The Seen and the Unseen: the Changing Nature of War Art Tim
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The Seen and the Unseen: The Changing Nature of War Art Tim Stevens, King’s College London (unpublished essay, 2012) Abstract This article argues that the relationships between war and art are constantly evolving and that our perceptions of ‘war art’ should similarly take account of changes in the global conflict environment, particularly with respect to contemporary communications and the postulated existence of total war, in particular the War on Terror. Through an examination of the work of painter Peter Howson in Bosnia and photographer Paul Seawright in Afghanistan, the article shows how two artists have successfully and powerfully challenged conventional notions of war art for the public good. The article concludes that war art should be viewed as a cultural response to war that transcends both its purely documentary function and the attitudes of cultural elites. Introduction The visual art of war probably has a history as long as that of war itself. It has always reflected societies engaged in acts and processes of communal and collective violence, for which commemoration through art has served important political and cultural functions. In the modern era, the diversifying nature of war necessitates a re-evaluation of what constitutes ‘war art’. This is most obvious in contemporary debates over whether war art should primarily be a form of ‘record’ or has validity as an artistic ‘response’ to conflict. This article proposes that although the essential characteristics of war and art remain relatively unaltered, the relationship between the two has changed and continues to evolve. War art originating from this nexus of creation and destruction has therefore also changed 1 and continues to alter in form and function. The first section of this article examines the changing nature of war art with reference to the evolution of global communications and the advent of ‘total war’, with its contemporary apotheosis of the ‘War on Terror’. The subsequent sections look at the work of painter Peter Howson in Bosnia and photographer Paul Seawright in Afghanistan. Both artists challenge conventional perspectives on war art and illustrate themes relating to the evolution of war and art in general. The article concludes by arguing that war art as a cultural response to war is more important than its documentary function alone. As a mirror to changing societies it will therefore continue to alter: our perceptions of ‘war art’ should keep pace with reality rather than atrophy through tradition or institutional inertia. Evolution of ‘war art’ To the best of our historical knowledge, all civilisations have experienced war. If history is ‘almost always written by the victors’ (Nehru 1989: 289) then they have often also sponsored the artistic texts that memorialise and record the experiences and outcomes of war. Burke (1989: 106) reminds us that often ‘history is forgotten by the victors’ too, which speaks to the selective nature of institutional war art. Brandon’s (2007: 26) comment that there was no anti-war art until the 1630s is difficult to prove to the contrary but illustrates that war art has tended historically to serve the political purposes of incumbent elites, whether in defeat or victory. Whilst acknowledging the savage anti-war critiques of early-modern artists like Francisco Goya and Jacques Callot, war art remained largely at the behest and control of those privileged few who commissioned it well into the nineteenth century. During this period, two intertwined developments began to change irrevocably the war/art relationship: the increased speed and reach of international communications, and the advent of ‘total war’. Their continued evolution further challenges traditional notions of war art. 2 The long-distance transmission of information by electromagnetic means was first achieved with the electric telegraph in the nineteenth century, an invention that would change military command and control, communications and logistics (Bousquet 2009: 94-96). Its importance to the civilian sphere too is illustrated by the persistence of ‘telegraph’ in the names of newspapers worldwide, which increasingly relied on news from abroad, transmitted rapidly across wired, and later wireless, networks. Telephony and radio would further collapse the spatial distance between receiver and communicator, a process that would effectively be completed by the near light-speed communications of cyberspace. For French urbanist and social theorist Paul Virilio, information technologies have led to the annihilation of space, so that politics―and by Clausewitzian extension, war (von Clausewitz 1984)―can only function within time itself, such that we are all subject to what he calls the ‘tyranny of real time’ (Virilio 2005: 3). Foreshadowing the global War on Terror and its Manichean battle for ‘hearts and minds’, Virilio maintains that the ‘logistics of perception’ have become more important than its physical counterpart (Virilio 1989). Whilst contemporary debates on the supply of men and materiel to the war in Afghanistan, for example, remind us that war is very much still physical, his point stands: in a world of globalised media, the image has become as political and important as the deed (Bolt 2012). The reach and ubiquity of media, whether ‘traditional’ like newspapers and television, or the newer technologies of cyberspace, have brought images of war into the lives and homes of those members of the public who choose to access them. At the beginning of the twentieth century, the advent of ‘total war’ meant that there were few people who could avoid being touched by war, such was the globalised nature of World War I. This conflict reignited in the middle of the century, another global war in which conscription took artists to foreign 3 theatres, stories of which they and the press communicated to domestic audiences. The ‘enemy within’ characterised the subsequent Cold War as distinctively as did the far enemies of a nuclear USSR or USA (e.g. Zieger 2004). As the last century began, so did the present one, with a global ‘war’, but one in which the ‘enemy’ is both at home and abroad, an observation validated by analyses of both Islamist and Western democratic discourses of the ‘war on terror’ (Gerges 2005; Jackson 2005). Virilio theorises this form of war as the creation of civil insecurity within national frontiers, which serves to excuse and effect the militarisation of peacetime societies through the mediation of technologies of control and surveillance (Virilio and Lotringer 2008). A demonstrable rise in different forms of domestic surveillance is but one of many products of the current preoccupation with global terrorism that serves to bolster this depressing thesis (e.g. Amoore 2006, 2007). These technological developments should not necessarily be interpreted as deterministic of what constitutes war art but they are drivers of important changes in perceptions of war art. For example, to accompany wire stories by foreign correspondents from 1870 onwards there developed a parallel economy of imagery created both by ‘Special Artists’ experiencing war firsthand and by London artists as far from the ‘action’ as their readers (Stearn 1992: 145). Such was the enthusiasm for this journalistic format that the illustrated papers received thousands of submissions every year from across the world, concerning not only warfare itself but also of related activities of soldiers and colonial administrations (Barnett 1883: 164). Official British war art programmes of the two World Wars further exemplify this democratic shift away from the twin grip of the academy and the formal ‘battle scene’. Although the soldier-artist was the preferred recipient of British War Memorials Committee commissions in World War I (Gough 2008: 343), the Committee did broaden the concept of war art to include depictions of the ‘Home Front’ and ‘subjects not exclusively military’ 4 (Harries and Harries 1983: 87). A similar relaxation of the bounds of ‘academic’ war art characterised the patronage programmes of World War II also (Foss 2007). In the later twentieth century, increased attention has also been given to other expressive genres that can certainly be considered ‘war art’, such as camouflage (Goodden 2007), art by Holocaust victims (Blatter and Milton 1982), and the ‘trench art’ of serving soldiers (Saunders 2003). Kenneth Clark, the indefatigable chairman of the World War II War Artists Advisory Committee (WAAC), was critical to the repurposing of art during the war and its aftermath (Foss 2007: 171ff.). Since 1972, the Imperial War Museum’s Artistic Records Committee (later, Art Commissions Committee) has been similarly crucial. One of the museum’s most influential curators of art, Angela Weight, remarked that war art’s responsibility was ‘to interpret the phenomenon of war on a more general level, and to express contemporary attitudes to war―works which will in themselves have some historical importance as evidence of the impact of war on a country’s culture’ (Harries and Harries 1983: 286). This has allowed the reassessment of existing museum collections―such as the relationships between ‘Women and War’ (Goldsworthy 2003)―a campaigning effort to commemorate war dead through the issuance of Royal Mail postage stamps (Crompton 2008), and the introduction of artists’ residencies (Moriarty and Weight 2008). These innovative and reflexive commissioning approaches have been balanced by the more traditional modus operandi of sending artists to the field. In theatre and in the museum the ‘artist’ has not been restricted to the painter or the soldier, with photographers, sculptors, video and installation artists all engaging with the subject of war. The following sections examine the work of two of these artists with differing experiences of war, working in different media, and with different perspectives. Despite their links to a long heritage of war 5 art neither can be considered traditional within the domain of institutionally-commissioned war art but they do reflect how institutions have themselves changed their perceptions of what constitutes war art, even as this has been challenged by some.