints from photographic images. Or as she herself puts it: “I don’t paint people, I paint images.” Her sources range from the personal to the pornographic; from the medical to the political. Consisting of eerily rendered bodies and heads in thin washes of paint, ink or chalk, Dumas’s paintings approximate the genre of portraiture but her figures are stripped of any kind of individualizing features. Dumas’s portraits are, instead, rendered with a kind of dispassionate morbidity that is redolent of violence. A body or head in often sickly or garish colors and in broadly contoured outlines appears against a faint or blank backdrop. That her paintings seem bent on obliterating their photographic origins and reducing the figure to a lifeless prop, suggests that there is a profoundly social resonance to her work.
Single sheet from Marlene Dumas, Models, 1994, watercolor and ink wash on paper, 62 x 50 cm (Van Abbemuseum)
Models, 1994, is a case in point: it conjures up a catalogue of the dead and/or missing—an all too frequent reference point that underlines the global contemporary. Arranged in the form of a grid, Models presents 100 female faces as if they were the carefully laid out heads of a morgue. Positioned on blank surfaces and retaining only a minimum of individualized features, each “model” stares frontally or is rotated to profile or three-quarter pose. Faces vary from light skinned to dark and some have pastel colored eyes, but these are not the warms blues, greens and browns one might expect: lavender or lime-green instead serves to only heightens the disconcerting appearance of these disembodied figures. Who are these so-called “models?” As Dumas describes it: “There are pictures of the insane, pictures of fashion models, you have pictures of my friends…” In her description, as in her painting, Dumas gives them equal treatment: one becomes virtually indistinguishable from the other.
Against Beauty
To unravel the meaning of this work, we might start with the title. What are we to make of it? Surely it is ironic. “Model” has a number of meanings—prominent among them is the life model, a venerable tradition in studio art. But Dumas dispenses with this approach; her models are not sourced from life. They are taken from polaroids (the friends she mentions), book illustrations (the “insane”) and other sundry sources where clippings are readily available. The grim visages on display, casually acquired but so carefully reworked, suggest that Dumas is also not interested in idealized forms of beauty, as “model” might also suggest. Fashion models are the unobtainable standard of idealized female bodies in contemporary culture and have long been a site of intervention for feminist art. The term “model” in both popular culture and art history functions as an indicator of the “beautiful”—it means the female body perpetually displayed for the presumed male viewer.
One of the faces in Models is taken from an image of the feminist author Simone de Beauvoir and although it should not be taken as an overt symbol, it is clear that Dumas’s critical interrogation of the “beautiful” is part of a feminist lineage in art that includes, to take only but a few examples, the photo-documented performance Carving—A Traditional Sculpture (1971) by Eleanor Antin, the photo-text work of Lorna Simpson (“Twenty Questions (A Sampler) (1986), the self-portraits of Cindy Sherman or even the 1990s performances by Vanessa Beecroft where standing live models (actual models) were posed clad in heels with little else and faced an often awkward audience. But unlike her feminist counterparts who abandoned or rejected painting, Dumas compels us to consider the specific social force painting might have in contemporary culture. “I wanted to give more attention to what the painting does to the image, not only to what the image does to the painting” (as quoted in “Who is Marlene Dumas?” from Tate).
There is a deconstructive impulse in Dumas’s work: she de-eroticizes the pornographic imagery she appropriates; she de-personalizes portraits of friends; she turns the image of a celebrity icon like Naomi Campbell into something strange and unrecognizable. Even her portraits of children tack towards the monstrous.
Troubling and compelling
Comparisons are often made to the German painter Gerhard Richter (his notable series on the imprisoned Bader-Meinhof terrorist group for example) as well as to Dumas’s contemporary Lucs Tuyman whose faded paintings (indeed they look as if they are drained of color) seem to speak to a contemporary painting’s inability to fully invoke scenes of political life. But Dumas’s works provoke strong reactions. Is it because they speak so forcefully of violence done to persons? Persuasive arguments have been made that tie her work to the culture of apartheid she witnessed growing up as an Afrikaans-speaking Dutch descendant whose only access to the world was through print imagery (television did not come to South Africa until 1976). This certainly is a factor that underlines her work. But images of the dispossessed, the missing, and tortured are fairly routine fare in contemporary life.
Dumas’s troubling images are compelling not because of the haunting figures they construct but because of her transformation of once discrete categories of portraiture into something almost unrecognizable. For example, we expect “model” as a term to not stray too far from a conventional meaning, and as an image we expect the subject to hew to certain conventions. In the interplay between photography and painting that exists in Dumas’s work, the traditional function of portraiture is negated. It once served, in the history of oil painting, to commemorate the social status of an individual, to provide visual evidence of a marriage, or document the social bonds of family. In the nineteenth century photography usurped that job. The modern photographic portrait was supposed to capture something of the inner truth of the subject—one’s psychological being. The poetic reveries of Juliet Margaret Cameron or the individualized studio portraits of Felix Nadar became the standard bearer for a newly emergent bourgeois identity where self trumped community. Photography’s ability to capture likeness was soon harnessed by emerging ethnographic, psychological and jurisprudential discourses—criminals, and the insane all came under the powerful scientific gaze of the camera’s lens.
The artist and critic Allan Sekula once described, in an influential essay, two exemplary modes of photographic representation, regimes of visibility one might say that determined, rather than represented, identity. One is honorific: the respectable bourgeois portrait. The other is repressive: the cold mug shot of the criminal. In Dumas’s painted portraits the subject that emerges is at once both and neither of these. In an increasingly uncertain global culture, Dumas paints the indeterminacies and terrors of social identity.
