Peter Kennard: Decoration
Gimpel Fils, London

Josie Appleton

The paintings in 'Decoration' by Peter Kennard are based on US and UK military medals - but the flags are fraying, and the metal medallions are replaced by the heads of the victims of war. The aim is to connect military glory, wars fought under national flags, with the resulting suffering and destruction. Here is the rare phenomenon of an artist making an overt critique of the Iraq war. Kennard clearly takes contemporary politics seriously: the paintings incorporate images from Abu Ghraib, and he had wanted the exhibition to be staged at around the time of the US election.

But Kennard’s critique is peculiarly lifeless. The paintings show no trace of human complexity or passion, of the kind that we are used to seeing in anti-war art, such as Picasso’s 'Guernica', which responded to the bombing of a Basque village in 1939. In 'Decoration', both the flags and their victims seem sterile, revealing little of what drives either the aggressors or their victims.

Kennard’s argument about the connection between flags and death is presented from every possible angle. There are faces of every variety – a man, a boy, a woman; in light and in shade, sometimes showing only a cheekbone; or with different parts of their faces obscured by bandages or bags. The flags are shown in varying states of unravelling: some are only a little frayed at the edges; others are ripped in two or blasted apart; or stripped down to a few entwined red threads.

Yet each angle is equally flat. War victims’ faces are expressionless and impenetrable. Eyes stare blankly ahead, revealing nothing – not even pain. How could a man, head bloodied by an American bomb, give no sign of agony or anger? How could a splayed figure, flesh peeling off her arm, not seem to feel? Just as with Kennard’s previous exhibition, 'face', the figures’ mouths are obscured to express their voicelessness.

The flag is portrayed as merely a piece of cloth, each thread revealed with a forensic precision. There is certainly no indication of why people might seek the military ‘decoration’ of the show’s title; no sense of the flag as a symbol that soldiers might march behind and die for. Kennard’s deconstruction of nationalism is literal – he peels away the flag’s threads, pulls it apart, rather than holding it up to criticism. He takes the coalition’s Iraq war apart with a scalpel.

The works are hung at regular intervals in a rectangular gallery, and this hanging is one of the more striking and successful aspects of the show. With their black backgrounds, Kennard’s lined-up paintings evoke tombstones, or the caskets in which American and British soldiers returned home.

But isn’t Kennard just being honest about Iraq? Wasn’t it a dead war after all? Indeed, there was little sign of passion or ideals either from coalition forces doing the bombing or from Iraqis resisting the occupation. For both sides, the war could be seen as a pretty flat affair, just involving meaningless pain and suffering. But perhaps all we can conclude from this is that such a war isn’t the best subject for an art exhibition.

Till 27 August 2004.