Hiroshima After Iraq:Three Studies in Art and War

"Hiroshima After Iraq is a powerful, timely, and original contribution to the cultural discourse on art, war, and contemporary art criticism. Like Judith Butler's Precarious Life and Susan Sontag's Regarding the Pain of Others, Rosalyn Deutsche's elegantly concise and pointed analysis promises to be immediately and enduringly influential as an intervention in the ethicopolitical discourse of the Iraq era. I found it gripping."---Mignon Nixon, Courtauld Institute of Art, London

"Rosalyn Deutsche argues for a certain modesty---or perhaps, I should say, a modest uncertainty---with regard to the demands placed upon art in response to war. She brings a deep knowledge of both contemporary art and the psychoanalytic literature on war to her study as well as the careful exposition and lucid prose we've come to expect from her work."---Douglas Crimp, author of Melancholia and Moralism: Essays on AIDS and Queer Politics

Many on the left lament an apathy of amnesia toward recent of war Particularly during the George W. Bush administration's invasion of Iraq Oppositions to war seemed to lack the heat and potency of the 1960s and 1970s, giving the impression that dassionate dissent was all but dead.

Through an analysis of three politically engaged works of act, Rosalyn Deutscheaegues against this melanchoic attitude confirming the power of contemporary art criticize subjectivity as well as war deutsche selects three videos centered on the deployment of the atomic bomb Krzysztol Wodiczko's Hiroshima Projection (1999), Made after the first Gulf War; Silvia Kolbowskis After Hiroshima mon amour (2005-2008); and Leslie Thornton's Let Me Count the Ways (2004-2008), Which followed the U.S. in vasion of Iraq.

Each of these works confronts the ethical task of addressing historical disaster and each explores the intersection of past and present wars. These artworks profoundly countrbute to the discourse of war resistance, Illuninating the complex dynamics of viewing and interpretation Devische employs feminist and psychoanalytic approaches in her study questioning both the role of totalizing images in the production of war like subjects and the fantasies that perpetuate, espercilally among the left, traditional notions of political dissent. She ultimately reveals the passive callusion between leftist critique and dominant discourse in which personal dimensions of war are denied.

Rosalyn Deutsche is an art historian and critic who teaches modern and contemporary art at Barnard College. She is the author of Evictions; Art and Spatial Politics, which investigates the politicsof space in art, architecture, and arban planning and design.