Protest In Western Art – True Or False?

There seem to be two dominant strands of protest in contemporary Western art.

In Ways of Seeing (1972), John Berger concludes ‘Men look at women. Women watch themselves being looked at’. The Tate article Feminist Art concludes, “Western art replicates the unequal relationships already embedded in society.” John Berger had a lot more to say than that though, taking the subject all the way back to the Bible.

Since the 70s women have been taking issue with the roles men expect them to fulfill, spare rib or not. Judy Chicago, Cindy Sherman and Barbara Kruger immediately spring to mind. Later artists, more specifically Lorna Simpson and Kara Walker lead well into the what I think is the second dominant strand of protest in Western art, namely the colour of your skin.

I love Jacob Lawrence’s work because I retain a weakness for that no-no, narrative art, which he did so outstandingly well. Of course, reference to past events is not limited to African-American artists. There is Gerhard Richter’s work on the Red Army Faction, Baader-Meinhof, and more recently his September. Like Jacob Lawrence’s, his social and political insights are highly refined.

And then there is Kerry James Marshall, who puts African-Americans into stylistic contexts derived from Western art genres – somewhat unkindly this approach reminds me of images of revolutionaries drinking what’s left of the wines and champagne in the cellars of ransacked palaces. It doesn’t work for me.

Exit Strategy, my oil from 2016 is a very mild attempt at showing the difficulty ‘liberated’ Turkish women were beginning to face with the onset of so-called Political Islam in Turkey. It has a Pop Art influence that I’ve retained as a hallmark in my figurative work. But as my painting 9/11 in acrylic from 2017 shows, this approach is not as successful when you broaden your subject matter, even if it’s a better painting, at least technically.