KCTribune: War of Words:

Art, like war, comes in any number of forms: there is the personal conflict, like Otto Dix’s nightmarish World War I etchings; the public anti-war photocollages of the Dadaist Hannah Höch; the officially sanctioned “war artist,” such as Lincoln’s star cartoonist, Thomas Nast; as well as the artist whose work, like Ronald Searle’s when he was a British POW in Singapore, evoked scenes at the hands of the Japanese, yet did not sear his consciousness ever after the way such horrors did to other artists. Then again, art, like war, is a statement: in the artistic sense, however, the greater the vision and the fuller the creation, the more powerful the impact. One need only think of Maya Lin’s Vietnam Veterans Memorial, the single most moving testament to death and to honor in the past century, when the September 11 memorial wrangling periodically returns to the news, to appreciate the ideas at work.

Cindy Kane’s wartime artwork, “The Helmet Project,” at Sherry Leedy Contemporary Art (running through February 27), is personal, though in a roundabout style. She invited fifty foreign war correspondents to contribute whatever they wished from their travels, and then she covered fifty used helmets with the personal artifacts. At the Leedy gallery, the decorated helmets hang in two rows of twenty-five, a little lower than eye level; the point is not to touch them so much as to read them. A visitor can weave in and out (with an accompanying guide), reading the journalists’ effects—notes, press passes, e-mails—and then noting how Kane has molded the words into images.

It must be one of the more striking shows in town. We have seen so many outrageous and forced exhibitions, so much amateurish art (and even more amateurish politics) that the simplicity of this piece conjures up memories and questions that trip one up. These are not the polished reports heard on NPR and read in The New York Times—this is the raw data. Even before the idea of Cindy Kane’s art comes into focus, the journalists’ choices are half the art. Deborah Amos of NPR contributes a press pass from Saudi Arabia, with her hair hidden under a red shawl in her photograph; at the bottom reads the (ominous) warning: “Valid until end of assignment.” Knowing that the former ban on attacking journalists that has been an informal agreement among combatants for so long, has been lifted from the former Yugoslavia to Russia to Iraq and Pakistan, makes reading these personal reports all the more compelling. Partly, it is fascinating to discover what each journalist thought was personally valuable; some gave Cindy Kane a lot, others a few mementoes. Stephanie Elizondo Griest sent a Russian visa, Band Aids, a beer label from Mozambique and ear plugs, which the artist has hung from the helmet. It is a miscellany from a nomad’s life.

While some helmets evoke more beauty than fury—former-journalist-turned-Pulitzer-Prize-winning-novelist Geraldine Brooks’s helmet is covered mysteriously with women’s eyes (Brooks has written extensively on the role of women in the Mideast)—others still feel like fresh news. The helmet dedicated to Asra Nomani, the Indian-American Wall Street Journal reporter who found herself in the middle of the Daniel Pearl kidnapping and murder, in 2002, in Pakistan, is the exhibit’s centerpiece. A series of papered-over e-mails form a tragic collage that traces Nomani’s attempts to follow and even get ahead of the unfolding story. One e-mail confirms the identity of two men with information cannot be determined (or trusted); a note to Nomani herself reads, “You’re confused. You have to keep doing the work of Danny”; finally, there is a reference to Pearl’s passport, whose date of expiration would have been August 30, 2010.

The personal and professional histories of these reporters intermix with Cindy Kane’s own hand at creating artistic statements for each journalist. The more a visitor roams through the exhibit, coming across something foreign or simply as interesting as foreign currency, the idea that war is not a 9-5 job, either for those who pursue policies or for those who report on them, becomes clearer—and scarier. Kane’s assembling the helmets, with names we know about conflicts we have felt to our bones, makes her artwork different than the Spanish Civil War photographs of Capa, say, or Manet’s historical painting “The Execution of the Emperor Maximilian.” Each artist’s take on an event seals it in time. In ours, when mass media is commonplace, perhaps a photograph or a painting or a sculpture that is realistic or figurative feels too much like (it could be) propaganda. This show puts war right in our faces, where we can consider how our passports would look.