The Politics of Artists in War Zones: Art in Conflict 9781350386020, 1350386022

Table of contents :
Cover
Halftitle page
Title page
Copyright page
Dedication
CONTENTS
ILLUSTRATIONS
NOTES ON THE EDITORS AND CONTRIBUTORS
ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
Introduction Contemporary War ArtKit Messham-Muir, Uroš Čvoro and Monika Lukowska-Appel
Colonization, Memory and Amnesia
War Art, Official and Unofficial
Knowing and Testimony
Notes
PART ONE Colonization, Memory and Amnesia
Introduction
CHAPTER ONE Unsettling Colonial Postamnesia Contemporary Art, the First World War Centenary and Beyond A. Carden-Coyne
‘A Plea from the Dead’: Embodied Memories of Colonial Military Service
Standing up to Stolen Memory: An Australian Indigenous Counter-Memorial
‘An atlas in my lap’: Megan Cope’s Cartographic Unsettling
Conclusion
Notes
CHAPTER TWO Above All Else Art as a Weapon Lisa Slade
Kulata Tjuta: Return Fire
Tjituru-tjituru: There is no Song for this Work. It is too Sad.
Trojan Horses from the Desert
Notes
CHAPTER THREE War (Art) What Is It Good For? Anthea Gunn and Laura Webster
Contemporary Conflict
Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Histories
Historic Reflections
Personal Encounters
Conclusion
Notes
CHAPTER FOUR Colonization, Memory and Amnesia Interviews with Baptist Coelho, Alana Hunt and Abdul Abdullah
Baptist Coelho, 28 February 2019, Woolloomooloo
Alana Hunt, 9 December 2018, Melbourne
Abdul Abdullah, 3 February 2020, Sydney
PART TWO War Art, Official and Unofficial
Introduction
CHAPTER FIVE The War at Home Charles Green
Notes
CHAPTER SIX Soldier/Artist Negotiating the Complexities of Military Service and Critical Practice Kit Messham-Muir and Uroš Čvoro
Being Human in the War Zone: Diary Rooms
In the Meantime: Draft for a 20-minute Monument
Notes
CHAPTER SEVEN War Art, Official and Unofficial Interviews with eX de Medici, David Cotterrell, Karen Bailey and Philip Cheung
eX de Medici, 19 December 2018, Canberra
David Cotterrell, 31 May 2019, London
Karen Bailey, 29 August 2019, Ottawa
Philip Cheung, 14 August 2019, Los Angeles
PART THREE Knowing and Testimony
Introduction
CHAPTER EIGHT The Art of Testimony Paul Lowe
Landscape as Archive
The Sniper
Reconciliations
Notes
CHAPTER NINE Inconvenient Narratives Addressing Moral Ambiguity in the National War Museum Kit Messham-Muir
Australian War Hero
Culture War
Conflicting Narratives
Notes
CHAPTER TEN Knowing and Testimony Interviews with Todd Stone, Andrew Sneddon and Joanna Bourke
Todd Stone, 23 August 2019, World Trade Center, New York
Andrew Sneddon, 15 May 2019, Edinburgh
Joanna Bourke, 27 February 2019, Newtown, Sydney
REFERENCES
INDEX

Citation preview

The Politics of Artists in War Zones

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The Politics of Artists in War Zones Art in Conflict Edited by KIT MESSHAM-MUIR , URO Š ČVORO AND MONIKA LUKOWSKA-APPEL

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BLOOMSBURY VISUAL ARTS Bloomsbury Publishing Plc 50 Bedford Square, London, WC1B 3DP, UK 1385 Broadway, New York, NY 10018, USA 29 Earlsfort Terrace, Dublin 2, Ireland BLOOMSBURY, BLOOMSBURY VISUAL ARTS and the Diana logo are trademarks of Bloomsbury Publishing Plc First published in Great Britain 2024 Selection and editorial material © Kit Messham-Muir, Uroš Cˇvoro and Monika Lukowska-Appel, 2024 Chapters © their authors, 2024 Kit Messham-Muir, Uroš Cˇvoro and Monika Lukowska-Appel have asserted their right under the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act, 1988, to be identified as Authors of the edited parts of this work. For legal purposes the Acknowledgements on p. xix constitute an extension of this copyright page. Cover design: Gita Kowlessur Front cover image: © Abdul Abdullah, All Let Us Rejoice, manual embroidery made with the assistance of DGTMB Studios, Yogyakarta, 125cm × 110cm, courtesy of the artist and Yavuz gallery. Back cover image: © Abdul Abdullah, For we are young and free, manual embroidery made with the assistance of DGTMB Studios, Yogyakarta, 126cm × 108cm, courtesy of the artist and Yavuz gallery. All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or any information storage or retrieval system, without prior permission in writing from the publishers. Bloomsbury Publishing Plc does not have any control over, or responsibility for, any third-party websites referred to or in this book. All internet addresses given in this book were correct at the time of going to press. The author and publisher regret any inconvenience caused if addresses have changed or sites have ceased to exist, but can accept no responsibility for any such changes. A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library. A catalog record for this book is available from the Library of Congress. ISBN: HB: PB: ePDF: eBook:

978-1-3503-8601-3 978-1-3503-8602-0 978-1-3503-8598-6 978-1-3503-8599-3

Typeset by RefineCatch Limited, Bungay, Suffolk To find out more about our authors and books visit www.bloomsbury.com and sign up for our newsletters.

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To Loretta, Marijana and Eric

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CONTENTS

List of Illustrations ix Notes on the Editors and Contributors xv Acknowledgements xix

Introduction: Contemporary War Art Kit Messham-Muir, Uroš Cˇ voro and Monika Lukowska-Appel 1

PART ONE Colonization, Memory and Amnesia Introduction

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1 Unsettling Colonial Postamnesia: Contemporary Art, the First World War Centenary and Beyond A. Carden-Coyne 19 2 Above All Else: Art as a Weapon Lisa Slade

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3 War (Art): What Is It Good For? Anthea Gunn and Laura Webster 67 4 Colonization, Memory and Amnesia: Interviews with Baptist Coelho, Alana Hunt and Abdul Abdullah 97

PART TWO War Art, Official and Unofficial Introduction

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5 The War at Home Charles Green

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6 Soldier/Artist: Negotiating the Complexities of Military Service and Critical Practice Kit MesshamMuir and Uroš Cˇ voro 137 vii

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CONTENTS

7 War Art, Official and Unofficial: Interviews with eX de Medici, David Cotterrell, Karen Bailey and Philip Cheung 155

PART THREE Knowing and Testimony Introduction

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8 The Art of Testimony Paul Lowe

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9 Inconvenient Narratives: Addressing Moral Ambiguity in the National War Museum Kit Messham-Muir 203 10 Knowing and Testimony: Interviews with Todd Stone, Andrew Sneddon and Joanna Bourke 221 References 235 Index 243

ILLUSTRATIONS

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Still from POV mirror sequence (Tarin Kowt), 2009–10, by Shaun Gladwell. Two-channel synchronized HD video, stereo audio, 16:9, 8 minutes, 22 seconds. 0.2 Tjituru-tjituru, 2015, by Niningka Lewis (dec.), Janet Inyika (dec.), Mary Katatjuku Pan, Freda Teamay, Lucille Armstrong, Erica Shorty, Rene Wanuny Kulitja, Judy Ukampari Trigger and Fiona Hall. Tjanpi, raffia, acrylic wool, jute/linen string, wire, acrylic paint, camouflage garments, plastic flowers, mixed media and found objects, dimensions variable. Photo: Rhett Hammerton. 0.3 Still from A Hundred Years, 2019–20, by Angelica Mesiti. Single-channel video, 21:24 minutes. 1.1 20618 Private Harper, Pioneer Battalion, New Zealand 4.10.19, 1919, by Herbert R. Cole. Watercolour on paper. 1.2A, 1.2B and 1.2C Stills from The Debt, 2013, by Kader Attia. Dual-slide projection. Photo: A. Carden-Coyne. 1.3 Mimesis: African Soldier, 2018, by John Akomfrah. 73 minutes, 3 channel HD colour video installation. 1.4A and 1.4B Yininmadyemi: Though didst let fall, 2014, by Tony Albert. Hyde Park, Sydney. Photo: A. Carden-Coyne. 1.5 What Are We Fighting For? [Gangurru Camouflage], 2012–13, by Tony Albert. Acrylic on paper, 30.6 × 21 cm. 1.6 White Australia Has a Blak History [Gangurru Camouflage], 2012–13, by Tony Albert. Acrylic on paper, 30.6 × 21 cm. 1.7 Fight or Flight #6. A Line in the Sand, 2019, by Megan Cope. Sykes–Picot map over Eastern Turkey in Asia, Syria and Western Persia on printed silk, 55 × 55.7cm. 1.8 Fight or Flight #5. Radar, 2018–19, by Megan Cope. Acrylic on paper. Ethnographic map of Eastern Turkey in Asia, Syria and Western Persia on linen, mounted in North Stradbroke Island Cyprus pine, 171 × 165 cm. 1.9 Flight or Fight #1. Old Rivers, Deep Water (Lake Qadisiya & Lake Assad), 2018–19, by Megan Cope. Used engine oil, ink and acrylic on paper and linen, mounted in North Stradbroke Island blue gum, 121 × 103 cm. 1.10 Flight or Fight #2. The Near East – Bombs and Oil (Hostile Object), 2018–19, by Megan Cope. Gifted Keffiyeh/Shemag,

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LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS

paper map of the Near East (published by the Serial Map Service 1941) and acrylic on linen mounted in North Stradbroke Island blue gum, 157 × 153 cm. 1.11 Ngaliya barwon Gami (our great-uncle), from the Anzac Centenary Print Portfolio, 2014–15, by Megan Cope. Lithograph, printed in yellow, red, blue and black ink, from four stones; screenprint, printed in grey ink, from one screen on paper, 76 × 56 cm. 1.12A and 1.12B Out of the Dark, 2018, by Barbara Walker. Graphite on paper. 2.1 Kulata Tjuta, 2017, by Alec Baker, Eric Mungi Kunmanara Barney, Freda Brady, Moses Brady, Michael Bruno, Angela Burton, Cisco Burton, Kunmanara (Hector) Burton, Noel Burton, Kunmanara Carroll, Taylor Wanyima Cooper, Margaret Ngilan Dodd, Sammy Dodd, Jimmy Donegan, Maureen Douglas, Kunmanara (Ronnie) Douglas, Stanley Douglas, Arnie Frank, Witjiti George, Kunmanara (Gordon) Ingkatji, Adrian Intjalki, Rupert Jack, Naomi Kantjuriny, Mrs Kaika-Burton, Kunmanara Kaika-Burton, Iluwanti Ken, Freddy Ken, Kunmanara (Brenton) Ken, Kunmanara (Ray) Ken, Graham Kulyuru, Kunmanara (Willy Muntjantji) Martin, Errol Morris, Kevin Morris, Mark Morris, Kunmanara Mungkuri, Vincent Namatjira, Kunmanara (Tiger) Palpatja, Mary Katatjuku Pan, David Pearson, Kunmanara (Jimmy) Pompey, Aaron Riley, Adrian Riley, William Tjapaltjarri Sandy, Priscilla Singer, Keith Stevens, Lydon Stevens, Bernard Tjalkuri, Lyndon Tjangala, Mr Wangin, Ginger Wikilyiri, Mick Wikilyiri, Mumu Mike Williams, Anwar Young, Carol Young, Frank Young, Kamurin Young, Marcus Young, Roma Young and Yaritji Tingila Young. Wood, spinifex resin, kangaroo tendon, plus six-channel DVD with sound (dimensions variable). 2.2 Kulata Tjuta Inma and installation, 9 October 2015, Government House, South Australia, commissioned by Tarnanthi 2015. Photo: Ben Searcy. 2.3 Kulata Tjuta (Many Spears), installation view at 2014 Adelaide Biennial of Australian Art: Dark Heart, Art Gallery of South Australia, Adelaide. Photo: Saul Steed. 2.4 Tjituru-tjituru, 2015, by Kunmanara (Niningka) Lewis (dec.), Janet Inyika (dec.), Mary Katatjuku Pan, Freda Teamay, Lucille Armstrong, Erica Shorty, Rene Wanuny Kulitja, Judy Ukampari Trigger and Fiona Hall. Tjanpi, raffia, acrylic wool, jute/linen string, wire, acrylic paint, camouflage garments, plastic flowers, mixed media and found objects, dimensions variable. Photo: Rhett Hammerton.

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Tjituru-tjituru, detail, 2015, by Mary Katatjuku Pan. Tjanpi, raffia, acrylic wool, jute/linen string, wire, acrylic paint, camouflage garments, plastic flowers, mixed media and found objects, dimensions variable. Photo: Rhett Hammerton. 2.6 Tjituru-tjituru, detail, 2015, by Mary Katatjuku Pan. Tjanpi, raffia, acrylic wool, jute/linen string, wire, acrylic paint, camouflage garments, plastic flowers, mixed media and found objects, dimensions variable. Photo: Rhett Hammerton. 2.7 Tjituru-tjituru, detail, 2015, by Mary Katatjuku Pan. Tjanpi, raffia, acrylic wool, jute/linen string, wire, acrylic paint, camouflage garments, plastic flowers, mixed media and found objects, dimensions variable. Photo: Rhett Hammerton. 2.8 Niningka’s Tjukurpa (Board One), 2020, by Kunmanara (Niningka) Lewis. Pyrography, synthetic polymer paint on plywood, 80.0 × 240.0 × 3.0 cm. 2.9 Niningka’s Tjukurpa (Board Two), 2020, by Kunmanara (Niningka) Lewis. Pyrography, synthetic polymer paint on plywood, 80.0 × 240.0 × 3.0 cm. 3.1 Unknown Soldier [Gangurru Camouflage], 2012–13, by Tony Albert. Acrylic on paper, 30.6 × 21 cm. 3.2 Installation view of Art in Conflict, Australian War Memorial touring exhibition, Shepparton Art Museum, March 2022, including works by Kumanara (Ray) Ken, Shirley Macnamara, Kapua Gutchen, Jack Green, David Jolly, Shane Cotton, Sriwhana Spong, Mike Parr, Richard Lewer. Photo: Christian Capurro. 3.3 Comparative Monument (Palestine), 2012, by Tom Nicholson. Installation, size variable. 3.4 War and Peace #14. The Fire Within, 2014, by Jon Cattapan, Lyndell Brown and Charles Green. Mixed media, 126.8 × 148.9 cm. 3.5 Tetanus, 2009, by eX de Medici. Watercolour on paper, 114 × 176 cm. 3.6 Still from Spheres of Influence, 2016–19, by Susan Norrie. Single channel video, 26:44 minutes. 3.7 Still from Spheres of Influence, 2016–19, by Susan Norrie. Single channel video, 26:44 minutes. 3.8 Transition/Evacuation, 2015, by Khadim Ali. Gouache, ink and gold leaf on wasli paper, 71 × 56.1 cm. 3.9 Paddy Cooley (Quilty) Story / Emu Dreaming, 1998, by Paddy Bedford. Natural earth pigments and synthetic binder on linen, 120 × 160 cm. 3.10 Brothers in Arms, 2016–17, by Dacchi Dang. Vietnamese lacquer, ink and paint on marine ply, five panels, each panel 20 × 90 cm.

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3.11 Lance Corporal M, After Afghanistan, 2012, by Ben Quilty. Oil on linen, 180.2 × 170.3 × 4 cm. 3.12 Gate of the Winds, 2014, by Karen Black. Oil on marble dust on board, 91.8 × 111.8 × 6.2 cm. 3.13 Flight or Fight #3. Silk Road Extended (Friendly Object), 2018–19, by Megan Cope. Acrylic on paper Chinese map of Middle East (printed by Sun Wah Press 1941) on linen mounted in North Stradbroke Island Blue Gum, 93 × 142 cm. 3.14 Flight or Fight #4. A Golden Arc (Known Object), 2018–19, by Megan Cope. Acrylic on paper over General World Series map of the Middle East 1933 on linen mounted in North Stradbroke Island Cyprus Pine, overall: 110 × 165 cm. 4.1 They agreed to eat biscuits and European bread, but our regiment refused, 2019, by Baptist Coelho. Performance still from War, Art and Visual Culture: Sydney symposium, 25 February 2019, SH Ervin Gallery, Sydney. Photo: Kit Messham-Muir. 4.2 Cups of nun chai, by Alana Hunt. From the body of work Cups of nun chai (2010–ongoing). 4.3 Cups of nun chai, installed, by Alana Hunt. From the body of work Cups of nun chai (2010–ongoing). 4.4 All Let Us Rejoice, 2017, by Abdul Abdullah. Manual embroidery made with the assistance of DGTMB Studios, Yogyakarta, 125 × 110 cm. 4.5 For We Are Young and Free, 2017, by Abdul Abdullah. Manual embroidery made with the assistance of DGTMB Studios, Yogyakarta, 126 × 108cm. 5.1 Scatter 2 (Santa Cruz), 2016, by Jon Cattapan and Lyndell Brown/Charles Green. Acrylic and oil on digital photograph on Duraclear film on Perspex, framed, 87 × 290 cm. 5.2 Santa Cruz Dusk 2, 2018, by Lyndell Brown/Charles Green. Digital photograph on rag paper, edition of five, framed, 87 × 290 cm. 5.3 Wall, Centro Nacional Chega, Dili, 2013. Photo: Lyndell Brown/Charles Green. 5.4 Detail of Scatter 2 (Santa Cruz), 2016, by Jon Cattapan and Lyndell Brown/Charles Green. Acrylic and oil on digital photograph on Duraclear film on Perspex, framed, 87 × 290 cm. 5.5 Ruined Ceiling, Arte Moris, Dili, 2013. Photo: Lyndell Brown/ Charles Green. 5.6 Installation view, exhibition, Arte Moris, Dili, 2013. Photo: Lyndell Brown/Charles. 5.7 Ruined Army Base, Mundo Perdido Mountains, Timor-Leste, 2013. Photo: Lyndell Brown/Charles Green.

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LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS

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5.10 5.11 5.12 5.13

6.1 6.2 6.3 6.4 6.5 6.6 6.7 7.1

7.2 7.3 7.4 7.5 7.6

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Detail of Scatter 2 (Santa Cruz), 2016, by Jon Cattapan and Lyndell Brown/Charles Green. Acrylic and oil on digital photograph on Duraclear film on Perspex, framed, 87 × 290 cm. History Painting: Market, Tarin Kowt, Uruzgan Province, Afghanistan, 2008, by Lyndell Brown and Charles Green. Oil on linen, 155 × 155 cm. Baku-Larrŋgay Mulka Centre, Yirrkala, 2013. Photo: Lyndell Brown/Charles Green. Yirrkala, 2013. Photo: Lyndell Brown/Charles Green. 100 Years of Turbulence, 2018, Lyndell Brown/Charles Green. Four inkjet prints on rag paper, 110 × 1761 cm. Detail of Scatter 2 (Santa Cruz), 2016, by Jon Cattapan and Lyndell Brown/Charles Green. Acrylic and oil on digital photograph on Duraclear film on Perspex, framed, 87 × 290 cm. Derek Eland, Lake District, United Kingdom, 2019. Photo: Kit Messham-Muir. Diary Room, Kalang, installation, 2011, by Derek Eland. Lennon Wall Hong Kong, Central Government Complex, Hong Kong SAR, December 2014. Photo: Kit Messham-Muir. Colum McGeown’s Note, from Diary Room, 2011, by Derek Eland. LCPL Brownlow’s Note, from Diary Room, 2011, by Derek Eland. Mladen Miljanovic´ at War Studies, Kings College London, 2019. Photo: Kit Messham-Muir. Still from Draft for a 20-Minute Monument, 2019, by Mladen Miljanovic´. Video, 21 minutes. Australia, Special Forces (Everywhere, Current), Digicam, 2010, by eX de Medici. Watercolour and gold leaf on paper, 57.2 × 76.4 cm. Bullpup, 2010, by eX de Medici. Watercolour on paper. Supernumerary I, II & III , 2008, by David Cotterrell. Triptych (detail), c-type prints. Sightlines I & II , 2008, by David Cotterrell. Diptych, c-type prints. Karen Bailey, private gallery in Ottawa, 2019. Photo: Kit Messham-Muir. Captain Bruce Reeves, Head Ward Nurse, Role 3 Hospital, 2007, by Karen Bailey. Acrylic on canvas, 50.8 × 50.8 cm. Photo: Dave Andrews. Morning Rounds II , 2008, by Karen Bailey. Acrylic on canvas, 76.2 × 76.2 cm. Photo: Dave Andrews. Observation Post, King William Island, 2017, by Philip Cheung.

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7.9 7.10 8.1 8.2 8.3 8.4 8.5 8.6

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LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS

Weapon Maintenance, Kandahar Airfield, 2010, by Philip Cheung. Philip Cheung in his studio, Downtown Los Angeles, 2019. Photo: Kit Messham-Muir. Disturbed Soil, 2018, by Vladimir Miladinovic´. Charcoal drawing on paper, 150 × 200 cm. Disturbed Soil, installation view, 2018, by Vladimir Miladinovic´. Free Objects, 2018, by Vladimir Miladinovic´. Ink wash on paper, 50 × 70 cm. Still from video Snajperist/The Sniper, 2007, by Adela Jusic´. Still from video Kome treba DRN Cˇ ?/Who Needs DRN Cˇ ?, 2008, by Adela Jusic´. Bedtime Stories, installation, 2011, by Lana Cˇ majcˇanin and Adela Jusic´. Photo: Zijah Gafic´, History Museum of Bosnia and Herzegovina. Memoria Bosniaca, Oslobodjenje, 2017, by Vladimir Miladinovic´. Ink wash on paper, 50 × 70 cm. Memoria Bosniaca, 2017, by Vladimir Miladinovic´. Ink wash on paper, 35 × 50 cm. Pistol Grip, 2014, by Michael Zavros. Oil on canvas, framed, 162 × 222 cm; unframed, 160 × 220 cm. Spatial Operations, 2015, by Baden Pailthorpe. 210 paper helmets created from each book on the Australian Chief of Army’s Reading List. PVA, cellulose powder, paper pulp, 24 × 30 × 22 cm (each), 210 pieces. Somalia 1, With Conscience, 1996, by Gertrude Kearns. Acrylic on canvas, 287.2 × 114.3 cm. Somalia 2, Without Conscience, 1996, by Gertrude Kearns. Acrylic on canvas, 287.2 × 114.3 cm. Ben Roberts-Smith VC, 2014, by Michael Zavros. Oil on canvas, 30 × 42 cm. Todd Stone in his studio at Three World Trade Center, New York, 2019. Photo: Kit Messham-Muir. Collapse, 9/11/2001, 2001, by Todd Stone. Uptown-Out-3, 2019, by Todd Stone. Andrew Sneddon in Edinburgh, Scotland, 2019. Photo: Kit Messham-Muir. The Battle of Orgreave (An Injury to One is an Injury to All), 2001, by Jeremy Deller. Photo: Parisah Taghizadeh. Joanna Bourke in Newtown, Sydney, 2019. Photo: Kit Messham-Muir.

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NOTES ON THE EDITORS AND CONTRIBUTORS Editors Professor Kit Messham-Muir is a Professor of Art at Curtin University in Perth, Australia. He publishes in peer-reviewed and popular press (Artforum, Art & Australia, Artlink, Di’van, The Conversation) and directs the StudioCrasher video project. Messham-Muir is the author of Double War: Shaun Gladwell, Visual Culture and the Wars in Afghanistan and Iraq (Thames & Hudson, 2015) and, with Uroš Cˇvoro, he is co-author of Images of War in Contemporary Art: Terror and Conflict in the Mass Media (Bloomsbury, 2021) and The Trump Effect in Contemporary Art and Visual Culture: Populism, Politics, and Paranoia (Bloomsbury, 2023). Prof. Messham-Muir is currently Lead Investigator on Art in Conflict, a threeyear Australian Research Council funded linkage project in partnership with the Australian War Memorial and the National Trust (NSW), and in collaboration with the University of Melbourne, the University of New South Wales and the University of Manchester. Associate Professor Uroš Cˇvoro is an Associate Professor in Art Theory at UNSW Australia. His research interests include contemporary art and politics, cultural representations of nationalism, post-socialist and postconflict art. His recent books are Post-Conflict Monuments in Bosnia and Herzegovina: Unfinished Histories (Routledge, 2020), Transitional Aesthetics: Art at the Edge of Europe (Bloomsbury, 2018) and Turbo-Folk Music and Cultural Representations of National Identity in Former Yugoslavia (Ashgate, 2014). With Kit Messham-Muir, he is co-author of Images of War in Contemporary Art: Terror and Conflict in the Mass Media (Bloomsbury, 2021) and The  Trump  Effect  in Contemporary Art and Visual Culture: Populism, Politics, and Paranoia (Bloomsbury, 2023). He is a Chief Investigator on Art in Conflict, a three-year Australian Research Council funded linkage project in partnership with the Australian War Memorial and in collaboration with an international team of researchers. Dr Monika Lukowska-Appel is an artist and academic from Poland currently based in Perth, Australia. She obtained her MA from the E. Geppert Academy of Fine Arts and Design in Wroclaw, Poland in 2011, MFA from San xv

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Francisco Art Institute, USA in 2014 and PhD from Curtin University Perth in 2018. Her artworks have been widely exhibited internationally, and she is a recipient of several awards and scholarships. She works as a sessional academic and research assistant at Curtin University. She has been a research assistant on the Art in Conflict project.

Contributors Professor A. Carden-Coyne is Director of the Centre for the Cultural History of War (CCHW) at the University of Manchester. She is a historian and curator. Her publications include The Politics of Wounds (Oxford University Press, 2014),  Reconstructing the Body (Oxford University Press, 2009), (ed.) Gender and Conflict Since 1914 (Palgrave, 2012) and a special edition of European Review of History on disability (2007). She co-curated a major exhibition with Manchester Art Gallery and the Whitworth Art Gallery, The Sensory War, 1914–2014  (October 2014–February 2015), attracting over 203,000 visitors, and for the Somme centenary, Visions of the Front, 1916– 18 (Whitworth Art Gallery). Other current projects include a special edition of  Cultural and Social History on Young People and the Two World Wars (with Kate Darian Smith); a project on the Art of Resilience with the Dutch military academy; and an exhibition with Manchester Art Gallery and Whitworth Art Gallery on Artists, War and Humanitarianism. Prof. CardenCoyne is a Partner Investigator (International) on the Australian Research Council Art in Conflict project. Professor Charles Green is Professor of Contemporary Art in the School of Culture and Communication at the University of Melbourne, and an authority on contemporary international and Australian art, biennials and exhibition histories, war art and artist collaborations. His books include Biennials, Triennials and Documenta: The Exhibitions that Created Contemporary Art (2016, co-authored with Anthony Gardner),  The Third Hand: Artist Collaborations from Conceptualism to Postmodernism (2001) and Peripheral Vision: Contemporary Australian Art 1970–94 (1995). He is also an artist, having worked in collaboration with Lyndell Brown as one artist since 1989; their works are in most Australian art museum collections and they were Australia’s official war artists in Iraq and Afghanistan in 2007. He has been awarded several Australian Research Council grants to explore the intersection of war and art, and is a Chief Investigator on the Australian Research Council Art in Conflict project. Dr Anthea Gunn is Senior Curator of Art, Australian War Memorial. She completed a PhD in art history for her thesis Imitation Realism and Australian Art in 2010 at the Australian National University. She worked as a social history curator at the National Museum of Australia (2008–13) and

NOTES ON THE EDITORS AND CONTRIBUTORS

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has been at the Australian War Memorial since 2014, where she is Senior Curator of Art. She has published in the Journal of Australian Studies and the Australian and New Zealand Journal of Art, amongst others. She has curated contemporary commissions and exhibitions and was lead curator of the online exhibition Art of Nation: Australia’s Official Art and Photography of the First World War. Dr Gunn is a Partner Investigator on the Australian Research Council Art in Conflict project, and is co-curator of the exhibition arising from that project. Dr Paul Lowe is an award-winning photographer, author, critic and educator. His photography has covered some of the most important world events of recent decades, including the fall of the Berlin Wall, the release of Nelson Mandela, famine and massacres in Africa, and war in the former Yugoslavia. His work has been published in Time, Newsweek, Life, The Sunday Times Magazine, The Observer and The Independent. He is the Course Leader for MA Photojournalism and Documentary Photography (Part Time/Online mode) at London College of Communication, University Arts London. His research interests focus on the representation of conflict in photography and the ethical issues this raises. Dr Lowe’s books include Bosnians (2005), A Chronology of Photography (2018), Understanding Photojournalism (with Jennifer Good, 2017) and Photography Masterclass: Creative Techniques of 100 Master Photographers (2016). Dr Lisa Slade is Assistant Director, Artistic Programs at the Art Gallery of South Australia. Her recent curatorial projects include  Quilty, a national touring exhibition that surveyed the work of Australian artist Ben Quilty;  John Mawurndjul: I Am the Old and the New, a retrospective of Australia’s premier bark painter; the 2016  Adelaide Biennial of Australian Art: Magic Object; and Sappers & Shrapnel: Contemporary Art and the Art of the Trenches. Several of these curatorial projects have been informed by her PhD research into Kunst  and  Wunderkammern  culture, colonial collecting and contemporary art. Laura Webster is the Head of Art, Australian War Memorial. She has worked in the Art section of the Australian War Memorial since 2006 and has been Senior Curator of Art since 2015, and is currently acting Head of Art. Her major projects have included the Anzac Centenary Print Portfolio (2016), the contemporary diorama commissions in the redeveloped First World War galleries by artists Arlo Mountford and Alexander Mckenzie (2015), Ben Quilty: After Afghanistan (2013), Perspectives: Jon Cattapan; eX de Medici (2010) and Sidney Nolan: the Gallipoli series (2009). At the Memorial she has been part of the transformation of the art commissioning programme and regularly commissions contemporary works of art and publishes on the collection. Webster is a Partner Investigator on the Australian Research Council Art in Conflict project.

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Interviewees Abdul Abdullah, artist, Sydney, Australia Karen Bailey, artist for Canadian Forces Artists Program, Ottawa, Canada Joanna Bourke, war historian, London, UK Philip Cheung, photographer for Canadian Forces Artists Program, Los Angeles, US Baptist Coelho, artist, Mumbai, India David Cotterrell, artist for Wellcome Trust, Sheffield, UK Derek Eland, UK official war artist, Lake District, UK Alana Hunt, artist, Northern Territory, Australia eX de Medici, Australian official war artist, Canberra, Australia Mladen Miljanovic´, artist, Banja Luka, Bosnia and Herzegovina Baden Pailthorpe, artist-in-residence at Australian War Memorial, Canberra, Australia Andrew Sneddon, academic, Edinburgh, UK Todd Stone, artist, New York, US

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander readers are advised that this publication may contain the names and images of deceased persons. This book is part of the Art in Conflict project, led by Prof. Kit MesshamMuir (Curtin University), in collaboration with Prof. Charles Green (University of Melbourne), A/Prof. Uroš Cˇvoro (UNSW), Ryan Johnston (University of Melbourne) and Prof. Ana Carden Coyne (University of Manchester), and Partner Investigators Dr Anthea Gunn and Laura Webster (Australian War Memorial). The Australian War Memorial and National Trust (NSW) are Partner Organizations. Art in Conflict is a three-year project funded by the Australian Government through the Australian Research Council. Art in Conflict (LP170100039) receives a Linkage Project grant of $293,380. An earlier version of a short section of Chapter 6 by Kit Messham-Muir and Uroš Cˇvoro, ‘Soldier/Artist: Negotiating the Complexities of Military Service and Critical Practice’, was previously published in The Trump Effect in Contemporary Art and Visual Culture: Populism, Politics, and Paranoia (Bloomsbury, 2023). We would like to thank the artists and academics who we interviewed in the course of the Art in Conflict project, and particularly those whose edited interview material appears in this volume. These are Prof. Joanna Bourke, Karen Bailey, Baptist Coelho, David Cotterrell, Derek Eland, Alana Hunt, eX de Medici, Mladen Miljanovic´, Andrew Sneddon and Todd Stone. Interviews were conducted in an ethical and responsible manner, under the approved protocols of Curtin University’s Human Research Ethics Committee (HRE2018-0100) and in accordance with data legislation under the various jurisdictions in which it was conducted. All final edited transcripts for publication have been approved by the interviewees. For generously granting us image reproduction permissions, we would like to thank the many artists whose works appear in this volume. Thanks to Rhubarb Academic Editing for line editing of the interview material and to Angela Roberts for copy editing of the authored chapters of the manuscript. Kit, Uroš and Monika give their deepest gratitude to their partners, respectively Loretta Tolnai, Marijana Cˇvoro and Eric Appel, for their love and support throughout this project. Thank you.

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Introduction Contemporary War Art Kit Messham-Muir, Uroš Čvoro and Monika Lukowska-Appel

IMAGE 0.1 Still from POV: mirror sequence (Tarin Kowt), 2009–10, by Shaun Gladwell. Two-channel synchronized HD video, stereo audio, 16:9, 8 minutes, 22 seconds, ART94193, official war artist, 2009 Afghanistan. © Shaun Gladwell 2009. Courtesy the Australian War Memorial.

What exactly is contemporary war art? And what is a contemporary war artist? In the first section of this book, Anthea Gunn and Laura Webster draw on Terry Smith’s now well-established notion of ‘contemporary art’, in which ‘contemporaneity itself is the most evident attribute of the current world picture, encompassing its most distinctive qualities, from the interactions between humans and the geosphere, through the multeity of cultures and the ideoscape of global politics to the interiority of individual being’.1 That is, whereas we may have talked in terms of ‘modernism’ and ‘postmodernism’ in twentieth-century discourses on art, contemporary art in the twenty-first century is primarily reflective of the now, without necessarily enlisting to any overarching and contended historicism.2 This particular understanding of the ‘contemporary’ of contemporary art has 1

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been dominant since the 1990s, and is well and truly naturalized at this point. Dropping the word ‘war’ into the middle of that term seems to unsettle the certainty around Smith’s definition of contemporary, potentially in a number of different ways. ‘Contemporary war art’ may even jar in our ears, perhaps because ‘war art’ suggests something outmoded, such as heroic, fanciful and sanitized depictions of the battlefield that no longer fit with our ideas of what real war is like, mostly gleaned from the news media and war movies. Yet another deeper reason may be the way in which the temporalities surrounding war – its visibility and invisibility, its paradoxical ubiquity and absence, amongst the gamification of conflict and the weaponization of everyday life – make it difficult for us to conceive of what ‘war time’ and ‘war zones’ even are when we seek to map them visually onto the contemporary. In 2011, Derek Gregory’s discussion of the United States’s upscaling of drone attacks in Pakistan and Afghanistan under the administration of US President Barack Obama introduced the notion of the ‘everywhere war’.3 The reach of drones, piloted remotely out of the US, extends the potential spatiality of the ‘war zone’ into, in effect, everywhere. And as the potential ubiquity of drone strikes spreads globally it also dissolves ‘war’ into atomized individual action. As Gregory notes, ‘representing each drone strike as a separate act of self-defence obscures the systematic cumulative nature of the campaign’.4 While US President George W. Bush very visibly installed American military infrastructure in Afghanistan and Iraq in the all-encompassing ‘Global War on Terror’, Obama increased the number of attacks on foreign soil while appearing to dismantle Bush’s seemingly monolithic war machine and rebrand it as the more bureaucratic-sounding ‘Overseas Contingency Operation’.5 War is over; long live the ‘OCO’. A decade later, war has also become everywhere as it has become, in effect, everything. In recent years, civic infrastructures, spaces and time have become weaponized. Hot war, declared violent battle of the kind that Russia launched in its invasion of Ukraine in 2022, becomes only one tool at the disposal of conflict, often enlisting and deploying peacetime structures as an effective means of conducting the work of war and terror. In Russia’s war of aggression on Ukraine, we see in practice what has been termed the ‘Gerasimov Doctrine’,6 referring to ideas in an article originally written by Vladimir Putin’s Chief of the General Staff, General Valery Gerasimov.7 Mark Galeotti’s translation of the Russian-language article begins with the observation that, ‘In the 21st century we have seen a tendency toward blurring the lines between the states of war and peace. Wars are no longer declared and, having begun, proceed according to an unfamiliar template.’8 According to this idea, contemporary war is mostly undeclared, and adversaries engage each other through denial-of-service attacks and cyberattacks, troll farms and fake news, electoral interference, trade wars, expulsion of diplomats, incarceration of foreign business people, harassment

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and murder of journalists. Importantly, these undeclared wars are fought through subverting civil and peacetime mechanisms. They are, as Galeotti says, ‘not the prelude to war, but the war itself’.9 In 2018, Galeotti apologized for the term ‘Gerasimov Doctrine’, and said that to coin the term was a ‘Big mistake’.10 He argues that this approach was not ‘a doctrine as such, and that this formulation was simply a placeholder for the ideas evolving in Russian military thinking’. Citing Lord Haw Haw in the Second World War or even Octavian’s disinformation campaign against Mark Antony, Galeotti acknowledged that distraction, disruption and disinformation are neither ‘a new way of war’ nor a distinct form of war.11 However, the 2022 Russian invasion of Ukraine has demonstrated that the ‘Gerasimov Doctrine’ qua doctrine is actually in full force during today’s hot wars: false accusations from Russia that victims of a maternity hospital bombed by Russia in Mariupol on 9 March 2022 are merely ‘crisis actors’; denials by Russia of the massacre of civilians in the Ukrainian town of Bucha as ‘fake news’;12 retaliation from the West with swingeing economic sanctions on Russia and its oligarchy. We have seen clearly that previous forms of wartime disinformation and those used today are both central and consistent throughout both hot and cold war, to degrees that have never been seen before in the history of conflict. This resonates with Georgio Agamben’s idea of ‘zones of indistinction’, which in turn produce a paradoxically permanent ‘state of exception’. Agamben compares the current notion of the state of exception with that of Adolf Hitler’s decree of a state of emergency following the burning of the Reichstag, barely a month after taking power. The decree was never repealed, and so ‘the Third Reich can be considered a state of exception that lasted twelve years’.13 In the conditions of ‘global civil war’ that have dominated the previous decade, which is worldwide, ubiquitous and even now still only partially declared, the state of exception is the dominant paradigm of geopolitics. The state of exception is no longer provisional but rather a technique of government to suspend ‘normal’ rights: ‘the state of exception appears as a threshold of indeterminacy between democracy and absolutism’.14 The War on Terror was an everywhere war, an everything war, and a permanent state of exception – the ‘enemy’ were the sleeper cells within who were plotting to weaponize civil aviation, agricultural crop spraying or the postal service, and, as Agamben discusses, the Patriot Act put the United States in a perpetual legal state of exception. We were only too happy to scan our shoes and be bullied by TSA staff at American airports if it caught the ‘evildoers’. We were perhaps not even sure whether that two-decade long state of exception was still in effect when the world was plunged into another state of exception with the COVID-19 pandemic. As states of emergency were declared, lockdowns imposed, borders closed and vaccines later mandated, the COVID-19 pandemic became a global state of exception more pervasive than the War on Terror. And, unlike the immediate post-9/11

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world, social media spread misinformation and conspiracy theories about the pandemic, the vaccines and the cures supposedly suppressed by Big Pharma. The ensuing polarization of whole populations has torn the social fabric, particularly throughout Europe and the United States. Is this the intended outcome of nefarious state-sponsored actors spreading misinformation and discord through troll farms and factories? Many of us have personal and familial relationships that have not survived culture war conflicts over COVID-19 vaccines, Trump vs Biden, or progressivism vs conservatism, a phenomenon which Anne Applebaum addresses in her recent book Twilight of Democracy: The Failure of Politics and the Parting of Friends.15 Beyond the as-yet localized war in Ukraine, seen from the perspective of the ‘Gerasimov Doctrine’, the escalating tensions with China in the South China Sea and over Taiwan, and the new AUKUS treaty between Australia, UK and the US suggest that ‘the war itself’ on a global scale may well be already under way. In the context of these seismic disruptions throughout the political sphere, from the geopolitical to the interpersonal, in which conflict is often both omnipresent and invisible, how does contemporary war art address the visuality of conflict? What role does contemporary war art play in this ambiguous, distributed and often invisible world of conflict into the third decade of the twenty-first century? It is within this uncertain and often contradictory nexus of political, social and military conflict that this book attempts to create new understandings of the relationships between contemporary art and war. This is a field that is presently marked by rapidly shifting ground, raising factorially expanding questions and concerns that are impossible to cover in a single volume. Our aim here is not to attempt to capture an impossibly expansive field, and it is important that we acknowledge what this volume does and, indeed, does not address. The particular focus of this book is to address three overlapping themes: first, memory and amnesia in relation to colonization; second, the complex role of ‘official’ war art, which is a subgenre of contemporary war art peculiar to Australia, Canada and the UK, each with a tradition of official war art that has significantly evolved over the last century; and third, questions of testimony, knowing and, indeed, unknowing. The artists mentioned in this volume – Indigenous Australian Anangu artists, Khadim Ali, Derek Eland, Mladen Miljanovicˇ, David Cotterrell, Philip Cheung, Karen Bailey, Lana Cˇmajcˇanin, Tony Albert and eX de Medici – address diverse concerns and conflicts. The discussions presented here speak to contemporary war art that has arisen within the Anglosphere – particularly Australia, Canada, United Kingdom and the United States – in relation to these nations’ military engagements in places such as Afghanistan, TimorLeste, Bosnia and Herzegovina, as well as involving Indigenous populations in Australia and Canada. We acknowledge both the limitations and strengths of this approach, which effectively reinforces the largely Anglophone

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emphasis of this volume. Moreover, while this book aims at an international focus, it is one that is from a particularly Australian perspective. The reason for this is that many of the authors included in this volume and their choice of topics, derived from a three-year project (2018–21) titled Art in Conflict, which was a collaboration between Australian universities, Curtin, UNSW and University of Melbourne, as well as the University of Manchester in the United Kingdom, in partnership with the Australian War Memorial. Indeed, the three main themes came from a key part of this project: the four international War, Art and Visual Culture symposia held in Sydney, London, Los Angeles (all in 2019) and Perth (2021). These symposia were accompanied by a series of interviews with many of the symposia keynotes and participants, as well as with contemporary artists working in Australia, the UK, the US and Canada. In this respect, the selection of both the interview subjects and the foci of this volume were determined by the networks into which each of these symposia tapped, which were different across the locations. A more exhaustive study may well have included discussions of war art in relation to Syria, Palestine, Northern Ireland, Yemen, Congo, and other recent and current sites of conflict. And there are hundreds of other equally significant artists that might have been addressed, some of whom crossed paths with the Art in Conflict project, including Sophie Ristelhueber, Hrair Sarkissian, Razan Al Naas, Emily Jacir, Zehra Dogan, Steve McQueen, Alketa Xhafa Mripa, Simon Norfolk and Willie Dougherty. This more inclusive approach necessitated an expansive series of volumes well beyond our aims here. Thus, we do not present this series of essays to suggest that the artists who feature in the book are more vital to our discussions than any of these potential others, but rather as a ‘core sample’ from across this expansive and expanding field relating to our three main themes.

Colonization, Memory and Amnesia The first key theme of this volume, opened by A. Carden-Coyne’s essay ‘Unsettling Colonial Postamnesia’, is the current and critical issue of memory and amnesia as related to the ongoing effects of colonialism. Carden-Coyne addresses the political dimensions of the personal experience of artists in war zones. In particular, she explores the dynamics of cultural memory and forgetting, the use of popular national platforms to address wider audiences, and the global historical amnesia around imperial war, colonial forces and marginalized histories. Carden-Coyne focuses on key artworks by French artist Kader Attia, British artist John Akomfrah and two recent Australian official war artists, Tony Albert and Megan Cope. She explores how contemporary art can actively intervene in the historic and ongoing amnesia surrounding the two World Wars, which were underpinned by imperial ambitions and the marshalled labour and efforts of colonized people. The roots of racism and empire in these conflicts are a conspicuously forgotten

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aspect of their legacy. She considers how Australian artists have intervened during the centenary celebrations of the First World War and through official war artist schemes to reckon with colonial amnesia and to reclaim a blighted history, thus remaking the present through a judicious engagement with the past through personal connections. Carden-Coyne’s discussion of Albert and Cope, both Indigenous Australian artists, leads to Lisa Slade’s chapter, ‘Above All Else: Art as a Weapon’. Slade demonstrates the extent to which contemporary Indigenous art continues to make steady and significant progress in the larger field of Australian contemporary war art. Slade, an outstanding Australian curator and assistant director of the Art Gallery of South Australia, examines the vital importance of art in providing agency for the communities of the Anangu Pitjantjatjara and Yankunytjatjara (APY) Lands in the northern regions of that state. Many APY artists directly experienced some of the most traumatic wrongs perpetrated by the Australian nation state on its First Nations people, particularly the systematic attempted genocide of the Stolen Generations, the Maralinga Nuclear Tests in Australia at the Woomera Range Complex and the theft of Indigenous land. Slade’s chapter discusses art projects Niningka’s Tjukurpa, Kulata Tjuta and the installation work Tjituru-tjituru as assertions of Anangu identity and connection to Country, and of the centrality of Country as a source of food and as a place to obtain materials for weapons, tools and art-making. Slade reveals the ways in which all three projects demonstrate the unsuppressed strength of Anangu culture, both in making traditional cultural material and in its adaptive ability to find new forms of creative expression. Slade, firmly holding to the principle of ‘nothing about us without us’, worked with and sought the approval of these communities. The third chapter of the ‘Colonization, Memory and Amnesia’ section is Anthea Gunn and Laura Webster’s exploration of contemporary art acquired and commissioned by the Australian War Memorial (AWM) since 2007, which now forms part of the Memorial’s art collection. Like Slade, Gunn and Webster are curators as well as theorists of art, and their chapter draws on direct experience implementing significant conceptual shifts in the curation of contemporary war art at the AWM over the last ten to fifteen years. With limited space in the AWM’s Canberra galleries for contemporary art and little capacity to tour curated exhibitions since 2014, the AWM’s radically shifting curatorial vision has gone largely unseen by the wider public, both in Australia and beyond, for nearly a decade. This drought ended with the Art in Conflict exhibition, which toured Australia during 2022 and 2023, which included the official contemporary war art of Australian artists such as Angelica Mesiti and Shaun Gladwell, as well as artists and themes that challenge the authority of the official and institutional. Gunn and Webster’s chapter, titled ‘War (Art): What Is It Good For?’, emerged from the curatorial research that led to this exhibition. In their chapter, they argue that the post-2007 contemporary art

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IMAGE 0.2 Tjituru-tjituru, 2015, by Niningka Lewis (dec.), Janet Inyika (dec.), Mary Katatjuku Pan, Freda Teamay, Lucille Armstrong, Erica Shorty, Rene Wanuny Kulitja, Judy Ukampari Trigger and Fiona Hall. Tjanpi, raffia, acrylic wool, jute/ linen string, wire, acrylic paint, camouflage garments, plastic flowers, mixed media and found objects, dimensions variable. Photo: Rhett Hammerton. © Tjanpi Desert Weavers, NPY Women’s Council. Reproduced with permission of the artists.

collection at the AWM straddles two traditional uses of art: ‘to offer a visual element alongside other collection items, as well as the artists’ unique perspectives and nuanced approaches to history’. In addition, and importantly, the fifteen-year period of collecting marks ‘ambitious acquisitions of conceptually rigorous, uncompromising contemporary art, away from commissions of well-regarded but fairly traditional figurative painters’. Within a contemporary art context this may well be regarded as core business; however, within the context of what is a deeply conservative national institution, a contemporary art approach to war art has the potential to create internal tensions. It is true that the AWM is an institution geared towards the reiteration and reinforcement of national mythologies and is not naturally encouraging of questioning and self-interrogation. This is not only because the AWM is seen as the guardian of the nation state’s

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IMAGE 0.3 Still from A Hundred Years, 2019–20, by Angelica Mesiti. Singlechannel video, 21:24 minutes, AWM2019.57.1. © Angelica Mesiti 2019–20. Reproduced with permission of the artist.

official memory, but also, importantly, because it has been directed by Dr Brendon Nelson for most of the last decade. Director from 2012 to 2019, Nelson – a former leader of the Liberal Party, former Australian Minister for Defence and now President of Boeing International – was criticized for his dogged refusal to allow the AWM to address Australia’s violent colonization of Indigenous land during the frontier wars. Despite this, and to his credit, Nelson also oversaw the construction of Daniel Boyd’s For Our Country, the AWM’s Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander memorial on Anzac Parade, Australia’s sacred national mall in Canberra, and, as Gunn and Webster discuss, the significant expansion of Indigenous contemporary art in the display and collection of the AWM.16 Many artworks commissioned since 2007 – which are the focus of this chapter – have catalysed national and international public debates around contemporary warfare, both its impacts and wider implications. Each of the three thematic sections of this volume concludes with an ‘interview chapter’ that draws from an extensive body of interviews conducted with over twenty Australian and international contemporary artists in the field, as well as some theorists, as part of the Art in Conflict project during 2018–20. Interviews took advantage of the keynotes and speakers who attended the symposia. A total of around 200,000 words were transcribed from these recordings and then analysed by Monika LukowskaAppel using Nvivo software. Although there are geographical and language limitations to this approach that are important to acknowledge, our analyses of these interviews proved to be valuable in reinforcing the importance of

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the three themes of this volume. It is perhaps unconventional for a critical academic book of this kind to include a significant volume of interview material; however, we felt it was important to give a platform to contemporary artists themselves. The interviews are selectively edited and abridged for readability, but their largely unfettered voice adds a valuable dimension to this volume beyond that of academia. This first section, ‘Colonization, Memory and Amnesia’, thus concludes with material from Indian artist Baptist Coelho, and Australian artists Alana Hunt and Abdul Abdullah. Following three very substantial chapters in this section, this first interview section complements the preceding chapters by exploring the complex and sometimes vexed circumstances of contemporary artists working around issues of conflict across cultural lines. Coelho is a Mumbai-based artist who we interviewed during a residency at Artspace’s Gunnery Studios in Sydney following his performance work at the Sydney War, Art and Visual Culture symposium in February 2019. The cultural significance of food was the focus of Coelho’s performance. In his interview, he discusses the complexities of conflicting Indian identity within the colonial relationship with Britain during the First World War. In her interview, Hunt discusses works such as her Cups of nun chai (2010), which addresses the ongoing conflict in Kashmir using a distinctly humanist approach. Hunt talks about the ethics of creating work about conflict elsewhere as a white Australian woman, that is creating work addressing the political violence of the disputed territory while consciously avoiding ‘speaking for’ the local Kashmiri population. She recounts an instance in which her positionality was seen as necessarily precluding her from engaging in the topic of Kashmir. Abdullah, on the other hand, was embroiled in a media controversy surrounding two works included in the Violent Salt group exhibition as its national tour began in Artspace Mackay, in northern Queensland. His Muslim background was a central factor in how the situation unfolded in the public debate that followed.

War Art, Official and Unofficial With official war art schemes, most notably those in Australia, Canada and the UK, the collision between the criticality of contemporary art and the conservatism of national institutions for war remembrance is a situation ripe for both conflict and compromise. For these national war museums, the period of 2007 to the present marked a particular shift in the nature of its appointments of official war art. Artists were invited to engage the topic of war with an independence that, according to Ryan Johnston, former Head of Art at the AWM, previous commissioned war artists would have envied.17 Catherine Speck also notes in the Australian context a shift towards more diverse and often contentious viewpoints, as well as better representation of Indigenous artists and women artists, who were largely, though not

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completely, excluded from AWM’s earlier commissions.18 Similarly, Britain’s Imperial War Museum, which commissions the UK’s official war artists, invited contemporary artist and Academy Award-winning film director Steve McQueen (Afghanistan, 2007) and the high-profile contemporary artist Derek Eland (Afghanistan, 2011) to create work for the institution. In both cases things did not always go smoothly: McQueen complained that he was not allowed out beyond the protection of the bases, and Eland met with resistance from troops. When former Australian official war artists Lyndell Brown and Charles Green (2007) gave gallery talks about their war artwork after returning from Iraq, they were confronted with ‘a palpable sense of discomfort within the audience’. Amelia Douglas noted that it is ‘as if the artists were “irresponsible”. As if they were, perhaps, “selling out” to Empire by taking on the commission in the first place.’19 Around the same time in Canada, the newly opened site of the Canadian War Museum came under fire for displaying paintings by official war artist Gertrude Kearns that addressed the moral ambiguities at play in the 1990s ‘Somalia Affair’.20 The Head of the National Council of Veterans Associations called Kearns’s paintings a ‘trashy, insulting tribute’ and called for a boycott of the opening of the new museum building,21 while curator Laura Brandon received abusive emails from members of the public.22 These conflicts within the museum are themselves indicative of the radical transformation of official war art towards a more contemporary art frame, and the expectation that official war artists should produce challenging and uncompromising work. Well-established and highly independent contemporary artists have been engaged not only as official war artists, but also for one-off commissions, portraits, group projects and artist-in-residency programmes at these national institutions. The section on ‘War Art, Official and Unofficial’, begins with Charles Green’s chapter ‘The War at Home’ and discusses his collaboration with Lyndell Brown and Jon Cattapan in Timor-Leste, which gained independence in 1999 following a violent struggle against forces that favoured Indonesian rule. Brown and Green were Australian official war artists sent to Iraq in 2007 as part of the AWM’s shift in direction and Cattapan was sent as an official war artist to the peacekeeping mission in Timor-Leste in 2008. Green’s chapter poetically captures the visit of these three former Australian official war artists to Timor-Leste in 2013. He discusses the ways in which contemporary art responds to conflict from the perspective of aftermath, particularly through the discussion of two artworks, Scatter 2 (Santa Cruz) and Church Panels. Cattapan, Brown and Green’s large-scale piece reflects on the turbulent and complex history of conflict in Timor-Leste in relation to the overarching humanitarian issue issues of genocide, military violence, colonialization, loss, mourning and memory. Church Panels, created by Yolngu artists from Yirrkala, negotiates the violent past, imposed settlers’ oppression and the neocolonial era which questions the sovereignty of this Indigenous group. Green encourages contemplation about contemporary

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war art and its role by looking through a decolonized and post-national lens. This is especially important in the current realm of art. In the second chapter of this section, Kit Messham-Muir and Uroš Cˇvoro examine the work of Derek Eland and Mladen Miljanovic´, two artists and former soldiers who draw on the subjective experience of soldiers to amplify the social aspects of their practice. Eland, unlike any British official war artist before him, created a site-specific social practice work, titled Diary Rooms; Miljanovic´, on the other hand, creates works that often involve and depict former combatants, often adversaries, in the Bosnian War of the mid-1990s. Messham-Muir and Cˇvoro argue that while Eland and Miljanovic´ address soldiers’ physical injuries, neither operates through a performance of emotional empathy. In both cases, and in very different ways, a sense of resilience prevails that moves beyond a fixation on mute trauma to a more pragmatic assertion of voice and agency. Like the other two sections, the ‘War Art, Official and Unofficial’ section includes an ‘interview chapter’. Following the chapters by Green, MesshamMuir and Cˇvoro, this second section includes edited interviews with four artists engaged as official war artists: Australian official war artist eX de Medici, Wellcome Trust official war artist David Cotterrell, and Canadian official war artists through the Canadian Forces Artists Program, Karen Bailey and Philip Cheung. Can contemporary artists bring particular and valuable perspectives to war zones, or are they always compromised by the limitations inherent in embedding with troops, the dangers of the war zone, or the broader institutional and ideological constraints within the culture of the military? When de Medici was sent to the Solomon Islands in 2009 to cover the Regional Assistance Mission to the Solomon Islands (RAMSI), a peacekeeping and policing mission, her deployment pushed her to the limits: torrential rain hampered her intention to draw and paint on site, while tensions with the military and police personnel led to, at one point, the deleting of some of the photographs she had taken. Cotterrell was sent as an official artist of the Wellcome Trust to Helmand Province in Afghanistan with British armed forces. He discusses the ways in which he negotiated the role of the official war artist in the midst of the life and death situations of a British military field hospital. Cotterrell then returned later to Afghanistan, this time on a tourist visa, which granted him rare insight into the UK’s military deployment from both inside and outside ‘the wire’ of the bases. Ottawa-based artist Bailey was similarly embedded as an official artist in field hospitals in Afghanistan in 2007, under the Canadian Forces Artists Program, and her interview reveals an interesting tension within the military establishment that emerged when her works were seen to heroicize regular frontline personnel. Los Angeles-based Canadian artist Cheung likewise worked with the Canadian Forces Artists Program, photographing the Canadian Rangers in the Arctic Circle. Cheung also spent time photographing in Kandahar, and he compares that experience with his time as an official artist in the Arctic.

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Knowing and Testimony The third and final section of this book is on the related themes of knowing and testimony. Contemporary war art is often attended by the assumption that it attests to some form of ‘truth’, albeit a subjective and perhaps a psychological or emotional truth. The chapters in this section consider different ways in which knowing and testimony can be problematized in the relationship between war and art. In the first chapter of this section, Paul Lowe reflects on the act of bearing witness to trauma in the works of Vladimir Miladinovic´ and Adela Jusic´. Positioning their works in relation to contested histories of the events in the former Yugoslavia in the 1990s, Lowe argues for art as a testimonial process, which transforms the evidential and primary materials. His essay also addresses the way in which testimonial art raises questions about the idea of art as a vehicle for post-conflict reconciliation in the region. This is illustrated by his discussion of Miladinovic´ and Jusic´’s participation in a series of interventions known as Reconciliations, which took place in the Historical Museum of Bosnia Herzegovina in Sarajevo 2018–19. Discussing the works produced for Reconcilations, Lowe argues for art that offers a parallel narrative to the political and nationalist dogmas shaping historical remembrance in the region. In Chapter 9, Messham-Muir asks how national war museums address the inconvenient narratives surrounding moral ambiguity in the national war museum. This chapter focuses on two painted portraits of Corporal Ben Roberts-Smith VC MG, Australia’s most decorated former serviceman. These were commissioned by the Australian War Memorial from the contemporary artist Michael Zavros. Roberts-Smith is currently (at the time of writing) engaged in a legal battle with a major Australian news media group, which he is suing for defamation after a series of stories alleging that he committed war crimes. This chapter considers the ways in which ‘culture war’ politics has impacted on the public discourse surrounding Roberts-Smith and looks back to instances in which other national museums have addressed the moral complexities of war. This volume concludes with the final interview chapter, bringing together edited interviews from New York-based Todd Stone, art theorist Andrew Sneddon and acclaimed war historian Joanna Bourke. Each of these interviews addresses an aspect of knowing and testimony. Stone witnessed 9/11 from the rooftop of his apartment building, six blocks north of ‘ground zero’, and he talks of trying to work through the trauma by capturing the transformation of the World Trade Center site back to a vibrant piece of downtown New York. In the years since 9/11, Stone has continued to create work around the destruction of the Twin Towers, the trauma that followed and the rebirth of the site, which is documented in his book Witness: Downtown Rising. Sneddon addresses the ways in which testimony and knowing are approached in the work of Willie Doherty, whose works often address the aftermath of the Troubles in Northern Ireland and portrayals of

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the trauma of conflict. Sneddon also looks at the work of Jeremy Deller, whose Battle of Orgreave re-enacted a battle between the police and the striking members of the National Union of Mineworkers near Sheffield, in the North of England. The Politics of Artists in War Zones: Art in Conflict is the third book to emerge from the Australia-based Art in Conflict project, following Cˇvoro and Messham-Muir’s co-authored Images of War in Contemporary Art: Terror and Conflict in the Mass Media (2021) and The Trump Effect in Contemporary Art and Visual Culture: Populism, Politics, and Paranoia (2023). Like those previous publications, this book has is a marked Australian locus, which, nonetheless, resonates with wider issues that surround contemporary art addressing war in its manifold incarnations now. And while this volume has very particular foci, its themes – contemporary war art, and its relation to colonization, memory, amnesia, knowing and testimony – can be applied to other conflicts that are not directly addressed in this volume. Ultimately, our aim here is to establish a more effective set of approaches to thinking about war art in the contemporary, and to move beyond the worn-out war art dichotomy of pacifist agit prop versus heroic narrative.

Notes 1 Terry Smith, ‘Profiles in Currency: Contemporary Art Today’, in 21st Century: Art in the First Decade, ed. Miranda Wallace (Brisbane: Queensland Art Gallery/Gallery of Modern Art, 2010), 206. 2 Ibid. 3 Derek Gregory, ‘The Everywhere War’, The Geographical Journal, vol. 177, no. 3 (2011). 4 Ibid., 241. 5 Scott Wilson and Al Kamen, ‘ “Global War on Terror” Is Given New Name’, Washington Post, 25 March 2009, www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/ article/2009/03/24/AR2009032402818.html, accessed 27 November 2020. 6 Mark Galeotti, ‘The “Gerasimov Doctrine” and Russian Non-Linear War’, Moscow’s Shadows, 6 June 2014, https://inmoscowsshadows.wordpress. com/2014/07/06/the-gerasimov-doctrine-and- russian-non-linear-war/, accessed October 2019. 7 Герасимов Валерий, ‘Ценность науки в предвидении’ [‘The Value of Science in Prediction’], Военно-промышленный курьер, [Military-Industrial Courier], 26 February 2013, www.vpk-news.ru/articles/14632, accessed October 2019. 8 Galeotti, ‘The “Gerasimov Doctrine” and Russian Non-Linear War’. 9 Mark Galeotti, ‘I’m Sorry for Creating the “Gerasimov Doctrine” ’, Foreign Policy, 5 March 2018, 2:04 pm, URL: https://foreignpolicy.com/2018/03/05/ im-sorry-for-creating-the-gerasimov-doctrine/, accessed 2 October 2019.

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10 Mark Galeotti, ‘The Mythical “Gerasimov Doctrine” and the Language of Threat’, Critical Studies on Security, vol. 7, no. 2, (2018): 2. 11 Ibid., 2–3. 12 ‘Fact check: Atrocities in Bucha not “staged”,’ DW.com, April 2022, https:// www.dw.com/en/fact-check-atrocities-in-bucha-not-staged/a-61366129, accessed April 2022. 13 Georgio Agamben, State of Exception, trans. Kevin Attell (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2005), 2. 14 Ibid. 15 Anne Applebaum, Twilight of Democracy: The Failure of Politics and the Parting of Friends (London: Penguin, 2021). 16 Paul Daley, ‘Australian War Memorial: the Remarkable Rise and Rise of the Nation’s Secular Shrine’, The Guardian, 19 May 2015, www.theguardian.com/ australia-news/postcolonial-blog/2015/may/19/australian-war-memorial-theremarkable-rise-and-rise-of-the-nations-secular-shrine, accessed November 2020. 17 Ryan Johnston, ‘Recalling History to Duty: 100 Years of Australian War Art’, Artlink 35, vol. 35, no. 1 (2015): 16. 18 Catherine Speck, ‘The Australian War Museum, Women Artists and the National Memory of the First World War’, paper presented at the When the Soldiers Return: November 2007 Conference Proceedings (Brisbane, 2009), 278. 19 Amelia Douglas, ‘The Viewfinder and the View’, Artlink 38, no. 3 (Sept.–Nov. 2009): 204. 20 Laura Brandon, ‘War, Art and the Internet: A Canadian Case Study’, Convergence: The International Journal of Research into New Media Technologies, vol. 13, no. 1 (2007): 10. 21 ‘War Museum’s Paintings Anger Veterans Group’, CBC News, 3 May 2005, www.cbc.ca/news/canada/war-museum-s-paintings-anger-veteransgroup-1.552891, accessed November 2020. 22 Brandon, ‘War, Art and the Internet’, 12.

PART ONE

Colonization, Memory and Amnesia

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Introduction The first section of this volume addresses aspects of the critical contemporaneous issue of memory and amnesia in relation to colonialism and its ongoing impacts. The first essay in this section is A. Carden-Coyne’s ‘Unsettling Colonial Postamnesia’. Carden-Coyne is a historian and curator, and Director of the Centre for the Cultural History of War at the University of Manchester. ‘Unsettling Colonial Postamnesia’ examines the way in which contemporary artists in Australia and Britain have addressed the history, memory and forgetting of war and conflict, exploring the importance of art that disrupts the social, political and family silences of war’s impact on human life and culture. It will consider artists’ deeply personal responses emerge in memories from childhood, family stories and community testimonies, and particularly the significance of war art in addressing the global historical amnesia surrounding imperialism, war and Black history in the British and Australian contexts, in the work of French artist Kader Attia, British artists John Akomfrah and Barbara Walker, and recent Australian official war artists Tony Albert and Megan Cope. What is art’s capacity to intervene in the cultural amnesia of colonialism? How can it reclaim the blighted past for human dignity and thus to remake the present through judicious engagement with the past? The next essay is authored by Lisa Slade, Assistant Director of Artistic Programs at the Art Gallery of South Australia. Her recent curatorial projects include John Mawurndjul: I Am the Old and the New, a retrospective of Australia’s premier bark painter, and Sappers & Shrapnel: Contemporary Art and the Art of the Trenches at the Art Gallery of South Australia. In her essay ‘Above All Else: Art as a Weapon’ Slade focuses on contemporary Indigenous art in Australia and the recognition of its increasing importance within the larger field of Australian contemporary war art, discussing the role of art in providing agency and amelioration for Australian Indigenous Anangu artists and communities. Importantly, Slade addresses how art can act as a conduit for broader recognition of Australia’s violent colonization of Indigenous land during the Frontier Wars, which remains a blind spot in 17

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the nation’s telling of its history. What happens when Anangu traditions of weapon and tool making—traditions spanning thousands of years—become contemporary art? Slade focuses on two projects—the Kulata Tjuta or Many Spears Project, begun by  senior men from the  Anangu  Pitjantjatjara Yankunytjatjara Lands, and a Tjanpi Desert Weavers project, led by senior women that was initiated for the Sappers & Shrapnel exhibition. The third essay in this section is by Anthea Gunn, Curator of Art at the Australian War Memorial (AWM) and Laura Webster, AWM’s Head of Art, and explores the contemporary art acquired and commissioned by the AWM in the last fifteen years, in which significant conceptual shifts were implemented in the curation of contemporary war art. Gunn and Webster’s essay ‘War (Art): What Is It Good For?’ draws on their own curatorial research leading to their Art in Conflict curated exhibition, which travelled throughout Australia during 2022–3. Their essay argues that the more recent contemporary art collected by the AWM straddles two traditional uses of art: ‘to offer a visual element alongside other collection items, as well as the artists’ unique perspectives and nuanced approaches to history’. Gunn and Webster consider the complex roles art played within this national commemorative site and history museum during the directorship of Dr Brendon Nelson (2012–19). During this time, Nelson was criticized for refusing to allow the AWM to address the Frontier Wars; yet, Nelson also oversaw the construction of the AWM’s Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander memorial and the significant expansion of Indigenous contemporary art in its displays and collection. Each section of this volume concludes with an ‘interview chapter’. These draw from an extensive body of interviews conducted with over twenty contemporary artists and theorists in the field. This section concludes with interviews with Mumbai-based artist Baptist Coelho, and Australian artists Alana Hunt and Abdul Abdullah. The cultural significance of food is the focus of Coelho’s interview and his discussion of his performance work They agreed to eat biscuits and European bread, but our regiment refused. Hunt’s interview focuses on her work Cups of nun chai (2010), addressing the ongoing conflict in Kashmir. Hunt’s interview touches on the ethics of a white Australian woman creating work about conflict elsewhere, consciously avoiding ‘speaking for’ others. Finally, Abdullah’s interview addresses a recent media controversy surrounding the artist and two of his works included in an exhibition in Mackay, in northern Queensland. The interview discusses the extent to which Abdullah’s Muslim background became central to the debate that ensued in the Australian public arena.

CHAPTER ONE

Unsettling Colonial Postamnesia Contemporary Art, the First World War Centenary and Beyond A. Carden-Coyne

The scale of the First World War was, in part, due to the global reach of the five Empires who were fighting to win. Its fronts stretched from eastern to western Europe, to the eastern Mediterranean and the Middle East (Egypt and Palestine), and to Mesopotamia, India and Africa. But the mythologizing of the Western Front in Britain, and Gallipoli in Australia, has led to a near erasure of over 2.5 million colonial forces, labourers and Indigenous people, who also served in the conflict. Historians have long sought to correct this historical amnesia through analysis of the imperial basis of the conflict and its consequences for colonized peoples.1 The tirailleurs sénégalais (French colonial infantry) were treated as primitive savages and used as shock troops, while the British imagined some ethnicities in India to be ‘martial races’, naturally fierce and yet potentially treacherous.2 After the war, colonial troops were routinely treated as threats to dominant white society. In 1919, 1,000 ex-servicemen were deported (forcibly ‘repatriated’) from Britain to Africa and the Caribbean, and denied the pensions given to white veterans. Over the last century, the ‘colour of war memory’ has been eroded, lost in the archive and denied a voice3. But this observation can be interrogated further. For this subsequent erasure stands in marked contrast to the period itself, in which colonial solders and indentured labourers from all corners of the conflict were the constant source of photography, press 19

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reports, posters and memorials at the time. They had a cultural presence that was removed and forgotten. It is remarkable, then, that it has taken a century to include Black, minority and Indigenous visual artists in commissioning for this significant event of cultural memory. Similarly, the Official War Art (OWA) commissions, originally a product of the First World War and Britain’s ties to its Dominions, began to engage Indigenous artists for the first time. Conventionally, OWA works involve observations of armed forces activities, which has overshadowed the lesser-studied depictions of bombed and displaced civilians, orphaned children, refugees and expellees, prisoners of war, and detainees in the World Wars. Although the context is wildly different today, it is still hard to imagine the OWA scheme being able to embed an artist with a refugee heritage with a unit on a mission. Yet something is changing. This essay explores how artists were able to mobilize the official and mainstream platform of the First World War centenary and the Official War Art commissions, to generate important conversations about the imperial and colonial past that are relevant in the present day. Both personal and political interventions have been part of the historical amnesia regarding the ongoing impact of empire and imperial warfare. As well, artists have illuminated the erased collective memory of Black and Indigenous military service and indentured labour during the World Wars that defined national identities and underpinned citizenship rights. This essay seeks to demonstrate how these artists inserted marginalized histories into the ‘official’ canon of war commemoration and challenged the often exclusionary national narratives. I will argue that in doing so, artists are unsettling the normative state of colonial postamnesia, a term I am using to capture the generational transmission of ‘forgetting’ about empire and the impact of colonial violence that has, over time, created a state of normalized unknowing. I will also consider how visual art can transform and re-compose forgotten stories in the present day. This cultural memory work by artists, in collaboration with curators and commissioners, intervenes in the historical and contemporary amnesia regarding empire and colonialism. By bringing back to life the invisible citizens of the wars that were part of imperial rule this intervention is addressing ongoing wounds and silences. I will argue that this is not just a performance of the vital task of decolonizing the history and popular memory of the World Wars in public discourse, art exhibitions, museum collections and institutional critique, it is also bringing to contemporary life a visual perspective on the First World War as a war of colonialism and imperialism through archives, personal stories and ancestral connections. Building on decades of artistic activism, social critique and reparative work, five international artists – Kader Attia, John Akomfrah, Tony Albert, Megan Cope and Barbara Walker – are reckoning with and unsettling the mainstream paradigms of colonial amnesia.

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‘A Plea from the Dead’: Embodied Memories of Colonial Military Service In The Sensory War, 1914–2014 centenary exhibition at Manchester Art Gallery (2014-15), the curators (Tim Wilcox, David Morris and I) juxtaposed contemporary art dealing with facial wounds with a historical medical illustration by Herbert Cole. One of the works on display was a watercolour drawing of Private Harper (a Maori soldier from the New Zealand Expeditionary Force Pioneer Battalion, 4 October 1919).4 The Native Contingent and Pioneer Battalion was raised in 1915 with around 2,227 Maori and 458 Pacific Islanders, and eventually suffered over 1,000 casualties. Emerging from the dusty archive box, this illustration was once an aid to surgical processes and has now been restaged as art. This unintended portrait is also a sobering counter to the myths of the war and the erasure of colonized people from national narratives. It signalled a call to the First World War centenary to educate communities about the missing stories of thousands of colonial soldiers who fought for the countries that had dispossessed them of land, deprived them of citizenship, and regarded them as uncivilized. In the exhibition, and in conversation with this small but significant piece of hidden history, was a contemporary art installation by the French Algerian artist Kader Attia. A dual-slide projection, consisting entirely of juxtaposed black and white archival photographs, was installed in a tight, darkened space, encouraging visitors to quietly reflect on the archival documentation whose importance had been lost to the cultural memory of the war. The slides could be experienced as powerful testimonies to the silenced suffering of colonial soldiers. Attia’s point is that French national recognition of their bodily sacrifices is still owed, referred to in the work’s title, The Debt (2013). Attia addresses the historical reality of Black men who fought and were wounded in white men’s wars, ranging from the earliest history of colonial French Africa to the First and Second World Wars. Archival photographs include a slide of a tank and military ship, alongside a close-up of a French colonial soldier. Another slide juxtaposes missiles rare medical photographs of a facially mutilated Black soldier. Another slide focuses on medical equipment used in maxillo-facial surgery, including surgical casts of colonial soldiers’ wounded faces and metal equipment placed in the mouth of a bust of a Black patient. Attia has a longstanding interest in rupture and repair, and this work confronts the national forgetting of colonial bodies. In France, the celebrated gueules cassées (broken faces) who led the victory parades became symbols not only of French loss and collective suffering in the First World War but also of survival; however, only white men could symbolize the nation. Mutilated Africans and Algerians were excluded from the privilege of nationalist discourse.5 A century later, Attia, a French Algerian residing in Europe, has

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IMAGE 1.1 20618 Private Harper, Pioneer Battalion, New Zealand 4.10.19, 1919, by Herbert R. Cole. Watercolour on paper. From the Archives of the Royal College of Surgeons of England.

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IMAGE 1.2A, 1.2B, 1.2C Stills from The Debt, 2013, by Kader Attia. Dual-slide projection. Photo: A. Carden-Coyne. © Kader Attia 2013. Reproduced with the permission of the artist.

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enlivened the archive with memory renewed. The rupturing of colonial soldiers’ bodies is extended to the historic losses they have experienced and their ongoing legacies. By placing this work in a section called ‘Ghostlands: Loss, Resilience and Memory’, the curators were emphasizing the idea that the phantoms of war memory are haunted by the colonial past. Visualizing disfigurement and repair is central to Attia’s project of reremembering and restoring the lost memories of the tirailleur sénégalais or tirailleur indigene (colonial infantry from North and West Africa). Routinely denigrated in cartoons and Banania packaging, their stereotyped presence in French cultural memory eclipsed acknowledgement of their service and obscured historical insight into recruitment as a colonizing practice.6 Attia’s work is sobering, especially given that it was not until 2017 that the presidential candidate Emmanuel Macron acknowledged on Algerian television that France had committed ‘crimes against humanity’ during its colonization of Algeria. The backlash in France, however, exposed the continuation of ‘colonial nostalgia’ and the inability to address the structures of power that support the continuance of coloniality, with which artists like Attia attempt to reckon.7 Nevertheless, the First World War centenary did enable a degree of cultural reflection such as with a bandes dessinées (comics) exhibition and a TV series, reviving the memory of the tirarilleurs sénégalais (French colonial infantry) as defenders of the Republic, and reanimating fraught attempts to rebalance the power differential between France and its former African colonies.8 Kader Attia’s visual dialogue between the violence of imperial warfare and the restorative intentions of maxillo-facial surgery proposes that art has an extraordinary power to heal the scars of colonial amnesia. In curating The Sensory War 1914–2014 for the centenary, we found that contemporary art can indeed bridge the gap between the past and present by informing audiences about this missing history in both moving and thoughtprovoking ways. The globalism of the First World War relied on the bodies and minds of colonial soldiers who were erased from memory. Yet, contemporary art enables new stories about imperialism and its legacies to emerge and become relevant to current questions of race, migration, inequality, justice and tolerance, citizenship and democracy, addressing diverse sections of society. In the UK, the official centenary commissioning programme, 14–18 NOW (directed by Jenny Waldman following her role as cultural director of the 2012 London Olympics), sought to ‘embed the idea that contemporary artists should be at the heart of our national discourse’.9 One important commission was John Akomfrah’s Mimesis: African Soldier (2018). It depicts what he calls ‘pleas from the dead’ – pleas, perhaps, for a voice, a representation and a historical significance in the present day – by creating a ‘fruitful encounter’ of the past archive with current audiences in Britain. The work seeks to change minds about the war and to impact the way history is taught in school curricula.10

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IMAGE 1.3 Mimesis: African Soldier, 2018, by John Akomfrah. 73 minutes, 3 channel HD colour video installation. © Smoking Dogs Films, All Rights Reserved, DACS/Artimage 2022. Courtesy Lisson Gallery 2023.

Since the 1980s, Akomfrah, a founding member of the Black Audio Film Collective (1982–98), has used archives and moving images, in concert with cultural theory and poetry, to examine the Black diaspora, the Black Atlantic, police violence, anti-immigration and racial ideologies in England.11 In this commission, Akomfrah and his team mined an extensive national and international set of film and photographic repositories. The three-screen video presents a constant flow of moving footage and stills of soldiers and labour forces from Senegal, Ghana, Kenya, and North America. Scenes of men digging trenches, lugging military supplies, marching and training with bayonets, and loading and firing ammunition, felling trees and carrying lumber to the railroads depict the physical service that was demanded by hungry empires. But in juxtaposing the black and white archive with newly filmed colour tableaux of actors playing the roles of African soldiers, labourers, railway workers, conscripts, mechanics, administrators, carriers and porters, colonial oblivion is revived through corporeal motion. Together, the non-fictive and fictive visual elements go beyond honouring forgotten soldiers brought to Europe to introduce what Akomfrah calls ‘a very necessary corrective that people of colour, African and Asian, did fight in this war’.12 The idea of mimesis in the title of the work suggests that the archival and performative act as mnemonic triggers which disturb and revive the spectre of millions of men from across the African continent who served and died in the First World War. This embodiment generates a living meaning,

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as the artist states, which ‘animates the present’ and demands to breathe.13 Unlike the vengeful ghosts of dead soldiers arising from war graves in Abel Gance’s 1919 silent film J’accuse, or the suffering exposed in Kader Attia’s 2016 sculptural and film installation of the same title, Akomfrah’s performative soldiers awaken dormant memory with colour, light and life. The political context of this work was also conceived in the wake of the Brexit vote which, the artist noted, excluded the very people whose ancestors were not only ‘involved in saving this place’, but felt a deep duty to the king and the British Empire that should be reciprocated in voting rights, racial equality and inclusion.14 But as the artist points out, ‘the map of the war is too small in most people’s minds’, and looking at the multiple roles of Africans enables us to ‘see the length and breadth of the war itself, and that’s important to me’.15 Akomfrah’s longstanding philosophical commitment to montage and bricolage combines ‘discrete fragments’ to form dialectical interactions, which create a ‘third meaning’. He makes dramatic use of the ‘memory bank’ of archival photographs, capturing the synergy between the dead past and the need to relive it and revive it in some form. His works are deeply moving, and yet present profoundly challenging questions that lie at the core of what it means to be human. He asks: What is the process of amnesia that allows the kinds of forgetting that builds into hierarchies in which there are beings and non-beings? So those things, the aversion to fiction, is what keeps me interested in the nonfictive. It’s what keeps me interested in questions of the historical because they act as a powerful counterbalance against the turbulence of amnesia, and amnesia is a constant sea. We swim in it all the time. One does need the ballast of memory and the historical, just to counter-balance.16 His articulation of ‘swimming in amnesia’ encapsulates what many historians seek to resist by writing against that tide. This artist opens a poetic mode of visually and sensorially exploring the fraught threads binding the wounded past to the anaesthetic yet ostensibly postcolonial present. There is something in Akomfrah’s work that oral historians also understand about memory work: the value of personal testimony, the personal past and the autobiography of memory, especially as it reveals buried family histories of global migration in the wake of war. Akomfrah recalled how his Gold Coast grandfather worked in Nigeria but was able to take a job that would usually have been done by a white colonial officer; this is the personal thread that binds the archival fragments. Family stories are so important because, as he points out, the First World War archive is mostly white, and ‘the way whiteness functions is to inadvertently exclude, by simply standing in the place of everything’.17 This understanding seems to inform his use of emotionally charged words in the film, such as disenchantment, disillusionment, distress and disgust.

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In death, exploited military bodies and colonized labour were excluded from national commemoration, which Achille Mbembe refers to as ‘necropolitics’ or the imposition on colonized people to die for the nation that denies them citizen rights, while dispossessing their land, resources, communities and culture.18 Indeed, historian Michèle Barrett found that despite the ‘equality discourse’ of the Imperial War Graves Commission, British governors in Africa baulked at naming 200,000 deceased Africans on local memorials. Despite the Imperial War Graves Commission’s pledge to equal treatment across all the armed forces regardless of ‘creed and race’, the distinct difference in the treatment of ‘white’ and ‘native’ graves rested on the white supremacist criteria of being ‘sufficiently civilized’. This not only ensures the continued silencing and erasure from popular memory of colonized peoples’ participation in the World Wars, it also effectively ensures that the ‘acts of exclusion [themselves] were erased’ from history.19 Thus, Attia and Akomfrah raise the public profile of lost histories and place them in the centre of national histories by using archival evidence of colonial soldiers or in the emotional resonance of live, performing actors. These two artists are embodying the lost memories of Africa and Asia, and restoring them to their rightful place on the centenary stage. Among the present-day living, such acts of embodiment allow the vast scale of the global, imperial war to be understood through intimate encounters with these forgotten colonial servicemen.

Standing up to Stolen Memory: An Australian Indigenous Counter-Memorial While the UK commemorative commissions of the 14–18 NOW programme were seen by thousands of people, they did not appear as permanent displays in museums or as memorials in civic spaces. By contrast, in Australia, the City of Sydney’s centenary project unveiled its commissioned memorial by Tony Albert in 2015. Yininmadyemi – Though didst let fall commemorates the unrecognized military service of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander men and women. Albert’s intimate connection to this forgotten history is retold in the memorial’s formal design. His grandfather Eddie Albert served in the 9th Division of the 2.15th battalion in the Middle East and was among some 3,000 forgotten and silenced Indigenous servicemen. Captured and held as a prisoner of war in Germany and Italy, Eddie Albert’s group were caught escaping, resulting in three men being shot and four survivors. This sorrowful, little-known, family story is directly represented by four statuesque golden bullets with white tips (indicating the explosive type) and three fallen spent-shell sculptures. Its monumentalism is remarkably masculine and defiant, despite the fallen bullets or the dejection of Aboriginal

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IMAGE 1.4A and 1.4B Yininmadyemi: Though didst let fall, 2014, by Tony Albert. Hyde Park, Sydney. Photo: A. Carden-Coyne.

servicemen repatriated after the war. Indeed, historian Noah Riseman has explored how military pensions and land schemes privileged white veterans.20 While the fallen bullets symbolize lost history, the upright bullets stand tall against the stolen memory of Indigenous service. Here the past and present, amnesia and memory are entangled, and yet a sense of Indigenous resilience pervades the space. The memorial inscription provides an extensive narrative of this missing history, and reiterates the importance of commemorating Indigenous soldiers whose service had not been officially honoured: Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people have always defended their country. Indigenous Australians are known to have served in the state colonial forces before Federation and have proudly carried on this tradition of service . . . [They] experienced the horror of war on the battlefield and many made the ultimate sacrifice. The sad reality for these veterans was that equality in the country they fought to defend remained a distant dream. This memorial on the land of the Gadigal clan pays tribute to All Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people who have defended our country – the unsung heroes, our brothers and sisters, our mates. We remember those fallen. We honour those standing. By placing the memorial in a central public or civic place, which is common for most war memorials in Australia, the commission is providing official redress to forgotten Indigenous veteran communities and asking white Australians to take notice, and to rethink the white myths of national memory.

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Indeed, Yininmadyemi can be seen as a counterpoint to the Anzac Memorial (1931–4), also in Hyde Park, and thus part of an unfinished conversation that the Australian community needed to have, made all the more poignant as the memorials are located in Australia’s oldest park which is actually Eora country, and the home of the Gadigal people before colonization. Architect C. Bruce Dellit commissioned sculptor Rayner Hoff for the exterior walls, which include colossal figurative sculptures representing the four branches of the Australian Imperial Force (AIF) and relief of muscular soldiers. This contrasts with his interior bronze statue, The Sacrifice (1931–4), which depicts an emaciated soldier lying dead on a shield upheld by a caryatid formation of women and an infant. It is a paean to the image of wasted masculinity set within the fortress.21 Situated at another corner of the park, Tony Albert’s memorial of fallen and standing bullets responds to Hoff’s depiction of white masculinity and nationhood, only through a deeply personal story of forgotten and denied Indigenous sacrifice. Albert’s recognition of family pride in military service is shared by John Akomfrah and Megan Cope, among other artists who have explored these stories at the meeting point of the personal, the public and the political. Albert’s memorial counters the amnesic culture of commemoration underpinning the Australian canon. Due to its size and location – the city heartland, the public thoroughfare of Hyde Park and its proximity to an Indigenous ceremonial site on Gadigal land – the memorial raises the possibility of dialogue between white and Black histories, insisting on the place of Indigenous people in national memory. Reflecting on the artistic development of ‘counter-memorials’ among the German post-Holocaust generation, James Young argues that they expose the monument’s incapacity to provide stable answers for tormented pasts. Albert’s fallen bullets also speak to that insight and to the ‘palpable and gaping wound’ of genocide and its amnesic legacy of ‘the essential fragility of memory’. As Young suggests, undercutting the ‘material presence and weight’ ensures that Albert’s work cannot be mistaken ‘for immutable permanence’.22 The connection to Albert’s previous AWM commission is also pertinent. In 2012, he was the first Indigenous official war artist, a role supported by the donated fee of the artist eX de Medici, for her AWM commission with the Australian Federal Police for the Solomon Islands peacekeeping mission. To be sure, the relationship between contemporary artists and the AWM commissioning process is a challenging and complex one, and the resulting experience often produces unexpected legacies. Albert is also a member of urban Aboriginal art collective proppaNOW, based in Brisbane, who, according to Rex Butler, demonstrate that ‘Aboriginality is not simply absent but everywhere present, unable to be kept outside or in its proper place’.23 Albert’s peacetime AWM commission, attached to NORFORCE (Army Regional Surveillance Force North West Mobile Unit), allowed him to join the men and women of the border force and sea patrol training camp in the Northern Territory. He describes his role as being ‘a vessel or a voice in

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telling their stories’, through the conceptual foundation of his practice. Albert explained that the series of portrait silhouettes produced, entitled Green Skins, refers both to the traditional role of ‘skin names’ in ceremonial and community life, and to the fact that the attachment to a military unit is indicated by the colour of army green used in camouflage uniforms and facepainting, military rituals that the artist documented in photographs.24 The works on paper from the series title Gangurru Camouflage (one of the earliest Gimmaray words recorded by the British) weave together camouflaged kangaroos in an Escher-like khaki pattern with key words, such as ‘advance australia fair’, ‘green skin’ and lines from popular songs. Voice is given to the colonial soldier with textual prompts that question: What Are We Fighting For? A resonant note of protest embedded in the camouflage colour scheme asserts White Australia has a black history. However, a more ambivalent relationship to this historically camouflaged history is expressed in the lowercase text unknown soldier. This series, perhaps a precursor to the later 2015 war memorial commission, underpins the artist’s commitment to placing Indigenous service personnel onto the national record.

IMAGE 1.5 What Are We Fighting For? IMAGE 1.6 White Australia Has a Blak [Gangurru Camouflage], 2012–13, by Tony Albert. Acrylic on paper, 30.6 × 21 cm, ART94993, Official War Artist 2012, NORFORCE. © Tony Albert 2012–13. Reproduced with the permission of the artist and Sullivan+Strumpf.

History [Gangurru Camouflage], 2012– 13, by Tony Albert. Acrylic on paper, 30.6 × 21 cm, ART94989, official war artist 2012, NORFORCE. © Tony Albert 2012–13. Reproduced with permission of the artist and Sullivan+Strumpf.

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These commissioned works provide an important corrective to the way in which military service has been tied to citizenship rights and belonging to the military family. Noah Riseman questions this, however, as a sidestepping of the issue of Stolen Generations (generations of Indigenous children who were forcibly removed from their families under government policy between the 1860s and 1970s) and successive ‘White Australia’ legislation that sought to restrict immigration of non-Europeans. Though servicemen in both World Wars may have experienced a degree of equality among their white comrades, those working in the remote north of the country were often segregated or treated poorly. The contradictions of colonial rule meant that unlike the martial races theory exploited by imperial powers, governments in Britain and its empire routinely considered Indigenous troops unworthy of rights, pensions and equal rewards.25 The proud history of Indigenous service contradicts exclusive national identities, which have been underwritten by the historic amnesia that conceals the structural impact of two centuries of violence perpetrated against Aboriginal parents and children, and repeated in social, institutional, academic and political denials.26 Thus, artists of colour are reckoning with and unsettling the historic erasure of colonial and Indigenous service from this much remembered and eulogized war, repairing the compounded trauma of colonial violence, dispossession and exclusion from citizenship in their own lands. In her concept of ‘post-memory’ following the Shoah, Marianne Hirsch has explored the longstanding shadow cast by genocidal violence in its impact upon subsequent generations, the children and grandchildren who ‘came after’. Reinforced and transmitted in cultural forms that ‘reactivate’ and ‘reembody’, postmemory seeks to heal the trauma of the prior generation.27 Postmemory is useful for understanding artists of colour today and their engagement with the lost colonial forces, some of whom are ancestors. We should also consider this cultural memory work in relation to the dominant culture of forgetting. Over the last century, what I am calling postamnesia has been passed down through generations and institutions, normalizing the erasure of empire and colonialism as a mainstream social reality. The structural and psychological forces of forgetting practices pervade education, politics, civic memorial spaces, culture and representations, as well as land dispossession, and they deny the basis of sovereignty; further, the postgenerations have benefited from colonial amnesia and the imperial ideology that continues to structure our politico-economic world order. Indeed, political scientist Sarah Maddison argues that despite the hopeful ‘moral language’ of reconciliation with Indigenous peoples, ‘the colonial fantasy’ of relegating the past to yesteryear has been persistent.28 In this normative state of postamnesia, remembering ‘fell exclusively to Aboriginal peoples’.29 To be sure, Indigenous artists and writers, television programmes and academics have continually highlighted Indigenous war service; however, this was often done on ‘the periphery’.30 The rising shift in memory work is

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thus being achieved via powerful cultural institutions during periods, and in spaces, of national significance, but hopefully this will also continue beyond commemorative anniversaries. As Hirsch reminds us, by considering ‘violent histories alongside and in connection to each other . . . we can be open to resonances and entanglements between them’.31 The contemporary artists of colour discussed here reveal how the ‘entanglements’ of memory and forgetting are indelibly personal, social and political. Bridging the canyon between white oblivion and Black memory in mainstream public culture signals a turning point by restoring lost memories, unsettling the foundation myths of white nationhood, and reprising silenced voices in the cultural canon of collective memory. Similar to the French and Australian case, British war memory has until very recently been mostly amnesic of empire and so too has its institutional repositories. Hence, Akomfrah notes how important it was for Mimesis to be exhibited at the Imperial War Museum, ‘with the emphasis on the word imperial’.32 The centenary of the First World War has sponsored an appetite for change. This was already happening at the Australian War Memorial with the hanging of a large Aboriginal dot painting, by the APY Centre Collective, a group of nineteen artists from APY (Anangu Pitjantjatjara Yankunytjatjara), next to the iconic Gallipoli longboat. Frank Young, the APY Chairman, said: ‘we want to show whitefellas the way we fought for the country and are still fighting for the country’.33 Visitors to these venerable institutions of war memory are thus gently encouraged to do what Wayne Modest (Director of Content of the National Museum of World Culture, the Netherlands) proposed in his 2015 address on decolonizing museums: ‘learning from being uncomfortable’.34 In Australia, the deep-rooted denial that normalizes the narrow vision of national identity is being subtly challenged from within a powerful institution.35 No longer voiceless subalterns, as Spivak once argued, here communication with the canonical is distinctive.36 In his AWM commission work, Tony Albert’s conversation with the canon is witty. He playfully inverts colonial stereotypes of Aboriginal people as martial races, ‘noble savages’ or ‘half-caste’ by reframing the servicemen as proud superheroes. Marvel, Star Wars and other cartoon figures, and comic language (WHAM! WHUMP!), transform 1950s white American popular culture into a source of Indigenous empowerment with a postcolonial nod to Roy Lichtenstein and Pop Art. Commercial iconography is incorporated with photos of the NORFORCE servicemen, and are set within yellow stars, against a background of distinctive Aboriginal dot impressions, and discourses such as ‘SORRY’ and ‘BE DEADLY’, as well as the Maori expression of affirmation, ‘KA MAU TE WEHI’ (‘That’s Awesome!’). The humorous poster format overturns prejudices with ‘deadly’ irony. Chrisoula Lionis argues that humour in contemporary art is a non-threatening mode of expression . . . that appears void of didactic politicization or ideological framing. Connected to a perception of

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innocence, the humorous mode contrasts sharply with the serious issues of oppression explored in cultural output. As such, humour might be said to signal a serious strategy of non-violent resistance to oppression.37 Humour, irony, and the visual dynamism of Indigenous contemporary art speaks succinctly to the multiple languages and dialects of diverse Australia and to its future generations. The AWM commissioning of Albert continues to be important, nationally and globally, and speaks to the ongoing capacity of contemporary art to challenge the myths of nation, and of Anglocentric cultural amnesia unremittingly embedded in commemorative forgetting. Australia’s ‘birth of the nation’ story, forged on the Gallipoli failure and its associated ANZAC legend, did not incorporate Indigenous histories. In fact, it excised them from the subsequent culture of war memory. Despite these historic precedents and the dark shadow cast by the toxic discourse of the so-called ‘culture wars’, the AWM’s quiet support for contemporary artists might just see it reframed as an exemplary postcolonial museum, one that is fit for the next century, in which Indigenous voices such as Albert are no longer marginal to national war memory.38

‘An atlas in my lap’: Megan Cope’s Cartographic Unsettling The British-Kenyan poet Warsan Shire writes in ‘What They Did Yesterday Afternoon’ (2015): . . . I held an atlas in my lap Ran my fingers across the whole world And whispered Where does it hurt? It answered Everywhere Everywhere Everywhere.39 Touching upon violence and dispossession by giving voice to the cartographic imagination, the poem reflects upon the suffering wrought by imperial geographies. To be sure, the atlas was rearranged and re-inscribed by the victors of the First World War. The personified atlas, who feels pain, speaks to the work of Megan Cope, the final artist discussed in this chapter. Cope’s work unsettles the imperial project, and its mapping of territories and oceans, with the genocidal violence hidden within cartography and subsequent colonial settlement.

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The work is also reminiscent of Jorge Luis Borges’ renowned tale ‘On the Exactitude of Science’, which ‘understood the rationalization of space to be a crucial component of the exercise of power’.40 Cope troubles the hegemony of science by transforming the knowledge system of survey and scale, navigation, exploration and occupation into an emotionally resonant sense of space and place. She interrupts the imperial optical regime with abstract signs and Indigenous language where Aboriginal ‘Country’ is evoked as sensory, embodied, ancestral and mnemonic, speaking unheard stories that have been obscured by the colonizer’s cartography. Like Shire’s poetry, Cope’s work unsettles what Terry Smith calls ‘the visual regimes of colonization . . . calibration, obliteration and symbolization’. Indeed, ‘the measuring eye’, that made artistry into imperial science, reclaims Indigenous lands as the ‘foundations of being’.41 Megan Cope turns this scientific power back into the art of Aboriginal sovereignty, chiming with Indigenous geographers’ challenge to settler topography.42 Stradbroke Island and Moreton Bay are embedded in her family and personal identity, but other places also capture her reclaiming of the mapped world as Indigenous places alive with Indigenous stories and memories. Kate McMillan suggests that Aboriginal artists force audiences to think about place and memory in particularly different and salient ways, for ‘no matter the beauty of the landscape, there is always something deeply terrifying under-step’; ‘the foundations’ of both the occupied and dispossessed.43 In her sculptural and installation work, Cope’s use of symbolic materiality, rocks and oyster shells, ‘geography as a site of resistance’, and Aboriginal storytelling from her father’s homeland, North Stradbroke island, is sensorial and evocative of a specific place that holds the secrets of the colonial past and can tell the stories of the land as it is today.44 Cope’s sensitivity to materiality and haptic emotion is equalled by her cartographic inscriptions. This is evident in her 2017 AWM commission, in which she became the first Aboriginal (Quandamooka, Moreton Bay; Minjerribah or Stradbroke Island) woman to act as an official war artist. Over three weeks, she accompanied Australian military units deployed in ‘Operation Accordion’ and was based at Al Minhad and Al Dafra airbases in the United Arab Emirates where she experienced the daily use of military mapping and surveillance, and the powerful hardware of the KC30 air tanker refuelling jets. For her, this unrelenting noise of aircraft activity contrasted with the gentle rhythms of the daily call to prayer or the natural ponds that disrupt the militarized space. 45 Cope’s interest in contested landscapes, borders and sovereignty continues in this series entitled Fight or Flight. She describes her method as a ‘sitespecific response to a place’, thoroughly researched but often starting with a map. In Fight or Flight #6. A Line in the Sand, a Sykes–Picot map of eastern Turkey, showing the dividing line between French and British possession, is printed on silk. It stems from her observations of the durable cloth maps that pilots carry and her conversations with servicemen about the significance

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IMAGE 1.7 Fight or Flight #6. A Line in the Sand, 2019, by Megan Cope. Sykes– Picot map over Eastern Turkey in Asia, Syria and Western Persia on printed silk, 55 × 55.7cm, AWM2019.58.6. © Megan Cope 2019. Reproduced with the permission of the artist and Milani Gallery, Meanjin/Brisbane.

of this map, which was ‘the reason that we’re here today’. Other maps she reprises include a Chinese map from the 1940s, and historical maps from the 1930s and 1940s, which become talking points for the ‘continual economic interest in the region and the resources that those ancient sea-beds hold’. The maps are hung on hangers made from Stradbroke cypress pine or blue gum, memory triggers of old school classrooms ‘where we learned about the world’. Knowledge is ‘prescribed onto maps’, imbuing occupation and sovereignty with the privileged power of scientific vision.46 In a fourpanelled work, Fight or Flight #5 Radar, radio waves are painted over an ethnographic map that was published by the Royal Geographic Society in 1910. In these acts of over-painting, Cope troubles the Eurocentric schema of cultural knowledge, which categorized Arab people’s religion and ethnicity, and reduced complex communities into consumable data. The artist has spoken of her experience as an Indigenous woman observing military operations and the magnitude of scientific and military

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power. Yet it also gave her a different perspective, such as the ‘breath-taking scale’ of the Blue Dam (Lake Qadisiya) viewed from high above in the sky. She flew a ten-hour journey following up from the Persian Gulf along the route of the Euphrates River, and noted how such ancient landmarks such as Mount Sinjar were still used by the air force. She said: I don’t want to be a hero in my work . . . I’m trying to do, in my own little way, challenging things that I think are quite small, but maybe they’re not small . . . I still feel a bit perplexed and uncomfortable about making work about other people’s countries. I feel I don’t have permission to do that in the same way that non-Aboriginal people do . . . I’ve learned a lot and I’ve felt a lot.47 The emotional and sensory threads in her work unsettle the history and contemporary meaning of maps. An overwhelming sense of the immense ‘realities’ of military airpower seemed to contrast with her ‘artistic sensibility’, and the experience made a significant impression on her that was not entirely easy to digest:

IMAGE 1.8 Fight or Flight #5. Radar, 2018–19, by Megan Cope. Acrylic on paper. Ethnographic map of Eastern Turkey in Asia, Syria and Western Persia on linen, mounted in North Stradbroke Island Cyprus pine, 171 × 165 cm, AWM 2018.58.5. © Megan Cope 2018–19. Reproduced with the permission of the artist and Milani Gallery, Meanjin/Brisbane.

IMAGE 1.9 Flight or Fight #1. Old Rivers, Deep Water (Lake Qadisiya & Lake Assad), 2018–19, by Megan Cope. Used engine oil, ink and acrylic on paper and linen, mounted in North Stradbroke Island blue gum, 121 × 103 cm, AWM2019.58.1. Official war artist 2017, Middle East Region © Megan Cope 2018–19. Reproduced with the permission of the artist and Milani Gallery, Meanjin/Brisbane.

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As a first nations woman, I’m not really sure what my place or role is in this . . . And apart from the family pride, and the tradition. I’m not. You know, it was one of the hardest things I’ve ever done in my life. It’s made me think very differently about what impact our involvement is having over there, and it’s made me want to think of alternative industries for fuel and oil, and their industry. In Fight or Flight #1. Old Rivers, Deep Water (Lake Qadisiya and Lake Assad), Cope’s concern about the global ‘need to start thinking differently about our relationship to fossil fuels and to petrochemicals’ inspired the incorporation of used engine oil on the paper and linen map. She wanted to produce a feeling of the blue gulf waters and river systems rendered shiny from oil, slick from the heavy industrial activity it sustains, and even leaking off the map, uncontained and forming its own path.

IMAGE 1.10 Flight or Fight #2. The Near East – Bombs and Oil (Hostile Object), 2018–19, by Megan Cope. Gifted Keffiyeh/Shemag, paper map of the Near East (published by the Serial Map Service 1941) and acrylic on linen mounted in North Stradbroke Island blue gum, 157 × 153 cm, AWM2019.58.2. Official war artist 2017, Middle East Region © Megan Cope 2018–19. Reproduced with the permission of the artist and Milani Gallery, Meanjin/Brisbane.

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A further work, Flight or Fight #2. The Near East – Bombs and Oil (Hostile Object) makes these connections between conflict and conquest as seen and traced by an Indigenous artist even more powerful. The acrylic painting includes a Keffiyeh or Shemag, used by the Australian Armed Forces in the Middle East but also a profoundly social and political garment for local Arab cultures, and a 1941 map of oilfields and pipelines. This is overlaid with bombs depicted with Aboriginal dots and floating abstract symbols (diamonds, circles, arrows), imitating the military communication signal for Hostile Object or War Craft, which appears on a pilot’s instrument panels. In bringing elements of the pilot’s perspective together with her own affective response to air power, the viewer also gains a sensibility of flying over these ancient lands and seascapes while also considering how they were contested in world war and have cast a long shadow that reaches into the present day. Thus, Megan Cope reconfigures and re-remembers the atlas not only as scientific discovery or site of conflict, but as affective geography and emotional space. Cope worked on an earlier piece for the AWM’s ANZAC Centenary Print Portfolio, which explored her family’s connection to the military in the two World Wars. Her cartographic imagination also underpins this work, entitled Ngaliya barwon Gami (our great-uncle), which uses a solemn portrait of her great-great-uncle in ANZAC uniform, adapted from an old photograph probably taken before his embarkation to Gallipoli with the 15th Battalion, AIF. In an interview, Megan Cope spoke of the women in her family being ‘really proud of him’ and his photograph being displayed on the mantelpiece.48 The family marvelled at his determination, too, as he (along with seven other men from Stradbroke Island) outwitted the recruitment rules that prohibited Aboriginal men from serving. Against this family story of a man’s determination to serve the country that denied him citizenship is the barbaric reality that, as Cope states, ‘Aboriginal people were not even considered human beings’; in her family an uncle had to attest he had only ever lived with white people, while another relative had been deemed ‘too dark to serve’.49 This appalling personal history of racial discrimination and dispossession is redeemed in Cope’s piece. The portrait of this valued family ancestor, ‘Great Grandma’s son, Uncle Dick’, is overlaid upon a map of the area in France where he also served and ultimately died, near the village of Dernancourt, close to the strategic centre of Albert. It is thus both a work of art and a memorial that insists upon the Aboriginal presence in Europe, once wiped from cultural memory, being returned to the historical and contemporary record. The lithograph evokes the Australian experience of alienation and estrangement in the French battlefields through the practice of renaming places. Trenches were Australianized with the words Dingo, Yarra, Dolly and Pioneer; topographic features are renamed Echuca Alley and Beer Street. As Cope states: ‘The renaming of these places that they were spending a lot of time in, provided a great sense of comfort and also perhaps navigation as

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IMAGE 1.11 Ngaliya barwon Gami (our great-uncle), from the Anzac Centenary Print Portfolio, 2014–15, by Megan Cope. Lithograph, printed in yellow, red, blue and black ink, from four stones; screenprint, printed in grey ink, from one screen on paper, 76 × 56 cm, edition 17/20, AWM2021.890.1.3. Commissioned by the Australian War Memorial © Megan Cope 2014–15. Courtesy the Australian War Memorial.

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well that was familiar.’50 This links with the wider framework of her practice in considering the meaning of landscapes, foreign invasion, occupation, and in troubling the conceptual apparatus of mapping. She uses four colours (red, brown, blue and black) to highlight the geographical contours and the renaming. The scene is set within an oval shape that reminded Cope of an Aboriginal coolamon (oval-shaped bark bowl) or a shield and is juxtaposed with the eighteenth-century font naming ‘Private Richard Martin Minjerribah 1359 28/3/1918 Quandamooka 47th Batallion Dernancourt’.51 The work brings into play Indigenous, colonial and wartime symbols as memory triggers that link modern European war with the Australian frontier. Kate McMillan writes that ‘in colonial spaces, it is often artists functioning as singular voices against these traumatic histories and the contemporary refusal to remember them’. Artists working in this way are resisting ‘the overwhelming weight of colonial forgetting’.52 This is also true of the way in which the colonial soldier and Indigenous service is being revisited by artists such as Cope and Albert. A collective need for greater cultural reflection is continuing to emerge, whether as result of Brexit, decolonizing education and the arts, and the Black Lives Matter movement. Lake Macquarie City Art Gallery’s exhibition (in)visible: the first people’s and war (2015), including works by Julie Gough, Megan Cope, Tony Albert, Judy Watson, Vernon Ah Kee and Amala Groom, reveal how the First World War ‘stalks the colonised history of our Indigenous history like a phantom’.53 In 2017, AWM’s touring show of Aboriginal art, For Country, for Nation (2017), sought to bring art and material culture together with Indigenous family stories of war service, representing the 1500 Aboriginal servicemen who enlisted in the First World War and the war memorial’s growing Aboriginal art collection.54 Artists are asking mainstream Australia to recognize its Indigenous soldiers, to include them in national history despite the traumatic consequences of denied Aboriginal sovereignty, and to explore the entangled memories of the colonial past with the unsettled present day.

Conclusion This essay has explored artistic interventions in the cultural amnesia of world war and its imperial roots. It has discussed the unsettling of colonial space and history, and the reclaiming of human dignity and a reckoning with cultural forgetting through artistic acts of justice and cultural reparation. I have argued that this body of British, French and Australian contemporary art has introduced into the popular commemoration of the World Wars an important analysis of imperialism and colonial power in settler societies. These artworks are attempting to remake the present through engagement with this fraught past through archives and maps, as well as through embodied and affective experiences. Beyond the critique of

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empire, colonialism and forgetting, these artists are also exploring their own family heritage and personal connections with the forgotten past, stitching together fragments of memory and objects, and touching upon hidden (often personal) stories of colonized and dispossessed ancestors. Albert explored his family’s proud history of Indigenous service and Akomfrah learned of his grandfather’s role in the First World War while conducting research for his film. During her official war artist commission, Cope learned more about her grandfather as well as about a contemporary relative serving in the armed forces. While colonial amnesia has played the long game, over centuries, the intimate personal quality of this art, though addressing questions larger than the individual, offers a profound counter to the ‘fog’ of the nationalist memory wars. Finally, artists’ practices of mining photographic archives, colonial recruitment posters and historic newspapers to recover hidden stories and family memories continue to resonate with audiences after the centenary. Barbara Walker’s powerful large-scale drawings of Black and Asian service personnel from both the First and Second World Wars questions the political losses experienced by loyal service personnel (Shock and Awe, 2015–20). Drawn and ghost-like embossed figures illuminate the dichotomy of absence and presence, suggesting a rightful place in history is yet to be found for the British West Indies Regiment and King’s African Rifles, evident also in the titles such as The Big Secret (2015) and I Was There (2018–19). Walker goes one significant step further in bringing to life Caribbean and West Indian women who served during the Second World War. Rows of uniformed women standing on parade, lined up hand to shoulder, almost punching the air as they appear to be coming, finally, Out of the Dark (2018) as the title explains.

IMAGE 1.12A and 1.12B Out of the Dark, 2018, by Barbara Walker. Graphite on paper. © Barbara Walker 2018. Reproduced with permission of the artist.

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The hidden history of women’s service stands out in colourful graphite, but their proud faces and averted eyes reject any voyeuristic spectacle they may have attracted. Viewed from right to left, the arrangement of emerging figures asserts a space for women of colour in the history of war service, a history so often heroized and commemorated in exclusionary, masculinist terms, and a history that has not accounted for the racist hostility these women experienced while they served in the auxiliary and nursing services. Historian Steven Bourne writes that after 1945 historians and the media ignored Black servicemen and women’s dedication and bravery, whitewashing them from the national narrative, a buttress against claims to national independence.55 Nevertheless, the West Indian Ex-Servicemen and Women’s Association was founded with pride in 1970s Britain in a period when racist violence terrorized communities. To be sure, Barbara Walker enables a conversation about Black servicewomen’s double invisibility of gender and race, sending a powerful message that suggests society must raise its awareness of gender inequalities at the heart of history, memory and present-day politics. Art can prod and provoke lost histories, and surely enable us to understand and challenge the longstanding cultural condition of colonial postamnesia.

Notes 1 Richard Smith, Jamaican Volunteers and the First World War: Race, Masculinity and National Consciousness (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2004); Xu Guoqui, Strangers on the Western front: Chinese Workers in the Great War (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2011); Anne Samson, World War I in Africa: The Forgotten Conflict among the European Power (New York: I.B. Taurus, 2013); David Olusoga, The World’s War: Forgotten Soldiers of Empire (London: Head of Zeus, 2014); Ray Costello, Black Tommies: British Soldiers of African Descent in the First World War (Liverpool: Liverpool University Press), 2015; Santanu Das, India, Empire and First World War Culture: Writings, Images and Songs (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2018). 2 Alison Fell and Nina Wardleworth, ‘The Colour of War Memory: Cultural Representations of tirailleurs sénégelais’, Journal of War and Culture Studies, vol. 9, no. 4 (2016): 9; Heather Streets, Martial Races: the Military, Race and Masculinity in British Imperial Culture, 1857–1914 (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2017). 3 Santanu Das, ‘The First World War and the Colour of Memory’, The Guardian, 22 July 2014. 4 Herbert R. Cole, watercolour portraits of New Zealand patients of Sir Harold Gillies, From the Archives of the Royal College of Surgeons of England (1917–1920); Box 4ID 289: MS0513/2/2/39. 5 See David Houston Jones and Marjorie Gehrhardt, ‘The Legacy of the Gueules Cassées: From Surgery to Art’, Journal of War and Culture Studies, vol. 10 (2017): 1–6.

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6 David Murphy, ‘Les Tirailleurs sénégelais’ in Postcolonial Realms of Memory, ed. Etienne Achille, Charles Forsdick and Lydie Moudileno (Liverpool: Liverpool University Press, 2020), 290–7. 7 David Murphy, ‘Anti-colonialism’, in Postcolonial Realms of Memory, ed. Achillle, Forsdick and Moudileno, 333–42. 8 David Murphy, ‘Les Tirailleirs sénégelais’, 296. 9 Conversation between Jenny Waldman, John Akomfrah and Skinder Hundal, New Art Exchange, 2019, www.youtube.com/watch?v=P6XThuKYCgQ, accessed November 2020. 10 Telling the story of Africa’s WW1 soldiers, BBC World Service interview, 29 February 2019, www.youtube.com/watch?v=itifBiC2-Uc, accessed November 2020. Co‐commissioned by New Art Exchange, Nottingham, Smoking Dogs Films and 14–18 NOW, and with additional support from Sharjah Art Foundation. 11 See the New Museum’s survey exhibition John Akomfrah: Signs of Empire, 2018). See also Nina Power, ‘Counter-Media, Migration, Poetry: Interview with John Akomfrah’, Film Quarterly, vol. 65, no. 2 (2011): 59–63. 12 John Akomfrah interview, 14–18 NOW, 2018, www.youtube.com/ watch?v=sXwaUOjDmas, accessed November 2020. 13 Conversation between Jenny Waldman, John Akomfrah and Skinder Hundal, New Art Exchange, 2019, www.youtube.com/watch?v=P6XThuKYCgQ, accessed November 2020. 14 John Akomfrah interview, 14–18 NOW, 2018, www.youtube.com/ watch?v=sXwaUOjDmas, accessed November 2020. 15 Cited in 14–18 NOW interview, www.1418now.org.uk/commissions/africansoldier/, accessed November 2020. 16 John Akomfrah interview, ‘Why History Matters’, Tate Shots, 2015, Smoking Dog Films. www.youtube.com/watch?v=jDJYyG7jKV0, accessed November 2020. 17 In conversation between Jenny Waldman, John Akomfrah and Skinder Hundal, New Art Exchange, 2019, www.youtube.com/ watch?v=P6XThuKYCgQ, accessed November 2020. 18 Achille Mbembe, ‘Necropolitics’, Public Culture, vol. 15, no. 1 (2003): 11–40. 19 Michèle Barrett, ‘Subalterns at War: First World War Colonial forces and the Politics of the Imperial War Graves Commission’, Interventions, vol. 9, no. 3, (2007): 451–74. 20 R. Scott Sheffield and Noah Riseman, Indigenous Peoples and the Second World War: The Politics, Experiences and Legacies of War in the US, Canada, Australia and New Zealand (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2019). See also Noah Riseman and Richard Trembath, Defending Country: Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Military Service since 1945 (St Lucia, QLD: University of Queensland Press, 2016); Noah Riseman, In Defence of Country: Life Stories of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Servicemen and Women (Canberra: ANU Press and Aboriginal History Inc., 2016).

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21 Ana Carden-Coyne, Reconstructing the Body: Classicism, Modernism and the First World War (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2009), x. 22 James E. Young, The Texture of Memory: Holocaust Memorials and Meaning (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1993), 14, 27–48; At Memory’s Edge: After-images of the Holocaust in Contemporary Art and Architecture (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2000), 196 23 Rex Butler, ‘Where to Put Aboriginal Art’, 2012, http://espace.library.uq.edu. au/eserv/UQ:215535/proppanow.pdf, accessed November 2020. 24 AWM film Tony Albert Norforce Commission: www.youtube.com/ watch?v=uYCF0DjhzqQ, accessed November 2020. 25 Noah Riseman, ‘Racism, Indigenous People, and the Australian Armed Forces in the Post – Second World War Era’, History Australia, vol. 10 (2013): 160. See also Robert Hall, The Black Diggers (Sydney: Allen & Unwin, 1989); Timothy Winegard, Indigenous Peoples of the British Dominions and the First World War (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2012). 26 Dirk Moses and Dan Stone, eds, Colonialism and Genocide (London: Routledge, 2006); Ann Curthoys on Raphael Lemkin’s unpublished work, ‘Tasmania’; see also Neil Levi, ‘ “No Sensible Comparison”? The Place of the Holocaust in Australia’s History Wars’, History and Memory, vol. 19, no. 1 (2007): 124–56. 27 Marianne Hirsch, The Generation of Postmemory: Writing and Visual Culture After the Holocaust (New York: Columbia University Press, 2012), 33. 28 Sarah Maddison, The Colonial Fantasy: Why Australia Can’t Solve Black Problems (Crown Nest, NS: Allen & Unwin, 2019), 188. 29 Kate McMillan, Contemporary Art and Unforgetting in Colonial Landscapes (Cham: Palgrave Macmillan, 2019), 118. 30 Noah Riseman, ‘Rectifying “the Great Australian Silence”? Creative representations of Australian Indigenous Second World War Service’, Australian Aboriginal Studies, no. 1 (2012): 7. 31 Marianne Hirsch, ‘The Connective Arts of Postmemory’, Analecta Politica, vol. 9, no. 16 (2019): 174. 32 Imperial War Museum, www.iwm.org.uk/history/John%20Akomfrah%20 on%20Mimesis%3A%20African%20Soldier, accessed November 2020. 33 Cited in the curatorial text label, AWM, 2019. The work is entitled Kulatangku angakanyini manta munu Tjukurpa (Country and Culture will be protected by spears), 2017. 34 Wayne Modest, ‘Decolonise the Museum’. Cited in John Giblin, Imma Ramos and Nikki Grout, ‘Dismantling the Master’s House’: Thoughts on representing Empire and Decolonising Museums in Public Spaces and Practice, Third Text, vol. 33, (2019): 472. 35 Stanley Cohen, States of Denial: Knowing About Atrocities and Suffering (Cambridge: Polity, 2001). 36 Gayatri Spivak, ‘Can the Subaltern Speak?’, in Marxism and the Interpretation of Culture, ed. Cary Nelsen and Lawrence Grossberg (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 1988), 271–313.

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37 Chrisoula Lionis, Laughter in Occupied Palestine (London, New York: IB Taurus, 2016), 175. 38 Ian Chambers, Alessandra De Angelis and Celeste Cianciolo et al. eds., The Postcolonial Museum: The Arts of Memory and the Pressures of History (Farnham: Ashgate Publishing, 2014). 39 Verse, https://verse.press/poem/what-they-did-yesterdayafternoon-6524900794187889060, accessed November 2020. 40 Ricardo Padron, ‘Mapping Plus Ultra: Cartography, Space and Hispanic Modernity’, in Empires of Vision: A Reader, ed. Martin Jay (Durham, NC and London: Duke University Press, 2014), 216. 41 Terry Smith, ‘Visual Regimes of Colonization: European and Aboriginal Seeing in Australia’, in Empires of Vision, ed. Jay, 268, 271, 277. 42 Sarah de Leeuw and Sarah Hunt, ‘Unsettling Decolonizing Geographies’, Geography Compass, vol.12, (2018): 1–14. See Jodi Byrd, The Transit of Empire: Indigenous Critiques of Colonialism (Minneapolis: Minnesota University Press, 2011). 43 McMillan, Art and Unforgetting, 125. 44 McMillan, Art and Unforgetting, 6, 205. 45 AWM Interview with Megan Cope by Erin Vink, Assistant Curator of Art, 17 April 2019, Accession no: AWM2019.12.51 46 Ibid. 47 Ibid. 48 Interview with Megan Cope in Making of the Anzac Centenary Print Portfolio 2014–15, Director Kris Kerehona, Producer Laura Webster, Australian War Memorial. 49 Ibid. 50 Ibid. 51 Ibid. 52 McMillan, Art and Unforgetting, 6, 105. 53 Adam Geczy, ‘(in)visible: The First Peoples and War’, Artlink, vol. 35, no. 2 (2015): 87. 54 Nelson as recorded in Council of Australasian Museum Directors interview, ‘AWM For Country, For National exhibition’, by Karen Hardy for the Canberra Times, 3 March 2017, and reprinted at https://camd.org.au/awm-forcountry-for-nation-exhibition/, accessed November 2020. 55 Stephen Bourne, The Motherland Calls: Britain’s Black Servicemen and Women, 1939-1945 (London: The History Press, 2010); Ben Bousquet and Colin Douglas, West Indian Women at War: British Racism and Wold War II (London: Lawrence and Wishart, 1991).

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CHAPTER TWO

Above All Else Art as a Weapon Lisa Slade

When Anangu talk about Kulata Tjuta, we are talking about what we must fight for, and what we protect above all else. MICK WIKILYIRI

In the interactive mapping of Australia’s frontier wars from 1788 until 1927 – the result of a collaboration between Guardian Australia and the University of Newcastle1 – the Anangu Pitjantjatjara Yankunytjatjara (APY) Lands2 lie unblemished. No mark is made on the map across the vast terrain in northwestern South Australia that stretches north to the Northern Territory border and west to Western Australia. However, far from escaping the colonial violence enacted elsewhere, Anangu to this day endure colonial violence and its legacy. The frontier persists and a century of colonial encroachments – which include pastoralism, missions, land-clearing, military experimentation and even the more recent establishment of incorporated communities and outstations – have shaped Anangu life. With a long history of defending Country against these encroachments, including the campaign and protests that led to the 1981 Anangu Pitjantjatjara Yankunytjatjara Land Rights Act, Anangu today deploy art as their weapon of choice. Several of the elders living on the APY Lands today directly experienced military experimentation, specifically the frontier of nuclear colonialism. This is what Anna Haebich has described as ‘a new frontier of military and scientific intervention’.3 Haebich is referring specifically to the atomic testing that devastated vast areas of northern South Australia, ruined lives and 47

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IMAGE 2.1 Kulata Tjuta, 2017, by Alec Baker, Eric  Mungi  Kunmanara  Barney, Freda Brady, Moses Brady, Michael Bruno, Angela Burton, Cisco Burton, Kunmanara (Hector) Burton, Noel Burton, Kunmanara Carroll, Taylor Wanyima Cooper, Margaret Ngilan Dodd, Sammy Dodd, Jimmy Donegan, Maureen Douglas, Kunmanara (Ronnie) Douglas, Stanley Douglas, Arnie Frank, Witjiti  George, Kunmanara (Gordon) Ingkatji, Adrian Intjalki, Rupert Jack, Naomi Kantjuriny, Mrs Kaika-Burton, Kunmanara Kaika-Burton, Iluwanti Ken, Freddy Ken, Kunmanara (Brenton) Ken, Kunmanara (Ray) Ken, Graham Kulyuru, Kunmanara (Willy Muntjantji) Martin, Errol  Morris, Kevin Morris, Mark Morris, Kunmanara Mungkuri, Vincent Namatjira, Kunmanara (Tiger) Palpatja, Mary Katatjuku Pan, David Pearson, Kunmanara (Jimmy) Pompey, Aaron Riley, Adrian Riley, William Tjapaltjarri Sandy, Priscilla Singer, Keith Stevens, Lydon Stevens, Bernard Tjalkuri, Lyndon Tjangala, Mr Wangin, Ginger Wikilyiri, Mick  Wikilyiri, Mumu Mike Williams, Anwar Young, Carol Young, Frank Young, Kamurin Young, Marcus Young, Roma  Young and  Yaritji Tingila Young. Wood, spinifex resin, kangaroo tendon, plus six-channel DVD with sound (dimensions variable). Acquisition through Tarnanthi: Festival of Contemporary Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Art supported by BHP 2017, Art Gallery of South Australia, Adelaide © artists and Ernabella Arts, Iwantja Arts, Kaltjiti Arts, Mimili Maku Arts, Tjala Arts, Ninuku Arts, Tjungu Palya, APY Art Centre Collective.

destroyed traditional homelands in the middle of last century. In a joint undertaking between the British and the Australian governments, a series of atomic tests were ‘performed’ in and on South Australia between 1953 and 1963. These tests occurred across what is known as the Woomera Range Complex, an area covering more than 100,000 square kilometres in northwestern South Australia, a vast area that includes Maralinga. This is the

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largest land testing range in the world, occupying more than 10 per cent of the state’s landmass. Much of the activity at Woomera was closely protected and highly secretive. The word ‘maralinga’ has an Aboriginal derivation linked to ‘thunder’,4 and ‘woomera’, which describes a spear-thrower, is a term that originated on Eora country on the east coast. The appropriation of both words by colonizers underscores the inherent violence and anticipated consequences of this mid-century military frontier. The 1985 Royal Commission into British Nuclear Tests in Australia revealed accounts of death, disability, displacement and disease from those on the fringes of the vast testing site. These truths remain largely untold – the recent Adelaide regional dialogue for the ‘Uluru Statement from the Heart’ called for the history of Aboriginal people [to be] taught in schools, including the truth about murders and theft of land, Maralinga, and the Stolen Generations, as well as the story of all the Aboriginal fighters for reform. Healing can only begin when this true history is taught.5 This essay examines the role of art in providing agency and amelioration for Anangu artists and communities, many of whom are part of the generation who experienced this frontier, and today endure its devastating consequences.

Kulata Tjuta: Return Fire Frontiers are not solely a historical phenomenon or sites of conflagration and violence entrenched in the past. They exist socially, politically and culturally in the present. But frontiers can be porous. They can be transgressed or simply put aside.6 This statement by Indigenous broadcaster Daniel Browning was made in the context of his description of the award-winning work by Anangu artists Frank Young, Anwar Young and Unrupa Rhonda Dick from the National Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Art Awards in 2017. Titled Kulata Tjuta – Wati kulunypa tjukurpa (Many Spears – Young Fella Story), the work is a mixed-media installation featuring kulata (spears) and is just one iteration among many of the now decade-long Kulata Tjuta project. Formally established in 2010 by senior men working at Tjala Arts, in the community of Amata in far north South Australia, Kulata Tjuta has spread like wildfire, to quote senior custodian Mrs Kaika-Burton,7 and has grown to include more than 100 artists across the APY Lands.8 The project began as a means of  instilling cultural awareness and pride in the younger generation, specifically young men, through the revival of spear-making practices. It was initiated by Mick Wikilyiri, Frank Young and five men who

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have now passed away – Kunmanara (Willy) Kaika-Burton, Kunmanara (Hector) Burton, Kunmanara (Ray) Ken, Kunmanara (Barney) Wangin and Kunmanara (Tiger) Palpatja. These tjilpi (senior men) recognized that skills in weapon-making and tool-making were crucial for cultural identity and that the skills deployed in punu (woodworking) could be reset as both a pedagogic device and a contemporary art manifestation. The proliferation of art centres across the APY Lands over recent decades has fed this wildfire and resulted in the active engagement of men of all generations across all seven of the APY communities. The art centre model – an expanded form of the professional artist’s studio – facilitates individual and collaborative artmaking and engages as many as 500 artists across the total APY population of just over 2,000 people. More critically, art centres return artists to Country through the act of art-making and, in the case of the Kulata Tjuta project, art-making becomes a form of return fire. Although deceptively simple, every kulata involves hours of Anangu labour and draws on generations of traditional knowledge. Its creation begins by making the spear’s shaft from Urtjanpa, the long flexible and twisted branches of Pandorea doratoxylon. As Sammy Dodd chronicles, Finding the right kulata (spear bush) is first, cutting it out the right length. The kulata bush is kali-kali pulka (very bent), so making a fire and straightening the wood is very important: heat, bend, heat, bend, slowly making it straight. There are many different ways of making kulata. Not every kulata needs a wata (spearhead), for example. I always make hunting kulata with wata and mukulpa (barb) from the mulga tree. Not too wide, not too long, sharpening and smoothing it for good throwing. The wata is attached with kiti (bush glue) and malu pulyku (kangaroo tendon). Kiti comes from a different kind of mulga (Acacia minyura), from the leaf. I dry the leaves for two days, then beat the dry resin out, then heat it and make a big batch of kiti, strong like a rock. I only use a little bit for each kulata, so the kiti lasts a long time. To attach the wata, I heat kiti kulunypa (a little bit of bush glue) in the fire to make it soft. Then I tie it all together extra strong with malu pulyku, which I first have to chew like chewing gum, softening it and pulling off long bits to bind the kiti. This same way is used (kiti and malu pulyku) to attach the mukulpa. You see, it’s a long process. Today the youngfellas learn the same way I did. Sitting and watching, listening to the stories, slowly.9 This pedagogical intent – with the senior men teaching the younger men – has coincided with, and been catalysed by, an expanding field of contemporary art opportunities for Anangu artists. Increased exhibition opportunities and greater exposure to art installations across the country, alongside Anangu participation in art fairs and art awards has led to this rethinking of the place of the kulata. In 2012, the elders invited Wiradjuri/Kamilaroi artist Jonathan Jones to work on the project and to assist them in presenting their

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work in a contemporary context. As a contemporary artist with an installation-based practice, Jones supported two artistic outcomes – the first of which was included in the 2014 Adelaide Biennial of Australian Art: Dark Heart, curated by Nick Mitzevich at the Art Gallery of South Australia, and the second an outdoor contemporary art installation and inma (cultural performance) on the grounds of Government House for the Art Gallery of South Australia’s Tarnanthi festival in 2015. The decision to engage Jones facilitated the step from the perceived souvenir or craft-object status of punu to the contemporary art context, thereby negotiating a new sphere of reception for the work. Jones’s own practice is characterized by a radical repositioning of Aboriginal artefacts, weapons and tools, perhaps best seen in barrangal dyara (skin and bones), his commission for the 32nd Kaldor Public Art Project in 2016. Jones’s vast sculptural installation stretched across Sydney’s Royal Botanic Garden, returning the countless Aboriginal shields lost in the 1882 fire that destroyed the Garden Palace and its collection of Aboriginal cultural objects, and incorporated a landscape of native kangaroo grasses and an embedded soundscape of Gadigal, Gamilaraay, Gumbaynggirr, Gunditjmara, Ngarrindjeri, Paakantji, Wiradjuri and Woiwurrung languages. This act of transposition, from weapon to work of art, evident in the practice of Jones

IMAGE 2.2 Kulata tjuta Inma and installation, 9 October 2015, Government House, South Australia, commissioned by Tarnanthi 2015. Photo: Ben Searcy. Courtesy Art Gallery of South Australia and Ernabella Arts, Iwantja Arts, Kaltjiti Arts, Mimili Maku Arts, Ninuku Arts, Tjala Arts and Tjungu Palya. © the artists/ Copyright Agency.

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and Anangu artists, is best articulated by Mrs Kaika-Burton when she explains, When I was a girl there was kulata around us, all the time. Kulata tjuta (many spears) of all sizes being made and, more importantly, kulata making being taught by the fires. Well, today it’s like my childhood again on the lands, with old men teaching young men to make spears. The spears are hard work to make; the skills have been passed down from men, one generation to the next. Traditionally the men used the spears to hunt, today they tell stories. With the spears the men make installations. Hundreds of spears together, used with light and sound. Through the spears, the old men are telling important stories of Country, culture and Law.10 The 2014 Kulata Tjuta installation presented as part of the Adelaide Biennial of Australian Art: Dark Heart featured a constellation of suspended spears thrusting downward, towards the beholder should they venture beneath them, and reminiscent of pre-contact conflict. Elder Frank Young describes his recollection of flying spears in the following way: When I was a young boy, I saw Anangu fight Anangu in the wars for Country: this was before we really knew about the white man’s world. When I was a boy, I learnt about wars as they were being fought . . . We were instructed to watch and learn. I vividly remember one war and seeing a dark cloud of spears that moved across Country.11 The 2014 installation included a soundscape devised by the late Munaldjali/ Nunukul composer David Page, which included ceremonial singing and the sound of spears in flight with the accompanying words of Kunmanara (Willy) Kaika-Burton: We (Anangu) have a word for the rattle of the spears; that word is Tirkilpa. We have a technique where we roll spears over each other to make this noise. A long time ago this noise would be heard before a battle begins . . . Sometimes I hear the Tirkilpa today; it is a different battle today but the fight is real for us.12 The second iteration of the project, presented as part of Tarnanthi in 2015 under the artistic direction of Nici Cumpston and again involving Jonathan Jones, incorporated sound, moving image, photography, cultural performance (inma) and sculptural installation and was held on the grounds of Government House in Adelaide for one night only in October 2015. The decision by the senior men to hold the event on the grounds of Government House, adjacent to Parliament House, was a symbolic marking of the struggle that led to the Anangu Pitjantjatjara Yankunytjatjara Land Rights Act 1981. Many of the artists had been in Adelaide decades before to press

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IMAGE 2.3 Kulata Tjuta (Many Spears), installation view at 2014 Adelaide Biennial of Australian Art: Dark Heart, Art Gallery of South Australia, Adelaide. Photo: Saul Steed.

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for the land rights legislation to be enacted, and during that time had camped along the river behind Parliament House and Government House. The suspension and rattling of spears in the 2014 project gave way in 2015 to the vertical grounding of the spears, becoming at once a projection screen and a mise en scène. Whereas kulata previously occupied a liminal role between weapon and souvenir, through these installations and performances they are recast as contemporary art objects – and as return fire. In the words of initiator Mick Wikilyiri: Kulata Tjuta means ‘many spears’. When Anangu talk about Kulata Tjuta, we are talking about what we must fight for, and what we protect above all else. This is what is most important to Anangu. Through Kulata Tjuta, we protect Tjukurpa, Manta, Walytja – Law, Country, Family. This is what is most important.13 In 2017 the Kulata Tjuta project reached a point of significant culmination with the presentation of a major installation, and accompanying moving-image work, again as part of Tarnanthi. In this work, now held in the collection of the Art Gallery of South Australia, 550 kulata made by Anangu men are suspended in an explosive formation that hovers above a circular installation of handcarved piti (water carriers) made by Anangu women, in an artistic response to weapons testing on Country. Internally lit from a single light source, the radiating spear shafts cast shadows onto the surrounding walls, proliferating the artistic effect and impact, and drawing an analogy with the cumulative and mushrooming effect of the atomic bomb testing directly referenced in the work. Initially involving the assistance of Sydney-based architect Luke Romandi, this iteration of the project was lauded as a breakthrough work in that year’s Tarnanthi festival and a significant turning point for the project itself. The work presented itself as an apposite response to the question of what happens when a tradition of weapon-making spanning thousands of years becomes contemporary art. In his response to the 2017 work, Professor Stephen Muecke described it as ‘a kind of artistic  “payback”. In circling around the atomic events, it becomes its own event with past and future ramifications.’14 In 2019 the next iteration of the Kulata Tjuta project occurred 15,000 kilometres from Central Australia, in Switzerland. It was commissioned and exhibited by the newly opened Fondation Opale, a Swiss foundation dedicated to contemporary art, notably Australian Indigenous art. Whereas the power of the 2017 Kulata Tjuta resides in its centrifugal force – its radiating form – the 2019 installation contains a double helix – a vortex of upward energy. As in previous iterations of this project, its 1500 spears are suspended, this time referencing a kupikupi, or willy willy – a large funnel shape of dust that is often seen across the desert landscape. Amid the kulata are historical documents and photographs, as well as punu (wood) objects, including weaponry and tools, which represent traditional life on the APY Lands. For Pitjantjatjara and Yankunytjatjara people, the weather, and in particular the

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wind, holds special cultural significance. The wind marks the passing of the most senior and significant Anangu elders. Young men are trained to listen to the wind to improve the efficacy of the hunt. Furthermore, the sight of a kupikupi can be a warning to Anangu that danger is approaching and can also signal the coming of great change. Indeed, it was the wind that constantly interfered with the British bomb testing at Maralinga.15 The evidence of the late Yankunytjatjara elder Yami Lester, given to the Royal Commission in 1985, centred on the conflation of the radical change in the weather wrought by the atomic bomb testing and cultural knowledge. As Lester explained: As it came over the camp, it blocked the sun. Everything went dark. It was like a thick black mist rolling along. It took a long time to pass over the camp. The old people were frightened as they’d never seen anything like it before. They thought it was ‘Mamu’. It’s a word that doesn’t translate directly, but applies to something strange you don’t understand that could be a bad or evil spirit. Mamu is frightening.16 The 2019 work is apotropaic – it communicates the need for Anangu to be ever vigilant in their protection of Country and culture. When viewed as a whole, the iterations of Kulata Tjuta bring together aspects of Anangu

IMAGE 2.4 Tjituru-tjituru, 2015, by Kunmanara (Niningka) Lewis (dec.), Janet Inyika (dec.), Mary Katatjuku Pan, Freda Teamay, Lucille Armstrong, Erica Shorty, Rene Wanuny Kulitja, Judy Ukampari Trigger and Fiona Hall. Tjanpi, raffia, acrylic wool, jute/linen string, wire, acrylic paint, camouflage garments, plastic flowers, mixed media and found objects, dimensions variable. Photo: Rhett Hammerton. © Tjanpi Desert Weavers, NPY Women’s Council. Reproduced with permission of the artists.

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culture prior to and following frontier conflict – having been led by senior artists, many of whom were among the first generation to see colonizers, and extended by younger generations of artists in their articulation of the new frontier of Western influence.

Tjituru-tjituru: There is no Song for this Work. It is too Sad. While the Kulata Tjuta project has antecedents in the traditional spearmaking in defence of Country, and more recently for tourist production, the weaving of desert grasses, or tjanpi, to make vessels and sculptures can be traced to several wellsprings. Officially, contemporary tjanpi weaving began in 1995 at a series of workshops facilitated by the Ngaanyatjarra Pitjantjatjara Yankunytjatjara (NPY) Women’s Council and, like the spearmaking initiative, it also ‘spread like wildfire’ across the Lands, to quote Kaika-Burton. Today, more than 400 women artists from twenty-eight communities across three states or territories – South Australia, Western Australia and the Northern Territory – work as part of the extended network that is Tjanpi Desert Weavers. This proliferation of activity and artistic agency can be attributed to several factors, including the long history of making manguri, the hair and fibre-string rings placed on the head when carrying a piti, and the making of wiltja (shelters). Other contact precedents include the activities undertaken in the Ernabella craft room at Pukatja from as early as 1948, which included the weaving of rugs from the wool left by sheep as they rubbed against the fences of the Ernabella mission station. Just as the making of kulata requires a deep understanding of the habits of certain plant species, tjanpi weaving relies on deep knowledge of local desert grasses, including minarri (Amphipogon caricinus) and wangurnu (Eragrostis eriopoda), which are gathered by hand by women across the Lands. This endemic plant material is augmented with materials such as raffia (an introduced palm fibre) and found materials. The resulting objects are made from, and of, Country, as Kaika-Burton explains: We have very strong feelings towards our grasses, we love them. They have sustained our lives forever. So when people ask us about our tjanpi grasses and we say they have Tjukurpa, we really mean it. Our grasses have great Tjukurpa. The grasses that are important to us are the grasses that are useful for us, or they feed us with their seeds. And they are strong enough to be used to make sculptures. Food grasses and straining grasses and padding grasses, and all the grasses that keep us alive, are absolutely vital . . . the fibres with which these items are made are of historical value and have sustained Aboriginal life in the desert since the beginning, and that these grasses themselves are of inestimable value.17

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IMAGE 2.5 Tjituru-tjituru, detail, 2015, by Mary Katatjuku Pan. Tjanpi, raffia, acrylic wool, jute/linen string, wire, acrylic paint, camouflage garments, plastic flowers, mixed media and found objects, dimensions variable. Photo: Rhett Hammerton. © Mary Katatjuku Pan/Tjanpi Desert Weavers/ NPY Women’s Council 2015. Reproduced with permission of the artist.

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IMAGE 2.6 Tjituru-tjituru, detail, 2015, by Mary Katatjuku Pan. Tjanpi, raffia, acrylic wool, jute/linen string, wire, acrylic paint, camouflage garments, plastic flowers, mixed media and found objects, dimensions variable. Photo: Rhett Hammerton. © Mary Katatjuku Pan/Tjanpi Desert Weavers/ NPY Women’s Council 2015. Reproduced with permission of the artist.

Kaika-Burton’s explanation suggests the ameliorative role of tjanpi for artists and communities. Biddle argues that such practices testify to sovereignty and that ‘this testimony is irrepressibly sentient: rough, redolent, haptic; distinctly female, embodied and performative. A high gendered atmospherics of minoritarian aesthetics built-in as it were – the feel and smell of desert lifeworld – to each object’.18 In 2015 artists Rene Wanuny Kulitja, Judy Ukampari Trigger, Erica Ikungka Shorty, Lucille Armstrong, Mary Katajuku Pan, Kunmanara (Janet) Inyika, Kunmanara (Niningka) Lewis, Freda Teamay and non-Aboriginal artist Fiona Hall19 gathered for a two-week bush camp at Mutitjulu, near Uluru, arguably Australia’s most sentient landmark. Facilitated by Jo Foster, the bush camp was motivated by the Art Gallery of South Australia exhibition Sappers and Shrapnel: Contemporary Art and the Art of the

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Trenches, supported through the Australian Government’s Anzac Centenary Arts and Culture Fund, an exhibition project that invited contemporary artists to make new work to commemorate the ‘war to end all wars’. Curated by the author, the 2016–17 exhibition brought together the work of contemporary artists Tony Albert, Olga Cironis, Nicholas Folland, Brett Graham, Fiona Hall, Richard Lewer, Alasdair McLuckie, Baden Pailthorpe, Ben Quilty, Sera Waters and Tjanpi Desert Weavers, with artefacts created by Tasmanian-born First World War sapper Keith Pearl and other examples of trench art drawn from the Australian War Memorial’s collection. The curatorial inclusion of the Tjanpi Desert Weavers was influenced by the author’s 2013 exhibition Heartland, co-curated with Barkandji curator Nici Cumpston, which included two large bodies of sculptural tjanpi exhibited in conversation with a precursory presentation of the Kulata Tjuta project, which brought together painting and kulata. More pertinently, the positioning of the Tjanpi Desert Weavers within this curatorial framework recognized that, just as the trench artists of the First World War had crafted votive offerings in the crucible of conflict to preserve their health and sanity, these women artists a century later understood the redemptive power of artmaking and its potential as weapon and shield. A visit to the Australian War Memorial preceded the bush camp and proved instrumental for the artists, with the showcases of fugitive forms crafted from the discards of war holding them captive and inspiring a response suitable for a new landscape and a new conflict. Hearing stories about Aboriginal war veterans also proved influential, with the belated national recognition that at least 1,000 Indigenous Australians, some from the desert communities where these artists now live, had fought in the First World War. The bush camp, held some months later, began with the question of what anxieties a war fought in the trenches would have raised, although the consideration of European frontiers, underscored by the visit to Canberra, were supplanted by the ensuing experience of frontier conflict for Anangu. For Anangu, the trenches of invasion persist, and Country continues to bear witness. While these discussions were had on Country, the response offered is of Country and comprises the large installation titled Tjituru-tjituru. Almost onomatopoeic, this Pitjantjatjara expression describes the feeling of worry and anxiety. Most certainly somatic, the expression is performed by the body when uttered, with its repetition underscoring its effect. The work itself – a contemporary art installation – comprises a cavalcade of vehicles including pushchairs, a baby capsule, a walker, a scooter and a toy wheelbarrow. The choice of nurturing or protective vessels embodies the artists’ fears for the next generations of Anangu, but also offers, in symbolic form, safety and sanctuary for the children of the future. Like the Kulata Tjuta project, Tjituru-tjituru too is apotropaic in intent. Hunted and collected from a nearby tip, the objects are all transformed by the artists’ weaving, wrapping, binding, modelling, painting, pyrography and punu (woodworking). In this desert convoy, many of the vessels are empty – their

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occupants stolen by the insidious frontiers of colonization and the attendant neglect, violence, poverty and substance abuse. Desert grasses and brilliantly hued wool shroud the vehicles; walka panels, featuring pokerwork and paint, adorn their chassis; sewn crucifixes replace small bodies in some works; small punu ngintaka (lizards carved from mulga wood) play scout, while hypercoloured synthetic flowers festoon several of the vehicles. These drought-hardy blooms are the floral tributes known as ‘sorry flowers’ – seen too often in desert country to mark the site of a tragedy, too often involving the young. In fact, the camp site selected was distinguished by the nearby presence of a large eucalypt encircled in sorry flowers – lurid blooms marking the site of recent and historic tragedy. As Rene Wanuny Kulitja articulates: This work is about tragedy, grief and sadness. We talked together and decided to make this installation to illustrate our collective understanding of it. Our sadness comes from stories of intergenerational trauma and memories of grief and loss. We now know that we suffer today from an inherited trauma, which is passed down to us through our grandfathers and grandmothers, who also carried it from before, and who suffered the same. We understand that we carry their memories within us, and old traumas live on in us. Those old stories are told and re-told, and the sadness and grief never goes away. It is present in our lives every day, in so many ways. We were told that during the post-contact period, our family members who lived in the traditional way suffered from many wars and executions. Groups of men armed with spears killed many people. There were fights and wars and many people died. People were speared to death, and their stories are never to be forgotten. They died by the spear. Our fathers remember our great-grandmothers and our great-grandfathers. They are grieved over it still today. This story goes back in time. It is what happened then. Yet what happened a long time ago still resonates today. We remember them. Each memory brings us pain and sorrow. In these modern times the story of death and loss continues, but differently. We made a number of prams, which were intended for our children. They were intended for our young women to be. They were intended for our young men to be. But those young men and women were born as babies but never lived to grow up. They never were. They all died. The baby carriers are all empty. Inside the prams, there is nothing, no person, no life. They are for the ones who were born but never lived. The dead people now lie in cemeteries. Our cemeteries are full of dead people. We made these graves here, to represent the depth of our loss and our grief for the people that never were. Dogs suffer the same. Dogs and puppies are left behind when their friend and owner dies. The dogs howl and cry, expressing their loss and lonesomeness, as we do. There is no song for this work. It is too sad.20

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IMAGE 2.7 Tjituru-tjituru, detail, 2015, by Mary Katatjuku Pan. Tjanpi, raffia, acrylic wool, jute/linen string, wire, acrylic paint, camouflage garments, plastic flowers, mixed media and found objects, dimensions variable. Photo: Rhett Hammerton. © Mary Katatjuku Pan/Tjanpi Desert Weavers/NPY Women’s Council 2015. Reproduced with permission of the artist.

Several of the Anangu artists, including Kulitja, Mary Katajuku Pan and Kunmanara (Niningka) Lewis, support multidisciplinary and muchcelebrated cultural practices: they are painters, sculptors, singers, performers of traditional inma and cultural custodians par excellence. While on camp, the artists worked both collaboratively and singularly, with conversation, silence and song eddying through the process, sparking innovation and enabling resolution. Pan and Lewis are also among the eyewitnesses and victims of the mid-twentieth-century scientific and military frontier. In the recordings made for the Tjanpi Desert Weavers installation in the 2015 Venice Biennale, as part of their collaboration with Australia’s representative artist Fiona Hall (a project that preceded and prepared the ground for the Sappers and Shrapnel commission), Mary Pan presents a eulogy for Country: Those of us that work on Land Management get to occasionally see tjakura (great desert skink lizard) and nganamara (mallee fowl) but only very rarely. Most of our small mammals disappeared when we were just tiny children. All those animals disappeared. The bomb killed a lot of people, and we were all affected. My mother never reached Ernabella. She died before she got there, from the bomb. I walked into Ernabella

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with just my father, older brother and sister, that’s all. Our family was supposed to be safe in Ernabella. I walked into Ernabella on my own two feet, and we were supposed to be safe in Ernabella, but people died in Ernabella. People died on Witjinti, Granite Downs. People died at Mimili. People died in many other places. People died in Ernabella. I can’t keep this story inside. Sometimes I have to talk about it. Put this story in the catalogue because not enough people know about it. I can never forget what happened to us.21 Pan’s woven stroller carries a tjitji (child), wounded and helpless, with just one eye. Biddle suggests that this could be a direct reference to Yami Lester’s loss of sight as a consequence of the atomic testing. It mostly certainly refers to the blinding, and blind-siding, of Australians both at the time of the testing and thereafter, and poses the question of how art can act as a conduit for broader Australia’s recognition of the frontier wars. As Pan demands, ‘put this story in the catalogue because not enough people know about it’. Attached to the back of the pram are two walka panels, one of which depicts ‘Captain Cook’ and the other a masted ship. As Biddle claims, ‘Tjanpi is counter-history. It provides for the first time, original witness, testimony – Anangu historical perspectives and experiences – to the national archive and historical memory. Crucially important, it does so by providing memory and counter-history in Anangu-specific form.’22 This approach, gently pervasive in so much art made by women artists from the APY Lands, is possessed by a rematriative spirit where art provides agency and amelioration for collective healing from historic and current-day trauma. Just as the Kulata Tjuta project engages generations of men, intergenerational mentoring between older and younger women is integral to tjanpi work too. For example, younger artist Erica Ikungka Shorty, who resides in the community of Warakurna in Western Australia, first became involved in the Tjanpi Desert Weavers during the Mutitjulu bush camp. There is strong evidence to suggest that these cultural practices with

IMAGE 2.8 Niningka’s Tjukurpa (Board One), 2020, by Kunmanara (Niningka) Lewis. Pyrography, synthetic polymer paint on plywood, 80.0 × 240.0 × 3.0 cm. © Kunmanara (Niningka) Lewis/Maruku Arts & Crafts.

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IMAGE 2.9 Niningka’s Tjukurpa (Board Two), 2020, by Kunmanara (Niningka) Lewis. Pyrography, synthetic polymer paint on plywood, 80.0 × 240.0 × 3.0 cm. © Kunmanara (Niningka) Lewis/Maruku Arts & Crafts.

outcomes delivered in the sphere of contemporary art have also led to positive social outcomes for young men and women. In his rallying speech upon being announced as the winner of the 2019 Ramsay Art Prize, Vincent Namatjira presented his version of a battle cry heard in varying forms across communities and generations, when he declared, ‘Art is a weapon. Art changed my life. Art can change the world.’

Trojan Horses from the Desert Rarely didactic or one dimensional in meaning, Anangu art can be viewed as a Trojan horse for a radical retelling of history. Among its clandestine warriors is Kunmanara (Niningka) Lewis, who as well as collaborating in the Tjanpi Desert Weaver work Tjituru-tjituru, was included in the Tarnanthi 2020 exhibition Open Hands, at the Art Gallery of South Australia. A history painting and a life-writing in one, Lewis’s diptych titled Niningka’s Tjukurpa chronicles the ongoing frontier wars for Anangu rendered as the artist’s own life story. Drawn with fire by using pyrography and augmented with brightly coloured acrylic paint, the elongated walka panels span approximately two and a half metres. The correlation between death and flowers seen in Tjituru-tjituru prevails – however, rather than a direct reference to funerary blooms, Niningka’s Tjukurpa calls up the story of Walter MacDougall, who was appointed by Aboriginal welfare departments in the tri-state area to relocate Indigenous populations ahead of the atomic testing period. Appointed to patrol more than 1 million square kilometres, MacDougall is remembered in the ‘Mr Mac’ song. As Lewis explains, I also burned into the board all the new dirt roads to all communities and when Mr Mac (Mr MacDougall) came to Warakurna with the yellow truck for the first time and all Anangu started singing the song from the

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yellow flowers because the truck was yellow. Old people still sing sometimes the Mr Mac song.23 Overlaying this seemingly benign encounter is the reality of MacDougall’s impossible task and the concomitant atrocity whereby Country was declared abandoned and the testing was carried out, resulting in the infliction of radiation, the loss of traditional homelands and the dispersal of Anangu. Lewis catalogues this litany of devastation with candour when she explains: The walka boards depicts the story of my family, the way my grandparents lived, what happened when the first white people came to Anangu land, about the Maralinga bomb, how Mr MacDougall helped, how life was when I was a little girl and how my children and grandchildren live today . . . I painted the people who came and build a camp and fired the Maralinga bomb and how all life around us died. All Anangu got sick and trees and animals got poisoned, even far away.24 Niningka’s Tjukurpa, like the Kulata Tjuta project and the installation work Tjituru-tjituru, offers not only an account of the historical and enduring violence faced by Anangu from the frontier wars. Through its articulation of this hidden history, it also offers a method to resist, repel and relieve that violence. Whether expressed through walka panels, kulata or tjanpi, all three art projects reveal hidden stories of colonial violence told from Anangu perspectives. All three assert Anangu identity and, with it, unwavering Anangu connections to Country – as the sites of origin of these stories and as the eternal sites of Tjukurpa, as a source of food and as a place to obtain materials for weapons, tools and art-making, all necessary to sustain temporal, spiritual and cultural life on Country. As works of art, all three projects demonstrate the unsuppressed strength of Anangu culture, both in making traditional cultural material and in its adaptive vitality in finding new forms of creative expression. And through them as contemporary art, Anangu have found a means of articulating to a broader audience – in Australia and overseas – their stories, their identity, their connection to Country and their robust culture. When contemporary Anangu art reveals itself, it shows that the frontier wars have not concluded. The battleground remains actively contested and defended.

Notes 1 ‘The Killing Times’, The Guardian, www.theguardian.com/australia-news/ ng-interactive/2019/mar/04/massacre-map-australia-the-killing-times-frontierwars, accessed September 2020.

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2 The two main languages spoken on the Anangu Pitjantjatjara Yankunytjatjara Lands are Pitjantjatjara and Yankunytjatjara – the word Anangu is used by Pitjantjatjara and Yankunytjatjara people to describe themselves. 3 Anna Haebich, ‘Forgetting Indigenous Histories: Cases from the History of Australia’s Stolen Generations’, Journal of Social History, vol. 44, no. 4 (2011): 1039. 4 Burrinja, Black Mist Burnt Country national touring exhibition website, https://blackmistburntcountry.com.au/index.php/resources/history/, accessed October 2020. 5 ‘Referendum Council Report’, Uluru Statement from the Heart website, https://ulurustatement.org/our-story, accessed September 2020. 6 Daniel Browning, ‘Award-winning Art Spearheads Cultural Revival in the APY Lands’, ABC website, 15 August 2017, www.abc.net.au/news/2017-08-15/ art-spearheads-cultural-revival-in-the-apy-lands/8807634, accessed September 2020. 7 Mrs Kaika-Burton, ‘Spreading like Wildfire: The ‘Kulata Tjuta Project’ in the APY lands’, Art Monthly Australasia, Issue 298 (May 2017): 32–3. 8 Kulata (spears) are referenced in the large men’s collaborative painting commissioned by Australian War Memorial in 2017 called Kulatangku angakanyini manta munu Tjukurpa (Country and Culture will be protected by spears). 9 Sammy Dodd, in Anna Wattler (ed.), Kulata Tjuta (Adelaide: Art Gallery of South Australia, 2020), 80. 10 Mrs Kaika-Burton, ‘Spreading like Wildfire’, 32–3. 11 Frank Young, ‘Weapons for the Soldier’, in Claire Armstrong and Hannah Kothe (eds), Weapons for the Soldier: Protecting Country, Culture and Family (Hazelhurst: Hazelhurst Arts Centre, 2018), 8–9. 12 Professor Ian McLean derived the title for his 2018 publication Rattling Spears: A History of Indigenous Australian Art after experiencing this work of art in the 2014 Adelaide Biennial of Australian Art. 13 Mick Wikilyiri, in Kulata Tjuta, 44. 14 RTG Minor Cosmopolitanisms ‘Summer School Sydney 2018’ programme, session 3, University of Potsdam website, www.uni-potsdam.de/en/ minorcosmopolitanisms/activities/summer-school-sydney-2018/program, accessed September 2020. 15 Liz Tynan, ‘Sixty Years On, the Maralinga Bomb Tests Remind Us Not to Put Security over Safety’, The Conversation website, 26 September 2016, https:// theconversation.com/sixty-years-on-the-maralinga-bomb-tests-remind-us-notto-put-security-over-safety-62441, accessed September 2020. 16 Suzie Keen, ‘Lessons to be Learned from Maralinga’, InDaily website, 12 November 2014, https://indaily.com.au/arts-and-culture/2014/11/12/ lessons-learned-maralinga/, accessed October 2020. 17 Mrs Kaika-Burton, Artist Talk for String Theory. Recordings made by Linda Rive with transcription and translation by Linda Rive, Museum of Contemporary Art, Sydney, 2013.

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18 Jennifer L. Biddle, ‘Tjituru Tjituru: Tjanpi Desert Weavers and the Art of Indigenous Survivance’, Australian Feminist Studies: Special Edition on Feminist Environment Humanities, vol. 34, no. 102 (2019): 429. 19 In 2014 Hall and her Anangu collaborators also camped out in the bush near Wingellina (Irrunytju) to create new work for the 2014 TarraWarra Biennial: Whisper in my Mask. One of these works, titled Kuka Irititja (Animals from Other Times), was included in Hall’s 2015 Venice Biennale installation Wrong Way Time, with its sculpted animal forms referencing the legion of native animals endangered by introduced species and habitat loss. 20 Rene Wanuny Kulitja, Tjukurpa Tjituru-tjituru – Tragedy, Grief and Sadness. Recordings made by Linda Rive with transcription and translation by Linda Rive, 26 August, Desert Knowledge Centre, Alice Springs, 2016. 21 Mary Katajuku Pan, in recordings made by Jo Foster with transcription and translation by Linda Rive, for Kuka Irititja, Tjanpi Desert Weavers installation in the Australian Pavilion, Venice Biennale 2015, 23–26 September 2014. 22 Jennifer Biddle, ‘A Politics of Proximity: Tjanpi and Other Experimental Desert Arts’, Studies in Material Thinking, vol. 8 (May 2012): 4. 23 Kunmanara (Niningka) Lewis, ‘Tarnanthi 2020: Open Hands’, Maruku Arts website, 15 October 2020, https://maruku.com.au/blog/tarnanthi-2020-openhands/, accessed October 2020. 24 Ibid.

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CHAPTER THREE

War (Art) What Is It Good For? Anthea Gunn and Laura Webster

IMAGE 3.1 Unknown Soldier [Gangurru Camouflage], 2012–13, by Tony Albert. Acrylic on paper, 30.6 × 21 cm. ART94996, official war artist 2012, NORFORCE © Tony Albert 2012–13. Reproduced with the permission of the artist and Sullivan+Strumpf.

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What comes to mind for most Australians asked to consider art at the Australian War Memorial? As the nation’s memorial for those killed in military service, it is likely that many would think of traditional works depicting battle scenes or commemorative works: George Lambert’s Anzac, The Landing, 1915, for instance, or Will Longstaff’s iconic Midnight at Menin Gate of 1927, the soaring mosaic ceiling of the Hall of Memory or the heritage-listed dioramas of the First World War galleries. Less well known is the growing collection of contemporary art and, consequently, there are few considerations of the unique context of the Memorial for its display. Australia’s military history and contemporary art intersect at the national memorial in compelling ways. Our research for the exhibition Art in Conflict led us to consider what art does at the Memorial: what does it offer the viewer that other exhibits (of vehicles, uniforms, weapons and so on) do not? And what does this in turn tell us about contemporary art? In this chapter we propose four broad categories in which to consider the roles art plays in this commemorative museum. First, we look at works by official war artists and others in response to recent conflicts. Second, we turn to the works by Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander artists recently acquired by the Memorial that respond to both ADF service and frontier conflict. Third, we consider the work of artists revisiting historical events. Finally, we examine works focused on personal experience. We conclude with an analysis of Megan Cope’s recent official war art commission as a body of work that exemplifies all the above categories. This follows the thematic structure of the exhibition, but it also includes artworks from the whole contemporary collection not just those included in Art in Conflict, since some of the landmark acquisitions of the period are on permanent display at the AWM or are too large to travel. Before considering these categories, we will outline the context for this research and the features of contemporary art that differentiate it from earlier war art. The exhibition Art in Conflict is an outcome of the Australian Research Council Linkage Project of the same name that considers contemporary art acquisitions at the AWM since 2007. The period of enquiry started with the deployment of Lyndell Brown and Charles Green as official war artists. This marked a shift towards ambitious acquisitions of conceptually rigorous, uncompromising contemporary art, and away from commissions of well-regarded but traditional figurative painters.1 Recent scholarship has established that prior to the twenty-first century, war art was generally defined on a binary as either pro- or anti-war.2 That is, it was produced, often commissioned, for deliberate nation-defining purposes or made as a protest against war. These models have not translated readily to a contemporary world defined by globalization, post-colonialism, digital communications and military technologies, nor by the rise of diffuse, intractable conflicts driven by terrorism and civil wars. Sue Malvern has summarized the change in war art around the start of the new millennium: ‘for contemporary artists, it is not a matter of unthinking

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IMAGE 3.2 Installation view of Art in Conflict, Australian War Memorial touring exhibition, Shepparton Art Museum, March 2022, including works by Kumanara (Ray) Ken, Shirley Macnamara, Kapua Gutchen and Jack Green, David Jolly, Shane Cotton, Sriwhana Spong, Mike Parr, Richard Lewer. Photo: Christian Capurro. Image courtesy Shepparton Art Museum.

repetitions of protest models from the twentieth century but a question of how to locate agency in relation to social structures and how to address the complexity of conflict in the twenty-first century’.3 Within the AWM collection the period reveals a fascinating intersection between Australia’s role in globalized conflicts and some defining characteristics of much contemporary art: its contemporaneity, the archival turn and a historiographic aesthetic. Because these three characteristics have proven particularly relevant for artists’ responses to both Australia’s experiences of conflict (past and present) and to the Memorial and its collection, we will briefly consider them here. To say that contemporary art is defined by ‘contemporaneity’ can sound staggeringly obvious, but in Terry Smith’s influential work interrogating the conceptual basis of contemporary art globally, the nature and experience of time is fundamental. Contemporaneity itself is the most evident attribute of the current world picture, encompassing its most distinctive qualities, from the interactions between humans and the geosphere, through the multeity of cultures and the ideoscape of global politics to the interiority of individual being. This picture can no longer be adequately characterised by terms such as ‘modernity’ and ‘post modernity’, not least because it is shaped by friction between antinomies so intense that it resists universal generalisation – indeed, it resists even generalisation about that resistance.4

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Contemporaneity is a defining characteristic of many works in the collection and is particularly apparent when they are viewed together in the exhibition Art in Conflict. For example, the official war art from the deployments of Brown and Green (2007), Susan Norrie (2015) and Megan Cope (2017) respond simultaneously to recent events as well as to the long histories of the Middle East, globalization and colonialism. In various ways they locate their personal perspective and experience within and alongside much broader, complex systems and histories. One of these histories is that of the Memorial itself, and more particularly the official war art scheme. The ‘archival turn’ (or more recently ‘archivalism’) of contemporary art has limitless potential when applied to the deeply symbolic, yet equally bureaucratic, collections at the AWM.5 Ian McLean’s exploration of the ‘conceptual innovations of contemporary archival art’ identifies it as a methodology that ‘allows artists to address some of the more unfathomable speculations of our era without proposing the definitive answer’.6 McLean found that artists’ turning to archives to tell new stories and produce knowledge deeply resonates with the human instinct for order, or at least for organization: ‘This archive we call culture is not a cold file of documents frozen in perpetuity, but a hot machine shuffling our memories and forgetting, erasing old ones and making new ones that speak to and from the present.’7 Shuffling memories is an apt description for recent commissioning projects, including the Anzac Centenary Print Portfolio and a series of artist exchange residencies in the Asia Pacific in which artists had opportunities to research across Memorial collections (art, photographs, film, sound, historic objects, and personal and official archives.) Delving into archives to reveal new stories and unearth different histories also reveals how history itself is understood. Former AWM Head of Art Ryan Johnston identified the prevalence of this in contemporary art, contextualizing Tom Nicholson’s Comparative monument (Palestine), (2012) acquired by the AWM in 2012, and commenting that ‘a renewed focus on the formulation and ethics of both history and memory, as well as the multiple and often convoluted paths between the two, has emerged as one of the most salient features of artistic practice in recent times, both in Australia and elsewhere’.8 The AWM partnered with the National Museum of Singapore for one of the Asia Pacific exchange residencies (Singaporean artist Debbie Ding spent a month at the AWM and Australian artist Angela Tiatia at the NMS). Curators Wong Hong Suen and Kathleen Ditzig considered the commissions through June Yap’s framework of the ‘historiographical aesthetic’.9 Yap considers contemporary artists’ responses to the recent histories of Singapore and Malaysia, entwined with themes of nation, colonialism and post-colonialism. The ‘historiographical aesthetic’ highlights work in which historic events are not merely depicted, but the formation of history itself is the subject, bringing to light ‘histories variously neglected, suppressed, suspended, and left behind’.10 Many recent commissions at the AWM can be understood within this framework,

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IMAGE 3.3 Comparative monument (Palestine), 2012, by Tom Nicholson. Installation, size variable, ART96669. Australian War Memorial Collection © Tom Nicholson 2012. Reproduced with the permission of the artist and Milani Gallery, Meanjin/Brisbane. including those of Ding and Tiatia which engage with the institution and Australia’s military history. The artists’ responses to conflict bring to light untold stories, revealing neglected histories and consequently bring greater complexity to our understanding of both the history, and the historiography, of Australia’s experience of conflict. Contemporaneity, archivalism and the historiographical aesthetic feature widely in contemporary art but are especially relevant to an institution as redolent with potent symbolism as a national memorial. The body of work that Brown and Green created as official war artists superficially appeared illustrative but was conceptually rigorous and carefully positioned with regard to histories of the region and the global politics of conflict.11 This effectively straddles the two traditional uses of art within the AWM galleries: to offer a visual element alongside other collection items, and to present the artists’ unique perspectives and nuanced approaches to history. This contributes to an ongoing historiography through artists’ responses to Australia’s role in conflicts since the First World War. The contemporary art acquired by the AWM since 2007 continues the long-held purpose of the

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collection to ‘record and interpret the Australian experience of war’ while simultaneously probing the intent of that purpose. We will now turn to the four categories of contemporary work in the collection that demonstrate the varied roles of art at the AWM.

Contemporary Conflict The most obvious role for art at the AWM is as a visual record of military events. Starting during the First World War, official war artists were deployed to witness war at first hand and record it for posterity. (The AWM soon started to acquire non-commissioned work as well.) The first question usually asked about official war art is whether artists are told what to depict. The answer is no. ‘Official’ in this context refers to their official deployment, not the art that they make. Artists are free to create an independent response – this independence is, of course, being exercised in the most complex of circumstances, the implications of which scholars have explored both in relation to the AWM and war art internationally.12 Since Green and Brown’s official war art commission in 2007 some of Australia’s leading contemporary artists have responded to Australia’s experience of recent conflict, including Jon Cattapan (Timor-Leste, 2008), eX de Medici (Solomon Islands, 2009), Shaun Gladwell (Afghanistan, 2009), Ben Quilty (Afghanistan, 2011), Tony Albert (NORFORCE, 2012), Alick Tipoti (51st Far North Queensland Regiment,  2016), Susan Norrie (Iraq, 2016) and Megan Cope (Middle East, 2017). The works range from Cattapan’s night vision works with their overlays of topography, data and surveillance that interconnect the past, present and future; eX de Medici’s exquisite watercolours combining the past and present in a single image telling the complexities of Peacekeeping in Solomon Islands; through to Quilty’s forceful portraits of individuals burdened with the psychological effects of service. We will explore just one of these works as exemplifying the contemporary potential for this most traditional of commissioning projects. The recently completed work by Susan Norrie can be understood in relation to all three of the characteristics proposed above as features of contemporary art in the collection. Especially through the historiographical aesthetic, it responds to the historical complexity that led to present-day conflicts while revealing how history itself is recorded. In 2016 the Memorial commissioned Norrie as an official war artist and asked her to interpret and respond to the Australian contribution to the operations in the Middle East and more specifically Camp Taji in Iraq.13 The time leading up to her deployment and during was a heightened period of Iraqi/ISIS conflict where the focus of the Australian forces was to train and assist in coordinating an approach for Iraqi troops to retake Mosul from ISIS. Norrie spent much time prior to her deployment researching the politics and histories of Iraq and the Middle

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IMAGE 3.4 War and Peace #14. The Fire Within, 2014, by Jon Cattapan, Lyndell Brown and Charles Green. Mixed media, 126.8 × 148.9 cm, ART96756, Australian War Memorial Collection. © Jon Cattapan, Lyndell Brown and Charles Green 2014. Courtesy Station and ARC One.

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IMAGE 3.5 Tetanus, 2009, by eX de Medici. Watercolour on paper, 114 × 176 cm, ART94226, official war artist 2009, Solomon Islands. Donated through the Australian Government’s Cultural Gifts Program by eX de Medici 2011 © eX de Medici 2009. Courtesy the Australian War Memorial.

East and the complexities they present with current conflicts. The resultant work Spheres of Influence (2016–19) is a twenty-five-minute, single-channel, quasi-documentary styled video artwork filmed by Norrie at both Camp Taji and the Palace of Versailles. Norrie uses elements of didactic documentary practice which allow a reading of historical authority, but she also combines disparate footage in ways that can ‘stimulate the viewer into thinking differently and thinking politically’.14 Norrie’s experiences as an artist deployed with the Allied forces at Camp Taji allowed her to document and encapsulate through video what she viewed of the soldier’s daily lives. The ‘personal diary’, as Norrie describes it, depicts the soldiers (Australian and Iraqi) training and interacting with the Iraqi civilians who provide services at the camps during their ‘downtime’. Interestingly, she was also permitted to film in the Prayer Room and the Iraqi Commander-in-Chief’s garden. The series of discrete film sequences create an experience of camp life amidst turmoil, albeit one that provides a deliberately ambiguous sense of this experience. Norrie juxtaposed the sequences from Camp Taji with footage she filmed at the Palace of Versailles while roaming the galleries with Salah Al-Hamdani – an Iraqi poet, dissident and former Iraqi Army veteran who spent time at Camp Taji in the late 1960s. This footage is overlaid with excerpts from a

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IMAGE 3.6 Still from Spheres of Influence, 2016–19, by Susan Norrie. Single channel video, 26:44 minutes, AWM2018.217.1. Australian War Memorial Collection © Susan Norrie 2016–19. Reproduced with permission of the artist.

IMAGE 3.7 Still from Spheres of Influence, 2016–19, by Susan Norrie. Single channel video, 26:44 minutes, AWM2018.217.1. Australian War Memorial Collection © Susan Norrie 2016–19. Reproduced with permission of the artist.

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series of interviews Norrie conducted with him. At first glance the footage from Taji and Versailles appear unrelated, but Norrie teases out the connections through Salah Al-Hamdani’s voiceover. As someone who has had direct experience of their consequences, Norrie invites Salah to be a voice for these contested histories and conflicts in the Middle East. Al-Hamdani speaks to his own history, military service and imprisonment. He provides his thoughts on the current conflicts within the Middle East and how they relate back to the Treaty of Versailles and the agreements made 100 years ago, and comments on the current and ongoing struggles of the Iraqi people. Norrie’s film underscores the objective of Australian involvement at Camp Taji – the provision of essential training for the Iraqi soldiers and the military commitment to defeat ISIS insurgents – but it also provides contextual, historical elements of the contested histories and narratives that invite the viewer to contemplate where we have come from, where we are now and where are we going. She places Australia’s role in its global, historical context, revealing how history privileges some narratives over others. Commissions have also been undertaken to address specific gaps identified in the collection. The commissioning of Hazara Australian artist Khadim Ali in 2014 was a purposeful curatorial decision to provide the Memorial’s collection a viewpoint on the Afghan war from a non-Western perspective, and by an artist with a close investment and knowledge of Afghanistan. Ali grew up on the Pakistan/Afghanistan border, but his family’s traditional home is Bamiyan in Afghanistan. His grandfather fled Bamiyan in the late 1890s following a massacre of Hazara, and his family have lived in exile ever since.15 Ali’s life and that of his family have been irrevocably altered by the ongoing centuries of conflicts in Afghanistan. Like Norrie, Ali’s work can be understood in all the terms outlined above, but his use of traditional iconography for a deliberate contemporary purpose is particularly striking within the context of archivalism. Throughout his work, Ali employs traditional Afghan and Hazara histories, motifs, artistic techniques and myths to reflect on the current situation in Afghanistan and convey the complex histories of the region. The 1000-year-old Persian epic the  Shahnameh (Book of Kings), written in the tenth century by the great poet Ferdowsi, is one such myth. As a young child, Ali would sit by his grandfather as he sang the stories for their family. One of its mythological heroes is Rustam, known for his extraordinary strength, bravery and loyalty. The large woven woollen carpet Transition/evacuation (2015) depicts the figure of Rustam holding a demon figure upside down. The dark upsidedown figure represents the Taliban supported by Pakistan while the Rustam figure represents the International Coalition Against Terrorism (ICAT) which includes the United Kingdom, the United States and Australia. For Ali all groups demonize and dehumanize the other – the Allied forces are demonized by Taliban and other forces in Afghanistan, while the Taliban are

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IMAGE 3.8 Transition/Evacuation, 2015, by Khadim Ali. Gouache, ink and gold leaf on wasli paper, 71 × 56.1 cm, ART96910, Commissioned by the Australian War Memorial 2015. © Khadim Ali 2015. Courtesy the Australian War Memorial.

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also demonized in return. Both figures are bearded in reference to the Taliban. As Rachel Kent observes, the original illustrations of the demons and of Rustam, associated with the Shahnameh, had no beards, suggesting that ‘Ali’s demons appropriated this characteristic as a way of linking past history with the present situation’.16 The lions at the feet of the figures were created with Afghan artist Sher Ali, then living in Afghanistan. Traditionally, the lion was a symbol of a strong and proud people and nation in Afghanistan, but here they are almost akin to toothless circus lions, kow-towing to international and fundamentalist influences, awaiting the outcome of the battle before them. It explores the lack of agency experienced by many Afghan groups and the resulting frustration which often leads to further violence. As Ali’s work contends, all are invaders and each rewrites the histories of Afghanistan for their own purposes and legitimation. The strength of the works as part of the Memorial’s collection is that they present insights into the complex cultural and historical landscape of Afghanistan, and they provide an historical context to the contemporary conflicts in this region from the perspective of the Hazara still living there. The importance of different voices within the collection has been a priority for art acquisitions in the period under discussion, especially those of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander communities.

Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Histories Even a cursory glance over the work acquired in the past decade reveals profound change to the collection through acquisitions of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander art. The AWM’s long overdue reckoning with the underrepresentation of Indigenous military service made these acquisitions a pressing and urgent concern. They are also relevant to a consideration of the nature of contemporary art at the Memorial and what it offers audiences. The works acquired relate to Indigenous peoples’ experiences of conflict on their lands and/or in the military. The artists whose work has been acquired include, among others, Tony Albert (Girramay, Kuku Yalanji); Megan Cope (Quandamooka); Shirley Macnamara (Camooweal, Indilanji, Dhidhanu, Alyawarre); Albert Namatjira (Arrente); Glenda Nicholls (Wadi Wadi, Yorta Yorta, Ngarrindjeri); Laurie Nona (Kala Lagaw Ya); Patrick Freddy Puruntatameri (Tiwi); Yhonnie Scarce (Kokatha, Nukunu); Andrew Snelgar (Ngemba); Alick Tipoti (Kala Lagaw Ya); Rosie Ware (Mer Wag, Besi); and Vicki West (Trawlwoolway). One of the most significant commissions undertaken during this period reveals the extent of these ongoing changes. In 2017 the AWM collaborated with the APY Art Centre Collective on a major new painting for permanent display in the Memorial’s first gallery. The purpose of the commission was to recognize the long history of defending Country by Indigenous owners. Reciprocal visits were made by AWM curators and the artists to the Anangu

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Pitjantjatjara Yankunytjatjara (APY) Lands, South Australia and the AWM. Nineteen male elders then met on the Lands to collaborate on the 2 × 5 metre painting. Keith Stevens, a Nyapari traditional owner and artist, explained the importance of such commissions: ‘I’m living here because of the Country that we look after, the Tjukurpa that our ancestors left, that our fathers left for us. We are telling the world that we’ve got our Country, we look after our Country, and that is why we are strong.’17 Integral to the project was cultural exchange and inviting the tjilpies (elders) to tell their own story in this prominent location in the Memorial. Another landmark commission (literally) was to recognize Indigenous service in the Australian military in the AWM’s Sculpture Garden. An advisory committee including Ngunnawal elders and Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander military veterans and curators collaborated with AWM staff to develop the brief for the sculpture and assess the proposals. Daniel Boyd (Kudjala/Gangalu/Kuku Yalanji/Waka Waka/Gubbi Gubbi/Wangerriburra/ Bandjalung) and Edition Office Architects collaborated on the selected work, a tour de force that delicately balances strength and delicacy, beauty and dark truths. For our country is a circular stone field of basalt shards, traditionally used for weapons, that surrounds a fire pit and a chamber for the deposit of earth from Country by Indigenous visitors: ‘In this way each nation is unified together in this place, where a piece of real country . . . can act as symbolic remains of the fallen who have died in the protection of their country.’18 Intersecting the stone field is a two-way mirrored glass ‘veil’, the black enamel surface shimmering with mirrored ‘lenses’ (the artist’s term for his trademark use of small circles to glimpse through the layers of imagery – or history – in his work). The veil reflects the viewer in the landscape, positioning them in relation to the Memorial dome and, symbolically, in Australia’s military history. The veil fronts a pavilion; the curved back wall completing the circle of the stone field. This thick black rammed earth wall embraces the visitor, bathed in delicate light through the lenses, and is representative of the many experiences and perspectives of history. The outer space to the front of this pavilion will welcome public gathering, mourning and ceremony in front of the memorial and around a reflected fire. The interior space between the veil and the black earth monolith is a darkened hollow, containing secluded seating for more intimate, introspective gathering and slow reflection.19 Visitors are always consciously positioning themselves in relation to the work, seeing themselves reflected in the landscape outside or in the shimmering light cast on their body inside. This active participation is fundamental. For our country embodies what Malvern considers the most influential aspects of Maya Lin’s Vietnam Veterans Memorial (1982, Washington DC) on monumental commemorative sculpture internationally. It ‘invites active participation, not passive admiration . . . It did not suggest

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that war was the apogee of manly heroism; it offered a space for reflecting on trauma and working towards closure.’20 At least one psychology study indicates that Lin’s sculpture offers healing benefit for Vietnam veterans suffering post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD), demonstrating the importance of works that acknowledge trauma and offer recognition.21 Expanding the collection of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander art quickly made apparent that the history of frontier violence is inextricable from that of ADF service: both are understood culturally in relation to Country. To truly represent this cultural understanding, the collection needed works about frontier violence. This led to a series of major acquisitions, starting in 2016 with a key early work by Rover Thomas (Joolama) (c. 1926–98).22 Thomas, a Kukatja and Wangkajunga man, who lived most of his life at Warmun in the East Kimberley, Western Australia, used painting strategically to record the oral history of his Country for the wider world.23 Ruby Plains Massacre 1 relates the aftermath of a massacre in which the station owner shot dead several Aboriginal men in retaliation for killing a bullock. Some days later, crows circling above drew Aboriginal stockmen to the killing site where they found the decapitated heads of the men in a hollow tree trunk. Thomas depicted this on the right of the painting,

IMAGE 3.9 Paddy Cooley (Quilty) Story / Emu Dreaming, 1998, by Paddy Bedford. Natural earth pigments and synthetic binder on linen, 120 × 160 cm, AWM2019.413.1. © Executors of Estate of Paddy Bedford. Reproduced with the permission of the Executors of Estate of Paddy Bedford.

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one of the few figurative elements in any of his works. The stockmen left the station in protest, and without their labour it was forced to close.24 Following this acquisition other important works about frontier violence were acquired, including works by Paddy Bedford (Gija); Robert Campbell Jr (Ngaku); Jill Daniels (Ritharrngu); Cassie Leatham (Taungurung/ Wurundjeri); Nancy McDinny (Yanuwa/Garawa); Hayley Millar-Baker (Gunditjmara); Queenie McKenzie (Gija); Shirley Purdie (Gija); and Freddie Timms (Gija). Works of art like these present a distinct contrast to both the traditional historiography and subject matter of the AWM. Thomas’s work, for example, relies on non-Western record keeping and depicts a pattern of violence that does not match the formal European definition of ‘war’.25 AWM collections otherwise overwhelmingly respond to Australia’s role in formally declared war or peacekeeping operations. The disjuncture between the two modes is affectively powerful in and of itself to make formerly suppressed histories known. Hence one of the key roles that contemporary art plays at the AWM is offering a conceptual logic for this disjuncture. Palyku poet Ambelin Kwaymullina expressed the nature of time with these words: ‘Life doesn’t move through time / Time moves through life.’26 Since the 1970s, Indigenous artists have transformed contemporary art by using art to proclaim entirely different cultural outlooks and relationships to time than those in the West.27 As Cara Pinchbeck wrote about Paddy Bedford’s depictions of a massacre at Bedford Downs Station in the Kimberleys, for ‘Bedford these events were not chronological, but concurrent, present within country’.28 This was fundamental to the conceptual changes that made contemporary art distinct from earlier periods, according to Smith, informing contemporaneity as a defining characteristic.29 Indigenous art has made it impossible not to have fundamentally different perspectives exhibited alongside one another (contrasting with modernism’s reliance on an overarching metanarrative that could not accommodate radically different perspectives.) Inspired by Smith, McLean argues that archivalism provides a methodology that encompasses difference, and thus logically embraces art produced from otherwise contradictory cultural positions.30 Hence Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander artists can relate their own experiences and cultural understandings of conflict – rather than recognition paid by inclusion in AMW displays but voiced in the language of a largely non-Indigenous museum – through acquisitions and commissions that allow agency to voice their experiences and history first-hand. This enables the AWM to better achieve its purpose of recording Australia’s experience of conflict, as well as its aims for reconciliation.31 The priority placed on expanding the collection has also had broader impacts – including specifically hiring Indigenous staff, expanding efforts to identify Indigenous service people, and adopting cultural protocols for handling and documenting collections. There is still much more that can be done to fully embrace and engage with Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander histories and

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voices and the Memorial, especially in providing Indigenous-led or Indigenous-directed opportunities.32 Recent exhibitions in Australia demonstrate the powerful potential for understanding global conflicts through an Indigenous framework and were similar exhibitions to be undertaken at the AWM, the results would surely be extraordinary.33

Historic Reflections Australia is almost unique internationally in combining its national memorial with a museum and archive. As its name suggests, the Memorial’s commemorative function is preeminent. The site of nationally televised ceremonies on commemorative anniversaries, the Roll of Honour listing those who died in war and in warlike operations, and the extensive galleries make this a powerfully symbolic site of public memory. As well as collecting art in response to contemporary conflict and historically underrepresented experiences, works are commissioned and acquired that provide a contemporary view of past events. They are often powerful statements revisiting the past with contemporary understandings of trauma and the long-term consequences of conflict. We focus here on commissions in response to the First World War centenary (2014–18), which provided a rich context for complex commissions.34 These anniversary years paralleled an intense period of global conflict, and so there is a fascinating conversation occurring between the works within the collection and consequently within the exhibition Art in Conflict, which look back to the past and those made in response to the present. The centenary of the landing at Gallipoli, long popularly understood (and contested for just as long) as the nation’s birthplace, was on 25 April 2015.35 The level of public interest in this anniversary was indicated by attendance figures at the dawn service, the traditional annual remembrance of this event, usually better attended – and marked with a public holiday – than the internationally observed Remembrance Day. Record numbers attended services nationally around Australia and at the Memorial and applied to attend the service at Gallipoli. The centenary was an important moment of reflection on how Australia understood itself. Two major commissions were undertaken: the Australian artist David Jolly was asked to attend the dawn service in Turkey and to create a series of his reversepainted glass works in response; and the Turkish artist Köken Ergun was asked to create a major film work. Jolly’s works capture the Australian ceremonial response to the historic event. Ten paintings each record a specific moment during the twenty-four hours before, during and after the dawn service. They are removed from any traditional notion of war art, responding instead to the meaning of the anniversary for contemporary Australia by documenting the complexity of the ceremony itself and through symbolic allusions. Jolly was among the

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IMAGE 3.10 Brothers in Arms, 2016–17, by Dacchi Dang. Vietnamese lacquer, ink and paint on marine ply, five panels, each panel 20 × 90 cm, AWM2016.626.1. © Dacchi Dang 2016–17. Australian War Memorial Collection. Image courtesy of the artist.

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10,000-strong crowd who travelled from Australia and New Zealand to the Turkish peninsula. The audience was required to arrive on 24 April for vigorous security screening, and then to walk to the event site where they would wait overnight either seated on the ground or in the stands. After the ceremony itself they had to walk back off site via Anzac Cove, some choosing to ascend the hillside to the Lone Pine ceremony at 11 a.m. While it hardly compares to the events that occurred there 100 years prior, it was a considerable feat of endurance to attend the ceremonial event, especially for the many older attendees. Jolly recorded the experience through hundreds of photographs, from which he selected the moments depicted in the paintings. Materially, the viewer unavoidably sees themselves in relation to his images, reflected in the reverse painted glass. The glass also alludes to photographic glass plates and the broader significance of photography at the time: this was the first conflict to be documented en masse by amateur photographers. Jolly’s paintings also evoke contemporary amateur photography, where any notable moment will be captured by countless colour rich images and instantly distributed globally. The paintings create a parallel with the events 100 years previously: the sun setting before the long wait overnight, the soldiers getting into position ahead of the landing, the crucial moments either side of the dawn, the crowds of people involved and the amount of infrastructure. They contrast prosaic moments familiar from mass travel or public events, such as crowd scenes and temporary infrastructure, with powerfully symbolic moments of remembrance such as the sunset on 24 April, the flag at half-mast immediately before the ceremony, and a view of the night sky with part of a lighting gantry in the corner. This last work offers different readings. Looking at the stars, Jolly recalled the words of British General Sir Ian Hamilton, commander of the Gallipoli operation, on 23 April 1915: ‘only the flower of the flock will serve him now, for God has started a celestial spring cleaning, and our star is to be scrubbed bright with the blood of our bravest and our best’.36 The lighting gantry ties the view back to the specific context and to the scale of human perspective and events. It also offers ambiguous meanings about the significance of the events and of humanity’s experience when compared to the scale of space. One of the AWM’s first commissions of an international artist, Köken Ergun, explored the significance of Gallipoli to both domestic and international (predominantly Australian and New Zealand) visitors. While the Gallipoli campaign is a touchstone in Australian history, its contested meaning in Turkey is little known to Australians.37 For two years, Ergun regularly attended bus tours of Gallipoli conducted by Australian, New Zealand or Turkish guides. He filmed the tours and interviewed participants, resulting in 120 hours of footage from which he edited the resulting 88-minute single-channel film Heroes (2018).38 Ergun positioned himself as a witness, recording expressions ranging from deeply felt personal emotion to nationalism. He was aware of the larger forces at play:

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There’s a big tourism economy behind all these war memorials and ceremonies. Therefore, we shouldn’t be so naïve to think that people are coming there to venerate their ancestors. Yes they are, but they’re also coming to have a good time. On top of this, the Turks are mostly bussed in, paid for by their municipalities. They’re basically having a free trip. For me this is the most complicated part about this whole Anzac/Çanakkale legacy. They are playing with people’s emotions. They’re staging these patriotic plays and they’re trying to hold the society together with these founding myths, with these national heroes. At the same time, they are generating capital from this. It is an industry. That’s what I call a ‘tourism of martyrdom’.39 By filming the guides, he essentially captures the ‘official’ narratives about Gallipoli; interviews with the audiences reveal their responses to this history. The soldiers valorized as Anzac ‘heroes’ or Turkish ‘martyrs’ are memorialized with cemeteries, heroic sculptures and public re-enactments (whether through Turkish history plays or the ‘Anzacs’ – as the tourists are known to the locals – pilgrimage from Anzac Cove to the Lone Pine Memorial).40 By filming the visitors on site, Ergun documents the affect of public memory – the ‘architecture of memory’ as he terms it – and how people physically respond to it.41 Ergun’s filming coincided with the period in which the statesponsored Turkish understanding of Gallipoli was changing rapidly under the Erdog˘an government from the long-standing secular-nationalist myths to the more recent Islamist interpretation as an ‘invasion of the Crusaders’.42 It is a powerful piece of historiography, revealing how history can be deliberately reinterpreted for nationalist purposes. Perhaps second only to Gallipoli as a site in the Australian public memory of war is the Western Front. Angelica Mesiti was invited to contemplate the 100 years since the First World War from an Australian and international perspective and to explore new ways of interpreting the Australian experience and legacy of the Western Front. The work is a meditation on the scars and trauma that are left behind on the landscape – in particular, the Somme battlefields. These battlefields are once again devoted to agriculture, the forests have regrown and there remain only the slightest of marks within the landscape as testament to the violent and tragic events that this place witnessed. Mesiti was ‘preoccupied by the idea of an earth whose soil has been nourished by the fallen. An environment where over a 100-year period, great numbers of dead young men have been digested by the earth and been transformed and regenerated into a forest or a field of wheat for example. The way nature continues to yield new life.’43 The single-channel film A Hundred Years begins in the dead of winter, through to spring’s arousal and on to high summer where the work climaxes in a musical performance (see Introduction of this volume for image of the work). The penny whistle, one of the only trench instruments, is played by a young man who walks in endless circles at the bottom of Lochnager crater. This was a site for one of

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the bloodiest days in 1916, one that has now been preserved to commemorate: ‘honouring the fallen of the Great War and of all wars’. The commission locates Australia’s participation within the international context of this war, providing an extra historical dimension to the predominantly national nature of the Australian centenary commemoration programme. It provides a complex engagement with the experience and legacy of the Western Front, placing the Australian experience within an important international context. This is a powerful parallel with the contemporary works in the collection that consider the international context of contemporary conflict: Mesiti’s consideration of the long repercussions of conflicts internationally; and artists including Green and Brown, Cope and Norrie looking at the historical currents that lead us to the present moment.

IMAGE 3.11 Lance Corporal M, After Afghanistan, 2012, by Ben Quilty. Oil on linen, 180.2 × 170.3 × 4 cm, AWM2018.888.1, official war artist, Afghanistan, 2011. © Ben Quilty 2012. Reproduced with the permission of the artist.

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Interpreted within the symbolically powerful context of a commemorative museum these commissions powerfully demonstrate the complexity of the original events as well as the contemporary reflections of them. Contemporary artists invite the public to consider new understandings of seemingly familiar events by unearthing untold stories from the archive, drawing attention to how history is made and to the multitude of perspectives on these globally influential conflicts.

Personal Encounters A potent storytelling device is to focus on an individual’s story within the scale of mass historical events. Contemporary artists use this to great effect, whether to express their own story or that of another. One such is Ben Quilty’s response to his deployment to Afghanistan as official war artist: a series of portraits of soldiers, many suffering PTSD.44 While many of the artists already discussed do this to varying degrees, there are some whose use of this device stands out as fundamental to the affect of their work. Karen Black’s work interprets the world through abstracted paintings. Gate of the Winds (2014) captures her response to the unfolding refugee crisis in Syria after the bombing of Aleppo. Syrians flee from the civil war framed by the stone archway of the ‘Gate of the Winds’. The artist draws on the ancient history of Aleppo (Bab al-Hawa, the ‘Gate of the Winds’ is an important border crossing between Syria and Turkey and the site of a sixthcentury arch) and what happened there since the protests broke out in January 2011. The main image of the grieving woman is drawn from media photographs of civilians in Aleppo, covered with dust from the government bombing of the city. The standing female figure to the left is taken from a photograph of a woman fleeing to Turkey and struggling to carry her family’s rugs (rugs often being both heirlooms and the most valuable property a family can carry.) The work is painted over a layer of ground marble, evoking the marble for which Aleppo is known (‘Aleppo’ means ‘white’). Black’s close observation of the refugee crisis later led her to volunteer to work with refugees in Turkey. Her work is unusual in the AWM collection as a response to conflict that does not depict the Australian ADF involvement, but instead is the experience of an Australian observing conflict in the world. By contrast, Natalie Duncan recorded the experience of her own service and that of her immediate family, along with the intense emotion she experienced when her son enlisted. Duncan entered the work in the Napier Waller Art Prize, a recent AWM initiative for current and former military personnel. The works entered range from those by accomplished artists such as Duncan, to amateur trench art and those who have discovered their creative abilities through art therapy. Duncan won the prize in 2019 for her ceramic You are in danger and I am far away. She wrote:

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The title of this work comes from a letter written by war artist Hilda Rix Nicholas. It is achingly beautiful. It is to her husband at war. Her works were offered to the Australian War Memorial in the 1920s, but were rejected on the basis that they were too personal. I understand Hilda’s work. As I make this ‘too personal’ work, I find myself in a somewhat unique position; an artist and a veteran, wife of a navy clearance diver and sister to one as well. I remember Afghanistan, the tired young heads

IMAGE 3.12 Gate of the Winds, 2014, by Karen Black. Oil on marble dust on board, 91.8 × 111.8 × 6.2 cm, ART96879. © Karen Black 2014. Reproduced with permission of the artist and Sullivan+Strumpf.

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resting in hands and shaky voices calling home. I ignore the mental pictures of my husband disposing of bombs overseas. And I know what waits in the dark for too many of our people, when they are alone. They all inspire me. However, nothing has prepared me for my own child now joining the army. I feel an irrational sense of dread and pride. Rage that anyone could think there was any war worth risking him in, and fury at those who would not appreciate the gift of my child; willing, if this country asks, to give his life for you and yours. It is too personal.45 The winning work is acquired and so over time these artists are adding a new dimension to the collection. Duncan’s work speaks to the impact on families of service people. In recent decades, the understanding of intergenerational trauma has increased thereby expanding our understanding of the long-term consequences of war.46 Over the past two decades, Denise Green’s painting has evolved alongside her understanding of her own experiences of trauma. Witnessing the 9/11 World Trade Center attacks from her studio in Tribeca was a jarring and catastrophic experience. She turned to painting as a lifeline and as a means of interpreting on canvas what could not be understood solely by witnessing. She introduced ‘stripes’ representing the towers into her signature graphic idiom, one that combines figurative elements within abstraction to create a poetic, ambiguous space. Over time, she realized that the stripes also evoked the harsh light underneath her childhood home, from the palings that lined the underfloor area of their Queenslander. This space was one of both profound safety, a refuge from family life where she first discovered her creativity, but also of trauma, when childhood bullies violated her sanctuary.47 Commissions in Europe directed her attention to sites of Second World War destruction and in creating these works she became aware of how she was affected by intergenerational trauma. ‘Even though I was not a survivor or victim of the Ardennes Trauma, I have a response to the landscape because of the atmosphere in which I grew up.’48 These works combined photographs collaged with strips of drawings on paper. This series became even more personal when a carefully curated and indexed album of her father’s wartime experiences in North Africa was discovered. After serving in North Africa and the Middle East, Richard James Green returned to Australia and then to New Guinea. He never spoke of his wartime experiences, but they shaped his family’s life, leading to addiction problems that landed the family in poverty.49 RJG: Air raid Alexandria 1 (Variant) (2016) combines an enlarged photograph from the album spliced with strips of drawing. These dense clouds of meandering lines intersect a dramatic night-time photograph of a German air raid over Alexandria in which the sky is lit by search lights and anti-aircraft shells. Evolved from the earlier stripes in Green’s work, the drawings create a personal connection that reveal the layers of experience and the long-term consequences of war.

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Green’s view of how works like this function in the world is highly relevant to the AWM collection: ‘there are two levels to an artwork, the formal and the emotional. If an individual artist draws on the experience of a trauma, and if others who experienced that trauma can respond to that artist’s work, and sense that their story is being told, the work becomes universal.’50 These works add powerful personal voices to the collection that deepen our understanding of the experience of conflict. Within the AWM galleries of historical objects their affect is often a powerful reminder of what sometimes prosaic objects and military hardware can represent.

Conclusion Each of these categories offer an answer to the question: ‘What does contemporary art do at the AWM?’ The new approaches to war art by contemporary artists allows the AWM to continue its long-held purpose to assist the nation to ‘understand the Australian experience of war and its enduring impact on Australian society’ as well as to remember its war dead.51 Smith’s definition of contemporaneity as a fundamental characteristic of contemporary art – of art that considers what it is to be in time when so many of the absolutes that defined

IMAGE 3.13 Flight or Fight #3. Silk Road Extended (Friendly Object), 2018–19, by Megan Cope. Acrylic on paper Chinese map of Middle East (printed by Sun Wah Press 1941) on linen mounted in North Stradbroke Island Blue Gum, 93 × 142 cm, AWM2019.58.3. © Megan Cope 2018–19. Reproduced with the permission of the artist and Milani Gallery, Meanjin/Brisbane

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earlier ages have lost their power – complements McLean’s conceptual analysis of archivalism and Yap’s framework of the historiographic aesthetic for a reading of the AWM collecting programme since 2007, which includes artists’ responses to both present-day military events, Indigenous experience, and historic events through a contemporary lens and personal stories. All of these are embodied in one of the most recent acquisitions, the official war art commission by Quandamooka artist Megan Cope. Cope was deployed in 2017, accompanying defence units participating in Operation Accordion, supporting the ADF’s roles in the Middle East Region. Operation Accordion included communications, transport and air support and so was ideally suited to Cope’s practice, which has been described as decolonial and social cartography for her interrogation of maps and what they reveal about colonization.52 Applying this methodology as an official war artist meant she was able to examine both contemporary military experience as well as the history of the region. A ten-hour flight in an RAAF KC-30 air transport tanker refuelling allied jets in mid-air was the crux of her deployment. Following the course of the Euphrates River and the borders of Syria, Iraq and Turkey, she was attuned to the deep symbolic resonance of this locus for so much of the globalized contemporary world’s military challenges.

IMAGE 3.14 Flight or Fight #4. A Golden Arc (Known Object), 2018–19, by Megan Cope. Acrylic on paper over General World Series map of the Middle East 1933 on linen mounted in North Stradbroke Island Cyprus Pine, overall: 110 × 165 cm, AWM2019.58.4. © Megan Cope 2018–19. Reproduced with the permission of the artist and Milani Gallery, Meanjin/Brisbane

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The resulting series of seven works are layered symbolically and physically. Each combines an historic map of the region (such as the Sykes–Picot map of 1916 or a Chinese map from the 1940s) with the symbolic language airforce pilots use to navigate, which was shared with the artist during her deployment. Other mixed-media elements are included on each of the seven works; for example, a keffiyeh or engine oil tracing out the rivers. Six works are mounted in the style of old school room maps with timber across the top and bottom of the work; Cope used timber from her Country, Minjerribah (North Stradbroke Island). ‘Kids today probably won’t ever know what those maps look like, but I really wanted the maps to have that weight . . . to reflect that time of when we are learning about the world,’ she said. ‘For me, it was really important to present the maps like that, and . . . attach some of my Country to it.’53 This important body of work exemplifies what contemporary art brings to the AWM: interpreting and recording current conflict; offering an Indigenous cultural framework for new understandings of conflict; responding to the past through a contemporary gaze and through highly personal interpretations that can shed light on the universal.

Notes 1 Ryan Johnston, ‘Recalling History to Duty: 100 Years of Australian War Art’, Artlink, vol. 35, no. 1 (March 2015): 12–16; Charles Brown and Lyndell Green, ‘No Agency: Iraq and Afghanistan at War’, in The Palgrave Handbook of Artistic and Cultural Responses to War since 1914, ed. Martin Kerby, Margaret Baguley and Janet McDonald (Cham: Palgrave Macmillan, 2019), 23–43. 2 Charles Green, Lyndell Brown and Jon Cattapan, ‘The Obscure Dimensions of Conflict: Three Contemporary War Artists Speak’, Journal of War and Culture Studies, vol. 8 (2015): 158–74; Joanna Bourke, ‘Cruel Visions: Reflections on Artists and Atrocities’, Australian and New Zealand Journal of Art, vol. 20 (2020): 5–22; Joanna Burke, ‘Introduction’ and Sue Malvern, ‘Contemporary War; Contemporary Art’, in War and Art: A Visual History of Modern Conflict, ed. Joanna Burke (London: Reaktion Books, 2017), 7–43 and 166–95. 3 Malvern, ‘Contemporary War; Contemporary Art’, 175 4 Terry Smith, ‘Profiles in Currency: Contemporary Art Today’, in 21st Century: Art in the First Decade, ed. Miranda Wallace (Brisbane: Queensland Art Gallery/Gallery of Modern Art, 2010), 206. 5 The term ‘archivalism’ was used by Una Rey and Belinda Howden, ‘Fugitive Islands and Shifting Monuments’ (paper presented in The Fugitive Aesthetics of Australian Contemporary Art session at the Art Association of Australia and New Zealand conference, Melbourne, Victoria, December 2018) as cited by Ian McLean, ‘The Archival Turn in Contemporary Art’, law&history, vol. 6 (2019): 84. 6 Ibid., 85. 7 Ibid., 105.

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8 Ryan Johnston, ‘From Competitive Memory to Comparative Commemoration: Tom Nicholson’s Palestine Monument and the Great War Centenary’, in Australia and the Great War: Identity, Memory and Mythology, ed. Michael J. K. Walsh and Andrekos Varnava (Melbourne: Melbourne University Press, 2016), 245. 9 Wong Hong Suen and Kathleen Ditzig, ‘After the Fall: Cultural Exchange and the Historiographical Artwork’, in After the Fall, ed. Kathleen Ditzig (Singapore: National Museum of Singapore, 2017) www.nationalmuseum.sg/-/ media/nms2017/documents/exhibition-and-programmes-brochures/after-thefall.pdf, accessed March 2019. 10 June Yap, Retrospective: A Historiographical Aesthetic in Contemporary Singapore and Malaysia (London: Lexington Books, 2016), 273. 11 Amelia Douglas, ‘The Viewfinder and the View’, Broadsheet 38, no. 3 (2009). 12 Kit Messham-Muir, ‘Conflict, Complicity and Ben Quilty’s After Afghanistan Portraits’, Australian and New Zealand Journal of Art, vol. 18 (2018): 71–89; Bourke, ‘Cruel Visions’, and ‘Introduction’; Sara Matthews, ‘ “The Trophies of Their Wars”: Affect and Encounter at the Canadian War Museum’, Museum Management and Curatorship, vol. 28 (2013): 1–17. 13 Camp Taji is based about 27 km north of Baghdad. Originally, Taji had been established during the Saddam Hussein era. In December 1998, American forces began bombing Iraq: Operation Desert Fox was an intense four-day bombing campaign that destroyed much of Iraq’s military infrastructure, including Taji. Five years later, in 2003, Saddam Hussein lost control of the base and the US took control of it. 14 Barbara Creed, ‘Susan Norrie’, in On reason and emotion¸ exhibition catalogue (Biennale of Sydney, Woolloomooloo, 2004), 158 15 See Michael Young, ‘Khadim Ali’, Artist Profile, Issue 40, 2017 for further biographical information about Ali. 16 See Rachel Kent, ‘On Angels and Devils: The Art of Khadim Ali’, ARTAND, no. 51.3 (2014): 404–11. 17 Keith Stevens quoted in Amos Aikman, ‘APY Paints Broader Picture for War Memorial’, Weekend Australian, 15 July 2017, 3 18 Daniel Boyd, Artist statement ‘For our country’ design proposal, 2017. 19 Ibid. 20 Malvern, ‘Contemporary War; Contemporary Art’, 188 21 Nicholas Watkins, Frances Cole, and Sue Weidemann, ‘The War Memorial as Healing Environment: The Psychological Effect of the Vietnam Veterans Memorial on Vietnam War Combat Veterans’ Posttraumatic Stress Disorder Symptoms,’ Environment and Behavior, vol. 42 (2010): 351–75. 22 Prior to this there was only a handful of works representing frontier violence in the collection, such as Godfrey Charles Mundy, ‘Mounted Police and Blacks, a Rencounter’, 1852, AWM ART50023. 23 Kim Akerman, in Rover Thomas et al., Roads Cross: The Paintings of Rover Thomas, National Gallery of Australia, Canberra, 1994.

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24 Settlement in the Kimberley followed the pattern of that in far north Queensland: originally settled by pastoralists in 1880s, gold was soon discovered and thousands arrived within a few short years. Aboriginal people were denied access to their country, as well as to food and water resources. Killing cattle was a strategy to repel the invaders and make it financially unviable for them to remain, as well as a source of food. Such resistance from Aboriginal people was met with shocking violence, euphemistically described as ‘dispersal’. Kimberley Language Resource Centre, Moola Bulla: In the Shadow of the Mountain (Broome: Magabala Books, 1996) and Anthea Gunn, ‘The East Kimberley Frontier’, in For Country, for Nation: An illustrated History of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Military Service, ed. Lachlan Grant with Michael Bell (Canberra: Australian War Memorial, 2018), 40–5. 25 Which of course was the point – the seemingly random pattern of violence of colonization was a deliberate strategy. See Akerman, Roads Cross, 7 26 Ambelin Kwaymullina, ‘Time’, The Saturday Paper, 24–30 October 2020, no. 424, www.thesaturdaypaper.com.au/culture/poetry/2020/10/24/ time/160345800010595 27 Ian McLean, Rattling Spears: A History of Indigenous Australian Art (London: Reaktion Books, 2016), 117 ff. 28 Cara Pinchbeck, ‘An Introduction: When Silence Falls’, in When Silence Falls, ed. Cara Pinchbeck and Amanda Pocock, exhibition catalogue (Sydney: Art Gallery of NSW, 2015), 7. 29 Terry Smith, What Is Contemporary Art? (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2009), 139. 30 McLean, ‘Archival Turn’, 92–4 31 Reconciliation Action Plan, Australian War Memorial www.awm.gov.au/ about/organisation/corporate/innovate-reconciliation-action-plan-2019-2021 32 It should also be noted that were a research project such as the ARC project (from which this book is an outcome) undertaken today, collaboration with Indigenous scholars would be prioritized. For more on decolonizing collections at the Memorial, see Erin Vink, ‘The Australian War Memorial and Collecting Aboriginal Art in a Moment’, Art Monthly Australasia, no. 325 (spring 2020), 86–9. 33 For example, With Secrecy & Despatch, curated by Tess Allas and David Garneau, Campbelltown Arts Centre, 2016, https://c-a-c.com.au/with-secrecydespatch/#; and When Silence Falls, curated by Cara Pinchbeck, Art Gallery of NSW, www.artgallery.nsw.gov.au/exhibitions/when-silence-falls/; 2015. Both accessed October 2020. 34 Other conflicts have also been the occasion to commission such reflective works, however, including Vietnam (Dacchi Dang) and the Second World War (Kapua Gutchen; Rosie Ware) and a series of artist exchange residencies responding to the shared histories of conflict between Australia and Singapore, South Korea, Vietnam and Papua New Guinea respectively: Angela Tiatia, Debbie Ding, Kim Taedong, Lee Grant, James Nguyen, Mai Nguyen Thi Thanh, Lisa Hilli and Gideon Kakabin.

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35 Carolyn Holbrook, Anzac: The Unauthorised Biography (Sydney: NewSouth Publishing, 2014) and Johnston, ‘Comparative Commemoration’, 2016. 36 Sir Ian Hamilton, Gallipoli Diary, volume I (New York: George H. Doran Company, 1920), Project Gutenberg EBook: #19317, www.gutenberg.org/ ebooks/19317 37 Ayhan Aktar, ‘The Struggle between Nationalist and Jihadist Narratives of Gallipoli, 1915–2015’, Forum for Modern Language Studies, vol. 56 (2020): 213–28. 38 ‘Heroes’ is a co-commission between the Australian War Memorial, Protocinema and Artspace, Sydney, with additional support from Supporting Contemporary Art from Turkey (SAHA) and Çanakkale Biennial Initiative (CABININ) 39 Köken Ergun, interviewed by Dirk de Bruyn, ‘Laying Bare the Anzac Legend: Interview with Köken Ergun’, Senses of Cinema, issue 92 (October 2019), www.sensesofcinema.com/2019/interviews/laying-bare-the-anzac-legendinterview-with-koken-ergun/, accessed October 2020. 40 Aktar, ‘The Struggle between Nationalist and Jihadist Narratives’, 223–4. 41 Köken Ergun in de Bruyn ‘Laying Bare’. 42 Aktar, ‘The Struggle between Nationalist and Jihadist Narratives’, 219–23. 43 Angelica Mesiti’s initial response to the commission brief, 21 February 2017. 44 Laura Webster, Ben Quilty: After Afghanistan (Canberra: Australian War Memorial, 2014); Kit Messham-Muir, ‘Conflict, Complicity and Ben Quilty’s After Afghanistan portraits’, Australian and New Zealand Journal of Art, vol. 18, no. 1 (2018), 71–89. See also ‘War Paint’, Australian Story, Australian Broadcasting Corporation, aired 3 September 2012 and ‘On the Warpath’, Australian Story, Australian Broadcasting Corporation, aired 25 March 2013. 45 Natalie Duncan, ‘You are in danger and I am far away’, artist’s statement, Napier Waller Art Prize, Australian War Memorial, 2019, www.awm.gov.au/ visit/exhibitions-online/napier-waller-art-prize/You_are_in_danger_and_I_am_ far_away, accessed October 2020. 46 Tori DeAngelis, ‘The Legacy of Trauma’ Monitor on Psychology, vol. 50 (2019), www.apa.org/monitor/2019/02/legacy-trauma, accessed October 2020. 47 Denise Green, ‘Trauma and the Visual Arts’, lecture presented at Universität des Saarlandes, Saarbrucken, 4 November 2015). See also Ingrid Periz, ‘Denise Green: Semantic Amplitude’, Eyeline, 86 (2018): 31–5. 48 Green, ‘Trauma and the Visual Arts’. 49 Denise Green, An Artist’s Odyssey (Melbourne: Palgrave Macmillan, 2012), 69–76 50 Green, ‘Trauma and the Visual Arts’. 51 ‘Organisation’ Australian War Memorial website, www.awm.gov.au/about/ organisation

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52 Helen Hughes, ‘Upside Down/Right Way Up: Historiography of Contemporary “Australian” Art’, The National: New Australian Art website, (2017), www. the-national.com.au/essays/upside-downright-way-up-historiography-ofcontemporary-australian-art/, accessed October 2020; Mariam Arcilla, ‘Invisible Agency: An Interview with Megan Cope’, Runway Journal, issue 35, undated. http://runway.org.au/invisible-agency-an-interview-with-megan-cope, accessed October 2020. 53 Megan Cope, quoted in Claire Hunter, ‘It’s probably the most challenging thing I’ve ever done’, Australian War Memorial website, 12 July 2019, www. awm.gov.au/articles/blog/megan-cope-official-war-artist, accessed October 2020.

CHAPTER FOUR

Colonization, Memory and Amnesia Interviews with Baptist Coelho, Alana Hunt and Abdul Abdullah We conclude this first section, ‘Colonization, Memory and Amnesia’, with three edited interviews. Each thematic section concludes with an ‘interview chapter’, drawn from an extensive body of interviews conducted with over twenty international contemporary artists in the field, as well as some theorists, creating a total of around 200,000 words transcribed from the recordings. The interviews are edited and abridged for readability, but they present the mostly unfettered voice of the interviewees. In this first of the three interview chapters, we hear from three artists who were interviewed in Australia during 2019: Mumbai artist Baptist Coelho, and the two Australian artists Alana Hunt and Abdul Abdullah. Each of these artists bring very different perspectives on the role of contemporary art in relation to colonization; and each addresses aspects of memory and memorialization of those caught in conflicts. Coelho is a Mumbai-based artist interviewed during a residency at Artspace’s Gunnery Studios in Woolloomooloo, following his performance work at the Sydney War, Art and Visual Culture symposium in February 2019 in which he focused on the cultural significance of food in war. Here, Coelho addresses the complex relationships between different Indian cultural identities and the subsequent simplification of those identities in relation to their British colonizers during the First World War. Hunt lived for a period of time in Kashmir and while she was there produced a number of works that dealt directly with political violence in that disputed territory. Her interview raises important and vexed issues surrounding making work about conflicts in another culture and country, and addresses 97

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criticisms she has received about her work potentially enacting a form of Western cultural imperialism. Thirdly, Abdullah recounts an incident in late 2019, in which two of his works – picturing two soldiers in battle fatigues – were included in the Violent Salt group exhibition in Artspace Mackay, in northern Queensland, and sparked a ‘culture war’ conflict. It becomes clear in the interview that Abdullah’s ‘provocative’ name and thus his Muslim background were central factors in how the situation unfolded in the media and public debate that ensued.

Baptist Coelho, 28 February 2019, Woolloomooloo At the War, Art and Visual Culture: Sydney symposium held on Monday [25 February 2019, SH Ervin Gallery, Sydney, Australia] you realized a performance entitled ‘They agreed to eat biscuits and European bread, but our regiment refused’. The performance was based on Indian soldiers’ letters and photographs from the First World War. In the performance you dressed in a khaki-coloured uniform like those worn by Indian soldiers from that period and were kneading dough to create ‘chapattis’ [Indian flatbread] accompanied by an audio-video projection. For most of the performance, you were silent but would suddenly break into a monologue. Can you tell me more about that performance? For my research on the experiences of Indian soldiers during the First World War in Europe, I’ve tried to look at various aspects of their everyday life. What were they eating? Did they have any discreet political alliances? What were their ideas of patriotism? What kind of clothes did they wear? Or how did they cope with the extreme weather conditions? And so on. And oh . . . above all, the fact that they were fighting a war, far away from home, a war that wasn’t even theirs to fight. I was curious to know what did they think of being part of such a war? During my research, I came across a book by David Omissi [Indian Voices of the Great War: Soldiers’ Letters, 1914– 18]. The book is a selection of various letters, but sadly the original letters no longer exist. What survived are reports of the letters, written in English by British officers and can be found at the British Library in London. The audio-video that is projected on the wall during the performance is a selection of those translated letters that references food and eating habits of the Indian sepoys. A few years ago in Delhi, I met the military historian and veteran of the Indian Air Force Rana Chhina and he told me that Omissi’s book is a good account to get a glimpse into the lives of Indian soldiers. I personally believed that all this while we only had access to photographs and documents of Indian soldiers that were authored by white Europeans, who had their own ulterior motives of power and propaganda. The Eurocentric gaze was

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biased and limited, since it didn’t really tell us anything much about the Indian soldiers and colonial armies in general. So, these letters, to a large extent, help us understand what these soldiers were thinking, feeling and eating. But having said that, these letters sent between soldiers and their families back home (to an undivided India) would have been censored by the British officers, and this led to a lot of editing and loss of information. Most soldiers couldn’t read and write, so scribes were required, and this added another set of thoughts and understanding. It’s also difficult to judge if the soldiers deliberately wrote something or were asked or forced to write, since there is a lot of glorification of the British Empire. Maybe the soldiers strategically suggested such praises, so that their letters would go past the censors. One will never know. These letters show the constant push and pull by the soldiers within their religious groups, and how they tried to abide with their specific food habits. There were Hindu, Muslim and Sikh communities. The Hindus and Muslims also had separate kitchens. In Santanu Das’s book [1914–1918: Indian Troops in Europe] he talks about a controversy that erupted in October 1914, when Sikhs soldiers were given lamb mince that was in a tin with a

IMAGE 4.1 They agreed to eat biscuits and European bread, but our regiment refused, 2019, by Baptist Coelho. Performance still from War, Art and Visual Culture: Sydney symposium, 25 February 2019, SH Ervin Gallery, Sydney. Courtesy of the artist; Project 88, Mumbai. Photo: Kit Messham-Muir

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picture of a cow on it, and for the Muslims soldiers halal practices were introduced for meat, which caused considerable curiosity from onlookers. From various letters one also notices a resistance by soldiers to merge food habits, but at the same time, one also recognizes the immense camaraderie and respect between soldiers and their religious beliefs. Growing up, I remembered eating biscuits; brands like Parle G [glucose biscuits] and another brand Marie, which still exist in India, and I relish them till today. As a child I thought the whole of India ate biscuits, and I associated it with something that originated in India, but now I think it’s a British thing. Part of me was not surprised that the Indian soldiers resisted eating biscuits. In India, we are very passionate about our food habits. Back home, there is a whole specificity about how, say a Goan, or Gujarati or a Sikh will cook their food – ‘Oh, you do it like that, and we do it like this’, ‘We fry it like this, a bit, but you are doing it like that’ – there is always that discussion. I also found it very intriguing that Indian soldiers were trying to maintain their respective eating customs, in a faraway country, right in the midst of a war. Where I grew up in Mumbai, bread for that matter was by and large what Christians mostly ate as part of their daily food. I was raised Catholic, and there was a slang word ‘pav wala’ which simply meant ‘the one who sells bread’ and at times I also thought the term meant ‘bread people’. Part of me was never sure how to understand this term: was it an insult or was it to poke fun? Or was it just making fun of one’s eating habits? It was always confusing. As I grew up, my friends at home and at school and college would at times address me as a pav wala. During my childhood, this term got into my head, and I resented hearing it, and was always embarrassed, as I thought it was demoralizing and stereotyping, and implicitly derogatory and insulting. However, today I don’t care, but as a teenager it was not easy to digest. Whenever I travel outside India, I try to manage and cook something easy like pasta and sauce, but if I haven’t eaten rice within, let’s say, four days, I start getting anxious and feel uneasy in some way. In David Omissi’s book, I found many letters that mention food, rations, and meat and so on. In one of the letters, a Muslim soldier describes how he has not eaten meat for the last two years and asks the recipient to check what are the halal laws around what can or cannot be consumed. In my performances, I am very interested in the notion of ritual and transformation. In a kitchen, various ingredients blend and manifest into a meal that nourishes the body and mind. The word atta is a Hindi word for flour. You knead the atta and it can be transformed into various types of Indian flatbreads such as chapatti, roti, naan, paratha, puri and so on. Atta is also a source for making biscuits. I wanted to draw attention to the idea of kneading, because kneading is also manipulating, one manipulates the dough. And within the context of the performance, I wanted to put it out there as questions for all, as to [who] was manipulating [who] during the First World War? Who was persuading the soldiers to go and fight? How did

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the British Forces manipulate the Indian Princely States? How did the soldiers manage to keep up to their intricate dietary requirements, whilst also dealing with extreme cold temperatures and hostility from their British commanders? So, kneading as an action to express all these queries was employed as part of the performance. When you knead, there is also this entire strategy of pressing and pushing. There was water in an enamel jug, water and flour were kneaded on enamel plates – all these were placed on a white fabric. These props are all symbolic for me, as each one has a story to tell, which I’m not going to try and explain. I’ll let the audience come up with their own understanding. I also use salt along with the flour and water. And for me, salt not just adds flavour, but highlights Mahatma Gandhi and his revolutionary protest of the Salt March. This twenty-four-day protest march was an act of nonviolent civil disobedience in colonial India that lasted from 12 March to 6 April 1930, as a direct action campaign of tax resistance against the British salt monopoly. I am an admirer of Gandhi, but at the same time, he also had some inconsistencies. His autobiography [My Experiments with Truth], written and published around the 1920s, is clear evidence that he had some contradictions. Well, no one is perfect. Using salt was also in many ways to evoke Gandhi in this narrative as he encouraged Indians to join the British Indian Army during the First World War and believed [Home Rule] without military power was useless, and the war was the best opportunity to get it. At the same time in his autobiography Gandhi dedicates a few chapters to try and explain [why] he encouraged civilians to join the war efforts. I guess it was also Gandhi’s way of justifying and intellectualizing his support for the war, so that history would not judge him, given his non-violent position. After all, he was a politician! He says, we [Indians] were slaves, and they [British] were masters. How could a slave co-operate with the master in their hour of need? Salt was also used in the performance to reference the complexities of patriotism that soldiers faced. They had to fight for the British who at the same time had colonized their homelands. In India salt is still a symbol of [loyalty and fidelity]. Many references are made to salt in the letters in Omissi’s book. Apart from the subtle ambient audio soundscape, which accompanied the projection, I chose to keep the performance mostly silent. I was thinking about how the letters were censored which supressed and silenced the thoughts and words of these soldiers and their families and friends. So just saying a few words during the performance was to recognize the subaltern, that limited voice that these soldiers had, on and off duty. I usually never plan, what I will really do in my performances. It is all organic with some sort of parameters in my mind, which act as guidelines, and these guides keep shifting. When I perform, I am just responding to what I am thinking and feeling at that very moment. I prefer to keep my actions and bodily movements spontaneous, which makes room for a lot of random accidents. Such uncertainties within the performance also resonate the catastrophes of

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war and how precarious and unfortunate were the lives of these Indian soldiers who were used as ‘cannon fodder’ by the imperial armies, a thought also passionately shared by Dominiek Dendooven, researcher and curator at the Flanders Fields Museum in Ypres, Belgium. During the performance, various letters are projected on the screen behind me, which appear and disappear, sometimes blurred, sometimes overlapping, to almost make it difficult to read. These subtle effects suggest the complexities of these letters. And so, during the performance the complexities of language usage and its translation kept passing my mind. I was thinking, how did the soldiers speaking Indian languages understand European languages and all this within the framework of a bloody war?! So . . . during this performance I wanted to include some of these language trepidations, and so I spoke a few words in Hindi, because some of the letters were written in Hindi. Letters were also written in Gurumukhi and Urdu, and since I can’t speak or write in those languages, I preferred to break the silence of the performance by shouting the word ‘D;ksa ?’ which means ‘why?’ in Hindi and is written in roman letters like this, ‘kyun?’ If the audience understands Hindi, they will recognize it, but if not, that’s also okay. This feeling of not knowing what I said echoes that sentiment of what must have been going on in the mind of British soldiers when the Indian sepoys were communicating amongst themselves and vice versa. They might have wondered: ‘What are they saying?’, ‘Could he be saying something against us?’ So, the idea of language and its translations has always played a very important part within my practise.

Alana Hunt, 9 December 2018, Melbourne Tell me about your work Cups of nun-chai (2010). In mid-2010 I was leaving Kashmir by road back to Delhi. While I was travelling, a young boy named Tufail Ahmad Mattoo – he was seventeen – was killed by a tear gas canister that hit his head when he was walking past a protest on his way home from tuition. He was carrying school books in his bag and [he] was not the first person to die that year – in fact some very young children had been killed earlier that year by the armed forces. And other people had been murdered in a ‘fake encounter’ in which the army lured civilians into a forest and killed them. The army then said that the civilians were terrorists from Pakistan and claimed rewards, whereas, in fact, they were locals who were told that they were getting a job. Tufail’s death sparked off a series of protests across Kashmir that lasted almost the whole summer. During those protests over 118 people were killed, unarmed civilians, at most throwing stones at the army or state police. On my return to Australia after an absence of almost three years – this was also the period when I started using social media [such as] Facebook – I was watching this death toll rise while I was sitting in Sydney. I was communicating

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IMAGE 4.2 Cups of nun chai, by Alana Hunt. From the body of work Cups of nun chai (2010–ongoing). © Alana Hunt. Reproduced with the permission of the artist.

with friends in Kashmir who felt utterly suffocated by the violence going on around them. There is often a feeling in Kashmir that India has liberty to execute this kind of extreme violence on Kashmiri civilians, and the world does nothing . . . I was watching on social media this horrible three or four months of protest unfold where people were dying every day, and no one around me in Australia knew what was taking place, so there was a massive gap that emotionally was really strange to deal with. One day the death toll reached sixty-nine people; it sort of clicked in my head that there would be sixty-nine cups of Kashmiri tea, nun chai, Kashmir’s most common drink, that would no longer be poured inside these homes. There was some really amazing journalism coming out of Kashmir at this time but it just wasn’t having the reach that it needed. I was thinking of writing a journalistic piece; it felt so urgent to try to do something. But people in Kashmir knew a lot more than me, and their writing was much better than I could [produce], so I was thinking how to connect on a more personal level. I decided to have one cup of nun chai for every person who had passed away, and I invited people to share that tea with me. There were no rules so long as people understood that we were sharing this tea as an accumulating memorial for this loss of life in Kashmir. And from there, the conversations would go in all sorts of directions. I would write about our conversation and take a photograph of each person holding their cup of tea. Holding the cup

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of tea creates a feeling of care. Empathy. The conversations would, you know, [touch on] pieces of Kashmiri history, but then the person that I was sharing tea with would also contribute by making sense of Kashmir by connecting it to somewhere else. Then I would write. Kashmir’s story, and in particular the events of 2010, would then be connected to both personal experiences of loss and larger political contexts around the world. And so these stories, these pieces of writing, for me they were like an accumulating archive that refused to let this loss of 2010, the loss of life in that period, disappear and just be sort of swept under the carpet. I didn’t want to allow the state to do that. It also became an expression of how we respond to and remember and understand political violence. And it explored the gap between being in an Australian context and all that violence [occurring] elsewhere. The first two-thirds took place mostly in Australia and the last third took place in India and Kashmir. And who were the people with whom you were sharing the tea? Well, actually, when I began the project, I made a little invitation card and I stood at Central Station in Sydney and I handed them out to, like, 100 people, explaining the situation and asking them to come and share this tea with me and to contact me. And not one person contacted me. And I was like, ‘Oh damn, maybe this work is kind of going to just fall flat’, and, you know, ‘I can’t do it’. So I was quite nervous about how to begin, and who would be the right person to begin with, and eventually my aunt (I was living with her at the time), she just said, ‘Sit down and we are going to have this tea right now’, so she broke the surface. Then it sort of grew through people who I knew and who I would encounter – ‘What are you doing?’ ‘I’m working on this’ and so on, ‘I would like to take part!’, and the work accumulated on the website progressively so the website got a little bit of traction as well, and I had some strangers emailing me, sometimes from different parts of the world as well. I did have tea with people in Bangkok and Europe, and that was just by chance because they emailed me and I ended up going to these places inadvertently, so we got to have the tea . . . By the time I got back to Kashmir, some people already knew about the work and people were suggesting, ‘You should talk to this person’. So, yeah, it just grew like that organically and actually the final cups of tea I had were with the caretakers of the martyrs’ graveyards in Srinagar who had actually buried Tufail. But that was not preplanned, it just happened, and it was a perfect conclusion to the work. Something that could not have been ‘organized’. It is interesting that it starts in your home Sydney, with your own family, and then travels all the way around the world to actually end up in the place where it ‘originated’. It did that in a very organic way. It took two years, and then I had an exhibition of the work in Sydney and produced three artist books. I worked on them in Delhi and then I knew I wanted to circulate them in Kashmir right away. People in Kashmir were accessing the website and the online community in Kashmir is amazing, but it is also small.

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I was also a bit nervous about the quality of my writing so I ended up editing the pieces. It is quite big, there are eighty-six individual stories. Sometimes I had tea with two or more people, so it is about fifty or sixty thousand words all up. I did feel a bit nervous about the quality of my writing. I got a very good friend of mine who is an amazing writer of short stories and essays and all sorts of things, Arif Ayaz Parrey, to help me edit the entire collection. Another friend from Sydney, the photographer David Watson, also edited the whole lot, so I kind of drew on their comments and worked through the body of work again. Then in 2016 I began a serialization in the newspaper Kashmir Reader, that began on the anniversary of Tufail’s death and continued for eleven months. I wanted to do that, to circulate it in Kashmir. My work is also very influenced by the media so it felt very good to put it in that context, a wide circulation that went beyond the sphere of art. It also enabled the work to be ‘exhibited’ within Kashmir where exhibitions, particularly of this kind of political nature, couldn’t take place. I was interested in bringing the memories from 2010 that the work embodies into dialogue with the news of ‘today’, at that moment when the serial took place. But a month after the serial began, a popular rebel commander named Burhan Wani was killed by the army and his death brought hundreds of thousands of people out in protest and mourning for the funeral. And the state responded with extreme suppression and violence towards all areas of civil society. A very renowned human rights activist in Kashmir was imprisoned during this time, and thousands of other people too. The army were using pellet guns, which they really started using in earnest in 2016. These fire very small pellets, [essentially] spraying it, so it is a very indiscriminate weapon. They were firing at this [eye-height] angle, and people were getting blinded. So, hundreds of people were blinded in that year and people have written about it as the first mass blinding in the human history of war. [These events] really placed 2016 into historical dialogue with 2010 in a way that was well beyond me. Because the violence of 2010 – people were connecting it with what was happening in 2016 in a whole multitude of ways. The newspaper that circulated my work was known for having bold reportage that didn’t follow the government’s line, and as the summer of 2016 unfolded the state removed their advertising [budget from it]. A lot of newspapers in Kashmir received their money from government advertising, and the government withdrew this from Kashmir Reader. They also, three or four times maybe, banned any media going to press in an attempt to kind of quell what was taking place. So there were a few days, at different times, that no papers went to print at all. Also, it was very hard for journalists to even go to work, because the streets weren’t safe. So, the newspapers following Burhan Wani’s death [on 8 July 2016], instead of producing a twelve-page newspaper, went down to four or six pages. You could really see the impact on the press at that time.

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Then in October Kashmir Reader was banned indefinitely, and it took three months for that ban to be lifted. The editor and op-ed editor of the newspaper eventually had to leave their positions because of the government pressures placed on the owner of the newspaper at the time. When the ban was lifted, they continued with the serialization of my work and stayed with the newspaper until the serialization ended, and then they both left; that’s some commitment to circulating my work! I was thinking they would turn around and say, ‘Oh, we can’t circulate anymore, it has just gotten too difficult’, but they really were so committed to seeing it through. They have said to me afterward that it was one of the highlights of their careers, being able to do that. I guess as a foreigner working in Kashmir, that was a very deep and surprising form of appreciation. Because this is a conflict that gets very little exposure outside that part of the world, perhaps the actual fact that you are an outsider gives you a great deal of leverage, in terms of getting this to the media through art. I was talking to a friend about this as well recently, particularly about identity politics. I was questioning him, ‘Why isn’t my work getting told to shut up in that context?’, because there are works within Kashmir by foreigners who do get told that and there is a critical discourse within Kashmir around ‘Kashmiris taking charge of their own narrative’ which is so important. And he said that, particularly with Cups of nun chai, ‘It wasn’t about you telling us who we are; it was about you learning who we are’ and, he said, ‘Through that we learnt about ourselves as well’. Even the journalists have appreciated how a lot of the topics covered through the conversations and writing around the project have gone to the subjects where normal journalism and normal academia haven’t gone, and so people have appreciated that, I think. Particularly when the serial was taking place, there was so much horrible violence going on that a few people have said to me that they really appreciated the calm and grounded nature of those Cups of nun chai. One old man said to one of the journalists with Kashmir Reader that it brought tears to his eyes to read of people in a foreign place speaking about Kashmir with such clarity, whereas around him was chaos. In that way, your work negotiates a very different approach, ‘you learning who we are’, from much contemporary war art, which tends to be the artist amplifying their own voice. By not speaking for people caught in conflicts elsewhere, your work actually gives a voice to those people. At a conference in the United States, I was told by someone that my work was Western cultural imperialism. They said it to me personally prior to the presentation, and then again at the presentation. It was interesting for me that the criticism came from a white male, whose career has basically been within one academic institution. I felt that his critique had an underlying assumption that, within Kashmir itself, there was no critical discourse capable of analysing my work and that’s why, in his view, ‘I had been able to do it’. If I was getting that kind of criticism from within Kashmir I would be listening to them. It also followed two weeks talking with academics and researchers

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IMAGE 4.3 Cups of nun chai, installed, by Alana Hunt. From the body of work Cups of nun chai (2010–ongoing). © Alana Hunt. Reproduced with the permission of the artist.

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from South Asia, none of whom had critiqued it along that those lines. His critique was like a brick wall, there was no space to discuss or talk about how things unfolded, or are negotiated. In a lot of discussions I have had with people, we talk about these things and how they have been navigated. My engagement with Kashmir has not been a ‘six-week artist residency’. NOTE: Cups of nun chai was published by Yaarbal Books (New Delhi, 2020), www.cupsofnunchai.com

Abdul Abdullah, 3 February 2020, Sydney Can you tell me about your background and how it led to the recent controversy around the reception of your work? So, before I studied art, I studied journalism. And I was always very interested in politics. [I was] interrogating my personal experience growing up in Australia overshadowed by the War on Terror, what that meant to my formative years, and the shift that I felt from being a very young person prior to 9/11, [to] then post-9/11 and that difference in perception of the Australian Muslim identity, the difference in how I felt myself, and [how] people from my community were treated. So that was something that I was looking into with journalism. But in the third year of journalism I picked up elective in art and I just fell in love with it . . . So for better or worse, naively or not, I thought that I would just paint portraits thinking that this was one way of being an artist. All I wanted to do, and all I did while I was at uni, was paint portraits, much to probably the chagrin of my lecturers. I was really stubborn, probably a bit of an asshole, and just pursued that. Then after art school I was continuing to paint portraits, just pretty pictures of my friends essentially until 2011, when I painted Waleed Aly. I entered that painting into the Archibald [Prize for portraiture], which was always a goal of mine. And I was so happy when the painting did get in. It was the biggest thing for me at that time and I was so stoked and so happy. But then soon after the work was published [in the media], I started to receive hate mail. And it was a really peculiar experience because they didn’t know anything about me apart from my name. And Waleed Aly wasn’t on television yet. He was on radio a bit, but he’d written a book called People Like Us (2007), which is what attracted me to him. So, there were not that many people that knew of him. And it was hard for me to imagine at that time that someone would go out of their way to find me online, or find my email address, or find some way to contact me to tell me that I somehow didn’t belong, that I was threatening to them somehow. And it was entirely to do with that perception of what I represent because of my name and nothing to do with anything else. At first, I found it really offensive and upsetting and it dredged up a lot of old feelings of me being an angry teenager, an angry young person. But it

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was Waleed who talked me through it. He had long experience in receiving hate mail, very nasty things directed at him, and he knew about my background in studying journalism, my interest in politics. One of the things that he said to me, among other things, was that it’s better to respond creatively rather than taking it all in and just getting angry about it. Funnily enough, the Archibald Prize was a real turning point for me and how I approached artmaking and what I was interested in. I didn’t have enough confidence before that to make the work that I wanted to make,

IMAGE 4.4 All Let Us Rejoice, 2017, by Abdul Abdullah. Manual embroidery made with the assistance of DGTMB Studios, Yogyakarta, 125 × 110 cm. © Abdul Abdullah 2017. Reproduced with the permission of the artist and Yavuz Gallery.

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because I felt that I would be ham-fisted about it, or just be too naive, or too immune to the issues. But then after being part of that [exhibition], for better or worse, being thrust into this conversation, and all the stuff that was visited upon me, I had been put in the position where I needed to respond. And that changed my practice entirely. In 2011, I had my first show in Melbourne, called Them and Us, which was my first show with no painting in it at all. [Instead] it was entirely looking at the political dynamic, and that started me on the path to the rest of the stuff that I have been doing now. So, tell me what happened with your work in the Violent Salt group exhibition at Artspace Mackay, in northern Queensland? The gallery reached out to the local council for the councillors to come and see the exhibition and take a tour of the show. In a way [this was] to include them in a conversation, and to talk about the success of this exhibition maybe with the hope for future exhibitions like this. And the council was really impressed by the show, except for one councillor called Martin Bella, who took deep offence to my work in particular. What happened? He got upset. He made overtures about getting the work taken down . . . He went to George Christensen who is a federal member [of Parliament] and it was picked up by Sky News and local papers, and from there it blossomed into an outrage snowball, that went to different veterans’ groups and people who just didn’t like people who’ve got names like mine. But also, I got a lot of supportive messages from veterans and from people who are currently serving, so this was happening at the same time, which was quite peculiar. In fact, personally, I got more messages from veterans and people that are serving, positive ones more than negative. My work started to get characterized as a disrespectful attack on our veterans and our troops. Initially the mayor [of Mackay] was quite supportive of the work, but then a group from a local RSL [Returned and Services League] and a local motorcycle club came to visit him in his offices. They made a case, and as he has told me, a very convincing case. They were concerned about veteran suicide. If someone was to commit suicide in the region it could be tied to these particular works. I think [that] is kind of absurd, but he decided to take the work down. Particularly in the under-thirty age group, veterans are twice as likely to die by suicide as compared to the rest of the population. But you could make the same argument that work such as Ben Quilty’s After Afghanistan portraits could trigger a similar response. I mean, we live in the world where there are images that will trigger some people and not others. A terrific film like 1917 could trigger someone. Absolutely. And I think your work is actually quite open and heuristic, when compared with Quilty’s work which is specifically about PTSD and suicide. Your work is much less direct in its meaning. It’s far more open. Ben is a friend of mine. I have talked about it with him since, and he talked about that exact same issue – the idea that the same things potentially

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could be said about his work. But they are not said in the same way because of [the difference in] our names really. It is my opinion that the issue was not the images themselves but perhaps the context of the show and the fact that my name is attached to it. Your name provides a big part of a context for the ‘right’ people, if you know what I mean. Definitely. People have talked about my work being quite ‘provocative’ and that’s come up a lot as a description that I find particularly annoying

IMAGE 4.5 For We Are Young and Free, 2017, by Abdul Abdullah. Manual embroidery made with the assistance of DGTMB Studios, Yogyakarta, 126 × 108 cm. © Abdul Abdullah 2017. Reproduced with the permission of the artist and Yavuz Gallery.

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recently, like [my work is] a stunt or something, and I never plan something as a stunt or as a way to sort of provoke people. I like to provoke conversation in the way that art provokes conversation, but not in such a way that I am trying to poke a hornet’s nest. I don’t think that it is ever my art that is the provocative bit. It is like you said, it is the name that is associated with it, and what that is representing in people’s imagination. I will tell you about another situation that happened in Western Australia. The Art Gallery of Western Australia (AGWA) has a WA-focused section, and my brother and I were in the first WA-focused show. During the installation period, some press came and took a photo of us [with some of our] paintings of balaclava-wearing heads on the wall, my brother and I standing in front of the works. It was published in the West Australian [newspaper]. And then people saw that. They didn’t read the article necessarily, but they saw the images of the balaclava’d heads, and they saw us, and they said ‘terrorists!’ They see our names, they go ‘terrorists!’, ‘AGWA!’, ‘taxpayer-funded!’ It is the state gallery, so it is taxpayer-funded. Their tax dollars are going toward supporting terrorism! There were letters to the editor, there were threats made to the gallery, there was a petition to stop the show, Perth radio spoke about it. It was a very similar thing to what happened in Mackay, but it felt isolated to WA, and only to the week leading up to the show. Up until the point when we did the artists’ talk. This is my theory, but there were some gentlemen that arrived to our artist talk – I spotted them as they came in – who were looking like they wanted to ‘engage negatively’ with us, I don’t know how else to put it . . . No, no, that’s very euphemistic but I kind of get it. Yeah, you know what I’m saying. There’s a group who weren’t ‘art people’, you know, and they were all standing in the back with their arms crossed. But I think . . . I don’t think that my brother and I were what they expected. And the way that we talked about the show, and the way that we talked about our motivations, and the way that we talked about our family, and how we grew up in Australia – growing up in Perth, I think that it disarmed them and put them off a little bit and they disappeared towards the end of the talk. But what happened in Mackay – because it got to the federal member, because it got to Sky News, because it got to some of the major news outlets – became much bigger. Talking to one of the veterans who was messaging me, he told me that on veterans’ forums on Facebook it was being shared in a very negative way. He and a few other people were defending me online, but then it got to the point where people were starting to attack him and question his military record and it just got quite toxic. That was one of the hard things to balance. I was asking him, ‘Please don’t put yourself at any more risk’. Fundamentally, it’s about questioning your legitimacy to make any statement about Australia because of your Muslim background. Totally. It is almost beside the point, and I don’t want to bring it up because it doesn’t really matter, but I am seventh-generation Australian. My

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family has been here since 1815. We’re convict stock, but my mum is from Malaysia so that gives me my name and my colour. My dad jokes that [the people attacking me] are ‘Johnny-come-latelys’, fresh off the boat, they are two-generation [Australians] and they are telling you [what you can say]. So, this is one of those frustrating things, because it shouldn’t matter that ‘I’ have been here for seven generations: I could have arrived here yesterday and be able to make this work. And not come up against that type of criticism. It is almost like you are finding yourself being sucked into a game, when you start thinking and saying things like, ‘I have been here for . . .’. It is a ridiculous thing really. Needless arm-wrestle, beside the point of the actual art of conversation. And it was hard with this one when it got to the point where Mackay had to get security [staff] on to the gallery, which they don’t normally have. I have been told that they took volunteers off the front desk and just had fulltime staff to kind of deal with people.

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War Art, Official and Unofficial

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Introduction The second section of this volume addresses the role of artists in war zones, specifically as official war artists, and seeks to understand some of the inherent tensions and contradictions of that role in its various forms in different nations. Australia, Canada and the United Kingdom each initiated official war art schemes during the First World War, and each has developed significantly over the past century. The first essay in this section is Charles Green’s ‘The War at Home’. Green, along with collaborator Lyndell Brown, was deployed to Iraq as an Australian official war artist in 2007, embedded with the Australian Defence Force. They created a series of major painted works and photographs, now in the collection of the Australian War Memorial. Green’s essay discusses his collaboration with Brown and another former Australian official war artist, Jon Cattapan. The three travelled to Timor-Leste in 2013, fourteen years after the small nation to the north of Australia gained independence in 1999, following violent conflict. Green’s essay discusses their 2013 visit in reference to two collaborative artworks: Scatter 2 (Santa Cruz) and Church Panels. In their essay ‘Soldier/Artist: Negotiating The Complexities of Military Service and Critical Practice’, Kit Messham-Muir and Uroš Cˇvoro examine the work of two artists and former soldiers, British artist Derek Eland and Bosnian artist Mladen Miljanovic´, who draw on the subjective experience of other soldiers and former combatants. Eland’s site-specific social practice work Diary Rooms encouraged serving British soldiers in Afghanistan to post their thoughts on the interior of a shipping container. Miljanovic´’s work involves collaboration with former combatants and adversaries of the Bosnian War of the mid-1990s. Interestingly, resilience prevails in the work of both Eland and Miljanovic´, taking their war art beyond a focus on trauma into the realms of voice and agency. Messham-Muir and Uroš Cˇvoro are two of this volume’s three editors and are frequent collaborators, including co-authors of the recent Bloomsbury books Images of War in Contemporary Art: Terror and Conflict in the Mass Media (2021) and The Trump Effect in Contemporary Art and Visual Culture: Populism, Politics, and Paranoia (2023). 117

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Each section of this volume concludes with an ‘interview chapter’. These draw from an extensive body of interviews conducted with over twenty contemporary artists and theorists in the field. This section concludes with interviews with four former official war artists, eX de Medici (Australian official war artist), David Cotterrell (Wellcome Trust official war artist), Karen Bailey and Philip Cheung (both Canadian official war artists through the Canadian Forces Artists Program). The deployment of de Medici to the Solomon Islands in 2009 to cover the Regional Assistance Mission to the Solomon Islands (RAMSI) proved to be a vexed encounter with torrential rain and tensions with the Australian military and police with which she was stationed. As an official artist of the Wellcome Trust, Cotterrell went to Afghanistan with British armed forces, then returned later on a tourist visa. He saw the British military presence from both inside and outside ‘the wire’ of the bases, providing interesting insights. Bailey was similarly an official artist in field hospitals in Afghanistan in 2007. She reveals in her interview the tension within the military establishment that emerged when her works were seen to heroicize regular frontline medics. In the final interview extract, Los Angeles-based Canadian artist Cheung compares his experience of photographing the Canadian Rangers in the Arctic Circle for the Canadian Forces Artists Program with his time photographing in Afghanistan. These essays and interviews highlight different aspects of the conflict inherent in the role of official war artist, as well as the evolution of the role in more recent years towards the expectation that official war artists produce challenging and critical works of contemporary art.

CHAPTER FIVE

The War at Home Charles Green

IMAGE 5.1 Scatter 2 (Santa Cruz), 2016, by Jon Cattapan and Lyndell Brown/ Charles Green. Acrylic and oil on digital photograph on Duraclear film on Perspex, framed, 87 × 290 cm. © Jon Cattapan and Lyndell Brown/Charles Green 2016. Courtesy Station Gallery and ARC One.

This essay is written from the idiosyncratic perspective of an artist: a painter and photographer, working in a life-long artist collaboration with Lyndell Brown. In addition, we make art in a decade-long collaboration with painter Jon Cattapan. Together, we three have been Australian official war artists for the Australian War Memorial (AWM): Cattapan with peacekeepers in Timor-Leste during 2008, and Brown and myself in Iraq and Afghanistan during the War on Terror in 2007. The subject of this essay, which aims partly to capture the gravitational pull of this most intricate subject – contemporary war art – upon our practice over the years after 2007, will be one of our recent three-artist paintings. The essay also reflects on the perspective we occupy – our particular voice – as postcolonial authors, which is also a speaking position I have written about since my first book, Peripheral Vision (1996), the first history of Australian postmodern art.1 We explored the dark edges of that subjectivity all through the 1990s in large paintings that placed fragmented images from art history within aerial views 119

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of contemporary cities, ports and airports – scenes of globalization – in virtuoso-painted trompe l’oeil (hyper-illusionistic, highly skilled hyperrealist painting), exploring the moral and ethical limitations of thendominant postmodernism. We sought in art the widely accepted understanding that white Australia bears responsibility for the violence of colonization, as I wrote in Peripheral Vision, and we searched for the limits of the proliferating globalization of Western culture by inventing ‘occidentalist’ images from the method of the body tattoo, and superimposing images of journeying on top of images taken from the history of oil painting.2 All this became intensely relevant to our experience of contemporary war art. I will move backwards and forwards in time from one particular work of contemporary war art, Scatter 2 (Santa Cruz), 2016, in the form of personal recollection, since this essay is autobiographical rather than scholarly. Within the present volume, it sits in the section that answers through artistcentred perspectives the question: What is contemporary war art? These answers may be radically different in discursive form, frankness and artistic licence from the volume’s art historical, scholarly contributions. At the same time, to avoid the impression of duplicating the many self-presentations and talks an artist usually gives, I should explain that ‘Scatter’ is the third in a trilogy of essays. The first was a record of our first-hand experience as an official artist from the heart of the calamitous, misguided War on Terror.3 The second was a wider reflection on participating in the lineage of war artists.4 Here, in the third essay, I will meditate on the emphatic relevance of the postcolonial themes that formed the basis of the art we made up to the war artist commission, but which erupted once more from Scatter 2, 2016 onwards, as we shifted further and further away from the viewpoint we’d occupied so precariously as official artists. We remained indelibly affected by that experience. But by mid-2019, it would become increasingly clear that as Australian whitefella artists we must return to thinking about how to paint the wars at home that underlie the Australian present and, therefore, how to depict the colonizing contemporaneity of so-called postcolonial nation states.

IMAGE 5.2 Santa Cruz Dusk 2, 2018, by Lyndell Brown/Charles Green. Digital photograph on rag paper, edition of five, framed, 87 × 290 cm. © Lyndell Brown/ Charles Green 2018. Courtesy Station Gallery and ARC One.

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A clear blue sky. Humid but not unbearable with the late-afternoon sea breeze. We’re in a graveyard at the edge of Dili on the north coast of TimorLeste, a tiny, independent nation situated way towards the east of the vast Indonesian archipelago; maybe you can sense we are in the tropics. The year is 2013, but it could be anytime between then and now. A year in the waning days of the contemporary, an era only just still ruled by the US. An era beset with that nation’s endless wars. And from the north, this era is being swept aside with the force of a tempest. Images like this photograph of the graveyard in Dili are now called aftermath photography: ruins, massacre sites, battlefields. According to some cultural theorists, photographs of these subjects by artists like Simon Norfolk or Luc Delahaye depoliticize conflict through their beauty and their sublimity, betraying in the process, they say, a lack of political awareness. But we know that the sublime is not politically anodyne and, as Boris Groys perceptively observed, that momentous images emerging from modern conflicts articulate less a Kantian notion of the sublime, of Swiss mountains and sea tempests, but more the sublime at its origins in Edmund Burke’s formulations, which capaciously included the savage, disruptive ‘political sublime’ of beheadings, tortures and disasters of war.5 But we jump ahead. We have a work of art to consider: Scatter 2 (Santa Cruz), 2016, the fifth work in the second cycle of artistic collaboration between Lyndell Brown, Charles Green and Jon Cattapan. The image underlying this large (87 × 290 cm) work co-authored with Cattapan is a photograph of Santa Cruz cemetery in Dili, the site of the infamous 1991 Timor-Leste massacre of students and demonstrators by the Indonesian military. An elongated panoramic photograph, it captures a moment. But only the gravity of eternity and the perspective of the Timorese themselves would befit a memorial adequate to the disasters of this war. Santa Cruz cemetery, gravestones, dusk: get ready. The picture tells a story about the afterlife of war from the past into the present from a particularly limited perspective. For Santa Cruz cemetery is a dark star, the nadir of neo-colonialism. If you told the families of the young Timorese massacred by Indonesian troops on 12 November 1991 in this very spot that a few short years later Timor-Leste would be free, but that at the same time the Australian peacekeepers’ own government would betray them, secretly swindle the new nation out of undersea oil and gas revenue, they might not have believed you.6 Just as the Timorese students might not have predicted the vengeful devastation that the Indonesians would unleash across Timor-Leste in 1999 as they and their shadowy militias retreated across the border into West Timor ahead of peacekeeping forces that included Australian soldiers. Perhaps you think of Goya. A radiantly beautiful, mountainous country, Timor-Leste is a crossroads of history, a lot of it a dismal story of drab colonization and disastrous, multiple betrayals or fumbling mistakes by friends, most dismal of all, by ostensibly benevolent neighbours like Australia.

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IMAGE 5.3 Wall, Centro Nacional Chega, Dili, 2013. Photo: Lyndell Brown/ Charles Green.

A few kilometres west from here, and even a little further from the waterfront, is Centro Nacional Chega, a former Indonesian prison where terrible Indonesian human rights abuses took place between 1974 and 1999, recorded in prisoners’ marks on walls. There, the work of the Commission for Reception, Truth & Reconciliation (CAVR) is presented in a series of photomontages mounted on panels, in uncredited assemblages that should sometime be reprinted and shown in a documenta or a biennal of contemporary art. Meanwhile, let’s start at the centre of our own painted photograph with the radiant, coloured headstone, a framed photograph of the image of Christ cradling a lamb in His arms, redeeming the world through self-sacrifice, yet calling everyone to account on the day of judgment. None of the political significance of the lamb would have been lost on Dili’s Timorese mourners. Serpentine paths cut through the maze of tombs, in a sharp, one-point

IMAGE 5.4 Detail of Scatter 2 (Santa Cruz), 2016, by Jon Cattapan and Lyndell Brown/Charles Green. Acrylic and oil on digital photograph on Duraclear film on Perspex, framed, 87 × 290 cm. © Jon Cattapan and Lyndell Brown/Charles Green 2016. Courtesy Station Gallery and ARC One.

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perspective that connects us to the deep, dark space beyond. But there are no vast mausoleums or war memorials here. We’re in a desperately poor country, one still impoverished by Indonesia’s genocidal colonization. The burial plots are rammed up close together so the visitor steps from one narrow gap to another over fading flowers. Late afternoon sun has coloured the stones, and it is turning the maze of simple tombs into a city of spirits. More than the many crosses, you see the force of history in the short epitaph – aqui jaz (here lies) – that precedes lists of names and dates on the tombs. We have stepped off the path and grip our camera on its tripod with both hands to frame the fading light. Our view is foreshortened and partial; we are looking at the ground and our peripheral vision recedes abruptly. The coming evening and its long shadows are bending everything out of shape, confusing near and far. There are a few local families and mothers walking slowly, but they are just beyond our viewpoint. What do we really know anyway? When we catch their glances, they smile gently but diffidently, also leaning into the past though they appear to us to be pressing on with the present and certainly without any particular desire to leave what they have come to do or pay us any more attention than we deserve, which is nothing. We know the dead here are at least moderately lucky, because they are not travelling alone. They are walking with friends, whereas the Indonesian military dead in the adjacent cemetery, just across the road, are having worse luck. Though their graves are immaculately tended by the Timorese and the grass is carefully clipped, there is no one to be seen there at all, no one visiting. Scatter 2 puts war front and centre, but from the point of view of onepoint perspective and deep recession. It is both aftermath photography and painting. We start with a panoramic photograph stitched together digitally from multiple photos we take at the scene, then our Melbourne masterprinter, Chris Pennings, prints the file onto transparent duraclear film that he then mounts over Perspex. Light suffuses the image in a contemporary photographic update of stained glass that we delicately overpaint in oil and acrylic with images, both semi-abstract (at top, a bloody waterfall of red paint; right, the freely drawn tracery of memorial architecture over two foreground gravestones) and figurative (left, the intricate, detailed, painted pyramid of images). Across to the left and right of the Christ, one of

IMAGE 5.5 Ruined Ceiling, Arte Moris, Dili, 2013. Photo: Lyndell Brown/Charles Green.

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us (Jon Cattapan) etches delicate geometric tracery in sky blue or pastel green across the tombstones. These are line drawings with blurred, bleeding edges and shadows. So far, we have hardly any more grasp on its meaning than anyone else. This photograph is becoming a painting and is certainly not a documentary study. During the Indonesian occupation, Timorese were barred from public self-expression on pain of death. The country was almost totally closed. Extrajudicial killings and murders were astonishing in magnitude and frequency. In such a situation, all art is war art. Incredibly and perhaps farcically, the Indonesian occupiers established a National Museum at Comora, just outside Dili and not far from the airport, housed in an extraordinarily dramatic, ultra-modern building (think of Brasilia) now in a state of extreme ruin, as you can see. Do you note here, how the wrecked ceiling slopes up high, mimicking both the profile of Indigenous village houses and the soaring spaces of a cathedral? But it became until recently a cultural centre – Arte Moris (which means Living Art in Tetun, the language most Timorese speak) – created by young artist-squatters living and working without official permission in the museum’s outbuildings. It was the only visual art centre in Timor-Leste. At Arte Moris, off and on, there were art classes, martial arts instructors, a drama troupe, a tattoo parlour and sprawling displays of paintings by mostly very young, substantially selftaught artists. The instructors were hungry for any assistance at all. A large portion of the art was, as you would guess, semi-surrealist or inflected by the example of street art and graffiti. And some local techniques can be seen, too. Absolutely present – still contemporary – is the war waged

IMAGE 5.6 Installation view, exhibition, Arte Moris, Dili, 2013. Photo: Lyndell Brown/Charles Green.

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upon these people. They lost almost everything in the genocide that the Indonesians unleashed; the militia even removed the wires and poles for electricity around the city as they left. Scorched earth, indeed! And how sharply and harshly this perspective pushes art world and art museum culture to one side. A new national museum? Where do you start? Where do you stand? In late 2021, the Timorese government forcibly evicted Arte Moris to make way for housing for veterans from the war for independence.7 After a long fight that it seemed Arte Moris had won, paintings and easels and workshop equipment were dumped out onto the roadway outside. If I was to seek out contemporary war art on the Timor-Leste independence struggle, I might start with those artists, mostly born since independence, but then look for the Timorese who lived through that conflict and who themselves recorded those times. Australia’s own war artists sit at the very edge of that conflict, maybe less qualified to sum it up but determined to think about their position in the long narrative of neo-colonial Western culture. Back past Dili Airport to Santa Cruz cemetery, not yet a historic attraction for foreign visitors (there are almost none), the landscape of vivid gravestones is picturesquely magnetic, so much so, for such a notorious site, that we might confuse it for an Italian hill town seen from a humble retail drone. And that is a clue of our painting’s melancholy. Its near-empty surf beaches aside and despite the unexpectedly short the flight from Darwin to Dili, Timor-Leste will remain a far distant outlier on Australia’s map of complacent self-regard, marking many places along our national timeline of mistaken self-congratulation, reaching from 1975 with the Indonesian invasion (which Prime Minister Gough Whitlam’s Australian government did not protest) to the present. And the tragedy of the cemetery at Santa Cruz and the ruined army bases, more than a day’s difficult drive eastwards at the feet of the Mundo Perdido (Lost World) Mountains, the last redoubt of Fretilin fighters before a tide of international support turned towards them after the massacre at Santa Cruz, is an episode in the prolonged end of more than one colonial adventure, a little rock in the foaming tsunami of history. Darkness, behind the sharp perspective of the gravestones, sits at our composition’s vanishing point, and we get finally to my uneasy point about an artist’s

IMAGE 5.7 Ruined Army Base, Mundo Perdido Mountains, Timor-Leste, 2013. Photo: Lyndell Brown/Charles Green.

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perspective drawn from the outside. A hallmark of European early modern art’s luminous rationalism, Western perspective has more recently been a very different, shared signifier in contemporary art. It has come to mean irrational darkness, tragic conflict and war – the view from the heights. Think Julie Mehretu or Anselm Kiefer or Fabian Marcaccio or Thomas Hirschhorn or William Kentridge or Gerhard Richter or Hito Steyerl or John Akomfrah. We would have picked up on the recessive geometry of the cemetery even if it had not been under our noses in the warm, humid Dili dusk. And something else as well. Across the cycle of paintings made at the same time as Scatter 2, in the pyramid of paper and the line-drawn diagrams where we three employ the perspectival modifications common in Indian miniature painting that Brown and Green have studied during visits to India each year over more than three decades, and in which we were, all three, coached the year before by renowned Indian artists at a retreat in Jaipur, similar-sized figures or objects are in groups positioned along sightlines. Artists always import new knowledge, absorbing a perspective on ideas from examples that come, in turn, from art pointed to by other artists. I emphasize that this is what artists do, including the young Timorese at Arte Moris, sometimes with credit, often not, in a sometimes depressing landscape of ethical and moral rights. Now look closely at Scatter’s stack of images at left, the next, densely overpainted part of the photograph: a sheaf of crumpled papers has been delicately arranged like a house of cards rising into the humid air. Newspaper cuttings, postcards, a map. Remember these? They were all common before

IMAGE 5.8 Detail of Scatter 2 (Santa Cruz), 2016, by Jon Cattapan and Lyndell Brown/Charles Green. Acrylic and oil on digital photograph on Duraclear film on Perspex, framed, 87 × 290 cm. © Jon Cattapan and Lyndell Brown/Charles Green 2016. Courtesy Station Gallery and ARC One.

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smartphones. We easily identify the left-hand fragment as a postcard of a painting by Venetian master Giovanni Bellini, St Jerome Reading in the Wilderness, 1480–5, in the collection of the National Gallery in London. Facing the saint on the right, part of a photograph by a famous war photographer of Gurkha soldiers being airlifted from a battlefield in Helmand province, Afghanistan, and a fragment of the headline, ‘Whatever happened to the American empire?’ It hardly matters that we don’t see the full text: we already know the story that is unfolding. Gurkhas go everywhere in the West’s imperial wars to clean up mess, each soldier a small part in a vast jigsaw of force: sudden deafening noises, long waiting, dust, the thousand natural hazards of modern war. Above them, a photograph of a Pakistan Army outpost on the border after it was attacked by the US Air Force (remember, as you do, Pakistan’s duplicitous, mendacious harbouring of terrorists against its ostensible allies, ourselves). And finally, stacked right, an almost unrecognizable, crumpled-up newspaper clipping of Dr Muhamed Haneef, an Indian doctor working in a Queensland regional hospital, wrongly accused of terrorism by the populist, right-wing Australian government in 2007. War and its aftermath are spread across this painted paper pyramid and span our present-day postcolonial national settler story, the story that is sometimes called Australian art. One reason that the concept of the war artist has gained little traction in the art world is that, despite each conflict’s universal and local urgency, each nation imagines its own national story. Even when subject to cosmopolitan revision, a nation’s claim on war art proves remarkably resilient, crowding each work of war art’s other characteristics; after all, the purpose of the Australian War Memorial’s official artist commissions was first of all to record the nation’s participation in war. Hence the current, deeply ironic situation in which the idea of war artist has no grip on the art world’s imagination yet within the national canon it retains a key place. To make the same point differently, the subgenre of war art has a life outside the normal critical mechanisms of the art world; we were stunned by the intense press attention to our AWM commission, humbled by the strength of the general public’s feedback, especially from veterans and their families, and surprised by the works’ longevity on repeated art museum display, especially by the fact that it was categorized within the genre of documentary.8 Here is, we think, the abiding relevance of our and others’ Australian war artist commissions: acknowledging and showing the frame, by which I mean not the formalist frame of late modernism, but the philosophical frame – of the long, fraught, conflicted histories, networks and infrastructure underlying and supporting contemporary wars. We were revealing that frame when we painted History Painting: Market, Tarin Kowt, 2008, incorporating the ghosts of nineteenth-century Orientalist paintings of exotic Central Asia, and painting what, on first glance, given the tradition of history paintings in oils, looked like a large battle scene but which resolved upon inspection into an incongruous mix of the exotic and utterly contemporary. Above all, at

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IMAGE 5.9 History Painting: Market, Tarin Kowt, Uruzgan Province, Afghanistan, 2008, by Lyndell Brown and Charles Green. Oil on linen, 155 × 155 cm. Australian War Memorial Collection. © Lyndell Brown/Charles Green 2008. Courtesy the Australian War Memorial.

the painting’s centre, is a documentary film: around the armed soldiers in camouflage, local traders, military vehicles; and, beyond, the vast Talibancontrolled mountains of central Afghanistan’s Oruzgan province, into which we had flown. Ben Quilty was doing the same with his charismatic, agonized portraits of nude veterans, painted in his studio. Australian Indigenous artists not far away, just across the Timor Sea, fifty years before, were weaving their own panoramic heritage together into a new, momentous perspective in response to endless wars at home, which were just as vicious. This is the point at which our story takes a different turn. In mid-2019, Ian McLean and I convened a week’s intensive, hosted by Baku-Larrŋgay Mulka Centre and Mr. Wanambi, a renowned traditional

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IMAGE 5.10 Baku-Larrŋgay Mulka Centre, Yirrkala, 2013. Photo: Lyndell Brown/ Charles Green.

IMAGE 5.11 Yirrkala, 2013. Photo: Lyndell Brown/Charles Green. Yolngu artist, at Yirrkala for an eighteen-researcher international colloquium. Before us was a great synthesis of resistance to colonization into art. War had shaped the emergence of contemporary art, but I have made the point that war in art is relegated to a minor art genre (war art). Further, Australians will eventually acknowledge that war occurs not just at a great distance in the past, at Gallipoli or the Western Front, but in the frontier wars and in our own sad histories with asylum seekers and refugees.9 But this may require the mediation of art to impact on Australian society, such is the impact upon Australian culture of art’s iconic vividness. And if anybody has experienced war, it is Indigenous people, who have experienced 200 years of continuous violence, conflict and war at the hands of our settler society and yet who have continually chosen to communicate with our society through visual art. More than this: they show us that the separation between art and the judgement of law is without substance, not just for Yolngu but for us all – and this is crucial.10 Central at Yirrkala in the Baku-Larrŋgay Mulka Centre, with its own, specially built chapel, is a huge but deliberately rarely reproduced (and then only in grainy old black and white) diptych, Yirrkala Church Panel – Dhuwa (1963), and Yirrkala Church Panel – Yirritja (1963), painted by great artists

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who lived across northeast Arnhem Land. It is a major statement of Yolngu resolve, given they had successfully resisted displacement from their homeland; however, they were forced to live with disadvantage and the despoiling of bauxite mining in the heart of their lands. The Church Panels were a manifesto for mediating the new, neo-colonial era that was now upon them. Yolngu artists have a long-standing desire to make collective visual statements that answer the legal question of their sovereignty as a people. Scholars and writers in ever-widening circles have since grasped at the ramifications. Howard Morphy first explained that the artists ‘decided how they would use their art in communicating with outsiders and how their sacred law could be presented in public contexts’.11 After the Church Panels followed the more famous Yirrkala petitions (a smaller version of the Church Panels), which curator Carolyn Christov-Bakargiev introduced to the yet wider world, hailing them as the world’s first great activist art when she exhibited them in the 2015 Istanbul Biennial.12 And, in Terry Smith’s comprehensive narration of their creation, the Yirrkala Church Panels were made in a cross-cultural gesture of political and legal significance, where the clans of the region pooled their knowledge to work together for the first time on a single, shared, collaborative work of art.13 The collaboration between Yolngu elders is clear but seamless; each painted their ancestral story, but they fit together perfectly. The two Church Panels are the most important paintings ever made in Australia. This is not just because they are comparable in power and imagination to anything painted in the world at that time, but because they proposed a future from the experience of war that concepts like decolonial and postnational are only now in the process of describing. What do I mean? The Panels inaugurated a global period of transition from the period of modernism to contemporaneity. We need to push the inception of the period of contemporary art back a few years earlier from the dates we are accustomed to, so circa 1968 becomes 1962–3. The question immediately arises: had other art about sovereignty and generosity amidst war appeared, also waiting to be acknowledged? Could those responses to war underpin a vast, ground-up reformulation of the idea of war and contemporary crises for the rest of us, since we too now experience vast, dangerous emergencies – wars at home – in the form of climate change, pandemics and the closing of borders? Completely redefining contemporary war art in this way involves two relatively new concepts. I must emphasize that the first concept – the postnational, because national boundaries do not help understand art – does not presume any diminution of national borders nor any move away from stubbornly xenophobic nation states.14 The second concept – to decolonize, the imperative felt by First Nations peoples and those attempting to create a more diverse and equal art world – is increasingly used to explain what artists and writers do when they challenge colonizing cultures; the

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word appeared alongside the idea of the postcolonial.15 All three concepts refute the vague, easy idea of increasingly globalized art, a favourite reflex of biennial curators in the early 2000s. For contemporary war art, attention must instead be paid to specific, exogenous factors, because war has changed art rather than, as many ever-hopeful critics claim, because art has ameliorated war. These are crucial coordinates for a thorough rethink of contemporary war art. The experience of war had continually motivated the production and justification of culture in adaptation to both exogenous and endogenous crisis – not by the diffusion of influence within a hermetic and gender-oblivious world of art. Within a decolonized and postnational model, violent conflict did not always result in exodus of the displaced, but saw resistance, followed by the assertion of sovereignty, judgement and even, perhaps after all that, clemency. All this was deliberately communicated by colonized people in the realm of culture and art without the need for the reportage of visiting war artists, but we visitors would gain an irreplaceable and unique perspective on the betrayals and violence of our own culture across generations. We then arrive at the wars at home, unfolding within the glum, divisive, disruptive logic that wars at home usually exhibit. We know that the notion of a war at home is not new. We have acknowledged that we need look no further than First Nations Australians enduring and surviving long struggles beginning with invasion and then the frontier wars. And in Australia, conflict was clearly renewed with the federal government’s outright refusal of the nation’s peak Indigenous elders’ Uluru Statement from the Heart (2017).16 And then there is the equally large conflict of climate warming born out of a savage war on nature; we all saw fires ravage Australia and the US as 2020 started. All this unfinished business is entwined with the impact of the arrival of Covid-19. For whitefella Australians, there is palpable shock, even anger, under the stress of isolation, quarantine, hard borders and repeated lockdowns to stave off Covid-19. What really surfaces from the debris of shirked responsibility is that we see Australian culture once again facing its deepest, most debilitating problems: the survival of the past into the present and specifically the survival of long wars and the refusal of long perspectives into the present. In 1995, when I wrote Peripheral Vision, I described art historians’ collaborations with national art history as treachery, drawing on South African writer Rian Malan’s excruciatingly honest book My Traitor’s Heart.17 Now, the ascendency of First Nations art in the international imaginary is in part a symptom of disenchantment with national ideology and its manifestations in art and art histories. So, Scatter and all the works we made around that time, including the panoramic, seventeen-metre-long print 100 Years of Turbulence, 2018, are a shift from our first responses as contemporary war artists. We were focusing on two themes: first, the great tension between Australia’s vision of itself, profoundly shaped by wars starting 100 years ago – imperial wars fought by colonials in foreign lands, often in the unacknowledged company of First

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IMAGE 5.12 100 Years of Turbulence, 2018, by Lyndell Brown/Charles Green, 2018. Four inkjet prints on rag paper, 110 × 1761 cm. Courtesy ARC One.

Nations volunteers; second, a wondering about cultural self-regard that was profoundly bent out of shape by catastrophic crises abroad and at home that disrupt national stories – ongoing, never-ending crises of climate warming, a barely started process of Indigenous reconciliation, and stigmatized immigration and persecuted asylum-seeking, all rooted in war and peace unilaterally mandated 100 years ago and more. Daytime at Santa Cruz cemetery has been replaced by dusk and a deluge of red lines and dots that fall from the sky like sparks of fire and rain over the most distant graves. Where Leonardo da Vinci’s late drawings of flood and deluge captured the rules and laws of turbulence on delicate, off-white paper, we show paint on a photograph printed on transparent film mounted on Perspex. Under the bright lights of the gallery, the print throws a ghost image onto the wall a few centimetres behind. A wind blows across the Timor Sea to the master-printer at Fini Frames in post-industrial Cremorne, then down the highway to a painter’s studio hidden in a drab industrial park in Moorabbin, then up the Calder Freeway across green hills to the artists’ studio in Central Victoria. A whole infrastructure of support and specialization, more brittle than you realize in every way. The pressure of history is so fragile and ephemeral that the red flood of lines and dots is not anything as obvious as blood. It strikes you more that this resembles the vast bushfires to come with each season’s extra climate change. Any single nation,

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when the new storms strike, recedes from view. At this small cemetery in little Dili under the evening shadow of the coastal mountains, we have a premonition. Because a work of art’s meaning does not lie in what it looks like, nor in how it circulates, and we can’t assume any fixed economy of art after January 2020 and the start of the pandemic, a broken narrative can be

IMAGE 5.13 Detail of Scatter 2 (Santa Cruz), 2016, by Jon Cattapan and Lyndell Brown/Charles Green. Acrylic and oil on digital photograph on Duraclear film on Perspex, framed, 87 × 290 cm. © Jon Cattapan and Lyndell Brown/Charles Green 2016. Courtesy Station Gallery and ARC One.

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emphasized too much. But all we have is a metaphoric and metonymic network of images mimicking the fragmented but eager movement of authors towards truth. Broken recollections produce the illusion that the workings of obliterated, unrecovered memory govern the world, but Scatter 2 – and in particular, the cascade of broken, folded objects and the deluge of red lines – tells us that the perspective of postmodernity is less and less true today. Therefore, hold lightly to what you can. The mountains fade into darkness.

Notes 1 Charles Green, Peripheral Vision: Contemporary Australian Art 1970–94 (Sydney: Craftsman House, 1996). 2 On these paintings, see Jeanette Hoorn, ‘The Desiring Phantom: Contemplating the Art of Lyndell Brown and Charles Green’, Art and Australia, vol. 35, no. 3 (April 1998): 374–81. 3 Charles Green, Lyndell Brown and Jon Cattapan, Framing Conflict: War, Peace and Aftermath (Melbourne: Palgrave Macmillan, 2014). 4 Charles Green and Lyndell Brown ‘No Agency: Iraq and Afghanistan at War: The Perspective of Commissioned War Artists’, in Mars and Minerva: Artistic and Cultural Responses to War (1914–2014) in the Anglo-Saxon World, ed. Margaret Baguley and Martin Kerby (London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2019), 23–44. 5 Boris Groys, Art Power (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2008), 127. 6 Christopher Knaus, ‘Witness K and the “Outrageous” Spy Scandal that Failed to Shame Australia’, The Guardian, 10 August 2019. www.theguardian.com/ australia-news/2019/aug/10/witness-k-and-the-outrageous-spy-scandal-thatfailed-to-shame-australia, accessed 9 February 2022. 7 Team Independente, ‘Horta Condemns Timor-Leste Government Decision to Evict Arte Moris’, Diariu Independente, 2 December 2021. www. independente.tl/en/national/horta-condemns-timor-leste-government-decisionto-evict-arte-moris, accessed 8 February 2022. 8 For instance, our photographs’ inclusion in the panoramic exhibition of international documentary photography, Civilisation: The Way We Live Now, curated by William Ewing and Holly Roussell (Melbourne: National Gallery of Victoria, 2019). 9 For more, see Richard Frankland et al., ‘Forever Business: A Framework for Maintaining and Restoring Cultural Safety in Aboriginal Victoria,’ Indigenous Law Bulletin, vol. 7, no. 24, (2011): 27–30. 10 Howard Morphy, ‘Acting in a Community: Art and Social Cohesion in Indigenous Australia’, Humanities Research Journal, vol. XV, no. 2 (2009): 115–31. 11 Morphy, ‘Acting in a Community’, 119. 12 Carolyn Christov-Bakargiev, SALTWATER: A Theory of Thought Forms: The 14th Istanbul Biennial (Istanbul: Istanbul Biennial, 2015). Christov-Bakargiev

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included several works by Indigenous artists in this Biennial, including by Djambawa Marawili and Vernon Ah-Kee as well as many earlier pieces including Maw and Dhangatji Mununggurr Maak Message Sticks (1935), Yirrkala Drawings (1947), Yirrkala Bark Petitions (1963) and Thumb Print petitions (1963), and four Saltwater Barks produced by the Yolngu to support their claims for Sea Rights (1998–2000). 13 Terry Smith, ‘Marking Places, Cross-Hatching Worlds: The Yirrkala Church Panels’, eflux journal, no. 111 (September 2020). 14 The term is first used in relation to contemporary art by Ian McLean and first coined by Jürgen Habermas in 1987; see Ian McLean, Rattling Spears: A History of Indigenous Australian Art (London: Reaktion, 2016), and Jürgen Habermas, The Postnational Constellation (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2001). 15 Jennifer Loureide Biddle, Remote Avant-garde: Aboriginal Art under Occupation (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2016). 16 ‘The Uluru Statement from the Heart’, 2017, https://ulurustatement.org/ the-statement, accessed 22 August 2021. 17 See Green, Peripheral Vision, 148; Rian Malan, Blood and Bad Dreams: A South African Explores the Madness in His Country, His Tribe and Himself (London: Atlantic Monthly Press, 1990).

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CHAPTER SIX

Soldier/Artist Negotiating the Complexities of Military Service and Critical Practice Kit Messham-Muir and Uroš Čvoro

In Australia, Canada and the United Kingdom the fairly recent tradition of official war art is just over 100 years long, with each nation initiating a scheme in the midst of the Great War. During the first fifty years of these schemes, it was not uncommon for artists to be commissioned into the military, often in an honorary role, such as Will Dyson who was made a lieutenant in the Australian Imperial Force, and Britain’s Muirhead Bone who was an honorary second lieutenant, both on the Western Front of the Great War.1 As public sensibilities around war shifted during the twentieth century, the idea of appointing a civilian artist into the armed forces became increasingly untenable. Ryan Johnston, former Head of Art at the Australian War Memorial says, ‘It was in Vietnam that the scheme faltered outright. Unlike previous or subsequent wars, any official artist deployed in Vietnam was required to undertake full jungle warfare training, and fight if required.’2 Will Dyson had been injured twice during his time as Australia’s first official war artist, but fifty years later when Ken McFadyen was accidentally shot in the leg while with Australian troops in Vietnam in 1968, it brought about a nearly thirty-year hiatus to that scheme.3 When the Australian scheme was revived in 1999, with Wendy Sharpe sent to peacekeeping operations in Timor-Leste, the emphasis shifted to a more emphatically civilian/artist 137

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approach and, as Catherine Speck notes, it deliberately included greater diversity.4 In Canada, the Canadian War Records Program sent artists to the Second World War, but went into hibernation for two decades following. The Canadian Armed Forces Civilian Artists Program (CAFCAP) came into existence in 1968, the same year that the Australian scheme went into abeyance, fixing the point of view very much with the civilian/artist (interestingly, Canada’s scheme was completely overhauled in 2001 into the Canadian Forces Artists Program, a much more expansive residency-style programme that deploys multiple civilian/artists with Canadian forces and tends to include a considerable representation of former Canadian military). The UK’s official war artist programme continued comparatively unchanged, perhaps with some notable incremental changes, such as Linda Kitson’s appointment as British official war artist to the Falklands conflict in 1982. While the role of artists deployed in war zones has evolved throughout the last 100 years, a common aim across time and schemes has been to capture something of the experience of the nation’s armed forces engaged in conflict. But is something lost with a shift from soldier/artist to civilian/artist? Since around 2007, each programme has shifted towards a contemporary art approach, and the more recent civilian/artists have produced interesting and challenging work, such as Steve McQueen’s Queen and Country (2007) and Shaun Gladwell’s Behind Point of View, Middle East Area of Operations (or BPOV MEAO ) (2010) anti-portraits from Afghanistan and nichola feldman-kiss’s after Africa, (2011–14) from the United Nations Mission in Sudan (UNMIS). In this new and edgier contemporary era of official war art, there is a much greater emphasis on the civilian/artist perspective. One effect of this is that it is a greater challenge for artists to address the experience of the military engaged in conflict, particularly within military subcultures that can be arcane and mystifying. Furthermore, as Joanna Bourke recently argues, ‘official war artists in particular are explicitly required to represent the world for a broad audience’. That is, part of what they are required to do is to perform the emotions for people back home. So they are required, in a sense, to actually mirror emotions that they are encountering in those war zones and provide people who are looking at it from the great distance with an image of how they ought to be responding to these. So, I called it performing the emotions for people back home.5 In its present form, then, and in a culture that is increasingly in the thrall of affect and emotion, empathy has become a central and vexed issue. For example, the Australian official war artist Ben Quilty created a series of paintings titled After Afghanistan, which portrayed returned Australian soldiers as vulnerable and psychologically injured. His works attempted to create an intersubjective bridge through expressive appeals to empathic

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identification between traumatized soldiers and the civilian audience. However, as we discuss elsewhere, this is problematic for a complex range of reasons – not least that, as Rex Butler argues, the potential that his works perform ‘the signs of empathy’,6 but do not necessarily create any sustained empathic connection to the soldier sitters or their trauma.7 Butler argues that this emphasis on creating an empathic emotional connection masks a tacit acceptance of the broader political context that put these soldiers in Afghanistan in the first place.8 Bourke makes a similar point about much contemporary war art and ‘the problem that, too often, audiences of war art are drawn into witnessing the corporeal suffering of victims, stripped of the structural factors that made the violence possible’.9 We have also argued elsewhere that much of the work by Australia’s preceding official war artist, Shaun Gladwell, focuses on issues of empathic identification, albeit from an entirely different trajectory. Gladwell was sent to Afghanistan and the Middle East in 2009 with a similar objective – to tell the story of the experience of Australian troops in the war zone. Much of his work contemplates the opportunities and barriers to establishing meaningful intersubjective alignments between the civilian/artist and the military subjects whose experience he was commissioned to record. This is played out in several of Gladwell’s war artworks, such as the series of photographs of BPOV MEAO , which adopt behind points of view, showing the backs of soldiers’ heads against military scenes that are, to both the civilian artist and viewer, difficult to decode. This is also expressed in a more sophisticated way in the work POV: Mirror Sequence Tarin Kowt, 2009–10, where Gladwell himself takes up the position of one the soldiers. In that work, Gladwell and a fully kitted-out Australian soldier circle and strafe each other on the edges of Camp Holland in Tarin Kowt, Afghanistan. They record each other through video cameras, attempting to keep the other in view without looking up from their viewfinder. Installed in a gallery, each of the two points of view is projected separately on opposing gallery walls as a two-channel video installation. Without helmet or camouflaged uniform, Gladwell projects a relatable civilian figure into the scene and, drawing attention to bodily gesture as his works usually do, we notice that soldier and civilian in the scene move in completely different ways. In both works, Gladwell’s attempts to establish a shared subjective point of view ultimately fail. And this is reinforced in POV: Mirror Sequence Tarin Kowt, which cleaves an intersubjective chasm between either our civilian identification with Gladwell, or, perhaps, our military identification with the soldier. Our perception of the work depends upon which side we fall on that civilian/ military divide. At the time the work was in post-production, Gladwell observed that it plays out an ‘an impossible empathy’.10 In other words, for a civilian/artist such as Gladwell, its shared points of view are unable to successfully create an empathic identification with the military gaze. In this chapter, we focus upon the work of Derek Eland, Britain’s official war artist, commissioned by the Imperial War Museum to travel to

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IMAGE 6.1 Derek Eland, Lake District, United Kingdom, 2019. Photo: Kit Messham-Muir.

Afghanistan in 2011, and Bosnian artist Mladen Miljanovic´. Eland was an official war artist; Miljanovic´ was not, but he represented Bosnia and Herzegovina at its return to the Venice Biennale after a twenty-year absence, initiated by the Bosnian War and continuing during its aftermath. We focus on particular works by both Eland and Miljanovic´ because both approach war through the perspective of soldier/artist, both are former officers in their country’s military, and this continues to heavily inform their art practice, particularly within the two works on which we will focus here. In addressing the subjective experiences of soldiers, both Eland and Miljanovic´ – in very different ways – use aspects of social practice. Eland, unlike any British official war artist before him, created a site-specific social practice work, titled Diary Rooms; Miljanovic´, on the other hand, creates works that often involve and depict former combatants, often adversaries, in the Bosnian War of the mid-1990s, and we focus here on Draft for a 20-minute Monument, 2019. Both works operate within the space of the dualistic subjectivity of soldier/artist and, in doing so, actually adopt a (perhaps) surprisingly humanistic approach in their work. Both Eland and Miljanovic´ address soldiers’ physical injuries. However, neither operates through a performance of emotional empathy; rather, the injuries they depict are approached as much more matter of fact. In both cases, and in very different ways, a sense of resilience prevails that moves beyond a fixation on mute trauma to a more pragmatic assertion of voice and agency. Importantly, we examine these two works through primary interview material from both artists, and consider the ways in which their soldier/artist subjectivity impacts upon the emphases of these works.

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Being Human in the War Zone: Diary Rooms Derek Eland was born and raised in Carlisle, Cumbria, in the northernmost reaches of England. After studying politics at Durham University, he attended Sandhurst and was commissioned into the UK’s Parachute Regiment in his early 20s. He served in the Paras for five years before leaving to become a management consultant, and he eventually returned to Carlisle in 2009 to study an MA in Contemporary Fine Art. Eland hit art school just at the peak moment of ‘relational aesthetics’;11 the critical resurgence of the 1990s ‘ “laboratory” paradigm’ that, Claire Bishop notes, had been promoted by Hans Ulrich Obrist, Barbara van der Linden, Hou Hanru and Nicolas Bourriaud: ‘openended, interactive, and resistant to closure, often appearing to be “work-in-progress” rather than a completed object’.12 At that time he created a project called Love Carlisle, in which he opened a shop in the city and asked members of the public to write their thoughts about Carlisle on sticky notes. Over six weeks he collected 4,000 notes, recording what people loved about the city or what they wanted to change. For Eland, Love Carlisle was a transformative moment, and a realization that this form of practice has much in common with his years as a management consultant working on cultural change in corporations. He says, ‘it was quite transformative for me, but also for people who saw it, because there was a real connection with the individual through that handwriting in a digital age. So, I got hooked on to the idea of the confessional, the idea of handwriting being a bit of a link to the soul, being lost through digital social media, through keyboards.’13 Eland varied this approach in other works that followed, such as This is Cockermouth, which used paper ‘leaves’ instead of sticky notes to record public responses to a disastrous flood in the nearby Lake District. Eland was heavily influenced by Alfredo Jaar and particularly Yoko Ono’s My Mommy Is Beautiful (1997–2018), in which members of the public leave notes about their feelings towards their mother. In 2010, a chance conversation with a former colleague at a regimental dinner led Eland to propose a similar project for British troops stationed in Afghanistan. Appointed then in 2011 as a British official war artist by the Imperial War Museum, Eland spent a month at Patrol Base Kalang in Helmand Province, collecting contributions from British soldiers to create walls of notes inside a shipping container (see Image 6.2). Leading up to the deployment, Eland had a fear of being perceived as an outsider by the troops in Helmand. He says that once an official war artist steps back to observe, ‘then you become the other and I didn’t want to become the other. But at the same time I wanted to keep my artistic creative independence, I didn’t want to be told to do anything or not to do anything and I didn’t want to be censored with the work. Those were the preconditions in my head. But I thought that it won’t work if I am the other.’14 And Eland did find that even as a former Paratrooper, he was still regarded somewhat as an outsider. It was, in fact, his sharing of the risk that helped build rapport with the soldiers

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IMAGE 6.2 Diary Room, Kalang, installation, 2011, by Derek Eland. © Derek Eland 2011. Reproduced with permission of the artist.

in Helmand. He went out on around thirty helicopter missions and around twenty-five ground patrols and stayed at small a checkpoint in Taliban territory (‘probably the place that I was the most scared’): ‘Because I took the same risks as them, I think they thought we will give him a story . . . I think if I just stayed in the main bases and asked for stories it wouldn’t have worked because they would have thought that I am an outsider.’15 However, it was not with British troops on the ground that Eland experienced the most resistance, but rather with the Parachute Regiment officers and senior sergeants at a pre-deployment briefing in Colchester in November 2010. Eland thought that with his Para background the meeting would be relatively straightforward. He gave a short presentation on the proposed work, but when he asked for questions at the end of his presentation, ‘everyone just sat with their arms folded looking at me. And someone from the back said, “Why the hell do we need to do this? I don’t think that we should be doing this.” ’ The discussion revealed to Eland that the greatest fear was that his Afghanistan Diary Room would ‘tap into something seditious that goes on in soldiers’ minds. So instead of “fighting the good fight” they would write about killing people or wanting to kill people, they would write seditious things.’16 There is perhaps something that seems fundamentally democratizing about a wall of sticky notes, which gives voice to an often anonymous and diverse voice of a mass. This is the tradition of the Lennon Wall, after the wall in Prague, then Czechoslovakia,

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IMAGE 6.3 Lennon Wall Hong Kong, Central Government Complex, Hong Kong SAR, December 2014. Photo: Kit Messham-Muir.

that was spontaneously decorated with notes in the days following the murder of John Lennon in 1980. During the late 1980s, leading up to the wholesale collapse of communism in Eastern Europe, the same wall again became a site for anonymous anti-government notes.17 The Prague Lennon Wall then inspired the Lennon Wall Hong Kong, an outside staircase covered with masses of multicoloured square notes as a focal point of the 2014 Hong Kong Umbrella Revolution at the Central Government Complex (see Image 6.3). British senior officers in Colchester were perhaps unlikely to have seen the Prague Lennon Wall of the late 1980s, but they clearly felt threatened by the notion of creating an anonymous outlet for thoughts and feelings. ‘I think they thought maybe I was kind of slightly seditious in my motives, they were questioning my motives for doing this’, Eland notes; ‘one person said, well, this project will end up with someone shooting someone’.18 The result was an exhibition at the Imperial War Museum (IWM) North in Manchester in late 2011, and a book of the notes alongside photographs by Eland from Helmand, many depicting the author of the message, published in 2014.19 Far from seditious, the soldiers’ messages ranged from falling in love,20 to the ingratitude of the locals,21 to the thrill of battle.22 Some are profoundly tragic, such as the message from GDSM McGeown from the Irish Guards, admiring the stars in the unpolluted night sky of

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IMAGE 6.4 Colum McGeown’s Note, from Diary Room, 2011, by Derek Eland. © Derek Eland 2011. Reproduced with permission of the artist.

Afghanistan, and signing off with, ‘my love I’ll see you in 2½ weeks’23 (see Image 6.4), followed by a message from a medic to McGeown saying, ‘sorry it had to be you Mucker “G”. Now you can be with your love and baby and never come back to this hell hole!’24 (see Image 6.5) We discover on the last page of Eland’s book a photograph Eland took of Colum McGeown, which turns out to be the last ever taken of the soldier with legs.25 As the subtitle of Eland’s book suggests, Diary Rooms was about ‘being human on the front line in Afghanistan’, rather than being a soldier. Yet when the exhibition opened at the IWM, Eland says, ‘it was very much at the military angle, so it was all about which units were where, and rank and status, and things like this. So it was a military view of the project which I wasn’t comfortable with, because I never presented it as “The Irish guards” or “The Parachute Regiment”, or “The Royal Irish Rangers” . . . it was always about being human in the war zone.’26 Eland points out that it was impossible to engage with the Afghan people, except through military interpreters or soldiers; he says, ‘so it’s a biased view and I recognize that. But I never wanted it to be a military view of the situation.’27 He found that as it has toured over the years, its military ‘frame’ has diminished; quite possibly due to the retrospective reframing of Eland’s work since, for instance, his similar social practice work on dementia in 2013, and another ‘diary room’ at Everest Base Camp in 2016. He says, ‘I think in the three or four years that I showed

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IMAGE 6.5 LCPL Brownlow’s Note, from Diary Room, 2011, by Derek Eland. © Derek Eland 2011. Reproduced with permission of the artist.

that work, it evolved from being kind of militarized experience which could be open to that criticism and I would accept that, to one that was just about being a bunch of humans in this place at the same time and what did it feel like, and it felt right to me. And I think people are less critical of that and as an artist I was much more comfortable with that.’28

In the Meantime: Draft for a 20-minute Monument Mladen Miljanovic´’s Draft for a 20-minute Monument (2019) is a video showing nine war veterans (from all three sides of the war in BiH: Croat, Bosniak and Serb) with various levels of disability sitting on a pile of discarded stones (see Image 6.7). We see the nine veterans slowly taking up position and sitting on a pile of discarded stones behind a stone factory for twenty minutes with minimal movement and action. The men shuffle into their spots, trying to find a more comfortable position on the hard, uncomfortable surface. Some engage in chatter about the surroundings, and a ringing mobile phone goes unanswered at one point. Towards the end of the video, they stand up one by one and slowly move off screen. There is a clear and immediate sense in which these men represent the ideological ‘leftovers’ of the Bosnian War: the discarded human fodder used in the

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IMAGE 6.6 Mladen Miljanovic´, at War Studies, King’s College London, 2019. Photo: Kit Messham-Muir.

nation-building war, which has now been forgotten by the political elites, and which is periodically remembered in line with the election cycles (such as the opportunistic political use of veterans as ‘readymades’ of patriotism to trot out announcements about increasing veterans’ pensions). The men represent the stark contrast between the overwhelming commemoration of military and paramilitary personnel by monuments (there are almost no monuments to civilians in BiH), and their lived experience of being left behind. This is further reinforced by the pile of discarded stones: these are the rejected parts of commemorative culture, which get left behind in the process of producing ideologically loaded remembering. The work combines long-running themes in Miljanovic´’s work – his childhood experience of war, his personal experience as a tombstone maker, his collaboration with veterans in BiH, and his service in the army – with a response to the political weaponization of monuments in BiH following the 1990s war.29 His practice is an example of an artist who combines first-hand experience of conflict, military training and long-term lived experience of militarized culture into a powerful critique of normativity. He says in an interview with us, ‘After the war, actually when the Dayton Agreement stopped it, there was a period when . . . military service was still obligatory and, as an 18-year-old boy, I was obligated to serve in the Army.’30 Miljanovic´ was chosen for the Reserve School Officers and spent six months in the military Academy, earning the rank of lieutenant and eventually training soldiers in the BiH Army. After his service was completed, he returned home and struggled to make a living in the post-war economy disaster. Barely

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IMAGE 6.7 Still from Draft for a 20-Minute Monument, 2019, by Mladen Miljanovic´. Video, 21 minutes. © Mladen Miljanovic´, 2019. Reproduced with permission of the artist.

surviving, Miljanovic´ trained as a tombstone engraver creating hyperreal portraits of the deceased on their granite gravestones. After that, he decided to study at the Academy of Arts in Banja Luka. Ironically, the new campus of the art academy was the former barracks of the same military academy where he had completed his officer training. In a sense, this twist of fate parallels the ways in which his military experience and knowledge feed seamlessly into his art practice. In works such as The Didactic Wall, 2019, Miljanovic´ repurposes military survival knowledge for the use of asylumseekers from the Middle East, crossing through BiH in an attempt to gain entry into the European Union. In Draft for a 20-minute Monument, Miljanovic´ likewise straddles the subjective positions of soldier/artist. The work responds to an ongoing obsession in BiH with installing memorial monuments to the Bosnian War. Since the end of the 1992–5 war, over 2,100 monuments have been built in BiH. At the same time, BiH remains one of the most divided post-conflict societies in the twenty-first century, with ethnic division enshrined in its constitution. Its contemporary social and aesthetic complexities around monuments – the high number built, the entrenched nationalism, the systemic denial of genocide and revision of history – resonates with the difficult political situation in the country. Almost three decades after the signing of the Dayton Agreement in 1995 that marked the end of war, the country remains mired in the ethnonational identitarianism of its two main constituent entities (the Bosniak-Croat Federation and the Serb-dominated Republika Srpska) and a failed trajectory from violence to reconciliation.

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This post-conflict trajectory has been hampered by dispossession of social wealth and infrastructure; a labyrinthine system of government; and routine sequestering of political debate into nationalist rhetoric by the dominant ethno-nationalist parties. Consequently, BiH is confronted with the coexistence of three mutually exclusive ‘official’ narratives that dominate its culture of remembrance, whilst simultaneously disputing each other’s claim of ownership over the space and time of the country. In this context, it is difficult to understand BiH monuments as anything other than materializations of the aggressive nationalist rhetoric that has dominated the country for over thirty years.31 Rather than a circumspect stepping back from the divisions that underscored the war, these latter-day monuments are stridently ethnonationalist, engaging in a weaponizing of history. Draft for a 20-minute Monument responds to this monumental obsession and the history wars in which BiH appears to have been locked for almost three decades. Miljanovic´ weaves the representation of veterans and his own experience in the army into a powerful critique of conservative, religious, patriarchal, nationalist hegemony in post-war BiH. This includes failed (and often corrupt) internationally led attempts at reconciliation, including, as Miljanovic´ notes, the misuse of funds intended at reconciliation: ‘Bosnia became Eldorado for the reconciliation projects’, he says, ‘everybody was cleaning their conscience for not preventing the war crimes of the 1990s taking place at the edge of the Europe, by giving money’.32 Miljanovic´ says that an influx of non-government organizations came to spend that money on reconciliations projects. However, for Miljanovic´, the approaches of these projects was completely misguided, driven by the idea that peace is built by declaring a ‘peace project’ and simply inviting former enemies to make peace: If you have two friends who don’t talk to each other, you do not call them and say, ‘come on, I want to meet you with the guy that you don’t talk with, so let’s bring you to make peace’. It doesn’t work like that. You invite them to help you to clean windows and not tell them that the other will come. And when they come to clean windows they will need to put the sponge in the same bucket. And when they put their sponge at the same bucket they will say, ‘oh I am sorry, I touched you’, or something like that, and they will start a conversation.33 In other words, for Miljanovic´ true reconciliation in BiH needs to arise as the product of working towards other common goals, rather than the explicit goal of peace and reconciliation itself. And therein lies the reconciliatory potential of art. As Miljanovic´ says, ‘ “reconciliation projects” should not be named that way’.34 Draft for a 20-minute Monument does exactly this. To understand Miljanovic´’s critique of militarism and post-war reconciliation, we can draw on the term ‘meantime’ to capture the temporal

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experience of the last two decades in BiH. While for the rest of the world 2020 marked the intensification of the temporal sense of displacement – a Covid-19 state of suspension, while political tectonic shifts occurred in all aspects of life; being split between a feeling of intense stillness and even more intense acceleration – a similar sense of temporal displacement has, for several decades, been experienced as the norm in BiH. In addition to the physical devastation of life and property, the war in BiH can be understood as a rupture in the experience of time, between pre-war ‘normality’ (the idealized past) and a normative (return to normal) yet unattainable future of the EU. This temporal suspension between a war that has not quite ended and a future that has not yet begun has been described as being caught in ‘post-Dayton meantime’.35 This sense of meantime should be understood in connection with another term used to describe BiH, ‘negative peace’, which is a situation that has all the characteristics of war save for outright violence and destruction (but has clear potential to move in that direction, and the country lives under that constant threat). Meantime plays out in Draft for a 20-minute Monument across several registers, bringing up associations with waiting for and staging an event. In an immediate sense, the work is a record of a group waiting: but for what? The metaphor of waiting has been a powerful one in the context of postsocialist artists, appearing as early as the immediate post-1989 period in Chantelle Ackermann’s From the East, 1993. Ackermann captured scenes of groups of people standing around, waiting. Similarly, the trope of waiting and delay has often been used in critical writing which describes ‘the road to democracy’ in post-socialist transition as a form of temporal delay: entire populations are expected to undergo a developmental phase until they are ready to ‘rejoin’ the EU community.36 Miljanovic´’s work does not signal what if anything these veterans are waiting for, but rather uses the powerful symbolism of their bodies, of their ‘delegated performance’ to conjure up an array of associations. But the strongest temporal sense of the work is the intersection between wartime (negative peace) and manufacture time. In post-Dayton BiH, ‘negative peace’ is not only conflict with the absence of violence, it is also marked by the absence of key social factors associated with peace – such as freedom and justice. Negative peace means the cessation of violence, but not the removal of triggers which could lead to violence.37 By setting Draft for a 20-minute Monument on a pile of rocks behind a privately owned factory of tombstones, Miljanonvic´ alludes to the privatization of commemoration and its peripheral relation to forms of remembering in the region. In this privatization of ‘public’ memorialization, we witness the fragmentation of the public into realms that are aligned with, and reinforce, the very same ethnic and nationalistic fractures that underscored the war. With Draft for a 20-minute Monument, Miljanovic´ creates a temporary, ephemeral twenty-minute monument as a way to capture the experience of people caught between an unfinished conflict and the physical and social

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devastation brought about by war, and a decimation of the social sphere that has been built on this very decimation: from impoverishment, unemployment, public and private indebtedness, widespread deindustrialization, political corruption, social degradation, to diminished life expectancy and emigration. In equal measure, Draft for a 20-minute Monument recalls the staging of political spectacles where bodies are paraded on a political stage or staged as a backdrop to a pre-election rally. Here Miljanovic´ acts as a director: veterans slowly move onto the rocks and take their positions in response to off-camera instructions. Their distribution across the representational plane recalls scenes of leisure activities like a picnic in a nineteenth-century French Impressionist painting. But the strongest association of staging is the way in which the work captures the whole of BiH as a contemporary readymade for a failed state. Miljanovic´ ‘uses’ the veterans as stand-ins for the way in which BiH is routinely used in EU discussions to illustrate contemporary failures: a country with the highest level of migration out of the country, which at the same time supplies cheap labour of skilled medical workers to Germany. Thus, veterans as readymades of redundant patriotism intersect with BiH as an international readymade of a failed state. This experience of the marginalized, returns Miljanovic´ once again to his long-term and ongoing collaboration with veterans and his frequent use of dark humour as a methodological principle underpinning his work. Indeed, there is something tragicomical about the mundane everyday activity, which looks like a picnic, or a group of men hanging out and having casual conversations about the surrounding landscape, representing a difficult historical question. Miljanovic´ says, ‘the idea of humour and the idea of art are quite close. Both seek to sublimate something, and I think that it is very important for art to sublimate.’38 He believes that in both art and humour, by sublimating the meaning of something difficult into a surrogate – a work, or a joke – it allows us to address things that are otherwise too troubling to tackle head-on. The dark humour in Draft for a 20-minute Monument recalls a well-known sketch by a Monty Python-inspired Yugoslav comedy group Top List of the Surrealists (Top Lista Nadrealista), which was active during the 1980s and 1990s. Top List of the Surrealists produced sketches that parodied the rising nationalism and political corruption in Yugoslavia at the time. There is one particular sketch, produced at the height of the unemployment crisis in the former Yugoslavia, which in many ways led to the rise of nationalist tensions: a news crew visits a factory which found an innovative solution to help young unemployed university graduates. They earn money by posing as living statues representing hard-working socialist labourers. On one level, this is a parody of the socialist failures and obsession with workers as symbols of (failed) progress. But on another level, this is a parody of participation, in which lived bodies are monumentalized into historical representations of themselves. They are estranged from history, which has left them behind. In similar fashion, Miljanovic´’s veterans become

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transformed into statues representing themselves: representations of a history which they sacrificed their bodies to create, but a history that is never theirs (‘ours but not ours’). This irreducible difference becomes the basis of remembrance. In these works by both Eland and Miljanovic´, a common tension is established in the dualistic subjectivity of soldier/artist. Both artists occupy a perspective that is both military and, perhaps for want of a better word, humanist. As Eland says of Diary Room, even though the work centred on the perspective of soldiers, at its core ‘it was always about being human in the war zone’.39 In Miljanovic´’s Draft for a 20-minute Monument, on the other hand, individual veterans, very much humanized by their sometimes visibly war-broken bodies, are reinserted into Bosnia’s ongoing history wars as living monuments and, in the process, partially re-militarized. Produced almost twenty-five years after the war in Bosnia, Draft for a 20-minute Monument tacitly emphasizes the permanent physical wounds of war, particularly the loss of limbs, in a similar way to Eland’s tragic narrative around Colum McGeown’s loss of his legs.40 Taken together, the works’ corporealizing of the ongoing effects of wartime function to universalize the effects of war, displaced perhaps sixteen years apart. While both approaches are markedly different, in common is their soldier/artist dual perspective. This is not to say that such could not have been made by artists without military backgrounds, but rather that both Eland and Miljanovic´ draw upon their residual military subjectivity to successfully negotiate the intersubjective blockage that vexes the work of civilian war artists such as Gladwell and Quilty. Miljanovic´’s work is not about evoking empathy, but rather a cooler humanistic sympathy for the soldier (now veteran) that maintains a critical distance from the structural politics driving the conflict and ongoing tensions. In a very different way, Eland’s Diary Room, simply by placing expression in the hands of the frontline personnel, presents a complexified and multivalent mosaic of voices and narratives, which include the tragic alongside the humorous, and are both circumspect and celebratory. These works suggest that, in occupying the dualistic subjectivity of soldier/ artist, Eland and Miljanovic´ cut through questions of identification. Both artists, at once both ‘insiders’ and ‘outsiders’, in turn destabilize the perception of their subjects as soldiers, reframing them, to paraphrase Eland, as humans in the war zone. It is a position not without its own issues, but it has potential to open a conceptual route out of questions of empathy.

Notes 1 Susan Cahill, ‘The Art of War: Painted Photographs and Australia’s “War on Terror” ’, RACAR: revue d’art Canadienne, vol. 39, no. 2 (2014): 74. 2 Ryan Johnston, ‘Recalling History to Duty: 100 Years of Australian War Art’, Artlink, vol. 35, no. 1 (2015): 15.

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3 Ibid., 12. 4 Catherine Speck, ‘The Australian War Museum, Women Artists and the National Memory of the First World War’, in When the Soldiers Return: November 2007 Conference Proceedings, ed. Martin Critty, (Brisbane: School of History, Philosophy, Religion and Classics, University of Queensland, 2009), 278. 5 Joanna Bourke, interview with Kit Messham-Muir, Newtown, Sydney, 27 February 2019, transcribed by Monika Lukowska-Appel. 6 Rex Butler, ‘Ben Quilty: The Fog of War’, Intellectual History Review, vol. 27, no. 3 (2017): 449. 7 Ibid., 442. 8 Ibid., 443. 9 Joanna Bourke, ‘Introduction’ in War and Art, ed. Joanna Bourke (London: Reaktion Books, 2017), 33. 10 Shaun Gladwell, interview with Kit Messham-Muir, Hyde Park, London, 30 September 2010, transcribed by Susan Cairns. 11 Nicholas Bourriaud, Relational Aesthetics, trans. Simon Pleasance, Fronza Woods and Mathieu Copeland (Paris: Les Presses du Réel, 2002). 12 Claire Bishop, ‘Antagonism and Relational Aesthetics’, October, vol. 110 (2004): 52. 13 Derek Eland, interview with Kit Messham-Muir, Hesket Newmarket, United Kingdom, 13 May 2019, transcribed by Monika Lukowska-Appel. 14 Eland, interview with Kit Messham-Muir, 13 May 2019. 15 Ibid. 16 Ibid. 17 Natasha Geiling, ‘Prague’s Famous John Lennon Wall: Is It Over, or Reborn?’, Smithsonian Mag, (November 2014), www.smithsonianmag.com/travel/ pragues-famous-john-lennon-wall-it-over-or-just-reborn-180953415/, accessed September 2020. 18 Eland, interview with Kit Messham-Muir, 13 May 2019. 19 Derek Eland, Diary Rooms: Being Human on the Front Line in Afghanistan (York: Big Ideas Library, 2014). 20 JH Acoy quoted in Eland, Diary Rooms, 73. 21 Anonymous quoted in Eland, Diary Rooms, 49. 22 Anonymous quoted in Eland, Diary Rooms, 39. 23 Colum McGeown quoted in Eland, Diary Rooms, 33. 24 LCPL Brownlow quoted in Eland, Diary Rooms, 35. 25 Eland, Diary Rooms, 183. 26 Eland, interview with Kit Messham-Muir, 13 May 2019. 27 Ibid. 28 Ibid. 29 Mladen Miljanovic´, Aperta Fenestra, Kamena Kuca Banski Dvor, Banja Luka, 2019.

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30 Mladen Miljanovic´, interview with Kit Messham-Muir, 29 May 2019, King’s College London, London, transcribed by Monika Lukowska-Appel. 31 For a discussion of post-1996 monuments and commemorative culture in BiH, see Uroš Cˇvoro, Post-Conflict Monuments in Bosnia and Herzegovina: Unfinished Histories (London: Routledge, 2020). 32 Miljanovic´, interview with Kit Messham-Muir, 29 May 2019. 33 Ibid. 34 Ibid. 35 For an articulation of the concept of meantime, see Stef Jansen, Yearnings in the Meantime: ‘Normal Lives’ and the State in a Sarajevo Apartment Complex (New York: Berghahn, 2015), 457. It is also important to acknowledge the relation of meantime to Antonio Gramsci’s concept of the interregnum as an in-between period of crisis where ‘the old is dying and the new cannot be born’. While Gramsci’s concept captures the sense of a stunted passage, his concept nevertheless relies on a sense of temporary suspension which will inevitably result in something new. Meantime much more effectively captures the sense of exacerbation of present conditions with an uncertainty about what is waiting on the other side. See Antonio Gramsci, Selections from the Prison Notebooks, ed. Quentin Hoare and Geoffrey Nowell Smith (London: Lawrence & Wishart, 1971). 36 For discussion of the use of metaphors of journey and family in discussions of EU ascencion, see Tanja Petrovic´, Yuropa: Jugoslovensko Nasledje I Politike Buducnosti u Postjugoslovenskim Drustvima (Belgrade: Fabrika Knjiga, 2012). 37 See J. Galtung, Mirnim Sredstvima Do Mira (Belgrade: Službeni Glasnik, 2009). 38 Miljanovic´, interview with Kit Messham-Muir, 29 May 2019. 39 Eland, interview with Kit Messham-Muir, 13 May 2019. 40 Eland, Diary Rooms, 183.

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CHAPTER SEVEN

War Art, Official and Unofficial Interviews with eX de Medici, David Cotterrell, Karen Bailey and Philip Cheung What is the value of sending artists into war zones, particularly within schemes and programmes that embed them with troops? Can contemporary artists bring particular and valuable perspectives to war zones, or are they always compromised by the limitations inherent in embedding with troops, the dangers of the war zone, or the broader institutional and ideological constraints within the culture of the military? How have artists who have been embedded with troops found those conditions, and what are the impacts upon the ways in which they understand the conflicts they are sent to cover? In this chapter, we explore these questions through interviews with eX de Medici, David Cotterrell, Karen Bailey and Philip Cheung. We interviewed many war artists who had been appointed as official war artists, which is a notion with a history almost exclusively in Australia, Canada and the United Kingdom, dating back to the First World War. During interviews with many of these artists, questions arose concerning the role of an artist embedded with troops in an official capacity. The interview with eX de Medici highlights some of the very real limitations inherent in being an official war artist. She was sent to the Solomon Islands in 2009 to cover the peacekeeping and policing Regional Assistance Mission to the Solomon Islands (RAMSI). In her interview, de Medici talks about her own conflict with the military and police that she had been sent to cover as an artist. Cotterrell is a British artist who was commissioned by the Wellcome Trust to travel to Afghanistan in 2008, similarly embedded with British military field hospitals. He later returned to Afghanistan on a tourist visa, so he has 155

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IMAGE 7.1 Australia, Special forces (Everywhere, Current), Digicam, 2010, by eX de Medici. Watercolour and gold leaf on paper, 57.2 × 76.4 cm, ART94369. © eX de Medici 2010. Courtesy the Australian War Memorial.

a rare insight into the UK’s military deployment from both inside and outside ‘the wire’ of the bases. Bailey is an Ottawa-based artist who was also embedded as an official artist in field hospitals in Afghanistan, in 2007, under the Canadian Forces Artists Program. She raises an interesting tension with the military establishment that emerged when her works were seen to heroicize regular frontline personnel who were ‘just doing their job’. Cheung is a Los Angeles-based Canadian artist who likewise worked with the Canadian Forces Artists Program, photographing the Canadian Rangers in the Arctic Circle. Cheung also spent time photographing in Kandahar, and compares that experience with his time in the Arctic.

eX de Medici, 19 December 2018, Canberra Was it a difficult decision, accepting the offer to be an Australian official war artist? I know that other artists have thought ten times, whatever, if they should accept the offer. I didn’t actually hesitate at all to accept the offer, because it

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was a really great place to discuss something. But again, you have to be relatively discreet about how you discuss something. I can tell you that when I was given that offer in 2009 it was a filthy word, ‘political’ artist. Now it is normal, but if you worked within a political construct – and I believe I work within an economic construct actually rather than a political one – the whole art world would turn their back on anything political in 2009. If you do not want everybody turning their backs, you have to hone your debates, and I think, as a younger artist, I was extremely didactic and driven to function in some way in the community rather than be a vain wanker. Charles Green and Lyndell Brown felt some backlash particularly from the art world when they gave gallery talks after they returned from Iraq as Australian official war artists in 2007. Did you feel any backlash or criticism? I felt none of that. I know that Jon’s [Cattapan] and my work toured for a couple of years, and I didn’t go to any of those venues, because I know that Jon would have done really well anyway. But my life was extremely hectic at that time. It was very hard to coordinate being away for the various openings. I think also [the lack of backlash was] because Jon and I were ‘peacekeeping’ artists, we weren’t in the major theatres [of war]. I mean, look, Indonesia and Timor-Leste have been thorns in Australia’s side for a very, very long time, since the Balibo Five. As a young teenager I remember all of that . . . It has been a highly contested place for a very long time, as much as West Papua, which is unaddressed to this day, about the land grabs by a country. You know, land grabs are pretty much frowned upon by the United Nations. So I think that these areas don’t sit in the same way that the invasion of Afghanistan and Iraq do. They are completely different things, they are not places of full-blown joint aggression on a country we have no truck with. I think that Jon and I sit in a different spot than the Afghanistan and Iraq war artists, quite frankly. I know that for Jon Cattapan it was quite important to be sent to the peacekeeping mission and not to Iraq. I think that it was an option at the time. Well, I was not even considered [for the war zones], which I think is good because I would probably not have been able to contain myself, given our national history with [John] Howard and [George W.] Bush and [Tony] Blair. I have been highly openly critical since. . . . I was happy to look at the historic issue of the Pacific. Because, you could say the ‘Pacific War’ is the only war that actually had meaning to us [Australians], as a place in the Asia Pacific. But we are still a monarchy and, you know, subservient to the US demands on our armed forces. I tend to think that it was a great place to discuss the Pacific War, which was vicious and horrifying as much as any other war, but the only one that really presented any actual threat to the sovereignty of this country. I was really happy to operate from that perspective rather than from a bogus perspective in Afghanistan or Iraq. You are a very politically minded person, and political artist, and one of the questions that often comes up is the extent to which art about war

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‘aestheticizes’ war. There is an implication of something inherently depoliticizing about aesthetics. What do you think about that idea? One hundred per cent, I agree with that. It makes it palatable; it makes something that happened palatable. I travelled the entire western border from Khorramshahr up to Azerbaijan on one of my trips [to Iran] and all along that route, along the entire western border with Iraq, and Turkey at the top, are war memorials. And those war memorials have no resemblance to ours; they show the entirety and the true horror of war in a way that is sickening and vile. And there should have been some areas I believe where they should have posted warnings, you know, ‘don’t go in here’. I wish I could unsee what I saw in the Iran and Iraq war memorials. I think that they function as a true warning against war. I think that there is . . . Say, if you look at the Australian War Memorial, it softens the blows. I remember showing, to one of the curators at the Australian War Memorial, some photographs I took in Iran, and I said, ‘Never in a million years will the Australian War Memorial show this material’. I believe that the Iran war memorials operate as: ‘This should never, ever, ever, ever happen again. No one, nobody, should ever have to go through this, anywhere in the world.’ Ours [Australian memorial] doesn’t operate from that perspective. And so, in turn, you know everything comes from the top of the pyramid and falls down it. And in turn, what is the subtext of working with artists in the war programme? I think that sometimes that Second World War artists and First World War artists actually did show those perspectives of the horrors of war. Whether or not it is about the aestheticizing of that experience, it is also about what that artist is allowed to see and how they are managed in that theatre. I know Steve McQueen was sent to Afghanistan as a British official war artist, in Basra, and he said he wasn’t able to go anywhere on his own. No, they never allow anyone out on their own. Even if you are given complete latitude to produce whatever you will, there is still only a very particular kind of perspective, that is restricted, inevitably . . . It censors your experience of the truth. Of course, there were places we weren’t allowed to go to. They have a very big market in Guadalcanal on Saturdays and I really wanted to go, but we were not allowed to go because there were dangerous people there. So, I have no idea, within the true war theatre, how much management you would be under in that situation. I know that a lot of the artists never leave the camp, so they don’t have any concept of what is beyond the camp. I guess, in a way, what the artists are discussing is this kind of mindset of the soldiers, not the place or the purpose. I remember giving a talk once, I think it was about Ben Quilty’s work, and a student put her hand up and said, ‘Yeah, this work is discussing the impact of the war in Afghanistan on Australian soldiers, but where is the voice of the Afghan people?’ Well, I sort of tried to discuss the Pacific and its effects of a long-gone war, because it was the only war there. I did discuss the Chinese trade in a couple

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IMAGE 7.2 Bullpup, 2010, by eX de Medici. Watercolour on paper, ART94228. © eX de Medici 2010. Courtesy the Australian War Memorial.

of pictures too though, and I did definitely discuss the logging trade. Often [Solomon Island] nationals were kept at a very long arm’s length. It is known and discussed and analysed that the more contact the foreign deployment have with the locals, the more sympathetic they [the foreigners] become. And that is why a tour is three months long, so we don’t get sympathetic. There has been deep analysis about this and I personally believe that they wouldn’t want you to become sympathetic with the plight of the war zone. I think that there are complex questions and also management issues with hyper-conservative aspects of our society, which is military. This brings me to probably my last question, which is: how do artists work in war zones in ways that can’t be restricted. Is that even possible? I do not think it is, because you are informed by the conditions under which you are going. If you do not accept them, they won’t accept you either. So, if you are to look at George Gittoes, he is completely the polar opposite of what the official war artists do. His work is extreme, on the extreme other side of the official story. Not only that: to enter the war zones that we are now involved with, if you are in the official capacity then you are under scrutiny, as you are the enemy of the state, of this state. If I wanted to go to Syria, I couldn’t, without being put under some sort of notice. Even going to Iran is problematic and viewed very badly. For instance, when you come back in or are leaving with Iranian visas in your passport, you are very suspicious to the authorities in immigration. ‘Why were you there? Why? What were you doing there?’ It is not like the friendly, ‘How was your

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IMAGE 7.3 Supernumerary I, II & III , 2008, by David Cotterrell. Triptych (detail), c-type prints. © David Cotterrell 2008. Reproduced with permission of the artist.

holiday?’ It was more like going to North Korea or something. You know, an independent artist could not go to the zone without suspicions being cast upon their loyalty to their country. It then becomes centrally a discussion about our troops there, the psychological effects [on them]. Ben Quilty can talk about the PTSD of Australian soldiers aggressing, yet not the aggressed. Where are the portraits of ordinary Afghan citizens whose lives have been destroyed by our presence, for instance? You know, again, is it a gigantic toothless tiger? I think, possibly, yes. A censored place? Possibly, yes. But it sits as a part of the record. However, it is engineered, it’s a part of the record. A long-term one. Is it habitual? Is it just an institution, you know, the war programme? I am not ‘dissing’ it. I divested myself of my fee. I do not think that was guilt, but to reinvest [my fee in the commissioning of Tony Albert’s appointment as an official war artist] was a good place to reinvest, in an Aboriginal artist and the inclusion of the Aboriginal artists in that museum [Australian War Memorial]. I felt that it was good for the future of the museum, in a way. And for the presence of a voice that did not exist there before.

David Cotterrell, 31 May 2019, London I want to ask you, David, about the work that you did with the Wellcome Trust, for which you were sent to Helmand Province in Afghanistan with British armed forces. Could you tell me about your experience there as an artist, and what you feel you brought to that situation? It was about eleven or twelve years ago now. It was a specific break-point in my career as an artist. I’d already been an artist for about thirteen years before that, working in different parts of the world but mainly interested in the urban situations that I lived in. [I was] invited by the Wellcome Trust to

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consider applying to be a war artist. And I just got the phone call out of the blue and I had to come out with the ethical kind of decision, really – whether I thought it was appropriate, whether I would become complicit in a war that I might not necessarily support, or whether I felt that there was an urgent need to have an additional witness. And after a lot of prevarications, I decided that I thought it was justifiable. So, I went through pre-deployment training, was given the rank C2, which equates to major, and then was sent out with the Field Hospital Regime to Helmand. I spent a month there. I spent a month I suppose entering a parallel culture which had existed all around me throughout my childhood and early adulthood in Britain, but that I hadn’t really had any access to. You start realizing, in England, if you step away from the motorways and go along some of the older roads, you start seeing the military bases all around Britain. But because of the Troubles in Northern Ireland there was a protocol where soldiers wore civilian clothes when they left bases, and so you can be forgiven for thinking that there was a very modest military, that we had very little activity in that regard. You only really see it through the news. In Afghanistan I found myself entirely immersed in a world which had its own vocabulary and its own moral code . . . which tolerated a level of violence, but also [encompassed] ways of managing trauma which were far and above anything that I had really witnessed beforehand. You have spoken before about the sense of feeling out of place within that particular context. Tell me a little bit about that, and how you felt at that time as an artist in that situation: whether you felt like an intruder, or how, and to what extent, you were welcomed. In the [‘War, Art and Visual Culture: London’] symposium we talked about the roles that people may play while carrying the badge ‘war artist’. There is the regimental war artist, which role people might be familiar with in the army; the artist who painted the picture that appears in the officers’ mess; or artists that in previous generations were involved in the government’s propaganda. And then there is another role that is more recent, which is this kind of independent war artist where you are supposed to be a critical witness. The problem is that there are not many of them. In Britain we have one or two per war, so the chance of anybody in the military base that you are landing in having ever met a war artist before and knowing what that role is [is] quite slim. So, you go through a continuous process of having to explain to others what your role is, whether you are a threat to them in terms of their own reputational damage, or whether you are going to be someone that can be trusted. But also, I have never really met a war artist before either, so I had to kind of go through a process of continuous self-evaluation, trying to understand whether this was justifiable, whether there was anything meaningful I was doing there apart from simply being a voyeur, watching a spectacle, possibly losing the critical distance that I should maintain as an artist. So, yes, essentially you stand out. And I think everybody has been in a role like that, as a lay-person in an environment full of people who are

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professionalized within it. You probably have to find a coping mechanism that involves either blending in or somehow becoming incredibly selfsufficient. So, I carried the camera [although] it wasn’t necessarily the primary tool that I was working with. I went there really trying to be as open and flexible as I could be, to capture whatever was going to happen around me, and hoped that later on I would understand what that thing that I saw was. But I realized quite early on, during the cargo flight out there, that carrying a camera, and possibly keeping it visible at all times, was helpful. Before I went, I was given a couple of bits of advice. If you are a smoker, don’t give up smoking, because it is an advantage to have something in common with people when everything else about you screams that you are different. And the second thing was to develop a routine, so people didn’t see you necessarily as something which was ambiguous and problematic. Being the person who documented things that were going on all around, although soldiers are typically a little bit suspicious of journalists, actually gave me a good role, and it was particularly [feasible] because I was attached to something which since the Falklands Crisis hadn’t been allowed to be documented. There had been a complete embargo on taking photographs of wounded or killed British service people, and any journalist that broke that embargo had a good chance of their career as a war journalist – certainly when it comes to the British military – being curtailed. So people that were working as nurses, doctors, combat medical technicians, even team medics, would recognize that things that they were doing were probably changing their own lives, [perhaps more than] the lives of the people they were treating. They were probably building . . . a whole range of unresolvable narratives in their heads, which were not going to be shared with the people back home. Nobody would understand why they were behaving differently [back home], but now they realised that for the first time there was an opportunity that someone might actually record some of that [trauma] with them. I was surprised to have been welcomed, then actually embraced, into that situation in a way that was, I felt, however amateurish my photographs might be . . . There was something of value I could give back, as well as simply absorbing the strangeness around me and trying to keep my distance. Do you think you would have been treated differently if you had been an embedded journalist? Yes. I mean, it is interesting that embedded journalists can become very close with people around them. Which is often a criticism. Absolutely. There are two problems. One is the structure, that they have to sign away so many of their rights in order to get the access, because you can’t really get into an armed regiment unless you are given a permission from a very high authority within the organization, [who] have a lot of control in setting conditions. Among the journalists I met, many of them seemed to have had to sign away editorial control, possibly [partly due to the fact] that they weren’t ever able to get a critical position looking back at

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the community that they were representing by travelling with them. So, they become close, but also there is a risk that they may not be able to claim the distance that they need to actually speak with authority about the things that they are witnessing. The other problem is that journalists have pressures of trying to form narratives, stories and reason out of something which may actually be irrational, chaotic and fragmented. I did meet two journalists that came through. I had been there about three weeks by that point, and it was strange because despite my ponytail and my being the only person without any type of upper-body strength in that whole area, I felt somehow that the world around me was my world at that point. I had spent a lot of time in the field hospital and I felt – I didn’t realize it, but something in there obviously changed me a little bit – I saw them as outsiders. And when they came in, not knowing their blood groups and telling me that they were propping open a satellite modem and saying that they were reporting, every twentyfour hours, a news story for the Daily Mail, I found it very hard to accept them, because I recognized that the things that I was seeing, and the things that I had seen a couple of weeks earlier, were things that it would take years to really understand the significance of: what was trivial, what was spectacle, and what actually had meaning. And the problem that journalists often have is that they are not given enough time or space to really present back some of the things which are more complex and ambiguous. Even they themselves would be aware of the story that they would like to tell, but it could be that through the editorial process and through the platforms of communications they would never really get a chance to explore the complexity of that story. A lot of journalists talk about the books that they write when they retire and there are often things which couldn’t possibly fit even into the Observer feature, and they are getting a fair amount of space of in that, but even there [they probably can’t] represent something that just doesn’t fit the narrative structure their editors and their audiences are expecting. Did you find that not having the imperative of immediacy freed you up? If somebody said, ‘You’ve got to write 3000 words and provide twenty images’, actually that would be a relief, because in some way that terrible angst-ridden prevarication about ‘What is the correct response?’ would be removed, and you could say, ‘Okay, that’s it, that’s what I’ve got to do’. But you carry with you this sense of doubt as to whether [you are having] the correct response. I had flexibility, ambiguity of time, and ambiguity of access – it was essentially a year between me engaging with the project and the public exhibition happening. It gives you a huge amount of control, but it also means that there is almost an infinite permutation in trying to work out what is appropriate. How did you feel after returning from Afghanistan to the UK? In my case, I came back to the UK, I didn’t go through decompression, and I went straight back to my college because I was worried that I’d miss the dissertation deadlines. I realized very quickly that I wasn’t really ready to

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IMAGE 7.4 Sightlines I & II , 2008, by David Cotterrell. Diptych, c-type prints. © David Cotterrell 2008. Reproduced with permission of the artist.

come back and offer pastoral support to my students. So I had to go for a debrief with the Ministry of Defence, and I said I would like to go back out there. And once you’ve been out once you can probably go out again, so they said that the Paras [Parachute Regiment] are going out now, you can probably go with them instead. At the same time I was a little bit worried about becoming institutionalized, and probably aware [of that] because I hadn’t taken my boots off by that point and I was still feeling naked wearing shoes, and I thought, ‘There is possibly something strange going on in my head here’. Luckily, I had also to offer a briefing to the Royal Society of the Arts, because they were about to set up an artist residency in Kabul and wanted to know what it is like in Afghanistan. I went in there, and I hadn’t recalibrated yet, so I showed them the sequential series of photographs and talked them through what I’d seen, but of course I was not realizing that what I was showing them was absolute horror. I showed the thirty days of carnage in field hospitals, in battlefield stations, and all sorts of other things. And I could see at the end of that, though I thought I gave a reasonably good account, that they were visibly shaken and clearly their artists-in-residence programme was going to be paused at that point. I think, recognizing that what I was showing them [highlighted that] there is a certain duty of care in sending somebody out there, they asked if I wanted to go back, because clearly I had already been affected and there was nothing more that could happen to me really. And they decided that they would pay my life insurance and allow me to go back, so I could avoid

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going back with the military, and I could get a second chance to contextualize what I had seen. That luxury is something which I didn’t realize at that time but came to realize afterwards. I had another month or five weeks out there with the tourist visa and stayed outside of the military bubble, and was able to travel overland with people that I met, and I’d go walking freely and not wear body armour, walking the markets, meeting local people, going to mosques, things like that. What I didn’t realize at that time was how incredibly rare that experience is: to be able to be entirely within two completely incompatible contexts on the same landscape is just such a rare privilege. For soldiers to be able to visit with the commercial airline they would have to essentially leave the military; for people involved in major NGOs to go to Helmand Province without the military they would either compromise their neutrality or they may well be breaching the terms of their risk assessments that they had to sign to be part of the ICRC [International Committee of the Red Cross]. If you go as a tourist and you turn up in Kabul with visa number 134 then the chance of any military base allowing you to wander freely is pretty slim and [you would] never get security clearance. Nevertheless, I started to realize that even these experiences really only documented the experience of being an outsider with a British passport in both cases, because both of them were highly contextualized by the privilege and the narratives that I received beforehand. They were also two experiences which, even within that limited domain, were very rare. For a journalist, I think they could do that, but whether an editor would fund that, whether they would have the freedom to do that, I think it is a rare case. And for me, I felt that having these opportunities to continuously reposition and recontextualize the information to the point where I decided that some of the things that I perceived were justified entering the public domain was a privilege – an absolutely necessary privilege, in terms of the role of an artist. Did you find that it felt like a different country when you went there outside of the military context? It was very confusing because our understanding of place, I think, [often] is built up either from a confidence that we will continuously aggregate the information we have – so we arrive in a new town that we have never been to before but we are confident that over the next few days we can continuously walk until we have a sense of how it’s mapped. We can live there for as long as we need to understand something of the local vernacular, the way of interaction. We also have contemporary experiences which involves us having a macro understanding of landscape and how the place we are standing in fits into a wider politics, a wider nation-state, and other forms of network. In Afghanistan, in Helmand Province, as I went further into the military, got further forward, I got less and less aware of the macro views, so I had a visceral experience, a subjective perspective, but I had no wider perspective to contextualize it in. I didn’t have the aerial view, I didn’t have the narrative which might frame the things that are beyond the horizon, or

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understand what the people around me represented: a wider story of disaster, a humanitarian effort, or other things. When I went as a tourist, I felt I saw more and I could look back at how strange that bubble looked from just beyond the wire, and when I saw the armed columns racing through Kabul and I wasn’t in them, it was very interesting to get a sense of how threatening that looks, even when the soldiers are waving and trying to take the helmets off to look like they are relaxed. How incongruous the relationship is between people that are wearing protective clothing and people that aren’t. What I began to realize, I suppose, was something of the symbolism of armour and militarisms. Obviously when you are going through the military you are constantly told, ‘Well, this is to protect you from a Kalashnikov round or that’s to stop you stepping on a land mine’. Everything mitigates a risk, but what they never talk about is what it represents to people. If we were in this room and somebody came in wearing riot gear and sat down next to us, and appeared to be holding a weapon or looking very shiftily around us, we would start thinking that that person is showing a lack of trust and not respecting us – we are not presenting a threat – particularly if they brought in several other people behind them that they were [in turn] protecting. What was happening was that I was recognizing how the soldiers and how the NGO officials that are on the duty of care of the security forces, how people that drive armed cars, how people that live behind the wire . . . [I realized not only] how their very separation causes them to objectify the people beyond their own armour, but also how it guarantees that they will be objectified by anyone seeing them. So it wasn’t that I saw a lot of Afghanistan or that I got a comprehensive view, but there was enough of a contradiction that you start seeing something which is entirely obvious but actually isn’t really something that is easy to experience from one of these vantage points without the other. So you saw the outside of the bubble. I saw how the bubble itself was not a neutral frame: it has a meaning. When you are looking through a gap in a wall [at] a field outside, you are thinking, ‘This wall protects me from the Taliban attacking and outside there are people who might burn the fields, or they might be out there simply planting the fields and trying to survive’. You are thinking about them, you are thinking about their threat to you. I suppose when you stand in the fields looking back at the fortified position, you are looking at the people in there, and it doesn’t matter whether they are in there because they are scared of you or because they hate you. But you are looking at them remaining within the armed compound as a highly aggressive act. I think for me this became the beginning of a journey of art practice which runs through to today, and is about how awareness of risk and attempts to mitigate it can be a profound challenge to empathetic engagement. Essentially the distancing process that comes from risk and its escalation happens not just through military conflict, but also through the iterative stages towards it. People start to think that it’s

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probably wise to stay within the compound, or maybe it’s wise to put the helmets on, or maybe it’s wise to have security detail with you. One of the great artists that was here [at the symposium] earlier said that sometimes you need to have multiple perspectives to understand something of why this bizarre construct, this very, very artificial social relationship is happening based purely on polarization, fear, and threat. Sometimes you need multiple perspectives to have any understanding of how that propagates, and also to be able to begin to see why it can’t be sustainable in that form. One of the difficult things is that for the military commanders that are supposed to be making judgements for the diplomatic staff, the MPs, the politicians and the people in the Foreign Office is that the more senior they are, the harder it is for them to have the experiences that I had – actually walking outside of that world that protects them and [cocoons] them in their [own] culture, in order to look back at the culture that is represented by their organization. And therein lies the value of artists coming to war zones. That is my belief. I don’t think it is just artists, I think that it will be wrong to claim that artists have some special agency, but I think independent lay-people, people that are not brought with an embedded adherence to an extant methodology, people who are potentially aware of their own [influence . . . We need] the people who will possibly find situations – which some disciplines have just come to accept and understand how to handle – who might find those situations strange and unfamiliar enough to still want to ask why it is like that. You can get that from historians, clergy, activists, artists, dancers, musicians or school teachers. But the problem is, I think, when people find themselves using a rehearsed language and rehearsed method to engage with something where the solution has not been rehearsed or discovered yet. Artists might be useful for that, because we are still within the realm of art practices where there are methodologies which are responsive and self-reflective and still evolving. That can be a quite useful tool.

Karen Bailey, 29 August 2019, Ottawa Do embedded official war artists produce propaganda? I thought, ‘How honest can I be with you, sitting here and being recorded’ . . . because the military is a big machine and, as I say, they are in the business of war, I am in the business of art. I was provided with an incredible, absolutely amazing opportunity. But it was up to me to do with it what I could, and it was not always an easy situation because I knew at one point they . . . [pauses to think] I am highlighting regular nurses, military nurses, military medical technicians – I am going to say, ‘regular folks in the military’ – yet the military doesn’t always like you to highlight specific people, because they are ‘just doing their job’. This is how they perceive it: they are ‘just doing their job’.

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IMAGE 7.5 Karen Bailey, private gallery in Ottawa, 2019. Photo: Kit MesshamMuir.

That’s interesting. I am thinking of these people as heroes for what they have done – it is absolutely remarkable. But, ‘They are just doing their job’. And it is true, these same people would say: they were sent over there, they don’t feel like they are heroes. And I think the way I painted them doesn’t make them look like they are glorious leaders or anything, they are just regular folks; they are just hospital scenes. But I would say that there is this slightly uneasy aspect [concerning the military establishment]. I wouldn’t say [there was unease] between the artist and the people that I was documenting, although I do admit that when I first arrived in Kandahar I think there was some, maybe, concern, some discomfort about what an artist is doing in a hospital in the middle of a war zone. They were flat out [rushing around]; what was I doing there? So I was trying to keep like a fly on the wall, as low-key as possible. But I think that once they saw the works, because I invited them to come to my studio to see what I was doing, they certainly changed their view, because then they realized that I was telling their story and that [telling it] was an important role. And I understand completely that in a hospital you have to look after the patient and that’s the most important thing: sketching this patient is not important, what is important is keeping the patient alive. So there was a little bit of, not tension, just maybe that they were questioning my role, but once they understood my role then they were completely on board. But I think that there was always going to be tension

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IMAGE 7.6 Captain Bruce Reeves, Head Ward Nurse, Role 3 Hospital, 2007, by Karen Bailey. Acrylic on canvas, 50.8 × 50.8 cm. Photo: Dave Andrews. © Karen Bailey 2007. Reproduced with permission of the artist.

between, say, the ‘highers-up’ in the military and the artists. There is a bit of a disconnect there. David Cotterrell, a British artist, also went to Afghanistan and produced work about the medical evacuation. He was telling me that the reason he used photography is that, in that context, the camera gave people there a less ambiguous sense of his function as a war artist. In my case I initially thought, ‘Oh, I do courtroom drawing, I can work quickly, I will just sketch the people when they are at work’. But what I realized [in Afghanistan] was in the courtroom people are fairly static whereas in a medical situation they never stop moving. So I sketched the patients and I sketched the security guards and the translators, the interpreters. And of course the patients were happy, it was always with their permission, through the translator I would always ask for their permission

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IMAGE 7.7 Morning Rounds II , 2008, by Karen Bailey. Acrylic on canvas, 76.2 × 76.2 cm. © Karen Bailey 2007. Photo: Dave Andrews. Reproduced with permission of the artist. to sketch them. And then what I did was, when I went back to Canada I invited all of the medical personnel that I’d encountered to come and sit at my studio for me so I could sketch and paint them from life. So that’s, in fact, what I did. They all come through Ottawa because it is a headquarters, so I was able to. Several of the nurses did come through and did come to my studio and I was able to work from life with them. Captain Bruce Reeves, who was a head of ward nurse, it was Remembrance Day 2007 [when] he came to my studio . . . I didn’t recognize him as he was in civvies. He was just wearing a black t-shirt and black jeans, and I wouldn’t have recognized him but he had his kit with him in a bag. He said, ‘I will change into my uniform when we get to the studio’. And when he put on his uniform, it was like he aged twenty years before my eyes. I was astounded because it was as if the weight of that uniform and what he experienced in

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it – he did three tours of Afghanistan, and actually did suffer from PTSD as a result of all of that – all came out when he sat for me. It was a real honour to have him there in front of me. And did you find that having them out of the context of Afghanistan and in your studio prompted a transformation? Or, did the different context change how you understood their experience? Well, what I realized was, for want of a better word, I was stuck, I was stuck in that one week in Kandahar. Everything had just stopped for me, I came back to the studio and for two years I was living this one week and I was surrounded by all of the paintings, all over my studio walls. My husband would come in and look at this painting or that: ‘That poor fellow, he’s still got this tube up in his nose, he is not getting any better, is he?’ And I thought, ‘The staff are working flat out, the patients aren’t getting any better’. And yet when the nurses, for instance, came . . . One of them, Nori, brought her uniform to put on to sit for me so I could paint her and she couldn’t do it up because she was seven months’ pregnant at the time, because she finished her tour of duty, got married and she was pregnant. This was probably a year after I returned, and here she was, and her life had carried on. And what I realized was that I was stuck in that time, and all of the other people had gone back to their lives; for them it was just a part of their lives and they’d moved on.

Philip Cheung, 14 August 2019, Los Angeles Do you think that having a military background gives you something that someone who has not served in the military doesn’t have? I think so. I think that my time in the military allows me to see past all the soldiers in the uniforms carrying guns and the military hardware and that kind of dog-and-pony show. Because it became normal for me, it’s the little nuances that jump out at me. So that is a part of what I like to capture, to document: it is the nuances, it is the subculture, it is the mirror image of civilian life but in the military context that interests me. And I suppose that because you have an understanding of the subculture, you understand the nuances of it, because subculture is all about the nuances, and you know how the coding of the culture happens almost in a mimesis of the mainstream culture. You have a greater understanding of that? Yeah. It’s those moments and those scenarios that I look for when I am documenting my personal projects that are military-related. For example, my project that I did in Afghanistan, called The Thing About Remembering (2009–10), offered an alternative lookout to what war photography can be. That was done in 2009 and 2010. I was first embedded with the Canadians in 2009, and funnily enough I was embedded with the same unit that I served with in Bosnia, so it just came full circle. And then the second time, 2010, I was embedded with the US Marines, the US Army in Kandahar Airfield and in Helmand Province. The engagement in 2009 was the first

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IMAGE 7.8 Observation Post, King William Island, 2017, by Philip Cheung. © Philip Cheung 2017. Reproduced with permission of the artist. time that I had actually worked in a conflict zone as a civilian photojournalist. And in 2009, I fell into the trap of a stereotypical war photographer coming out of Afghanistan. I remember a few scenarios where I was taking photos and I was attached to the Canadian patrol, and I was making photos the exact same way that I would see photos of Afghanistan in the media. And it worried me a little, and it turned me off for some reason, and I thought to myself, ‘What am I doing here, I am not doing anything different’. So it is as though you were adopting a pre-existing frame? Yeah, totally. And for the rest of my time – I was there for a month – I was trying to figure out a way to shoot this differently, from another angle. It was not until I returned in 2010 that I kind of figured it out. Instead of being on a front line, where most of the embedded journalists tend to go because they want to get those shots of the soldier shooting his rifle behind the mud wall, or being in the market place shaking hands with local kids, I actually concentrated my work within Kandahar Airfield, which is one of the biggest multinational bases in Southern Afghanistan. My focus was on the banality of war and is most of what war is. It is boredom, it is not exciting. A very small percentage of soldiers’ time overseas is actually spent fighting, and the majority of it is logistics and administration. What I also found interesting is that when soldiers prepare for war back home in Canada, UK or America, the military tries their hardest to make

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IMAGE 7.9 Weapon Maintenance, Kandahar Airfield, 2010, by Philip Cheung. © Philip Cheung 2010. Reproduced with permission of the artist.

their training environment look like where they are going to go and fight, but then when you go overseas to Kandahar the military tries their hardest to make the environment look as much like [home as possible]. I found that really interesting too, and it is another aspect that I want to cover; I mean, that is what war looks like in the twenty-first century. It is isolating, with very little connection with the local environment. I found that fascinating. That is how I approached my second time around going to Afghanistan, when I created this body of work, and so the body of work is separated into three different chapters. The first chapter is banal moments on the front line, or within the Kandahar airfield of war. For example, there is a photo of a soldier reading an instruction manual, learning how to put a weapon together, or there is a photograph of the administrative soldier photocopying paperwork. And then there are moments on the front line when the Marines are working on providing first aid to a civilian child. It is this fragmented memory of war mixed up with the front-line workers and the safety of Kandahar Airfield. The second chapter concentrates on the Mortuary Affairs Unit. Their job and main responsibility is retrieving and preparing and transporting war dead from Afghanistan back home to the United States. That represents the

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transition from Afghanistan to home. And then the third chapter are still-life photos of war souvenirs that soldiers have brought from theatre. So, this project covers a few things. I wanted to offer the viewer a different perspective on war. I also wanted to remind people that this war has been going on for eighteen years now, and it doesn’t look like it is going to end anytime soon. Another aspect that I wanted to show was how, as the war goes on and memory of war fades, photography can bring order back to those fragmented memories of war. I think that this project would not have been possible if I wasn’t aware of the nuances and of the experience of being in the military prior to becoming a photographer. It is interesting that you say that, because it reminds me of something British artist David Cotterrell said about his time in Afghanistan during a commission for the Wellcome Trust. He took a lot of photographs, mostly to capture what he could, in the hope that he could later understand what he saw. He also kept diaries and found them very useful for looking retrospectively and realizing that, at the time, there was no clear narrative in a particular moment, and that it can often take some time to make sense of the chaos of a situation. The news media, on the other hand, tends to do something different with time in war zones, focusing on a battle that lasts for ten minutes but not on the preceding thirty-six hours which in some ways actually create that enormous amount of stress and tension that is experienced by the troops. There’s a very famous phrase from the First World War, ‘war is months of boredom punctuated by moments of terror’, and I think that in the usual nature of telling the stories, those mundane aspects are left out because they are not seen as essential to the narrative. No, and that does not fit the template the newspapers and magazines want. And that aspect of war really fascinates me: the waiting, the everyday, the boring moments scattered with those moments of terror. And that’s what I remember from my time over there. I don’t know why that aspect hasn’t been photographed more, because it is so apparent when you get to these locations. But I guess the majority of journalists that go there are asked to capture certain types of images. In your work as an official artist for the Canadian Forces Artists Program, working with the Canadian Rangers in the north of the country, were you given a high degree of autonomy and freedom, as compared to the Afghanistan work? Total freedom. When you are out in the field, generally I think that there is very little control and you have complete freedom. It’s when you are in the base, when you are closer to the headquarters: for example, in Kandahar it was more controlling and a little more difficult access-wise because I always had to have a public affairs officer with me. But when you are embedded out with the field units, whether it is in Afghanistan or in the Arctic, those public affairs officers are not with you, so you do have complete control of what

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IMAGE 7.10 Philip Cheung in his studio, Downtown Los Angeles, 2019. Photo: Kit Messham-Muir.

you want to do. I mean, those public affairs officers were not controlling my movements or what I could photograph while I was on base. I think that they are just required to be with you in case you end up in the wrong part of the base or something like that, because a lot of the stuff that I shoot they actually allow you to shoot. So, yeah, there was complete freedom. I never felt like I was restricted in any way.

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PART THREE

Knowing and Testimony

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Introduction The third section of this volume addresses aspects of knowing and testimony in relation to contemporary war art and visual culture more broadly. The first essay in this section, by Paul Lowe, investigates the act of bearing witness to trauma in the art works of Vladimir Miladinovic´ and Adela Jusic´. Lowe gained considerable first-hand experience of witnessing conflict, with a long career as a press photographer amidst historic conflicts in Bosnia, Rwanda and elsewhere, for Time, Newsweek, the Sunday Times Magazine and the Observer. He is Reader in Photojournalism and Documentary Photography at the London College of Communication, University of the Arts London. In Lowe’s discussion of the work of Miladinovic´ and Jusic´ he argues in favour of the testimonial force of contemporary art and raises questions about the idea of art as a vehicle for post-conflict reconciliation in the former Yugoslavia. In the next essay in this section, Kit Messham-Muir considers the ways in which national war museums approach inconvenient narratives. Violent conflict gives rise to complex stories vexed with moral ambiguities. This chapter focuses on Michael Zavros’s two painted portraits of Australia’s most decorated former serviceman, Ben Roberts-Smith VC MG, commissioned by the Australian War Memorial. Against the backdrop of Roberts-Smith’s defamation battle with a major Australian news media group over allegations of war crimes, and the ‘culture war’ politics surrounding it, this chapter considers how national museums tackle the moral and ethical complexities of warfare. Each section of this volume concludes with an ‘interview chapter’, which draw from an extensive body of interviews conducted with over twenty contemporary artists and theorists in the field. This third section concludes with interviews with artist Todd Stone, art theorist Andrew Sneddon and war historian Joanna Bourke. Each of these interviews addresses an aspect of knowing and testimony. Stone is a New York artist who witnessed the horror of 9/11 in Manhattan in 2001 from the rooftop of his apartment building, six blocks north of ‘Ground Zero’. In his interview, Stone talks of 179

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trying to work through the trauma by capturing the two-decade-long transformation of the World Trade Center site back to a vibrant precinct of downtown New York. In the years since 9/11, Stone has continued to create work around the destruction of the Twin Towers, the trauma that followed and the rebirth of the site, which is documented in his book Witness: Downtown Rising. Sneddon’s interview addresses the ways in which testimony and knowing are approached in the video installation work of Willie Doherty, whose art often addresses the aftermath of the Troubles in Northern Ireland as well as more abstract portrayals of the foreboding trauma of conflict. Sneddon also looks at the work of Jeremy Deller, whose Battle of Orgreave re-enacted a battle between the police and the striking members of the National Union of Mineworkers near Sheffield, in the North of England. Bourke’s interview was conducted in February 2019, following her keynote lecture at the War, Art and Visual Culture: Sydney symposium. Bourke’s keynote, titled ‘Cruel Visions: Reflections on Artists and Atrocities’, raised interesting questions about notion of affective contagion and trauma in contemporary war art, which are explored further in her interview. As Professor of History at Birkbeck College, London, Bourke is one of the world’s leading historians of the social history of war and conflict, and editor of War and Art: A Visual History of Modern Conflict (2017).

CHAPTER EIGHT

The Art of Testimony Paul Lowe

IMAGE 8.1 Disturbed Soil, 2018, by Vladimir Miladinovic´. Charcoal drawing on paper, 150 × 200 cm. © Vladimir Miladinovic´ 2018. Reproduced with permission of the artist.

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Landscape as Archive A line of four large-scale black and white images of what appear to be landscapes of forests and trails hangs on the wall of the ‘white cube’ space in the Eugster Gallery in Belgrade.1 From a distance, they resemble photographs, but on closer inspection they reveal themselves to be handdrawn artworks, with traces of the soft touch of fingertips embedded in the surface of the paper (Image 8.1). Framed in simple, pale birch wood frames, and measuring almost 2 × 1.5 metres, the images are epic in scale, and seductive in their flowing tones of charcoal black, modulated greys and pale white highlights. The images seem to shimmer, the texture of the foliage oscillating with a suppressed energy that makes the seemingly bucolic scenes appear charged and alive. The drawings have a sense of structure and internal rhythm, but they are also of what appear to be banal areas with little of the usual compositional elements of a typical landscape painting. The spaces depicted are also claustrophobic, the point of view filling the frame of the image with the density of information of the textures of leaves, flowers branches and soil. The drawings have a haunting, but disturbing beauty, their scale a testament to the artistic endeavour and effort needed to realize them. The slight blurring of the details of the images produced by the process of hand drawing them in charcoal leaves suggests a lyricism and a certain subjectivity of artistic expression. The images are identified by code numbers, ‘ACE58681R0000228501’, ‘ACE58682R0000228502.’ – rather than captions that reveal anything substantive about their meaning. Entitled Disturbed soil/Uznemirena tla, the series comprises eight works that the Serbian artist Vladimir Miladinovic´ has painstakingly enlarged and copied from postcard-sized original photographs taken by forensic investigators working with the International Criminal Tribunal for the Former Yugoslavia (ICTY)2 who were documenting suspected mass graves sites in the Belgrade suburb of Batajnica in 2001 (Image 8.2). The investigation was gathering evidence relating to the execution of Kosovo Albanian civilians by Serbian paramilitaries. Between 7 and 11 May 1999, members of Serbian forces killed ninety-three Kosovo Albanian civilians in the town of Gjakovë in Kosovo. The remains of seventy-eight of the victims were found in Batajnica, the youngest of which was seventeen, and the oldest seventy years old. Miladinovic´ discovered the photographs in the archives of the ICTY as part of his ongoing engagement with the contested histories of the events that occurred in the former Yugoslavia in the 1990s. Through the active process of painstakingly copying these small images, buried in the archival record of atrocity and therefore rendered invisible by the weight of material enclosed within the court records, Miladinovic´ pays testimony to these nondescript places where human lives were treated with such disdain, dumped in mass graves and thus hidden from sight and from memory. In this process of making visible to a public audience the documents of human rights abuse that would otherwise have remained hidden, Miladinovic´ calls on the topology of atrocity

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IMAGE 8.2 Disturbed Soil, installation view, 2018, by Vladimir Miladinovic´ © Vladimir Miladinovic´ 2018. Reproduced with permission of the artist.

itself rather than the human victim to deliver its testimony. His deployment of the techniques of classical charcoal landscape drawing to give these forensic images a new life elevates and monumentalizes the evidential nature of the original document, transforming it in the process from evidence into interpretation and response. In so doing, he creates a visual space that is at once aesthetically engaging and emotionally devastating. Miladinovic´ reads the landscape as archive, expanding beyond topography and transforming it into a space of memory, allusion, metaphor, association and, ultimately, remembrance. Writing about the landscapes of Poland that still contain the traces of the extermination of the Jews in the Second World War, Simon Schama acknowledges the co-existence of horror and aesthetic stimulation: In our mind’s eye we are accustomed to think of the Holocaust as having no landscape – or at best one emptied of features and cold, shrouded in night and fog, blanketed by perpetual winter, collapsed into shades of dun and grey, the grey of smoke, of ash, of pulverised bones, of quicklime. It is shocking, then, to realise that Treblinka, too, belongs to a brilliantly vivid countryside; the river land of the Bug and the Vistula; rolling, gentle land, lined by avenues of poplar and aspen.3 Free Objects forms a companion piece to Disturbed soil/Uznemirena tla in that it deals with another form of the archival evidence relating to the

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Batanjica case. During his research into the ICTY archive in Belgrade, he uncovered an official list of 410 objects that were found in the mass graves on the Batajnica 2 site between June 2001 and November 2002 during the exhumation. He notes how during this grisly process ‘a significant number of victims’ personal items were found. Hundreds of items were listed as having been found on bodies or in their immediate vicinity. These were mostly small personal items, but the list also contains body parts and missiles of different calibers.’4 Printed out in the form of an eleven-page formatted list of the items with their evidential identification number and the name of the investigator who unearthed the remains, the documents make for an extraordinary litany of the minute detail of trauma and loss. The list details in sequence items that include ‘a projectile from a chest cavity’ followed immediately by ‘a lucky charm, . . . bus ticket, bicycle tyre valve sealing caps’. The juxtaposition of forensic detail, like the bullets that killed the victims, with the everyday banality of the personal effects found in their pockets creates a disturbing effect akin to Michael Rothberg’s concept of ‘traumatic realism’, defined as a point where the ‘extreme and the everyday are neither opposed, collapsed, nor transcended through a dialectical synthesis-instead, they are at once held together and kept forever apart in a mode of representation and historical cognition’.5 The process of transcription of these documents lies at the centre of Miladinovic´’s testimonial process, in which he fully embraces the disruption and disturbance that his intervention is making into the official transcript of events (Image 8.3). He explains how he begins with a ‘white sheet of paper’, and although he attempts to be as accurate as possible, the possibility of minor infractions occurring is conceptually part of the process of transcribing from the original document, which is in itself a translation from the original account: You have to be concentrated to try not to make too many mistakes, even though I do make mistakes. Who knows if the court never mistakenly translated some material? It’s putting a mirror in front of this archival politics of trying to be objective, what does it mean to be objective, the truth doesn’t exist anywhere, you are creating truth. We know what happened and when, but by interpreting this reference it is creating something challenging. When I made a mistake I never change it; sometimes my thoughts fly away and I make a mistake, but this is a process, an artistic interpretation of this very sensitive material.6 As with his other series of archival interventions, in these works Miladinovic´ attempts to open an imaginative engagement with memory where the viewer can begin to make sense of their own relationship with past atrocity events. He explains how there is an underlying frustration with structuring knowledge about a violent past in a society such as Serbia, and how perhaps an artistic intervention into these contested narratives can

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IMAGE 8.3 Free Objects, 2018, by Vladimir Miladinovic´. Ink wash on paper, 50 × 70 cm. © Vladimir Miladinovic´ 2018. Reproduced with permission of the artist.

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create a space for dialogue and a restructuring of experience. He argues that in Serbia, society is Struggling with history, leftovers from the past, we don’t know what to do with them. We don’t even have a symbolic space that would give us a space to think about that past, it’s on us to create this symbolic space where people could be triggered about this rather than just a closed narrative on the other side. Through an act of artistic imagination, we can achieve the production of a third image in the head of the viewer.[iv] Disturbed soil/Uznemirena tla and Free Objects thus suggest the possibility of a ‘third image’, an imaginative projected space in the mind of the viewer through a range of aesthetic and intellectual interventions that raise questions about the nature of how to represent, remember and deal with the past. Miladinovic´’s testimonial transformation of the evidential material of the judicial process that would otherwise remain buried in the enormity of the vast archives of the ICTY can be viewed as a performative act of bearing witness that creates a new aesthetic form of the representation of trauma. As Rothberg argues, this allows the gap between literal representation and artistic interpretation to become a space of intense political activity:

IMAGE 8.4 Still from video Snajperist/The Sniper, 2007, by Adela Jusic´. © Adela Jusic´ 2007. Reproduced with permission of the artist.

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The traumatic realist project is not an attempt to reflect the traumatic event mimetically, but to produce it as an object of knowledge, and to transform its readers so that they are forced to acknowledge their relationship to post-traumatic culture . . . Because it seeks both to construct access to a previously unknowable object, the stakes of traumatic realism are at once epistemological and pedagogical, or, in other words, political.7 By representing in a highly aestheticized form a fragment of evidence that was processed as part of a judicial process of establishing responsibility for the act of atrocity, Miladinovic´ confronts the audience with a monumentalized version of the site of the crime, inviting viewers to enter into an imaginative engagement with the complexity of how to deal with the legacy of state supported mass murder.

The Sniper A disembodied hand slowly and carefully inscribes a small circle of red on a white sheet of paper. As the red dot grows gradually in size, a female voice intones a list that begins, ‘November the first, one soldier, November the second, one soldier, one truck driver. November the fourth: three soldiers’. As the video continues, the voice overlaps with itself, continuing the diary of dates and targets. Gradually, a black and white image of the head and shoulders of a man appears superimposed on the paper, but underneath the hand and with the red circle centred on his right eye. As the face of the man becomes clearer, the hand slowly fades away, until it vanishes completely, at which point the voiceover states flatly, ‘December the third. My father, the sniper, was shot by a sniper, into his right eye’ (Image 8.4). The video ends by slowly zooming out on the image to reveal the man is himself holding a sniper rifle with a telescopic sight. Entitled Snajperist/The Sniper, the fourminute-long video is a work by the Bosnian artist Adela Jusic´, dating from 2007.8 Jusic´’s father was a member of the Bosnian army defending the city of Sarajevo during the siege, and was killed by a Serbian sniper on 3 December 1992. Just before his death, Jusic´ discovered his war diary, in which he had recorded the daily tally of enemy combatants he had himself killed. Projected in installation in a darkened room, the video combines the childlike innocence of drawing with the repetitive roll call of death. As the red dot grows in size, and is superimposed over the eye of Jusic´’s father, it is transformed from a doodle into a wound. The final portrait of Jusic´’s father can be read as both heroic and tragic, as it is very similar to dozens of other portraits taken of the defenders of the city, some of whom survived the conflict, and some of whom did not. Although rooted in the specifics of Adela Jusic´’s own life and in the history of the Bosnian conflict, the piece resonates with the trauma of other families in other wars who lost fathers

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defending the values they believed in. It also raises the uncomfortable possibility that the men killed by Jusic´’s father might also have left behind daughters who are also dealing with the loss of their loved one. The list of targets can be read from one side as the casualties inflicted on the enemy, whilst from the other as the victims of war. Jonathan Blackwood, who has written extensively on Jusic´ and her generation of young artists from the former Yugoslavia, views the piece as a ‘profound reflection on mourning and loss, set in the context of the “losses” of individual lives on a daily basis during the early years of the siege. Individual deaths are intoned in a matterof-fact way, with lost human lives reduced to impersonal numbers on a list’.9 Snajperist/The Sniper is part of a trilogy of works that deal with the intertwining of the symbolic and contested role of sniping during the siege of Sarajevo and Jusic´’s own autobiography. Kome treba DRNCˇ?/Who needs DRNCˇ? (2008) is another video piece in which Jusic´ carefully re-enacts the cleaning of a rifle used by her father during the war. DNRCˇ is an abbreviation for ‘Deterdžentni rastvaracˇ naslaga cˇađi’, the name of a type of detergent used for cleaning weapons. Jusic´ describes how When I was 10, my father thought me how to clean his weapon. This was our little ritual after he comes from a front line. Then he would leave for a battle again . . . Once he even took me to the front line with him to see my uncle. A lot of children of my generation cleaned their parents’ weapons, uniforms, boots after they come home from the front line.10 The film is cropped to show Jusic´’s hands and part of her legs as she sits on what appears to be a bedsheet. It starts with her carefully removing the telescopic sight from the rifle, which is worn and well used (Image 8.5). The weapon is a German KAR98K rifle, which dates it to well before the conflict of the 1990s, back to the Second World War. Jusic´ dismantles, cleans and reassembles the weapon: the sound of the bolt being drawn back is familiar from countless war movies, whilst the repetitive scrubbing and polishing of the metal of the rifle with the cleaning cloth makes a contrasting soft, scratching sound. Her hands carefully polish the parts of the gun as if she were polishing the family silver; it is a powerful combination of the domestic and the martial. The piece finishes with the rifle again fully assembled: the weapon is cocked, and the trigger is pulled to create the final sound of a loud crack, as if a bullet has been discharged from the weapon. As Blackwood notes, the work has a powerful emotional charge, as there is a ‘poignant intimacy in cleaning a weapon for someone who is no longer able to use it; a challenging ritual of memory, based on the disruption of normality, symbolised by the involvement of children in the everyday chores of a frontline soldier’.11 Born in 1982, Jusic´ was a child at the outbreak of the war in April 1992, and in her work she draws on her own lived experience of surviving the daily privations and dangers of the siege of Sarajevo. She recounts that in making these works she ‘reached out to my own personal

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IMAGE 8.5 Still from video Kome treba DRNCˇ?/Who needs DRNCˇ?, 2008, by Adela Jusic´. © Adela Jusic´ 2008. Reproduced with permission of the artist. experiences of the war since I grew up in the war, my mother was in the military, my father died in the military, my sister was in the military, we were displaced from our home’.12 Kome treba DRNCˇ?/Who needs DRNCˇ? speaks to this family history and the longer-term connection to the legacy of the anti-fascist struggle of the Second World War. The rifle itself can thus be regarded as a form of archival artefact, with its own history that can only be imagined. Finally, Ride the Recoil (2013) reworks Sniper: Ghost Warrior 2, a computer video game based on the Siege of Sarajevo in which a team of American soldiers carry out a mission that involves them undertaking a covert mission to gather evidence of Serbian war crimes. The segment of the game set in Bosnia in 1993 culminates in the long-range killing of the leader of the enemy unit, Marko Vladic´, targeted through the telescopic sight of a simulated sniper rifle. Jusic´ reworks this game into an installation piece, where again a woman’s voice reads out the tactical guide for playing the game on a two-channel sound whilst a sequential series of images of a child in red shorts is projected onto a large screen, each successively larger as if observed through the sights of a sniper rifle. Blackwood describes the combination of sound and image as chilling, as the visitor processes the multiple gaps between personal memories of that siege and the commercial fiction now offered for sale by a global corporation. The callousness of the computerised female voice,

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giving the game player instructions of how to kill more effectively, set against the very human surveillance images of a small child, can’t help but provoke feelings of anger in the viewer.13 These three pieces oscillate between Jusic´’s intensely personal experience, rooted in her own life and loss, the wider loss and legacy of the Bosnian conflict, and the human cost of war more generally. Even though she is from Bosnia and a survivor of the siege, Jusic´ is careful to speak from her own perspective about issues that she can address with the authority of having lived through and witnessed herself. She explains how for her it would be ‘hard to speak about systematic rape or missing persons or genocide, as at the same time I did not have those experiences, if you don’t have it inside of your own experience you have to be careful about such subjects’.14 She feels, however, that her work ‘can function as testimonial and as a representation and as an artefact of a certain time’.15 Jusic´ consciously does position herself and her generation of artists as operating as an alternative to mainstream debates in the social and political sphere, and as moving between the local and the global, the specific and the generic: What we hear and see about war in everyday media is not what artists are saying about it. People are used to artistic representations and discourses using different means, different languages, different methodologies and discourses. I am coming from personal experience, with nothing to do with the standard political views of the political technologies, the parliament, president, parties, narratives of victims and perpetrators. We can speak to the audience from non-nationalist, non-ethnical positions, a more universal position. We wanted to reach a wider audience, we wanted to speak for the whole world, the whole of Europe. We approached the subject from more universal aspect to reach not only our surroundings, to speak from a local position but to reach a wider international global audience, not just primarily local audiences.16 The work of both Jusic´ and Miladinovic´ and others of their generation of exYugoslav artists can be situated within the context of the identification of ‘performative’ art as a key theme of contemporary practice. As can be clearly seen in their work, Blackwood argues that performativity can be seen as a ‘communication strategy; as a biographical and confessional intervention, in which the artist offers implicit comparison between personal stories and those of the audience; and, the use of performativity in the construction of sociopolitical critique’.17 In this sense, performativity is closely aligned to testimony, with artists situating themselves and their work as sites of witnessing. As W. J. Booth observes, this act of performative bearing witness is A gesture of defiance and resistance: against the flow of time which distances us from what went before, against an absorption in the present,

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and against the desire to forget or conceal. It is an act of resistance related to an absence, a silence, and therefore to a certain kind of vulnerability; that what is absent will be forever lost.18 These artists reassemble fragments of past experiences, translating them into an artistic form that operates at the fringes of knowledge and comprehension. Jusic´ draws on her own personal experience of trauma, whilst Miladinovic´ makes visible the traces of atrocity through an active process of secondary witnessing. They both bear witness to past traumas and reinterpret them for new and contemporary audiences.

Reconciliations Along with several other artists of their generation from the former Yugoslavia, both Jusic´ and Miladinovic´ participated in a series of interventions under the banner of Reconciliations that took place in the Historical Museum of Bosnia Herzegovina19 from 2018 to 2019.20 Following an open call for artists from the region to participate, they were commissioned to make works that responded to the Museum’s permanent collection, Besieged Sarajevo, on the Siege of Sarajevo and its associated archives from both the recent conflict and the Second World War. The open call was part of a larger research project led by King’s College London, University of the Arts London and the London School of Economics that sought to examine the nature of the term ‘reconciliation’ and how relevant it is in the context of post-conflict society.21 A key focus of the research was to examine ‘how the arts might present intriguing possibilities for transitional justice by pluralizing the sites and modes of engagement through which people can engage with and frame the past and its relation to the future on their own terms’.22 The Historical Museum operates in a unique space within the cultural sphere both within Bosnia and the region. Although it has an extensive collection of historical artefacts on display from both the Second World War and the anti-fascist struggle, and from the conflict of the 1990s, the Museum always integrated art into the exhibition narratives, even in its previous incarnation as the Museum of the Revolution. The current curatorial team therefore recognizes the potential role that art and artists can play in interacting with the historical narratives of conflict that have shaped the region, which indeed have impacted on the very fabric of the Museum itself. The Historical Museum can be seen through an archival lens, in terms of its own history and architectural form and in terms of how it has been affected by that history in profoundly material ways. In its permanent exhibition, Besieged Sarajevo, artefacts donated to the Museum by the citizens of the city are arranged as a testimony to the survival of its inhabitants. Displays of home-made stoves, a recreation of a living room,

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improvised weapons and a satellite phone dish form a powerful experiential account of how life was lived under the duress of the siege. As Harrington, Dimitrijevic´ and Salama note, the Museum’s collection provides a powerful human connection with the events that occurred in Sarajevo during the siege, as ‘these objects and souvenirs of personal experiences of the war, expressed through real and virtual records, represent a heritage of destruction’.23 Similarly, they also maintain that the ‘Museum building and its contents have today become a public display of scars, wounds and fragments of the former life, practically an exhibition of what can be termed as an archaeology of conflict’.24 Barbora Chrzová likewise explains how the various facets of the Museum’s physical presence combine to produce a form of spatial testimony to its own history, noting how The museum’s space encompasses personal objects (providing a material testimony to life in besieged Sarajevo), pictures (presenting a visual testimony of endured horrors and tragedies) and a bodily and sensory sound installation (providing oral testimonies), all located within a building that itself was damaged by the war and which still bears its traces. Such a blend creates a powerful experience and even a physical sense of discomfort that strongly appeals to the visitors’ obligation to remember.25 The Museum therefore provided an ideal venue through which to experiment with and explore how artistic interventions can operate in the context of post-conflict memory. From extended interviews and discussions with the artists and curators who participated in the Reconciliations commissions,26 and from analysis of the audience responses to the exhibitions, it is clear that art operated within the context of post-conflict societies in several significant ways. Artists and arts organizations in the region conceive of the role of creative interventions in post-conflict situations in four important ways: the arts were seen as a force for healing, as part of a process of remembering, as a space for dialogue, and as a vehicle for imagining new futures and new possibilities. Art was thus seen as having the potential to operate in parallel to mainstream political and social arenas, and it has the ability to unsettle dominant narratives of what reconciliation is or isn’t, should or shouldn’t be, as well as providing a platform for differing views and for dissent. As the curator of the Historical Museum, Elma Hodzic´, explained: arts can give platform for dialogue about the past. The museum is neglected and abandoned by the official state, but that means that we can offer and build a platform about the past. The recent Bosnian past is still contested, still has many questions and needs answers and the Museum can serve as a space where these questions can be opened.27

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Jusic´ expanded on this, maintaining that the ‘artistic interpretation of war exists in a totally parallel reality from the typical representation of war, and maybe in that sense operates as an oppositional position’.28 Another of the participating artists, Mladen Miljanovic´, argued that the role of the artist in post-conflict society is to challenge and ultimately overthrow accepted and established narratives, if we don’t take risks in art we are lying. Art should reflect these difficult circumstances, but art should ask not how can we face trauma but how can we redefine question of trauma. That is the power of art, the artist can reformulate the problem of the present and its relation to the past. That is the power and the responsibility of the artist today.29 Art was also identified as an intensely personal exercise, one that allowed for an individual response to a complex issue, both from the practitioner but also from the audience. An artwork has the potential to take an abstract concept or a social or historical fact and imbue it with a sense of intimacy and relevance. As Jusic´ explained, the community of ex-Yugoslav artists engaged in dealing with the legacy of the past can be regarded as a Regional force that sees art as contra-nationalist. We don’t connect nationalist belongings but we are united by the same problems and troubles we face in our own ethnic or national communities. We go out in the world as cultural and political agents of our own countries, of the problems going on in our own societies, we speak about the problems of nationalism on a global stage.30 Connected to this personalization of experience, art was also seen as empathetic, enabling a sense of a communal response to an issue that can connect people in an emotionally charged space. The ability of an artwork or an artist to pay attention to things that might otherwise go unnoticed or remain hidden was also identified as a significant feature of art’s ability to create awareness of an issue that was obscured or hidden. Linked to this characteristic, the transformative power and potential of an artwork was seen as vital. This could take the form of the transformation and repurposing of material objects, but also encompass an artwork’s ability to shift people’s perceptions of an issue. Underpinning all these facets of the role of art in dealing with conflict is its testimonial function, its ability to remember the past and to represent it into the present and the future. These characteristics were profoundly demonstrated by the works produced by Jusic´ and Miladinovic´ in their participation in Reconciliations. Jusic´ and her long-time collaborator, Lana Cˇmajcˇanin, based their installation, Bedtime Stories, on their own experiences of life sheltering from the shelling of the city during the siege. They described how

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IMAGE 8.6 Bedtime Stories, installation, 2011, by Lana Cˇmajcˇanin and Adela Jusic´. Photo: Zijah Gafic´, History Museum of Bosnia and Herzegovina. © Lana Cˇmajcˇanin and Adela Jusic´ 2011. Reproduced with permission of the artists. The basements in the apartment buildings had small spaces, one for every apartment. These spaces were transformed into sleeping rooms. The size of these spaces could be as little as one-meter-wide and two meters long because their natural function was storage. These storage spaces were usually full of old things, or things that just don’t belong inside apartments.31 These underground spaces became the focal point of life for the families that lived in each building. The proximity to neighbours and families created a shared communal space, one that both Cˇmajcˇanin and Jusic´ experienced personally. As they recall, ‘It is hard to imagine this life inside a basement. People formed a special community with its own rules and a new system of survival. They shared everything, from food to clothes, from happiness to misery.’32 Originally produced as Pricˇe za laku noc´ (2011) and previously exhibited in Stockholm, Zagreb and Maribor, for the commission with the Historical Museum, Bedtime Stories was situated within the permanent

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collection Besieged Sarajevo. The installation consists of two lines of white painted cubicles the size of a single bed facing each other, each containing a mattress and a pair of headphones (Image 8.6). Each cubicle forms its own cocoon where the visitor can lie down and listen to the recorded voices of survivors of the siege who were children and teenagers at the time. The stories are varied, some tell of extreme privations and terror, whilst others are charming and funny. As Chrzová observes, The ‘resilience narrative’ of the permanent exhibition also strongly resonates in the stories recalled by the narrators: they are full of humour and sarcasm and testify to people’s ability to adapt even to the most traumatic situations. The underlying notion of fear, suffering and destroyed lives and childhoods is, however, inescapably present.33 In her audio story, Aida Vežic´ described herself as a ‘confused teenage girl, 14 to 18 years old’ who describes how ‘only fragments exist’ of her memories that she cannot join together to make a coherent story. However, she does recall the moment when a shell hit the entrance to her apartment building when she was sitting outside, The thing I cannot forget is the deafening explosion. The sound of breaking glass, tumbling down, and the terrible heat of detonation on my bare hands and on my skin. The shell fell on the street and the glass was broken. No one was hurt, but I was in shock. In shock over terrifying strength of the detonation that caused everything in me to vibrate and buzz. I hear nothing. Understand nothing, and have no clue where did the grenade fell. Too much dust, and smoke. . . . They say you never hear your own shell, and you are still alive if you are aware of the explosion. There are so many of such moments in my memory. They often come to the surface by themselves. In fragments.34 According to Chrzová, the pared-down minimalist space of the installation intensifies the empathetic connection to the narratives of survival, as the ‘lack of visual incentives allows visitors to imagine the described scenes and stories through the eyes of the narrators, thus reliving their experiences and empathizing with their emotions. The performative aesthetic technique therefore casts a new more personal and deeply felt memory of the past.’35 The installation thus operates in a spatio-temporal realm where the audience moves from the artefact-centred permanent exhibition into the restful and confined cubicles where they are transported into a childlike remembering of the past. As Kerr and Fairey note, this forms a powerful experiential experience that is ‘at once an intimate telling of individual stories, including the artists’ own, and a political statement of resilience. In that sense, it probes the unreconciled nature of dissonant experiences, but also seeks to reconcile the past with the lived experience of the present. The effect is

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profoundly discomforting.’36 The performance of these testimonies of survival in the comforting space of a bed makes this piece a deeply emotional and intimate experience, representing the memories of these Bosnian youth from the past in the present day. Miladinovic´ worked with the paper archives of the Museum from the period of the siege, selecting a range of documents, newspapers, posters and other ephemera that represented the social and cultural response to the conflict. This was a continuation of his ongoing project of working with archives that began with his initial interrogation of Serbian newspaper archives from the Yugoslav wars. His initial impulse was simply to try to understand from his own perspective what had occurred during the conflict, as he had been too young at the time to comprehend what was happening. He grew up in the small town of c´uprija in central Serbia, and his family were largely untouched directly by the war, so he was motivated by the desire to try to formulate his own version of the events. He began this process by studying Serbian newspapers held in the central state archive, making scans of them so he could read them in more detail in his own time. This led him to realize that the perspective on the events that occurred, put forward by most of the Serbian press, was biased and one-sided. To solidify this process of careful reading of the newspapers into a tangible form, he began to meticulously copy by hand the newspaper pages at an enlarged scale. Using an ink pen and wash technique, he created a facsimile of the original that bears the marks of his own precise and time-consuming labour. He views this careful research into the original newspaper accounts as his way of challenging the established narratives of Serbian revisionist history, and therefore the ‘process of reading was a very important process of requestioning the knowledge already embodied into me’.37 Miladinovic´ further developed the series to work with other newspaper archives in Germany and Spain. This produced a series of exhibitions titled Rendered History where newspaper pages were presented en masse on the gallery wall, thus providing multiple perspectives on the same series of now historical events. For the commission at the Historical Museum, the opportunity to work with a wider range of archival documents was both emotionally and artistically challenging. As Miladinovic´ explains, working in the collection was ‘even more amazing, really touching. It felt really powerful to spend time in the basement of the Museum browsing through these items, newspaper clippings, official documents, the announcement of the war. You have got a piece of history that you’re lucky to have in your hands for the first time.’ However, the difficulty was to make sense of this wide variety of documents to form a coherent artistic statement, and a ‘challenge to extract something that will be beautiful’. As a Serb with no direct experience of conflict, Miladinovic´ felt a sense of personal responsibility to both the material and to the citizens of Sarajevo (Image 8.7). He recounted how he felt ‘totally free to do whatever you like

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IMAGE 8.7. Memoria Bosniaca, Oslobodjenje, 2017, by Vladimir Miladinovic´. Ink wash on paper, 50 × 70 cm. © Vladimir Miladinovic´ 2017. Reproduced with permission of the artist.

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and then to present it back in the space of the museum where you found these materials, to an audience that knows about all these things, from firsthand, literally living the history of these items that I was using’. He worked with the ‘little items that people donated, the various newspaper clippings’ that provide more ‘possibilities to create a narrative but also are more challenging as they put you in a position as researcher and artist to show your ethical position, what you want to do with it’.38 Entitled Memoria Bosniaca, this cycle of works – as with Disturbed soil/Uznemirena tla and Free Objects – represents archival material in a new form that both reveals and transforms it, allowing new audiences to engage with the complexity and contested nature of the historical narrative (Image 8.8). Both Bedtime Stories and Memoria Bosniaca present a fragmentary and partial account of lived experience. These are recounted in oral testimony and through a selection of documents that reflect a range of perspectives on existence during the siege, ranging from the banal and parochial to the horrific. Neither project seeks to offer answers but rather to pose questions about how to engage with and deal with past events. It is important to note that in dealing with the trauma of the past, the parallel space that art offers remains a contested one, as any accounting of the past has to be incomplete, especially when dealing with traumatic histories. Dealing with the complexity of trauma is a difficult task that resists representation. As Shoshana Felman notes,

IMAGE 8.8. Memoria Bosniaca, 2017, by Vladimir Miladinovic´. Ink wash on paper, 35 × 50 cm. © Vladimir Miladinovic´ 2017. Reproduced with permission of the artist.

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Testimony seems to be composed of bits and pieces of a memory that has been overwhelmed by occurrences that have not settled into understanding or remembrance, acts that cannot be constructed as knowledge nor assimilated into full cognition, events in excess of our frames of reference.39 Kerr and Fairey have similarly reflected on all the artists who participated in the Reconciliations project, noting that they did not seek to disseminate a ‘shared’ narrative or to heal division in the way that is normally associated with reconciliation activity, but rather to open up new discursive spaces and encourage others to reflect. It is precisely the idea that the engagement is open-ended, and not predetermined, that is valuable in so far as the arts can accommodate difference, not seek a single didactic ‘truth’.40 Art can be seen therefore as offering an alternative space where discussion and debate can take place. It can provide a parallel narrative to the established social, political and historical narratives that are too often deployed in negative ways by ethno-nationalist forces. By their very nature, atrocity events resist representation in any complete way, and a testimony of suffering must always include absence at its core. The lacuna of trauma creates a space of silence where the ability of language fails to express experience. These spaces are like topological features, with the peaks of representation mirrored by the troughs of its failure to truly describe the totality of the crime. The role of the witness who uses form to translate their testimony contains at its centre an aesthetic intervention. The way in which the testimony is formulated, presented and performed, whether in text, image or some other presentation, directly impacts on how it might be received by an audience. The aesthetic process can fill in these almost invisible indentations, as W. J. Booth argues, we ‘might better think of these silences or absences as a sort of topography: hollows or indentations left by the past, unannounced and mute but awaiting memory’s voice, a witness, a poet, and orator, or a monument’.41 For the witness then, the imperative is to fill these lacunae with something, even if it ultimately fails to fully represent the event. Some representation is therefore better than none.

Notes 1 For more on the Disturbed soil/Uznemirena tla exhibition, see the Eugster Gallery website, www.eugster belgrade.com/artists/vladimir-miladinovic/?secti on=exhibitions&exh=437&tab=2, accessed November 2020. 2 Established by Resolution 827 of the United Nations Security Council in May 1993 the ICTY was a body of the United Nations established to prosecute war crimes and their perpetrators committed during the Yugoslav Wars.

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During its twenty-six-year existence, the court indicted 161 persons, with ninety being sentenced and eighteen acquitted. The ICTY’s archive holds a vast collection of records, evidence and testimony relating to the conflict in the former Yugoslavia, making it a key site of memory in relation to the conflict. See https://www.icty.org/ 3 Simon Schama, Landscape and Memory (London: HarperCollins, 1995), 26. 4 See Vladimir Miladinovic´, Free Objects, http://vladimirmiladinovic.blogspot. com/2015/04/free-objects.html, accessed November 2020. 5 Michael Rothberg, ‘Between the Extreme and the Everyday: Ruth Kluger’s Traumatic Realism’, in Extremities, ed. Nancy Miller and Jason Daniel Tougaw, (Chicago: University of Illinois Press, 2002), 55. 6 Author’s interview with Vladimir Miladinovic´, 2020. 7 Rothberg, ‘Between the Extreme and the Everyday’, 67. 8 See Adela Jusic´, The Sniper, on her website: https://adelajusic.wordpress.com/ works/the-sniper/, accessed November 2020. 9 Jon Blackwood, Without Pity or Sentiment: Conflict in The Art of Adela Jušic´, 2016, https://jonblackwood.net/2016/01/27/30/, accessed November 2020. 10 See Adela Jusic´, Who Needs Drncˇ? https://adelajusic.wordpress.com/works/ who-needs-drnc/, accessed November 2020. 11 Blackwood, Without Pity or Sentiment. 12 Author’s interview with Adela Jusic´, 2018. 13 See Adela Jusic´, Ride the Recoil, https://adelajusic.wordpress.com/works/ ride-the-recoil/, accessed November 2020. 14 Interview Jusic´, 2018. 15 Ibid. 16 Ibid. 17 Jon Blackwood, Introduction to Contemporary Art in BiH, Duplex 100m2, Sarajevo, 2015, 43. 18 William James Booth, Communities of Memory: On Witness, Identity and Justice (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2006), 73. 19 The Museum of the Revolution was established initially to mark the victory of Marshal Josip Broz Tito’s Partisans in the Second World War in 1945. Until 1993, the Museum commemorated the history of anti-fascism during the Second World War, which played a part in the celebration and promotion of socialist state values. With the collapse of the Socialist Federalist Republic of Yugoslavia in 1992, the Museum was renamed the History Museum of Bosnia and Herzegovina. 20 ‘Art and Reconciliation: Conflict, Culture and Community’ was a two-and-ahalf-year research programme, funded by the UK Arts and Humanities Research Council and the Global Challenges Research Fund. The project investigated and explored a range of creative approaches to reconciliation. Working in the Western Balkans, the programme commissioned regional artists and built research partnerships with arts institutions and nongovernmental organizations (NGOs) using ‘strategic’ arts-based

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approaches. Instead of predefining the term ‘reconciliation’, the research sought to understand how it was experienced, conceptualized, evaluated and practised by those involved. In total, fifteen artistic projects were commissioned, including a participatory drawing workshop, a documentary film and the creation of eleven new pieces of artwork (sculpture, paintings and mixed-media installations). Mixed qualitative methods and adaptive evaluation strategies were designed to assess each intervention. Data was gathered through artists’ diaries, focus groups, audience surveys, content analysis and semi-structured interviews. 21 In 2017, a public call was made for applications from regional artists. The form of the artwork was left entirely open. It could be performance, sculpture, photography, film or fine art as long as it had the potential to be exhibited. Applications that were socially engaged and participatory or collaborative in nature were particularly welcome. The Museum received over fifty applications, from which three projects were selected by an independent panel of judges: Bedtime Stories by Adela Jusic´ and Lana Cˇmajcˇanin, Cathode Infusion by Dario Kristic´ and Sabina Tanovic´ and Memoria Bosniaca by Vladimir Miladinovic´. All three artworks (or modified versions of them) were exhibited at the Museum in Sarajevo and at King’s College London. 22 Tiffany Fairey and Rachel Kerr, ‘What Works? Creative Approaches to Transitional Justice in Bosnia and Herzegovina’, International Journal of Transitional Justice, vol. 14, no. 1 (2020): 146. 23 Selma Harrington, Branka Dimitrijevic´ and Ashraf M. Salama, ‘Modernist Architecture, Conflict, Heritage and Resilience: The Case of the Historical Museum of Bosnia and Herzegovina’, International Journal of Architectural Research, vol. 11, no. 3 (2017): 183. 24 Harrington et al., ‘Modernist Architecture’, 182. 25 Barbora Chrzová, ‘Performing a Difficult Past in a Museum: The History Museum of Bosnia and Herzegovina’, Slavia Meridionalis, vol. 19 (2019): 10. 26 ‘The Artist in Post Conflict Society’ was a one-day public artist workshop held at the History Museum of Bosnia and Herzegovina on 25 June 2018. See, https://artreconciliation.org/research-activities/ events/artists-workshopsarajevo-june-2018/, accessed November 2019. 27 Author’s interview with Elma Hozdic´, 2018. 28 Interview Jusic´, 2018. 29 Author’s interview with Mladen Miljanovic´, 2018. 30 Interview Jusic´, 2018. 31 Lana Cˇmajcˇanin, Adela Jusic´ and Rachel Kerr, Bedtime Stories exhibition catalogue (Sarajevo: History Museum of Bosnia Herzegovina 2018), 10. 32 Ibid., 12. 33 Chrzová, ‘Performing a Difficult Past’, 10. 34 Bedtime Stories, exhibition catalogue, 36. 35 Chrzová, ‘Performing a Difficult Past’, 10. 36 Fairey and Kerr, ‘What Works?’, 151.

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37 Interview Miladinovic´, 2020. 38 Ibid., 2020. 39 Shoshana Felman, ‘Education and Crisis, Or the Vicissitudes of Teaching’, in Testimony: Crises of Witnessing in Literature, Psychoanalysis and History, ed. Shoshana Felman and Dori Laub (New York: Routledge, 1999), 4. 40 Fairey and Kerr, ‘What Works?’, 164. 41 Booth, Communities of Memory, 74.

CHAPTER NINE

Inconvenient Narratives Addressing Moral Ambiguity in the National War Museum Kit Messham-Muir

IMAGE 9.1 Pistol Grip, 2014, by Michael Zavros. Oil on canvas, framed, 162 × 222 cm; unframed, 160 × 220 cm. © Michael Zavros 2014. Reproduced with permission of the artist and Yavuz gallery. 203

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In order to articulate what is ‘Australian’, we turn to hyperbole and symbolism. We create heroes and idols. That Ben Roberts-Smith has become a heroic figure in the hearts and minds of so many Australians is clear. He’s come to represent so much of what we hold dear as a nation. That he’s a reluctant hero endears him to us even more, because it is genuine.1 MICHAEL ZAVROS, AUSTRALIAN ARTIST

On 2 September 2014, the Australian War Memorial (AWM) – that country’s national war museum and shrine of remembrance – unveiled the two painted portraits it had commissioned from Michael Zavos of Corporal Ben Roberts-Smith VC MG. Australia’s most decorated former serviceman, Roberts-Smith served six tours in Afghanistan with Australia’s Special Air Service Regiment, received the Commendation for Distinguished Service in 2013, the Medal for Gallantry in 2006 and, in 2011, the Victoria Cross, Australia’s highest military honour for valour. During the public launch of the two portraits the then-director of the AWM, Dr Brendon Nelson, explained that the choice of Zavros was down to the intensity and the richness of his past portraits, and ‘the way in which he particularly paints men’.2 Pistol Grip [Ben Roberts-Smith VC]3 is a larger than life-sized depiction of Roberts-Smith, seen from his left side, his camouflage arms outstretched, mimicking the action of holding a pistol in battle. The second work, Ben Roberts-Smith VC , both 2014,4 is also a portrait of Roberts-Smith, depicting the soldier in his ceremonial military uniform from the thighs up, isolated on a white background, on a small canvas of only 42 cm across. Rendered in Zavros’s signature photorealistic style, these portraits are easily digestible images of Australian military heroism in the theatre of war that trade on familiar nationalistic tropes. Roberts-Smith is a physically imposing figure, standing more than two metres tall (at 6 ft 8 in). Many images of him in the media depict him as broad-shouldered, muscular and tattooed, similar to how he is pictured in Julian Kingma’s 2017 photographic portrait at Australia’s National Portrait Gallery.5 For much of the decade after receiving the Victoria Cross, Roberts-Smith maintained a well-established public image of benign masculinity: a ‘genuine’ reluctant hero; no tall poppy, but just one of the guys, doing his job. Yet in 2022, at the time of writing, Roberts-Smith has found himself fighting a court battle to save his reputation, against serious allegations by Australia’s Channel 9 television and newspapers The Age, The Sydney Morning Herald and The Canberra Times. In a series of stories, Channel 9’s 60 Minutes and its newspapers allege that Roberts-Smith committed war crimes while deployed in Afghanistan, ‘breaking moral and legal military rules of engagement’, including allegations that he had, ‘murdered an unarmed and defenceless Afghan civilian’.6 In this chapter, I will briefly consider the impact of these allegations on Roberts-Smith’s once-uncomplicated image as a war hero and,

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more important to the discussion of this chapter, consider the ways in which those allegations potentially impact upon the place held by Zavros’s portraits in the national war museum. My purpose here is not to speculate on the truth or otherwise of the allegations levelled at Roberts-Smith – which at the time of writing was coming before the courts – but rather to consider the larger issue of how our national institutions for the public memory of war address problematic, difficult or morally ambiguous instances in the national narrative. Indeed, how do national museums of war, whose interpretive mode is almost by default one of commemorating heroic narratives and people, deal with inconvenient counter-narratives, including alleged war crimes. I will consider this question within the broader context of ongoing ‘culture war’ politics, which dominates much of the public discourse around such instances and tends to be characterized by a polarized and non-consensus politics that is frequently expressed and performed rhetorically through the visual culture of the media and the Internet. I will consider how highly problematic narratives have been addressed at America’s National Air and Space Museum and the Canadian War Museum.

Australian War Hero After receiving the Victoria Cross, the public image of Roberts-Smith – as ‘an Australian hero’ yet very much humble and reluctant – owed much to his 2011 interview on Australian Channel 7’s Sunday Night, a news and current affairs magazine programme much in the format of American 60 Minutes. ‘You’re about to meet a man’, said anchor Chris Bath, ‘who believes freedom and family are worth fighting for.’ His interview with veteran Australian journalist Mike Willesee told of the seven-hour battle in Afghanistan which earned Roberts-Smith the VC, his balancing of family life and his commitment to his protecting Australia: ‘I know what we’re doing is actually stemming the flow of terrorism into this country.’ The interview’s publicity was amplified when hosts of The Circle on rival network Channel Ten mocked an image of Roberts-Smith shirtless in a swimming pool, saying ‘He’s going to dive down to the bottom of the pool to see if his brain is there’, and ‘what if they’re not up to it in the sack?’7 The ensuing social media backlash and apologies further cemented RobertsSmith as an Australian hero, one who was not merely worthy of respect but had become something of a sacrosanct public figure. Roberts-Smith subsequently became The Shepherd Centre’s 2013 Australian Father of the Year, the public face of the Stay Kind campaign, attempting to tackle youth suicide and promoting kindness and empathy,8 and when family violence survivor and campaigner Rosie Batty was awarded Australian of the Year in 2015, images of Roberts-Smith comforting Batty, tearful at the announcement in Canberra, cemented his public image as a gentle giant with a big heart.

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When Ben Roberts-Smith’s combat uniform was donated to the AWM and displayed in 2013 in the permanent exhibition Afghanistan: The Australian Story, it was not merely as an example of an military artefact from that conflict but also as a hallowed relic to both his VC-awarded acts of valour and to the man’s physical build: ‘Super-sized mannequin required for Victoria Cross recipient Ben Roberts-Smith’s uniform’, declared the headline in The Canberra Times.9 A year later, when artist Baden Pailthorpe took up the role as artist-in-residence at the AWM, Roberts-Smith’s helmet, suspended in the space alongside the display of his combat uniform, became the focus of his work. In the resulting work, Spatial Operations, 2014 – exhibited at Newcastle Art Gallery in regional NSW in 2015 – Pailthorpe hung 210 casts of that very same helmet in a grid against a black wall. The helmets were each cast in pulped paper made from all the books on the Australian Chief of Army’s Reading List.10 I interviewed Pailthorpe about this work in December 2018, and I asked him how the work had evolved to that point. He replied: [Roberts-Smith] has been in the media a lot and that has been quite interesting to observe, and particularly a lot of the work was about the way that Special Services, Special Operation soldiers, go from having their identities officially protected, to being famous . . . obviously part of that territory is being exposed to the media a lot and then having your actions scrutinized, I think that has added a different tone to the work perhaps, but yeah, I think that still remains to be seen.11 Pailthorpe’s words seem almost prescient, but challenges to RobertsSmith’s heroic public image had already begun circulating. Three months earlier, Nick McKenzie, Chris Masters and David Wroe published an article in The Sydney Morning Herald that claimed to have interviewed dozens of veterans, officials and witnesses of Roberts-Smith’s conduct who alleged, ‘bullying, intimidation and his involvement in small SAS teams suspected of the abuse of unarmed civilians and the use of force that goes well beyond what is acceptable in the theatre of war’.12 RobertsSmith attempted to stop that story in the Federal Court, with his lawyer claiming that it ‘committed a criminal offence by publishing confidential military information’.13 Then, on 22 September 2019, Australia’s 60 Minutes news and current affairs programme and newspapers The Age and The Sydney Morning Herald alleged that Roberts-Smith was under investigation for war crimes: ‘allegedly kicking a handcuffed detainee off a small cliff in an Afghan village in 2012’.14 It is important to note here that Roberts-Smith has denied the allegations and, at the time of writing, is suing Nine Entertainment Co, which owns 60 Minutes,15 as well as Melbourne’s Age newspaper and the Sydney Morning Herald for characterizing him as a war criminal.16 Nevertheless, according to The Australian, ‘The effect has been to skew the public’s perception of Roberts-Smith, turning him from venerated war hero to a figure of questionable moral standing, to say the least.’17

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IMAGE 9.2 Spatial Operations, 2015, by Baden Pailthorpe. 210 paper helmets created from each book on the Australian Chief of Army’s Reading List. PVA, cellulose powder, paper pulp, 24 × 30 × 22 cm (each), 210 pieces. © Baden Pailthorpe 2015. Reproduced with permission of the artist and Sullivan+Strumpf.

Culture War The media allegations against Roberts-Smith were immediately enlisted in the fray of Australia’s culture wars, contextualized by the highly polarized politics that has gripped liberal democracies in recent years, most notably in the United Kingdom and the United States, where pitting left against right, liberalism against populism, globalism against nationalism, continues to play out on traditional electronic and online social media. In the days following the 2019 60 Minutes broadcast, 2GB radio’s then-presenter and conservative commentator Alan Jones implored, ‘Servicemen like Ben Roberts-Smith have put their lives on the line in war scenarios where peacetime rules don’t always apply.’18 Channel 10’s The Project’s regular conservative panellist Steve Price asked, ‘Why the hell are we investigating soldier heroes who we train to kill, who we then send off to war? Why are we just not letting them do what they are supposed to do?’19 Many Australian conservatives maintained an underlying sense that the investigation was an unnecessary ‘Witch Hunt’, and many thanked Roberts-Smith for his service. Others blamed the left for a ‘beat up’,20 and of ‘always trying to discredit the war heroes [because] they just don’t like Australia’,21 and suggested that

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‘This whole issue is about bringing down a person and an institution that puts Australia first, this is the way the Left and Socialism works’.22 Further, Geoff Hourn, a former SASR officer and president of Highgate Returned and Services League, criticized ‘the pacifist and the politically correct’: ‘in 2018 we now live in a culture that suffers from “western civilisation anxiety”. It is the culture of political correctness.’23 Social media acted to magnify the culture war politics. On Twitter, comments were polarized: ‘I think war breaks men. Killing people shouldnt [sic] mean you are “honourable” at all’,24 and ‘Ben Roberts-Smith, VC, MG is a war criminal. A bully grows up to be a murderer, torturer, and wifebeater. No surprises there’,25 versus ‘It is War not play school’,26 and ‘The pursuit of Ben Roberts-Smith by softcock, desk bound, living at home with mum journalists of the Australian media is a typical witch hunt by the people he was sent overseas to protect’.27 On the Friday following the 2019 60 Minutes special report, Carrie McDougall and Michael Bachelard responded to a number of media commentators and social media posters who had criticized the 60 Minutes story. They responded to Price’s criticism: ‘Australian Defence Force personnel are not trained to kill. They are trained to pursue the lawful objectives of their mission and to comply with strict rules of engagement.’28 The same day, an article by The Australian’s defence editor, Paul Maley, which largely discussed the delays in official investigations around the alleged incident, prompted overwhelming support for RobertsSmith in the readers’ comments section. A year later, the allegations attracted more media attention with the release of the 2020 Inspector-General of the Australian Defence Force Afghanistan Inquiry Report, abbreviated as The Brereton Report after Major General Paul Brereton, a judge and a senior officer in the Australian Army Reserve.29 The Report does not identify specific names. In general, it alleges twenty-three separate incidents of unlawful killing of noncombatants, perpetrated by twenty-five members of Australia’s Special Operations Task Group, in which thirty-nine Afghan non-combatants or hors-de-combat (mostly detained fighters) were killed. The Brereton Report claims, ‘None of these are incidents of disputable decisions made under pressure in the heat of battle. The cases in which it has been found that there is credible information of a war crime are ones in which it was or should have been plain that the person killed was a non-combatant.’30 Chief of the Australian Defence Force (ADF) General Angus Campbell said these were ‘prisoners, farmers or other civilians’ in controlled situations – not in the fog of war or ‘in the heat of battle’.31 Campbell spoke of ‘a self-centred “warrior culture”, a misplaced focus on prestige, status and power, turning away from the [SAS] Regiment’s heritage of military excellence fused with the quiet humility of service’. He went on to say that the Report noted that ‘this distorted culture was embraced and amplified by some experienced, charismatic and influential non-commissioned officers and their proteges, who sought to fuse military excellence with ego, elitism and entitlement’.32

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It is important to remember here that the initial allegations actually arose from within the Regiment, and the Report was commissioned by the ADF, rather than a ‘witch hunt’ emerging from the left. Nevertheless, and despite Roberts-Smith identifying himself as one of the subjects of The Brereton Report,33 the culture war politics were further stoked. Mike O’Connor in The Courier Mail characterized the Report, and Campbell’s condemnation of the Australian SAS’s ‘warrior culture’ as ‘tall poppy syndrome’ (an Australian aphorism in which the tallest growing poppies of a bunch are cut-down-to-size for standing out), and declared Roberts-Smith, ‘A genuine hero – what a perfect target for the armchair critics who have never heard or seen a shot fired in anger, and whose most critical life decisions relate to the choice between iced latte and cappuccino.’34 Kerry Stokes, the billionaire owner of Channel 7 and chairman of the Council of the Australian War Memorial, financially backed Roberts-Smith’s lawsuit against the Age and Sydney Morning Herald, which are owned by rival network Channel 9.35 Stokes is a major private collector of contemporary art and historical artefacts, with a particular interest in the military. He also has close connections to the Australian SAS, which is based in Swanbourne, an ocean-side suburb of Perth in Western Australia, which is also Stokes’s hometown and the location of his art and historical collection. After he left the SAS, Roberts-Smith was employed as managing director of the Queensland operations of Stokes’s company, SevenWest. According to The Guardian, Stokes has loaned Roberts-Smith the funds to pay for his legal fees in the defamation trial, who in return has put up his medals as collateral. If Roberts-Smith cannot repay the loan, claims The Guardian, the medals will be donated to the Australian War Memorial.36 Roberts-Smith’s ongoing defamation trial against Channel 9 has become a long, drawn-out affair, delayed by Sydney’s 2021 lockdown. The media reporting on the trial is now extensive and has added detail to the allegations as the defence draws on testimony from witnesses who worked alongside Roberts-Smith. It is difficult to identify the ways in which the original media stories, and now the protracted court case, have shifted public perceptions of Roberts-Smith. However, it would be realistic to say that his oncestraightforward public image as an Australian war hero has now been complexified and problematized. In what ways, then, might Zavos’s portraits now be understood and read by their audience, almost a decade after their unveiling, particularly within the institutional context of the Australian War Memorial? Zavros’s two portraits already sat within a complex nexus of readings, particularly given Zavros’s established critical oeuvre, which considers contemporary art in relation to the eye candy of luxury consumer goods. As Zavros’s speech at the launch of the AWM’s portraits states, his works directly address aspects of national identity and heroism, both their hyperbole and symbolism. They are arguably much more complex than simple hero portraits of a VC recipient, and thus there is a level of layering that to some degree destabilizes any straightforward reading. However, this

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new context has generated uncertainty around what Roberts-Smith as a public figure symbolizes, which, in turn, radically disrupts the already complex meaning of Zavros’s portraits.

Conflicting Narratives So, how might national war museums address incidents that conflict with or problematize the predominantly heroic narratives that they were built to convey? The potential issues facing Zavros’s portraits bring to mind a contentious exhibition that was planned for Washington DC’s National Air and Space Museum in the mid-1990s, titled The Crossroads: The End of World War II, the Atomic Bomb and the Origins of the Cold War.37 The incident was one in which conflicting narratives were ultimately irreconcilable, and highlighted the difficulties of attempting to provide a politically ‘balanced’ narrative around the display of a collection object. Indeed, the Crossroads case was one of a spate of incidents in the 1990s ‘museum wars’ that took hold of many national museums around the world, which in Australia included conservative objections to the historical narrative around Indigenous massacres portrayed in the then-new National Museum of Australia. The Crossroads exhibition was to centre around the fuselage of the Enola Gay, the Boeing B-29 Superfortress bomber that had dropped the very first nuclear weapons deployed in conflict, on the Japanese cities of Hiroshima and Nagasaki in the last days of the Second World War. Thomas F. Gieryn provides a contemporaneous discussion of the internal tensions and contentions at the museum during the planning of the exhibition. According to Gieryn, the difficulty with Crossroads was how to tell the story of the bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki – a decisive moment at the end of the war in the Pacific, which brought about the surrender of Japan and yet directly caused a high number of civilian casualties. Gieryn argues that with such an exhibition it is never possible to tell a ‘factual’ story that is not already ideologically framed, and that the notion of seeking a ‘balanced’ display is naïve. He recalls: For critics of Crossroads, balance most often refers to equivalent displays of potent images and artefacts that would recreate the whole moment in which the Enola Gay was asked to make its historic run: if photographs of atomic bomb victims were shown, so too must the atrocities of Japanese war camps; if numbers of lives lost at Hiroshima and Nagasaki are reported, so too must the numbers of Allied lives lost in the Pacific campaign.38 Gieryn’s analysis of the debates focuses on two camps – the ‘critics’ who opposed curators’ portrayal of America as ‘bloodthirsty, racist killers’ versus the ‘curators’ who opposed the heroicized narratives of their critics39 – and

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IMAGE 9.3 Somalia 1, With Conscience, 1996, by Gertrude Kearns. Acrylic on canvas, 287.2 × 114.3 cm. Accession number (ex. CWM 19710261-0123), Beaverbrook Collection of War Art, Canadian War Museum. © Gertrude Kearns 1996. Reproduced with permission of the artist and the Canadian War Museum.

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the impossibility of balancing their irresolvable narratives, to the extent that attempts to reconcile the conflicting perspectives ultimately collapsed and the Crossroads exhibition never actually eventuated. Another more recent example of a national war museum tackling incidents that problematize heroic narratives of a nation’s own armed forces occurred when the Canadian War Museum (CWM) opened in its new Ottawa premises in 2005. Its new permanent displays conveyed the narratives of conflicts familiar to its Canadian audience – the South African War, First and Second World Wars, the Cold War, Gulf War, Somalia, Rwanda, the former Yugoslavia and Afghanistan. And the new vast foyer and lower Peacekeeping Section of the museum both also included two paintings in the CWM’s collection by Canadian artist, Gertrude Kearns, which addressed one of the most confronting recent episodes in Canada’s military history, known as the Somalia Affair.40 Kearns’s Somalia without Conscience, 1996, depicts Canadian Forces Airborne Regiment Master Corporal Clayton Matchee posing with the limp body of a Somali teenager, Shidane Arone, whom he had beaten and tortured.41 Its diptych partner, in storage at the time, Somalia with Conscience, 1996, depicts a similar image with his subordinate Private Kyle Brown, and in the main level foyer gallery Kearns’s initial painting of Brown, The Dilemma of Kyle Brown: Paradox in the Beyond, 1995, depicts the private symbolically holding two potential fates in both his hands. The works do not simply condemn the behaviour of the two soldiers, but suggest – particularly with Brown – an ethical grey area in which the hierarchy of command comes into direct conflict with conscience. It is a paradox that many soldiers must face during active service. When Somalia without Conscience and Somalia with Conscience were hung in the new CWM building, the museum received repeated calls to take down Kearns’s paintings.42 The Head of the National Council of Veterans Associations called the paintings a ‘trashy, insulting tribute’ and urged the public to boycott the opening ceremonies for the new museum site.43 Both the artist and curator Laura Brandon received abusive emails from members of the public. Discussing the controversy in 2007, Brandon says, ‘what upset members of those communities that opposed the display of the paintings was learning virtually for the first time that what they regarded as “their” museum (they had, after all, lobbied and fundraised for it) was not only telling the stories of heroism and courage that most of them expected to be told but also stories about failures, disappointments, and human frailty’.44 Brandon cites the Internet in particular as feeding the outrage, even before social media pile-ons had become a hallmark of the culture wars.45 However, as Brandon notes, the London Free Press ran an opinion piece, which argued that ‘to reflect war’s spectrum, the museum must balance the valour with the horror and even the atrocities’.46 Sara Matthews similarly argues, ‘the conflicts of getting to know oneself as human must be negotiated alongside the conflicts of war, social violence and human devastation’.47 Kearns’s paintings remained on display for their intended duration, and Somalia

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IMAGE 9.4 Somalia 2, Without Conscience, 1996, by Gertrude Kearns. Acrylic on canvas, 287.2 × 114.3 cm. Accession number (ex. CWM 19710261-0123), Beaverbrook Collection of War Art, Canadian War Museum. © Gertrude Kearns 1996. Reproduced with permission of the artist and the Canadian War Museum.

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without Conscience eventually toured nationally throughout Canada in 2009–12 in the exhibition Brush with War. Of course, both examples – the National Air and Space Museum’s Crossroads and the Canadian War Museum’s exhibition of Kearns’s Somalia paintings – are very different, and in important ways, from Zavros’s portraits of Ben Roberts-Smith at the AWM. Roberts-Smith is fiercely denying any allegations of wrongdoing in the courts. While the matter remains unresolved, it is undeniable that the portraits create what Ben Doherty in The Guardian describes as ‘a potentially invidious dilemma’ for the Australian War Memorial.48 ‘If Roberts-Smith loses’, Doherty speculates, ‘the memorial would have to consider whether it could continue to laud a soldier a judge has believed killed unarmed, bound non-combatants. It might also be forced to confront a decision over whether to display his medals, essentially “bought” for the memorial by its own chairman.’49 In fact, the issue is even less straightforward, since the current court battle is actually a civil defamation case brought by Roberts-Smith, and Channel 9 and its newspapers are defendants claiming a truth defence – in other words, it is not RobertsSmith’s conduct that is on trial, but rather the veracity of claims made by Channel 9 and its newspapers. If Roberts-Smith were to win his case, he would be vindicated, but on a lower standard of evidence than at a criminal trial, which could still eventuate. If Roberts-Smith were to lose his case, the verdict itself proves nothing criminal. Could either outcome leave RobertsSmith in a reputational limbo, neither fully condemned nor fully vindicated? If so, what does the AWM do with Zavros’s portraits of Roberts-Smith? Perhaps the most honest approach would be to do nothing. In present-day culture war politics, to remove the portrait from display would be, in one sense, to ‘de-platform’ Roberts-Smith while paradoxically rewriting history by removing him from public record. However, it also would effectively be erasing a narrative that, rightly or wrongly, has not been a straightforward ‘hero story’. The example of the Crossroads exhibition suggests that it is sometimes us, those who write the narratives, that fail in the face of moral ambiguity, ethical complexity and conflicting narratives. While Kearns’s Somalia paintings certainly attracted criticism, the Canadian War Museum remained committed, as Brandon says, to tell both the stories of heroism as well as those of human frailty and fallibility.50 Whatever the outcome of the defamation trial, Roberts-Smith’s public record will forever include the episode of the trial itself, and that is a story that Zavros’s paintings will always tell. The example of Kearns’s Somalia paintings and the curatorial decisions surrounding their display perhaps strikes at the heart of what contemporary war art does that is special and important in a national war museum: it presents ethical and moral complexity, grey zones and a range of perspectives. This is vital within a healthy liberal democracy. Kearns’s work often addresses the moral ambiguities of the Western military, such as in multilateral international peacekeeping missions, underscoring the paradox

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IMAGE 9.5 Ben Roberts-Smith VC , 2014, by Michael Zavros. Oil on canvas, 30 × 42 cm. © Michael Zavros 2014. Reproduced with permission of the artist and Yavuz gallery.

of deploying lethal force for the purposes of peace and humanitarianism. When the Canadian government published its Report on Somalia, it was particularly damning of General Lewis MacKenzie, Commander Land Force Central Area (LFCA), concluding, ‘MacKenzie’s fundamental failing was that he exercised inappropriate control and provided inadequate supervision.’51 For his part, the report reveals a series breakdown of the chain of command in the Canadian Air Regiment (CAR) between the Brigade Commander and the Commanding Officer, and that MacKenzie was aware of these issues but failed to adequately act on information he had received.52 Before his fall from grace, MacKenzie was the Chief of Staff of the UN’s peacekeeping mission (UNPROFOR) during the Bosnian War, and at the time Kearns painted a portrait of him titled MacKenzie/ Sarajevo/1992, for which he sat. Following the Somalia Affair, she repurposed a drawing study from the sitting into a print, adding the text ‘KEEP THE PEACE/OR I’LL KILL YOU’,53 emphasizing the complex ethics inherent in military conflict, even in cases like Somalia, Bosnia and Afghanistan, where the intention is to keep the peace, build nations and defend liberal democracy. The narratives of war, like the stories of our own lives, are never simple, consistent and coherent. Humans are complex beings, and the most compelling contemporary art is that which considers our complexities,

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raises questions and challenges simplistic narratives. We should expect no different from contemporary artworks about war and conflict, which seeks to contemplate, challenge, speculate, honour, question and create. Contemporary war art sometimes confronts us, and it sometimes pushes us to address what we would prefer not to know; in doing so, it can bring into view the complex questions that need to be asked in order to begin processes of reconciliation. Addendum: On 1 June 2023, as this book was about to go to press, Australia’s Federal Court dismissed Ben Roberts-Smith’s defamation case. Justice Anthony Besanko ruled that The Age, The Sydney Morning Herald and The Canberra Times had established, by the ‘balance of probabilities’ (the standard of evidence in a civil lawsuit), that the newspapers’ claims were substantially true. Roberts-Smith’s legal representatives are considering an appeal.

Notes 1 Michael Zavros quoted in ‘Michael Zavros Portraits of Ben Roberts-Smith Go on Display’, Australian War Memorial, YouTube, 2 September 2014, (02:4503:07), https://youtu.be/xh5AiqTJUHY, accessed September 2019. 2 Brendon Nelson quoted in ‘Michael Zavros Portraits of Ben Roberts-Smith Go on display’. 3 ‘Pistol Grip [Ben Roberts-Smith VC]’, Australian War Memorial, www.awm. gov.au/collection/C2092390, accessed September 2019. 4 ‘Ben Roberts-Smith VC’, Australian War Memorial, www.awm.gov.au/ collection/C2092391, accessed September 2019. 5 ‘Ben Roberts-Smith, 2017, by Julian Kingman’, National Portrait Gallery, www.portrait.gov.au/portraits/2018.7/ben-roberts-smith, accessed 12 September 2019. 6 ‘BEN ROBERTS-SMITH v FAIRFAX MEDIA PUBLICATIONS PTY LTD’, Document Lodged: Statement of Claim – Form 17 – Rule 8.06(1)(a); File Number: NSD1485/2018, Australia, 2018, 2. 7 Megan Levy, ‘ “I feel sick”: Circle Host Shocked at Backlash over “dud root” Comment’, The Sydney Morning Herald, 29 February 2012, www.smh.com. au/entertainment/ tv-and-radio/i-feel-sick-circle-host-shocked-at-backlash-over-dud-rootcomment-20120229-1u1mr.html, accessed 7 February 2022. 8 ‘Ben Roberts-Smith – Stay Kind’, Stay Kind, Facebook, 8 April 2018, www. facebook.com/staykindorg/videos/ben-roberts-smith-staykind/1938363499509834/, accessed February 7, 2022. 9 Fleta Page, ‘Super-sized Mannequin Required for Victoria Cross Recipient Ben Roberts-Smith’s Uniform’, The Canberra Times, 5 November 2013, www. canberratimes.com.au/story/6149874/super-sized-mannequin-required-forvictoria-cross-recipient-ben-roberts-smiths-uniform/ accessed 7 February 2022.

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10 Baden Pailthorpe, ‘Spatial Operations’, in Baden Pailthorpe: Spatial Operations: 7 February–26 April 2015 (Newcastle: Newcastle Art Gallery, 2015), 3. 11 Baden Pailthorpe, interview with Kit Messham-Muir, Canberra ACT, Australia, 19 December 2018, transcribed by Monika Lukowska. 12 Nick McKenzie and David Wroe and Chris Masters, ‘Beneath the Bravery of Our Most Decorated Soldier’, The Sydney Morning Herald, 10 August 2018, www.smh.com.au/politics/federal/beneath-the-bravery-of-our-most-decoratedsoldier-20180801-p4zuwp.html, accessed 7 February 2022. 13 Michael Evans and Kate McClymont, ‘War Hero Ben Roberts-Smith Fails to Stop Publication over Allegations’, The Sydney Morning Herald, 10 August 2018, www.smh.com.au/national/war-hero-ben-roberts-smith-fails-to-stoppublication-over-allegations-20180810-p4zwun.html, accessed 7 February 2022. 14 Nick McKenzie and Chris Masters, ‘Ben Roberts-Smith under Police Investigation for “kicking handcuffed Afghan off small cliff” ’, The Age, 22 September 2019, www.theage.com.au/national/ben-roberts-smith-underpolice-investigation-for-kicking-handcuffed-afghan-off-small-cliff-20190910p52pys.html, accessed September 2019. 15 Paul Maley, ‘VC Hero Roberts-Smith Denies Execution Claims’, The Australian, 23 September 2019, www.theaustralian.com.au/nation/vc-herorobertssmith-denies-execution-claims/news-story/ f14bdc94556bd43068a0ffed6b8aa145, accessed September 2019. 16 Christopher Knaus, ‘Ben Roberts-Smith Defamation Case: Ex-Soldier Ordered to Hand over War Crimes Inquiry Documents’, The Guardian, 11 November 2020, www.theguardian.com/australia-news/2020/nov/11/ben-roberts-smithdefamation-case-ex-soldier-ordered-to-hand-over-war-crimes-inquirydocuments, accessed November 2020. 17 Paul Maley, ‘Ben Roberts-Smith and the Battle on the Home Front’, The Australian, 27 September 2019. www.theaustralian.com.au/inquirer/benrobertssmith-and-the-battle-on-the-home-front/news-story/9f100020493948d 5f625c61619cad4f6, accessed September 2019. 18 Alan Jones, ‘ “This is disgusting stuff!”: Calls to Resolve Ben Roberts-Smith Accusations’, 2GB, 24 September 2019, www.2gb.com/this-is-disgusting-stuffcalls-to-resolve-ben-roberts-smith-accusations/, accessed September 2019. 19 Steve Price quoted in Carrie McDougall and Michael Bachelard, ‘Shining the Spotlight: Why We Reported that Ben Roberts-Smith was Under Investigation’, The Age, 27 September 2019, www.theage.com.au/national/shining-thespotlight-why-we-reported-that-ben-roberts-smith-was-under-investigation20190925-p52uqo.html, accessed September 2019. 20 Comment by reader identified as ‘Mark’, Paul Maley, ‘VC Hero Roberts-Smith Denies Execution Claims’, The Australian, 23 September 2019, www. theaustralian.com.au/nation/vc-hero-robertssmith-denies-execution-claims/ news-story/f14bdc94556bd43068a0ffed6b8aa145, accessed September 2019. 21 Comment by reader identified as ‘Bronwyn’, Paul Maley, ‘VC Hero RobertsSmith Denies Execution Claims’, The Australian, 23 September 2019.

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22 Comment by reader identified as ‘Ian’, Paul Maley, ‘VC hero Roberts-Smith Denies Execution Claims’, The Australian, 23 September 2019. 23 Geoff Hourn, ‘Geoff Hourn: We Must Stand by War Heroes’, The West Australian, 3 October 2018, https://thewest.com.au/opinion/geoff-hourn-wemust-stand-by-war-heroes-ng-b88978503z, accessed September 2019. 24 @Drk98451370, Twitter, 22 September 2019, https://twitter.com/ Drk98451370/status/1177331270524653569, accessed September 2019. 25 @GoldenTalon77, Twitter, 23 September 2019, https://twitter.com/ GoldenTalon77/status/1175888465994477568, accessed September 2019. 26 @conserv1951, Twitter, 22 September 2019, https://twitter.com/conserv1951/ status/1175752887898476545, accessed September 2019. 27 @T5VanMan, Twitter, 23 September 2019, https://twitter.com/T5VanMan/ status/1175935153014595585 accessed September 2019. 28 Price quoted in McDougall and Bachelard, ‘Shining the Spotlight’. 29 Samantha Maiden, ‘Victoria Cross Recipient Benjamin Roberts-Smith is in the Inquiry’s Sights as Chief of Army Disbands Perth-based Special Forces Unit’, News.com.au, 19 November 2020, www.news.com.au/national/politics/ australias-most-decorated-living-soldier-in-inquirys-sights/news-story/ b622417cd5f9e221e246f74a72045223, accessed November 2020. 30 Inspector-General of the Australian Defence Force Afghanistan Inquiry Report, Commonwealth of Australia, Canberra, 2020, 28–29. 31 General Angus Campbell, ‘ADF Chief Confirms “unlawful killings” of Afghans by Australian Soldiers I SBS News’, 19 November 2020, www.youtube.com/ watch?v=eMfot7Q2DEY, accessed November 2020. 32 Ibid. 33 Maiden, ‘Victoria Cross Recipient Benjamin Roberts’. 34 Mike O’Connor, ‘Armchair Critics of our Elite Troops Can’t Handle the Truth’, The Courier Mail, republished in The Queensland Times, 24 November 2020, www.couriermail.com.au/news/opinion/mike-oconnor/ opinion-war-heroes-deserve-our-thanks-not-cutting-down/news-story/951e176 19856c62a3158fc2110ca94c4, accessed November 2020. 35 Anthony Galloway, ‘Kerry Stokes Moves to help SAS Members Accused of War Crimes’, The Age, 19 November 2020, www.theage.com.au/politics/ federal/kerry-stokes-moves-to-help-sas-members-accused-of-war-crimes20201119-p56g8j.html, accessed November 2020. 36 Ben Doherty, ‘Ben Roberts-Smith: Trial of the Century Gets Bigger with Media Empires as well as Soldiers at War,’ The Guardian, 24 April 2021, www. theguardian.com/australia-news/2021/apr/24/ben-roberts-smith-trial-of-thecentury-gets-bigger-with-media-empires-as-well-as-soldiers-at-war, accessed February 8, 2022. 37 Thomas F. Gieryn, ‘Science, Enola Gay and History Wars at the Smithsonian,’ in The Politics of Display: Museums, Science, Culture (London: Routledge, 1998), 197. 38 Gieryn, ‘Science, Enola Gay and History Wars at the Smithsonian’, 204–5.

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39 Ibid., 207–9. 40 J. L. Granatstein and Dean F. Oliver, ‘The Somalia Affair: Oxford Companion to Canadian Military History’, Canadian Military History, vol. 22, no. 4 (2015): 59–63. 41 Sara Matthews, ‘ “The Trophies of Their Wars”: Affect and Encounter at the Canadian War Museum’, Museum Management and Curatorship, vol. 28, no. 3 (2013): 273. 42 Laura Brandon, ‘War, Art and the Internet: A Canadian Case Study,’ Convergence: The International Journal of Research into New Media Technologies, vol. 13, no. 1 (2007): 10. 43 ‘War Museum’s Paintings Anger Veterans Group’, CBC News, 3 May 2005, www.cbc.ca/news/canada/war-museum-s-paintings-anger-veteransgroup-1.552891, accessed November 2020. 44 Brandon, ‘War, Art and the Internet’, 12. 45 The phenomenon of the internet ‘pile-on’ goes back to 2009. An early example of a Facebook ‘pile-on’ occurred when in 2010 Greenpeace supporters, opposing Nestle’s use of palm oil and its impact on Indonesian orangutan populations, flooded Nestle’s Facebook page with comments and altered anti-Nestle logos. The company’s social media manager ‘devolved into snark and derision’, which attracted even more Facebook users to the pile-on. The comments feed became overwhelmed with comments. Mike Pascucci, ‘Social Media Strategy, Moderation & Management Musings: All things Social’, www.mikepascucci.com, 23 April 2009, https://mikepascucci.com/2009/04/, accessed June 2019; ‘6 Painful Social Media Screw-Ups: Nestle’s Facebook Page Gets Oily’, CNN Money, 7 April 2011, https://money.cnn.com/ galleries/2011/technology/1104/gallery.social_media_controversies/2.html, accessed June 2019. 46 Quoted in Brandon, ‘War, Art and the Internet’, 13. 47 Sara Matthews, ‘The Trophies of Their Wars’: Affect and Encounter at the Canadian War Museum’, Museum Management and Curatorship, vol. 28, no. 3 (2013): 273. 48 Doherty, ‘Ben Roberts-Smith’. 49 Ibid. 50 Laura Brandon, ‘War, Art and the Internet’, 12. 51 Report of the Commission of Inquiry into the Deployment of Canadian Forces to Somalia: Volume 4 (Ottawa: Minister of Public Works and Government Services Canada, 1997), 994. 52 Report of the Commission of Inquiry, 989. 53 Gertrude Kearns, PEACE/KILL [Major-General Lewis MacKenzie (ret’d)], 2004

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Knowing and Testimony Interviews with Todd Stone, Andrew Sneddon and Joanna Bourke This volume concludes with three edited interviews, from New York-based artist Todd Stone, Scotland-based art historian Dr Andrew Sneddon and acclaimed war historian Professor Joanna Bourke at Birkbeck, London. Stone is a New York artist who witnessed the 9/11 attack on the World Trade Center from the rooftop of his apartment building in Thomas Street, Tribeca, six blocks north of ‘Ground Zero’. We met him at his studio on the forty-fifth floor of the new Three World Trade Center building almost exactly eighteen years after that day. Sneddon is a researcher based in Scotland. He discusses post-conflict trauma through the work of Willie Doherty, a Northern Ireland artist whose work addresses the Troubles, and the historical re-enactments of English artist Jeremy Deller. Bourke is Professor of History at Birkbeck College and one of the world’s leading historians of the social history of war and conflict. She was the keynote speaker at the ‘War, Art and Visual Culture: Sydney’ symposium in February 2019, and we conducted our interview with her two days later. These interviews address different aspects of knowing and testimony, and the theme of trauma underlies each one. In our very last interview here, with Bourke, we discuss the ways in which ‘trauma studies’ in the humanities, including in art theory, was particularly shaped by Cathy Caruth’s literary theory on trauma in Unclaimed Experience: Trauma, Narrative, and History (1996). Interest in cultural depictions of trauma and the particular ‘Caruthian’ model of thinking about traumatic form rapidly evolved during the years immediately following the terror attack in America on 221

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IMAGE 10.1 Todd Stone in his studio at Three World Trade Center, New York, 2019. Photo: Kit Messham-Muir.

11 September 2001. It is now that particular model – dissociative trauma whose inciting incident can never be known but which returns symptomatically as a rupture in language – that now appears to provide the natural theoretical language for talking about artistic and visual cultural representations of war and terror. Bourke’s interview concludes with some very interesting thoughts on the future of that model of thinking about contemporary war art.

Todd Stone, 23 August 2019, World Trade Center, New York The South Tower of the World Trade Center was the first of the Towers to collapse. Viewing that first collapse from your vantage point, did you comprehend it? First of all, I had by that time no electricity, and my experience was that there was a bomb inside the Tower, which has happened before. My experience was [of] explosions all over Lower Manhattan, that there were bombs everywhere and I didn’t know where to go. I ran for my life several times that day, but when the first Tower came down, I thought that it was an atom bomb. It came down like a mushroom cloud, and then that [cloud] started coming up the road. I was on the roof. By the time that I got to my

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door, down off the roof, the cloud had reached me and dissipated, like dust. It was like there was a [finish] line. And I didn’t get buried, I got dusted. And, of course, it all came to into my place, but I wasn’t one of those people who was covered in ash. It was very toxic. And horrifying. There was this thing coming up the street. When I was a young man, I would say ‘I am not scared of anything’, but I was so terrified that day. And, you know, eventually I couldn’t believe my own eyes as to what I was seeing. I was so traumatized. Meanwhile, you are looking for the airplanes – where is the Air Force? Where is the defence? When you are living here in New York City you think that you are under some type of umbrella. There was no umbrella. So you felt very vulnerable? Totally vulnerable, not knowing where to go. You were watching it on TV. I didn’t have TV, the cell phones were out; you know, everything was at the Trade Center. My power station was at the Trade Center. The phones were at the Trade Center. My kids were uptown at school and I didn’t know what to do. I didn’t know where to go. So I just stayed and I just filled myself up with these images. So the day ends, I know that I have to leave, the wind has shifted, my place is full of smoke . . . but I am left with this burden of these images that I saw. What the hell, fireballs ain’t my thing! How do I connect to what I was doing on the tenth [of September]? I was really close. I was seeing people jumping. I couldn’t believe what was going on, and I saw the picture [on my digital camera] from the tenth of September, with raindrops on the roof. That is my starting place . . . I gave myself permission to try to make these horrible images as beautiful as I could, by adapting them as a form of eulogy. I started to think about a song for the dead, to make a song for the dead. I watched all these people murdered, I watched all these people die and I am making artwork out of this. How do you do this? . . . I didn’t know anyone who was killed in this, but I saw them dematerialized, I saw them turned into the dust. I am breathing that shit. When I’m starting my watercolours I am collecting the dust in my studio, rubbing it into the picture. I am meditating on the people who died and as I am making these pictures I am counting, I am trying to get a grip on the thousands of people who were killed. Thousands of people were killed, so I didn’t put any people into these pictures. The buildings were the representation of the city for me and I put every goddamn detail into it. I was counting each stroke – ‘56,257’ – to give myself some type of permission to try to make artwork out of this. So that was years’ worth of work, and during that time I focused on the horror. I was painting these images that I photographed. They were horrible. The people who loved me said ‘don’t do this, this is not good for you’. You know, ‘don’t look downtown, look uptown’. I couldn’t stop. I felt this tremendous burden, this responsibility to those people. That I had to convey these stories.

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IMAGE 10.2 Collapse, 9/11/2001, 2001, by Todd Stone. © 2001 Todd Stone. Reproduced with permission of the artist.

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IMAGE 10.3 Uptown-Out-3, 2019, by Todd Stone. © 2019 Todd Stone. Reproduced with permission of the artist.

Is there a therapeutic dimension to what you are doing, recording the reconstruction? Many people say that with PTSD [post-traumatic stress disorder] you are averse to a number of things. For me, it was different than that. For me, I wanted to be on this site. I would sneak into this site at night; I was attracted to this, it was something that I had to deal with, I had to look at this. I had to unburden myself of this responsibility to make art out of this, and it didn’t seem healthy at that time but over the years I do feel stronger and I do feel, as a human being, more cognisant of the dimensionality of what that means. Love [versus] hate. Many of us watched these events happen on TV. But for you, it was something that you actually witnessed, that you actually saw. Your art practice is one of working through that, over the rest of your life. The fear and the horror. The horror. But that is a part of it, it is a part of what life is about: we have been chased by sabre-toothed tigers through time, you just don’t know [that so] it came out of the blue and [we were] so unprepared for it . . . Eventually, what is important is what comes out of this. All of us who witnessed this will fade away. It is going to be the twenty-year-olds, the people who weren’t here then, who are going to determine the legacy of

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what happened here . . . That is the beauty of New York City, that is the beauty of cosmopolitan life: that you are surrounded by people who are not like you. And for an artist, that is the charm, that is the impetus. Part of the impetus is that you are living in the fulcrum of people coming together . . . so, I try to tune in to that.

Andrew Sneddon, 15 May 2019, Edinburgh You and I both grew up in the United Kingdom at the time when the violence in Northern Ireland was really at its peak. To an unfamiliar audience, can you give a brief overview of that time? When I was growing up it was very ordinary to turn on your TV and see bomb blasts, to hear loud percussion, to see the dust bloom, to hear about knee-capping and retaliations . . . I think it made it very, very real, and you couldn’t escape that. And being a young person, incredibly impressionable, to feel that fear in witnessing the trauma, the death, the disappearances . . . The aftermath of all those, it brings back all the memories. It gets even more complicated nowadays because such a long time has passed, and the media in particular are doing something quite interesting. There is a comedy on TV at the moment called Derry Girls, and they are looking back at that particular period – the period when Clinton visited Northern Ireland, those sort of days – but they are using humour. And it is fantastic. The programme is incredibly popular. There are other programmes such as Pop Goes Northern Ireland, which is a peculiar programme because

IMAGE 10.4 Andrew Sneddon in Edinburgh, Scotland, 2019. Photo: Kit MesshamMuir.

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there is no documentary voiceover, it is simply music from the times (the seventies, eighties, nineties) set to video images of the Troubles, the bomb blasts, the news reports. When I first watched it, I was staggered by it. Initially I felt it was tasteless, but the more I watched it the more it reminded me of that particular period and my own history, and a lot of other people’s history. We often remember times and places through music, so that transports you straight back to those days when you were listening to music [at] the same time as watching these horrific events on TV. So what is interesting is that the people you would think would be most annoyed by setting music to trauma are actually quite interested in the programme. You participated in a group exhibition, The Shock of 9/11 and the Mystery of the Other [10 June–30 July 2002] at Haus am Lützowplatz in Berlin shortly after 9/11. Can you tell me about that exhibition? At that time, it was only a year or so after the event, and everybody’s impressions were raw . . . anger, frustration, disbelief. And the elements of trauma were just everywhere. Everyone was dealing with it, and processing it in different ways. I think that exhibition was really quite an important one, that it signified the responses from quite a number of artists [who] saw the events unfurl on September 11, and the aftermath of that. I think that is how we processed the images of trauma and the memory of trauma. And then also the forgetting of trauma. I am interested in that because we all process it, we all deal with it in different ways, and I think the beauty of a contemporary art practice is that it helps us to process those incredibly brutal images and events. I think that is equally why I am attracted to [Willie] Doherty’s work now, thirty years on from that body of work. [Doherty’s works] are a testament to what happened at that particular time [of the Troubles]: the unmediated witnessing of certain events, or suggesting of the feelings and emotions that people had at the particular time. And we all know that media can be manipulated, so I think that they oppose manipulation in some way. Trauma studies emerged in about 1996, and one of the main proponents was Cathy Caruth, who wrote the book Unclaimed Experience at that time. When 9/11 happened, right across the humanities a set of ideas were proposed, ripe for explaining the impact of 9/11 and the War on Terror, a lot of which is image-based: 9/11, the invasion of Iraq, Abu Ghraib, and so on. My question is: in terms of addressing trauma, what is the function of art? Is it to witness? Or is it to work through trauma? I am a fan of the writing of W. G. Sebald. He writes about trauma and guilt and violence and the history of violence and trauma. And he suggests that the only way to deal with it is indirectly: not to deal with it directly, which simply creates an illustration of it, you don’t actually address it. So, Sebald suggests that that’s the best way, even the only way, to deal with trauma – and he’s talking about his German history and narrative and he also talks about the silence. I am a fan of his writing, because I do believe that’s what contemporary fine art does really well. It finds really emotive

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ways of communicating. It doesn’t necessarily illustrate what’s happened, it provides a different way for people to deal with, to process, and to talk about trauma. So, I am thinking that is what contemporary art can bring to trauma studies in a significant way. This is a theoretical question really, but one of the issues I have had with what has been referred to as a ‘Caruthian’ formulation of trauma, which has informed trauma studies, is the way which in Caruth’s work tends to roll together cultural theory with ideas that come from a particularly Freudian reading of trauma. Specifically, from Moses and Monotheism (1939) she expands a personal, individual, psychological context into what could be regarded as a more cultural traumatic context. One issue with the Freudian notion of working through trauma is that it is quite different from how trauma is worked through in the cultural realm. So, Stef Craps, for instance, building from Eric Santner and the idea of narrative fetishism, argues that in the post-9/11 period there has been a diversion from the proper work of mourning into more ideological narrativizing, almost like a corruption of the traumatic process. And, of course, in America that becomes then the inciting incident for the War on Terror. Do you have any thoughts on this? The thing that jumps to mind is that I’ve just recently read Adrian Forty’s The Art of Forgetting (2001) and I am thinking that forgetting is actually really, really important in dealing with trauma, how we process trauma. There is a need to forget in order to move on. Yet there is a lot of discussion within the Northern Ireland issue about how when the peace process came in people were expected to forget and move on: it was just something that was part of the agreement that would have to happen, there was no alternative. People had to accept and move on, and how do you move on from losing people, having seen them blown up and all the horrors. I think forgetting is part of the equation that is often left out, but is incredibly important, because if we don’t forget we retain too much information that we cannot process. Do you think forgetting risks repeating historical mistakes? Not really, because we have works like Doherty’s to remind us, and other artists to remind us of the horrors. And it is important that we don’t forget, but I think that there is a difference between forgetting and allowing things to move on. It is a very fine tool, I imagine. There are significant [advantages in] leaving things in the past and moving on – because you’ve got to, there is no alternative. What is the alternative, really, in processing all that stuff? It seems to me also, when you are dealing with a history of trauma which spans a period of thirty years in Northern Ireland, that you have a subsequent generation that just wants to move on, because they grew up with the trauma and they’ve had enough of it. And I suppose my fear regarding Northern Ireland is what it will mean that a younger generation doesn’t remember what it was like during the 1980s?

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IMAGE 10.5 The Battle of Orgreave (An Injury to One is an Injury to All), 2001, by Jeremy Deller. © Jeremy Deller 2001. Reproduced with permission of the artist. Photo: Parisah Taghizadeh.

I think the generational aspect is really interesting and, on a similar note, I often use the work of Jeremy Deller, Battle of Orgreave (2001), which was filmed on the outskirts of Sheffield. Deller was interested in watching the 1984 miners’ strike and the brutality between the police and the [National Union of Mineworkers] demonstrators, and he saw that as being equivalent to a civil war. One of the benefits and absolute joys of teaching in [Hallam University] Sheffield is that we can visit all those places. They are unrecognizable now. The site is a housing estate, with no names or signifiers of past events, but the students that come from the area are very much aware of [the strike]. They are aware of it because their fathers, their uncles and their brothers have dealt with it, and are dealing with it [still since] 1984, which is thirty-five years ago – very similar to the period of Operation Banner in Northern Ireland. It’s probably a generation as well: thirty or thirty-five years is a generation’s worth. So, it is really interesting to see the generation now and hope people do try to forget. It’s not black and white. There’s not an answer to it; I think that there are several answers to it. Some is forgetting, some is not forgetting, some is moving on, some is not moving on; some of the inquests are still to be had. It is still quite a raw [issue] in that area, as in other mining areas in the country.

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Joanna Bourke, 27 February 2019, Newtown, Sydney You gave the keynote address at the ‘War, Art and Visual Culture’ symposium in Sydney, and I want to delve deeper into the themes that you talked about in the keynote: particularly, what you talked about as the process of ‘contagion’ within the work of official war artists. I think what I mean when I talk about contagion is that war artists, official war artists in particular, are explicitly required to represent the world for a broad audience. They have a very different role from many other artists who may go into war zones as independents or may indeed create war art from well behind the scenes or from back home. Official war artists are expected to produce a living record, and a permanent record, that people can refer to. And part of what they are required to do is perform the emotions for people back home. They are required, in a sense, to actually mirror emotions that they are encountering in those war zones and provide people living at great distances away with an image of how they ought to be responding to these [wars]. This is what I mean by ‘performing emotions for people back home’. I just wanted to tease out something that you said at the conference: you actually used the term ‘bad events’ but said that you used that term

IMAGE 10.6 Joanna Bourke in Newtown, Sydney, 2019. Photo: Kit MesshamMuir.

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‘advisedly’, and that there has been a certain, specific frame around trauma itself. Can you tell me more about it? I think that this is where my role as historian as opposed to art historian or art critic really comes to the fore – I am very critical of ‘trauma narratives’ and ‘trauma tropes’ as they are used more broadly, including by academics. As an historian I can trace through this trauma trope and I can see how it changed really dramatically over time. The concept of trauma comes from the Greek word τρανμα which means bodily wounds (which is where we get the term ‘trauma wards’ in hospitals). But τρανμα does not only mean ‘wound’, it also refers to ‘the act of wounding’. So, it is particularly appropriate when we are talking about military issues and combat. However, the concept ‘trauma’ as we use it today is more recent. Predating Freud, it is the 1860s when it was first used in the sense of a psychological response to a ‘bad event’. I prefer to use the term ‘bad event’ as opposed to ‘trauma’ because I think it signals three things. Firstly, it signals the historical specificities of the term ‘trauma’, and that’s really important. ‘Trauma’ is recent; really not until the 1980s was it used very widely to refer to any bad event. Secondly, it signals that the term ‘trauma’ is problematic because, at least in its Freudian manifestations, it is a very universalistic concept. It is a concept that applies, or has been made to apply, to all psyches. So, any person undergoing a sudden ‘bad event’ will be traumatized, and this trauma will be represented through certain bodily manifestations and symptoms. And artists, of course, then map these symptoms onto their canvas. The third signal is that trauma is very culturally specific. What I mean by that is that the concept of trauma-as-bad-event is very narrow in its interpretation of what constitutes a bad event. In other words, it is used in the West to refer to any sudden, violent event. And what that basically does is erase a vast array of other bad events – structural violence, to name the most obvious. It also erases the lived experiences of people who are in environments where war is the norm, not a sudden thing that appears from the outside, but is an everyday experience. This is why I almost always put ‘trauma’ in inverted commas. I prefer to use the words ‘bad events’ to signal that when we talk (as critics, historians, art historians) about ‘trauma’, we are actually making a statement about power, a power that we also wield as do those people who we are talking about. I find the problem with the trauma paradigm is that it often imposes a teleology to trauma and its aftermath, such as Kübler-Ross’s five stages of grieving – narrativizing trauma in that way. That tends to be adopted at a cultural level. I always think about the speech that George W. Bush gave shortly after 9/11. On 20 September 2001 he talked to Congress about moving from shock to anger. And that, therefore, was the narrative that led to the War on Terror. Eric Santner, back in 1992, writes about the idea of ‘narrative fetishism’. We take ‘bad events’ and make a traumatic interpretation; we then say ‘this justifies that’, putting the next step in a teleological sort of narrative; we can then have, for example, the War on

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Terror which justifies and is justified by our original interpretation of events yet does not have anything to do with the resolution of the trauma in any other way. This is one of the central problems of the trauma narrative. It is not a coincidence that trauma narratives and human rights narratives are deeply intertwined. It is really startling to note the extent to which both of these concepts – trauma and human rights – are central ways to justify committing violence against others. These are central tropes in Western society for inflicting violence upon other people. I can’t think of any other concepts that are as powerful as either of those two. That’s at the social level. At the individual level, if you go through a bad event and you don’t exhibit traumatic signs and symptoms, then somehow your experience of that bad event is devalued; you are not really traumatized. It wasn’t really bad for you. We see this frequently when it comes to looking at different responses to bad events between men and women. Trauma as a concept was developed in the context of men, war, PTSD, from 1980 onwards. It is predicated on a male subject who responds to an event in apparently non-masculine ways: crying, weeping, hysteria, and so on. It legitimates those men’s experience. When a woman goes through a bad event, sometimes it is not as easy to see how she is exhibiting those traits, because (it is believed) women cry more generally, they are ‘hyperactive’ and ‘hysterical’, and so it does enable commentators to diminish the seriousness of a bad event on the female subject. I use ‘man’ and ‘woman’ here, but of course we can look in terms of ethnic differences in responses to bad events. Or prejudices associated with elderly people . . . And again, it comes back to the political uses of that term, ‘trauma’. One of the papers at the symposium mentioned the idea of ‘trauma growth theory’, which is something I’m not familiar with, but essentially the suggestion was that trauma does not necessarily follow the Freudian model of the symptomatic return of an originary ‘bad event’, but rather that there can be other ways of thinking about bad events and how we deal with them that are actually more about resilience. Yes absolutely, from the Lacanian perspective and from the perspective of people like Slavoj Žižek, for example, ‘trauma’ is not something that comes from the outside. Trauma is part of everyday life. It is not what impinges upon the subject; it is what constitutes that subject, and much commentary in the field of trauma studies implies that there is this Eden of a coherent self that is all together and not fractured and then something happens and it is fractured. We should question that assumption. I think that idea that a person has to be traumatized, and if they’re not it is going to come back at a certain stage, because they really are; this is rather insulting for victims of bad events and indeed for all of us. I think we really need to take seriously the way people make meaning of their own lives. I am very sceptical about the military use, in the last ten years, of ‘resilience’, that concept. Resilience training – particularly in the American

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military, but also in the British, I do not know about the Australian – has replaced realism training in military regimes. Resilience is the keyword. I gave a paper on this topic in Copenhagen recently, where I looked at the shift in emphasis from PTSD, in particular, to resilience. I explored the political and ideological meanings and effects of that shift. What it does is bring the responsibility for – I am going to use the word ‘trauma’ – in combat back to the individual, and, in so doing, excuses the military. For example resilience training is predicated on that notion that ‘we are training you to be strong, to be resilient and to face what are going to be very difficult, bloody, brutal environments, and if you break down it is simply because you didn’t learn the lesson well enough’. It results in a shift away from this idea that we can all break down in war, which the military adopted after the First World War: that everyone has their breaking point. Now, not everyone has their breaking point: people break down because they have failed to take precautions. What this means is that the trauma predates the bad event in military training. Trauma is what maketh the soldier; trauma is expected, embraced, planned for and therefore, when it happens and you do have an emotional problem, it’s because you lacked something, you hadn’t planned for it. In the 1980s, semiotics was the predominant paradigm in art theory and it was almost impossible to think about art outside of that frame. And clearly that paradigm was missing anything around emotion, affect, embodiment, and those phenomenological aspects of meaning. Then the trauma–affect paradigm became more developed, and now it’s difficult to think outside of that paradigm. Yes. And I know that’s obviously a condition of history and in some sense of fashion – perhaps we will look back on this moment with the same kind of disdain. We think this particular paradigm, the intellectual moment, will be here forever because it is so perfect in its formation. I sense that, wherever a certain paradigm predominates, any analysis of anything will manifest in a relatively predictable form. At that point, the paradigm itself needs to be questioned thoroughly. I do not know what the answer is. I do not know the answer either. I mean, you are absolutely right. Particularly about the trauma paradigm: we all know, when we see ‘trauma’ in the title of a book, what the argument is going to be. Now, I think that we have reached the end of that particular way of understanding our world. And I can think of so many other concepts that actually have that kind of application. Concepts you can attach to anything – war, violence – and know what the argument is going to be. Trauma has reached that point.

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INDEX

60 Minutes (Channel 9 Australia) 205–8 9/11 221–6, 227–8 Abdul Abdullah 9, 18, 97–8, 108–13 All Let Us Rejoice 109 For we are young and free cover image, 111 Abu Ghraib 227 Ackermann, Chantelle From the East 149 Afghanistan xv, xvi, xvii, 1 Agamben, Georgio 3 Age, the 204, 206, 209 Akomfrah, John 5, 17, 20, 29, 32, 41, 126 Mimesis: African Soldier 24–7 Albert, Tony 4–6, 17, 20, 27–30, 32–3, 38, 40, 41, 58, 67, 72, 78, 160 Aleppo 87 Algeria 21, 24 Ali, Khadim 4, 76–8 Ali, Sher 78 Aly, Waleed 108–9 People Like Us 108 Alyawarre 78 Amnesia 97 Anangu 4, 6, 17, 18, 32, 47 49–56, 58, 61–3 Anangu Pitjantjatjara Yankunytjatjara (APY) Lands artists 6, 18, 32, 47, 52, 54 Kulata Tjuta (Many Spears) 6, 18, 47–56, 58, 61, 63 ANZAC 8, 29, 33, 38, 39, 58, 68, 70, 84–5 Anzac Centenary Print Portfolio xvii, 38, 39, 70 Applebaum, Anne 4

Archibald Prize 108–9 archival turn (archivalism) 21, 25–7, 69–71, 75, 81, 182–4, 189, 191, 196–8 Arctic Circle 11, 118, 156 Armstrong, Lucille 57 Arone, Shidane 212 Arrente 78 Art Gallery of South Australia 6, 17, 48–9, 54, 62 2014 Adelaide Biennial of Australian Art: Dark Heart 51, 52 Sappers & Shrapnel: contemporary art and the art of the trenches 17, 18, 59, 60 Art Gallery of Western Australia (AGWA) 112 Arte Moris 124–6 Artspace Mackay 9, 98, 110 Asia Pacific 70, 157 Attia, Kader 5, 17 The Debt 21–4 Australian Research Council, the 68 Australian War Memorial 6–8, 9–10, 18, 32, 58, 68, 69, 71, 88, 117, 119, 127, 137, 158–60, 179, 204, 209–10, 214 Art in Conflict exhibition 6, 68 Hall of Memory 68 Bailey, Karen 4, 11, 118, 155, 156, 167–71 Banja Luka 147 Barrett, Michèle 27 Bath, Chris 205 Batty, Rosie 205 Bedford, Paddy 80 Bella, Martin 110 243

244

INDEX

Bellini, Giovanni 127 Besi 78 Biden, Joe 4 Bishop, Claire 141 Black, Karen 87 Gate of the Winds 87 Black Lives Matter 40 Bosnia and Herzegovina (BiH) 4, 140, 194 Bosniak-Croat Federation 145, 147 Bosnian War 11, 117, 140, 145–7, 215 Bourke, Joanna 221–2, 230–3 Bourriaud, Nicolas 141 Boyd, Daniel 8, 79 Brandon, Laura 10, 212, 214 Brereton Report (Inspector-General of the Australian Defence Force Afghanistan Inquiry Report, 2020) 208–9 Brexit 26, 40 Brown, Kyle 212 Brown, Lyndell 10, 68 Brown, Lyndell and Charles Green History Painting: Market, Tarin Kowt 127–8 Bucha 3 Burton, Cisco Burton, Kunmanara (Hector) 50 Burton, Kunmanara (Willy) Kaika 50 Bush, George W. 2, 157, 231 Butler, Rex 29, 139 Camooweal 78 Campbell, Angus 208 Campbell Jr, Robert 81 Canada 4, 5, 9, 10, 117, 138, 155, 170, 212, 214 Canadian Armed Forces Civilian Artists Program (CAFCAP) and Canadian Forces Artists Program 138 Canadian Rangers 174–5 Canadian War Museum 205, 212, 214 Canberra Times, the 204 Captain Cook 61 Caribbean 19 Caruth, Cathy Unclaimed Experience: Trauma, Narrative, and History 221

Cattapan, Jon 10, 72, 117, 119 Cattapan, Jon, Lyndell Brown and Charles Green 10 100 Years of Turbulence 131, 132–3 Scatter 2 (Santa Cruz) 120–1, 123, 126 Channel 7 205, 209 Channel 9 209, 214 Channel 10 207 The Circle 205 The Project 207 Cheung, Philip 4, 11, 118, 155, 156, 171–5 China 4 Christensen, George 110 Christov-Bakargiev, Carolyn 130 Cˇ majcˇanin, Lana 193–4 Coelho, Baptist 9, 19, 18, 97, 98–102 Cole, Herbert 21–2 Colonialism 5–9, 17, 20, 31, 41, 47, 68, 70, 120–1 Contemporaneity 1, 69–71, 81, 90, 120, 130 Cope, Megan 5, 6, 17, 20, 29, 33–8 Cotterrell, David 4, 11, 118 Country (Australian Aboriginal concept) 6, 8, 29, 31–2, 34, 38, 40, 47–9, 50–6, 59, 60, 63 Courier Mail, The 209 Covid–19 3–4, 131, 149 culture war 4, 12, 33, 98, 179, 205, 207–10, 212–14 Cumpston, Nici 52, 58 Daily Mail, the 163 Daniels, Jill 81 Dayton Agreement 146, 147, 149 Deller, Jeremy Battle of Orgreave 180 Derry Girls 226 Dhidhanu 78 Dick, Unrupa Rhonda 79 Dili 121–6, 133 Ditzig, Kathleen 70 Dodd, Sammy 50 Doherty, Willie 180, 214 Douglas, Amelia 10 Drones 2, 125 Dyson, Will 137

INDEX

Eland, Derek 4, 10, 11, 117, Diary Room 139–45 Empathy 11, 104, 151, 205 Enola Gay 210 Ergun, Köken 82, 84 European Union (EU) 147 Fake news 2–3 Falklands 138, 162 Feldman-Kiss, Nichola 138 Felman, Shoshana 198 field hospital 11, 118, 155, 156, 161–4 First World War xvii, 8, 9, 19–26, 32, 33, 40–2, 58, 68, 71, 72, 82, 85, 97, 98, 101, 117, 155, 158, 174, 233 Forty, Adrian The Art of Forgetting 228 Frontier Wars 8, 17, 40, 48–9, 56, 58–63, 68, 80, 81, 129, 131 Galeotti, Mark 2–3 Gallipoli 82, 84–5, 129 Gance, Abel 26 Gandhi, Mahatma 101 Garawa 81 Gender 42, 57, 131 George Lambert Anzac, The Landing 68 Gerasimov, Valery 2–4 Gerasimov Doctrine 3–4 Gieryn, Thomas F. 210 Gija 81 Gittoes, George 159 Gladwell, Shaun 6, 72, 138, 139 Behind Point of View, Middle East Area of Operations (BPOV MEAO) 138 POV: Mirror Sequence Tarin Kowt 139 Global War on Terror see war on terror Green, Charles Peripheral Vision 119, 120 Green, Richard James 89 Gregory, Derek 2 Guadalcanal 158 Guardian, The 209, 214

245

Gubbi Gubbi 79 gueules cassées 21 Gunditjmara 51, 81 Hall, Fiona 57, 58, 60 Hanru, Hou 141 Harper, Private 21–2 Helmand Province 11, 127, 141–3, 160–1, 165, 171 Hiroshima 210 Hirsch, Marianne 31–2 Hirschhorn, Thomas 126 Hodzic´, Elma 192 Hoff, Rayner 29 Hunt, Alana 97 Cups of nun chai 102–8 Imperial War Museum (London) 10, 32, 139, 141, 143 India 9, 19, 41, 42, 97, 98–102, 126–7 Indigenous art 4, 6, 8, 9, 10, 17, 18, 20, 27–9, 31–4, 38, 40, 47–63, 78, 79, 81, 82, 92, 128–9 Indilanji 78 Indonesia 10, 121, 124–5, 157 International Coalition Against Terrorism (ICAT) 76 International Criminal Tribunal for the Former Yugoslavia (ICTY) 182, 184, 186 Inyika, Kunmanara (Janet) 57 Iraq 2, 10, 72, 74, 76, 91, 92, 117, 119, 157 Johnston, Ryan 9, 70 Jolly, David 83–4 Jones, Alan 207 Jones, Jonathan 50–2 Jusic´, Adela 12, 179 Kome treba DRNCˇ ? /Who needs DRNCˇ ? 188–9 Ride the Recoil 189–91 Snajperist/The Sniper 186–7 Jusic´, Adela and Lana Cˇ majcˇanin Bedtime Stories 193, 194, 198 Kabul 164, 165, 166 Kaika-Burton, Kunmanara x, 48, 49, 50, 52, 56, 57, 64, 238

246

INDEX

Kaika-Burton, Nyurpaya 238 Kala Lagaw Ya 79 Kaldor Public Art Project 51 Kandahar xiv, 11, 156, 168, 171, 172, 173, 174 Kantjuriny, Naomi x, 48 Kashmir 9, 18, 97, 102, 103, 104, 105, 106, 108 Kearns, Gertrude xiv, 10, 212, 213, 215, 219 Ken, Freddy x, 48 Ken, Iluwanti x, 48 Ken, Kunmanara (Brenton) x, 48 Ken, Kunmanara (Ray) x, 48 Kentridge, William 126 Kiefer, Anselm 126 Kingma, Julian 204, 216 Kitson, Linda 138 Kokatha 78 Kosovo 182 Kulitja, Rene Wanuny 7, 56, 57, 59, 60, 65, 239 Kulyuru, Graham x, 48 Kwaymullina, Ambelin 81, 94, 239 Leatham, Cassie 81 Lennon, John 142, 143, 152 Lester, Yami 55, 61 Lewis, Niningka ix, x, xi, 7, 57, 60, 61, 62, 65, 239 Niningka’s Tjukurpa xi, 6, 61, 62, 63 Liberal Party 8 van der Linden, Barbara 141 Lone Pine Memorial 85 Longstaff, Will Midnight at Menin Gate of 1927 68 Los Angeles xiv, 5, 11, 118, 156, 171, 175 McDinny, Nancy 81 McFadyen, Ken 137 McKenzie, Queenie 81 McLean, Ian 64, 70, 81, 91, 92, 94, 128, 135, 240 McMillan, Kate 34, 40, 44, 45, 240 Macnamara, Shirley xi, 69, 78 Macron, Emmanuel 24 McQueen, Steve Queen and Country 138

Malan, Rian My Traitor’s Heart 131 Malvern, Sue 68, 79, 92, 93 Manchester Art Gallery The Sensory War xvi, 21, 24 Maralinga Nuclear Tests 6, 49 Marcaccio, Fabian 126 Mariupol 3 Martin, Kunmanara (Willy Muntjantji) x, 48 Matchee, Clayton 212 Maya Lin Vietnam Veterans Memorial 79, 80, 242 de Medici, eX viii, xi, xiii, xvii, xviii, 4, 11, 29, 72, 74, 118, 155, 156–60 Mehretu, Julie 126 Memory 4, 5, 6, 8, 9, 10, 13, 15–17, 19, 20, 21, 24, 26, 27, 28, 29, 31–3, 34, 35, 36, 40–2, 59, 61, 68, 70, 82, 85, 97, 99–113, 134, 173, 174, 182, 183, 183, 188, 192, 195, 199, 200, 202, 205, 227 Mer Wag 78 Mesiti, Angelica A hundred years 8, 85 Middle East xii, 19, 27, 36, 37, 38, 70, 72, 89, 90, 91, 139, 147 Miladinovic´, Vladimir Disturbed soil/Uznemirena tla xiv, 182, 183, 186, 198, 199 Free Objects xiv, 183, 185, 186, 198, 200 military 2, 3, 4, 10, 11, 20, 21, 25, 27, 28, 29, 30, 31, 34, 35, 36, 38, 47, 49, 60, 68, 71, 72, 76, 78, 79, 87, 90, 91, 93, 98, 101, 112, 117, 118, 121, 123, 128, 137–40, 144, 146, 147, 151, 155–6, 159, 161, 162, 165, 166–8, 169, 171, 172, 173, 174. 189, 204, 206, 208, 209, 212, 214, 215, 231, 232, 233 Miljanovic´, Mladen Draft for a 20-minute monument 140, 145–51 The Didactic Wall 147

INDEX

Millar-Baker, Hayley 81 Miners’ Strike (UK) 229 Minjerribah (North Stradbroke Island) 34, 40, 92 Mitzevich, Nick 51 Modernism 2, 44, 81, 127, 130 Morris, David 21 Morris, Errol x, 48  Morris, Kevin x, 48 Morris, Mark x, 48 Mungkuri, Peter x, 48 Museum of the Revolution 191, 200 Muslim 9, 18, 98, 99, 100, 108, 112 Mutitjulu 57, 61, 62 Nagasaki 210 Namatjira, Albert 78 Namatjira, Vincent x, 48, 62 Napier Waller Art Prize 87 National Air and Space Museum, Washington DC The Crossroads: The End of World War II, the Atomic Bomb and the Origins of the Cold War 210, 212, 214 National Museum at Comora 124 National Museum of Australia xvi, 210 National Portrait Gallery (Australia) 204, 216 New York xiv, xvii, 12, 179, 180, 221, 222, 223, 226 New Zealand ix, 21, 22, 42, 84 Ngaanyatjarra Pitjantjatjara Yankunytjatjara (NPY) Women’s Council 7, 55, 56, 57, 60 Ngaku 81 Ngarrindjeri 51, 78 Ngemba 78 Nicholls, Glenda 78 Nona, Laurie 78 NORFORCE 29, 30, 32, 67, 72 Norrie, Susan xi, 70, 72, 75 Northern Ireland 5, 12, 162, 180, 222, 226, 228, 229 Nukunu 78 Obama, Barack 2 Obrist, Hans Ulrich 141 Observer, the xvii, 163, 180

247

Official War Art 4, 9, 20, 68, 70, 72, 91, 117, 137, 138 Omissi, David Indian Voices of the Great War: Soldiers’ Letters, 1914–18 98 Ono, Yoko My Mommy Is Beautiful 141 Operation Accordion 34, 91 Ottawa xiii, 11, 156, 167, 168, 170, 212 Overseas Contingency Operation (OCO) 2 Pailthorpe, Baden Spatial Operations xiv, 206, 207, 216 Pakistan 2, 76, 102, 127 Palace of Versailles 74, 76 Palpatja, Kunmanara (Tiger) x, 48, 50 Pan, Mary Katatjuku Tjituru-tjituru ix, x, xi, 6, 7, 55, 56, 57, 58, 60, 62, 63, 65 Pearson, David x, 48 Pennings, Chris 123 Pompey, Kunmanara (Jimmy) x, 48 Postamnesia vii, 5, 17, 19, 20–45 Postmemory 31 Post-modernism 2, 120 Post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD) 80, 87, 110, 160, 171, 225, 232, 233 Prague 142, 143 Price, Steve 207 Project, the (Channel 10 Australia) 207 Purdie, Shirley 81 Puruntatameri, Patrick Freddy 78 Putin, Vladimir 148 Quandamooka 34, 40, 78, 91 Quilty, Ben After Afghanistan series xii, xvii, 86, 110, 138 Racism 5 Regional Assistance Mission, Solomon Islands (RAMSI) 11, 118, 155 Republika Srpska 147 Returned and Services League (RSL) 110

248

INDEX

Richter, Gerhard 126 Riley, Aaron x, 48 Riley, Adrian x, 48 Riseman, Noah 28, 31 Ritharrngu 81 Rix Nicholas, Hilda 88 Roberts-Smith, Ben 12, 179, 204, 205, 206, 207, 208, 209, 210, 214, 215 Romandi, Luke 54 Royal College of Surgeons, London 22 Royal Commission into British Nuclear Tests (1985) 49 Russia 2, 3 Rwanda 179, 212 Sandy, William Tjapaltjarri x, 48  Santa Cruz cemetery 121, 125, 132 Sarajevo 12, 187, 188, 189, 191, 192, 195, 196, 215 Scarce, Yhonnie 78 Sebald, W. G. 227 Serbia 182 SH Ervin Gallery (Sydney) xii, 98, 99 Shahnameh (Book of Kings) 75, 78 Sheffield xvii, 13, 180, 229 Shorty, Erica Ikungka ix, x, 7, 55, 57, 61 Siege of Sarajevo 188, 189, 191 Singer, Priscilla x, 48 Sky News 110, 112 Sneddon, Andrew viii, xiv, xviii, 12, 13, 179, 180, 221, 226 Solomon Islands 11, 29, 72, 74, 118, 155 Somalia xiv, 10, 211, 212, 213, 214, 215 Speck, Catherine 9, 138 Stevens, Keith x, 48, 79 Stevens, Lydon x, 48 Steyerl, Hito 126 Stokes, Kerry 209 Stolen Generations 6, 31, 49 Stone, Todd Collapse, 9/11/2001 xiv, 224 Uptown-Out-3 xiv, 225 Sunday Night (Channel 7 Australia) 205

Sydney Morning Herald, the 204, 206, 209 Tarnanthi x, 48, 51, 51, 54, 62 Taungurung 81 Teamay, Freda ix, x, 7, 55, 57 Timms, Freddie 81 Timor-Leste 4, 10, 72, 117, 119, 121, 124, 125, 137, 157 Tipoti, Alick 72, 78 tirarilleurs sénégalais 24 Tjala Arts 48, 49, 51 Tjalkuri, Bernard x, 48 Tjangala, Lyndon x, 48 Top Lista Nadrealista (Top List of the Surrealists) 150 Torture 121 Trauma 11, 12, 13, 31, 59, 69, 80, 82, 85, 89, 90, 118, 139, 140, 161, 162, 198, 180, 184, 186, 187, 191, 193, 195, 198, 199, 222, 226, 227–8, 231–3 Τρανμα (trauma, Greek word) 231 Trawlwoolway 78 Trigger, Judy Ukampari ix, x, 7, 55, 57 Troubles, the (Northern Ireland) 12, 161, 180, 222, 227 Trump, Donald J. 4 Ukraine 2, 3, 4 Uluru Statement from the Heart 49, 131 United Arab Emirates 34 United Kingdom 4, 5, 76, 117, 137, 140, 155, 207, 226 United States of America 3, 4, 76, 106, 173, 207 University of Newcastle 47 da Vinci, Leonardo 132 Venice Biennale 60, 140 Victims 3, 60, 139, 182, 184, 188, 190, 210, 232 Vietnam xi, 137 Wadi Wadi 78 Waka Waka 79

INDEX

Waldman, Jenny 24 Walker, Barbara x, 17, 20, 41, 42 Wangerriburra 79 Wangin, Kunmanara 50 War, Art and Visual Culture (symposia series) xii, 5, 9, 98, 99, 161, 180, 222, 230 War on Terror 2, 3, 108, 119, 120, 227, 228, 231 Warakurna 61, 62 Ware, Rosie 78 Watson, David 105 Wellcome Trust xviii, 11, 118, 155, 160, 174 West Australian, the 112 West Papua 157 West, Vicki 78 Wikilyiri, Ginger x, 48 Wikilyiri, Mick x, 47, 48, 49, 54 Wilcox, Tim 21 Willesee, Mike 205 Williams, Mumu Mike x, 48 Woolloomooloo 97, 98

249

Woomera Range Complex 6, 48, 49 World Trade Center xiv, 12, 89, 180, 221, 222 Wurundjeri 81 Yanuwa 81 Yirrkala xiii, 129, 130, 135 Yolngu artist 10, 129, 130 Yorta Yorta 78 Young, Anwar x, 48, 49 Young, Carol x, 48 Young, Frank x, 32, 48, 49, 52, 64 Young, Kamurin x, 48 Young, Marcus x, 48 Young, Roma x, 48 Young, Yaritji x, 48 Zavros, Michael Ben Roberts-Smith VC xiv, 12, 179, 204, 208, 215 Pistol Grip [Ben Roberts-Smith VC] 204, 216 Žižek, Slavoj 232

250

251

252