Analysis of a series of artistic works through the lens of aesthetic and contextual chaos, whether they work on the same level, and the potential reactions these artists sought out from owners and audiences in creating these pieces.

1. Chaos and Migration; Chaos in Migration
Europe in Transit, The Art of Migration
Art History 202

2. A point that comes up time and time again in our seminar, whether it be through
discussing reasons for migration, people who migrate, the implications of migration, the physical
act of migration, and the indicators of this entire process is the fact that migrant experiences
possess histories so diverse that the condensing of migration into just mold is nearly, if not,
impossible. From Turks in medical examinations in Berger and Mohr’s book to the Bangladeshi
migrants in Libyan camps show in Babylone, analyzing the abstract and concrete movement of
peoples across cities, nations, and even continents requires a mode to characterize and relate their
equally diverse modes of portrayal through art that do not homogenize, but rather connect, them.
Because of this, I chose to analyze the following series of artistic works through the lens of
aesthetic and contextual chaos, whether they work on the same level, and the potential reactions
these artists sought out from owners and audiences in creating these pieces.
Before commencing to run through this “imagined exhibition”, it is important to
characterize the basic components of what will be considered as “chaos” throughout the rest of
this paper. According to the Oxford English Dictionary, chaos is defined as “complete disorder
and confusion”; thus, in considering the visual manifestation of this through art, the way this
adjective will be used throughout this writing will reference components within the piece and its
context that can attribute to it these qualities will be based off emotional cues from my own
observation and reactions I observed during my presentation on my second paper (Oxford).
Visually, chaos in this exhibition takes the form of overwhelming detail, disorder, lacking
cohesion, and references to a primeval state, violence, and distress. In order to advance this
interpretation, I will also be noting configurations of chaos’ antithesis: calm- initially defined by
Oxford as “not showing or feeling nervousness, anger, or other strong emotions (Oxford). The

3. visual indicators for this mode in the exhibition will thus be placidity, comfort, simplicity, and
references to innocence, familiarity, and comfort.
Overall, chaos will be associated closely with violence and discomfort, whereas calm
will be considered as pacific and consensual; this will likewise extend to whether or not works’
contexts can be defined as one, the other, or a combination of both. This exhibition is thus
intended to serve as a survey of artworks that act as a visual spectrum from calm to chaos, and
would, if manifested, be ideally placed in the way that they will be discussed as follows, with the
actual contextualization of each as a secondary component to amplify each work’s individual and
relational significance.
The first of these works, and thus the closest to an aesthetic of lacking chaos is Alen
MacWeeney’s gelatin silver print of a trio of Irish travelers, Willie Donoghue and Children,
Cherry Orchard. In this photograph, one sees three subjects: a girl to the left, a small boy in the
foreground, and an older man- presumably Willie Donoghue-in the middle of the picture. They
are arranged in a mode which guides audience’s eyes in a spiral, starting with the smiling girl,
who appears to be mid-twirl in her patterned skirt. Following the line of her body and skirt, the
eye moves to the child in the foreground, who is out of focus, peering into the camera with a
curious expression, and dressed in a button shirt and sweater. Then, one might observe the
looming figure of Mr. Donoghue behind him, dressed head-to-toe in clack and holding an
expression that, be it not the presence of smiling children around him, might have been taken for
severity but comes forth as parental exasperation. Only then does Cherry Orchard come into
focus, from the simple shack behind him, to the fur-like grass under them, and finally towards
the unfocused background of rolling hills and distant trees.
Considering Donoghue’s placement and the fact that the camera is focused on him, one

4. might imagine that MacWeeney’s might have intended to photograph him alone, only for the
session to be interfered with by the pair of children in the picture. The familiar air that results in
their relaxed nature reflects upon Mr. Donoghue, who as a result of this appears more as a
parental figure of order and maturity in contrast to them (despite them not being dubbed his
children in the title), rather than stern and lonely as he might appear had they not been in the
photograph. Additionally, the inclusion of his name in the title brings to attention a personal
connection between him and the photographer formed through the sharing of his full name; this
relationship is then extended towards the audience who learn of it in reading the work’s name,
giving him a further sense of legality and level-headedness.
This combination of childhood naiveté and adult sobriety adds to the relaxed air of the
background’s inclusion of a natural, open space. Even though, as presented by the variation of
the subjects’ ages, for example, certain states are fleeting, the lacking constraint and return to
nature that the distant trees and field imply grants the image a sense of stability, placidness, and
relatability. Additionally, the photograph’s subdued palette of blacks, greys, and whites gives the
overall image a sense of cohesion and timelessness, presenting another mode of acquaintance
between audience and piece.
The inclusion of the camp’s name, Cherry Orchard, adds in the implication of bounty
and harvest to a photograph that would have initially been solemn and empty. This contrasts with
the transitory implications of the camp’s actual history, one where these nomadic “tinkers”
would stay in during their time in the outskirts of Dublin. However, returning to the theme of the
photograph’s familiar aura, this becomes perhaps their home, regardless of its permanence.
This topic of stability and familial relations that MacWeeney’s photograph emits earns it
as an example of a lack of aesthetic chaos, but it nevertheless merits its own sense of chaos when

5. contextualized as a capturing of peoples who have faced and continue to face isolation from
mainstream Irish society, live in ways outside of traditional definitions of “stability” (under a
scope of physical permanence in a specified space, such as a house or city), and do not explicitly
possess the familial dynamic that one would originally expect given the children’s’ comfort
around Donoghue. A possible reason for MacWeeney’s portrayal of them in this way that
obscures such chaos could be the fact that, aside from being a Dublin local himself, he spent
much of his career photographic “Tinkers”. During this time, he could experience their different
modes of living that went past the superficiality of their nomadism; he drank tea and ate with
them, listened to and recorded their music and tales, and created personal connections with his
subjects. Although the placid way of their portrayal does not present the reality of the chaos in
their life, it is perhaps MacWeeney’s form of demonstrating the depth and closeness to the
migrant experiences he was involved in and heard of during his time with them.
Following this closeness between artist and migrant experience is an artist who migrated
herself and her work from Colombia to England, Doris Salcedo, who did so in order to conduct a
commission that would be the first to “intervene directly in the fabric of” the Tate Museum’s
Turbine Hall: Shibboleth I. This installment was constructed by the artist through creating a deep
fissure in the Hall’s floor that began and ended at the gallery’s extremities, in which she placed
what the Tate describes as “a Colombian rock face with a wire chain-link fence set to it” (Tate).
At first glance, the work itself could merely be reduced to its pictorial manifestation of
simplicity: a crack that is unevenly distributed and cutting across the floor sharply in a jagged,
but nevertheless continuous, line. However, it is until one steps into the gallery floor and is
forced to interact with the piece that it, along with its name, begins to make sense.
“Shibboleth” is a Hebrew word describing a “word, phrase, or custom that can be used to

6. test whether or not an individual belongs to a particular group or region” (Tate). According to
the site, this world originates from the Old Testament story where the Ephraimites were
challenged by the Gileadites to say the word in order to be allowed to flee to Jordan; because
they were unable to pronounce it, all 42,000 of them were slaughtered. When a museum visitor
encounters this work, they are forced to decide where, how, when, and whether to cross the crack
to view the works available on the opposite side of the gallery space. Although this is an
instantaneous, unaggressive action for many, the subtlety of how they are forced to interact with
the piece, especially within a specified manner, reveals the wavering of free will at the hands of
external powers described by the artist as “high Western culture” that in turn cause “cultural and
geographical exclusion” of migrant peoples who physically enter different societal and political
spaces. More specifically, the artist claims it is supposed to represent the immigrant experience
in Europe through creating physical discomfort in spectators- causing them to move where they
might otherwise not, to bend their backs to see into the crack, to jump in fear of tripping over the
crack.
The impermanence of this exhibition, as it lasted from 2007 to 2008, does little to conceal
the work’s former presence, as once it ended the crack was filled up, leaving a permanent scar on
the gallery floor. This is reflective of issues that remain for migrant groups long after they enter
new lands plagued by unfamiliarity. What is essential of this piece is thus the combination of its
unaggressive- and, in our terms, calm- aesthetic existence that creates a cut in audience’s
consent- whether they are aware of it or not- that ends up acting as a mechanism for transmitting
them into an emotional space reminiscent of the isolation of migrants and their experiences in
European spaces.
Moving further into the manifestation of depicted chaos is Reuben Nakian’s Europa and

7. the Bull. Based off the Greek myth the work is titled off, this ink on paper work depicts a sensual
and soft Europa, passively atop of Zeus’s bull form. The flowing lines of ink that present her in
the nude further the natural, comfortable state emitted by the painting’s soft tones of grey and
blue. Her body is curvaceous and romantic, presenting a serene portrait of a woman’s relation to
an inactive bull, scantly depicted in the lower right through a variation of more abstract lines.
These lines emit an organic, flowing atmosphere of soft movement that compliments the clean,
white background. Overall, there is an overwhelming sense of purity and comfort throughout the
work’s aesthetic features, and so it comes quite surprising once one notes the backstory what is
being presented.
Europa and the Bull was originally a Greek myth in which Zeus, a god infamous for rape
and incest throughout much of Greek myth, transforms into a bull to kidnap the nymph Europa.
Once he succeeds in doing so, he carries her across the Mediterranean Sea to the island of Crete,
leading to the founding of Europe. This chaos of lacking consent and forced movement is hidden
through the way Nakian utilizes the sexualization of the female form and the integration of
simple and subdued elements, thus leading for this history to be exposed solely through its title.
This is reminiscent of the way that women, particularly those in former colonies, experience
Orientalist attitudes on behalf of Europeans, particularly men. In the hierarchies that Edward
Said describes in his book, “Orientalism”, the romantization, sexualization, and exoticizing of
the “Orient” and its peoples on behalf of European empires is correlated with the subjugation and
exploitation of these other nations (Said). Here, the same dynamics are being applied to Europa,
presumably a non-European (as Europe was not established before her existence), as she is being
stripped of her will in an originally-chaotic scene that is subdued so as to remove the violence
and calamity of its original mythic portrayal. Europa’s discomfort in this painting is not made

8. obvious- if anything, it is absent- and neither are the circumstances that come to foreign women
who are involved in migratory movement (especially in cases where it is forced upon them).
Perhaps this is an intentional way of Nakian engaging European audiences to think past potential
Orientalist assumptions through reflections upon staples of their founding cultures, given the
artist’s Middle Eastern origins.
Artist intent is necessary in order to contextualize works such as Europa where the
correlation between depiction and truth is blurred; however, as in the case of British Artist Julian
Trevelyan’s Heathrow, what is depicted moves more into ambiguous grounds of multifaceted
circumstances. Here, audiences are engaged with a more versatile portrait of the migrant
experience through something that transforms all those involved with it into migrants
themselves: an airport. Outside of the name, which references a popular airport in England, it is
identified as so because of the plane-like silhouettes in the upper area of the illustration (the sky).
The systematic, bureaucratic, and organizational methods- in short, the calm- of airport security
and processes are transmitted here though a variation of elements within a similar color palette as
Europa. However, here, the greys and blacks are harsher, the lines more clearly cut, and the
etching overwhelmed with much more detail, especially in relation to the black keyhole-like
figures that populate it. Although these shapes might be alluding to something inhuman
altogether, it is hard to place them as anything different than the transitory, universalized visitors
to Heathrow, coming in and leaving to other nations, perhaps even ones on the opposite side of
the globe. If these are people indeed, then Trevelyan has certainly managed to universalize and
inter-familiarize these figures, removing their individual travel itineraries, statuses, and physical
appearances, perhaps playing into the orderliness an airport might have in the depersonalization
of its customers as a product of their frequent, short-lived movement through it.

9. The harmony of the movement promoted in this orderly process is subjective, however,
as I learned during my second presentation at the Nasher. It was Kelly (I believe) who
highlighted the fact that the overwhelming inclusion of elements in the etching presents a more
chaotic scene than I had originally attributed to it. Perhaps, despite the cleanliness of lines and
effortlessness of an airport to one migrant can become a flurry of unfamiliarity, disorder, and
distress. Here, the anonymity of the “people” in the piece becomes a sea of faceless strangers, the
lines of the buildings and roads a channel of controlling movement, and the color palette of the
painting indicative of dullness and pessimism. The integration of authority, especially regarding
cases of people who might be disenfranchised because of their national origin coming into
Britain, might then make the experience of this airport more into a situation of discomfort and
chaos, rather than simplicity and security. There is certainly a hierarchy of privilege that must be
evaluated- whether it be privilege of citizenship or something altogether disparate- in considering
these situations, and so perhaps it is Trevelyan’s point to retain the ambiguity of association and
depiction so as to reveal the depth and complexities of the experience of physical movement
through spaces such as airports.
Made and transported far before the time of airports, the Dutch cutlery case nevertheless
serves as an example of disparate modes of privilege- this time of class- and migration in a
similarly-ambiguous format. Fashioned out of boxwood and decorated to the brim in skilled
carvings, this utilitarian piece was intended to be used as a tool for relatively well-off European
to transport their cutlery tools when invited to dine at others’ homes. Although this usefulness
does merit its mention, the aesthetic qualities of the piece are what made it particularly striking
to me back when we chose our initial two objects for our first papers. Clad in Old and New
Testament figures carved in detail and miniscule size, the case features different scenes in which

10. such characters as Balthazar, Samson, and Abraham faced within the Book. What is interesting
to consider when it comes to this piece is this excess of detail, and what this feature makes of
migratory lifestyles in relation to chaos.
My original explanation for this referenced the works’ horror vacui (“fear of empty
space”) and the integration of its inscription, which details on the need to honor God and to avoid
sin in the face of impending death and judgment, as sources for the case’s reflection of chaos
found within the everyday lives of migration and transpor (Soegaard). In fact, the case’s
fashioning during the Dutch Golden Age, a time characterized by the influx of skilled migrants,
perhaps would even allow for one to ponder as to whether it was a migrant artist who crafted this
object, and whether they might have agreed with the sentiment expressed, or if they practiced
Christian thought altogether. However, commentary on my second paper lead me to likewise
consider the decorativeness of these inscriptions as characteristic of religious celebration and
feast-making, which trails back to our earlier conceptualization of calm as familial, comfortable,
and playful.
The fact that the detailing is so small would have engaged owners to share and pass
around the object with other diners, perhaps leading to a discussion or reflection upon religious
thought and pride. At the same time, the control over the object’s exposure would have given
them the ability to consent to its handling; ironically perhaps, this nowadays would be
inapplicable because of the object’s shift to being a publicly-viewed museum piece.
Nevertheless, even in current contexts, the process of dining and the elements that construct its
culture may be associated with sentiments of communion and familiarity within audiences.
Moving more towards works that function aesthetically as more chaotic, we have Juan
Genovés’s Señales Internacionales, a black and white etching on paper much like Trevelyan’s,

11. but coming from a much blunter perpetuation of a chaotic perspective. This color palette
becomes a means of contrast, the black figures truthfully are people this time, and movement is
once again integrated as an integrated channel, but with the twist of an opposing flow. The
massive crowds of people appearing to flee and overcome the man-made force of a road of
arrows, ending engulfed in a cloud of bright, white light, presents a claustrophobic, countered
portrayal of movement that deviates little from Genovés’s own experiences during the Francisco
Franco regime in Spain. The fear and confusion experienced by many Spaniards during the time
of this dictatorship is clearly delineated in this work, from the sense of urgency and restraint
communicated by the people’s opposed movement to the established visual flow to the lack of a
central, visual focus in the etching.
Rather than portraying one precise subject, Genovés presents miniatures of people that
appear to be mere speckled shadows until one actually approaches the piece. Perhaps the point of
this disclosure of proximity as a requisite for perceiving the piece’s content is indicative of the
need for global audiences to become proximate to the experiences of oppressed peoples,
regardless of the origins of their fleeing. Violence must be portrayed and perceived carefully in
the same matter that it must be understood and handled with care. If this is to happen and
suffering alleviated, more straightforward aesthetics that portray chaotic situations intended to
emit strong emotion and thus prompt urgent change as was required during Franco might just be
the “International Signals” that Genovés alludes to through the work’s title.
Then again, with works such as Pablo Picasso’s Guernica, one might consider this
prompt already answered, especially as goes from one Spanish artist’s testimony of Franco’s
regime to another. Picasso’s cubist-surrealist, oil on canvas work has, ever since its original
exhibition at the International Exposition in Paris in 1937, been established as the “generic plea

12. against the barbarity of terror and war” (Museo reina Sofia). Based off photographs published on
periodicals of the aerial bombing of the Spanish town of Guernica, the only actual allusion to the
specific event is the work’s title; this, perhaps, is what diversifies its use as the quintessential
form of chaos within migration and art. Here, the palette of black and white returns, albeit in a
muted version with some tonalities of cream and blue incorporated upon the visages of the
subjects. These subjects, composed a total of nine figures (three animals and six people) are
intensely depicted, highlighting an aesthetic of extreme tragedy and chaos in the franticness of
their expressions, the collision and lacking unity of their movement, and the lack of complete
features on some, if not most, of them.
Although there are different means of grouping these figures, the site for the museum in
which the painting is housed, the Museo Nacional Centro de Arte Reina Sofia, suggests Guernica
scholar Anthony Blunt’s grouping of these figures into animal and human. Thus, for the initial
group, one has the bull, the wounded horse, and the winged bird in the background on the left. In
this order, one has aesthetics appealing to decapitation, darkness, and screaming, all which
directly transcribe this thematic of chaos. We then also have a dead soldier, a woman holding a
lamp, a mother holding her dead child on the left, another woman rushing in from the right, and
one with her arms outstretched towards a lit window. Because of the different portrayals of
individual human suffering in this collective setting, the overwhelmingness of the scene takes
both an aesthetic and emotional toll that perpetuates direct awareness of their suffering within
audience members. This, in combination with the work’s context of having been the product of a
famous artist’s political reactions to an exceptional time in Spanish democracy, allows it to be
proper in its stance as a quintessentially chaotic piece.
Thus, by placing together Alen MacWeeney’s, Doris Salcedo’s, Reuben Nakian’s, Julian

13. Trevelyan’s, Juan Genovés’s, and Pablo Picasso’s pieces, as well as the Dutch Cutlery Case,
there is an established spectrum of a dynamic of physically-manifested chaos in correlation with
each piece’s background. This diversity of existence and of representation heavily characterizes
the overall exhibit, and so in taking to account each work’s background, physical elements, and
the potential audience reactions towards both of these things, this variety is truly highlighted and
each work characterized as a facet that, although different from the rest in style, period, and
context, serves in the movement of the narrative of migration as conducive to senses of serenity,
turmoil, or both. In the evaluation of pieces as transitions from a lack of chaos to an enforcement
of it, they may be placed as so to mimic the transition of the migratory experience itself, where
the gradual movement and adjustment into new lands perpetuates deeper and more exposed
senses of isolation, fear, and chaos.
Works Cited
“Calm - Definition of Calm.” Oxford English Dictionary. N.p. Web. 4 May 2017.
“Chaos - Definition of Chaos.” Oxford Dictionaries | English. Oxford English Dictionary.
Web. 4 May 2017.
“Pablo Picasso (Pablo Ruiz Picasso) - Guernica.” Museo Reina Sofia. N.p., n.d. Web. 4 May

14. 2017.
Said, Edward. Orientalism. N.p., 1979. Print.
Soegaard, Mads. “Horror Vacui: The Fear of Emptiness.” The Interaction Design
Foundation. N.p., n.d. Web. 4 May 2017.
“Shibboleth I, Doris Salcedo 2007.” Tate Museum. N.p., n.d. Web. 4 May 2017.
“The Unilever Series: Doris Salcedo: Shibboleth.” Tate Museum. N.p., n.d. Web. 4 May
2017.