Political art and the horizon of justice: the associated Argentine artists

© 2013 Adrian StojkovichMy project represents an attempt to create an explicitly political art focused on historical events. My creative works have been inspired by narrative accounts related to the Iran-Contra political scandal. I have elaborated these accounts to some degree in this thesis. I will argue throughout this thesis that my creative works are no mere ‘doubling’ of the narratives that inspired them but are instead critical reconfigurations of the politicized narrative structures that frame the past. Jacques Rancière wrote, “the real must be fictionalized in order to be thought.” By this Rancière meant that political meaning is necessarily transcribed in and by narrative accounts of the past. This thesis initially follows an argument that artwork is a kind of metaphoring which allows art to partake in the political by referencing this ontological condition of politics described by Rancière. I argue that artworks can be used to render history un-familiar, and in so doing they can reference political readability. Toward the second half of this thesis, I consider art’s obligation to historical acts of radical, ethical commitment. I reference in particular Paul Ricœur’s interpretation of the Heideggerian concept wiederholen, which entails a sort of return to, and retrieval from the past. I argue that my own creative works are an attempt to recover from the historical past a possibility of meaningful political action in the present. The creative works that I intend to submit for examination include several monochromatic paintings. These paintings represent visual ephemera related to Nicaraguan political history. I also intend to submit a video work that depicts a restaged photographic image of the severed hands of Che Guevara. The final work that I intend to submit for examination is a 1:1 scale replica of the Mercedes-Benz sedan in which the Nicaraguan dictator Anastasio Somoza Debayle was assassinated. My thesis contextualises these creative works by bringing them into discourse with Luc Tuymans’ painting Chalk and Gerhard Richter’s OKTOBER 18, 1977 cycle. I also follow several motifs from the political-fiction film’s The Battle of Algiers, Z and Missing