Sheridan Griswold
22 August 2008
book review
Gaborone — Elin o'Hara slavick (2007). "Bomb After Bomb: a Violent Cartography". Milano, Italy, Edzioni Charta, 111 pages, Paperback. US$34.95, ISBN 88-8158-633-9. Available through Exclusive Books, Riverwalk.
In my review of another book, At War (Mmegi 20 August 2004) I noted that it was a book about, "Artists called on to portray war, in sketches, paintings in a variety of media, in sculpture and in recreations from war scrap". It includes art by soldiers in front-line ditches and "wooden spoons left by those cremated at Majdanek concentration camp in Poland, to Henry Rosen's violin, which was also rescued from the Nazis by Oskar Schindler, and a collection of war toys. The aftermath of war is here, too ... the memorials people erect to the dead." I noted that "250 million people died in the last century because of wars", but as many wars were left out, that figure is actually higher.
Bomb After Bomb is a work of art by elin o'Hara slavick (yes, she prefers lowercase for her names, except the "H") that focuses on bombing and uses cartography as its base, with layers added to create effects. She used aerial photography, military surveillance images, maps and other sources to create 20" by 22" pictures on paper using dropped ink, watercolour, graphite and other media. She captures a sense of war from above and through her approach allows viewers who might be turned off by the intimate horror reveled in photographs to consider the implications of war from a new perspective.
She is a professor of studio art, theory and practice at the University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill.
Her MFA in 1992 was in photography. This is her first work that explores other media. Over the years she has participated in at least 20 shows in different parts of the world. She has staged a show in Amsterdam with 40 artists on Violent Violence.
When elin o'Hara slavick began researching America's use of bombs, she found that they began in 1854 in Nicaragua. She was shocked to find that they have also been used within the territory of the United States. The most famous is the first nuclear explosion at Alamogordo New Mexico on July 16, 1945. Her painting of this is labelled We are our own enemy. Domestic bombing began in 1941 in Puerto Rico and continued on Vieques Island for five decades until 1999. Uranium tipped bombs were tested there and people living in the area, which now has twice the normal cancer rate for the nation. In Utah, Dugway Proving Ground became a testing ground where the Cold War was waged.
Some of the surprising incidents of domestic bombing occurred outside those associated with nuclear testing on the Marshall Islands (beginning in 1944 and still continuing) on four different atolls (and at Christmas Islands or Kirimati) and at different sites in Nevada between 1951 and 1992. Lesser known sites were in Mississippi (1964-1970), Alaska (1965-1971) and the firebombing of a block of flats in Philadelphia (instead of waiting out a siege against MOVE) that killed 11 people.
Firebombing is an old technique, used against many German cities (elin o'Hara slavick only features Dresden), in the war against the Nazis and in France between 1944 and 1945 where Napalm was first used, and in Korea where five million people died between 1950 and 1953. In Vietnam, between 1961 and 1971, at least three million people died. Laos and Cambodia were also bombed during this period. Bombing has been "ongoing" in Iraq since 1990 and Afghanistan since 2001. Odd that America's bombing of China in 1945-1946 and again over 1950-1953 is left out?
In Africa, American bombing in Libya (1986), Sudan (1998) and Zaire (1960-1964) are depicted by the artists' violent cartography. This is not to deny that bombing from the air has been part of many civil wars over the past decades from Biafra to Eritrea, Ethiopia, Somalia and in Angola and Mozambique.
This book has a powerful foreword by Howard Zinn, a famous and well decorated bombardier in World War II. In 1968, he was one of two people who went to receive the first three captured American pilots released in Hanoi. He is an historian with 24 books to his credit including his The People's History of the United States. He is a professor at Boston University. He is noted for saying: "Bombs are dropped because they have been made [I would add "or bought"] and it would be a waste of expended resources and investments not to test them". Zinn observes: "The means of waging war (demolition bombs, cluster bombs, white phosphorus, nuclear weapons, napalm) have become so horrendous in their effects on human beings that no political end-however laudable, the existence of no enemy-however vicious, can justify war".
This introduction is followed by an extraordinary tribute (pages 13 to 33) by Carol Mavor, professor of art History and visual history at the University of Manchester, England. The concluding text is an interview with the artist conducted by Catherine Lutz, a professor of anthropology at Brown University in Providence, Rhode Island.
The artist quotes a poem from Anne Michaels, Fugitive Pieces: History is amoral events occurred. // But memory is moral; // what we consciously remember is what our conscience remembers. // If one no longer has land, but has a memory of land, // then one can make a map. The cover showing the world is the last map that elin o'Hara slavick did for her exhibitions and for this book. The flag pins show the places highlighted in her violent cartography.
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