ART: Pictures for an Institution
Langlands & Bell and the Imperial War Museum
The Artistic Records Committee of the Imperial War Museum recently commissioned artists Langlands and Bell to commemorate both the aftermath of the events 11 September and the war in Afghanistan. The Imperial War Museum is a marvel of effectiveness, intelligence, good taste and good sense, and so it comes as no surprise that this has every appearance of being an excellent choice. The pair will set off for Afghanistan next month, according to a recent Sunday Telegraph article, and their new work will be shown at the Imperial War Museum in April 2003.
Who or what, you are perhaps wondering, are Langlands and Bell? The couple - Ben Langlands and Nikki Bell - may not be household names on the Hirst or Emin scale (although their cool, unsentimental, architecture-based work was one of Sensation's quieter pleasures) but their international reputation is formidable. The couple have been working together for more than twenty years, have a long and distinguished list of exhibitions to their collective name, and have left their mark on plenty of important collections. They are mature and professional; they have developed a distinctive and serious body of work; they have stuck to their course amid the woozily churning seas of BritArt fashion with admirable resolution.
The art they make, whether sculptural or on film, is austere and beautiful in the pure, slightly self-congratulatory way that only successful minimalist art ever can be. Their explicit interests are in the connections between people, the structures they make and the way these structures in turn shape their experiences - or to put it another way, in the nature of designed environments that are "both enabling and controlling", in Nikki Bell's words. In recent years, they have worked with building plans, air traffic routes, and the three-letter codes used to represent airports. All of these themes, of course, have eerie resonances with the terrible events of 11 September. Since much of Langlands and Bell's work entails creating elegant visual orders out of the often ugly chaos of human interaction, it will be fascinating to see where they are led by this enforced engagement with extremes of violence and disorder.
Fascinating, that is, from the point of view of contemporary fine art - of the sort of art that periodically fills the apparently endless corridor of the Corderie, that looks good on the walls of unwanted power stations and Hoxton 'spaces' - but is that enough, or even the right thing in the first place? This is, after all, art being commissioned within a very specific context. The phrase "Artistic Records Committee" would seem to suggest that the primary purpose is to create a hand-make visual record of historic events; common sense might to license, under the circumstances, subsidiary purposes such as commemoration, critical commentary, perhaps even - though this is perhaps asking too much of anyone - explanation. Yet as soon as we consider what is not required, and what art is not being asked to do, it becomes clear that the answer is altogether different. Angela Waite, secretary of the Artistic Records Committee, articulated crisply for the Daily Telegraph what has become a modern truism: "The increasing part played by journalists in documenting war has meant that artists have to make something more iconic by comparison - something that will last. There is no point in attempting to make a record when so many other media do that so well." So that, then, is the brief: not to make a record, but to make some sort of enduring visual totem that will transcend mere documentation.
But actually, when it comes to that, why bother with official war art at all, in these days of photography and film and instant video links to virtually everywhere? What is it that 'art' is supposed to add to the picture? Does art have any role to play these days in our understanding of war, or do we feel we need artists only because other places and times had war artists, and so - like bearskins and cavalry and so on - we have no desire to break this link with a congenial past?
The answer, obviously, is complicated, and goes right to the heart of perhaps the most interesting question about art - what's it for, anyway? For official war art is a strange, often oxymoronic thing which deserves a lot more attention than it generally gets. On one hand, throughout history and across cultures, armed conflict has been challenged only by sex as the great theme of visual art; on the other hand, the nature of modernism is such that mainstream twentieth century 'fine art' (as opposed to commemoration or advertising or propaganda or design or anything else explicitly functional in more than a purely aesthetic sense) has felt it necessary to address the subject of war from a sharply limited number of stances, while carrying on what has at best been an illicit and unsatisfactory series of liaisons with officialdom.
Hence the coexistence, in twentieth century Britain, Europe, Australia, New Zealand and North America, of two almost completely distinct strands of art about warfare. These are, respectively, high art and 'popular' art - or, to put it another way, the art which one could imagine at the Biennale or in Tate Modern, and the art which one could imagine lining the long corridors of the Royal Air Force Club. (The RAF Club is a better example than, say, the Cavalry & Guards, for the simple reason that the RAF Club's art is by definition limited to the twentieth century, and hence invariably dates from the period after which modernism and 'war art' took different roads.) These two strands, united only by their central preoccupation with war itself, are aimed at different audiences, governed by different rules and serve different ends.
There is a riposte to this, but it's aimed in the wrong direction. There exists, of course, plenty of officially-commissioned war art - one thinks here of Spencer, Nevinson, Bomberg, Nash etcetera - that has long been appreciated within the context of modern art. This, however, entirely misses the point. The popular art of air-shows, regimental museums and British Legion function-rooms rarely, if ever, looks to such painters for its influences, and instead cranes over its shoulder to catch sight instead of Lady Butler. This is what is generally meant when someone talks about 'war artists' and 'war art'. Nor should this, incidentally, be taken as a dig - at least, not an uncomplicated one - at the quality of RAF Club-standard war art. Rather, it in an expression of sheer wonder that there should exist a type of thriving visual culture which, while thoroughly engaged with some of the most formative events of modern experience, should have nevertheless refused - except in one crucial, if entirely negative way - to engage with modernism itself.
Because let's make no mistake - this sort of war art is, indeed, art. These careful portraits of men and machines are, after all, aesthetic objects, made with attention to formal values and occasionally executed not just with formidable skill, but with real conviction too. Yet they reject every single point of modernist dogma except the most important one. This sort of war art is an art which ignores modernism's distrust of beauty. It rejects modernism's need to move forward, modernism's need to go against the grain of what's gone before. Yet inevitably (for there is no choice any more) through its conscious rejection of those very alternatives - its decision to act as if modernism never happened - war art enacts the central feature of the world it rejects - the stomach-churning sense of unavoidable contingency which lies at the heart of the modernist dilemma. In this sense, war art is as much a part of modernism, albeit a problematic one, as any work by Picasso or Beuys or Golub. Or to put it another way, the strange thing about this sort of war art is less its unyielding and highly mannered take on 'representation' than the way in which it pretends that its stance is in any way a natural or normal state of affairs.
Where does this leave Langlands and Bell? Unlike our great-great-grandparents, we inhabit a world in which there is something handmade and visual which represents war but which seems to exist outside 'art', juxtaposed with a type of visual culture which addresses war and yet at the same time is not regarded as 'war art' but simply as art per se. It is this latter sort of art which Langlands and Bell will inevitably produce. Or at any rate, because they are Langlands and Bell and because their art will end up in a gallery, hung as 'art', this is the sort of art it will become. The Imperial War Museum comes as close as any institution can to trying to bridge the gap between these two visual cultures, and the decision to commission Langlands and Bell should be seen in that light. Yet the gap cannot be bridged - nor, I suspect, should it be.
There is far more to be said about the conventions of war art and why they have become what they are than can possibly be said here. One point worth making, though, has to do with context. It is no accident that war art has been discussed here primarily in terms of the physical and cultural spaces in which it is to be found - spaces created to mediate the gap between the purposefully distinct worlds of war and peace, of military and civilian life and mores. This happens because such art is created not to tell a literal truth about war, but to make a promulgate an account of war that bonds the two worlds together. It is not intended to hang inside a white cube in East London where it can make ironic comment on all art that has gone before and all art that will follow. Rather - like, in their various ways, a Russian icon, Titian's Pieta or Holbein's great portrait of Henry VIII - it has been created to link two worlds while ensuring that they remain fundamentally distinct. Shifting context has stripped some of this meaning from Titian and Holbein's work, so that it takes an effort of imagination and sympathy to reconstruct the fact that such a meaning ever existed, but there is no reason to assume that history will be any kinder to the weirder relics of BritArt five hundred years hence.
All of which brings us back to that earlier, difficult question - why bother with art - high art or popular war art - when photography and other media can do so much? The idea that art is necessarily more 'iconic' than photography does not survive a moment's reflection. For most people, photography carries with it a sharper frisson of 'realism' than art ever could do. It can also be every bit as formally compelling. Rarely has this been more brutally, magnificently obvious than on 11 September.
Of all the sad things that have ever happened in the world, few can have been filmed and photographed more often, or to greater effect, than the events of those few surprising hours. For those not immediately involved - the great majority of us - the televisual impact of the disaster can only have boosted the force of its emotional impact. If one were setting out to create an iconic image of disaster, what could be more striking than those two tall towers, standing out amid their entourage of smaller skyscrapers, the whole crowd of buildings surging forth from the edge of the continent into the blue water with all the innocent assertiveness of a certain take on the American dream, the whole scene framed with a blameless blue sky - and then, out of that sky, to see first one, then two sudden impacts - two terrible wounds, two trails of smoke - and then, over what seemed at the time little more than a few minutes, to see this whole scene vanish literally before one's eyes into a black, wretched, ineradicable scar? People of my parents' generation ask each other "where were you when you heard that Kennedy had been shot?"; people of my own generation have the equivalent conversations about the death of Diana, Princess of Wales. But on 11 September, however, most of us actually saw the World Trade Center collapse. And then for days and days afterwards, we saw those same film clips played and played again, and the broadsheets ran special photographic supplements, and those images burned deeper and deeper into our consciousnesses until we became mercifully numb to their enormity.
In part, this is a tribute both to what one has to assume is the purely accidental photogenic nature of the Twin Towers - compared with this, what visual impact was made by the deaths at the Pentagon? - and to the skill with which some of the images were shot. In formal terms, few disasters have ever had a simpler, more powerful visual focus. Recently, I was chatting to an artist in her studio about the nature of war and art, when the conversation turned to the events of 11 September. Perhaps in deference to my American accent she only gradually, and with some encouragement, admitted what seemed to her a guilty secret - that when watching footage of the disaster as it unfolded, her natural horror at what was taking place (because she's a decent, sympathetic, morally alert human being) was at the same time coupled with her admiration as an artist at the sheer formal genius of those two wounded towers framed against the blue sky, and then their sudden, strangely complete collapse. But she also was clear that she would not dream of making art out of such an image. When asked why not, she only shook her head and looked away, as if she couldn't stand thinking about it.
Of course different people handle such images in different ways. My artist friend was ashamed, I think, to have found and admired beauty in the midst of horror. Yet another friend was genuinely shocked to discover, in a London newspaper office, pinned up behind someone's desk, a huge glossy close-up photo of one of the towers just a moment before collapse, complete with recognisable, individual human beings pressed up against the window-frames, as close to inevitable violent death as it is possible to be. These were real people, about to die. My friend wondered what sort of person could bear to look at such a picture every day, amid all the mundane inanity of office life. I wonder, too. What seems obvious, though, is that this picture had a power - for my friend, as well as presumably for the person who pinned it up as an office decoration - that no mere work of art could hope to match. We all know that photographs are, at some level, partial truths shading into out-and-out fiction, and never more so than with digital photograph. Yet at the same time, the language in which it bears witness is direct and compelling. We are scarred by it whether we choose to be or not.
The highly visual, well-documented nature of 11 September was important at more than an aesthetic level. It is beyond argument that the murder of several thousand innocent people is an appalling event. Yet it must also be said that many people die in conditions of shocking violence on a daily basis all around the world, and in many cases, they are forced to exist in conditions of life-distorting fear for years, rather than minutes, beforehand. Of course a great deal of the reason September 11 was, briefly, believed to have somehow changed everything stems from the fact it happened in the de facto cultural capital of the United States - East Coast American lives may seem more real to us than other lives in other places - but at the same time the fact that we "saw it with our own eyes" - and yet over such a short period of time that we could not possibly have become bored and turned away - makes an immense amount of difference. This is a central fact informing the aftermath of the disaster, from the war in Afghanistan onwards.
Thus while it is easy to think of art which has given us iconic images of events we could not possibly have seen - the death of General Wolfe, Goya's Third of May, even Winslow Homer's irenic The Veteran in a New Field which both acknowledged and sought to heal the wounds of America's Civil War - it is hard to see how fine art could provide an alternative iconic vision to photographic images of 11 September.
This is not to say that Langlands and Bell will not produce good art through their engagement with this commission. Indeed, there is plenty of reason to think that the art they produce will be very good indeed. And just possibly, it might be more than that. After all, it is striking that the few points at which modernist art and truly popular war art have overlapped almost invariably involved sculptural or architectural minimalism. Lutyens' Whitehall Cenotaph has elements not only of minimalism, but of conceptual art as well, inviting those who passed it not only to project on its simple shape the ennobling heritage of classical civilisation, but also the appalling complexity and carnage of the First World War. By a similar token, Maya Lin's Vietnam Veterans' Memorial in Washington D.C. is both a sophisticated and elegant piece of minimalist architecture, and a vastly popular secular shrine at which many hundreds of thousands of Americans have tried to make something positive - sense, peace, something - out of that wretched entanglement. Indeed, it is possible that especially in wars such as these - conflicts which don't seem to add up, about which everything is known except some central, visceral 'why?' - minimalism, with its silences and clear spaces, comes into its own. Its dignity, coupled with its refusal to sum things up too neatly, seems somehow to suit modern warfare. In a sense, as with the sort of popular war art mentioned earlier, these are site-specific works that end up bridging two distinct worlds, but they do so through silence and receptiveness, rather than through the accumulation of accurate detail and the reassurance of extreme specificity; with reference to conflicts over which there is little general agreement, the silence is tactful as much as strategic.
Can it be possible that the media gives us too much information about war? I do not, of course, mean that we should turn away from the newspaper or the television or the website just because there are too many facts, most of which are hideously unpleasant and few of which we can do much about. Rather, I mean that perhaps there are points at which we need not more knowledge, but instead, more effective ritual contexts in which to absorb and make sense of what we already know. Fine art, it goes without saying, cannot provide those sorts of insights. Art can't make people do anything, not least because we bring so much more to it than we ever take away. It can, however, if it is willing to look slightly beyond the constraints of modernist convention, create functional visual objects which do particular jobs within particular ritual spaces, whether these are churches, public thoroughfares in imperial centres, servicemen's clubs - even, perhaps, museums, although I rather doubt it. Still, I very much look forward to seeing what Langlands and Bell manage to do with the rich, terrible subject that awaits them.
Bunny Smedley, March 4, 2003 10:55 PM
