There are many historical periods that living and surviving had been difficult for human being. Times of war, in regions where genocide has occurred or may yet occur, during the Holocaust, and even in post-conflict region, there have always been folks who made/ or make art, mostly risking their lives to do so. While there are many reasons for making art under duress, in following blogs, I would argue that we can put these reasons into two main categories: one is art making as a political act and resistance against the oppression system, and the other is art making as a facilitating of challenging circumstances and assisting in surviving.
I will argue that these two categories are not separate from each other. They are related to each other as cause and effect, as resistance against oppression uplifts the soul and self-esteem, which facilitate problematic situation; also, facilitating complex situation and surviving makes the audience and artists stronger, which can be considered a kind of resistance, or in other words, energizes them to resist.
For the first category, art as a political statement and resistance against oppressors, I will refer to the article that we investigate at the beginning of the course, Art Resistance against Russia's "Non-Invasion" of Ukraine by Nazar Kuzak in which he investigates three art projects and how they had agency in disrupting the "non-invasion" simulation that Russia attempted to present to people to distance itself from invasion.
For the second category, Art making for facilitating challenging circumstances and assisting to survive, I will refer to the Jews' cultural activity in Terezin, in Holocaust and argue the role of art there. Then, at the end of the article, I investigate the play Max and Willy's Last Laugh, a very recent dark musical comedy written by Jake Broder & Conor Duffy, as a case study to show how reasons from both categories lead artists to make art under duress.
Comments