Arts & International Affairs: Vol. 4, No. 3, Spring 2020 | Page 5

ARTS & INTERNATIONAL AFFAIRS
How does art address issues of conflict in a global age? The latter connotes the shrinking
of distances, and the production and circulation of art through globally dispersed spaces,
be they museums or mural walls. In this issue of Arts & International Affairs, the conflicts
detailed range from traditional to current concerns: bordered lands and peoples
(David Toohey and Fabiana Kent Paiva), migration and refugees (Eliza Garnsey), the issue
of power in curating military heritage (Chrisine Sylvester and Panos Kompatsiaris),
and tensions arising from the bureaucratization and political economy of cultural policy
making (Karsten Xuereb).
Until quite recently, dominant art value chains worked through a variety of exclusions�
that of peoples, ideas, forms, colors, and aesthetics among other things. The arts reflected,
represented, and shaped conflicts, either through their opposition to being excluded or,
at times, in congruence or complicity for their inclusion. Peter Weibel (2013) writes the
project of European modernity that created nation-states and their political economies
also worked itself through the hierarchies of art. These hierarchies are now coming undone
in Europe: “Now for the first time they find themselves in the situation�or at least
potentially in a situation�where other states determine who is included and excluded”
(p. 20). As to the circulation of these new inclusions and exclusions, the vastly different
and media-rich spaces of the twenty-first century are quite different from the walls of
European palaces or the privileged museum spaces where art used to be displayed. To
cite an example of new difference, the glorification of conquest and military history was
and, to some extent, remains a European arts project. However, in a multimodal essay
in this issue, Panos Kompatsiaris and Christine Sylvester engage on the question of who
has the authority to memorialize war. Sylvester writes that “multiple sites of curatorial
display can curate or re-curate common but incomplete understandings of a war and
its constituent parts.” The AIA multimodal essay engages the content of Sylvester’s new
book Curating and Re-Curating the American Wars in Vietnam and Iraq (Oxford 2019).
As modernity gives way to globalized spaces, the role of art is open to question again.
A recent report titled Art and Conflict from the Arts and Humanities Research Council
in the United Kingdom warns that art cannot be instrumentalized to provide solutions
or a privileged perspective on the conflict. Michaela Crimmin (2014) notes in her introduction
to the AHRC volume that art plays multiple roles in conflict�among other
things, representing, resisting, reflecting, role-playing, provoking and observing. “What
is absolutely definite is that art continuously stimulates new debates and fresh reflection,
and this is as true of art produced by Goya as it is by some of the art school students of
today” (p. 11).
To understand the multiple roles for art, one must imagine a world without art. This
need not mean the physical absence of art but the absence of the positionality of art in
global processes of conflict of various sorts. This would be a world without the contemplation
of the war from Picasso’s 1937 Guernica or the articulation of a revolution from
Freedom Songs in apartheid South Africa. Freedom Songs did not end apartheid either
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