Artists have been central to recording and interpreting the wars of their times. While the results often fail to be strictly factual--Washington's crossing of the Delaware didn't quite come off the way Leutze painted it--such work can still reveal, centuries later, the feelings of the time: fears or aspirations, despair or hope. In Iraq, artists are breaking free of years of totalitarian censorship and stagnation to record and interpret what's happening around them. They're creating Renaissance-style sculptures of the figures from the Abu Ghraib pictures, paintings of tanks burning and bombs dropping, and a flowering of satirical dramas in which star-crossed lovers meet in the shadows of American tanks.
This creative freedom would have been impossible under Saddam Hussein. I guess that's one of those ironies of war.
(via Modern Art Notes)
Posted by Emily at November 23, 2004 07:52 AM