Tim White: "God Bless America"

Only a few of these are necessarily anti-war works: they are more often works of art that treat of war, as background – Tolstoi’s War and Peace – or as psychological subject matter – Stephen Crane’s The Red Badge of Courage. Why are art and war so sympatico? Probably because they both deal with first and last things – with the apocalypses and the treaties, the leadings and the feints, the cataclysms and the recreations, the marching orders and the turnings-of-tail, all things big and small and crucial, in war and peace, that go to make up our days and nights in our unsteadying advances toward the end.

Tim White’s place in the art/war canon, I sense, is assured, even though his work is only now coming into public focus, a rare flower opening, and again closing, then unfolding its petals, in its time, to its purpose, at its pace. This essay is in no way intended as a piece of painterly hagiography or art-critical historiography, but a few initial probes of the White phenomenon – a phenomenon by turns, ambitious, demure, dainty, orgiastic, reflective, aggressive, subtle, bombastic, nostalgic, timely, and above all, out at every turn to make a kind beautiful moot point of its internal, sociocultural, philosophical arguments and agendas. The moot point is the art part: art is Hell; art about war can be Heaven, indeed, must be, to redeem the subject matter at all. White is well on his way.

Gerrit Henry New York, 2000

	Art and war – perhaps even more than love and war – seem to have been made for one another. A quick glance down the years of Western culture offers a wealth, even a glut, of such couplings: The Iliad, Beowulf, Shakespeare’s history plays (among other plays), history paintings by David or Ingres, Goya’s "Desastros," Revolutionary War-vintage American history painting (is "history" here, and throughout, perhaps, a euphemism for war?) In music, that most calmative of arts, there are Beethoven’s "Eroica", Tchaikovsky’s warhorse-of-warhorses, "The 1812 Overture," and Mahler’s "Resurrection." And what about, on a more elegiac note, Walt Whitman’s achingly tender poems written while nursing soldiers during the Civil War, or Rupert Brooke’s antiwar verses? Then there are Guernica, and Robert Motherwell’s Elegies to the Spanish Republic, and "Saving Private Ryan" (to name but one of a slightly stupefying array of war films) – the list can, and apparently must, go on indefinitely, as long as there is a human race to hate itself, or certain shared aspects of itself, and there are artists to wonder why.
	Only a few of these are necessarily anti-war works: they are more often works of art that treat of war, as background – Tolstoi’s War and Peace – or as psychological subject matter – Stephen Crane’s The Red Badge of Courage. Why are art and war so sympatico? Probably because they both deal with first and last things – with the apocalypses and the treaties, the leadings and the feints, the cataclysms and the recreations, the marching orders and the turnings-of-tail, all things big and small and crucial, in war and peace, that go to make up our days and nights in our unsteadying advances toward the end.
	Tim White’s place in the art/war canon, I sense, is assured, even though his work is only now coming into public focus, a rare flower opening, and again closing, then unfolding its petals, in its time, to its purpose, at its pace. This essay is in no way intended as a piece of painterly hagiography or art-critical historiography, but a few initial probes of the White phenomenon – a phenomenon by turns, ambitious, demure, dainty, orgiastic, reflective, aggressive, subtle, bombastic, nostalgic, timely, and above all, out at every turn to make a kind beautiful moot point of its internal, sociocultural, philosophical arguments and agendas. The moot point is the art part: art is Hell; art about war can be Heaven, indeed, must be, to redeem the subject matter at all. White is well on his way.
	To this purpose, what you are in the midst of in this gallery is an installation piece (for perpetual want of a better term) titled, with avuncular irony, "God Bless America." It consists of no less than four mammoth, monolithically handsome Sony video screens constantly replaying serialized, seemingly interchangeable image-tracks, such as boot-clad feet scrunching endlessly through snow; synchronized, digitized noise-tracks accompanying the videos (or somehow, abstractly of the videos, or about them), serving as the latest in wraparound, at-the-very-least-quadraphonic sound; and a number of aluminized cibachrome prints of diminutively epic scale, one hue bleeding through each. You have, in other words, a very sophisticated, highly virtuosic work of installation art before you, ingeniously mediated between source and viewer. How so? Refreshingly, for today, the piece concerns more the art of history than the history of art. What White has done is to cull ancient World War II film footage from citadels as pedestrian as the New York Public or as arcane as private historical libraries; computer-video-ize them; select the images he likes or finds most to the visual/conceptual point, and produce, as one end-result, the enlarged cibachrome prints mentioned earlier. The prints are like glorious sidebars; the piece entire is the basic text, an ongoing history of its own history. The effect of the piece is contemporarily, aesthetically numinous: like Jehovah before him, White the creator of "God Bless America" places before us, "his people," blessing or cursing, life or death. Or is there another, third choice?
	When I was a boy, my friends and I used to like to play a game called "Die." We’d stand lined up on the 3-foot-off-the-ground "brick wall" in my backyard, with a "shooter" on the grass, picking each of us off in turn. Whomever won the game was the one who "died" best as he hurled toward the bitter earth – the most poignant, agitated, wrenching, convulsing, exhilarating performance carried the day, for the moment. To say this that was a "boy thing" is to say a lot for women – do little girls lie around in rows of plush canopy beds seeing how well they can expire of tuberculosis? Not that I know of. But I have known of many men who find the thought of death exhilarating, from joy-riding red-necked cyclist to suicidal Rhodes scholar. Is it in the genes?
	Whatever his private opinions on war and death, Tim White brings the male death’s-head obsession to frighteningly red, black and brilliant light in one cibachrome from his "Runner" series. The runner is seen, black silhouetted against red, transfixed in flight, helmet in place, legs pumping, agog, going nowhere. For whom – or from whom? – is this last of the GI Joes running? For country, to camp, to home, to family – or himself? This is terror beyond fear – it is the terror of knowing terror, the eternal instant of oblivion. So perhaps there is a third option in the war-and-death "game" impassioned enlightenment. Perhaps Tim White is not only a virtuoso computer-keypad bombardier, but also a moralist of the sublime, making undying art of the machineries of our madness. For in what position does our "Runner" put the viewer? Is she/he now one of the gods — for what other creature could just watch such a thing but a fascinated Mars? Except a woeful God Himself? Gerrit Henry New York, 2000