Age of the Uncertainty: the Artist as Social Critic

AGE OF THE UNCERTAINTY: the artist as social critic

THE ART OF TODAY

The 21st century was ushered in by most of the world’s major cities by a display of fireworks, with their intense colours and symphony of explosions, welcoming a new era of prosperity, freedom, and optimism from one side of the globe to the other.  However, the optimistic start to the century was short-lived, when the September 11 2001 attacks on the Pentagon and World Trade Centre rocked the world to its core.  Since most of the world were watching the events unfold live on TV, it reflects the new-dominated media age in which we live.  ‘That’ moment become most of those seminal episodes in history, making us remember where we were and what we were doing.  The after-affects of 9/11, besides the thousands of lives lost, includes the loss of sense of freedom, an increased sense of vulnerability, and suspicion that has come across all people irrespective of their race, religion, or nationality.  

The planet’s vulnerability, has become one the most universal concerns to preoccupy people, and a great source of material for artists to explore.  It it believed that the greatest threat to humankind is climate change and global warming, with such changes to our ecosystem building up, creating a domino affect.  

Improved technologies in communication and medicine have changed the way we live.  New medical procedures and discoveries, such as cloning, stem-cell research, and surrogacy challenge the limits of our religious and moral convictions.  On average, we are living longer than our parents, because of medical intervention, although disease such as AIDS, malaria, and other epidemics still continue to kill vast numbers.

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Themes and narratives explored by artists have been related to social and political events witnessed by the global community.  Migration, gender and identity, capitalism and consumerism, war and conflict, the environment, and our place in the world, are some of the predominant concerns of Postmodern artists.  Whether seen through the veil of humour, irony, or documentary, in a variety of media, these works continue to position the artist as an important social critique.  

Painting

There remains a significant collection of artists throughout the world who still choose the traditional materials of paint, paintbrush and canvas as their preferred medium, despite the proclamations by influential art critics and cultural commentators that painting was dying out, becoming an increasingly irrelevant medium.  Even with the advent of photography, performance, and conceptual art, and digital and electronic art, painting has remained dominant.  Whether figurative or abstract, it painting continues to be the most popular of visual arts, dating back to the more than 50 000 years ago, when pigment was first used to delineate form.  

Fernando Botero (1932)

Fernando Botero has been the most successful figurative painters of his generation, with his career spanning more than half a century.  From the late 1950s, Botero was primarily known for his images of rotound people and small-town life in rural Colombia.  In 2006, he shocked the art world with his confronting images of war, and the abuse and torture of Iraqi prisoners at Abu Ghraib prison in Baghdad by American soldiers in 2004.  These works demonstrate the artist’s role as a social critic and shows how powerful a voice he or she can be.

While Botero was neither a political artist nor realist, his images of torture outraged people across the world, that were stimulated by the reports Botero had seen in the media and on the internet about the atrocities being carried out at the prison.  “The more I read the more I was upset…I was surprised that America, which criticises everyone for human rights, was going this.  This is so un-American…I felt I had to do it…After all, I am a figurative artist and I can say it in a very direct way that most artists today cannot”.

The works are confrontational, and more so when you realize that they are based on newspaper images and media reports.  When shown in his dealer’s gallery in New York, it was noted that the artist’s conservative style had reached new heights.

In the Abu Ghraib Series 2006, the pneumatic bodies, precise brushwork and smooth surfaces that sometimes seem bland and ingratiating are put into the service of a horrific theme that gains more force from its contrast with the artist’s essentially conservative style.  The softly rounded flesh of the prisoners’ naked bodies becomes a canvas upon which prison guards and prison dogs inscribe bright red scars, bruises, and cuts, while the starkly geometric prison cells in which they are held become stages upon which unspeakable acts are performed.  Some of the many drawings are done in gray charcoal with accents of red, bringing out the bruises and blood.  Others a drawn entirely in sanguine conte crayon, heightening their emotional urgency.