Entries Tagged 'CONTRIBUTORS' ↓

Look what sells as Non-Fiction at the Perth Airport News Agency! The majority of covers feature either women veiled, or tales of prostitution, apparently. How do we reconcile such apparent extremes? What does this weird conjunction tell us about the popular imagination?

Halls Creek is where one-stop shopping is a meaningful concept. But it was Manchester that caught Bill’s eye!

There are too many ground zeros in Afghanistan… This is how the dead are buried near Kandahar.

See how Michael Yon photographs the war in Afghanistan. Despite the constraints of being embedded, his work conveys a very real sense of the human experience of the conflict. Being embedded means photography is never at the front line, and therefore it is almost impossible to reproduce the actual experience of war. The still, quiet, clean precision of the camera can only allude to the full sensorium of the war environment. In such circumstances, limited by what he can’t show the viewer, Michael has to find other subjects in order to build a complex set of visual narratives which combine to provide the stimulus for the viewer to imagine what can’t be conveyed by imagery alone. See how he finds imagery to evoke such absences.  And see how he captures the sometimes bizarre effects of the technology of contemporary warfare.

This is from his tiger-vision photographs of a medical evacuation of an Afghan casualty. Only the containers are familiar. Nothing else makes sense. The helicopter’s rotor blades light up as they churn through the dust.

Michael Yon was recently chosen by Times Online as one of the “40 bloggers who count.” Go to his site when you have a quiet moment and you’ll see why. (Images copyright Michael Yon here reproduced with permission and thanks.) Read more? Go to D.B.Grady’s biographical story about Yon in The Atlantic.

The Australian National University owns the painting Camouflage #7 (2003) by Gordon Bennett. The Australian War Memorial owns the next in the series. Recently the ANU’s version has been hung in the foyer of the Sir Roland Wilson Building, the home of the Research School of the Humanities and the Arts. To hang a work which has as its primary subject a depiction of the late Iraqi dictator has raised a certain degree of controversy amongst the residents of the building. Irrespective of interpretations of subsequent events, Iconophilia was not alone in wondering the purpose in hanging a portrait of a onetime head of state, who many regarded as a brutal war criminal, and the perpetrator of many civilian deaths, or as the Kurds would say, genocide. …

With news of a potential debate brewing in relation to the hanging of the Gordon Bennett, the University provided an exegesis, which had been written for the first exhibition of this work, and the others in the series for their first exhibition in 2003 at Sherman Galleries. Never before had we seen a wall text like it. This turned out to be the text written by Ian McLean (reprinted with permission below) which contextualised the work in relation to the artist’s previous oeuvre, and the historical moment at which it was first exhibited – at a time in which time Saddam Hussein was still in hiding.

But how do we now understand this work, hanging on our wall? Subsequent historical events, his discovery, his trial, his execution, the failure of the invading forces to discover any evidence of weapons of mass destruction, the ongoing occupation, Abu Ghraib, and the ensuing civil war, now creates a very different interpretative context to that of 2003.

So it is interesting, your Iconophile thought, that a painting should require such an extensive exegesis to justify its presence in a context such as the RSHA. Perhaps, I wondered, these paintings had lost their provocative ambiguity through the passage of time and changing political circumstances? It seems some works of art keep getting better and better, and others just lose it. How a painting might seem to have a special kind of potentiality at one moment, which becomes lost in its subsequent historical context, is a perennial problem for works of art. Nevertheless, this is precisely one of those instances when the work of art succeeds or fails by itself, on its own terms, and whether it survives the changing circumstances of its referents.

How would the University community react, I wondered, if I loaned my Turkmen portrait of Stalin to complement this ensemble? I suspect it would require some justification.

Of course, the carpet is a different kind of artefact, without the kind of intention or agency we expect of a painting. It was produced to commemorate Stalin and his regime, while the Soviet Union was still intact. It is best understood as a cynical form of tourist art. It embodies no complex inversions of meaning. But sometimes such contrasts are productive…

In this instance, there is an intriguing textile connection. I was curious as to Bennett’s pictorial strategy of painting a portrait with the face overlaid with a very specific kind of pattern, like a veil, and whether this signals the artist’s intentions, and his position in relation to his subject? Perhaps this lattice pattern (technically, derived from Turkish ogival woven designs, but also related to carpet designs, or wallpaper) could be interpreted as a means to further orientalise the image of Saddam?

Might we have expected some further kind of critical displacement in a portrait of Saddam from the way his political reputation was understood? Bennett’s intent is elusive, at best. So how are we to read his use of camouflage devices, as signalled by the title of the work itself? According to a number of sources (see  Zara Stanhope, and the AWM’s own account), the ogival pattern was “derived from the inside papers of the Koran.” In the same manner as the Prophet’s face is conventionally hidden from view, Saddam’s face is here partially obscured, perhaps as if he is sheltered by one of those camouflage netting sheets used to protect weaponry from surveillance, but this time with a strangely archaic cultural and religious twist.

If so, could this not be read as an auratic device, as an allusion to martyrdom? Is Saddam Hussein here represented as a victim, in the face of an overwhelming invasive force? Alas, the AWM doesn’t contribute very much to this debate when it suggests its very similar work “alludes to the disturbing, unknown and hidden reasons, hence the ‘camouflage’, behind the war in Iraq” – itself an unusually independent position for the AWM to take – plus an unattributed quote: ‘so the whole Iraq war seems a camouflage for secrets that may never be revealed’. Is this the limit of the artist’s own account?

Laura Murray Cree is quoted by Bennett’s dealers (and others down the line) when she also references such “issues of secrecy” as if that is a motive or justification for his pictorial ambivalence… Drawing a longer bow, McLean suggests that this is “an art of reportage”, motivated by Bennett’s desire not to forget the foundational “terror and trauma” that “still constitutes the Australian nation.” Is either position sufficient, in the current circumstances, for a reading of the painting’s continuing contradictions? Iconophilia thinks not…

So we have an ongoing artistic war of allusions, veiled in secrecy, with little to suggest the artist’s own motivation, or his views on Saddam Hussein, his subject, then or now. Granted, the artist has only given us the three painterly elements to work with: the recognisable drawing of the subject, plus the two patterns, one of which references Islam. With, maybe, just a little post-Pop irony. This doesn’t provide many options for a nuanced reading of the artist’s intention – and thus the effects of the interactions between these elements seem relatively arbitrary, as these differing and ultimately unsatisfactory interpretations suggest.

Such retrospective evaluations as these also behoves us to attempt to understand the moment of a work’s creation. In 2003 McLean wrote the text below, which remains as the most comprehensive interpretation, written to accompany the  work’s first exposure:

“Bennett’s recent reflections on the Iraq war in the Camouflage series continue a prolonged interest in American affairs. It began in the late-1990s with his Notes to Basquiat series that culminated in an exhibition relating to the September 11 terrorist attack on New York. However the terror of colonialism and the trauma of being Australian that had previously preoccupied Bennett have not been forgotten. Rather they have been displaced onto contemporary global events, as if Bennett is developing an art of reportage.

This apparent shift in Bennett’s work is partly due to a long expressed frustration at being pigeon holed as an Indigenous artist. Not only did this elicit a burden of representation that he was unwilling and unable to bear, but it limited and indeed reduced the meaning and range of his art. Bennett’s earlier art consistently addressed the logic of settler desire and Australian national identity, thus situating itself within the traditional concerns of Australian art and history. However Bennett was also acutely aware that the idea of an Australian art or identity has long been an ideological smokescreen for the global aspirations of European Empire. Australia’s wars have always been ones of empire fought away from home; while the local war of settler conquest remains invisible, or when brought to our attention, denied. Thus his work also insisted on the global or even universal structures of this settler desire and its national discourses by showing the ways in which the paradigms of twentieth century Western art were ever-present in the constructions of Australian identity and its Aboriginal other. Continue reading →

…even though most people in the outside world would rather turn a blind eye. Michael Callaghan‘s exhibition Image and Text 1967 – 2010 confronts the viewer with imagery that makes it hard to ignore the effects of America’s two current “interventions” in the Middle East in Iraq and Afghanistan. In the new works that he has produced since his tenure as the H. C. Coombs Creative Arts Fellow at the ANU School of Art Callaghan has produced new prints and sculptures which force a kind of engagement with his texts and images that is not meant to be comfortable. Concentrating on the war in Iraq, he mixes text references in both English and Arabic with the imagery of war. He lines up graphic representations of militaria (sometimes derived from war carpets) with flags, and the headline texts that have now become meaningless clichés: Operation Iraqi Freedom, Weapons of Mass Destruction, Regime Change… But he also wants us to think about the people on the ground, people who go shopping, who go to school, who go to work, who meet friends. They, more likely, will be reading the Arabic texts…

Earlier phases of Michael’s work are also on show. As a founder member of Redback Graphix, Michael’s current art is still stylistically based on his strength as a designer for the screenprint medium. Solid images, strong colour contrast, integrated text and image. But now, exploiting the School’s new media and digital print technology, his work has been exploring all kinds of subtle visual imaging techniques, so that ancient Islamic texts and illustrations can now be merged with strident, unsettling imagery of war and its effects, and colours and forms can be infinitely layered.

Most striking in this regard is the relationship between the image of a chair (imagining the kind of chair on which you might be tortured) and its representations in both two and three dimensions. Reproductions of maps and documentation from Guantanamo Bay locate its specific referents.

More emblematic are those images which take the outline of a bullet, a jet fighter, a cruise missile, or a burst of flame, laid over the streams of text and icons. Inside the primary form is a text in Arabic. Of course, most of its Australian viewers don’t know what it says. It’s just calligraphy. Exotic, and at the same time unsettling and disempowering. We have to ask what it says. And how does that feel?

Canberra readers and visitors can catch the show at the ANU School of Art Gallery, Ellery Crescent, Acton, until 29 May. Phone 6125 5841 to check the opening hours. Michael is represented by Damien Minton Gallery, Sydney 02 9699 7551.

Tony Burke (Associate Professor in the Politics Program at ADFA, UNSW) gave the following opening address: “It is an honour to be asked to open this exhibition. I recall as a young human rights activist in Sydney seeing some of Michael’s posters – especially the very striking one he did for Amnesty International’s 25th anniversary – and so its interesting to see the longer survey of his work, especially how its book-ended by the early anti-militarist concrete poems and the recent work on Iraq. As someone who has travelled a strange route, from being a human rights activist to teaching at a military academy – where I have a strange role as a kind of embedded critical theorist – seeing Michael’s new work on Iraq and the war on terror is fascinating. Continue reading →

Photography Makes It Real. At first glance. Or rather ghostly when you take a second look… Reconsider your Picnic Plans.

Or as Tory Maguire observes maybe you can photograph your way out of danger…

Thanks to Iain McG for making the heroic u-turn to enable me to capture this image.

P.S If I was more adept at Photoshop, I would have inverted the photograph for you…

Ivan Solotaroff writes in The Guardian: Philadelphia is a city of murals. More than 2,800 have been commissioned by the civic Mural Arts Program, which itself grew out of the city’s Anti-Graffiti Network. Typically, murals here celebrate ethnic traditions or Philly mainstays like jazz, or basketball legend Julius “Dr J” Erving; but these messages are far closer to graffiti, their boldness drawing attention to their huge words and whimsically postmodern cartoons and motifs. Unlike traditional graffiti, however, where the message is often simply the artist’s street-name, these are consistently positive and amusing, equally thought-provoking and eye-pleasing.

They are romantic, too: visible from the commuter train, as if one is riding through a billet-doux. A Love Letter for You is a collaboration between the Mural Arts Program and Stephen Powers, a 42-year-old artist who emerged on West Philly walls and rooftops 25 years ago, under the street-name ESPO. As a 17-year-old hoodlum then, Powers was inspired by Cornbread, the seminal graffiti writer who covered Philadelphia with his name to catch a girl’s attention. Cornbread spraypainted not only walls but police cars, the visiting Jackson 5′s private jet and an elephant in the city zoo. Love Letter reads like a series of notes left on a bedside table or refrigerator…

See the series here

I nearly titled this post “dog p*rn”. And then I realized I’d be attracting the wrong kind of dog-lovers: if you’re brave, go here at the NYT.

The war rug aficionado Kevin Sudeith is leaving New York to go bush for a year. Literally. “War rugs” you ask? Wait! There’s a connection…

Kevin’s form of practice as a visual artist is creating contemporary petroglyphs in secret locations “out west”. I’m surprised to hear there is an “out west” left anywhere on the planet – but maybe, hidden away in his (studio) cave, he finds places nobody goes anymore? And if they do, quelle surprise!

…is not even a question for Cubans! In that other universe, for the last fifty years, the stock of pre-revolutionary gas guzzlers was (almost) all Cuba had as private transport. If they could afford the petrol. Just keeping them going and refurbished is their automotive industry.

Iconophilia thanks Jan Luedert for these recent photographs of a 1953 Buick being reconstructed in downtown Havana. Jan writes: “the pictures where taken near Trinidad the UN World Heritage City. The shop was set up by two Cubans as a private enterprise. The interesting thing about these vehicles is the way that it represents “true sustainability” as these cars are rebuilt, recycled and always find their way back to the road. What they also do at the shop is install a more modern diesel engine so the while the chassis is old style 50s the engines are usually new and often diesel. It is incredible to watch how without a fair degree of ingenuity and with how few resources a car that would rust away in our world finds its way back to the road. Cars are mostly communal in Cuba and one hardly ever finds a car with less than five people in them.”

More paint than metal, methinks. For more background, read this piece by Tom Miller from the NYT.

But who among you doesn’t feel just a little bit guilty that we in the outside world take such perverse pleasure in observing the fact that Fidel’s Revolution has subjected his country to this technological time-warp? How pictureque is it (still) that Cuban citizens are forced to live out the historical antipathy to the U.S.A. by driving around in these decaying icons of the excesses of the decade of the 1950s? Contradictions abound in such circumstances. For example, what are we to make of this 1948 Cadillac Fleetwood snapped by The Iconophile in the back streets of Tehran in 2007? If it looks somewhat abandoned, consider (a) how difficult it would be to get spare parts these days, and (b) how much more politically incorrect it would be on the streets of Tehran than Havana?