Soldiers lie motionless, limbs wrenched from torsos, fragments of lives and fragments of weapons. The camera spells out a story of death and destruction from left to right, like a single line from a macabre poem. The image is monochrome, shot in black and white, the background a uniform, opaque grey. The work is formally reminiscent of both a temple frieze adorned with battle scenes and of that other monochrome depiction of the horrors of war, Picasso’s ‘Guernica’; yet the similarity, in both cases, remains formal: this work neither glorifies victory, nor does it focus on the personal, if emblematic, suffering of those who are dying. Its achievement is that is exposes the sheer facticity and, at the same time, the historicity of destruction.
The soldiers turn out, upon closer examination, to be toy soldiers, scattered, pulled apart, photographed, the image cut and digitally manipulated. They are manufactured objects that are arranged and mutilated to serve a higher purpose, and their image has undergone further mutilation and manipulation. Their nature as objects mirrors the objectification that takes place in war, it focuses the viewers mind on the permanent fact of destruction rather than on the short-lived, though humanly important, response of the participants.
Death itself is absolute stillness; here, an image of death has been created using lifeless objects. Yet the image is perpetually in motion, suggesting the historicity of events without, therefore, embracing an unproblematic narrativity. Narrative makes sense of history by providing beginnings and endings to the middles we find ourselves in; no such consolatory fiction is provided by this work. The movement of the camera, instead, integrates the movement of the gaze along a temple frieze into the work itself. The litany of destruction read to us by the camera is pervaded by a second, non-linear, more subtle kind of motion, a pulsating lengthening and shortening of the shadows which suggests the refraction of light through water, the pulse that pumps the blood out of a dying body’s wounds, or the strange light cast by a ceiling lamp that swings away from the viewers and towards them on its cord, an association that emphasises the work’s affinity with ‘Guernica’, where a single bare lightbulb mercilessly casts its light upon events.
On the opposite side of the exhibition space, display panels advertise share prices, permanently freezing in time a single moment of the volatile, ever-changing world of the global stock market. While the irreversible stillness of death has been endowed with motion, that which is volatile appears unchanging. The collocation and inversion of the mutable and the immutable prompts questions regarding history, agency and the possibility of change. The tantalising possibility that war might be avoided is contrasted with the real inevitability and the tragic irreversibility of death. On the other hand, the changing prices of stock market shares mask the reality that crisis is inherent to capitalism and the ongoing reality of exploitation. The silence of the exhibition space is interrupted only by the visitors, whose awareness of themselves as participants in the installation thereby heightened. By implication, this also calls into question their own stance towards the historical processes that drive both war and the stock market, disposing of real soldiers in the same way in which the artist has disposed of toys.
Beyond the contrast that marks their respective relation to temporality, what is the connection between an image of the destruction of war and the stock market? The profiteering associated with war would provide all too easy an answer. War and speculation may both be seen as a competitive form of play; toy soldiers, after all, are a part of war games. Play, however, is an end in itself. It takes place under special conditions, which demarcate it from the activities of daily life and constitutes a magic circle. Where war and the stock market become ends in themselves, however, history is reified; all too often, we embrace the hazardous fiction that these activities follow their own, inevitable logic and that they do, indeed, take place in a magic circle, far away from us. We fail to take into account the possibility that destruction, whether in the guise of the organised violence of war or of the catastrophic effects of capitalist crises, can irrupt into our own lives.
Georgia Xhristinidis 9/2009