What's the price of war
AK47 Kalashnikov on golden and black pallet
Présentation
This piece marks the end of a cycle begun with What's the price of freedom and Cycles and Civilizations. It's the endpoint of a reflection on freedom, ideological manipulation, consumption, and systemic violence.
Here, I put an AK-47 on a pallet. Painted black and gold. Not to make it pretty. To talk about the real subject: war as merchandise.
Symbolisme
Les éléments
- La palette : A pallet is transport. Logistics. Commerce. The industrial and productivist dimension.
- La Kalach : A Kalashnikov is the symbol of all conflicts.
- L'or : Gold is the glitter, the marketing, the political and media packaging. The economic dimension of war: from arms sales, to pillaging, to conditional peace/surrender agreements (cause of many subsequent wars following the first ones due to unbalanced agreements).
- Le noir : Black is the oil that fuels all conflicts as reason or resource.
Réflexion
This is not a work "about" war. It's a piece that poses a simple question:
How much does a war cost?
Who buys it? Who sells it? Who suffers from it?
Le complexe militaro-intellectuel
We often talk about the military-industrial complex. I think we need to add the military-intellectual complex: the one that shapes narratives, prepares minds, justifies the unjustifiable.
"This artwork is a brutal way of saying that all this is thought out, manufactured, transported, monetized. And that many of us pretend not to see it."