Escola Massana
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// Friday, November 29th at 5 p.m. in the auditorium of the Escola Massana //
Discussion with Santiago López Petit accompanied by Falconetti Peña.There are art works that arise from discomfort, from the urgent need to hit the crust of stupidity behind which the apostles of national vengeance hide. Immediately, the normalizers charge against them. Their language is strange, their forms intolerable.
Therefore, they bury them under tons of silence and, when that is no longer possible, they musealize them.
What can we learn from Otto Dix, George Grosz, Gerd Arntz?
That the homeland is the last refuge of the rats.// On Wednesday, November 27 at 10 am in the auditorium of the Escola Massana //
we will have a meeting with the schools, presented by Falconetti Peña.Some references on Gerd Arntz, Otto Dix, George Grosz and Peter Watkins
The artistic production of Arntz, Dix and Grosz during the Weimar Republic (1919-1933) is crossed by the debate on the revolutionary cultural policy that was appropriate for a time in which, after the war apocalypse of the First World War, the fate of Germany and Europe was at stake. The German Revolution of November 1918 materialized in the need to break with the old forms of expressionism to make way for direct and political intervention. Each one chose an iconographic line, but all were involved in the convulsive revolutionary attempts. The Spartacist insurrection and its crushing at the hands of a shady alliance between social democrats and far-right paramilitaries marked the work of all three artists. Their styles are opposed, but the intransigence of their gaze put them on the list of artists hated by the Nazis.
To carry out this work I have followed, in the first place, the line marked by Jesusa Vega and Sally Radic in their book 3 visions of war: Jacques Callot, Francisco de Goya and Otto Dix.
Otto Dix's engravings, but also those of George Grosz refer to Goya's The Disasters of War. They, who participated in one world war, saw themselves reflected in another world war. Immanuel Wallerstein, in a booklet as succinct as it is clarifying, the historical capitalism, divides the process of capitalist accumulation into three great periods, separated by what he calls the three world wars we have lived through so far: The Thirty Years' War (1618-1648), which ended with the hegemony of the Netherlands; the Napoleonic Wars (1792-1815), which consolidated Britain's imperial power; and the conflicts of the 20th century between 1914 and 1945, which Wallerstein regards as a single world war and which made the United States the hegemonic power.What Dix and Grosz found in Goya, Grosz found in Jacques Callot, who in 1633 published his series of engravings entitled The Great Miseries of War. The artist from Lorraine shows class warfare as a cruel act. Callot, Goya, Dix, Grosz and Arntz share a need to leave a record of reality behind the war propaganda.
Wars of capital accumulation are just that. The dismembered bodies, hunger, homicidal madness of the victors, death without glory of the proletarians, ruin, misery, consolidation of a new order on the mass graves of the losers. Three world wars have shaped modern capitalism. Each lasted about thirty years, or two generations. We are close to a fourth world war. It will be more dangerous than the previous ones because of nuclear weapons and the War-State, which uses terror to replace lost legitimacy. The end of the capitalist system could be the end of humanity. Peter Watkins showed us how this could happen.Callot, Goya, Dix, Grosz, Arntz and Watkins saw what was happening.
It is time for us to see.
