a garden bursting into life. some aims: what social issues do artists consider and why? how do...
TRANSCRIPT
A Garden Bursting into Life
A Garden Bursting into Life
Some Aims:• What social issues do artists consider and why?• How do artists respond?• What role do artists play in creating issues for us to consider?• What is a work of art and how does it come into being?
A Garden Bursting into Life
Artists respond to what happens around them!
The Third of May 1808 – Francisco Goya (1746-1828),
painted 1814-1815
A Garden Bursting into Life
Artists respond to an event: Spain 1936-1939
In 1994 the historian E.J. Hobsbawm wrote:
“…at the time it seemed to those who fought fascism to be the central front of their battle, because the only one in which action never ceased for over two-and-a-half years, the only one where they could participate as individuals, if not in uniform, then by collecting money, by helping refugees, and by the never-ending campaigns to put pressure on our own chicken-hearted governments.”
A Garden Bursting into Life
Spain 1936-1939
Guernica by Pablo Picasso (1881-1973), painted 1937
A Garden Bursting into Life
Spain 1936-1939
The political journalist George Orwell wrote:
“I had come to Spain with some notion of writing newspaper articles, but I had joined the militia almost immediately, because at that time and in that atmosphere it seemed the only conceivable thing to do.”
A Garden Bursting into Life
Spain 1936-1939
The poet W.H Auden wrote:
‘What’s your proposal? To build the just city? I will. I agree. Or is it the suicide pact the romantic Death? Very well, I accept, for I am your choice, your decision. Yes, I am Spain.’
A Garden Bursting into Life
Spain 1936-1939
The poet Louis MacNeice wrote:
…And next day took the boatFor home, forgetting Spain, not realizingThat Spain would soon denoteOur grief, our aspirations;Not knowing that our bluntIdeals would find their whetstones, that our spiritWould find its frontier on the Spanish front,Its body in a rag-tag army.
A Garden Bursting into Life
Spain 1936-1939
The novelist Ernest Hemingway wrote:
“He fought the war now because it had started in a country that he loved and he believed in the Republic and that if it were destroyed life would be unbearable for all those people who believed in it. “
A Garden Bursting into Life
Spain 1936-1939
And the photo-journalist Robert Capa:
Loyalist Militiaman at the Moment of Death, Cerro Muriano, September 5, 1936.
A Garden Bursting into Life
Spain 1936-1939
Recently the photographer Martin Parr said:
“Photography is Art and Art is Photography.”
More of him later, but is he right about the Capa picture?
What do you think?
A Garden Bursting into Life
Artists decide what is important - The British New Wave.
From the term given to the French film “Nouvelle Vague”.
“There is considerable overlap with the so-called “Angry Young Men”, those artistes in British theatre and film…who challenged the social status quo. Their work drew attention to the reality of life for the working classes…”
A Garden Bursting into Life
The British New Wave
From Arnold Wesker’s “Roots”:“Do you think we really count? You don' wanna take any notice of what them ole papers say about the workers bein' all-important these days - that's all squit! 'Cos we aren't...The writers don't write thinkin' we can understand, nor the painters don't paint expectin' us to be interested - that they don't, nor don't the composers give out music thinkin' we can appreciate it…'the masses is too stupid for us to come down to them…So you know who come along? …the women's magazines and the tabloid papers and the picture-strip love stories - thaas who come along, and you don't hev to make no effort for them, it come easy…The whole stinkin' commercial world insults us and we don't care a damn.”
A Garden Bursting into Life
The British New Wave
From Alan Sillitoe’s “The Loneliness of the Long Distance Runner”, 1959:
“I'm a human being and I've got thoughts and secrets and bloody life inside me that he doesn't know is there, and he'll never know what's there because he's stupid. I suppose you'll laugh at this, me saying the governor's a stupid bastard when I know hardly how to write and he can read and write and add-up like a professor. But what I say is true right enough. He's stupid, and I'm not, because I can see further into the likes of him than he can see into the likes of me.
A Garden Bursting into Life
The British New Wave
Albert Finney as Arthur Seaton in Karel Reisz’s film of Alan Sillitoe’s “Saturday Night and Sunday Morning”, 1960
A Garden Bursting into Life
The British New Wave
Carol White as Cathy in “Cathy Come Home”, a BBC Play for Today, written by Jeremy Sandford and directed by Ken Loach, 1966.
A Garden Bursting into Life
The British New Wave
Back to Martin Parr…
New Brighton, 1985
A Garden Bursting into Life
The British New Wave
And finally the Artic Monkeys: And up rolls the riot van
And these lads just wind the coppers upThey ask why they don't catch proper crooksThey get their address and their names tookBut they couldn't care less
Got thrown in a riot van,and all the coppers kicked him in, and there was no way he could win, just had to take it on the chin.
“Riot Van” from the album Whatever People Say I am, That’s What I’m Not,2006. A quotation from Saturday Night and Sunday Morning.