Beautiful, Gruesome, and True - Artists at Work in the Face of War

"Wilson-Goldie memorably profiles three artists who work in widely separated locations, but who share a commitment to conveying the emotional and political truth of some of the worst horrors the world has to offer"--

About the author

Kaelen Wilson-Goldie is a writer and critic who contributes regularly to Artforum, Aperture, and Afterall, among other publications. She is the author of Etel Adnan, a monographic study on the paintings of the Lebanese-American poet Etel Adnan, and a contributor to numerous books on modern and contemporary art, including Art Cities of the Future: 21st-Century Avant-Gardes and Huguette Caland: Everything Takes the Shape of a Person. She lives in New York City and Beirut.

Summary

Why have some of the most interesting artists of our time committed themselves to some of the most devastating conflicts on Earth?

Why are some of the most interesting artists of our time committed to engaging with conflict and exploitation around the world? Beautiful, Gruesome, and True tells the stories of three of them: Amar Kanwar makes riveting films about the destruction of rural India in the drive to extract natural resources. Teresa Margolles creates haunting installations from the traces of crime scenes and drug-related violence in Mexico. The anonymous collective Abounaddara has produced more than four hundred short films chronicling the uprising and civil war in Syria. Drawing on years of research and extensive reporting, Kaelen Wilson-Goldie vividly recounts how a group of “political” artists found ways to produce remarkable works of art that demand deliberate and methodical ways of thinking—works that are contemplative, thoughtful, even redemptive.

Named one of the best art books of the year by Holland Cotter of the New York Times

“A gifted critic and a compelling journalist, Wilson-Goldie offers many important insights into the challenges these artists face in their confrontation with authority, repressive regimes, death, and violence. The story she tells could not be more timely.”

—Glenn D. Lowry, David Rockefeller Director, Museum of Modern Art

Foreword

Introduction

Throughout the summer and into the fall of 2019, a haunting
artwork by Mexican artist Teresa Margolles stood in a darkened
corner of an old warehouse in the Italian port city of Venice.
The piece consisted of three large glass panels, each fitted into a
free-standing metal frame, placed side-by-side at a bend in the
segmented path through the Corderie, a former rope-making
facility that runs, corridorlike, for nearly three hundred and
fifty yards, through the ancient brick columns and fresh plywood
dividers of the Arsenale, a vast complex of decommissioned
armories and shipyards in the Venetian neighborhood of
Castello.

The glass panels in Margolles’s installation, titled La
búsqueda (The Search), 2014, were dirty, scratched in stray graffiti,
and covered at eye-level with wheat-pasted flyers that had
been torn by time, weather, and the hands of passersby. The
posters announced the names of one or a half-dozen missing
women, with accompanying pictures ranging from unsmiling
ID photos to joyous graduation portraits and the hopeful headshots of young professionals at the starts of their careers.
Listed beneath the images were the identifying details: ages,
heights, specifics of appearance, dates of disappearance, places
lived in or vanished from. Across the three panels, the ages of
the missing women were frightful. Few of them were older than
nineteen. Several were as young as thirteen. Many of them had
been gone for a decade. All of the posters implored: “Ayúdanos
. . . Ayúdanos. . . . Ayúdanos a localizarla” (Help us . . . Help us. . . .
Help us locate her).

Margolles had found the glass panels five years earlier in
Ciudad Juárez, a city plagued by drugs, crime, and the struggles
of low-wage labor on the Mexican side of the border with the
United States. For decades, the gruesome violence of competing
drug cartels had overwhelmed Juárez. Then, starting in the early
1990s, there was a sudden and dramatic uptick in the number
of women being kidnapped, tortured, and murdered in the city.
More than three thousand people were murdered in Juárez in
the year 2010 alone, out of a population of just 1.3 million. But
even as the rates of other crimes eventually began to level off,
the killing of women, most but not all of them young and poor,
remained high. Hundreds of those murders were left unsolved.
The crime wave continued and beyond the battered social circles
of the city itself the femicides were largely forgotten.

Equally sensitive to current events, political circumstances,
and the more rebellious chapters of art history, La búsqueda
evoked the work of Marcel Duchamp in two key ways, not only
by repositioning a set of common objects as rarefied fine art,
as Duchamp had famously done in works such as Bicycle Wheel,
1915 (a bicycle wheel), and Fountain, 1917 (a urinal), but also in
emulating the sculptural form and spatial presence of the two free-standing glass panels in Duchamp’s The Bride Stripped Bare by Her Bachelors, Even, 1915–1923, also known as The Large Glass.
Margolles had taken her glass panels from a bus stop in the historic
city center of Juárez, and turned them into contemporary
art like unsuspecting urban readymades wrestled into the cool,
serial language of minimalist sculpture.

The installation also embodied the more activist, interventionist
spirit of a large subset within the field of contemporary
art, roughly defined as politically engaged or driven by
a demand for social justice. As documents, the faded posters,
whether vandalized or smudged by greasy fingers or fixed to the
glass as far back as 2009, called attention to the extreme pain of
Juárez, to the fates of women who disappeared, to the struggle
of mothers still searching for their daughters, and to the city’s
loneliness and desolation, like night falling on a once lively
place, now emptied of everything but dread.

The real power of Margolles’s piece did not from the flyers
alone. It came from the fact that the glass panels were rattling
slightly in their frames. The most important part of the
piece was in fact a hidden audio track, which transformed
sound recordings the artist had made of freight trains rumbling
through Juárez into a frequency so low that it shook the glass
panels at period intervals when they were installed in the exhibition
space. The dim but jarring sounds of the shaking panels
coupled with the stories of the missing women made it feel as
though the piece was being rocked by angry ghosts.

La búsqueda had been shown in other museums and
arts institutions, before the installation was transported to
Northern Italy for the fifty-eighth edition of the Venice Biennale,
where it was shown as part of curator Ralph Rugoff’s now seemingly prophetic exhibition, whose title, “May You Live in
Interesting Times,” came from an apocryphal Chinese curse,
attributed to a British diplomat, who invented its provenance
and passed it along to a member of parliament, who in turn used
the expression in a 1936 speech warning about the very real dangers
of Hitler and the rise of fascism in Europe. “We move from
one crisis to another,” the diplomat said. “We suffer one disturbance
and shock after another. . . . There is no doubt that the
curse has fallen on us.” The saying never actually existed in Chinese
philosophy, folklore, or proverbs, but it has been repeated
down the ages by everyone from Albert Camus and Arthur C.
Clark to Robert F. Kennedy and Hillary Clinton. “For an exhibition
that [considered] how art functions in an era of lies, it
struck me as an apt title,” Rugoff wrote in a curatorial statement.
An American based in London, where he directs the Hayward
Gallery, a public institution down the road from Tate Modern,
Rugoff turned the phrase into a capacious curatorial framework,
generous enough to include the complexity and nuance of
nearly eighty different artists responding to a litany of urgent,
timely issues in an age of fake news and alternative facts.

“The idea was that interesting times were times of change,
potentially times of revolution, disaster, war, famine,” Rugoff
explained in an interview with the Los Angeles Review of Books.
“So, you really wanted to live in boring, stable, prosperous
times.” In addition to La búsqueda, Rugoff included in the exhibition
Margolles’s Muro Ciudad Juárez (Juárez City Wall), 2010,
a barrier of concrete blocks riddled with bullet holes and topped
with barbed wire, which the artist had taken from the yard of a
public school where four young people were killed in a run-in
with organized crime.

Margolles won a special mention from the jury of the 58th Venice Biennale. Many people remembered her work for
the Mexican national pavilion of the 53rd Venice Biennale, ten
years earlier, which involved mopping the floor of a dilapidated
palazzo with the blood of the victims of Mexico’s violence. It
was called “one of the most memorable and frightening works
ever shown there.”

Margolles is certainly exceptional, but she belongs to a
larger group of like-minded contemporary artists who approach
their work as an inherently political practice. They delve into
complicated, difficult, and ambitious subjects, such as life,
death, love, pain, dignity, and injustice. But more than that, they
transform the materials they find into unexpected forms that
are most notable for being contemplative, thoughtful, orderly,
even redemptive. From the chaos of wars or sustained periods of
seemingly senseless violence come details, anecdotes, digressions,
traces, examples, and evidence that are then translated
into a moving array of objects, an exquisite grid of images, a
beautifully composed narrative, or a highly ritualized performance.
Although they don’t constitute a school or a movement,
artists like Margolles represent a considerable amount of the
work being made in the name of contemporary art today.

That may come as a surprise to anyone holding onto the idea
that the art of our time should be pretty, pleasant, uplifting, or
that the more general purpose of culture is to delight and entertain.
But artists have always been working in close proximity or
direct response to political violence. Even the most traditional
of art histories trace a crucial if brutal lineage. The most obvious
example is Picasso’s Guernica, 1937, an enormous mural capturing,
in discombobulated fragments, broken glass, and shades of black and white, the incendiary bombing of a tiny Basque
town by German and Italian forces. Maybe the best known
anti-war work in history, it marks the advent of total war, blitzkrieg
tactics, and the targeting of civilians in the mid-twentieth
century. From there, one can reach back in time to the three versions
of Édouard Manet’s The Execution of the Emperor Maximillian,
1867, 1867–68, and 1869, depicting a firing squad poised
to kill the young Austrian archduke who was installed by Napoleon
III as the ruler of a French monarchy in Mexico. The series
culminates, in the last painting, with the sudden appearance
of a crowd of voyeurs who foretell the ways in which atrocities
will be transformed into spectacle. Moving further back, there
is Goya, the eighteenth-century history paintings of Géricault
and Delacroix and David, the blood and gore of Caravaggio, and
the intense Renaissance battle scenes of Paolo Uccello, Leonardo
Da Vinci, and more. Go as far back as the epics of ancient
Greece, India, and Mesopotamia, and you’ll find that even those
early poets dwelled at length on descriptions of war.

An obsession with violence doesn’t necessarily run counter
to the purpose of art but rather supports its possible role in
sublimating passions—redirecting, say, the death drive toward
more productive ends. As Susan Sontag argues in her landmark
essay “Against Interpretation,” paraphrasing Aristotle: “Art is
useful . . . medicinally useful in that it arouses and purges dangerous
emotions.” Some of the best and most enduring works
of art about willful, man-made crises are shaded with humility.
They show us that as a species, we are capable of many wondrous
things, including the transcendent power of art. But at the
same time, they remind us of our baser instincts, of our propensity
to do great damage to each other, the planet, and ourselves.

That is not to say that artists like Margolles are making 27
explicitly political art, a dutiful category of earnest, often joyless,
and mostly terrible work that is usually intended to serve
as an instrument or tool in achieving a specific goal. “I don’t
think anyone in this exhibition is making political art,” Rugoff
said of the artists in “May You Live in Interesting Times.” “I
think some of them are making art politically. They’re thinking
politically. But to me political art means art that’s trying to
drive home one message or is trying to make one point about
one issue.” The artists in Rugoff’s show weren’t doing that.
They were raising questions, making connections among disparate
things, framing events of the day in new or different ways.

In that respect, such artists sometimes do the work of
journalists, novelists, sociologists, and anthropologists. One
of the major themes running through contemporary art since
the 1990s involves archival investigations into past moments
of political upheaval and potential, for example, in relation to
independence movements or the process of decolonization. Or
those investigations delve into periods of violence that have
been overlooked or covered up. Exceptional works of contemporary
art sometimes surpass investigative journalism, documentary
films, or the advocacy of human rights campaigns because
they are able to take their audiences by surprise. They can
convey the sensation of living through a crime wave, the corporate
pillaging on indigenous lands, or the collapse of a revolutionary
movement in the barbaric onslaught of civil war, to a
crowd of people who may have been hoping for some pretty pictures
but had their minds blown by a video installation instead.

It is somewhat disorienting to look back now on “May
You Live in Interesting Times.” Rugoff’s edition of the Venice Biennale was the last to happen before the start of the global
COVID-19 pandemic. The next edition, organized by Italian
curator Cecilia Alemani and inspired by artist Leonora Carrington’s
surrealist children’s book The Milk of Dreams, was
delayed by a year. Such interruptions in the schedule are rare. In
retrospect, “May You Live in Interesting Times” sounds like “Be
Careful What You Wish For.” The conflicts and crises of just a
few years ago have multiplied in number and gravity. The institutions,
circulatory systems, and survival modes of contemporary
art have themselves come under enormous strain.

For all its promise, Rugoff’s exhibition didn’t always hold
together or add up to the sum of its parts. One could argue that
Rugoff padded the exhibition with more frivolous modes of
art-making, in order to make it palatable to mainstream tastes.
Still, at its core, the show offered a remarkable concentration of
artists thinking politically today. There have been other shows
like it, and there are more artists working in the same vein as
Margolles. Few of them are as good or as challenging as she is.
But the ones who are have much to tell us about how contemporary
art has changed and what it could be in the future. This
book focuses on three of them.

The story of the work of Amar Kanwar begins, in part one, with
the assassination of a charismatic labor leader in the central
Indian state of Chhattisgarh, an event the artist describes as
both the gate-crashing arrival of twentieth-century globalization
and a pivotal moment in his political life.

Part two takes up the story of Teresa Margolles’s work, first
by revisiting the explosive exhibition “What Else Could We
Talk About?” staged in 2009, and then moving backward and forward in time to consider her early work with the collective SEMEFO, and her more recent work on a group of transgender women and sex workers in Ciudad Juárez.

The work of Abounaddara rounds out part three. Initially
composed of a small group of filmmakers working anonymously
in Syria, the group came to widespread attention in
the years following the start of the revolution, which began in
2011 with protests scattered around the country, inspired by the
Arab Spring. Just as the uprising was organized around Friday
demonstrations, Abounaddara posted one short film to Facebook,
Twitter, and Vimeo at the end of every week, in solidarity
with the protesters.

The idea for this book came together at a time when I had
been following the work of each of these three artists, separately,
for a number of years. I began to wonder what it would
mean to look at their projects side by side. Amar Kanwar, Teresa
Margolles, and Abounaddara create dramatically different art.
What linked them together in my mind, and set them apart
from their peers, was the consistency and coherence of what
each of them was doing in the face of horrific violence and longstanding
conflict, the awful if typical forever wars of our age. As
I began to think about their work together, the importance of
collaboration, of trying out different modes of working collectively,
quickly emerged as a question I wanted to pursue. It was a
common element that distinguished their work, and it seemed
to have been born of the time and seriousness they had each
devoted to their subjects.

That said, this book is not a work of critical theory or art
history. Although I dwell at length on certain institutions as
nodes in the circulatory systems of contemporary art, and despite my abiding interest in how those institutions are tied
to longer, older histories of war, violence, and political conflict,
this book is not an exposé of all the contradictions, compromises,
and complicities inherent to the art world today. This
book is lastly not a joint biography of these three artists. Some
people love to place their own stories, backgrounds, and identities
at the heart of their work. Amar Kanwar, Teresa Margolles,
and Abounaddara decidedly do not. The stories I tell are the stories
of the work, not the stories of the makers, and those stories
are themselves a work of journalism and criticism, first and
foremost.

The title Beautiful, Gruesome, and True is meant to describe
the many artworks that are discussed at length but never
shown in a book that is being published without a single image
reproduced on its cover or in its pages. My hope is that some
readers will already know those artworks and other readers
will enjoy the freedom to imagine them. In any case, anyone
with a decent internet connection can find a wealth of images
online showing many stills from Kanwar’s films and multiple
views of Margolles’s installations; Abounaddara’s archive of
four hundred-plus films, made from 2010 through 2017, is still
parked on Vimeo, free for all to see.

Kanwar, Margolles, and Abounaddara belong to a long tradition
of artists dealing with political violence in their work. But
the recitation of epic poems that told of distant wars operated in
a very different conception of time from our own. Renaissance
battle scenes that were meant to cower viewers with their grisly
details assumed an audience that was almost always on the winning
side. Kanwar, Margolles, and Abounaddara have more in
common with artists closer to their time, a generation before, a generation after, contending with how ubiquitous images of 31
atrocity have become, whether in magazines, on television, or
online. What sets Kanwar, Margolles, and Abounaddara apart
is how long each has spent at work in a single place, in response
to a specific conflict, finding modes of enduring collectivity
and lasting collaboration—and in doing so, slowing the pace
of internet time by demanding more deliberate and methodical
ways of thinking.

“Artists are seldom brave, nor need they be,” the art historian
T. J. Clark said about Picasso and others in the time of
Guernica. Kanwar, Margolles, and Abounaddara would never
describe themselves as brave, though their work is undoubtedly
fearless. This book about them is dedicated to two younger
artists like them, who came along in the generation after and
should have been just now hitting their stride. Amal Kenawy
and Leila Alaoui worked in similar ways. They put themselves
in volatile situations, stuck with it, created an incredible record
of work, and paid far too heavy a price for their bravery. Kenawy,
who made wildly surrealist videos and provocative street performances
that chiseled into deeply held hatreds of women in
Egypt, earning her run-ins with the police and prison, died of
illness in 2012 at the age of thirty-seven. Leila Alaoui, who made
films and photographs about the effects of migration on identity
and community in Morocco, was killed in 2016 in a terrorist
attack in Burkina Faso, caught in the wrong place at the wrong
time, at the age of thirty-three. I wrote this book for them, for
the risks they took, and for the work they made in a world that
still has a lot to learn from artists like them.

Additional text

“Kaelen Wilson-Goldie writes with clarity and great knowledge about the artists Amar Kanwar, Teresa Margolles, and the Syrian collective Abounaddara. A gifted critic and a compelling journalist, she offers many important insights into their art, and the challenges they each face in their confrontation with authority, repressive regimes, death, and violence. The story she tells is one of persistence and dedication, contingency and tragedy, and the ability of art to transcend the horrors of murder, violence, war and repression. It could not be more timely.” —Glenn D. Lowry, David Rockefeller Director, Museum of Modern Art

Product details

• Authors: Kaelen Wilson-Goldie
• Publisher: Ingram Publishers Services
• Languages: English
• Product format: Paperback / Softback
• Release: 06.09.2022, delayed
• EAN: 9781735913728
• ISBN: 978-1-73591-372-8
• No. of pages: 146
• Subjects: Humanities, art, music > Art > General, dictionaries; ART / Art & Politics, ART / History / Contemporary (1945-), The Arts: treatments and subjects