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The Landscape of War

The exhibition The Landscape of War—now wrapping up after running for two months at the San Jose Institute for Contemporary Art—is a poignant display of individual artworks that vary in message and style yet collectively address the “War on Terror” mess that the US of A has gotten itself into, and reaffirms artists ability (and tradition…) to be politically relevant in their message without being pushy or ingratiating, in order that we the viewer might be inspired in a practical manner to deal/fix/remove this burden on our collective society and culture: the United States’ war agenda.

It is quite shocking, actually, that amidst an Iraq war, USA/Iran saber-rattling and Pakistan government failures, that more art venues and curators aren’t taking on presenting the reactions of artists (not to mention the dissent) to the quandary that is the War on Terror. Yes, CCA made an attempt with the recent Apocalypse Now exhibition (although that show read more like a history lesson buried deep within an over-designed exhibition that showcased the wherewithal of the curator and his team more than the artwork itself, but that’s another story…) and I’m sure there are a few more exhibitions that missed my radar (if you know of any, feel free to list in the Comments section, to your right, please…). Furthermore, how deep are contemporary artists themselves engaged within a dialogue of these same issues, and are there even enough of them to fill a gallery? Maybe general apathy is the problem, or lack of funding/interest on the part of institutions. However, after viewing The Landscape of War, I was inspired and compelled to promote this rare action by Anne Veh, guest curator at the SJICA, as well as tip my hat towards these artists (enough to fill a gallery too…) and their art work, that stands tall not only with individual artistic quality, but also in the curator-formulated context of the exhibition.

As mentioned above, The Landscape of War shows a range of artworks that address the idea of landscape both conceptually and physically as a place of existence, playing with the word "landscape" through varied interpretations and contexts. It could also be said that the works of art, together, create a momentary landscape to view the context of War, as in to take a viewpoint, as viewer, upon a landscape of discussion and critique. Housed in the main gallery (right-half of the SJICA), every available space on the walls is occupied by various media: painting, drawing, photo, video and sculpture.



Sandow Birk—well-known for his reuse of compositions from painters of the Neo-classicism and Romantic schools—has contributed one painting and three monumental woodcuts from his series Depravities of War, each depicting what might be called a “typical day on the job” for US soldiers in Iraq: searching, arresting, destroying. The pieces, titled Invasion, Destruction and Desecration belay a haunting truth under the simplistic style of the woodcut print: burning mosques, corpses and violation and respect of Iraqi people. It is difficult to stand far enough away from the large-scale work within the gallery space to get a safe overview—you are unable to escape/distance yourself from the desperate reality of the scene(s). Strategic.



By using odd materials such as rice grains and slices of Spam (yes, Spam), Michael Arcega taps into the oddity and creativity that is truly only reserved for the lucid artistic thinker. Arcega’s well-depicted map of the World formed from precise slices of Spam meat, pin-mounted in a display box mounted on the wall and titled Spam/Maps, World, suggests to me a world built from rotting or scorched flesh…not appealing as an idea but visually stunning by taking a medium/food product with a wealth of associations into another context altogether. Another Arcega artwork, titled Terrorice: Grain Aide #1/3, are hand grenades formed from sculpted rice balls and arranged on a shelf, outside their accompanying grenade box, is a simple, lovely, visual pun. According to the exhibition text, Arcega has combined rice with the form of a weapon to question/undermine the USA’s aid program of supplying grain to war-torn and developing countries for possible political leverage. Explosive.



Fanny Retsek, through making small individual pen marks over large sheets of paper that grow into abstract forms, counts her personal activities related to war goods (such as oil consumed) or the number of dead in Iraq (bodies). The marks themselves become—in an abstract manner—tiny, tiny stacks of oil drums and tiny, tiny stacks of humans corpses, all very neat and lined up: a harsh reality beneath beautiful images. Resistance.

Trevor Paglen is represented by two photographs from his series documenting possible secret and clandestine actions and locations from military bases and off-limits installations in the Nevada desert. Taken from impossible distances using telescopic lenses, the photos really don’t give us much to see in the first place: some lights in the distance here, a mysteriously lit plane there. Having titled each work with a location and a time frame of observance (example: Unidentified Light Source, Cactus Flats, NV, Distance ~17 miles) somehow we believe Paglen, that he has found something of secret importance. But then again, we want to believe in the unknown, in the X-Files-esque mystery of it all…a “something” only the military could possibly keep under wraps. Operation: Secret Agenda.

Christoph Draeger shows a video-montage with found footage from a Hungarian post-nuclear education film overdubbed with narration by George W. Bush in his inaugural speech of 2004. The artwork, titled Helenés-Apparition of Freedom, deftly contrasts a speech by a known war-monger on the fundamentals of freedom (and how America will provide that freedom whether you want it or not) while we witness burned bodies, a city destroyed…and, the difficulty of placing a gas mask on a civilian who has just seen their world blown to complete hell. Terrorist-in-Chief.

While it might sound wrong to say I greatly enjoyed this show about War and its consequences, it is true nonetheless. War is tantalizing. Images of War can be even more tantalizing, knowing full well we should avert our eyes before our stomachs become sick, but having to look anyway, and look and look again. Maybe that is exactly what makes The Landscape of War so compelling to me as an exhibition: the more you look at each image and contemplate the message of the artist, the greater the satisfaction, reveling in the capacity of art to reference the unsaid rejection, dare I say subtle rebellion, against the War of Terror…or, at least by some of us.

Still more visually engaging artwork hangs on the walls in The Landscape of War than is reported here, but not for long. The exhibition only lasts until January 19, 2008.

The Landscape of War
November 10, 2007 - January 19, 2008
Opening Reception: November 9, 6-8 pm

Mike Arcega, Sandow Birk, Enrique Chagoya, James Drake, Christoph Draeger, Mark Klett, Michael Light, Trevor Paglen, Ligorano/Reese, Fanny Retsek, Pamela Wilson Ryckman

San Jose Institute for Contemporary Art
560 South First Street
San Jose, CA

Gallery Hours
TueWedFri: 10:00 – 5:00
Thursday: 10:00 – 8:00
Saturday: 12:00 – 5:00
Sunday/Monday: Closed

Free Admission

Allora & Calzadilla

“Agonism . . . a relationship that is at the same time mutual incitement and struggle; less of a face-to-face confrontation that paralyzes both sides than a permanent provocation,”1 writes Michel Foucault in an essay about subject and power. Exploring this simultaneous 'mutual excitement and struggle' are the concurrent exhibitions at CCA's Wattis Institute, curated by Jens Hoffman with the Puerto Rican-based artist collaborative Allora & Calzadilla, and the solo exhibition by Allora & Calzadilla at San Francisco Art Institute's Walter & McBean Gallery.

In “Apocalypse Now: The Theater of War” at CCA's Wattis Institute, the exhibition is most brilliant when it makes full use of Hoffman's former training as a theater director and Allora & Calzadilla's attentiveness to the politics of sound. For example, throughout the exhibition are the letterdrop-sized slits that puncture the gallery walls, resembling the vantage points of medieval castle from where arrows and bullets are strategically fired. Enabling the viewer to surveil others in the gallery, the slits recursively subject each visitor to another's gaze. In doing so, the slits suggest that perhaps the sublime moments of war lie in the capacity to be rendered vulnerable and to comprehend one's capacity for predation. By foregrounding the theatrics of the gallery experience, the visitor becomes a spectator inculpated in the production of war.

The slits make for an interesting comparison to Luigi Fontana's 'Concetto Spatiale' paintings, which date from the late 1950's to mid 1960's. Each of the paintings in this series feature a taut, stretched canvas slit in the middle by a knife. By disrupting the picture plane and turning attention towards the works' material construction—stretcher bars, canvas, paint, etc.--Fontana's paintings embody the metaphysical tension characterizing the history of painting. So too, the slits puncturing the walls of “Theater of War” self-reflexively comment on museological convention. But while the slits/wounds in Fontana's paintings deny a glimpse into another world, the slits in “Theater of War” reveal what lies on the other side of the gallery wall—the Other who looks back.

Certain rooms in the Wattis gallery present imagery, sounds, text, and objects as ethnographic artifacts of war. “Get Out Of My Mind Get out of This Room” (1968) is an installation by Bruce Nauman in which the artist growls and whispers to the audience, entreating him/her to immediately leave the room. Attracting and repelling the audience, Nauman's installation invokes the conflictual nature of war.

In another room, painted wooden boxes with protruding amplification cones produce cacaphonic sounds. These are recreations of the noise machines developed by Luigi Russolo, an early 20th century artist whose manifesto entitled The Art of Noise (1913) figured significantly in the Italian Futurists' celebration of the First World War. As early sound sculptures that convey the Futurists fascination with technology, art, and power, the Russolo boxes point to the aestheticization of war and its stylistic evolution.

Segueing to Allora & Calzadilla's exhibition in the San Francisco Art Institute's Walter and McBean Gallery, the main gallery hosts a floor-to-ceiling sculpture in which large-scale plaster slabs wind and curl. Within the sculpture, the negative spaces between the slabs leave perches that were, at the exhibition's opening night, occupied by supine opera singers (students from the San Francisco Conservatory) singing historic wartime scores. After the opening exhibition, visitors hear recordings from this opening night emitted from the sculpture's interior. As many projects within Allora & Calzadilla's oeuvre engender participation, it would have been wonderful to see this commanding sculpture in a public setting that invited more daring interaction. For instance, placed onto the terrace just outside the McBean Gallery as a kind of continuation (or apotheosis) of its Brutalist architectural style, the sculpture might have wildly repatterned normative activity.

The side and upstairs galleries of the Walter & McBean gallery presents various videos by Allora & Calzadilla that communicate their knack in capturing moments that slip between simple observations and allegory. “There is More Than One Way to Skin a Sheep (2007)” opens with a scene in which a lamb is roped to the roof of a car, likely being hauled off to slaughter. In a subsequent scene, a male protagonist is seen alternately inflating the tires of his bicycle with a tulum, one of the world's oldest piping instrument that resembles the carcass of a lamb, and solitarily biking around Istanbul. In “breathing life” from one vessel to another (human to sheep to tire), the rider is positioned as a code-switcher between east and west, ancient and modern. The repeated motif of the lamb—figured first as animal, then as the body of the tulum—invokes biblical associations about the transfiguration of life from body to body and song to song. Hovering between narrative and minimalist vignette, the video draws the viewer into an open-ended question about the everyday experience of history.

Notes: Foucault, Michel. “Subject and Power” in _Michel Foucault: Power_. New York: The New Press: 1994. p. 342. This interview between Paul Rabinow and Michel Foucault first appeared in /Skyline, /1982.