It is often asked of us, why we painted our murals and we have given an exhaustive account of why in our book The People’s Gallery. In the excerpt below Solzhenitsyn throws a glaring light on the reason why artists cannot bow to violence whatever form it takes and why freedom of speech is the life and spirit of art and of a nation’s collective life. Artistic expression is not just the voice of an individual but the voice of a people and the voice of mankind. He knew well enough, as do we , that the forces of violence against it and the truth it speaks emanate not from the ground up but from the political games-masters and bureaucratic functionaries who weild power ‘legally’ or otherwise from the top. Only when the media weed class privileges and affiliations out of its editorial policy and implant the democratic principles they are supposed to defend will we have freedom of speech proper. But that, of course , is when the wheels fall off and truth takes over from media induces narcosis and collective hypnosis. And that too is when the oligarchs, the dictatorial executives and the incurable narcissists holding poitical office resort to what keeps them in power in the first place – the gun. Hear now from someone who paid dearly for what many among you striding meekly off to their places of work, swinging briefcases, trimly dressed and ever-so proud of their societal clout and Luciferian allegiances are hell-bent in preventing – your freedom to express – your creative birthright – your freedom of speech!
“But woe betide that nation whose literature is interrupted by the interference of force. This is not simply a violation of the ‘freedom of the press’; it is the locking up of the national heart, the carving up of the national memory. Such a nation does not remember itself, it is deprived of its spiritual unity, and although its population supposedly have a common language, fellow countrymen suddenly stop understanding eachother. Mute generations live out their lives and die without telling either to their own or to a future generation. If such geniuses as Akhmatova or Zamyratin are walled up alive for the duration of their lives, if they are condemned to create in silence until the grave, without hearing any response to what they have written, then this is not just their personal misfortune but the deep tragedy of the whole nation – and too, a threat to the whole nation. And in certain cases it is a danger for the whole of mankind….when the whole of history ceases to be understood because of that silence.”
“A work of art carries its proof in itself. Artificial, strained concepts do not withstand the image-test; all such concepts crumble, they are revealed as puny and colourless, they convince nobody. But words which have drawn on truth and presented it to us in live, concentrated form, grip us and communicate themselves to us compellingly – and nobody, even centuries later, will ever be able to refute them.”
our flag
A sound question. Addressed to home-grown pseudo-revolutionaries in particular, especially those who take sledgehammers to crack peanuts. Never mind the multi-conglomerates, the state protected polluters of oceans and rivers, the high-rollers of Monaco or Vegas who think nothing of tossing away a million or two on the flip of a card, the billionaires who lust for ever greater and greater power, the war-mongers and political spin doctors who haunt the corridors of Washington and London planning the ,merciless subjugation of small struggling nations like Nicaragua or Afghanistan. No, the real enemy are three Derry men from the slums of the Bogside, spawned from the lowest level of the working class, socialists to a man please note, who are trying to scratch a living from their art – the murals they painted for the people of Derry and which attract many thousands of visitors per year. Socialist murals indeed which we intended from the start even if the pseudo’s have neither the sensibilities or the intelligence to recognise that simple fact.
Targeted by the jealous, the petty-minded, the misinformed, the greedy and self-deluded fantasists masquerading as “revolutionaries’ who seemingly can sleep through all of their astonishing contradictions like babes in straw, snug in their self-appointed roles as liberators of mankind and blessed, would you believe ?, with an all-embracing love for the oppressed everywhere except those of course, like us, they are determined to add to the pile. We three, it seems, The Bogside Artists, provide these idiots with a mighty cause to serve – What mighty cause? Why preventing us, in homage to the class we represent, from earning an honest living from our labours by denigrating our work and our names. How proud they must be of themselves and how humbled by their mighty achievement. What achievement? Well…. you would need to ask them, unless you count working in the employ of even bigger idiots than even they, an ‘achievement’. We are still here is what this blog is here to state. That is our flag flying in the breeze by the way, just outside our studio. Our flag of independence. The price we have paid? Contact us and we will be happy to tell you. It is not over until The Fat Tyrant learns to sing and the fanatic understands that the system is his real target and not the ordinary folk who are trying to earn a living against the oppression of these – its most ruthless practitioners.
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