Artist Story: Mary Patten

As I write this, I am thinking about the deep festering wound, the toxic running sores - not just in the waters of New Orleans and in the bodies of the victims and survivors, but in the heart of this wretched, doomed country. "Art and activism"? An overworked discussion, one demanding fresh ideas.

Artists are citizens, and thus have no more or less "social responsibility" than anyone else. However, artists, writers, or anyone claiming to be a critical thinker, have a responsibility to foster complexity of thinking and feeling. Many of us worry as we try to balance the need for swift responses and complex articulation; urgency as well as depth. Here's the paradox: there's no time! But let's resist the idea that art is either a weapon or a luxury. Art and art-making is both useless and necessary. Some of us worry that "art" is too much of a floating signifier - that it can be co-opted and deployed and marketed to fit all kinds of terrible agendas. But so can virtually any other human endeavor. Calls for certain kinds of art, and not others, only lead to prescriptions and repressions. The free play of imagination is worth the risk.

The war in Iraq has revived debates about the uses of images during wartime. Many have accused broadcast media of sanitizing the war by refusing to show images of bloodshed, torn bodies, civilian casualties, and the draped coffins of U.S. soldiers who have been killed. If only people could see these images, then they would turn against the violence. But horror and revulsion, in and of themselves, produce nothing but a kind of numbness. One's politics will shape how, and what, one sees and feels. This is the problem of anguished pictures: what Susan Sontag, in Regarding the Pain of Others, has characterized as "'the gruesome' (inviting) us to be either spectators or cowards, unable to look."

There are other dangers, too: of aestheticizing war, or trauma; or quoting already-saturated images, emptied of power by endless repetition. At the least, let's hope that other pictures have meaning, too, besides our own: let's ask what we can do to change those pictures.

Mary Patten is a visual artist, video-maker, writer, educator, and occasional curator. She has also been a political activist for most of her adult life, with years of work on prison issues, AIDS and queer activism, and solidarity work with various liberation struggles. Her art, while infused with deeply-felt political ideas, is also fueled by a desire to address the contradictory worlds of politics and art-making. Recent projects include "Project Enduring Look" and "Feeltank Chicago," where she direly claims to be "politicizing depression since 2003."