We live in unprecedented times. As our young Democracy gasps for air under a murderous automaton masquerading as a mediocre salesman come president. Now is the time to break the safety glass and create extraordinary art. Set the sky on fire.
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“The purpose of art is washing the dust of daily life off our souls.” – Pablo Picasso
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“If you hear a voice within you say ‘you cannot paint,’ then by all means paint, and that voice will be silenced.” -Vincent Van Gogh
“An intellectual says a simple thing in a hard way. An artist says a hard thing in a simple way.” –Charles Bukowski
Art as a Weapon
In the spring of 1942, an anonymous editorial in Literature and Art entitled “Artist-Agitator” proposed that artists might contribute materially to national defense: “A living Bolshevik word,” Pravda recently wrote, “is a part of the Red Army’s military equipment alongside tanks and airplanes. We should take care of it and love it no less than our rifles or guns.” We can easily use these words when we talk about art agitation. Like a living word, a visual image provides a powerful form of ideological ammunition for teaching the masses. An image created by a masterful hand has the power to embody people’s feelings and thoughts. It reverberates in the heart of every honest man, strengthens his faith in himself [and] in his people, and inspires him to fight the enemy heroically.
Such rousing rhetoric proved to be popular among artists and writers contributing to the Soviet wartime propaganda effort. The following year, for example, TASS Artistic Director Pavel Sokolov-Skalia declared, “My weapon is the three hundred posters I created during the war.” Self-referential images of artists and writers wielding the tools of their trade as weapons were relatively rare, however, as they undermined the effectiveness of propaganda by pointing to the tendentious means by which it was constructed. More typically, such images aimed to expose the fabricated nature of enemy propaganda.
Art As A Weapon from BREADTRUCK FILMS on Vimeo.
“The principles of true art is not to portray, but to evoke.” -Jerzy Kosinski
“The creative act lasts but a brief moment, a lightning instant of give-and-take, just long enough for you to level the camera and to trap the fleeting prey in your little box. “ -Henri Cartier-Bresson
“The artist is a receptacle for emotions that come from all over the place: from the sky, from the earth, from a scrap of paper, from a passing shape, from a spider’s web. “-Pablo Picasso
The Velvet Revolution ended 41 years of authoritarian Communist rule in Czechoslovakia in 1989. It started a week after the Berlin Wall fell when Czechoslovak riot police brutally suppressed a student-led pro-democracy protest in Bratislava, causing massive public outrage. The people of Czechoslovakia came out in droves to call for democracy.
A week later, after the number of protesters grew to an unprecedented half a million and 75 percent of the country’s entire population went on a two-hour general strike, the Communist leadership stepped down. Two weeks after that, the first non-Communist government was sworn in and a dissident leader, the playwright Vaclav Havel, was made president just in time for New Years 1990. Remarkably, no one was killed, especially considering Warsaw Pact nations had invaded Czechoslovakia to suppress a popular reform movement just 21 years before.
Four years later the country split, also peacefully, into the Czech and Slovak republics
Art is a Weapon and we are tasked to use it to free Humanity from the yoke of slavery, ignorance and hate. Ar†stråda Magazine is “weaponized” art that seeks to express the soul of Austin and the surrounding communities that make this world GREAT AND UNIQUE AND DARK. This is how we shed light on reality and how we help reveal our true selves. This is our Ar† and we will “ART YOUR FACE OFF”.
