on art and justice…
The latest section of my thesis. I’m getting closer to being done–the end is in sight!
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No matter what its form, true art draws people into a conversation about something deeper. True art challenges individuals and communities to rethink their understanding of the world as they know it and to instead consider the world from a new perspective. This art does not have to be explicitly justice themed, but often the most powerful examples are. Some of the following examples were created by world famous artists, while other examples are less well known but no less important.
There is admittedly a narrow line between art that clearly features and struggles with justice themes and art that functions as political propaganda, but there are enough examples of art that does justice while avoiding being propaganda that it is worth examining. All artists have to figure out for themselves how to exactly include justice themes in their own work and how overt that inclusion is. I realize that may sound like something of a cop-out but what this looks like for a poet compared to a painter compared to a photographer is very different. Rather than try to give a set of rules or formula to follow, we should look instead at some examples of artists who have already done some of this work.
The first example is not just a justice themed work of art, but one of the most famous pieces of art from the twentieth century. Picasso painted Guernica in 1937 in response to the bombing of the eponymous town by the forces of Francisco Franco. In his distinct style, Picasso paints figures twisted and broken by the attack, bodies crushed by debris as buildings crumble. Though the piece depicts a specific historical event it remains to this day a powerful statement on the destructive force of ever increasing military technology and the ease with which political leaders will employ that force against innocent civilians in order to achieve their goals.
There are numerous examples of films that bring attention to great injustices and tell stories of the people who overcame them. Hotel Rwanda tells the story of Paul Rusesabagina, a Rwandan hotel manager who saved the lives of almost 1,300 people during the 1994 genocide that took the lives of over 800,000 Rwandans. Schindler’s List tells the World War II story of Oskar Schindler, a German businessman who managed to save the lives of over 1,000 Polish-Jews by employing them in his factories and preventing their transfer to a concentration camp. The Killing Fields, a 1984 film, recounts the atrocities of Pol Pot and the Khmer Rouge in Cambodia. The Khmer Rouge killed an estimated 1.7 to 2.5 million people during their rule over Cambodia between 1975 and 1979. The Brazilian film City of God tells a fictionalized story of life in the favelas of Rio de Janeiro. The film Sin Nombre deals with the dangerous journey immigrants make from Central America north to the US border. This is just some of the feature films that deal with the theme of justice, a great number of documentaries also deserve mention.
The 2007 documentary War/Dance is about a group of children from Northern Uganda who compete in a national song and dance competition. Many of the children lost family members to the long war fought between the Ugandan government and the Lord’s Resistance Army of Joseph Kony. The Academy Award winning 2004 documentary Born into Brothels followed filmmaker Zana Briski as she taught photography to a group of young children living in Kolkata’s red light district, Sonagachi. The 2008 documentary Call + Response was put together by musician Justin Dillon and spread awareness of human trafficking while featuring music from acts as diverse as Moby, Talib Kweli, Nickel Creek and Switchfoot, among others. Depending on how wide you want to cast the net of “justice-themed”, even a documentary like Food, Inc., about industrial food production in the United States, raises questions about the ethical treatment of animals and the wisdom of massive farm subsidy programs.
Photographer James Nachtwey specializes in documenting the lives and struggles of people in conflict zones. He also does a large amount of work focusing simply on the lives of the poor and disenfranchised. Nachtwey was the focus of a 2001 Academy Award nominated documentary War Photographer. In his 2007 talk at the TED Conference Nachtwey said, “I have been a witness, and these pictures are my testimony. The events I have recorded should not be forgotten and must not be repeated” (Nachtwey, 2007). His documentary photography has helped tell the stories of those who otherwise would not have a voice. Nachtwey is just one of many documentary photographers who do this work. It may be cliché, but there is a reason for the phrase, “a picture is worth a thousand words.” Documentary photography has only gained power as the Internet and mass media technology and access allow near instantaneous sharing of images around the planet. More recently Nachtwey has worked on documenting the story of those fighting antibiotic resistant tuberculosis.
The theater troupe Belarus Free Theater, in response to their increasingly critical plays about the government of Belarus and its treatment of its citizens, recently snuck out of the country. Currently they are touring America with their play “Being Harold Pinter.” It was written by the eponymous playwright and tells the story of increasingly brutal political oppression in Belarus. Ben Brantley, a theater writer for the New York Times, called the performance “heroic” and struggled to think of the last time he saw a play that was so of the moment as he “marveled at the bravery and urgency” (Brantley, 2011). The final scene of the play features the actors illuminated by a single flashlight telling true stories of people in Belarus who have been harassed, detained, arrested and tortured by the state police.
I hope you can see in this sample of artists and works that art very clearly can do justice. In fact, art that deals with justice issues is sometimes among the most exciting and daring art being produced at the moment! Artists will create art for all seasons of life—creating sometimes out of a spirit of joy and celebrating the good things of life, but other times creating out of the darkness and suffering of the human condition. In creating art that is accessible, in creating art that is meaningful, in creating art that is genuine artists help their community ask the right questions, leading us from a worldview centered on conflict and materialism to an orientation of justice and reconciliation. Again, as Mark Labberton writes, it is about having an “imagination for justice.”
This call to justice extends beyond Christian artists and the church though. Storytelling guru Robert McKee writes,
“The final cause of the decline of story runs very deep. Values, the positive/negative charges of life, are at the soul of our art. The writer shapes story around a perception of what’s worth living for and what’s worth dying for, what is foolish to pursue, the meaning of justice, truth-the essential values. …ours has become an age of moral and ethical cynicism, relativism, and subjectivism–a great confusion of values. As the family disintegrates and sexual antagonisms rise, who, for example, feels he understands the nature of love? And how, if you do have a conviction, do you express it to an ever-more skeptical audience? This erosion of values has brought with it a corresponding erosion of story” (Miller).
McKee’s point is that values and ethics do not simply have a place in storytelling, but they are in fact vital to the telling of great stories. When artists are weaving themes of justice through their art they are telling great stories. It is through this telling of great stories that artists help us to imagine a more just world. This may sound a little pie in the sky or idealistic, but it is none-the-less true. We have the culture that we as artists create. We can choose to create works that are empty and glorify temporal achievements, or we can create works that speak to the human soul and call us to something better.
This section has admittedly been somewhat lacking when it comes to practical or theoretical advice. As previously mentioned, it is difficult to argue for how specific artists operating in specific media should best incorporate justice themes into their art. My goal was simply to provide examples proving it can be done. The following section will tie together these first three and argue for why it is important for artists to include the theme of justice in their art.
