A wide-eyed world has spent all of March, named after the Roman god of war, riveted to Russia’s depredations in Ukraine. The story of this annihilation has been a montage of image and text, with image, on most occasions, triumphing against text. Kyiv’s night sky lit up by rings of eerie, concentric light from Russian rockets raining down on cities; smoky morning light revealing skeletal buildings in Kharkiv and Mariupol; a single, pearly teardrop on the cheek of a child about to be separated from her Ukrainian father; grainy footage of another child singing inside an air shelter — there is now a rich visual archive of Ukraine’s destruction and resilience.
War is not merely a conflict of interests among nations. It is, equally, a brutal contest among competing visions. And Art, in all its diverse forms, has served as a cipher of — a weapon in — this parallel conflict. The war in Ukraine has not been an exception. The letter, ‘Z’ — The Economist speculated that it stood for ‘zapad’ or West in Russian — has emerged as the most graphic logo of endorsement of Russia’s pillage. This fearsome sign has been spotted on a range of surfaces; on cold steel — that of armoured tanks — as well as on soft fabric — a Russian gymnast stood next to his Ukrainian competitor with ‘Z’ marking the spot on his shirt. Ukraine has effectively countered this Russian propaganda by weaponizing heart-rending images of human suffering.
Art and/as War has a long and fascinating history. In fact, it would not be facile to argue that war is a reliable register of the evolution and the changing contours of the means of production, dissemination and consumption of Art. Painting, for instance, was discernibly indoctrinated into the theatre of the First World War: World War I and the Visual Arts, an impressive exhibition organized by The Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York, brought together a body of artworks some years ago that served as a reminder of not only the importance of art as a chronological catalogue of cataclysm but also its latent function as an arsenal. Here, while Der Krieg, Otto Dix’s seminal reproduction of the horror of trench warfare, embodied the spirit of artistic denouncement of war and its patronage by profiteering enterprises, there were also artists, such as Filippo Tommaso Marinetti, who were shrill proponents of participation in the bloodshed. Interestingly, the exhibition also takes note of the production of textiles with motifs — the antecedents of Russia’s ‘Z’ — to boost patriotism and morale.
Twenty years later, the paintbrush had more or less been discarded for the camera: the Second World War was, undoubtedly, exhaustively photographed and generated, along with the American Civil War, some of the most iconic printed images of modern conflict. Here too, there is evidence of a simultaneous artistic battle: the poignancy of Yevgeny Khaldei’s famous photograph of Russian soldiers raising the Red Flag over the remains of the Reichstag challenges the morbidity embedded in the Warsaw Ghetto Boy, the work of a German photographer, probably Franz Konrad, that captures the chilling moment of Polish Jews, including a child with raised arms, being rounded up for concentration camps.
The waltz of Art — image — and War has continued since. Vietnam, Kaitlyn Tiffany writes in a fascinating piece in The Atlantic, was the first “Television War”. She goes on to refer to the First Gulf War as “CNN’s War” (CNN broadcast live from Iraq) and the US invasion of Iraq, 12 years later, the “YouTube War” (in which “homemade videos of gunfights, suicide bombings, and other violence, many set to rap or metal music” were uploaded by American soldiers). The war in Ukraine, a testament to the evolution of social media, has similarly earned itself a moniker, ‘TikTok War’, with Thomas Friedman of The New York Times and the venerable The New Yorker acknowledging TikTok’s disproportionate influence on the global consumption of the pictures of the ongoing bloodshed. Data confirm this hypothesis. Tiffany writes that researchers at the Centre for Information Resilience were relying — overwhelmingly — on TikTok videos uploaded by besieged civilians to track the trajectory of the war.
The key question, a query that has troubled both the artist and the politician — Virginia Woolf and Lyndon B. Johnson are examples — is whether this mass consumption of War as Art has had a perceptible impact on public consciousness. Have these images, say, energized anti-war movements? Can propaganda camouflaged as art kindle militant nationalism in a society under duress?
There are no easy answers.
It is generally believed that Vietnam, the first televised spectacle, coalesced anti-war mobilizations. Michael J. Arlen’s classic essay, “Television’s War” (The New Yorker, 1967) has immortalized — in text — the revulsion elicited by images of war and viewers’ complicity manifest in their eager consumption of such content: “[A]nd suddenly men were running here and there in front of the camera, the small-arms fire became louder and more intense, and once again — in our living room, or was it at the Yale Club bar, or lying on the deck of the grand yacht Fatima with a Sony portable TV upon our belly? — we were watching, a bit numbly perhaps (we have watched it so often), real men get shot at, real men (our surrogates, in fact) get killed and wounded.” But evidence to the contrary is not difficult to come by. Tiffany writes that war playing on television can end up caricaturing the hellish experience of destruction. She cites another essay, “Living-Room War”, published in The New Yorker in 1966, which argued that reality got distorted — diminished — by the Idiot Box beaming images of “men three inches tall shooting at other men three inches tall.” Interestingly, Arab states began to view the media as a potential tool of strategic leverage after CNN’s success in televising the Gulf War. Neither can it be stated with certainty that coverage of conflict — in Art and Media — has led to a decline in global conflict.
It is being hoped that the immersive — intimate — experience of witnessing the purging of a people on social media may cause a paradigmatic shift in culture’s perverse fascination with war as spectacle. But the very nature of this consumption — a deep, disembodied absorption of images from a distance — may impede empathy.
The jury is thus still out on the outcome of TikTok’s battle against War.
