Signal: A Journal of International Political Graphics & Culture (2) - Brossura

Brossura

ISBN 10: 160486298X ISBN 13: 9781604862980

Casa editrice: Pm Pr, 2012

Riassunto

<p><em>Signal</em> is an ongoing book series dedicated to documenting and sharing compelling graphics, art projects, and cultural movements of international resistance and liberation struggles. Artists and cultural workers have been at the center of upheavals and revolts the world over, from the painters and poets in the Paris Commune to the poster makers and street theatre performers of the recent Occupy movement. <em>Signal</em> will bring these artists and their work to a new audience, digging deep through our common history to unearth their images and stories. We have no doubt that Signal will come to serve as a unique and irreplaceable resource for activist artists and academic researchers, as well as an active forum for critique of the role of art in revolution.</p><p>Highlights of the second volume of<em>Signal<em> include:<br><ul><li>Anarchist Manga in Japan</li><li>Breaking Chains: Political Graphics and the Anti-Apartheid Struggle</li><li>Selling <em>Freedom</em>: Promotional Posters from the 1910s</li><li>Street Art, Oaxacan Struggle, and the Mexican Context</li><li>Covering the Wall: Revolutionary Murals in 1970s Portugal</li><li>R&#248;de Mor: Danish printmaking, pop music, and politics</li></ul><p>In the US there is a tendency to focus only on the artworks produced within our shores or from English speaking producers. <em>Signal</em> reaches beyond those bounds, bringing material produced the world over, translated from dozens of languages and collected from both the present and decades past. Though it is a full-color printed publication, <em>Signal</em> is not limited to the graphic arts. Within its pages you will find political posters and fine arts, comics and murals, street art, site-specific works, zines, art collectives, documentation of performance and articles on the often overlooked but essential role all of these have played in struggles around the world.</p></em></em></p>

Su questo libro

Informazioni sull?autore

Alec Dunn is an illustrator and a printer who has designed book and record covers, political graphics, and punk fliers. He lives in Portland, Oregon. Josh Macphee is an artist, a&#160;curator, an activist, and the author of Paper Politics and Reproduce and Revolt. He lives in Brooklyn, New York.

Estratto. © Ristampato con autorizzazione. Tutti i diritti riservati.

Signal:02

By Alec Dunn, Josh MacPhee

PM Press

Copyright © 2012 PM Press
All rights reserved.

ISBN: 978-1-60486-298-0

Contents

Malangatana's Fire Judy Seidman remembers the Mozambican revolutionary painter, 
Street Murals in the Portuguese Revolution Phil Mailer strolls down the avenues of revolt, 
Selling Freedom A collection of early 20th-Century broadsides, 
Cranking It Out Old School Style Lincoln Cushing explores the lost legacy of Gestetner art, 
Art of Rebellion Deborah Caplow puts Oaxacan street art in a Mexican context, 
Sketches from Memory The Yamaga Manga and Japanese anarchism, 
A Heart of Concrete through Fire and Water Kasper Opstrup Frederiksen looks at the history of Danish art collective Røde Mor, 

CHAPTER 1

MALANGAT ANA'S FIRE

Judy Seidman

"If imperialist domination has the vital need to practice cultural oppression, national liberation is necessarily an act of culture."

— Amílcar Cabral, 1970

Flags across Mozambique flew at half-mast for two days in mourning when artist Malangatana Valente Nguenha died in January 2011. At his funeral, speakers declared that he was "much more than an artist — he is a part of us," naming him a hero and a freedom fighter. The government originally proposed placing his remains in the Heroes' Mausoleum with postcolonial Mozambique's founders, Samora Machel and Eduardo Mondlane. But in line with his own wishes, Malangatana was buried in his rural home town of Matalana, some thirty kilometers north of Maputo.

In a similar spirit, we need to place his life's work as an artist within the context of building revolutionary culture and national liberation for and with his people. As a painter, poet, musician, intellectual, and revolutionary, Malangatana gave voice to the struggles of the people of Mozambique, and indeed of Africa — in pain and trauma, in joy and victory, in line, color, and beauty. He himself wrote,

Art for me is a collective expression that comes from the uses and customs of the people and leads to their social, mental, cultural and political evolution. Art is a musical instrument full of messages. These are messages that the artist selects to put together in front of humanity.

Brought Up in the Culture of the People

Malangatana was born to a poor family in Matalana in 1936. As a child he herded animals for farmers, which meant that he provided child labor for the owner of the beasts. His was not a romantic carefree childhood spent wandering in the fields while watching over his family's wealth. His father was mostly absent, working in the mines in South Africa. His mother worked as a traditional healer, teeth sharpener, and tattooist. (These were skilled crafts in the Ronga community — the Ronga form one of the three major "tribal" groups of Southern Mozambique.) He learned from two of his uncles who were traditional healers. He absorbed the rich symbols and narratives of rural life from those around him. "Aside from making useful things like gourds, people carved things for witch doctors, and there were very strong, impulsive dances. And there was poetry," Malangatana recalled. "As children, my friends and I, we were already prepared to be poets, dancers, writers, even philosophers, but most important we were full of imagination."

His childhood fascination with his mother's work echoes in the teeth and claws that fill his mature art. That he adapted and built upon this imagery reflects in the title of a painting from the 1960s, "The mouth of society has sharpened teeth; the only way to destroy a monster is to pull out his teeth."

At age nine, Malangatana attended a Swiss mission school. Over his existing rich mix of culture he learned Christianity's myths and traditions. In addition, the mission school taught creative skills like pottery, wood -carving, and basketry. The Portuguese regime closed down the school after he had been there only two years. By age twelve, he left home to find work in the capital city of Lorenzo Marques (its name was changed to Maputo after liberation).

Art in the Liberation Struggle

Like all the young children who grew up with me in the 1940s I saw many things — many things which made my life political from the start. I saw my parents forced to work on the railway without food. I saw my aunts and my uncles being punished by the sipiao, the colonial police. I saw my cousins beaten with the palmatória. All this was preparation for a political life. Of course sometimes you don't care what you see. But I cared and feel it still today. — Malangatana

In Lorenzo Marques he worked during the day as a "ball boy" at the tennis club, and studied at night. When club member Augusto Cabral, an architect and amateur painter, kindly gave him a pair of sandals, Malangatana responded by asking for painting lessons. Later he worked as a waiter at the Club de Lorenzo Marques, and in his spare time studied art with Portuguese artist Ze Julio. He attended classes and events organized through the Núcleo de Arte da Colónia de Moçambique, an association of artists whose aim was to promote art in Lorenzo Marques, and to exchange art between the colony and the Portuguese metropole. He first publically exhibited his paintings in a Núcleo de Arte exhibit in 1959. Leading architect Pancho Guedes became his mentor and patron. Malangatana wrote:

It was here in the capital, in the 1950s, that I began to hear voices of protest against the colonial administration. There were strikes in the docks. ... In my spare time I was always painting. When I heard about the liberation struggles that were taking place in Tanganyika and Kenya I started painting in protest against the colonial situation. ... In Mozambique, FRELIMO [Frente de Libertação de Moçambique] was starting to operate in the north of the country. It was a long way from [Lorenzo Marques], but there was no girl or boy here who had not heard of them. At this point I changed from being a landscape or portrait painter to being more the kind of painter I am now.

In 1961, Pancho Guedes introduced the aspiring artist to Eduardo Mondlane (who at that time had been studying in the United States, and visited Mozambique on a UN passport). Malangatana talked about his desire to travel to the United States to become an artist. But Mondlane advised him not to leave Mozambique "because there was a need to develop the arts, and through them to capture the history and suffering of Mozambique's people." In June 1962, a year after visiting Lorenzo Marques, Mondlane launched the revolutionary party FRELIMO in Tanzania.

The young Malangatana took Mondlane's advice to heart. Later, he would argue that art must express the anxieties and aspirations of the people — it should be "a simple dialogue, comprehensible ... a vibrant thing, crying to the spectator, full of heat and life that makes him cry, or creates tremors in his body." He argued,

It's worthwhile to have art, to make it, to express it as a force of our veins and with the heat of our blood. It ought to be executed with the same passion in which lovers enter in that subconscious relationship at the exact moment of possession. In this manner we look at a statue, a painting, or we read a poem, as if hearing a guitar or an Xitende whose metal wires were forged in the ardent fire burning for centuries in the hearts of the people.

Malangatana saw his artistic passion increasingly driven by the liberation struggle.

He held his first solo exhibit in 1961. The exhibit included the painting Juizo Final (Final Judgment), a commentary on the ugliness and savagery of life under Portuguese rule. He commented, "As FRELIMO grew Portuguese people who saw my art said: 'He is abusing our sympathy by being so violent in his painting.' This so-called 'abuse' was my participation in the politics of this country. Then the war came and for the next ten years my painting was dedicated to this struggle."

A common error of critics and art historians in tracing the links between a artist and the liberation struggle is to attempt to pinpoint a date where the artist admits he "joined" the movement. A person living underground and working with the national struggle is highly unlikely to declare they are a member of an illegal structure; indeed, she or he usually denies it — to friends and family, to the police, to the public.

National Liberation Is Necessarily an Act of Culture

Let art seek to combine old forms with new content, then giving rise to new form. Let painting, writing literature, theatre and artistic handicraft be added to the traditional cultivated dance, sculpture and singing.

— Samora Machel

Art historians have also to a large extent neglected the links forged between cultural resistance, pan-African culture, anti-imperialist culture, and Africa's liberation movements. For many decades, progressive art critics and historians have deplored the efforts of imperialist regimes to reject and ignore African cultural histories on the one hand, and to assimilate emergent cultural expression into imperialist discourse on the other. But these same historians have paid little attention to the construction of revolutionary African culture, integrating popular cultural traditions and established forms of expression with demands, experience, and expressions of the national liberation struggle. This gap continues even now, fifty years later, despite the words of key revolutionary leaders such as Eduardo Mondlane, Amílcar Cabral, Marcellino dos Santos, and Samora Machel, who state explicitly that liberation movements emerged from cultural roots. To quote from the poem "Culture" by Samora Machel, FRELIMO leader and president of Mozambique (assassinated in 1986 by the South African regime):

Culture is created by the people,
It's not artists that create it ...
Look at the peasants
Their music talks of their
life The tilling, the harvesting, the watering
He sings of happiness,
He sings and dances,
It might be sad or happy
A reference to history
Or a daily episode.
But that's how it is, it has a real meaning,
It defines the enemy And how to fight the enemy.

Revolutionary cultural theory specifically refers to Malangatana's artwork. According to Mondlane, "The paintings of Malangatana and José Craveirinha ... draw their inspiration from the images of traditional sculpture and from African mythology, binding them into works explosive with themes of liberation and the denunciation of cultural violence." We should also note that during the long years of the liberation war (the late 1960s and early '70s), FRELIMO supported artists' collectives that made Makonde sculpture in the "liberated zones" of northern Mozambique and in Tanzania. Like Malangatana's images, the symbols and metaphors used in these sculptures were not a reworking of traditional, primitive, or supernatural themes, but a conscious use of the popular aesthetic to address the experience of struggle:

FRELIMO mobilisers not only set up carving collectives, they also influenced the subject matter of the carvings. They encouraged carvers to create new themes that would illustrate the evils of colonial oppression and the carvers responded by developing a "genre" of "personages in a state of oppression." Among the themes included in this genre was the figure of the suffering woman with head in hand, the African carrying the European, the woman shielding her head from the attacks of a policeman, and the tied-up African being led away by a policeman. In addition to the personages in a state of oppression, satirical and subversive images were also carved. For example the carver Nanelo Mtamanu stated that during the armed struggle members of the Beira co-operative used to make, among other themes, images of President Caetano and of the one-eyed Luis de Camoes. These carvings were undoubtedly caricatures of the formal bust portraits that Portuguese patrons had previously commissioned from Makonde carvers. According to Mondlane ... some Makonde carvers, who had experience of carving religious images, expressed their rejection of the colonial culture by creating works that subverted those same religious themes.

In this political, social, and cultural context, Malangatana pursued his artistic career in Lorenzo Marques. In 1964, he exhibited paintings in a collective show of new Mozambican artists. The Portuguese secret police (PIDE) shut down the exhibition, as part of a broader crackdown on intellectuals supporting the struggle. Malangatana spent eighteen months in the Central Jail of Machava, along with other leading cultural figures such as writer Luis Bernardo Honwana, and poets José Craveirinha and Rui Nogar. Malangatana shared a prison cell with Craveirinha.

When PIDE failed to prove Malangatana's FRELIMO connections, they released him uncharged. He continued to paint.

After Independence: Art with the FRELIMO government

The armed struggle in Portugal's African colonies played a major role in the Carnation Revolution that overthrew the Portuguese dictatorship in April 1974. In June 1974, Malangatana returned home to welcome Mozambique's independence, and to join the newly formed FRELIMO government. He spent four years working for the government, first as a city official in Maputo (the post -revolution renaming of Lorenzo Marques), then in the Ministry of Cultural Affairs. Later, he served as a FRELIMO deputy in Parliament. During these years he produced art for political mobilization, for events, and for literacy campaigns. However, Malangatana maintained that even during this period his artwork did not aim at promoting political points, "I am a social painter, but not in a pamphleteering way."

An outpouring of artistic expression occurred in the decade after independence, with painting on public walls: the murals of Maputo. In the first years after 1974, people painted slogans, political images, and revolutionary graffiti. In 1982, Albie Sachs — a former political prisoner for his role in the South African liberation struggle, living in Mozambique — wrote: "In a wave of enthusiasm to express what had been denied and affirm what had seemed reachable only in fantasy, thousands of Mozambicans in every part of the country got out their paint pots and emblazoned the walls." By the end of the 1970s, this spontaneous outburst became more structured, more formalized, with murals designed and executed by experienced muralists and artists, working individually and collectively. Mural collectives were structured by refugees who had developed their skills working with the Popular Unity cultural movement in Chile.

Malangatana collaborated on a mural at the Ministry of Agriculture, started by Chilean veteran Moira Toha and a team of mostly Chilean volunteers. Albie Sachs described Malangatana's input to the mural as

introducing his own intense, anguished and highly personal style into the painting, added drama and tension ... It was paradoxical to see joyous fruit and footballs and flying fish coming from the brush of the Chilean exile, whose brother-in-law had been hanged by the fascists, while sad and uncertain faces emerged from the strokes of the Mozambican, a jolly person living in his own free and independent country.

Sachs describes the result as a statement that "optimism is not self-realising, that the victory of the revolution creates only the conditions for happiness, not happiness itself."

Malangatana was also commissioned to paint a mural in the Natural History Museum in Maputo. Sachs, again:

This is a giant impetuous dream of colour and symbol crowding the three walls. The lines move but the people are still trapped in the commotion swirling around them, asking questions of the viewer, looking uncertainly at the world which is changing all around them, wondering about their ancestors, about faith, about the revolution. The colours may dance, there may be movement, vitality, brilliance in the scene, the garden of humanity may be vibrant. But the people are silent, and their eyes are sad. Though life may be rich and full and variegated, there is no easy pathway to happiness, no simple exit from suffering: we must go gently with the people since they have suffered.

Two Steps Back: Confronting the Violence of Counter-Revolution

By 1981, Malangatana had returned to painting full-time. But again the situation was changing. From the time of FRELIMO's victory, neighboring white racist regimes in Rhodesia and South Africa sponsored counterrevolutionary armed bands, called RENAMO, to destabilize liberated Mozambique. Malangatana remarked, "For a brief period after independence my painting became softer. I was using more blues, yellows, whites. Then the liberation war in Zimbabwe started and RENAMO was set up by the Rhodesians. And when that war was over, South Africa took over backing RENAMO — destroying more than the Portuguese ever destroyed."

Malangatana's brother and other family members were murdered by RENAMO. This time, from 1981 to 1994, has been called Malangatana's blue period. His paintings say, "a luta continua," we have won one step but the terror is not over. He stated, "My painting got more violent, more shocking, with reds that were stronger than ever," he commented. "To see the schools, the hospitals, the farms, the railways — all symbols of hope and growth for our country being destroyed. To see pregnant women, children, men being killed — sometimes two or three hundred in one day, in forty minutes — creates in my heart a sadness that does not stop."

He threw his energy and his art into calling for peace, an end to violence. He helped found the Mozambican Peace Movement. He worked as a negotiator to end the sixteen-year civil war, and ultimately was a signatory to the 1992 peace accord between FRELIMO and RENAMO.

(Continues...)

Excerpted from Signal:02 by Alec Dunn, Josh MacPhee. Copyright © 2012 PM Press. Excerpted by permission of PM Press.
All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
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Dettagli dell?edizione

• Editore: Pm Pr
• Data di pubblicazione: 2012
• Lingua: Inglese
• ISBN 10: 160486298X
• ISBN 13: 9781604862980
• Rilegatura: Copertina flessibile
• Numero di pagine: 158
• Redattore: Dunn Alec, MacPhee Josh
• Contatto del produttore: non disponibile