This picture is called “Echo of a Scream” and was painted in Mexico more than seventy years ago by David Alfaro Siqueiros. He painted it to portray the horrible conditions in his country at the time.
An abandoned child sits screaming in hunger and pain on a pile of industrial rubbish a dump site, while in the background huge oil tanks recede into the distance. A large superimposed close-up of his head amplifies the scream and carries it as an echo through the poisoned landscape, out into the feelings of those who see the painting. It’s surreal in technique, but it’s point is terrifyingly clear.
At that time in Mexico, industrialism was invading the country from outside. Oil wealth was being extracted from the earth, factories were built and drained their smoking wastes into the local rivers and streams- oil wells and factories owned by foreigners and operated by the local rich landowners, who paid their workers barely enough to eat while they poisoned the land around them.
These conditions were so horrible that they finally led to revolution and reform in Mexico, thanks partly to artists like Siqueiros, who through their paintings and cartoons and wall murals aroused the public.
Art is a powerful tool for protest. Terrible conditions in a society tend to be ignored day by day out of habit, even by those who suffer most from them, until their situation is depicted powerfully enough by words, or songs, or photos, or paintings- to make people realize the horror of the things portrayed, and then make them ashamed to accept them.
There are children living in stinking dump sites today, right here in Dumaguete, while their parents paw through the garbage to find something to sell for food. There are men and women here, sweating on construction crews, abused in service, dying without medical care or medicine, paid barely enough to feed themselves and their families.
But artists and writers here do not identify with these situations, nor feel moved to depict them. It would be considered bad manners for them to question the existing order and practice of life around them.
But great works are never polite. Siqueiros’s “Scream”, Picasso’ s “Guernica” and Francis Bacon’s “Screaming Pope” hang and echo through the galleries of the worlds great museums- while the “Barrio Fiestas” and pretty flowers of our artists only decorate the local salas and restaurants.
