When I spoke to Amherst artist Matt Mitchell about his 100 Faces of War Experience portrait project for this week’s cover story, an intriguing point came up. What he is creating is, in many ways, a war monument. Mitchell is interested in the difference between an ego-driven artwork and a public work that is considered everyone’s. He pointed out that no one tends to speak of the Vietnam War memorial as a Maya Lin sculpture; its stature as a monument has changed how it’s thought of.
Driving through a small town anywhere in the country, you’re likely to see a monument to a war. They dot Western Mass., too—small, uninviting concrete plots with columns, maybe a statue, some flags. Even though they’re supposed to keep us from forgetting, they become strange, half-forgotten spaces, seldom inhabited and quickly incorporated into the blur of landscape seen through a windshield.
They are also revealers of how we think of permanence, how we craft what is supposed to transcend the everyday. What does it mean that the creators of these spaces reach for gravitas with drably ordered symmetry?
If we are to reach for the eternal, it seems we often wish to do so without the offense of an overly personalized artistic hand. Perhaps this is because what is avant today can become, as real estate agents like to say, “dated” tomorrow. Perhaps it is because we want to emulate some of the buildings that have survived the longest among human creations, the carefully assembled edifices of an ancient world in search of the secrets of order.
And yet the result of all that granite grandiosity is too often a space that invites a chill wind, an austerity that connects present to past by reminding us of the continuity of suffering in a terribly distanced and abstract way. Of course, war is suffering on a grand scale, but it is often more difficult to grasp what that means on a personal level in the face of some monument reaching for eternity with mute stone and stern-jawed sculpture.
In viewing the portraits of Matt Mitchell’s 100 Faces of War Experience, something different happens. His group of paintings, whether or not it was originally intended to become a memorial or monument in the usual public sense, is coalescing into a unique record of our current conflicts. Viewing the paintings and reading the statements crafted by the subjects of his portraiture is simply a much warmer, more human experience than viewing even a monument like Maya Lin’s that manages to marry the public and personal.
The stiff and sterile whitewash of monumentality is subverted in Mitchell’s creation. Where the silent dead stay silent in those flag-draped spaces, they speak here, and they look back from the canvas; some of Mitchell’s paintings depict veterans who died in the conflict or who died later by suicide. Others gaze unflinchingly out bearing visible reminders of what they suffered in our names.
The portraits of Rick Yarosh and Chaplain Tim Vakoc demand something of the viewer. If you are a supporter of the conflict in Iraq, their faces represent the cost of the conflict in stark, perhaps uncomfortable terms. If you do not support the conflict, they are reminders of the terrible cost of the failure to stop Bush’s march to war.
It is just such things that war monuments ought to do. Asking questions, and never ceasing to ask them, can only lead to greater understanding of the human urge to war. Erecting dull, classically crafted tributes seldom fosters questions. It seems rather to create a notion that wars are only history, to be incorporated into the human landscape and left to their silent and stoic persistence.
Projects like Mitchell’s have another potential entirely. What is better remembered is easier to avoid repeating. The more the power of art is brought to bear to crystallize memories of war with faces and stories, the more likely we are to avoid having to create even more monuments and memorials to the ineffable horrors of human-inflicted suffering.