Cause and Affect War Art and Emotion

In 2006, the Br i t ish Broadcasting Corporation launched a television series called The Power of Art. Historian and art historian Simon Schama selected eight famous artists and in the context of their lives and times explored the creation of several significant compositions, arguing that the artists’ works not only changed the course of art history but, in some cases, profoundly altered public understanding of events in their own time and after. This article, delivered as a lecture at Carleton University in November 2011, explores those emotional theories and the power of art in a Canadian context. It examines the circumstances that led artist Gertrude Kearns to paint What They Gave, a 2006 Afghanistan war composition, and questions whether the artist’s emotional response to the tragedy she witnessed is conveyed in paint and whether viewers respond directly to the work or are moved by other information sources. Resume : En 2006, la television de la BBC diffusait une serie de documentaires intitulee The Power of Art. S’interessant a la vie de huit artistes celebres et a leur epoque, l’historien et l’historien de l’art Simon Schama y analysait la creation de plusieurs œuvres significatives pour demontrer que celles-ci avaient non seulement change le cours de histoire de l’art, mais aussi modifie la perception que se faisait le public des evenements, a l’epoque et par la suite. L’article, une causerie presentee a l’Universite Carleton, en novembre 2011, etudie ces theories affectives et le pouvoir de l’art dans un contexte canadien. Il examine les circonstances qui ont amene l’artiste Gertrude Kearns a peindre What They Gave, un œuvre sur la guerre d’Afghanistan realisee en 2006. L’auteur se demande si la reaction affective de l‘artiste s’est bien inscrite dans l’œuvre et si le public a pu y reagir directement ou en ressentir une emotion suscitee par d’autres sources d’information. Nine years ago, I completed a history PhD here at Carleton University. My thesis was published in 2006 as Art or Memorial? The Forgotten History of Canada’s War Art.1 Influenced by the then relatively new memory theories, especially those pertaining to monuments as “sites of memory,” I argued that through the act of looking, whether on the part of an artist, curator, or viewer, everyone associated with a military-related work of art assigns meanings to that work – meanings that constantly change and evolve in relationship with one another. Today I will contend that war art can also be a “site of emotion”: a place to which you bring things you know and have experienced emotionally and with which through a dialogue with the artwork, its interpreters, and other viewers you not only enrich your own understanding of what you already recognize or have knowledge of emotionally but you also contribute to the emotional understanding of others. My presentation today looks at a single piece of contemporary war art in the context of emotional theories. In questioning whether we respond emotionally to a painting because we know the artist has created it under emotional circumstances, in asking whether emotion is inherent in any formal qualities of the piece itself, for example, in the colours used, or in the nature of the brushwork, and in exploring whether a familiarity with the artwork’s subject matter enables us to project our own existing emotions onto an essentially inert composition I conclude that war art can be a “site of emotion.” This is the painting under consideration: Gertrude Kearns’ 2006 Afghanistan composition What They Gave. It is a large painting – each panel is 152 x 102 cm. It was painted in Toronto nearly nine months after Kearns returned from a four and a half week visit to Afghanistan lasting from 28 December 2005 to 27 January 2006. She was an embedded artist with the Canadian Forces (or CF for short) and had a commission to produce five finished canvases relating to events and personnel she witnessed. Kearns is a well-known Toronto-based artist. She began painting military subjects in the aftermath of the 1990 to 1991 Gulf War and, 20 years later, military portraiture remains at the heart of her practice. Her approach combines a certain accuracy of detail born of her interest in historical documentation combined with the more abstract content that typifies her non-military work. This 1992 piece is called Containments. Four interrelated formative personal experiences lie behind my discussion of What They Gave. Before I get into the meat of my presentation I would like to speak a little about © Canadian Military History, Volume 21, Number 1, Winter 2012, pp.44-58. 1 : Cause and Affect War Art and Emotion Published by Scholars Commons @ Laurier, 44 Gertrude Kearns – What They Gave (2006). Ca na di an W ar M us eu m 2 01 20 01 900 1 2 Canadian Military History, Vol. 21 [], Iss. 1, Art. 5 http://scholars.wlu.ca/cmh/vol21/iss1/5 46 them. They are, after all a part of the personal emotional luggage I bring to this study. They centre first, on the concept of art as a site of memory, second, on the role of language in our understanding of visual imagery, third, on the so-called power of art, and fourth, on emotional theories. I have already touched a little on the first – art as a site of memory. In arguing in my thesis for the existence of a relationship between works of art and their publics as far as memory is concerned, I conclude (and I’m quoting myself here) “that no study of social memory can determine the limitations of agency, the mechanisms of control, or the power of language that determines the changing authoritative viewpoint collectively accepted as memory.” Broadly translated this states that in my view collective meaning in art as understood through memory is a never-ending construction site. In discussing What They Gave as “a site of emotion,” I will make a similar argument. Second, earlier this year, I published an article in the Journal of Canadian Art History that argues that it is their accompanying words not the pictures themselves that give meaning to some specific official war photographs.2 In looking for atrocity in Canadian Expeditionary Force First World War pictures, I found almost none. Instead, I found tragic but certainly less than atrocious images of damaged churches, graveyards, villages, and orchards that in albums and exhibitions were accompanied by emotion-laden text that inferred far more awfulness than was depicted. The exhibition caption for a photograph of felled trees reads: “The wanton destruction of these trees can only be stigmatised as ‘murder.’ To prevent their being of any use to the advancing troops, the Germans took the life of each one by severing its trunk.” This research left me with an understanding that how I or anyone else for that matter reacts intrinsically emotional in its own right, language will prove critical in establishing the painting as a “site of emotion.” Third, somewhat late in the day, very recently in fact, I finally got around to viewing the British Broadcasting Corporation’s 2006 television series The Power of Art. In it historian and art historian Simon Schama explores the creation of several significant compositions by eight famous artists in the context of their lives and times. He argues that their works not only changed the course of art history but, in some cases, profoundly altered public understanding of events in their own time and after. As writer Frances Spalding notes in the UK Independent newspaper of the Picasso segment in her October 2006 review of the accompanying book: When in February 2003 the United Nations Security Council decided to hold a press conference about the likelihood of armed intervention in Iraq, someone noticed that hanging in the chosen location was a [1955] tapestry reproduction of [Picasso’s] Guernica, with its burning houses, screaming women and dead babies. It was hurriedly covered over with a sky-blue UN drape. Schama is not alone is seeing this as the ultimate backhanded compliment to the

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