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In a large square room, we find ourselves engulfed in a spectacle of crowded abstractions. Hung three high and filling all the walls in an even grid, the pictures emanate an almost suffocating glow, warm but unnatural, in faded shades of gold, hot rusts, and sour lead. Here and there, we also see more chilling passages in black and white as if a once-warm image has died on the wall. Soon we realize that the pictures are actually photographic and have clearly focused subjects. But we are not used to seeing photographs like these. Without the usual reflection in the protective glass, which is deliberately eliminated by the artist here, these images are as immediate as paintings. And each time our eyes attempt to recognize a new image, we must readjust our point of view while isolating the picture from the others to do so. Stepping back, the spectacle returns us to the exotic array of abstractions.
Eventually, most of us understand that this installation represents a photographic record of a war, the Persian Gulf War, in fact. And many of the images are familiar to millions of us who remember the 1991 cataclysm in the Kuwaiti desert. But that lightening contest involving dozens of nations, the gripping moments of its unfolding details, and the sickening horrors that frame it in history seem oddly beside the point in this room where silence almost hurts the ears. Something else is at work here, not another fiction drawn from an historical event, not another romantic account of man's inhumanity to man, but an older, bigger, and more ineffable sensation.
In 1991, French artist Sophie Ristelhueber traveled to Kuwait to take a set of pictures that she anticipated finding there. The war had ended eight months earlier but much of the destruction and debris was largely untouched and burning oil derricks still filled the sky with toxic smoke. Many of the pictures Ristelhueber brought back to France remind us variously of aerial reconnaissance, of satellite surveillance, or of Art informel.1 When her focus is closer to the ground, we spot oblique but poignant artifacts of human suffering: a vitrified shoe, some thin blankets, land mines in the desert weeds, tin cups filled with sand. Ristelhueber's inventory also includes many anecdotal pictures that could only belong to this war: a convoy of military vehicles charred to a crimson red along a mile of straight highway; the medieval geometry of Iraqi trenches in a field of countless craters; lead-colored crude oil dumped into hastily bulldozed pits by a retreating enemy that intended to light them; a wide horizon of the burning derricks they did ignite with flames reaching the height of mountains; the cruciform crash site of a jet fighter; a solitary television scuttled in the sand.
The artist gave her assortment of seventy-one pictures the laconic title FAIT, a word that means both "fact" and "done." On the surface, FAIT affects a cold, blow-by-blow, item-by-item record of the Persian Gulf War. But for all the familiarity of the various types of images, the human-interest snapshot, the military-intelligence document, the insurance-adjuster's evidence, Ristelhueber does not deliver her inventory of manmade disasters as either a photojournalist or a military intelligence gatherer. In fact, her purpose is not related. Despite the size and clarity of these pictures, their subject matter resists quick recognition, and we are affected by them differently than we are by the nightly news.
Whether they are presented in their original form as an artist's book, or in a group of typically one or two dozen, or all together, as they are here for the first time, Ristelhueber's Gulf War pictures are arranged in no discernible order. Although the photographs give us quite a bit of factual information about the war, most of it disturbing, they don't tell us a story, and they make no explicit commentary. In fact, the artist avoids logically sequential arrangements as scrupulously as she avoided horizon lines within the pictures themselves. There are no explanatory captions whatsoever to tell us what we are looking at or to suggest what we should think.
Our gaze is met here by a visual turbulence that makes us struggle to see more in these pictures than beautiful abstractions, the easier thing to see. We must work to find the information that is otherwise in plain view and that has us thinking longer for ourselves about what it all might mean. As our eyes go from one image to the next, in this deliberately overwhelming display, our relationship to depicted space-- to the ground in particular-- shifts radically to the point of vertigo. We cannot anticipate where we are in relation to each successive image without concentrating on them individually and by excluding the others from our field of view. But in so replete an environment as this installation, that is difficult to do. The unrelenting grid of their arrangement and the limited tonal palette of these otherwise vivid photographs notwithstanding, a cumulative turmoil results that, perhaps, mimics the chaos of war. To add to the general disorientation of the images is a regular, dull glint of metal that catches the eye throughout this installation. The artist has carefully painted each thin wooden frame to a mottled gold luster that complements, with an almost perverse seduction, the desert's warm sand and the war's brass shell casings.
FAIT belongs comfortably to Ristelhueber's corpus, much of which, though not all, concerns war. She is fascinated by scars of all kinds-- scarred bodies, scarred territories-- and by the more imperceptible scars that events and texts leave on our cultures and personalities. Traces is another word she uses often to discuss her work: the real, actual traces of time's passage on people and places, the disfiguring marks that real life leaves on our ideals.
In a later work entitled Every One, 1994, she juxtaposed a powerful passage from Thucydides's History of the Peloponnesian War with close-ups of facial and bodily scars. Thucydides's account is so jarringly familiar, that it could indeed serve to describe almost any civil war. We tend to transfer this familiarity, through the agency of the artist's forced implication, to the damaged flesh. We are offered, thereby, a brief opportunity, and without too much effort on the part of our imagination, to empathize with the wounded.
Sophie Ristelhueber's alchemy usually involves textual quotation. In the book work version of FAIT, she includes two random passages from the classic study On War by Karl von Clausewitz, relegatings them to end pages. But in the exhibitions of her prints, text has been omitted, and that is fitting. What we have in this work is a chance to feel war in a way that literature cannot approximate, least of all, a cold theoretical treatise. Ristelhueber's purely visual technique keeps us working to find the information. As we concentrate, it might be possible for us to feel something we might not have felt from either a presidential news conference or even a graphic television broadcast.
"We must not abandon the territory of reality and collective emotion to reporters, editors, and photographers," Sophie Ristelhueber once said in an interview with the French daily, Le Monde. With this admonition, she expands the social role of the artist while raising the stakes to a more intellectually dangerous game than most artists are prepared to play. It requires them to leave the moot world of the studio. What she has attempted, besides a monument for a war unlikely to ever have one, is the exercise of full artistic freedom on events of the day. The result teaches us nothing new about war and nothing we have not already known for centuries about the human condition. Rather, it gives us an unusually strong aesthetic moment in which we can glimpse something more humbling than war. What we see in her work may simply be the plain fact, the FAIT of our presence on the land. The sight of it can be more chastening, ultimately, than a picture of individual misery or an illustrated history of human calamity.
- Marc Mayer, Curator
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Cover | Curator's Essay | Color Prints | Bibliography & Biography | Credits