Making Statements through ArtC

Making Statements through Art

Guernica

Propaganda in art is not only used by powerful authorities. It can also be used to voice the

people through an artist’s work.

In the beginning of the 20th century, the world is devastated and exhausted with a world war

and the many civil wars within civilizations that come as an aftermath and eventually leads to the

second world war. In a gruesome atmosphere like this, artists have nothing to do but reflect to these

emotions in their works. Picasso, being one of these artists, is commissioned in 1937 to paint for the

Spanish Pavilion at the Paris International Exposition. The work he produces: Guernica, is a mural

sized painting inspired by the bombings in a small town called Basque. [iv]

The painting in its raw black and white palette portrays human figures, a bull, and a horse in

a frenzy. The whole composition is a big mess of tangled bodies and extravagant emotional

expressions. Bodies laying lifeless in the helpless arms of loved ones who wail in agony, animals

perplexed with the senseless hustle happening around them, it is just a moment after the bombs

have hit the ground. It is such a dynamic piece in spite of the lack of color use. The light coming

from the weirdly shaped head light, which some say resembles an actual bomb explosion, lighten

the faces of people on the move going around in this moment of great worry, agony and shock. It

lays bare the cruelty and unfairness of wars and how it affects the innocent more than anyone else.

It is such a strong anti war statement that is still relevant today. In this context Guernica can surely

be an example of propaganda and art in a harmonised marriage.

With Guernica, Picasso shows that fine arts can serve the people to promote their ideas too.

Propaganda in art is not only a tool for powerful leaders and high authorities. Guernica in later years

becomes more universal and even takes a life beyond canvas. It appears in stand-ins for Dresden,

Berlin, Hiroshima where defenceless civilians were attacked. Reproductions are carried in protests

all over the world. [v]

Transparency

In the 21st century art and what is defined as an artwork begin to come in many unique

forms. Contemporary art and especially performance art continue to raise eyebrows and the viewers

are asked to participate and put more thought to be able to understand the work more than prior

times. Performative artworks sometimes blur the lines between propaganda and art. Some of them

seek to provoke new ideas promoting one idea on the other hand protesting another.

Transparency is a performative art piece done by the Silsila Collective based in Istanbul,

Turkey. The Collective consists of a group of high school students and artist Jeffrey Baykal-Rollins

as their art teacher, instructor and curator. SALT Galata, a renowned art gallery in Turkey, had an

exhibition called ‘It Was a Time of Conversation’ in 2012. The exhibition examines three

collaborative exhibitions in Turkey from the 90s by providing access to the original documents

from each of these exhibitions’ archives. With “Transparanlık/Transparency”, Silsila Collective

offers a collaborative student response to this exhibition by considering this “open archive” out in

the open of public space. [vi]

On the Silsila Collective’s website, it states:

“Eighteen students from Robert College created a large transparent banner using imagery from the

SALT exhibition, cross-woven with images and text from a wide-range of media coverage of current

events. The banner the students constructed mirrors the “Gar Sergi” banner installed in SALT’s

exhibition, and was completed at SALT Galata during the last of a series of workshop sessions.

Students then carried the banner in silence, from the space of the exhibition back into the public

domain.

Transparency is a collective project that investigates the idea of transparency in relation to

democracy by weaving together images from past and present media, creating an open archive that

was transported through public space.” [6]

This work of visual art and public performance is a response to the current exhibition, ‘It

Was a Time of Conversation’. The artwork is actually in the moment of that silent walk they take on

the busy street with strange looking stares on them. The work has the actual banner as a result of the

performance but it is the process of the making and presenting the banner to the public which

counts as the artwork as a whole. Students create something out of the things they were given in this

case headlines and news sections from national newspapers of Turkey in 1990s. By making the

banner transparent they question the transparency of the media and how biased it might be. They

are protesting in the most subtle way without dialogue, it is almost like a painting that is walking.

As the saying goes, which Banksy also uses, art should comfort the disturbed and disturb the

comfortable. It is exactly what this performance is doing.