TV,
The second question that I did not answer the last time was about Goya and the place of portrayal of various types of tragedy in the arts in general. I don’t have any credentials as an art critic. I majored in Physics and Latin and minored in Ancient History and Mathematics. Any comments I make about art are informed only by my own native foolishness and by the scraps picked up in the study of ancient history. As a post, it has taken me a long time to put together, and I apologize for the delay.
Flora MacDonald made the most telling criticism. Upthread she questioned whether ice dance is an appropriate medium for serious messages. Mel Brooks certainly would agree with her. He chose to end movie History of the World with a spurious advertisement for History of the World Part II, promising a segment of Hitler on Ice. A fake teaser clip was shown of a skater dressed as Hitler in German military uniform hitting Jackson Haines-like poses and completing a double jump. It was very funny. I might not go that far. I thought S&B’s Chaplin programs (both the competitive and the exhibition) were both brilliant and serious. But I would agree that ice dance is not the easiest medium to use to convey serious messages.
I would not prohibit L&A, A&P or anyone else from putting on any program they like, on any topic that they would like, including their WTC performance. I believe in freedom of speech and performance. However, I would reserve to myself the right to either like or dislike the program, based only on my own whims, rather than any broad strictures about Art with a capital A. And because we are talking about a sport, as well as an art, I would hope that the judges would follow Chris Dean’s advice from commentary in 1990 US broadcast. Paraphrased quote: You cannot deny anyone the right to say whether they like it or not ... they should just judge it for what it is. It is a dance competition ... a honest person can try to assess the relative difficulty of the dances and make judgments about all the things that relate to artistic impression. End Paraphrase
There have been a lot of reasons that depiction of tragedies is popular. The most popular is the desire of the victors to record their winning campaigns. I recall a picture of Assyrian ladies relaxing in the garden with the heads of enemies hung off the trees as one of the most casually bloody I have ever seen. In ancient Greece, attendance at the performance of tragedies was an encouraged religious and civic duty. In the days before television, another reason was simple reportage. Currier and Ives brought out a series of prints of shipwrecks that sold well and were on the walls of many nineteenth century homes, for example. A number then of these tragic artistic productions had simple financial motivations. The people who rubberneck at highway accidents are showing a blatant curiosity about tragedies that leads them to buy the newspaper the next day. There are those people who simply like to stare long and hard at gruesome scenes. From time to time, some productions were meant as social critique and commentary by the artist. Turner’s Slave Ship reports an actual event, and I am not clever enough to know whether he was just reporting, or whether he was expressing an opinion, contrasting the reaching hands of slaves and the brilliance of the heavens, foretelling the oncoming “Typhon.” It is interesting that Turner seems to have kept the violence rather schematic, rather than explicit.
I don’t see Goya’s 3rd of May painting as particularly unusual or shocking (remember I have no art critic credentials). The painting was commissioned by the Commission of the Regency Council, which governed Spain after the defeat of France, to commemorate the martyred defenders of Madrid, who were executed by Napoleon’s soldiers. As such, this picture falls right into the long tradition of commemoration of the deaths of martyrs, though secular in this case. In fact, the picture is very reminiscent to me of many representations of the Stoning of Stephen, for example, even though the martyrs are a secular rather than religious martyrs in this case. This isn’t the greatest representation of Stephen but you can see the general point:
http://www.bethelks.edu/services/mla/images/martyrsmirror/mm bk1 p006.jpg
In Goya’s painting, the chief Madrid martyr is portrayed as unafraid, his arms spread as for the crucifixion, in front of a church steeple in the background. He is standing in a brilliant shaft of light. The French soldiers are portrayed as dark, Satanic clones, shooting the martyrs. This is exactly how martyrs are generally portrayed. While there is considerable gore in the picture, this is not unusual for Goya, who (in my opinion) had a very peculiar taste in wall art for his own house. See the following link to “The Black Pictures” which Goya painted as murals on the walls of his own house, particularly the picture of Saturn Devouring his Son.
http://www.ibiblio.org/wm/paint/auth/goya/goya.saturn-son.jpg
However, graphic depiction of the violence is a typical feature of art that commemorates martyrs, as a review of the illustrations in Foxe’s Book of Martyrs (English ed. 1563) and the Mennonite Book of Martyrs (Luiken, 1685 edition) will show. Depicting martyrs very graphically has been a standard technique of both governments and religions. Not only do such depictions increase the group solidarity, they also incite the faithful to retaliatory violence to “protect” the innocent and avenge the death of the innocent martyrs. The performances of Medieval Passion plays were often followed by pogroms, for example.
If you wanted to insert L&A’s production into this artistic series, they are obviously doing a depiction of innocent martyrs, but instead of leaving the martyrs the figleaf of courage in the face of death, they stuck with reportage, and the victims are shown running like rabbits. At this point, it’s how the observer interacts with the piece. Here are some ways the program could be interpreted:
1. Some people see nothing in the program, and they just like it or not based on the skating and composition. (several have posted here)
2. Some people flashback to the WTC event and are offended. (me)
3. Some people find it an offensive Schadenfreude, akin to laughing when the fat tycoon slips on the banana peel. The US as victim is a cause for celebration in some quarters, and people in the US know that. Such people might have the suspicion that this is an appeal to non US judges to share and enjoy that emotion with the performers, who would then hope for better marks than they might have gotten otherwise.
I thought it was more likely that they were maybe trying to give a message about what the speech stood for, that it's as important today as it was back then. Or maybe that the fact that the Games were in the US swung the decision, since MLK was American. Or maybe they just thought of the idea of doing a free dance based on the theme of Liberty, and the speech/music worked for their ideas, and maybe was somehting different that nobody had done before.
