Climate of war.

AN-MY LE: SMALL WARS

OCTOBER 26, 2006-JANUARY 6, 2007

MUSEUM OF CONTEMPORARY PHOTOGRAPHY, COLUMBIA COLLEGE CHICAGO 

CHICAGO

WAR FARE: WORKS BY ASHLEY GILBERTSON, SEAN HEMMERLE, SARAH PICKERING, MARTHA ROSLER, AND SEAN SNYDER

OCTOBER 26, 2006-JANUARY 6, 2007

MUSEUM OF CONTEMPORARY PHOTOGRAPHY, COLUMBIA COLLEGE CHICAGO

CHICAGO

Two separate but closely related exhibitions at the Museum of Contemporary Photography in Chicago display representations of war. In "Small Wars" Victnamese American photographer An-My Le combines two of her series, "Small Wars" (1999-2002) and "29 Palms" (2003-04), documenting how wars in Vietnam and Iraq respectively are prepared for and reenacted in America. "War Fare" is a selection of works from five photographers each representing war from a different perspective. The two exhibits, both curated by Karen Irvine, comprise a partial and critical catalog, a typology of the range and disparate functions of images of war:

Most readers of this publication have been taught that the presence of black and white and as many shades of gray as we can achieve in a negative are the optimum and essential conditions for good black-and-white photography. Le's photos of the military training ground at 29 Palms in Southern California's Mojave Desert have a grayness (despite the presence of the full-spectrum; her craft is impeccable) that contests the rules and conventions for black-and-white photography. The lack of light effects reminds the viewer that visual polarities imply a drama that correlates with western cultural ideas about conflict. The sense that something is going to happen, the anticipation and tension leading to eventual resolution, accompany pictorial conventions of drawing and printmaking that evolve into black-and-white photography. These literary ideas and heroic tropes are part of the same cultural vocabulary that includes visual hierarchies, pictorial depth, conquest, and ownership. Representations of space attend its conquest: maps, optics, and heroic landscapes all serve similar instrumental and ideological functions. Grayness brings a sense of tedium and ambiguity that implicitly questions the terms of the conflict: black and white, good and evil, power and glory.

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It is immediately clear to any viewer of Le's photographs, from both the "29 Palms" series and "Small Wars," that the artist sees no high drama in the preparation for or the recollection of recent wars. While Le uses a large-format camera and observes some of the conventions of landscape photography (her large prints and camera positions preserve the gravity and distance that recall the origins of American landscape photography in the European sublime), she appears to shoot at a time of day when the angle of light does not reveal depth in the landscape. The resulting flatness, a loss of distinction among objects, clouds the hierarchical relationships and diffuses any sense of spatial conquest or penetration. The soldiers wander on an endless, featureless plane. The tonal quality of her documentation subtly forecasts the moral climate of the war. Grayness, empty expanses of desert spaces, simulated towns, battles, and fidgeting recruits represent the industrial, bureaucratic, institutional, and disciplinary processes that actually produce war. Le says: "I consider my work an inquiry into the literal representation of things vs. the depictions that live in the popular imagination." (1)

Some of the photos like Colonel Greenwood raise specific questions about the war: an armed soldier sitting on a rock outcrop over a vast empty desert evokes these questions: who is his enemy? where are we going? And while we think we know who the enemy is, the composition slyly reopens the question. For instance, in Mechanized Assault, Captain Folsom, and Small Convoy Attack the pictured vehicles (tanks and trucks) are either in sloppy formation or moving in an indiscernible pattern. The visual unease is increased by the troops who appear to be in disarray. By contrast, the images that comprise "Night Operations," a group of images within "29 Palms," have a sense of mystery and drama. Tracers and flares illuminate a plain of creosote bushes and scattered equipment recalling the phrase, "theater of war."

The "29 Palms" series depicts military training through still photographs and a dual projection video installation of the "hapless soldiers" fidgeting, pursing their lips, and shifting their weight while completely unaware of the camera. Alongside the medium-sized portrait is a projection of the vast landscape of the training ground punctuated by people and explosions. "Small Wars" documents reenactors of Vietnam, where the photographer herself is part of the game. Those of us who did not go to Vietnam during the war know it from the news and the movies. The flat horizons of the Mekong Delta, fringed with palm trees or dark jungle-lined rivers and muddy rice paddies, exist in our peripheral vision. Le's war reenactors are camping in deciduous forests, not oriental climes, and even the beach scenes look like they might be Connecticut. The incongruous domestic setting foregrounds the social and psychological motives of the reenactors, as well as reminding us of the implications of the Oriental setting of the actual war. They look absurd, like campers run amok. In both cases, the trainees and the reenactors inhabit the virtual landscapes of the future and the past. The viewer sees them apart from their memories and projections in the fragile deserts and forests of North America in a revealing and subversive set of dislocations.

The frightening and exotic nature of war, not to mention the very high drama of the news and the reactions of the populace to the war before we became accustomed to what Anthony Burgess's and Stanley Kubrick's characters in A Clockwork Orange (1962, 1971) called "ultra violence," provided Martha Rosler with materials for her collages. The idea that the palace walls run in blood, as William Blake put it in the early nineteenth century in reference to the war fought by monarchial coalitions in resistance to the French Revolution, is not a new one, but it deserves to be restated with every war. (2) Rosler juxtaposed images from the Vietnam War inside the homes of the American upper-middle class. Her detournment and interventions--a body and a heap of filthy rags on the floor behind the conversation circle (Roadside Ambush, 1967-72); or a Vietnamese child with a stump for a leg leaning against the picture plane, a beautiful room behind her (Tron [amputee], 1967-72)--confront the viewer by shattering the discourse of redemption through the cleanliness, domestic order, and class status that magazines represent. Now she has brought the series "Bringing the War Home" (1967-72) up to date with more sharp and excruciating images from Iraq. This time it is expensive kitchens and the impossible luxuries of the very wealthy (who have so much to gain from war) who are haunted by pale orphans sitting under their gleaming furniture on an oriental rug (Vanitas, 2004), and images of torture on the oven door, masked terrorists (in the street), and smoking ruins outside the double-paned glass or behind the white sofa (Gladiators, 2004).

Her photomontages are simple and clear in their didactism; the images are graphic and unambiguous. There is nothing really to theorize about here. The next step might be action on the part of a viewer who gets Rosler's point about suffering and profit, or about our emulation of the material luxury that numbs the wealthy to the human condition and the alarming inequities produced and defended by war. At least, that is the Brechtian equation Rosler uses so well.

Australian photographer Ashley Gilbertson's photojournalism hangs in the same gallery as Rosler's, reminding us that during the 1960s photojournalism was instrumental in the popular resistance to the war in Vietnam. Images of slaughter and the suffering of children who were victimized by the conflict did come into our living rooms as Rosler demonstrates graphically, but now families are no longer gathered around the electronic hearth. The civic virtue of watching the news has been questioned, and rightly so, but the images still appall and instruct us. Gilbertson's 35 mm images from Falluja, Iraq, are immediate and dynamic. Shot at close range and fully saturated, they convey the sense of threat, vertigo, and exhaustion that result from violence. The photojournalist is gathering news, bearing witness, informing, reporting, and despite our loss of belief in the indexical nature of the photographic image, the war is actually there and we need to know about it. Editorial policies of the major news outlets in the United States confirm photojournalism's utility in swaying public opinion. A simple survey of what photographs appear where and on what page of the major U.S. and world newspapers and television broadcasts (and of what images are suppressed) refreshes one's understanding of the power of photographic images of war. Overseas outlets broadcast much more graphic images, and Gilberton's images frequently draw us to the front page of the New York Times, a paper that has been critical of Middle East policy and the administration that sponsors it.

There is something cynical and slightly self-serving in the alimentary word play in the title of the exhibit "War Fare," yet all of the images do not go down easily despite their meta-theoretical sauces. Rosler's images stick firmly in the craw, but the remaining work in the exhibit tends to produce either a critical, moral, or philosophic state of mind, so one tends to lose oneself in problems concerning the status of representations or the loss of the real. Work by Sarah Pickering, large photographs of mock explosions used for training or the movies, connect theater and war, but her point is a bit too attenuated to follow fruitfully. Sean Snyder's work is likewise concerned with making connections between corporate products, commodification, and consumption of images. Despite the bloglike secondary quality to it, the work is reflective and complex and needs a better viewing area than the stairwell in which it appeared. Sean Hemmerle, whose four-year service in the army gives his point of view a different kind of authority, chooses static scenes portraying the effects of war. A large-format photograph of Times Square (W, Times Square, 2003) dominated by a monumental digital screen image of President George W. Bush, a news scrawl running beneath him (recalling the huge posters of leaders like Mao Zedong from the early twentieth century) as he gazes out into the empty street, above a small shadowy crowd of people who seem unaware of both images and text, captures a sense of loss and absence. A photograph of Qsay's Palace (2003) in Iraq, a large empty room with an ornate medallion on the ceiling and other hints of splendor now strewn with debris, likewise portrays a spectacle of emptiness and the devastation of conquered space.

While light might be the essential material of photography, selection and framing distinguish between one photographer's vision and the next. An exhibition comprised of the work of seven photographers, each exploring the same subject, foregrounds the differences between 35 mm, large format, and how these lenses affect point of view, making it clear that aspect ratios, juxtapositions, and simulations all define the relationship between the photographer, the audience, and the subject. The unstated common clement in this timely exhibit is the relationship between Americans and our far-away war. Each photographer's position is critical.

NOTES (1.) An-My Le, Small Wars, "Interview: Hilton Als" (New York: Aperture Foundation, 2005), 124. (2.) From William Blake, "London," 1794: And the Hapless soldier's sigh / Runs in blood down palace walls. In The Poetry and Prose of William Blake, David V. Erdman, ed. (Garden City, NY: Doubleday and Company, 1970), 26-7.

JANINA A. CIEZADLO is an artist and writer in Chicago.