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Bruce Helford
Bruce Helford and his wife, Jan Corey Helford, co-own their gallery, where, for one night only this past December they presented ? The War, an exhibition showcasing new works from over twenty artists interpreting the War in Iraq.
What Have We Done?, 2007. Oil on panel, 18 x 24 inches. Courtesy of Corey Helford Gallery.Sometime in September 2007, Jan and I realized there were no iconic images for the current anti-war movement. With no draft and limited visual coverage of the ugliness of the war, there’s barely a movement at all. If the traditional method of resistance was that prominent artists pick up the baton and take the lead, we thought, it seemed like everyone was asleep at the easel. With the terrific exception of the subtle, subliminal imagery of Shepard Fairey (Obey), there hasn’t even been an exhibit of prominence where artists could take their shot at the next peace symbol or “War Is Not Healthy…” poster. So we decided to do it. We approached twenty-one of our favorite artists whom we felt would best create images that captured the anxiety, pain, dark humor, and honesty of people’s unhappiness with the war, as has been increasingly expressed in U.S. polls, but seems to have no voice.
I would like to use the space given to spotlight a few artists in the show. Gary Baseman, a pillar of the new art community, whose work has graced the covers of New Yorker Magazine and galleries around the world, was the first to jump in and take a stand. The disarming innocence of his disturbingly adorable character bleeding at the end of a gun barrel re-invents the head-shop poster wall for 2007. Chris Anthony’s photograph of a blue-eyed woman wrapped in an American flag-burka and the added text, “Coercion Is Not Glory,” provides a scorching insight into the motives of the war. Korin Faught’s Lady Liberty in post-copulation with a soldier, entitled What Did We Do? makes its point with her neo-traditional rendition of Iraq War buyer’s remorse. Michael Mararian’s Fatherless, Motherless, Pointless is almost unbearably empathetic to our national loss with a baby wailing on a flag-covered coffin. Other artists were gentler in their subversiveness, such as Sage Vaughn with his Make Love, a graffiti-scrawled wall depicting an ironic bird of peace upon which the words “Fuck the World” is tattooed on its wing.
There were many more outstanding works, each vastly different from the next. Besides donating twenty percent of proceeds from the show to a veterans’ charity, our contribution to the effort was printing almost 30,000 high-quality 18 x 24 inch poster prints of all the works and giving them away for free at the gallery and through guerilla street teams at Art Basel in Miami. The Peace Movement of the 60s was galvanized and memorialized by posters that were scotch-taped to everyone’s walls. Perhaps these works will have the same future.
