War is the Weapon of Mass Destruction: Art of Conscience
Foreword
This project began by noticing both the broad lack and want of a major exhibition of anti-war art. Much of this art was already out there to be found or in the process of being made on each of three turfs: with professional artists who’d been creating it in their studios; among protestors and activists who’d made their own quality pieces in support of the ongoing anti-war movement both in the United States and around the world; and in the personal, therapeutic work of private citizen-artists.
We wanted to bring the visual artistry of these forces together consciously and cooperatively in ways they hadn’t been before. (Though it was also clear from the outset that these three spheres of anti-war art were never mutually exclusive and that, indeed, in every functional respect frequently swap their respective typecast identities.) As the idea of doing so took shape and outreach to various bodies began, progressive religious communities began to make their desire to participate known and to offer organizational as well as technical support, for which we are immensely grateful.
Co-curated by artists Lili Lakich and Darryl Smith, the exhibition features 60 works by 25 artists comprising a people’s critical witness of and orientation to war, with particular focus on those invasions and protracted occupations by the U.S. over the last decade. We ask how can and how must anti-war art work in an age that promotes to our detriment – as various theorists have shown – a constant state of emergency? We hope that the works in War is the WMD: Artists of Conscience will not so much form as confirm for many a motivated intuition that the promotion of this siege state is an unconscionable and dispensable one.
We wish to thank the artists and the volunteers who have provided their time, work, advice, and generous support toward the realization of this exhibition.
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I. Introduction: Rocking the Horse of War – Toward A People’s Art Exhibition
When I think of the relationship between artists and society—and for me the question is always what it could be, rather than what it is—I think of the word transcendent. It is a word I never use in public, but it’s the only word I can come up with to describe what I think about the role of artists. By transcendent, I mean that the artist transcends the immediate. Transcends the here and now. Transcends the madness of the world. Transcends terrorism and war.
—Howard Zinn, Artists in Times of War
On the crown of Dadaist Raoul Hausmann’s assemblage Mechanical Head: The Spirit of Our Time (c.1920) sits an empty tin cup. Attached to the wooden head, itself wearing a vacant, slack-jawed expression of incurious stupidity, are familiar sundry objects. A ruler, a pocket watch mechanism, camera parts, the key spool of a typewriter, a snake-skin wallet, etc. As if at the ready to receive some fuel that will get going the rote thinking of the tailor’s dummy head the tin cup – with its heart-shaped engraving – dully awaits the “love” of anonymous activation. Mechanical Head is the effigy for a Zeitgeist of war that seems to light without ignition and burn without exhaustion. It also represents the antiwar art mood and movement that was Dada in the period of the Great War, a movement that described not simply a civilization with problems but, far more damningly, a problem civilization.
On April 29, 2006, an anti-war rally was organized in New York City. Dancing above the protesters among a sea of activist signage was an image, reminiscent of the machine montages of Berlin Dadaists John Heartfield, George Grosz, Hannah Höch and, in particular, Hausmann. It featured an acrid, black and white blow up of the head of George W. Bush mounted on foam core board. On top, rising from the floor of its open (and otherwise hollow) cranial cavity was the horse head pumpjack of an oil well. In the set up of a pumpjack it is the steel or fiberglass cable, called a “bridle,” that connects it first to what’s called the “polished rod” and then to a piston within the so-called “stuffing box.” The stuffing box keeps oil from escaping at that point as it is pumped to one just below it. But on the montage at the rally that day the stuffing box had become the mouth of the Bush figure, connected by bridle to its jutting horse head pump. As the lazy pumpjack worked the stuffing box mouth, the jaw opened and closed to recurrently reveal a single utterance: “BLA” rendered in coarse, oily black magic marker.
From the mechanized masquerade of the Trojan Horse to the mechanized masquerade of the horse head pumpjack crowning the deliberately obscured U.S. motives for war, we note that in French “Dada” itself means “hobby horse.” We see that as an anti-war art movement the hobby horse of Dada engaged the second, red-hued horse of that European apocalypse – the “war to end all wars” – with the same truth present today in people’s artistic responses to war.
Since the start of the invasions of Afghanistan and Iraq the nature of anti-war art has changed. In recent years, a new collusion has taken shape between the artwork of the anti-war movement and of fine art often lying at the periphery of the institutional art world. Though an open-ended “War on Terror” had been declared, the Bush administration’s own naively optimistic expectations of a quick war – one in which we “would be seen as liberators” and that would virtually pay for itself through the generous gratitude and oil reserves of a unified Iraqi people – only helped to drive a justifiable urgency in the art coming from the anti-war movement. Art here needed to be speedily re-/producible and dispersible. Most of the space of anti-war movement art was, then, occupied by the graphic arts posters, stencils, and graffiti that dominated the early years of the wars. These formats and dispensations continue, of course. But with the protracted nature of the occupations what has begun to emerge is 1) a sustained and burgeoning democratic collaboration between professional and lay anti-war artists; 2) the evident appearance of more time-consuming artwork within the scene of the anti-war movement; and 3) across all art media and formats both traditional and emerging, an increased placing of the theme of war within a broader context – one that questions the legitimacy and sustainability of a civilization that itself continues to produce war unremittingly in order to function. Such contexts include the growth in public awareness about global climate change since the start of the wars, the unstable global as well as national economy, and the xenophobic zealotry that greases the gears of an increasingly indiscriminant military industrial complex.
War is the Weapon of Mass Destruction: Art of Conscience, therefore, comes as a second wave in anti-war art since the start of the invasions of Iraq and Afghanistan. What marks this shift is the rise of a consistent functional exchange between a populist movement and a fine arts community. The first wave saw these two groups innocently paralleling each other, while the second wave has seen them consciously and purposefully conjoin. This conjunction while driven by the length of the wars has also been conditioned by an already shared historical aesthetic-activism within each group. Both inside the art of the anti-war movement and inside the anti-war art of the fine arts community there is an indebtedness to and recapitulation of everyday billboards and signage, pop cultural touchstones, tutorial workshops of apprenticeship, and civic responsibility.
This travelling exhibition of war art intends to serve as a riposte to the established cruise control of war that has become so endemic to contemporary American life and culture. As co-curators, Lili Lakich and Darryl A. Smith first mounted an online digital version of the exhibit that eventually ran concurrently with its touring counterpart. Works broadly engage both the theme of war and each other from a variety of perspectives and experiences by the diverse artists who have produced them. Artists include the curators as well as Bill Concannon, Dan Levin, Cherri Pann, Gary Trudeau, [… etc.]. The travelling show is international in scope, with funding secured for this purpose. It is the collective hope of this showcase to return contemporary art to some improved measure of engagement with the subject of war, with the toll it extracts and the tyranny it imposes upon the entire human family.
IIa. War for War’s (Name)Sake: The Art of Not/Calling a Spade a Spade
This Administration prefers to avoid using the term ‘Long War’ or ‘Global War on Terror’. Please use ‘Overseas Contingency Operation’.
—Memo of the Office of Management and Budget reported by the Washington Post, March 24, 2009
Do they not then intend to find the path of good speech? From these terrible faces I see great profit for these citizens; for, if you always greatly honor with kindness the kindly ones, you will surely be pre-eminent, keeping your land and city in the straight path of justice.
—Athena, the Eumenides of Aeschylus
In the torturous wake of the onslaught of the Furies (Erinýes) Athena suggests that the city speak of them not as “the angry ones” but, rather, genteelly as “the kindly ones” (Eumenídes). Anti-war art knows that the signs of torture (somatic) and the torture of signs (semantic) are deeply reciprocal and bear a keen relationship. As signs in language, sterile euphemisms put us very far indeed from where art wants to take people. War is the WMD interrogates that relationship.
Somewhere along the way the so-called “Global War on Terror” became something to which the United States, as a nation, has come to adapt and, at least practically speaking, accept. This situation became internalized in what then-Vice President Dick Cheney described with clear elation a month after 9/11 as a war that “will not end in our lifetime.” Contemporary Italian political philosopher Giorgio Agamben theorizes that such a regime’s executive declaration of “states of exception” – i.e., states of emergency – have occurred with increasing frequency and duration since the 19th century. Agamben argues that ever-expanding suspensions of the constitutional rule of law, which the “guaranteed emergency” provides, have become a modern political commonplace in the U.S. and beyond. States of exception serve, he suggests, as an effective means of conditioning and finally normalizing totalitarian segues into representative democratic states. The Orwellian antecedents of the state of exception that the permanent War on Terror has become are clear. By, for example, refiguring what a combat soldier is or by summarily altering timetables for withdrawal, the Obama administration, like that of Oceania, is forever “authorized to say that the action we are now reporting may well bring the war within measurable distance of its end.”
Such a permanent emergency would not be possible without the studied manipulation and skilled (mis-)application of language. The Obama administration has adroitly changed the name of an ongoing violent state of global affairs which has itself not at all improved. The strategy capitalizes on the power we often imbue to names and to the act of naming to vitally alter the things they signify. This was done to great effect, of course, when “torture” became “enhanced interrogation.” The torture memos that were issued through the Office of Special Counsel (OSC) bear an immanent relationship with the acts they attempted to justify. When the body is tortured, it is placed under a form of duress that forces the tortured part(s) of the body to “stand (in pain)” for the whole. It is, for that painful duration, “all there is” to the body in the midst of torture and at the site of elicited pain. In this sense, torture becomes an eliminative process, reducing to one excruciating detail the otherwise infinite and expansive body human. The body is reduced to a single and totalizing “event” of extracted pain. But just as we can understand the signs of torture in this way, we can understand through art the “legalese” of tortured signs as they appeared in the OSC memos.
In literary creation – with Aeschylus and Thoreau, Hawthorne and Ellison, Dostoevsky and Orwell, and, yes, even with Justice Jay Bybee – signs can become so twisted that one sign can be changed into the very opposite of itself. Sometimes this is done in the service of life, sometimes in the service of anti-life. Orwell recognized this in his essay “The Politics of the English Language” (1946) and in Room 101, that place of unspeakable torture, in Nineteen Eighty-four (1949). He saw that within all things there is inevitably a little bit of its opposite. This fact can be abused, allowing for the exaggeration of what is partial in a thing and turning it into the whole of that thing. What gives the party mottos in Orwell’s novel their power – Ignorance is Strength, Slavery is Freedom, War is Peace, is that we can well see how ignorance can be a source of strength. The self-satisfaction of the many deniers of climate change or of the theory of evolution tells us so. We can understand well enough how delivering ourselves into the waiting arms of dubious authorities can be for many a seductive self-enslavement. The continuing pervasive support of both the Patriot Act and the Transportation Security Administration (TSA) tells us this is so. And, as abhorrent as we may find it, we can see how a prolonged war can provide amply for a distorted sense of peace. In his play, Mother Courage and Her Children, Bertolt Brecht illuminates the slippery slope of euphemistic exaggeration that breads the transformation of an inevitable conceptual part of war into a lethargic conceptual whole. In the character of the chaplain – Mother Courage’s transitory assistant – the peace of war is played up to Orwellian extrapolation:
THE CHAPLAIN: I’d say there’s peace in war too; it has its peaceful moments. Because war satisfies all requirements, peaceable ones included, they’re catered for, and it would simply fizzle out if it weren’t. In war you can do a crap like in the depths of peacetime, then between one battle and the next you can have a beer, then even when you’re moving up you can lay your head on your arms and have a bit of shuteye in the ditch, it’s entirely possible. During a charge you can’t play cards maybe, but nor can you in the depths of peacetime when you’re ploughing, and after a victory there are various openings. You may get a leg blown off, then you start by making a lot of fuss as though it were serious, but afterwards you calm down or get given a schnapps, and you end up hopping around and the war’s no worse off than before. And what’s to stop you from being fruitful and multiplying in the middle of the butchery, behind a barn or something, in the long run you can’t be held back from it, and then the war will have your progeny and can use them to carry on with.…
So, much like the contemporary euphemisms of war today, or like an auto body shop whose sign promises to “TAKE THE DENT OUT OF ACCIDENT,” such language can facilitate our taking the War out of “War,” the Ignorance out of “Ignorance,” the Slavery out of “Slavery.” Through calling a spade a spade, however, it is the job of art not to erase the inherent ambiguity of words and signs but, rather, to show how both their erasure and exposure can each either serve or hinder life and to reveal when and how this happens. Instead, then, of moneyed patrons we have named the galleries of the exhibition after the numerous antiseptic circumlocutions that have entered the lingo of these wars against which the art works of the exhibition play off. Besides “Enhanced Interrogation,” the following also appear and are described through the referenced text and poster art below.
IIb. The Doublespeak Of War – A Reference and Illustrated Primer:
•"Rendition" (also called: "Extraordinary Rendition") – Kidnapping Followed by Torture:
“Rendition, the practice of capturing and transporting someone to another country without legal extradition, is not a new practice. It has been used by U.S. law enforcement for decades to bring wanted suspects back to face trial in the U.S., rather than to a foreign country. In his book Ghost Plane: The True Story of the CIA Rendition and Torture Program, investigative journalist Stephen Grey reports that the earliest known rendition by the U.S. was in 1883 when Frederick Ker was kidnapped in Peru by the Pinkerton Detective Agency and rendered back to Chicago to face trial for grand larceny. The tactic was endorsed by the Supreme Court (see Ker vs Illinois). Until 9/11, reports Grey, the FBI published an annual summary of what they called "irregular renditions." Snatch operations may occasionally have broken local laws, Grey says, but ultimately the suspect was brought to court to face a judge and jury.”
http://www.pbs.org/frontlineworld/stories/rendition701/timeline/timeline_1.html
•"Kinetic Action" (also called: "Kinetic Military Action") – Fighting/Attacking:
“'Obviously that involves kinetic military action, particularly on the front end. But again, the nature of our commitment is that we are not getting into an open-ended war, a land invasion in Libya.’
—Deputy National Security Adviser Ben Rhodes, March 24, 2011
"As for the semantic argument: The Obama administration is borrowing words from its predecessor in the White House when it talks of “kinetic military action.” Bush’s team used that construction in advance of the Iraq War, according to Bob Woodward [i.e., Bush at War] and others.”
War of Semantics Over Libya
By PETER CATAPANO
March 25, 2011, 7:03 PM
http://opinionator.blogs.nytimes.com/2011/03/25/war-of-semantics/
•"Contractors" (Blackwater/Xe, etc.) – A Paramilitary Force of Hired Private Mercenaries:
“The Costs of Outsourcing War
People working for private military and security companies (PMSCs) have been accused of engaging in a number of human rights violations including the abuse and torture of detainees, shootings and killings of innocent civilians, destruction of property, sexual harassment and rape, human trafficking in the recruitment of third-country nationals, weapons proliferation, and participation in renditions. Amnesty International USA strives to ensure that PMSCs complicit in human rights violations are brought to justice and seeks to put adequate regulations and laws in place to improve oversight and accountability of the industry. Through legislative actions, corporate engagement, dialogue, direct actions, and participation in multi-stakeholder initiatives and coalitions, Amnesty works to ensure that PMSCs adhere to international human rights and humanitarian law in all of their operations around the world.”
http://www.amnestyusa.org/our-work/issues/business-and-human-rights/private-military-and-security-companies
•"Indefinite Detention" – Imprisonment without Charge/Trial:
President Obama today proposed something new: something called prolonged detention. Doesn't sound that bad, right? Prolonged detention? Did you ever see the movie Minority Report? It was based on a Philip K. Dick short story, came out in 2002. It starred Tom Cruise. Remember? He played a police officer in something called the Department of Precrime...
[...]
OBAMA: "There may be a number of people who cannot be prosecuted for past crimes, in some cases because evidence may be tainted. But who, nonetheless, pose a threat to the security of the United States."
MADDOW: We're not prosecuting them for past crimes, but we need to keep them in prison because of our expectation of their future crimes.
OBAMA: "Al-Qaeda terrorists and their affiliates are at war with the United States, and those that we capture, like other prisoners of war, must be prevented from attacking us again."
MADDOW: Prevented. We will incarcerate people preventively. Preventive incarceration. Indefinite detention, without trial. That's what this is. That's what President Obama proposed today if you strip away the euphemisms.
One civil liberties advocate told the New York Times today "We've known this was on the horizon for many years. But we were able to hold it off with George Bush. The idea that we might find ourselves fighting with the Obama administration over these powers is really stunning."
And it is stunning. Particularly to hear President Obama claim the power to keep people in prison indefinitely, with no charges against them. No conviction. No sentence. Just imprisonment. It's particularly stunning to hear him make that claim in the middle of a speech that was all about the rule of law.
Rachel Maddow on Obama's Indefinite detention ideas 5/21/09
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=L8J_lcHwkvc
Obama proposes Indefinite Preventive Detention without trial
http://open.salon.com/blog/behind_blue_eyes/2009/05/22/obama_proposes_indefinite_preventive_detention_without_trial
•"Target Servicing" (also called: "Servicing the Target") – Bombing:
Eugene Register-Guard – Nov. 23, 1991
By the Associated Press
SEATTLE – “Servicing the target” meant bombing and killing Iraqis. “Soft targets” were humans. “Hard targets” were buildings. “Force packages” were bombers, fighters and radar-jamming aircraft.
Those and other Persian Gulf War euphemisms were cited Friday in selection of the Defense Department for the annual Doublespeak Award of the National Conference of Teachers of English.
“Returning from a bombing attack, an American pilot said he had ‘sanitized the area’… and an artillery captain said, I prefer not to say we are killing other people. I prefer to say we are servicing the target,’” said William Lutz, chairman of the committee of English teachers and professors that made the awards.
“The misuse of public language by the Department of Defense merits some form of recognition,” Lutz told the conference board of directors.
Second place went to Rep. Newt Gingrich, R-Ga., and GOPAC, a Republican group he heads, for a booklet called “Language: A Key Mechanism of Control.”
The booklet said Republican candidates should stress words like “environment, peace, freedom, fair, flag, we-us-our, family and human” for themselves and “betray, sick, pathetic, liberal, hypocrisy, permissive, attitude and self-serving” for opponents…
Educators Target War Doublespeak
http://news.google.com/newspapers?nid=1310&dat=19911123&id=ckRWAAAAIBAJ&sjid=1uoDAAAAIBAJ&pg=4362,5263114
•"U.S. Department of Defense" – War Department/ U.S. Department of War (until 1949):
“Perhaps our temporizing began right after World War II, when the Department of War was folded under and rebranded as the Department of Defense. Coincidentally, just before this occurred, George Orwell penned his classic essay, “The Politics of the English Language” (1946). It remains telling:
[P]olitical language has to consist largely of euphemism, question-begging and sheer cloudy vagueness. Defenseless villages are bombarded from the air, the inhabitants driven out into the countryside, the cattle machine-gunned, the huts set on fire with incendiary bullets: this is called pacification. Millions of peasants are robbed of their farms and sent trudging along the roads with no more than they can carry: this is called transfer of population or rectification of frontiers. People are imprisoned for years without trial, or shot in the back of the neck or sent to die of scurvy in Arctic lumber camps: this is called elimination of unreliable elements. Such phraseology is needed if one wants to name things without calling up mental pictures of them.”
The United States of Euphemism
By William J. Astore, Lt. Col. (USAF, Ret.)
Sunday, May 31, 2009 - 15:31
http://hnn.us/articles/88504.html
•"Signature Strike"/"Personality Strike" – Killing Un/Known Persons:
“Drone Wars
“Bug Splat: military jargon for someone killed in a drone strike.
“‘Distance is of essential importance. It renders responsibility invisible and retaliation impossible.’
—Etel Adnan, Master of the Eclipse
“‘For a new generation of young guns, the experience of piloting a drone is not unlike the video games they grew up on. …drone operators kill at the touch of a button, without ever leaving their base – a remove that only serves to further desensitize the taking of human life.’
—Michael Hastings, “The Drone Wars,” Rolling Stone, April 26, 2012
“President George W. Bush, in his eight years as the self-proclaimed War President, authorized 78 drone strikes. President Obama, on his third day in office, authorized a drone strike that killed 20 people in Pakistan, three of them children. In his first three years as president, there were 253 known covert drone strikes in Pakistan alone, plus an unknown number in Yemen, Somalia, Libya, and, most recently, the Philippines. Drones are Obama’s weapon of choice.
There is a category of drone strikes called a “signature strike” in which the identities of individuals are unknown but they are acting in a “suspicious manner” and there is another category, a secondary strike, that attacks rescuers who come to the aid of victims from a first strike (at least 50 confirmed cases) or an attack on a funeral procession (more than 20 times). These are defined in the Rome Statute as war crimes.
“Targeted killing [Personality strikes]. This occurs when a drone strike is used to kill a terrorist whose identity is known, and whose name has been placed on a hit list, due to being deemed a ‘direct and immediate threat’ to US security. The government would like people to think this means these strikes target a terrorist literally with his or her hand on a detonator. But, in actuality, the only real criterion is that the government believes the target is sufficiently closely affiliated with terrorist organizations (e.g., a propagandist or financier) to justify assassination. This is likely the rarest form of drone strike. However it receives the most publicity, because the government likes to crow when it kills a high-ranking terrorist.
“Signature strikes. In signature strikes, the target is a person whose name is not known, but whose actions fit the profile (or ‘signature’) of a high-ranking terrorist. There is some ambiguity concerning the meaning of this term. Some use it in the sense just stated — i.e., a strike against an anonymous terrorist leader. Others use it more broadly to include killing of any non-identified militants, whether high-ranking or not. However from the moral standpoint it makes a major difference whether an anonymous targeted victim is a high-level leader, or simply an anonymous combatant….
“The Four Kinds of Drone Strikes”
http://satyagraha.wordpress.com/2012/05/23/the-four-kinds-of-drone-strikes/
•“WMD”
“‘Those weapons of mass destruction have got to be somewhere.’
—Bush jokes at the Radio and Television Correspondents Association Dinner, 3/24/04
“A Timeline of the Iraq War”
http://thinkprogress.org/report/iraq-timeline/
When the news emerged that there were no weapons of mass destruction and no terrorist haven, the idea [that the Bush administration should declare victory and bring the troops home] took on more weight, since the raison d’etre for the war no longer applied. Why then, did the Bush administration seek to subdue Iraqi society instead of looking for a face-saving way to depart? The problem, which grew more pronounced as time went on, was that such a withdrawal would not accomplish the geopolitical goals of the war: the conversion of Iraq into an outpost for U.S. Middle East policy. These goals required that Iraq transfer its oil production from the government to international oil companies, that Iraq be ruled by a stable, powerful, and friendly regime, and that Iraq be a home base for U.S. military presence in the Middle East.
—Michael Schwartz, War Without End:
The Iraq War in Context, p. 50
•“Collateral Damage”
We must be ruthless, especially in the area of collateral damage…. We shouldn’t be concerned about collateral damage. All the good civilians are gone. If we must make Falluja Carthage then let’s make Falluja Carthage.
—Lt. General Tom McInerney (Ret.), FOXNews military analyst qtd. in Schwartz, War Without End, pp. 97-8
While the U.S. leaders pondered whether to renew the marines’ advance into the city, official and unofficial observers inside and outside the U.S. government argued that the U.S. military should use its overwhelming firepower to sweep away the resistance, even if that meant destroying much of the city. Included among the many advocates of this option was...McInerney, who advocated attacking the entire remaining civilian population, emulating Rome’s most famous act of state terrorism, the destruction of the competitive city of Carthage...
—Michael Schwartz, War Without End:
The Iraq War in Context, p. 97-8
III. Guernica’s Horse as an Oil Pumpjack
—Did you do that?
—No, you did.
—Exchange between Gestapo officer and Pablo Picasso over the painting of Guernica, 1937
It was 75 years ago, in June of 1937, that Pablo Picasso completed that supreme canvas concerning the toll and tyranny of war, Guernica. At this timely anniversary, we find ourselves within and without that painting in unexpected ways. Who now is the bull(y) gazing obliviously over a mother deranged with pain and grief as she holds her dead child? Of course, that animal had its original representation there in the autocratic cruelty of Francisco Franco. What of the spear-gouged horse whose shocked eyes, spiked tongue, and splayed hooves, tell us so much today in our climate-altered world about the perplexed reaction of the non-human environment to our destructiveness? And that dove, set in the back there almost unseen but for its placement between the horse and the bull. What of it today? Winged peace is placed in such an astonishing darkness – what writer Cormac MacCarthy might call “that cold autistic dark” – and is rendered cartoonishly intangible within a two-dimensionality that is almost unviable. Yet it, too, cries out. And perhaps that dove finds a measure of fuller form in that shaft of light that scores it in the middle.
But these days, to see the “bombilla” in Guernica – the ambiguous Mithraic eye/electric light hovering over it all to serve and survey the catastrophe – one too easily (and too rightly) thinks of continuing U.S. Predator drone strikes and the Hellfire missiles they carry. One too easily and too rightly thinks of Middle Eastern villages, towns not so different from Guernica, that these drones observe with impunity as they remotely conduct their “signature strikes” and “personality strikes” – even more remotely than did the Spanish nationalists who bombarded Guernica through their fascist surrogates, the German Luftwaffe and the Italian Aviazione Legionaria.
These days, in 2012, following the unspeakable scene that we view in Picasso’s Guernica, one too easily and too rightly imagines the redux Predator drone therein doing nothing more but this: simply moving on to its new “objective.” And there is always a new objective. Picasso’s floating electric eye – the bombilla, goes on and on, 24/7/3-6-5. It alights here and it alights there and, perhaps, eventually everywhere. And bringing with it are the luminous promises of freedom and free markets – for those who survive to enjoy them. The coasting bombilla moves off the canvas and into new restricted air space, reserved solely for itself.
IV. The Artists
To me, my art is always a weapon.
—Paul Robeson
Cindy Jackson
Cindy Jackson is a sculptor living in Los Angeles. Her work explores the emotional space that happens within (and without) relationships. The sculpture, ‘Falling Away’ is our modern day Pieta, not in a biblical sense but rather in a human sense. It’s about the deep, intimate connections between people. We understand the cost of love. We know that the fullness of life renders a fullness of emotions. ‘Falling Away’ is about the cost of love. ‘Falling Away’ speaks of hanging on, of letting go, of caring... but mostly it speaks of connecting to another individual. For this exhibition, the work engages the viewer with an image of the emotional damage of loss… the brutal and senseless losses we experience as a result of war affect us deeply- and forever cast a sad shadow on our compassionate hearts.
Jim Jenkins
Jim Jenkins is an American artist who has utilized the element of motion and medium of motors to create kinetic works since 1976.
Unlike the repetitive staccato movement associated with motorized sculpture, "Questions" features the element of chance as the unpredictable path of the knife plunges into the wooden base, coming to rest on either the word "DO" or "DIE". These words represent ultimatums that exist both against our enemies, as well as within ourselves. As with any arena of conflict, the base accumulates the marks, and eventually deteriorates, from the continual assault of the weapon.
Sean Munley
Sean Munley, a native of Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, received degrees from the University of Scranton and Widener University. The critical thinking skills he received from his Jesuit education at the University of Scranton prepared him well for all aspects of his personal and professional career. Sean moved to Los Angeles in 2003 after two years teaching elementary school on a Hawaiian Homestead, an indigenous enclave on the Waianae Coast of Oahu. He is currently a middle school teacher in Compton, California. As a 7th grader, his art teacher was very discouraging of his talent. As a result, his artistic career did not begin until his late 20's. Although he is not a credentialed art teacher, he instills his love of art with his students and encourages them with projects he develops. Having received no formal training in an arts program, he considers himself primarily a self-taught artist. However, he does jump at every opportunity to learn more about artistic techniques, art history, and experimenting with new mediums. He has studied under stone sculptors Dodd Roth and Rude Calderon as well as neon sculptor Lili Lakich. Many of his creations are known for their edgy social commentary. This emerging artist work has been displayed at the Los Angeles County Municipal Art Gallery, several group shows in the Los Angeles area, and in private collections.
Cheri Pann
Born in San Francisco but raised in Los Angeles, CA, Cheri Pann received a B.A. & a Masters degree in Fine Art/painting from Cal State University L.A. She has worked in printmaking, drawing, painting and clay & glass art. Her paintings have been shown at LACMA, Metro Rail Transit, San Francisco Museum of Art, Pacific Asia Museum in Pasadena, CA, American Cultural Center in Fukuoka, Japan & Galeria Juan Prats in Barcelona, Spain since1961. Her paintings & constructions are included in the collections of Robert A. Rowan, Isadore & Lucy Adelman, Dr. Herbert & Raphaella Martin (Baligen, Germany), Dr. Leslie & Judy Eber, and Jean & Christine Kazandjian. She is currently painting & continuing to build the Mosaic Tile House in Venice, CA with her husband Gonzalo Duran.
In 1989 while living in Paris, France and after visiting the Berlin Wall before it came down, I started doing political constructions. Then in 1990 I created "war works" in response to the 1st & 2nd Gulf Wars. Later that same year I created "Tree of War", a multimedia piece that many people donated items to that meant war to them. And when 9/11 happened, that gave me another opportunity to comment on that borrow with "Tree of Towers & Terror". Each one tells a complex story & is very large in scale.
Dave Quick
Man the tool user or tool the man user — whose show is it? For over three decades Santa Monica artist Dave Quick's mixed media kinetic assemblages have utilized wit, sarcasm, irony and angst to explore the relationship of humankind-to-machine. Topics include everything from bombs (atomic) to baseball to Busby Berkeley. Quick's works have appeared in over 100 exhibitions, the most recent a solo show in early 2012 at Santa Monica's Bleicher Gallery.
V. Conclusion: States of (Taking) Exception
Why are you jurists silent about that which concerns you?
—Epigraph, Giorgio Agamben, State of Exception
To be silent is to collaborate.
—Howard Zinn
That a state of war or, more accurately, the “fancied emergency,” has become the rule rather than the exception in our world speaks to the grave condition of our very civilization. When Howard Zinn speaks of the artist as a “transcendent” figure, he does not mean that the artist somehow goes beyond or outside civilization. Rather, he means that the artist critically and doggedly insists anyway upon the continuity of civilization in the face of juridical and biopolitical assault upon such continuity. Speaking of the threat of (extra-)legal exceptions taken by state actors within the context of the U.S. after 9-11, Italian political theorist Giorgio Agamben writes:
The immediate biopolitical significance of the state of exception as the original structure in which law encompasses living beings by means of its own suspension emerges clearly in the “military order” issued by the president of the United States on November 13, 2001, which authorized the “indefinite detention” and trial by “military commissions” (not to be confused with the military tribunals provided for by the law of war) of noncitizens suspected of involvement in terrorist activities.
…What is new about President Bush’s order is that it radically erases any legal status of the individual, thus producing a legally unnamable and unclassifiable being. (Agamben, Exception, p. 3)
In fact, then, it is these states of exception – these states of so-called emergency – that are themselves transcendent in an anti-artistic sense of moving outside of civilization. Because it was supposed to be the application of those (civilized) rules governing even POW’s by the Geneva Convention and those (civilized) U.S. laws meant to govern charged persons that preserved the legal and therefore civilized existence of such persons. But such decrees as Bush’s and Obama’s exceed this and it is the artist who functions to keep civilization unexceeded – “untranscended” – through the constant and relentless foregrounding of a human commitment to civilization. As Zinn elaborates:
So the word transcendent comes to mind when I think of the role of the artist in dealing with issues of the day. I use that word to suggest that the role of the artist is to transcend conventional wisdom, to transcend the word of the establishment, to transcend the orthodoxy, to go beyond and escape what is handed down by the government or what is said in the media. (Zinn, ATW, p. 11.)
So this form of transcendence remains very much of this world. The artist flips the script on the sovereign famously defined by German theorist Carl Schmitt as “he who decides on the state of exception." Instead, the artist operates as a repudiation of sovereignty where civilization itself cannot operate as such. It is ever within the interests of civilization that the anti-war artist seeks the transcendence of that particular artist which we call by the name civilization.
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