Crossing the wire: Western contemporary war art in the interbellum

In 2022, war is again at the forefront of international consciousness, to degrees not seen for two decades. The response of the Administration of US President George W. Bush to the terror attacks in America on 11 September 2001 embroiled global geopolitics in an upheaval that dominated the news cycle for many years. America’s already precarious post-9/11 righteous indignation was eroded in a series of Coalition atrocities, ghost prisoners, black sites, extraordinary rendition, torture, humiliation, and festive cruelty at Abu Ghraib. Global attention to the seemingly endless deployments inevitably waned in the war’s second decade, after the election of US President Barack Obama and the assassination of Osama Bin Laden. The visibility of the War on Terror mutated into the more banal-sounding ‘Overseas Contingency Operation’,1 while Obama increased the number of attacks on foreign soil through drone strikes, prompting Derek Gregory’s 2011 coining of the term “everywhere war,” in which the monolith of war dissolves into less visible acts of “self-defence” that “obscures the systematic cumulative nature of the campaign.”2 Obama’s sleight-of-hand did the trick and attention waned, only to emerge briefly as a coda in 2021 with images of desperate Afghans falling from an American C-17 onto the runway at Kabul.

Two decades of the global War on Terror taught the world nothing new about war. Nearly twenty years later we know exactly what six-to-ten million protesters on 15 February 2003,3 against the invasion of Iraq, might have suggested—that war is the violent exercise of existing power relations, usually colonial, if only vestigial, that it fires-up long-standing and deeply ingrained injustices, that the wealthy profit while the already impoverished and vulnerable pay with their uncountable grief, their lands, their bodies and lives. War is nonlinear and stochastic, and its outcomes are synergistic and unpredictable. Neither those who had chanted “no war!” back in 2003 nor those who moved resources around maps in the Pentagon could predict the extent of the final costs; yet all knew generally someone would pay, and who they would likely be. Brown University’s Watson Institute for International Relations and Public Affairs found that up to August 2021, 387,072 civilians died in Iraq, Afghanistan and other nations in the region, as a direct result of the War on Terror. That is more than a third of all deaths in those wars.4 This is the point underlying Muhub Esmat’s recent text in this journal on the video installation and photography work of Aziz Hazara, an Afghan artist working between Kabul and Ghent, whose five-channel video installation Bow Echo (2019), was included in the 2020 Biennale of Sydney. In that work, young Afghan boys struggle to stand on a windy mountain top with Kabul down below, while blowing a tiny toy trumpet. The work speaks of vulnerability and a stoic endurance in the face of forces that are both great and indifferent, that could literally blow life away.

In this text, I want to briefly consider a handful of recent Western contemporary war art works, while picking up on a powerful point made fleetingly in Esmat’s essay, in which he argues that “Hazara’s works aim to incite examination and investigation,” unlike what he disparages as the “facile compassion often aroused by the widely circulated images of the war.”5 The implicit targets of Esmat’s ire are the works of many Western contemporary artists who have travelled to the war in Afghanistan as it stretched over the last two decades. These artists have been the focus of much of my own research since 2009, initiated by a series of interviews with Australian artist, Shaun Gladwell leading to the book Double War (2016), which discussed the video installation artist’s work as Australia’s Official War Artist in Afghanistan in 2009, particularly within the broader visual politics of the War on Terror.6 Over the past four years, I have worked closely with Australian academic Uroš Čvoro on three books published by Bloomsbury as part of the large ‘Art in Conflict’ project, two of which are due out in 2023. We are also about to enter our next project in 2023, ‘Art of Peace’. What has become clear to us is that art can be powerful, even in the face of war, but it can do virtually nothing to prevent it or change its course. The grandest of humanitarian statements against war—a tapestry at the United Nations of Pablo Picasso’s Guernica (1937)—was simply covered with a blue curtain as Colin Powell presented falsities and outright lies to the Security Council on 5 February 2003 to justify the American invasion of Iraq. That moment attests to both the power and limitations of art.

As art historian Terry Smith convincingly argues, “contemporary art” is deeply enmeshed within contemporaneity; both reflective and constitutive of our time’s “currents,”7 and this is strongly the case with contemporary war art. In reflecting contemporaneity, as Smith argues, contemporary art tends to map-out, explore and articulate deeper historical shifts that take place over larger timeframes. After two decades of contemporary war art from the War on Terror, we now live in an atmosphere of a tense and seemingly fleeting interbellum. One generation after the beginning of the War on Terror, and nearly thirty-five years after the end of the Cold War, the threat of nuclear war has returned as a geopolitical tool, gambling with the highest stakes possible. This moment seems appropriate for some critical reflection on ‘contemporary war art’, or, more perhaps accurately the focus of this article, on Western contemporary art that addresses the wars that Western nations, Australia, the United States, NATO, wage elsewhere in the world. How are Australian artists and other artists from the West to address something as profound as the human cost of war, while negotiating reductive or performative modes of compassion? This text briefly considers not only the question of what war art can incite in audiences in the West, but also what we, that audience, demand of contemporary war art.

In Susan Sontag’s final book Regarding the Pain of Others (2003), written in the early days of the War on Terror, she argues audiences make ideological demands on images of war.8 Sontag discusses Three Guineas, published in 1938 on the precipice of World War II, in which Virginia Woolf suggests that images of human destruction in war incite a universal response of horror with the potential force to stop war in its tracks. Sontag rejects Woolf’s assertion, arguing that any compassion is actually contingent on the extent to which the audience of the image identifies with the victim depicted: “identity is everything.”9 In other words, Sontag argues, compassion is ideologically conditional. Moreover, as I have argued elsewhere, audiences can impose emotionally driven demands on images, which are sometimes left unsatisfied by the images themselves. In instances where the images are important enough to an audience, those demands are met by iterative mediated reimaginings of those images, until they are fully rehabilitated in the service of the audience’s demands.

One such example is the image of the supposedly dead Osama Bin Laden that was widely broadcast following his assassination by the US Navy Seals on 2 May 2011. The photo briefly did the rounds on different television and online media outlets, before it was swiftly debunked as a bad Photoshop job that had been circulating on the net since 2009. And yet, a year and a half later, as if to satisfy the popular thirst in the US for an image of Bin Laden dead, that had been effectively stolen away when the photo was debunked, a representation of the ‘real’ photographic image reappears in Kathryn Bigelow’s film Zero Dark Thirty (2012), as a photograph taken by the Navy Seal commanding officer, seen fleetingly on the back viewfinder of his digital camera.10 Sontag says in her earlier landmark work, On Photography (1977) that images can goad conscience but can never be ethical or political knowledge.11 If compassion is ideologically conditional and, in turn, we make demands on images to align with what audiences want of them, the highly subjective field of visual art is particularly apt to act as a mirror to popular fears and desires.

In his 2015 lecture,12 and his later 2017 article,13 Rex Butler considers the possible forces of the collective Id at work in the popularity of Ben Quilty’s After Afghanistan exhibition as it toured Australia. Butler is particularly swingeing of what he saw at that time as the uncritical “nationalist group-think” of Australia’s art critics around Quilty’s work.14 The After Afghanistan series mostly consists of large oil-on-canvas portraits of Australian Defence Force soldiers, posed in Quilty’s studio in the town of Robertson in regional New South Wales in the months following the artist’s time in Afghanistan as Australian Official War Artist in 2011. It is now ten years since After Afghanistan began its tour, met with the almost unanimous praise of Australia’s art critics. Focusing on Quilty’s virtuosic execution of impasto painting, applied in thick swathes with a cake icing knife, Butler points out that this signature style is what critics claim connects the audience with the individual psychologically traumatic experiences of his soldier sitters. Critics often applaud the artist’s own incisive empathy and the ways in which his gesturality and expressivity channel the soldiers’ traumatic experiences through the aesthetic enactment of trauma—“visceral technique supports the emotional response of the subjects to their wartime experience,”15 “sensuous layers of paint [that] reveal the emotional cost of war,”16 “given their pain a language.”17

Butler argues, however, that despite the fairly consistent reading of the paintings as capturing and conveying traumatic experience, their expressionistic aesthetic functions primarily as a vehicle for audiences to perform a generic empathy that has little to do with the actual sitters’ experiences. “The real experience of the work,” argues Butler, “is an empty expressiveness, the signs of expressivity but without anything actually being expressed.”18 The mainstay of Butler’s critique of Quilty’s After Afghanistan is less an attack on the paintings themselves or any accusation of Quilty engaging in “facile compassion”; but rather that the popularity of the works reveals much about what Butler calls the “wider ideology of our time,”19 that is, “solicitation at a distance or care without responsibility, that ‘interpassivity’ that is to be seen in all contemporary internet campaigns, Facebook signings and twitter trendings in the name of a good cause.”20 Butler borrows “interpassivity” from Slavoj Žižek, meaning a “mode of our participation in socio-ideological life in which we are active all the time in order to make sure that nothing will happen, that nothing will really change.”21

Butler’s analysis of the popular reception of After Afghanistan suggests that what Australian, and Western audiences more generally, want from contemporary war art is that “we just abstractly have to feel or sympathise with them [the traumatised returned soldiers],” Butler says, “and that is enough.”22 In other words, After Afghanistan provides its audience with the opportunity to publicly perform empathy and compassion—reassuring them they are good people, against war in the broadest terms—without mounting any ethical challenges to the larger political and structural contexts that lead to Australia’s involvement in Afghanistan in the first place.23 And I don’t say this smugly. My own analysis of Quilty’s After Afghanistan at that time focuses on the work’s adept affective capacities and discusses the gesture of the sitters through Warburgian analysis,24 while overlooking the more complex ethical problematic arising from the tour of After Afghanistan being supported by defence contractor Thales,25 a criticism of the exhibition I have only once come across, in a blog post by Australian blogger Natalie Thomas.26

Shaun Gladwell immediately preceded Quilty as the Australian Official War Artist and was sent to Afghanistan with the Australian Defence Forces in 2009. Gladwell and I worked collaboratively on bringing to print Double War: Shaun Gladwell, visual culture and the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq, my first book on contemporary war art with the artist contributing many images of his work and several interviews. What interested me about Gladwell’s approach was, in our interviews he talked about “an impossible empathy” that percolates through his Afghanistan works,27 the inability of him as an artist to align himself in any meaningful way with the experience of the soldiers. This is clear when we compare two works from Gladwell’s Afghanistan works, Double Field (2009-10) and POV: Mirror Sequence Tarin Kowt (2009–10). Both are synchronised twochannel video installations in which two opponents attempt to follow each other through the viewfinder, moving sideways and strafing around their opponent. In Double Field, both opponents are ADF soldiers: “The overall effect is that the two points of view form a tight isolated hermetic feedback loop—nearly a mirror image;”28 on the other hand, in POV: Mirror Sequence Tarin Kowt, Gladwell takes the place of one of the soldiers, and the civilian/military divide becomes clear, through differences in both the visual framing of the points-of-view and the movements of Gladwell and the soldiers. Furthermore, I was acutely conscious that any in-depth discussion of a Western official war artist accompanying Coalition troops on a War on Terror mission, necessitated discussions of torture, the Bush Administration’s twisting of international law, the weaponisation of video games, the gamification of viewfinder warfare and the propaganda of movies like Zero Dark Thirty and NBC’s Saving Jessica Lynch (2003). Large sections of the book never mention Gladwell or his work.

During a public talk promoting Double War a year later, an audience member asked, where are the absent Afghans in Gladwell’s Afghanistan?29 It is an obvious point that can be fairly made about both Quilty and Gladwell’s Afghanistan works—the central topic of both bodies of work is ‘our’ pain, ‘our’ gaze. Questions aside of whether or not we get to know either of these dimensions through their respective bodies of contemporary war artwork, the perspectives of Afghans lie far outside their frames, in the sense used by Judith Butler in her book Frames of War (2009).

To an Australian and Western audience more generally, the images in Hazara’s work make this contrastingly clear with images that we do not necessarily want to know about, that challenge the security of our long-held narratives of having defended Afghanistan’s liberty in the face of the tireless tyranny of the Taliban. How are we to know about the massive dumps of potentially toxic military material pictured in Hazara’s I am looking for you like a drone, my love (2021), or imagine the oppressive presence of the American surveillance blimps fixed 1,500 feet above the expanse of Kabul depicted in his Kite Balloon (2018), when images such as these are rarely on our news and never in Western contemporary war art? As Esmat says, even though the blimps are now gone, “the experience of living under them, that shaped the lives of many since their original introduction into the country in 2007, remains.”30 They are literally and figuratively beyond our frame.

Yet this is an inherent limitation surrounding any Western contemporary artist in an overseas war zone, many of whom are sent with their nation’s military in the capacity of official war artist. The very first Australian, British and Canadian official war artists worked alongside soldiers in the trenches on the front lines of the First World War. As Australia’s scheme developed and included high profile artists, such as Stella Bowen, William Dobell, Donald Friend, Ivor Hele and Arthur Streeton, they became less exposed to direct risk. However, Australia’s Official War Artists sent to America’s war in Vietnam, Bruce Fletcher and Ken McFadyen were required to be fully trained to fight in jungle warfare. When McFadyen was sent in 1968 he was shot in the leg, by accident.31 It is quite likely this incident is the reason why Australia appointed no more official war artists until 1999, when Rick Amor and Wendy Sharpe, were sent to cover Australia’s INTERFET peacekeeping operations in Timor Leste. With Amor and Sharpe, the scheme was broadened to include any Australian military operations,32 and has since included a greater representation of Indigenous artists and women artists after a long list of mostly white men.33 Yet risk management, insurance and workplace health and safety standards, which have clearly changed since McFadyen’s day, necessitate official war artists functioning in similar ways, and with comparable restrictions, as those of embedded journalists.

As art theorist Julian Stallabrass argued amidst the War on Terror in 2008, Western troops, their travails and stories, become the inevitable focus of work of embedded journalists and, moreover, they depend upon them for their very safety and survival.34 At a 2016 symposium at Kings College London, Stallabrass pressed Gladwell on this issue, to which the artist responded, “I was offered that vantage point, but I could not be outside of that space of power.”35 Similarly, British contemporary artist and filmmaker Steve McQueen was sent to Iraq as Britain’s Official War Artist, where he was embedded with British troops in Basra. McQueen felt completely constrained, not allowed to leave the base, and was told he would receive no protection if he left on his own.36 Of course, a Western artist within the danger and volatility of a war zone, in a foreign country and unfamiliar cultural context, unarmed and untrained, is extremely vulnerable, so the constraining protections are inevitable. This is not to naively suggest that Quilty, Gladwell and others needed to throw caution to the wind and cross the wire; but rather, that the possibility did not present to them as an option.37 However, not all recent Western official war artists have remained inside the wire. English artist David Cotterrell spent a month with British troops in Helmand Province at the height of the war in Afghanistan. Cotterrell was commissioned by the Wellcome Trust in association with Britain’s Ministry of Defence to create a major series of works around the intersection of contemporary war and medicine. His first trip to Afghanistan was in 2007 with the Joint Forces Medical Group and the Combat Medical Technicians of 40 Commando at Camp Bastion, Lash Kagar and Sangin. However, he returned in 2018 as a tourist and observed, “I felt I saw more and I could look back at how strange that bubble looked from just beyond the wire. When I saw the armed columns racing through Kabul and I wasn’t in them, it was very interesting to get a sense of how threatening that looks, even when the soldiers are waving and trying to take the helmets off to look like they are relaxed.”38 Cotterrell began to understand the extent to which the very infrastructure and equipment considered necessary for protection functions symbolically. This brings to mind Esmat’s discussion of Hazara’s Kite Balloon and the ‘protection’ provided by American surveillance. As Cotterrell observes, “everything mitigates a risk, but what they never talk about is what it represents to people.”39

As Esmat’s article argues, Hazara’s work emphasizes the longer term, the deeper time, of lived experience within an ongoing zone of conflict. In I am looking for you like a drone, my love, Hazara conveys the scale of the garbage dumps left behind by the American military infrastructure, with a number of locals foraging among the expanse of tech waste and military junk. While Cotterrell’s images are clearly different in many ways, they share a similar deeper sense of time, as well as address the clash of temporalities that occurs in war zones. For an official war artist, whose experience of war zones is often measured in the total of a few weeks, Cotterrell spent a significant amount of time longer in Afghanistan creating Theatre (2009), a one hundred and eighty degree multichannel video installation at the Wellcome Collection, London, as part of the War and Medicine exhibition.40 Michael Corris says of Cotterrell’s Theatre, it is “a work of immense emotional power.”41 And, in 2009, Cotterrell continued to document returning injured British troops at Selly Oak Hospital and Headley Court (Defence Medical Rehabilitation Centre) over the course of six months.

Of course, once again it is the narratives of the troops of Western military that are the focus, the Coalition perspective of the war in Afghanistan. However, Cotterrell is highly conscious of the differential temporalities that collide in war zones and within the frame of his own images, which inflects his work somewhat differently. His works address the gulf between the subjective experience of a war zone and the ways in which they are mediated visually: we do not see “twelvehour films of [solders] waiting to see if they’re going to be extracted on a plane or not,” yet, “that waiting is so important, and the problem is the formats which were used for actually conveying information deal with things which are resolvable in a short time, and digestible.”42 For Cotterrell, it is artists’ championing of the subject’s experience, “without the objective aspirations of a historian or the journalist”43 that is the greatest value that Western contemporary artists bring to war zones. Comparing his role with that of the news media, he says: “[journalists] had to form stories; and I think the problem is that it belies the fact that most conflict involves chaos, moments that don’t make sense. And it’s right they don’t make sense. Part of the trauma is the fact that there isn’t meaning and not all things lead to a conclusion. And the problem is, it’s very hard to represent those.”44

Cotterrell observes that the closer to the crucible of warfare, we see “less of the metanarrative.”45 War time is experienced by combatants in war zones, as the aphorism from the First World War goes, as months of boredom punctuated by moments of extreme terror. Much of the boredom is waiting, indefinite interruptions of the narrative flow; much of the terror is chaos, non-narrative. The hours of boredom cannot be mediated and represented, and so the moments of extreme terror cannot be contrasted against it. As Cotterrell says, this “means that we don’t really understand anything of the actual experience.”46 Cotterrell notes that in a war zone the chaos of events fragments narrative, and that it is often the ambiguity, incomprehensibility and the openended free-floating sense of volatility that is traumatic to experience.47 In the reconstructive process

—whether this is in Cotterrell’s studio practice on returning to the United Kingdom, or in the news media’s reports of stories of the war—a form of ‘mastery’ is imposed upon events that were, in fact, fugitive and chaotic. That mastery was entirely absent in the subjective experience of the original moment as it happened. Events as they happen possess a sense atelicity—until a coherent narrative retrospectively forms and those events become teleological (this happened, then that, leading to this). After returning to the UK, Cotterrell’s photographs and diaries from Afghanistan served to remind him of the subjective experience of chaos that is lost in the later construction of narrative through his work: “my memory would swiftly try and provide a coherent narrative and the diary would remind me that it was fragmentary and unresolved… it’s important not to forget that so much of the trauma of a situation is actually the ambiguity. It’s not the clear understood moment of drama.”48 What is interesting about Cotterrell’s investigation of the trauma of war is that it is less rooted in the empathy/compassion/trauma nexus, enacting in an affect-trauma psychodrama, but is instead more concerned with the temporalities of trauma. It seems not to demand that we, the audience, connect empathically in order to understand trauma—and the surgical PPE in much of Cotterrell’s images further serves to disconnect us from the depicted subjects—but rather, in focusing on the disorienting atelicity experienced in war, we might understand something about trauma beyond how we imagine we might feel.

An even cooler head can be found in much of the work of Mladen Miljanović. Miljanović lives and works in Banja Luka, Bosnia and Herzegovina, a republic of the former Yugoslavia—the ‘former East’ yet not a former member of the Warsaw Pact; now ambiguously East and West; a European nation and yet not within the European Union, a seemingly ambivalent aspirant to NATO membership with a problematic past with existing NATO members. His work often addresses the duality of straddling boundaries, of being none and both, of crossing the wires of Europe. Miljanović was a child in Bosnia and Herzegovina during the Bosnian War (1992–1995) in a village around a kilometre away from the frontline. Following the Dayton Agreement, the war ended in ‘negative peace’—absence of conflict, rather than the ‘presence of peace’—and the compromise of one country with two ‘entities’, the Federation of Bosnia and Herzegovina and Republika Srpska, and Banja Luka is the de facto capital of the Republika Srpska. As a survivor of the Bosnian War and then former military conscript, Miljanović’s work often addresses war, or rather the conflicting tensions that sometimes barely hold it at bay. Between military service and establishing himself as a contemporary artist (the first to represent Bosnia and Herzegovina at the Venice Biennale after a two-decade absence), Miljanović worked for a stonemason as a tombstone engraver (“In my village, I was a curse,” he jokes, “the curse was ‘I hope that Mladen would draw your portrait!’”),49 a technique that is often found in his work. In 2015, Bosnia and Herzegovina became the frontline of another type of conflict in Europe, as thousands of displaced people fled ISIS in Syria and northern Iraq, travelling west to seek asylum in the European Union, particularly in Angela Merkel’s Germany. In response, some EU member nations, notably Hungary and Slovenia, reinforced and militarised their borders, refusing to allow the asylum seekers passage through their countries. Anticipating the wave of European ethno-nationalism that has since followed, this moment saw the re-emergence of hard borders within the European Union.

In response to the ongoing humanitarian crisis and the hard-line taken by Slovenia and Hungary, Miljanović created Didactic Wall (2019), a large white marble work engraved with survival manual instructions and diagrams on how to cross a fortified border, use the sun and the hands of a wristwatch to determine direction and a multitude of other practical techniques for surviving outdoors and evading authorities. Didactic Wall’s first opening night, on 15 July 2019, was held at the city gallery of Bihać, a town in Bosnia and Herzegovina. Bihać is ten kilometres from the border with Croatia, at the hard edge of the European Union. Between the town and border was the Vucjak camp, at that time housing eight hundred asylum seekers hoping to cross the border. Miljanović had the same survival manual diagrams compiled and printed into a booklet, one thousand copies of which were made available for anyone visiting the exhibition to take a copy. The booklets were stacked on two plinths next to wall text printed with the inscription from the survival manual given to Miljanović as he graduated military academy in 2001: “Believing that the knowledge you have gained in this military school would be successfully applied in peace, as well as in an eventual war, I wish you much luck in your future life.”50 A limited number of the booklets included a sachet of flammable coloured powder, which, if set alight, would emit brightly coloured smoke that could be used to signal for help. At the opening of Didactic Wall at Bihać City Gallery, the booklets found their way into the hands of some of the asylum seekers, who attended. Almost inevitably, one of those copies was set on fire by some of the children outside the gallery. In the time of Donald Trump’s Mexican border wall and the hardening of borders in Europe, Didactic Wall subverted military knowledge, smuggling it to asylum seekers as tools of active agency for crossing the wire. Miljanović’s works incite not just compassion, albeit a subversive one, but also action. Compassion is the starting point, not the destination.

Didactic Wall possesses the mischievous dissident humour found throughout much of his work, often actively resisting the wishes of his audience. On opening night of his 2013 Venice pavilion exhibition, Miljanović performed The Pressure of Wishes, in which he held in his arms a heavy granite slab engraved with text taken from various messages of best wishes and expectations leading up to Venice, the slab covering his face and body, turning the demands back on the audience. At several of his openings he has performed At the Edge, in which the artist hangs high up on the exterior wall of the gallery by only his forearms.51 At his 2017 opening at ACB Gallery Budapest, he performed In Low Flight, crawling along the floor of the gallery, amongst opening guests’ feet. Each performance is effectively a snub, eschewing the guests, the glasses of wine and the polite conversation, potentially with wealthy collectors and influential curators. Over the two decades since the War on Terror, an expectation has developed that good contemporary anti-war art is necessarily centred on performative modes of those things that are incontrovertibly good—compassion, empathy and emotionality—which in turn remind us that we are good people, against war, while overlooking the more critical structural, ideological and political dimension of war. Meanwhile, works such Didactic Wall addresses the messy specificities and complexities of the shifting geopolitics, from historical tensions, to displaced populations and xenophobic domestic politics, and remain less legible as contemporary war art.

The complex geopolitical context that characterizes Bosnia and Herzegovina—its duality, its straddling of the ideological East and West—is also central to the current war in Ukraine. Like Bosnia and Herzegovina, Ukraine is in the ‘former East’, a former republic of the Soviet Union, now an applicant to both NATO and the European Union. The threat seemingly posed by the Westernisation of its culture and its political integration into Europe was motive enough for Vladimir Putin’s Russia to invade on 24 February 2022, attempt to overthrow the government in Kyiv, and unilaterally annex the Donetsk, Kherson, Luhansk and Zaporizhzhia oblasts in September the same year. Many Ukrainian artists became war artists by default, and the war art coming out of Ukraine since the invasion is immediate, raw and reactive. One such Ukrainian artist goes by the pseudonym ‘Ave’.52

Before Russia’s invasion, her works still possessed a graphic style that borrowed playfully from Eastern European twentieth century propaganda poster art. Prior to the invasion, it seems to be a largely aesthetic appropriation, and almost nostalgic adoptions of a style half-a-century’s historical distance. Yet since February 2022, all of Ave’s works now focus on the war. Some are figurative depictions of tragedy, while others are metaphoric and symbolic vignettes; and their style now takes on a different weight. I only saw many of Ave’s works at the very end of writing this text and I have yet to properly digest these works; but what is clear in them is their raw anger and lack of compassion. To varying degrees, each of Ave’s post-invasion works convey a deep sense of rage that to a Western audience may well feel uncomfortably forceful. In contemporary war art, we are not used to thinking about victims of war as active, creative agents, as vociferous. Maybe we are not used to hearing their voices at all.

Notes

1 Scott Wilson and Al Kamen, ‘“Global War On Terror” Is Given New Name’, Washington Post, 25 March 2009; www.washingtonpost.com/ wp-dyn/content/article/2009/03/24/AR2009032402818.html accessed 27 November 2020

2 Derek Gregory, ‘The Everywhere War’, The Geographical Journal vol. 177, no. 3, 2011, p. 241

3 ‘Millions join global anti-war protests’, BBC News, 17 February, 2003; http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/europe/2765215.stm accessed 12 October 2022

4 Neta Crawford and Catherine Lutz, ‘Human Cost of Post-9/11 Wars’, Costs of War, Brown University; https://watson.brown.edu/costsofwar/ figures/2021/WarDeathToll accessed 3 November 2022

5 Muheb Esmat, ‘To hold you close as you fall with the hope that you may rise in a better place’, di’van | A Journal of Accounts 11, 2022, p. 82

6 Kit Messham-Muir, Double War: Shaun Gladwell: Visual Culture and the Wars in Afghanistan and Iraq, Melbourne: Thames & Hudson Australia, 2016

7 Terry Smith, What is Contemporary Art?, Chicago: Chicago University Press, 2009, p. 7

8 Susan Sontag, Regarding the Pain of Others, London: Penguin, 2003, p. 6

9 Ibid., 9

10 Messham-Muir, pp. 81-99

11 Sontag, p. 24

12 Rex Butler, ‘Ben Quilty: The Fog of War’, Finest Art Seminar Series Tonight (FASST), Inaugural Seminar 14 April 2015, Part II, Panoptic Press, 24 June 2015; https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dr3ie4DT1qg accessed 7 November 2022

13 Rex Butler, ‘Ben Quilty: The Fog of War’, Intellectual History Review 27:3, 2017

14 Butler, ‘Ben Quilty: The Fog of War’, Finest Art Seminar Series Tonight

15 Michael Desmond, ‘Blood and Landscape: Ben Quilty in Afghanistan and at Home’, Contemporary Visual Art+Culture Broadsheet 43–1, 2014, p. 36

16 Kathleen Linn, ‘Ben Quilty: After Afghanistan’, ArtsHub, 6 March 2013; https://visual.artshub.com.au/news-article/reviews/visual-arts/ kathleen-linn/ben-quilty-after-afghanistan-194488 accessed 7 November 2022

17 Steve Proposch, ‘Ben Quilty: Spoils of War’, Trouble Magazine, 2 February, 2016; http://www.troublemag.com/ben-quilty-spoils-of-war/ accessed 9 November 2022

18 Butler, ‘Ben Quilty: The Fog of War’, Intellectual History Review, p. 443

19 Ibid., 442

20 Ibid., 449

21 Slavoj Žižek, The Parallax View, Cambridge MA and London: MIT Press, 2006, p. 332

22 Butler, ‘Ben Quilty: The Fog of War’, p. 442

23 Ibid., p. 443

24 Kit Messham-Muir, ‘Conflict, Complicity and Ben Quilty’s After Afghanistan portraits’, Australian and New Zealand Journal of Art 18:1, 2018

25 ‘Ben Quilty: After Afghanistan 2016’, Castlemaine Art Gallery, 2016; https://www.castlemainegallery.com/exhibitions/ben-quilty-afterafghanistan-2016 accessed 8 November 2022

26 Natalie Thomas, ‘Quilty: Sit Down Bitch. Be Humble’, Natty Solo, 2019; https://nattysolo.com/2019/05/11/quilty-sit-down-bitch-be-humble/ accessed 10 November 2022

Crossing the wire: Western contemporary war art in the interbellum

27 Shaun Gladwell, interview with Kit Messham-Muir, Hyde Park, London, 30 September 2010

28 Messham-Muir, p. 189

29 Gladwell’s images in Double War do include some images of Afghan military personnel within the wire of the Coalition camp

30 Esmat, p. 82

31 Ryan Johnston, ‘Recalling History to Duty: 100 years of Australian war art’, Artlink vol. 35, no. 1, 2015, p. 15

32 Ibid.

33 Catherine Speck, ‘The Australian War Museum, Women Artists and the National Memory of the First World War’, When the Soldiers Return: November 2007 Conference Proceedings, Martin Critty (ed.), Brisbane: University of Queensland, 2009, p. 278

34 Julian Stallabrass, ‘The Power and Impotence of Images’, Memory of Fire: The War of Images and Images of War, Brighton: Brighton Photo Biennial, 2008, p. 6

35 Shaun Gladwell, Traces of War Symposium, Kings College London, 1 October 2016

36 Adrian Searle, ‘Last Post’, The Guardian, 13 March 2007; https://www.theguardian.com/politics/2007/mar/12/iraq.art; accessed 10 November 2022

37 There is, of course, the fairly unique case of western war artist George Gittoes, who I have addressed elsewhere: Kit Messham-Muir, ‘Conflict and Compromise: Australia’s Official War Artists and the “War on Terror”’, The Palgrave Handbook of Artistic and Cultural Responses to War – Volume 1: Australasia, the British Isles, and the United States, Martin Kerby, Margaret Baguley and Janet McDonald eds., Melbourne: Palgrave Macmillan, 2019

38 David Cotterrell, interview with Kit Messham-Muir, transcribed by Monika Lukowska, London, 31 May 2019

39 Ibid.

40 Michael Corris, ‘My Name is David and I will be your War Artist for the Day: David Cotterrell Shoots a Video’, War and Art, Joanna Bourke (ed.), 7-41, London: Reaktion Books, 2017, p. 291

41 Ibid.

42 David Cotterrell, ‘The Theatre of War Symposium Day One–David Cotterrell, Subjective Documentary’, Abbey Theatre, YouTube, 4 February 2015; https://youtu.be/Tvc8yZv8aWM accessed 10 November 2022

43 David Cotterrell, ‘Age of Terror: David Cotterell on making art in Afghanistan’, Imperial War Museum, URL: https://youtu.be/rD1j3ZHFK-Q accessed 9 November 2022

44 Ibid.

45 Ibid.

46 Ibid.

47 Ibid.

48 Cotterrell, ‘The Theatre of War Symposium Day One’

49 Mladen Miljanovič, interview with Kit Messham-Muir, transcribed by Monika Lukowska, London, 29 May 2019

50 ‘The Didactic Wall’, Mladen Miljanovič; http://mladenmiljanovic.com/The-Didactic-Wall accessed 10 November 2022

51 Oberfälzer Künstlerhaus in Schwandorf, Germany (2011), HDLU Zagreb, Croatia (2012), A+A Gallery, Venice, Italy (2012), Gallery MC, New York, USA (2012), DADO Gallery Cetinje, Montenegro (2013), ACB Gallery Budapest, Hungary (2014), PERA Museum, Istanbul, Turkey (2016), Synagogue, Varaždin, Croatia (2017), Gallery OFF, Piotrków Trybunalski, Poland (2018)

52 Ave brought to my attention by the Australian artist and filmmaker George Gittoes

Front cover

Taring Padi, People’s Justice, 2002

Photo courtesy the artists

In the days after documenta’s opening, one work immediately generated a windfall of controversy.

Taring Padi’s People’s Justice is… an epic depiction of various historical events in Indonesia, where the collective hails from. Created 20 years ago for the 2002 South Australian Art Festival in Adelaide, the work charts a period of Indonesian history spanning from the 1960s to the turn of the century… One particular focus of the mural is the genocide of 1965, in which hundreds of thousands of Communists, leftists, Gerwani women, Chinese people, Javanese Abangan people, and more were murdered by stateoperated forces. The mural alludes to some historians’ claims that Israeli intelligence helped the regime of Sukarno, Indonesia’s first president, conduct the genocide. The genocide ultimately gave way to a coup that led to the rise of Suharto, who held a dictatorship in the country for over 30 years, until his resignation in 1998, the year that Taring Padi formed. Almost as soon as the piece went up, pictures of the anti-Semitic imagery made their way around social media, and a wide-scale outcry ensued… Several days after its installation, the Taring Padi mural was covered over with a black fabric. The following day, documenta said it had made the decision to take away the mural altogether. Taring Padi said the work was not supposed to be anti-Semitic, adding, “This work then becomes a monument of mourning for the impossibility of dialogue at this moment. This monument, we hope, will be the starting point for a new dialogue.” Taring Padi apologised for the work and, in a follow-up statement, later admitted that depicting the anti-Semitic imagery was a “mistake.” Alex Greenberger, 22 July 2022; https://www.artnews.com/art-news/news/ what-is-documenta-15-antisemitismcontroversy-1234635001/

Page 20

Taksim Square during Occupy Gezi, 2013

Testifying to the political dimension of urban public space, the occupation of Gezi Park transformed a protest against an urban planning project into a historic struggle for democracy. It is estimated that more than three million people were directly involved in the biggest demonstrations Turkey had seen for decades, comparable with those of the Arab Spring (2010–11), the Indignados (2011), the Occupy movement (2011) and even those of May ’68 in France. On 8 June, Mayor Topbaş publicly retracted and distanced himself from the decision to open a shopping centre and hotel inside the future replica of the old barracks, announcing that he was studying plans to go ahead with a public museum instead. A week later the Gezi Park camp was officially dismantled but the “chapulling” [Erdoğan labelled the demonstrators “çapulcu”, “marauders” in Turkish] movement continued to apply pressure from other parts of the city and, indeed, from all over the country. Eventually, local and international social pressure obliged President Erdoğan to cancel his construction plans for the park. Public Space, https://www.publicspace.org/ works/-/project/h312-occupy-gezi has said that the protest would not be subject to an intervention unless it began to constitute a menace against public order… “If it doesn’t turn into an act of violence, does not disrupt the public order and does not limit other people’s freedom, everyone has such a right [to stage a protest]” … Union of Turkish Bar Associations head Metin Feyzioğlu also declared that the standing man’s act was not a crime according to the Turkish Criminal Code. “Standing does not constitute a crime by any means,” he said, adding that there was no stance more democratic than this. “Humanity cannot find a more democratic type of protest,” he said… The protest spread across the country hours after Gündüz’s launch; https://www.hurriyetdailynews.com/standingman-inspires-a-new-type-of-civil-disobedience-inturkey--48999

Page 20

Erdem Gunduz during his Standing Man protest Taksim Square, Istanbul, 2013

Photo https://resistology.files.wordpress.com/ 2013/06/duranadam.jpg

A single man who started standing silently in the middle of Istanbul’s city centre has provoked a silent struggle across Turkey for the right to protest. The young man, later identified as performance artist Erdem Gündüz, stood in the same place without moving for eight hours on June 17, staring at the flag of modern Turkey’s founder Mustafa Kemal Atatürk on the Atatürk Culture Center. The police have been limiting access to the city centre following the crackdown on Gezi Park protesters. Over the weekend, the police evacuated the city centre to stop the Gezi Park occupation, which started three weeks ago against a controversial renovation plan, and the Istanbul Metropolitan Municipality planted trees and flowers in the park, which is closed to the public now. Turkish Interior Minister Muammer Güler

Top: Atatürk Cultural Center, Taksim Square, Istanbul, with banners of left wing groups, Gezi Park occupation, early-June 2013. Immediately after the siege, the police removed banners hung by left-wing groups and replaced them with a portrait of Atatürk flanked by two Turkish flags. In an uncharacteristic departure from the usual iconography of the present regime, a portrait of Prime Minister Erdoğan is conspicuous by its absence; https://bubkes. org/2013/06/24/gezi-parktaksim-square-ataturkcultural-center-during-and-after-occupation-plus-aword-on-the-iconography-of-public-space/

Photo uncredited

Middle/bottom: Halil Altindere, Wonderland (video stills), 2013

Photos courtesy the artist and Pilot Gallery, Istanbul

Wonderland is a document of anger, resistance and hope voiced by the children of Sulukule, a neighbourhood which for six centuries hosted the Roma population and their culture, and was demolished… as part of an urban transformation project. As the prosperity promised by the Public Housing Project (TOKI)… ends up serving nothing more than social inequality, poverty and infrastructural problems, the deep-rooted lifetsyle shaped with music and dance of the people of Sulukule faces oppression and irreversible corrosion. Istanbul’s adventure of concretisation, gentrification… is voiced by the [hip-hop/rap] group Tahribad-i Isyan and accompanied by Altindere’s visuals which land a punch in our stomach, producing a dreamlike reality that is difficult to digest.

13th Istanbul Biennial guidebook

Page 28

Gayatri Spivak, Imperatives to Reimagine the Postcolonial, March Meeting 2022. As global neoliberalism becomes the main instrument of exploitation, ideological oppression, and subalternisation, we have to re-imagine what the colonies were… What was there before the colonies? Did all deployment of power relations start with the colonies?… Are we nothing but post-colonial? As planetary destruction by human greed is upon us, the mindset change that is required must accommodate such questions and more; https://sharjahart.org/sharjah-art-foundation/ events/march-meeting-2022-imperatives-toreimagine-the-postcolonial brick kilns to endure their extreme heat. After years of exposure, their feet become numb and hard like the bricks themselves. Wall text, 2022 Berlin Biennale: Still Present!

Page 43

Top and bottom: Neos Aristophanes, installation view (and detail) at the 3rd Athens Biennale MONODROME, 2011

Chromolithographies from the Neos Aristophanes magazine, circa 1889–94, part of the National Historical Museum Collection. Photography reproduction Klaus-Valtin von Eickstedt

Photos by Margarita Myrogianni

Page 31

Birender Yadav, Walking on the Roof of Hell, 2016

Photos courtesy the artist

Photos https://www.lynnecameron.com/blog

The promise of modernity in India has often been linked to industry as an engine to lift the country out of poverty. Sadly, the very industry that this political utopia is based on is entrenched in exploitative practices. Typically, brick workers are landless bonded laborers. Walking on the Roof of Hell consists of thirty pairs of wooden khadau sandals that these workers use when treading the

Page 34

Top: Taring Padi, People’s Justice, 2002

Photo courtesy the artists

Bottom: Mayuri Chari, I was not created for pleasure, 2022

Photo courtesy the artist

In the installation, I was not created for pleasure (2022), on view at the 12th Berlin Biennale, [Mayuri Chari] has affixed cow dung cakes to a wall, mocking the tradition of banishing menstruating women (seen as impure) from the home, whereas the use of cow dung as fuel and in religious purification rituals is accepted. For thousands of years, Indian miniatures depicted sensual forms and various aspects of nudity, especially within narratives of society and culture. However, recently Chari was excluded from a museum exhibition due to the presence of nudity in her works. In another group exhibition, the venue owners asked her to remove her stitched work, which celebrated the body of a woman who could have been a victim of body shaming. Instead, she covered it with a black curtain that read, “Don’t open, I am nude inside.” SumeshManoj-Sharma; https://12.berlinbiennale.de/artists/ mayuri-chari/

Page 48

Top: Andreas Angelidakis, Crash Pad, 2013 Photo courtesy the artist Andreas Angelidakis designed a multi-purpose room with a library… It picks up the idea of the intellectual 19th century salon as setting for cultural and political conversations. Angelidakis arranges Greek folklore rugs handmade in the Greek countryside in an Ottoman tradition. Thus the project refers to the German intellectual and scholar imagination of the Ancient Greece at that time that was inspired by contemporaneous researches like Heinrich Schliemann’s archeological excavations of those ideal ruins. The European idea of an ancient glory was a projection significantly developed by classicists like Johann Wolfgang von Goethe in the 19th century and followed by circles like the “George-Kreis” around German poet Stefan George at the turn of the century. It originated the imaginary of Greece as the heart of European’s civilisation and occident culture until today. There is also an economic parallel to today that Crash Pad refers to: The liberation of the nation in 1830 and the introduction of the concept of a Modern Greece after the Greek War of independence was accompanied by differences and struggles between Britain and Turkey. It lead to the first bankruptcy of modern Greece in 1895. In order to supervise the debt of Greece, the original version of the International Monetary Fund (IMF) was put in place by France, England and Germany. Today we find Greece and Germany in an awkward financial exchange and somehow history repeats itself. 8th Berlin Biennale press release.

Bottom: Neos Aristophanes (detail), 3rd Athens Biennale Monodrome, 2011

Chromolithographies from the Neos Aristophanes magazine, circa 1889–94, part of the National Historical Museum Collection. Photography reproduction Klaus-Valtin von Eickstedt

Photo by Margarita Myrogianni

United States was compelled to assist “free peoples” in their struggles against “totalitarian regimes,” because the spread of authoritarianism would “undermine the foundations of international peace and hence the security of the United States.” The Truman Doctrine, 1947, Office of the Historian; https://history.state.gov/ milestones/1945-1952/truman-doctrine

Page 50

Top: Stelios Faitakis, Socrates Drinks the Conium, installation view at the 1st Athens Biennale: Destroy Athens, 2007

Photo courtesy the artist and The Breeder, Athens

The work of Stelios Faitakis negotiates diverse styles and traditions, combining street art culture with Byzantine iconography, Cretan folk art, Mexican Muralism and Japanese art. Eastern traditions intermingle with Western culture in a unique artistic vision, where scenes from everyday life can be viewed through a plethora of metaphors and symbols. The invocation of religious conventions through the depiction of halos and extensive use of gold elevates his earthly figures to a divine status and moreover invests the scenes with a sense of eternality… The art critic Andrea Gilbert comments on political art and Stelios Faitakis’s work: “Political art, to be truly successful, must not only relate to the era and place of its creation but also transcend the topical, to speak a universal language, and to carry its impact into the future... art as a voice of dissent against normative societal values and as a means of deconstructing and undermining perceptions and systems, demonstrating that although art cannot change the world, it can certainly make people think... Stelios Faitakis conflates the anarchic gesture of street art, the socialist message of Mexican mural painting, and the devotional persuasion of Byzantine hagiography into a multivalent pictorial idiom that acknowledges the fundamental communicative power of the narrative image... creates a universal iconography that speaks to ‘The People’ across time and culture.” Artmap, Stelios Faitakis; https://artmap. com/thebreeder/exhibition/stelios-faitakis2009?print=do

Bottom: Pablo Picasso, Le Parthénon, 1959

Installation view at the 1st Athens Biennale: Destroy Athens, 2007

Page 53

Stefanos Tsivopoulos, Lost Monument (video stills), 2009

Photos courtesy the artist

With the Truman Doctrine… the United States would provide political, military and economic assistance to all democratic nations under threat from external or internal authoritarian forces. The Truman Doctrine effectively reoriented U.S. foreign policy, away from its usual stance of withdrawal from regional conflicts not directly involving the United States, to one of possible intervention in far away conflicts. The Truman Doctrine arose from a speech delivered by President Truman before a joint session of Congress on March 12, 1947. The immediate cause for the speech was a recent announcement by the British Government that it would no longer provide military and economic assistance to the Greek Government in its civil war against the Greek Communist Party. Truman asked Congress to support the Greek Government against the Communists. He also asked Congress to provide assistance for Turkey, since that nation, too, had previously been dependent on British aid. At the time, the U.S. Government believed that the Soviet Union supported the Greek Communist war effort and worried that if the Communists prevailed in the Greek civil war, the Soviets would ultimately influence Greek policy… a number of other foreign policy problems also influenced President Truman’s decision to actively aid Greece and Turkey. In 1946, four setbacks, in particular, had served to effectively torpedo any chance of achieving a durable post-war rapprochement with the Soviet Union: the Soviets’ failure to withdraw their troops from northern Iran in early 1946 (as per the terms of the Tehran Declaration of 1943); Soviet attempts to pressure the Iranian Government into granting them oil concessions while supposedly fomenting irredentism by Azerbaijani separatists in northern Iran; Soviet efforts to force the Turkish Government into granting them base and transit rights through the Turkish Straits; and, the Soviet Government’s rejection of the Baruch plan for international control over nuclear energy and weapons in June 1946. In light of the deteriorating relationship with the Soviet Union and the appearance of Soviet meddling in Greek and Turkish affairs, the withdrawal of British assistance to Greece provided the necessary catalyst for the Truman Administration to reorient American foreign policy. Accordingly, in his speech, President Truman requested that Congress provide $400 million worth of aid to both the Greek and Turkish Governments and support the dispatch of American civilian and military personnel and equipment to the region. Truman justified his request on two grounds. He argued that a Communist victory in the Greek Civil War would endanger the political stability of Turkey, which would undermine the political stability of the Middle East… Truman also argued that the

The Marshall Plan, formally European Recovery Program, (April 1948–December 1951), was a US-sponsored program designed to rehabilitate the economies of seventeen western and southern European countries in order to create stable conditions in which democratic institutions could survive. The United States feared that the poverty, unemployment, and dislocation of the post-World War II period were reinforcing the appeal of communist parties to voters in western Europe… Aid was originally offered to almost all the European countries, including those under military occupation by the Soviet Union. The Soviets early on withdrew from participation in the plan, however, and were soon followed by the other eastern European nations under their influence. This left the following countries to participate in the plan: Austria, Belgium, Denmark, France, Greece, Iceland, Ireland, Italy, Luxembourg, the Netherlands, Norway, Portugal, Sweden, Switzerland, Turkey, the United Kingdom, and West Germany; https://www.britannica.com/ event/Marshall-Plan

Page 66

Top: Kanitha Tith, Hut Tep Soda Chan (Hut of an Angel), 2011/2017

Photo courtesy the artist

Hut Tep Soda Chan (Hut of an Angel) borrows its title from a famous Khmer film from 1968, a love story between an angel and a mortal man, with the former relinquishing her riches to be with the latter. It illustrates how the poor, though materially impoverished, are rich in happiness and love… Tith invited her neighbours to contribute objects from their home to her work, including personal belongings such as pictures and fishing equipment, and conversations around the items as extensions of their owners soon ensued. Standing as a mini anthropological ‘museum,’ Hut Tep Soda Chan continues to play an important role in documenting the effects of economic and social change in Cambodia in the private, public and urban spheres; https://www.singapore artmuseum. sg/about/our-collection/hut-tep-soda-chan

Bottom: Zarina Muhammad, Moving Earth, Crossing Water, Eating Soil, 2022

Photo courtesy the artist

The title of the work alludes to the multiple historical identities of Pulau Sekijang Bendera (currently known as St John’s Island). The work draws inspiration from islands that have lost their names, shapeshifting creation myths, lines plotted by animal navigation, trickster tides, submerged reefs and maritime arteries. The work unfolds over nine archetypal signatures and departure points… These nine points are presented as a diorama of (inter)cardinal directions, palimpsests and constellations that can be read or experienced through a variety of ways and engages with the entanglements of various knowledge systems; https://www.singaporebiennale.org/artists/zarinamuhammad

Page 72

Top: Heman Chong, The Library of Unread Books, 2016–ongoing

Photo courtesy the artist

The Library of Unread Books… is a living reference library with a collection of over 700 titles, which traces the perimeters of knowledge and reflects on notions of access, excess and the politics of redistribution. Every book in the collection [has been] donated by an individual who did not read it when it was in their possession… The Library of Unread Books sheds light on these once-hiddenaway titles to emphasise shared knowledge… Umberto Eco famously called for an “antilibrary” made up of unread books. The novelist and scholar argued that read books are far less valuable than unread ones and that a library should contain as much of what one does not know as finance might allow. “You will accumulate more knowledge and more books as you grow older, and the growing number of unread books on the shelves will look at you menacingly”; https://www. singaporebiennale.org/artists/heman-chong

Bottom: Raed Ibrahim, Scripted Tablets, 2022

Photo courtesy the artist

Forty-five engraved terracotta clay tablets each depict a unique scene or texture. The nearinfinite permutations of available arrangements demonstrate the ways readings of history can be arbitrated over time, while the use of clay indicates the vulnerability of historical accounts to the elements and their ability to be reformed. Working with a symbolic lexicon ranging from the obviously representational (one tablet features a loose circle of electrical plugs, and another, sun and wind on skyscrapers), to the abstract, Ibrahim’s wry ordering also recalls the rhythms and structures of a new grammar and its ability to propose a new sense of the world. Alfonse Chiu, Ocula; https://ocula.com/magazine/features/will-thesingapore-biennale-speak/

Page 79

Fan Dongwang, Shifting Perspectives and the Body #3, 1999–2001

Photo courtesy the artist

The artist uses shifting perspectives as method (sculptural painting) to analyse different art styles while using shifting perspectives as metaphors to convey different cultural aspects. The environment (or the association of the forms) determines the concept of the object. The painting shows a series of mannerisms and conventions of shifting perspectives that serve in a way to impose a hidden order upon surface chaos to achieve a visual poetic; https://www.fandongwang.com/ shifting-perspective-painting

Page 74

Maile Meyer and Drew Kahu‘āina Broderick, KĪPUKA (for “Natasha”), 2022

Photo courtesy the artists

Page 82

Top: Shen Jiawei, Seven Self-Portraits, 1996

Bottom: Shen Jiawei, Suddenly Back to 1900, 2000

Photos courtesy the artist

In [Seven Self-Portraits], Jiawei Shen has borrowed the conception of reincarnation from the Buddhist faith to express some of his feelings about history and his life. The work is comprised of seven self portraits and images of himself in reincarnated personas; https://www.artgallery.nsw.gov.au/prizes/ archibald/1997/18543/

Photos courtesy the artist and ARC ONE Gallery, Melbourne

Arriving in Australia in 1992, Guo Jian’s art practice has been fuelled by his position as a reflective, sharply satirical Chinese expatriate who grew up during the Cultural Revolution… [his] early experiences of art were inevitably entwined with communist authority, ideology and militaristic power–his first acquaintance with art was time spent as a propaganda-poster painter for the People’s Liberation Army then later, as an art student in Beijing, he took part in the protests which led to the Tiananmen Square massacre in 1989. Guo Jian takes the Socialist Realism he grew up with in China, subverts and transforms it, often humorously, into Socio-Realism in an almost celebratory act of protest and liberation. His flat surfaces and heightened colours owe much to the Chinese visual and political language of the Communist era. Dancing girls in dressed in traditional ballet costumes or in uniforms with weapons are either placed in the foreground with soldiers leering (usually in disquieting repetition of Guo Jian’s own face) or in the background as a lingerie-clad model straight out of a Western fashion magazine poses in the foreground; a contrast of unrestricted sexuality and enforced conformity… Underlying conflicting themes of sex and violence, East and West are dominant forces in Jian’s works. Soldiers are captivated and awestruck by female performers, sometimes in quiet contemplation, sometimes in overly excited wonderment, but a sense of false happiness, hypocrisy and hysteria often pervade the scenes; https://arcone.com.au/guo-jian-artist-profile

In the late 1950s, Mao Zedong called upon artists to combine ‘revolutionary realism with revolutionary romanticism’ in order that art should serve the people. In a very different 21st century context, by recording the impacts of globalisation, industrialisation and urbanisation on Chinese society, the current work of Chinese/ Australian artist Guo Jian comments fearlessly on the ills of his — and our —society… His experiences of the tumultuous events of China’s recent history—his childhood during the upheavals of the Cultural Revolution, military service, and first-hand experience of the events of 1989—influenced his autobiographical approach to painting. He became known for savagely satirical Pop-inspired realist works: populated by ‘Entertainment Soldiers’, the seductive dancers and singers deployed to motivate and mollify the troops, his paintings examine the sexualisation of propaganda. Luise Guest, The Art Life; http://theartlife.com.au/2017/the-romanticrevolutionary-a-profile-of-guo-jian/

Page 86

Top left: Wang Zhiyuan, Beauties Captured in Time #4, 1994

Bottom left: Wang Zhiyuan, Fragments (Underpants), 2000

Right: Wang Zhiyuan, Fragments (Monkey Holding Peach), 2000

Photos courtesy the artist

With the creation of Fragments (2000), Wang Zhiyuan has made this form a vehicle for the expression of ideas about contemporary life and society. Fragments seems a realistic reflection on the realities of an age when metaphysics is dead and society is awash in pop and commercial culture. One of the images [is] a pair of underpants. They were presented at the same size as all the other everyday objects, with no special meaning or emphasis. The sense of floating may also reflect a sense of disconnection from art history and one’s own identity. It is possible that Wang Zhiyuan’s move back to China in 2001 was motivated by the desire to rescue himself from that sense of floating. If so, it was a mistaken desire. For China has lost its spiritual roots, and its lust for material wealth is so extreme as to make

Australia seem like a pastoral Shangri-La by comparison. What Wang Zhiyuan has experienced here is only the “madness of desire for materialism”. In his newer works, underpants—items of clothing that are usually concealed—are hugely enlarged, conveying today’s hyperinflation of desire as well as the enlarged role of sexuality and everything connected with it… The items from daily life that made up Fragments and Wang Zhiyuan’s doubts about art have fused with a mood of mischievous absurdity and carnival; http://www.wangzhiyuanart.com/4_ text/4_texts_08.html

Page 96

Top: Tsang Tsou-choi, c. 1996–97 Long before they began showing up in exhibitions and auctions in the 1990s, the characteristic black ink scrawls of Tsang Tsou-choi’s kingly persona had been appearing across public surfaces in Hong Kong. For decades, he had written his claims of sovereignty over the peninsula on anything from pillars, lampposts, and utility boxes to walls.

Tsang’s ascent from street vandal to art star was extraordinary, as were the critiques that his work ignited along the way. Even today, he remains an enigma–and not just because of the ancestral documents he apparently found in 1956, which led him to believe in his regal birthright. But because he had no intention of masquerading as an artist in the first place, his work tends to evade neat categorisations. That very few works by Tsang from before the 1990s exist is due to the simple fact that they were not regarded as artworks back then. Most of Tsang’s ink inscriptions, which asserted that his rightful position as King of Kowloon was stolen by colonial pretenders, were either washed away or painted over by city authorities which viewed them as graffiti… Why did Tsang capture the imagination of the residents of Hong Kong in the 1990s? Perhaps in the years leading up to the 1997 transfer of sovereignty from Britain to China, he reflected how we all felt: at once powerless and powerful. Perhaps the city’s inhabitants were moved by the tenacity of his unwavering diatribes against the British colonisers and his desire to reclaim his home. As critic Fung Man-yee put it, Tsang was “the last free man” in the territory. (Fung would go on to launch an online petition to save his street calligraphy from erasure.) The art historian David Clarke observed Tsang’s “acute sense of the topography of power when pursuing his public mark-making,” while the curator Hans Ulrich Obrist called Tsang an “urban poet’ who fought “against forgetting.” In short, to borrow the words artist and writer Brandon LaBelle employs in his discussions of strategies of resistance, Tsang embodied “the weak and the radical”… As his popularity soared in the last decade of his life, Tsang calligraphed on any surface provided, from vehicles, lanterns, jugs, printed maps, and doors, to sheets of paper. Throughout it all, he maintained an amicable ambivalence. More than once in front of the camera, he said, with his typical grin, that he was unbothered if his ink writings were considered art or otherwise. To continue writing was all that mattered to him. Phoebe Wong, ‘Long live the King of Kowloon: Tsang Tsou-choi and the making of an icon’; https://www.artbasel.com/stories/ long-live-the-king-of-kowloon-tsang-tsou-choi

Hedda Morrison, Young acrobat at Tianqiao market, Peking, China, 1933-1946

Powerhouse collection, Museum of Applied Arts and Sciences, Sydney. Gift of Mr Alastair Morrison, 1992

Page 96

Bottom left: Ho Siu-kee, Walking on two balls (video still), 1995

Photo courtesy the artist

In one of his seminal works, Walking on Two Balls (1995), the artist’s body is put into a state where day-to-day balance is compromised, and a new balance must be sought. The challenge is to walk on two wooden balls, sculpted by Kee himself, and of the course, the inherent risk is that Kee might fall… [he] mentioned the previous 9 times failing, which meant losing balance, was just as important as the 10th try in maintaining balance. Each attempt contributes to the body’s dynamism in adapting, which is an ongoing and ever-changing process. Each balance lost is the success in finding balance. This process validates an ever-changing state that yields hope in finding new balances; https://teahouse.buddhistdoor.net/a-meditationon-mind-body-and-place-ho-siu-kee/

In Walking on Two Balls, Ho… is attempting to progress forward whilst balancing precariously on two-ball shaped sculptural objects he had constructed. Ho’s concern is not merely allegorical, but one can’t help seeing this work as representing the situation of an artist attempting to acquire the responsiveness and fine sense of balance required to operate in the hybrid and ungrounded cultural space of Hong Kong.

David Clarke, ‘Found in Transit: Hong Kong Art in a Time of Change’, Inside Out: New Chinese Art (catalogue), University of California Press, 1998

Bottom right: Phoebe Man, Beautiful Flowers, 1996

Photo courtesy the artist

In Beautiful Flowers, Man transforms sanitary napkins from a general impression of being “dirty” and “shameful” things into chunks of poetic blossoming flowers, decorated with red eggs, incorporating traditional Chinese elements (red eggs means celebration of birth)… In an interview, she refuted an accusation that criticised these works were aiming at striking a moral stance. Man said the intention of these works was to realise her poetic feeling towards her anxiety of her body changes, though some art critics interpreted her art as an accusation of the female role as a “birth giving machine”; http://www.cyman.net/myworkreview/jess.htm

Page 100

Top: Kum Chi Keung, Door, 1995

Photo courtesy the artist Shown at Special Pre-97 Arts Zone, Exposition Hall, Hong Kong University of Science and Technology (1995); Contemporary Hong Kong Arts Biennial Exhibition (1996); City at the End Time Hong Kong 1997, Vancouver, Canada (1997). It is the first installation by Kum that makes use of a birdcage to make a door. It is a metaphor of Hong Kong people at that time it was transferring from a British colony to Chinese control. [Here] Kum made a good use of the birdcage. It is easy for us to link cage and “being controlled and trapped”. Also, according to an interview with Kum, he released over one hundred doves at the opening of the exhibition. Doves can fly freely and go into the cage or escape from the exhibition centre. Hong Kong people at that time were just likes those doves, some of them chose to migrate to other countries, some of them stayed in Hong Kong and fed by the Chinese Government; https://waisiuwu.wordpress.com

Bottom: Leung Chi-wo, Crossing Sky, 2001 Photo courtesy the artist Crossing sky is a coffeeshop installation of 15 tables topped with images of urban skylines of both Hong Kong and Venice. Visitors can take a rest here. The biggest table displays the skyline merged by both Hong Kong and Venetian urbanscapes and hung above it is a chandelier in the same shape of the skyline; https://arthistory.hku.hk/hkaa/ revamp2011/artist_view.php?artist_id=031 Hong Kong is, undeniably, part of China, but it functions in the ambivalent space of the label, “one country, two systems”, a space that is continuously negotiated and redefined. In this negotiated space we can see the work of Leung Chi-wo as exemplary in the way he uses photography and installation to problematically map various urban spaces. His pinhole photographs are presented as negative shapes mapped onto various objects; tabletops, chandeliers, and even cookies. His work, though full of almost manic attempts at placing oneself in a particular time and space, interrupts efforts at this placement, as the architectural clues needed to find ones’ way have been eliminated, leaving only the abstracted shape of the sky to use as a signpost. Leung’s work only allows an unstable sense of place, disrupting what would normally be the photograph’s ability to support memory. Norman Jackson Ford, ‘Re–considered crossings: representation beyond hybridity’; https://www. fotogaleriewien.at/en/exhibition/re-consideredcrossings-representation-beyond-hybridity/

Page 112

Hedda Morrison, Man and children enjoying the winter sunshine, Peking, China, 1933–1946 Powerhouse collection, Museum of Applied Arts and Sciences, Sydney. Gift of Mr Alastair Morrison, 1992

Page 116

Hedda Morrison, Rickshaws, Peking, China, 1933–1946

Powerhouse collection, Museum of Applied Arts and Sciences, Sydney. Gift of Mr Alastair Morrison, 1992

Pages 128–129

Shaun Gladwell, POV Mirror Sequence (Tarin Kowt), 2009–2010

Australian War Memorial collection ART94193

Photo courtesy the artist, Australian War Memorial Canberra and Anna Schwartz Gallery, Melbourne

When he went to Afghanistan and the Middle East, Gladwell wanted to analyse the war experience from a less dramatic perspective, using a less expected language, one that was empathetic but critical… For Gladwell, photojournalism and the newly emerging genre of soldier-produced documentaries via body and helmet cameras proved to be the best medium for describing the experience. “I was not a combat soldier and did not pretend to be. Instead, I conducted a series of experiments with photography and video that would not try to represent the pressure, the insanity, but generate its own pressure. For instance, I made a video of me stalking a fully equipped combat soldier. We both locked video cameras onto each other and mirrored each other’s movements. Then I asked two soldiers to also perform this almost ritualistic mirroring… Gladwell said he felt complicit just by accepting the commission. If he’d been asked today, now that he has a family, he probably wouldn’t have accepted.

“There are works of mine that are still enigmatic, even to me. I just seem to have arrived at more questions… I have never stopped thinking about the experience, and consequently, I have never stopped making work about it. I am not sure there will ever be closure”; Lilly Wei, ‘Art Made in Harm’s Way’, ARTnews; https://www.artnews.com/ art-news/news/art-made-in-harms-way-3888/

Page 132

Top: David Cotterrell, Sightlines I & II, 2008

Photo courtesy the artist

In November 2007, [Cotterrell] flew in an RAF C17 from Brize Norton to Kandahar… to join Operation Herrick 7. Focusing on these experiences and their inevitable aftermath, Cotterrell has produced a new body of photographic work. Sightlines, Principals and Supernumerary are arranged as diptychs and triptychs. Shot in the operating theatre, these images reference painters famous for their use of chiaroscuro. The lighting and formal arrangements caught in the artist’s lens for a moment distract the viewer’s gaze, suggesting the sublime beauty within horror, the human scale compassion in the face of destruction; https://dublin.sciencegallery. com/trauma-exhibits/sightlines-i-supernumerary

Bottom: Mladen Miljanović, The Didactic Wall (detail), 2019

The project Didactic Wall is a subversive educational installation that focuses on the issue of migrants, refugees, displaced persons and apatrids, and the difficulties they face when moving towards their desired geographic destination. This is an engaged set of illustrations that address directly those who are trying, in an “illegal” way, to cross national borders to get to their “land of dreams”.

The Didactic Wall is a kind of instruction on how to overcome natural and artificial barriers a “person on the move” may possibly come across; https:// www.mladenmiljanovic.com/The-Didactic-Wall

Photo courtesy the artist

Page 135

Ave, Meat grinder, 2022

Photo courtesy the artist

ARTISTS | WRITERS

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