“If at an incurable distance from participation, hopelessly incapable of reactions adequate to the event, we watch men killing each other, we may be . . . profoundly degrading ourselves.” So wrote James Agee in 1944, reviewing grisly newsreels of the Allies invading Iwo Jima. It’s like viewing pornography, he proposed. Perhaps “we have no business seeing this sort of experience, . . . these terrible records of war.”
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Artist Peter Barnes once got a stack of maps that his dad, a colonel in the Reserves, brought back from war college. First as a youngster, then as an artist, he put them to many uses. A military-school dropout, Barnes in this show spells out in block letters his antiwar sentiments. War of Words is a dense matrix of red ink stamped on a 1964 U.S. Army map of Iraq (which prophetically warns, in fine print: “The delineation of internal and administrative boundaries on this map must not be considered authoritative”). The artist implies that the moral terrain is hard to read when we are inundated with military detail.
Descent is a toothy, mangy, shrew-faced jet fighter plane sculpted by Larry Lundy. He dunked patches of his own hair in ink, then glued this ratty fur onto a diving, snarling war machine. High-tech weapon mutates into low-life rodent in this insult to the evolutionary process. In Running painter Jinna Welday takes a lethal icon from her TV screen–bomber cross hairs–and targets a fleeing figure, collapsing the usual impersonal distance between bomb dropper and bomb sufferer. Military censors only cleared snuff videos of buildings; bodies were never perceptible in the bombsights. High-altitude infrared cameras were insensitive to the thousand points of heat representing a thousand Iraqi souls.
On May 3 Andy Marko, a Loyola video teacher, will stage a performance with a war theme. Last Halloween he put on What Are You Afraid Of? at Art-O-Rama: using a wheelchair, he pushed audience members one at a time through a sequence of rooms of fear. For his upcoming piece he plans to address “the little acts of war in day-to-day life.” It will be his chance to get through to the audience after he tried, unsuccessfully, to get through to CNN. One night during the gulf war, CNN polled viewers, asking: “When should we starve out the people of Iraq?” Marko kept phoning but says he never got his chance to “question the question.”
