For Friedrich Schiller, Art is a form of play (Schiller, 1965:35). Only through the play of Art do people become liberated, train their senses and become more refined. In his letters on the aesthetic education of man, Schiller states that "Man only plays when he is in the fullest sense of the word a human being, and he is only fully a human being when he plays" (Schiller, 1965:42). Schiller was one of the first thinkers to point out that the path from nature to culture is through "play," that is, through rituals, taboos, and symbolizations. Schiller believes that play can prevent wars and evils that restrict freedom (Schiller, 1965:43). Power, which is referred to as Schieltrieb and believed to be educational by Schiller, can only be realized in the freedom and selflessness in the Art of play. One-way progress in modern societies tears people apart, leaving human crumbs behind. According to Schiller, the pain of the internal and physical destruction caused by the division of labor can only be overcome through the play of Art. What will unite the fragmented human being is this understanding that allows us to grasp Art as play (Schiller, 1965:46).
The "Memory Theater" is designed as an interactive art of play. In childhood, we invite our imaginary friends to our play to enter, understand and make sense of life by portraying different identities and personalities.We develop dialogues and performances by coming together imaginatively with many artists, thinkers, writers, and characters in different periods.
Each of the seven columns representing the Prophet Solomon's seven doctrines symbolizes a different character. On the right and left of the columns are the gods of wisdom and justice. The goddess of justice is blindfolded. She represents impartiality and the ideal that justice should be applied to all. The goddess of wisdom, Athena, is the goddess of intelligence, Art, strategy, inspiration, and peace. Her dazzling beauty blinds those who look at her.
At the entrance of the hall of the "Memory Theater" is Hera, the goddess of women and family, and at the exit is Anubis, the god of the dead. In the play, they symbolize dramatic contrasts in life. William Shakespeare stated that if a play ends with a wedding, it's a comedy, and if it ends with a funeral, it's a tragedy. Contrasts allow us to understand better the intertwined contradiction in the theater of real life. According to Arthur Schopenhauer (Schopenhauer, 2010:34), one knows that one will die as a tragedy, but the real tragedy is that one forgets about death until the last scene. Art makes tragedy beautiful in fiction, and the human soul is free from passions.
Tragedy puts love, curiosity, and quest in the center of real life and transforms by striving to understand, hear and design life. These personal and social symbols and narratives are about the construction of Art.Aby Warburg stated that he "wanted to turn pain into humanity's treasure." (Warburg, 2018:34). Art is based on pain and suffering and the means of overcoming this anxiety. According to this definition, artworks represent humanity's internal agony.
The stories of ancient texts begin with a tragedy. The first tragedy starts with a serpent deceiving a human being into eating fruit from the forbidden tree and being thrown out of heaven. The exile of man from heaven is where the narrative begins.
Freud states that mourning ends only with recognizing that loss cannot be reversed. (Freud, 1964:84) Works of Art have replaced mourning and taken the first step to a lasting change. With a dedicated spirit, Art gives to the other, that is, to those who are not represented. Works of Art are solutions that make crises visible, that existed someday, somewhere, or are likely to live.
Heidegger's tragedies, the Erinyes, Antigone, "The Trojan Women" by Euripides, and the "Oresteia" by Aeschylus are examples that incorporate the loss into a play.
Insisting on her right to mourn her brother, whose mourning was banned by the authority, Antigone advocates kinship, a more ancient tradition than political authority. However, she is not allowed to mourn her brother. Antigone, who cannot express her pain, ends her life.The ability to speak allowed by the political authority determines the limits of language. According to Giorgio Agamben, the poet does not choose the subject of poetry, but poetry appears at the point where speech becomes dysfunctional (Agamben, 2008:57).
Judith Butler has called for solidarity and global justice in international law by using Emmanuel Levinas's understanding of ethics in terms of the Other. In a world where some lives do not count, Butler discusses in the public sphere the questions of "whose deaths are worthy of mourning?" and "which is considered human?" According to Butler, every life is precarious, but some lives are even more dangerous due to their identity (Butler, 2005:65). Only those well-protected lives are ideal citizens. The likelihood of their being hurt is a cause of war, and their deaths are collectively mourned. The central theme of Precarious Life by Butler is that "if a life is not grievable, it is not a quiet life." (Butler, 2005:65)
Collective mourning, which authoritarian and totalitarian states may try to prevent by rewriting history, has been undertaken by Art itself. In a sense, sufferings were expressed on cave walls, ancient Greek vases, medieval engravings, eighteenth-century book pages, art galleries, movie screens, and performances. Art tends to make what is not remembered or archived visible, even by taking the risk of jeopardizing national pride. Influential works of Art have been created by people who are confronted with the contradictions arising from tragedy and those who convey it "as it is." Every powerful work of Art has liberated itself from an ideology or a political speech only by remaining loyal to that crisis.
Through identification, Art allows us to look at the suffering of others and to empathize with the mourning of even those who are different from us. Art exposes the adverse conditions that affect others and will affect us one day. Despite political anger and state control, Art shows that victims are not alone.Even though Art cannot fully represent and compensate for a loss, it preserves collective recovery because it can archive. Every unrecorded memory turns into a trauma. Those who are humiliated, marginalized, and denied their rights to live, die and mourn, and those deprived of their rights to be publicly buried turn into ghosts. They walk among us even if they are dead, for their rights are reinstated.
Quest for Justice and Meaning and Political Art
In broad terms, Art allows one to cross the boundaries of the material world and construct new universes. This is an attempt to avoid accepting the given universe and changing the world and the norms we adopt.According to Jacques Rancière, "art is the shaping of what is heard." (Rancière, 2005:56). Police organize powers and distribute and legitimize functions. Politics record inequality and aims to shape it differently through new experiences. In this sense, Art and politics are similar in their restructuring functions. According to Rancière, politics, and art "reshape what is heard."
Art reshapes the likelihood of being heard and seen when political economies do not distribute fairly. Art makes those that are held in contempt or are made invisible and anonymous prominent. In a sense, Art strives to make things that are invisible or appear different from what they seem in the face of a police order that defines the limits of how we see, how we are positioned, and what we experience. According to Theodor Adorno, Art, with its autonomous position within capitalist society, is the last resort where beliefs and aspirations will be carried, and that provides the opportunity to criticize and question (League, 2010:25). According to Marxism, Art makes new propositions and undertakes the duty of destroying the order and is revolutionary by its very nature. (Derrida, 1994:45) Art is collective solidarity for people who can speak against Power and the capitalist system and seek justice for all oppressed or ignored.Power has always shaped knowledge and justice as the protector of individual rights. People want to make their voices heard because they have non-transferable rights and freedom in their era that has witnessed the most devastating wars intended to bring peace and the most terrible massacres which destroyed our humanity. Art alone undertakes this duty.Schopenhauer states that any beautiful painting carries the impression of the mood it portrays (Schopenhauer, 2010:32). Art alone affects and influences people's senses and actions and contributes to a system that opens the door to impartial and metaphysical use. Regarding humanity's fundamental rights, artworks have existed in the quest for meaning and justice.
Artworks That Transform Public Space
Art is the depiction 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" (Diderot, 1995:80).
Artists are embedded in social events that transform societies. However, sometimes with the concern of responsibility, aesthetics is neglected, and works of Art are transformed into elements of propaganda.For example, Nazi Germany, one of the most traumatic periods in history, caused hundreds of thinkers and artists to live under heavy conditions or migrate. The aim of Art in Nazi Germany was to create a sense of belonging to symbols and images designed to emphasize the glory of a pure race (Clark 2004: 67). The Art of propaganda has led to what Benjamin calls "the aestheticization of politics" as a critical ingredient of fascist regimes (Benjamin, 2006:57).
To address a broad audience, Mexican artists Diego Rivera and Jose Clemente Orozco expressed Mexican workers and their struggles to educate the revolutionaries and the working class in their murals.The communist states used Art not only as a means of propaganda but also as a component of education. For example, in the first early days of the U.S.S.R., a state-funded art that appealed to the national and mass audience emerged. Kazimir Malevich writes, "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, 2004: 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.The brutality of nationalist movements, the strengthening of liberalism, the desire to transform independence, and the failed revolutions have gradually estranged artists from the idea of social Art. The Power of imagination has become necessary, and the struggle for an artistic revolution has begun.
No artist has been indifferent to war, tyranny, violence, and stormy conditions. The histories of Art and literature are full of works that protect peace and human dignity. Numerous pieces of Art, from novels, poems, and stories to performing arts of today, have emerged as political acts to save the dignity of humanity. Many sensitive artists and thinkers have been creating artworks to transform the public sphere and educate the masses' feelings.
Paintings created by the Spanish painter and printmaker Francisco Goya still horrify the audience. For example, The Disasters of War series symbolize cruelty and shock and deeply hurts those viewing the images. Goya's Art, like the novels of Dostoevsky, stands at a turning point in history, examining moral values and grief in a new way. Goya introduced a new standard to Art regarding sensitivity to individual and collective pain. The written explanations under each painting bring a provocative dimension to the impression left by that painting. This has made it impossible to remain indifferent to the scenes Goya fictionalized as if they were seizing the audience by the collar and shaking them.
Picasso's Guernica conveys war and violence as traumatic experiences 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, 2012: p. 366). As John Berger states, a work of Art is a protest, and pain is the body's protest. Spectators feel the pain of the victims with their eyes without knowing the history of the work of Art (Berger, 1989: pp. 174-181).
Even painting a picture of the ruins, he saw in his dreams was no escape for Otto Dix, who experienced war voluntarily (Otto Dix, 2005, p. 28). Dix boldly reminds his contemporaries of the humiliation of war without lying to his contemporaries. When Power was replaced by conscience, memory rewrote the facts. Humanity and conscience showed every detail that others failed to see and allowed us to learn about the consequences of having Power with no conscience.
Kathe Kollwitz was an artist who portrayed the inequalities and injustices of the Weimar Republic and made the victim heard. She realistically portrays death and the pain that comes with it.
Anselm Kiefer, who is of German origin, uses symbolic materials to describe the violent acts of the Holocaust. In the painting series Your Golden Hair, Margarete, the poem's protagonist, symbolizes Margarethe's golden hair with straw and the Jewish Sulamith with charcoal. The coat of the Jews incinerated in Nazi extermination camps turned into ash, but the ideal German daughter's blond hair is made of straw. The straw disappears in time, but the coal is permanent. Kiefer questions whether the past that this form of expression presents is something beautiful and lovely.
In the 19th century, artists such as Gunter Brus, Otto Muhl, and Hermann Nitsch learned from their performances not to feel the pain of humanity in wars and executions like Jesus. Artists Such as Orlan exposed their bodies to dangers and suffering to feel what victims felt and experienced; these artists turned into ghosts.
Art is an Advocate of Justice and Human Values
Advocacy of rights and justice is undertaken by all who feel their conscience. However, people with no conscience have always tended to make life miserable for those outside social norms throughout history.Socrates, who was condemned to death in Athens in the fifth century BC; Galileo, who was sentenced to life imprisonment by the Roman Inquisition in 1633; Bruno, who preferred to be burned to death rather than deny what he believed in; Plato who chose to be done injustice to himself rather than do someone an injustice; Aristotle who were expelled from the city because of bigotry? All were martyred for their conscience.While even today, the position of women in science is discussed, Hypatia, who tried to explain nature with math and logic, was dragged on the ground, stoned, and burned to death because she was a woman. Pythagoras's works burned to ashes, and many scientific thinkers and artists, such as Newton, Alan Turing, and Tesla, were not appreciated when they were alive.
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 makes the world a better place. The legacy of numerous writers such as Pablo Neruda, Louis Aragon, and Jean-Paul Sartre are examples of artists and thinkers taking a stance against oppression, persecution, and war. Leo Tolstoy, Victor Hugo, and Albert Camus signed anti-war petitions to make a political stance. Honore de Balzac, who wanted the Power of his pen to write what Napoleon had done with his sword, criticizes the persecution and corruption he encountered in French society in his work The Girl With the Golden Eyes, dedicated to Eugene Delacroix. Nikolai Gogol's stories help us better understand the ongoing injustices in 19th-century Tsarist Russia. We face and learn from the story of humans in flesh and bones that breathes, weep, suffer, and fall in love. However, history tells only what the "winners" demand; a rewriting and a deviation from reality. 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. However, history is not fiction but a process of torture and atrocities dealt with by numbers, making us feel numb and powerless. Art also becomes ideological if it acts based solely on emotion or history. Here, "aesthetic language," as stated by Adorno, comes to our rescue. From a moralistic perspective, Adorno says that history cannot be written unless the strikes and pains that they receive on their bodies in war are felt by others (Adorno,1992:27).
An aesthetic language is warranted for the sensation of pain and the expression of emotions and intuitions. We need an aesthetic language that can convey pain to others and carry us to the scene with a time machine. The aesthetic language uses all kinds of signs, shapes, indicators, and symbols -such as a scar- and allows us to see the result through moral inferences.
To Edwardo Galeano, writing means raising a voice and "embracing. "In The Book of Embraces, the word "sentipensante," coined by the fishermen from the Colombian coast, was used to describe the process of thinking and to sense simultaneously. (Galeano, 1992:56)
Galeano states, "there is no magical way to change it without looking at the truth. This is the real problem in Latin America; we can't see, we are blind, because we are conditioned to look at ourselves through the eyes of others" *Citation needed. To retrieve a lost memory, he tells about how an injustice at one end of the world affected the other end. Maybe that is why John Berger referred to Galeano as the "conscience of the world." *Citation needed.
When it comes to conscience, who else but Tolstoy to talk to? Tolstoy abandoned his estate and his novels, even Anna Karenina, to turn his flaws into virtues. In the end, he thought that he was leading the wrong life. He asked himself: "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?" Over time, his works have their share of this questioning: "Do I have the right to sit at my mansion and tell the poor peasants' stories while they have to work the land to make ends meet?"
For Tolstoy, poverty 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 poverty. 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 writes. *Citation needed.
Dystrophic language expresses the destructiveness of the Power of dictatorships in the 20th century that combined terrorism and technology to destroy equality and transformed society into a swarm of automatons in a Kafkaesque and Orwellian way. Art has discovered and represented this destructiveness earlier than science and showed us threats to society with immediacy and urgency. Like Isaac Asimov, H. G. Wells asks, "What would you do if that happened to you?" to empathize. * Works of Art have made visible the existing crises and those likely to emerge in the future.Human history is full of choices that either defended justice and human values or spread oppression and cruelty. Art has also turned into political action to counteract nihilism, where the hegemony has used excessive force to make torture ordinary and to marginalize virtue and dignity. In this unjust world where the big fish eat the little ones, Art has reminded us of the existence of the flower in the ground, the love in the heart, and the virtue in the mind. Using provocative Power, Art has reminded us of the things that hegemony made us forget and give back to those who have self-alienated their feelings, thoughts, and humanity.