Alexander
Roob, 'In conversation with Suzanne Treister on her War Artists series',
Melton
Prior Institute, Dusseldorf, Germany, 20/02/2009
AR:
By tracing this very diverse photographic material of a multinational
gallery of war artists, you manage to unify them into a kind of a
single corpus; a body, who is shaped by the similarity of experiences
and visions. All these artists seem to be deeply connected, because,
as you said, inside the eyes of each of them, "are retinal imprints
of what they are witnessing or have witnessed, like with a russian
doll, images inside images inside images." Maybe you could achieve
this impression of equalization by manipulating the photos with a
digital editing program. What does this act of redrawing mean to you?
ST: If
I were to manipulate the photographs it would become also a work about
the photographers who took the original photographs of the war artists.
In this series the idea is to turn the photographs into drawings,
so that they become my own drawings of artists who in turn have made
drawings of war or are in the process of doing so in the photographs.
(In the series however there is the exception of Lee Miller who was
a photographer, but perhaps that exception is there to test the rule.)
By making drawings there is a physical connection through the medium.
Whilst clearly my drawings of war artists are made from the comfort
of my studio, I am connected to them and the events they have depicted
by a thread of history which I am creating myself through the act
of drawing, and somehow it's this thread which is making visible the
tenuous 'armchair' connection most of us have to the kind of scenes
these artists have witnessed and which they in turn have not fully
operated within, in the sense that they were not using weapons but
pencils or brushes and somehow this thread seems more real through
being a drawing rather than a manipulated photograph.
AR:
As far as I can see, all the examples of war artistry, you have chosen,
were official ones, and their positions in the field were mainly embedded
ones. The only exception in your gallery seems to be Otto Dix. His
expressive accusatory mode is the only one which really plays a role
in the popular art historiography today. But besides there were other
countless "hot" descriptions of World War I, mainly of the opposite,
affirmative and heroic kind. And also innumerable descriptions of
the "cold", distanced manner like the ones of Francois Flameng, or
John Singer Sargent or Adolf Hitler, whose watercolours are very representative
for the works of art of the legions of soldiers, who were, though
not professionals, nevertheless very ambitious. - So, why did you
choose Otto Dix as the only representative of World War I reporting?
ST: Otto
Dix was the last artist I chose to draw in the first group of twelve
drawings I made in this series. The series is ongoing however and
this choice represented a shift in focus, as you point out, firstly
to further back, to World War 1 and also to the unofficial 'expressive'
war artist. I have since made another drawing titled, 'War Artists/American/Kristopher
Battles - sketching mock assault at Mojave Viper training base, Marine
Corps Air Ground Combat Center at Twentynine Palms, California, USA,
2008'. Mojave Viper is an extensive month-long training that uses
more than 250 role players and two working towns to test Marines from
throughout the USA on urban warfare and the rigors of the desert.
To make a drawing of a war artist drawing a mock war scene at US training
base, rather than a real war scene, is again another departure from
the main focus of the first twelve works and I hope there will be
other directions that emerge as I follow things up.
But getting
back to Otto Dix and thinking back to my motives at the time, I would
say that since I have personal (Jewish) history to do with the Holocaust,
when choosing a German artist I decided in this instance to avoid
WW2 and the German war art of the National Socialists. This is not
to say I won't include examples of these artists later on in the series
but to do it in the context of only twelve drawings seemed too pointed
and would have unbalanced the project for me. Instead I chose to represent
a German artist who was not complicit with National Socialism. Another
reason for Otto Dix may have been the opportunity to represent an
example of a largely anti-military, anti-war artist, a position shared
by many other artists, and thereby to insert the perhaps obvious question
as to whether for an artist to be an official war artist, a reporter
who supposedly supports the regime of his or her nation, might in
some sense be anathema.
In this
respect we could look at the case of another artist in the series,
Steve McQueen, the official British war artist to Iraq in 2003, whose
project for postage stamps depicting soldiers who died in the conflict
was rejected as a series of real commemorative stamps by the Royal
Mail's director Allan Leighton. Apparently the Ministry of Defence
asked McQueen why couldnŐt he do a landscape instead. (see: http://www.guardian.co.uk/politics/2007/mar/12/iraq.art)
I am
also interested in the idea of the outsider artist and of specific
genres of art practice which are not acknowledged by the mainstream
contemporary art world. Those who are specifically war artists, rather
than mainstream artists who have been chosen to be (temporarily) war
artists - perhaps because the contemporary art world tends to take
a critical stance towards war - have not been recuperated into the
mainstream in the same way as other 'outsider' artists who have often
become fetishised in recent years and so I thought it might be interesting
to depict some of these artists within my own more mainstream art
practice, to see what that felt like, to put let's say Michael Fay,
a full time war artist with the US Marines, next to someone like Otto
Dix.
AR:
Why did you restrict your choice of war artistry mainly to the span
between World War II and the actual Iraq War, to an era where the
execution of this profession had almost become something of a quixotic
project? By the end of World War I " the pencil, the pen, the drawing
and the paintingÓ had ceased to be "privileged means of understanding.",
at least in the field of visual documentary.
ST: I
like that seeming perversity. I spent a long time working within the
context of the new media art world and through most of the 1990s I
rejected more traditional media. I now find media like drawing totally
unquixotic and very relevant again, it feels to me like a political
act not to use the advanced media of the corporate and military spheres,
although I still do from time to time in my work when I feel it's
necessary or relevant. I like the idea of being self sufficient with
just a few pencils and paper, but like most other people I am hooked
most of the time to my computer, part of the techno arms race, compromised
up to my neck.
But again
in relation to your question, I could almost say we are in a post
media moment, post Photoshop, post the moment where new media, new
technologies and the internet feel so new even though they are still
developing, post the grass roots period of net politics where there
was an idea of a utopian future... but isn't it interesting that governments
continue to send out people with pencils to the Iraqi desert, just
why do they do that? Probably for a few reasons, maybe because of
what I said earlier about the physicality of old media, because people
are jaded by so much photography and documentary footage on TV and
in the papers, because drawing is physical as is war, and it can be
used differently for propaganda purposes. This undermines my previous
comment about drawing not being co-opted by the military, because
it has been, it always was and it still is. So maybe that's one thing
this work is exposing, critiquing and also employing, playing with
the idea of complicity, which is an issue for all of us.
AR:
Another recent project of yours was the updating of hermetic diagrams
from the 17th and 18th century by "overwriting" them with texts and
images from the front pages of the international daily press. In a
broader sense this project is also about connectedness and international
conflicts. Do you see any analogies between the art of war reporters
and the art of hermetic illustrators? Both professions seem to share
the same fate in being ignored by the mainstream art historiography.
That's
very interesting you say that. I think I have partially answered it
at the end of my answer to your second question when I talked about
different types of outsider art which have been variously recuperated.
I think
mainstream art has been seen to be a language that must develop its
own forms and reference its own history, rather than stepping too
far outside itself and forsaking that obligation. Both alchemical
drawings and war art contain other knowledges and have other functions
outside art, they are not pure art as required by some gatekeepers
of art history where the illustrative has often been taboo. Also perhaps
you can see alchemical drawings as an early form of current sci-art
which also has problems being incorporated into the mainstream, but
then I think a lot of that is because of the 'commissioned' nature
of many of those projects which doesn't often result in very interesting
art.
Within
contemporary art as well, until recently, there has not been much
art dealing with history or complex narrative based subject matter.
Unlike literature, for example, contemporary art was somehow supposed
to be about the present, this was like an unwritten law. 'History
painting' was a genre of the past. (Of course there were exceptions,
quite a few in Germany, eg. Kiefer, Richter, Beuys...) Now it seems
to be reincarnated in various new formations everywhere in the mainstream
contemporary art world, everyone is looking backwards, digging up
archives, but a relatively short while ago it was the exception. I
guess what I am saying is that Alchemical drawings from the 17th and
18th century are most likely in the process of being re-incorporated
into a more central place in art history and your Alchemy book is
perhaps part of that process.
With
the war artists series I am in a sense making art about art, recuperating
and re-presenting a marginalised art form, but in doing so, ironically
I am making work which is more about the world outside art than about
art, or more perhaps about the relationship between art and the world.
Now that
we are living in a complex and difficult time perhaps 'pure art'*
looks a little escapist at the present moment. Perhaps the complexities
of 17th and 18th century alchemical diagrams come closer to describing
- albeit in different code - the sense we have right now of the insane
interconnectedness of the new globalised world order under collapse,
and in their search for knowledge, for the philosopher's stone, they
echo our need to work out our future. That's how it goes, doesn't
it, when you're in a fix you look to the past for help. Alchemy was
early science, at a moment where it seems to me from those drawings/diagrams
that art and science were more in harmony, and so it feels interesting
and positive to recuperate them into the present for the future.
* Disclaimer:
I hate these generalised categories... I just googled 'pure art' and
the first thing that came up was a ranch in Idaho, USA, run by someone
calling himself Farmer Brown. http://www.pureartranch.com/index.html
online
at:
http://www.meltonpriorinstitut.org/pages/textarchive.php5?view=text&ID=32&language=English