Anitra Hamilton at Georgia Scherman Projects Thomas Hirschhorn at The Power Plant There have been official war artists in Canada since World War One, when A.Y. Jackson and Frederick Varley of the Group of Seven covered the front, brushes in hand. Since 2001, a wider variety of creative types – including photo-conceptualists, experimental filmmakers, and mixed media curators – have documented our military in the field through the Canadian Forces Artists Program. If any local candidate were a shoe-in for the next tour of duty, it would be Anitra Hamilton whose predominantly sculpture-based practice has for years trained its gaze on the material of war without simply being propaganda for the army or public service announcements for pacifists. She is best known for re-purposing decommissioned bombs for artistic ends, be it covering them in a coating of broken eggshells or mounting one on the base of a quarter-a-turn children’s ride the likes of which you find in a shopping mall (though usually with a horse or a fire truck attached). The former might be a bit obvious in its play on the shattering fragility of both the explosive’s contents and the target’s mortality. The latter might leave one having to explain the ending of Dr. Strangelove and its clichd nuclear cowboy to the generation of twentysomethings who came of age after the fall of the Berlin Wall, thus missing out on the formative fears of nuclear annihilation that their elders have etched into their childhood memories. But when you’re dealing with the heavy hand of global conflict, subtlety has a tendency to get lost in the crossfire. Hamilton’s current exhibition at Georgia Scherman Projects on Tecumseth traces the ironies of international conflict through historical drawings of a variety of soldiers in their national uniforms but with tops and bottoms switched around to demonstrate the similarity (uniformity?) of the men who take arms and lay their lives on the line for differences that are as arbitrary as the clothes on their backs. The vintage of the wars depicted only emphasizes the number of years that have passed without any end to these combative relations. As Canada has recently taken the helm on yet another new conflict, the inevitability of war seems a forgone conclusion. The most striking work in the show, however, takes a step back to consider the aftermath of battle and reflects on the weight of this history through the symbols of memorial ceremonies. Suspended in the middle of the gallery – on a hangar, not a mannequin – Red Coat is a Canadian Forces great coat completely transformed by three thousand Remembrance Day poppies, multiplying that annual signifier as it evokes both the blood of those slain and the immense number of lives lost. En masse the flowers soften the military look of the garment, turning it into a lady’s fashion, suggesting both the women who were left when their sons and husbands failed to return from overseas, but also the idea that the masculine attitudes forever leading us to war must change, and perhaps new outfits are a first step in that direction. Accompanying the coat is a sound-artwork titled Two Minutes of Silence that is anything but. Made during a November 11 service in Ottawa, the recording is full of ambient noise that disrupts any possibility of quiet contemplation and forces the listener’s attention outward to the raucous living world around them. It’s a clever reprise of American avant-garde composer John Cage’s famous and so-called “silent” piece “4’33”. In that work, a musician appears on stage and doesn’t play his instrument, leaving the audience to hear all the sounds that are present while the performed music is usually played. Cage’s intent was tied to his interest in Zen philosophy; Hamilton’s version, however, usurps both the peace of the ceremony and that of the gallery to mischievously remind the unsettled listener that, despite our pause, the world continues cacophonously around us – wars and all. The simplicity of this gesture appears in stark contrast to the visual and material overload in Paris-based, Swiss artist Thomas Hirschhorn’s stuff-to-the-gills installation at The Power Plant. Not explicitly a statement about war, Das Auge (The Eye) uses a white and (lots of) red colour scheme to mash up a provocative “proposal” concerning violence, fur, fashion, protests, corporations, the seal hunt, nationalism, and an all-encompassing voyeurism (hence the title) that falls too easily into the realm of apolitical, amoral shock art. Hirschhorn’s previous work dealt with the exchange of ideas, the power of political symbols, and the confusing culture of globalization. This assembly contains some of that (a pile of Coke bottles, stacks of protest placards, mannequins wearing furs and covered in red paint), but plastered throughout are photographs of graphic violence (dismembered bodies, blown apart faces, piles of corpses) that will turn even the strongest stomach and immediately thrust one out of any artistic experience into the realm of the undeniably real. If this is the artist’s intention, he succeeds. But in doing so, he fails to acknowledge his own role in feeding the hungry eye of the media and, by extension, his audience. The violence of both the images and the sheer quantity of stuff in the gallery – there is barely room to move – is an assault, a trap laid down by the artist to elicit a debilitating confusion in whoever chooses to enter the space. While this can be an effective means of shaking us from our slumber, drawing attention to the horrors that surround us, it can also shut us down, leading us to reject the “art” because the pictures of real human loss outweigh it. Given Hirshhorn’s blatant critique of our desensitized culture, the irony is that his overwhelming mass of images leaves us no space to think and, more importantly, to care.
