In our view, the artists have proven ill-equipped, unprepared intellectually for the developments....
If one compares them, as a body, with Apocalypse Now, or even Platoon, for all its histrionics—the latter were movies that attempted to make a broad statement about American involvement in Vietnam, to paint it as a crime, as an imperialist crime....
--------
Notice the dates for Apocalypse and Platoon, 1979 and 1986. AN was set in approximately the 67-9 era of the war. Platoon was during the search and destroy phase, which I can't remember when (66-7). There was also Full Metal Jacket (Hue 68), which came out in 1987 and the more recent The Quiet American 2002 which was the pre-amble during the 50s. The point is that all these movies came out ten years or more after the events depicted.
I personally feel much worse about the list of recent events rattled off, from the absurd impeachment up to Obama's extension of everything Bush set in place. These are certainly worse than anything going on in the Vietnam era or its brief aftermath in Watergate.
We've been through some fifteen years of high speed historical transformation and we are not going back. With the exception of the pre-war demonstrations in February 2003(?) which had good turn outs in SF, there has been no resistance to subsequent events.
There's been plenty of writing about what has happened, but little `art' about it. So the question is why? That's tough to answer, although I understand something of the reasons. The events have been abstractions, distant from everyday life which superficially remains the same quiet, disparate and alienated grind from these larger flows of history. And then too, the political system has virtually shut off channels to any meaningful response.
The visual arts need concrete images to work with, and except for propagandistic news video, there are no concrete images. For example, during the Vietnam era the bay area was a transit point, some local industries were booming, sailors and soldiers were commonly seen in bus stations and airports, the area was home to giant military bases which were the launch for major navy and army operations. All of that is gone, plus of course the draft.
When I started in on anti-war paintings in grad school, I faced a strange problem, because most of my image bank, running in my head was from WWII history, photographs, and films. There was no WWII painting directly related to the war, except the photographic documentary of death camps and bombed to ruin cities. That iconography had nothing to do with Vietnam. So I had to invent and much of the invention was not very successful in terms of painting. Part of the trouble was that wars cry out for the documentary, and not the symbolic laden imagery that most painting indulges. On the other hand whole push in reality outside the medium is toward a hard realism, stark, barren of most recognizable emotive registers.
Well, with the photograph we have an instant cultural record, but it takes time to build up a cultural system of symbolic forms that can reach far beyond the simple record of an event. For instance, consider Thomas Mann's Doctor Faustus was an example of such a system of symbolic form that attempted to get at the heart of what happened to German culture that lead to the vast destruction of Germany and much of Europe. The currents and themes of the Faust legend run deep into the intellectual history of modernity, and it was those currents that Mann wove together to make the novel a vast allegory of the interwar and WWII period.
For the visual arts, the best example of how to construct these symbols, allegories, and metaphors, is found in Goya's painting and prints, the May paintings, the Disasters of War, the social commentary of the Caprices and Proverbs and certainly the prisoner series. Because of the heavy Moorish influence in Spain, the over all look of Goya's people and places have a startling similarity to people and places in Iraq and Afghanistan, minus the cars, planes and cell phones. So I would be tempted to start with this not entirely fortuitous similitude.
You could even make a pretty standard mainstream movie of the historical events that Goya depicts. If written and directed right, the story could be designed to read by an attentive audience as an allegory of the US in the lands of Islam---while pretending to be a well crafted historical drama. The public image of the French might go down a few notches among the wine and cheese crowd...
CG