A DIFFERENT WAR: VIETNAM IN ART
John Olbrantz and Lucy Lippard organized this exhibit, which comprises 100 works by 54 artists, for the Whatcom Museum in Bellingham, Washington. It is the first exhibit to look at the effect of the war on American art. The works are divided into three main categories: protest art of the late 60s and early 70s; art by Vietnam vets; and recent art by nonveterans, including two Vietnamese refugees. The title of the exhibit comes from Tim O’Brien’s book Going After Cacciato: “Each soldier has a different war.” Each civilian does too.
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Officially, the first American soldier died in Vietnam on July 8, 1959, the year Wally Hedrick, a veteran of the Korean war, painted his brutal, apocalyptic Anger/Madam Nhu’s Bar-B-Q. In the early years of the Vietnam war, few American artists chose the conflict as a subject, for the art world was split by debate about whether art had a role in politics, a quarrel Lippard details in her thorough catalog essay. But by the late 60s many works protested the horrors of the war. In 1967 Michele Oka Doner made a number of ceramic “death masks,” tortured but piercingly beautiful faces that seem to have found relief in death. Between 1966 and 1968 Nancy Spero did a series of watercolors on rice paper called “Bombs and Helicopters.” In one, detached heads streak toward a hovering helicopter, shrieking blood. In another, a screaming male head pilots a helicopter; below him flies the black silhouette of an eagle’s head, its beak cruelly sharp, its eyes invisible. The rage in these paintings is frightening, demonic. In fact, the shrillest art in this exhibit can be found among these earlier civilian protest works, from Peter Saul’s vitriolic Day-Glo Fantastic Justice (1968) to Leon Golub’s Vietnam I (1972), in which hard, slashing brush strokes portray brutally aggressive American soldiers on one side of the enormous canvas, and terrorized Vietnamese on the other.
Wendy Watriss brings memories of the war into the present with her series of somber black-and-white photographs (1980-83) chronicling the effects of Agent Orange. Daniel Salmon of San Antonio, a shrunken figure with an old man’s gnarled hands, stands in front of a photo of himself as he once was. Richard Sutton of Los Angeles holds on his lap his crippled daughter, who will never walk. There are also works that refer to recent events in Central America, such as Jerry Kearns’s El Norte (1987), a “portrait” of Oliver North set against the skulls of Khmer Rouge Cambodia. And Sue Coe’s War Train (1986) refers to the Vietnam vets who make up a huge percentage of the homeless in this country.
