Gabrielle GoliathUntitled 4, 2013
It was in Sontag’s treatise on the visual representation of war and violence in contemporary culture that Goliath first came across Ernst Friedrich’s Krieg dem Kriege, which translates as War Against War. Friedrich was a German pacifist and a member of various radical collectives, which were precursors to the anti-war movement of the 1960s and the ongoing peace movement today. Horrified by the unprecedented brutality and vast destruction of World War I, he compiled and published a collection of images depicting the atrocities and human suffering produced by the war. Successfully suppressed up until that point, these photographs and related visual artifacts brought the public face to face with the horror of war. By means of the mass circulation of these images, Friedrich wanted to expose the lies and hypocrisy of the political and economic forces that instigated the war. It was his hope that when people saw the brutish realities of warfare, they would become more critical and actively opposed to the military and militarism. ‘Unfortunately other wars have followed the “war to end all wars”. War continued,’ says Goliath. ‘But Friedrich’s intention to unmask war got me thinking about how to expose a conflict like domestic violence that happens behind closed doors. For so many reasons it remains undisclosed – fear, stigma, economic reliance, fear of reprisal.’ The inability to stop loving somebody who keeps on hurting you is often paramount among these reasons. Goliath began with the etchings. Intimate, immaculately rendered, small-scale interpretations of the portraits from Friedrich’s visual polemic – men with their jaws blown off and their faces ripped apart... The images are accompanied by detailed descriptive captions from Friedrich’s book.
