Foreign Policy In Focus

The Art of Anti-War
Foreign Policy In Focus

John Feffer | September 21, 2007
Editor: Debayani Kar

The future has arrived, but the Futurists didn’t make it.

In the early part of the 20th century, the Futurist movement of
artists in Italy, led by Filippo Marinetti, glorified war as a dynamic
organizing principle for their art work. If art was about energy – and
the raw power of the modern machine age — where could you find more
energy and concentrated machinery than on the battlefield? Art, they
proclaimed in their manifesto, `can be nothing but violence, cruelty,
and injustice.’ Marinetti and his war-worshipping Futurists easily
fell in with Mussolini and the fascists. But, after Nuremburg, few
artists have followed their lead.

This month, at the Istanbul Biennale, the future has arrived in the
form of a very different kind of art. The curator of the Istanbul
show, Hou Hanru of China, begins his exhibition catalogue with an
unadorned statement: `We are living at a time of global wars.’ The
rest of the introduction reads like the agenda of the World Social
Forum. `Most of these wars, conflicts and clashes take place in the
developing world,’ Hou continues. `The centre of the Empire has
ruthlessly exported violence to other parts of the world.’

This narrative does not refer to any specific wars such as Iraq or
Afghanistan. Nor does it suggest anything that might offend the
Turkish hosts of the event, such as Ankara’s preparations for a
possible cross-border incursion against separatist Kurds operating in
the Kurdish area of northern Iraq. Still, the art at the Biennale does
not pull any punches. In the same way that war represented an ideal
organizing principle for the Futurists, anti-war serves a similar
purpose for the Biennale curator and many of the artists that he
selected for the exhibition.

The Istanbul show does not focus exclusively on the issue of war. One
venue, the Textile Traders’ Market, is a complex of classic modernist
buildings designed to promote Turkey’s role as a global economic
crossroads and to update the ancient chaos of the Grand Bazaar
nearby. Another exhibition installed at the Ataturk Cultural Center, a
ravishingly ugly modernist edifice once symbolizing Turkey’s model
ascendancy to world-class nation status, focuses on the failed promise
of utopian architecture.

Nevertheless, some of the most interesting art at the Biennale engages
questions of violence, militarism, and the creativity that arises from
conflict. But a question lingers over the show: does all this anti-war
art add up to a movement that can rival or even replace the Futurists?

Creative Conflict
Much of the anti-war art of the Istanbul Biennale directly comments on
the Turkish experience. Perhaps the most controversial contribution
comes from Canadian-Armenian filmmaker Atom Egoyan, whose powerful
2002 film on the Armenian genocide, Ararat, was also shown as part of
the Biennale.

In his original contribution to the exhibition, Egoyan offers an eerie
reimagining of the life of Aurora Mardiganian, an Armenian teenager
who survived the mass slaughter of her people in Turkey in the early
part of the 20th century. She eventually made it to the United States
where she tried to find her brother, the only other surviving member
of her family. Her story was compelling enough for the early motion
picture industry to dramatize in the 1919 film Auction of Souls, which
turned out to be an early blockbuster. Unable to reconcile the
tragedy of her life with her newfound fame, Mardiganian went AWOL from
the promotional tour before it even began, and the film company hired
seven look-alikes to fill her shoes. In Egoyan’s short film, Aurora,
seven women read portions of Mardiganian’s life, describing the events
leading up to the killing of her mother. In the same space is another
short film, by Turkish video artist Kutlug Ataman, about his Armenian
nanny who can’t recall a key event from her own life. Both films are
painful, slow, horrific, and convey the unalluring reality of the
violence that the Futurists so fetishized.

Construction Site by Huang Yong Ping. Photo by John Feffer
Chinese artist Huang Yong Ping also takes up the challenge of engaging
Turkish life and culture by turning the top of a minaret at an angle
and enclosing it in a cloth fence. Tilted upward, the minaret looks
like an anti-aircraft gun, thus echoing a famous Turkish poem by Ziya
Gokalp (`The mosques are our barracks, the domes our helmets, the
minarets our bayonets, and the faithful our soldiers.’ ). Surrounded
by a cloth fence, the minaret is enclosed as if by a headscarf that
both conceals and reveals.

In Scary Asian Men, Turkish artist Banu Cennetoglu takes what
resembles surveillance photographs of Turkish men. They are small
figures in unremarkable landscapes, relaxing or talking beside the
road that connects the Asian part of Istanbul with the European
part. Turkey is a candidate for membership in the European Union, but
several Western European government leaders have expressed doubts
about including a predominantly Muslim country in the grand European
project. As Cennetoglu suggests, the European governments have
projected their long-held fears of violent Asian men – Ottomans, Huns,
Mongols – onto the unarmed, benign figures of Turkish workers and
peasants.

A Friendly Fire Poster by Jonathan Barnbrook. Photo by John Feffer
Sometimes the Biennale art is quite graphic in its depiction of
violence. Britain’s Jonathan Barnbrook has designed posters that would
not look out of place at an anti-war rally, though their content is
somewhat more ambiguous. The mandala-like cycle of violence depicted
in one poster, of a symbolic Moslem shooting a symbolic Jew shooting a
symbolic Moslem and so forth around in a circle, refuses to assign
primary responsibility to either side in the conflict. Pakistani
Hamra Abbas sculpts life-sized figures in imaginative sexual positions
from the Kama Sutra, and yet the men wield weapons. The AES Group, the
initials formed from the last names of three Russian artists,
contribute a long, mural-like composition, Last Riot, that depicts
hyper-realistic young people of various ethnicities in a kind of
apocalyptic Benetton billboard. The girls and boys in battle fatigues
are on the verge of choking each other, stabbing themselves hara-kiri
style, and clubbing their younger charges and small animals, all
against a montage of recognizable urban landscapes. Their faces reveal
not anger or bloodlust, but merely bored resignation, as if playing a
video game.

Finally, perhaps most subversively, there are the two large plastic
Coke bottles, taped together and fitted with what looks like a timer,
flashing ominously. This homemade Coke bomb sits hidden beneath a
staircase inside the gallery space. There is no nearby label to take
the sting out of the intervention by giving it a name, assigning it to
an artist, or otherwise enclosing it in a safe package called `art.’
It is anonymous, has clear links to the United States and the global
economy, and might go off at any time – to destroy itself and the
Biennale. In security-conscious Istanbul, where political violence is
a recent memory if not a present reality, and in a world where we are
constantly reminded that terrorism is no joking matter, this Coke bomb
is pure effrontery.

Where are the Anti-Futurists?
The Futurists are gone, and no anti-Futurists have taken their
place. Dada briefly coalesced around a group of artists disgusted with
World War I, and some of their art reflected their anti-war
sentiments. But although quite a few artists have taken clear anti-war
positions in their art, no art movement has taken so passionately to
the principle of anti-war as the Futurists once did to war. There are
several reasons for this vacuum. Manifestos are rare in this day and
age. Artists are reluctant to launch world movements. And didacticism
is only intermittently popular in an art world so thoroughly soaked in
irony.

RGB’s War by Porntaweesak Rimsakul. Photo by John Feffer
But there is another explanation as well. In the Biennale installation
RGB’s War, Thai artist Porntaweesak Rimsakul sets up remote-controlled
vehicles topped by army helmets that collide with each other and with
tiny houses filled with the primary colors. From this battlefield
emerges a work of abstract expressionism. The very act of painting
depends on the collision of colors and the use of machines like
brushes reinforces the essential point of the Futurists. Perhaps art
does in fact arise out of conflict, and artists are as fascinated by
technology today as they were in Marinetti’s time.

Indeed, many of the anti-war artists rely on the power of violence to
drive home their points. The Biennale is full of guns, missiles, and
bombs. All of this deadly hardware is alluring, even if the weaponry
is deployed for anti-war purposes. The Futurists may well be dead. But
as long as war and violence continue to hold such sway over our
imaginations, the Futurist ideology will live on in some small way
within us.

John Feffer is co-director of Foreign Policy In Focus
() at the Institute for Policy Studies
().