blood and landscape: ben quilty in afghanistan and at home

blood and landscape:
ben quilty in afghanistan and at home
37 c o n t e m p o r a ry v i s u a l a r t + c u lt u r e b r oa d s h e e t 4 3 .1 2 014
MICHAEL DESMOND
The carparks made me jumpy and
I never stopped the dreams
Or the growing need for speed
and novocaine
So I worked across the country
from end to end
I tried to find a place to settle
down, where my mixed up life
could mend.
Don Walker, Khe Sanh (1978)
In the 1978 Cold Chisel song Khe Sanh, singer
Jimmy Barnes lamented the despair and loss
of social direction of Diggers returned from
the Vietnam War. Ben Quilty painted ‘Barnsey’
for the Doug Moran Portrait Prize in 2009,
thirty years after the song first publicised
the traumatic legacy of battle to a cynical
generation. It’s not hard to imagine that two
years later Quilty could hear the words of the
lament in his mind when, as the Australian War
Memorial’s official war artist in Afghanistan,
he was depicting a new generation of serving
soldiers.
Quilty spent just over a month
in Afghanistan with Australian troops in
Kabul, Kandahar and Tarin Kowt in 2011
and was occasionally taken on patrol into the
countryside. He described the experience as
frightening and disturbing. He made numerous
sketches, took photos and made notes—the
essential routine of a war artist. While making
sketches of the soldiers, Quilty listened to their
stories, getting a better understanding of the
trials of active service. In return for this sharing
of confidences, Quilty made a large mural of
a rampant kangaroo and emu complete with
writhing snakes and diabolic skulls to decorate
the base in a virtuoso display of spray painting,
a miscegenist mating of street art with the
Australian coat of arms. The war artist scheme
generates work for the AWM in Canberra
—the mural was intended to give something
directly to the troops. Land Cruiser (2007), a
work that similarly uses the Australian coat of
arms, referred directly to the domination of the
land by invading settlers. The twisting of the
official government logo was popular on the
base, but its full implications might not have
been understood.
When Quilty returned to Australia
to complete the commission, he declared
himself a changed person. On his first night
in Afghanistan, the base was hit by three
rockets and an American servicewoman died.
Quilty felt and saw the tension in the troops
and imagined its impact—“I was there for five
weeks, the others had five months or more to
serve.” He spoke with serving and returned
soldiers and felt the residue of that pressure.
Like the war artists before him, Quilty recorded
his time in Afghanistan with sketches and talks
to troops, but he differed from the others in that
he followed up with meetings with veterans
back in Australia. Their stories changed him.
The sketches made in situ were
almost exclusively observational—Quilty’s
interpretation would be made in the studio on
his return. Back in Australia he talked to soldiers
and then invited them to pose. The men and
one woman were asked to pose naked, choosing
their own characteristic position—without the
protection of uniform, rank, equipment. Naked
and vulnerable humanity, posed in connection
to duty: they fear, they hide, they wait. There is
no armour, just the veins, muscles and sinews of
the flesh. Quilty was impressed by their regular
regime in the gym and the high level of fitness
he saw—the soldiers are constantly training,
literally as a matter of life or death. Painting
the nude, particularly the male nude, is out
of favour: it’s a long time since the heroics of
eighteenth century Neoclassicism held sway.
Quilty reclaims the tradition just as he has the
tradition of painting in the grande manière,
the elevated and rhetorical manner of historical
painting exemplified by Poussin and David
(this, despite the expressionistic paintwork).
The moral lessons of history painting are
attended to in the Afghanistan commission
and subsequent series of Rorschach landscapes
but the heroism and virtue of the eighteenth
century has been lost, leaving classical stability,
clarity and a nobility of ambition.
This is particularly evident in the
symmetry of the landscape paintings made
after the Afghanistan series. In his painting
of the Defence Force soldiers, Quilty does
not maintain the established tradition of ‘the
bronzed Anzac’. There is dignity but not the
fearless “one Aussie is worth five of the enemy”,
not the mighty Anzac who created mateship,
nor the tough-as-nails larrikin, disrespectful of
authority. Not that these qualities are dismissed,
but rather that they are added to. These naked
humans show the soldier who is vulnerable,
who is anxious after nerve-wracking tension,
the soldier who serves but holds back fear to
contain it internally till it eventually warps
personality.
Quilty depicts the human psyche
crouching in a foxhole protecting itself. Asked
to choose their own pose, one that they adopted
in duty, Lance Corporal M. sprawls like a
warrior on a temple pediment, but without the
marble skin he is vulnerable. “The pose for this
painting was chosen by Captain S. and reflects a
memorable and terrifying experience he had as
an officer in the Australian Army in 2011”, says
Quilty. “Under constant fire from insurgents in
the Helmand Province in Afghanistan, Captain
S. spent eighteen hours taking cover behind
a low mud-brick wall.” Captain Kate Porter,
the only woman soldier in the group is shown
Opposite: Ben Quilty,
Lance Corporal M, after Afghanistan, 2012
Below: Ben Quilty,
Air Commodore John Oddie,
after Afghanistan no. 3, 2012
Page 38: Ben Quilty,
Captain Kate Porter, after Afghanistan, 2012
Photos courtesy the artist and Jan Murphy Gallery, Brisbane
stiffly posed with her arm defensively in front
of her. Behind her, an ominous black shadow
serves as a morbid reminder of human frailty.
The paintings in the touring
exhibition After Afghanistan are bold, graphic
and expressionistic, built with oozing clots of
paint and powerful brushstrokes of red, black,
purple and brown. Paint, inevitably in Quilty’s
work, is his prime vehicle for conveying feeling.
Dribbles strike a lugubrious note in many of
these works, particularly the portrait of
Air Commodore John Oddie. Blood? Tears?
Paint? The over ripe flesh colours speak
of corporeal tension, as does the muscular
contours of thick impasto, relieved by the
innately sensitive beauty of the glossy, turgid,
paint surfaces. Drama is created via jumps
between thick and thin areas of paint, as well
as the striking contrasts in colour and the tight
framing of the figure. This body of work marks
a milestone in Quilty’s technique in terms of
his greatly varied paint facture and in painting
directly from life rather than from photographs.
His visceral technique supports the emotional
response of the subjects to their wartime
experience and to a sympathetic interpretation
of their state of mind by the viewer.
This is not the neat-edged sexuality of
Lucian Freud, nor is it quite the meaty animus
of Francis Bacon, though both are clearly
antecedents. Quilty’s soldiers exhibit a certain
fatalism, a degree of introversion. Wilhelm, the
disillusioned officer and narrator on the German
TV drama Generation War, which deals with
conflicts of conscience in the Hitler era, noted
that the stress of war is not about the action; it’s
about the waiting. The masterwork of the show
is perhaps the portrait of Trooper Daniel Spain.
His face, sketched on bare canvas with a few
incisive lines of colour, is placed next to a black
cloud. The metaphor is graphic, immediate
and devastating.
The muscle car of Quilty’s earlier
works, the Torana, has been replaced by a
savaged and torn Bushmaster, the army’s
armoured vehicle designed to protect its
occupants like a carapace around a quivering
humanity. The broken vehicle matches the
broken men. A personal favourite is the image
of the pullulating base at Kandahar, a floating
black cloud seething with malevolent energy
that is half Howl’s moving castle and half the
whirling Tasmanian devil of Looney Tunes
fame.
Post-traumatic stress disorder or PTSD is a
factor of the kind of rigidly defined manhood
that Quilty has explored in previous works and
he has used the commission to draw attention
to the Australian veterans suffering from the
condition. One cannot but think that in some
ways the Australian War Memorial got more
than it bargained for. Quilty insists that he was
encouraged to comment without any agenda.
The portraits confront the Anzac legend, revise
and enlarge it, moving from the mythological,
forged in fire, bronzed Anzac of the last century,
to something more realistic reflecting who
we are today and what we know of stress.
In that sense the portraits reflect the reshaping
and reconfiguring of existing political and
cultural systems in the post-war era. Seeing
Afghanistan, Quilty became aware of its dry,
rugged landscape and its history of resilience
which he felt had affinities to Australia.
Transparent might after Afghanistan (2011),
refers to this correlation. To a reproduction of
Arthur Streeton’s iconic The purple noon’s
transparent might (1896), Quilty added a range
of rocky mountains and to ensure recognition,
the inscription “Afghanistan”. Interestingly
Streeton’s title, taken from Percy Bysshe
Shelley’s poem ‘Stanzas Written in Dejection,
near Naples’ refers to the power of human
emotion to infect thoughts of nature. Looking
at the gullies and scrub of Afghanistan, Quilty
imagined parallels with Australia both in the
arid geography and in seeing a conquered
land. The idea of indigenous resistance and the
bloody earth as a witness to human tribulation
and conflict was to drive the following series of
works, the Rorschach landscapes. The largest
of this series will be displayed in the Adelaide
Biennial of Australian Art, and will add an eerie
sublime to the theme of the exhibition Dark
Heart. These pictures show surreal landscapes
perhaps made uneasy by human passions.
Fairy Bower Rorschach (2012), for
example, notes the site of a nineteenth century
massacre of indigenous peoples. Quilty’s dark
heart for Adelaide is an island (presumably
Australia) which, like the portrait of Kandahar
in his Afghanistan series, shows geography as a
place imbued and shaped by human emotions.
The painting shows a lush, yet gloomy island
against a twilight sky. For me it conjured up
Joseph Conrad’s Heart of Darkness, with its
implicit colonial violence and racism, and in the
idea that what we see of the world outside us is
actually a projection of what is inside. Quilty’s
After Afghanistan focused on portraits, but
in the Rorschach landscapes, people are near
invisible. That’s the point. Knowing something
of the history of the Kandahar base, Fairy
Bower or our island home, we people it with
emotional forces according to our beliefs and
our conscience. The Rorschach is a means to
bring this about free association.
The “frontier wars”, as they are
called, between settlers and indigenous
inhabitants in Australia in nineteenth century
are a topic of much contemporary debate.
There are no fallen soldiers from these wars
recorded in the Australian War Memorial.
The indigenous peoples from this moment are
absent. Representation of the frontier wars
in the memorial is currently being argued
between academics, indigenous people and the
institution. Despite the ‘Sorry speech’ by Prime
Minister Kevin Rudd in 2007, it is clear that
Australia still has unresolved issues deriving
from the clash of cultures in the nineteenth
century. Australia’s own case of national PTSD
is unlikely to be resolved with the change of
government and what seems like a coming
time of revisionism. The school curriculum is
under scrutiny with indications of a return to
the nationalist platform of the Howard era
—reintroduction of religious studies, support
for a colonialist view of Australian history, pride
in military prowess. Quilty’s work (and politics)
confronts this new climate.
2014 Adelaide Biennial of Australian Art: Dark
Heart, Art Gallery of South Australia, Adelaide
will be presenting the work of Ben Quilty,
1 March–11 May.

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