https://www.laweekly.com/art-event-pick-war-art-and-visual-culture-symposium-at-torrance-art-museum/
War is not healthy for children and other living things, the classic sign says, and we don’t need more evidence to prove it. But considering that an entire generation has come of age, with another close behind, in a world in which America has never not been at war, it does seem worth investigating the mechanisms by which this is communicated, internalized, and expressed in our culture.
In conjunction with the ongoing exhibition GENERATION W(ar), the Torrance Art Museum hosts War, Art and Visual Culture, a free, one-day symposium addressing today’s images of war, terror, and political violence. Shaun Gladwell, VR and video artist, and a former Australian Official War Artist, will be a keynote speaker, as will international expert on war and art, Dr. Laura Brandon, now retired from the Canadian War Museum. Other panels will include addresses from TAM director Max Presneill, who also co-curated the museum exhibition with Ichiro Irie, and GENERATION W(ar) artist Allison Stewart.
The crossover between depictions of war and the creation of art is not commonly apparent. Often art addressing war is overtly political or even activist in nature, it is not typically nuanced, semiotic, ambivalent, aestheticized, humorous, or subtle. But with this thoughtfully curated exhibition, the artists each in their way manage to occupy more liminal, symbolic, and even witty territory in their conceptual campaigns. The idea after all was to not make art about war, but rather, to use art as a way to figure out the cultural effects of unrelenting wartime visual culture on young minds.
Exhibition highlights include Stewart’s prepper-chic “Bug Out Bags” and erased confederate statuary to Vanessa Beecroft’s fashion-plate military sex appeal send-up, Josh Azzarella’s counterfactual 9-11 in which the plane misses its target, Ben Jackel’s medieval Brutalist fortress sculpture, Joaquin Segura’s redacted tapestries, Kim Rugg’s reconstituted newspaper headline collage, and many other rich emotional, material and intellectual responses.
Torrance Art Museum, 3320 Civic Center Dr., Torrance; torranceartmuseum.com; Saturday, August 17, 10am-5:30pm; Exhibition continues through August 24; free.
artinconflict.com/symposium-la
GENERATION W(ar) artists are: Shusuke Ao, Josh Azzarella, Vanessa Beecroft, Harun Farocki, Melanie Friend, Shaun Gladwell, Ben Jackel, Jerome Lagarrigue, Dinh Q. Lê, Hillary Mushkin, Simon Norfolk, Kim Rugg, Joaquín Segura, Allison Stewart, Dan Van Clapp, and Yoram Wolberger.
