URL originale : https://books.openedition.org/pur/197116

Objects at War: Soldier-Artists in Afghanistan
p. 225-240
Résumés
War evokes national desires of supremacy, dominance, financial gain and power; it also activates individual desires for peace, normality, emotional balance and ordinary life, especially among soldiers and veterans. Some soldiers engaged in Afghanistan symbolically escape through their drawings, sketches, watercolors, and oil paintings. They capture in images the soldiers’ longings for peace, visibility and recognition. Their art seeks to rescue the dead and to honor those who did not return, physically and/or psychologically. The texts that accompany the war images in War Artists in Afghanistan: Beyond the Wire (2016) suggest that objects of desire could be banal, but also that those objects and desires become as confusing as the sand that made the difference between friend and foe disappear. In the end, survival undoubtedly became the sole object of desire for some.
La guerre évoque des désirs nationaux de suprématie, de domination, de gains financiers et de pouvoir, mais également des désirs individuels de paix, de normalité, d’équilibre émotionnel et de vie ordinaire, notamment chez les soldats et les vétérans. Des soldats engagés en Afghanistan s’évadent avec leurs dessins, croquis, aquarelles et peintures à l’huile. Ils capturent en images les aspirations des soldats à la paix, à la visibilité et à la reconnaissance. Leur art cherche à sauver les morts et à honorer ceux qui ne sont pas revenus intacts, physiquement et/ou psychologiquement. Les textes qui accompagnent les images de guerre dans War Artists in Afghanistan : Beyond the Wire (2016) suggèrent que les objets de désir peuvent être des objets banals, mais aussi que ces objets et ces désirs sont devenus aussi déroutants que le sable qui faisait disparaître la différence entre ami et ennemi. En fin de compte, la survie est sans doute devenue pour certains le seul objet de désir.
Entrées d’index
Mots-clés : art de guerre, Jules George, Afghanistan, objets matériels, Tim O'Brien
Keywords : war art, Jules George, Afghanistan, material objects, Tim O'Brien
Texte intégral
1War evokes national desires of supremacy, dominance, financial gain and power, but it also activates individual desires for peace, normality, emotional balance and ordinary life, especially among soldiers and veterans. Those who have come to know war articulate desire through material objects, such as a gun or a cigarette, through marks or scars or missing limbs, and through medals and corpses. These objects capture the materiality of practice, because they are enacted and embodied. Ultimately, they speak of desires, or frustrated attempts at fulfilling them. Artist-soldiers engaged or embedded in Afghanistan move beyond the camp wires with their sketch pads, watercolors, and oil paint so as to seize the desert beauty, the comrades on patrol or engaged in a firefight, and the arrivals and departures of Chinook helicopters. In War Artists in Afghanistan, Beyond the Wire (2016),1 edited by Jules George, the artists—Michael D. Fay, Matthew Cook, Arabella Dorman, Douglas Farthing, and Jules George himself—represent in images the desires that thicken the dry air in Helmand Province and the deployed soldiers’ longings for peace, visibility and recognition. Their art seeks to rescue the dead and to honor, if not restore, those who did not return, physically or psychologically.
2The war artists provide with accounts that might be labeled documentary or autobiographical their own first-hand impressions of the situations and contexts in which their art was produced. The texts that accompany the war images suggest that objects of desire might be a beer, a pen, a camera or a pizza, but also that objects and desires become as confusing as the sand that makes the difference between friend and foe disappear. For the embedded artists, the “thingness of war” stimulates their color pens and brushes, and the difference between object and desire vanishes in their primary object of desire: to create their art. But in visualizing objects of war, and war itself, they also aestheticize the war effort. War may be beautiful, or exciting, to those who view the art produced in Afghanistan, but the death, despair and destruction that artists omit or cannot represent go missing.
3In acknowledging and focusing on the objects of war, several of the contemporary artists gesture towards a previous generation of soldiers in Vietnam. In describing or sketching helicopters and tents and cooking fires like those carried to or used in Vietnam, they draw on war iconography and war writers who have themselves highlighted the materiality of war. Especially Tim O’Brien’s Vietnam book The Things They Carried becomes a shadow text for the art works in War Artists, since both O’Brien’s title and the story “The Things They Carried,” which opens his collection, emphasize war objects and their significance:
The things they carried were largely determined by necessity. Among the necessities or near-necessities were P-38 can openers, pocket knives, heat tabs, wristwatches, dog tags, mosquito repellent, chewing gum, candy, cigarettes, salt tablets, packets of Kool-Aid, lighters, matches, sewing kits, Military Payment Certificates, C rations, and two or three canteens of water. Together, these items weighed between 15 and 20 pounds, depending upon a man’s habits or rate of metabolism.2
4Like O’Brien, the artists and soldiers representing war in Afghanistan zoom in on things and their emotional and symbolic significance. O’Brien’s soldiers carry things that constitute the heavy burden of America itself and the weight of the nation’s expectations. This task echoes in Michael D. Fay’s painting of a marine carrying a huge coil of barbed wire, which signifies not only the weight and burdens of individual soldiers, but also the dangers lurking in the Afghan desert and the protection these dangers necessitate. The image suggests as well Fay’s criticism of American intrusion into a landscape now abandoned by the Afghans. The native population has over generations exposed rows of soil for farming, but they have now abandoned this effort. The soldier carries his burden, and the guilt of his nation.
5War artists in Afghanistan do not constitute a homogenous group. Jules George, a professional artist, secured a place on a trip to Helmand in Afghanistan sanctioned and sponsored by the Army Media Operations of the British Ministry of Defense, a deployment called Hendrich 11, and he spent only a short time in Afghanistan. Michael D. Fay is a retired US Marine Corps Chief Warrant Officer, who from 2000 to 2009 was the primary official combat artist for the National Museum of the Marine Corps in Quantico, Virginia. Matthew Cook travelled to Afghanistan as a war artist on seven occasions between 2006 and 2013, while Arabella Dorman worked and travelled with British and Afghan forces in Afghanistan between 2009 and 2014. Finally, Douglas Farthing, a Warrant Officer with the Parachute Regiment, served in the military for 23 years, which included tours to Afghanistan, Iraq, Macedonia and Northern Ireland. The close ties to military institutions, or the involvement with war as a profession or a practice, may explain the distance to horror, dead bodies, and other costs of war that the art coming out of Afghanistan suggests.
6Several of the artists consciously work within a tradition of war art. Jules George mentions especially Paul Nash and includes in War Artists a two-page spread of his oil painting “The Menin Road” from 1919, which depicts a devastated battlefield with rain-filled shell-holes, flooded trenches and shattered trees lit by light from a brutal sky. Concrete blocks, barbed wire and corrugated iron dominate the foreground, while columns of mud from artillery fire rise up in the background. Arabella Dorman shares with Elisabeth Butler an interest in the everyday life of war. Jules George includes in his book Butler’s “The Remnants of an Army” (1917), but does not comment on it. Dorman explains her connection to Lady Butler: “I have always been fascinated by the power of the still image to express human history and I seek to depict the people of Afghanistan and the soldiers serving there in the more intimate spaces of their everyday lives.”3 Butler portrays in her painting William Brydon arriving at the gates of Jalalabad in January 1842, the only survivor of an evacuation from Kabul that originally counted 16,500 people. Butler shows him in a human, lonely moment after destruction and tragedy.
7The artists also comment on the genre of war art and ascribe to it a grounding, object-oriented quality missing in TV news and on the Internet. Jules George explains:
By contrast, drawing and painting have an innate human quality and a tangible physicality and expression. They speak to us in a timeless and direct way, provoking a deeper thought process. Making a drawing ‘in situ’ forces you to look and look again and to consider what you’re studying—it demands interpretation and understanding. It is hard and arduous and one is not always assured of a result. These factors combine subconsciously to give such gravitas to the human mark and create its inherent nature.4
8Art goes deeper than other media in representing war and the objects, actors and emotions it involves.
9The genre of war art also allows for gaps and silences, for what cannot be shown. Perhaps horror does not lend itself to structures of language and visual representation, or political considerations prevent the artists tied to military institutions from depicting the death and the corpses that the public must not see. In Jules George’s “Drawing on the move” (2010) and “10 hours on the ground” (2010), soldiers disappear into the blank space that fills most of the paper. In the latter, soldiers are tiny figures forming a curved line, the ones closest to viewers recognizable as soldiers, but at the front of the line, farthest away, they are tiny dots on a light grey background that seems to swallow the small blotches of dark watercolor. By including the unsaid and the unrepresented, the art form holds aspects of war that must not or cannot be imagined. American ex-patriate Gertrude Stein called this absence something “inaccrochable” and discussed with young Hemingway in Paris “unhangable” works of art.5 The locality—the grounding of the war in Afghanistan— enters only indirectly through the connection between the grey and the desert, or through the Afghan lapis lazuli oil paint that gives many of Jules Georges’s war paintings their blue washes. The caption of “The Crossing” (2012) reads: “The use of local pigments on paintings of Afghanistan felt symbolic and appropriate.”6 In this painting, an Afghan on a white horse crosses a deep blue sheet of water on his way to sandy ground. The pigment and his unobstructed, quiet journey suggest his connection to the locale, which is half a deep, beautiful blue and half the shades of brown, mauve and beige that extend into the sky above the horseman.
10The tools and objects of war fill the canvases of all the artists in War Artists. They paint or sketch the aircraft that dwarfs the mechanics maintaining them, as in Michael D. Fay’s “EA-6B Prowler, Bagram” (2005), in which Marine technicians repair the engine of an electronic fighter jet. His “Corporal William Simmons, VMAQ-3, Bagram Airfield” (2005), where the aircraft dominates the watercolor image, has a similar effect. Simultaneously, the aircraft offers security by enclosing the soldiers, like a protective womb, for example in Matthew Cook’s “Lashar Gah” (2013). The helicopters, which also provided the sound track for Vietnam War films, return in representations of the Afghanistan war effort. Cook comments on his helicopter watercolors, presumably nudged by unspecified outside parties:
I was asked to paint the Russian Mi-8 helicopters as they flew supplies from Kabul. The terrain to the north was spectacular and lush compared to the south. I liked the irony of Russian pilots providing US troops with supplies in Afghanistan, and I love drawing helicopters. These civilian helicopters and crew had no protection or way of defending themselves, and teased me for wearing body armor. Several had been shot over the years.7
11Cook sketched using an image intensifier to view troops leaving on a night operation: “I had never seen a sketch using night-vision, and was fascinated to have a go at the blurred green image. I painted with my right eye dimmed from the low light of looking through the sight.”8 The result would be haunting representations of helicopters on a toxic green background, everything else reduced to black silhouettes and horizontal lines, lurking danger everywhere. His helicopters establish a connection to past wars, but the technology—another thing—also performs temporality, the passing of time. Things constitute a point in time made tangible, but as artifacts of their time, they signal change as well.
12Fascination and difficult working conditions accompany other material objects such as urinals and pizza huts set up in camp. Jules George comments on the “thingness” of war, O’Brien fashion: “I could not believe the sheer scale of the operation and had never considered what was needed behind the scenes to keep an army going: the convoys of trucks bringing in supplies night and day, the incessant construction, blast walls, helicopters, vast cook houses. Every little detail imaginable had been thought of.”9 He lists “helmets, body armor, rifles, magazines, Vallon metal detectors, maps, medical packs and, of course, plenty of water, usually carried in a ‘camel’s back’”10 In a similar move, he puts his own “idiosyncratic, specialist ‘artist’s kit’ together.”11 Things dominate war, for soldiers and artists alike. They emphasize objects necessary for survival, but a lingering desire for the everyday objects of normality turns up in paintings of the Afghani in their own habitat: market vegetables, a cooking pot, a book. In “Thing Theory,” Bill Brown mentions the “return of the real” in contemporary art, and he also notes that things might offer “some stable alternative to the instabilities and uncertainties, the ambiguities and anxieties”12 around us, however illusory such an alternative might be. Matthew Cook’s “Nad e-Ali” (2009) depicts the soldiers’ urinals, drainpipe tubes they call “desert roses.” The urinals promise business as usual, a desire for normal routines, but these objects do not protect soldiers from the violence outside the walled-in compound. In fact, a mother later contacted Cook to tell him that her son’s name appeared in the graffiti to the right of the urinal, scribbled before he was killed in an explosion.13 In Arabella Dorman’s “Faces of the Fallen” (2012), a soldier in full gear merges with the photographs of British soldiers killed in action in the background. Despite the tragedy of these losses, the mixed-media tribute to the fallen reassures its viewers at the Westminster Abbey’s Field of Remembrances. As Roland Barthes reminds us in Camera Lucida (1981; Fr. La Chambre claire, 1980), photographs are the hero’s locus of identity, and a space celebrating death.14
13The objects of war have fluid boundaries, though Jules George sets up a dichotomy between the Afghan landscape and the war machinery: “These two distinct and opposing elements made a lasting impression on me in this theatre of war. On the one hand, the vast and stunning landscape, inhabited by seemingly ancient peoples wearing traditional costume, and on the other the sudden episodes of brutal violence conducted by the modern tools and machines of war.”15 But objects frequently consume or obliterate the surrounding landscape, as in his oil painting of soldiers entering a helicopter that looks like a live frog, “Beyond the Wire” (2010). The helicopter has huge, staring eyes while the soldiers entering its mouth merge with the sand and the sky, all colored beige. Douglas Farthing’s “Jackals in the Outback” (undated) has jeeps watch and wait, like jackals, almost indistinguishable from the sand and mauve hills protecting them. In one of Jules George’s paintings, “Inside Mastiff 33A” (2011), the landscape enters an aircraft full of withdrawing soldiers seen only as light and air and sky. Similarly, landscape and machinery merge in Matthew Cook’s “Lashkar Gah Durai” (2012), perhaps the most obvious blurring of the lines where objects begin and context ends. Even the boundary between war and art evaporates on occasion, as Jules George recalls: “A sniper, his sights incorrectly set, did not bother to fire at an obvious target and a trooper from the next vehicle raced over seeking a knife, desperate to open a new ammo box to continue the fight. On this occasion my penknife had to suffice.”16 In one of his sketches, “Outbound” (2010), a blood stain and a tear in the paper suggest the connection, rather than the distinction, between the art object and the war all around it. Here the act of sketching seeks to reinstall art as an object of desire, in the face of objects connoting suffering and despair.
14While some of the art work above suggests a personification of objects, the locals in Afghanistan become objectified, not least because of the artist’s dominant gaze. Like the colonial “seeing man” in Marie Louise Pratt’s Imperial Eyes, several artists describe the locals as frozen in time and place, inscrutable masses of people who merge with the landscape or inhabit a contact zone in which they represent timelessness and biblical archetypes.17 Jules George’s text may represent this perspective: “I was fascinated by the local Pashtuns who sat opposite the gates from dawn to dusk, seemingly watching and waiting for something to happen. I found them hard to read, almost inscrutable. You could not tell if they were friend or foe but I was entranced by their medieval-like garments and turbans.”18 George’s fascination with the Pashtuns establishes them as absolute Others, their inscrutable, exotic existence triggering his artistic impulses, his desire to create. In another written comment, he again sees the locals as a mass, inhabiting a distant past and seen though a biblical lens: “I was struck by the innate beauty of the surrounding landscape, reminiscent of a biblical scene. In the distance, under the inevitable haze of dust, small figures, many dressed in bright garments, went about their chores outside compounds. In the foreground, amongst the trees, shepherds tended their flocks or peacefully worked the fields.”19 The mass, the distance in time, the archetypes replacing historical agents all situate the embedded artist as Pratt’s dominant, western seeing man, who desires conquest and control. In this project, locals become things, irrelevant as agents of their own projects and simply props in George’s own.
15The Afghans may be covered by objects, as in Douglas Farthing’s undated “Prisoner of War Handling,” which shows the middle figure, dressed in white, with a white bag over his head, the combination of color—and the echo of the 2004 photos from the Abu Ghraib prison in Iraq—reducing him to object status. Native inhabitants of Afghanistan generally appear as Other in War Artists, incomprehensible and indistinguishable from those around them. In some cases they have vanished, possibly because they do not matter, while the objects of daily life remain, as in Matthew Cook’s depiction of an Afghan dwelling, “Nar-e Sara” (2012), where the bright purple and the kitchen utensils take the place of the residents. Occasionally, the objects connote a desire for communication, a shared humanity across cultures. In “Police District 8, Kabul” (2006), Matthew Cook depicts an elderly man sitting on a stool in his shop, reading. His book is bright red, while the rest of the watercolor sketch, including the figure, remains a greyish beige. The book may function as a cultural bridge, but Cook’s comment stresses the mediated nature of the encounter: “I never found out what he sold, but I did think of The Bookseller of Kabul.”20 Accordingly, two books—one painted in red and the other remembered—fail to establish a contact between the artist and his motif, the bright red representing a desire unfulfilled or, ultimately, unimportant.
16Other art pieces try to communicate. Arabella Dorman’s “Alchemy” (2014) invites the viewer into the circle of local women making biomass briquettes, her comment on the oil painting noting that “the warmth, generosity and laughter of the people coming together was contagious.”21 Her note suggests, in short, that the artist has created a bridge between herself and the Afghan women, with the briquettes as mediators. Nevertheless, Dorman’s caption, “Alchemy” and another section of her commentary suggest a distancing similar to Cook’s: “Despite being pressed on all sides, I hope I managed to capture something of the mystical, alchemic quality of the scene.”22 Like the smoke and fog blocking the path between the working women and the artist and viewer, the text wraps the women in magic and mystery, so as to remove them into an unreal world that blocks cultural or perceptive exchanges. In this portrait of Afghan women, Dorman produces and over-represents the idea of the stranger as unknowable, or, Sarah Ahmed argues in Strange Encounters, as that which must be expelled from the “the purified space of the community, the purified life of the good citizen.”23 Dorman and her viewers recognize the image of the stranger, a recognition embedded in a discourse of survival. It is, Ahmed writes, “a question of how to survive the proximity of strangers who are already figurable, who have already taken shape […].”24 Dorman desires the women to be exotic, mysterious, but is not interested in their community, individuality and daily lives as such. She prefers the magic, the enigmatic.
17In other Dorman art works, a kite or a football allows for humanity and communication. Yet the objects in a war zone always suggest danger, as Dorman explains in a diary entry: “A memorable match between Afghan and British soldiers, dust kicked up, catching the late afternoon sun. All the more poignant for the courage and trust required to play together after Captain Walter Barrie’s death. Remembrance Day, 2012: Walter Barrie was shot by an ANA soldier and comrade-in-arms whilst playing football.”25 By painting the match, the sun, the players, Dorman affirms the strength and beauty of life despite the death and destruction that may at any time destroy this idyll. In Douglas Farthing’s “The Blue Car” (undated), the soldiers have just been warned of an enemy car—blue—carrying a vehicle-born improvised explosive device, a so-called VBIED. Objects represent simultaneously a desire for communication and its failure: war is war, despite the smoke, the fog, and the clear, beautiful colors that may hide its ugliness.
18Bodies become objects or things in wartime Afghanistan art. Not only do soldiers always carry things, which constantly, in Brown’s formulation, “assert their presence and their power.”26 Things cover up soldiers’ bodies, as Michael D. Fay’s sketch of a marine’s required outfit makes clear. The artist’s arrows and notes point to the identity of things, rather than of soldiers: scarf, head sock, dust goggles with improvised sock cover, old style chin wrap, woodland pattern magazine pouches, and more. If individual soldiers exist, they merge with their uniforms, like Major Robert B. Farrell, commanding officer of Weapons Company, who, the artist explains, “hadn’t been out of his uniform in weeks.”27 The wartime emphasis on bodies and physicality suggests the literal, the concrete, the status of the body as object. Warm weather and water add to the weight and the dominance of clothes over human flesh and blood. Or the body becomes body parts, as death and horror take over. As Brown puts it, in “Thing Theory,” “we begin to confront the thingness of objects when they stop working for us: when the drill breaks, when the car stalls, when the windows get filthy […].”28 Bodies call attention to themselves as body parts, fragmented and violated. Artists in Afghanistan find and draw a suicide bomber’s head (Matthew Cook, “Mazar-e-Sharif” [2006]), or they know, like Michael D. Fay, that the legs of the crouching soldier to the left will have been blown off two weeks after he drew a Marin sniper team returning fire on Talibans at daybreak (“Returning sniper fire” [2013]). Ultimately, a body becomes a coffin, the final body as object in Matthew Cook’s “Helmand, February 2009.” In this watercolor, five anonymous soldiers, seen from the back, carry a coffin wrapped in an American flag into the blackness that covers two thirds of the image. The body of their comrade inside the coffin remains invisible, covered by tree and flag, symbols of the nation that sends young men to war but will not display dead bodies. Again objects speak about desires to hide war realities, about nationalism, about monitoring responses of the American public, and about tragedy.
19Things are liminal, to the point of being absent while present. The word “things,” Brown explains, holds within it an “audacious ambiguity.” It designates “the concrete yet ambiguous within the everyday: ‘Put it by that green thing in the hall.’”29 In the context of war artistry, this ambiguity translates into liminality, obscurity and absence. In this vein, Michael D. Fay has soldiers watch out for improvised explosive devices, IEDs, that are invisible but all-encompassing and deadly (“All Eyes Down” [2002]); an insurgent IED has been found by the Afghan Uniform Police and makes a rare occurrence in a Matthew Cook watercolor and ink rendition, “Pan Kalay Police Station” (2012). Arabella Dorman charts in “Hidden (The IED series)” (2014) the before, during and after of an IED explosion, without ever depicting the IEDs that remain hidden, but fatal. Douglas Farthing’s “Aftermath British Council Attack” (2011) demonstrates the deadly effect of a Taliban attack, with only the wrecked room in a teacher’s compound to suggest weapons and intent to kill. A missing eye and scars in the face of Marine veteran also call up the grenade that blasted his shattered face and arm (Michael D. Fay, “Lance Corporal Kyle Carpenter” [2011]), while the objects in Corporal Nicholas C. Kirven’s Memorial evoke still another ultimate absence: a soldier kneels before a rifle carrying a helmet, and the worn, empty boots of his fallen comrade. Objects also dissolve into smoke, or into a blast, with the dripping paint a tangible object representing the explosion in Jules George’s “Blast” (2011). Blasts or IEDs become objects, if colors only, in works by Douglas Farthing, a flash of red oil paint in “SIED” (undated) evoking the bomb that killed fifty-five people and injured more than two hundred in a market near a Shiite shrine. The dissolution of things into air, or into liminality, suggests a liquid power, the notion that power is everywhere and nowhere, or that it is at least decentralized, with no omniscience or central overview. This liquidity characterizes modern warfare, where enemies hide on the ground in Afghanistan and in global cyberspace as well.
20As in Tim O’Brien’s “The Things They Carried,” the material objects suggest burdens and desires. The artists carry the burden of creating, explaining and representing, but what they represent is in the end their own desires. Jules George desires primarily to connect with his past, with the absent father and grandfather whose wars he tries to share in a search for them, and for himself. He writes in the introduction: “I considered the journey my grandfather would have made by train and ship on his way to the trenches many years before.”30 In another gesture that distances him from the war he supposedly represents, he explains: “Quite frankly, for good or for bad, I wasn’t interested in the politics of Afghanistan. I wasn’t interested in the rights and wrongs, I wished merely to experience being with The British Army on active service and thereby perhaps understand a little more about both my father and grandfather and their respective experiences in Aden and Flanders.”31 In the war zone in Afghanistan, he encounters his grandfather, Alfred Charles Harvey, C Squadron 1st Essex Yeomanry, 1915, and his father, Lance Corporal Brian Lawrence George, on active service with “The Buffs” in Aden, late 1950s. They stare back at him, and his readers and viewers, from the old photos included, and from his art, which serves as his passport to the past, his own country of origin, and his manhood.
21Images in War Artists focus as well on peace of mind and freedom from Posttraumatic stress disorder (PTSD). Arabella Dorman paints beds and rumpled bedclothes as objects standing in for sleepless nights and haunted soldiers. Her diary fills in the blanks: “Nightmares. Flashbacks. Depression. Sleepless nights. Medication. Alcohol. Guilt. Anger. Blame. Isolation. Hope,”32 all listed elements represented in her “PTSD (Sleepless Series of 9)” (2009). This panel, divided into six images, repeats an almost identical scene, a bedroom with a queen-size bed. The colors change with day and night within a narrow range of brown and white, the curtains open or partially drawn in all frames. The bed appears in various stages of disorder to show the sleep disorder and lack of a regular schedule of its absent occupant, marred by PTSD and sleepless nights. In “Live Another Day” (2009), she paints despair and terror caught in a soldier’s eyes. The image depicts a young man’s face, with a weary, anguished expression, his eyes staring straight at the spectator. He is traumatized and has lost his voice and ability to communicate, the lower part of his face a blur. His skin is blotted with poetic words and phrases that articulate his pain and fear. Art is therapy, a path to healing, which the artists and the soldiers they represent all desire.
22Beyond the wire—in, through and beyond the object—is art. Jules George merges war, body and art supplies, literally: “The large interior pockets of my green DPM (Disruptive Pattern Material) assault vest were ideal for storing my sketchbooks; the exterior pockets, usually used for carrying rifle magazines, were filled with an assortment of pens, brushes, inks, paints and even a camera.”33 During an enemy attack, he puts art first, since he “had to seize the moment, however fleeting, to scrawl down some marks recording the events as they unraveled.”34 And though he was inspired by the bravery of the young men and women of the British Army, he concludes on the final outcome of his war experiences: “Finally, I’d also learned much about the craft and tradition of the war artist, a knowledge that made me hungry for more. Indeed, my return from Afghanistan felt just like the beginning of my learning process as an artist.”35 Matthew Cook and Douglas Farthing articulate this desire—to create art through the multiple and ill-defined objects of war—by merging art and object. Matthew Cook fuses war, terror, a material object and art in “Yakhchai” (2013), while Douglas Farthing’s sketches on an ammo box, “drawn quickly,” he explains, “onto a cartridge case container we had been using on the range that day.”36 War, as military analyst Claus von Clausewitz knew, is itself an art form.
23The question remains, however, about aestheticizing war. Many images and objects in War Artists are hauntingly beautiful. The torn-off head of suicide bomber might be the only sketch or painting in the collection that presents the uglier realities of the war in Afghanistan. Matthew Cook even writes on his sketch the gruesome details of the young Afghan’s death: he was praying in the Blue Mosque but negligently set off his bomb—and the note continues with details of scattered organs and innards. However, beauty dominates the artists’ vision, as in Jules George’s “End of the Day” (2011), which shows a Chinook helicopter flying home at dusk, with a stunning evening sky of rose color, grey, and cobalt blue, the helicopter with its load just a small, insignificant black silhouette on this splendid background. Similar beauty exudes from his oil on linen painting of “Battle,” in which a coalition of international troops and the Afghan National Army, aided by a red smokescreen that helps the soldiers cross open ground, launches an assault on Taliban positions. Grey, beige, brown and fabulous reds surround the silhouetted soldiers. The image calls up Clausewitz’s concept, “the fog of war,” which he explains in the English translation of Vom Kriege (1832): “War is the realm of uncertainty; three quarters of the factors on which action in war is based are wrapped in a fog of greater or lesser uncertainty. A sensitive and discriminating judgment is called for; a skilled intelligence to scent out the truth.”37 Alternatively, war itself vanishes in the red smoke, along with the slaughter that accompanies the attack. The ties to the British Ministry of Defense, or to the National Museum of the Marine Corps, to mention only the institutions sponsoring Jules George and Michael D. Fay, might help explain the emphasis on aesthetics over horror and death and encourage what critic Malcolm Cowley in the aftermath of WWI called “a spectatorial attitude.”38 The institutions prefer, it seems, a glossy version of war and not its brutality, its confusion and slaughter. Hemingway preferred the sense of bearing witness. Frances K. Pohl writes in Framing America: “Many are optimistic that the visions and stories of previously marginalized peoples are finally being told,” a category that might include the Afghans and even the private soldiers deployed far from home. But, she continues, “how they are told and by whom remains an issue.”39 Artists with close affiliations to government institutions or even the military might constitute such an issue.
24Tim O’Brien reminds us in The Things They Carried that artists and writers can only re-present war. Only those who know war, know better. O’Brien teases readers into speculating on how to write a true war story, and how to recognize one. His truth criteria include the notions that a true war story confuses its audience as to what happened, and he also suggests that a true war story is beyond belief. A true war story is also beyond words, and it is never-ending. A true war story should not generalize, nor should it be addicted to truth. As O’Brien puts it, “in war you lose your sense of the definite, hence your sense of truth itself, and therefore it’s safe to say that in a true war story nothing is absolutely true.”40 Ultimately, readers or viewers must make up their own minds. In O’Brien’s words, “somebody tells a story, let’s say, and afterward you ask, ‘Is it true?’ and if the answer matters, you’ve got your answer.”41 If the embedded artists make the public care, their objects and desires create a true story of the war in Afghanistan and beyond, and they communicate with art what language cannot express. “And in the end,” O’Brien writes, “a true war story is never about war. It’s about sunlight. It’s about the special way that dawn spreads out on a river when you know you must cross that river and march into the mountains and do things you are afraid to do.”42 War, and the objects making it possible, might in the end create a desire for beauty, for humanity, and for the survival of moral codes, with objects reinscribing the human, always a bit belatedly.43 What art historian Erika Doss writes about late-twentieth-century American art might apply to new generations of global artists, who “shift private concerns to larger cultural contexts [...] to form new perspectives about the nation, its culture, and themselves in the twenty-first century.”44 War has turned into an everyday condition of global violence and a weaponization of everything.45 Increasingly, it is fought with images, the light footsteps of endless conflict.
Notes de bas de page
1 George, J. (ed.), War Artists in Afghanistan: Beyond the Wire, Woodbrick, Suffolk, ACC Art Books, 2016, henceforth abbreviated to War Artists. Many, but not all, of the art works discussed here may be accessed online. See for ex. http://www.julesgeorge.com/slideshow.php?id=afghanistan and http://www.matthewcookillustrator.co.uk/content/matthewcookwarartist/Afghanistan1.htm
2 O’Brien, T., The Things They Carried, New York, Houghton Mifflin, 1990, p. 4.
3 George, J., op. cit., p. 154.
4 Ibid., p. 18.
5 Hemingway, E., A Moveable Feast: Sketches from the Author’s Life in Paris in the Twenties, [1964], New York, Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1993, p. 15.
6 George, J., War Artists, op. cit., p. 77.
7 Ibid., p. 136.
8 Loc. cit.
9 Ibid., p. 25-26.
10 Ibid., p. 32.
11 Loc. cit.
12 Brown, B., “Thing Theory,” Critical Inquiry, 28.1, Autumn 2001, p. 4.
13 George, J., War Artists, op. cit., p. 140.
14 See Barthes, R., Camera lucida, Reflections on Photography, trans. R. Howard, New York, Hill and Wang/Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 1980, for ex. pp. 15, 87 and 92f.
15 Ibid., p. 36.
16 Ibid., p. 38.
17 Pratt, M. L., Imperial Eyes: Travel Writing and Transculturation, New York, Routledge, 1992, p. 4.
18 George, J., War Artists, op. cit., p. 29.
19 Ibid., p. 31.
20 Ibid., p. 138.
21 Ibid., p. 159.
22 Loc. cit.
23 Ahmed, S., Strange Encounters: Embodied Others in Post-Coloniality, London, Routledge, 2000, p. 20.
24 Loc. cit.
25 George, J., War Artists, op. cit., p. 174.
26 Brown, B., op. cit., p. 3.
27 George, J., War Artists, op. cit., p. 114.
28 Brown, B., op. cit., p. 4.
29 Loc. cit.
30 George, J., War Artists, op. cit., p. 21.
31 Ibid., p. 25.
32 Ibid., p. 177.
33 Ibid., p. 32.
34 Ibid., p. 38.
35 Ibid., p. 49.
36 Ibid., p. 201.
37 Clausewitz, C. von, On War [1832], Princeton, Princeton University Press, 1976, p. 101.
38 Quoted in North, M., Camera Works: Photography and the Twentieth-Century Word, Oxford, Oxford University Press, 2005, p. 147.
39 Pohl, F. K., Framing America: The Social History of American Art, New York, Thames & Hudson, 2002, p. 520.
40 O’Brien, T., op. cit., p. 89.
41 Loc. cit.
42 Ibid., p. 91.
43 Brown, B., op. cit., p. 16.
44 Doss, E., Twentieth-Century American Art, Oxford, Oxford University Press, 2002, p. 248.
45 Deer, P., “Mapping Contemporary American War Culture,” College Literature 45.1, Winter 2016, p. 48.
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