Circa 116: Review
This ain’t no fooling
around
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| Josephine Meckseper:
Untitled (detail), 2005
laser prints, Ed. 5 |
In The New shock of the new,1 critic Robert Hughes made the claim that no political art has been made since Picasso’s Guernica in 1937. Leon Golub might well have disagreed with that statement or, closer to home, so may artists such as Jack Packenham, Locky Morris, Willie Doherty and Dermot Seymour. What has been missing from art post-Guernica, however, is that sense of focused outrage: the idea of a work that will function as an agent of change. In the case of the current war in Iraq, there has been no iconic art-image symbolising the senses of helplessness, outrage, shock and horror and of grief that the war has engendered. Instead, our defining and iconic images have come from the perpetrators themselves, via the media. The photographs of torture from Abu Ghraib prison jolted an image-saturated public, generated discussion, led calls for change. They created a fleeting feeling that the lies of ‘liberation’, ‘democracy’ and ‘freedom’ at the heart of the excuses for the war would be seen for what they were. And then, very little happened. Very little changed. While history could come to see the Abu Ghraib photographs as a tipping point, what they symbolise now, perhaps more than anything, is impotence. We live in a world where images have lost their power.
Perhaps the difference between 1937 and 2006 lies not in art but in the public. The more access to the media we have, the more diffused its impact. Equally, because everyone can select which slant they would like their news served up with (Fox News or The New York Times, The Guardian or The Sun), most newspapers and broadcasters are preaching to an audience already converted. This is especially true in the so-called ‘neutral’ environs of the contemporary art gallery. This ain’t no fooling around and the associated Critical voices panel discussion were therefore predicated on the fact that those participating as audience and viewers would all have broadly similar attitudes towards the war which the works were addressing.
Curated by US critic and curator Joseph R Wolin, the exhibition borrows its title from the Talking Heads’ song Life during wartime, and borrows along with it the implication that despite the horrors of war, some form of ‘normal’ life goes on. In his introduction to the exhibition, Wolin notes that while “the war [in Iraq] is the defining geopolitical event of the present moment [… it] has shockingly little resonance in our daily lives.” Wolin also goes on to consider that “the American military adventure in Iraq is also little evident in most contemporary art.” Selecting a group of six artists (one Canadian, one Irish and four American) who do address the war, Wolin sees the grouping as “a primer of varying approaches – documentary, abstract, critical, symbolic, elegiac, and domestic, respectively – to art during wartime.” In fact there is relatively little abstraction in this exhibition. The primary artistic response to dealing with the war seems to have been to re-present or re-work existing imagery, or to adopt a journalistic approach.
Canadian artist, Stephen Andrews
takes images from the internet, and
redraws them with coloured
crayons rubbed through a screen.
The resulting pictures are
pixellated, hazy. They could be the
kind of scenes you might recognise
from an old television set, or from
newsprint. Their aesthetics are also
similar to that of the comic book or
graphic novel. Seen as still images,
or put together as animation,
Andrews’ process represents the
throwaway culture that consumes
our most significant scenes and
images. Describing, in the Critical
voices discussion, the internet sites
where he finds his source material,
Andrews refers to the “hopefully
redemptive nature” of his
depictions. This aspiration is set
against their context, both within a
brutal war, and online, where they
are often linked to sites containing
particularly unpleasant and sadistic
pornography.
Embedded with a regiment in Iraq,
Steve Mumford’s watercolours of
the daily life of both soldiers and
Iraqis are interesting for their
unsatisfactory nature. Why does
Mumford adopt the tools of a
pre-photography war artist? How
genuine is his detached view, his
uncritical gaze? Considering
further, what was most unsettling
about Mumford’s work (taken as a
wider body than the small selection
on show at the Rubicon allowed)
was how I quickly found that I like
my left-wing, anti-war politics to be
as black and white as the nearest
Bush supporter. Sympathy for
American soldiers, cast by my
media-brush after Abu Ghraib as
inhuman torturers, is a wrench.
Seeing these soldiers on patrol as
frightened young men and women
doing their best in a war not of their
own making is an uncomfortable
position to take for an arm-chair
anti-war campaigner.
What Mumford shows, in his hundreds of watercolours from his four trips to Iraq, and in his journals,2 is that vital other side to the story. In her New York Times article, Regarding the torture of others,3 Susan Sontag argued that the Abu Ghraib torture was “a direct consequence of the with-us-oragainst- us doctrines of world struggle” promulgated by the Bush administration. The prisoners were tortured because the rhetoric of the war had dehumanised them. What my initial response to Mumford’s paintings demonstrated is that such dehumanising can cut both ways. Even in the liberal confines of an art gallery.
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| Barbara Pollack: (still from) , 2005 three-channel DVD, 8 minute loop |
Both Tom Molloy and Barbara Pollack also work with images from Abu Ghraib. Molloy taking the image of a hooded man standing on a box, which he has earlier worked in pieces such as Crown. This time he presents it, with an unsettling confusion of object and subject matter, as the pattern on a roll of camouflage fabric. Molloy also presents a series of panels in which the Universal declaration of human rights has been translated into Arabic and cut into sheets of paper. Indecipherable (though not to readers of Arabic), it forms a pattern open to both scrutiny and misunderstanding. Meanwhile, Pollack’s video installation War dance shows her son Max (who is at the age most targeted by army recruiters) re-creating the image of a pyramid of bodies from Abu Ghraib, juxtaposed with scenes from Max’s birthday party. War dance plays on the casual violence of teenage boys, and also alludes to Sontag’s discussion of the way in which the right-wing media had sought to neutralise the effect of the Abu Ghraib photos.
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To “stack naked men” is like a college fraternity prank, said a caller to Rush Limbaugh and the many millions of Americans who listen to his radio show. Had the caller, one wonders, seen the photographs? No matter. The observation – or is it the fantasy? – was on the mark. What may still be capable of shocking some Americans was Limbaugh’s response: “Exactly!” he exclaimed. “Exactly my point. This is no different than what happens at the Skull and Bones initiation, and we’re going to ruin people’s lives over it, and we’re going to hamper our military effort, and then we are going to really hammer them because they had a good time.” “They” are the American soldiers, the torturers. And Limbaugh went on: “You know, these people are being fired at every day. I’m talking about people having a good time, these people. You ever heard of emotional release?” 4
Another Pollack video, not shown
in the exhibition, sees Max playing
a video game developed by the
US army to groom teenagers for
a career with them. With the
domesticity implied by the
mother-son relationship at their
core, what Pollack’s videos
demonstrate is the awful normality
of violence and brutality at the
heart of middle American culture.
Also at the heart of American
culture is commerce, and Josephine
Meckseper’s contribution to the
exhibition turns on the idea of
political protest being just another
thing to do, a consumer choice in a
society where political activism is
commodified and commercialised.
This was less evident from the work
Meckseper had on show at the
Rubicon than from an exploration
of her wider practice. Wolin’s
description of the exhibition as a
‘primer’ is worth remembering here,
as I found the impact of the issues
raised by the artists would have
been amplified if more pieces by
each had been exhibited.
In this context, the work of one of
the most interesting artists, Marc
Handelman, almost lost its effect in
the group nature of the exhibition.
Handelman is the only artist of the
six not to rely on recognizable
imagery, creating instead abstract
paintings that allude to the shared
iconography of bastions of the
American right (such as Fox News)
and the Fascist architecture of
Albert Speer.
Questioned about the preponderance
of work reusing existing
imagery, Stephen Andrews and
Tom Molly both talked about the
way in which we are subjected to
so many images from the war,
and how their work is an attempt
to make us really notice them.
Concluding the Critical voices
discussion, moderator Liam
Kennedy from the Clinton Institute
for American Studies at UCD
asked, “should we, could we, invest
the image with a belief that it can
change things?” The history of the
war, the works in this exhibition,
and the ensuing discussion at the
RHA would suggest that while
experience shows we can’t, we will
nonetheless persist in doing so.
Gemma Tipton is a writer
and critic of contemporary
art and architecture based
in Dublin.
