If Iraq was, eventually, “almost livable,” the return to “totally normal” was surreal: from mortars to MTV, from truck convoys to mom’s car and the oddity of being alone after military quarters, of being unarmed and unarmored. “Would I go back? Yes. Why? I have no idea, but if my guys go, I go.”
Dr. Bica provided some background on how the military developed the indoctrination called “esprit de corps” after a post-World War II survey showed that only about 15%-20% of soldiers ever fired their weapons at the enemy even under combat conditions.Peter Buotte had seen overseas service even before Iraq. He served in Haiti and had to take leave from SVA after one semester to go to Bosnia in 1997. He was working and teaching in Maine when he was sent to Iraq – “from snowstorm to sandstorm” – with a civil affairs unit in 2005.As a teacher, he was assigned to school rebuilding where his language skills (Buotte studied twice at the E’cole des Beaux Arts) came in handy. Different governments wanted to fix different things, and he had to coordinate their efforts as well as manage the translators. The Fallujah office where he worked was blown up the day after he left.Buotte tried to keep up with his art in Iraq and showed a series of cartoons, “Turtle in a Rock”(Turtle being a reference for his Bosnian experience). Among his post-Iraq works “target America,” the symposium logo shows the stars and stripes as a target. The artist used this image in a number of works. In one he saw himself as the target because he was an American; in another he turned the image upside down as a country-in-distress signal. Painted on a round wooden table top it can convey “what goes around comes around.” Buotte currently shows his work covered or ‘veiled” so that viewers can decide what to view by the act of lifting the cover. The black covers mourn friends, both Americans and Iraqis, and reference the burkhas worn by many Iraqi women. Finally, Buotte proposed a future sculpture competition for Iraqi artists to create new works from dismantled statues of Saddam Hussein, a combination of phoenix rising and recycling.The presentations were followed by a spirited discussion with the audience regarding the civil and moral responsibilities of veterans, artists, and all citizens to become socially and politically engaged. A DVD of the event is available at the Visual Arts Library.