11.3 The Functions of Visual Art and Design in History, Society, and Culture

The Functions of Visual Art and Design in History, Society, and Culture

Throughout human civilization, visual art and design have never existed in an aesthetic vacuum. Rather than serving purely as ornamental luxuries or passive museum artifacts, images, objects, and built spaces have operated as vital cultural technologies that fulfill urgent societal needs. Visual forms have mediated spiritual encounters, legitimized imperial conquests, documented collective histories, expressed innermost psychological trauma, solved utilitarian problems of daily survival, fueled political revolutions, and provided sanctified spaces for public mourning.

For Illinois art educators, teaching the functions of art is essential for helping students understand that every artwork is an active participant in its cultural and historical ecosystem. By interrogating why an artwork was made and what work it performed for its community, students move beyond superficial stylistic descriptions to deep contextual understanding.

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1. Ceremonial, Spiritual, and Ritual Functions

For the vast majority of human history, the primary impulse behind visual creation was sacred. Art served as an intermediary between the mundane physical world and the transcendent metaphysical realm:

• Spiritual Conduit and Deity Manifestation: Sacred sculptures were frequently believed not merely to represent gods, but to serve as physical vessels or conduits through which divine power was made manifest. In ancient Egypt, the Opening of the Mouth ceremony performed on funerary statues restored the spiritual senses of the deceased's ka (soul). In South Asian Hindu traditions, the practice of darshan involves an active, mutual gaze between the devotee and the divine murti (consecrated statue of a deity, such as Shiva Nataraja), creating an intimate spiritual exchange.
• Sacred Architecture as Cosmic Models: Religious buildings are structural physicalizations of cosmological beliefs. The Hindu temple's towering shikhara mirrors the sacred world-mountain Mount Meru; the Islamic mosque's central dome and infinite geometric arabesques reflect the boundless unity (tawhid) and perfection of Allah; and the soaring verticality and stained glass of Abbot Suger's Gothic Basilica of Saint-Denis manifested the divine theological light (lux nova) that lifted human souls toward heaven.
• Ritual Masquerade and Rites of Passage: In traditional West African cultures, masks are dynamic components of multi-sensory masquerade performances involving music, dance, costuming, and ancestral possession. For example, the Sowei helmet masks of the Mende Sande society in Sierra Leone—carved from wood with glossy black surfaces, segmented neck rings signifying health and prosperity, and serene downcast eyes—are worn exclusively by women elders during initiation rituals to teach young women moral purity, spiritual wisdom, and cultural identity.

2. Political Persuasion, Ideology, and Propaganda

Rulers, religious hierarchies, and political regimes have systematically mobilized visual art to legitimize their authority, assert territorial control, and indoctrinate the public.

Classical and Imperial Statecraft

• Augustus of Primaporta (Early 1st Century CE): When Octavian became the first Emperor of Rome, he utilized portraiture as mass media. The Augustus of Primaporta sculpts the emperor as an eternally youthful, godlike imperator in a heroic contrapposto stance derived from Polykleitos' Doryphoros. His ornate breastplate (cuirass) depicts historical diplomacy—the return of Roman military battle standards by the Parthians—flanked by cosmic deities of the sky and earth, proclaiming that Augustus brought universal peace (Pax Romana) under divine mandate.

Revolutionary Martyrdom: Jacques-Louis David

• The Death of Marat (1793): During the Reign of Terror in the French Revolution, Neoclassical painter Jacques-Louis David was commissioned to memorialize his murdered friend, the radical Jacobin journalist Jean-Paul Marat, who was assassinated in his medicinal bath by Charlotte Corday. David transformed a political agitator into a secular, christological martyr. Marat's slumped arm, pale torso, and peaceful countenance borrow directly from Michelangelo's Pietà and Caravaggio's Entombment of Christ. By eliminating all superfluous household details and isolating Marat against an austere, luminous greenish-ochre void, David engineered a powerful icon of political martyrdom to galvanize revolutionary devotion.

Revolutionary Mass Mobilization: Soviet Agitprop and Mexican Muralism

• Soviet Constructivism and Agitprop (1917–1920s): Following the Russian Revolution, artists such as Vladimir Tatlin, El Lissitzky, and Gustav Klutsis abandoned bourgeois easel painting to construct visual propaganda for the masses. In Beat the Whites with the Red Wedge (1919), El Lissitzky transformed pure geometric abstraction into a political weapon, using a dynamic red triangle piercing a white circle to symbolize the Bolshevik Red Army defeating anti-communist White forces. Photomontage posters deployed dynamic typography, bold diagonals, and industrial imagery to mobilize a widely non-literate peasant population into modern industrial collectivism.
• Mexican Muralism (1920s–1950s): Commissioned by the post-revolutionary Mexican government, "Los Tres Grandes"—Diego Rivera, José Clemente Orozco, and David Alfaro Siqueiros—demanded art that was public, monumental, and educational. Rejecting private canvas collections, Rivera painted monumental fresco cycles across public government walls (such as The History of Mexico at the National Palace). These murals celebrated indigenous pre-Columbian civilization, unmasked the cruelties of the Spanish Conquest and Catholic Inquisition, and dramatized peasant and labor struggles, providing the public with an empowering narrative of national identity.

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3. Narrative Storytelling and Historical Documentation

Before the rise of mass printing, photography, and digital video, monumental narrative art operated as humanity's primary mechanism for recording historic battles, royal lineages, and cultural mythologies.

• Trajan's Column (Rome, 113 CE): A monumental 128-foot marble column celebrating Emperor Trajan's victories in the Dacian Wars. A continuous, winding helical relief frieze over 625 feet long coils 23 times up the marble shaft, depicting more than 2,500 individual figures across 155 narrative scenes. Beyond displaying battle engagements, the column acts as a documentary military archive, illustrating bridge engineering, fortress construction, legionary marches, Roman weaponry, and Emperor Trajan addressing his troops.
• The Bayeux Tapestry (ca. 1070s): An extraordinary 230-foot-long embroidered linen cloth (technically an embroidery rather than a woven tapestry) created by Anglo-Saxon needleworkers, likely commissioned by Bishop Odo of Bayeux. The narrative chronicles the events leading up to the Norman Conquest of England in 1066, climaxing in the pivotal Battle of Hastings. Executed in wool yarn using stem and laid-and-couched stitches, it provides invaluable documentary visual evidence of medieval chainmail armor, longships, cavalry tactics, castle architecture, and the appearance of Halley's Comet.

4. Personal, Psychological, and Emotional Expression

For many artists, visual creation is primarily an inward-facing necessity—a vehicle for exploring personal identity, articulating intense psychological trauma, working through grief, or grappling with mortality.

• Käthe Kollwitz (1867–1945): Her prints address poverty, grief and war through compressed figures and expressive value. Woman with Dead Child (1903) is an etching with drypoint and other tonal work; The Mothers (1921–1922, published 1923) is a woodcut from the War portfolio. Her son Peter's death in 1914 intensified an existing concern with loss rather than preceding the 1903 work. Identify each work's actual medium and date before explaining its technique or context.
• Frida Kahlo (1907–1954): Mexican painter whose deeply autobiographical canvases merged Mexican folk art (retablos) with surreal, personal symbolic imagery. Having survived childhood polio and a catastrophic bus collision that shattered her spine and pelvis, Kahlo transformed chronic physical pain, multiple surgeries, and marital heartbreak into uncompromising self-portraits. In The Broken Column (1944), her torso is split open to reveal a crumbling ionic stone column in place of her fractured spine, while nails pierce her flesh and weeping eyes look out with resolute defiance. In The Two Fridas (1939), twin self-portraits connected by an exposed, severed artery explore her dual cultural heritage and the agony of emotional divorce.

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5. Utilitarian, Industrial, and Functional Design

Visual design functions critically in shaping the material objects and physical environments of everyday human life, negotiating the balance between functional utility, ergonomics, and aesthetic beauty.

The Arts and Crafts Movement

Emerging in late 19th-century Britain under the intellectual leadership of John Ruskin and William Morris, the Arts and Crafts movement reacted against the dehumanizing effects of the Industrial Revolution, the poor quality of factory mass-produced goods, and the alienation of factory workers:

• Core Ideals: Morris advocated for a return to handcrafted integrity, honest use of natural materials (wood, stained glass, hand-printed wallpaper), and the revival of medieval guild craftsmanship.
• Design Philosophy: Utilitarian home furnishings, furniture, and textiles should be aesthetically beautiful, durable, and crafted with pride, declaring: "Have nothing in your houses that you do not know to be useful or believe to be beautiful."

The Bauhaus (1919–1933) and Modern Industrial Design

Founded in Weimar, Germany, by architect Walter Gropius, the Bauhaus revolutionized 20th-century design by rejecting ornamental historicism and forging an alliance between art, craft, and modern industrial technology:

• Form Follows Function: Originally coined by American architect Louis Sullivan, this dictum became the foundational dogma of the Bauhaus. An object's external form must emerge directly and logically from its practical utility, material properties, and manufacturing method, stripped of superficial decoration.
• Industrial Prototyping: Master instructors (such as Marcel Breuer, Marianne Brandt, and Wilhelm Wagenfeld) designed functional prototypes engineered for mass production. Breuer's Wassily Chair (Model B3) revolutionized furniture by utilizing tubular steel inspired by bicycle handlebars paired with taut canvas strips, creating a lightweight, hygienic, structurally transparent domestic seat.

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6. Social Protest, Resistance, and Political Activism

Visual art has long served as a potent weapon of resistance, unmasking state sanctioned atrocities, challenging institutional injustice, and mobilizing mass social movements.

• Francisco de Goya's The Third of May, 1808 (1814): Commemorating the brutal execution of Spanish freedom fighters by Napoleon's occupying French soldiers following an uprising in Madrid. Goya shattered traditional heroic depictions of military warfare. The French firing squad is rendered as an anonymous, faceless mechanical execution machine with rifles raised in unison. In contrast, the central Spanish martyr—a humble peasant in a bright white shirt—flings his arms wide in a cruciform gesture of defiance, his face illuminated by a box lantern on the ground as blood pools at his feet. Goya's companion series of etchings, The Disasters of War, provided an unflinching documentary record of wartime rape, torture, and famine.
• Pablo Picasso's Guernica (1937): A monumental 25-foot oil painting protesting the horrific aerial saturation bombing of the defenseless Basque village of Guernica by Nazi German and Fascist Italian warplanes at the behest of Spanish Nationalist general Francisco Franco. Painted in stark, monochromatic grays, blacks, and whites resembling newsprint, Guernica rejects heroic narrative in favor of universal visceral terror: a disemboweled horse screaming in agony, a grieving mother clutching her lifeless infant, a fallen warrior clutching a shattered sword, and a disembodied electric light bulb resembling a mechanical eye of torture.
• ACT UP and Gran Fury (Silence = Death, 1987): During the peak of the HIV/AIDS epidemic in the 1980s, the grassroots activist group ACT UP (AIDS Coalition to Unleash Power) and its artistic affinity group Gran Fury deployed graphic design to confront governmental apathy and public homophobia. The iconic Silence = Death poster appropriated the pink triangle—the badge used by Nazi concentration camps to identify homosexuals—inverted its orientation to point upward as a symbol of active defiance, and set it against a stark black background beneath bold sans-serif typography. The graphic weaponized visual culture to demand urgent clinical trials and public health funding.

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7. Commemoration, Memorialization, and Collective Mourning

Communities construct monuments and memorials to preserve historical memory, honor collective sacrifice, and provide sacred spaces for public grief.

• The Taj Mahal (Agra, India, 1632–1653): Commissioned by Mughal Emperor Shah Jahan as a monumental white marble mausoleum for his beloved wife Mumtaz Mahal. Beyond its personal grief, the complex functions as an architectural earthly physicalization of the heavenly gardens of Paradise described in the Quran. Set within a classical charbagh (four-quartered paradise garden) with reflecting pools, its perfect bilateral symmetry, floral marble inlays (pietra dura), and soaring dome symbolize eternal love, imperial majesty, and spiritual transcendence.
• Maya Lin's Vietnam Veterans Memorial (Washington, D.C., 1982): Lin's design represented a radical departure from traditional figurative war monuments. Selected through an open anonymous competition while Lin was a 21-year-old Yale undergraduate, the memorial consists of two 246-foot polished black granite walls cut into the earth, forming an open V that points toward the Washington Monument and Lincoln Memorial:
  • Subverting Triumphalist Heroism: Instead of heroic bronze soldiers planted high on a pedestal, the memorial is sunken into the ground, resembling an open wound cut into the earth that is gradually healing.
  • Chronological Inscription: The names of over 58,000 fallen and missing service members are carved into the stone not alphabetically, but chronologically by date of casualty, allowing visitors to locate their loved ones within the narrative arc of the war.
  • Reflective Encounter: The mirror-like black granite reflects the living visitor's face directly over the etched names of the dead, creating an intimate, participatory threshold where the living and the fallen meet in solemn communion.

Comparative Overview of Visual Art Functions

The following table illustrates how different artworks embody distinct societal, political, and cultural functions across historical eras: