The Others Face 'The Third of May 1808'
Who built Thebes of the seven gates?
In the books, you will find the name of kings.
Did the kings haul up the lumps of rock?
Bertolt Brecht
Artworks confront us with the face of the other. In fact, this pandemic has made even more sense. When was the last time you came face to face with the other? When did you meet someone who was nothing like you?
The pain is gone as the artworks lift us from our comfortable seats. Art writers are not Aby Walburg to be loved. They are the voice of a farewell, exile, and sometimes death narrator to us; kills us before we die.
I always would like to have made the painting 'The Third of May 1808'. The work would have retained its meaning even after many centuries and represented all ages. Everyone watching will try to touch desperate people waiting to die against the soldiers who will soon be singing victory songs with revenge. Adorno states that as a requirement of morals, "unless the wounds received by individuals in war are felt by others individually, Justice will not be served unless their pain is felt one by one.
Artworks uplift and train the people, reflecting the pain of suffering to the audience. In contrast with all heroism discourses, you will side with victimization in this painting. Even if their ideas differ, you want to reach out to the victim. Probably for the first time in history, an artist made victimization a recording standard at the risk of going against the government. The work tells how the enlightenment expected from France for Spain had turned into a military tyranny when Napoleon entered Spain on 'The Third of May 1808'. It reflects Goya's loss of belief in the enlightenment because the only thing that the enlightenment had brought to Madrid was the barbarity of humankind. The work portrays a group of peasants murdered by armed robotized soldiers on a night. As the incident occurs in front of a hill, a church in a city silhouette in the background is witnessing the incident forever. The white-shirt figure in the painting is dynamically presented as a cross. Those who are murdered, are about to die, and are waiting to be murdered symbolize the destructive severity of violence with the light given out by a lantern and the dark sky. The portraits generally have anxious and thrillful expressions. The man in the white shirt is aware that he will die and wants to make one last eye contact. In comparison, the soldiers are looking at the guns. The French soldiers are depicted as robots in an attempt to indicate that violence originates from authority, power, and militarism, which is controlled by other robots. The man in the white shirt probably died there that night. But thanks to the artist, he has lived with us for more than 200 years.Something had been lost somewhere, but there are neither stories nor memories about it (Judith Butler, "After Loss, What Then?"). A moment that an artist can only eternalize.
In the night, the witness of all this slaughter is the hill, the church, and the sky. There is another witness to this moment. Who? Artist Goya. Even if the artist is not at the scene, he hears the cry of the other. And it helps us hear, too.Although art historians have many different interpretations, I can portray the innocent white-shirt men in the painting as ghosts.
Goya undertook this social crisis, transforming consciousness and memory into a boggart or a spirit. Heidegger also mentions revenge fairies (Erinys) in his tragedies. Death is displaced in people who cannot be mourned and even buried due to injustice and mass murder. They don't die. They live as boggarts and take revenge. People who are insulted and marginalized and are deprived of the right to live, die, heal and mourn humanly become ghosts, and because they are ghosts, they cannot be buried in public spaces. The government forbids mourning them. Rilke states that people carry their death inside them. The end of "dignified" people who are victimized is a disappearance "just like a fruit bearing its seed inside." An artist may feel the imaginary voices of those who have already passed away, those who haven't been born yet, wars, or victims as a requirement of the desire for Justice. Sometimes there is no need even for the language; the artist can read the ghost language. In Hamlet, William Shakespeare talks to a ghost and says, "The time is out of control."Judith Butler writes in a world where some lives aren't considered lives. "Who is worth mourning?", "who is considered human?" "Why does no one mourn for bodies outside the norms produced in the public space?".
According to Butler, our lives are fragile, but some are more fragile due to their identities. What can art give people that history spares? Tolstoy says, "If all the generals in the world read War and Peace, they wouldn't dare to fight. Now the biggest question is: what will art save? Art as a form of education transforms the public space and lifts the voice of victims. It makes those that are forgotten or not archived visible. In this work, we see and feel in our hearts the wounds of man and humanity as a requirement of Justice.