The Running Horse

back

Emeric Lhuisset is a multidisciplinary artist who often travels to conflict zones to create works that question the relationship between contemporary art and geopolitics. Although Emeric’s artistic output has always drawn on current events and the war journalist tradition, with the present exhibition, aptly entitled “Theater of War”, Emeric takes his hybrid practice even further.

---

 

Between 2011 and 2012, Emeric lived and worked with a group of Iranian Kurds guerilla fighters in their secret training camp to the backdrop of a mountainous topography. What resulted was a series of photographs where the fighters appear in their guerilla garb posing in staged combat scenes inspired by representations of the Franco-Prussian war of 1870.

 

Historically, representation of war in art was a laudatory and apologetic practice. However, today with the use of photography in journalism to cover conflicts and the arguable belief in its power to realistically communicate the horrors of war and the pain of those subject to it, using photography in art to depict contemporary conflicts is no longer an anodyne matter. And yet this is exactly what Emeric does with “Theater of War” where de Neuville’s paintings seem to find echo on the guerilla front between Iraq and Iran.

 

Emeric’s work seems to fall in a territory of artistic practices that muddles the boundaries between art and journalism thus questioning the claim of photojournalism to truth. The photographs in “Theater of War” bring to mind Jeff Wall’s “Dead Troops Talk”, on the one hand, in their demonstrably staged aspect where some of the actors’ gaze meets that of the viewer and Luc Delahaye’s recent large-scale photography that crossed the boundaries of journalism media to fine art gallery walls, on the other. And yet, they belong to a category of their own, not decrying the atrocities of war as much as questioning photojournalism in conflict zones that creates with its mediated images the conflict in the imagination of those who are not part of it. 

 

What Emeric creates is a strange visual territory where the formal aspects of the work somehow “aestheticise” the violence in war and brings to attention the inevitability of a subject adulterated by the presence of a camera. The question of the ethical representation of conflict seems to persist in an age of heavily regulated and ritualistic theaters of war.

---

"Emeric Lhuisset throws us off by mixing fiction with reality.

He asks real fighters in a conflict zone to re-enact their own reality in staged scenes suggestive of painting, thus inviting us to reconsider staging in the representation of reality.

He also confronts us with reality in the raw by asking fighters to produce the image in his place, questioning at the same time the role of the war photographer; the fighter being always closer to reality than the photographer, so when the fighter takes a turn at becoming the producer of images, how do we reconsider the role of the war photographer?

When in 2007 Emeric Lhuisset filmed an imaginary conflict with a mobile phone, he presented us with an image of conflict that we were to see appear a few years later during the Arab revolutions.

The image is no longer a truth but becomes an object/icon.

In the media, photography is presented as proof. Emeric Lhuisset questions the taboo of staging. He invites the viewer to think his role of onlooker and rethink the images he is “informed” by.

Not many artists commit themselves so fully to live and produce their work; Emeric Lhuisset puts himself in extremely dangerous zones, taking risks in an attempt to better understand the different issues at stake in those conflicts, the day-to-day of war and its players."

                                      ORLAN

 

Semioclasm of War – The Art of Emeric Lhuisset

By Samira Ouardi

 

An interdisciplinary art

Roland Barthes wrote in 1971 on interdisciplinary studies, "Interdisciplinary studies... do not merely confront already constituted disciplines. In order to do interdisciplinary work, it is not enough to take a 'subject' (a theme) and to arrange two or three sciences around it. Interdisciplinary study consists in creating a new object, which belongs to no one." Here is a quotation that, without a doubt, adequately describes the practice of Emeric Lhuisset, whose work goes beyond the boundaries of art and navigates among quite a few spheres without ever giving itself to a definitive categorisation. For here are works that in their plastic diversity – Emeric Lhuisset works not only with photography but also with video and produces objects and mixed media installations – retain an indefinable status. The photographs, for instance, and in particular the series « Theater of War», exhibited here in part, draw on the conventions of classical painting and also, less explicitly, those of contemporary war photography as well as ethnographic documentary photography.

 

These images are original and truly interdisciplinary, that is at once unclassifiable and nomadic, in that what emanates from them is something beyond a mere description of war scenes, but well and truly an analysis (the art of creating links) of the nature of representation of conflict and its history, and more generally, an analysis of the issues at stake in representation, particularly mediatised representation, as an aesthetic and political gesture. An analysis that renders particularly tangible and legible the inter-pictorialities –  to give a name to the purely iconic structures of intertextuality - used as a basis for constructing the photographs (Lhuisset stages scenes from 1870s paintings in his photographs), in addition to the deliberate serial format and the chosen title ("Theater of War"). In this series, and more generally in his work, Lhuisset presents an analysis usually carried out elsewhere by sociologists and semiologists, writers and anthropologists; these images seem to remind us that "all the world’s a stage, and all men and women merely players"…  And also that there is no image without framing, no image without staging; what is at stake is, therefore, not to denounce the theatricalisation of the real, an adolescent version of anti-media indignation, but rather to interrogate oneself on its forms and educate the eye. Heir (perhaps subconsciously) of a Barthes who spent his life trying to understand the functioning of the image and the photograph (botn social and iconographic) and who, for that matter, ends his career with poetic escapades in photographic emotion, Lhuisset plays with the codes of representation of conflicts, explores and experiments with them in order to better distance himself from them. This process places him in a surprising position and once again at the meeting point of several paths: manufacturer of images of conflicts, he is at the same time sémioclaste of representations of war, that is he breaks the conventions of representation, and by doing so, establishes them as conventions, thus contributing to building another view of conflicts.

The cultural depth of this analysis, that does not give in to the exoticism of the other or the distant nor to journalistic emotional manipulation reveals something of the working ethics of this artist who is himself socially unclassifiable.

He belongs, indeed, to the world of art as much as to that of the social sciences and, to produce his art work, he takes turns at being, voluntarily or not, historian, political scientist, reporter, ethnographer, director, painter, translator…

Thus, photography here isn’t merely pictorial, it could be said that it is essayist. Essayist with a tendency towards semiotics. It thinks over (reflects and organizes) a discourse on the image as well as questions its functioning in the form of an original and powerful experiment.

To say that the works of Emeric Lhuisset build in their aesthetic arrangement, their serial accumulation and their original production process, an analysis of the question of representation, does not in any case get in the way of their dialogical nature. for that matter, herein lies the potency of these works, in building an analysis while avoiding at the same time any conclusive simplism: an analytical one (they point to links, they pose questions, create ways of understanding), they are not argumentative (they do not takes sides with anything or anyone). They owe their potency to their great aesthetic quality among other things: Lhuisset works in the detail and sensitivity. Design, colours, lighting are finely worked out. For that matter, the artist does not content himself to referencing painting, he photographs as a painter.

 

This unquestionably contributes to the captivating nature of these works that demand  meticulous observation. Beyond the abundance of detail and nuances, the viewer is captivated, seized by these at once beautiful and terrible images, at once familiar (as we all are submerged with war images) and peculiar (because they remain undecidable). In no way a journalistic "photograph shock", rather a mixed aesthetic experience that disconcerts the viewer and gently interrogates him, almost by surprise, on the ordinary violence of "received images" (clichés), on the deception that is  the mediatised claim to the real. Or rather...

 

To represent … The representation of wars

There are ten of them. And we wouldn’t be able to tell whether they are ready to lay down arms or whether their withdrawal is momentary, just enough time to rebuild the forces that combat has largely undermined. Over there, a man and a woman, squatting on fabulous oriental carpets, strewn with miscellaneous objects, load arms. Not far from them, two men watch out for the enemy out of a window, their faces exposed to the glaring sun. Two other men rest their injured bodies against a cupboard, while a boy lying on a makeshift bed that fortune has favoured him seems to call to his aid his brothers in misfortune. In front of him, a man stands. He is taking a break. His hand in his pocket, his hips feigning a careless sway to the side, almost coquettishly - That's it! He's taking a break! And all of a sudden, the entire image takes on another dimension, the overly placid figure of this oriental infantryman freshly shedding light on it with his clearly deliberate posture. The gaze then goes over the faces again, which do not seem to bear any traces of pain that blood-trenched bodies would usually betray and that the ravaged setting would suggest. This is enough to recognise, behind the fragile realism, a staging that we can not tell at first sight whether it was intended to be concealed in the first place.

Upon observation, the clues to this making (it is important to remember that it was in this that the ancients saw poetry…) accumulate and the doubt about the nature of the image grows: right and wrong, fiction and reality collide and seem to no longer agree on the description of anything. On the one hand, the photograph straightaway evokes in the mind of the citizen of a mediatised age that we are the other photographs of war that regularly mark the press and that formally and politically demand the 'real', and on the other hand, the title of the series gains all its meaning here, for it becomes clear that we are looking at a theatrical image. On the one hand, the story behind the work informs us that the soldiers in the photograph are well and truly soldiers, real fighters (peshmerga, Kurdish guerrilla fighters) in a real conflict zone (the frontier between Iraq and Iran), on the other, the image stages untrained actors.  A vague impression of familiarity is added to the confusion of the image with other images, yet again other than those of war photojournalists. It is in that the construction of this photo is strongly evocative of classical painting. An informed viewer would probably recognise what the photo is about: it is a quotation. Indeed, Emeric Lhuisset makes his fighters pose in a re-make of a painting by the most famous painter of the late 19th century, Alphonse de Neuville. The painting titled "Bazeilles: les dernieres cartouches" depicts an episode from the battle of Sedan, a house encircled by the enemy was defended to the last cartridge at Bazeilles in the Ardennes during the Franco-Prussian war (1870-1871). The artwork, which dates from 1873, earned de Neuville the French order of the Legion of Honour. And the image's unknown and unsettling aesthetic codes reveals itself as palimpsest, invisible superimposition of other images where some have been discarded and others called to the rescue.

All of the images from the series "Theater of War" are constructed with the same staging and quoting process that provokes at once confusion and fascination, powerful emotions and aesthetic confusion: see those fighters in the midst of battle hiding behind a wall;  the other one worried in the observation post in what formerly was a room and is no more than ruins now; see this battlefield charged by the particularly intense gaze of the woman fighter who seems to be inviting you (rather than defying you) to join her in a mined territory; this fighter who is passing to his comrade his last cartridges precisely... The same hesitation grips the viewer facing these dead with the faces of sleepers, these injured men who do not really seem to know pain, these fighters supposedly in movement but that are in somehow frozen poses.  These details deflect the course of reading and expectation from what each one of us first associates with the war photograph and its aesthetics of the instantaneous. At the same time, each one is gripped with fascination at the indisputable pictorial quality these images hold from the fact, among others, that they all are the photographic reproduction of paintings, mainly of works by Alphonse de Neuville (1836-1885) and of Jean-Baptiste Detaille (1848-1912), two artists who documented copiously the war of 1870.

 

The richness of these photographic paintings does not stop here because if all these images bring up simultaneously the aesthetics of military paintings and photographs from the press, different bring up still other iconic codes. It is the case, for example, with this soldier holding in his arms a comrade who died during battle, a wonderful oriental pieta, that is here to remind us that we are really in the Orient, there where the fighter is always a martyr who is always a witness (the same arabic word "shahid" is used for both). For that matter, a very particular and specific genre of photography circulates in the Orient: martyr portraits. A genre that this photograph evokes without Lhuisset ever rushing to single out culturally representations of conflict. Quite the contrary, what the artist shows when evoking Western paintings to represent Oriental conflicts is that certain rules of representation of war in the media are now valid everywhere, in the east as in the west, in the north as in the south. Even more so today with the radical democratisation of the internet. The work of Emeric Lhuisset has a political dimension, too: he critically documents the circulation a global culture of war images. And the palimpsest thickens...

We see him, by this elaborate writing of the image and the recounting of battle, Emeric Lhuisset shifts his subject and object of artistic intervention from the war to the codes of representation of war. From this perspective, the choice to reenact paintings from the war of 1870 carries a powerful meaning: Lhuisset who had immersed himself in a long and careful investigation on the forms of representation of war has detected in this period a transitional/pivotal moment in the history of images of conflict whose successor is contemporary war photography. "The French defeat to Prussia in 1870," he explains, "has changed the way conflicts are depicted. How do you represent defeat ? As a result, more intimist and less grandiloquent representations appeared in opposition to propaganda painting, produced by painters who took part in the battlefields."

The focal length of war paintings actually narrows during this period and the subject of the painting becomes the "soldier" represented in the day-to-day where individual heroism competes with the absurdity of war. The photographs of Emeric Lhuisset equally build up intrigue in battle scenes giving off an intimate feel even when they are collective: moments of withdrawal, waiting, observation, catching a breath or even representation of multiple and complex emotions at the heart of the battlefield – thus the  meticulous work around the gaze that often organises the directing lines of  photographs. Here, too, everything is in the detail : like the nail polish on the finger nails of a woman fighter or the fashionable trainers worn by a young guerrilla fighter remind us that even at war seduction has its place; like the carcasses of cola cans or a pack of  cigarettes of a recognisable brand evoke a globalised break… In short, the images produced by Lhuisset as those of Detaille and De Neuville depict the battlefield as a living space and remind us in passing that life itself is a battlefield of sorts.

But there where the paintings of the war of 1870 develop a convincing form of realism,  those of Emeric Lhuisset, as mentioned earlier, raise doubts and discretely take on theatricalisation and fiction. It is around the issue of realism, the media dummy for the real - the political artist is aware of it - that the problematics of representation of conflicts is debated. War photography as we know it today inherits the realist ambition of military painters from the 19th century to the point of making it the continuing credo of its professional mythology: war reporting claims to be field journalism, reporting live, right there with the real. But realism, a serial process of staging, is not the real and even less so the truth. And isn’t the real itself always turned into a narrative account? Lhuisset poses these vertiginous questions implicitly, through his photography, to the viewer. He seems to question them thus, "Does the fact that I photograph real fighters who are playing the role of fighters on their actual conflict zone make this photo "a fake"? Are there any war photographs that are not a staging?"

With a scholarly knowledge of war photography, Lhuisset knows that the answer is no, and that this reality that the media sells is never more than a fiction concocted in the newsroom even before taking place in the field. Particularly as inside or outside the image, the fighter is always playing the role of the fighter. Emeric Lhuisset, an explorer of conflict zones before becoming their photographer, is full of stories illustrating this state of affairs. This is how he recounts the production of the series "War Pictures", for instance, the prelude to the series "Theater of War", depicting an Afghan fighter wandering through the ruins of the former royal palace in Kabul, armed with a strangely adorned fake AK-47, "I wanted to take photos in the former royal palace of Kabul because the space is spectacular, and there I meet the armed group of the Afghan army that runs it (…) after negotiating with their leader, I was granted the authorisation to take photos in exchange for a portrait of him (…) When I started taking my photos, he asked me to give him the time to rest… I had this fake Kalachnikov with me, a child's toy, that I had bought in some market and that I had decorated because it seemed too real even for a toy (…) I gave it to him and he started spontaneously playing a fighter for me, posing… which was followed by a game in the palace in ruins where the soldier played the soldier, without me asking him to do anything at any moment in time."

The Afghan fighter and the Kurdish peshmerga who pose in the series "Theater of War" are overly aware of the mediatised character of social and political identities and, when they can, they produce and co-produce themselves images that are always a re-presentation of themselves that are fed by mixed pictorial imaginations. Children of the media, they play the game, a game that is at once ludic and theatrical. They, too, participate in the great contemporary battle of images, where Western war reporters are only a few of the directors amongst many others. In that sense, the art of Emeric Lhuisset aesthetically justifies the essential axiom of contemporary perception: there is nothing more real than fiction.

Emeric Lhuisset: War Artist

By Jean-Vincent Holeindre

I was introduced to the work of Emeric Lhuisset at a conference on "Art and geopolitics” held at Sciences-Po Paris on April 22, 2011. Emeric had asked me to give my opinion on his work of "war artist" as a political science researcher specialising in international and strategic issues. Besides the fact that the subject entirely falls into my field of interest, I was fascinated straightaway by his original and subtle artistic process. Although not a specialist on contemporary art, I believe I can say that the vision of Emeric Lhuisset adds a lot to the understanding of the wars of today.

“War artist”, the expression can surprise those who think that the military and art worlds are generally incompatible. It is true that war has produced many works of art – just think of Guernica by Picasso - but there are very few artists in contemporary art who go as Emeric Lhuisset does to theaters of conflict and proceed with their artistic practice around the experience of combat. Moreover, the expression “war artist” might offend those who believe that the artist must keep his distance from the world of war ravaged by violence and ideological confrontations in order to maintain his independence. Here again, it appears that Emeric Lhuisset succeeds, more than any other artist perhaps, to maintain the independence that is characteristic of creation while getting as close as possible  to conflicts.

In fact, what is instantly striking in the work of Emeric Lhuisset is above all his keen knowledge of war, as much theoretical as it is practical. This knowledge is linked to the methodical nature of his work process. Just like an investigative journalist or a researcher, Emeric Lhuisset carries out an investigation; he conducts a research and then goes to the field, establishing a relationship directly with the belligerents. He lives with them just like an ethnographer conducting participant observation. His desire to understand, his self-control and kindness are certainly the explanation for his acceptance on the Columbian, Iraqi, Afghan and Syrian theaters of operation, there where current conflicts take place and where danger is often present. This ability to blend in an armed group, including dress code and aesthetics, enables him to grasp a reality that is often masked by official rhetoric on both sides of the frontline. Emeric Lhuisset, thus, establishes a strategy truly based on discretion that involves, for instance, wearing local clothes or even growing a beard. The work of the artist presupposes a share of cunning. Not the kind looking to deceive, but rather cunning in defense, that would protect from eventual attacks, and that allows the artist to be accepted by the fighters, to integrate the very unusual world of war. Emeric Lhuisset's discretion and cunning intelligence brings him even closer to the people of war who must practice the art of discretion and cunning if they are to survive and win.

Through his photographs, Emeric Lhuisset also demonstrates well the extent to which the world of war is a world of waiting, where the decisive battle is an exception, the acme of a fight that is first and foremost characterised by missions of observation and reconnaissance. The day-to-day of the fighter is not the battle, a much fantasised moment that almost never materialises. The reality of war is the waiting, meals shared together, solidarity brought about by shared moments. There exists a form of sociability proper to the war by resourcefulness.

We never consider enough the crucial role of "bricolage" (Levi-Strauss) in the life of a society, particularly in a military context. Emeric Lhuisset is its discreet witness, adopting the right tone to reconstruct a conflict's background.

Furthermore, Emeric Lhuisset proposes with his work a reflection that does not separate the reality of war from its staging, present in official speeches and, more generally, in all forms of media representation. The war artist has understood that the current conflicts are not taking place solely on the military field; they are also taking place, perhaps even more so, on the media field, that allows for direct action on the political dimension. All this play around the image and propaganda that, in the era of television and the internet form an integral part of new conflictualities and is at the heart of the work of Emeric Lhuisset. Through his investigations, he has seen that the fighters of today, in particular those who do not dispose of an armed force and considerable technological means, can compensate this weakness with stagings that strike and sometimes terrorise western viewers anaesthetised by decades of peace. The image, which is the virtual battlefield  of today's wars, is employed by Emeric Lhusset as his main tool of analysis and primary topic of investigation.

In the series “Theater of War”, Emeric Lhuisset photographs on the ground fighters from the Iranian Kurdish guerrilla, asking them to mimic war scenes borrowed from 19^th century paintings, which depicted the Franco-Prussian war. This interpolation of the Western military past in the extra-Western present of wars leaves a taste of strangeness that adds a dreamlike feeling to the scenes of conflict represented by Emeric Lhuisset. The violence of arms is pushed to the background, our gaze is focused on the fighters' pride, who, like mischievous children, are happy to show their brand new toy and “play” war. Emeric Lhuisset immortalises the individual pride of soldiers in arms and uniform, and even more,  the collective pride of fighting for a cause that transcends.

Thus, the artist brings to the fore the essential role of staging the self in a war: as an Achilles who braved death to achieve immortality, the guerrilla fighter or partisan of the 21^st century is very concerned with the public image that he generates of himself and that he projects to others. This particular form of heroism is a way of marking history at an age where the military feat tends to disappear behind the anonymous figure of the terrorist-martyr. Through his art, Emeric Lhuisset reveals, with elegance and subtlety, the universality of war.