Kill for Peace by Matthew Israel

Author:Matthew Israel [Israel, Matthew]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: University of Texas Press
Published: 2013-09-23T04:00:00+00:00

58. Duane Hanson, War (Vietnam Scene), 1969. Installation with five figures, polyester resin and fiberglass, painted, different accessories. Approx. 77 × 550 × 355 cm. Art © Estate of Duane Hanson/Licensed by VAGA. Courtesy Stiftung Wilhelm Lehmbruck Museum, Duisberg. Photographer: Bernd Kirtz.

Kienholz completed his Non-War Memorial in 1970. Though less graphic than Hanson’s work, Kienholz’s piece similarly debunks the characteristic pageantry of war memorials. Planned but never fully executed—in this way it exists as one of Kienholz’s many “concept tableaus”—the Memorial was to have consisted of fifty thousand surplus military uniforms filled with clay slurry. These uniforms would then be then spaced out randomly and laid down across a seventy-five-acre meadow near Clark Fort, Idaho.40 According to curator and cofounder of the Ferus Gallery, Walter Hopps—a longtime friend of Kienholz’s—the making of the work was to be a collective endeavor, involving time donated by artists, students, and peace activists.41 Nevertheless, once finished, the work was not intended to endure like a historical memorial, but to biodegrade and disappear. As Hopps explained, “In time, the uniforms would rot, [the] bodies [would] melt away, and wildflowers [would] grow on the site. Eventually the land would revert to alfalfa fields.”42 As a result, the non in the title bore a twofold resonance: it stressed how atypical the work would look in contrast to traditional war memorials—since it was non-vertical and presented tens of thousands of soldiers’ bodies in a field—and highlighted the fact that the memorial would eventually be non or nothing.

Part of the sculpture was The Non-War Memorial Book, printed in an edition of twenty-five, which recorded the elements of the sculpture for posterity. It contained photographs of each of the fifty thousand dirt-filled uniforms, laid out in twenty images per page. As an ephemeral memorial, The Non-War Memorial is a significant statement in the face of war and in the history of war memorials. War memorials are characteristically focused on concretizing memory and occupying the place of missing soldiers. The Non-War Memorial does concretize memory—by always having a written record of the piece—but its elimination of soldiers’ bodies takes away from the traditional memorial’s need to solidify life and assert the ever-present existence of the soldier’s body.

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