An image from the front of Metro newspaper, 5 January 2024, showing destruction in Rafah following an air strike
Photograph taken by Mohammed Abed/AFP
Introduction
Why do wars matter? Why, particularly, do wars beyond our shores matter to us? There are conflicts unfolding around the world and those conflicts sit in what history tells us is a never-ending cycle of the human urge to fight.
Wars matter to those of us beyond the theatre of conflict because they tell us something about ourselves; about the way in which, as Susan Sontag might have said, we “regard the pain of others”. They force us to decide whether and how we involve ourselves, and make judgements in support of, or opposition to, those conflicts; and they force us to confront uncomfortable truths about the limits of our compassion; but perhaps also, disturbingly, our complicity in fostering some our own impulses which push us periodically from anger to a point at which violence, in one shape or another, is no longer unthinkable.
Sontag's book, more than any other, has influenced my thinking on this subject. But it hasn't answered fundamental questions about my own emotional reaction to violence, and the personal responsibility I might have as a result of allowing either anger or apathy to dictate my response to conflicts involving others.
I ask myself how as an artist I should address this topic, and address those uncomfortable truths about my own shortcomings in the face of the current fighting.
A personal context
I was born in Malaysia 14 years after the end of the Second World War. Relatives of mine, including my father, fought in that war and family friends, living in what was then Malaya when Japanese forces overran the country in 1941, spent much of the war in Japanese prison camps. Attitudes to the Japanese during my childhood in Malaysia were strong. Those attitudes softened, and I spent four months in 1978 living with a Japanese family in Kyoto, learning to reconcile the attitudes I had met as a child with the very different reality I experienced with my hosts.
My maternal grandmother was Jewish. Her father had come to England from Germany early in the 20th Century. The family name was Binswanger, changed to Byng in acknowledgment of English anti-German feeling at the time. Although not in Germany herself during the holocaust, ten of my grandmother’s relatives died as a result of Nazi persecution in the 1930's.
I give this personal background not to establish credentials for a right to treat a current conflict, but simply to explain perhaps why this subject has a particular focus for me now.
The historic artistic depiction of conflict
Sontag says: “Compassion is an unstable emotion. It needs to be translated into action, or it withers.” Sontag (2003, p.88).
Artists have risen to that challenge and have expressed their pain at the horrors of war but, it appears, with little long term effect.
The printed series of images produced by, in turn, Callot (1633), Goya (published posthumously in 1863) and Dix (1924), contain graphic images of war, witnessed by the artists first hand. That last point is significant. These were artworks, and received as such by those looking at them. But Goya was alive to that charge, and the title of the image below is a direct challenge to anyone daring to suggest his images were either invented or exaggerated.
Goya, F Yo lo vi (I saw it) March 1863 - Plate 44 from Los desastres de la guerra
Image taken from Disasters of War Callot Goya Dix (1998, p.51)
And nobody looking at the picture below would conclude that Dix hadn't witnessed that scene.
Dix, O Dead Men before the Position at Tahure
Plate 50 - Image taken from Disasters of War Callot Goya Dix (1998, p.89)
It was not a questioning of the veracity of the images, nor a shortfall in the horror of their initial impact, which allowed the three series to fade from public consciousness. It was the apathy that follows compassion "left to wither by inaction", and identified by Sontag in the words above, which smothered them. With painful irony, Dix’ lost painting The Trench, painted between 1920 and 1923 and a major personal statement about the horrors he had witnessed in the First World War, was lent to a show called Nie wieder Krieg! (Never another War!). The Second World War began less than two decades later.
From compassion and anger to activism
The emotional turmoil unleashed by violent conflict has not always been allowed to wither. Activists and artists have both found ways to confront that turmoil and challenge its causes.
Anthony Downey’s work Art and Politics Now gives an overview of the more recent interaction between the two.
A quotation from Stephen Duncombe and Steve Lambert
Downey, (2014 p.79)
I have focused on one work addressed in Downey's book – Mark Wallenger’s State Britain (2007) “which recreated the camp set up by peace campaigner Brian Haw opposite the Houses of Parliament…..[and] re-made everything that the Metropolitan police had confiscated from the camp... The location of Wallinger’s reconstruction is key here: displayed...at Tate Britain, a public institution that straddled the exclusion zone…placed on protest camps in Westminster as a direct result of Haw’s protest, the work existed in defiance of that zone.” Downey (2014, p.95)
Mark Wallenger -State Britain (2007) mixed media installation at Tate Britain
5.7 x 4.3 x 1.9 m
Wallinger's work was not without its critics. As Sue Hubbard asked in an article in Artlyst in 2016: "Was Wallinger’s recreation a form of political solidarity, or did it turn viewers into cultural voyeurs?"
Brian Haw spent ten years protesting against US and UK involvement in Iraq and Afghanistan. Wallinger approached Haw with the idea for State Britain and Haw, we are told, was not only in favour of the project but helped source some of the recreated imagery.
It is nevertheless Haw’s original camp that moves me. Wallenger’s State Britain is as much about the right to protest, as a cry against the conflicts themselves; and although I see State Britain as retrospectively supportive of his campaign it is nevertheless, for me, only an adjunct to Haw's stand against compassion apathy.
Wallenger created an artwork out of Brian Haw’s camp. I see an element of that camp, its imagery and colours, as an artwork in its own right.
A similar aesthetic is evident in the marches current now in London in response to the Middle East conflict.
Photographs taken by me during a pro Palestine march in central London on 2nd November 2024.
The costumes, colouring, symbols and messaging have a powerful aesthetic. At what point does an activist become an artist?
Activist vocabulary, its history and sensitivity
Activism, by its nature, reflects opposing views. That was clear during the largely pro-Palestinian march on 2nd November when it approached a smaller, pro-Israel demonstration.
The language of those demonstrating was at times neutral – “Ceasefire Now!” “Children of Gaza, the world has failed you.” But other language was more emotive and some had legal force: “End Israeli Apartheid”; “Holocaust survivor..against Gaza genocide”.
The word “genocide” has a particular significance for me. Philippe Sands'East West Street is in part a family history, centred on the city of Lviv in Ukraine, which I visited recently. But it is also a history of an element of the Nuremberg trials, a choice of language used to define crimes prosecuted at those trials. The choice, which forms a central theme of the book, lay between “Genocide” and “Crimes Against Humanity”. Two lawyers (Rafael Lemkin and Hersch Lauterpacht), both from Lviv, argued separately for each term and genocide, subsequently enshrined in the Genocide Convention, “won” that argument.
An image from inside the front cover of Sands' East West Street (2016)
Language matters. The single word Genocide, used extensively within the artwork of placards during the march I attended, carries a particular weight.
Taking sides
Before coming to Camberwell, I produced work about the conflict in Ukraine. That work was in part a cry of anguish at the suffering caused by the fighting, but it was also a cry of anger at those responsible for decisions which led to the war.
Accordingly, I took sides and apportioned blame; and work I have been producing recently, which has as its object a caricature based loosely on the persona of the Russian President, does so too.
But I have met an opposing view, that Russia’s incursion into Ukraine was provoked by Western ambitions to expand to the East. I might not accept that position but must acknowledge that my view is not unchallenged.
As an artist, to what extent am I entitled, or obliged, to form a judgment on the rights and wrongs of any particular conflict? Are there, of necessity, “rights” or “wrongs” sitting behind wars and what responsibility do we have to exhaust the source material before taking sides?
If you can’t take sides, do you espouse a balanced view?
Given the historic and other complexities of the Middle East, described in Jeremy Bowen's The Making of the Modern Middle East, it is not surprising that no consensus has emerged to resolve the conflict in that region.
It is however surprising to me that views expressed in relation to that conflict appear to be as clear-cut as they are. In the pro-Palestinian march on 2nd November, I looked in vain for any banner which condemned the killing of Israelis on 7th October 2023. Conversely, within a pro-Israel counter-demonstration, I found not one acknowledgement of the killing and destruction in Gaza. It was as if everyone present had chosen a loyalty to their cause which admitted of no alternative narrative.
What is it within many of us which stops us from failing to acknowledge the views of those with whom we disagree?
Two of my works about confrontation, Diplomats I and Diplomats II, have titles which are ironic. Diplomacy by its nature involves at least an attempt at balance, and my protagonists show none.
A third work, UN Security Council Meeting is another ironic take, this time on the ineffectiveness of international diplomacy.
Perhaps the new media echo chambers in which many of us now find ourselves are responsible for our certainties. But perhaps, instead, the media algorithms are simply playing to a tune already buried deep within us, a basic instinct which says that a balanced view leads to indecision, and that in a hostile world indecision is more dangerous than making the wrong decision.
We can all condemn the effects of violence, but to what end, if we do not also condemn those who caused that violence? How can artists expect to be listened to unless we take sides and point fingers at those we think carry guilt?
Photo Op 2005 Kennardphillipps - Digital inkjet print in colours
Peter Kennard and Cat Phillipps were clear in their messaging in the manipulated photograph above. They took sides and pointed a finger.
My painting The Bright Cloud Oil on Canvas (2024) 80 x 80 cm
Have I, in showing devastation caused to one community in the work above, taken sides? I'm not sure I have.
Why do wars start?
Wars, of course, start for different reasons; but without knowing why they start what hope do we have of preventing them?
One person's view of how wars start and how they can be stopped, on display at the march in London on 2nd November 2024
This question troubled me from a very early age in relation to Japan, which in 1941 had attacked Pearl Harbour, effectively declaring war on the US, and had invaded the nations of South East Asia, including Malaya, in another act of unprovoked aggression.
The Brittle Decade, Visualising Japan in the 1930’s, in part answers that question.
Front cover The Brittle Decade (2012) showing Saeki Shunko's Tearoom, (1936)
Dower’s opening essay in the book explains that since Japan’s reformers had overthrown the country’s feudal system in 1868, the country had embraced Western “modernity” and that “in the two decades following that purported “war to end all wars”, Western influences continued to inundate imperial Japan…” MFA Publications, (2012, p.12)
But he goes on to say that, “…to its critics, modernization also signified unruliness, degeneracy, fragmentation and instability…”. He concludes: “The rhetoric of social solidarity coupled with racial and moral purity that accompanied Japan’s war making from the late 1930’s is best understood in this context: as an attempt to turn back the flood of Western-inspired attitudes and activities associated with becoming modern and cosmopolitan.” MFA Publications, (2012, p.12)
That America, Britain and their Western allies failed to appreciate this showed a lack of understanding of Japanese history and cultural traditions. It isn’t just Julian Assange's "lies" that start wars. It is also ignorance.
The Chrysanthemum and the Sword by Ruth Benedict, an American anthropologist commissioned to examine the differences and misunderstandings, cultural and historic, between the Americans and the Japanese which had not only led to the war between those nations, but governed the manner in which it was prosecuted, highlights the differences and misunderstandings addressed again, decades later, in The Brittle Decade.
Truth, Lies and Photography
Some might have thought that the advent of photography would shock us into insisting on an end to all conflict. But the "war to end all wars" began within three generations of photography becoming a reporting medium. Its images have indeed shocked us, and have had an impact on public sentiment, perhaps most obviously during the Vietnam war, but nobody could argue that it has prevented subsequent conflicts from starting.
The medium was undermined from the outset. The photographic process meant that most early images had to be staged. The staging evolved and the camera began to lie. A well-known photograph of cannonballs on a road in the aftermath of a Crimean War battle was taken after the cannonballs, for effect, had been spread more evenly over the road.
Roger Fenton, Valley of the Shadow of Death (1855)
Images have always been manipulated but some have an inherent veracity. Sontag describes three photographs documenting the killing of a Taliban soldier by Northern Alliance soldiers in Afghanistan on 13th November 2001 and says: “An ample reservoir of stoicism is needed to get through the great newspaper of record each morning, given the likelihood of seeing photographs that could make you cry.” Sontag, (2003, p.10).
Many of us do not however brace ourselves as Sontag advocates, not because we question the truth of what we see, but simply because there are limits to how much suffering we can bear.
But if photography has limits on its capacity to shock, either because we impose those limits as a form of self-preservation or because we no longer believe what we see, that is not all. Photographers reporting from conflict zones meet constraints on which of their images are made public. A desire on the part of those witnessing violence to force us, too, to see what they have seen is often smothered by those who know that our capacity to absorb the horror is limited.
A detail from:Wall, J Dead Troops Talk (a Vision after an Ambush of a Red Army Patrol, Near Moqor, Afghanistan, Winter 1986) 1992
Image taken from Jeff Wall, (2005, p.62 )
I return again and again to Jeff Wall’s constructed photograph. In an interview with Craig Burnett he explains that: “It always seemed to me that the work was going to have a relationship to war photography. I was going to advance a claim to authenticity that couldn’t be satisfied, and in the suspension of that area – the fantasy – the hallucination could occur.”- Burnett, (2005) p.59. But although the work’s title places it firmly within the war in Afghanistan, Wall says: “It had nothing to do with the Afghan war, but the subjects needed to be soldiers because it seemed important that they would have died in an official capacity, that would surely give them something to talk about.” For Wall, the foundation of the image is simply “a dialogue of the dead.” - Burnett, (2005) p.59.
That expression - "a claim to authenticity that couldn't be satisfied" - is powerful for me. The pretence to authenticity which comes with a photograph but which is immediately undermined because our reason tells us the image can't be real, gives the work a tension it wouldn't have if it were a painting.
Sontag ends Regarding the Pain of Others with a description of Wall’s photograph which attributes to the image a narrative beyond Wall’s own description of the work. “These dead” she says “are supremely uninterested in the living….What would they have to say to us?....We don’t get it. We truly can’t imagine what it was like...how dreadful, how terrifying war is;.. Can’t understand, can’t imagine.”
How have I addressed this subject
To date, much of the messaging in my work has been abrupt. Confrontation, with the hint of a descent into violence, and despair; then, beyond that, some uncomfortable introspection. Why does this subject grip me as it does? I feel horror at the suffering; but there is also anger.
Is anger the first nudge within us which unlocks responses which are difficult to control and which allow us too to contemplate violence? I am stung by Virginia Woolf's view, in her book Three Guineas, that wars are started by men and prosecuted for their benefit: "Here,,,,are three reasons which lead your sex [my emphasis] to fight; war is a profession; a source of happiness and excitement, and it is also an outlet for manly qualities...." Woolf, V (1993, p.122). There is no reference to anger in that list.
Sontag however wonders whether Virginia Woolf’s abhorrence of war would have extended to fighting employed in the “defence of the Spanish Republic against the forces of militarist and clerical fascism?” a cause Woolf supported throughout the Spanish Civil War, and which made her angry. Sontag, (2003, p.6)
Perhaps not all violence is equal. Perhaps taking sides matters, and perhaps anger has its place in that.
My most recent work, a caricatured bust of the Russian president, expresses my anger at what I see as an unnecessary conflict in Ukraine.
But am I also subject to what Joseph Conrad called “the fascination of the abomination”, an interest in violence at odds with my abhorrence at its outcomes? My painting Leontius addresses that clash between fascination and abhorrence.
The story of Leontius is told by Socrates in the fourth book of Plato’s Republic. Leontius walks up a hill outside Athens, sees the public executioner in front of the bodies of those he has just killed, and is struck by an internal turmoil, wanting to look at the bodies, reasoning with himself that he should not, and feeling disgust as he succumbs to his desire to gaze.
It is extraordinary that the Socratic description of that tension between an appetite for what is ghoulish and our reason, provoking an emotional discomfort, should resonate now.
The development of the consumption of violent entertainment
Anyone who doubts our appetite for violence need only look at the levels of violence in today's media entertainment. We watch violent films. We know they are fiction and we like the narratives - good people fighting bad people - which underpin most of the violence we consume. But is that entertainment harmless?
One of my ceramic vase series, with an image taken from one of the Commando war magazines, this edition published when I was at school in the 1960's
Porcelain, with digitally manipulated decal images glazed and fired at a stoneware temperature of 1260 degrees C 18 x 18 x 21 cm
The porcelain vases I made adopt images taken from early war magazines I read as a boy. The stories in those magazines represented an almost universal narrative of patriotism, courage, and violence. Was that a form of conditioning, or were those stories simply responding to impulses already imbedded within us?
The violence formed a backdrop to the qualities of patriotism and courage. We admire the qualities. Do we ever consider that they might not exist without the fighting which tests them?
As films become increasingly realistic, and the effort required to 'suspend our disbelief' diminishes, will the distinction between fiction and reality blur; and are we sure that our capacity to maintain the distinction would then survive intact? And if the gulf between the violent entertainment we enjoy and the real violence we see on our news diminishes, might we become increasingly inured to the latter?
To what extent, when we are confronted by real violence, is our emotional response affected by the fictional violence we consume?
Conclusion
The focus of my work, our collective propensity for confrontation and violence , has evolved to encompass uncomfortable questions about my own attitude to violence, the extent to which anger unconsciously triggers an aggressive impulse, and the possibility that violent entertainment is either evidence of an inherent ease with violence or a form of conditioning that might prompt some of us to condone violence in the real world.
There are I think, within us, opposing forces which at times endorse violence but appall us with its consequences.
I have reflected, throughout the course, on that tension and have considered how, as an artist, to address it.
There is I think a pendulum swing within us which takes us from anger, to confrontation, to aggression. If as artists we cannot dampen the impetus behind that pendulum swing, we can at least draw attention to those impulses and warn of the horrors to which they might lead, perhaps punishing, in our work, those who choose to ignore those warnings.
References
Downey, A., 2014. Art and Politics Now. London: Thames & Hudson.
Hubbard, S. (2016) ‘Mark Wallinger: Reflections on the Self’, Artlyst, Available at: https://www.artlyst.com (Accessed: October 2024).
MFA Publications (2012) The Brittle Decade: Visualizing Japan in the 1930s. Boston: Museum of Fine Arts, Boston.
Rosendorg, L, 2017. The Binswanger Family and the Holocaust. Shutterfly.
Sands, P. (2016) East West Street: On the Origins of "Genocide" and "Crimes Against Humanity". London: Weidenfeld & Nicolson.
Woolf, V. (2019) A Room of One's Own and Three Guineas. London: Penguin Books.
Bibliography
Benedict, R., 1946. The Chrysanthemum and the Sword: Patterns of Japanese Culture. Boston: Houghton Mifflin Harcourt.
Bowen, J., 2022. The Making of the Modern Middle East: A Personal History. London: Picador.
Burnett, C., 2005. Jeff Wall. Modern Artists series. London: Tate Publishing.
Downey, A., 2014. Art and Politics Now. London: Thames & Hudson.
Gormley, A., 2020. Shaping the World. London: Thames & Hudson.
Plato, 1935. The Republic. Translated by D. Lee. London: J.M. Dent.
Sontag, S. (2004) Regarding the Pain of Others. London: Penguin.