War and Healing and Art
The Euphrat Museum tried to teach an unconnected public about war. Who listened?
The bombs that hang from the ceiling in the small art gallery in suburban Silicon Valley are filled with bizarre visions of aquatic pre-dinosaur invertebrates from another age.
A 15-foot-tall bronze statue depicts a guardian angel with Vietnam-era magazine pouches and a missing leg. Woodcut prints of a dying warrior, a wall of ceramic cups decorated with rifles and flags, a child’s mobile with Soviet antipersonnel mines in place of hot-air balloons or zoo animals — these were all in the Euphrat Museum of Art on the campus of De Anza College in Cupertino, a city better known for iPhones than infantry.
At a recent reception for the artists of this new exhibit, “War and Healing,” on display this past spring, the faces of the guests examining the statues and paintings were even more diverse than the artwork. This part of California is one of the most integrated and multicultural communities in the nation, and the patrons reflected that: turbaned Sikhs, Chinese, Filipinos, Indians and South Asians, black and white.
This pleased Diana Argabrite, curator of the exhibit and director of the museum, who told me that the intended audience was not only veterans but also students of the college and the larger community. “I saw this as a great opportunity to help increase understanding about the long-term effects of war, to create a platform for campus and community dialogue and reflection,” she said.
Veterans’ programs that use art as therapy are springing up around the country: writing workshops from New York to San Diego, classes where old uniforms are shredded and turned into paper. These programs, however, tend to focus inward. Their goal typically is to bring peace of mind to the writer or artist, to help a story get out and ease the transition home. The audience for such work is often the other members of their workshops or the readers of their literary journals, largely veterans writing and creating for other veterans.
Contrast this with the exhibit at the Euphrat Museum. The artists themselves may be veterans and civilians who have firsthand experience with war and other kinds of violence, but the goal is to reach the uninitiated, to explain and educate.
Ehren Tool is a mountain of a man with short gray hair, a former military police officer in the Marine Corps who served in the Persian Gulf war in 1991, escorting convoys and guarding prisoners of war. “It was surreal to come back to the States and see that there were action figures, trading cards and video game versions of my war,” he said. Mr. Tool left the Marine Corps after four years and is now a potter and visiting lecturer at the University of California at Berkeley, where he has spent much of his time trying to explain this incongruity.
The quality of the work at the Euphrat show does much to bridge the gulf between military and civilian experiences. Mr. Tool has shown work at the Craft and Folk Art Museum in Los Angeles and the Museum of Contemporary Craft in Portland, Ore. The printmaker and self-described “political artist” Diego Marcial Rios has more than 450 shows in 30 years under his belt. Rolf Kriken, a Vietnam veteran and sculptor of the bronze angel, created the statues at the California Vietnam Veterans Memorial in Sacramento. These are successful professionals who are using their war experience as the inspiration for art.
So what are they trying to teach us?
Elizabeth Travelslight is an art teacher who was struck by the enthusiasm that Afghan children show for toylike submunitions. In her classes, she told me that she struggled to find ways to engage her American students, but that these Afghan children were fascinated by Dragon’s Teeth, airdropped scatterable antipersonnel mines that were used by the Soviets in the 1980s. In her work “Green Parrots,” those mines form a candy-color display suitable to decorate a child’s room.
This merging of civilian and military experience is a common theme. Giuseppe Pellicano, an Army veteran who served in Kosovo and now lives in Chicago, photographs everyday scenes — having a tea party with a young daughter, Christmas morning, getting a tattoo, visiting a grave — with an enormous frag grenade in place of the presumed veteran. Mr. Tool makes everyday items, small ceramic cups, decorated with running soldiers, rifles and gas masks in the shape of Mickey Mouse, the type fielded to British children during World War II.
Mr. Rios is a veteran of a different kind of struggle, the child of United Farm Worker activists; his first memories are of making picket signs as a child. His black-and-white woodcut prints depict warriors in the throes of death, tempted by demons, symbols of hope present but small. Mr. Rios doesn’t apologize. “People say I’m a fatalist, I’m just criticizing,” he said. “But I’m also an employment specialist for Catholic Charities. I help people, including veterans, get back to work. What good is it to complain if you don’t get off your ass?”
The steady consolidation of military units into a few superbases in recent decades, a consequence of the base-closing process, has reduced the opportunities for the average American citizen to interact with the active-duty military. Can an art exhibit in Cupertino, where there is almost no military presence, help fill the gap? How much can you actually teach a civilian about war? This is a matter of debate among veterans.
“The best stories I have about the cups is when someone with no war experience gives the cup to someone they love with war experience,” Mr. Tool said. “In a few cases the cups have been a place to start a conversation about the unspeakable.”
He remains philosophical, though. “I think if it was possible to communicate the horrors of war, my grandfather would not be a vet.”
This article first appeared at The New York Times.
