The trappings of war do not include beauty. They inspire it. On display now at the Museum of Fine Arts, "War and Discontent" is an exploration of artists past and present and their reaction to war in their times. The title of the exhibition just barely reveals the extent of discontent, disenchantment and pure distaste that is expressed in the exhibited works.
Yinka Shonibare's "Black Gold II" (2006) confronts the viewer immediately upon entering the exhibition hall. It's a mounted installation piece with a number of circular panels mounted on a black splat of "oil" against a white wall. The dominating colors, predictably, are black and gold, references to today's gold equivalent, oil. With this piece, Shonibare asks a question that follows one throughout the exhibit - "Can art evolve absolutely oblivious to our time of extreme trauma? Or can we find solace in it?"
Two massive Leon Golub has pieces in the show further ponder this question. The first, "Napalm"(1969), is inspired by Picasso's "Guernica" (1937), insofar as it features tortured figures mid-stride in violent motion. The limited color palette of red clay-like earth tones with white and black, combined with the raw linen backdrop, gives the piece a primitive if not inhuman feel. It is only in the textured areas, thick patches of black and red paint meant to imitate burning flesh, that Golub evokes an emotion reaction.
His other piece, "Interrogation I," evokes a much more visceral reaction. The floor-to-ceiling canvas presents a larger-than-life scene of two mercenaries presumably beating a hanging victim. The image calls to mind photos released from Abu Ghraib prison, and Golub has traded proper proportion in his figures for the sheer scale and grandeur and emotional effectiveness of the piece.
Across the room is Edouard Manet's "Execution of the Emperor Maximilian" (1867). This extremely dark and enormous piece is overwhelming in its scale. Manet uses sweeping broad strokes and passionate marks to render an emotional execution scene.
The painting was originally done as an expression of France's reaction to the real execution of Emperor Maximilian, but the message is timeless. The soldier in the foreground says it all; it is the innocent bystander's disgust with the atrocities of war.
Francisco Goya explores those atrocities in depth in his series of etchings on display, "The Disasters of War." The series is an exploration of the horrors endured during Spain's invasion by Napoleon in the 1800s. Etching lends itself quite nicely to gloomy scenes of death and horror, since the process results in deep, penetrating blacks, especially in later editions of plates. Goya is a master of the medium, and he delicately creates these sad figures with little more than a few lines and some cross-hatching, expressing his extreme feelings of grief and disgust with his times' atrocities.
Shown in conjunction with the Goya etchings, Jake and Dinos Chapman's series inspired by Goya are not nearly as well-executed, though that is because they were looking to express a different sentiment. Where Goya was trying to document the real atrocities of war, the Chapmans are exploring the less tangible atrocities, such as the rampant desensitization to violence they have seen in recent years.
They claim that they have become cynical and disenchanted with the lack of social response art has cultivated when the subject matter and inspiration is war and human suffering.
Throughout the entire exhibit, Phil Collins' video "They Shoot Horses" can be heard, as a booming bass rings out from his two-channel video piece, a film of Palestinian teens participating in an eight-hour dance marathon, interrupted periodically by power outages (presumably from bombs or other such violence raging outside), calls to prayer and a curfew.
These teens are stripped completely of any facades, because the straight-on, no-frills style of filming hides nothing. The loop of Western pop songs provides an eerie soundtrack to the film, and makes outsiders wonder: has the concept of war been trivialized for those who live in it constantly? How much can it really affect someone if all it takes to drown out the sounds of bombs and violence is a mix tape of Madonna and Beyonc?© hits?
All of this is presented in an echoing exhibition hall with stark white walls, isolating each image, allowing each to speak for itself. There is a collective groan emanating from within these walls.
The artists have all developed a supreme distaste for the war and violence that rages around them. This is a feeling that exists independent of time or place.
Despite these works, there are also worries regarding the response - or lack thereof - of the general populace. Like the Chapmans, who have become cynical and critical of the art world as it pushes its representations of war into abstraction, some artists are concerned with the rampant desensitization, and the lack of emotion civilians feel when exposed to images of war.
With their work, these artists prove that it is not the violent and disturbing images of gore and death that garner a reaction from the public. It is the simple and sadly poetic beauty that comes of death and destruction. Art still has a job to do, regardless of what the Chapmans might think. Art can still save us. Or at least, it can help us to save each other.
