ABSTRACT
Avery Gordon: When you and Nancy Spero received The Third Hiroshima Art Prize in 1996, you made the following statement:
The history of the twentieth century is in large part a record of war, violence and atrocities.…
Artists have recorded these conflicts over the millennia, most typically in celebration of the feasts of power of rulers and national entities. Much of the history of art illustrates these events and celebrations. It’s very possible that many of the painters and sculptors who describe wars and feats of arms may have found their subject matter repugnant, but in its appearance, the art usually does not indicate this.…
I have pictured some of the events and some of the kinds of experiences that undercut our current world pictures … the effects of power and domination, the uses of interrogation to control dissidence or opposition, how such behaviors affect the consciousness and psychic responses of victimizers and victims, and also to indicate some of the public and private behavioral gestures of men acting out real-time reactive scenarios.
The art is intended … to be … a picture of the real. I would even dare claim that despite the apparent pessimism or negativity of the subject matter … in the very reporting of all this, there is retained a residual optimism in the very freedom to tell.
