ART IS A WEAPON
The text of a talk, a conversation-starter.
Museum of Free Derry, 16th June 2023.
Sé bhur mbeatha. Tráthnóna maith. Good evening. Míle buíochas don iarsmallan as an cuireadh a thabhairt dom. Thanks to the Museum for the invitation to share some thoughts on Art and Power, under the title Art is a Weapon. Many artists, including myself, are uncomfortable with this statement. It is open to contradiction. It sits well, however, with my experience that everything humans do is a weapon, because the world is in a state of permanent conflict, right up to and including international wars.
My response to this, formed from a working class background in Waterford, from time as a solidarity worker in Asia and Africa, a primary school teacher in Letterkenny, a youth worker and bookseller in Derry and as a writer throughout, my response favours non-violence. Not pacifism, but non-violence, pushing back against the oppression and ruin delivered by war-makers.
I don’t believe all human activity is driven by conflict. Let’s keep that on the hurling field, as far as I’m concerned. The best of us is found in co-operation. Around here, that means in trade unions and credit unions. And food banks.
When our Fiona was in P7 in The Model School, she told me that something I said was an opinion, not a fact. She explained why. I didn’t fully agree with her, but I enjoyed the life lesson she passed on to me.
I toggle between fact and opinion around the phrase ‘Art is a Weapon’ and come up with the thoughts I present here. I hope to tease out why I say that Art is a Weapon, over the next thirty or so minutes. Then we can have responses and questions.
Art is all around us. Sculptor Locky Morris’ steel panel cut with the sound-wave of a line from “We Shall Overcome” fronts this museum. A re-working of painter Robert Ballagh’s The Third of May – After Goya is high on a wall to our left as we exit the museum.
I describe these works as art and also as weapons - of resistance, of celebration, of remembrance, of solidarity.
I’m a writer, not a visual artist. Most of my thoughts on art and power arise from experiences in literature, (writing books) and drama, (writing plays for stage, screen and radio). Let me begin with two instances from my own work.
In January 2012, I was writer and director on a theatre piece created by The Bloody Sunday Trust and The Pat Finucane Centre, in support of Gerald Donaghey’s family. It was a dramatised objection toThe Bloody Sunday Inquiry’s judgement that Gerald Donaghey was carrying nail bombs when he was murdered.
I used witness statements from the Inquiry to create a text. I convened and rehearsed readers on a staging that mimicked a court setting. Geraldine Donaghey, Gerald’s niece, vividly proved the impossibility of hiding nail bombs in the pockets of Gerald’s clothes, worn by a mannequin on stage, thus overturning the Inquiry’s judgement.
The work exhilarated me. It marked a return to my practice as an artist. It was a weapon of dramatic art. It asserted that Gerald Donaghey’s treatment by the Inquiry was wrong and unjust.
In 2005, I wrote, directed and toured, with Sole Purpose Productions, a play called AH 6905. Now, AH 6905 is a character about to have the truth of all the violent incidents in our recent conflict cut out, as part of a truth recovery process. In 2008 I gave permission to theatre makers in Kabul to translate my play into Dari and Pashtun and to mount touring productions across Afghanistan. They sent me images of an actor on stage in front of the grottos of Buddhas, blown up by the Taliban. And images of a technician, backstage in the ruins of the Russian Cultural Centre in Kabul, where a performance is underway. The audience is seated amidst the ruins of war.
The Afghan theatre makers work exhilarates me. It makes me proud, in a small way. The theatre makers and their families are now scattered widely, following imperialistic onslaught and abandonment by US/UK and allied forces.
My play AH 6905 is dramatic art and a weapon. It affirms a desire for truth and justice against efforts to do people down. The work says, in an artistic form, that our lives are valuable. Worthy of our grief.
Judith Butler, a philosopher of identity and of non-violence, writes about the division of people into grievable and ungrievable lives. Why do deaths caused by suicide bombing bring forth greater moral outrage in the Western media than deaths caused by aerial bombings?
Power judges, often by race and ethnicity, which victims are grieveable and which are not, thus defining the precarious multitude. In these times of permanent war, I do not accept that. We are all the same, that is, human, in such a way that nobody is the same as anyone else who ever lived, lives or will live. This is a paradox that underpins my work.
The legacy legislation passing through Westminster is an attempt to declare the people of Northern Ireland as ungrievable. No wonder it is being opposed by citizens, subjects, community organisations and political groupings.
We, including artists, each have the power to destroy and to be destroyed. We are bound to one another in this power. So we take a stance. We choose. Tentatively. Uncertainly.
My work as an artist in words stands with the multitude, those close by, here at home, and those close by, though far away. There are no ungrievable lives, no matter what the Powerful say.
Now let my try to pin down what I mean by Art. Power. Weapon.
I offer the following definitions. You may offer others.
ART is the skill to produce beauty and order in works of creative imagination.
POWER is control or influence exercised over people.
WEAPON is an instrument of offence or defence. Or both.
Tom Cruise is a weapon. A Cruise missile of popular culture. Especially in the Top Gun films. The films are instruments of offence, weapons in the service of the Powerful. We might ask, ah yes, Dave, but are they art? They are, by the definition above: they are works of creative imagination, expertlydesigned to exercise influence over people. To make people feel something.
It’s a matter of personal, aesthetic opinion as to whether or not they are beautiful. All such opinions are forcefully influenced by the Powerful. Are the films not just Entertainment? Yes, they are and because of that they are weapons of art, used as propaganda by the current world order.
More than that, the films and their stars are cool and desirable.
They continue the Hollywood tradition of Western and War films, starring John Wayne. The hero, a charismatic and dominant white male, wins the day, no matter how high the body count.
The Tom Cruise Top Gun films are art weapons of militarism, aimed at cowering people into accepting that monstrous machines of war – weapons of mass destruction – are perfectly acceptable, when they are murdering people who do not matter, the current world order designating them ungrievable, people who don’t deserve to be mourned.
Staying with the art of cinema, films and film-makers labelled arthouse are particularly cool. Is the work of German film-maker Leni Riefenstahl cool?
It is certainly highly regarded as film, as art, though a stench surrounds the work because the film-maker put her great skill in producing beauty and order, in works of creative imagination, at the service of POWER, fascist power, as developed by the Nazi regime in Germany in the 1930s.
Her art is a weapon of attack in support of other weapons of attack: public rhetoric, mass mobilisation, uniformed parades.
The cliché says ‘beauty is in the eye of the beholder’. Many people are seduced by Leni Riefenstahl's extraordinary film of the 1936 Olympics in Berlin, which weaponises her art in the service of the Fascist state. More seductive still is her 1934 film Triumph of the Will, which features the Nazi Party rally at Nuremberg, using all the techniques and methods of cinematic art to create an imaginative work of telling beauty. It is an assertion that Art is indeed a Weapon.
Conceptual artist Damien Hirst is another weapon. A weapon of Art. So is his work. His theme is death. His practice is to propose concepts, which his assistants fabricate. He conceived of dead animals – sharks, cows – set floating by his workers in large tanks of the toxic preservative, formaldehyde.
Wealthy patrons paid millions for them. He conceived an eyeless skull which his assistants encrusted with diamonds. It sold for fifty million pounds.
Once again, the works are art and whether they are any good or not is a matter of personal opinion. They have huge material value. That’s what weaponises them. Damien Hirst’s works are weapons of attack in the armoury of POWER. They support conspicuous over-consumption. They affirm the death wish that drives the extractive industries. They validate the vanity space-travel projects of the billionaires and their political allies who run the economy.
Hirst’s art is a weapon in the assertion of the power of the market and the power of celebrity. The power of being noticed.
Am I saying that art is propaganda? Tentatively, yes. And that artists are propagandists? Again, tentatively, I say yes. I’m comfortable with my uncertainty. As I’m comfortable with disagreement. I’m working all this out by living it, experiencing it and reflecting upon it.
Artists make choices and make work, either obviously or by default. If the work does not point in dissent at the current order, it defends and affirms it. By default.
Choosing to dissent is complex, wherever you are.
The people of Cuba are under pressure from the imperial power next door, the USA. Currently, individual artists and groups oppose increased Cuban government control over their work, notably by Decree 349, made law in two thousand and eighteen.
The government says artists are subject to manipulation by enemies of the state. What do artists do when their work is criminalised?
Artists are not neutral. Not even hermits are neutral. Saying that you are neutral is saying that you can jump over your own shadow. That you are not human.
Luis Manuel Otero Alcántara, a performance artist in Cuba, says
For government systems, it is impossible to control art, because it is capable of being born of the most unexpected places and situations. In these moments of such fragility and therefore repression, art is a very powerful weapon and the system knows it.
I am not neutral. I am not outside the world looking in and making art as some disconnected activity. I am not objective. No one is. If you consume, you are not objective, though individuals and corporations often claim to be.
Another definition then. Propaganda is the organised spreading of opinions, whether they are spread openly or by being subtly embedded in everyday experience. Ads on tv are propaganda. They are weapons, some of them very artful, on the attack, on behalf of the current economic order.
What is the artist to do? Retreat to a hermitage? Who pays for the hermitage? Choices are set before the artist. They, she, he chooses co-option to the war efforts of the Powerful or engagement with the efforts of the multitude to oppose them.
Such choices are not clean. They are as messy as all choices in life. But it is possible to see the main tendency of an artist’s work. Is it leaning towards the Powerful like the work of Tom Cruise or Leni Riefensthal? Or is it leaning towards the multitude, defined as powerless, like the work of Albert Camus or Ursula le Guin?
Perhaps none of this matters. Films are only entertainment after all. Art doesn’t actually ‘do’ anything, right?
English poet W. H. Auden made his reputation in the intensely political 1930s, when he inclined towards the anti-fascist movement in Europe and served as a stretcher-bearer for the Republicans during the Spanish Civil War.
Auden composed an elegy on the death of the Irish poet William Butler Yeats, in which he wrote that
poetry makes nothing happen:
it survives
In the valley of its making
The line – poetry makes nothing happen – is often quoted in the argument as to whether poetry (or art) is any use. Yet for all its alleged uselessness, poetry continues to be written, spoken and sung.
Consider the words of Fadwa Tuqan, a poet from Palestine. She writes
Enough for me
to die on her earth
be buried in her,
to melt and vanish into her soil
then sprout forth as a flower
played with by a child from my country.
Like the mural and the sculpture outside, her words are a dissenting art piece, in the opposite direction to the films of Tom Cruise and Leni Riefenstahl, once again as weapons of resistance, of celebration, of remembrance, of solidarity.
Yes, as poetry her work exists In the valley of its making. But that valley is in and of the this world.
Poetry and art are part of life and part of history. I say Fadwa Tuqan’s art is a weapon. It is a contribution to the politics of world-building, as described by Kenyan writer, Njala Nyabola.
She writes:
Good and timely art may not avert the crisis of the season, but world-building art will capture the energy of the moment and at least start the process of imagining different forms.
Poetry – art – does make something happen. It stirs peoples’ emotions, either in the direction of world-ruining or in the direction of world-building.
Following years of ideologically-driven austerity, many young people cower on entering insecure, low-paid creative work in the arts. Austerity is a weapon of the Powerful.
Artists are pressured to take hyper-commercial or instrumental routes with their work. They become enmeshed in the overpowering merry-go-round of consumption and dismissal that characterises the dissemination of art today. Many creative professions are only occupied by people who can afford to work insecurely. The funders and gate-keepers of the arts industry in Ireland come, in the main, from the same group. Dissenting is allowed, but only in your spare time and on-line, and certainly not if it means upsetting your landlord. Artists, as much as anyone, exist in the world as it is. Artists who make art weapons aimed at changing the world strive to manage the dangers of co-option in the midst of compromise. This is the challenge of Power, particularly the perverse power of the banks.
When I ask myself, what is my theme? what am I making work about? I realise that what impels me is Power and its offspring, violence.
The personal power of the individual; the individual experiencing power in small groups; small groups experiencing the power of society to deliver manifest violence (visible and direct) and latent violence (social and cultural, indirect). Artists seek a place for their work, and for themselves, in this power structure. They may seek Power’s validation, even as they challenge it, writhing on the spit of thatparadox.
I adopt a critical orientation towards power. In so far as my work re-balances power in the direction of the multitude, I am satisfied. The art of writing as a practice of dissent, an instance of a weapon, is widely acknowledged, whether it be of the “right”, like Boris Johnson’s journalism and books, or of the “left”, like Bernardine Evaristo’s plays and novels or the climate change novels of Barbara Kingsolver.
They, and all other writers, are writing politics when they take up the pen, obviously in some cases, less so in others.
I suggest it is solidarity that artists can offer. The artist is like Sisyphus, a mythological hero used by French writer Albert Camus. Sisyphus spends eternity pushing a burden up a slope only for it to fall and roll down, so that he has to start again. We’re not all carrying the same burden, up the same slope. The rich are on a fully-serviced escalator, toting privilege. The multitude, Sisyphus in our midst, are on a craggy rise, lugging hardship. Sisyphus is not alone. The struggle is the struggle of the multitude. Together.
Artists who strive to spill ink and paint, not blood, weaponise art and politics in favour the multitude. This forges weapons of non-violence, in opposition to Power.
Not easy, when the tanks arrive, as happened, on the hill of Creggan, when a British Army Centurion tank lumbered down a street at the end of July 1972. Such direct violence leads to anger, some of which may appear as other direct violence. This should surprise no-one.
The work of artists can be a weapon of non-violence, in opposition to the tanks. Not as pacifism. Pacifism is a really tough stance, when the tanks come down your street, though there is less call for lumbering tanks today. Power is the owner-occupier of social media. The tanks are on our mobile phones, bearing down on us each time we click or swipe.
We experience the world through isolated, personalised lenses. We consume narrow views, via feeds controlled top-down by algorithms in the service of billionaires.
Physical communities weaken and creak as solidarity is beaten into loneliness. These are some of the products of the violence created by Power.
The art of writing in prose and drama, with their traditions of form, language, style and innovation, offer a viable weapon by which to affirm my resistance to violence. Not to the tank on the street, no. But to all the forms of violence up to that point, in efforts to ensure we don’t get to that point. There will always be violence, as long as there is power. There will always be weapons of violence; guns, poverty, bombs, discrimination.
Art enables the creation of options. Acts of art clear space for other social orders, ones that move us closer to greater equality, greater justice among peoples and considerably less violence.
I hold to an idea attributed to Leo Tolstoy, the Russian author of - no irony intended -, War and Peace.He wrote
Art should cause violence to be set aside and it is only art that can accomplish this.
Humans have the ability to creatively change conflicts without violence. There’s a role for artists. And a choice to make, in a never-ending process.
People wonder how we might move into a peaceful future if the truth of the past continues to divide us. We do so by placing justice hand-in-hand with peace; by holding Power to account, moving slowly; carefully; putting victims and survivors front and centre; by acknowledging complexity; being creative and imaginative.
Art is a weapon of imagination, bringing play into the world. It faces down “we can't” by acts of creativity that point us at “maybe we can”, even when facing the power of the rich, who glory in the feeling that riches draw the attention of the world. You know who I’m taking about: Bezos, Bronson, Musk, Gates, Zuckerberg, and many others. Their lust for notice and power over-rides commercial sense, as they purchase remote island sanctuaries and develop space rockets. Their only desire for the world is to consume it. Then to flee from it.
They set the multitude arguing over which value is more important: recognition of our identities, by a change in language or representation or redistribution of material goods. This argument is fostered by Power as a weapon in our commercial society. How we produce, exchange, distribute, and consume wealth is not just an economic question. It’s also a matter of culture and recognition, how we relate to one another and create ourselves.
Art is implicated on both sides: representation and redistribution, both generate considerations of justice. When we pit recognition against redistribution, identity against economics, we affirm a contemporary tragedy, weaponised by Power in its use of art, through language, fashion, design, music, painting, literature, film and social media.
The job of the artist is to make art. I will continue working, uncertainly, putting my art into the world. Currently a collection of essays in English is under consideration by publishers. A stage-play romance-tragedy in a time of global-warming, is slowly emerging.
I conclude with two further examples from my own work that illustrate the title of the talk: Art is a Weapon.
I had a good year last year. Cló Iar Chonnacht published my second novel in Irish, Ór agus Mil, in November. Writing novels in Irish is a mug’s game in terms of economics, but it’s profitable in terms of identity. Actually, the economics are not totally dire, as there is support from readers (buyers) and the State.
Ór agus Mil, a piece of literary art, is a weapon of cultural defence in the face of the onslaught of a mono-lingual, Anglo-American, hyper-commercial culture. And a good, light read, ideal for the deck chair or under the duvet.
I also write novels in English and this talk is in English. I’m compromised and co-opted in good measure. In the only world possible. This changeable one, which holds me, my family, my friends and the multitude.
Last year, there was a twentieth anniversary production of my play Scenes from an Inquiry. It is a poetic dramatisation of The Bloody Sunday Inquiry. The final lament from the play was also sung on the Millennium Forum stage by Bronagh Gallagher who, alongside Jamie-Lee O’Donnell, read community writing as an art weapon in this Museum’s tremendous event to mark the 50th anniversary of Bloody Sunday.
My play and the final lament are weapons of art: of resistance, of celebration, of remembrance, of solidarity.
Here’s the last stanza of the lament. (sings)
All you who are of good intent
On truth and justice be you bent
So all the world may with us say
We made peace with that bloody day.
Thank you. Go raibh maith agaibh.
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