‘Mission accomplished,’ art history-style

The May 1 New York Review of Books featured a terrific essay by Tony Judt about how history matters, about how all the old axioms about learning from history still apply, about how there’s nothing new about the post-1989 world or the post-9/11 world. Judt persuasively argues that in our rush to declare a new world order or to fight a nebulous Global War on Terrorism that we’ve failed to learn from the past.

Speaking of history: Tomorrow is May 1, the fifth anniversary of President Bush’s ‘Mission Accomplished’ speech on the USS Abraham Lincoln. Judt never out-and-says-it, but that Sforzian event is the backdrop for his essay. Judt effectively argues that the hubris behind that speech was sadly, uniquely American:

“What, then, is it that we have misplaced in our haste to put the twentieth century behind us? In the US, at least, we have forgotten the meaning of war.”

Clearly: Over 97 percent of American military deaths in Iraq have come since the ‘mission was accomplished.’ Even the Bush White House had to admit it blundered (in its own way).

Judt makes lots of connections between Bush Administration hubris and willful historical forgetfulness, but not all of them are relevant to an art blog. This one is:

“[T]he twentieth century that we have chosen to commemorate is curiously out of focus. The overwhelming majority of places of official twentieth-century memory are either avowedly nostalgo-triumphalist — praising famous men and celebrating famous victories — or else, and increasingly, they are opportunities for the recollection of selective suffering.”

That is effectively an argument in favor of art and artists, individuals with voices historically louder, stronger, and more piercing than official commemoration memorials-by-commission.  Art museums aren’t just aesthetic temples, they are repositories of histories. For hundreds of years artists have been part of our shared human memory, especially of war. (And, as Judt would expect, European artists most of all. Artists were the vanguard of Western anti-war movements: Dada was the West’s first anti-war movement.)

Throughout the day I’ll be posting examples of art as memory-of-war here on MAN. If other bloggers want to offer up their own examples of such, I’ll do a post of links on Monday or Tuesday.