Thursday 13 November 2008

Lest we forget, oops we forget.

Many creative people have made comments on war, in all of its manifestations, in a wide variety of media and I shall be considering the work of a few that I admire. On the day of the 90th anniversary of the Armistice I want to share with you my choice, not definitive, of creative people who have made observations in their various media on conflict.

Artists:

• Salvador Dali vented his anger at the civil war in Spain with his painting called Civil War wherein a strange character epitomises man's inhumanity to man as he sticks a fork into himself and proceeds to eat the flesh, this harks back to the greatest war artist of all time.
• Francisco Goya watched as Napoleon's desire to unite the whole of Europe under one banner for the people went pear shaped in Spain and became an horrific vindictive battle against the Spaniards who had dared to resist him. Goya created one of the darkest memoirs of man's inhumanity to man in a stunning series of etchings called 'The Disasters of War', never equalled since in vision and scope. Goya's painting entitled 'The Third of May' depicts a mass execution by French troops in which he deliberately echoes Christ on the cross. I took one of the grimacing faces as inspiration when I created my commemoration of Seb Coe winning the Olympics with his face contorted in the agony & ecstasy of extreme effort.
• The Chapman Brothers recently re-worked Goya's 'Disasters of War' adding comic characters with a sinister turn. Also they created forest scenes in model soldier sculptures of the abominations carried out by Hitler's Nazi SS. Art Speigelman also featured the SS disguised as cats as they annihilated the Jews disguised as mice in his classic graphic illustrated story 'Maus', a tail based on his own parent's experiences.
• Max Ernst, one of Dada's founders, used 19th century scientific/medical catalogues to access their imagery which he then re-presented in wierd juxtapositions, opening the way for the Surrealists' imagery. Ernst's use of frottage and decalcomanie techniques he invented to find different ways of creating imagery were to have far reaching consequences. His experiments dripping paint through a can on a string had repercussions on Pollock and later on Hirst. So Dada did do big doodas. You could say that the first world war was also to blame for the revolution in art that we are still milking today! As a writer Ernst created his own indecipherable graphic alphabet, which like everything else he did is just good to contemplate. During the 2nd world war he created wonderful surreal forestscapes peopled with foreboding Hieronymus Bosch like characters.
• John Heartfield also used collage but right under the eyes of the Nazis to pour scorn on Hitler's ways. His graphic style impacted large on the graphics of central Europe. Like Otto Dix he spared no feeling for sensitive folk, exposing the results of war and bullying in a raw depiction.
• Picasso I have saved for last as I believe his 'Guernica' painting to be the most powerful anti war image of the 20th century. Sadly the copy of it that hangs in the United Nations seems to have little effect on world leaders who stil resort to war rather than diplomacy. l spent many happy hours contemplating  'Guernica' and it preparatory and post sketches in Madrid. the work encapsulates Picasso's inability to let a theme so close to his heart go until he has squeezed every ounce of visual potential out of it. 

Writers:

• William Blake denounced war believing war to be immoral when it was not unjust,
  "Naught can deform the human race
  Like the armourer's iron brace."
  
  I happened to read this the very day Blair took British forces in to war in Iraq and dallied over sending the words to him, I hesitated thinking I would be considered crazy. In his major poem 'Jerusalem' Blake tells of Albion who has egotistically forsaken his God only to be thrust down into the human condition which is a state of war.
• Walt Whitman wrote about a centenarian who fought against the British looking back on Washington's first battle as a general on Brooklyn Hill,
  "The British advancing, rounding in from the east, fiercely playing their guns,
  That brigade of the youngest was cut off and at the enemies mercy.
  he continues
  Rank after rank falls, while over them silently droops the flag,
  Baptised that day in many a young man's bloody wounds,
  In death, defeat, and sisters', mothers' tears"
  Leaves of Grass p 245
• Kenneth Patchen similarly wrote of the madness of war he lived through,
  "I weep at the monstrous horror of this crime against man and against God! if you have blood on your hands take them off this page." p13 'In Quest of Candlelighters' which can be found in the Poet Library at Festival Hall in London. In his masterwork, 'The journals of Albion Moonlight', Patchen's version of Blake's hero takes a 20th century journey of a more surreal nature into the hell of human conflict.
• Voltaire's great naive hero 'Candide' with his own journey through the Napoleonic wars may have influenced Patchen, as he did my own alter ego Apulhed. I created Appleheadman, his original name, in my own horror of the wars of the 1970s in Biafra, Ireland, Vietnam and Pakistan which raged when I went to college. I had Apulhed looking on at man's inhumanity to man.
• Alfred Jarry invented a comical dictator named Ubu Roi who, like the monarch in Lewis Carrol's Alice in Wonderland would scream out horrific executions to be carried out by his more than willing henchmen. I was lucky to see this play enacted at the Roundhouse in the 70's, but Jarry was one of the thinkers behind the Dada movement at the end of the first world war. this group of people wanted to create a new movement for creativity with different ideas to those that prevailed before the 14-18 war believing that a society which could perpetrate such a crime on itself had to be over-ridden in new ways of seeing and acting out the arts. Marcel Duchamp's seminal 'Urinal' by R. Mutt grew from this desire to change things.
• Lorca, a close friend of Dali, was one of those unfortunate creative spirits deemed too influential by a dictator and was summarily executed by Franco's henchmen. His poetry inspired many writers of the 20th century, not least Leonard Cohen but also in latin America which was to have its fair share of 'disappeared'. The Spanish artist Miro took up Jarry's Ubu Roi as a representation of Franco in his strange symbolic paintings done under the nose of the regime. On Franco's death he did them again as gigantic puppets in a celebratory dance performance.
• Wilhelm Reich in his book 'Listen Little Man' addressed at dictators and their henchmen talks about the need for mankind not to meekly follow the call to arms.  He highlights the tendency of countries to attack other countries on the basis that if you don't strike them first they will strike you. Kaiser Bill used this excuse against Russia in the run up to world war one.
• Wilfred Owen's ideas in his poems of the first world war developed after he met another war poet, Seigfried Sassoon who told him to write about what he knew and in his own language. Owen, having been at the Front knew enough about the reality of war to no longer believe it the duty of every man to follow deferentially orders from out of touch leaders.

Musicians:

Having been an impressionable and optimistic student in the 60s and early 70s I feel lucky to have heard the music of people who changed the face of popular music and took on the resposibility for change and social comment which still resonates today.

• Woody Guthrie and his son Arlo did beautiful songs of protest. the former had a massive influence on Bob Dylan who in turn influenced the latter. One of Woody's songs, 'This land is your land' was adopted as a national anthem in the USA but similar to the later Springstein song mentioned below his words were not properly understood. Most people saw his song as a jingoistic ditty when in fact it was a protest about social injustice.
• Bob Dylan's songs were adopted by the peace movement of the 60s as anthems. I remember the dire warning that came from his 'Hard Rain's a Gonna Fall' with its story of a man walking around after a nuclear explosion. Its surreal imagery reminiscent of Patchen. In England Manfred Mann had a big hit with Dylan's 'God on their side' which mentioned the irony that the German people also were fighting with God on their side, although I am unsure if the Nazi Party were Sunday church goers. These songs and Barry McGuire's 'Eve of Destruction' seemed to reflect the threat we as 60s children felt of all out war being imminent.
• Bruce Springstein seemed to follow in the tradition of writing anthemic songs. His 'Born In The USA' is in fact an anti war tune but has more often been mistaken for a jingoistic one. On a more recent cd 'Devils and Dust' he reflects, "We've got God on our side, we're just trying to survive." he seems to echo Dylan's earlier tune. For a real treat listen to the words of 'Nothing Man' where Bruce shows his uncanny ability to tell a story in the time it takes to sing a song. His adaptation of Edwin Starr's trade mark song, 'War' seems to clearly place Bruce in the anti-war zone.
• John Lennon is our own past master of the clever anti-war slogans. He began with his anti-vietnam song, 'Give Peace a Chance' and climaxed with the lovely perennial 'Happy Christmas, War is Over'. Add his superb ability to write a catchy tune to his brave tendecy to fly in the face of those he considered to be unjust his songs remained topical and popular until and beyond his untimely death, by the gun.
• Mark Knopfler created a touching masterpiece in his title track on 'Brothers in Arms'.
• James, a group from Manchester carry on the fight with the title track of their cd 'Hey Ma' which talks about what happens to those unfortunate to be killed in a warzone.
  

Films:

• 'Oh what a lovely war' with a cameo role for Lennon seemed to affirm his nailing himself to the flag of protest  is based on the folly of the first world war.
• 'Yellow Submarine' is an anti-dictator cartoon film set to the rebellious Beatles lyrics in which the fab four confront the Blue Meanies who are a bit Ubu Roi like.
• 'Gallipolli' a film starring the youngster Mel Gibson shows the farce that resulted when Churchill tried to end the war early by sending an expeditionary force to Turkish territory forgetting that the Turks were good fighters who refused to let the allies through to their prime objective which was to create a second front on Germany's east end.
• 'Goya's Ghosts' starring Javier Bardem, Natalie Portman & Stellan Skarsgard is a devastating film seen through Goya's eyes on the Inquisition and Napoleon's invasion. the message it conveys is every bit as devastating as Goya's original print series. I found it hard to watch but worth it and would put it amongst my top films ever.
  

This week our own centenarians Harry Patch, William Stone and  Henry Allingham laid wreaths at the Cenotaph. The 110 year old Harry Patch said that he remains scornful of anyone who seeks war over peace, "War always finishes with both sides sitting down and talking; why the devil don't they do that beforehand?" he asked. This idea was echoed at this year's Edinburgh Book Festival by  the reporter James Ferguson who wrote "A Million Bullets" after meeting the Taliban in Afghanistan. He says that there is only one way to end that war too, and it means talking to the Taliban. I do not think Lennon was being insincere when he wrote songs like " Stop The Killing, Now".
   
Peace be with you.

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