Grenada painting

Bomb after Bomb: A Violent Cartography, is a collection of the work of artist elin o'Hara slavick. It includes 48 color plates depicting regions that have been the target of political bombings, naval shelling, ground-attacks, and other combat missions led by the United States, and in a few cases, in the United States. In an interview, slavick recalls dropping ink onto wet paper, watching it bleed across the fibers, relentlessly spreading beyond the area for which it was intended.

The connection for slavick is that bombs bleed into landscapes in a similar way, often into areas for which they were not intended. Bombs leave a lasting stain of unexploded ordinance, and toxicity. Slavick's abstract paintings about these events serve as both an education and an aesthetic experience. It is "protest art" that raises important questions, notably, how can we use these weapons when the pain they inflict is so great?

Slavick's accounts of US-led bombing missions are a record of historical events, some more well-known than others. The lines used by slavick are based on political borders, evocative of the creation of "us" and "them."

Yet Slavick literally blurs these lines, and heightens this effect by excluding city names from the pictures. The shapes of varying countries look similar, but at first glance it is unclear even to which continent each shape belongs.

The purpose here is to highlight that the focus should be on weapons' use, rather than on the justifications for their use based on a country's history, its placement in the world, and the reasons for its government's dispute with the United States. The fact that weapons kill and wound innocent people makes the issue of nationality secondary.

Howard Zinn, an active bombardier during WWII, wrote the foreword to Bomb after Bomb. In it, he recalls his ignorance of what aerial bombs were capable of once released. He says, "ordinary people with ordinary consciences will allow their instincts for decency to be overcome by the compulsion to obey authority." Abstract political language is used to insulate perpetrators from the human consequences of our actions. The word "communism" was used to justify inflicting millions of deaths, later termed "collateral damage," across Cambodia, Laos, and Vietnam in the 1960s and 1970s.

Slavick employs simple titles of the place and the year(s). Some include the propagandistic names of the missions. These missions include: "Operation Just Cause" (Panama, 1989-1990), "Democracy Now" (Pakistan, 1998), and "Operation Enduring Freedom" (Afghanistan, 2001-present).

Her abstractions are based on aerial maps, so the outlines are familiar, but the effects of combat are represented in varying levels of abstraction: bleeding pigment, concentric circles, splatters of bold color, and sometimes vague outlines of planes or buildings.

"Grenada, Operation Urgent Fury, 1983" (shown in black and white below) is simple in relation to other works, but stands as a bare-bones representation of a country. Slavick's depiction of Grenada shows a shape almost like a thumb print in the center, -surrounded by thin black concentric lines. What is shown is stained with one color that ranges from blotches of red to pink. The book tells us that over 100 people, Cuban, -Grenadian, and US were killed in the invasion.

The painting motivated me to ask more questions. To justify the invasion to the public, the Reagan administration claimed that US medical students studying on Grenada were endangered. Later, it was discovered [5] that none were threatened, some left the day before the invasion, and it was the US government who convinced Barbados to close its airport so that the rest couldn't leave.

In an interview included at the end of the book, slavick references W.G. Sebald, author of On the Natural History of Destruction. Sebald maintains that the goal of an artist is not to attempt to solve the world's problems, but rather, to expose them. Pablo Picasso's "Guernica," painted in 1937 to protest the Nazis' aerial bombardment of the town, serves as a popular example. In both Picasso and slavick's cases, the aesthetic quality of the art provides the visual interest that engages the mind.

Art has the power to educate, to allow the space and time for emotion and human response. If more artists channel creative energy into paintings, drawings, and sculptures of protest, perhaps we can begin to think of creative ways to solve conflict without the use of bombs or weapons.