| From the lethal pyrotechnics that rocked Baghdad in the early days of the war to the steady diet of video in the wake of suicide bombings and IED attacks, media has brought the Iraq War into American living rooms. “Embedded” reporters, as though part of some macabre reality show, compete to stay alive and show us the daily life of soldiers in harm’s way. Like many of us, artist Max Schumann has imbibed diverse elixirs of war reporting, spanning the political gamut from left to right. |  |
Max Schumann’s “Painting News Project” – Daniel Rothbart
From the lethal pyrotechnics that rocked Baghdad in the early days of the war to the steady diet of video in the wake of suicide bombings and IED attacks, media has brought the Iraq War into American living rooms. “Embedded” reporters, as though part of some macabre reality show, compete to stay alive and show us the daily life of soldiers in harm’s way. Like many of us, artist Max Schumann has imbibed diverse elixirs of war reporting, spanning the political gamut from left to right. Uniquely, Schumann chose to develop a body of paintings based on stills of war reporting footage and to exhibit them juxtaposed with images of television commentators and pundits.
Color photographs of carefully groomed anchormen in studios with professional lighting and video captioning are pinned to the wall at irregular intervals. Four by six snapshots taken by Schumann are set in front of his television, and these pictures convey layers of mediation, including some reporters’ biases regarding events overseas and Schumann's subjectivity in selecting the particular images present. Coupled with these color photographs are monochrome paintings by Schumann of the war-ravaged Iraq for both civilians and American service people. Culled from war reportage photographs and video stills, these paintings depict such everyday events as bomb victims recovering in a hospital ward and soldiers patrolling a desolate land in an atmosphere of repression and fear.
Skillfully painted with broad strokes and impasto, Schumann's work invokes an atmospheric sense of gloom without focusing on the particular features of any individual. Reduced to general brushstrokes, people recede into a general mass, be they American service people far from home in a dangerous, confusing reality or Iraqi civilians living in fear of violence. Schumann's paintings lack the sensationalism of direct violence embodied most potently in Adams' photograph of General Nguyen Ngoc executing a Viet Cong prisoner. Instead, Schumann’s paintings reflect the violence’s aftermath and the tense monotony of life during wartime. Schumann's montage of these paintings with colorful stills of media commentators is intriguing. The physical space between them seems to emphasize the displacement between the two cultures. Their relationship heralds an interesting transformation of perception.
