Backgrounds of War: A phenomenology of official British war art in Afghanistan


Mark Gilks, Independent

For the British soldier during the recent conflict in Afghanistan, “Afghan” did not refer to the geographic area of Central Asia or to the political entity that other political entities may or may not recognise as an autonomous “Afghanistan”. It referred, rather, to a “theatre of operations” (to use military jargon), to a collectively imagined space in which the military (and broader society) can collectivity realise its ends of being at war. How do we delineate, conceptualise, and understand this imagined space? And what, moreover, is its ethical and political significance? In this paper, I attempt to answer these questions by critically interpreting “official British war art” – a category of art which, in the contemporary British context, has been dominated by impressionist painting commissioned directly by military regiments or by the Imperial War Museum. I analyse this painting to explore what it can teach us about the collectively imagined (and militarised) space of “Afghan”. To do so, I draw on Maurice Merleau-Ponty’s phenomenology of art and on Hans-Georg Gadamer’s hermeneutic aesthetics. Merleau-Ponty facilitates an understanding of the (impressionist) painting not as an embellishment of the “real world”, but as—potentially (if it is a good painting)—disclosing the “enigma of vision”, of teaching us what we really see when we look at the world. Merleau-Ponty cannot, however, facilitate a bridging of the gap between the artist and soldier, and for this I turn to Gadamer’s hermeneutics. Drawing on Gadamer’s critique of genius and his notion of a “hermeneutic universe”, I develop an understanding of the official war artists as an ethnographer who, to some degree, belongs to the same lifeworld as the soldier he (sometimes she) is commissioned to paint. What the official war artist/impressionists painter discloses, therefore, is not an objective and universal “enigma of vision”, but a parochial and culturally contingent one. I argue that bringing Gadamer’s hermeneutic aesthetics and Merleau-Ponty’s phenomenology of perception together in this way highlights the unique sociological validity of the official impressionist war painting: the painting, as such, bears the potential to teach us what it is like to be a British soldier by depicting the contours of the World in which and for which the soldier exists. Thus, the painting is not an abstracted corruption of “reality” which would ideally be replaced by the photograph or by video footage; it is, rather, an ethnographic exposition of a lifeworld, capable of offering unique insights into experience and behaviour. Moreover, the prejudice of the painter is not something to be methodologically overcome but is to be exploited. Indeed, it is precisely this prejudice which constitutes the validity of the artwork – for it is a prejudice which represents, to some degree, the prejudice of the subject to be understood. The paper develops in three mains stages. In the first part, I develop the aforementioned theoretical framework. In the second section, I then explore the spatial horizons of the world – of how the world, as World (in a phenomenological-existentialist sense), is always bounded by horizons which define and delineate it spatially. I explore, for example, the significance of romanticised landscapes, of sublime mountains, and of the “fog of war” which mystifies and—for the soldier—validates the “theatre of war”. Lastly, I explore the historical horizons of the soldier’s world. Comparing contemporary impressionist depictions with British imperial depictions from the nineteenth century, I show that the soldier/artist’s imaginative projection of the World is often steeped in traditional frames of war, and that the World therefore betrays a deep historical continuity. I conclude with reflections on the moral and political significance of the collectively imagined World of “Afghan”. In particular, I explore how it enables sentiments of enmity, of tragic indifference, and of hatred – and ultimately, how it enables acts of violence. Overall, my aim is to problematize the soldier’s World, to reveal its existential contingency, and to facilitate a critique of bellicose horizons.

This paper will be presented at the following session: