The ubiquitous depiction of violence, mass shootings, blood, and gore in video games and TV focusing on human wreckage has dulled our senses and created a phantasmagoric hunger for terror served as a form of entertainment. Now the ICE/GESTAPO occupation and killings in American cities look like a video game – but it is deadly real.
When actual wars enter our living rooms, like in Gaza, Ukraine, the Middle East, Darfur, or Congo, it does not take much to flip the channel. It is supposed to be happening “over there”, somewhere far away from our shores. But our weapon industry is supplying a lot of the hardware for the ongoing slaughter. Is it of little surprise that the drone was invented by an Israeli-American and has become the new killing machine of choice? The genie is out of the bottle, and what goes around comes around.
The title “Disasters of War” is borrowed from Goya’s famous etching series Desastres de la guerra. But unlike his (and later Otto Dix’s WWI reinterpretation of it in his cycle The War), this work does not show the gruesome carnage and devastation war brings on friend and foe alike.
Vintage postcards of iconic Western American landscapes showcase a hunky-dory, idyllic world, untouched by the “troubles” abroad. The peace, though, is on the surface only, and the images are overshadowed by ominous signs of dreadful things to come. Rather than the depiction of suffering, it relies on our imagination to envision the horrors to come.