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ABSTRACT
This essay looks at the war paintings of Ben Quilty, who in October 2011 was stationed with Australian troops fighting against the Taliban in Afghanistan as part of Australia’s Official War Art Scheme. Quilty’s portraits, in fact made back at home in his studio after he returned, show soldiers naked, in pain, reliving traumatic episodes from their war experiences. They have been almost universally praised as providing a new and compelling image of war for those who have not experienced it themselves. We examine these portraits closely, arguing that they express a new post-modern ideology of “interpassivity”, allowing the spectator to exhibit signs of concern for soldiers, without actually doing anything to change their situation. In this we suggest that Quilty’s paintings contain a meaning that goes against the intentions of the artist and the understanding of their audience. Contrary to their dominant reading, they express something about our culture that our culture is unable to admit about itself.
Notes on contributor
Rex Butler is professor of Art History in the Faculty of Art Design and Architecture at Monash University. He writes mainly on Australian Art and Critical Theory.
Notes
1 Quilty cited on Reucassel, “On the Warpath.”
2 For a collection of essays explaining the meaning of Anzac Day for Australia and New Zealand, and comparing it to other similar commemorations in Europe, see Sumartojo and Wellings, eds. Nation, Memory and Great War Commemoration.
3 See Wikipedia entry for “Fog of War.”
4 For an overview of war art, see Freeman, “War Art”. For a consideration of the relationship between war art and history painting, see Conn, “Narrative Trauma and Civil War History Painting.”
5 For two surveys of Australian war art, see Churcher, The Art of War; and Wilkins, ed., Artists in Action.
6 All works spoken of come from the collection of the Australian War Memorial, Canberra, unless otherwise specified.
7 Although Hele was a war artist during the Second World War, he did not paint Bardi until after he had been a citizen again for some 14 years. It is a painting of the war, we might say, and not of the times. It is based on photographs subsequently given to Hele by one of the survivors of the attack.
8 For a small sample of the writing on Quilty's war art, see the responses to his winning of the Prudential Eye Award in 2014 for his portrait of Air Commodore John Oddie: http://prudentialeyeawards.com/uploads/press/pdf/53e4a2f91d41c8ed6f000002/Ben_Quilty_coverage_report__8_August__Fleishman_Hillard.pdf.
9 Bithell, “Ben Quilty.”
10 Cited on Reucassel, “War Paint.”
11 Hutchinson, “Ben Quilty: After Afghanistan.”
12 McDonald, “Soldiers Laid Bare,” 12.
13 Cited on Reucassel, “On the Warpath.”
14 Quilty, “Artist Statement,” in Webster, Ben Quilty: After Afghanistan, 7.
15 See on this “War Paint” in which Quilty says: “I have met lots of young men who are suffering from Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder and depression and are having suicidal thoughts … And it remains how the Veterans Affairs and Australian Defence Force and the Returned and Services Leagues will support and care for those soldiers”.
16 Desmond, “Blood and Landscape,” 37.
17 Table is the first painting that Richter counts as part of his oeuvre. Robert Storr, the curator of Richter's retrospective at MoMA in 2002, writes of Table that it embodies an “opposition or layering of incompatible styles that transcends a polemical use of contradiction and becomes something tense but whole”. Storr, Gerhard Richter, 44.
18 See on Richter's October series and its relation to history painting the chapter “Painting History – Painting Tragedy,” in Gerhard Richter: Doubt and Belief, 250–63.
19 Brown and Green cited in Heywood, “Obscure Dimensions of Conflict,” 53.
20 Ibid., 54.
21 On the work of Gladwell, see Messham-Muir, Double War. Messham-Muir has also written comparing the war work of Gladwell and Quilty in “Two Artists Go to War.”
22 See on this, for example, Žižek's analysis of the “interpassivity” of the Beautiful Soul, who acts so that “nothing will happen, that nothing will really change”. Žižek, The Parallax View, 342.