Drones through artists' eyes: killing machines and political avatars

The drone is a potent symbol of the political processes which allow for remote-controlled, largely invisible, modern war

Andrew Frost

The art of modern war demands careful media management. The images of death and destruction that turned public opinion against the Vietnam War have long been banished from the screens of western countries by a censorious and moralistic media afraid of upsetting or offending people with the grim reality of industrial scale slaughter. We may well be aware of the conflicts in Syria or Afghanistan, but can we conjure an image in our minds that stands for that war?

The ‘war on terror’ has produced an absence of popular culture war imagery – with mainstream media stripped of all the signifiers of content. For the most part these wars have disappeared, with only an occasional reminder on stage, in a documentary, a TV series or video game. War is now just background noise, no louder or more urgent than most other media chatter.

In the face of all this, contemporary art has struggled to say something meaningful or relevant about these wars or the politics that created them. This is in part, I think, connected to the fact that much of the work in this area uses imagery so familiar as to be emptied of all significance.

Perhaps the only single image that truly speaks of our contemporary situation is that of the military drone, the remote-controlled, pilotless aircraft used by western alliance forces to observe, destroy and kill from afar. Artist James Bridle attempted to install a silhouette of a drone at the Queensland State Library for the Brisbane Writers Festival, as part of an ongoing series of works on drones, but was prevented from doing so by an over-cautious bureaucracy.

On his blog, Bridle described drones as : “Avatars of the political process: they are instantiations of a set of ideologies and beliefs, made visible by their reification in electro-mechanical systems. When we talk about drones, we are really talking about the politics that demand, shape, and deploy them, and the politics which are made possible by them.”

Detail from The Drone Stripped Bare of all its Brides 2013. Photograph: Richard Goodwin

Richard Goodwin’s Drone Dorje + The Drone Stripped Bare of all its Brides  at Australian Galleries in Sydney takes on the drone as an icon, making it both material and present in the gallery space. Goodwin has long been interested in the instruments and prostheses of technological civilisation, and for this show he has produced two large works: the video installation Drone Dorje – in which the artist enacts a funeral ritual for a half-scale model drone made from wire and paper – and The Drone Stripped Bare, a large, charcoal drawing that is a flowing panorama of black lines, carefully inscribed mathematical formula, art historical references, and icons of the ‘war on terror’ from the Twin Towers to the drone itself. As if bearing witness, another scale model of a drone sits in front of the drawing, its nose similarly inscribed with lines and scribble.

Goodwin has also created an accompanying series of drawings, a sculpture of a rowing boat, and three small bronzes, Drone Dorje, Drone Ghanti and Ghanti. These last three objects – a model of a drone, its radar dish and a traditional ritual object – are the keys to the concept of the show. The dorje is a Buddhist/Hindu symbol of sudden enlightenment, a thunderbolt of awakening and the diamond-hard realisation of the reality of the world. By conflating the military object with spiritual belief, and mixing the war on terror with the history of western art, Goodwin seeks to draw parallels between notions of good and evil and draw attention to that which is culturally visible, or absent.

Perhaps there’s also an element of magical thinking here, the artist hoping to denude the death effect of the drone through the spiritual power of religious belief. The frequency of use and destructive power of drones is frightening and our complicity in this process isn’t so much a condemnation of those who would seek to repress the information, as it is of those who imagine it’s simply not happening. Bridle and Goodwin are recuperating the unimaginable back into the world, and that is honourable work.

http://www.theguardian.com/culture/2013/oct/25/drones-through-artists-eyes-killing-machines-and-political-avatars