(IMAGE CAPTION) Harrell Fletcher, The American War Billboard project. Photo: Lesley Moon
Recently there has been a lot of comparison between the current war in Iraq and The Vietnam War, which ended over thirty years ago. Its pretty clear that there are disparities between the specifics of the two situations, but at the same time there is a connection. The Vietnam War was the last time that the U.S. was willing to engage directly in a prolonged, unprovoked military conflict. In the late nineteen sixties and early-to-mid seventies the public's reaction to The Vietnam War was so clearly negative that it appeared as if the U.S. would only involve itself in covert warfare or very short and limited conflicts. But I guess enough time had gone by that the Bush administration decided that the public's aversion to Vietnam-like experiences was long forgotten or replaced by revisionist history. Very few people now have any idea of the details of The Vietnam War and its ramifications. Fifty-eight thousand U.S. troops, three million Vietnamese, and millions of Cambodians and Laotians were killed as a result of the ten years of official U.S. military involvement in Vietnam and the surrounding area. The destruction of land, social/political structure, and regional stability is still affecting Vietnam and its South East Asian neighbors. The Vietnam War was an obvious, shameful mistake, but four years ago the U.S. public lacked the knowledge and memory to realize that the invasion of Iraq was the beginning of another war that would leave nothing but devastation and regret.
In June 2005 I was in Vietnam for a month as part of an international artists retreat. One of the reasons I was interested in going on the trip was to have a chance to compare my concepts of Vietnam, which had been mostly derived from watching Hollywood war movies, to the reality of actually being there and meeting local people. I was particularly looking forward to having the opportunity to find out about perceptions of The Vietnam War from Vietnamese people who lived through it. But I found that most people there didn't want to talk about the war. When I asked they told me that it was long over and that there was no remaining animosity, and in fact everyone I met was extremely kind and hospitable. When I pressed people for more information they usually told me to go to The War Remnants Museum in Ho Chi Minh City if I wanted to get an idea of what the war was like for people in Vietnam. So when I got to Ho Chi Minh City that's what I did.
The War Remnants Museum is a memorial museum for what is referred to in Vietnam as The American War. I took a cyclo (a sort of bicycle-powered cab) with Yan Chung-Hsien, an artist from Taiwan who I had become friends with as part of the retreat. Along the way the cyclo driver asked me where I was from and was excited to hear that I had come from the U.S. He said that he thought I was Australian or possibly Canadian because he had encountered very few Americans in Vietnam since the war had ended. Yan and I were dropped off in front of the museum and were immediately approached by various people selling bootlegged copies of western books about The Vietnam War. I bought one called The Girl in The Picture which researches what happened to a young girl who was burned by napalm and was famously photographed running down a country road. The bootlegged version was wrapped in plastic. When I opened it, I found the paper was so thin that you could see right through to the opposite page, which made it impossible to read. Still I found the facsimile an interesting object.
We paid the small admission to get into the museum and found ourselves in a walled-in yard that was filled with leftover U.S. Military equipment--helicopters, tanks, planes, and even bombs. It was shocking to me to see how small and almost fragile these pieces of equipment were, having only previously seen them on the big screen in movies like Apocalypse Now, Full Metal Jacket, etc. We entered the main museum which contained a selection of about one hundred documentary photographs starting at the beginning of the official time line for U.S. military involvement 1965 and continuing until the end of the war in 1975, along with images of people affected by birth defects and war wounds long after the U.S. military had pulled out of the region. The photos came from a variety of sources--Vietnamese documentary photos, American magazines and newspapers, and archives from international organizations that were involved in resolving the conflict and dealing with the after effects of the war.
I was so affected by what I saw at the museum that I went back several times to try to sort out my feelings. Many of the images were familiar to me, and I was already very antiwar in general and decidedly against what had happened in Vietnam as well as the current U.S. military engagements in Afghanistan, and Iraq. But seeing all of the photos and information together and organized from a Vietnamese perspective was overwhelmingly upsetting and sad for me. I also realized that even though I was opposed and angered by what had happened in Vietnam, that I didn't really have a good understanding of the details of the war. Seeing the museum display gave me a good overview of what went on during that time period and lead me to do much more research on the subject once I returned home. On one of my last days in Vietnam I decided that I should find a way to bring the experience of the museum to a larger American audience. It occurred to me that I could just photograph all of the images and text descriptions from the main museum using my digital camera. I went out and found an additional memory card for my camera and went back to the museum. There were no prohibitions against taking photos in the museum. Actually the first day I went there I saw many people take pictures of the photographs, and thought that it was a bit disturbing. Now I was systematically photographing everything there and getting some funny stares myself, though no one questioned me. I took the shots hand-held and at off angles to avoid flash reflections, so the images have an oddly casual quality but are still accurate representations of the material shown at the museum, with a similarly horrifying quality, along with an added layer -- in the wall color, reflections, etc, which makes the viewer realize that they are looking at what I viewed at the museum.
Since returning to the U.S., I have taken the re-created museum, in a few different forms, to various venues around the country starting in San Antonio, Texas; on to Richmond, Virginia; Boston; New York City, Portland, Oregon; Minneapolis; San Francisco, and Los Angeles. In each venue I have organized some kind of public program to try to add to the larger context of the museum re-creation. In some venues this has taken the form of all day screenings of documentaries about the war, in others I have organized public events for local people with connections to Vietnam to talk about their experiences. These speakers have included Vets, immigrants from Vietnam, aid workers, protesters, and historians among others.
The museum and my re-presentations of it are only showing one perspective, there are obviously many others. I encourage everyone to do their own research and find out more about The American War in Vietnam and all of the other American Wars that have been happening ever since, sometimes covertly and at other times, as in the current situation in the Middle East, overtly, but hidden at the same time.
You can view all of the images I took at The War Remnants Museum online here .
The exhibition version of The American War is on view in Los Angeles at LAXART from JANUARY 20 through MARCH 3, 2007 and has been organized by Ali Subotnick
LA ART
2640 SOUTH LA CIENEGA BLVD
LOS ANGELES CALIFORNIA 90034
WWW.LAXART.ORG
A public event related to The Vietnam War will be held at the gallery on January 20, 2007 at 12 p.m.
Part of Campari Talks at LA>Please RSVP for events: 310.559.0166 or rsvp@laxart.org
In association with The American War at LAXART, a billboard project was produced that will be up for the month of January 2007 on La Cienega Blvd., facing north, between Venice and Washington.