As long as there have been people to send into battle, there have been those that have documented their struggles. Today, with seemingly limitless outlets for media sources, our society is one where the pressure of the image is intense, and the emotional power of a picture is often lost in its overwhelming frequency.
Imagery in the realm of war has most prominently been presented in the form of a statement, a gory portrayal of its horrors with an intensity and clarity of message that moves the viewer. The objective representations of war come from photojournalists, whose medium is easily accessible, concrete and factual. There is a certain aspect of reality associated with photographs, where art such as paintings and drawings tend to be taken as interpretations: subjective and less accurate.
In an unusual exhibit on campus at the Koppelman Gallery in the Aidekman Arts Center, Steve Mumford takes on the war in Iraq through his own artistic journalism. The show, "Baghdad and Beyond: Drawings by Steve Mumford," holds a series of 41 sepia drawings and watercolors by Mumford, who was embedded with U.S. army troops in Iraq in 2003 and 2004.
Finding a press pass through an unlikely source (an online arts magazine called artnet), the Bostonian and graduate of the School of the Museum of Fine Arts made four trips lasting three to four months each to the cities of Baghdad, Kirkuk, Tikrit, Ramadi and Samarra.
The resulting works are vastly different from war-related art like Picasso's "Guernica" (1937); there is something atypical about their compositions. They are similar to photographs, with the forms pushed into and cut off by a framing rectangle - not the way a painting would generally be executed.
The show begins with the most personal, intimate drawing in the gallery, a kind of opening to what it is that this man's life became during his stay with American soldiers in Iraq. The caption reads, "My room at the Orient Palace Hotel, Baghdad" which, the caption explains, had closed by June 2004. The captions throughout the exhibit are not the conventional "title and medium," but small descriptions of the event or scene being recorded and, occasionally, excerpts from Mumford's eloquent accounts published in his "Baghdad Journal" at artnet.com.
In this particular drawing, which is basically a still life, the fruit on the table loses its bright gaiety as the caption brings up questions about the fate of the Armenian Christians who ran the hotel and simultaneously uncovers an untapped perspective on the passing quality of a foreign soldier.
Each drawing is about the same size, and they all fit together with a cohesive storybook-like feel, depicting a journey - though it is unclear what the plot is or if it ever really climaxes.
The drawings are well executed, with a sense of rapidity and keen observation. They show the city of Baghdad in its common urban existence: the familiar metropolitan nightmare of a traffic jam in Baghdad's Russafi Square in February 2004 and a "Tea Seller" making a living with his private business.
In these particular pieces, there is no indication of war or any evidence of occupation, and while later in the show the compositions show distinctly war-torn street scenes and signs of military presence, the outrageous images of something like Goya's "Disasters of War" (1820s) etching series are distinctly absent.
Where Goya painted a heap of bodies and a man vomiting under the title "For this you were born" (1810s), Mumford's most provocative piece is unlike the other 40 in terms of style and composition: "Suspects, CMOC, Samarra, October 2003" is an empty, black-and-white drawing of three men seated in rags, floating upon the page in sheer anonymity with bags over their bowed heads.
The majority of the compositions have a certain level of accuracy that is impressive and thorough, but the forms seem to be accidentally caught in their detailed rectangles and remind the viewer too much of a photographic image that has been taken and then copied later. Whether this is Mumford's system or not, his work is still worthy of our respect, and he acts as a recorder of history, more like Homer during the Civil War than Goya, depicting events we have never before seen with an artist's discerning eye.
The question does arise, however, whether these are works of art or works of a journalist's documentation, a curiosity that comes mostly from the pervasive removed nature of Mumford's works.
One may argue that the mere touch of an artist's hand to the paper brings a certain amount of humanity to Mumford's pictures that a cold, photographic lens could not, and that, while a photographer can crop an image, an artist can emphasize and eliminate elements of a composition with greater ease. Yet, the mood of these works is primarily an accidental one, and there is very little deliberateness and too much objectivity for it to be considered an effective political statement.
The problem may stem from the basic issue of an artist living the life of a soldier, and perhaps we should question the value in being "embedded." Amy Schlegel, the curator of the show and Director of the Galleries and Collections at the Tufts University Art Gallery, referred to the gallery's mission statement of "new, global perspectives on art and art discourse" when describing the importance of Mumford's work.
Remarking on the show's relevance in conjunction with the other shows currently on view in the gallery, Schlegel said, "His work is small-scale; it's narrative, and it's figurative - everything that the other exhibits aren't - and it has made an intriguing connection with the other works."
Here she is referring to G??nther Selichar's "Media Machines," a photography show upstairs in the Tisch Gallery that was inspired by technology's unseen invasion into our modern lives.
Just as Selichar's concept is the subversive "embedding" of machines in our daily life, the sheer proximity of Mumford to the world he was observing seems to have desensitized him. The uniforms, machine guns and tanks take on the same level of importance as everyday objects, and though this may accurately reflect the drudgery of war, it does not seem to have been done on purpose.
Either Mumford could not successfully translate the moving sights of war, or we, as unaffected viewers, must conclude that the artist became so accustomed to his miserable surroundings that he was simply unstirred by the events unfolding around him.
This work raises the lifelong debate between the realists and the expressionists, and the section of the show dedicated to the work Mumford did while visiting the Brooke Army Medical Center near San Antonio displays more of an artistic endeavor and an expressionism sometimes lacking in his other works. These eight drawings, printed in the July 2006 issue of "Harper's Magazine," show the sneakers and sweatpants, the mutilated limbs and prosthetic appendages, and the monotony of physical therapy in the aftermath of war. Here, he is distinctly a painter, and more involved emotionally with his subjects. He is an observer, rather than one of them.
Despite its lack of intense emotional grip, Steve Mumford's documentation of the war in Iraq is something to visit and take in. It showcases his own form of photojournalism that, through its medium, is less crude than most war-zone media's casualness. While the show is mostly a record of events, the concept of an artist among an army offers a fresh view of images that seem rehashed and redundant in the news.
Steve Mumford will give an artist talk on November 2 at 6:00pm.
