War Front Home Front rejects both the possibility and the facticity of a war fought without a human enemy. A diptych, it makes one narrative in two parts, replicating the moment by moment depiction of the inevitable suggested by wartime newscasts. In the left frame, the War Front , an infantry machine gun unit and a military helicopter maintain the perimeter of a no-fly zone around a pair of eyes veiled in a red rock mountain. The scale is such that the eyes, those of the enemy, a man of Semitic origins, dominate the landscape. In this way the idea of territory is personified.
Territory is a construct dependant upon the people who mark it, maintain it, and defend it by force.
The gaze of these eyes is a terrain itself, that of the people caught between conflicting claims for territory, territoriality, oil rights, and national interests. Their blank expression stands in for the mute agony of human existence between internal and external political antagonism, respectively, Saddam Hussein s totalitarian regime and the ongoing U.S. campaign of sporadic bombing and debilitating economic sanctions. Home Front , in the right frame, is another Brechtian production, portraying the loneliness and breakdown of the family stripped of its men of military age. The city behind these people is a ruin, a gutted building, against which the woman in the foreground, apparently a mother, holds up a flag and a photograph of her absent son. Technology has won the race for novelty in appearance, and collage now fulfills many of the same functions that painting and photography did 100 years ago.