Critical Reflection
War, and the violence associated with war, are the core subjects of my current practice. There are two active conflicts unfolding now. I cannot ignore them. I have produced work relating to Ukraine, and the extension of my practice to the Middle East is not therefore new. I am alive to the sensitivities around this topic; and the many questions, for an artist, which need to be addressed when approaching it.
An important question for me is the extent to which artists have the right to adopt, as subject matter, events (such as war) with which they have no direct involvement. Alternatively, can artists, who wish to engage with politics, in conscience avoid addressing violent conflicts which confront us every day, and which threaten an escalation we might not avoid. I have chosen to try to engage with this subject.
There are subsidiary questions which arise from that choice: What am I seeking to achieve with my work?How, in choice of subject matter, medium, form and colour, do I present that work? What boundaries should govern my work? How do I achieve a balance between creating work with impact and avoiding work which touches a point so raw or offensive that it becomes alienating rather than compelling?
I have looked at how artists have depicted wars in the past, and at works of art and literature which address other subjects but which, for me, contain hooks or triggers which prompt new ideas for my work.
What am I trying to achieve? Our media is fickle. Where once they covered both of the current conflicts every day, they now don’t. At its most simple, I want my work to remind. I try to avoid taking sides. I simply want the fighting to stop. If my art helps to keep the horror of what is occurring within the public consciousness, that perhaps is a start.
How to present my work? Important influences for me:
Elements of ancient art – not just its clarity of line, but also its studied distortions - the quirky omission of features in a human figure - a flattened head, missing eyes, mouth, ears. Part of the figure's appeal is the mystery of why those choices were made. A "clear enigma" [See passim]. That phrase, relevant to so much art and literature over time, has a force for me. We respond to the challenge presented by something we don’t fully understand – and as a result the thing presenting that challenge often carries a punch which lingers, more so than would a readily comprehensible image.
Narrative. I am drawn to traditions of story-telling, in particular from the wider medieval period.
The Bayeux tapestry - the medium (embroidery) to some extent dictated the style - linear and simplistic. There is no mystery but the narrative is powerful; and artistic choices have been made. The paring down of unnecessary detail; but the inclusion of additional elements which add nothing to the story but which give life and force to the work.
Much medieval art has this mix of simplicity of line with quirky, memorable detail.
Marble figure, Early Cycladic ca. 2600 - 2400 BC - the Bastis Master, Metropolitan Museum New York
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Bayeux Tapestry 11th Century
A bit later, the clarity and simplicity of early Renaissance frescoes - Masaccio and Giotto – again with slight distortion (the length and shape of Adam’s limbs), an almost childlike simplicity, but a choice of detail which brings life to the works.
Chaucer's Parlement of Foulys, written in about 1382, is an allegorical work about the nature of love, debate, and choice. It has similarities to the much later Pilgrim's Progress (see below). A discussion is conducted not by men and women but by birds, with robust and clearly defined characters. The language is Middle English, and has a charm not entirely of its author's making but enhanced by the unfamiliar spelling:
"The goos, the cokkow, & the doke also
So cryede "kek kek", "kokkow", "quek quek" hye,
That thourw myne erys the noyse wente tho."
The form therefore is enigmatic and requires study, but once unravelled the substance is clear.
Masaccio - Expulsion of Adam and Eve from the Garden of Eden, ca. 1424 - 1427, fresco Florence
Illumination - British Library
The Pilgrim's Progress by John Bunyan, 1678. Another, later allegorical tale representing “the Christian experience of conversion leading to salvation” [Introduction by W.R. Owens to the Oxford World’s Classics edition 2003] and which has also been a source of inspiration for me. Not the religious subject matter, but the allegorical form again interests me. Bunyan gives a compelling reason for using allegory - a device, a trick concealing an important message in simple clothing:
"My dark and cloudy words they do but hold
The Truth, as Cabinets inclose the Gold."
I have drawn on The Pilgrim’s Progress for some of my recent pictures. The core of the tale – the pilgrim Christian, leaving “the City of Destruction” with a great burden on his back on his pilgrimage to reach the Celestial City – had a clear parallel for me with a number of media images from the current fighting.
Goya – Countless artists have depicted wars and violence. Few before Goya had done so quite as unapologetically and graphically as he. Perhaps, more recently, his role as a chronicler of the horrors of war has been assumed by photographers (Vietnam), encouraging other artists to find different methods of presenting difficult material; and yet Peter Howson's graphic images from the Bosnian war suggest that artists continue to find new forms for depicting violence.
Howson was a commissioned war artist. His work raises again the core question of the right of other artists to treat a war with which they have had no personal involvement.
Goya - The Disasters of War, prints - 1810 - 1820
Boundaries:
The Blavatnik Gallery at the Imperial War Museum. Works which stood out for me:
Peter Jackson's re-digitised black and white to colour footage from WW1 brought a new immediacy to that footage. It also, for me, sanctioned his right to use, for an artistic purpose, material amassed by others and which documented experiences he hadn’t had. But I believe there’s a limit to that licence. The material was film footage, and the re-working limited in scope. I have, by contrast and for example, a problem with novels about the Holocaust. Where the accuracy of historical events is paramount those events should not, I believe, be fictionalised.
Peter Howson - Bosnia - 1994
Peter Jackson - They Shall Not Grow Old, 2018
Stop the War Coalition - the pictures in this poster (End the Torture) were taken from newspapers. The artists weren’t witnesses to the atrocities depicted but they have used images taken by those who were.
Stop the War Coalition, End the Torture, 2004
The Tony Blair "selfie" was made in 2007, before discussions about deep fake technology became topical. Many looking at that image would have understood that it was fake, and satirical. But some might not. Indeed one of the artists (Kennard) himself acknowledges that "the strange and devastatingly effective quality of the portrait....is that it really does meld into a luridly believable scene." Is the manipulation of a photograph for political purposes a legitimate artistic endeavour or can it cross a line? Have the ethics around manipulating images changed, to make that image less acceptable today than in 2007?
Kennardphillipps, Photo Op. 2007
I have trouble with this work by Artur Zmijewski. He persuades an Auschwitz survivor (Józef Tarnawa) to have the number on his arm (80064) “re-tattooed”. Tarnawa at one point “complains that the newness of his tattoo will lead others to disbelieve his story of the camps.” Art and Politics Now, Thames and Hudson, p180. For me, performance art involving a Holocaust survivor who is uncomfortable with the project is not, ethically, a legitimate artistic endeavour. Claude Landesmann, in his documentary Shoah [See passim], pushes a Holocaust survivor interviewee to recount his testimony; but Landesmann does so, as he makes clear, because the testimony is an important historical record. The same cannot I think be said of Tarnawa’s work here.
Artur Zmijewski - 80064, 2004, video