| An-My Le
by Cynthia Henthorn
The Unique Copy
Small Wars (1999-2002) is a confrontation of
binaries on several paradoxical fronts:
-the banal vs. the emotive;
-the real vs. the simulated;
-the true vs. the false;
-the copy vs. its unique original.
Shot in a photojournalist style, Small Wars is a
stop-action dichotomy, a series of 15 black-and-white photos that capture the ironies of a
Vietnam War re-enactment.
Using authentic gear from the era, men replicate a war they never fought. But their
simulation of the "truth" will to a large extent be false:
1. No one will die, though some re-enactors are paradoxically already dead.
2. A South Carolina forest stands in as the backdrop for a steamy Southeast Asian jungle.
3. A "crashed" A2 isn’t really on fire; the smoke rising from the
jet’s fuselage is fake; the "crash" only a scene borrowed from a training
simulation used at a nearby army reserve base.
4. The emotive furor of war is re-produced by imagination punctuated with historical
study. There is no imminent danger, but there is also no "original"
memory—or leftover aura—from this war except the artist’s, An-my Lê who,
as a Vietnamese political refuge, grew up within the conflict before immigrating to the
U.S. in 1975.
5. Portraits of the soldiers reveal fatigue, but one generated by every-day tiredness, not
the barrage of real combat chaos.
6. While some of the re-enactors may have had a military affiliation, they don’t
appear old enough to have fought in Vietnam. And, most look too young to have seen first
hand wounded soldiers air-lifted out of rice paddies on the evening news.
These layers of irony in Small Wars provide us with
a model through which we might analyze the shifting "lines in the sand" between
the fake and the true—a feature symptomatic of the Postmodern condition.
Writing on Postmodernity, the French theorist Jean Baudrillard claims that there is no
real because genuine reality has been betrayed by signs—the contradiction between the
truth and the imaginary no longer exists. Our lives are dictated by a self-perpetuating
hyper-reality because the boundaries that once distinguished the values between such
binaries as copy/original, true/false, and real/simulated have all collapsed. Baudrillard
dubbed the falsehood of contemporary reality "simulacrum," essentially another
word for "copy," but one which by definition is more pejorative. The lies
embedded within simulacra (pl.) are unabashedly deceptive and as such can never match the
aura of the imitated truth. The Vietnam re-enactment and Lê’s photos are both
simulacra—signs of reality, but not reality itself.
If the false has so much power, is there any value left in the truth? In a world replete
with computer simulations, retro styles, and commodified illusions, the auras associated
with "truth," "reality," and "original" are hard to come by.
The ambiguity between these agents makes the Postmodern condition a confusing world to
navigate, especially when so much value has been transferred to simulacra. Essentially, we
still crave the aura of the original—something that can’t be replicated, but we
try nonetheless. As such, we exist in a throw-away culture based on planned-obsolescence
in which everything from the real to the imagined can be easily replaced. Within this
Postmodern matrix, the aura of the "real" looses its authority when the
"false" has been given equal weight. Even the binary of life/death is no longer
definitive.
In "The American Way of Death Becomes America’s Way of Life" (8/18/02 NY
Times), journalist Jack Hitt touches upon the way Americans now memorialize death by
clinging to the original aura of tragedy. This cultural predilection has generated a new
form of public monument in which a detrimental reality—from presidential
assassination to terrorist attack—is perpetually re-enacted. Classical temples have
been replaced by memorials that attempt to encapsulate an aura through a narrative space
and re-play reality—the lived experience of death. In Dallas, for example, each
visitor stands along the parade route passing by the Grassy Knoll, while in Oklahoma City,
the moment just before death and the second it happened are etched upon doorways that
frame a site filled with chairs, each seat representing every aura lost, but also inviting
the living to converse with the dead.
Lê’s photos are a record of this now common cultural process that involves the
intentional (and paradoxical) fusion of polarities: memorializing death by simulating
loss. In Small Wars the aura of the "original" is re-lived through the
"false"—both the real and artificial are necessary to reproducing, and
remembering, the "truth."
Cynthia Lee Henthorn is a visual culture historian with a
Ph.D. in art history from the CUNY Graduate Center. She is a development editor of art
history textbooks in NYC for Prentice-Hall and has worked for the artbook publisher Harry
N. Abrams. Her editorial projects for these publishers include the fifth edition of
Frederick Hartt’s History of Italian Renaissance Art (2002) and the second
edition of Marilyn Stokstad’s Art: A Brief History (2003). She also writes on
World War II and early Cold War commercial propaganda. |
