On 11 November the last ceramic poppy of the Blood Swept Lands and Seas of Red installation will be placed on the moat around the Tower of London. It will bring the total number of poppies to nearly 900,000 – one for each soldier from the UK, Australia and the Commonwealth who died during the first world war. The memorial has attracted thousands of visitors and international press attention. The photographs and aerial shots of the scarlet moat have been spectacular.
Some people, including Guardian art writer Jonathan Jones, argue that the installation makes it too easy to forget the crude nature of conflict, its ugliness and its reliance on the most abhorrent aspects of human nature.
So how much are we truly willing to confront when it comes to war? How much can we bear to remember? We do not have to look very far to consider the devastation and trauma inherent in conflict. We were forced to partially witness such acts through the videos broadcast by Islamic State (Isis). I suspect I am not the only one who would rather turn away from the thought of those orange-clad men kneeling in sand; or who would want a way to commemorate their lives without referencing those videos. So how are we to remember them, and all victims of recent wars, when the hideousness of violence makes it nearly impossible to look?
While those red ceramic poppies want to remind us of the transcendent power of memory and imagination, the Isis videos want to drive home that we are, in the end, no more than our bodies. That we are all shatterable and fragile, interchangeable political symbols knotted around a stoppable heart. Both the installation and the videos demand that we take note and look. In both instances, our gaze is the first step in receiving a prescribed message. Yet to watch the Isis videos involves a heartrending complicity with the murderers; our gaze would be an instrument in the oppression depicted, a continuation of the vulgar narrative.
I’ve long believed in our need to look at photographs of violence: the power of a gaze has the ability to reshape a narrative and turn victim into human being. Then came the videos. Then came the requests by the families of the victims to remember them as they had been – alive and active – rather than as they were intended. Yet in the aftermath of the shock, in the deliberate decision to look away, where is there to settle a gaze when turning away feels like forgetting? To look is to be a pawn in the propaganda. To turn away is its own kind of acquiescence, one that renders these victims as symbols.
For all the sterilised visions of violence in the Tower of London poppy field, it reminds us it is possible for art to provide a level of comfort. When my mind has refused to contemplate the full horror and trauma of the Isis videos, I have returned again and again to Egon Schiele’s Self-Portrait with Orange Cloak. In the painting, Schiele is a gaunt figure engulfed in an oversized orange jacket, the colour its own kind of weight. He stands with his face raised, emerging out of an unidentifiable tan-coloured void. His head is tilted back. His chin is angled up. His eyes are shut.
Schiele renders his own hand as dark-knuckled and skeletal, his skin as sickly and nearly bruised. An index finger rests in the crescent hollow of his cheekbone. It supports his head and pokes into flesh. It looks as if the nail has dug too deep and left a scar. This is a body made of angles and exaggerated lines, a series of interconnecting bones pushing through taut skin. Background and foreground are flattened and melded together: his portrait-self exists in an unnerving limbo. The painting is at once beautiful and terrifying, violent and – that tilted head, the shut eyes – reassuring.
Schiele’s portrait, like most of his work, is emotionally charged and garish, grotesque for his revelations of the frailty of the human body. He was merciless in his renderings, using art to contemplate questions of mortality, of what holds us to this earth and keeps us alive. This particular portrait is one way to confront what was done to innocent victims. It is inadequate and indirect, but it is an approach towards what still seems unfathomable.
Perhaps then, a gaze, even when turned elsewhere, can still contain a remembrance. Looking away does not have to mean forgetting but here – still – is the insistence that we look at something, at examples of other imaginations confronting the very questions that we cannot seem to answer on our own. Our gaze will be fraught and complicated, but at least it will contain an acknowledgment that once, a human being existed and we have not forgotten. That will have to be enough for now.
