“The Image in Question: War – Media – Art”

Exploring representations of war through re-mediations of the image, the photographs, animations, short films, and digital pictures in this exhibition ever decline documentarism. Curated by Antje Ehmann and Harun Farocki, the show is especially interested in animation—from its gaming and instructional uses to its curious ability to divulge the unconscious of an image. In Peggy Ahwesh’s She Puppet, 2001, edited footage from a Lara Croft video game discovers our heroine pausing, breathing, or floating among fish—in lifelike, lyrical wobble—worlds-weary, between throes of vaulting and dying. If sometimes mistakable for that gamescape’s vulture-speckled canyons, the smudgy dynamism of military animation has an ensnaring aesthetic all its own, visible in two selections from Farocki’s video studies of psychological war work, “Serious Games,” 2009–10. Adjacently mounted, 1 / Watson is down, 2010, and 3 / Immersion, 2009, dialogue between the deficient horror of simulated combat (as cadets practice patrolling Afghan deserts on laptops) and the overpowering vividness of virtual-reality PTSD therapy. One VR-goggled veteran, prompted to recall a horrific incident, pleads for the reenactment to stop, and when it does we hear applause: It is a live demo for therapists, and thus one disquieting scene of training has replaced another.

The disarticulation between vast death-dealing and precisionist fantasy emerges plainest in Allan Sekula’s photo suite War Without Bodies, 1991-96, where gun barrels on display at a Desert Storm jubilee in California become mammoth curios, poked at by adults and infants alike as at a petting zoo. Deceptive innocence of medium marks Kota Ezawa’s Dead Troops Talk, 2007, an intricate camouflage-like paper collage (war abstracted unto war-pattern) reformatting Jeff Wall’s 1992 photograph of the same title via computer drawing and 35-mm slide. In William E. Jones’ Killed, 2009, a looped sequence of rejects from a Depression-era archive, images targeted by aggression prove resilient: Edge-remains of hole-punched photographs radiate as from a cannon hole or solar corona.