Re-authoring images of the Vietnam War

The curatorial authority of dOCUMENTA (13)

Within the context of dOCUMENTA (13), Dinh Q Lê’s “Light and Belief: Sketches of Life from the Vietnam War” figures as one of the 180 works by artists scattered around various venues in the city of Kassel. Located in the Black Forest region of Germany, Kassel comes to life every five years during the course of the various Documenta exhibitions. The 13th edition of the quinquennial event ran for 100 days from June 9 to September 16, 2012. Founded by German artist and curator Arnold Baude (1900–1977) with the goal of helping Germany participate in the development of European Modern art after the Nazi era, its first iteration took place in 1955 as part of the Kassel Bundesgartenschau (Federal Horticultural Show). The name of the exhibition, “documenta,” arose out of the intent to give Germany a role in the documentation of contemporary art. After Arnold Baude, subsequent curators have included Harald Szeeman (1933–2005) in 1972, Rudi Fuchs (b. 1942) in 1982, Catherine David (b. 1954) in 1997, Okwui Enwezor (b. 1963) in 2002, and Carolyn Christov-Bakargiev (b. 1957) in 2012. Each curator selected the works included in the exhibition and authored its vision or theme. Each of the events became landmarks in the history of contemporary art by arguably, according to some critics, redefining the field.

Catherine David was the first woman and non-German to hold the position. Her tenure at documenta X in 1997 was the last iteration of the exhibition before the transition to the new millennium. Inspired by this historical turn, she used as her central motif the idea of “looking back to the future.” Okwui Enwezor was the first non-European, and his exhibition was organized around the themes of migration and post-coloniality. Carolyn Christov-Bakargiev claimed not to have built her exhibition around a theme, but most critics noted the underlying political subtext of world conflict.

Different Documenta curators have used different extant buildings in the city for their exhibition projects. These range from the train station to the gardens, various shop fronts, cinemas, and apartment buildings. The main venue, however, has been the Fridericianum, an 18th century Enlightenment building that became the city’s first public museum. Housing antiques and books, it also became a parliamentary building and, after extensive damage during the Second World War, was restored by Arnold Baude in 1955 for the first Documenta exhibtion. When Documenta is not in session, it hosts various contemporary art exhibitions and events. Carolyn Christov-Bakargiev installed what she called “The Brain” in the Fridericianum, a selection of ancient and modern objects, art works, and documents that, according to the organizer, “are ‘eccentric,’ ‘destroyed,’ have lost something,’ were ‘stolen,’ hidden or disguised, that are ‘in refuge,’ are ‘traumatized’ or are ‘transitional’ and brought together in lieu of a concept.” ⁹ Among the objects, according to critic Alex Farquharson, “valued for their encoded social, political and cultural relations, even when they are singularly authored,” ¹⁰ was the only other work by a Vietnamese artist—a drawing by Vũ Giáng Hương (1930–2011)—hanging alongside a still-life painting by Giorgio Morandi (1890–1964), a photograph by David E Scherman (1916–1997) of Lee Miller taking a bath in Hitler’s bathtub, a 5000-year-old clay figure from Central Asia, and a photograph of a bomb pond by the Cambodian artist Vandy Rattana (b. 1980).

Aside from “The Brain” were rooms that contained large sculptural installations or hangings of several paintings by individual artists. One of these was Sopheap Pich, a Cambodian artist who, in parallel to Dinh’s life trajectory, was born in Cambodia in 1971 and came to the United States with his family after fleeing the Khmer Rouge, later returning to his homeland as a professional artist. His sculptures, large bamboo, rattan, and burlap grid frames painted with beeswax and charcoal, occupied a single room in the Friedericianum. And, similarly to Dinh’s display of drawings from his own collection, a painting owned by Sopheap hung alongside his works, a smaller acrylic canvas made by the recently deceased Khmer Rouge prison survivor Vann Nath (1946–2011). ¹¹ The painting depicts an interrogation session between a prisoner and Khmer Rouge officers and is dated to 2006. In the exhibition catalogue, Sopheap wrote that, as an artist, he is “inspired by Vann Nath’s wisdom and humility and by his love for the medium and method of painting,” oddly neglecting to mention the political gravity of the scene. ¹²

There were numerous other examples of art works that bore political content without identification as such by the chief curator. These included “The Refusal of Time” by South African William Kentridge (b. 1955), “Scratching on Things I Could Disavow” by Lebanese artist Walid Raad (b. 1967), and “Death at a 30 Degree Angle” by Pakistani Bani Abidi (b. 1971). These works have been described by critics as illustrating the post-traumatic condition of former war zones, and yet Christov-Bakargiev claims throughout the catalogue that the exhibition is apolitical. Perhaps she avoided the term “political” in order to allow the viewer to make connections between one artist and another, one part of the world and another. The lack of guidance may have had the goal of creating a more fluid and borderless viewing experience. But, the curatorial agenda did not need to be explicitly stated for viewers to understand the underlying theme of US intervention in the Middle East, Asia, and Latin America, based on the choice of artists.

Viewing Dinh Q Lê’s installation of war drawings within this context, one can better understand not only the artist’s motive behind this work, but also the Chief curator’s decision to commission it. Its presence in the exhibition signals Christov-Bakargiev’s ambitions for the overall exhibition, to display works that reflect on the legacy of war. Dinh’s interest in the art historical legacy of his divided homeland figures then as a component of a larger theme. Nestled in a wooded corner of Karlsaue Park, away from “The Brain,” it acted as a “distant mirror,” to borrow the title of Barbara Tuchman’s book on 14th century France—a reminder of history’s tendency toward repetition. ¹³ And yet, away from the spectacular and provocative displays closer to the heart of the exhibition and the Friedericianum, Dinh’s work also provided a more intimate setting. The homely nature of the locale allowed for a more personal experience with the works.

Dinh Q Lê’s images of the Vietnam War

The installation in Kassel is not the first work by the artist to make use of images from the war. After receiving an MFA in photography and related media at the School of Visual Arts in New York, Dinh Q Lê first came to the attention of the contemporary art world with his series of photo weavings, titled “The Persistence of Memory,” first shown at the Elizabeth Leach Gallery in Portland, Oregon in 2000. As the artist described it, he learned to weave grass mats from his grandmother and applied that technique to large prints that intertwined images of Hollywood films of the Vietnam War with media photographs of the actual event. In speaking about them for a subsequent catalogue produced for a showing at the Bellevue Arts Museum in 2007, the artist stated that they:

were drawn from the merging of my personal memories, media-influenced memories, and Hollywood-fabricated memories to create a surreal landscape memory that is neither fact nor fiction. At the same time I want the series to talk about the struggle for control of meaning and memories of the Vietnam War between these three different sources of memories…Hollywood and the U.S. media are constantly trying to displace and destroy our memories about the Vietnam War to replace it with their versions. ¹⁴

Although he has employed multiple media, from photography to film and installation, he has consistently made use of what I will call found objects or ready-mades. His photo-weavings employ photographs taken by photojournalists published in various news media during the war together with stills from Hollywood movies, and the helicopter was acquired directly from the farmer. He also created a hanging installation composed of photographs that he found in the markets of Hồ Chí Minh City. Titled “Một cõi đi về,” ¹⁶ or a lifetime to return home, it was described by Moira Roth as:

a huge, curtain-like story-quilt hanging from the gallery’s ceiling to the floor. It can be viewed and literally “read” from all sides. Composed of hundreds of old photographs, together with texts, inscribed in English, French, Vietnamese, and Chinese, it is a continuation of Lê’s passionate, poetic, and original exhuming and navigating of the obdurate history of Vietnam. ¹⁷

Moira Roth and others who have written about Dinh’s work over the past decade suggest that Dinh’s art works can be seen as acts of repair or as a kind of memorial. This is evidenced by the title for one of his series of cloths embroidered with silhouettes of photographs of victims of the Khmer Rouge genocide that he borrowed from James E Young’s well known treatise, The Texture of Memory. ¹⁹ Although Young’s essay reflects on the commemorative monuments built in Europe to honor those who died during the Holocaust, his distinction between a memorial and a monument suits our discussion of Dinh’s projects. Young writes that, “memorials ritualize remembrance and mark the reality of ends…Monuments make heroes and triumphs, victories and conquests, perpetually present and part of life.” ²⁰ Both Vietnam and the United States have a long history of celebrating their war heroes, often while neglecting the sacrifices of ordinary citizens. Dinh’s projects bring to light those individuals who may otherwise be forgotten, perhaps echoing Carolyn Christov-Bakargiev’s mini-exhibition “The Brain” that made use of “remains” as reminders of humanity’s losses.

Khóa Kháng Chiến

If we travel back to the “real” past alluded to in Dinh’s dOCUMENTA (13) work, a different picture may emerge. Unlike his other works that use found material or collaborations with ordinary civilians, in this work he makes use of his own collection of drawings that were made by artists who were hired by the Reunification guerilla movement. The set includes works by the following artists: Lê Lam, Vũ Giáng Hương, Quang Thọ, Huỳnh Phương Đông, Nguyễn Thụ, Trường Hiếu, Phan Oánh, Nguyễn Toan Thi, Dương Ánh, Minh Phương, Kim Tiến, Quách Phong, and Nguyễn Thanh Chuâ. All of them studied art after the end of the colonial period, after Hanoi’s first art academy, l’Ecole des Beaux-Arts d’Indochine, founded in 1925 had closed and relocated drawing classes to the seat of the resistance movement in Việt Bắc, north of Hanoi in 1945. The artist Tô Ngọc Vân (1908–1954), a graduate of the colonial art school, became head of the Khóa Kháng Chiến, or the Resistance class, at what was still maintained as the Hanoi School of Fine Art. Some artists joined classes from Hanoi and others were recruited in the field.

As in the classes supervised by French teachers before them during the colonial period that emphasized technical skills in realistic painting and drawing, pupils in the Resistance class were assigned to capture life in the army in naturalistic detail. The spirit and goals of the two schools were very different. The curriculum in the Resistance school included lessons in Marxist-Leninism and Hồ Chí Minh’s thought. Students were encouraged to infuse their drawings with the spirit of the revolution and anti-colonial sentiment. Hồ Chí Minh himself traveled with the group and became a favorite subject, often appearing in sketches, seated at his makeshift desk made of rocks or walking the trails in his signature rubber sandals and peasant clothing. As an essay in the catalogue for an exhibition of similar sketches at the Drawing Center in New York (November 2005 – February 2006) remarked, combat was never depicted. ²¹ Artists chose, were required, or prompted to illustrate ordinary tasks on the trail such as cooking and sewing or soldiers at rest, playing cards, or engaging in discussion. Sometimes party meetings or assemblies were represented. The drawings do not reveal what is going on in the trenches. They depict life on the fringes of war and therefore are not necessarily as “truthful” as they appear. One may wonder why the artists were not more concerned about the death and dying around them, as the comments in Dinh’s documentary suggest, why they dutifully followed Hồ Chí Minh’s direction if they were not themselves “believers” in the cause.

Artists were recruited like everyone else into the party but they were hired during the war as documentarians. In their essay for the exhibition catalogue, Catherine de Zegher and Katherine Carl go so far as to question whether these drawings were not perhaps more “true” than photographs:

The North Vietnamese artists took up drawing to reinvest the image with meaning, mixing fantasy and reality in ways that are more idealized and more documentary than in photography. The question of which medium, drawing or photography, relates more of the “truth” then becomes a complex issue. ²²

When these sketches were exhibited at the Drawing Center in New York in 2005, they were largely unknown to the American public. Most of the works included in the show belonged to the Vietnamese-American collector Thu Stern. An earlier exhibition had taken place at the British Museum that, like the exhibition in New York, was notable because of the novelty of exposing drawings rather than the iconic photographs taken by American journalists. ²⁵ Exhibiting the drawings was a means of illustrating the “other” side of the war to an American or British audience. They acted as a kind of correction for the general lack of attention paid to the Vietnamese side of the war. They also were intended to make up for the mistreatment of the Vietnamese in the media and to give them a voice, a face, a presence. Instead of perpetuating the image of the Vietnamese as “the enemy,” they offered a kinder view, one that was more humane. Because of the scarcity of photographs taken by Vietnamese, as opposed to the saturation of media images on the American side, these drawings offer rare glimpses of daily life on the ground during the war. There is something paradoxically comforting about viewing peaceful drawings of wartime, as if to suggest that the Vietnamese did not truly suffer. At the very least, they showed the continuity of daily life in spite of everything. In his essay for the Drawing Center catalogue, Boreth Ly describes one of the drawings by Quang Thọ as “delicate and rather meditative.” ²⁶ This description does not match the preconceptions that most Americans had of a violent and destructive war, but they do match what the Vietnamese government wanted its people to see in the war: a campaign to regain independence, to unify the population under one flag. The war was not necessarily portrayed as anti-American, but rather pro-Vietnamese. These drawings gave the Vietnamese hope that their people could return to their ordinary lives after the war was over.

The artists who made those drawings were rewarded by the Vietnamese government for their service and given preferential treatment in state exhibitions for their contribution to the revolutionary cause. The drawings themselves served as sketches for larger paintings that were exhibited in state galleries and official headquarters. Once the paintings were hung, the sketches were kept by the artists in their modest homes, under beds or in dusty closets. They were almost never exhibited as art works in their own right until recently. They resurfaced in the mid-1990s in galleries that catered to an international clientele. The closed-door policy that kept tourists and outside visitors away from Vietnam for some 15 years after the end of the war meant that the international art world was not aware of the existence of these drawings until after economic renovation, or Đỏi Mới. The earliest attempt to bring these artists to light was made by the American veteran combat artist David Thomas (b. 1950), who came to Hanoi in 1989 with the first wave of return trips by veterans organizations to Vietnam in efforts at reconciliation.

David Thomas had met Vũ Giáng Hương (1930–2011)—one of the artists in Dinh Q Lê’s installation and part of the larger dOCUMENTA (13) “Brain” exhibition mentioned above, and General Secretary of the Artists’ Association from 1989 to 1999. After meeting his Vietnamese counterparts, he decided to arrange for an exhibition that would unite American and Vietnamese veteran artists from the 1960s and 1970s. The result was a touring exhibition in 1991 entitled “Art Seen by Both Sides” that included both protest art made by American anti-war activists such as Nancy Spero and Leon Golub and works by artists from Vietnam who had served on the front. ²⁷ While the exhibition gave American audiences exposure to Vietnamese artists for the first time, staged as it was prior to the renewal of diplomatic ties between the two countries, the exhibition was seen as a political coup by advocates of normalization, but was also the subject of protests and controversy among the anti-communist Vietnamese community in the United States. Possibly because of its political nature, the exhibition was rarely covered in contemporary art journals other than the occasional mention of the closing of the exhibition at one of its venues, the San Jose Museum of Art. ²⁸ In other words, the controversy took precedence over an evaluation of its artistic merit.

What the exhibition brought to bear were the differences between the ways in which artists from the United States and those from Vietnam were covering the war. American artists tended to use their art as a call for an end to the war. Their imagery, therefore, leaned toward calling attention to the violence to make a point, to raise awareness of the destructive nature of war, not to mention the familiarity that American audiences would have had with the photographs that appeared in the press. After the embargo was lifted in 1994, these drawings were not as highly sought after as was the work by a wave of new artists of the post-War generation that began to appear in the private galleries. Art galleries opened around Hanoi and Hồ Chí Minh City selling works by artists, young and old. The international community was largely interested in art that seemed to oppose the state or that might be evidence of an “underground” or “unofficial” art movement as in the former Soviet Union or the People’s Republic of China.

The first exhibition of Vietnamese art to take place outside Vietnam, “Uncorked Soul,” organized by Plum Blossoms Gallery in Hong Kong, heralded the onset of a new era of creative freedom in Vietnam after decades of government control. Artists such as Bùi Xuân Phái (1920–1988) and Trần Trung Tin (1933–2008) who spent years shying away from state art organizations were seen as examples of individuals who put art before politics. In his exhibition catalogue essay, Jeffrey Hantover described them as modernists who “served no master, only art and the Vietnam they loved.” ²⁹ Galleries showing contemporary Vietnamese art after 1994 generally favored artists whose work represented lyrical themes, expressionist colors, and beautiful scenery rather than the themes of soldiers that had dominated the state-sponsored exhibition halls for the two preceding decades. The impression that this gave both the outside visitors to these galleries and the local artistic community was that Vietnam was now a society—as indicated by the title of the Plum Blossoms exhibition—where emotions could be unleashed, and that political art was undesirable.

Over time, the situation has changed. After 2000, the Vietnamese art market and foreign tastes for Vietnamese art began to fluctuate, and a backlash soon emerged with artists and art collectors complaining that Vietnamese art had become too decorative. “Where is the Vietnamese avant-garde?” asked one scholar. ³⁰ Ironically enough, the so-called “decorative art” of the 1990s was the avant-garde of the 1980s. In retrospect, the distinction between “official” and “non-official” was suddenly not so clear. ³¹ By 2011, when Dinh was invited to participate in dOCUMENTA (13) and began production on the film to accompany the drawings, he may have had a sense that the group of revolutionary artists, the Khóa Kháng Chiến, had been dismissed by the current generation that found them overly propagandistic. ³² The decade separating the ubiquity of “national” art on the Hanoi art scene, and the proliferation of non-nationalist art in the commercial galleries, had somehow obliterated the historical connection between two seemingly opposed types of art work: war drawings made as sketches for revolutionary paintings and colorful expressions of Vietnamese life made for the market. So, it made sense that after the first decade of the 21st century, galleries started selling wartime art as nostalgia and romantic views of a more distant past.

Over the past few years, war and revolutionary drawings have appeared on the market in greater numbers, traded by private dealers or intermediaries in Hanoi and sold to international buyers. The most visible of them has been Tira Vanichtheeranont, a citizen of Thailand and resident of Bangkok and a former engineer turned Vietnamese art aficionado. After traveling to Vietnam on business, Tira began trading in antiques before taking an interest in art from the early independence era. His collection includes some 2000 drawings by artists such as Mai Văn Nam, Mai Văn Hiến, Mai Long, Tôn Đức Lượng, and Tô Ngọc Vân. ³³ He purchased whole sketchbooks, some of which the surviving artists had not seen since they created them in the 1950s. When I visited Tôn Đức Lượng in 2009, he recounted to me how he had entrusted his sketchbook to Mai Văn Nam after the victory at Điện Biên Phủ. After Mai Văn Nam died (1920–19??), the family had misplaced it, and it only resurfaced when Tira approached them in search of drawings by Nam. The story confirms the sense that many of the drawings from this time period were “lost” somehow or disappeared from view. Their precarious place in Vietnamese art history only reinforces their role in fulfilling Christov-Bakargiev’s agenda of displaying “traumatized” objects.

Re-authoring the Vietnam War

This broader art historical context is largely omitted from the dOCUMENTA (13) catalogue descriptions of the installation. Although “Light and Belief” is identified as a collaboration, it is mostly categorized as a work by the artist Dinh Q Lê. What this article has attempted to do is complicate the role of the artist in authoring a work that not only bears the heavy burden of history, memory, and trauma, but is inclusive of an entire art historical narrative. Unlike works of art that serve as visual reminders of acts of violence, whether in protest or as ideological statements, the triple authorship of Dinh Q Lê’s “Light and Belief” neither links viewers to the past nor allows them to move forward because it is an art historical display. The principal author of the work, in essence, is the curator of the larger exhibition of dOCUMENTA (13), Carolyn Christov-Bakargiev, who commissioned the work from the artist and was the mastermind behind the narrative that visitors to Kassel are expected to “read.” While the individual installations may appear disconnected, they are also made to speak to the curator’s vision of a whole oeuvre made up of its multiple components. In this case study of a work of art that is in itself a micro-exhibition, an installation of separately authored pieces presented under the guise of a single work that happens to stand as testimony to the legacy of the Vietnam War, the viewer is prompted to reflect on that very historical narrative. In incorporating multiple authors, the work’s point of view also shifts depending on who is telling what story. If one looks at the drawings alone, one may understand the perspective of the Viet Cong, the “believer” in Hô Chí Minh’s call for national unification. The film acts as an imaginary pen that draws the viewer back to the sketch’s inception, almost as if it were authorless and merely drew itself. The artist Dinh Q Lê, in constructing a tableau composed of these drawings, framed by the grove of trees in Karlsaue Park, has offered the viewer a surreal image of artists who appear to live in a remote world fueled by ideology.

The chief curator of dOCUMENTA (13) may have intended to bring to light artists’ contributions to the history of warfare by questioning the role that art has played in the display of trauma. But Dinh’s installation is at odds with the other works in the larger exhibition that ask, as Christov-Bakargiev states in the exhibition catalogue:

…is the fact of organizing artistic projects in war zones or occupied territories a form of “normalization” of outrageous events? Or is such engagement a form of alternate action keyed toward enacting and testing the potential of art to intervene effectively and decrease violence, injustice and conflict in these places? ³⁴