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the materiality of "battlefield crosses"

patch crowley

In the past three years since the beginning of the Iraq war, much has been made in art historical discourse concerning the felled statues of the deposed dictator Saddam Hussein.  By recalling the iconoclastic actions of the American troops and Iraqi citizens on the one hand, as well as the journalistic fervor surrounding these events on the other, scholars of the visual arts could point with an almost triumphant prescience to the “power of images.”  One object that seems largely to have escaped the notice of these critics, however, is a sort of effigy put up in order to commemorate the life of a fallen soldier — a “battlefield cross,” as it is sometimes called.  Composed of the boots, rifle, helmet, and (sometimes) the dog tags of the deceased, the battlefield cross was organized in order to approximate the human form so that the rifle constituted the trunk of the body on which the other attributes could be attached.  The construction of these ostensibly makeshift and temporary monuments presents a stark contrast to the toppling of the bronze Saddam statues, the latter of which are by and large recognized as works of art, their propagandistic noisiness notwithstanding.  What then, we might ask, is the status of the battlefield cross?  What exactly is it supposed to do for those who make and look at it?  And what can the materiality of the object itself tell us about those fabricators and viewers?

While the particular rituals surrounding the erection and treatment of the battlefield cross by contemporary American troops is surely unique, the practice of composing an anthropomorphic image from arms and armor — the extensions of man in the enterprise of war, as Marshall McLuhan has made clear — has a long pedigree.  In classical antiquity, the comparable example was called a tropaion in Greek, a noun ostensibly derived from the verb trepein, which means “to turn, to rout.”  Thus philologists have suggested that the trophy (as it is called in its English equivalent) marked the place where an enemy had been routed.  In any event, the fact that winged Victories are almost always depicted as the builders and bearers of these objects in works of visual art points up their triumphal connotations.  Likewise, the textual record offers a number of references to the construction of trophies like the one recounted by Plutarch, who describes the first of this class of monuments to be constructed by Romulus, the legendary first king of Rome:

But Romulus, after considering how he might perform his vow in a matter most acceptable to Jupiter and accompany the performance with a spectacle most pleasing to the citizens, cut down a monstrous oak that grew in the camp, hewed it into the shape of a trophy, and fitted and fastened to it the armor of Acron, each piece in its due order.[1]

Here, as in the case of the American battlefield crosses, the emphasis is placed on the power of these dissociated soldierly appurtenances to reconstitute the body in a schematized, but nevertheless recognizable form.  This point has been addressed most succinctly by Hal Foster in relation to Max Ernst’s drawing of a sort of bachelor machine entitled Trophée Hypertrophique: “arms first vanquish the body, then represent it, and finally displace it; in effect, the trophy is the body transformed into armor.”[2]  In both the classical and the contemporary cases it is this power of the trophy / battlefield cross to work as a kind of corporeal palimpsest that makes visually present the absence of the deceased in material form.   

And yet, even as the anthropomorphic character of the trophy / battlefield cross surely plays an important role in guaranteeing the efficacy of these objects, it is also necessary to stress the significance that was attached to the materiality of their once disjointed, now resynthesized components.  In turning once more to Plutarch, some assumptions of the Greeks about the material makeup of their own trophy monuments may be uncovered that, while contextually specific, may provide an interesting point of comparison to the contemporary case at hand.  In the Roman Questions of his Moralia, Plutarch approaches this problem directly:

Why is it that of all the things dedicated to the gods it is a custom to allow only spoils of war to disintegrate with the passage of time, and not to move them beforehand nor repair them?   

Is it in order that men may believe that their repute deserts them at the same time with the obliteration of their early memorials, and may ever seek to bring in some fresh reminder of valor?  Or is it rather that, as time makes dim the memorials of their dissension with their enemies, it would be invidious and malicious to restore and renew them?  Nor among the Greeks, either, do they that first erected a trophy of stone or bronze stand in good repute.[3]

Plutarch’s fascinating probe into the materiality of these objects, as well as the moral connotations he attaches to it, are not even anomalous in ancient thought.  Similar statements from Diodorus Siculus and Cicero reveal just how commonplace was the recognition in classical antiquity that the material composition of things bears as much weight as the employment of them.  While the evidence from the archaeological record shows that permanent trophies hewn from marble or cast in bronze were in fact produced — and in great numbers at that — the basic premise regarding the erection of the trophy in its initial phase (or later ones from which ephemeral evidence like wood cannot be retrieved) cannot be ignored.  To corroborate these concerns, it is surely significant that visual representations of trophies almost always show these objects being built or borne by important deities or lesser, though still numinous creatures whose supernatural status permits them to handle what mere mortals cannot. 

Of course, the ancient trophy and the modern battlefield cross could not be more different in terms of what kind of subject each monument purports to commemorate, whether that be a vanquished enemy or a fallen comrade.  Nevertheless, the essential similarity that binds these objects lies in the emphasis each places on a kind of fetishism of the extensions of the deceased that may be recombined and re-presented in the spirit of commemoration, the ostensibly temporary nature of these objects notwithstanding.  In a sense, then, the attention paid to the materiality of the battlefield cross, much like the trophy, corresponds to the brand of fetishism that Lynn Meskell has described as “a composite fabrication of metonymic materiality with the ability to inscribe or historicize a unique, unrepeatable originating event in a novel form.”[4]   In a similar way the battlefield cross with its collage-like synthesis of complementary forms represents this kind of metonymic refashioning of the body.  As for the uniqueness of the event that this object purports to memorialize, it is the combination of the schematic rendering of the human form and the attachment of significative tokens like the dog tags that allows the battlefield cross to communicate repetition and difference, all at the same time. 

As a coda to the issues already discussed, it is especially interesting to note that an artist named Richard Rist from the Large Art Company (accessible also by the Internet at www.LargeArt.com) has, in a way, capitalized on the battlefield cross for his own business.  For $4,400 (with a $500 discount for those who have lost a loved one in the war), anyone can purchase his own battlefield cross through the company website directly.  One of the photographs on the site shows a group of soldiers gathered around this statue (in America, presumably) in a way that recalls the sort of impromptu rituals carried out by soldiers in Iraq that have been infrequently documented by the American media.  And yet, the majority of the photographs here portray the battlefield cross in a very different light.  Displaced from the battlefield and the identity of a particular individual, the battlefield cross from the Large Art Company is produced for domestic consumption from unwieldy bronze.   It does not purport, either by virtue of an epigraphic or material connection to the deceased, to commemorate any one person.  Rather, metaphor replaces metonymy as the battlefield cross statue may potentially reference (in a more emphatic way than its “real” counterpart due to the circumstances surrounding its production) all troops for the person who purchases the piece at full cost, a single soldier for the person who qualifies for the discount, or a combination of the two.  Indeed, the only unequivocal signifiers on the Large Art Company’s battlefield cross are the inscribed copyright symbol, the name of the artist, and the year in which the work was executed.  All of these factors, in addition to the fact that several photographs on the website show the statue in a gallery context and provide close-up shots of the artist’s signature, indicate a particular meaning to the battlefield cross cast by Richard Rist.  As Martin Heidegger famously argued in his essay On the Origin of the Work of Art, it is first and foremost the place of the artist that separates “mere things” from “works of art,” imbuing the latter with a function and status that remains wholly distinct from the former.  Nevertheless, the way in which these materially disparate objects may operate similarly in ritual contexts by encouraging the elision of signifier and signified requires that further attention should be paid to the value that is placed upon the medium used to convey a particular message.


[1] Plutarch, Life of Romulus XVI.3-6

[2] Foster 2004, p. 166

[3] Plutarch, Moralia, XXXVII

[4] Meskell 2004, p. 88

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