War, Memory, the Artist and the Politics of Language

Extract

In this essay, two U.S.-based visual artists discuss a selection of their works that represents history, memory and the trauma of war. They use different artistic media, aims, and methodologies in dealing with these subjects. However, their conversation converges on common ground as they discuss the role of art and artists in remembering war atrocities such as the Nanjing Massacre, the Hiroshima bombings, the Korean War, and the Vietnam War, among others. The conversation shows how artists express their interests in history by incorporating empirical and theoretical elements into their artwork, and looks at the way they explore physical, emotional, individual, and collective perspectives of war and trauma through art.

Though these two artists do not have firsthand experiences of war, they are motivated by historical events and historical figures, both distant and recent, that are pertinent to their works. Truong is interested in the way history is produced by individuals. In her video installation, A Measure of Remorse, Truong features an American-born Chinese historian, Iris Chang, and presents the ambiguity of individuals’ acts of speaking about and against the past. Slavick's cartographic drawings, Protesting Cartography, on the other hand, feature images of the U.S. testing ground for weapons and provide both well-known and lesser-known facts about U.S. bombings since Hiroshima. By presenting informative texts alongside images, Slavick aims to educate others about the U.S. military interventions that have taken place since 1945 in 60 different parts of the world. The essay includes a number of Slavick's drawings and a link to an audio clip used in Truong's work - a conversation among Iris Chang; the Ambassador of Japan, Kunihiko Saito; and a journalist, Elizabeth Farnsworth. The conversation was held by the Public Broadcasting Service (PBS) in 1998.