Beautiful, Gruesome, and True: Artists at Work in the Face of War

Artists today can choose to lead relatively comfortable lives. The cliché is that they suffer, but if they are willing to make shiny objects for wealthy collectors, paint decorative murals for the lobbies of banks, or aggregate existing images into new supports for digital currencies, then they can reasonably hope for a good chance of achieving some measure of commercial success. Why, then, have some the most interesting artists of our time committed themselves, for a decade or more, to some of the most devastating conflicts on earth, including wars over precious metals that have devastated indigenous lands, crimes associated with the drug trade that have shattered poor and vulnerable communities, and popular uprisings for dignity and justice that have been pummeled by autocratic regimes and mired in civil strife? This book tells the stories of three such artists--Amar Kanwar in India, Teresa Margolles in Mexico, and Abounaddara in Syria--and considers what their work means for the future of contemporary art and the global circuits that are meant to sustain it.


Drawing on years of research and extensive reporting, Kaelen Wilson-Goldie vividly recounts the worlds these artists inhabit and the profound and unflinching works they create. As a longtime critic attuned to close looking, she follows her subjects through the materials they gather, the relationships they form, and the responsibilities they bear to the people who make their art possible. Pushing at the boundaries of what art is and testing out new modes of working together, these artists express deep ambivalence toward a field they entered largely by chance. With intensifying debates about the market, museum ethics, and institutional politics, the art world stands to benefit from the provocative examples that Kanwar, Margolles, and Abounaddara set, adept as they are at translating chaotic violence into meaningful works of art.