If the Getty Research Institute gallery is the best small, academic space I know of, the Theater Gallery Berkeley Art Museum comes in a close second. Maybe it’s just luck, but whenever I’m up in the Bay Area there seems to be something on display, in what is basically a hallway (midway down the hall, are the restrooms), that’s staggeringly good. Last time I was there it was Yoko Ono’s GRAPEFRUIT. This time, a full print run of Francisco Goya’s Disasters of War (Los Desatres de la Guerra).
The Disasters of War series has come up a lot in conversation and in my reading lately. This series, unpublished until decades after Goya’s death, is prescient of the miliary journalism and photography that has come to be our window into war since the American Civil War. At the time the etchings were made, Goya was witness to Napoleon’s unsuccessful Peninsular Campaign, considered the first modern guerrilla conflict, a prototype of the asymmetric warfare that has come to define war in the post World War II era. This series also illustrates a concept that is increasingly important in warfare, the concept of “war amongst the people.” After experiencing the Total War doctrine of World War II, I believe that there will never again be fought a war that is defined by battlefield combat - the wars of today and tomorrow will be fought in bombed out business districts, suburban wastelands and the parking lots of Best Buys.
In addition to the obvious historical significance, there’s something honest and raw about the series, as if one of the world’s greatest writers was blogging from downtown Baghdad or Grozny, deeply, personally involved in the conflict he/she was witnessing. Goya is an impassioned witness, these images pulse with the rage and disquiet of someone living under inhuman circumstances.
BAM has a no photos policy - so these are the best I could sneak of the 80+ images on display. You can see the whole series on Wikimedia Commons, but the image quality is pretty low. I’d also like to mention that two of my favourite and Southern California’s best contemporary painters have touched upon this series. Sandow Birk’s 2007 series, The Depravities of War (CSULB UAM .pdf on the show), Ben Sakoguchi’s 2003-2004 series, Disasters of War.
Above - Wonderful Heroism! Against Dead Men! (Grande Hazana! Con Muertos) - Let’s get the severed head out of the way first. I find this image, and many others in the selection to resonate with the religious energy I’d normally associate with portraits of martyred saints. Goya elevates his subjects to mythological importance, these degraded men become symbols of all victims everywhere, and their unseen aggressors are reduced to petty children. The whole series is Goya at his most powerful - dealing in eternal struggles with a Hobbesian sense of the animal nature of man’s instincts.
Above - Barbarians! (Barbaros!) - Here are our unseen aggressors. French troops, shooting a defenseless man, whom is tied to a tree. Despite their swords, muskets and position of superiority, they seem pathetic and helpless. Their victim’s face is unseen, he could be live or dead for all we know. Goya’s composition and position as observer infects this faceless figure with incredible dignity.
Above - For Having a Knife (Por una Navaja) - This piece has multiple layers of witness, both the milling crowd, the unseen persecutors and Goya himself. The circumstances of this man’s “crime” are unknown, as a two century separated viewer, my thoughts wander - was he a regular, knife-owning guy caught up in a political war, a suspected agitator on whom a knife was planted, was he caught sneaking up on a French soldier in the dark, etc…? We don’t know, and we shouldn’t - that uncertainty is what Goya is playing with, as much as the indignity of this man’s humiliating death.
Above - Rabble (Populacho) - Chaos. Goya’s late works show a deep understanding of the limits of rationality. Living in the Enlightenment, he is rejecting the notions of progress that the elite of society believes in, here illustrated by the fury of the masses. Again, this photo is filled with witnesses and unknowns. The “rabble” here are witnesses become participants, and the man who’s corpse they are enthusiastically abusing is unknown and mysterious - he could be from any side in the conflict, or even a bystander in the wrong place at the wrong time. I think that is the lesson of these images - that war is anything but predictable, that it effects everything in its path, that it spreads and breeds chaos, and that uncontrolled it demonstrates how quickly the triumph of centuries of civilization can be wiped away.
Technorati Tags: Francisco Goya, Goya, etchings, prints, printmaking, Berkeley Art Museum, Los Desatres de la Guerra, Disasters of War, war, Peninsular War, Sandow Birk, Ben Sakoguchi, art, severed head
