SUBSTRATED

Here’s my Texan piece for this week. It’s a long, garbled rant with little or no real point. Enjoy.

This April, for the second year in a row, a group of students and activists organized a silent auction on the campus of Southern Methodist University in Dallas to promote awareness and raise money to combat the conflict in Darfur. The program, called Art for Darfur, hopes to spread awareness through art, staking their claim on the idea that our world is getting smaller and that atrocities half a world away can no longer be comfortably ignored by a complacent public. It’s an idea not much different from any of the activist groups on our own campus, from FACEAIDS to Oxfam, and an idea that has become slowly ingrained into our college lifestyle since the protests of the 1960s and before. What’s sets this idea apart, however, is its insistence on the power of art – a belief that what’s unspoken can transcend pamphlets and West Mall sales pitches and connect with something more. Understanding the rapturous force art can impel, as well as knowing its limitations, can help us put a better perspective on our own homegrown projects of prevention, protection and awareness.
But haven’t we tried this all before? Hasn’t art always attempted to communicate things transcendent – in this case, horrific? Yet, we find ourselves rewound in cycles of violence and suffering in every part of the world. Have art and activism failed in the quest for prevention, even in creating contemporary awareness? Does a conflict have to end for us to truly appreciate its art, and likewise, the activism that tried to push conflict to its end? The world still reels from the jagged, agitated cacophony of Picasso’s “Guernica”, the brightness and agonizing verve of Goya’s “The Third of May”, or the pulsating, luminous forms of Rothko that grew ever-darker after the holocaust. But the art itself, even if reified as a symbol of the suffering, never seems to end it. Conflict seems only to end based on terms considered more “real” – the turns of economic, political or military fortune.
That’s what makes a project like Art for Darfur more potent. The silent auction that it hosts contributed to the chorus of voices breaking the silence about the endlessly-faceted, endless conflict in Sudan by contributing its proceeds to the peacekeeping mission in the region. And while art holds a certain place of exaltation in society, we can only expect it to exert its sway on a certain latte-sipping set. Luckily for activists, the Bohemian bourgeois often come with deep pockets and post-hippie bleeding hearts. In the end, however, its the block walking, email lists, CNN interviews or in this case, silent auctions that give a movement its real political and economic bargaining tools. Art seems to be just an augmentation.
But what traditional bullhorn-brandishing activism lacks in unspoken power is made up for when it brings art into the fold. Conflict is ineffable, but we can try to come to terms with it through art. There is something going on within art that, even after centuries of self imposed conflict, the human psyche still struggles to cope with. With art, as with activism, we attempt to extinguish a painful flame in our collective soul by groping for a light in the dark. When done right, art really can flip the switch. A copy of “Guernica”, Picasso’s massive mural depicting a horrific fire-bombing during the Spanish civil war, hangs at the entrance of the U.N. Security Council chambers in New York. In 2003, as Colin Powell visited the chambers to make the Bush adminstration’s case for war, the mural was hidden behind a huge blue cloth. It seems the diplomats didn’t want the painfully crafted eye of history – the lessons or war – looking back at them as they decided whether or not to plunge the world into conflict again.
In the end, there’s still a place for our traditional means of spreading awareness, perhaps now more than ever as we begin to reap the power of information. Let’s hope the activists, the White Rose Societies and Amnesties International of the world keep up their fight around the globe and on our campus, and let’s hope they can share it through the power of art. Until then, I’ll keep my “Save Darfur” t-shirt on.

Goya's "The Third of May, 1808"

The Rothko chapel in Houston, Texas by Mark Rothko

Picasso's "Guernica"