Kyiv, Ukraine — You don’t have to go out of Kyiv to see that civilian massacres and cultural trampling are still happening. About 45 minutes north of here, in Borodianka, the core of Russia’s atrocity, the bridge was demolished, slowing the drive and blowing the windows of the Palace of Culture. The concert hall is covered with dust and the ticket booth is at a loss. Halfway between the capital and the Belarusian border, I had to crouch through twisted studs and enter the flattened Ivankifu Museum of History and Regional History. The statue is now perforated and the embroidery is charred. It’s even worse to the east.
Here in Kyiv, like many previous citizens, masterpieces lie underground. The Kanenko National Museum, located in an old mansion on Teresichenkivska Street, owns a small Rubens. A small oil painting of the river god, usually on the blue wall under the skylight of the Bozar. I couldn’t see it when I was walking over there. The entire collection is hidden.
When Kyiv was besieged from all sides during the first few days of the war and half of the city’s population fled, many Americans in the arts had to do everything they could to support charities, refugees, etc. We wanted to know what we could do beyond. Museums and orchestras have issued statements that require disgust and loyalty. The Ukrainian national anthem was sung at the Metropolitan Opera. “Saturday Night Live” is a cold open Ukrainian folk song. We are now internalizing all participatory privileges on social media. You have to react and you have to get involved. The algorithm does not support Rubens’ parable.
Ukrainian authorities were not shy to encourage areas of international culture to support war effort until they turned from actors to commander-in-chief. President Volodymyr Zelensky addressed the tumultuous crowd at the Venice Biennale and the Cannes Film Festival. Grammy Awards too. “In our land, we are fighting Russia, which brings horrific silence with bombs. It’s a dead silence,” the president wore an olive T-shirt to Olivia Rodrigo, Jazmine Sullivan, and other gathered stars. Told. “Fill the silence with your music.” (He was followed by John Legend, who shimmered on the piano for soldiers to “put their weapons”. Perhaps to defenders of the Empire Invasion. It’s a nasty message.)
Our people in the rich and safe regions of the world are rich and safe as long as nuclear weapons are covered. Something From this cultural solidarity. And during a war as morally obvious as this, why shouldn’t your local flamenco company say “Slava Ukraini” after the approval of the land? But it makes this groundbreaking war another “Current oneAt least in the United States, this has already been hit by new domestic anger. Crime against Ukrainian citizens still occurs every day. The death toll on the front lines remains terribly high. If you’re going to stick to culture during the war, it can’t be just another broadcast medium. It’s not when a much larger microphone that speaks a more accessible language can’t turn our heads.
Reasons to listen to music, Why do you see art, why go to the theater when the war is intensifying? Twenty years ago, on these pages, critic Margo Jefferson always gave me the answer, as the mountains of Ground Zero were still smoldering and the long war in Afghanistan had just begun.
Jefferson writes that the reason why art is needed during the war is that “history cannot exist without the discipline of imagination.” Through art, we establish past and future, short and long distance, abstract and concrete similarities. We see and hear thoughts and emotions parallel to each other. And in extreme cases, this type of cultural reputation can rise from the analytical to the moral side. With the utmost care (a task that is difficult with all meme bursts and iPhone deployments), art, literature, and music have the ability to see our new gifts as more than a stream of words and images. Can be improved. As Jefferson wrote at the time, they can “provide a way to see and order the world.” “Not only our world, but the world of other places we hardly know.”
From Sophocles to Wolf, from Goya to Chaplin, the cultural figures we live through the war to become lions Kikuji Kawada For Wole Soyinka, we knew better than us that the clarity that art could provide did not come from lectures and news reports. It doesn’t mean that high culture naturally frees you from savagery. Dictators can love ballet as much as Democrats. I’m not saying that it is a business that cannot express war, or that the mode of documentary or testimony has a more limited purpose than abstraction or epic.Since the origin of the war, domestic and foreign artists have portrayed the war head-on here. actually Started eight years ago — Ukrainian director Sergei Loznitsa’s intense satire “Dombas”, Serhiy Zhadan’s live novel “Orphanage”Or the profound and award-winning war series“Sparks.. “
I’m just saying that the best art of war is important For myself, And its full value lies beyond communication and advocacy. Implicitly, we already know this: Picasso’s “Guernica“In 1937, when a bombardment in a village of Basque found a universe of sorrow,” was summoned in the bombardment of Fallujah, Aleppo, and now Mariupol.Aidez L’EspagneThe more immediate cry for help made in the same year became just a historic relic. There is reason to return to the romance of “Casablanca” given the wartime refugees and to the thriller of the “Battle of Algiers” given the anti-colonial struggle. Why the hieroglyph “Blown by the Wind” has endured beyond so many obvious protest songs.
Somewhere between form and meaning, between pictures and plot lines, between thoughts and emotions, art gives us a view of human suffering and human abilities. These war activities are not important as they are “local”. In other words, it is “necessary” to use today’s empty tagline. They are important because they reaffirm the place of shape and imagination in an era when they would deny their potential. They tell history at a scale and depth that push notifications simply can’t deliver, and don’t care about promotion. They allow us to identify every meaning in the daily flow of images and madness.
Leave the modern onslaught and return to Florence. It is now a mecca for tourism and a military fortress in the Rubens era. The war he drew is still in its infancy, but Mars already has a bloody sword. As he rushes forward, he looks back on his lover, Venus, who is desperately trying to detain him.
But love is now nothing. Mars is in the grip of another woman, the angry Alecto, whose hair is upright and her eyes are crazy and swollen.
Look over your face and your body. The big gods writhe and bottle openers as they roll from left to right. A small, innocent person slips and shatters.
The Thirty Years War was only 20 years when Rubens began drawing “the consequences of the war” around 1638. Europe has never known of a death orgy like Rubens was alive. It wasn’t there again until the 20th century. This picture is anatomically clear “Massacre of the infant(Around 1610), and later photos show how it bleeds, pools, runs, and undulates.
Rather than portraying the battle and the plague head-on, it’s like here Paint yourself I went to war. Rubens realized that in unprecedented violence, the times changed Baroque’s overkill into a mode of realism.
Or, in other words, I knew that the limits of the Thirty Years War needed a limit of form, and that parables could indicate something that was not possible in other ways. That was what he emphasized in the last major figure in the “Results of War”, the leftmost figure. She is a young woman in a black dress that has been torn and not crouched. Her arms stick out into the sky and her ruddy cheeks are dyed with thick tears.As Rubens wrote to a fellow painter in Florence, this mourning woman l’infelice Europa: “Unfortunate Europe has experienced looting, anger and misery for years. These are very harmful to everyone and do not require any further designation.”
It is very harmful and does not require any further specification. Even in the mid-17th century, the scene of atrocities was already so powerful and lasting that the entire Thirty Years War could be worn on European tangled gowns, her hair, and her hot pink face. It’s done. If the image of war was such an environment in the 1630s, we don’t even know how to start quantifying supersaturation today. But the image of looting and misery in our own time is less morally influential each year. Probably the most documented in human history (to date), as we learned horribly during the Syrian Civil War.
The ubiquitous photographs and ongoing testimony of Syria’s atrocities over a decade have had a near-zero impact. And this month, I could feel it in this horrifying war handheld camera and influential advertiser, a live stream of Kh-22 missile attacks, a minute telegram update of eastern horror, and an Instagram post. A 4-year-old child with Down syndrome was attacked by a Russian missile in a city park. These angers in Ukraine have already passed one more, just as they have passed Damascus and Aleppo.
War has become the ultimate It reflects the addition of digital, which Polish novelist Olga Tokarczuk has identified as a major challenge for today’s artists and audiences.Tokarczuk regrets that she is “somewhere” everywhere on the phone screen Her 2019 Nobel Lecture: “Some people are drowning trying to cross the sea” somewhere “. “Somewhere,” “for a while,” and “some kind of” war is happening. In the vast amount of information, individual messages lose their contours, dissipate in our memory, become unrealistic, and disappear. How can war photography force us, and how can works of war art maintain its importance and maintain its importance? Soldiers also carry mobile phones with their AK-74s, and since February 24th, they have been brought to another eternal present every day.
According to Tokarczuk, the only chance to get somewhere from “somewhere” is in the model of artistic creation, which breaks the first-person singular of status updates and pursues “a story beyond my non-communicative prison.” myself. American culture has become afraid of such stories, more universal stories, and more comprehensive stories, but since Aeschylus staged “The Persians,” writing them has been wartime. It was the work of an artist inside. When the world of yesterday was foggy, one of the cultural commitments we can make is to recapture the holistic cost of our lasting battle, even if the reflection in art is fragmented. Is to discover. From those fragments, we may still constellate the views of the consequences of war and the dangers that come, we do not have the luxury of scrolling beyond it.
Peter Paul Rubens, “Results of the War”, via the Uffizi Gallery.
