Friday, January 3, 2014

Expo: man, eternal cannon fodder - lalibre.be

Guy Duplat Published Friday, January 3, 2014 at 5:36 – Updated Friday, January 3, 2014 at 1:56 p.m.

cultural Selection Lest We Forget.

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in 2014 is commemorated the centenary of the First World War, the “Great War”, it was said before realizing that “Big” does not make sense. It was a terrible war in which tens of millions of victims, but certainly tens of millions of wounded and traumatized in their flesh and spirit.

magnificent last Goncourt Prize, “Goodbye, up there,” Pierre Lemaitre, told the story of two “broken faces” crushed by the war, and has shown that, far from official histories of glory and battles, wars are first tragedies that affect men and women became flesh gun.

As early as 1957, Stanley Kubrick’s “Paths of Glory”, showed the fatal stupidity of war.

opening this year of commemoration, we must visit the exhibition “War and Trauma” at the Museum Dr. Guislain in Ghent (explanations in French). Housed in a psychiatric hospital still active, this museum has examined the psychological and psychiatric injuries in war, through a large number of paintings, drawings and photographs often striking. We leave the exhibition moved by this series of human dramas. If it starts on the war of 14-18, it continues until today, showing that the wars in Iraq, Syria and elsewhere always produce the same trauma as those of the “Great War.”

“The Sacrifice”

can already highlight six important works: First, “The Sacrifice”, a whole wall covered sixty black and white photographs, large format, placed end to end, James Nachtwey, the great war photographer who photographed in close-up, operation tables in makeshift hospitals during the war in Iraq. These are just injuries, mushy flesh, attempts cauterization. A little later, Alfredo Jaar shows the opposite, with its large color photographs so moving, two boys, arms entwined, attending a ceremony to remember the Rwandan genocide.

A film made

14-18, shows a soldier suffering from “obusite” mental illness which gave rise to insomnia, nightmares, uncontrollable tremors. A result of seeing his friends blown up by a shell or to have escaped death by a miracle. A self-portrait of Rik Wouters, 1915, the haunted look as he remembers the forehead Liège “the terrible sight of all these young people dying made me mad” , he said. Announces that his eyes, empty, scary fear, soldier of the Vietnam War, while mud, taken by Dan McCullin. Finally, in this first round, we can mention these little sketches Arpaïs Wood, daughter of a deported to Dachau, which attempts by his sketches to shape the nightmares that his father is unable to express.

cowards or heroes?

recognition of psychological trauma was slow to do. During the First World War, those who were affected by the “obusite” were treated simulators, cowards, deserters and sometimes shot as such. This placed the military leaders face a dilemma: was it a genuine victims of trauma or simply cowards hoping to be away from the terror of the front? Should we evacuate or rather return to battle? And how to effectively treat this disease?

During the First World War, the English and the French are simply pass the terror squad as “cowards” and “mutineers”, as in the case of corporals Souain. During World War II, General George Patton slapped a soldier terrorized by a coward before being forced to apologize in a public ceremony.

exhibition subtitled “Soldiers and psychiatrists 1914-2014″ also stops on more recent conflicts of the past century. How a psychiatrist he treats today a soldier syndrome, post-traumatic stress? This is it better understood? And look what correspondents and war photographers do they see the violence of war and mental suffering?

American soldiers returning from the Vietnam War did not know if they would be welcomed by those around them as heroes after months of horror they had experienced, or as bastards after countless anti-war demonstrations, USA.

In the 70s, in the wake of the trauma of the Vietnam War, the similarity was observed between nightmares and the sudden emergence of terrifying images of women victims of rape and symptoms of veterans with traumatic neuroses war. Victims of rape or intrafamily sexual abuse suffered from the same symptoms of post-traumatic stress disorder, PTSD.

André Masson could draw the battles he lived in the Somme, 15 years after the war. In the 70s, a doctor attempted to speak (and cry) a victim of the camps by treatment with LSD.

sick exterminated

worst course, was the treatment that the Nazis exterminated psychiatric patients in the camps, or left in hospitals, no food, starving (even in France, it is said that Camille Claudel died of starvation during the war in Avignon psychiatric hospital). The exhibition in Ghent shows number of drawings from the Prinzhorn collection, psychiatric patients exterminated during World War II.

museum exhibition of Dr. Guislain multiplies strong and meaningful images as current tables Ronald Ophuis the Srebrenica massacre, giving images on this ignominy down. Eric Manigaud offers a large drawing of a broken mouth while Philip Gurrey painted the portrait of a man who has only one eye, but that sets us strangely.

Eleanor Cook restored, wax, scale, an orchestra of military-faced smashed. Jan Van Riet, as it does in the Dossin barracks, painted in colors, giving them life, faces deportation parties Mechelen to death camps.

found the greatest photographers: Robert Capa, Manuel Alvarez Bravo, Don McCullin, Marc Riboud or Teun Voeten and Belgian photographers of war: Stephan Van Fleteren in Afghanistan, Tim Dirven in Afghanistan or Guantanamo, Gaël Turine Kabul, Roger Job in Rwanda. It reviews the Eddie Adams photo of a summary execution on the streets of Saigon, and photography by Christine Spengler Phnom Penh bombed and turned into a killing field.

The exhibition does not forget that violence begins near us. Marina Abramovic and her partner Ulay, show it with their “Game of Death” where they shoot a bow whose arrow is pointing at the heart of Abramovic. And a very funny film Bruce Nauman shows how a silly joke (take the chair of someone who wants to sit) can degenerate into the worst violence.

then remains to face the look of a little girl holding her toy abused, painted by He Sen and bodies hanging from the ceiling, upside down, Zhang Dali.

The exhibition also has a museum in Ypres for “In Flanders Fields” where she focuses on caring for the wounded during the First World War.

“War and trauma, soldiers and psychiatrists, 1914-2014″, Museum Dr. Guislain Ghent, until June 30. Tuesday to Friday from 9h to 17h and on weekends, from 13h to 17h. www.museumdrguislain.be

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