Representing the Iraq War—boots on the ground—in documentary/artistic hybrid

Paul X Rutz, Purdue University

Abstract

This dissertation demonstrates that if done with care, combat art has potential to effect healthy change for audiences, artists, and in some cases the troops themselves. To do so it engages with American artists in four different media—poetry, painting, film, and dance—who use journalistic methods to represent the visceral experience of fighting on the ground in Iraq. I examine how these artists exploit and expand generic and formal conventions in order to represent life in combat zones and to help reintegrate troops back into the civilian community when they return home. I contend, also, that scholars of the humanities and hard sciences have much to learn from each other about the stakes and potential next steps for the arts of embodied perception. I begin with a chapter on methodology, arguing that biology and cognitive psychology can offer useful vocabulary and important insights to help us investigate why the artists I discuss in my dissertation go to such lengths to experience war personally or offer audiences the chance to personally meet those who have been there. I use a phenomenological approach, supported by recent scientific research on human cognition, to enact such a dialogue among not only Jacques Derrida, Jean Baudrillard, and Maurice Merleau-Ponty, but also psychologists James J. Gibson and Ulric Neisser, as well as neuroscientists Merlin Donald, Eric Kandel, and Antonio Damasio. The discoveries of psychologists and neuroscientists present solid, multidisciplinary ground for exploring art that seeks to represent these memories. Chapter 2 explores the poetry of Brian Turner, an Iraq war veteran, focusing on his 2005 collection Here, Bullet. As much poetry from past wars has done, Turner's work seeks to approximate the visceral experience of combat in a clever blend of rhythm, metaphor, and other devices. I cite the multidisciplinary work of linguists such as George Lakoff, Mark Johnson, and Mark Turner to argue that Turner's attention to embodied metaphor can afford readers important insights to sensations, changing recollections, and latent problems that come from experiencing combat intensely and over a long duration. This textual practice, common in combat poetry, presents readers with a problematic first-person model that is difficult (if it is possible) to evoke in traditional textual news forms. In chapter 3, I examine the work of Steve Mumford, a New York painter, who embedded himself with American troops after the fall of Baghdad on ad-hoc press credentials from an online art magazine. Looking at his work presents an opportunity for scholars and policy makers to debate whether on-scene paintings provide a view of the war that warrants a painter's repeated journeys into harm's way. I consider what his work can show, if anything, about the assumptions that correspondents, editors, and viewers make in composing, producing, and consuming images of the daily struggles on the ground in Iraq, and I ask whether the insights we gain from looking at his paintings are significantly different from ones we might derive from photojournalism. Chapter 4 engages with films about Iraq that live in a hybrid space between fiction and nonfiction, focusing on three examples: Brian De Palma's Redacted, Katherine Bigelow's The Hurt Locker, and David Simon and Ed Burns's Generation Kill. These films employ visual, aural, and rhetorical devices commonly used in documentaries and newscasts, yet they are shot outside of Iraq and feature professional actors. These films exploit the blurriness between fact and fiction not just for rhetorical advantage, but to more effectively pull a skeptical and visually savvy audience into their stories, inviting us to see combat on a character level. I argue that far from attempting to open questions about the nature of perception and memory of combat, each of these presentations advocates its own singular narrative of Iraq combat, but studying them as a group can prompt viewers to ask important questions about the supposed reality of events depicted in independent documentaries and the various kinds of moving-picture news. The fifth chapter, on dance, considers the work of a choreographer attempting not only to represent the war's action but also to welcome veterans with post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD) safely back into the civilian world. Victoria Marks hosts workshops between veterans with PTSD, antiwar activists, and artists, bringing them into her dance studio and introducing them to a range of verbal and movement-based creative exercises. The resulting vignettes are stitched together into an evening length performance, including call-and-response conversations between the performers and the audience. I combine neurological scholarship on memory with the clinical trauma theory of Judith Herman, Bessel van der Kolk, and others to illustrate that while this dance project should not be considered therapy, it can provide a powerful set of cathartic, communal experiences for veterans and citizens who otherwise would not interact meaningfully.

Degree

Ph.D.

Advisors

Duvall, Purdue University.

Subject Area

Fine arts|Art Criticism|Dance|American literature|Film studies

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