Art and International Human Rights: Reflections on the Course

It's always interesting to think about one's personal development in relation to academic coursework.

This semester, I had the incredible opportunity to take a class at Yale Law School called "Art and International Human Rights."

The course description was as follows:

This seminar aims to explore the rich and complex intersections between art and artistic practices and international human rights. It is a central part of JUNCTURE: Explorations in Art and Human Rights, a new initiative sponsored by the Schell Center at Yale Law School. Unfolding over the 2015-2016 academic year, JUNCTURE will encompass collaborations with visiting artists, fellowships for Yale MFA students, public lectures, this seminar, publications, performances, an exhibition, and a symposium. In this seminar, as in the initiative, we welcome the participation of law students, art students, and graduate students from other disciplines.

We seek to articulate and discuss a series of questions about the relationship between art and international human rights. For example, what are the possibilities and limits of the documentary form? What are the possibilities and limits of art as an agent of social change? What ethics should govern the representation and reception of images of violence and atrocity? What are the relationships among aesthetics, politics, and justice? What institutional, political, and economic factors affect the conditions in which art and artists function? We will situate these discussions both in historical perspective and in the practices of contemporary artists and writers.


As the semester wraps up, we had to reflect on what we had learned in the course, and this is what I wrote:

In the beginning, there was art.  Art was an agent of human rights, and art was human rights.  Art reflected human rights from the beginning.
The Divinity School student in me could not help indulging in some poetic license, interweaving Scriptural text (see John 1:1-2) with our themes from this course—something that I have not done thus far.  Walking a mile “down the hill” once a week for class, I was determined to leave religion out of the picture in order to fully immerse myself in different intellectual territory.  I also learned to see images and hear words in a context outside of music and ritual, expanding my own artistic and professional training as a violinist and music therapist to engage with film, play, and visual material.

In the beginning, we met as strangers, walking and talking thoughtfully around select images in the Gallery.  From there, we collected keywords and met visiting artists, with whom we worked to develop separate projects.  Our classes have found us grappling with current issues, philosophical concepts, and debates that took on a nearly “moral” tone.  
Interestingly, my keyword from our second class was morality.  What about both art and human rights, I asked, make them “accountable” to a wider community?  To whom are they accountable—what/who constitutes that community?  Are there ever times when we must deal with competing “moralities” when making an artistic or legal decision?  When we take religion out of the picture, who decides what “morality” means?  To what authority does art appeal?  Are the artist’s intentions sufficient, or must art “speak” for itself in broader ways?  Is there a difference between “objective” and “emotional” truth?  Perhaps, like religion, “morality” should be left out of the picture.
Thanks to the group work with Dipika, I have chosen instead to focus on the relationship between narrative and justice.  I have written dramatic scenes dealing with my own family history of migration, interrogating concepts of identity in transnational contexts. I have watched interviews with asylum seekers, concluding upon the importance of psychological training in matters of trauma when conducting legal matters.  And most recently, I researched and created a play about the Sanctuary Movement, which ties theological themes with social justice—and thus marries art with human rights in its own way.

Warm data.  Empathy.  Plasticity.  
These are but a few of the words and themes that have stayed in my mind.  As a former helping professional who has worked with survivors of trauma and patients facing death, I appreciated Chitra and Mariam’s emphasis on the humanness of data.  As a musician, I have always taken for granted the power of the arts (my exposure has mostly been to music) to elicit empathy and emotion—and thus found it interesting to struggle (collectively, in class) with defining empathy in light of Levinas.
Ultimately, I am indebted to Dipika for showing me the importance of plasticity in playwriting and in life, because here is where the realm of ritual and liturgy (found in both music therapy and religion) intersect with the biggest question of all: what can art do for human rights?

Primarily, art tells a story.  It is a narrative.  Amalia reminded us that objects carry anecdotal history.  An artistic work contains the process of its making (we were fortunate to hear and learn about this from our MFA students); the interpretation of a work adds another element to the narrative—art must have an audience to count as art; and most importantly, the story must continue/progress and be translated into action—whether direct or indirect—for art to truly impact the condition of humanity.
Thus, art is a relational activity.  The fact that all art elicits some sort of reaction means that it is doing the work of raising awareness and encouraging discussion.  (If I could recommend a book to be added to our syllabus, it would be John Dewey’s Art As Experience.  Adding Dewey to the conversation might have added clarity to our evaluations on how exactly to engage with art—and I regret not thinking of this until now.)  What we do with it becomes our responsibility, and the potential ways in which we can narrate justice through art are boundless.

Music therapy and religion have made me an astute student of ritual.  Like play, ritual narrates by eliciting emotional responses—a certain form of empathy.  It is my personal belief that visual art is most powerful when mixed with other artistic forms—movement, music, etc.—and that art should never be viewed in isolation from other human activity.