War Museum Controversy and Follow-up Thread [merged]
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mariomike said:
I have not heard about that one. I was referring to the Afghanistan exhibit.
http://www.warmuseum.ca/cwm/index_e.aspx?ArticleID=19362
During the planning stage of the exhibit, there was discussions of adding an anti-war domestic side of the war as someone at the museum was in contact with someone in the protest group I was involved with or vice versa to help with that aspect, but did not pan out due to disagreements, and some folks thought about protesting the exhibit which I was against. As far as I could tell, neither the anti-war thing or the protest happened.
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mellian said:
I think its good that they left the anti-war domestic side of things out of the war museum. If they want an exhibit, they should push for their own museum. That way the war museum does not get waterred down by politics, and every activist group and their dog.
ltmaverick25 said:
- Don't go to the back room of the Juno Beach Centre, then. It is full of stories about what WW2 means to a bunch of self-centered post-war baby-boomer slackers all caught up in their own 'cultures'. If I was a WW2 vet and I walked through that room, I would be tempted to pull my old BREN out of the cosmoline...
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I stick with my views, expressed about four years ago on or around page 5 of this thread: the "role" of a museum is educational and some, often a lot of controversy should be welcomed.
My problem with the Canadian War Museum, effective my most recent visit a few days ago, is the same as it was when the CWM opened: the signage, especially the technical signage is poor - so poor as to be embarrassing. When signage exists it is, too often, written at a grade school level (grade school explanations ought to be there, don't get me wrong, but that ought not to be the only explanations on view) and fails to cover key parts of the display in question. I recognize that adequate and conventional signage would overwhelm some displays but there are, other, better, electronic ways to allow visitors to access much more and much more pertinent and accurate information than is now on display.
My second problem is: no catalogue. The primary, educational function of the CWM remains a failure because there is no authoritative catalogue.
Some guesses:
+ Adequate, electronic signage will costs several tens of millions of dollars and I know the money isn't there; and
+ A proper catalogue can, probably, be written by a committee of distinguished historians in three or four years at a total cost of less than $2.5 Million. I know about camels being horses designed by committees, but a subject as deep and broad as Canada's military history, especially with the e.g. aboriginal and technological aspects involved, is, I suggest, beyond the ken of any one Canadian historian.
My problem with the Canadian War Museum, effective my most recent visit a few days ago, is the same as it was when the CWM opened: the signage, especially the technical signage is poor - so poor as to be embarrassing. When signage exists it is, too often, written at a grade school level (grade school explanations ought to be there, don't get me wrong, but that ought not to be the only explanations on view) and fails to cover key parts of the display in question. I recognize that adequate and conventional signage would overwhelm some displays but there are, other, better, electronic ways to allow visitors to access much more and much more pertinent and accurate information than is now on display.
My second problem is: no catalogue. The primary, educational function of the CWM remains a failure because there is no authoritative catalogue.
Some guesses:
+ Adequate, electronic signage will costs several tens of millions of dollars and I know the money isn't there; and
+ A proper catalogue can, probably, be written by a committee of distinguished historians in three or four years at a total cost of less than $2.5 Million. I know about camels being horses designed by committees, but a subject as deep and broad as Canada's military history, especially with the e.g. aboriginal and technological aspects involved, is, I suggest, beyond the ken of any one Canadian historian.
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More, reproduced under the Fair Dealing provisons of the Copyright Act, from the Ottawa Citizen, in war artist Gertrude Kearns:
http://www.ottawacitizen.com/news/canada-in-afghanistan/takes+courage+takes+artistic+courage/5439635/story.html
As (then) LCol Dave Anderson said, "Art is not supposed to match your sofa. Art is supposed to challenge you ..." On that sensible basis, Kearns is a successful artist.
http://www.ottawacitizen.com/news/canada-in-afghanistan/takes+courage+takes+artistic+courage/5439635/story.html
War takes courage - and war art takes artistic courage
By Elizabeth Payne, Ottawa Citizen
September 22, 2011
Gertrude Kearns is not who you might think she is. Petite, with a mass of curly hair and a fondness for black, she looks every inch the Toronto Artist. Which she is.
She is also one of Canada's leading war artists - whose work never shies away from addressing the misery, the courage and the complex moral issues embedded in the war experience. If the two roles seem at odds, they are not.
In an age in which wearing red on Fridays and watching Don Cherry wax on about military heroes is about as nuanced as most public discussion on the military gets, Kearns' work is challenging and unblinking, which is rare. Her unvarnished approach has won her respect from inside and outside the military. It has also attracted controversy.
Kearns says she has long felt there was a lack of recognition in the world of serious art for Canadian military history. She has devoted much of her career to changing that with work about war that is both officially commissioned and self-initiated. Her interest in war art has made her unusual among her peers. "I am not an automatic left-wing antiwar person, which is usually the artistic left position."
She has been on training missions with soldiers, is a member of the Royal Canadian Military Institute in Toronto where she is war artist in residence, and has chronicled the war in Afghanistan. Kearns was at the Kandahar Air Base in Afghanistan in a convoy waiting to follow other vehicles in 2005 when diplomat Glyn Berry was killed in a bomb attack. She put away the camera she always carries with her and pitched in, eventually helping to clean the bloody treatment rooms after the wounded had been evacuated from the base.
Much of the controversy involving Kearns' pieces has landed at the doorstep of the Canadian War Museum where 15 of her works are housed, nine of which are installed there. The latest of her works to hang in the museum is her portrait of Maj.-Gen. Lewis MacKenzie, who headed the UN peacekeeping force in the former Yugoslavia. The large painting of the retired general called MacKenzie/Sarajevo/1992 was placed on a wall at the museum this month.
Retired Major General Lewis Mackenzie poses beside his portrait painted by Gertrude Kearns.
Photograph by: Wayne Cuddington, The Ottawa Citizen
When MacKenzie first saw the large drawing of him crouched on sandbags wearing a blue beret, the drawing that would form the basis of the painting in 2003, he commented: "It's saying keep the peace or I'll kill you."
Kearns later created a war poster with those words surrounding the image of MacKenzie. "It appears to be an oxymoron, but it isn't," she says of the poster. The work called Keep the Peace or I'll Kill You has been the focus of bubbling controversy, as have her series of paintings depicting a distraught Lt.-Gen.
Roméo Dallaire. Dallaire, now a senator, headed the understaffed UN mission to Rwanda during the 1994 genocide. He later suffered from post traumatic stress disorder.
MacKenzie attended Kearns' Dallaire show in 2002 and found the work interesting. He agreed to sit for Kearns for the portrait that would become one in a series of her works on military leadership. Their discussions during those sittings led to the poster.
Perhaps the most controversial of her works are her pieces depicting Canada's disastrous mission in Somalia. When the war museum opened at LeBreton Flats in 2005, the decision to prominently display her painting Somalia #2, Without Conscience led veterans groups to threaten a boycott. The painting depicts the torture of Somali teenager Shidane Arone by Canadian soldiers. The death resulted in the disbanding of the Airborne regiment.
Kearns' works highlight the war museum's own approach to depictions of war.
"War is a miserable experience," said museum historian Peter Mac-Leod when the museum opened.
"This is why we respect our veterans, because they have gone through these hideous experiences themselves. To make it something dashing and heroic, like a war movie, insults their real achievements."
The former chief of staff of Task Force Afghanistan who was instrumental in Kearns going to Afghanistan to chronicle the war, said: "Art is not supposed to match your sofa. Art is supposed to challenge you and I am perfectly OK with that."
Kearns, who takes a journalistic approach to her work, calls herself a war artist, not a military artist. Military art, she says, pays tribute to the "gallantry and the uniform and the physical accoutrements" rather than delving into psychological questions.
"War art is going to stir you up more, get a more emotional and visceral reaction than military art might."
That reaction can make people uncomfortable. But at a time when Canada's military role is changing, it serves an important purpose.
Canada needs more voices like Kearns'.
Elizabeth Payne is a member of the Citizen's editorial board. E-mail: epayne@ottawacitizen.com
© Copyright (c) The Ottawa Citizen
As (then) LCol Dave Anderson said, "Art is not supposed to match your sofa. Art is supposed to challenge you ..." On that sensible basis, Kearns is a successful artist.
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E.R. Campbell said:
Indeed,
I had the privelage of meeting her earlier this year at the OSISS tenth anniversary conference, as she painted a portrait of LCol Stephan Grenier that was used on much material for OSISS;
And she did indeed cause cause quite a stir with these paintings, much talked about here
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