What then of Tobey C. Anderson’s representation of the Iraqi /Afghan war? Rather than being embedded, Tobey is an outsider, a Vietnam War deserter now looking on (offside) from Canadian sidelines. Most of his images have been gathered from the public domain—photographs from newspapers, television and the Internet. Thus in Anderson’s renderings, we are several removes away from reality itself: there is the war; behind it are the government officials; behind them, the lobbyists and think tanks; in front are the TV cameras, the digital cameras, and even the unauthorized emailed telephone/camera photos belonging to the soldiers themselves, then the contexts of newspaper and television editorials; in the foreground is the American audience, the Canadian audience, the world audience—and finally the artist himself making sense out of this many-layered public domain.

From this cluttered backdrop, then, how does Anderson realize his own point of view? He selects ‘iconic” images that imply the many layered involvement of America in war. As an unbeliever--some might say, apostate--who suffered the lies of the Vietnam era, he would now peel back the present layers of public deceit to expose the “stark reality” underneath. Hence the appropriateness of his scratchboard drawings: here one does not encounter the grey smudging or shadings laid on by pencil, charcoal or watercolour. Instead the artist cuts, scrapes, scratches at the black surface to uncover the hidden light and bones. The black and white medium of the scratchboard (with its potential for fine texture) answers Bush’s crude black and white pronouncements, Bush’s extravagant “patriotic dogma”, his “axis of evil” implying a Manichaean war of absolute good and evil, his faith that a war against terror will lead to a final solution, a “mission accomplished”. The unpleasant ‘noise’ of Tobey’s scratching on the blackboard, then, is meant to jar us awake to the falsity of the prevailing public message.

Of course, an art that merely questions and quarrels can be accused of lacking a substance of its own. The reactionary ironist or critic who merely questions becomes part of the larger social problem--like the so-called ‘liberal’ Democrats who look so ineffectual against the fiercely convinced Neo-Conservative Republicans. Tobey, however, insists that the irony in his art is not merely his own: it inheres in the contradictions, the lies, the inconsistencies, and the obfuscation of the Bush campaign against terrorism. His questioning, then, is like that of the “investigative journalist who uncovers truths we are not privy to.” Thus to expose “advocates of freedom torturing” is to say more than enough. Again, irony inheres in the fact itself of “Christian dogma that leads to crusades and inquisitions.”

So against those sleepwalkers who would “wave the flag, support their troops and memorialize the dead,” Tobey would awaken us instead “to look at dead terrorists, US troops killed in action, and dead civilians on the same playing field, so to speak.” This three sided pantheon of the dead “requires some sort of mind wrapping experience that points to a more humanist view of the world …”

R. D. MacDonald
St. Catharines
July 2006