War Games
Catalogue essay by Charles Boyle
for Turbamente/Trouble, Bologna., 2003
‘Visually stunning’, ‘kind of like an artwork in its own right’ – Damien Hirst’s description of September 11th in a video essay for BBC News Online in September 2002. He was echoing the composer Karlheinz Stockhausen, who was reported as calling the same event ‘the greatest work of art imaginable’. Both got into trouble – two of Stockhausen’s concerts were cancelled, Hirst (who went on to say, about the terrorists, ‘you’ve got to hand it to them on some level’) was forced to issue an apology – and for understandable reasons: by speaking of September 11th as art, they appeared to be denying the reality of the suffering of those who died, the grief of the survivors. But equally, one see their point: war is visually stunning, it gives rise to images whose intensity and dramatic impact many artists might envy.
Someone else who got into trouble was Jean Baudrillard. In his provocatively entitled The Gulf War Did Not Take Place (2005), he argued that the UN allies were fighting a virtual reality war, aiming their missiles at dots on a screen; that the war was essentially a media phenomenon, comprised of images and information; and that the only reality was the spectacle, the representation of war in the media. Again, offence was caused, and not just to the people of Iraq and Kuwait. And again, one takes his point: for most people in the Western world, the superabundance of manipulated information, both visual and other, removes and becomes a substitute for the reality of war.
The recent work of Madeleine Strindberg acknowledges and exploits the visual appeal of war imagery, in particular the pornographic nature of images of military hardware. More importantly, it comprises an unsettling commentary on the way that war is represented in the media. She is a new kind of war artist, exactly the kind that Baudrillard’s arguments imply: working not on the front line, as artists were paid by their governments to work in previous wars, but in the home of the war’s audience, a place far removed from the battlefield but saturated to the point of banality by war’s imagery.
Strindberg takes her raw material primarily from the press, and she didn’t have to look far: war, like sex, sells newspapers. We need to remember, of course, that by the time today’s picture of tanks in the desert has appeared on our breakfast table, at least two processes have divorced this picture from the reality of war. Firstly, the media are subject to manipulation by the government and the military, part of whose role in modern war is to control exactly what information is passed on to the home audience, and the media in turn are highly selective in their transmission of information. (Bombing raids in the Gulf War of 1991 tended to be described as ‘precise strikes on strategic targets’; very few images of dead bodies were broadcast or printed until the war was almost over; only after the war did the military begin to reveal their estimates of Iraqi military casualties – figures ranged between 40,000 and 200,000 killed.) And secondly, because of their sheer abundance and repetition, most press images of war have become clichés – aircraft taking off from carriers, groups of huddled prisoners – and function as a form of musak, incapable of expressing even the very limited reality they claim to show. A very few press images do have an emotional (and political) impact that suggests they are telling it true – the semi-naked girl with napalm burns running down a road in Vietnam, the concentration camp internees behind barbed wire at Omarska in Bosnia, the burnt Iraqi soldier at Mutla Ridge – but these are the exceptions, not the rule.
Strindberg’s raw material, then, is not really raw at all but cooked – sanitised, expurgated, deemed fit for family viewing. Strindberg proceeds to cook the material still further, using techniques that parody those to which it has already been subjected. The colours, for example: brash yellows, oranges and pinks that wouldn’t be out of place in a child’s bedroom, and which mock by their contrariness the colours (greys, browns, muddy red) conventionally ascribed to war. In pictures that include human figures – which have already been de-individualised by their inclusion in generic tableaux of war – she abstracts them still further by blanking the faces. Sometimes the abstraction is taken right over the top, and returns as cartoon-like figuration: the soldiers have teddy-bear heads, pointing up the infantilism of the whole military enterprise. Previous to the paintings based directly on press photographs, Strindberg made a whole series of abstracted mug-shots – in metallic silver on gloss black; some apparently placid, other gashed or bandaged or breaking into fragments – that would be the heads of helmeted warriors were they not also those of teddy-bears. (In America, Baudrillard suggested that Disneyland and America are one and the same: the walls surrounding Disneyland are there to make people think that Disneyland is only a fantasy, and that there is a real America outside.)
The pornographic nature of weapons is exaggerated: guns are tumescent and ejaculating, missiles are fleshly and erect. Military hardware is toys for the boys (Stealth, Tomahawk: these are Fisher-Price names). There’s a series of paintings of helicopters, silvery-grey silhouettes on vivid flat backgrounds stacked one above the other like a mobile hanging in a boy’s room; tanks squat in the desert like Airfix models while a boy on a donkey crosses in the foreground, heedless of these alien and incomprehensible objects (that donkey, by the way, we’ve seen before: it’s the donkey from a children’s Bible illustration, ridden by Mary and the infant Jesus on the flight into Egypt). In one group of paintings – six small and four larger, with what could be a prayer stool set in front of them – hardware, teddy-bears, abstracted faces and a partying couple from a magazine advertisement are brought together in a single installation. The arrangement mimics the way in which the press presents news photos adjacent to ads for perfume, but here the elements transgress: a missile and dagger are superimposed over the partying couple, the lipstick of a laughing woman with head thrown back stands out from skin that appears burned or decomposing, and her sunglasses aren’t nearly as cool as those worn by the dog-like helmeted face opposite. There’s been a printing mistake, the art director explains; never mind, says the editor, maybe no one will notice.
On the floor, in the same way as the prayer stool already mentioned, Strindberg sets out a field of lemons when she exhibits these paintings. Lemon-fresh, say the ads, but not these ones: many are pulpy or rotten, their skin decaying into grey mould, many are studded with razor blades. Vegetable and mineral, you might think; the quick and the dead; corpses on a battlefield, their flesh more transient than the hard metal weaponry that outlasts them. But they shrug off such easy interpretation, insisting on their status a mundane domestic objects, and on an acid, visceral beauty of ruination that is all their own. The pull the viewer’s gaze down to ground level; they function like some distraction while we are watching TV, a reminder that there is no essential separation between what we see on the screen and our humdrum lives in curtained rooms.
Are what we see on the walls war paintings at all? Certainly these pictures of pictures are at several removes from the reality of conflict: most of the original press photos themselves are not of violence but of the prelude to or aftermath of violence; they are partial and sanitised records; and Strindberg’s treatment of them – irreverent, impromptu, ironic – appears to take them even further form the physical reality of war. But these, however juggled and shuffled, are guns, missiles and soldiers that we are looking at, and our awareness of what this imagery alludes to – war, the wretched brutality of which can rarely, perhaps never, be directly expressed by art – freights the paintings, or acts as a counterweight to the skimpy artifice. The brightness and hurry of the surfaces are deceptive: they are in fact a means of bypassing an aesthetic problem endemic to traditional war art, film and photography as well as painting, in which the horror of the subject matter is blocked out by perfect composition and tone. Strindberg’s work is more like the naive but shocking paintings made by children in a war zone, but inscribed here with adult sophistication; and when you consider what they’re up to, what’s remarkable is not the paintings’ abandon but their restraint.
These brazen paintings, both playful and deadly serious, were made before the current war in Iraq began, and during those strange, feverish months so so-called diplomacy when there was a massive attempt to impose consensus, their effect was to subvert the grey pomposity of headlines and news bulletins. Now, at the time of writing, the war is taking place, and the paintings have become bitterly poignant: the promise of their vitality – of release from the dumb helplessness to which the media’s relentless monotone condemns us – is a promise unfulfilled. They have lost their innocence.
