Senior fine arts student Maria Jenkins poses with
what will become her honors project.
Photo by Fred Baerkircher
By Fred Baerkircher
It's hard to describe the effect of seeing a good painting
charged with meaning for the first time. Who could forget, for example, Goya's
"The Third of May," that depicts Spanish partisans, arms outstretched, being
ruthlessly gunned down by Napoleon's troops? A great deal of what we see
in museums is there because of its meaning, whether the messages it conveys
are on the surface, or hidden away. Art has long been a powerful weapon
in the activist's arsenal.
For assistant professor Scott Sherer, who teaches
modern and contemporary art history, the marriage of art and activism is
just as strong as ever. Popular themes these days run from contemporary
politics and sexuality to gender and race. Some works address relatively
narrow themes like the relative reluctance on the part of some museums
to display depictions of the nude male form as opposed to that of the female.
Others work on a larger scale, exploring the viewer's relationship to the world.
"A lot of contemporary art is about questions of
cultural duality, social identity, and the relationship between cultural
identity and the self, the subject," Sherer said.
He described artists as investigators of how
meaning is produced. They often make use of common symbols to show us that
the way we collect information is part of the broader visual culture in which we
reside. Sometimes that work is blatant. He points to a large portrait of a red
hand, with text declaring that the United States has blood on its hands, which
underscores a perceived lack of attention to the AIDS crisis in Africa. Often,
the artist takes a more subtle tack: an example is a work by Fred Wilson at the Maryland
Historical Society that featured a collection of fine silverware alongside a set of slave
shackles and was titled, simply, "Metalwork."
"A lot of times art opens up for the viewer an opportunity for
questioning," Sherer said.
Sherer explained that art frequently serves as a vehicle
for activist messages because it allows us to examine issues and themes that might otherwise
be difficult or impossible to confront, like loss or love. It has a way of pulling us in where
other media might fail.
"We can't be passive spectators," Sherer said. "Good art can make us actively
interested in something."
Sherer said art can also be useful in addressing
issues that can’t be accessed on a logical level. As an example, he cited racism.
Racism is something that can’t be reached rationally. Reaching conclusions about someone
based solely on the color of their skin just doesn't make sense, and yet racism not
only exists, but is all too common. Art can be used to comment on the issue regardless of
our ability to rationally address it.
"Art kind of suggests to us that we cannot rely upon fully rational systems,"
Sherer said.
There's also a sense of play involved.
"Art is just a really great way to make activism fun again," said Maria
Jenkins, a senior fine arts major, from behind a table in her studio covered in pink fabric.
"Humor is necessary in the activist movement."
Her latest project involves enlisting roughly 20 people to dress
in gaudy pink police uniforms and undertake a short march and performance outside the student center.
It's something she views as a response to patriarchal authority in the form of
a machismo-laden police force. She said the project is also heavily influenced by the punk
rock movement and the methods it used to convey often important messages.
"It’s kind of an adolescent response to an adolescent society,"
Jenkins said.
Jenkins, whose past works have included wrapping paper
bearing the images of toy company executives and a comparison of shock imagery
used by pro-life groups and war protesters to explore what is seen as culturally
acceptable, said she has been consciously trying for a couple of years now to combine art and activism.
For Jenkins, art and activism go hand in hand.
"I think there's a lot of freedom in creativity," she said.
"Being creative is one of the only ways to break through the status quo."
Sherer explained that often art that is not necessarily
intended to make an explicit statement gets appropriated by a larger movement. It's
a fine line, sometimes, between what is political and what isn't. As an example, Sherer
pointed to the work of Doris Salcedo, who reconstructed living spaces of people who have
been disappeared in Colombia. The work is about loss and memory, not making direct statements
about the climate in which these disappearances are taking place. Yet the broader ramifications
are inescapable. It's apolitical, and yet at the same time, it's most definitely not. It's
this attribute of art, its unique slipperiness, which makes it such a frequent conduit for
social messages. Of course, Sherer concedes, art sometimes is created for the simple purpose of looking nice.
"But," he added, "it’s usually bad art."