Contemporary War: A message from Afghanistan
"Afghan National Army Perimeter Post with Chair, Tarin Kowt, Uruzgan Province, Afghanistan", 2007-9. Source: Lyndell Brown and Charles Green
In 2007, Lyndell Brown and Charles Green were appointed Australian Official War Artists - as “contemporary” war artists in that immensely high profile tradition. They were deployed for six weeks in combat zones and remote military bases (both Australian and U.S. bases) across Iraq, the Gulf and Afghanistan, later finishing a 33-painting commission and a series of mural-size photographs documenting those wars for the Australian War Memorial. As critic Ray Edgar noted, “If the Australian military was after a gung-ho endorsement of the Iraq conflict, clearly they had recruited the wrong troops.”
Their method was to work with documentary objectivity in apparently neutral but very large photographs of silence and stillness, or apparently literal, extremely austere paintings of dust and emptiness.
In a 2008 feature in the pages of the Melbourne Age, Andrew Stephens assessed their contribution as follows: “CNN, YouTube and the World War II, Korea and Vietnam films that have flooded out of Hollywood have brought war images much closer for civilians, vigorously shaping perceptions. Even so, such imagery emphasises constant action. In the art of Brown and Green, the results are wholly different: stillness and the “quiet looking things” of Streeton strongly characterise their work, yet there is much to be seen. Their paintings and photographs, made after a six-week tour of Afghanistan, Iraq and the Persian Gulf are, like their other work, complex and layered but much more firmly grounded in direct representation of what they saw amid a symphony of gravel, sand, dust and bomb-blast barricades. In some ways, they resemble grand 18th-century landscapes, carefully composed and steeped in one of war’s overwhelming yet little-documented qualities: the state of interminable waiting.”
Dr Lyndell Brown is a Melbourne-based artist. Charles Green is Professor of Contemporary Art and Head of Art History at the University of Melbourne. Since 1989, they have worked in collaboration as one artist. In early 2007 they were Australia’s Official Artists, working on location for the Australian War Memorial with the Australian Defence forces in Iraq, Afghanistan and the Gulf.
Date: Thursday 4th July 2013
Venue: Museum Theatre, Melbourne Museum
Bookings: Book online $12/$10 concession or MV member
Proudly supported by University of Melbourne, University Partner for theAfghanistan: Hidden Treasures exhibition.