CounterPunch Exclusives

CounterPunch Exclusives

Making Us Conscious of the Things We Don’t See

In his 1962 essay titled “The Creative Dilemma,” James Baldwin wrote, “The role of the artist is exactly the same as the role of the lover. If I love you, I have to make you conscious of the things you don’t see.” Baldwin goes on to state that the role of the artist is to reveal the deeper truths of the society they live and work in; a situation which ultimately means that the artist is always at war with that society. It may be what he calls “a lover’s war,” but it is a war nonetheless. The ideal result of this struggle between the artist and the society they live in is progress towards greater social justice. Of course, art cannot change society on its own, but it can change people who in turn can change society.

Artist Susan Simensky Bietila has been moving people in just this way for over sixty years. After breaking free of the social restrictions and expectations of her parents and their culture in the early 1960s, Bietila joined the antiwar and anti-racist movements of the time, marching, organizing and creating art for political posters and the burgeoning underground newspaper movement, specifically the New York City paper The Subterranean Rat. By 1969, she was also already part of a growing feminist movement as a member of Women’s International Terrorist Conspiracy from Hell (W.I.T.C.H.) For those who don’t know (or don’t remember), The Rat had one of the larger circulations of an underground paper; it was political, countercultural and, like too many other New Left and counterculture organizations in the 1960s, almost as sexist as the mainstream........

© CounterPunch