 Good evening everyone. I'm just going to give a minute for everybody to come in Before we start so we'll just wait one minute Okay, I think we'll start Good evening everyone and a very warm welcome to this panel discussion on the big question of why art matters in war So my name is Rachel Kerr and I'm a professor of war and society in the department of war studies and also deputy deputy head of department and I'm really delighted to welcome you all and our panelists this evening So this event is part of a series of discussions of big questions to mark war studies 60th Birthday this academic year And we wanted to use the opportunity to explore a set of issues that we think both illustrate the breadth and depth of war studies Is an area of study and allow us to think about the relationship between war and society in the next 60 odd years So this evening our focus is on art not the art of war but art in and around war So the questions we want to explore why art matters in war and why does that matter to war studies? We have four excellent speakers this evening all coming from quite different perspectives and coming with different experiences And I'm confident that we're going to have an excellent discussion So our four speakers if I just introduce them all briefly before we move on to the discussion First we have Dr. Jan Willem Honig who is a senior lecturer in wars to the east at King's and a long-standing member of the department And as our students will attest a world-leading expert in all things class fits His research focuses on the relationship between politics and war the development of Western strategic thought and practice From the Middle Ages to the present the theories of class fits and their influence and the dynamics and mechanics of European security and foreign policymaking He's also interested in how art and artistic representations of war intersect with all of this Next up we have Rebecca Newell who is head of art at the Imperial War Museum Working across the five branches of the museum on all aspects related to the care display And interpretation of the museum's 20th and 21st century art collection Rebecca is the Imperial War Museum's lead subject specialist for art history and engagement and is part of the research active staff community at the museum She's recently curated a large-scale commission with global artists and activists Ai Weiwei For Imperial War Museum London and an exhibition of Blitz paintings with a focus on the experience of London that's for the church or war rooms Other areas of research include decolonisation practice within museums And marginalised histories issues of representation and the role of the artist in recording and memorialising conflict Next we have Professor Sir Lawrence Friedman who possibly needs no introduction in this audience Many will know him from his long association with war studies where he's now Professor Emeritus He served as head of department of war studies for many years overseeing its expansion in many areas during the period And then head of the newly established school of social sciences and public policy and then vice principal at search at King's He's the author of a great many books including his Magnus Opus on strategy A history of the future of war and most recently a ladybird expert book on nuclear deterrence So what some people may not know and I did not know until recently is that he is also a keen cartoonist and cartoon aficionado And I fully expect his next book to be a graphic novel Next we have Dr Paul Lowe Paul is a reader in documentary photography at the London School of Communication University of the Arts London Paul's an award-winning photographer and educator and as a photojournalist he covered some of the most iconic events in recent history Including the fall of the Berlin Wall Nelson Maddler's release Siege of Sarajevo and destruction of Gosney Paul's latest book is a history of the news coverage of the siege Some of you may have attended the book talk we held a couple of weeks ago With his co-author Kenneth Morrison Paul's also engaged in peace building and museum work in Sarajevo And has been collaborating with us in war studies for a number of years on a series of projects under the umbrella of art and reconciliation And then finally last but not least we're joined by Professor James Gao Who is like me a member of the art and conflict hub in war studies and the art and reconciliation program as well as the war crimes research group And also a long-term inmate of the department So James is going to act as discussant and ask a few questions Once all of our panelists have presented their openings So i've asked the panel to reflect on the relationship between art and war We'll explore why and how war matters to art and art matters in war and to war studies And what we can learn from studying art and artists about studying war in all its forms What is war art? How have fashions and styles changed? And what can we learn about societal and cultural attitudes to war for art? Who and what is the subject of war art and what's its purpose? Should art be above politics or is it intrinsically political? And what does art do in war including resisting it? Finally, we ask how might it be invoked for peace and reconciliation after war? So each of our panelists is going to speak for seven to ten minutes And then we'll turn to James for some questions before opening up the discussion for Q&A from the audience So please if you have a question, feel free to post it as we go along and we'll pick up as many as we can Before we finish So first of all, if I can turn to Jan Willem and ask you to take the floor please. Thank you Thanks Rachel Oh, I shared the wrong thing That's better What I want to do in the next seven to ten minutes is to give you a whiz bang tour Through early modern and modern European history to give you an idea of how valuable art can be If you want to understand what simply what war is, how it is understood, but also how it evolves over time That things we associate deeply with war nowadays may not have always been associated so strongly Even though, even though as I'll show you through the pictures that there is often a lot of confusion in modern viewers about art There's a lot of confusion in modern viewers about what they actually see and they very often don't see the right thing in pictures from the past So I'm going to show you give you a flavor of what war reeks a few examples of what violence, which is the thing we associate mostly with war Is thought to have produced and how it is depicted in art What it produces everyone would agree is death but there is a fundamental question here whether death is always seen as the main product As we tend to nowadays or whether it may have been seen may be seen as a byproduct to give you a first example This is a battle Napoleon or the aftermath of a battle Napoleon fought against the Russians in Russia In the middle of winter. Now the thing that modern viewers are immediately drawn to if you can see my mouse are the dead bodies in the foreground And we immediately associate this painting with a depiction of the horror of warfare and indeed if you go and see this picture and copies of it in a museum that is what you will find Emphasized however if you put this picture in a longer continuum of art history what you find is that it is extremely rare until the second half of the 19th century To find dead bodies of soldiers depicted in the center of art. It is never really centered That is also the case in this picture. The dead bodies are in the foreground. They are therefore intended to be a byproduct of war that emphasizes what the guy who appears in the center with a sort of pale face as a latter day Christ who dispenses charity through a team of his doctors whom you see here there and elsewhere dispensing charity to the casualties of war So it is not a depiction here of how horrible war is no war is actually a thing that this guy does very well as the successful advance of his troops in the background suggests it is a depiction of death happens in war but it isn't regrettable byproduct that only changes if you look at European art from the third quarter of the 19th century onwards and this is one of the early pictures I found which is not famous Private collection or that moves dead soldiers to the center of a picture but but but if you read around the picture and also if you look carefully at it, what you will find out is that this is not a condemnation of war not a depiction of the pity of war. This is rather a depiction by a military veteran, the painter Edward de Ty fort in the Franco-Prussian war. This is a depiction of a necessary product of war, killing the enemy. These are German soldiers. This is a French painter in a way commemorating but also celebrating the death that is inflicted upon the enemy. And that is a trend that continues. And if you then look third picture I have which is probably famous, the most famous one so far for all of you that is a dead soldier in the artillery monument in Hyde Park corner. That is really sort of the first public example that is well known that you can find that puts a dead soldier at the center of this sort of sculpture but at the same time the sculptor doesn't quite dare put it at the center of the monument. And it's put at the back. It is put in great realistic detail. And it is meant to raise not only the issue that death is now by the beginning of the 20th century seen as a central product of war, but it is also meant to introduce an idea that this is not a good central product of war. There is a condemnation or at the very least a reservation about what war does to human beings in this picture. Now, this is part of a series I have as the next pictures, which you could extend to make the same point more clearly, but this should give you an idea that if you trace evolution in art and you look carefully at pictures, you will see that there is evolution that people evaluate war, what it is about what it is produces differently. The second issue is what produces brutality, war crimes. Although one can ask a question whether war crimes brutality is a natural and unlawful product or actually an intentional and lawful thing that war produces. If you then take this example of the capture of Maastricht in 1579 by the Spanish, our focus is immediately on the murder of the civilians on the bridge. By the way, another thing that art does is it sort of evokes a historical sensation in you because if you go to Maastricht, the bridge is still in the same place, all the churches you see in the background are still there. So you can actually move into this picture for real life and imagine that you're there. But what we focus on is the murder, the persecution of the civilians here. However, if you read the text, if you look at the title, how Maastricht was captured, what this shows is a process of how siege warfare is supposed to evolve and take place. And it is not necessarily a condemnation of what the Spanish do, rather it is an affirmation of that they follow the right kind of procedures in taking a town full of rebels who are resisting against their sovereign Spanish overlord. So what you see here is not a disordered picture. This is an army taking its just revenge on the Dutch population in the town. If you then look at the same scene a century later when the Dutch we had won the war against the Spanish, you see that the depiction is not quite the same. What this one does is it begins to shift the blame onto the Spanish. The Spanish are behaving with brutality that the picture suggests is illegitimate unlawful. The telltale signs of that and those become standard depictions is the baby that is grabbed by its neck and is about to get its head bashed in. And the woman whose hair is being grabbed by a soldier and will have a head cleaved in two axes with by the way not a common weapon in those days so it is a bit fancy for, but it depicts a changing sensibility towards war, war crimes, legitimate illegitimate siege warfare. Now, the third element of what war produces is an end to war, but that raises a question, whether war is supposed to where the war does end by common consent between two enemies, or if it is the result of the application of force of violence alone on a unwilling but one accepting victim. Now, what you see whistle stop tour again through European history here is a depiction of the end of what for the Dutch was an 80 years war but in Europe is known as the end of the 30 years war 1648. The worst wars known amongst historians and European peoples nowadays that the European continent has experienced, it should therefore be something of a surprise to see this depiction of the swearing of the oath of ratification of the Treaty of Munster one of the two treaties of the Treaty of West failure, where you see the two parties swearing the oath together intermixed, it is not clear from this picture who are the two sides in the conflict, who are the enemies, nor is it clear from this picture immediately who won and who lost. Now, we all know the Dutch won and the Spanish lost big time. That is not the way this picture depicts it, and it depicts something more, that if you look at who looks at you from the painting, there's this man, and there is this man. This man is the painter himself who was there who witnessed the event. That man is the Catholic priest of the Spanish delegation that lost, but there's a further trick hence the lines that I drew of things we are not attuned to looking for in paintings but that is a vanishing point. If you then also look at the vanishing point, you find the face of the Dutch Protestant preacher who accompanied the Dutch delegation. So what you have here is an end to a war that doesn't recognize clear winners and clear losers that only recognizes political. There's no soldiers really in this painting, political diplomatic harmony, as well as for the conflict known as the biggest religious war in Europe, religious harmony. Now you might say, this is fanciful. No, it is not because this really happened. We know that from other sources. If you then move forward to the Congress of Vienna, you still see harmony and equality between the winners and the losers, although it is near harmony now. But what you note on the left hand side of the picture is the three major powers. Here is Mettenich, Austria, Karlsruhe, Prussia, and that's really Karlsruhe, Britain, Hardenberg, Prussia. Who organized the piece? On the other side in the second group of people, you find at the center, Thalerand, the French negotiator. So there is no clear distinction here, but there is a subtle distinction here between who won and who lost. What there is also is a depiction of an end to war that is a diplomatic political moment, not a military one. There are some people in uniform. Here's one, the French collaborator with the other side, and there's the Duke of Wellington, but most of them are civilians. That is the beginnings of a radical shift in how wars end in Europe and how we think wars should end in Europe. Here's the iconic picture of the end of the First World War. That is the military delegation that appears from the carriage in which the ceasefire on the 11th of the 11th. That's tomorrow, however many years ago, was signed. And what you have here therefore is no longer a political moment that ends war, no longer a moment that has both the winners and the losers as equals or near equals there, but you have a depiction of a military end to the war. And what you don't have is the official moment of ending war, and this is my last picture and I'm going over time. This was supposed to have been the iconic moment that would have ended the war and the signing of the Treaty of Versailles, which if you go back quickly to this one, you can see that the date only is 1914, 1919 and not yet 1980. 1918 becomes the end and not 1990. And what you see in this picture is sort of embarrassment by the painter, who again puts himself in the mirror at the background in the picture, like Ter Borch in the earlier picture I showed it, which he knew, which he knew, which he copied and inspired him, where the victors look vacantly at you, not directly as if they're guilty and were crouched in the foreground in a clearly inferior position are the German losers of the war. What you see here therefore is sort of confirmation that we're not comfortable anymore with the idea that wars end in a diplomatically negotiated peace treaty between co-equal, almost co-equal winners and losers. Rather what we see war as needing as its end is something that is imposed by soldiers upon an enemy, who therefore is not allowed to have a place, a part in the peace that has to be as it were almost written out of the post-war history. Okay, I will leave it at that. You can add your own pictures after this for yourself, 1945, or the ones in recent wars, where's the big iconic picture of our loss in Afghanistan. Okay, that's it, thank you. Thank you very much, Jan Willem, that's fantastic kicking off, I think, talking about what art's telling us about societal perspectives on war, what the artists are trying to tell us and how we think about what we're looking at now. So we're going to move on to Rebecca next, Rebecca Newell from the Imperial War Museum. I was going to talk about how a museum that's focused on telling us about war, what museum can do with art and artists. So over to you, Rebecca. Thank you very much, and thanks Rachel and the rest of the team for inviting me to be on such an esteemed panel. I'm also just going to share my screen. Great. So please see Jan Willem end on an IWM picture as well, so we'll come back to that. So I thought what I'd do this evening is just give you a bit of a sense of IWM as an organization and then start to situate the art collection within that and what I thought the most helpful thing I could do is really just show you some examples from the collection so we can start to situate some of our questions. So a bit of an introduction by IWM. The collection comprises about 800,000 items collected by the museum since 1917 at our inception to tell the story of modern war and conflict. Our remit is to explore the causes, course and consequences of conflict. So the collection covers the sublime to the everyday of war to try and do that from all perspectives. Those who thought, those who witnessed, those who have reflected and mediated our understanding. We cover overseas as well as home front experiences and perspectives. We consider local, national, international perspectives. And the collection comprises exhibitable types, photographs, film, a sound archive, vehicles, tanks, planes, and technological objects. And the collection also includes a diverse and exceptional art collection, numbering in total about 100,000 items. With many great works of art from the war art schemes of the first and second World War, perhaps at its core. And it is to this time that we can perhaps trace the idea and term official war artist or war artists as we know it today. And from this time to the core of the collection is an exceptional representation of British modernism. But we have continued this thread since the World Wars. The museum has continued to commission and collect work from artists through the late 20th century and 21st century, reflecting recent and contemporary conflicts, including Northern Ireland, the Netherlands, Bosnia, Iraq and Afghanistan. So as I said, I thought the most interesting thing I could do is to show you a few examples from that huge collection and to frame our discussion of what is war art and how has war aren't changed. What are the agents of that change. And maybe what are or what else are war artists doing. So first of all, a work that comes from that early, early period of commissioning activity during the first World War War scheme, which was obviously a government scheme. This is Stanley Spencer's true voice arriving at small from an event that happened in 1916, but the painting dating from 1919 Stanley Spencer was an up and coming artist at the outbreak of the first World War, and was very important and distinctive single year cohort at the Slade studying under Henry Tonks, which also included Christopher Nevinson, Paul Nash or a Carrington David Bonberg. Henry Tonks described this intake as a crisis of brilliance. The years before the first World War were very demanding and exciting time with various forms of modernism, kind of competing for attention, including futurism, cubism and vortism. By all accounts Spencer was a quite a spirited and rather eccentric character was eager to do his bit at outbreak, following two brothers who had immediately enlisted in 1915 aged only 24. He was posted to the Salonica front in an area of northern Greece and Macedonia, and largely undertook medical duties at first in the Royal Army Medical Corps. He was stationed with an ambulance unit and soon dealt with an attack in which the wounded he wrote passed through the dressing stations in a never ending stream. In 1919 Spencer, still very young was commissioned by the British War Memorial's Committee of the Ministry of Information to paint a large work for a proposed but never built Hall of Remembrance which the William Orpin that young William showed us was also destined. It was to be on the theme of and I quote a religious service at the front. Stanley Spencer found great spiritualism in his battlefield experiences partly because of his own pre existing fervent if unconventional Christianity and post war he went on to make a cycle of related paintings at Sandham Memorial Chapel which you can still see, which has also been described as a process of remembrance and exorcism for Spencer, and was a truly colossal undertaking. So clearly the war experience had changed him as an artist and as an individual. In this painting, however, Spencer wrote that his aim was here to show God in the bare real things in a limbo wagon in ravines in fouling mule lines. So the scene of casualties being drawn on sledges or Travoise towards a central dressing station in a converted old church in small is imbued with that sense of veneration and you might think it recalls kind of nativity painting and older religious painting. So it was shown in a in a groundbreaking exhibition in 1919 and from this time has been regarded as one of the seminal modernist war art contributions. So moving forward in time to the Second World War. This is Laura Knights Nuremberg trial of 46 in the aftermath of the Second World War Laura Knight proposed to the war artists advisory committee which is kind of the second world movement of that war artist group in the First World War and was headed up by Kenneth Clark. She proposed to them the subject of Nuremberg war crimes quite an unusual thing for female artists to do at that time but she'd already reached a very high pinnacle in her career and was an older artist. But she pitched that the Nuremberg war crimes trial should be part of her work as a war artist she was in fact the only woman to be sent overseas. The committee agreed night went to Germany in January of that year appointed as an I quote war correspondent and made a special BBC broadcast from Nuremberg as part of her role there. She gained special access to a courtroom box above the prisoners at the Palace of Justice and she made charcoal sketches in situ of the main protagonists. The accused Nazi leaders in various modes of attentiveness or perhaps border and we might say headed by a white suited Herman Goring. They stretch away in the foreground, and they're attended by lawyers in black robes. Many wear the headphones required to hear translation of the proceedings. And we see behind the defendants, a line of helmeted military police who guard the benches and separate the prisoners from the court beyond. In terms of the image night moved some of the main protagonists around Herman Goring is pictured where he sat the kind of mid top of the painting. But Hans Frank Hitler's personal lawyer and governor of occupied Poland, who was actually in life seated on the front row is represented on the second row closest to us. And perhaps night did this to make more of his features more of his hands. He wore gloves each day to court in life, but D gloves here by night, and his hands bear the scars of failed suicide. It's also most likely deliberate that no women are represented here in the eye of the artist. So, so I think what we're seeing is Laura Knight making artistic choices making political choices. But we also have a sort of sense of how the trial felt, which is also important in terms of how we might understand truth and storytelling within a war art. She was by all accounts very deeply disturbed by what she'd heard during the trial and she added later on this kind of imaginary desolate landscape at the top of the painting. And I think through this we are invited to contemplate the dreadful consequences of totalitarian regime contrasting with this more documentary style of the courtroom below. So we have a kind of tangible and intangible sense of horror and reality. And I think that points to something very special that war artists are doing in this space and in the IWM collection as a whole that actually when dealing with atrocity and horror artists occupy a very special place in this regard because they invite us not just to, not just to see but to look carefully and absorb and you know with objects that are designed to be looked at that something very particular and peculiar. So this is something completely different moving huge, huge, many years in time. I wanted to give you a sense of the breadth and diversity of the collection. This is a, this is a huge work, huge photographic work by Ory Gersh. I'm sure Paul will be familiar with this work is, and it's from a series called After Wars, and was taken in Sarajevo in the aftermath of the Bosnian War. It was taken in and around the city. And the subject of the series is the kind of landscapes and also the apartment blocks and the kind of living conditions that bear the scars of war. But also act as a, as the places that act as a new, new locus for new growth and recovery and reconciliation in the aftermath. You see a swimming pool with crowded with young people, spectators and beavers in the foreground we see a kind of retaining wall and wasteland and behind the pool and this kind of very vertical layered image is a is a main road with concrete walls and if you look close you can see kind of the scars of war within within that physical landscape. After Wars series is not, it's not a moralistic meditation on war. It's not an artist grieving the past or the devastation of atrocious deeds it's not an act of mourning, nor do the images from this series commemorate the lost part of Bosnia. Instead here the artist is aiming for some sort of capture of an immutable force of life, the condition in us all that generates optimism and renewal and kind of commands a post conflict landscape. And I think he offers us a couple of other ways in to thinking about post conflict situations that go beyond a kind of before and after and actually talk a bit more about continuum of humanity. And just to give you kind of a last thing to look at. It's very different to all the other things we've seen. This is Steve McQueen's Queen and Country from 2007. So the current day art commissions committee at the museum which is kind of the descendant of those committees from the World Wars we can understand it as I guess. So the Queen, a commission to respond to British forces in Iraq and the Iraq war and more generally, and he got the commission in 2003. He visited Iraq shortly after his was embedded with with a team out there for about six days. McQueen had planned to produce a film as we might expect about the troops that he witnessed and talk to an experience serving in Iraq, but was very frustrated by the restrictions of embedding and restrictions on movement in particular. So instead he proposed that the Royal Mail produce commemorative stamps to commemorate the activity and to think about the individual servicemen and women who had lost their lives in Iraq. With the intention through this that their images should and I quote enter the lifeblood of the nation. So this kind of conceptual but also physical aspiration that he had. The Royal Mail were dubious and worried, and instead the Queen then brought his own research team on board to contact an initial 115 bereaved families, which was a total at the time. And I think 98 agreed in the first instance be part of the presentation. So this cabinet that we see a kind of sculptural cabinet is is a kind of development of the proposal because he didn't manage to realize the stamp circulation and consists of facsimiles of stamps based each based on one of the individuals that had lost their lives. And then they're housed in this in this oak cabinet so their experiences as an interactive spoke to you. And there is a sense that this work remains a kind of live meditation on recent conflict. So this work in particular points to the role and place of artists within war, that is still a current debate, and that is a renewed debate about what artists ethically, you know, equitably physically literally bring to the war art space to the conflict space rather, and what questions they feel they should ask, which perhaps is a preoccupation that exists more now than it did 100 years ago. So I'll probably stop there I've got more things to say but perhaps I'll wait for the for the Q&A to kind of bring some of those to bear. Thank you. Wonderful. Thank you so much Rebecca and I hope we can come back to that that question that you just posed at the end about the ethical responsibility for war artists as well. It's difficult to hold back because as we've had to very rich presentations and I can tell already we may not have time for all of the questions that are going to arise. But let's move on from from fine art to graphic art and invite so Lawrence to give your presentation please. Hi. I'm inevitably struggle here we go. Right. So, what's your presentation isn't showing. If you want to try loading up again. Here we go. Yep, it's coming now. Okay sorry about that. Yes. Let's go right back. You can see there's lots of cartoons. Actually that's not the right presentation. That's the longer one. I'm going to stop. No I won't. I don't want to do that one. Bear with me one sec. Let's get it right. That's the one I want. Can you see that? Yeah. Okay. You can still see the other one. I don't know. If you stop sharing that one. And then put the other one up. That's me again. Yeah. Now your camera's off. Yeah, that's the one I want. There we go. Not again. It's coming up. And then if you just click your camera back on. And then we can see you. Perfect. Okay. It's not by now. Two years I've got used to this. Okay. So I'm going to talk about cartoons of war. For a waste of time already because there's a lot I want to try and get through. I'm concentrating on the second world war. But I'm largely concentrating on what cartoons can tell us about general social attitudes, particularly in the UK, bit in the US of the time. The point about cartoons, why I find them fascinating is that they're immediate. They're not people going back and depicting what they think happened. They're crafted for tomorrow's audience or next week's audience, possibly next month's audience. But they have to be immediate. They may have to appeal to the audience. They're employed to do these cartoons. And if they don't work though, the assignments won't come upon coming in and by and large the ones we're going to look at are not for the eccentrics or outliers. These are mainstream cartoonists. And I'm just going to start because Rebecca had Laura Knight's picture of Nuremberg. This is David Low, who is the great British cartoonist. This is the only low I'm going to show. He's actually a New Zealander. He also went to Nuremberg. Here's a sketches of that's Frank who Rebecca mentioned of the characters he saw. And you can see his technique as a caricature is picking out essential features to convey characters, but very recognizably those people. And then the cartoon that came out, which again, doesn't bear any particular having seen the Laura Knight one. You can see this doesn't bear very much resemblance to the actual layout. But there's the soldiers at the back is that they're similar. Goring, I mean, is that no drums, no trumpets, no banners. We could have done how much better we would have done it. And the political point, obviously, is to make a contrast between the Nuremberg rallies of the past, the German style of doing things and the rule of law, the more democratic style being adopted. And then just as a further contrast of this from the same time. This is Giles, a famous express cartoonist, which is a mockery sort of cartoon, the other things cartoons can do, even if they're where War Crimes Commission does let us go free after the war Himmler. I can't imagine you settling down a little grocery business or something. I put, I mean, I just put this in because Rebecca had given me the opening, but it just indicates the different ways in which a cartoonist using mockery, humor, contrasts can make a point. These are all about making a point, although the points, as you will see, are sometimes quite subtle, sometimes just mildly humorous. I'm going to talk to start with about the home front and the blitz and so on. Again, these are all cartoons from the time. Here's one. Sorry. Why them Germans is that dirty. They even drop bombs on you after all clear is gone. Those of you who recognize punch cartoons will know the working classes are never allowed to speak received English. It's always done. If I can ever quite get it right. It's striking how much of the punch cartoons. I was a major outlet for this sort of illustration during the war of the middle classes. Now, these are by my absolute favorite. A child called Philip laid log is known as pond who tragically died in 1940, not from the war, but from polio. He was famous from before the war of doing cartoons about the British character. And you can see here a very definite effort to create a sense of the British coping. Meanwhile, in Britain, the entire population faded by the threat of invasion has been flung into a state of complete panic. And here you have the the chap looking up with his glasses during the battle of Britain, seeing it as a sort of sport while the ladies are making tea. And there's more again about how people are adjusting to the war. There's some ladies clearly never managed without a servant working out how to make a cup of tea. This lady doing her knitting or having people turning around and blaming me if we don't win this damned war. A man here. Quite interesting. You can almost imagine this working during the pandemic. And it's not the same as it used to be. But it's not the same as it used to be. She won't go to ration me. And then another, again, also by Pond. But you must remember that I numbered them by one to three. So this. Busterism. But again, this is a contemporary. Discussion and illustration. This is what people like to think and wanted to think and he was talking to another theme of racism. These are two cartoons by somebody you will recognize as Dr. Seuss. Theodore Geisel, who was a refugee himself from the Nazis. Put a lot of effort trying to get the US into the war. Here he's talking about the horrors of anti-Semitism. And the US Nazis. But look at this one. Because of cartoons like this. Dr. Seuss is now being re-evaluated in the US. Because his anti-Japanese cartoons. And this is not just the Japanese eminently overseas. These are the Japanese in California are extraordinarily racist, however much you want to gloss it over by the demands of water. These are not just having a go at the Japanese enemy. These are not just having a go at the Japanese American citizens waiting for the stimulus home. Another. This cartoon is by a chap called Charles Alston, who is one of the great American black artists, sculpture and so on. He was commissioned by the US War Office. To do this sort of cartoon. He was commissioned by the US War Office. He was commissioned by the US War Office. Black heroes signing up and doing their bit. This one to the right. Raises the interest in question. He's. Going off to liberate enslaved. Europe, but he has enslaved USA. And looking back and saying, we'll be back. How seriously that would be taken. And I'm going to move in quickly through race, gender, and I get onto class. This is. That's only better than the minister of work. Getting women to work. So these are the new. The land army, the ATS, nursing, and so on. And there's another. There's a number of cartoons, which. Basically pretty sexist, but they give you. An idea of how things were treated. There's lots about. The land army and. The surprise of coming. To. Agricultural. Agricultural life. There's quite a lot along these lines. This one is a British one. Blighty that it comes from. Was a fun magazine, but quite saucy. Dealing with the consequences of. Of the lady waiting to see what happens if the lady takes her. The trousers off to have hers pressed. And then. Who are you calling sister? There's one great American. Female cartoonist. All of those ones are done by me. But. Helen. Hawkinson. Didn't write the cartoons for the New Yorker. I may always. Most of them showed this sort of women's institute type. Meeting where these Republican, always Republican ladies. Peer does rather naive. May I ask a question. There are still one or two things about the post-war world. That bother me. But this is my favorite. This white head has come to tell us how to amuse sailors. So that. Tells you. About. Sorry. Cheeky. But. But again, what was acceptable and understood and thought funny. At the time. But here's another. This race is sort of the big, the sort of larger feminist question. The little man down here saying that this is based on Rosie. The welder. Some of you may be aware of this was iconic. Figure. But remember, you've got to keep your eyes open. And she's saying, oh yeah. But of course that's. What happened. So the aspirations as with the. With the blacks coming back. The blacks not being so enslaved. At the end of the war after Europe has been liberated. It didn't quite work out as intended. But. The. In terms of sort of looking at the class element, I want to quickly look. At. I think you see this much more in, in officer. Rank. Men relationships. So this is another Giles cartoon. The correct term private Wilson referring to a commanding officer. Not there goes the toffee nose dough basket. And. You can see, I think you see the class tensions. Best. Through the attitudes. Shown of soldiers. To. To the hierarchy into the elite. Bill more than. More than. Was with the American army in Italy. And his work became very contentious, but was supported by the high command because they felt it was an outlet for the grievances felt by. A lot of the soldiers that reflect their attitudes and they liked it. They felt that somebody understood it. But. Staff officers only. Just give me a couple of aspirin. I've already got a purple heart. Already been wounded. Before he doesn't need another medal. He needs an aspirin. A couple more. Now that you mention it does sound like the pattern of rain on a tin roof. And. You know, I don't know. Again, just imagine the frustrations that this is depicting my son five days old. Good looking kid. So it gives a sense of. Of what it's like. Now these are. Sort of quite the British equivalent. These are called the two types. And. This is John, who was a daily man. And. Again, he was with the 8th Army. And they were notable for. Taking no notice of. Dress codes or anything. And sort of insusciently thought going their way. Brown. Around the campaign. And so. I don't know. I don't know. I don't know. I don't know. I don't know. I don't know. I don't know. I don't know. I don't know. I don't know. I don't know. I don't know. Don't know. I don't know and. Around the campaign. Again, you get back to this. They're officers. Clearly. So they're not giving you the perspective. Of the. Of the men are giving the respect. Perspective of the officers. And. Who stuck. The most famous image of a shell hole comes from the First World War. It's this one, if he knows of a better old go to it when somebody's crumbling. That was by Bruce Benz, father, and again was at the front. In the Second World War, didn't quite reach the same standards, but he has old Bill Nalema in the home guard. And you can't read the captains just just because he was the only house it by the bomb. You can scarcely speak to him to talk about swank and this one, that's enough about Harold did it at Hastings, I'm doing it now. And again, you see this when the working classes are in vote, they're never allowed just to speak in proper sentences. I've put this in because it's quite interesting to have a Scottish soldier wishing it to be seen as Great Britain and not just England. A man, this is just, that's it really. This is to conclude with another Giles cartoon. It'd be funny if the siren went out, wouldn't it? That was a quick gallop through. What I was trying to do in all of that was to, I mean, what's just what interesting is just to get a good sense of how those at the time saw what was going on, how they drew their humor, what they thought was funny. And you can assume that most of the ones I've shown were found to be amusing, to be pointed. And what I haven't done, but you might wanna talk about is talk about how the war itself was depicted, how the ebb and flow of conflict. But these were very much about how the cartoons reflected the social changes and developments that were taking place during the war. Thank you. Thank you very much, Llorian. I think it's really interesting in that is the clarity of the differences in society and the challenges that were coming as a result of the war, which were then subject to ridicule in the cartoons, so fascinating stuff. We're moving on now to Paul, Paul Lowe, and again, from cartoons back to visual art and photography and possibly also from war to post-war, maybe to peace. So over to you, please, Paul, thank you. Thanks, can you hear me okay? Yes. Yes, so I'm actually gonna talk about three artists that we've been working with over the past several years, all three of whom are from the former Yugoslavia and they all were children before in Yugoslavia itself and they all lived through the conflict in various different ways and they now ended up in various different parts of from Yugoslavia and Serbia and in Bosnia Herzegovinae. But all of them, I think we worked with as part of the art and reconciliation project that Rachel alluded to earlier on that was a collaboration between War Studies and the University of Arts London. And we commissioned each of them to make a new body of work that reflected on their post-war, post-conflict experience and dealt with some of the contested nature of reconciliation. So I'm gonna talk about how they work with the past and how they represent the past into the present. So a line of four large-scale black and white images what appear to be landscapes of forest and trails hangs on the wall of a white cube space in the Yugoslavia gallery in Belgrade. From a distance, they resemble photographs but in closer inspection, these images reveal themselves to be hand-drawn artworks with the traces of the soft touch of fingertips embedded in the surface of the paper. Framed in simple pale birchwood frames and measuring almost two meters by one and a half, the images are epic in scale and seductive in their flowing tones of charcoal black, modulated grays and pale white highlights. The images seem to shimmer, the texture of the foliage oscillating with a suppressed energy that makes the seemingly bucolic scenes appear charged and alive. These drawings have a sense of structure and internal rhythm but they're also what appear to be banal areas with little of the usual composition elements of a typical landscape painting. These spaces are also claustrophobic, the point of view filling the frame of the image with a density of information and detections of leaves, flowers, branches and soil. The drawings have a haunting but disturbing beauty. Their scale attests them into the artistic endeavour and effort needed to realise them. The slight blurring of the details of the images produced by the process of hand drawing in charcoal leaves a suggest, suggests a lyricism and a certain subjectivity of artistic expression. The images in the exhibition are identified by code numbers A, C, E, 5, 8, 6, 8, 1, R, 0, 0, 0, 2, 2, 8, 5, 0, 1 rather than captions that reveal anything about substantive about their meaning. The series is entitled Disturbed Stoil or Uzmenli Tla. The series comprises eight works that the Serbian artist Vladimir Milanovic has painstakingly enlarged and copied from the original postcard-sized photographs that were taken by forensic investigators who were working with the International Criminal Tribunal for the former Yugoslavia, ICTY. They were documenting suspected mass grave sites in the Belgrade suburb of Batonica in 2001. This investigation was gathering evidence related to the execution of Kosovo Albanian civilians by Serbian paramilitaries between the 7th and the 11th of May, 1999 when 93 Kosovo civilians were killed in the town of Jakove in Kosovo. Miladinovic discovered these photographs in the archives of the ICTY as part of his ongoing engagement to contested histories of the events that occurred in the former Yugoslavian in the 1990s. Through an active process of painstakingly copying these small images buried in the archival records of atrocity and therefore rendered invisible by the weight of material enclosed in the court records, Miladinovic pays testimony to these nondescript places where human lives are treated with such disdain dumped in mass graves hidden from sight and from memory. In the process of making visible to a public audience documents of human rights abuse that otherwise remain hidden, Miladinovic calls on the topology of atrocity itself rather than the human victim to deliver his testimony. His deployment to the techniques of classical charcoal landscape drawing to give these forensic images a new life elevates and monumentalizes the evidential nature of the original document, transforming it in the process from evidence into interpretation and response. In doing so, he creates a visual space that's once aesthetically engaging and emotionally devastating. He reads the landscape as an archive expanding beyond topography, transforming it into a space of memory, illusion, metaphor, association, and ultimately remembrance. Free objects forms a companion piece to disturb soil. It deals with another form of the archival evidence relating to the Batanica case. He uncovered an official list of 410 objects that were found in the mass graves on Batanica II site between June 2001 and November 2002 during the exclamation of the mass grave there. He notes how, during this grizzly process, a significant number of victims' personal items were found. Hundreds of items were listed as having been found on bodies or their immediate vicinity. These were mostly small personal items, but the list also contains body parts and missiles of different calibers. Printed out in the form of an 11-page formatted list of the item with the evidential identification numbers and the name of the vestigate who unearthed the remains, the documents make for an extraordinary litany of death. So Miladinović very, very painstakingly hand copies these documents and then exhibits them in a process which is central to his testimonial process. And he accepts that during the process, small mistakes will creep in. He's very, very precise and very, very careful with his transcription, but even these tiny small mistakes, he says, you have to be concentrated to try to not make too many mistakes, even though I do make the main mistakes. Who knows if the court never mistakenly translated some material? It's putting a mirror in front of this archival politics of trying to be objective, what it means to be objective, the truth doesn't exist anywhere, you're creating truth. We know what happened and when, but by interpreting this reference, it's creating something challenging. When I make a mistake, I never change it. Sometimes my thoughts fly away and I make a mistake, but this is a protest, process, an artistic interpretation of this very sensitive material. So as with other series of archival interventions that use this same technique, in these works, Mildinovic attempts to open up an imaginative engagement with memory, where the viewer can begin to make sense of their own relationship with past atrocity events. He explains how there's an underlying frustration with the structuring knowledge about a violent past in societies such as Serbia and how perhaps an artistic intervention in these contested narratives can open up spaces for dialogue and a restructuring of experience. He argues that Serbia is struggling with its history, he's left overs in the past, we don't know what to do with them, we don't even have a symbolic space that would give us a space to think about that past. It's on us to create this symbolic space where people could be triggered about this, rather just a closed narrative of the other side. Through an act of artistic imagination, we can achieve the production of a third image in the head of the viewer. So this is one of the key things that art I think does in this context. It pays attention to things that were otherwise go unnoticed. It makes us look at things anew, makes things fresh, and it makes us pay attention to things that perhaps these details, these forensic details buried away in archives that we would not otherwise have seen. One of Milne's other projects is the transcription of one of Raccoon Lallich's war notebooks that was found in his hiding place when he was captured, eventually brought to justice. And this is a huge work, monumental work of hundreds and hundreds of transcriptions of the individual pages of Lallich's war diary, creating this incredible installations you can see here. And obviously with what's currently happening in Serbia with the honouring of Lallich in this mural that's been painted on a street there, which is being repeatedly attacked and tried to be destroyed by anti-fascist youth and then being defended by the Serbian forces, the Serbian paramilitary forces and Serbian right-wingers is extremely relevant today. And so this sense that art is remembers, art pays testimony to the past and makes it present into the present. So the next artist I want to talk about is Adelausic. And this is a work of hers called Sniper, where we see which is a video piece. And during the video piece, we see a disembodied hand which slowly and carefully inscribed a small circle of red on a white sheet of paper. As the red dot grows gradually in size, a female voice intones a list that begins. November the first, one soldier. November the second, one soldier, one truck driver. November the fourth, three soldiers. As the video continues, the voice overlaps itself, continuous diary of dates. Slowly and gradually, a black and white image of the head and shoulders of a man appears superimposed on the paper underneath the hand with the red circle centred on his right eye. As the face of the man becomes clearer, the hand slowly fades away until at the moment it vanished completely, the voice of a state's flatly. December the third, my father, the sniper, was shot by a sniper into his right eye. Entitled Sniperist, the Sniper, this four minute long video was made by Usage in 2007. Usage's own father was a member of the Bosnian army defending the city of Sarajevo during the siege and was killed by a Serbian site sniper on December the third, 1992. Just before his death, Usage discovered his war diary which he'd recorded the daily tally of enemy combatants he'd himself killed. This final portrait of Usage's father could be read as both heroic and tragic and it's very similar to dozens of other portraits taken defending the city, some of whom survived the siege. Sniperist is part of a trilogy of works that deals with the intertwining of the symbolic and contested role of sniping during the siege of Sarajevo and Usage's own autobiography. Who Needs DRNC is another video piece in which Usage carefully re-enacts the cleaning of a rifle that was used by her father during the war. DNRC is an abbreviation for, and apologies for my pronunciation, detergentsni lastavatsnaslaja chadi, the name of a type of detergent used for cleaning weapons. When she was a child, Usage used to clean her father's weapons and this re-working of that childhood memory is a central part of this video installation. As she carefully strips down the weapon, cleans it and re-assembles it. Another piece that we commissioned for, from both Adelaide Usage and Lana Chimanchemin was Bedtime Stories, which was an installation piece where Usage and Chimanchin used audio recordings of people they interviewed from their generation about their experiences and their survival during the conflict. And it's then presented, you lie in these sort of enclosed bed-shaped cubicles where you can lie down and listen to these testimonies. And Usage says, what we hear and see about war in everyday media is not what artists are saying about it. People used to artistic representations and discourses use different means, different languages, different methodologies and discourses. I'm coming from a personal experience, nothing to do with the standard political views, the political technologies, the parliament, president, parties, narratives of victims and perpetrators. We can speak to the audience in non-nationalist, non-ethical positions and more universal position. We want to reach a wider audience to speak for the whole world, the whole of Europe. We approach the subject from a more universal aspect to reach not only our surroundings, not to speak just from a local position, but to reach a wider international global audience. Let's skip over those two works. And this is a very important point as well, that all of these artists make the point that art is personal. It's all coming from their own lived experience of art. And this is especially true of the final artist I want to talk about, Milad and Miljanovic, who had an extraordinary trajectory in life. He was a young boy, joined the war, his family village on the Republic of Serbska side, and near Doboy was on the front line. So he went to school, his school was very close to the front line. After the war, he was conscripted into the Republic of Serbska army and he served his nine month military service in Banyuluka in the barracks there. After that, he then joined, he then left the army and several years later went back to study at the art school in Banyuluka. And in the intermeeting time, the barracks that had housed him as a soldier had been donated to the university and it become the art school. So his final work during art school was to spend nine months making this piece, I serve art, where he did not leave the confines of the barracks, which was now the art school for the entire nine month period. So he found the former military base to be emblematic of the totalitarian regime apparatus which had built it, the totalitarian regime whose traumatic consequences are still present in society. And this installation was presented as a series of black and white photographs of each day that he'd served out during this artistic endeavor. Most of his work, subsequent to that, draws on military terminology, military mapping, military handbooks and his experience as a soldier to contest and challenge the nature, the embedded nature of militarism and nationalism in contemporary Serbian society. He did a series of works where he took maps because as an artist, he was trying to infiltrate or enter into the art world. So he imagined himself as a military strategist planning out attacks on well-known artistic buildings and museums such as the New York Gallery, City of Calgary and Tate Modern. The work that we commissioned him to make was MWRL 120, Multiple Water Rocket Launcher which was the reworking of materials that he took from the barracks, these drain pipes, they were drain pipes from the original barracks which had become the art school which he reworked to create a replica of a multiple barrel rocket launcher that had been used during the war to attack enemy positions and attack civilians. And he turned it into a weapon of peace by making it into a machine, a system for watering the ground in the botanical gardens of the university in a process of which he calls site decontamination. And he says the artist is a social subject whose actions are critical in reality and therefore human responsibility for reality to her direct participation in the therapeutic and healing processes of the site of decontamination of sites and reconstruction. Another one of his works again uses this military style mapping approach to talk about the diaspora movements from his village in Republic of Serbska out into Europe. So I think the lesson from Latin's work is the transformational value of art, the way that art can talk about parallel spaces to conventional social and political discourse. I'm just gonna leave this quote from Latin about the responsibility of the artist on the screen there for a moment for you to read and we can move on to hopefully some discussion and questions. Thank you very much. Hey, wonderful. Thank you so much, Paul. Okay, we have a little bit of time for questions. I'm gonna invite James Gow to first offer some reflections and a couple of questions for the panelists and then we'll go back to the panel and then I can see we've got one question in the Q&A so please do put others in there. You have time to get to them. So first of all, James can invite you. Thank you, Rachel. Thank you everybody else. I'm quite prepared not to say anything more at all because it's been such a rich discussion and I'm sure people have things to say but do you want me to go ahead? Cause I have far too much to say for the remaining 20 minutes. Perhaps confine yourself to three or four minutes. That's all right. Oh, okay, fine. We'll give it a go. Thank you all. I mean, it's been a really, really rich and splendid situation, set of presentations and it gives us lots of examples and lots of details of many different aspects with which we really need to have some thought and give consideration. I mean, we start with the question and Rachel posed this from the outset, yeah, go, why art and why war art? And why art, yeah? And the thing is it's the human condition. This is an essential part of the human condition to search for meaning. It's part of our culture that not only do we find ways to civilize ourselves and the environment but in the time left over, we do unnecessary things but unnecessary things that address meaning and thought. And I think that's a way into understanding all the different aspects of the things that we've been hearing now. We start with creativity. Creativity is essential to the nature of human beings and experience but it's really also a vital link. It's the essence of artistic matters but as a laden who Paul was referencing at the end would say, yeah, it's the inspiration for everything else. It's about thinking differently. And if you want to think about war, if you want to get an advantage strategically or technically in war, it's about being creative and about being different. And so it's the mix of things that come to help. The obvious element in everything is experience. People turn to the experience of war, to human experience in its many, many different aspects. Celebration, suffering, loss, tedium. We can go on. Humor as Laurie was pointing out. We can do all of these kinds of things. We see celebration and we see attempts to understand and cope with memory. We have ideas of inspiration, maybe propaganda. And I think one of the things that in this focus on mainly visual arts and particularly non-moving visual arts, we've missed also the role of the other arts. I always think of Shostakovich and Tchaikoviev, the inspiration of music in the Second World War and I bleed from that into the role of art as an instrument of war. The way in which the Cold War was in many senses a contest between abstract expressionism in the United States and socialist realism in the Soviet Union, an aspect of the overall conflict that really cannot be dismissed because it was probably in the end one of the decisive elements. What else do we get? Well, we have young women introducing us to art and war as a heuristic point of inquiry. We get the same with Laurie and the cartoons. We use these to understand and one of the things that we get to understand is change. Change in warfare, change in individual artists. And we heard the envelope about Jagger but I would have also looked to Christopher Nevinson and Rebecca mentioned, and the important change that took place in his shift from vorticism, futurism, through to playing realism, naturalism, a response to the things that happened in the Third World War, pictures of dead soldiers. I think the reflections that we see about coming to terms, Rebecca talked about the Steeper Queen piece but so many other aspects of the work that we've touched on here and more that we could are about people coming to terms artists themselves coming to terms but artists seeking to find ways to help others come to terms with the things that have happened on all kinds of levels. And that kind of reflection can be longer term and maybe even the Queen suggests that some of the other works suggest that or it can be very immediate and that's one of the powerful elements of the cartoons. It can come through contrasts. I think looking at the Laura Knight painting at Nuremberg what a great piece of testimony. Paul was talking about testimony. It's a great piece of testimony but it's a great comment because what we see is not only a version of the benches but we see the destroyed ruins of Nuremberg that would be unrecognizable if you went today because it's a restored city. And that made me think of Bradley Smith's great account in the preface to judgment at Nuremberg of Colonel Bernays walking through the ruins in Nuremberg and what was he thinking? And he wasn't thinking, the allies did this. He was thinking, how could the Germans have brought this on themselves? We've got both aspects there of a reflection and a comment and it's there in that painting by Laura Knight not only looking at the courtroom but looking at the context and the situation. We can see change in the history of the IWM itself. Rebecca mentioned that it started in 1917 and it started as a museum for the First World War. By 1920 it was already changing to have a colonial aspect. Compare that with the wonderful institutions that we have today in London but also spread around the country. And I'm gonna finish maybe by coming back to what Paul says about testimony because I think not only in the examples that he gave but in running through everything there is a sense that testimony is important. It can come in many different forms looking at the disturbed soil is a comment is an investigation of an investigation. It's getting us to think. And one of the great things that art can do is make us see things differently. Going back to that initial point about creativity and the points about reflection running through all of this is that it makes us see things different. That's what, and that's my alarm is going to tell me I should stop this second but I'll go on for 15 more. Paul is, wait a minute, go. The works that Paul discussed, especially those by Radha and Adele Yushish's Sniper is a really powerful investigation and a personal coming to terms but making her self see things differently, exploring and making others see it differently. Also work that we've done in other parts of the reconciliation projects on invisible war crime sites. What we can do is use all of this both to inspire but also to provide critique but most of all to make us think, reflect, see things differently and use the arts as a tool of investigation because they're a part of human experience and war touches every aspect of human experience. And that's why this sense of understanding humanity and understanding war all come as one. Rachel, sorry. Yeah, that's great. Thank you very much. So I'm going to just pick up the questions that have come up in the Q&A and then to go back to the panel to reflect on, reflect on those and on Jen's comments and in particular, perhaps I can direct them at people. So there's a question from Richard Barrett which I think is directed to Jan Willem primarily whether art cannot be at all to depict Klaus Witz's changing character of war and then a question about the impact of art on war. So a reference to Vietnam and the impact of photography like the infamous image of Ney Pham Carl on the anti-war movement, are there other examples? Perhaps I could ask Paul particularly comment on that and maybe Laurie to pick up on the comments you made about cartoons as well in that respect. And then finally Kate, Kate asks, does it matter that the contemporaneous shared meaning of the experience of war changes over time? I wonder, Rebecca, if you can reflect on that perhaps from the perspective of how audiences engage with the artworks in the museums and what the museum is trying to do in that sort of space. So I wonder if I can go, maybe I'll go backwards through and we'll go in reverse order and end with Jan Willem. So Paul, can I invite you first? Oh, sorry, yes. You didn't want me to go, yeah. Yeah, I mean, it's a very interesting question. I think the problem with a lot of the photographic representation of this and the arguments that it changes things is that it only changes things if there's a political will for that change to occur. And that was very much the case in Vietnam where actually the majority of journalists and photographers although they may have critiqued how the war was being carried out in sort of a tactical sense. They broadly agreed, allied themselves and agreed with the idea that it was a good war to be fighting until almost the very end. Apart from a couple of multiple exceptions like Philip Jones Griffiths, for example, who's Vietnam ink was a really polemical deconstruction of the American military machine. And you could argue the same was true of the war in Bosnia, Ron Haviv's photographs from Bielina from April 1992 that showed explicit images of war crimes being committed, the execution of civilians on the street by Arkhan's paramilitary tigers. Those images occurred at the very, very beginning of the war and likewise images from the camps in Priyadour and Eastern Bosnia were released in August. It did nothing to prevent the war from continuing for another three years and for those, for the thousands, tens of thousands more people to be killed and ethnic cleansing and everything we know, which we're still seeing very much as I alluded to earlier on, very much playing out in Bosnia today, 30 years on, the country is still very tense and extraordinarily nervous at the moment. And I think the problem is that it doesn't, it's only if the political elites want things to change that they will change and it's very difficult for the media and artists and photographers to influence that directly. But I think what they can do is make sure that the evidence is there. Gather that evidence in the first place, photograph, record, write, report, create artistic interpretations as artists. And then that material is then there for to be, we can't say we didn't know this was happening. We did know it was happening. We just didn't take action on it. Thank you, Paul. Perhaps next, if I can ask Lori. Oh, Lori, sorry, before you start, I've just seen there's another question from Merwin, actually from Lola, asked about asymmetric war. So given that war is currently asymmetrical, what can art tell us about this kind of war? Seemed like a good question to, to throw at you as well. I'm going to ask that. Yeah. What was asymmetrical? What was asymmetric? So, you know, I generally agree with Paul. Secondly, it's important to keep in mind that with most wars, most of the time, the, the cartoonists are pro-war. They're cheerleaders. The most of the cartoons I showed, they may have dwelt a little bit on the frustrations and so on, but by and large, this was something that we had to go through. And that's true even if you look at, I mean, you could do a different story about cartoons during Vietnam when there was quite a large number of very powerful anti-war cartooning, but that reflected divisions within the country. If you don't have divisions within the country, you're unlikely, the cartoonists are not going to create it. They're likely to reflect what's already there. That doesn't mean to say, however, that politicians are always confident of that. Before the first, before the Second World War, David Lowe was certainly on the enemy's list as far as the Nazis were concerned. And there were representations made to the foreign office that they should be shut up because his anti-appeasement cartoons were causing distress. So there is, and then during the war, there's a famous cartoon, which if I was very brave, I might try and share with you, which I will be brave, which is by Zach. Let's see if we can find it, yeah, this one. Here we go. So this is a famous cartoon. The price of petrol has been increased by one penny. Now, Zach wasn't an anti-war cartoonist. What he was trying to make people realize that there was a cost in the Battle of the Atlantic for, they shouldn't grumble when this was, these are the sacrifices people were going through. Churchill was furious about this cartoon and he wanted it stopped and banned and Zach punished and so on. So it is, governments can still be very touchy on the question of what's good or bad for morale, but none of the cartoonists in general that I was looking at were seen as bad for morale, were anything other than pro-war. I think the one on Vietnam would be different. Just perhaps a final point on Lola's question on asymmetric war. One of the issues is the understanding of the enemy and you could do, there's interesting studies that have been done about how you treat your enemies. Do you present them as monsters and gobble you up? Who are dangerous and demonic and so on? Or do you try and mock them as the sort of giles was doing within your own big war cartoon? I showed and I think it's, there were studies done even of Napoleon, during the Napoleonic Wars, how he shrunk over time in British cartoons as the Napoleonic Wars progressed so that he didn't seem so frightened that he seemed to be somebody who could be beaten. But that became sort of ways of personalizing the enemy. In a lot of the wars we've been fighting over the last couple of days, much harder. The enemy doesn't appear as, Saddam Hussein might play that role, Salam bin Laden to a degree, but you don't have that the same sense. And also you're aware that the victims, whether intended or not, are often not, are innocent in one way or the other. So I think the pro-war cartoons is a much harder job in a counterinsurgency campaign than they did in a sort of existential interstate war. Thank you. Sorry, so over to Rebecca. Now, Rebecca, I wonder if you can just comment briefly on the museum's role in this. Absolutely, and I thought I'd also bring in Shreya's question a bit as much as I can about how would cyber war or information wars possibly be depicted? And that kind of relates to the point I was going to make about the previous question, which I think is something I touched on, which is probably more than ever before, I think within a kind of contemporary conflict environment, artists are thematically engaged with their own role in that storytelling or in that space, as well as feeling the responsibility to in some way represent experiences about conflict or about kind of linear events or whatever. So they're thinking about that kind of ethical space and the thematics of that ethical space, which I think is even more heightened in a conflict environment, which looks digital or related to cyber warfare or that kind of involves many more multi-dimensional qualities than perhaps artists understood in the past. And I think they're also aware in a kind of contemporary environment that they're engaging with a canon of war art in a way that has emerged over or many centuries. But in my case, looking at the Ida Bim collection essentially or more. So I would say there's a changing nature of conflict as a backdrop, but there's also a changing nature of what it means to be a war artist or artists even problematize that further and say, I don't want to be called a war artist and I don't want to have that particular kind of labor attached to my name. That's not what I'm doing here. So in understanding, a kind of shifting understanding of conflict and a shifting understanding of what we want to do in the war art space. I think what we can say is that perhaps in a more static way the Ida Bim collection comprises works of art that are world-class and that are established to be preeminent. But it's distinctly a collection that exists in tension with a changing nature of storytelling for a museum and a kind of changing nature of social history storytelling. So that makes it different to, and there are other museums like that, it makes it different to an art museum in some senses. I think on a fundamental level, artists within that space or artworks within that space help to democratize the experience of conflict for audiences and in particular, enable dialogues where all kind of moments of reflection where stories are particularly challenging, where we're talking about atrocity, trauma, very difficult to understand things. And perhaps what we'd rather not look, you know, where we'd rather not look in conflict, artists help us do that. And I think so that is perhaps a more stable ambition that artists, as we've said, artists' works are made to be looked at and that is a really fundamental difference to other kinds of objects. So we at IWM think about artists as they bear witness, as they document, as they record and also as they interpret for our audiences. And within that we understand artworks as a space for looking that enables us to have an emotional reaction as audiences as well as an intellectual reaction. And in that sense, they're not the nice to have things after the event. They're actually the primary kind of vehicles for understanding conflict. So that hasn't completely answered the question of how do artists reflect a changing nature of conflict? But I think it goes some way to establish what we're trying to do at IWM, maybe. Yeah, absolutely. It's a huge question and I'm really interested in going to explore further as well. Thank you very much Rebecca. So finally, if I turn to Jan Willem to tell us about Classics and the changing character of war in 30 seconds or a minute, if you can. The short answer is yes. But what I wanted to show is official pictures of war, which are educational in nature. That on the one hand, they reflect how war is, but they also want to show you what war should be, how it should be conducted. And there, but the pictures I showed you the first and the third series are part of a book on the development of strategic thinking, which starts with the ideas of Klausowitz and takes them as a guiding red thread. Because in the pictures, you can see the reception of ideas you find crystallized in Klausowitz. So there is a close connection. I would argue between the art I've shown you and as Laurie has indicated with the cartoons, he's shown you as well with social norms and views on what war is, how it should be viewed, what it does. And what I wanted to, I just want to say something about the asymmetry which Lola raised, that what I try to show you very imperfectly is that what you see over time in Europe or European warfare is a normative change on two levels. On the one hand, you see an increasing idea that war is revolving solely around the application of violence, that war becomes militarized, war becomes militaristic. It is a move away from a war as a political venture to war as a more purely military venture. That is one thing. The second thing is, and that is a development in asymmetry that it moves from the political becoming underweight and the military becoming overweight. The second element, which is also asymmetrical is the changing views of the enemy. Laurie already mentioned that and that what you see over time with the development of Western democracy really or the development of Western political, ideologically based political systems is an increasing demonization of the enemy. So rather than in the early pictures I showed you of an almost full equality between the two sides, no clear distinction between winners and losers. You see that shift dramatically over the course of the 19th and particularly the 20th century into a situation where in art you don't depict the victor and the loser together. It is not imaginable that Saddam Hussein would have been allowed to appear in a picture with the victor of the 2003 conflict. Think of Afghanistan where we still don't quite officially negotiate with the Taliban. We don't appear in the picture with them. If we are forced to treat with them we do that behind the scenes, not in public. That those two things, the militarization of war and the demonization of the enemy are two fundamental normative changes that create a very curious sort of conundrum that on the one hand we hate war and its effects. We think it is so terrible, but in order to deal with the people who make terrible war, who create war we end up doing terrible things ourselves. And we feed war as an interactive escalatory monster. Strange, very strange. Okay, I'll leave it at that. Thank you. We are a couple of minutes over so I think I've got to draw things to a close here which I'm sort of reluctant to do because it's such an interesting discussion. But nevertheless we have to, I feel that we should have had a whole series on arts and war and carry on exploring these. The next seminar in this series for Warsaw, these at 16 series are looking at big questions is about technologies and the changing military landscape. That's on the 19th of January. So I'll just end by giving a huge thank you to all of our panelists this evening for very rich presentations. It's been a really fascinating set of discussions and what I think it reminds or brings me back to is this idea that it is important for us in war studies to think about art and to think in art reminds us too that war is this uniquely human activity and one that connects us as well as divides us. So perhaps ending on a potentially more optimistic note as we close and thinking about the connections as well as our divisions. So thank you all very much for joining. Thank you for your questions and once again, thank you very much to all of our panelists.