{"id":153451,"date":"2024-06-28T16:45:00","date_gmt":"2024-06-28T20:45:00","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/newcriterion.com\/?p=153451"},"modified":"2024-06-28T18:21:47","modified_gmt":"2024-06-28T22:21:47","slug":"the-great-war-of-2024","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/newcriterion.com\/2024\/06\/the-great-war-of-2024\/","title":{"rendered":"The great war of 2024"},"content":{"rendered":"\n

The Los Angeles County Museum of Art has been in the news over the last few years due to the controversial destruction<\/a> of its four main buildings (three of which were designed by the pioneering California architect William Pereira). They are to be replaced with a new $750 million structure by the Pritzker Prize\u2013winning Swiss starchitect Peter Zamthor. While most of the museum campus is currently a construction site, albeit a tastefully camouflaged one, the Broad Contemporary Art Museum building and the Resnick Pavilion are open for business. For the past seven months, the latter has housed an extensive two-hundred-plus-object exhibition, \u201cImagined Fronts: The Great War and Global Media.\u201d The show has taken over most of the pavilion, utilizing temporary walls with bold graphic designs to integrate its numerous multimedia components, ranging from films to paintings to printed matter. It has a content warning, naturally, reminding the visitors that \u201cthis exhibition contains images of war, violence, injury, and death, as well as sounds of explosions.\u201d Who would have thought! The bar is set low to accommodate fragile viewers triggered by the mere mention of the violence, injury, and death that took place on a different continent over a century ago. But this goes well with the breathtakingly narcissistic framing of the Great War as the origin of the \u201cmedia spectacle in which we live\u201d\u2014an argument that reveals an astonishing lack of historical awareness. Never mind the twenty million dead, it is the media wars that makes real wars visible to the audience in 2024.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

\"\"
Gino Severini, <\/em>Armored Train in Action, 1915, Oil on canvas, Museum of Modern Art, New York.<\/em><\/figcaption><\/figure>\n\n\n\n

Worse still, \u201cImagined Fronts\u201d appears to be a rethread of a much better exhibition\u2014\u201cWorld War I: War of Images, Images of War\u201d\u2014mounted by the Getty Research Institute in 2014. Instead of attempting to force the materials into a concept du jour such as media manipulation, the organizers of the Getty show took a more sensible approach, distinguishing between the \u201crepresentation of the war in propaganda\u201d and the \u201cdepiction of war by artists who experienced the brutality firsthand.\u201d By keeping the \u201cwar of images\u201d and the \u201cimages of war\u201d separate, Getty avoided equating outright propaganda with actual art. The \u201cWar of Images\u201d section of the exhibition contained posters and graphic works of unqualified propaganda, including the bellicose pamphlet of the poet Filippo Tommaso Marinetti War, the World\u2019s Only Hygiene<\/em>, published in 1915. But whereas this paean to war rightly belongs to the propaganda section, his 1917 pen-and-ink illustrated text The Carso = A Rat\u2019s Nest: A Night in a Sinkhole + Mice in Love <\/em>and other Parole in Libert\u00e0<\/em>, or \u201cwords in freedom\u201d drawings, were rightly placed in the \u201cImages of War\u201d section. This show also included a fascinating subcategory of \u201cTrench Art\u201d\u2014mostly anonymous objects created by soldiers during breaks between fighting, featuring several customized helmets and canteens, a cow\u2019s shoulder bone painted by a German soldier on the Eastern Front, a letter opener with a handle made from an artillery shell, a driving band, a blade from scrap brass, and another one with a handle made from a rifle cartridge and a bullet.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

In contrast, the LACMA exhibition is organized to reinforce the rhetoric of equivalence between propaganda and art, where everything is treated as a \u201ctext.\u201d Its three thematic sections\u2014\u201cMobilizing the Masses,\u201d \u201cImagining the Battlefield,\u201d and \u201cContaining the Aftermath\u201d\u2014indiscriminately mingle printed matter, paintings, and graphic art. The paintings range from Pierre Albert-Birot\u2019s nearly abstract Final Study for the War <\/em>(1916) to Gino Severini\u2019s Futurist classic Armored Train in Action<\/em> (1915), to the figurative yet symbolic The Holy War<\/em> (1914) by Ernst Barlach, and to F\u00e9lix Vallotton\u2019s tragicomic white-on-black woodcut In the Darkness <\/em>(1916). All these are treated as mere illustrations of the war, a point underscored by the side-by-side presentation of Severini\u2019s Armored Train<\/em> alongside its source in a press photo. The accompanying wall text only briefly references the \u201cprogressive artistic styles\u201d before circling back to report on this or that artist\u2019s purported stance on the war. I found myself disagreeing with many of the statements in the wall texts because of their generalizations about \u201cmany artists and writers\u201d and various art-historical inaccuracies. The Russian artist Natalia Goncharova was hardly pining for \u201csweeping positive change and an end to the rigid social hierarchies of empires and monarchies\u201d in her \u201cAngels and Airplanes\u201d lithograph from the 1914 Mystical Images of War<\/em> set. Her subject was mysticism and futurism, not social justice, but mysticism and futurism are no longer fashionable, whereas everyone is on board with social justice.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

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Natalia Goncharova, \u201cAngels and Airplanes\u201d from <\/em>Mystical Images of War, Lithograph, LACMA, California.<\/em><\/figcaption><\/figure>\n\n\n\n

While many of the two shows\u2019 objects overlapped, and their subject matter was essentially identical, these two Great War exhibitions were bound to be different. The Getty exhibition was scholarly in aim, execution, and audience, whereas LACMA exists to serve the general public, so it makes sense that \u201cImagined Fronts\u201d was relatively uncomplicated. The difference lay in their fundamental conceptions of art. The Getty version offered plenty of evidence that the \u201cwar of images\u201d was prompted by the struggle for cultural dominance among the warring parties, as was indeed the case. Unlike the LACMA show, it did so without veering off into anachronistic projections about \u201cimagined fronts,\u201d the very concept of which indicates a postmodernist relativism; it invokes some amorphous, unanchored entity, a fabulous construct that somehow exists alongside the \u201creal\u201d fronts. This mindset impedes any sensible approach to art. If interpretation is to remain at surface level, concerned solely with content, and neither with the form of art nor with its history, then art is only a component in a generalized cultural \u201cdiscourse.\u201d Here, we are told, the discourse is the \u201cglobal media\u201d and its \u201cimagined fronts,\u201d in which paintings are just another vehicle of war-mongering propaganda used \u201cin the furtherance of war.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Yet art is not just another propaganda vehicle, such as film, newsprint, or posters, that might be tasked with \u201cmobilizing the masses, imagining the battlefield, facilitating the global war, and containing the aftermath of a conflict that ended in a torturous ambiguity.\u201d The art of the World War I era is difficult to analyze, because it sprang out of a multitude of interruptions: geographical, national, stylistic, and personal. This was the time when the ideal of a culturally unified Europe was finally debunked. It was also the moment when, after decades of experimentation, representational art gave way to geometric abstraction, collage, found objects, and ready-mades. To assume that art concerning war merely expresses a pro- or anti-war stance is reductive, and ultimately serves little purpose.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Art born from war is especially vulnerable to being \u201caestheticized or anesthetized,\u201d as Dave Hickey put it in the essay \u201cWar is Beautiful, They Said,\u201d published in David Shields\u2019s War is Beautiful: The New York Times Pictorial Guide to the Glamour of the Armed Conflict<\/em>. Hickey argues that the multiple \u201ctouchers\u201d (\u201cthe photographer, the photo editor, the managing editor, the page editor, the designer, and finally, the layout editor\u201d) aestheticized and anesthetized war photographs printed in The<\/em> New York Times<\/em>, because art ceases to be authentic when it \u201cperforms itself\u201d as art. In an uncannily similar fashion, LACMA\u2019s \u201cImagined Fronts\u201d presents the art in the show as just one more weapon in \u201ca global media war,\u201d bidding it to \u201cperform itself\u201d as art, while putting it level with propaganda. Complicated rhetorical gymnastics indeed, considering the uninspired goal of making the Great War relevant and relatable.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

On \u201cImagined Fronts,\u201d at LACMA, California.<\/i><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2259,"featured_media":153452,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"_eb_attr":"","advgb_blocks_editor_width":"","advgb_blocks_columns_visual_guide":"","wds_primary_category":472,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[472],"tags":[647],"dispatch-city":[3298],"acf":{"participants":{"simple_value_formatted":"","value_formatted":"","value":"","field":{"ID":0,"key":"field_65fb0bff29d65","label":"Participants","name":"participants","aria-label":"","prefix":"acf","type":"user","value":null,"menu_order":0,"instructions":"","required":0,"id":"","class":"","conditional_logic":0,"parent":"group_651c53615a3f7","wrapper":{"width":"","class":"","id":""},"role":"","return_format":"object","multiple":1,"allow_null":0,"bidirectional":0,"bidirectional_target":[],"_name":"participants","_valid":1}},"featured_image_credits":{"simple_value_formatted":"

F\u00e9lix Edouard Vallotton, <\/i>Verdun, 1917, Mus\u00e9e de l\u2019arm\u00e9e, Paris.<\/i><\/p>\n","value_formatted":"F\u00e9lix Edouard Vallotton, <\/i>Verdun, 1917, Mus\u00e9e de l\u2019arm\u00e9e, Paris.<\/i>","value":"F\u00e9lix Edouard Vallotton, <\/i>Verdun, 1917, Mus\u00e9e de l\u2019arm\u00e9e, Paris.<\/i>","field":{"ID":0,"key":"field_651c536113a8e","label":"Featured Image Credits","name":"featured_image_credits","aria-label":"","prefix":"acf","type":"wysiwyg","value":null,"menu_order":1,"instructions":"","required":0,"id":"","class":"","conditional_logic":0,"parent":"group_651c53615a3f7","wrapper":{"width":"","class":"","id":""},"default_value":"","tabs":"all","toolbar":"basic","media_upload":0,"delay":0,"_name":"featured_image_credits","_valid":1}},"enable_paywall":{"simple_value_formatted":"No","value_formatted":false,"value":"0","field":{"ID":0,"key":"field_66009169342f2","label":"Enable Paywall","name":"enable_paywall","aria-label":"","prefix":"acf","type":"true_false","value":null,"menu_order":2,"instructions":"","required":0,"id":"","class":"","conditional_logic":0,"parent":"group_651c53615a3f7","wrapper":{"width":"","class":"","id":""},"message":"","default_value":0,"ui":0,"ui_on_text":"","ui_off_text":"","_name":"enable_paywall","_valid":1}}},"author_meta":{"display_name":"Julia Friedman","author_link":"https:\/\/newcriterion.com\/author\/julia-friedman-isan-independent-art-historian\/"},"featured_img":"https:\/\/newcriterion.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2024\/06\/Felix_Valloton-Verdun._Tableau_de_guerre-1917-e1719607398816-300x137.jpg","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_featured_media_url":"https:\/\/newcriterion.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2024\/06\/Felix_Valloton-Verdun._Tableau_de_guerre-1917-e1719607398816.jpg","coauthors":[],"tax_additional":{"categories":{"linked":["Dispatch<\/a>"],"unlinked":["Dispatch<\/span>"]},"tags":{"linked":["Art<\/a>"],"unlinked":["Art<\/span>"]}},"comment_count":0,"relative_dates":{"created":"Posted 2 days ago","modified":"Updated 2 days ago"},"absolute_dates":{"created":"Posted on June 28, 2024","modified":"Updated on June 28, 2024"},"absolute_dates_time":{"created":"Posted on June 28, 2024 4:45 pm","modified":"Updated on June 28, 2024 6:21 pm"},"featured_img_caption":"","series_order":"","jetpack-related-posts":[],"mfb_rest_fields":["author_meta","featured_img","jetpack_sharing_enabled","jetpack_featured_media_url","coauthors","tax_additional","comment_count","relative_dates","absolute_dates","absolute_dates_time","featured_img_caption","series_order","jetpack-related-posts"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/newcriterion.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/153451"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/newcriterion.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/newcriterion.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/newcriterion.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2259"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/newcriterion.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=153451"}],"version-history":[{"count":4,"href":"https:\/\/newcriterion.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/153451\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":153460,"href":"https:\/\/newcriterion.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/153451\/revisions\/153460"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/newcriterion.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/153452"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/newcriterion.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=153451"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/newcriterion.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=153451"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/newcriterion.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=153451"},{"taxonomy":"dispatch-city","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/newcriterion.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/dispatch-city?post=153451"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}