Photojournalist and documentary film-maker George Gittoes tells Alex Sudheim that not even his gory paintings of violent conflict can aptly describe the horror out there
Australian artist George Gittoes is both a conundrum and an extraordinary synthesis of seemingly paradoxical forces.
In his work and his life, Gittoes is simultaneously a modernist, a postmodernist, a social realist, a pop artist and an expressionist.
His primary motivation being to reassert the role of the artist on the front lines of battle, he daily risks his life in the planet’s deadliest and most violent conflict-zones.
Here Gittoes is a modernist he believes the camera has not replaced the artist and it is through the expressive renderings of direct experience of extreme cruelty and mayhem that the artist is able to make a profound statement about the human condition that the passive camera cannot.
Yet paintings hanging in a gallery are one thing reaching millions of people is another. Though Gittoes is evidently compelled to paint and his paintings are about as vivid and visceral a statement of human lust for blood and destruction as any he is also frustrated by the limit of their impact. “Preaching to the converted” is how he describes the fine art environment, where inevitably only a small amount of educated and art-literate people will engage with the work.
Trained as an film-maker, Gittoes soon decided that “making film for the news is more challenging as modern art than some esoteric film clip in a gallery”. Thus he is also an acclaimed photojournalist and documentary film-maker.
By virtue of his knack for always being in the bloodiest maw of war, his footage of genocide-in-progress is often beamed around the world on Sky TV or CNN and his photographs appear in countless newpapers and magazines.
Significantly, Gittoes sees this aspect of his work as an integral part of his art, not something separate from it. Here we see Gittoes the postmodernist, removing the line between high and low art by according the mass-medium of television equal status as a vehicle for serious artistic ideals as canvas and oils.
“But you can’t deny the element of showbiz in television,” he says. “Whenever I’ve got footage of a massacre or people being butchered I know I’m competing for the prime-time slot against the story of a little girl who found a lost baby elephant and took it back to the circus,” he says wryly. “So documentary also has to work as entertainment, otherwise it won’t get on the screen.”
Here is Gittoes the pop artist, recognising that if one wants to hit the masses with a message, the bitter pill of the heavy stuff needs to be coated with easily-digestible sugar. On this score, Gittoes draws a comparison to Andy Warhol, with whom he was friendly in the United States.
“Warhol was a social realist,” he says. “His silkscreens of the electric chair expressed his horror of it and the images of soup cans were an attempt to tell people that art was all around them, even in the most banal circumstances.”
Gittoes himself is a self-confessed social realist, an unpopular stance to adopt in the contemporary art world where just about everything is about the sleekness and sophistication of designer abstractions.
“My work concentrates on what is beyond myself. I’m not interested in making art about art, but art that shows you what it feels like to be there. This is when one ceases to be a fine artist but an applied artist,” he says.
“Besides, most of the best art has been populist Shakespeare was writing for an average audience.”
Lest you get the impression Gittoes is some kind of vainglorious moral crusader in love with the idea of being a martyr to the terror of our times, he isn’t. Even though he’s dodged bullets everywhere from Rwanda to Bosnia and Cambodia to Chechnya, he is neither a hero nor an anguished soul suffering for the sins of the world.
To paint, Gittoes returns from the front lines to his home and family in Sydney, where he practices the discipline of distance. “I’m not an actor,” he states. “I don’t try to relive the horror for the sake of the painting. Everything I do is inadequate in the context of the experience of horror anyway. Its only when I distance myself and focus on how to most effectively represent this experience that I find the art.”
His exhibition Lives in the Balance, currently on the South African leg of its round-the-world trip, is both a visceral expressionistic tour de force and astute comment on the intractable perversions of global politics.
“When the Cold War was over,” he says, “George Bush [Snr] declared the beginning of a New World Order. So I decided to travel around and see what it looked like. Yet in a way it felt like I was documenting World War III.”
Looking at the exhibition, one quickly realises that this is no overstatement. The huge, harsh and brutal paintings are the artistic equivalent of broken bones protruding from the flesh. “A lot of people say my work is very dark,” says Gittoes, “but it isn’t really. It’s mostly about the beauty of courage. I’m actually quite a light person I’m quite happy, well-adjusted with a lovely wife and two kids. But I find myself in these dark places looking for little pieces of light.”
Perhaps one day he’ll reach the end of the tunnel and the darkness will be gone. In the meantime, look at the paintings, be thankful your life is not portrayed in them and pray for the artist’s safety. Lives in the Balance is on show at the Durban Art Gallery until April 8. It is at the Johannesburg Art Gallery during April and May, and the Pretoria Art Gallery in June and July