Tag: War art

The instinct and talent to paint pictures is mysterious to those of us who possess neither. I suppose the inclination and some of the talent is god-given and then is nourished by training and practice. When it comes to soldier-and-veteran artwork, many of the same questions arise as in regard to writing about war: What story does the painting tell? What were the circumstances of its production? What were the artists trying to achieve? How do we measure quality and achievement? What constitutes a “beautiful” war painting? Can a war painting be an “anti-war” painting? How are stock scenes transformed and transcended? Can they be, or should they even try? Who are the artists, and what is their story? What makes them tick? Do paintings romanticize or glorify war? Can creating art about war experience be therapeutic?  

From the viewer’s perspective, paintings, far-more-so than writing, are instantaneously apprehensible. An emotional response and aesthetic judgement is formed as soon as a painting is viewed. And yet, lasting cultural presence is harder to establish for art than for writing: The mechanisms of cultural memory so at-hand in book publication and book sales and preservation in libraries are diffuse when it comes to art. Exhibitions are acclaimed in the moment, but pictures are viewed quickly and easily moved-on from. The exhibit is soon over, paintings are sold or not, and most will never be publicly viewed again. No one bats an eye at reading a reproduction of an author’s narrative, but paintings somehow imply that contemplating anything but the original artwork is a necessarily diminished experience. And even if saved on the Internet, paintings can languish unnoticed for years and decades, orphaned from all but most determined of curious observers, the sites buried more deeply in digital obscurity than even the dustiest of books on a library shelf.

Such were my sobering thoughts as I dedicated a few days to exploring contemporary soldier art available on the  Internet. An interesting aspect of war-art is that the military itself sanctions and supports it, through official “combat-artist” programs and also links to artwork featured on military museum and archive websites. Search-term entries took me first to a book published by the U.S. Army Center for Military History called Army Artists Look at the War on Terrorism, 2001 to the Present, and available in full online in PDF and HTML. Army Artists Look at the War on Terrorism features eight artists, all of whom served in the Army or were associated with it on deployments to Iraq, Afghanistan, and Kuwait, as well as train-ups for deployment in the US. The volume is silent about what “the Present” date is that it refers to in the title, but I am guessing it was published sometime around 2010.

Over 90 paintings are included, in a variety of mediums such as oil, watercolor, pencil, etc. All the pictures are representational rather than figurative, with the most obvious artistic effect being heightened coloring and various ways of situating the paintings’ principal subjects. The collection clearly intends to represent different facets of a soldier’s experience—from pre-deployment to combat to camp life to interaction with locals to various maintenance and support activities. Below are three pictures I enjoyed contemplating:

A second stop on the Internet journey was an issue of the National Endowment of the Arts journal NEA Arts published in 2012 themed “The Soul of America: The Arts and the Military.” All the articles in the issue connect artistic expression to contemporary soldiering. A particular emphasis is on art as a means of understanding complicated war experiences; one article, for example, profiles Veterans Writing Project founder Ron Capps. An article titled “Seeing is Believing: War Through the Eyes of a Combat Artist” zeroes in on former-Marine combat-artist Michael Fay and his project to honor wounded veterans The Joe Bonham Project (named after the war-wounded quadriplegic protagonist of Dalton Trumbo’s novel Johnny Got His Gun), which is affiliated with the National Museum of the Marine Corps. Fay’s painting below is striking, but far more startling are the others that accompany the article, featuring badly wounded soldiers and Marines:

My search next took me to the work of civilian painter Steve Mumford. Mumford has a large presence on the web, and a solid introduction to his work is an article he himself authored titled, “Fifteen Years Into the War in Afghanistan, an Embedded Artist Looks Back.” In it, Mumford describes how many of his paintings were inspired by multiple tours as an embedded artist with US military forces. In several pictures Mumford captures the deployment experience of female soldiers, such as this one:

Mumford also painted this stunner of a picture, which is perhaps my favorite of all the paintings I discovered over several days of searching:

A final stop on this Internet tour was an article that explored in detail the use of painting as therapy: “Creating Battle Signs: Iraq/Afghanistan, War Veterans, Art Therapy, and Rehabilitation.” As the title suggests, the article takes seriously the idea that grievously wounded veterans (physically and psychologically) might find expression for or escape from their pain by making art. The paintings offered for contemplation are by far the most non-representational, obviously figurative of any I’ve mentioned so far:

So, much art, all interesting and all to my eye accomplished. All put to different purposes: to document, to honor, to shock, to evoke, to help, to express. I invite you to spend more time with the artists, paintings, articles, and books I have canvassed here.

The Theater of Operations: The Gulf Wars, 1991-2011 exhibit currently running at the Museum of Modern Art’s PS1 annex in Long Island City, Queens, New York, has all the trappings of a major art-world event. Not just the MoMA imprimatur, but its size and obvious commitment to showcasing major artists signal intent to make a significant statement about how the First and Second Iraq Wars were fought and how they have been portrayed in art in Iraq and America and Great Britain. As such, when Theater of Operations opened last November, it was covered by mainstream press giants such as the New York Times and The Guardian. The Times and Guardian reviews were mostly approving, but a discordant, brooding note was struck by the New Yorker‘s Peter Schjeldahl, who seemed irritated by the spirit of the exhibit and unimpressed by much that he observed.

In Schjeldahl’s review, which at best damned Theater of Operations with faint praise, the author ruminated on the relationship of art and war, and his skepticism that great art might result from war resonated loud and clear. Adding poignancy to and perhaps justification for the bummer review was a long article called “The Art of Dying” by Schjeldahl in the next week’s New Yorker, in which the author not only revealed he was dying of cancer but spent significant page-space reminiscing about the long sad after-effects of his father’s service in Europe in World War II as an infantryman. Since Schjeldahl felt war had ruined his father and the Schjeldahl family happiness, it was hard not to think that his life’s commitment to art lay in belief that art constituted a realm of human endeavor opposite to and incompatible with warfaring and militarism.

Just as I was taking all this in, another furor arose: Apparently, Theater of Operations is partially funded by a corporation directly connected to Blackwater. O unholy alliance of money, blood, and art! Was it ever not so? Can it ever not be so?

Eager to make sense of things for myself, I visited MoMA PS1 a couple of weekends ago. The Theater of Operations exhibit occupies the better part of three floors of the renovated schoolhouse that constitutes the museum. Most of the artworks in Theater of Operations stem from the First Gulf War, and most are creations of Iraqi artists. Many of these artworks portray horrifying images of forty years of nearly continuous war in Iraq, while others are non-representational works that allow viewers to consider their relation to war obliquely. The artworks by Americans are almost all polemically anti-war and anti-Republican administration in intent and execution. Very few, though, are of or by soldiers; the American soldiers’ experience of war is largely limited to a series of photographs of deploying soldiers, their faces etched with both gravity and innocence, and another series of photographs illustrating political protests by veterans against the war.

Many of the artworks by American artists are not especially subtle:

Others reflect more artistic or less strident processing of war events and impressions.

A few large-scale installations work hard to impress themselves upon viewers. “Untitled (Iraq Book Project),” for example, by Rachel Khedoori, features everything available on the Internet about the Second Iraq War printed out and presented for inspection in bound volumes. The piece seems to speak to the over-saturation of words about the war and the strained effort to find words equal to the real events, anguish, and loss on the ground.

Another piece, “Hotel Democracy” by Thomas Hirschhorn, features twenty-some cubicle like living spaces, some reflective of soldier quarters on military FOBs and others the living spaces of Iraqi civilians hunkered down in tiny rooms, the inhabitants reduced to poverty and trying to survive sans community. The message here seems to address both the drive for individuals to personalize their living spaces in the face of war’s deprivations, while also speaking to the essentially cloistered and unnourishing inhumanity of those same living spaces.

Many many many pieces feature TV, drone, and video footage, as if to comment on how the war was made known through the unreliable necessity of second-hand images.

Schjeldahl objected in particular to this aspect of Theater of Operations. He suggested that the exhibit’s acknowledged debt to Jean Baudrillard’s famous “The Gulf War Did Not Take Place” manifesto was morally facile and factually incorrect (real people, he implied, and I’m thinking he was thinking of his father, understand war not through images but by killing other people while trying to stay alive themselves). The sense was also that creating artwork around TV footage of, say, a news pundit describing “shock and awe,” was artistically lazy and cliched. Hmm, maybe…. One video installation I appreciated very much, “Shadow Sites II” by Jananne Al-ani, projects a series of drone or satellite shots of sculpted Iraqi landscapes on a giant screen in a darkened room. I found the slow-moving, nearly static videos engrossing—an overwhelming sensory experience at once ominous and soothing.

Some of the artworks by Iraqi artists also riff on the shock power of photographic images:

All told, my favorite pieces were paintings by Iraqi artists. I might say I “liked” them, but that seems wrong, for pleasurable enjoyment is not what the art of war is all about. English appears to lack the word to properly describe apprehension of artworks inspired by carnage and documenting atrocity. The most we can do, I’d say, is appreciate the drive to create art under terrible circumstances and contemplate their terrifying majesty.

The exhibition’s intent is clearly not to privilege American soldier perspectives and for God’s sake not to cultivate sympathy for American soldiers or absolve them of their complicity in the wars. That’s OK, but just OK—I think exhibition attendees would like to balance consideration of work by Iraqi and American civilian-artists with that of art created by military veterans. In my mind, the picture-and-text assemblages of Benjamin Busch (displayed at the 2010 War, Literature and the Arts conference), the FOB barrier murals collected by Graffiti of War (displayed at West Point in 2014), and Maximilian Uriarte’s superb Terminal Lance line drawings (as displayed in 2018 at Rutgers’ Zimmerli Art Museum) all would have sat very well alongside the artists and art featured in Theater of Operations. And what art might we find, if we looked, created by Iraqi soldiers and insurgents?

Further proof of the intent to exclude the voice of the American soldier was found in the museum bookstore offerings associated with the exhibit. On my visit, the only fiction featured  were three titles by Iraqi-American author Sinan Antoon. Antoon’s great, but conspicuous by its absence was fiction by American author Iraq War veterans such as Phil Klay, Matt Gallagher, or even the scathingly dissident Roy Scranton, or “anti-war” novels by civilians such as Helen Benedict’s Sand Queen, or the searching and complex Iraq War poetry of civilian Philip Metres and veteran Brian Turner. The shelves were also missing titles by terrific and important Iraqi authors such as Hassan Blasim and Ahmed Saadawi, which was curious. And finally, I appreciated seeing Susan Sontag’s Regarding the Pain of Others, whose ideas about war imagery are central, but I would have loved to have also seen works by Ariella Azoulay, whose extrapolations of Sontag’s ideas takes us ever-nearer to understanding the vexed intertwining of violence, image, and art.

OK, OK, everyone’s a critic, and everyone is potentially a curator, right? Be all the above as it may, I invite you to reflect on the MoMA PS1 Theater of Operations exhibit as you will and as you can, hopefully in person or if not that, then by reading the articles it has inspired.

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A little outside the purview of the exhibition review, but perhaps not too far: I was struck by the MoMA P1’s exterior and interior appearance, which makes little effort to hide the time-worn wrinkles and scars of the old school, even as it tacks on a number of modern adornments. The postindustrial-chic building and the jury-rigged exhibition spaces made me think of the half-wrecked government buildings repurposed as army outposts I inhabited on deployments to Kosovo and Afghanistan. I never served in Iraq, but I’m sure it was something of the same there.