Art and Activism: A Purpose, A Medium, and a Hope for Change

Many believe that art, merely by its existence and its aesthetic value, inherently portrays a specific ideology. However, it may be most realistic to contend that art, throughout time, has served as a medium for expression, rather than manifesting within itself a belief system standardized among all elements of the discipline. Indeed, art exists as an opportunity for the artist to portray her own ideologies and her own opinions, and, provided she attracts an actively engaged audience, potentially provide the informational or emotional importance in effecting positive change to the problems the art addresses. <1> Moreover, art can encompass both wishes for pacifism and the like for militaristic engagement, among other ideas—the ideology it may portray cannot be limited in direction by the medium itself. Rather, art preaches empathy to those who grapple with it, fostering the beginnings of emotional understanding across boundaries that differ from portrait to portrait but nonetheless exist among all artistic works, while simultaneously pushing its viewers to yearn and to search for a greater solution to the problems it addresses. If the power of empathy for those struggling with new, different, and unique challenges may direct an audience to ameliorate the hardships of the other, brought to the viewer’s eyes via the art itself, however, the intent of the author effectively suffers from the strain of mortality, as the only aspect of the artistic piece that lives beyond its own production is the viewer’s actions after engaging with the work. The activist ideology of any work is ultimately the stream of meaning stringing across the audience’s forthcoming actions, the light streaming from the portrait, penetrating the viewers’ eyes, that encourages the diligent spectators to witness the weeping women of another world and care for them, fight their oppressors, or stand idly by the interpersonal torture. Ultimately, a reading of Virginia Woolf’s Three Guineas, combined with contemporaneous visual art, suggests that art’s usage, the historical contexts of its societal impact and its post-production employment in pushing for positive change to the problems it addresses—rather than merely its existence—encapsulates its power for activism in whichever direction its audience, after grappling with the work, decides.

Langston Hughes and Pragmatic Pacifism

In both his dispatches in the Spanish Civil War and his contemporaneous poetry of life in Black America, Langston Hughes brings forth, into the larger conversation of peace, justice, and human rights studies, a methodology that I call “pragmatic pacifism,” which imagines positive peace as a goal, while sustaining negative pacifist policy in the process of attaining that global culture of peace. With his theory, Hughes elevates the conquest of peace to a certainly realistic one, involving ruthlessly destroying foreign fascism, as well as systematically dismantling domestic racism. Given his violent methods for the former, however, it is difficult to declare Hughes a genuine pacifist without understanding his mixed ideologies and relabeling his beliefs under the structure of pragmatic pacifism, a methodology that he actively attempts to leverage in contemporaneous policy. Nevertheless, Hughes presents a novel style of pacifism that employs violent and militant techniques with pacifist motivations to instill a long-lasting culture of equal opportunity, regardless of demographic differences. This innovative technique for pacifism may ultimately be the most effective pacifist stance yet formulated, as it rests upon nonradical governmental changes, without necessitating the elimination of any government structures, such as the military, while simultaneously demanding massive societal reconsiderations, meriting the end of unjustified social practices, such as institutionalized racism.

Die Fotografien: Omitting the Face of Total War to Ignite Pacifism

In her testament to positive peace, pragmatic empathy, and practical distributions of power, Three Guineas, Virginia Woolf captures the essence of the Spanish Civil War and positive, all-inclusive pacifism, all while failing to publish in her text any photograph remotely depicting the violence. In great irony, Woolf fails to include a single photograph of the contemporaneous Spanish terror. Instead, leveraging the inherent power of visuality within her text, she injects, in the midst of her words, five photographs of British men prominent in the international spheres of military and academia, which ultimately serve to expose and highlight amid her argument for peace the traumatic gender-based hierarchy rampaging throughout Great Britain. Thus, in maintaining her firm credence that articulating atrocity through words, rather than strictly visual media, intellectually, instead of animalistically, Woolf charges the world to fight war with peace, injustice with thoughtful care, by scribing her letters with a charred pen, allowing her words to be her only weapons against tyranny, in Western Europe and beyond.

Whose Responsibility is a Collegiate Overthrow?

In Virginia Woolf’s manifesto for gender-based equality, Three Guineas, she challenges contemporary universities—age-old institutions of higher learning, competition, and economic viability—because of their exclusion of all women, deconstructing their very foundations and scribing new blueprints of a more just, more powerful educational sub-society, one that would train all of its students in the arts of both intellectual curiosity and ethical behavior. However, in proposing her ideations of an “experimental college,” she fails to enumerate communal ramifications for straying from her individual didactic stipulations, thus eliminating the possibility for any future positive collegiate universalism (Woolf 43).

Allocating War’s Advantages to a Future of Cross-Cultural Activism

In Paul Saint-Amour’s introduction to Tense Future, he depicts a disheartening view of what many imagine to be peacetime prosperity by imposing on it the terrible ramifications of war: a communal, never-ending fear of death and destruction, thus asserting that the mere existence of past war-related trauma inevitably refutes any future public declaration that peace—an impossible “refuge from anxiety and history”—will ever arrive (Saint-Amour 10). Indeed, relying on Lewis Mumford, he insists that anticipating future violence is comparable to dying “a thousand deaths” (qtd. in Saint-Amour 7). Furthermore, Saint-Amour expands upon his conclusions of peacetime’s ultimate bane: “The warning is the war; the drill and the raid are one” (Saint-Amour 13).