The art of war
SOME OF the art on display in the Museum of Fine Arts exhibit "War and Discontent" feels like a critique of the war in Iraq. Except that the most damning works -- depicting torture and commercial opportunism -- were made years before this particular war started.
The resulting visual message is stark: War -- no matter the land, century, or cause -- brims with horrors.
At first glance, this is a harsh, depressing show. Jarring pop music bounces off too-white walls. But this is also a show in motion: Its strength and mercy is that the emotional tone changes as one walks through.
Often, the gallery feels like a collection of angry artists saying, Look, when we'd rather look away. There is Pablo Picasso's "Rape of the Sabine Women " and an unfinished version of Edouard Manet's "Execution of the Emperor Maximilian," a portrait of the fatal moment of a firing squad. And Leon Golub's "Interrogation I," a wall-sized painting made in 1980-81, looks like one of the Abu Ghraib photographs that was too incendiary to appear on television or in the newspapers.
But other artists are more ambivalent. Maybe war crushes, maybe it doesn't. Chris Burden offers plans for and a model of a warship transformed into a sailing vessel with great, white sails. Jake and Dinos Chapman do a take off of Goya's series of "Disasters of War" etchings, saying in an exhibit sign that while they are "intensely pessimistic about the job of being an artist and about what art does socially . . . our cynicism translates into humour."
There is also the saving grace of teenagers. In this exhibit, most of the art has two signs: the traditional one written by curators and personal reactions to the work written by members of the museum's Teen Arts Council, an apprenticeship program launched last year.
"What if life is a constant distance to happiness?" council member Cam Yen Le writes in the second sign describing Manet's portait of an execution.
"Harmless and helpless men march and stride, letters to their mothers as they are sons and they are brothers," council member Miles Twomey writes of the soldiers in Picasso's Sabine women.
It's a slim promise that even if art doesn't speak to government, it does speak to those who might one day become the government.
As for the source of the incongruous pop music, it comes from a video installation, "They shoot horses," by Phil Collins -- a British artist born in 1970, not the pop singer. Describing the installation would ruin its effect. But either before or after going in, do read the signage.
"War and Discontent," which runs until Aug. 5, isn't a blockbuster show, nor is it kindling for a feel-good afternoon. But the exhibit's grim candor is, in a way, liberating. 