A Crisis of Purpose

My experience of day one of “Arts in Times of Crises and The Role of Artists in Weakened Democracies” at the Roy and Edna Disney CalArts Theater began with getting wanded down and having my bag searched by security. Surprised, I asked if the conference, organized by the Thomas Mann House, had received a threat, and was told no, but it was felt this would make people in the audience feel safer. When the welcoming speech by German ambassador Andreas Michaelis made mention of an artist in Tel Aviv making work about the suffering of Israelis taken hostage on October 7 and another Ukraine-oriented work but no mention of any artist making work about Palestine, I began to understand what and whom we were meant to feel safe from.

And safe we were, at “Art in Times of Crises,” from reckoning with the Nakba unfolding in Gaza at that very moment (late November), or the censorship of artists and art workers speaking out against it, or any real engagement with the urgent politics of the day at all. The panel “Must Artists Be Activists?” answered with a resounding no; when pressed in a Q&A with the audience to take a position on the “ideological war” being waged on artists and curators critical of Israel (with Germany’s Documenta 15 exhibition as one example), the panelists treated the demand as unintelligible. And in the context of this conference, it was—powerful and evocative opening performances by Lynne Thompson and Guillermo Gómez-Peña notwithstanding.

A spirited conversation among directors of major arts institutions on a panel organized around the question “How Should Arts Institutions Navigate the Culture Wars?” was strangely evacuated of political content as well, despite the clear effects of the Black Lives Matter movement and the George Floyd rebellion on the workings and non-workings of their respective organizations. By the time the evening keynote dialogue with filmmaker Werner Herzog rolled around, one had to ask, is it “the role of artists in weakened democracies” to promote their own memoirs and films? Perhaps the most lasting image of the day came from the final moment of Gómez-Peña’s performance, when he picked up a bullhorn and mimed the inability to speak into it, and then, after several tries, put it back on the stage, got down on all fours, and barked into it. Anything to break the silence.