Last weekend, I watched Full Metal Jacket. Being a huge fan of Stanley Kubrick and a sucker for a well done war film, the movie was phenomenal. Naturally, I thought of the various ways war has been depicted in the visual and new media arts. Admittedly, I’m not huge fan of political art; HOWEVER, when it’s done well, it can be powerful and truly engaging. From visual to performative, the artists below have created some of the most memorable pieces.
* * * *
During a Feminism & the Arts course, I studied Martha Rosler‘s photo montage works of the Vietnam war.
Artist: Martha Rosler | Title: red stripe kitchen (Part of ‘Bringing the War Home’ Series) | photo montage | 1967-1972
Currently in draft mode, I’m working on a zer01 piece on new media art that serves as both political and social commentary. One of the artists I’m looking at is Joseph DeLappe and his work, ‘dead-in-Iraq’.
The conceptual work of Chris Burden possesses an extraordinary and rather dangerous level of self-sacrifice that works extremely well. His work STILL gives me chills. Talk about physicality and gesture – his work is all about that.
Art collectives epitomize the adage, ‘Power in Numbers’, and the Tool Shed Days is a collaborative effort that created the interactive piece, ‘Befriend a Recruiter’. Please watch the video and share your reflections. Again, I am working on a piece and will be discussing them a bit more in detail…In the interim, I would love to hear what you think – positive, negative, or indifferent.
Dorothy R. Santos (she/they) is a Filipino American writer, artist, and educator whose academic and research interests include feminist media histories, computational media, critical medical anthropology, technology, race, and ethics. She is a Ph.D. candidate in Film and Digital Media at the University of California, Santa Cruz as a Eugene V. Cota-Robles fellow. She received her Master’s degree in Visual and Critical Studies at the California College of the Arts and holds Bachelor’s degrees in Philosophy and Psychology from the University of San Francisco. Her work as been exhibited at Ars Electronica, Fort Mason Center for Arts & Culture, Yerba Buena Center for the Arts, and the GLBT Historical Society.
Her writing appears in art21, Art in America, Ars Technica, Hyperallergic, Rhizome, Vice Motherboard, and SF MOMA’s Open Space. Her essay “Materiality to Machines: Manufacturing the Organic and Hypotheses for Future Imaginings,” was published in The Routledge Companion to Biology in Art and Architecture. She is a co-founder of REFRESH, a politically-engaged art and curatorial collective and serves as the Executive Director for the Processing Foundation. She is an advisor for Brooklyn-based arts and tech organization POWRPLNT and Bay Area-based arts organization slash arts.
dorothy r. santos 
Leave a Reply