Artist Comments

Gerald Laing

IRAQ WAR PAINTINGS

2004 - 2005

THE ARTIST’S COMMENTS:

CAPRICCIO 2005

Oilpaint on canvas, 36” x 32”

A capriccio is a sudden start, motion or freak.

A free, fantastic style, a prank, trick or caper.

A thing or work of fancy.

1696: Phillips. ‘Capriccios are pieces of music, poetry and painting wherein the force of the Imagination has better success than the Rules of Art’.

This painting is full of paradox and ambiguity. These qualities encourage abstract thought, and allow the eye and the mind to wander and speculate.

Thus it becomes possible to avoid thinking about the surreal arrangement of the human figure, and the internal life of prisoner.

Formal concerns become a sort of anaesthetic, or at least a way of re-composing the reality of Abu Ghraib.

CARYATID 2004

Oilpaint on canvas, 36” x 32”

The powerful physique of this semi-crouching Iraqi prisoner wearing nothing but a green bag over his head and in such a graceful pose was obviously posing for a sculpture of a caryatid.

So I gave him some neo-classical architectural detail to support. Neo-classical architecture was an important early part of the symbology of the American Dream.

I find it fascinating that his genitals have been pixelled out. It demonstrates a rare sensitivity to shield the viewer from moral harm.

ONLY ONE OF THEM USES COLGATE 2004

Oilpaint on canvas, 32” x 36”

What has happened to my American Starlets of the early 1960’s?

Evidently some of them have joined the US Army.

Here is one gesticulating triumphantly over the battered corpse of a dead Iraqi in Abu Ghraib Prison. She wears rubber gloves to protect her hands, but not from domestic dirt. She looks as if she might be an ad for toothpaste. We know the American dental fetish for perfect teeth. There is a marked difference between hers and those of the victim. The corpse was wrapped in what appears to be an Arab Airlines plastic bag.

I took the liberty of substituting the Colgate logo in commemoration of Bush’s immortal words at his first press conference with Blair. When asked what they could possibly have in common, he replied, “We both use Colgate”.

Even so, and as one would expect, Bush’s teeth are far more even and white than Blair’s.

L’APRES MIDI D’UN FAUNE 2004

Oilpaint on Canvas, 32” x 36”

The graceful figure smeared in excrement, standing in a balletic pose in front of the gaoler with a truncheon, struck me as being so surreal and bizarre that I must be mistaken.

No one could have gone to all that trouble. The image must represent something else.

Eventually I realised that it was in fact a scene from a rehearsal of a new production of the Nijinsky L’Après Midi d’un Faune. Evidently they intended putting it on to entertain the other prisoners.

US ON TOP 2004

Oilpaint on canvas, 36” x 32”

Jammed between two military stretchers, with his hands clasped behind his neck and a large US soldier sitting on him, the Iraqi prisoner’s tongue is forced out.

The monumental, static nature of the soldier is contrasted by the suggestion of movement in the half-tone area in which the Iraqi resides.

In the background I have painted the fabric hanging on the bars of the prison cells as though it was drapery wafted by Zephyr in a grand portrait of the 18th century.

LOOK MICKEY 2004

Oilpaint on canvas, 36” x 32”

This painting refers to Roy Lichtenstein’s first essay in cartoon-based art.

In his painting, Donald Duck and Mickey Mouse are fishing. Donald Duck has accidentally hooked his own rear end and is excitedly tugging at his rod – hence the caption.

When the image of Lynndie England humiliating an Iraqi prisoner was published, America hooked its own …

I have treated the soldier and the prison as though they were an anodyne part of a Disney film; perhaps Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs.

The Iraqi is shown in the second-hand but subjective reality of half-tone.

AMERICAN GOTHIC 2004

Oilpaint on Canvas, 36” x 32”

Naked bodies piled up like logs drying for the winter is a new and strange phenomenon.

Soldiers proudly gesticulate over this achievement. They wear green rubber gloves, just in case.

One of each sex, standing in close relationship, they put me in mind of an American painting which is important to the mythology of the US – American Gothic, by Grant Wood. But if you look closely at the farmer and his wife in the painting they seem pretty grim. Hard working children of toil they may be, but do they stare out at their legacy?

In case they are, I have substituted for them the reassuring figures of their progeny in the composition – two friends from Abu Ghraib.

REPETITION 2005

Oilpaint on canvas, 32” x 36”

In the pre-industrial period two identical items were an expensive luxury. After mass-production was established, the converse was the case.

The PR machine for Bush’s re-election campaign made the mistake of grouping identical twins and triplets in The Service as a backdrop to a photo-op: the media erroneously assumed that the image had been doctored. Naturally, the Bush administration was merely trying to appeal to a pre-industrial electorate.

By contrast, the banality of Warhol’s repeated use of the image of Campbell’s Soup is therefore pathic to the modern condition.

Repeating images of soldiers in order to give the impression that there are more of them results, rather worringly, in actual humans becoming a virtual army. It is also a lie.

THE SILENT SULLEN PEOPLE SHALL WEIGH YOUR GODS AND YOU 2004

Oilpaint on Canvas, 60” x 58”

The title is a quotation from Kipling’s poem, The White Man’s Burden.

In my painting, the central figure is supported by a US soldier struggling to push a Bradley Fighting Vehicle up a slope (The BFV is manufactured by the Caterpillar Corporation). The pilot is surrounded by the circle and square from Leonardo’s Vetruvian Man, which demonstrates the perfect symmetry of the Humanist ideal.

This figure, is, however, off balance. His lower part is naked to emphasise his own inevitable vulnerability; he wears an expensive cashmere sweater in RAF blue and a combat pilot’s helmet.

The clouds in the sky which he occupies are innocent and schematic in the style of a Mabel Lucy Attwell illustration, but his arm which is dropping cluster bombs is skeletal. The configuration of the cluster bombs, which I obtained from a website called The Ordnance Shop, is similar to that of condoms.

The bombs are falling onto the half-tone area, the media image, which depicts in its lower half two Iraqi soldiers in a slit trench with the tops of their heads blown off. They have primitive military equipment; you can see their steel helmets lying about. They have a rudimentary flag of surrender made from a piece of white cloth knotted onto a stick which has evidently proved to be ineffective.

Above them is Little Ali. During an early bombardment his entire family were killed and he had his arms and legs blown off. For a while Little Ali received a great deal of sympathetic media attention, but we do not know where he is now. He still has the rest of his life to live.

Along the top of the canvas a row of politicians applaud. One is expressing at least some degree of original thought by wearing a yellow, not a red tie.

AWE SHUCKS 2004

Oilpaint on canvas, 48” x 80”

The first night of vicious bombing of a living city with all of its lights on and cars still moving about the streets was Rumsfeld’s expression of Shock and Awe.

Like all US bombing, it was claimed to be targeted and accurate – he even once referred to “compassionate targeting”. Here are two views of the effect. You cannot drop bombs on a crowded city and not kill and maim in a random manner.

Fortunately the pilots are at 40,000 feet of altitude and only over the city for a few minutes. They are absolutely invulnerable and play rock & roll songs whilst carrying out the task which they are bidden to do, safe in the knowledge that they will be back in the good ol’ USA in no time at all, and able to take their families shopping in the mall or camping in the Grand Canyon.

In the centre, Bush swaggers over the abyss down a red carpet with gold classical detail to tell America about the possibility of war. I have pixelled out his face to protect his identity; also his genital area in case he has by accident left his fly unzipped.

CATECHISM 2005

Oilpaint on canvas, 120” x 72”

Catechism - Instruction by question and answer, especially on religious doctrine.

In the bottom third of the canvas the grieving women of Beslan bury their children.

The graves are marked by white wooden posts. Further up the canvas the figures dissolve into pixels, which introduce their own officious, arbitrary and busy version of reality. The white posts are echoed by the reflections in the river of violent explosions as the glowing city of Bagdad is bombed.

Above the people float the hooded torture victims from Abu Ghraib, in a manner suggestive of the Crucifixion. They are standing on Andy Warhol Brillo Box sculptures, which substitute banality for intellectual rigour.