Untitled (Dresden)
2006
c-print
30 x 40 inches
via The NY Sun:
Confronting War Waged With Precision
By JOÃO RIBAS
September 21, 2006
The ability to deal out inhumanity with equanimity is at the core of British-born artist Adam McEwen's second solo show,"8 for 8:30," at Nicole Klagsbrun Gallery. A timely meditation on the cold rationality of the military-industrial complex, Mr. McEwen's shrewdly political show asks more questions than it tries to answer.
Yet by looking at the horror of the Allied bombings of Nazi Germany, and the post-war American boom that was its euphoric aftermath, the show makes the case that the link between profit and obliteration applies today more than ever. First raze, then rebuild, and as Kurt Vonnegut likes to say, so it goes.
The show is divided into two seemingly disparate parts: a series of monochrome paintings spackled with wads of chewed gum, and several C-print photographs of New York's notorious Lefrak City housing complex.
Each of Mr. McEwen's large-scale paintings is named after German cities decimated by incendiary bombs (Dresden, Hamburg, Cologne, etc.). Pieces of flat dried gum glued to the canvas — think of the typical New York sidewalk — offer a bird's eye view of each blank ‘cityscape', from the objective distance with which military might is wielded.
In "Dresden," for example, different colored wads sit on a field of deep black, beacons suspended in a sea of darkness. The visual analogy becomes immediate through Mr. McEwen's appropriation of a vintage photograph showing the firestorms enveloping the city from above.
This isn't simply gallows humor. The paintings have an unsettling source, as Mr. McEwen's compositions loosely follow the RAF's own calculations of how many Germans could be killed by each ton of bombs dropped (the answer was .2).The chewed gum makes the absurdity of this quantitative destruction visceral: lots of wads for high-saturated areas of death, sparse monochromatic fields for minimal damage.
In asking how annihilation can be quantified, Mr. McEwen asks an important question for artists in our fervent political era: How can the horror of war be represented? Answering that question is, in effect, to take a stand on what constitutes political art. {read on...}
