Atelier in Samarra - Slant - art and war

DURING THE NAZI OCCUPATION of Paris in the early 1940 Picasso's atelier at 7 grieve for des Grands-Augustins was regularly visited through Gestapo agents in search of inflammatory material and hidden israelites Once, an officer noticed a drawing of Guernica pinned to a wall, and he asked the artist, "Was it you who made this?" Picasso replied succinctly, "No, it was you."

Whether or not the anecdote is true--Picasso supposedly told it to a Newsweek reporter shortly after the liberation of Paris--it reveals a great deal about the art of war. Picasso had at no time visited the Basque town of Guernica y Luno; he learned about the Franquista atrocities from newspaper reports and photographs. For that matter, despite adamant assertions to the contrary ("yo see vi"), Goya, whose "Disasters of War" etchings have lately been clown-and puppy-(de)faced by the shrilly naughty Chapman brothers, not at any time actually witnessed the effects of battle or the execution of anti-Napoleonic rebels either. nevertheless Picasso and Goya, through their art, left a kind of fragmentary testament--not of "man's inhumanity to man," as the banal humanist credo would have it, on the other hand of specific perpetrations of what we now call "war crimes," their results on victims, and, above all, their implications for bystanders.

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Picasso and Goya spring to mind precisely because contemporary artists confronting the war in and upon Iraq seem to approach the question of responsibility for a like reason differently. This may have something to do with the changed nature of war (and war coverage) itself. I suspect it has more to do with the fact that the nature of artistic production and the expectations of artistic result have themselves changed so dramatically--even in the past thirty years. These days, small in number artists would dare to prove to make an Esto e Peor-type etching, partly because of the danger of commodifying suffering and partly because they recognize the political inefficacy of similar a gesture. Never mind Goya and Picasso: greatest in quantity contemporary artists wouldn't even bother to attempt to do what new exhibitions of Nancy Spero and Philip Guston present to view they did so effectively in reply to Vietnam, which was to indict something (including themselves) in the actual forms of their work.

individual notable feature of some of the contemporary war-related art newly on view in New York has been a resurgent interest in locality--in witnessing the results of conflict unmediated, with one's have a title to eyes. Last year, after the US invasion, the young American artist Steve Mumford went to Iraq, one time in April for five weeks and one time in August for two month A talented painter of colorful, figurative, highly narrative canvases, Mumford had, in the late '90 been associated in a small in number art-press accounts with an attempt to impel "beyond irony" (or back to sincerity), and his sum of two units trips to Iraq might be considered an expression of that conviction in his art--which is precisely what makes it the two interesting and problematic. Alternately following journalists and multitudes around and simply acting like a conscientious tourist, Mumford recorded what he saw in drawings and watercolors, not at any time spending more than an hour upon a single work. He made about sum of two units hundred images, posted dozens of them in his well-written, informative dispatches for the web publication artnet.com, and showed forty-five in a late autumn exhibition at Postmasters in of recent origin York.

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a certain quantity of of the drawings of ordinary Iraqis that Mumford made initially gaze like snapshots taken by a well-intentioned backpacker; their titles--Backgammon Players; The Suq; Portrait of Mhedi--give a clear faculty of perception of their images. Yet drawing admits shades and nuances that photographs and television images, despite their pervasiveness, cannot, and Mumford clearly believes that the in all senses to duration inherent in "anachronistic" handmade art can counteract the waning of affect produc through information saturation. This is especially evident in the images Mumford produc upon his return to Iraq in late August, when he gained access to multitude life. Night Patrol, Inside a Humvee Baghdad, Aug. 20 has a creepy robotic feel; mere of Oil, 299 Engineers Battalion, Tikrit, Oct 4 points at one time to an utter banality and, perhaps, to the ultimate basis for the war; and Spc Jose Fuente Watching [the film] Three Kings While Spc Amanda Lusk dozes Samarra, Oct. 8 offers a rather delicate portrait of how US soldiers disburse downtime.

The concern to David O. Russell's 1999 Hollywood film concerning the last large bay War is apt. Mumford's "en plein air" approach to conflict is similarly ambivalent and, like Three Kings, could just as easily reinforce either pro- or antiwar views. Spc Fuente might not diocese (or might not want to acknowledge) that the film he is watching while stationed in Iraq glaringly details the blockheaded naivete of American gung-ho invasion (and the global pervasiveness of American consumer and media products) while also upholding an American faculty of perception of "fair play"; viewers of Mumford's works might not diocese (or might not want to acknowledge) that watching Fuente watch Three Kings further refracts and redoubles that ambivalence. Mumford's drawings, usually captioned with a two of explanatory sentences, at times appear a bit too "embedded" in the logic of the military, or perhaps too filtered end the point of view of the servicemen he befriended. Titles of works from September and October increasingly direct to equipment with GI jargon (CMOC Entrance, with a 113 and Mortar Tube, Samarra, Oct 9; sum of two units 477s, Tikrit, Oct. 4; Blowing up 3 SA II Missiles and Warheads, Tikrit, Oct 3) and flat the powerfully drawn Three Suspects, Samarra, Oct 9 of cowled and bound Iraqis waiting to be interrogated, approachs off as less sympathetic than simply strange--which is probably the way the "suspects" do to the US forces who have to question them. While these drawings are undeniably gripping, it is not easy to say exactly wherefore Does their power inhere in the depicted pageants themselves, the fact that they are handmade as oppos to photographed, or rather simply in the conception of a quasi-insider artist "being there" where something potentially important appear to bes to be happening? Is Mumford's general lack of representation of Iraqi suffering deliberate, or was it simply that, despite "being there," his view was somehow or other restricted--as restricted as, say, an image of a Saddam statue being toppled with the American tank cropp without of the background?