GroundTruth

Cindy Kane is an extraordinary artist who is drawn to war.

Like many foreign correspondents who can’t quite explain what it is that pulls them in the direction of conflict, she set out to tell the story of the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan through a unique installation. The exhibit features the helmets of 50 correspondents who have covered war and it is now on view in New York City at the Cheryl Pelavin Gallery in Tribeca until April 25th.

“It grew out of my fascination with the work of foreign correspondents, particularly war reporters, whose writings have so strongly shaped my own worldview. I wanted to incorporate their field notes and mementos into a work of visual art,” she said in an email exchange from her home on Martha’s Vineyard.

“I was lucky enough to gain the trust of fifty journalists willing to surrender to me an amazing array of letters, press passes, notes and other pungent souvenirs of their travels … The battle-scarred helmets hang from the ceiling in a somewhat ghostly circle.”

The journalists who contributed scraps of notes and old press cards and other broken shards of war include: Jacki Lyden, Deb Amos, Ethan Bronner, Ray Bonner, Caryle Murphy, Jonathan Randall, Anthony Shadid, Neal Conan and many others including yours truly.

I have to say it was a bit unsettling to see plastered on a helmet my own handwriting scrawled on reporter’s notebook paper and a tattered press pass and some prayer beads that were given to me by a Kurdish fighter in Northern Iraq.

It all felt very real and raw to have these very private and interior fragments of war exposed to the world. War is unsettling. And the exhibit captures that.

There is something about the way the helmets hang, suspended in the air that makes all the memories of the horrific things you see in covering a conflict ring hollow and empty. I wondered if I had this feeling because we who covered the war in Iraq — despite some bold insights and brave actions by a notable few — failed collectively to do ours jobs in many respects. This was particularly true in the first phase of the war where we were simply not asking hard enough questions, or at least not asking them persistently enough. I shared some of my own angst about this with Cindy and I asked her about it in our email exchange.

“The artifacts, paper detritus, and notes which I received from most of the journalists did not reveal the kind of “angst” that I think you are referring to, but rather the intimacy of their craft,” she said.

“The cigarette packets, the ear plugs, beer labels, band aids, dog tags, smudged notes, phone numbers, little sketches, hate mail, and in Kimberly Dozier’s case, get well cards from the public after the explosion which she survived, all connect the battle field to the headlines, and that is what I was looking for.”