‘Readings in Nonviolence’ features extracts from our favourite books, pamphlets, articles or other material on nonviolence, or reviews of important works in the field (suggestions welcome).
Continuing our theme of art, peace and war, we publish an
interview with the artist and activist Roberto Arroyo, reproduced by
permission, in which he considers some of the issues and linkages in a very
perceptive and challenging way. Selected by Roberta Bacic.
Edited from Le RIRe Magazine (France July 2000)
Art, war, politics
An interview with Roberto Arroyo
Who are you?
I am Roberto Arroyo, born in Temuco, Chile, 1959. I
paint, draw, and illustrate, I am a musician, and I am an activist and
investigator of human rights issues. I am Chilean, of the Abya-Yala continent,
which in Kuna language means “Yala”, territory, land, and “Abya” hole of blood,
mature mother.
As an artist I have held numerous individual and
collective expositions and conferences about my art in Chile, Ecuador, England,
Croatia, Germany and the United States. I have developed an extensive body of
work on the subject of human rights under the title “Amor Contra el Olvido
(Love Against Forgetting)”.
As a human rights activist and investigator in Chile I
participated for over 20 years in a variety of action groups that act on behalf
of human rights such as Servicio Paz y Justicia (Peace and Justice Service,
regional coordinator), Amnesty International (national director and activist),
Vicariate of Solidarity (coordinator and investigator), and the National
Corporation for Reparation and Reconciliation (regional investigator). At the
Vicariate of Solidarity of Valdivia (in the south of Chile) I was in charge of
the historic unit and of the creation of the human rights files of the region.
This included the search for hundreds of disappeared detainees. I participated
as a consultant in a forensic anthropology team in at least five exhumations of
the remains of people who were massacred during the military dictatorship in
Chile. In the National Corporation for Reparation and Reconciliation I
exercised the same investigative duties finding the final destination of
victims of the military repression.
I have participated in several conferences on ethics,
aesthetics, and human rights in Chile and abroad. In 1998 I was invited by the
International War Resisters to participate in a forum on justice after war and
to lead a workshop on Human Rights and Art that took place in Porec, Croatia.
As an artist I actively participated in the
interdisciplinary cultural movement of my country including Grupo 6, Grupo
Matra, Talleres La Ventana, and Coordinador Cultural. As a musician I was a
member of “Schwenke y Nilo”, a relevant group in Chile’s New Song movement. As
an artist I have illustrated the books of significant poets of Chile and other
countries such as Clemente Riedeman, Jorge Torres, Steven White, Hans Schuster
and Sergio Mansilla among others.
Although art and war seem like opposites at first sight -
the former representing beauty, universality, a gift and the latter horror,
nationalism and theft - maybe their relationship is more substantial than we
think. How do you explain this relationship? Does it limit itself to the
vision/perception that art proposes of one of the main realities of humanity:
war?
If I perceived art only as a contemplation of objective
and subjective realities in a non-participatory way evidently there would be no
link between art and war and it is obvious that there is a type of artist that
operates that way, that manifests his or her self, who gives of him or her self
in that way and who renounces to what art is called to be, artists who place
themselves on a pedestal and who live in their own limbo. Yet for the artists
who have suffered the horrors of war all over the world there is no impartial
vision of facts and in that sense one necessarily involves oneself in a setting
where violence occupies a big deal of our settings but where also the signs of
love and solidarity that are born in those contexts have a place.
In my experience of a war that we never declared but that
was imposed on us, the whole concept of war is questionable. In the case of
Chile and of many other dictatorships in Indo South America, unilateral
massacres and genocide characterized these structures of violence, and violence
modified our lives completely, forever, and as artists we had to become
inevitably involved in this madness of horror. I do not agree with the idea
that art represents beauty or universality or a gift. That would restrict the
artist and his occupation to a merely passive role: beauty is a very ambiguous
and arbitrary concept, each day universality seems more like the concepts of
globalization that end up amputating any indication of difference and which
oppress under the search for consensus, and a “gift” is a religious concept
that can easily place us in a messianic position as artists that takes away
power from the great effort that the artist makes to decipher the signs of the
times.
I would rather say that the artist has a different ethic
and sensibility (not better, not worse), which allow him to see and to act
differently, an ethic and sensibility that are forged from a profound
questioning of life and death. This questioning is also felt with greater force
and radicality. Wars and oppressions, dictatorships and fascisms, and also
“guarded democracies”, at all times necessarily generate in us a
conscientization and a positioning within these realities in which a position
of ambiguity is repulsive.
I can add that from my work experience in defense of
human rights in my country as well as in my artistic work, which are
inseparable from each other, injustice, the abuse of human dignity, torture,
forced disappearance, institutionalized lying, force us to choose a position
and in that choice what we see, what we express, the signs we choose, the human
actions that we opt for in order to live are necessarily revolutionary and tie
us to others who are in a similar position, for example what today would be our
link to marginality and the marginalized of the whole world.
“Since generals do not die on their horses anymore,
painters are not forced to die at their easels”. How does this thought/raillery
by Marcel Duchamp inspire you?
Generals no longer die on their horses, today they don’t even
die in their offices or their businesses, they die retired, with full benefits
under the law or from their prosperous industries. On the other hand painters
are no longer forced to die at their easels, they die obliged to satisfy the
rules of the market and of the art merchants, on their knees to the comparative
advantages of success.
It becomes evident that Marcel Duchamp’s thought and
action is still current in the original sense of what this thought inspires me,
the understanding that the artist as anyone else that becomes conscious that
there exist organized ways to fabricate injustice, of provoking pain and
exploitation, has no choice other than permanent rebellion, of assuming a
position and from that look, to act with honesty. Is it possible to obviate
that the prosperity of the transnationals of power is still proportional to the
degrees of exploitation of the poor countries? Eduardo Galeano, prominent
thinker of our South America in a revealing recent report clarifies on this
subject:
“The world
demonstrates how human it is by setting aside, every minute, one million
dollars toward military spending. Wars are now humanitarian missions, Rambo is
the Erasmus of this new humanism. According to what war correspondents have
told, Russian soldiers, who reduced the city of Grozny to ashes, had Rambo for
a model…Putin has applied the same humanitarian treatment [to Chechnya] that
NATO had applied to Yugoslavia shortly before. The therapy comes from the
Vietnam War. Since that time, the great powers, who share the right to kill
with impunity, have made great progress in the art of killing from a distance,
without the risk of dying, and technology, put at the service of hypocrisy,
allows the butchers to not see their victims, who are also not seen by public
opinion….In the hunting rituals of our time, the warrior is the hunter and the
civilian his prey. Throughout the 20th Century, which has been by far the most
slaughterous in history, there was a 15% civilian death in the First World War.
The proportion jumped greatly, up to 75% during World War II. And after that it
has continued to climb, in the wars of the next half a century, to arrive at
the horrifying statistics of today: nine out of ten victims are civilians, and
in their majority, children. Many of those children die after the wars are
over. They blow up when they come into contact with the land mines planted in
the fields that the United States continues to produce and sell in spite of
international prohibitions, or they pay the consequences of wars that have
already taken place. …In Yugoslavia, civilian children and adults are
suffering, now that the war is over, from the carcinogenic radiation of the
fields contaminated by uranium covered bombs, a deadly by-product of nuclear
energy. According to the Landau Center, a research center that produced a
report for the Italian government, each Tomahawk missile can generate 1,600
cancer victims.”
(Excerpted from ¿Humaniqué? By Eduardo Galeano, January
2000)
Lately, there have been many important exhibitions on the
theme of art and war. This has coincided with declarations from several heads
of state, recognizing that certain aspects of history had been concealed: the
President of the United States has recently admitted that the Amerindians had
been exterminated, Mr. Chirac has lately acknowledged France’s collaboration
under the Vichy regime, more recently, the mutinous soldiers of the first World
War were reintegrated onto our national collective memories, while the Pope
John Paul II has asked forgiveness for the crimes perpetrated in the name of
the Catholic faith…
What do you think
of these coincidences, of the role of art in national collective memories, of
its autonomy facing power?
I consider these declarations to be no more than just
that, declarations. My perception is that there is a kind of competition within
the world leadership that possesses the administration and the hegemony, to
have “the cleanest wheat” or “the test of cleanliness”, as we say in my
country. It is something like an act of good taste to repent in public of the
fuck-ups they commit, a kind of self-flagellating narcissism with advertising,
but that does not lead to a modification of abusive and dictatorial behaviors.
In the United States the so-called “minorities” are still the slave meat for
low-cost production. The Amerindians were exterminated and the descendents of
the Amerindians are still being exterminated now without notice with modern
killing techniques, or without the neighbor’s knowledge. One of these
techniques is indifference and another the maintenance of a global economy that
supports itself through the growth of the poverty of the majority. Nazism still
has a place and collaboration in Chile, France, Austria, Germany and other
parts of the world and it even enjoys popularity. The Pope and his retinue of
Opus Dei continue their work of destruction of any person that aspires to a
liberating theology, while continuing the blessing and protection of dictators.
This was revealed by president Carlos Menem, who maintains a close relationship
with the Pope, in his sixth private audience in the Vatican: “When I pardoned
the military, Menem bragged, I talked it over with the Holy father and the
leaders of the church. The Pope thought it was a move that would help the pacification
of Argentina.” This was also revealed by the interventions of Cardinals Angelo
Sodano and Jorge Medina to obtain the liberation of Pinochet before the
extradition request from Spanish justice to judge him for the responsibility he
shared in the killings of thousands of people in Chile and for his acts of
international terrorism. They are the new representatives of an old model of
repression, lies disguised as truth, the new regulators of what should be said
and done in the “new world order”. Thus my belief is that these declarations
are but one more sign of great hypocrisy.
Perplexed by this reality of hypocrisy, it becomes
significant for the artist and his collective to unveil this reality. At the
time the world lives a permanent amnesia, the struggle against forgetting is an
inevitable task. There are not only the names of thousands of dead that are
engraved on our hands, not only dates that strike our memories, but there are
shared experiences that changed our lives forever. In the same manner that “a
painting does not hang on a wall, it hangs on history”, (Guillermo Ulrichsen,
Architect and professor in Chile’s Valparaiso University) our acts as humans
are impregnated forever in the collective memory. To forget is to forget
oneself.
Artists, for the most part, had rather not get involved
in politics. Often, they declare having superior preoccupations, far from down
to earth politics, while others consider the act of painting or sculpting as a
political deed in itself. On the other hand, many artists are acquainted with
and will sometimes profit from, the political power, which in turn has an
important influence on art, or at least on what is shown.
Following this,
how would you describe the relationship between art and politicians?
The art profession is without a doubt in itself a
political act, from the moment one chooses to look through art’s tools to the
personal world and the world that surrounds us, which are intricately related.
The Chilean painter Alberto Perez had a way of describing this situation, he
said that “by living the real we give course to all possibilities of marvelous
imagination” and I agree with this solidarious vision of art. The vision of
death as of life, the vision of love as of life are not the patrimony of individuality,
they are also a collective experience, and in that context the political is
unavoidable, it is born almost as a consequence of becoming aware of our human
factor.
Those who make an art that is alienated from this human
dimension act with inhuman intellectual arrogance. They are the ones that have
everything clear, those who declare having superior preoccupations because they
truly believe themselves superior to others, isolated in a fictional world. “If
the world was clear, art would not exist” Camus told us a long time ago.
It’s true that there are artists that profit from
political power and who from that space enjoy the benefits that those spaces
grant them. This is happening in a great part of the world. It is difficult to
generalize, but it happens, a prize, a fellowship often buys silence and a
portion of artists, in all latitudes accepts that.
The relationship between art and politicians is even more
conflictive. In my experience in Chile, artists involved ourselves strongly in
the process of liberation of our country from the military dictatorship. We
were without a doubt an important group in our country’s cultural, social and
political reconstruction. But nonetheless the political leaders once they
recovered small spaces of democratization again relegated the artists to
marginality, dividing the cultural movement. Experience is cruel but also
meaningful. My natural political space is in marginality. Living in and looking
from the point of view of a person who is a “marginal” helps to better
distinguish the existing differences between the cultural structures that serve
the liars (collective amnesia, manipulation of public opinion, social
indifference, globalization of human exploitation and of culture). Camus
believed that you had to be on the side of those who suffer history and that is
a great truth, but that “truth” is more complete when one is coming from that
experience and one breaks those structures to live in spaces of humanity that
just because they exist defy the structures of oppression and deceit.
When talking of
intellectuals’ responsibilities, one sometimes deplores their absence from
major issues facing our societies. Some prophesize, others hope for, the end of
ideologies when it might be more relevant to notice, albeit in various degrees,
the decline in social participation and the disbelief in activism. In this
debate, how does art come in to play, how does the artist position himself or
herself?
I have a different impression. As far as I am concerned,
what happens is a progressive distancing of people from a type of activism, or
of certain kinds of activism that have turned out to be a failure. In that
sense my own self-critical evaluation of my participation in varied groups of
pacifist activism, is that in general our actions have not managed to
substantially modify the structures of violence and oppression. For example,
the innumerable existing pacifist or social development organizations of the
world are, in my view, functional to the systems of exploitation, replacing the
social activities that States must carry out, without confronting the causes
that originate inequality. The power structures know and take advantage of this
weakness of pacifist activism because they know perfectly well the limitations
that our groups have. I support the anti-systemic, autonomous, anarchic groups
because human relationships emerge from them that the structured conceptions
(of power and of alternatives) cannot even visualize, they are perhaps the only
spaces of freedom in a world effectively controlled by a machinery for the
destruction of a large part of humanity. These spaces of freedom are minority,
marginal, like the cultures of the original peoples who still survive centuries
of programmed extermination. In that present, in that future I hold up my art
and I collaborate. As Galeano says, “the indian cultures are the most future
cultures of all. After all, they have been miraculously capable of perpetuating
humanity’s identity with nature, while the whole world persists in committing
suicide. Those cultures that the dominant culture considers non-cultures,
refuse to violate the earth: they do not reduce it to merchandize, they do not
turn it into an object for use and abuse: the sacred earth is not a thing.”
Many spectators
and some “professionals” (artists, critics, amateurs and collectors) worry that
the art on display today is hermetic, narcissistic, empty or insignificant.
Does the artistic environment - nourished by ‘useful friendships’- have a tendency
to despise or ignore those who are not initiated? Has it lost its will to
intervene in the construction of the world?
My opinion is that this vacuous and narcissistic
hermetism corresponds and is a reflection of the space that the “new order”
assigns art and artists. It’s symptomatic of this that the artists of the third
world are still being judged under criteria of aesthetic valuation that are
principally European. In fact, there are a great number of artists and of art
that is produced in the backyard of the great mansion that is completely
unknown or that is seen as “arts and crafts”. This is not new in history, and
it also happens in the urban centers of our countries where the ruling class
prefers to look to Europe instead of rescuing the silenced memory of Latin
America, for example. In my view you cannot participate in the construction of
the world without destroying the fucked-up world we continue to sustain, and
that destruction in our case, in the case of the americans from the south, means
that we need to recover our collective memory.
An important part of that memory for me has been
discovering something for my art in the figure of the Shaman that our original
peoples had. It would take many pages to discuss the specific role of the Shaman
in ancient and present communities, so I will only say that what I want to
point out is that the artist as well as his art and the art constructed by the
community without the need for anyone to direct it possesses an extraordinary
element of healing, capable of healing wounds, healing oppression, healing by
expanding consciousness, healing in multiple and unsuspected ways. Today the
artist seems to have lost that close relationship with his community, and
because of that the update of the Shaman’s role gives complete meaning to our
artistic work, putting us in solidarity with ourselves and with the collective,
a magical voyage through a kind of unconventional healing that takes place when
we recover our silenced memory by exorcising our experiences and redoing our
own utopias by looking at how we want to live in the magic of our differences.
Art can acquaint
us with war (as a witness) and art drives to war (it is one of its actors). We
know many examples of “warfare art”, but can we, must we talk of art for peace?
We can talk about art that aspires to a living together
where differences do not mean risking death. We can talk about art that rescues
the hidden memory of our dreams. We can and we must talk about art that puts a
face to our oppression and our sentences, but in that same way we will talk
about the forms of love that revolutionize us and make us more human, that
aspire to break the structures that impoverish the human condition so that an
effective evolution is produced. Mario Benedetti, an outstanding South American
poet says, “if they kick you until you are blind the only effective answer is
to kick them until they see”.
In the actual context this position has become one of
excessive violence because there is a power that does not resign itself to die,
and to believe otherwise is to enjoy a dangerous ingenuity. The artist is
confronting an extremely complex reality, where the peace of cemeteries does
not liberate us. The search for ‘peace’ gives meaning to a word that is
meaningless today only if it is speeded up, if it struggles, if it is
activated, lucid, effective, if it enters the conflict, if it dares to develop
progressive, constant, unexpected and above all effective mechanisms of civil
disobedience. A different art is possible. Any doubt or naivete ends up
favoring those who sustain an inhuman way of living together.
“How is it
possible, for example, to behave on the one hand as if nothing in the world
were more important than literature while, on the other hand, it is impossible
not to see around us that people struggle against hunger and are obliged to
consider that the most thing for them, is what they eat at the end of the
month? He [the author] runs into a paradox: he who only wants to write for
those who are hungry discovers that only those who have enough to eat have the
leisure to notice his existence” wrote the author Stig Dagerman. How do you
position yourself as an artist? Which remarks and judgements does this
quotation raise?
The reality of artists, at least those that I know and
relate with, is that the majority is living in complete marginality - that is,
on the side of those who are hungry and whose basic necessities go unmet. In
this sense the experience of doing art under a dictatorship and doing art in a
democracy, for those that are marginalized is the same, yes, it’s curious but
it is the same because the “pigs with wings”, like Pink Floyd used to say,
still do not see what is happening around them, because it would evidently
spoil their lunch.
We are therefore part of that reality of poverty and
precariousness and that is an important source of our growth as artists. It is
precisely that excessive dose of reality that bothers the rich, the ones that
have the weapons, the ones that exploit with unfair economic systems and who
favor ignorance. Power profoundly hates the real, hates who does not accept the
shit served in sugarcoated dosages, hates who does not bow down their head or
kneels. The authorities hate all that is too real.
In reality one always manages to bring out the best of
oneself, in the best conditions possible. For example, in my case, not having
access to the “great galleries”, to the great spaces for the commercialization
of art, I have privileged the showing of my work and the human exchange in spaces
that are close to people. In the case of my series “Love against forgetting”,
which deals with the subject of the disappeared, the premiere was held at the
Headquarters of CODEPU, the Commission for the Rights of the People, in
Valdivia, Chile, where those in attendance were the wives and children and
friends of the disappeared detainees. In Sheffield, England, the show was held
in a Union Hall, and so on. Obviously these spaces are not “lucrative” but they
are the motors of our activity and they give meaning to the work. Moreover, it
is natural that as an artist one considers that it would be healthy and
beautiful that our work would someday give us the possibility to provide us
bread and sustenance. Unfortunately for the great majority of artists that is
not the reality.
But these are not times to stare at our bellybuttons, it
is not the time now nor has it ever been. The more brutal reality is that on
our side, the side of the “losers” there is as much hunger for the many as
riches for the few, and even though it is true that some of us are trying to
build humanity from the side of the despised of history, there are also artists
that help construct history from the oppressors’ side, as translators of their
shit, as traitors to themselves, as servants of the transnationalization of
lies, as creators of their advertising images, as supporters of their “moral”
and “ethical” discourse, as salesmen of a “universal” world culture that does
not question, that consolidates obedient ways of seeing. As icons of what they
are willing to withstand inside the limits of the free market, because that
sells, because that gives status, because that gives security.
What would you
like to add on this theme of art and war, on the positive and negative aspects
of the relationship between art and politics?
I would only say that in my experience and that of the
many collectives that I have been a member, it is possible to visualize and
construct different ways of life. This demands much of oneself, changes that are
extremely difficult to sustain in daily life, sometimes unbearable risks,
because to enter the side of uncertainty is difficult, but still it is the only
option that I have constructed for myself, with a light hope that this
revolution that one experiments in oneself transgresses my limits and excites
others, connected to others that live similar processes throughout the world. I
cannot predict that this will serve for others, to each his own, but to enter
into uncertainty is the only thing that has generated in me a certain intuition
that is appropriate and insolent to observe the fissures of this inhuman system
that we live in, and from there hit the blows that are necessary on the faces
of the liars. Julio Cortazar, Argentinean writer, says it better than me:
“Better to be what one is, to say that which burns the tongue and the stomach,
there will always be someone who understands that language that from comes the
bottom.” I aspire to this attitude for living the art profession.
- - -
Art, Guerre Politique, Roberto Arroyo artiste et
militant. (Interview) Published by Le RIRe, Réseau d’Information Réfractaire,
Marseille, France. (2000).
Roberto Arroyo was born in Temuco, Chile. He holds a B.A.
in painting and drawing from the Universidad Austral de Chile, having studied
music pedagogy and violin as well. Roberto has held numerous exhibitions of his
artwork in the Americas and Europe, and he has worked as an activist and human
rights investigator in Chile participating as a consultant for a team forensic
anthropologists who searched for the remains of the hundreds of disappeared
detainees of the military dictatorship in Chile and also for SERPAJ (Peace and
Justice Service), National Reparation and Reconciliation Corporation of the
Ministry of the Interior National Government of Chile and Solidarity Bureau:
Human Rights Department - Bishopric of Valdivia, Chile. Currently, he is
working in a dissertation titled: Indigenous Literatures: resistance, autonomy
and self representation from the end of XX century to the beginning of XXI
century.
