A Global Response to War Rendered in Words and Images
By V�ctor Alejandro Sorell
Although the gulf between war and peace is profoundly abysmal, Indian author, Arundhati Roy, equates these opposite poles in her brilliant and trenchant essay of 2001, War Is Peace, reflecting on the current Iraqi war.
Rendered in words alone, the strongest indictment in the English language against war is arguably Dalton Trumbo’s pacifist novel of 1938, Johnny Got His Gun. Published ten days after the Nazi-Soviet pact, and two days into W.W. II, the book was soon suppressed due to its anti-war indignation.
Indelible memories of World Wars I and II, together with countless other armed conflicts across continents linger in the face of the latest theater of war in Iraq. Against that historical and contemporary backdrop, Chicago’s Aldo Castillo Gallery conceptualized and organized an exhibition, Art At War: The Artist’s Voice. Speaking, one might say, for Trumbo’s tragically maimed and mute protagonist, nearly 100 visual artists from some 20 nations have submitted works and accompanying statements to the show which opened September 10th.
Matt Mahurin, whose haunting portrayal of a hooded Abu Ghraib torture victim appeared on the May 17, 2004 cover of Time, is regrettably not among the featured artists. His image hints at what that weekly contains within its pages: unequivocally damning photographic testimony of war’s inhumanity. By contrast, relatively few images in Art At War are so overtly denunciatory.
Utilizing clay oxides and wire, Jo-Ann Brody of Peekskill, New York, has executed The Road, a six-panel screen-like memorial. A procession of abstract figures extends above the captioned words, "the road goes on forever and the sorrow never ends," an allusion to the unavoidable recurrence of war. On the back of the panels, torsos are inscribed in Hebrew text denouncing war’s horrors. This conflation of verbal and non-verbal content raises its voice in conspicuous protest. So too does an evocative painting recalling the uncompromising visual rhetoric of Leon Golub. U.S. Latino artist Fernando Garc�a depicts an elegantly delineated figure hung by a rope of U.S. dollar bills, "war’s true catalyst." The lone truncated chiaroscuro figure dangles in relief against a bold red ground. G�nther Gerzso’s articulate figuration is a throwback to Jacques Callot and Goya, while his fellow Mexican-based artist, Hugo Crosthwaite, harkens back to the complex and dense compositions of Hieronymous Bosch and muralist Jos� Clemente Orozco.
Many of the other contributing artists engage in tempered, equivocal introspection. Consider U.S.-based artist Valerie Hird who "explore(s) the nature of historical memory" in her mixed-media piece, Prophet, Martyr, Terrorist. Her self-interrogation establishes a fertile arena commingling perception and misperception. South African Sonya Rademeyer’s own mixed-media piece, Iraq, raises similar paradoxical considerations. Their audience must in turn interrogate itself.
