Harrell Fletcher: The American War James Stanfield

In a recent project, Harrell Fletcher documented a display at The War Remnants Museum in Ho Chi Minh City, Vietnam. The museum is a memorial revealing the atrocities that we committed during the Vietnam War - which is known in Vietnam as the American War.

Fletcher’s photography is purposefully amateur. The photos are of text and images framed behind glass, and - in an attempt to minimize reflected flash - they’re taken at peculiar angles. The wonky documentation makes the subject of the images more immediate.

In case it is unrecognizable as such, the following paragraph is intended as a compliment.

Fletcher’s project is hard to view as artwork. Its subject matter maybe too important to be understood as Duchampian reframing, and, unlike Pictures generation artwork, Fletcher has not really transformed the images into aestheticized art objects. Fletcher’s presentation is too direct for the discourse of appropriation, but this also means that I can mentally foreground the subject instead of experiencing an artwork. I will spend the next two paragraphs doing just that.

I first viewed the project’s website while at the office and had to stifle the impulse to weep. Murder and Savagery. Young Americans mutated into animals wielding weapons beyond their comprehension. There are not words vile enough to describe our aggression in Vietnam, but, foolishly, I’ll try; what we did was fucking monstrous and subhuman.

And it’s worse, because we’re still doing the American War: still killing, still profiting and still pretending that we’re helping. For nearly every devastating photo of our brutality in Vietnam there may exist an equivalent act of abuse in Iraq. The documentation - mediated by Harrell Fletcher but originally presented at The War Remnants Museum - not only recounts our cruelty in Vietnam but also illustrates the horrifying cost of our current and future military engagements.