Telegraph.co.uk
11 October 2008

What happens to the horrific images of war that don't appear in the media? Where does war photography end and art begin? Two new exhibitions raise provocative questions, as Ruby Russell discovers

Currently on display in a gallery space in a converted church in Brighton is what is surely one of the most disturbing works of art to be seen this year. Entering the building, you are confronted with a curved plastic screen, through which the installation behind appears as lurid blur of colour. The screen has been erected to ease the viewer into a scene that the gallery's director, Matthew Miller, thought long and hard through "sleepless nights" about displaying.

Swiss artist Thomas Hirschhorn's The Incommensurable Banner is an 18-metre fabric sheet that reveals a bloody mass of graphic images depicting the effects of modern munitions on the human body: horrifically degraded flesh, smashed skulls, tortured remains.

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The Lonely Hunter

Green branches, green branches, I see you beckon; I follow!
Sweet is the place you guard, there in the rowan-tree hollow.
There he lies in the darkness, under the frail white flowers,
Heedless at last, in the silence, of these sweet midsummer hours.

But sweeter, it may be, the moss whereon he is sleeping now,
And sweeter the fragrant flowers that may crown his moon-white brow:
And sweeter the shady place deep in an Eden hollow
Wherein he dreams I am with him -- and, dreaming, whispers, "Follow!"

Green wind from the green-gold branches, what is the song you bring?
What are all songs for me, now, who no more care to sing?
Deep in the heart of Summer, sweet is life to me still,
But my heart is a lonely hunter that hunts on a lonely hill.

Green is that hill and lonely, set far in a shadowy place;
White is the hunter's quarry, a lost-loved human face:
O hunting heart, shall you find it, with arrow of failing breath,
Led o'er a green hill lonely by the shadowy hound of Death?

Green branches, green branches, you sing of a sorrow olden,
But now it is midsummer weather, earth-young, sun-ripe, golden:
Here I stand and I wait, here in the rowan-tree hollow,
But never a green leaf whispers, "Follow, oh, Follow, Follow!"

O never a green leaf whispers, where the green-gold branches swing:
O never a song I hear now, where one was wont to sing.
Here in the heart of Summer, sweet is life to me still,
But my heart is a lonely hunter that hunts on a lonely hill.

--William Sharp 1855-1905


Photo by D.L. Ennis

'This is love: to fly toward a secret sky, to cause a hundred veils to fall each moment. First to let go of life. Finally, to take a step without feet.'

Jalal ad-Din Rumi - Persian Poet and Mystic, 1207-1273


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