Mark Pinto, Small Arms, 2014, digital print, 24 x 24. | Image: Courtesy of the artist. Fallujah is the first opera on the Iraq War. Artbound documentary Fallujah: Art, Healing, and PTSD explores how the experience of war was transformed into a work of art. Watch the episodes debut Tuesday, May 24 at 9 p.m., or check for rebroadcasts here.
How does it feel to go to war? What does it feel like to come back? With less than one percent of the U.S. population in the armed forces, how are artist-veterans making bridges for a public that's increasingly disconnected from the consequences of war? Is it ever truly possible to come home?
Every war delivers a raft of new technologies, injuries, and artworks.
The American Civil War produced multiple amputations courtesy of a spinning bullet that ground bones almost to powder, as well as some of the first major war photographs. In the First World War, heavy artillery shrapnel mangled soft flesh. Advances in medical science kept severely wounded troops alive, and veteran artist Otto Dix recorded the nascent plastic surgery and sensory prosthetics that tried to give them back a life.
The signature wounds of Iraq and Afghanistan troops are Post Traumatic Stress Disorder (PTSD), clinical depression, and Traumatic Brain Injury (TBI). Although 22 veterans kill themselves each day, there is, as yet, no Defense Department recognition of moral injury, the bruise on the soul that Michael Castellana, psychotherapist at the U.S. Naval Medical Center in San Diego, has attributed to what happens when we send our children into a war zone and say, kill like a champion.'
For artist and Gulf War veteran Mark Pinto, the crux of his artwork is this moral injury, a phenomenon that shares symptoms with PTSD, but is not the same thing. You can get PTSD from a car crash, says Pinto in a recent conversation, but you haven't done anything that goes against societal norms. With a moral injury, you've done something, seen something, or know something that you shouldn't have to see, know, or do.
For Pinto, art therapy is not enough: I honor and respect art therapy work, he says, but at the same time I want to transcend it. Many of us, we feel an obligation to share what we have learned. If I can personalize this moral injury and make it visceral, if non-veterans understood their complicity in war, something might change?
Like Pinto, there is an emerging generation of American veterans who are acting on the idea that their work can help to heal not only its viewers and participants, but also wider societal wounds.
Celebrate Peoples History: Iraq Veterans Against the War street art action in Portland, 2015. | Photo: Courtesy of Aaron Hughes.
Utilizing multiple channels to broadcast and connect, these veteran artists tend to be individual makers of diverse objects -- including ceramics, installations, photographs, drawings, prints, and posters -- who also embrace the interaction, intervention, and activism that has come to be called social practice. When the subject of art and military veterans is discussed these days, it is usually in the context of therapeutic activities for people struggling to heal from the often-invisible wounds of war. Setting aside artists whose military service may be coincidental to their art-making -- like vets Jasper Johns, Robert Rauschenberg, Sol Lewitt, Richard Diebenkorn, and even the popular TV painter Bob Ross -- art therapy focuses on benefit for the individual patient rather than on the quality of the artwork. The Art of War Project, which aims to use art to help veterans with PTSD, is a case in point. As its founder Curtis Bean says: There are [more] healthy and positive options than medicating or self-medicating. You've just got to find the right option for you.
In Pintos work Small Arms, a mandala-like print of word-filled rifles and grenades, the artist says he was referencing the morals you are raised with, not least the commandment thou shalt not kill. A former Buddhist priest, Pinto says the mandala is a map of the spiritual world and a focal point for meditation. As the public gets farther and farther away from the actual fight, he says, the military are isolated, and feel that they're becoming expendable.
Still from Jason Moons video Trying to Find My Way Home, 2010.
Iraq War veteran and singer-songwriter Jason Moon echoes Pintos sentiments with his song Trying to Find My Way Home:
How do they expect a man to do the things that I have, come back and be the same? The things I done that I regret, the things I seen I won't forget in this life and so many more.
And I'm trying to find my way home, the child inside me is long dead and gone, somewhere between lost and alone, trying to find my way home.
Telling a visual story in which a troubled veteran chooses writing over suicide, one of Moon's viewers has written: Tragedy rips out that innocence the void of losing it changes a persons mind, heart and soul. I feel like steel beaten, burned and forged into something I never should of been One thing to be said song like this gives me hope that am not alone...
Celebrate Peoples History: Iraq Veterans Against the War San Francisco Projection Department action in West Oakland, 2015. | Photo: Courtesy of Aaron Hughes.
Comparatively few in number, veteran artists often collaborate in a web of overlapping collectives.
The Dirty Canteen is a nine-artist collective that works to promote understanding of how war and trauma not only affect members of the military, but our society as a whole. Its members -- Pinto, Amber Hoy, Ehren Tool, Thomas Dang, Aaron Hughes, Jesse Albrecht, Daniel Donovan, Ash Kyrie, and Erica Slone -- have all exhibited or collaborated with San Francisco-based Combat Paper (CP), a project initiated by Drew Cameron, which h
