In 1937, Pablo Picasso painted his famous large painting named Guernica. Guernica depicts chaos caused by war, shown through dismembered humans and animals, women screaming, a dead baby, and flames. Picasso created Guernica in response to the Spanish Civil War.
In the twenty-first century, Guernica image has been reproduced to indicate anti-war stance, in many media from posters, decoration paintings, fragments in the bulletin, stamps, to t-shirts and tote bags, both in monochrome and color. Guernica has been distributed as a resistance popular icon, but also as an image for consumption. Can we still grasp a new meaning of this image in today’s context? How did this image circulate meaning from its creation to the contemporary era?
W.J.T. Mitchell, a media theorist and professor at the University of Chicago, shared his critical thought about the afterlives of Picasso’s Guernica in an international seminar held by Museo Picasso Málaga in November 2021.
Mitchell started by highlighting Guernica’s move from its Spanish Pavilion to many exhibitions all over the world, and finally, return to its home. Guernica has moved from a picture in the gallery to a prop in New York’s anti-war protests, and the irony of the Bundeswehr’s (german military) using as an icon of a peace-keeping mission. As we know, this painting was created in response to the 1937 bombing of Guernica by German and Italy. Mitchell also mentioned the United Nations’ hanging of Guernica tapestry in its lobby for 36 years is contradictory to the UN’s justification of the U.S. invasion of Iraq based on the false claim that they have mass destructive weapons. In 2021, the painting was returned to Rockefeller’s family.
Mitchell was interested not in the picture or material and physical thing of Guernica, but in the image or dematerialized thing that circulates across media, also through discourses about the visual arts.
According to Mitchell, Guernica as an image plays three roles. First, as a totem, Guernica is an index of a community that is loosely associated with progressive liberal politics and an international peace movement. They resist against “militarism, colonialism, and mass murder”. Second, as a fetish, the painting has shattered or lost its original meaning. For Picasso, the painting aims as a propaganda for the endangered Spanish Republic in 1937. Third, this painting is also what Marx a commodity fetish that circulates in ads, stamps, or other commercial images.
Mitchell also underlined Picasso works’ significance that “not only embraces all the arts and media but also science and politics”. Picasso’s Guernica does not only speak about the past, but also the future. The eyes in this painting seem to gaze at us to see “what will do next after the Guernica’s retirement”.
Conferencia “Las otras vidas de Guernica”
