'Lessons in visual literacy': how art can help us look more carefully at language
In the 1980s, the Chilean artist Eugenio Dittborn created what he calls “airmail paintings”: folded-up paper artworks he popped in the mail to art galleries abroad.
He would paint toys, beds and bodies as a way of critiquing the Augusto Pinochet dictatorship, which ran from 1973 to 1990, without the government ever knowing. Dittborn says the lone objects in his artworks were left empty and unoccupied for a reason. “The work portrays deaths in the present, while indirectly alluding to deaths and disappearances from political reasons,” he said.
Some of these paintings will be on view at the Museum of Contemporary Art Chicago as part of Direct Message: Art, Language and Power. With more than 70 artworks, from the 1980s to the present, the exhibition looks at how artists add, remove or play with language in relation to the government and the media.
“Most of the artists are trying to make us think and look more carefully at the words the media and the government uses,” said Michael Darling, the museum’s chief curator. “I would sum it up as lessons in visual literacy.”
The exhibition also details how an artist manages to carefully sidestep trouble. In the case of Dittborn’s work, Darling said it came down to visual coding.
“The language he used to critique the Chilean government had to be quite coded to avoid persecution,” said Darling. “This is an example of somebody who doesn’t have the protection of the first amendment to make critical comments about his government; he had to find other ways to get his message out there.”
There are also artworks that are what Darling called “artists who are casting a skeptical eye towards the media in their work”.
This includes the works of Stan Douglas, whose video piece Evening, from 1994, takes archival news footage from the 1960s and hires actors to reenact the same broadcasts to highlight the breaking news that led to America experiencing a time of unrest.
“It’s an old-fashioned Walter Cronkite-style of news reporting with three different news anchors whose words are in conflict with one another,” said Darling. “You get a different sense of these types of deliveries, and different emphases come into play.”
Another work in the exhibition includes Jamal Cyrus’s artwork CultrOps,where he has layered and removed information from Malcolm X’s FBI file. “The work is about the surveillance and repression of American popular culture in the late 1960s and early 1970s, but also prompts the viewer to ask the question how this cultural form is policed and controlled in the present,” said Cyrus.
Darling said: “Even with the Freedom of Information Act, there have been certain things that still are not legible and visible to us, which describes the activity of the government. These documents have been circulated in the public eye, and he has redacted them, but has also found ones that have been redacted, too.”
Another artist who blocks out paragraphs of text is Alexandra Bell, who uses articles from the New York Times to criticize how the media has covered certain key tragedies, from the Charlottesville riots in 2017 to the killing of
Ferguson teen Michael Brown in 2014.
“It looks into current day news coverage; how we read the New York Times versus the Washington Post, even CNN versus Fox, and how news items are covered by different media outlets and what their biases bring to their stories,” said Darling. “Many artists use that technique of covering up language, censoring in various ways, to make their messages clear.”
Famed text-based artist Barbara Kruger is showing Untitled (We construct the chorus of missing persons) from 1983, which shows the title alongside an image of an anonymous person with hair covering their face.
Jenny Holzer’s LED piece For Chicagofrom 2007 will also be on view, reading phrases the artist refers to as “truisms”, such as: “Abuse of power comes as no surprise” and “Action causes more trouble than thought” alongside the more debatable “A lot of professionals are crackpots”.
“A lot of artists here take newspapers and highlight words and excise others to show there is bias in the language the media uses,” said Darling. “Racial bias, political bias; so much of the work is to make us aware of how we’re all being manipulated by the news we read. That’s a theme throughout the exhibition.”
Other artworks in the exhibition include works by Paul Thek, William Kentridge and Gary Simmons, many of which don’t directly criticize propaganda directly, but rather make soft (and arguably safe) suggestions.
“We’ve painted a broader picture of those ideas, media manipulation, without pinning it all on one politician or news outlet or news network,” said Darling. “I think visitors would draw their own conclusions of that and make those connections.”
But in an ever-increasing self-critical media landscape, can viewers and readers think entirely for themselves?
“The show is quite timely because it hopefully will make us think more carefully about how we are being led to certain conclusions by newspapers and TV news, and that they aren’t as neutral as we’d hope they would be,” said Darling. “There are angles that they’re pushing.”
Direct Message: Art, Language, and Power is on show at the Museum of Contemporary Art Chicago until 26 January
hope that it will repair her relationship with her boyfriend and, more importantly, help her come to terms with the deaths of her sister and parents. She is charmed by a promise of deliverance, just as Juliette in my new novel Starve Acre is drawn from Leeds to the Yorkshire Dales, trusting in the “goodness of country living”.
It’s a recurring motif in folk horror that the countryside beckons to the characters as a place of hope. That events often culminate in graphic violence is a given: this is horror, after all. What is more interesting is the way in which these stories show how we’re seduced by the idea that the natural world is where we’ll find some kind of restoration, enlightenment and, ultimately, peace.
This has been a pervasive notion throughout history. The same wisdom that equates nature with wellbeing is what prompted Cyrus the Great to build his vast public gardens at Pasargadae two and a half thousand years ago and what led to the formation of the UK’s national parks in the 1950s. In literature, too, the rural is often depicted as a place of refuge. I think of the notebooks Coleridge kept as he tramped the Cumbrian fells in a bid to wean himself off laudanum, full of moments in which the terrain induces in him a kind of euphoric insight. Today we have Richard
Mabey, who in his memoir Nature Cure finds a salve for depression in the flatlands of Norfolk; or Helen Macdonald, in H Is for Hawk, who grapples with bereavement as she trains her goshawk, Mabel. In Raynor Winn’s recent book, The Salt Path, it’s against the windswept cliffs of the south-west coast that the consequences of terminal illness are calibrated.
When Wordsworth says “Let nature be your teacher”, it seems like sound advice. The trouble is, the classroom is falling apart. The recent State of Nature report concludes that almost a quarter of mammals and half of birds in the UK are under threat of extinction from a combination of climate change, farming practices, pollution and the construction of new housing estates, making it “one of the most nature-depleted countries in the world”. The urgency to preserve – in direct action and in literature – the habitats that shaped us and shape us still has never been stronger. And although the tales of ghosts, sacrifice, devils and debauchery are unsettling, folk horror plays an important role in this process.
It’s no coincidence that its popularity has risen with that of “nature writing”. Like the best examples of that genre, it is concerned with a conservation of particulars. It engages in a deep mapping of place, connecting layers of history, ecology, folklore and memory. It accommodates the supernatural and the eldritch, both of which are often ramped up to provide the horror. But, artistic licence aside, they remain a significant part of the totality of rural Britain, which is haunted by its past – perhaps even cursed because we’ve buried our unpalatable actions so deeply. Part of folk horror’s role is to unearth forgotten barbarities and injustices and make us look at ourselves afresh. It was on England’s clouded hills that we built our gallows – an image of cruelty rendered so starkly in Michael Reeves’s 1968 film Witchfinder General, and which greatly alarms Fanshawe in MR James’s 1925 story “A View from a Hill”. Scanning the idyllic English countryside with a strange pair of binoculars, he suddenly lights upon a scene from the past and sees “something hanging on the gibbet”.
As polemic, folk horror can perform a needful check on the indiscriminate romanticising of ourselves and our country. It can be an antidote to the jingoism that arises when nostalgia is cut with nationalism and moments of history are co-opted by the right or the far right. Recently, the anti-Muslim group Britain First dubbed their repugnant vigilante patrols of the south coast “Operation White Cliffs”, and Conservative Brexiters are fond of evoking the famous “British pluck” of the second world war in response to the perceived machinations of the EU. What’s being peddled here is the myth that the country of our forebears was, if not peaceful, then at least somehow more understandable than ours. People were decent, the “right” sort were in power, the law was respected, morals upheld, the lines between “right” and “wrong”, “us” and “them”, more clearly defined, cause and effect more obviously coupled. The past was more coherent – which, in hindsight, the past always seems to be.
It’s this kind of dangerous, atavistic fantasy that folk horror takes to task; indeed, much of the “horror” is predicated on the willingness of seemingly ordinary people to believe these claims. In The Wicker Man, Sergeant Howie’s investigation into a girl’s disappearance is frustrated because he is battling against the will of an entire community, and for all his bluster about their pagan beliefs, he is conscious that the islanders live by a common and unshakeable faith in their practices. In Midsommar, it’s the appearance of communal unity that seemingly appeals to Dani when she arrives at Hårga for the festival. Strange though the place is, the very fact the community is celebrating something that’s part of a larger natural cycle is evidence of a consistency and stability lacking in her life. There’s a philosophy that underpins everything. Everyone has a role to play. Power is localised and tangible. And so to live in a community where the individual is not only able to grasp that power, but is an inherent part of its potency, is an attractive proposition in an era of relativist truths, fractured democracy, global environmental threats and a society in which the spheres of influence are ineffably remote.
That we’ve been diminished in some way by swapping the rituals of small community for the rituals of global capitalism feels true, but since rural utopias always turn rotten in folk horror, they do not hold the solution to a better way of living. Rather it’s through the experience of seeing them unmasked that we’re awakened to the struggle we’re embroiled in here and now. Individuals in folk horror are shown to be so weak against much bigger forces – religious, political or preternatural – that they run the risk of being crushed entirely. Or else they become the force, which is perhaps the greatest horror of all.
• Andrew Michael Hurley’s Starve Acre is published by John Murray.
Part of folk horror’s role is to unearth forgotten barbarities and injustices and make us look at ourselves afresh