Since Australia’s official First World War historian Charles Bean remarked that ‘the big thing in the war for Australia, was the discovery of the character of Australian men’, the figure of the Anzac soldier has stood as the principal allegory for Australian nationhood and manhood. In the Anzac myth, the physical characterisation of the Anzac is bound to a psychological identity that accentuates his masculinity. The Anzac is brave, loyal and egalitarian, not fearful, cowardly or uncertain.
This masculine construction of citizenship has since been redressed by feminist histories of war that recognise the contribution of women to battlefield and home front. More recently, Australia’s military engagement since 2001 in Afghanistan has taken place against the backdrop of shifts in the sexual and gender politics of the modern battlefield. The political battle in America over ‘don’t ask don’t tell’ and debates about the deployment of women in frontline combat units in Australian forces have raised public consciousness to the diversity of gender and sexual identities in the military.
Yet Australian popular culture has been slow to revise the image of the impenetrable male soldier as a symbol of national strength. An assault on the masculinity of the Anzac or the rites by which it is consecrated still constitutes a rupture of the body politic. In this context, the work of Australian artists at war has enormous potential to contribute to debates about gender and identity, and so it has proved in the case of Shaun Gladwell and Ben Quilty, who undertook commissions in Afghanistan under the auspices of the Official War Art Scheme in 2009 and 2011 respectively.
Both artists were particularly well-armed for the task; their work has examined not only the visual expressions of male sub-cultures, but the rituals by which identities are codified in icons: the skull, the car, the motorbike, the skateboard, the breakdancer. The coincidence of both artists’ exhibiting simultaneously in Sydney – Shaun Gladwell: Afghanistan at the Casula Powerhouse Arts Centre (29 March – 12 May 2013) and Ben Quilty: After Afghanistan at the National Art School (21 February – 13 April 2013) – brought both icon and ritual under scrutiny.
It is an axiomatic quirk that the recording of a sub-culture inevitably results in its unveiling. In the case of Quilty’s Afghanistan portraits, the artist reveals the inner sanctum of his subjects’ psyches, exposing a dissonance between the private and public expressions of soldiering. As one of his subjects, Air Commodore John Oddie, remarked, ‘what these paintings do, [is] put on the table the thing that we won’t tell our families. The things that we won’t, for embarrassment, or fear, or uncertainty of reception, we won’t put in front of you as we walk down the street’.
This is borne out in works such as Captain S After Afghanistan (2012) in which Quilty’s deep intimacy with his subject affords him a degree of agency in his representation. Painted from life in Quilty’s Robertson NSW studio, the pose was chosen by Captain S to reflect an engagement in which for 18 hours he took cover behind a low wall. During this time he not only directed aircraft gunfire, but supervised the evacuation of a friend severely wounded in the battle. Yet despite the heroism of the soldier’s actions, his pose in the painting is remarkably vulnerable. His arched back presses his upturned chin awkwardly towards the viewer. His right arm, which reaches desperately towards his head, implies a mental anguish manifested physically. Though it bears a likeness to Rayner Hoff’s Christ-like Sacrifice (1934), Quilty’s focus on the individual, shorn of heroic symbols, reclaims the figure from spiritual allegory to be a tribute to the soldier’s humanity. It is a portrait that mediates between the soldier’s remembered experience and residual self-image.
Quilty’s intent to depict the soldier ‘naked, showing not only his physical strength but also the frailty of human skin and the darkness of the emotional weight of the war’ is realised in Lance Corporal M, After Afghanistan (2012). Beneath the thick skins of Quilty’s paint lie the scars of psychological wounding and an anxiety at the social dislocation that admission of this condition brings. As a consequence of his service, Trooper M recorded that he ‘was diagnosed with major depression and post traumatic stress disorder… It’s still a very stigmatised injury within Defence…’.
The subject of the psychologically wounded soldier – to some the antithesis of the heroically wounded – is the subject of few Australian artworks. Yet Quilty met many young men afflicted by PTSD or suicidal thoughts and part of the anxiety embedded in his portraits of Anzac soldiers is his own. It is also expressed in a loss of faith in previously redoubtable icons. In Bushmaster (2012), the bullishness of the Torana of Quilty’s youth is replaced by the ambivalence of a wrecked vehicle. In Kandahar (2011) a monstrous, unstable mass might stand for the difficulty of reconciling wartime service with civilian life.
Gladwell’s Afghanistan work is similarly concerned with negotiating the relationship between artist and subject. In his photographic series BPOV MEAO (behind point of view, Middle East Area of Operations) (2009-10) he explores the construction of identity through the symbolic markers – names, ranks, patches, uniforms – by which military roles are designated. His video Portrait of Mark Donaldson VC (2011) records the soldier in deep contemplation, transforming the frozen instant of a traditional portrait into a meditative exchange between viewer and subject.
But Gladwell’s work is more significant for its reflection on the rituals and mechanisms by which these identities are translated. In Field Strip (2010) two soldiers – one in parade dress, the other in camouflage – dismantle and reconstruct their weapons in slow motion. For a soldier in the field, this is a necessary act to maintain battlefield capability, but the significance of the ritual to home front ceremony is less apparent. The comparison becomes clear as both men check their gun sights with metronomic precision: both the conduct of war and its commemoration are performative acts. Identities constructed on the battlefield are fought for and maintained by rite, ritual and tradition be they on the parade ground, in public ceremony, or in politics or culture.
The question of what role the war artist plays in constructing and upholding these rituals is a subtext of Field Strip. In POV mirror sequence [Tarin Kowt] (2009-10) the focus turns to the artist. In it Gladwell and a soldier (two, alternately) simultaneously film each other, their feeds displayed on facing screens. The artist and his subject circle each other, shuffling to keep the other in their sights. The viewer becomes complicit in this physical play, forced to turn between two screens to both view the images and avoid the sensation of being scrutinised.
Gladwell recorded that ‘image-capturing technology is deadly as it helps the enemy see where [the soldiers] are. My camera in some instances was much more of a problem for people… than a gun’. He was, of course, speaking of the threat that technological surveillance poses to combat operations. However, the ability of the camera to shoot dangerous material hints at the potentially problematic status of the war artist. Temporarily commissioned within a highly-protected sub-culture from the outside, their role is to observe, record and memorialise, but they also posses the power to criticise.
Both Gladwell and Quilty emerged from their commissions with heightened respect and support for the military service of Australian men and women. It is a testament to the poignancy of their observations that the work of both artists has inspired public debate and critical reflection. Shaun Gladwell: Afghanistan was paired at Casula Powerhouse Arts Centre with another exhibition, Landlock that explored the cultural dialogues between Afghanistan and Australia through the work of Afghan-Australian artists. Ben Quilty: After Afghanistan at the National Art School met with a tremendous media response, instigated by a television documentary on the Australian Broadcasting Corporation’s Australian Story program that was updated and rebroadcast shortly after the exhibition opened. The second Australian Story drew particular attention to the intense psychological struggles of many of Quilty’s subjects post-war.
A critical tension has certainly emerged in Quilty’s practice after Afghanistan. Of his decision to highlight not only these mental battles but also institutional responses to such trauma, Quilty admitted that ‘there are some people [in the military] who are going to hate that I’m [speaking out], and I feel like I may be threatening the, the future of the war artists’ residency’. Whether or not Quilty’s work in particular poses a threat to the national image, it is fitting that both his and Gladwell’s commissions in Afghanistan have raised new avenues for debate about the construction of male identities in wartime, for in the history of Australian art frontier zones have always been sites for the exploration of an Australian interiority.
Publication: Artlink, ‘Sexing the Agenda’, vol 33, no 3, 2013. Editors: Joanna Mendelssohn and Bec Dean.