Art as Loss, and Recovery

According to Freud, memory resists mourning because what is lost is not only a person/object but also the bond one forms with that lost person/object. Hence, one cannot know exactly what is lost. His anger is accompanied by denial, bargaining with God, and not knowing who one is and what to do next. According to Freud, successful mourning is possible if one replaces the lost object/person with a new object/person (Freud,61). People have recognized that recovery after trauma is impossible and, therefore, replaced their grief with their work and stepped into a positive change that would last forever. Artists have dedicated themselves to the Other, that is, to the unrepresented. As in all influential works, artists make crises that have arisen or are likely to arise visibly and provide solutions. There are several examining literature and art history follow.

Heidegger's tragedies, Erinyes, Sophocles' Antigone, Euripides' Medea, Trojan Women, and Aeschylus' Eumenides put the loss on stage and bring us closer to ourselves and our historical roots.

In the tragedy of Sophocles, Antigone's decision to bury her brother brings her into a clash with the authorities. Resisting her right to mourn her brother, whose mourning was banned by the authority, Antigone advocates kinship, a more ancient tradition than political authority. Kinship representing memory cannot resist the long-standing desire of the political authority to be recognized and obeyed.

The right of speech held by the political authority determines the limits of language and is reflected in the language of art. According to Giorgio Agamben, the poet does not determine the subject of poetry, and poetry emerges in a society where speech becomes pure speech when rendered dysfunctional(Agamben,23).

Judith Butler has called for solidarity and global justice in international law by using Emmanuel Levinas' understanding of the humane Other. Her work warns about what power violating citizenship rights might lead to. In a world where some lives do not count, Butler has discussed in the public sphere the questions of "whose deaths are worthy of mourning?" and "which is considered human?"

Why is it that humans outside the norms are not collectively mourned? According to Butler, every life is precarious, but some lives are even more precarious due to their identity (Butler,35). Only those whose lives are well protected are ideal citizens. The likelihood of them being hurt resulted from war and their deaths are collectively mourned.

Art, on the other hand, tends to make what is not remembered or archived visible even by taking the risk of jeopardizing national pride. Almost every powerful work of art is born out of a crisis and liberates itself from an ideology or a political speech only by remaining loyal to that crisis. Powerful works of art are those that can face contradictions or exposes crises.

The central theme of Precarious Life by Butler is the concept of "mourning" based on the distinction between lives that count and those that do not. The concept of mourning has been the primary source of politics and art. Butler states, "if a life is not grievable, it is not quite a life." Collective mourning, which official channels and the state have prevented, has been undertaken and articulated by art itself. In a sense, those not worthy of mourning are mourned on cave walls, ancient Greek vases, book pages, motion picture screens, and in medieval engravings and art galleries.

We can criticize and resist the anti-democratic conditions only when we can identify with the suffering of others and mourn for those who are out of our identity. Thus, we can start a resistance against all kinds of violence and a damaged system that will affect others and ultimately us.

Of course, the most critical question is, " What will art save?" Art, as a form of education, transforms the public sphere and allows us to raise the victims' voices, encourage people to use the therapeutic power of art against political anger, and show that the victims are not alone.

Even if art cannot fully represent and compensate for the loss, it provides collective recovery because every memory that is not recorded turns into trauma. In my opinion, those who are humiliated, marginalized, and devoid of their rights to live, die and mourn become ghosts or spooks and cannot be buried in public spaces.

Imaginary Voices in Artist's Mind: Inspiration

We can sustain the ancient cult of the dead by allowing the deceased to live in our memory. In ancient Greece, the body of a deceased individual was respected to prevent his/her soul from haunting the world of the living (Agamben,80). The deceased ancestors are honored with mighty funerals and offerings for a deceased person whose right has not been served and has not been mourned becomes a ‚ghost' (Derrida,23).

Rilke speaks of the ability of people to carry death within themselves. He states that "we each carry our death inside us as the fruit has its core," "a dignified, befitting and humane death," while the death of victims is a disappearance ( Rilke, 73). Rilke lived like a poem and died like a poem after being pricked by a rose thorn.

Heidegger knows that the "forgetting of being" is the major crisis of his age. People have been denied the right to die, which wars, genocides, conflicts, and protests have displaced. Art undertakes the crisis of transfer and turns memory, through consciousness, into an apparition or ghost. We remember that William Shakespeare's Hamlet speaks to a ghost and says, "the time is out of joint."

Edvard Munch's The Scream has been the voice of the existential suffering of humans. The figure, standing on a bridge under a yellow, orange, and red sky, with his hands raised to his face and with a look of terror in his eyes, appears to scream at the top of his lungs. Munch says, "...as the flaming skies hung like blood and sword over the blue-black fjord and the city. My friends went on. I stood there trembling with anxiety, and I felt a vast infinite scream tear through nature."

Artists listen to their inner voices when they create art and hear the imaginary voices, even screams of victims, as their inner voices. For justice, artists hear the imaginary voices of those who have already died and who have not yet been born and the victims of politics, nationalism, racism, colonialism, capitalism, sexism, totalitarianism, wars, and massacres. Perhaps, these sounds or screams are what artists call inspiration.

Artists hear the screams of those silenced, read their ghost language well, and help us hear it by transforming it into an aesthetic one. While speaking of life and death, Adorno interprets the language of expression as a distinctive and sensual form of the soul (Derrida,23). Derrida stated that one would have to learn about spirits. However, how? Learning to live would amount to living together with ghosts on the border.

While one needs to complete a dream and reach the limit of wakefulness to define, interpret and resolve it, one needs to reach the limit of death to learn about life. This limit allows us to describe a dream before waking up.

According to Adorno, even if Auschwitz survivors live fake lives deprived of their liberties, they are trapped between life and death. The fact that they live knowing that fear is worse than death does not make them different from the dead. When life is reified, compassion is reduced and becomes a selfish motive of self-defense (Adorno, 299). This is harmony with no solidarity and a state of senselessness sustained through social cohesiveness developed by the use of force. Adorno's "reified consciousness" does not only refer to those "that cannot be directly actualized" but to those "that live on merely as thought and recollection."

The Spanish painter Francisco Goya's painting Sad Presentiments of What Must Come To Pass makes us feel the coming of an agony that will cause harm or even death. The dark figure kneels with his hands open before the coming agony and surrenders helplessly.

Goya's The Third of May 1808 witnesses a bloody murder on a night: civilians being massacred by rows of French soldiers, a pile of dead bodies lying on the ground, and others witnessing the atrocity and awaiting their turn to be murdered. Thanks to Goya's remarkable observational power, the painting established a profound relationship with the ongoing wars, massacres, violence, and killed or uprooted people. Sometimes, something has gone away, but no story or memory is left of it (Butler, 8). It is a moment when only the artist can immortalize the screams of victims.

If artists who stand on the line that separates life from death and dream from wakefulness can speak of the completeness of life, then they too must be ghosts. However, Derrida, who reminded us that ghosts do not exist, knew that artists assumed the role of ghosts and were the border guards who let us know about them.

Art and History as Components of Education Transforming The Public Space

Art is the perception of the responsibilities of reality through imagination. According to Denis Diderot, the aim of art is "to make virtue attractive, vice odious, ridicule forceful" and "a work of art is interesting to the extent that it has a social content and a moral perspective" (:1814).

However, the sense of responsibility may lead to the neglect of aesthetics and the reduction of the work of art to a form of propaganda. This reductionism should not cause the stereotyping of the work of art. This problem may turn into an action that cannot provide the necessary solution or even may alienate it.

For example, Nazi Germany, during one of the most traumatic periods in world history, caused hundreds of thinkers and artists to live under perilous conditions or migrate. The art of Nazi Germany aimed to create a sense of belonging through symbols and images designed to emphasize the glory of a pure race (Clark, 67). The art of propaganda has led to what Benjamin calls the "aestheticization of politics" (Benjamin, 2007).

The communist states used art not as a means of propaganda but as a component of education. In Lenin's Soviet Union, art was funded by the state and addressed national and mass audiences. Kazimir Malevich says, "I have transformed myself in the zero of form and have fished myself out of the rubbishy slough of academic art" regarding his iconic painting Black Square (Clark, 102). To him, this new language of art symbolizes a form of enlightenment and the destruction of the old order, and the birth of a revolution.

To address a broad audience, Mexican artists Diego Rivera and Jose Clemente Orozco addressed Mexican workers and their struggles in their murals. They used the visuality of art for the education of the working class.

Baudelaire takes pride in the powdery smell on his hands against the barricades in Paris during the revolution. The strengthening of liberalism, nationalist movements and the urge to lead them into independence, and the brutality in the aftermath of failed revolutions drove artists over time away from the idea of social art. The power of imagination has become more prominent, and a struggle for an artistic revolution has begun.

Vanita's paintings symbolize the horror and imminence of death and the decay of the human body and allow the spectator to see the transience of life (Leppert, 22). Albrecht Dürer con-fronts us with the idea of death by using the concept of Renaissance Humanism.

No artist has ever been insensitive to war, tyranny, or violence. In response, the history of art and literature is full of works advocating peace and human dignity. In the history of literature, numerous works of art ranging from novels to poems and stories to today's performance arts have emerged as political actions to save the dignity of humanity. Many conscientious artists and thinkers have used their works of art to transform public space and educate the emotions of society.

What could art provide that history cannot? Dostoyevsky holds people responsible for evil and argues that they must fight it. Goethe, on the other hand, states that art contributes to improving the world. The legacy of numerous writers such as Neruda, Aragon, and Sartre is full of examples where artists and thinkers take a stance against oppression and war. Tolstoy, Hugo, and Camus signed anti-war petitions to make a political stance. Honore de Balzac, who wanted to have by his pen what Napoleon had by his sword, criticizes the persecution and corruption that he encountered in the then-French society in his work The Girl With the Golden Eyes, which he dedicated to Eugene Delacroix. Gogol's stories help us better understand the ongoing injustices.

We read Macbeth, which is one of the most significant tragedies of William Shakespeare, and the like as depraved, megalomaniac, and crazed characters. While Macbeth was trying to dominate with the obsessive-compulsive disorder that was not known in the sixteenth century, he was about the social betrayal of a king turned to evil ways. Macbeth, as we encounter as a war hero, is sent off in the final scene with a dishonorable death full of cruelty.

Everyone in his right mind says that war brings destruction and that people should sing songs of happiness and embrace each other with peace. A thinker states that if all the generals in the world read War and Peace, they would not dare declare war. Tolstoy's novels remove us from our comfortable chairs and plunge us into the midst of flames. Bombs explode around us, and bodies pile up on the ground as numbers and as our friends and relatives. When we are done reading them, we, too, turn into veterans and turn numbness into self-awareness.

History tells only what is essential in itself; it is a re-writing and an explanation of how reality changes over time. What history teaches us is that it repeats itself. There is no deception in art since we recognize that a work of art is a kind of fiction. We face and learn from the story of a human in the flesh and bones who breathes, weeps, suffers, and falls in love.

In his poem in Questions From a Worker Who Reads, Bertolt Brecht asks how history can be fictional, biased, and problematic. History is not fiction but conveys a persecution process that numbs us by showing people in numbers. Art also becomes ideological if it acts with emotion or with only knowledge, like history. According to Adorno, aesthetic language will come to our rescue. Adorno, from a moralistic perspective, history cannot be written if the blows and pains inflicted on everybody in a war are not felt by others.

An aesthetic language is needed for the sensation of pain and the expression of feelings and senses. How far can a work of art and its aesthetic language go? In other words, how far can a work of art carry the body that moves toward death or its feelings? Can a work of art convey these feelings most simply and realistically? For example, we need an aesthetic language that will transport us to the scene using a time machine and can convey pain to others at that time and in that place. Adorno sees the aesthetic language he deems necessary for writing history as important in showing the pain at that time and that place. Which is more accurate, then? The things that the aesthetic language conveys to us or the experience had at that time and place (e.g. on the battlefield)?

If we could return to the time and place of experience, we would not need an aesthetic language. Experience cannot be explained by a single time and place. According to Adorno, in the first stage of experience, the body takes a blow, feels pain, gets gashed open, and bleeds. In the second stage, the wound closes, blood coagulates, and the pain is relieved. In the third and last stage, what occurred and what was felt turned into a superficial scar with no pain. Aesthetic language includes all these stages and conveys each process of change as a whole. It uses all kinds of signs, shapes, indicators, and symbols, such as a scar, and allows us to see the result.

Picasso's Guernica conveys war and violence as an experience to us. Guernica, the historical symbol of freedom and peace, is a cry of anguish demonstrating the unfortunate sufferings of the desperate victims of the Spanish civil war (Heartney, 366). As John Berger states, a work of art is a protest and pain is the protest of the body. Spectators feel the pain of the victims with their eyes without knowing the history of the work of art ( Berger,174 ).

Even painting a picture of the ruins, he saw in his dreams was no escape for Otto Dix, a volunteer ( Dix, 28 ). His paintings symbolize the misery of the battlefront, the brutality of the conflicts, and the corruption of urban life. Thanks to his familiarity as a witness, Dix takes us to the battlefield and shows us soldiers and innocent people that are hunted, wounded, madden, murdered, and gassed. Dix boldly reminds his contemporaries of the humiliation of war.

Frans Masereel illustrated Quinze Poémes by the Belgian poet Emile Verhaeren and those of many writers and poets of the period. He produced the first wordless books, Arise Ye Dead and The Dead Speak (Balember, 16). In his 25 Images of a Man's Passion, he criticized the disproportionate use of force. One of the images symbolizes the use of excessive force against the public, which is an obvious sign of fascism, with the portrayal of a prominent police officer strangling a more petite man. He saw the other figures act as silent bystanders as an injustice.

Art as Compensation for Science

Does art aim to be the voice of those who cannot speak? Artists have the social responsibility to become the voice of those who are not heard. Art can turn the voice of those who have lost their voice into a kind of echo.

In his trials in Jerusalem, Adolf Eichmann stated that he had committed acts "for which you are decorated if you win and go to the gallows if you lose." In his work Crime and Punishment, Dostoevsky also seeks answers to a similar question. In the book, Raskolnikov states, "If I had succeeded, I should have been crowned with glory, but now I am trapped," and asks why Napoleon, who shed much blood, is considered a hero but himself a criminal.

Based on a number of historical examples, rulers shed blood and succeed and become heroes, whereas those who fail with the same ideas are regarded as traitors. Power produces works supporting art and cultural policies in order to strengthen its historical origins. To prove its superiority, it displays people from different parts of the world as primitive, uncultured, and barbaric. It sees itself in the center, divides the world as East and West, and renders some people invisible.

Herbert George Wells tells the story of an invisible man. Herbert George Wells' The Invisible Man becomes the voice of an invisible person and tells the story of a marginalized man who shuns and is shunned by society. It is the story of a man with "wounds of pride" and "arrogant loneliness" observed in people who are hurt and shunned by – and shun – society.

To prove it's own superiority, power showcases the Other as primitive, uncultured, and barbaric. That is how the eastern writer explains to us how the race was humiliated. Cemil Meric states, "I am a victim forever, the victim of geography, politics, biology, etc. I should have been born in another country or another era. Or, I should never have been born. I did not understand; I did not understand" (Meriç, 79).

As Sartre puts it, the effort to be visible and to have the right to see turns into an effort to be the subject, not the object of the gaze. An effort to be the subject of the gaze, such as the desire to dress up. Devushkin, the protagonist of Poor Folk by Fyodor Dostoyevsky, explains it better when he states, "one does not wear an overcoat or even boots for oneself, but for others; boots are necessary to uphold his honor and his good name" (Gürbilek, 27). Dostoevsky's protagonists' need for honor turns into a desire to eliminate the "mediocrity that accompanies the lack rather than the lack" and its shame (Gürbilek, 32). It is a contradiction caused by the desire to get rid of mediocrity which is the desire to be seen without being ridiculed succumbs to.

With the pride in being humiliated, Oğuz Atay states, "Everyone is watching us. Go away! This is not a puppet show. We are in pain here!" (Atay, 94)

Great thinkers and artists are great because they touch our souls by making sociological and psychological interpretations. They feel what happened and will happen and illuminate our way. They make visible the stories, scenarios, deaths, loves, ambitions, and wars within and without us that have not changed since the existence of humanity.

Edwardo Galeano dedicated his book Open Veins of Latin America to Obama to make Latin America's sufferings heard. To Galeano, writing means raising your voice and embracing others. In The Book of Embraces, Galeano asks, "Why does one write, if not to put one's pieces together?" He states, "From the moment we enter school or church, education chops us into pieces: it teaches us to breakup soul from body and mind from heart." The word "sen-pesante," coined by the fishermen from the Colombian coast to describe the process of thinking and sensing at the same time, was the starting point of Galeano (Galeano, 19).

Galeano states that "there is no magical way to change it without looking at the truth " (Galeano, 43). This is the real problem in Latin America; we cannot see, we are blind, because we are conditioned to look at ourselves through the eyes of others." In order to regain a lost memory, he tells about how an injustice at one end of the world might affect the other end of the world(Galeano, 27). Maybe that is why John Berger referred to Galeano as the "conscience of the world."

However, who else but Tolstoy to talk to when it comes to conscience? Tolstoy abandoned not only his estate but also his novels to turn his flaws into virtues. In the end, he thinks that he led a sinful life. Adorno confronted us with the problems of moral philosophy by stating, "There is no right life in the wrong one." (Adorno, 56)

Is this the good life? Do I have the right to live in wealth when there is so much poverty in the world? Is it possible to be happy when some are in misery? One step further, Tolstoy's works have their share of this questioning. Do I have the right to sit in my mansion and tell the poor peasants' story while they work the land to make ends meet?

Concerned that he would lose credibility because of this contradiction, Tolstoy asks Vladimir Chertkov if the inconsistency between his writings and his lifestyle might shake the faith of those who favor him. For Tolstoy, lack is not something that needs to be rectified but is an ideal to reach. The poor have something the rich do not; the ethics of lack. If they do not have, I should not have either; if they do not enjoy, I should not either; if they cannot write, I should not either. "I want neither my land nor my house nor Anna Karenina," he says (SOURCE).

Galeano was also for the correct representation of suffering. "I write for those who cannot read me: the downtrodden, the ones who have been waiting in line for centuries to get into history, who cannot read a book or afford to buy one," he stated (Galeano, 47).

Kathe Kollwitz is an artist who portrays the inequalities and injustices of the Weimar Republic and makes the unheard heard. She realistically portrays death and the pain that precedes it. Her engraving depicts a group of people lying down; the two people standing among them are responsible for this death. However, their casual behavior implies that they do not hold themselves responsible for those deaths and think they just fulfilled an order. The artist depicts that militarism kills emotions, turns people into killing machines, and makes them murder each other for ideologies, although they are not that different from each other. Kathe Kollwitz's father was a lawyer, but he did not want to be a part of the injustices of the authoritarian system. Therefore, he quit his profession and became a mason instead. He had a significant influence on the way she always took sides with the oppressed and exploited. As a mother, grandmother, and wife who lost loved ones to war, she found death as part of life, but she also questioned the reasons behind the deception of war that takes away children's lives, leaves women husbandless, and drives workers to desperation.

Anselm Kiefer, of German origin, uses symbolic materials to describe violent acts and the Holocaust. In his "Your Golden Hair, Margarete" was inspired by the poems of the Jewish poet Paul, who survived the Nazi concentration camp but lost all his family. The poem's protagonist symbolizes Margarethe's golden hair with straw and the Jewish Sulamith with charcoal. The hair of the Jews incinerated in Nazi extermination camps turned into ash, but the ideal German daughter's blond hair was made of straw. The straw disappears in time, but the ash is permanent. Kiefer wants to reveal the true face of history that this form of expression shows as beautiful. Having been born during the destruction of war and grown up with the psychology of war, she focuses on mythology and war in her works.

In the 19th century, such artists as Gunter Brush, Beuys, and Nitzs wanted to master pain like Jesus through their performances. Such artists as Orlan MqQuin exposed their bodies to dangers and suffering to feel what victims felt.

They used dystopic language to express the destructiveness of the power of the dictatorships of the 20th century that combined terrorism and technology and destroyed equality. They transformed society into a swarm of automatons in a Kafkaesque and Orwellian way. Art has discovered this destructiveness earlier than science and showed us the social threats that should immediately be seen through representation. Like Asimov, Wells asks, "What would you do if that happened to you?" to develop empathy skills and emotional intelligence. Works of art have made visible not only the crises that existed but also those that are likely to exist.

With Brecht's words, the artist depicts the power of thought. Artists who witness address the natural, environmental, and social conditions Ali Shariati calls the dungeons that surround human beings and deprive them of their freedom. They absorb and reproduce reality and become the carriers of hope and patience to open the door to a better reality in the future.

Galeano, the memory of South America, expressed that he always takes sides with the oppressed and marginalized by stating, "I always root for the bull, not for the matador." The history of humanity consisted of the choices of people who defend human values or spread oppression.

As a Result

I wanted to put together different questions and thoughts in this research and ask again. We can read an artwork in many different ways. However, the relationship between art and politics drew my attention to how suffering was disregarded and how human dignity was restituted with artwork and aesthetic language. Art has been the only way to make others' sufferings visible from the past to today. I have seen many iniquities in the geography I was part of, especially in the last couple of years. Since there are numerous grievances today, with this comprehension as an art educator, I wanted to focus on the effect of art on transforming society.

In light of all these choices, art has been transformed into political action in an environment where power has banalized torture and spread victimization by using excessive force. In this unjust world where the strong ride the weak, art has reminded us of the existence of the flower in the ground, the love in the heart and the virtue in the mind. Art has had the opportunity to remind us of the things that the provocative force of power made us forget and to return people's feelings and thoughts from which they have been alienated. It has given us our humanity back.