What does art do in the face of the massacre that takes place before our eyes every day in the Gaza Strip? Manuela Gandini, art critic of the Turin newspaper and professor at NABA in Milan, asks this question in an article published the day before yesterday in La Stampa. She cannot find where the voice of art has gone “while blood waters the earth.” Of Gandini’s thesis, one can glean a summary that engages no more than twelve words: today artists are aphonious, while in the past the situation was different. To substantiate her claims, the Press critic compares the silence of artists on Gaza to the great demonstrations of Americans at the time of the Vietnam War, to the 3,102 cultural events that enlivened the war-torn Sarajevo in Bosnia, to John Lennon and Yoko Ono’s performance that, again during the Vietnam War, incited young Americans to desertion, to Marina Abramović’s Balkan Baroque performance presented at the 1997 Venice Biennale. He concludes by saying that even a minimal reaction nevertheless seems to be there, and gives the example of Gian Maria Tosatti’s transparent flags exhibited at Lia Rumma in Milan.
Gandini’s article headlines “Need a call against guns, artists and intellectuals do more.” His idea is that art needs to engage more and better, that sheets taped to balconies are not enough, that at the time of the war in Bosnia the world “wrote, denounced, acted, filmed and performed concrete actions,” and today it is not. Calls against guns. Inert intellectuals. Art that needs to do more. Now, the reader who is moved by a certain spontaneous, natural, naive idealism, of a vaguely pacifist brand, might also be tempted to agree with Manuela Gandini, provided, however, that her candor is so dazzling and childlike as to lead him to think that in the face of every war, theart can act in the same way, and that, in order to spur an artist in listening and vision to some form of action, it may be intelligent to accept crude, coarse, axe-cut comparisons, by which history and art are made into a sort of fruit salad where everything can be mixed without perishing to contravene the most elementary rules of pairing. The reader who wants to observe reality, however, should start from another premise, namely, to ask himself what art can do not in the face of a war in general, but in the face of this precise war, a war with totally unprecedented features and for which no answers comparable to those that artists shouted against the wars of the past can be invoked.
The era of the Vietnam War was the era of great collective narratives. The era of countercultures. The era of Woodstock, of Allen Ginsberg, of the flower children, of the Beat Generation, of Veterans Against the War, of the civil rights movement, of second wave feminism, of intellectuals. What’s more, the Vietnam War touched young Americans firsthand: a 20-year-old from Milwaukee or San Diego or Miami might happen to be called by the motherland to fight in a faraway country, a country that so many might never have even heard of, or it might touch a son, a brother, a boyfriend, a friend, which is why the transversality of protest could be fueled by a heartfelt personal rootedness. The time of the Bosnian war, on the other hand, was the time of the end of the Cold War, the time when the East of Europe was opening up to a West that, however, already appeared rather tired and not as involved as it had been at the time of Vietnam: even at that time, Gandini will recall, there was not this great response from artists in the West. The response, if anything, came from the local artists, who continued to do theater, write poetry, paint, hold underground concerts even under the bombs. As it is today in Ukraine: the example of Pavlo Makov who, three years ago, in a Kharkiv bombed by the Russians, was working to finish the work that, two months after the war began, he would take to the Venice Biennale, to the Ukrainian Pavilion. And if I had to point to the work that most moved me in the last biennials, I would point to his. Art, for Ukrainians, is a form of resistance, and if our artists, in this case, were to do something concrete, then they should mobilize to ask our governments to do more to help Ukraine.Ukraine, to enable it to win a twentieth-century war waged by a tyrant who wanted to make paper out of international law, to put it in a position to resist the invader to the bitter end and, hopefully, to drive it back beyond its legally recognized borders.
In Gaza, it was said, the situation is unprecedented. I do not want to go into complex and thorny historical and political analyses, not having the expertise, so I will just note some data: as of today, the population of Gaza, a hell on earth, is hostage, on the one hand, to a group of terrorists responsible for a heinous and cowardly massacre, that of October 7, and who, as terrorists, have no qualms about shielding themselves, metaphorically and literally, with the civilians who die by the thousands under Israeli bombs, and on the other handother of an authoritarian leader, wanted for crimes against humanity, at the head of an extremist government that is proving utterly incapable of initiating any process that could lead to a credible resolution of the conflict, which on the contrary is exacerbating and has now turned into an indiscriminate and therefore inhuman and savage slaughter. Nothing can be expected from Gaza for the simple fact that Gaza is not Ukraine, Gaza is not Sarajevo, the balance of power between the contenders is totally unbalanced in favor of theIsraeli army, one cannot enter Gaza nor leave Gaza, and an action comparable to that of Susan Sontag who went to Sarajevo in 1993 to direct Waiting for Godot under the bombs is simply unthinkable. On the ideal level, the only way art could have to stop the war in a direct way is to create a movement of opinion (or to put itself at its head, to direct it), so vast as to make pressure from the Israeli government untenable, which could then stop the slaughter by fearing for its own consent. And it could be said in this case that art directly saved lives. Even if it were only one life, it would be an effort worth engaging in. Possible (although it has been more than twenty years since the last time we heard of a mass movement to stop a war: it was 1999 and the D’Alema government was asked not to make Italian bases available to NATO planes bombing Kosovo, but it was of little use, despite the commitment of artists). Realistically unlikely, though.
The fact is that twenty-first-century society is no longer that of the twentieth century. Gone are the great narratives, gone are the great collective events, structured mass movements hardly exist anymore, we live in the society of fragmentation, polarization, individualism. Content disperses on social media, works, even the most powerful ones, disappear between trends, burned out by increasingly compressed cycles of attention. Look at what has happened and what effect the appeal, signed in Cannes last week by 350 actors reminding that cinema “has a duty to convey messages, to reflect our societies,” signed not by distinguished unknowns, but by many of the most celebrated of today’s cinema: Pedro Almodovar, Javier Bardem, David Cronenberg, Adèle Exharchopoulos, Isabella Ferrari, Ralph Fiennes, Richard Gere, Alma Jodorowsky, Gabriele Muccino, Ferzan Ozpetek, Mark Ruffalo, Ludivine Sagnier, Susan Sarandon, Paolo Sorrentino, Giovanni Veronesi. No effect, no relevance. One letter among many. An exercise in rhetoric. Probably an end in itself, since the missive was addressed to no one and asked for nothing but a generic stance against the alleged silence on Gaza.
It is curious, moreover, to note that in the same issue of La Stampa, while Manuela Gandini was questioning why artists do nothing for Gaza, a few pages earlier Luca Ricolfi was intoning the funeral song of public opinion (“Today everyone makes his own little speech in general indifference, ignored by anyone who is not of the same parish. The triumph of social is also a consequence of the self-referential closure of the traditional media.”). It is as if a debate no longer exists. And there probably is. If there is then to be thought of art as a force capable of raising public awareness, one has to imagine it enmeshed in a society that reduces everything to tatters and yet, paradoxically, is perhaps the most sensitized society that has ever existed, since it is constantly reached by images of the massacres, with a frequency and intensity that before today, before the Internet, before social media, before the spread of smartphones capable of shooting high quality video and semi-professional editing, was completely unthinkable. Balkan Baroque made sense in the 1990s, when the audience at the 1997 Venice Biennale had a vague idea of what had happened just before in the mountains of Bosnia: Today, can such an operation of aestheticizing the violence of a conflict have the same force as, say, a brutal documentary such as Lirica Ucraina, moreover produced and broadcast while the event was in progress, or Lorenzo Tugnoli’s reportages, or the videos of Gaza firemen pulling the bodies of children burned alive from the rubble of their homes? Today, an art that forces the audience to “watch and breathe in the unclean smell of mass death” runs the serious, concrete, palpable risk of becoming inactual and counterproductive, for the simple fact that mass death is broadcast on television and social media on a continuous cycle, so much so that it almost triggers mechanisms of rejection, if not outright anesthesia. Similarly, it is difficult to think of an art to put pressure on our governments, partly because I don’t think Western governments are unaware of what is happening in Gaza (the Italian government itself took its own position today, through the mouth of Minister Tajani: the population that is paying a very high price, the Israeli government that has turned a reaction to a terrorist attack into something dramatic and unacceptable, the bombing that must end, humanitarian assistance that must resume, international law that must’be restored), some because civil society is coming before art to put pressure on our governments (on June 1 there will be a demonstration calling on the government to impose sanctions on Israel: this is an issue that the European Union is discussing, and a powerful collective mobilization movement could spur our governments on).
There are therefore several reasons to believe that there is little room intended for art as a sufficiently incisive and today sufficiently powerful tool to activate mass mobilization. Similarly, art is a sluggish tool if intended as a commentary on current events, for the risk is still that the work will end up dispersed, or be found to feed the mechanisms of polarizing debate, or be limited to a mere rhetorical exercise or, worse, territorial marking. If, then, one wants to find a contemporary counterpart to a Yoko Ono or an Abramović, one has to accept the reality: the world has changed from thirty and sixty years ago. Nor is it interesting to know what an artist thinks about what is happening in Gaza if his or her voice only serves to feed a cacophony of thousands of voices chasing each other every day in the newspapers, on the Internet, and on television. Of course, this does not mean that art is entirely powerless. There is no question of what art does in the face of what is happening in Gaza: if anything, there is a question of what it can do for Gaza. Three paths come to mind. The first: concrete actions. A few days ago, on May 8, Milan’s Spazio Lock hosted a charity auction to raise funds for humanitarian projects to support the people of Gaza. Important names in contemporary Italian art donated their works: Yuri Ancarani, Roberto Cuoghi, Liliana Moro, Chiara Camoni, Luca Bertolo, Jacopo Benassi, among many others. There is, of course, the issue of how funds are handled to help the people of Gaza. But in the meantime at least something is being done: here, it would perhaps be more useful if artists, instead of commenting on what is happening in Gaza, because their commentary interests us just the right amount, were more often involved in activities of this kind. The second: An art that does not have to shock like Balkan Baroque did, but that is able to exert its transformative power with more intimate, deeper, more thoughtful forms, without shouting but whispering, away from the dimension of shock and close instead to a dimension of openness, because we are already too much shocked by the images we see every day and we do not want more shocking images to contribute to anesthetize us further. An art that does not serve to throw salt in the wounds, an art that serves to open. This is difficult because it means forgoing rhetoric and going down extremely complicated paths, because it means finding a way to get the horror to the audience’s brain and not their guts, but there are good examples: the work Repeat after me that the Ukrainian collective Open Group brought to the Poland Pavilion at the Venice Biennale last year comes to mind. Then, of course, one cannot expect a work like that to take on a mass-product dimension, but today a visual art product that wants to reach as many people as possible in a historical moment when visual arts are no longer the dominant art, probably needs to imagine itself more as an intermediate language that can inspire other art forms closer to common feeling. The third: as Luca Rossi suggests, an art that acts in an indirect form, protecting those rules that in Gaza and Ukraine are completely skipped. For the first time since the end of the Second World War, we find ourselves floundering in a geopolitical context disrupted by two wars that have made a mockery of international law, without, however, in at least one case, that of Ukraine, forcing the aggressor to respect those rules that he himself would be obliged not to violate. For those two cases, certainly, little can be done. But ethics are not only in jeopardy in those latitudes. Until a few years ago, to say, it was unthinkable that the world’s leading democracy would end up being ruled by a pot salesman who mistreats the president of an attacked country on world television. Until a few years ago, it was unthinkable that in the heart of Europe, forces capable of advocating mass deportations of immigrants and even descendants of immigrants would arise, and that these forces would even gain political agility. Until a few years ago it was unthinkable. Until a few years ago it was unthinkable that a country in the European Union would pass legislation allowing fines to be imposed on those who participate in a Pride. And the list could go on. Here, what art could do is protect us from the normalization of extremism, from the end of political shaming. The problem, however, Luca Rossi notes, is that we also need to ask ourselves who it is that might be able to direct some form of art that would act in this way. Because there is an increasing lack of adusancy to this art.
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