Monstrosity: The face of war

Abstract

During 2018 the centenary of the end of WWI was widely commemorated, engaging with questions of art and politics that continue to haunt conceptions of ‘national memory’, as it transforms history into myth. How might the testimonies of art and activism resist this ‘glorifying’ process? What kind of performance research finds expression in the form of an anti-war manifesto? Addressing disfigurement, as presenting the real ‘face of war’, how might the memory of flesh – its mutilation rather than any ‘memorial’ – make appeal to conscience, distinct from the ‘patriotic’ performance aesthetics of the state?

Notes

1 Neo-colonial globalization involves a set of historical relations that are not simply Eurocentric in the same way that they were in the early twentieth century – for all that we remain bound in the intertwined coils of colonialism and modernity.

2 It might be remembered that Dix had been a machine gunner on the front line, serving throughout the four years of the war, being wounded five times and awarded the Iron Cross in 1915.

3 That is, notwithstanding the 1917 revolution, itself an intensification of the class war into a terror that collapsed its supposed ends into its very means.

4 This is what the United Nations’ special rapporteur on extreme poverty and human rights, Philip Alston, calls an ‘alienated society’ in his November 2018 report on the UK and the consequences of a decade of so-called ‘austerity’ politics. Alston also describes ‘a state of denial’ amongst the government ministers who he interviewed for his report (Alston, 2018).

5 An online reprint of a review article of Friedrich’s book in the New Yorker by Susan Sontag (itself a fragment of her own book, Regarding the Pain of Others (2004: 12– 15)) includes examples of these portrait photographs: https://thecharnelhouse.org/tag/susan-sontag

6 As Daniel Morgan notes: ‘the idea that cinema lies in the background of our lives is one of the deep themes in his late work. It’s sounded over and over again in Histoire(s) du cinéma, as Godard places events from the twentieth century up against scenes from the history of cinema. And we find it in the opening montage of Notre Musique, where clips of combat – from documentaries, from re-enactments, from Westerns – show that what we understand war to be is (at least in part) determined by the backdrop of images we’ve received from the cinema’ (2013: 152).