Human beings have always devoted much energy to slaughtering each other. The histories of these bloodlettings usually revolve around the combatants and their leaders, but off in the margins civilians get caught in the crossfire. With the sponsorship of the International Committee of the Red Cross, photojournalist Fred Clarke has been making a visual record of people who live with this conflict. Now, the former Nashville Banner photographer has a growing collection of portraits from hot spots around the world.
“Pressing Pause,” now on display at Zeitgeist Gallery, features some of these portraits along with artwork from the Fugitive Projects group. The artists from this collective took up the challenge of creating works that respond to Clarke’s photos, which include images from Pakistan, Liberia and Lebanon, along with a bunch of former Soviet territories such as Chechnya, Georgia, Abkhazia and Ingushetia. Each photo focuses on one person, or perhaps a couple, even when they’re in a crowd. No longer at the margins of the story, these people are at the center of attention, their physical features clearly detailed, their dignity acknowledged.
While the photos often show grief— hands held to the face, for instance—they don’t dwell on disease, injury or disfigurement. Some actually capture a sense of beauty. A woman in South Lebanon wears a satiny blue robe covered with turquoise and lavender buttons. Another woman, this one in Abkhazia, sits in a small room lined with red velvet cloth. These little bits of pleasure keep the images from conveying a sense of unmitigated misery, and they open the portraits to a full range of human feeling.
When you go from Clarke’s work to the pieces made in response, you move between realms of expressive purpose. Photojournalists tend to keep themselves in the background. Artists, on the other hand, place their perspectives and personalities front and center, so it’s no surprise that the Fugitive artists express a broad range of personal views.
One obvious reaction is to feel the pain of Clarke’s subjects, engaging in an act of empathy through imagination. Lesley Patterson-Marx does this in an exquisite handmade paper booklet titled “Interrupted.” This booklet unfolds with side-by-side pairs of pages that combine maps of conflict zones, silhouettes of figures from Clarke’s photographs and quotes such as, “After that day, I never saw my brother again.” The words plainly express the everyday grief and pain from these places. The map-based pages alternate with pages featuring eyes that demand we bear witness to these events. It is a forthright statement delivered in a delicate package.Lain York also shows great feeling for the people in conflict zones. His “Internally Displaced Person” consists of five wooden boxes, each bearing a boy’s face outlined in graphite, with daubs of white primer splashed across the surface. York’s statement underscores French Symbolist poet Stéphane Mallarmé’s association of white with the abyss; the color also brings to mind the Asian association of white with mourning and death. The boy’s face is barely there, a light outline easily covered up, evoking the tenuousness of personal identity when war destroys community, tears apart families and produces homeless, stateless refugees.
Other artists take a more analytical approach. Jack Dingo Ryan’s prints bring together maps of places such as Nagorno-Karabakh, dramatic photos of the Caucasus Mountains and such incongruous elements as a chandelier or the bullet-riddled door of Bonnie and Clyde’s car. That Bonnie and Clyde reference may seem out of place, but a connection lies in the background of the image, where a group of men look on. The remains from the gun battle became an object of curiosity, a spectacle eagerly consumed by a culture hungry for entertainment. That media hunger for conflict and violence has not abated, and it lurks behind media coverage of today’s wars.
It’s also worth noting that Ryan doesn’t show people in the conflict zones but rather pays attention to their physical, political and social environment. To someone familiar with Ryan’s work there is a striking visual correspondence between the rugged terrain of the Caucasus and the western U.S. lands that he frequently shows in his work. Another artist, Melody Owen, also plays up the topographic similarities in collages that layer western U.S. landscapes with old postcards of the Middle East, both arid places. Her collages, moreover, point to economic motives by representing the conflict lands through postcards sold to tourists.
Bryan Hunter, an artist and poet, made a simple statement by recording himself reading a passage from Thucydides, who described the Peloponnesian War of 431-404 B.C.E. in eerily contemporary terms: deceit and treachery, Thucydides wrote, earned more respect than honesty. Likewise, perversions of language became common. His observations apply to any place where the insanity of war has broken out. Hunter’s sly use of this passage implies the pessimistic message—“thus was it ever.”
By contrast, Hans Schmitt-Matzen creates a remarkably optimistic statement. “The One and the Many” is a drawing on mylar that repeats and overlays the United Nations emblem with the map of the world. Each iteration increases in size, reflecting the growth in the world population every 10 years since the U.N. was founded. Schmitt-Matzen’s reconfiguration draws attention to the symbol’s beauty, which recalls the hope that the U.N. inspired at the time the emblem was designed. After years of dismissing the U.N. as ineffective, it is refreshing to remember the potential this body once had to inspire people.
The Fugitive artists translate Clarke’s photos into imagined emotional lives and articulate some wider social implications. With many of the pieces expressing the sharp pain spread around the globe, Schmitt-Matzen’s hopefulness can seem out of place—but it may not be so anachronistic when you consider people such as Fred Clarke, who dedicate themselves to recognizing people who would otherwise be pushed into history’s margins.
Fred Clarke and several of the Fugitive Projects artists will give a talk at Zeitgeist at 6 p.m. Thursday, Feb. 15.
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