Artists Respond: American Art and the Vietnam War -- 1965-1975

Artists Respond is an exhibit of art relating to the Vietnam War on view at the Minneapolis Institute of Art.  The exhibit may be of some minor interest to people born after this war.  For those of us who recall the Vietnam War as reported on TV and the political turmoil that the conflict engendered, there is nothing in this show but ugly objects with painful memories attached to them.  Some of these artifacts may have limited interest historically ' but with no real exceptions, however, there is no art in this show -- merely nasty forms of anti-war propaganda.  Even if you opposed this war, as most of us did, more or less reflexively, the art in this show is completely uninspiring -- it doesn't tell you anything you didn't already know.  The Vietnam debacle inspired some minor literature, a few interesting films, and one genuine and mysteriously moving masterpiece, Maya Lin's Vietnam War Memorial on the National Mall in Washington.  There's nothing in this show that remotely compares to any of these few things. 

Most of the stuff in this show is, more or less, hideous.  There is a big mural showing women and babies murdered by American soldiers at My Lai, images of wounded and disfigured soldiers, a couple of large wall-sized paintings that represent Pop Art in its crudest forms.  We have magazine covers manipulated to show happy suburban families enjoying their leisure while atrocities are committed just beyond their windows, lots of posters decrying the barbarism of the war, and some unpleasant "happenings" or conceptual art:  poor Yoko Ono sits passively while people snip off her clothes -- the label tells us that, although Yoko was not Vietnamese but Japanese, she's still an Asian woman and so somehow the video-tape of this event is relevant.  Carolyn Schneeman gets sort of naked and coats her body with adhesive and some sort of white flaky substance -- this is fairly disgusting but only tangentially related to the theme of the show. (A better example of this kind of stunt are souvenirs of the so-called "mud man", a fellow who coated himself in goo and, then, walked for 18 miles along Wiltshire Blvd in LA -- this agon is documented by a number of pictures and a huge stack of wooden branches, also covered in mud, that the man carried on his march.  These things are genuinely disturbing.)  Predictably, the best works in the show are by established artists who provided the equivalent of "occasional" work relating to the war.  There is a spooky interior by Ed Kienholz with a TV embedded in a tombstone and another work that apparently involved strewing 50,000 war surplus uniforms over some fields to simulate the number of casualties in the conflict.  The best canvas in the show is Philip Guston's image of Dick Nixon scarlet-faced with swollen nose and jowls, shedding a single tear from his one cyclopean eye, as he drags the montrous pillar of his phlebitis-swollen leg across a desolate plain -- this is an effective image and brilliantly painted.  Barnett Newman's barbed wire fence encased in a steel framework casts some pretty shadows when properly lit -- the assemblage has something to do with the fighting in Chicago during the Democratic Convention in that city in 1968.  A lot of collages displayed on the walls look a little like the Weimar Republic work of Hannah Hoch or John Heartfield -- but are less accomplished.  There's a big predictable mural by Leon Golub and a few other atrocity pictures.  Jim Nutt's "Summer Salt" is effectively hideous and grotesque -- the canon for inclusion in this show seems to be that if something is really, really ugly it gets admitted to the gallery, even though it's actual connection to the Vietnam War is questionable. 

Curiously, some of the best things in these galleries are not part of the MIA show itself.  Two galleries at the end of the exhibit display works by Hmong artists -- these things seem to be part of a Smithsonian show accompanying the MIA exhibition.  There are a number of childishly colorful images of combat in the Hmong territories adjacent to Vietnam -- these folk art items, related to Hmong tapestry and fabric work, have a barbaric intensity that makes them quite effective.  In addition, there are some startling images of Hmong people in Virginia engaged in exceptionally realistic-looking war reenactments, apparently a popular activity -- these include images of napalm exploding, downed helicopters, and snipers shooting a patrols of other Hmong dressed up as Viet Cong or NVA soldiers.  Finally, three Louisville Sluggers bats have been painstakingly carved into images of the monk, Thich Quang Duc, self-immolating himself -- these miniature images cut into filigree in window-like openings in the broad part of the bats are very exquisitely made, and look like they have been carved into ivory.  These are beautiful and memorable objects unlike almost everything in the MIA show.