A Battle of Ideas
Artist explores how allegory alters our understanding of war and suffering
by David Maddox
At first glance, Joseph Peragine has a curious obsession with rabbits. He ties together the pieces in his Cheekwood show with parallel correspondences between rabbits and people, rabbits and battle tanks. Through association and replacement, these animals occupy an ominous space, where painful subjects such as war and suffering become even more poignant.
The exhibit contains several connected elements: three large oil paintings of rabbits alive, dead or in an ambiguous state of vitality; paintings of decommissioned World War II-era tanks serving as monuments; diagrammatic paintings of Sherman tanks; sculptures of the same tank in cardboard and army-surplus canvas; and an animated video that restages iconic scenes of the Iraq war (soldiers at checkpoints, tanks and helicopters in action, a hooded prisoner, flag-draped coffins and the president speaking on a carrier deck) with all the people switched out for rabbits. The works overlap in techniques and content. The paintings of rabbits and tanks have a notably similar, soft style; the profile of a crouching rabbit echoes that of the Sherman tank; the scenes from the Iraq war are accompanied by the song “Praise the Lord and Pass the Ammunition,” which like the tanks comes from World War II.
Rabbits must be one of the most common substitutes for humans in literature, appearing in Aesop fables, Joel Chandler Harris stories and John Updike novels; they’re almost a neutral medium for delivering allegory. Here, they represent vulnerability and lend an air of strangeness to Peragine’s works. Their pervasive presence in the video, where they stand in for every human figure, suggests a world in which all experience points toward something else, like Emerson’s view of nature: “It is not words only that are emblematic; it is things which are emblematic. Every natural fact is a symbol of some spiritual fact.” Seeing the rabbits this way illuminates the significance of the tanks, particularly the ones serving as battlefield monuments. They are no longer weapons of war, but symbols of the fighting that occurred, or of qualities like martial strength or national will.
Rabbits must be one of the most common substitutes for humans in literature, appearing in Aesop fables, Joel Chandler Harris stories and John Updike novels; they’re almost a neutral medium for delivering allegory. Here, they represent vulnerability and lend an air of strangeness to Peragine’s works. Their pervasive presence in the video, where they stand in for every human figure, suggests a world in which all experience points toward something else, like Emerson’s view of nature: “It is not words only that are emblematic; it is things which are emblematic. Every natural fact is a symbol of some spiritual fact.” Seeing the rabbits this way illuminates the significance of the tanks, particularly the ones serving as battlefield monuments. They are no longer weapons of war, but symbols of the fighting that occurred, or of qualities like martial strength or national will.
Peragine’s substitutions in the Iraq war video suggest, more disturbingly, that this war exists for people in the form of allegory, as opposed to concrete events where humans die and have pain inflicted on them. It’s bad enough to think that people in the U.S.—the TV audience, if you will—see the conflict in a symbolic way. More distressing is the idea that those who prosecute the war might view it that way.
Supporters of the war tend to stress ideas, not events; they point to the advance of democracy, a phrase that sounds like the title of an allegorical painting. Peragine has turned the idea of allegory around to show how the case for this war distances itself from the war’s concrete phenomena. His deepest criticism may be that this conflict reflects a very modern dissociation in which tremendous pain and tangible destruction can be buried simply by submitting to a thoroughly allegorical understanding of experience.
