The figure in times of crisis

I usually don’t write a whole lot on this blog and I definitely don’t make posts with out artwork to show but today is the exception.

I went to an opening at the Aldrich today and there was a panel of artists from the "pretty Tough" exhibition. The exhibition is a collection of works that use story telling and the figure to discus very complex and often painful subject matter. The curator of “Pretty Tough” asked an interesting question. It was something along the lines of “Do human beings turn to figurative work in times of crisis?” This really stuck me because I had always been taught that in times of crisis people turn to more experimental work that is often disturbing, disjointed, and a lot of times really brutal. This theory was always characterized by the work of the abstract expressionists. While thinking about this point however I realized that a lot of the art from post WWI in Germany was figurative and even de Kooning’s work has it’s basis in the figure however disassembled and abstracted. It is quite possible that in times of crisis we turn to the figure because we are wrapped up in the problems we are facing and have to examine our selves to find out what we did wrong, or simply to record the current cultural climate.

In this there is also a question of gender. When you learn about wartime art that depicts turmoil it is always men in uniform and women as prostitutes. In our current society however women can go to war in a much more active sense, and women artists have a greater voice. Does this mean that the figure will be used to show crisis in a different way then it has in the past?