How the War Will Change Art

[xchrom]

http://www.theatlantic.com/entertainment/archive/2011/08/how-the-war-will-change-art/243563/

Rising evil is concomitant with the destruction of art. Before anyone had heard of the Mullah Omar, NPR described to the world the obliteration of the Bamiyan buddhas. No vision of the Third Reich is complete without mountains of "degenerate" texts set ablaze, the deckled edges of Hemingway and Marx and Einstein curling into black as the printed words fade into ember. Yet though the dogmatist and the totalitarian and the theocratic would try to use violence to destroy art, as Bulgakov once wrote: "Manuscripts don't burn." Indeed, Orson Welles famously observed in a Carol Reed film that war can facilitate the conditions for great art. But during the act itself -- of the squeezing of triggers and the releasing of JDAMs -- art almost by definition cannot exist in those moments. War is the absence of art.

Western life is generally one of music and color. No matter where one goes or what one does, music follows. The alarm clock, the shower radio, advertising jingles on television, car stereos, muzak at the coffee shop, clarinet renditions of '80s pop hits while on hold at the office, mobile phones, restaurant jukeboxes, sidewalk bands, chimes when doors open and orchestral nods when computers close. Color, likewise, is everywhere, and focus-group-tested to stimulate the pleasure centers of the brain. Cars aren't red or brown; they're "nightfire" and "hot chocolate." Breakfast cereal aisles are the aftermath of a Sherwin-Williams plant explosion. Our ancestors would have worshipped modern toothpaste packaging as the earthly manifestation of a sacred god.

This is the opposite of the combat zone, where everything is so ordered as to deflate the senses and deflect attention -- and for obvious reasons. Two-by-fours and eight-by-tens are hammered together to form rudimentary buildings (when soldiers are lucky), and slathered in the same flat coats of paint. What does Afghanistan look like? Tan. The occasional green truck rolls off an Eeyore-gray C-17, but lest you think the Army is having a party, the tint is called "olive drab," and means it.

When there is sound, it's strictly utilitarian or designed to intimidate. It's a rumbling diesel engine; the blades of a helicopter chopping air; the propulsion system of a fighter jet; small arms fire -- tiny punctures in the sound barrier; the earthquaking detonation of ordinance. Sometimes it's a cacophony of all of these at once. (Apple gadgets, I'm sure, have improved things a bit, but that's a stick of Doublemint between buckets of porridge.)