Curator
John Bechtold
After a twenty-one-year career in the United States Army, John Bechtold is living his second act of life as an artist and academic. He was in Iraq twice, once as a platoon leader and once again as an advisor to the Iraqi Army. That experience continues to shape how he sees the world. John holds both a Ph.D. in American Studies from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill and a master’s degree from Duke University. His current project explores the representation of war in contemporary American culture.
Project background
This visual exhibit is an extension of my critical work.. I’m researching and writing about representations of war in American culture, where I argue that modes of commemoration configure veterans as heroic victims of violence. In general, this martial logic (as I think of it) requires the erasure of occupied citizens whose presence in our visual field may challenge the formation of the soldier subject. This erasure is often literal, meaning images of the Iraq War readily available in the public domain foreground a mediated version of the soldier experience. For instance, this photograph associated with the Second Battle of Fallujah on Wikipedia is thematically composed in relation to military activity — an artillery battery shooting projectiles. We see the weapon, marines and projectile, but we don’t see the city where it landed or its citizens.
That Iraqi citizens are not visible in this image is obvious. Less obvious to American audiences may be the way this omission constructs Iraq as a violent setting devoid of people in public memory. The purpose of this exhibit is to bring an Iraqi perspective to American audiences which challenges the militarized meaning of Fallujah, Iraq in cultural representations of war. Iraq is not a battlefield, neither is Fallujah. It is a place where people attend school, work, and public spaces wanting what we all want, a chance to peaceably choose our lives.