ABSTRACT
There is a long official tradition of drawing war. Artists are regularly commissioned by government committees, museums and the armed forces to make art from the battlefield, often through the use of drawing. Since 2001 I have attempted to reverse this tradition by drawing the arms trade. This alternative focus was initially accidental, a result of my circumstances on 9/11. It was only later that it became deliberate. I didn’t see the attacks on the world trade centre when they were first broadcast. I was trapped behind police lines outside DSEi, the Defence Systems and Equipment International, one of the world’s largest arms fairs. I am a reportage illustrator and I had gone to draw and take part in the protests. Using a tactic called ‘penning in’, the police confined protestors to a small square of tarmac opposite Excel, the exhibition centre where the fair was being held. With phone signals down, and restricted movement, there was little news from the outside world. It wasn’t until the evening, on my way home on the tube, that I saw the harrowing photographs of the twin towers and headlines about war. The commuter sitting next to me questioned the paper’s interpretation. The attacks were a brutal act of terrorism, but surely not a war? However, in a formal response to the attacks nine days later, George Bush declared war on terrorism,1 ‘Our war on terror begins with al Qaeda, but it does not end there. It will not end until every terrorist group of global reach has been found, stopped and defeated’ (Bush, 2001). Such an amorphous target raised the prospect of unending conflict. Who could possibly benefit? In the following months, shares in arms companies soared. Perhaps my location that day was not entirely irrelevant. So, when artists were dispatched to document the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq, I decided to draw the arms trade. This chapter tells the story of the attempt. Because the project has developed largely in opposition to official drawings of war, the chapter begins with a brief history of the genre. Here, I argue that the tradition of sending artists into war zones has an ideological function. The next section explains the relevance of the arms trade as a subject of war art, and the final section describes my attempts to draw it. Running through the chapter is a discussion of meanings of witness, a word that has provided a structuring rationale for official war art and my own drawings of the arms trade.
