For many years I have kept an eye on what Sue Coe is doing, she is an artist who uses her image making skills to highlight various aspects of society's ills, as well as making direct political interventions based on her strongly held beliefs. Sue Coe has campaigned for animal rights for many years, both by making imagery and by taking direct action. She uses traditional print and drawing techniques and sees herself belonging to a tradition that includes Goya, Hogarth and Kollwitz.
Sue Coe
Coe’s art speaks of the socially oppressed, the disenfranchised and outcast, and addresses everyone, not just the art going public. Her images arrive out of the struggle to balance her politics with a humanist art that searches for a deeper meaning, something difficult to reconcile, especially when working directly with a political group, because a situation can arise which can often be seen by outsiders as simply instrumental to the Marxist ‘class struggle’ and by insiders as a failure to fully communicate a political stance as laid out in a manifesto or other political tract.
Sue Coe: Factory farm
I have often remarked on that barrier that stands between fine art and illustration. Sue Coe is an artist that straddles the two disciplines and asks questions as to the relative purpose of them. The censorious nature of commercial illustration forced Coe to make compromises when she tried to get her images into what she saw as relevant publications. She was interested in reaching a much wider audience than the traditional art gallery going one and was therefore forced to see if she could use the illustrational route as a way into the pages of popular publications. For years she used editorial work to make a living, but art directors tended to think of her as a kind of exotic outsider who had 'working-class rage’. Within a fine art context she was seen as merely an illustrator. The reality is that she uses a visual vocabulary rooted in art history. "Like Goya and the seventeenth-century etcher Jacques Callot she isolated vignettes of horror; like Daumier and Grosz she made totems out of the commonplace; and like Rivera and Orozco she froze the historical moment".(Heller, 1996)
During the 1980s Sue Coe became suddenly trendy and as the art world became 'politically conscious', (something it sometimes does, more as a fashion statement I sometimes feel), she was picked out as a rising star. An art world that she herself described thus, ‘The art world is a zipped-up body bag of what they call culture.’ (So I'm sure she was very aware of how fickle the art world's embrace can be). During this time she exhibited a huge 20 foot wide image, a brutal picture of a gang rape called 'Woman Walks into Bar – Is Raped by 4 Men on the Pool Table – While 20 Watch'. Critics during this time equated her with Beckmann, Posada and Siqueiros and the format of 'Woman walks into a bar' is clearly a reflection on the expressionist compositions of Max Beckmann. In 1987, Art News put her on its cover. and in 1994, she was honoured with a retrospective at Washington’s Hirshorn Museum. You can read about her early career here in an excellent Eye Magazine article. Since that time her art world career has been one of confusing indifference and sudden moments of interest, as the fickle finger of art fame has moved on to point in other directions.
Sue Coe
Most contemporary Fine Art practitioners tend to use a range of media to get their ideas across. Film and video are however usually the media of choice when it comes to working in an area that is politically focused. What this means is that the sub sets of skills required are different and when you look at an artist's work in detail you will notice that other people have to be involved in the production. An artist that has had a long involvement in this area is Harun Farocki.
Serious Games III: Immersion: Harun Farocki
For the video installation Immersion Farocki visited a workshop organised by the Institute for Creative Technologies, a research centre for virtual reality and computer-simulations. One of their projects concerns the development of a therapy for war-veterans suffering from Post-traumatic Stress Disorder. Farocki is interested in the use of virtual realities and games in the recruting, training and also therapy for soldiers. Farocki explores the connection between virtual reality and the military – how the fictional scenarios of computer games are used both in the training of U.S. troops prior to their deployment in combat zones, and in psychological care for troops suffering battlefield trauma upon their return. In order for the work to be made a series of production stages and roles were needed, for instance, Harun Farocki was the director and scriptwriter, Matthias Rajmann conducted the research, Max Riemann was the editor working alongside Farocki, Ingo Kratisch was the cinematographer and Matthias Rajmann was in charge of sound.
'I Thought they were convicts' is centred around grainy surveillance footage from a maximum-security prison which captures the dramatic moment when an inmate is shot dead by guards. The shooting of William Martinez was one of many similar incidents at California State Prison, which became notorious for its brutal conditions. Farocki’s film focuses on the investigation into the shootings, revealing that guards intentionally set up fights between prisoners, allowing them to escalate before interceding with live ammunition. I'm interested in this work because of the way that drawing is used, the prison footage being juxtaposed with computer-generated drawings based on the movements of supermarket shoppers. In this way Farocki explores the power relationship between the observer and the observed, drawing parallels between the role of surveillance in the lives of prisoners and those of everyday shoppers.
I thought they were convicts: Harun Farocki
Workers Leaving the Factory in Eleven Decades: Harun Farocki
Workers Leaving the Factory in Eleven Decades, is displayed on twelve monitors simultaneously. When it comes to social conflict, the show place 'in front of a factory', is very significant; when it comes to a private life of a film's character, which really only begins after work, the factory is relegated to the background. In Fritz Langs Clash by Night (1952), you see Marilyn Monroe on the assembly line, coming out of the factory, and hear her talking about it. A movie star working in a factory evokes associations of a fairy tale in which a princess must work before she attains her true calling. What Farocki is pointing to here is that factories and the whole subject of labour are often relegated to the fringes of film history.
Deep Play: Harun Farocki
Deep Play is made up of various perspectives on the final of the 2006 World Cup. We see the 'clean feed', the television networks’ raw material, as well as individual players on both teams in close ups alongside abstract computer-generated representations of the flow of play. These drawings help classify and assess what's going on because they are used by trusted experts to analyse and evaluate all quantifiable events. Above all, what we experience is how the laboratory of football is able to exhibit the most advanced technology in the production and presentation of moving images. We see how eerily close the wishes of the consumers, the trainers and the police really are to each other. Just as they are in real life. Drawing in all these cases is woven seamlessly into the artwork, and it is common now to see drawing featuring as just one way amongst several others to carry information within complex communication packages.
Kara Walker: Endless Conundrum
Nancy Spero
Nancy Spero was making art alongside the beginnings of the Women’s Movement in the 1960s. Her large scale images were often emotional reactions to war as well as responses to emerging feminist issues. She rejected the use of paint on canvas as it was synonymous with misogynistic male painters. Instead she opted for a variety of drawing materials to create intense, raw, and illustrative political works. Of her 'War' series of images she stated, “ With the War Paintings, I had to figure out how to paint ‘manifestos’ against the war and the violence. From 1966–70 I worked fast and furiously. No more labouring over oil paint and canvas. I used gouache, watercolours, drawing inks, and paper.” It is interesting to remember how political the use of oil paint was and I could argue still is. One of the reasons this blog is about drawing rather than painting, is that painting is still saddled with many of its old associations with male privilege, media hierarchy, consumerist values and art world prejudice. Drawing hopefully escapes some of these associations because it is seen as less formal, is not as gendered, is more about thinking through ideas and is less collectable because works on paper have never been valued as highly as works on canvas.
Theatre Gates: Civil Tapestry (Dirty Yellow)
Using unusual materials to make your artwork can be a powerful way of engaging with history. A decommissioned fire hose is used to make this work, its formal arrangement, recalling American abstract art of the early 1960s, such as the minimalist abstractions made by Frank Stella. However, Gates’s work is actually about the violent hosing of civil-rights demonstrators by police in Birmingham, Alabama, in 1963. Gates uses money raised from the sale of his works to help in the regeneration of deprived neighbourhoods. He works with architects, craftspeople, and unemployed labourers, buying and renovating derelict properties. Salvaged materials from the buildings are then used by him to create new artworks, in this way ensuring that the process is as important as the products. It is perhaps the engagement with process that is becoming the most important aspect of current politically motivated art practice.
The New York City artist Tatyana Fazlalizadeh, has been drawing portraits of women that have suffered street harassment. The posters are put up in the places where the harassment happened, obviously hoping to embarrass the harassers but also making people aware that there is a powerful movement engaged with making sure that social customs and behaviours are both challenged and changed.
If you want to know more about art and activism the link to this booklet is a good starting point. Why artistic activism?
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