2009 AAANZ Conference Abstracts - The Art Association of Australia ...

of archival footage registering the suffering and desecration of
bodies in death or near death; in Hiroshima Mon Amour, the
historical fact of the bombing of Hiroshima is, controversially,
framed within a fictional narrative the film mixes documentary
images and footage drawn from older feature films relating to the
bombing of Hiroshima into its staging of an encounter between
a French woman and a Japanese man. The great difficulties that
Resnais’s picturing of twentieth-century atrocities may continue
to pose for us are signalled by one of his commentators,
Emma Wilson, when she writes: Resnais risks lyricism and
aestheticism in representing a real excess of horror. Here,
while considering the strikingly different‹yet in certain respects
consistent‹approaches to the cinematic representation of
violence and warfare that are traversed in these films, as well as
some of the criticisms to which they have given rise, I will focus
on the question of the extent to which the subject matter of
these films brings with it a particular violence at the level of the
film-making itself and, if so, how we might attempt to evaluate
such a violence now.
Morgan Thomas is a Lecturer at the University of Canterbury.
6. Reflecting the Vietnam War: How Have Self-Portraits
Shaped Official War Art
Sam Bowker
Self-portraiture provides a means of intensely personalizing the
first-hand experience of war. This is especially important for
public audiences who risk detachment from these realities due
to the strategic directions of twenty-first century warfare.
The prevalence of self-portraits in the art collection of the AWM
gradually increases over the course of the twentieth century.
Very few were openly presented in the First World War, but
by the time of the Vietnam War, the Gulf War, and East Timor,
self-portraits emerged as important interpretative devices. This
observation reflects broader shifts in the collection-building
emphasis of the AWM over the last century, and proposes a
potential direction for official war artists yet to be commissioned.
This paper will examine the implications of self-portraiture within
the unique public role of the Australian War Memorial. It shall
centre upon the pivotal role of the Vietnam War, in which no
self-portraits were produced by the official war artists (Kenneth
McFadyen and Bruce Fletcher). Instead, self-portraits feature
across a series of powerful autobiographic statements by
Vietnam War veterans.
Building on the work of Ann-Mari Jordens (1987), this paper will
then demonstrate what these self-portraits reveal for today’s
audiences, and examine why the official war artists in Vietnam
produced no comparable images. This paper will then discuss
this particular legacy of the Vietnam War in the AWM’s art
collection. Notably, it will reveal how self-portraiture has been
featured by subsequent official war artists, including those
recently appointed by the Imperial War Museum in London.
Sam Bowker is a PhD candidate in Art History at The Australian
National University, and also teaches Art Theory for the School
of Art. His previous work for the National Portrait Gallery
and National Library of Australia initiated his interest in the
implications and applications of self-portraiture. His PhD thesis
examines ‘Self-Portraiture and War’, and will be submitted in
2010.
7. Unofficial Artist: George Gittoes’ Unconventional View
of the Australian Soldier
Dr Peter Londey
George Gittoes has never been an Australian Official War Artist,
yet he has produced a body of work – art, photography, film –
over the last twenty years which rivals any artist’s attempt to
depict and interpret the diverse roles of the Australian military.
Drawing inspiration, as Joanna Mendelssohn has commented,
from the anti-war romantic tradition of Goya and 20th century
German Expressionism, Gittoes has used a range of different
media to dissect and interrogate the role of Australian soldiers
when they enter the world of other people’s conflicts and when
they themselves are the belligerents.
Gittoes’ work differs from that of most official artists in its
attempt to place the work of the military overseas in a historical
context. This is partly because of the range of operations
which he has observed first-hand: he has visited peacekeeping
operations in the Middle East, Western Sahara, Yugoslavia,
Cambodia, Somalia, Rwanda, and East Timor, and made
repeated visits to Iraq, Afghanistan, and Pakistan. The nature
of his work also derives from his deep humanity as an observer
– seen also in earlier work, for example in Nicaragua – which
always leads him to contemplate the human situation which has
provoked the need for peacekeeping or which subsists in a time
of war.
The result of this is a deeply-felt contextualisation of the
Australian military experience, a contextualisation which in some
respects runs counter to the dominant paradigms of military
commemoration in Australia.
Peter Londey is a Lecturer in Classics and Ancient History, in
the School of Humanities at The Australian National University.
He researches in ancient Greek history, including the history
of Delphi and the ancient history of the Gallipoli peninsula.
However, he also worked for many years as a historian at the
Australian War Memorial, developing an interest in peacekeeping
and writing a narrative history of Australian peacekeeping, Other
people’s wars (Allen and Unwin, 2004). He first interviewed
George Gittoes in 1993 and has maintained contact ever since.
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