The Iraq War: What Artists and Capitalists Display

Remember the Iraq War? Yes, we are still engaged fully in it, although you wouldn’t much guess so the way the news from Iraq is buried behind stories of Heath Ledger, Britney Spears, Republican and Democratic primaries, and the home mortgage crisis. The cover story of Foreign Policy magazine two issues ago declared that the Iraq War was our fault—the public’s—and not George W. Bush’s. The article received much attention and rancor, and rightly so… it’s not our fault. It’s his fault. And the media’s perhaps… but I digress. The author’s main point is worth thinking about: that American citizens are not treating the Iraq War as an existential crisis (which it isn’t) like we did during World War II; that we spend an awful lot of time avoiding the news coming out of Mesopotamia. I already mentioned the main news headlines this week, but the author was also concerned that we are too busy spending time at the shopping mall rather than our energies to bringing the war to an end. Okay, fair enough, but at least give us credit for getting hundreds of thousands of people out on the streets to protest before the war began. We were against it then and the public is against it now. To call the war our fault is misguided to say the least.

We are distanced from the war, for sure. Media coverage of the conflict is brief and hygienic (no dead bodies). While many families are affected personally by the loss of a loved one the nation is not allowed to mourn en masse by watching the coffins of young soldiers unloaded at Dover Air Force Base. Besides, with as many private employees serving in Iraq as there are soldiers fewer families are exposed to the drama of having a loved one called up for duty (and fewer politicians have to tell their constituents that their boys and girls must sacrifice for their country). Few documentaries about the folly and horror of this war have made it around to large viewing audiences. So in many ways our attention has been diverted from the atrocities of war, both purposefully by the masters of this tragedy and unwittingly by our own disposition to really not caring that much.

Two of the best social commentaries on the Iraq War I have seen in a long time can currently be seen at the New Museum for Contemporary Art in New York. Martha Rosler’s provocative photographic collage series titled “Bringing the War Home: House Beautiful,” does exactly what the timid mass media does not do: she puts the war in our living rooms. Rosler brilliantly mishmashes photos of living rooms and everyday home-like situations with pictures of American soldiers, Iraqis and even scenes from Abu Ghraib. A picture of a blithe living room scene reveals American soldiers acting like gladiators beyond the living room windows. Garden scenes are bordered with American soldiers on patrol on one end and covered Iraqi women marching down the garden path on the other side. Girls, posing like all girls do, cheek to jowl with big grins, appear to be posing in front of Baghdad under the most chaotic and explosively dark circumstances. In this series we are brought to the war, and the war is brought to us, something the American media has failed to do since Shock and Awe.

The other exhibit is Thomas Hirschhorn’s “Tattoo Series.” His too is in collage medium, but instead of photographs his are displayed on giant sheets and include magazine cut-out, mix-ups of naked women, close-ups of tattoos, and gruesome photographs of mangled, dismembered, disemboweled, decapitated, bullet-ridden and burned bodies of Iraqi citizens. Naked women. Mutilated bodies. I take it to be a commentary on pornography of both sorts—the obsession of American culture with the figure-eight nubile babe in high heels, and our glorification of violence in popular shoot-em up movies, television shows, music and video games. Hirschhorn deftly juxtaposes the images of hot asses next to decapitated bodies without explanation, shame or irony. It’s a powerful series of images that sucked me in on one pretext and shot me out the other side under a different hypnotization. Naturally drawn to the naked ladies I moved from one collage to the next, down the line, fixated on close-up pictures and cutouts of tattoos and breasts and intestines… until I was spit out at the end of the row… the naked women completely invisible to me. By the time I was done with this exhibit I was morbidly transfixed (unconscious of my transformation) by the gruesome images of Iraqi dead, and left wondering why it had taken so long for me to see these pictures. The anti-septic American media has failed the public on this end, sheltering us from the Hell that war is because they are afraid of upsetting our stomachs and minds.

War needs artists.

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A Prisoners-of-War/Missing-in-Action (POW-MIA) flag hangs above the floor of the New York Stock Exchange (NYSE). Ostensibly it hangs to remind traders of the sacrifices made by military personnel in defense of the United States and our way of life against the forces of evil. Variously these external threats have been Socialism, Communism, the Soviet Union, and now terrorism. Yet all of these threats can be compressed into a simple category: “anti-free market.”

Our way of life in America is characterized by many facets, the most prominent being our belief in the individual. In this country a peanut farmer can become president, a college dropout can become the world’s richest man, immigrants can become state governors, and a kid with a talent for rhyme can become a platinum musical artist. This pull-yourself-up-by-the-bootstraps, “anyone can make it if they work hard enough,” Protestant work ethic fits handily with the free market attitude of “may the best man win.” That’s capitalism. Capitalists. The men and women who have given their lives in Vietnam and Korea and Iraq and elsewhere have done so to protect the American way of life—neoliberalism.

I wonder… which flag do they hang over the floor of the NYSE to commemorate the missing and dead brothers-in-arms who fall for the cause of the free market? I’m not talking about the men and women of the armed forces; I’m speaking about the mercenaries and contract personnel who also fight on behalf of Wall Street’s business interests. The employees of corporations like Blackwater Worldwide, Triple Canopy, Dyncorp, Aegis and Erinys die in the line of duty while doing the bidding of multinational corporations that seek to maintain or gain footholds in emerging markets in places as varied as Colombia, Honduras, Azerbaijan, Sierra Leone, Zimbabwe, and Iraq.

The wounded and dead contract employees fighting and dying for corporations don’t count amongst the American government’s casualty counts. They count for their families, for sure, but not in Washington. CNN doesn’t keep track of them either. Does Wall Street? Private security firms battling it out in the streets of Baghdad keeping American businessmen, diplomats and soldiers safe do so with the broader goal to establish firmer control over Earth’s most precious resource. In doing so they also protect our economic system—the American way of life.

What does that flag look like?

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January 27, 2008