Slow Violence
Slow Violence is a theory of environmental justice stating that actions like pollution, deforestation, and neglect all are violence tantamount to ecological warfare, but on a longer scale that is not immediately apparent. In his book Slow Violence and the Environmentalism of the Poor (2011), Rob Nixon states that we overlook its execution because it is not eye-grabbing, not a spectacle. He cites the example of Lawrence Summers, CEO of the World Bank at the time, who suggested exporting America’s toxic waste to Africa in the interests of economic efficiency and to appease American environmentalists. With the dawn of the anthropocene, and humanity constantly expanding into nature, slow violence—aided by “disruption”—has become the norm, the default state to support our economy. Patient conservation must be constant to hold entropy and careless expansion at bay.
But slow violence doesn’t just apply to environmentalism; it can apply to socioeconomic policies too. For example, defunding public institutions and healthcare are forms of slow violence against people. More directly relevant to this exhibit, the Great Depression and Dust Bowl can be understood as violence distributed over time and space, with Hoovervilles simply manifesting a more obvious form. We even can see the effects of slow violence at the New Deal Gallery itself. Older paintings like John Muir’s Still Life on a Table (1937) require constant restoration, upkeep and a climate controlled environment to prevent varnish from rotting or paint from fading. Underfunding galleries and museums is slow violence in that it withholds resources needed to upkeep the pieces. Many of the New Deal Gallery paintings are badly damaged—they’re torn or shredded in places—so in this respect Muir’s canvas and the battered fedora it depicts are a poignant synthesis.
Cutting New Deal relief to the artists, too, was a form of slow violence. Artists have to work, Roger G. Kennedy writes; “Artists are not artists unless they do. By definition, they create” (19). Yet as a subjective medium, art cannot reliably be offered and sold on a consistent market with dependable demand. There was hostility to the Federal Art Project from the beginning, opponents in Congress instituting freezes, reductions in wages, across-the-board cuts, term limitations, quotas, and beginning in 1938 red-baiting investigations by the Select Committee on Un-American Activities (Langa 204-207). In New York State, beginning in 1939 administration of the FAP passed to Lt. Col. Brehon Somervell, who actively worked to dismantle the program and eventually liquidated painted canvases at 4 cents per pound to a junk dealer (“End of WPA Art”). What would we call such actions, if not violence?
Nixon’s argument recalibrates our thinking downward, to all kinds of small actions and events. Thought to be stolen along with the New Deal Gallery’s other three dozen Ghost Paintings, a second of four Leon Foster Jones prints recently was found behind a paper portfolio, left behind loose clutter in storage. Unnamed and abandoned, his newfound print features a dock or port building with two ships moored—an appropriate metaphor, considering the fortunes of his engraving. It’s possible that the subject of Jones’ art is the Suwasset Oyster Company in his home town of Port Jefferson, NY. If so, then he might have been sketching in haste, for a 1934 winter storm severely damaged the structure and later it was dismantled.
Works Consulted
—“End of WPA Art.” Life 17 April 1944: 85-86. Web version available here.
—Kennedy, Roger G. “Coaxing the Soul of America Back to Life.” 1934: A New Deal for Artists, ed. Ann Prentice Wagner. Smithsonian, 2009.
—Langa, Helen. Radical Art: Printmaking and the Left in 1930s New York. University of California, 2004. 13-28.
—Nixon, Rob. Slow Violence and the Environmentalism of the Poor. Harvard, 2011.
—Village of Port Jefferson, NY. Port Jefferson Village Photo Archive. Web.