Posts Tagged ‘War’

April 25, 2008 Small Wars

[In what will become a regular feature, we'll invite a local writer, artist, visitor, or observer to respond in whatever manner they choose (given the limits of blog-hosting technology) to an exhibition, public program, film, or object on view. In this first installment, poet Eleni Stecopoulos reflects on the An-My Lê exhibition, Small Wars, on view now through May 4.]

SMALL WARS: THE AMERICAN CHRONOTOPE

Eleni Stecopoulos

An-My Lê; 29 Palms: Mechanized Assault, 2003-04; Courtesy Murray Guy Gallery, New York

American development has exhibited not merely advance along a single line, but a return to primitive conditions on a continually advancing frontier line…this perennial rebirth…this expansion westward with its new opportunities, its continuous touch with the simplicity of primitive society, furnish the forces dominating American character.

- Frederick Jackson Turner, The Frontier in American History

War is God’s way of teaching Americans geography.
- Ambrose Bierce

At the 5th anniversary, the war in Iraq remains “over there”—an abstraction for many Americans, despite the deaths of more than 4,000 Americans and hundreds of thousands, if not over one million, Iraqis. Americans have had the luxury of regarding war as something that takes place in other people’s countries.

By documenting large-scale exercises in artifice that uncannily relocate foreign wars to American landscapes, An-My Lê’s Small Wars and 29 Palms pose imaginative provocation to this illusion. Pine forests in Virginia stand in for the jungles of Vietnam. The Mojave stands in for the desert outside Baghdad or Basra or Kandahar. Lê turns her gaze on two American regions, the South and the West, perhaps the most mythologized in the nation, which themselves hold historical battlefields and spaces of conflict.

Much of Small Wars was shot in Virginia, home to Manassas, Appomattox, and more battles than any other state in the bloodiest conflict in U.S. history. The Civil War was the first major American war to be photographed and covered by the media on a large scale. It was a war that took place at home, where families combed the battlefields to recover the bodies of loved ones. Although the legacies of the Civil War remain grossly evident throughout the nation—in race relations, politics, and culture wars—only the South actively remembers it.

On the ground of the world’s “first modern war,” Virginians reenact what became known as “America’s longest war.” In an artist’s talk, Lê confirmed that these men often begin as Civil War reenactors before “moving on” to World War II and then Vietnam. Their reenactments take place on land that bears the memory of its own war, land revered as hallowed ground.

The South holds a space of memory, preservation, resistance to change. It plays the past in American mythology. And across from it stands the West, a space of invention and self-invention, the infinite possibilities of the future.

“I take SPACE to be the central fact to man born in America,” wrote the poet Charles Olson. (more…)

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