Vietnam: Reflexes and Reflections; The National Vietnam Veterans Art Museum - Review

Art in America, May, 1999 by Eleanor Heartney

APOCALYPSE THEN

Vietnam: Reflexes and Reflections; The National Vietnam Veterans Art Museum, edited by Eve Sinaiko, Harry N. Abrams, 1998; 256 pages, $45.

Perhaps the most poignant works in this compilation of art by Vietnam veterans are five modest images by an anonymous North Vietnamese soldier. Following a routine engagement in which several Vietcong were killed by an American reconnaissance team, the victors opened their adversaries' backpacks. The U.S. team leader, an operations officer whose name is not given, describes what they found in one: "a sheaf of mildewed papers with delicate watercolor and pen sketches and a pocket watercolor kit similar to the one I carried at the time." The sketches, reproduced in this unusual volume, are skillful yet otherwise unexceptional renderings of life behind enemy lines--camp women making dinner over an open fire, soldiers scavenging a wrecked airplane, a female soldier clutching her rifle. The only works here by an artist from the "other side," these simple pictures were saved by the team leader--who is today a scholar in an unspecified field--for reasons that are still not entirely clear to him.

This unexpected cache reminds us that, despite all the movies, novels and memoirs about the Vietnam War, it is still hard for nonparticipants to grasp the human side of the story. How do stateside civilians make sense of a place where artists were killers, killers were artists and those who might have been friends in another lifetime were mortal enemies in a world turned upside down? And how does current visual-arts discourse, so well attuned to the antics of someone like Mike Kelley, shift to accommodate the work, and experiences, of a vet named Michael Kelley?

I served with D Company as a rifleman and machine gunner, carrying an M-60 along the tortuous trails that spiderwebbed the jungle and the big mountains west of the imperial capital. I was wounded near Firebase Blitz in September 1970, when our platoon medic discovered a land mine by stepping on it. That step cost him his legs, most of both hands, and, five days later, his life. It cost me a most unpleasant year-long hospital stay, the use of my left lung, part of my stomach, various small pieces of head, chest, and arm, and, no doubt, a bit of my sanity.

Vietnam: Reflexes and Reflections provides a firsthand account of the war by artists who served in Vietnam on the American side. The core of the book is a selection of works from the National Vietnam Veterans Art Museum. This institution seems to have developed spontaneously from the encounters of museum director Sondra Varco with ever-increasing numbers of vets who were exorcising their demons through art. After a series of nomadic exhibitions throughout the country from the late '70s to the mid-'90s, the still-growing collection has now found a permanent home in Chicago.

While a few former soldiers have achieved critical standing within the contemporary art world, most Vietnam veterans see their work enter the mainstream solely, if at all, in the context of antiwar exhibitions [see p. 142]. As with Vietnam movies such as Full Metal Jacket, Platoon and Born on the Fourth of July, which (unlike the maverick Apocalypse Now) have concluded their chronicles of horrors with a return to moral order, there has been a tendency to fit Vietnam War art into a more familiar art-world narrative of protest and political commentary. Yet as Lucy Lippard notes in the catalogue for "A Different War," a traveling 1990 exhibition which included pieces by some of the artists represented here together with Vietnam-inspired art by civilians and antiwar activists, artist-veterans generally tend to focus on personal experiences rather than on the laying of blame.

As a result, much of the work in Vietnam: Reflexes and Reflections resists offering easily digestible lessons. While some of the vets express their rage at the generals, politicians and capitalists who initiated and prolonged this futile war, others explore emotions that include survivor's guilt, helplessness, unassuageable pain, anger at the protesters who evaded the draft, recollections of the exhilaration of battle and shock at the capacity for bestiality inherent in the most apparently civilized individuals.

Even the design of the book frustrates the reader's desire for closure. The editor, Eve Sinaiko, who also contributed a perceptive essay on the history of war art, has elected to represent each artist with a page or more of reproductions and a text in the artist's own words, frequently culled from letters or memoirs. Small black-and-white photographs depict the artists during their Vietnam tours and the short bios give only date and place of birth, rank and dates of Vietnam service. As a result, except for hints in the written text, we have no information about the artist's subsequent life. Did he (or, in a few cases, she) go to art school? How do these vets make a living now? Did they marry and have children? Have the psychic wounds healed? How do their stories end?