The war
One never stops forgetting what must not be forgotten - Lyotard
How do we negotiate the hyperbole surrounding a global event like the Gulf war, and how do we as artists, thinkers and cultural producers of all kinds participate in or comment on this event responsibly and ethically? Adam Geczy examines these dilemmas and finds neither silence nor declamation adequate.
After his experience in the Great War, the philosopher Ludwig Wittgenstein said it was a most salutary interval that he himself could not have sought out but which was suddenly thrust upon him. He had been for some time at a critical junction in his thinking: the war took the role of febrifuge to his addled and overly complex consciousness, a mitigator of massive proportions.
Franz Marc's early death in the same war was received with the bitterest indignation by his friends of Der Blaue Reiter group of artists. That such misdirected violence could have despoiled one so gentle and charming was anathema to them, the free-flowing pantheistic effervescence of colour and rhythm in his paintings somehow lost in the mire of the trenches. It gave way to feckless rage as it always does, this war was truly godless.
At any one time, at any localisable moment in history, there is never one war; it doesn't occupy a single space or a particular description. Describing it, the act of allocating blame, exacting revenge, its lagging and interminable aftermath, are all part of what should be understood as a great conglomerative dynamic. The 'war' represented is naturally never the same as the prior or 'real' event, and yet it requires the transferral into language, the remodification and refashioning into stories and... The rest of this article is available to subscribers of Eyeline