Expanding Internationalism - A Conference on ... - Mary Jane Jacob

saw for the first time the drawings and paintings by survivors of the
bombing of Hiroshima, eye-witness memories of events lived through thirty
years before.
I realized that the Japanese group charged with the care of
these pictures, their curators, had faced the dilemma that to withhold and
to hide the images was as important as to show them.
They tried to assess
each person's or organization's request to exhibit or reproduce the
pictures so that they would be properly shown and labelled and would not
lose their efficacy (which is very considerable) through over-exposure.
They were co:rrpelled to take this attitude out of respect for the people
whose devastating experiences these picture depicted.
Even the book they
produced, combining photographs of the effects of the bombing with the
paintings, was not made available for sale, but could be applied for as a
gift.
Although it is rather difficult for the Hiroshima paintings, even
without their labels (the texts writt~ on .them by their authors), to slip
into the category of "naive art, " for which there is already a subsection
of the art market, there are plenty of contemporary, popular visual
expressions being produced around the world as a testimony to lived
experience which are eminently consumable on that level. How do we
prevent them from falling prey to what the Australian writer Eric Michaels
has called "our ultra-consumerist appetite, using up the object to the
point of exhaustion, of 'sophistication, ' so as to risk making it
disappear altogether" This is, I believe, a problem which a number of
artists in different places have actually addressed themselves in their
work in recent years. And this is one of the points at which I would like
to propose an examination of the relationship between artist and curator.
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