It is a fact that as time has gone on in modern warfare those who are most effected are the innocent civilians, more civilians than ever are victims of war.Being reminded of Picassos Guernica 1937 painting which emerged from the impact of the air raid Bombing of Guernica. Leon Golub and many artists in the late 1960s protested at the MOMA in the US comparing the My Lai massacre of civilians to Guernica In effect one could also compare the bombing of civilians in Baghdad, where at the time of the Baghdad bombing the mean age of the civilians was 15 years old, knowing this leaves one lost for words. Susan Sontag wrote in her book ‘No one after a certain age has the right to this kind of innocence of superficiality….to this degree of ignorance, or amnesia’ (Sontag,2003,p102, Regarding the pain of others.New York , Farrar,Strauss and Giroux..Also Sociologist Judith Butler states “There is an ethical responsibility to respond to the appearance of others especially to their cry of suffering.” ( Butler ,2010 ,cited in Apel , 2012,pp8-9) War Culture and the Contest of Images,New Brunswick,NJ:Rutgers University Press. This sums up the belief in a humanity that defends and upholds the rights of others. I have seen in the works of Leon Golub , Martha Rosler, William Kentridge, Kathe Kollwitz, Barbara Kruger,and Susan Crile a passion to express through their work a need to make social comment through visual art, to communicate alternative perspective to what is told and portrayed. Sociologist and philosopher,Herbert Marcuse observes the control of the one dimensional portrayal of the dominant discourse, in his book One Dimensional Man .Marcuse points out, ” One dimensional thought is systematically promoted by the makers of politics and their purveyors of mass information , their universe of discourse populated by the self validating of hypothesis which incessantly and monopolistically repeated become hypnotic defintions of dictations .” (Marcuse,1991,p 14) One dimensional man. London,Routledge. Hope springs up when one remembers the collapse of the Berlin wall,The fall of the Romanian dictatorship in the 1980s, Nelson Mandela and the fall of apartheid, Martin Luther Kings stand for human rights, Ghandi and Aung San Suu Kyi in Burma the on going move towards a better place.
