George Gittoes in an Era of Post-Heroic, Hyper-Real Warfare

Abstract

The drawings, paintings and films of George Gittoes have been interpreted as humanistic works of art, as they emphasise the fate of those caught up in wars around the world. Philosopher Daniel Herwitz compares Gittoes to artists from India and South Africa to align him with a global campaign for human rights and humanitarian interventionism. Media theorist Nicholas Mirzoeff has criticised the way Gittoes paints suffering in poorer parts of the world, while activists have applauded this same feature of his work, awarding him the Sydney Peace Prize in 2015 alongside Naomi Klein and Nelson Mandela. The prize came after Gittoes’ turn to documentary filmmaking in the 21st century, and his films have themselves been awarded for their humanitarianism. These documentaries work to capture the complexity of life in low-intensity war zones in Afghanistan, Pakistan, Iraq, and the inner cities of the United States. An examination of key drawings and paintings from the 1980s and 1990s, however, troubles this humanistic interpretation of Gittoes’ films. In their representation of machinic soldiers and mutilated victims, Gittoes’ drawings, paintings and graphic works from conflicts in Australia, Nicaragua, Somalia, and Rwanda suggest that war is as much a posthumanist experience as one demanding a humanistic response. The concepts of post-heroic and hyper-real war help to sketch out the ways in which Gittoes’ works respond to the strange and disconcerting experience of contemporary conflict. This is not to say that Gittoes does not document suffering, but that his work is also engaged with the alienating experience of wars that are increasingly conducted with advanced visual technologies and over long, drawn-out periods of time. In 1995, two texts were published that attempted to capture something of this new era of warfare. In the journal Foreign Affairs, Edward N. Luttwak named a ‘post-heroic war’ that had come about because of the reluctance of advanced Western militaries to inflict casualties on either the enemy or their own troops. The term quickly became a catch-all to describe the shift away from the total wars of the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries to the low-intensity conflicts of the