Mind States
War and Peace: Art as Communicator
by Bente Mirow
Is it better to forget than to remember? That is a question of serious consequence for those who have seen and lived through the horrors of war firsthand. And for them, it is hardly a choice. The essence of war, destructive and life threatening, can evoke a need to create. Making art can be a catalyst for dealing with deep inner damage and it can also be an attempt to understand, forgive, forget, or heal. Psychologists tell us that the drive to overcome death often drives the artistic impulse. For war veterans, art can become the medium that describes that which cannot be said in words, so that both the one expressing the unspeakable and those who read the message find some understanding that would otherwise be impossible.
While many famous artists have painted the cruelty of war, most have experiences with brutality and mortality. Veterans of war themselves often talk about the feeling of becoming redundant, how their stories become “stories of stories,” or how untold stories become “memories of stories”—if they get communicated at all.
Post Traumatic Stress Disorder was called “Shell Shock” after World War One, “battle fatigue” during World War Two and “Soldier’s Heart” in the American Civil War. The veterans of the Vietnam War brought the awareness of the condition to the forefront, insisting that it be recognized as what it actually was to them. Appropriately, they called it “Post-Vietnam Syndrome.”
A friend told me recently about a young local veteran, twenty-three year-old Randall from Oakland, California (who does not want to share his last name nor his art). My friend explains that Randall feels he would have lost his sanity if he had not found art after retuning from Iraq. He is not ready to talk about his experiences and his parents are worried. He breaks down in tears at the smallest mention of something that triggers the memory of war for him. “Shell shocked” seems befitting for Randall.
Randall spends his days sleeping, and painting when he can no longer sleep. He uses a lot of reds and blacks in his art. He claims to know nothing of art and has never practiced it before now. His parents tell me his pictures are primitive and mostly non-representational. He does not know what he paints, he says. Randall’s parents feel they see his inner turmoil on his canvases and papers, but also some kind of development. It is as if some of the recurring pieces of his memories are being replaced with others. They are not necessarily a suggestion of increasing inner peace, but rather what Randall’s parents would like to think of as their son processing his war experiences—one piece, one memory, at a time.
These days, computer-based war games are dulling our reactions to outrageous images and behaviors. But the audience of any art form must still fill in the blanks themselves. Art carries the capability to enable the viewer to see something they have never looked at.
Colby Buzzell spent 2003 in Iraq. At the age of twenty-seven, he was assigned to a Stryker Brigade Combat Team. Even though Buzzell has become most known for his blog and his book My War, it is his cartoon Men in Black, with its eerie pencil drawings aided by a telling narrative, that shows the fear in the soldier’s face, the anger in the terrorist’s stance and how immediate and fragile life becomes when enemy soldiers emerge from nowhere and bullets rain through the air. For the veteran turned artist, art is less about the critic’s opinion or the art’s monetary value. It is more a way to heal and reach out, to take the experiences from out of the enclosed areas of the heart and soul and into humanity.
Soldiers are not the only ones exposed to meaningless suffering in war. There are the civilian women as well. In the late summer of 2007, the San Jose Museum of Quilts and Textiles offered an exhibit called “The Weavings of War: Fabrics of Memory.” It featured textile creations by women from many parts of the world, depicting war from their point of view.
Part of the “Fabrics of Memory” exhibit is the “arpileras,” textiles that were sewn by the women prisoners of the Chilean concentration camps during the Pinochet era. They tell the story of the violence and brutality they lived through and witnessed during that time. The textiles themselves were used as a practical means to communicate an urgent need for help as the women were smuggled out to Europe. The “arpileras” are now traveling the world and will soon return to Chile “to mediate and preserve memories.” They exist as a warning for future civil repression or the repetition of the tragedies of war in general.
“Art is a wound turned into light, “said Georges Braque. And war is an antiquated language of imagined problem-solving, completely incompetent of solving anything without great human cost. Perhaps it should be a requirement for any world leader to participate in art therapy in order to learn the language of peace. In the meantime, the process of artmaking as expression may be one of the few tools available for those souls who have been wounded by war. It is a chance for healing as well as an attempt to communicate the near-impossible.
For more from Colby Buzzell, visit cbftw.blogspot.com. Visit the San Jose Musuem of Quilts and Textiles online a twww.sjquiltmuseum.org. Bente Mirow writes what her heart and mind demand. She can be reached at
hyggemer@netscape.net