Arts & International Affairs: Vol. 4, No. 3, Spring 2020 | Page 6

EDITORIAL: ART AND CONFLICT
but they galvanized the collective action that brought apartheid to its close. Neither did
Guernica end the idea of war but called attention to its horrors. Picasso refused on several
occasions to explain the symbolism in his painting. The cry on the right and the horror of
the war are reminiscent of Francisco de Goya’s Third of May painted in 1808. From Goya
to the time Picasso paints Guernica, questions of heroic art or notion of power and glory
in painting began to be laid to rest.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bq_zSSOCEZA
South African choir Ladysmith Black Mambazo perform “Long Walk to Freedom.”
Joseph Shabalala, founder of the choir, died 11 February 2020 at the age of 78.
Art can reinterpret conflict. Questioning oppressive state instruments, Eliza Garnsey
writes in this issue: “In the absence of state protection, artistic representation becomes
an important intervention into the practices and narratives surrounding Australia’s treatment
of refugees and asylum seekers.” Similarly, addressing issues of protest, racism, and
art in the context of United States-Mexico border David Toohey writes: “Art about the
border fights racism in a few different ways. It sometimes directly depicts racist incidents
at the border. It may also refer to land loss, which is an assault on communities of Mexican
ancestry.”
Both David Toohey and Karsten Xuereb in this volume call attention to the underlying
political economies of accumulation and subsequent cultural production in addressing
conflict. David Toohey foregrounds issues of “primitive accumulation” that underlie current
assertions of border and sovereignty. Karsten Xuereb looks to the future in his critical
analysis of the European Commission’s A New Agenda for Culture. While the Commission
tries to further inclusivity and diversity in cultural expressions, Xuereb finds
that the economic priorities and “self-satisfying bureaucratic merit and achievement”
are counterproductive to the project of European cohesion and integration.
Both essays may be read as part of an on-going debate about the deeper structures in
art. David Toohey invokes Deleuze in his reasoning, specifically the theory of the time
image which allows him to show how borders obscure the reality of how safe and dangerous
zones were created. These underlying political economies are also emphasized in
Hardt and Negri’s 2001 book Empire. Writing about the global turn in art, Aruna D’Souza
(2014) notes that the global is economic. This “economic” global also forms the crux
of Xuereb’s essay. My own views on global arts remain cognizant of both enslaving and
redemptive and redemptive possibilities but some underlying force of the economic is
undeniable (Singh 2011, 2017).
There are two further issues that are central to our consideration of art and conflict. In
describing these issues, I borrow from filmmaker Hito Styerl’s 2007 essay “The Articulation
of Protest.” Steyrl notes that this articulation must be understood at two levels: that
of the “verbalization or vocalization of political protest” and “the structure and internal
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