Abstract
In 2007, Lyndell Brown and Charles Green, who have worked as one artist in collaboration since 1989, were commissioned by the Australian War Memorial to serve as Australian Official War Artists in Iraq and Afghanistan. They were given complete artistic freedom and unique access to the unfolding War on Terror’s two principal conflict zones, but their deployment occurred at a point where both zones definitively escaped the West’s ability to impose its imperial power, and thus they were often hemmed in by the realities of two deteriorating wars and the fantasies of their hosts. This chapter, illustrated by their works both during and after their official commission, unpacks the process by which the artists tried to make artistic sense of their experience.
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- 1.
For an alternative methodology for understanding war art, focusing on World War I, see The Sensory War 1914–2014, edited by Ana Carden-Coyne, David Morris, Tim Wilcox (Manchester: Manchester Art Gallery, 2014), Exhibition catalogue.
- 2.
Pankaj Mishra chronicles the continuous history of anti-colonial movements across Asia from the eighteenth century onwards and brings together the panorama of many scholars’ research currently under way on the long history of anti-colonialism; we read his articles and then books from their appearance in the early 2000s onwards; see Pankaj Mishra, From the Ruins of Empire: The Revolt Against the West and the Remaking of Asia (London: Picador, 2012); also see Pankaj Mishra, Age of Anger: A History of the Present (New York: Farrar, Straus, and Giroux, 2017). Australian counter-insurgency expert and military strategist David Kilcullen was a senior advisor to General David Petraeus as the Surge was implemented in Iraq in early 2007, at the point we visited Iraq, following what seemed clearly, even to us—as we stood on the roof of one of Saddam Hussein’s ruined palaces in Camp Victory listening to engineers blow up IEDs, watching shuttles of choppers land and take off and waiting to be ferried into the so-called Green Zone along what experts were then calling “the most dangerous road in the world”—to be the collapse of US military strategies in the Middle East and Central Asia; over a period of years following our return from the Middle East, we then read the succession of essays, articles and books by Kilcullen in which he traced how the initial “Surge” strategy that he had helped invent, based on “disaggregation” (meaning the disruption of terrorist groups through local assistance), failed after its initial 2007–2008 success due to sloppy, inconsistent implementation and the retreat into vicious sectarian rule by the Shia government in Baghdad, which the Islamic State movement then turned to catastrophic advantage. Kilcullen and many others have concluded that we have witnessed the collapse of Western counterterrorism strategy since 2001 and that the West is worse off in 2018 than before 2001, facing stronger, more dangerous enemies; see David Kilcullen, “Countering Global Insurgency,” Journal of Strategic Studies 28, no. 4 (2005): 597–617; also see David Kilcullen, The Accidental Guerrilla: Fighting Small Wars in the Midst of a Big One (New York: Oxford University Press, 2011), David Kilcullen, Out of the Mountains: The Coming Age of the Urban Guerrilla (New York: Oxford University Press, 2013); David Kilcullen, “Blood Year: Terror and the Islamic State,” Quarterly Essay 58 (May 2015); and David Kilcullen, Blood Year: The Unraveling of Western Counterterrorism (New York: Oxford University Press, 2016).
- 3.
Charles Green, Peripheral Vision: Contemporary Australian Art 1970–94 (Sydney: Craftsman House, 1995).
- 4.
She was to later republish her 1990s essays in Geeta Kapur, When Was Modernism: Essays on Contemporary Cultural Practice in India (New Delhi: Tulika, 2000); for Vivan Sundaram’s re-making of his grandfather’s photographs of his daughter, Amrita Sher-Gil (who was Sundaram’s aunt), see Green’s essay, Charles Green, “Vivan Sundaram,” World Art 18 (Aug. 1998): 54–59.
- 5.
Blair French, “Tranquillity,” in Natasha Bullock (curator), Tranquillity, exh. catalogue (Sydney: Art Gallery of New South Wales, May 2005), 2–4.
- 6.
Amelia Douglas, “The viewfinder and the view,” Broadsheet 38, no. 1 (Sept. 2009): 200–205; an expanded version appears in Amelia Barikin, “Framing Conflict,” which is Part Two of “The Museum in Hiding: Framing Conflict,” in The International Handbooks of Museum Studies: Museum Theory, eds. Andrea Whitcomb and Kylie Message (Boston: Wiley, 2015), 485–510; also see Stephen Matchett, “The Art of War,” The Weekend Australian Review, April 25, 2009.
- 7.
Dan Rule, “In the Galleries: Christian Capurro’s Homage to Dan Flavin and Mutual works by Lyndell Brown, Charles Green & Jon Cattapan,” The Age, August 23, 2014.
- 8.
See Nola Anderson, Australian War Memorial: Treasures from a Century of Collecting (Canberra and Melbourne: Australian War Memorial and Murdoch Books, 2012), 544, 545, 548, 564, 570–573, 580–581; these pages are an account of our Official Artist commission and an extended discussion of the significance of our art.
- 9.
See Brian Foss, War Paint: Art, War, State and Identity in Britain, 1939–1945 (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2007).
- 10.
I am indebted to Kit Messham-Muir for his insights on this debate; see Kit Messham-Muir, Double War: Shaun Gladwell (Melbourne: Thames & Hudson, 2015); also see Simon Norfolk, Burke + Norfolk: Photographs from the War in Afghanistan (London: Tate Modern, 2011). The two essays we refer to are Julian Stallabrass, “The Power and Impotence of Images,” in Memory of Fire: The War of Images and Images of War (Brighton: Brighton Photo Biennial, 2008), 6–9, and Sarah James, “Making an Ugly World Beautiful?” in Memory of Fire (Brighton: Brighton Photo Biennial, 2008), 12–15; for a rebuttal of this argument, see Veronica Tello, “The Aesthetics and Politics of Aftermath Photography,” Third Text 28, no. 6 (Dec. 2014), 555–562.
- 11.
Charles Green and Anthony Gardner, Biennials, Triennials and Documenta: The Exhibitions That Created Contemporary Art (Boston: Wiley-Blackwell, 2016).
- 12.
George Gittoes pointedly writes, “Once back in Jalalabad we will be soft targets, not suited up [like Official War Artists] in cams and Kevlar body armour with a tank to get around in and a fortress to retreat to at night”; see George Gittoes, “The Art of War: How Picasso and van Gogh helped George Gittoes interpret the horrors he witnessed in Rwanda, Somalia, Baghdad and Sarajevo,” The Weekend Australian Magazine, October 15–16, 2016. http://www.theaustralian.com.au/life/weekend-australian-magazine/george-gittoes-the-art-of-war/news-story/48606f87cb11e734efc42472ae52d595. Also see (and note Green’s own comments quoted in this report): Sune Engel Rasmussen, “George Gittoes and the art of war: Conflict and brutality have formed the work of Australian artist George Gittoes, who this year is the recipient of the Sydney Peace Prize,” The Age Good Weekend, April 11, 2015. http://www.theage.com.au/good-weekend/george-gittoes-and-the-art-of-war-20150409-1mhay4.html?logout=true.
- 13.
Boris Groys, Art Power (London & Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2008), 127.
- 14.
See Anthony Gardner, Politically Unbecoming: Postsocialist Art Against Democracy (London and Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2015).
- 15.
Jonathon Franzen, “Carbon capture: Has climate change made it harder for people to care about conservation,” The New Yorker, April 6, 2015. https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2015/04/06/carbon-capture. Also see Jonathan Franzen, “One year of Trump: Is it too late to save the world? Jonathan Franzen on one year of Trump’s America,” The Guardian, Nov. 4, 2017. https://www.theguardian.com/books/2017/nov/04/jonathan-franzen-too-late-to-save-world-donald-trump-environment.
- 16.
Greg Dodds, “Australian sacrifice in Vietnam, it’s time to rethink the way we memorialise,” Australian Financial Review, Sept. 22, 2016. http://www.afr.com/news/world/asia/australian-sacrifice-in-vietnam-its-time-to-rethink-the-way-we-memorialise-20160919-grjhgg.
- 17.
Australia Council for the Arts, Arts Nation: An Overview of Australian Arts, 2015 Edition (Sydney: Australia Council for the Arts, 2015).
References
Anderson, Nola. Australian War Memorial: Treasures from a Century of Collecting. Canberra and Melbourne: Australian War Memorial and Murdoch Books, 2012.
Australia Council for the Arts. Arts Nation: An Overview of Australian Arts. Sydney: Australia Council for the Arts, 2015.
Barikin, Amelia. “Framing Conflict.” In The International Handbooks of Museum Studies: Museum Theory, ed. Andrea Whitcomb and Kylie Message, 485–510. Boston: Wiley, 2015.
Douglas, Amelia. “The Viewfinder and the View.” Broadsheet 38, no. 1 (Sept. 2009): 200–205.
Foss, Brian. War Paint: Art, War, State and Identity in Britain, 1939–1945. New Haven: Yale University Press, 2007.
French, Blair. Tranquillity. Curated by Natasha Bullock with Art Gallery of New South Wales, May 2005. Exhibition Catalogue: 2–4.
Gardner, Anthony. Politically Unbecoming: Postsocialist Art Against Democracy. London and Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2015.
Green, Charles. Peripheral Vision: Contemporary Australian Art 1970–94. Sydney: Craftsman House, 1995.
———. “Vivian Sundaram.” World Art, no. 18 (Aug. 1998): 54–59.
Green, Charles, and Anthony Gardner. Biennials, Triennials and Documenta: The Exhibitions that Created Contemporary Art. Boston: Wiley-Blackwell, 2016.
Groys, Boris. Art Power. London and Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2008.
James, Sarah. “Making an Ugly World Beautiful?” In Memory of Fire: The War of Images and Images of War, 12–15. Brighton: Brighton Photo Biennial, 2008.
Kapur, Geeta. When Was Modernism: Essays on Contemporary Cultural Practice in India. New Delhi: Tulika, 2000.
Kilcullen, David. “Countering Global Insurgency.” Journal of Strategic Studies 28, no. 4 (2005): 597–617.
———. Out of the Mountains: The Coming Age of the Urban Guerrilla. New York: Oxford University Press, 2013.
———. “Blood Year: Terror and the Islamic State.” Quarterly Essay, no. 58 (May 2015).
———. Blood Year: The Unraveling of Western Counterterrorism. New York: Oxford University Press, 2016.
Messham-Muir, Kit. Double War: Shaun Gladwell. Melbourne: Thames & Hudson, 2015.
Mishra, Pankaj. From the Ruins of Empire: The Revolt Against the West and the Remaking of Asia. London: Picador, 2012.
———. Age of Anger: A History of the Present. New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2017.
Norfolk, Simon. Burke + Norfolk: Photographs from the War in Afghanistan. London: Tate Modern, 2011.
Stallabrass, Julian. “The Power and Impotence of Images.” In Memory of Fire: The War of Images and Images of War, 6–9. Brighton: Brighton Photo Biennial, 2008.
Tello, Veronica. “The Aesthetics and Politics of Aftermath Photography.” Third Text, 28, no. 6 (Dec. 2014): 555–562.
The Sensory War 1914–2014. Edited by Ana Carden-Coyne, David Morris, and Tim Wilcox, with Manchester Art Gallery, 2014. Exhibition Catalogue.
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Green, C., Brown, L. (2019). No Agency: Iraq and Afghanistan at War—The Perspective of Commissioned War Artists. In: Kerby, M., Baguley, M., McDonald, J. (eds) The Palgrave Handbook of Artistic and Cultural Responses to War since 1914. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-96986-2_2
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