I watched a documentary this evening presented by John Snow about the representation of war in British art. Well worth a watch, especially for the paintings done by Stanley Spencer at the Sandham Memorial Chapel in Burghclere, Hampshire. When he painted these murals, he drew upon what he had seen during his service in World War One. However, they're not about the brutality of war in a blood and guts sense. Rather, many of these vignettes seem moving in a gentle and intimate way, whilst also saying a great deal about the underlying psychological horrors of war. Below is an image that Snow showed in the documentary, in which a once-vigorous soldier who has to stand hidden in his blankets on a hot water bottle while his sheets are changed.
As a pacifist, Spencer had agonised over whether to sign up or not; the service he saw in the Ambulance Corps in Macedonia disturbed him immensely and, after the war, he spent several months recuperating in a hospital, where presumably these images are drawn from. If you can't play the John Snow film on the Channel 4 website, there's a short film on youtube on the Sandham chapel, which gives a sense of the work. It reminded me of a book I've been meaning to read more than a few chapters of at some point, Forgotten Lunatics of the Great War by Peter Barham, which shows how the psychiatric casualties of war were dealt with in the early days of psychiatry, of which there's a comprehensive review here.
As I like drawing connections between depictions of war and peace in music and songs, Spencer's paintings that he did in World War Two of Glaswegian workers on the home front, working in the shipyards of the Clyde, also appeared on the 7" cover of Robert Wyatt's version of Elvis Costello's anti-war song Shipbuilding.
Over the weekend I saw several great pieces of art that also grapple with the subject of war and peace. The most impressive of these were Fiona Banner's decommissioned fighter planes now on show at the Tate Britain. Both are jets that have seen service used in military conflicts over the last twenty years. The surface of the Jaguar has been polished so as you move about it you see you reflection morphs and bend with the constantly changing contours. It's almost as if your own organic humanity is being challenged and shaped by the inorganic lines of a lethal military machine. This setting makes it unquestionably beautiful simply as an object, let alone powerful as a work of art.
The second plane is a Sea Harrier which crash landed in 2000. Its surface has been brushed in patterns that mimic feathers, a play on its name. But it also seems to me that this is also a play on the fact that humans wage war by supplementing flesh and blood with machines. This is driven home by the small window for the pilot to see out of is hung just above head-height, so you can see this tiny space from which this massive plane was controlled. I imagine that Jeremy Deller's Baghdad, 5 MArch 2007 bombed car at the Imperial War Museum would be an interesting companion piece to these, although I couldn't make it south of the river this time around.
Banner's planes aren't the only pieces currently on display that deal with war. I usually dislike the the Turner Prize immensely and, despite some suggestions that it's a weak show from some art critics, I enjoyed it far more than usual. I particularly liked Dexter Dalwood's beautiful paintings, including one about about Greenham Common. It seems to evoke all of the images I can remember from my childhood about the women's protests there in one painting. Obsessed with history, absent of figures, as are all his paintings, instead it suggests the barbed wire fences, green fields and the idea that seemed omnipresent in the mid-eighties - that it was almost inevitable that nuclear war would transform a map of Europe into a series of overlapping concentric fallout zones. There is, though, a suggestion of a hand, reaching out of the wire fences as the women's hands reached out to each other forming a circle around the perimeter of Greenham in 1982. An impressive-looking resource I've just stumbled across in writing this piece on the protests and the protesters can be found at http://www.yourgreenham.co.uk/
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