By Carl Gopalkrishnan
For the past two decades I have focused my acrylic paintings, drawings and prints on uncovering the hidden narratives that drive political change, especially those that foster a decision to go to war. Such decisions are often embroidered with the fine handiwork of legal experts who could probably justify dropping their own families from a helicopter into an active volcano. The skill with which our top legal minds can employ the rules of jus ad bellum and jus in bello to drop other people’s families and children into active volcanoes fills us with shock and awe.
That doesn’t need to be admired so much as respected if we heed the advice of the 18th century poet William Blake, whose complex poems re-arrange biblical mythology into a timeless manual for the “the mental fight” between good and evil. Polarisation, hate and a refusal to engage with each other always depletes our knowledge of ‘the other.’ Perhaps that is why my work often inserts irony and subtle humour into even the darkest themes. It is probably why my work doesn’t fit into the genre of ‘protest art’, but it does make an argument to expand our concept of ‘war art’ to include the experiences of civilians affected by war, injustice, corruption and to those witnessing it.
I have found in my own life and in my ‘day job’ as a multicultural community advocate that a blind belief in any ideology, without deeper reflection, seems to drown out the voices of the people whom we want to protect. People who often respond creatively to protect themselves in ways that align with their culture, their faith, their gender or, not least, their desire to not become bigger targets and victims in elite culture wars.
A lot of us who book a table at a swish bar and end up next to the toilets or a drunk football team know that the worldly power of elite lawyers, soldiers or politicians is totally out of reach, so we become more creative know that we do not have the worldly power of elite lawyers, soldiers or politicians. Our silences are not consent, nor are our cultural & artistic responses ‘weak’ for being creative, soft, or simply flavoured by differences which haven’t yet been catalogued.
I try to paint cultural metaphors that invite non-expert people with different views to sit down and have a chat, I look for metaphors that they might understand. 1950s Hollywood icons like Judy Garland and James Mason in A Star is Born to describe the political marriage between the US and Israel. The musical South Pacific to talk about our soldiers’ love affair with drones and other technologies of death. A tiered wedding cake to remind us all that the cultural stories that we commit to can inspire war or peace.
In Australia, I spent one pandemic year in an imaginary relationship with William Blake’s character Orc from his 1793 poem America a Prophecy to try to understand the role of masculine violence in war and the West’s obsession with China and the ‘Indo-Pacific’.
I don’t assume righteousness. Instead, I assume that our tormentors are also tormented and have traumas of their own, and that this complexity bleeds into our laws subconsciously and invisibly over time. So, if we are to engage with someone in trauma, then we must understand our own or, as Sun Tzu writes in The Art of War:
“If you know the enemy and know yourself, you need not fear the result of a hundred battles. If you know yourself but not the enemy, for every victory gained you will also suffer a defeat. If you know neither the enemy nor yourself, you will succumb in every battle.”
For me, the role of the public Artist is to create stories that people on both sides of a conflict might relate to enough to engage with each other. These stories become my metaphors for each painting. I invite my viewer to add their own meaning to these metaphors, and to revisit the cultural artifacts that I play with. That playfulness challenges the linearity of ‘precedent and perhaps also the creative stagnation within the culture of jurisprudence.
I hope you can use these paintings to form spaces for respectful and curious conversations between people of similar and dissimilar life experiences, cultures, faiths and orientations towards The Law and The World itself.
Links for more reading:
Artist's website: www.carlgopal.com
Abstract: “Hitting the Target Poster Exhibition: Romancing the Drone: Using painting as reflective discourse to creatively respond to new capabilities”. A 2012 workshop University of Surrey, School of Politics, UK. https://www.carlgopal.com/hitting-the-target-2012. Poster Session Video, University of Surrey, 2012 at You Tube: https://youtu.be/Uqy1zc3RjXc
Visual Essay: "A Field Manual for A Lost Soldier: William Blake's The Marriage of Heaven and Hell as a Course in Complexity" in VALA, # 4 (The Blake Society, London, UK). Free download: https://blakesociety.org/wp-content/uploads/2023/12/VALA-04.pdf
Art Feature: The Australian Fabians Review #6, January 2024, Australia. Art Feature of my Gaza paintings from 2010. Free download: https://assets.nationbuilder.com/australianfabians/pages/1482/attachments/original/1704108890/FabiansReview-web6.pdf?1704108890
Article: “An Artists exploration of the mythic, subconscious and literary constructions of military interventions in the Indo-Pacific in Critical Military Studies”, Vol 9, 2023, Issue 2. Subscription access. URL: https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/23337486.2022.2088082
Cover Art: Cultural Politics of Targeted Killing On Drones, Counter-Insurgency, and Violence By Kyle Grayson. Amazon: https://www.routledge.com/Cultural-Politics-of-Targeted-Killing-On-Drones-Counter-Insurgency-and/Grayson/p/book/9780367596309
Public Talk: Australia a Prophecy, for The Blake Society, London, UK January 2023. Video You Tube: https://youtu.be/2ag3-5wgDp4?feature=shared