And what isn’t said can be as important as what is. “Rather than just having displays where you’re looking inside the mechanisms of a giant bomb, and admiring that engineering might, if you were to have a plaque next to it saying ‘this could destroy ten schools at once’, it might make people think.”
6th of October War Panorama #1 (Cairo, Egypt), 2009 (Credit: Jason Larkin, Courtesy of Flowers Gallery)
Even the visual style in which war is depicted is significant. Some of the dioramas in Larkin’s images resemble toys, placing battles in an unexpected context. “There’s something interesting about that war panorama,” he remarks on an installation at the October 1973 War Museum in Cairo, “because it was painted by North Koreans – they built that museum for Egyptians, and their artists came over, because they’ve got a similar panorama in Pyongyang. It harks back to how the North Koreans see war – it’s a very American GI Joe style.”
Churchill War Rooms #1 (London, UK), 2015 (Credit: Jason Larkin, Courtesy of Flowers Gallery)
The cultural filter on war can mean that less overtly ideological museums are in fact more influential. “I think America owns the military aesthetic in many people’s psyches, we recognise an American military jeep before any other type of military equipment because it’s been so engrained in our visual memories through films and comic books.”
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