Images of War in Contemporary Art

Terror and Conflict in the Mass Media

Uroš Cvoro, Kit Messham-Muir

• Publisher: Bloomsbury Visual Arts
• Year: 2021
• ISBN:
  9781350227354
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Art
• Subtopic: Art General

In Images of War in Contemporary Art, Uroš Cvoro and Kit Messham-Muir mount a challenge to the dominance of theoretical tropes of trauma, affect, and emotion that have determined how we think of images of war and terror for the last 20 years. Through analyses of visual culture from contemporary "war art" to the meme wars, they argue that the art that most effectively challenges the ethics and aesthetics of war and terror today is that which disrupts this flow-art that makes alternative perceptions of wartime both visible and possible. As a theoretical work, Images of War in Contemporary Art is richly supported by visual and textual evidence and firmly embedded in current artistic practice. Significantly, though, the book breaks with both traditional and current ways of thinking about war art-offering a radical rethinking of the politics and aesthetics of art today through analyses of a diverse scope of contemporary art that includes Ben Quilty, Abdul Abdullah (Australia), Mladen Miljanovic, Nebojša Šeric Šoba (Bosnia and Herzegovina), Hiwa K, Wafaa Bilal (Iraq), Teresa Margolles (Mexico), and Arthur Jafa (United States).

1

The Trauma Artist

Australian contemporary artist Ben Quilty is not well-known internationally;¹ however, in his home country he is an art star, “the darling of the Australian art world,”² “the closest thing Australia has to a celebrity artist,”³ having won the nation’s most prestigious art prizes (National Self-Portrait Prize 2007; Doug Moran Prize 2009; Archibald Prize 2011). As an “impassioned activist,”⁴ he has also become the recognizable public face of liberal humanitarianism. Australians who are unlikely to know the name of any other living artist might well have heard of Ben Quilty, similarly to how the wider British public might know of Damien Hirst or Tracey Emin, or the American public might have heard of Jeff Koons. Quilty led an intense public campaign against the execution by Indonesia of his painting protégé and convicted drug smuggler Myuran Sukumaran. He has highlighted the human toll of the refugee crisis in the Mediterranean and South Pacific, as well as confronted contemporary Australia with its shameful and largely ignored history of massacres of the Indigenous population by the colonizing settlers at sites such as Myall Creek in New South Wales. Quilty is a frequent commentator in broadcast media and the subject of a number of documentaries, and Australia’s media, generally speaking, loves him: “mainstream media respond[s] to Quilty with hagiography.”⁵ In 2019, he featured on the covers of Good Weekend magazine (weekend supplement of The Sydney Morning Herald and Melbourne’s The Age) wearing a crown of barbed wire (“[t]he inference was that Quilty might have a ‘messiah complex’,” says Anna Zagala⁶). Later in the same year, Queensland Art Gallery and Gallery of Modern Art opened a major mid-career retrospective on Quilty. Its curator, Lisa Slade, commented in the messianic Good Weekend feature that, “[s]o much has happened for him and to him—and to us, as Australians—and he has made so much work about it. The way the arc of Ben’s humanity has developed, through all those experiences, is remarkable. He has become a citizen artist, the witness to our times.”⁷

Quilty’s first appearance on the cover of Good Weekend was in 2012, for a feature about his then recent appointment as Australia’s Official War Artist. It was that role and the work that arose from it—a series of paintings titled After Afghanistan—that first established him as a public figure and humanitarian. The Australian War Memorial’s Official War Artist scheme embedded Quilty with the Australian Defence Force in October 2011. He spent twenty-four days in Afghanistan, mostly at the Coalition base at Tarinkot in Urōzgān Province, taking thousands of photographs, recording video, and creating a portfolio of sketches and watercolors, mostly of Australian soldiers, such as Captain Kate Porter, Tarin Kot (2011) and Captain M II, Tarin Kot (2011). He returned to his studio in the countryside south of Sydney not knowing how he could possibly make work about what had been a “surreal” experience.⁸ When some of the troops he had met also returned to Australia, he asked them to sit for larger-scale painted portraits. It was then he realized that “some of the work has become quite dark because of their experience—it’s a cliché from the Vietnam War—that they then suffer the emotional effects from being exposed to the things that they’re exposed to … crashing down to the earth with post-traumatic stress disorder is very crushing and confronting.”⁹ The trauma of returned soldiers thus became the focus of Quilty’s After Afghanistan series, which toured through Australia from 2014 to 2016.

Figure 1.1 Ben Quilty on the cover of The Good Weekend, February 23, 2019. Photo: Tim Bauer. © Tim Bauer 2019. Reproduced with the permission of the photographer.

After Afghanistan consists of twenty-two large paintings and sixteen smaller drawings that attempt to convey war trauma. The paintings were all created in Quilty’s studio in the Australian country town of Robinson in 2012, after his return. Some, such as Tarin Kot, Hilux, depict destroyed objects. Others are more abstract and allegorical, such as Kandahar and Tarin Kot, while Air Commander John Oddie, no. 3; Sergeant P. After Afghanistan; and Trooper Daniel Spain are portraits of soldiers in uniform. However, the core of the series, which attracted the greatest amount of critical attention, consists of paintings of the naked and contorted figures of men and one woman—Captain Kate Porter, after Afghanistan; Captain S after Afghanistan; Trooper M, after Afghanistan; Troy Park, after Afghanistan, no. 2; Trooper M, after Afghanistan, no. 2; and Lance Corporal M, after Afghanistan. These paintings in particular are rendered in Quilty’s long-established signature style. Most of Quilty’s paintings are figure-ground compositions centering on head or full-body portraits or objects such as cars, often floating on an abstracted background. Quilty works speedily and expediently, applying richly pigmented viscous oil paints to large stretched white canvases in thick impasto strokes, most often with a long cake-decorating knife, and occasionally with brushes, fingers, hands. Often, unpainted sections of the white canvas are left to function either as highlights or, as is the case in many of these portraits, the skin of the sitter’s pale body. Documentaries on Quilty often show him working in his studio manipulating his paint and canvases in a particularly dynamic physical way—smearing, wiping, scraping, stepping back and forth to the canvas, turning it upside down. Certainly, the dynamism of his studio technique does translate to the aesthetic of his finished works. And, to some extent, this technique is also part of Quilty’s public image, as “Australia’s artist from central casting”:¹⁰ echoes of Hans Namuth’s 1950 film of Jackson Pollock working his canvases, with a local pinch of the fast-working television portrait artist Anh Do, or of bush artist Pro Hart in the 1980s Australian Dupont Stainmaster advertisement.

Quilty’s own curriculum vitae describes his painting style as “emphatically expressive,”¹¹ which is doubtlessly his thing. Zagala observes that the war artworks “deploy gesture, brushwork and composition to depict the returned soldiers as physically vulnerable and anguished,”¹² and certainly in the core After Afghanistan works his technique lives up to the anticipated drama of “Quilty’s expressive compositions,” as Katya Wachtel describes them.¹³ For example, Captain S after Afghanistan (2012)—a key work in the series, shortlisted for the 2012 Archibald Prize—rendered in fleshy pinks broken up by urgently applied thick bloody reds, hematomatic purples and unpainted canvas, also em...