'ANTI-WAR MEDALS: ARTISTS RESPOND TO THE WAR'

摘要

Some people say that war is beautiful. What they mean by this is that war creates strong, pure feelings: that it reduces life to simplicities like the folk wisdoms of football. The aesthetics of war is partly a matter of beauty and partly one of feeling. When critic Walter Benjamin wrote that fascism consists of "aesthetidzing the political," he was referring to an expressionist aesthetic of pure feeling. The team sport aspect of war feels great. The Futurist poet Filippo Marinetti, whom Benjamin quotes at some length on the beauties of war, was very much in favor of war as sport, and as mechanical theater. He envisioned alpine meadows blossoming with machine gun fire and the like. Marinetti loved war much the same way hippies loved unicorns: he had never seen one. War is ugly. There's no great insight here, but what remains odd is the continuing, anxious need to reclaim some sense of beauty for war: to rediscover beauty in war, and reclaim something that was lost when war became ugly. The fantasy is that once, when the nations were young, or mythic, or anyhow long, long ago, in the Age of Heroes, war was how male beauty best displayed itself. All modern efforts to reclaim martial beauty, like all efforts to turn that search for beauty elsewhere, into sport or the arts, are marked by nostalgia for an age of heroes. And the primary reward for heroism, the symbol of heroic recognition, is the medal. We have Olympic medals, Nobel Prize medals, and, of course, military medals, which honor the military virtues, primarily valor. But the purpose of the medal is only partly to honor the valiant soldier: the reflection of that honor is to be shed on war itself; war as a place where men can be brave and selfless, can rise above themselves and become heroes.