Rwanda: An Elegy - Robert C. Morgan
Upon occasion an artist who has traditionally worked in a particular medium according to a chosen subject will feel compelled to move in another direction. Such departures are often motivated through the artist's awareness of a troubling political situation. These events in human history are likely to have deep moral consequences for artists who are not merely absorbed in an aesthetic idea at the exclusion of other realities, but who are also sensitive to the world around them.
Vivian Bower is known primarily for her subtle and resonant depictions of landscape. To look at her work suggests a sensibility far removed from one that might address the atrocities in Rwanda. Yet Bower found it necessary to come to terms with what she was reading in the news concerning the genocide. One report cited that between April and June 1994 anywhere from 500,000 to one million Tutsis and moderate Hutus were systematically exterminated at the hands of the Hutu extremists.
What I find remarkable about Vivian Bower's drawings and related wall installations is the personal sensitivity that is instilled in these works. In many cases, the individual symbolic heads carry the elegance of abstract rendering found in the late Rudolf Baranik's "Napalm Series" from the seventies. Bower reveals her subtle ability to manipulate light and dark, to isolate her subjects in discreetly manipulated monochrome fields, and to create appropriate visual symbolic effects. Her head paintings suggest the trace of poignant lives¥innocent women, children, and men¥cut down and violently terminated, made anonymous in a single blow. Rather than trying to reveal the cynicism of politics, Vivian Bower goes straight to the point. These are real human lives that are destroyed.
These personages are also landscapes, but not in the literal sense. They represent landscapes of human absence, landscapes as tragic as those of Kiefer, but more intimate. They are about our responsibility to maintain vigilance in relation to one another, yet they are more than existential metaphors. Through the Rwanda drawings, we are given a renewed alertness as to the tragic consequences of what happens when we lose sight of the humanity of others. Vivian Bower offers an elegy of a recent event in world history, an inconceivable event, a genocide that cannot be denied. Her Rwanda series is a statement that makes us reflect on the essential connection that we share with others. Such humanism in art is a powerful and indispensable political statement, yet one that is never divorced from aesthetic understanding.
Robert C. Morgan