Critical Reflection Unit 2

My core subject remains war but now, more particularly, the politics of war. More particulary still, the extent to which art can influence politics, and therefore war, and the extent to which artists whose work is profoundly political alter the boundary between art and politics - whether that boundary is either necessary or obstructive and, assuming (as I do) that it still exists, where it lies.

An important text for me has been Anthony Downey's Art and Politics Now - which has at the beginning of its introduction the above quotation from Jacques Ranciere.

Downey does not stop there: "Contemporary art, this book will propose, imagines that which remains politically unimaginable. In this context, contemporary art practices not only offer ways of thinking about some of society's most pressing concerns, but also can rethink what we understand by the term 'politics'."

I am excited by that view.

I have always believed that art is capable of influencing politics. Indeed if politics is given its broadest meaning - the way in which we govern our dealings between each other - then some of the very earliest art can I think be said to have had political weight.

But the interaction between art and politics, and more particularly war as a political act, is itself too broad a subject for me. I am less interested in art as a form of political documentary or record. I am interested in art as a political tool, a means of contributing to, and influencing, political debate, and specifically debate about war.

The Geneva Academy of International Humanitarian Law and Human Rights has announced that it is monitoring 110 armed conflicts around the world today. Two of those are the major conflicts in Ukraine and the Middle East, each of which has the potential to trigger potentially global escalation. We could be forgiven for thinking that if artists have tried to influence political decision making, in particular in relation to armed conflict, they haven't been successful.

Screen shot taken from the Geneva Academy website at 14.03 on 14.05.24

The artist Beryl Cook would have made that point (that artists haven't been successful at influencing politics).

Julian Spalding, in his review of a current exhibition of work by Beryl Cook and Tom of Finland - Spectator May 2024 - reported the following, during an earlier conversation with her;

" I once asked Beryl if she'd ever wanted to paint something serious. She said: "I see things that horrify me, but I don't want to paint them. If I thought that by painting something very meaningful it would change things, then perhaps I might, but I don't believe that. So, I don't. I think people are getting dulled by the amount of horror (my emphasis). I only paint when I'm excited by something, and what excites me is the joy in life."

I share at least a part of her view. I too think that we (I discuss what I mean by "we" below) are becoming dulled by the amount of horror thrown at us by, above all, our media. But that, for me, simply presents a challenge to artists to find ways to break through what dulls us, and to force a new momentum in what should be a collective revulsion towards the violence and misery we see around the world.

Lady of Marseilles c 1990 by Beryl Cook

This is a subject addressed in detail by Susan Sontag in her book Regarding the Pain of Others (Penguin 2003). Conflicts have been the subject of imagery produced by artists, photographers and other media participants for hundreds of years. That imagery, Sontag is clear, has the power to horrify and revolt us. What is also clear is that the horror and the revulsion, often the deliberate goal of the imagery, fail in their purpose - to bring an end to war. She cites a film made by the French director Abel Gance in 1938 with close-up images "of the mostly hidden population of hideously disfigured ex-combatants" from the First World War ('the war to end all wars', an epithet often quoted in relation to the First World War and repeated here by Sontag). The film ends with the main protagonist saying: 'Your sacrifices were in vain'......'Fill your eyes with this horror! It is the only thing that can stop you!'

And yet it doesn't.

Because, as Sontag concludes; "And the following year the [Second World] war came."

I have chosen a large subject, covering a multitude of overlapping segments in a complicated venn diagram.

I don't normally work with mind maps but found sketching this one below helpful. I have chosen simple, everyday terminology.

I could see, once I had structured the map, not only that much of my work could very easily be fitted into particular boxes within the map, but also that texts I had been reading, and continued to read after producing the map, trod some very similar steps. I confess that I have therefore reverse-engineered some of my critical thinking, clarifying for me, through a mind map, a thought process which was to some extent unconscious or at least impromptu but which has led to almost all of the works I have made recently.

Sketched mind map, graphite on paper - 15 x 25 cm

Much of my thinking has been around the initial impact of artistic images, the fading of that impact and the efforts, by various contemporary artists, to keep that impact alive.

Sontag (2003) addresses this issue, and its history, throughout Regarding the Pain of Others. The work focuses more on photography and film than other artistic media. She acknowledges the initial impact of the photographic image but reminds us that, contrary to recent thinking (and certainly before the advent of deep fake imagery) photographs were not always regarded as "truthful". Early photographs ("The Brady war pictures") Sontag (2003, p.44) showing bodies on a battlefield in the American Civil War were found to have been staged, with the bodies moved and deliberately placed, before the photographs were taken.

Roger Fenton, "invariably called the first war photographer" - Sontag (2003, p.41) is known for his photograph from the Crimean war called The Valley of the Shadow of Death, which was not, according to Sontag and despite its title, the valley in which the disastrous charge of the Light Brigade took place. Before taking that photograph (the second of two that he took and the one best known (and reproduced below) Fenton "oversaw the scattering of cannonballs on the road itself " - Sontag (2203, p.46). Before the scattering, the cannonballs had only been visible in the gully to the left of the road.

Roger Fenton The Valley of the Shadow of Death April 23, 1855 Wikipedia

Sontag refers to this picture, and to a number of similar images, to make the point that photographs aren't always an accurate historical record; that the manipulation or staging of a photograph undermines its impact. "...we are surprised to learn that they were staged, and always disappointed." Sontag (2003, p.47).

But for me this image does something else, and something that has I think become a fundamental part of contemporary art. It demonstrates the power of the absence of the horrific. There are no dead bodies in this picture; but we know that (at least in the real valley in which the charge of the Light Brigade took place) there was considerable slaughter. Confronted with the number and scale of the cannonballs in an otherwise deserted and desolate landscape our imagination does the rest. And that is the point. Our imaginations are, sometimes, capable of conjuring a greater and more lasting sense of horror than the image of the horrific itself.

To my mind, Dexter Dalwood's painting The Death of David Kelly adopts that artifice. It is a haunting image.

Dexter Dalwood The Death of David Kelly, 2008

The construction of the painting is notable - a single pine tree cropped top and bottom so that only the central trunk and three main branches are visible; the painting's simplicity - three objects (the tree, the mound on which it sits and the moon behind the tree) set against a night sky of unnatural uniformity of colour, a blue almost of Yves Klein tone and intensity, the moon itself a distorted oval shape with a childlike quality to it, the mound edged with a silver moonlit line; but of course the overwhelming element of the painting is what's missing - the body of David Kelly. It is only from the title of the work that we know what it is intended to represent.

What is an artist doing when they present a work, a figurative work such as this, in which the image makes only an oblique reference to the subject of the painting? The absence of David Kelly's body forces from us a contribution to the work, forces us to use our imagination to picture an horrific event with huge political significance, which should never have happened but to which, perhaps because of the enormous media coverage at the time, we might otherwise have become apathetic.

Much of that analysis could apply to Roger Fenton's photograph above. And if it had not been called The Valley of the Shadow of Death, few people would have taken any notice of it.

Roger Fenton's photograph is as much a work of art as it is, simply, a photograph. It isn't just the staging of the cannonballs that transforms it in that way. He chose to photograph a scene and link it to a major military event with a title which was duplicitous. This was a different valley. He was duping his audience and doing it deliberately; and by doing so was inviting them to imagine the horror that had taken place in a wholly different location to the one he had photographed.

The photograph had, by its nature, political force. As does Dalwood's The Death of David Kelly.

Where then does the boundary between politics and art lie?

Jeremy Deller's It is what it is has features of both the Fenton photograph and Dalwood's painting.

Jeremy Deller It is what it is 2009

Installation view, New Museum, New York

Deller "...obtained a car that had been bombed in a Baghdad marketplace in 2007 and took it across the United States" Downey (2014, p.15). The object (the car) was compelling, simply because of its history. There were no dead bodies in the car, and indeed no evidence of who, if anyone, had been hurt in what had clearly been a very powerful explosion. Those viewing the car were, as with the Fenton photograph and Dalwood's painting, being asked to imagine the event which destroyed it.

But this work was different in another respect from those of Fenton and Dalwood. No artistic input had been applied to the car, other than its finding, by the artist, and its presentation to his audience. The "artwork" was therefore just that - the presentation of the found object coupled with the discussions, amongst its audience, about, and triggered by, that object. The work was, in many respects, a performance piece, but also a political one. "The car was accompanied by an Iraqi artist and a US military reservist, to whom viewers were encouraged to pose questions about the Iraq war..." Downey (2014, p.15).

It is not clear who planted the bomb which destroyed the car and who, if anyone, was hurt in the explosion. The title of the work - It is what it is - suggests, at least to me, that that question doesn't matter - or didn't matter to Deller. We (at least as artists) shouldn't take sides.

But Sontag addresses that point (who is the "we") forcefully, and very early on, in Regarding the Pain of Others. The book was written in 2003 but this passage, in its prescience, is chilling:

"To an Israeli Jew, a photograph of a child torn apart in the attack on the Sbarro pizzeria in downtown Jerusalem is first of all a photograph of a Jewish child killed by a Palestinian suicide-bomber. To a Palestinian, a photograph of a child torn apart by a tank round in Gaza is first of all a photograph of a Palestinian child killed by Israeli ordnance. To the militant, identity is everything (my emphasis)." Sontag (2003, p.7)

Sontag isn't making a moral judgement. She is stating a truth about human nature. We care about those closest to us. Should we fight that instinct? Her book begins with a description of Virginia Woolf's Three Guineas - a discussion about war which acknowledges, after an introductory admonishment that "war is a man's game", that "we" are all revolted by war.

But Sontag addresses that "we":

"No 'we'", she says, "should be taken for granted when the subject is looking at other people's pain."

And she then gently makes the point that Three Guineas was written against the backdrop of the Spanish Civil War, towards which members of Woolf's circle were intensely partisan.

For my part, I ask myself simply whether or not we, and by "we" I mean we as artists, should, when dealing with this subject, avoid a partisan view. How easy is it, when producing work that is by its nature political, to avoid adopting a political angle? Where is the boundary between art and politics on this subject?

The conflict in the Middle East is particularly contentious from that perspective, given the history of the region and the enormous complexities that history has driven.

I painted my picture - To the Militant, Identity is Everything - of two children being killed, before I had read Sontag's words above. I had originally called the picture I have no Preference but changed the title having read her book. My point, behind that picture, was that although I know that to the militant identity is everything, to the infant casualty identity is irrelevant.

Mark Wallinger State Britain (2007)

Mark Wallinger's State Britain "considered the relationship between art institutions and various forms of protest and conflict." Downey (2014). He "recreated the peace camp set up by peace campaigner Brian Haw opposite the Houses of Parliament". That process involved a creative act of reconstruction by Wallinger, and in that respect differed from Jeremy Deller's It is what it is and indeed from Mark Dion's The Life of a Dead Tree (see passim) but all three works were presented as art works, for consideration by those viewing them as such. All three were performance pieces (to a greater or lesser extent), inviting an audience interpretation on, and therefore contribution to, the work.

There is however another question in relation to Wallinger's State Britain - which is whether or not the original Brian Haw camp was itself a work of art and if so, as with Deller's It is what it is, where the boundary between art and politics or political activism lay. Brian Haw will not, I suspect, have considered himself an artist and indeed might have resented that suggestion. But I view the dividing line between art and politics in that instance, and certainly with Wallinger's work, as blurred.

In my own work, I feel a pressure towards simplicity, or perhaps a bluntness, of messaging. Why do wars start? Because human beings have a propensity for confrontation and violence. In the images below, I wanted forceful demonstrations of confrontation, one within an institution charged specifically with avoiding confrontation and the other between two individuals.

UN Security Council Meeting

Oil on canvas 60 x 80 cm

Untitled Oil on canvas 60 x 80 cm

Are we now conditioned, from an early age, to accept wars and wider violence as an inevitable part of life?

Does the imagery we are presented with across all forms of media give us a sanitised, or at least unrealistic picture of the nature of that violence, and indeed in many instances seek to justify it? More often than not it does.

The vases I have made present, as they were when I saw them as a child, images from magazines devoted to a war which ended two decades earlier, bringing to us as children dashing tales of heroism and a very clear, and partisan, picture of a struggle between good and evil. I cannot say, even now, that I haven't been influenced by those stories.

I printed these particular images as decals and glazed them onto porcelain vases copied from a Ming dynasty ceramic piece. I wanted an incongruous setting for the images. They came from paper magazines printed twice a week, to be read quickly and then discarded. I have printed them onto fragile but valued objects capable of lasting, and intended to last, for hundreds of years.

I hesitate to quote Beryl Cook again but if she is right and "we are dulled by the amount of horror" how, as artists, do we break through that anesthesia? What gets our attention? The new, the unexpected, perhaps the scale of the work or the medium from which it is constructed, or a deliberate artistic vacuum, whether through performance or an enigma of some sort, which requires us to invest our own thoughts and ideas, forces us to commit our imagination to a work and in doing so perhaps give that work a meaning and an impact it might not otherwise have had.

Sontag's Regarding the Pain of Others focuses predominantly on photography rather than on other artistic media, and much of that work addresses photography's failings - the disillusion caused by the staged photograph, the numbness from an overwhelming volume of images of real carnage and a human tendency to a ghoulish fascination with those images, undermining completely the intent behind them.

It was therefore odd but to my mind very refreshing that she chose, as the last work she discussed, Jeff Wall's work Dead Troops Talk ( A Vision After an Ambush of a Red Army Patrol near Moqor, Afghanistan, Winter 1986). The image is a photograph, but "visionary" and entirely constructed and staged. She gives a wonderful description of the work - Russian soldiers killed in a fictional Afghanistan setting, coming back to life and engaging with each other in a bloody scene. But the message from the work, apparent from the behaviour of the soldiers, is this:

"These dead are supremely uninterested in the living: in those who took their lives; in witnesses - and in us. Why should they seek our gaze? What would they have to say to us? 'We' - this 'we' is everyone who has never experienced anything like what they went through...We can't imagine how dreadful, how terrifying war is...That's what every soldier, and every journalist and aid worker and independent observer who has put in time under fire...stubbornly feels. And they are right."

Jeff Wall Dead Troops Talk (A vision After an Ambush of a Red Army Patrol near Moqor. Afghanistan, Winter 1986)

This is not photography as historical record, as truth or even as a pretence at truth. It is photography as a construct, as art. It is Jeff Wall telling us that it isn't images of reality, of actual carnage, which have lasting power. Here, through an effort of artistic imagination he forces on us, as Sontag says, a realisation on our part that we are excluded from comprehending the true ghastliness of war because we have never encountered it, and it is that realisation, and that sense of exclusion, which endures.

References:

Downey, A (2014) Art and Politics Now, Thames and Hudson

Sontag, S (2003) Regarding the Pain of Others. Penguin Random House UK

Spalding, J (11 May 2024) The Last Laugh The Spectator pp. 38 and 39