The long 20th century has been receding in the rear view mirror for nearly a quarter century now, though its legacy seems impossible to shake, regardless of how much we slam our feet against the shiny gas pedal of digitized progress. The 20th century’s innovations in the realm of industrialized slaughter continue to evolve into monstrous new configurations, making optimistic appraisals like Steven Pinker’s seem like the 21st century version of Norman Angell’s The Great Illusion (i.e. the best-selling 1910 opus which claimed that new economic arrangements would make war “every day more difficult and improbable,” to be followed four years later by a war in which a single protracted battle claimed over a million casualties). The Great Illusion of total war turned out to be anything but, leading to an experience so all-enveloping that it not only inspired several political revolutions but, also numerous revolutions in the realm of art and aesthetics. The next time a military conflict coincided with such decisive change on both these “fronts,” it would be with America’s involvement in Vietnam; a conflict which precipitated another more ambiguous and as-of-yet inconclusive war over the ownership of reality.
There has never been a historical shortage of theorizing as to war’s exact relation to “reality,”often summarized with Heraclitus’ famous axiom that war was the “Father of all and the king of all.” The title of a universally recognized manual of military strategy notwithstanding, it is easy to forget how much artistic creativity is part of that “all”: art’s flourishing is generally seen as proof of a civilization peaceful enough to nurture it. Yet the provocations of the Italian Futurists, for example, provided a contrasting viewpoint whereby the poetic or creative impulse was itself an act of war. Their declaration of war as “mental hygiene” would be put to the test at the outbreak of the first World War, becoming a dazzling beacon for artists who welcomed the conflict’s potential to vaporize old cultural detritus.
Art and war become intertwined during this period in unanticipated ways (not the least because the sacrifice of entire male populations made it more likely for artists to be actual combatants). Therefore, it almost feels cliched to point out how artists arrayed themselves in quasi-military formations and combative “-isms,” adopted terms of military strategy like “avant-garde” to clarify their aims, and even fought with and among each other with an unprecedented enthusiasm (see the British Vorticists’ attempts, in their Blast journal, to fire back at F.T. Marinetti and the Futurists with the accusation that they were merely “the corpses of vortices”).
By contrast, the Vietnam War was perhaps the first notable instance of non-combatant artists and/or culture creators not just going to “war” with abstractions such as tradition, but believing that their actions would transform the “kinetic” battlefield in some way. Dissatisfied with the negligible gains made by peaceful protests against the war, the period slogan of “bringing the war home” (itself inspired by Che Guevara’s call to radicals to create “two, three, many Vietnams”) became a galvanizing incitement to violence that was often given an “aesthetic” reading. This wave of insurgent activity accounted for some 2,800 incidents in the U.S. between 1969 and 1970, with parallel movements in Europe.
For the latter, it’s particularly telling to read the celebratory text of the K1 [Kommune Eins] group upon learning that a Brussels department store had caught fire and caused mass casualties. Morbidly noting how the incinerated residents of the imperialist-capitalist West were now able to share in “that crackling Vietnam feeling,” K1’s framing of this disaster as a karmic retribution inspired R.A.F. [Rote Armee Fraktion] members Gudrun Ensslin and Andreas Baader to bomb a pair of Frankfurt department stores. They would almost immediately be arrested for the acts, and would be the subjects of a trial where they easily exploited the media attention accorded to them in order to further propagandize. Before that time came, though, the authors of the inflammatory K1 text were themselves brought to trial, and became embroiled in legal arguments that would become more commonplace in the new age of international terrorism. As Charity Scribner recalls:
The jury had to decide whether the K1 leaflet was an expression of artistic freedom or a blueprint for terrorism. Their findings would set an important precedent for Ensslin and Baader's first trial, as well as for the subsequent hearings of other RAF members that would dominate the German public sphere for much of the seventies. The investigators touched upon a central question. How, the courts asked, do we distinguish between aesthetic performance and acts of terror?1
This episode touches upon one of the many unintended consequences of America’s military involvement in Vietnam: a growing awareness, and subsequent criticism, of the ways in which our media conditions, rather than merely reflects, our shared reality. As Neal Postman contended in Amusing Ourselves to Death, television had made “entertainment the natural format for the representation of all experience,” to the degree that it became difficult to portray events of great seriousness without this “entertaining” framing. Countless spectators who witnessed the war unfolding in front of them via televised coverage spoke to the strange emotional incongruity resulting from this conditioning, particularly the way in which it was difficult to not liken horrific events to ones of a more telegenic nature (e.g. the nightly reported toll of casualties for the U.S. and Viet Cong forces, which could have been compared to the box score of a baseball game).
The film documentary therefore came into its own as a viable form, with affinities to the culture of radical protest ignited by the Vietnam War (despite this term “documentary” existing in the lexicon of cinema since at least 1926, when Scottish film critic John Grierson applied this term to Robert Flaherty’s investigation of Samoa, Moana). As the bizarre incongruity between televisual reality and actually embodied, “on-the-ground” reality became more decidedly pronounced, it necessitated those instances in which the former substituted or became confused for the latter. The headline for the theatrical release poster accompanying 1969 documentary Medium Cool (“beyond the age of innocence…into the age of awareness”) serves as a succinct mission statement for independent documentary filmmakers of the period, who confidently felt that they were bearing witness to life as it really was, and providing the social service of countering the deceptive or naive narratives forwarded by the mass media.
The complete story of the Vietnam era’s artistic re-ordering of reality tends to focus on such innovations, as well new hybrid forms like Happenings and “guerrilla theater” which erased ontological demarcations between simulated and actual realities, as the artists understood them. It is strange, then, how few encomia of the “60s” pay any attention to the inverse of this situation: that is to say, combatants who turned to art to make sense of the war, rather than artists who “went to war” with aesthetic means of influence (what the military would, then and now, term “psy-ops”).
We have notable exceptions, of course: Oliver Stone served in the 25th Infantry Division for a tour and bore witness to these experiences with the 1986 film Platoon. There are numerous other American military from the period who have made works that are as compelling in their depiction of war and its consequences, but in media that are less accessible in both their availability and in their precise content. Many Vietnam vets would utilize creative media with more porous boundaries than that of film, using their wartime experiences as a canvas upon which to paint visceral, yet not intellectually simplistic, portraits of the human condition. Among these, perhaps only Kim Jones has received much recognition from the official Art World’s biennales, and even then only after staging his notorious 1976 “Rat Piece” in imitation of the sadistic rituals he had witnessed “in country”. The catalog documenting Reflexes and Reflections, the initial exhibit of the National Vietnam Veterans’ Art Museum (now simply the National Veterans’ Art Museum), does indeed feature Jones, and also introduces many artists whose work is trenchant in its commentary, and aesthetically engaging, without being a product of the formal art education intended to instill such qualities.
I strongly encourage any readers to track down a copy of this document, or to visit the Chicago museum where many of these works are housed. It is an expectedly solemn, partial affirmation of Heraclitus’ take on the primacy of conflict, but with surprises in store for those who may believe they what exactly wha war “fathers.” More importantly, the collected works are a rebuke to those who glamorize war as an ultimate reality. The distorted expressions and stark frozenness on the mask sculptures by Randolph Harmes are as capable a memento mori as anything in the classical canon, with one work in particular - Dulce Bellum Inexpertis [“war is sweet to those who have not experienced it”] - unequivocally calling on viewers not to idealize a culture of death.
Elsewhere, Cao Ninh’s When I Look in the Mirror Each Morning (a collection of mirrored glass fragments) elegantly summarizes the splintering of personality encountered under extreme duress, while Ned Broderick’s This is How it Works achieves this same effect by juxtaposing a luridly glowing body image with clinical reportage on battle-sustained flesh wounds, delivered with the sort of chilled forensic terminology I’ve seen elsewhere in medical examiners’ autopsy reports. This blending of a vivid and liquified portrait with arid technical language evokes a dynamic relationship between “concrete” aspects of reality and ones of unpredictable fluidity, with the implication that neither ever achieves a total victory.
In among these, though, are items like Air Force technician Frankie J. Howery’s illustrated envelopes for his letters home from the front: defiant attempts by the artist to preserve humor in the midst of, and in spite of, the obvious horror.
The total experience provided by this artwork is more, say, Apocalypse Now than Platoon, precisely because of the unreality of the former: portraying the conflict as a kind of surrealistic or “psychedelic” war, its fictionalized events nevertheless speak to the truth of many vets who saw their time in Vietnam as a twisted aberration from reality, or some sort of hellish intermediate state, rather than as the apotheosis of reality. Several of the artists featured in the original Reflexes… show mention how deployed G.I.s used the phrase “back in the World” to refer to any reality existing away from the war, as if the time in Vietnam was time spent in an illusory nightmare realm. Indeed, the morgue laboratory tech William Dugan contributes a piece titled “Back In The World Again,” a fascinating scrap metal bone sculpture a la Jean Tinguely. The artist’s concise, clever statement on this piece is worth reprising here:
I was an Air Force lab tech and did autopsies and bagged bodies in Thailand […]. Yes, Back in the World Again is how it felt to come back. The pieces of bone, brass, shells braided in the creature’s hair and hanging from its belt are the tokens, mementos, souvenirs, transitional objects of our life. We all carry tokens with us to strange places for magical protection.2
Encoded in this statement is a suggestion that the return to “the World” was an experience that could be as traumatizing as the events that happened outside of it; one that necessitated talismanic, ritual means to ease the walk between worlds. This more nuanced understanding of “reality” does demand a contrast with the deeply seeded idea, held by many in the Stateside protest movement, that “real-ness” (according to Larkin & Foss’ lexicon of period “folk” lingo) increased in direct proportion to excessive danger.3 It should come as no surprise that many of the New Left militants in the U.S., particularly those with the societal connections to evade both the draft and the legal consequences for violent activism, embraced an ideal of extremity-as-authenticity, while the “grunts” on deployment saw the experience of psychic terror and physical pain as a deviation from a “real world” in which supposedly mundane, superficial happenings were not external impositions to be resented or ashamed of.
Some might find even that to be too simplistic an appraisal of their personal ontologies. The P.O.W. and painter Theodore Gostas, in his statement for the Reflections… catalog, notes that the experience and memory of living in constant pain causes worlds to interpenetrate, their collected impressions alternating so rapidly and forcefully that there is no single, true reality. “Often I hurry when I paint,” he says, “because my feelings of pain shift from one image to another instantly and I feel compelled to rush after them all”.
Returning to Kim Jones for a moment, it bears asking what benefits we would actually get from crowning the reality of danger and suffering as the “true” reality, and seeing experiences with reduced levels of intensity as epiphenomena or pale after-images. In his personal statement on “Rat Piece,” Jones charts a continuity of cruelty between Celtic “wicker man” rituals of sacrifice via immolation, and the vengeful immolation of the rodents which would frequently torment the troops in the jungle. This, to my mind, feels like a warning that we should not expect a commitment to violence and suffering to be something “transformative”: it can just as easily, perhaps more easily, become a commitment to something that replicates itself without delivering meaningful insight or flourishes of wisdom.
One mental image, relayed by more than one participant in the museum’s original Reflections… exhibit, is likely to stick with me for as long as my memory serves me. This is the harrowing account of vets who witnessed medics running I.V. equipment to soldiers already dead, in the hopes that the still living, yet profoundly suffering, wounded would not see these bodies in their true state and lose all hope of recovery. Improvisational, even desperate, acts like this clearly inspired much of the art that veterans of this conflict produced, and remind of the true potential of the illusory, virtual realities we construct with art.
Aesthetic and theatrical disruptions of reality can “bring the war home,” sure enough, but can also point to a fundamental human resilience that allows moments of beauty to transcend our vilest immersions into the sea of hate and fear. Department store arsonists may be able to claim artist status by imparting “that crackling Vietnam feeling” to the sleeping masses, but by that token, artist status should also be awarded to the medical “sculptors” who attempted to convey something more universal and enduring - something beyond necrophilic desires to repackage suffering and mass destruction as the only “reality” that can inspire new creation.
Scribner, C. (2007). “Buildings on Fire: The Situationist International and the Red Army Faction” Grey Room 26, pp. 30-55.
William Dugan quoted in Sinaiko, E. (ed.) (1998). Vietnam: Reflexes and Reflections. New York: Harry N. Abrams Inc.
See Larkin, R. & Foss, D. (1988). “Lexicon of Folk-Etymology” in The 60s Without Apology, ed. Sohnya Sayres et al. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press.