The smell was worse than fresh tar and I wore a respirator much of the time. All senses were under assault. The noise was deafening, like bomber jets taking off , and the heat of these fires was so intense (2000-3000 degrees), it penetrated even the windshield of an air-conditioned vehicle.
These notes from Susan Crile’s 1991 journal predict that her future artwork would give new meaning to the expression “looking like hell.” Based on the fiery conflagration in Kuwait at the end of the Gulf War, the series of drawings and paintings — now on exhibit at the Middlebury College Museum of Art — might be an eyewitness account of the end of the world. More than the deadening repetition of video images during that war, Crile’s painterly “landscapes” sustain the power to horrify: raging, uncontrollable flames, skies blackened by smoke, ruined earth and — on the part of both artist and viewer — the understanding that this environmental cataclysm was deliberate, motivated by hatred and revenge.
Crile, a New York artist and 1965 Bennington grad, says she was driven to depict the Kuwaiti disaster by both personal outrage and her need to counter public indifference. When the war and its coverage ended, she notes, America’s attention shifted to the next televised drama. By contrast, a parallel exhibit at Trinity College in Burlington documents the relentless suffering of people who can never forget — the atomic-bomb survivors of Nagasaki.
Shot by acclaimed post-World War II photographer Tomatsu Shomei, these 16 prints in the McAuley Arts Center graphically usher in this year’s Waters Chair lecture series, “The Legacy of Hiroshima and Nagasaki.” Unlike Crile’s apocalyptic paintings, Tomatsu’s black-and-white portraits are unsensational, but the resigned expressions of his subjects — and the accompanying text of their stories — are deeply moving. So, too, is their quintessential Japanese-ness: a simultaneous dignity of character and shame in victimhood.
Unlike the recently witnessed Gulf War images, Tomatsu’s prints are referential. They were taken more than 15 years after the August 9, 1945 detonation. Even now, as the images speak from a distance of 50 years, their impact is undiminished.
Though the timing of the Crile and Tomatsu exhibits is coincidental, both take place in the shadow, as it were, of seemingly unquenchable brutality — in Bosnia. And if the latest televised images from that conflict lack the visual drama of a mushroom cloud or towering inferno, they nonetheless attest to the tenacity, the timelessness, of inhumanity.
It’s a theme that artists, along with historians and philosophers, have tackled throughout history. Photography, being an art of documentation, has been an especially powerful medium for instant storytelling and consciousness-raising — witness the influence in this country of decades of Life magazine photos, the Depression-era portraits of poverty and despair by Walker Evans, or scenes from Auschwitz. Single images have had — and still have — a unique ability to show us who we are and where we have been.
But if a picture “tells a thousand words,” it’s ironic that, as Crile says, television images can cause viewers to dissociate and lose their ability to respond, to move from horror to ho-hum. Perhaps the important word is “single” — that with images, less is more. A constant barrage of visual information, like prolonged exposure to a smell, leads to a desensitization in which the sensory system no longer reacts. The same theory would apply to the overuse of violence in film. Crile notes also that, reduced to the size of a TV screen, events in the Persian Gulf became just one of many daily dramas. Perhaps the cumulative effect of too much reality is simply ennui — and a corresponding lapse in moral obligation to intercede.
The public’s acclimation to horror and its subsequent apathy is precisely what Crile hoped to combat with “The Fires of War.” After months of effort she was able to obtain the necessary visa for Kuwait and permission from the government to enter the burning oil fields. A full five months after retreating Iraqis had set the fires, 500 wells were still ablaze. “…Day was night, the ground alive with burning embers, oil rained from the sky and tar stuck to your shoes,” she wrote in her journal. Despite the hellish conditions — not to mention fear of stepping on land mines — Crile spent 10 days sketching and taking photographs. Then she returned to New York to relay her impressions to paper and canvas.
Her previous experience painting still lifes — which, she says, took her so long that the fruits and vegetables would rot — and abstractions of pattern with multiple points of view prepared her for these representational landscapes of destruction. Hung in abutting, unframed panels on long walls of the Christian Johnson gallery, the bank of images allows for different vantage points on the conflagration. Crile believes that the viewer’s confrontation with a 7 x 40-foot panorama of flame- and smoke-colored paintings will have a greater impact on the consciousness than a 20-inch video image. It does. The five-panel work called “The Fire Next Time” dispenses the power of both Goya’s “The Disasters of War” and Dante’s Inferno, and is thoroughly riveting.
Crile has mixed pumice into her oil paint, oil stick, pastel and charcoal, lending the surfaces of the works an appearance of scorched earth. In one painting, “Encrusted Tar,” she has used just that. In two more recent drawings, “The Beginning of Time” and “Primordial Scene,” Crile says she is working toward less literalness and more metaphor. And that’s exactly how she views the fires themselves — “a metaphor of late-20th-century destruction.”
The mid-20th century brought more destruction than the Japanese ever cared to see — in fact, the sort of torture depicted in certain Buddhist myths. When “Little Boy” and “Fat Man” — military euphemisms for the atomic bombs — were dropped over Hiroshima and Nagasaki, scores of thousands of people died instantly and thousands of others were doomed to a life of physical disfigurement, disability and psychological damage. And, as it turned out, to the ignominy of poverty and a sense of worthlessness — neither the government nor the healthy citizens of Japan, ironically, heaped compassion upon the victims. In Japan, to need social welfare is humiliating.
But not only the Japanese were collectively scarred by the enormity of atomic destruction. Each generation since 1945 has grown up with “bomb consciousness” — the not unrealistic fear of total annihilation. But in Japan more than elsewhere, the bombings spawned an entire genre of artwork. Tomatsu’s photographs were initially collected in a 1966 book called simply Nagasaki, which remains a monumental document in the history of photography. The 16 prints in Burlington are a minute fraction of the 12,000 he eventually shot.
Tomatsu’s exhibit is co-curated by Japanese scholars Linda Hoaglund, who interpreted the texts with his photos, and Alexandra Munroe, author of Japanese Art After 1945: Scream Against the Sky (Abrams, 1994). That book was written to accompany a still-traveling show of Japanese postwar art which includes three of Tomatsu’s photos.
It is also the name of Munro’s lecture next week — she’s the first speaker in the Waters Chair series about the legacy of the nuclear age.
The Middlebury and Trinity College exhibits present a nexus of art and the devastation of war spanning more than five decades. Different individuals in nearly every way, Tomatsu and Crile nonetheless have shared an artistic philosophy. Ultimately the implications of their work far surpasses the work itself: What you see is not all you get. It is the best that can be asked of art.
This article appears in September 13 • 1995.
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