Chicago Artists’ News
A publication of the Chicago Artists’ Coalition ISSN 0890-5908 Volume XXXV, Number 2, February 2008
Responses to War:
“Consuming War” at the Hyde Park Art Center and
“Meanwhile, in Baghdad…” at the Renaissance Society
By Spencer Dew
The fliers mailed out to advertise the recent “Consuming War” show at the Hyde Park Art Center were camouflaged
in more ways than one. Not only did the folded newsprint sheets feature camo patterns; the fliers were also disguised as pieces of consumer junk mail, featuring the characteristic jagged-edged, eye-catching graphics and crammed text of retail circulars. At first glance they looked like advertisements for discount furniture outlets or holiday grocery specials.
Inside, along with descriptions of the show and its associated performances and lectures, were “clip and save” coupons that gave the reader an opportunity to take immediate, direct, and practical action. One “coupon” featured an image of a mutilated young girl on her hospital bed, a photograph which was part of a letter to President Bush, ready to be signed and mailed away: “Please save this girl, and thousands of war victims like her. Stop the war now.” The other two gave web inks for the organizations Iraq Veterans Against the War and Emergency, which provides “free of charge, high standard medical and surgical care in war-torn areas.” The message was immediate and undeniable: the flier was at once an advertisement for a specific show and a resource for further study and political engagement.
The dynamics of both “Consuming War” and the Renaissance Society’s “Meanwhile, in Baghdad” play out in miniature here, with this flier. The initial gimmick jolts the viewer into some fresh recognition of a large issue (here specifically the multifaceted connection between capitalism and war as well as the fact of war as a banal aspect of our daily lives and, simultaneously, a spectacle to be marketed and consumed). Beyond that, however, the works (like the flier) rely on the active participation of the viewer. Exhibiting a pedagogical function, the works both encourage continued reflection on the issues they raise and direct the viewer toward practical work in the world. Always rooted in and to some degree responding to the historical context of its making, art often deals – explicitly or implicitly – with war: its causes and ramifications, and the zeitgeist it creates at home and abroad. These shows, however, exemplify a particular sort of response, coupling a hook that grabs the viewer’s attention with deep content intended to inspire alteration in the viewer’s life. Resolutely democratic in this regard, these shows treat art as an essential element for healthy democracy. Both shows aim to raise awareness of the broader situation of the war, offering witness to atrocities and loss, chronicling the political climate, and presenting observations on foreign policy that locate the current moment alongside historical parallels. Yet the pedagogical mode here is one that opens a conversation rather than making a didactic claim.
Even the simplest of the pieces on display – which in their logic can be compared to particularly witty protest signs – exhibit this element of opening conversation rather than articulating some dogmatic statement. A Monopoly game of imperial investments across the globe, an oil barrel spewing simulated blood: these pieces [by Frederick Holland] rely on an almost joke-like initial impression as a segue into contemplation of the wider issues they reference.
At the Hyde Park Art Center, Tom Burtonwood and Holly Holmes have hung paper-maché bombs from the ceiling. Dangling down ominously in a perpetual state of freefall, the surfaces of these shapes are collaged over with cheap retail advertisements that recall the show’s flier. Visually arresting, the work – “Price War” – is also thick with content, highlighting the grammar of warfare covertly embedded in our daily language while implicitly critiquing the economic motivations underlying war itself.
These works are far from simple polemics, and often the awe of the aesthetic is as useful for the function of the piece as the shock of recognition. Jannis Kounellis’s untitled work, featuring metal frames wrapped in what look like blood-soaked bandages, appears as both hospital cots on the floor and, on the wall, a startling expressionist “picture.” The result is quite literally stunning, speaking in an extremely visceral way while remaining rooted in an art-historical lineage that includes the work of Mark Rothko or Clifford Still.
Likewise, Edra Soto Fernandez, in the tradition of Sherrie Levine and Richard Prince, rephotographs images of actors playing soldiers and thereby immerses the viewer in concentric layers of representation and simulation, at once paying homage to and casting suspicion upon a central romantic myth of our culture.
Harold Mendez’s treatment of one of the Art Center’s walls, reminiscent at first glance of the formalism of Sol Lewit, reveals itself upon inspection to reference concrete reality in multiple ways. Using duct tape – an item now linked with the threat of terrorist attack – Mendez layers colors onto the wall to give the illusion of detainment center fences. The perspective dwarfs the viewer while calling to mind accounts of Guantanamo and government-run “black sites.”
At the Renaissance Society, Daniel Heyman’s etchings of Abu Ghraib torture victims restore voice and dignity to these men. In portraits relying on simple, strong lines, Heyman makes it clear that these former detainees are just like us, but plucked from their lives and subjected to horrific abuses. Their own words, snaking around the edges of the pieces in cramped script, visually evoke their confusion and fear while drawing the viewer closer, as if to listen to the intimate whispers of what these men have endured.
Maryam Jafri’s “The Siege of Khartoum 1884” likewise makes the viewer do work. A series of pictures featuring early journalistic accounts of American and British colonial entanglements, key words of which have been blanked out, these pieces at once allude to the censorship of official narratives and confront the viewer with the fearful symmetry of history, its repeating patterns of lust for power, lack of knowledge, and suffering and death as consequences.
Ellen Rothenberg’s “collection/storage system (hpac): stealth” renders concrete and domestic the global security situation by asking viewers to participate in the collection of camouflage cloth items from their closets and drawers. Such items are then tightly folded and compacted with plastic restraints like those used by police and soldiers. Displayed on a series of shelves, the bound pieces of fabric look like prisoners, hooded and undergoing torture.
Other pieces speak to the monumentality of war and the monuments lost therein. Mary Brogger’s “All of It/Everything” is the hull of some massive, fantastic machine. Made out of oil drums, it rusts away, an ambiguous relic consumed by time.
Michael Rakowitz’s ambitious project involves the recreation of over 7,000 artifacts from the National Museum of Iraq, looted or destroyed in the aftermath of the invasion. He does this with Middle Eastern food packaging and newspapers, creating scale “reproductions” that at once resemble and jarringly differ from the lost treasures. His piece also includes a chronology of events, weaving together several narratives and a number of quotes from public figures, including those Donald Rumsfeld delivered in press conferences during the early days of the war, claiming that “freedom’s untidy,” and that the press was responsible for the distortion of running “the same picture of some person walking out of some building with a vase.” “You see it 20 times,” marveled Rumsfeld, “and you think, ‘My goodness, were there that many vases?’”
Ann Messner’s “The Disasters of War” at the Renaissance Society offers the most comprehensive and intellectual treatment of the various levels of crisis related to the war in Iraq as well as the wider war on terrorism, with particular attention to the role of the media as marketing both of these as spectacle, sanitized but laced with titillation. Messner’s piece is a thick anthology of excerpts from academic theorists, bloggers, and journalists, all analyzing or exemplifying some aspect of the larger discourse around the war. We revisit, in these pages, Steven Bonchco’s “apolitical” Iraq-based reality show “Over There” and are presented with a bibliography for further investigation. This piece – much like the flier for the Art Center show – is designed to be taken home, studied and contemplated. Appealing to “fair use” to circumvent copyright restrictions, Messner has created an important and very useful document, a sourcebook for thinking about the situation in which we as Americans find ourselves.
These shows, characterized by pedagogical art intent on opening conversations about the issues related to the current state of war, share an urgency – an urgency linked to the desperate necessity of such conversations. We must, these shows insist, pay attention and actively respond to the political scene around us. As voting citizens in a democratic state, we, the viewers of such works, play a determining role in all of our country’s affairs. Foreign policy, torture, war: There is a risk of seeing such things as remote, abstract, or utterly beyond our control, when, in fact – as both of these excellent exhibits hold – we must take responsibility for changing them.
The Hyde Park Art Center flier features, on an inside corner, a quote from President Bush, delivered June 18, 2002: “When we talk about war,” said the President of the United States, “we’re really talking about peace.” The Orwellian echo of that statement is yet another truly jolting and arresting call to action. We must pay attention to such comments; we must refuse to treat them as any less disturbing than they are. This is the goal behind both of these shows: to frame our contemporary situation such that we can better see what is happening, and to remind us of our roles as “deciders” in our own national fate.
Spencer Dew is a PhD candidate at the University of Chicago Divinity School. His collection of short fiction, Songs of Insurgency, is forthcoming in Spring of 2008 from Vagabond Press.