[pic- guernica ac-nancy-metz.fr]The East London's Whitechapel Gallery became famous in 1939 for receiving a version of Picasso's Guernica (see video below), which was made to remind the world of the slaughter of innocent people in the Basque town of Gernica by Franco's Spanish fascists.
More recently, after the re-opening of the gallery this year, Goshka Macuga built an installation that looked like a Museum of Guernica's history. It's the first useful installation I've ever seen. They're usually monuments to ego and waste. But, this one included examples of the use of the printed word to incite violence, in the form of the purjury-laiden Case against Iraq which was read to the UN by Colon Powell. It's almost as dodgey as Tony Blair's plagiarised dosier.
Anyway, he/she put across the idea that Guernica was used by the local Communist party to get people to sign up to fight Franco. That may be true, but it seems that it could have also represented the general fight against fascism. It may have thus softened people up to go to war against Germany.
It seems odd how a piece of anti-war art ended up stoking the fires of armageddon.
Macuga's installation is called "the nature of the beast". I can see that this artist has understood how blood-thirsty people are. You tell them "don't kill" and they go off and kill.
That would seem to make sense to Slavoj Zizek, the philosopher. He has shown repeatedly how so much of what we try to do for our own good ends up being used to beat us over the head.
[pic- Guernica/ part. foothilltech.org]The road to hell is paved with good intentions...and art.
-Cos67 ~(%^D>
