Confronting War Waged With Precision

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The New York Sun

The ability to deal out inhumanity with equanimity is at the core of British-born artist Adam McEwen’s second solo show,”8 for 8:30,” at Nicole Klagsbrun Gallery. A timely meditation on the cold rationality of the military-industrial complex, Mr. McEwen’s shrewdly political show asks more questions than it tries to answer.

Yet by looking at the horror of the Allied bombings of Nazi Germany, and the post-war American boom that was its euphoric aftermath, the show makes the case that the link between profit and obliteration applies today more than ever. First raze, then rebuild, and as Kurt Vonnegut likes to say, so it goes.

The show is divided into two seemingly disparate parts: a series of monochrome paintings spackled with wads of chewed gum, and several C-print photographs of New York’s notorious Lefrak City housing complex.

Each of Mr. McEwen’s large-scale paintings is named after German cities decimated by incendiary bombs (Dresden, Hamburg, Cologne, etc.). Pieces of flat dried gum glued to the canvas — think of the typical New York sidewalk — offer a bird’s eye view of each blank ‘cityscape’, from the objective distance with which military might is wielded.

In “Dresden,” for example, different colored wads sit on a field of deep black, beacons suspended in a sea of darkness. The visual analogy becomes immediate through Mr. McEwen’s appropriation of a vintage photograph showing the firestorms enveloping the city from above.

This isn’t simply gallows humor. The paintings have an unsettling source, as Mr. McEwen’s compositions loosely follow the RAF’s own calculations of how many Germans could be killed by each ton of bombs dropped (the answer was .2).The chewed gum makes the absurdity of this quantitative destruction visceral: lots of wads for high-saturated areas of death, sparse monochromatic fields for minimal damage.

In asking how annihilation can be quantified, Mr. McEwen asks an important question for artists in our fervent political era: How can the horror of war be represented? Answering that question is, in effect, to take a stand on what constitutes political art.

That Mr. McEwen does it by mimicking a rigidly formal style — the paintings look like classic Larry Poons — is an indictment of the kind of didactic sloganeering that often passes as serious political engagement, as well as of the opposite retreat into empty formalism.

The photographs of the LeFrak City housing complex take the viewer from post-apocalyptic landscape to its converse of modernist utopia. Built on 40 acres of land alongside the Long Island Expressway, the massive structure is home to more than 15,000 people. Known colloquially as “LeCrack City,” it was built in the 1960s on a site that had housed returning war veterans and their families in prefabricated Quonset huts.

Mr. McEwen takes LeFrak to be a product of the same industrially-driven corporatism as the Allied bombing campaign. The building’s motto, “Live a Little Better,” offers a compensating myth for the brutal post-war economy of which it is a product.

The parallel with our era of Iraq reconstruction and government contracts is tenuous but telling. Lefrak is an example of planning gone awry in a disorderly post-war reality, a warning to those who approach nation building with scarcely a thought of contingencies.

In his self-portrait as Sir Arthur “Bomber” Harris — responsible for the massive air campaign against Nazi Germany — Mr. McEwen can be faulted for playing dress up rather than confronting the complicated moral dilemma of a man in charge of bombing a population complicit in mass murder. But the position “8 for 8:30” takes in the well-worn debate about politics and art is interesting in any case.

In contemporary art, casuistry is often taken for conviction, and a general evasiveness in regards to politics pervades. Even as artists face the moral responsibility of addressing barbarity, a lot of art concerned with the vicissitudes of geopolitics today merely flirts with the intellectual cachet of being “political.” That’s now virtually synonymous with being “serious.”

Mr. McEwen’s take on the scourge of war lays bare the callous indifference with which it’s calculated. It’s a political show as much about World War II and modernism as about Iraq and Halliburton — without ever having to say so.

It also confronts how art and politics still struggle to be reconciled. Mr. McEwen’s response is to treat both the literal and the literary with equal suspicion. In doing so, he points to the kind of politicized art — resonant, uneasy, and incisive — that ought to be more commonplace on all sides of the political spectrum.

Until October 14 (526 W. 26th St., between Tenth and Eleventh avenues, 212-243-3335).


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