Gittoes’ art makes such facts remarkable in a world where their combination of distance and excessive circulation threatens them with constant devaluation. Things which happen a half a world away--whether on the borders of Europe or in the heart of Africa--are things of blunted power, especially when they flood the television in daily fifteen second visual/sound bites with the force of bird shot and then get lost in the bureaucratic norms
of what is called International Law. Susan Sontag warned us twenty years ago that photography has the effect of commuting specifically the most overwhelming images into the most amorphous, homogenized mass through their endlessly repetitive circulation in human societies. Perhaps this archive fever is datable to the stark images from Bergen Belsen of emaciated, wraith like human ghosts, but fifty years of over-accumulation of images of horror have turned them into a virtual department store of banalities. It is for this reason that Claude Lanzmann, filming Shoah, refused to use any extant photographs of the Holocaust and relied instead on nothing beyond record, survivor, witness, site, and an obsessively theatrical repetition of trains, gates, and stories, thus forcing the viewer to enter into an event whose unyielding power must remain perpetually beyond comprehension (this as a measure of its comprehension). To overcome the deadening effects of images, one must invent an idiom.

Lanzmann’s task is to animate a spectre from the past, something whose only record exists in the survivors, the witnesses, the perpetrators, and the soft green grass of places often now oblivious to what they were. His gestures are, appropriately, those of re-telling, re-enactment and re-incarnation. But what happens if the thing is happening now, perpetually now, in one place and then another? What kind of ongoing act of witnessing is capable of breaking through the haze of CNN reports (dead bodies piled up before television cameras and journalists reciting with fine, combed hair, wearing khaki)? How can an artist of war find a voice in relation to this rapid fire circulation of images produced by automatic machine gun cameras and disseminated globally in seconds? What would it mean for plastic art to presume this immediacy of response today? Conversely, what would it mean for plastic art to abdicate this position, this responsibility to witness, hiding in the presumption of studio autonomy? Or worse, what would it mean for plastic art to retain the illusion that by smearing its images and installations with the blood of children and the hair of murderers it has retained (or regained) contact with immediate reality when all it has succeeded in doing is pornographizing itself, turning itself into the poor relation of CNN? These are not minor questions. At stake is Hegel’s larger question of to what extent, and how, plastic art might continue to “voice our deepest aspirations” and speak to the deepest concerns of our time.

Gittoes has worked in Afghanistan, Gaza, Chechnya, Rwanda, Somalia, Bosnia, South Africa (where I first met him while teaching at a South African university in the late 1990s), and many other places. He travels with peace keeping forces or Non-governmental organizations to insure access to disturbational areas of the world. The map of global suffering has been his terrain. Gittoes draws at the scene of devastation, scribbling notes and taking photographs, which he then brings back to his studio in Australia. There he makes huge, staggered oil or acrylic canvases from these materials, exhibiting the entire process. His work thus moves from the position of on-site witness to that of artist-in-studio, and it is only because he starts from the position of witness that the power of his art can unfold as it does. For it presents the viewer with an exfoliation: a way of grasping the formless, contingent power of events at their horrifying sources, and retaining that in all that follows. Since the traces of immediacy are retained in his paintings, the work undercuts the comfort zone of autonomous studio productions to shock us, enveloping with something of the immediacy of suffering. We too become witnesses, confronting his victims as he does. So does the distant draw us near. There is a clarity about this that is astonishing, as well as a feat of talent, for anyone who has actually witnessed human trauma (especially in its larger scale social dimensions involving hundreds or millions) knows that it is nearly impossible to capture the power of what one has seen without giving into weak stereotype or formulaic emotion. Events literally fall apart when one tries to represent them, and especially so at the scene.

Gittoes manages to capture the formlessness of trauma while it is happening while retaining focus, and he does this by focusing always on the individual victim, by drawing the victim like lighting. Drawing at the scene, speed is crucial. Artists of war must draw fast or paint fast--while the thing burns before the retina. They must commute it into drawing or painting before it turns to ash, fades into the haunting shadows of mourning, becoming spectral. And yet their finished product has to retain this sense of reactivity. It has to look unfinished, carry the framelessness of the event itself, of the terrible formlessness of that now, while also being finished, well-formed. The artists who have been capable of reacting with this lightning energy are few and far between: Goya, Husain, Picasso. Picasso was not literally there at the scene when Guernica fell so you can, sometimes, react half a world away if you retain a deep sense of place and spirit. But Gittoes always, but always is there. And it is crucial to the moral urgency of his project, to its combination of journalism and subjectivity, to its capacity to take over from television something of the circulation of information, that he always is there, making drawings right in front of the victims, wandering the aimless trajectory of refugee camps and military operations, scribbling on the sides of drawn pages notes about victim and circumstance.

Gittoes’ drawings exist midway between the drawing and the sketch. They have the balance, complication and refinement of drawing while retaining something of the quick, unfinished, spontaneity of the sketch. His figures fill the frames, indeed pass beyond them. They are bent in suffering, with distorted facial features and tortured limbs, fiercely engaged in the act of endurance beyond all measure of human possibility or collapsed into themselves, staring vacantly, withdrawn into the traumatic blankness of their crushed lives, sometimes even figures, children, momentarily blessed with the fragmentary joys of ordinary lives resumed, other times with oversized, opaque eyes that speak haunting, frozen languages untranslatable into ordinary human experience. He executes them on the spot, right in front of the victims, the children in camps, the passers by. The people he draws often stare back at the artist as he works, talk to him, and this relationship of person to person becomes central to the drawing. The artist claims he learned to draw fast and spontaneously as a young bohemian living in the New York of Andy Warhol and abstract expressionism (the sixties), when he supplemented his living as a street artist in Washington Square by drawing anybody and everybody who would sit (and sometimes pay). It was there, he says, that his ability to track reality, to line the particulars of subject and mood, was cultivated in rapid fire form. It is a quirk of history that an art learned in the refined and historical urban jungles of New York should find its deeper communion in the refugee camp and the tented caravan. More amazing still is that an incessant quality of invention should pertain to each and every drawing. For this is above all what counts: the fact that each drawing seems invented on the spot, that no two should be “the same” or “repetitions of the type”, as if the singularity of each person, each event, each horror should call for an attention achieved through the invention of a new variation on the idiom, or even a new idiom altogether. Gittoes never rests on the laurels of his style, and this is his way of marking each figure, each gross violation of human rights as a unique, irreducible event in history that happens to someone and not to another, a special someone and not a mere “victim” who quickly disappears into the homogenized vale of human suffering, into the namelessness of terrible things. Gittoes’ way of keeping the power of each figure and what happened to them alive is to render each as freshly to human consciousness as each person is—or should be—to the world. This is called, from the moral point of view, respect.

Along with drawing, words are scribbled furiously across the page, describing in the manner of a journalist or writer where he is, who he is talking to or drawing, what is happening around him. In a particularly poignant picture, a Preacher is preaching to the dying in Rwanda, as they are being hacked to death. This preacher, the words tell us, spontaneously stood up among the slaughter to preach, thus “giving the people back their dignity”. He was soon to be cut down himself, so what we are seeing is a man whose moment in life is his last. Gittoes told me although he tried, he could do nothing, nothing other than draw and write. Too little too late, a record of human strength, but also artistic failure, the true record of a witness.

Gittoes’ work is a kind of performance: from drawing to painting. The paintings do not merely recapitulate the drawings but remake them through the resources of painting. It is here again that Gittoes parts ways with television. Circulation is not propagation through airwaves, it is recreation, variation, re-incarnation. But re-incarnation which must retain the urgency of the now, the spontaneity of the witness, the sense of drawing by torchlight under the cover of some United Nations tented darkness. The question becomes that of inventing an idiom of painting which retains the intensity of being there but also enlarges it in scope and expression. Thus, the project takes us from the rapid fire intensity of drawing-at-the-scene to the reinvention of being-there in the slower, thickly layered gestures of paint-in-studio.

Now it seems to me that painting has, for the past twenty years been in stiff competition with television: regarding the immediacy of the image, the spectacle of presentation, the power of circulation, the juxtaposition of the frame, and in many other ways. Gittoes’ project begins from the obvious recognition the television camera can capture what is happening in the world instantaneously and send it reeling into a thousand television sets without the slightest effort: plastic art will never succeed it gaining this position of power. Between the events of the world and the act of painting there is a time lag built into the creative process which the instantaneousness of the media belies. However, plastic art, given the terms of Gittoes’ project, can therefore be called on to blend the rapid fire response of the witness with the expressive subjectivity of drawing and painting that the “time lag” allows for, in the hope of retrieving events from their homogenized deadness (the way they strike us on the evening news). Serious photography, and documentary filmmaking, can—let it be said--also do this (one can stand and compose photos for expressive ends, carefully craft documentary films about the violations of human rights, etc.) and it is no part of my argument to disparage this important body of work. Nor do I wish to crudely castigate the media. To state the obvious: Bringing the news to the living room TV is a crucial way of connecting people to things, even if it also may paradoxically deaden their responses. But drawing and painting have the special virtue of molten reactivity brought right into the tracing of lines, the boldness of shadows, the exaggerations of physiognomy, the raw application of paint, the riotous calamities of colour. In drawing and painting, seeing is reacting with mind and body: as one does in situations of overwhelming horror, and indeed, in all situations where one is not anaesthetized.

In order that this process of circulation not reduce to a series of homogeneous representative styles and information bytes, Gittoes must never repeat himself. Everything must retain the freshness of the encounter, including that made in the studio. It takes a rare artist to seldom repeat himself. Especially in the postmodern times of routinized mass productions disguised under the aura of “studio practices”. Picasso was perhaps the paradigm of the non-repeating artist (until he got old anyway). Suffering, like joy, like contentment, like mythology, like everything, demands a continually new idiom for its appearance. Gittoes’ paintings do exist in conversation with the stark expressiveness of late twentieth century German painting, the powerful, strident colours of European and American post war art, the worlds of detritus and death that Kiefer composed, the staggered, the tormented figural acrobatics of Clemente, the displaced figures of Baselitz, the cramped, melodramatic spaces of Immendorf, the expressionistic impasto of Van Gogh, De Kooning, and Appel. But their quality of closeness to their subjects, their feel for the people in the pictures as individuals reacting to the closure of their worlds: this is his alone. His pictures share with Rembrandt one crucial aspect: they begin and end with people and only with people.--And not just with people, with their heads, their faces, their expressions, their lips, their eyes, their furrowed brows. Gittoes’ figures lack the luxury of such detailed subjectivity since they exist in collapsing worlds. And where Rembrandt details their subtleties of feeling, Gittoes shows us their striated bodies, bodies which are what Foucault would call “power points” of systemic atrocity. However, he also marks their subjectivity by expanding and exaggerating their heads, which are in his work typically oversized with respect to the bodies. This exaggeration places the burden of their experience in reactions which are making, literally, their heads reel. A large head in relation to a diminished body signifies weakness, deformation and perhaps also infancy: all are associatively present. It also signifies the concentration of human emotion—and related, the distended character of time. It is well known that in any traumatic moment, time always flows too fast and too slow, the instant remains strange, distance, foreign, horrifying, unreal--a point of amnesia and perpetual memory, over in an instance and never over.

In paintings of Bosnia—one of a young woman having a cigarette with her dead brother, the one cigarette is in her mouth, the other in the ground next to the fresh flowers by her brother’s wooden gravestone—the heads are doubled. When one looks at these paintings the heads seem permanently out of focus, like madness. A painting of an Orangeman in Northern Ireland enlarges the man’s sclerotic jowls, pink, flaccid skin and round face into a grotesqueness further accentuated by the strident palette of orange, pink and brown colours, the yellow tinted sunglasses, and the blue top hat the man is wearing. Tony Mullingully, a native Aboriginal Australian embroiled in the law, is painted with his head vertically doubled, the doubled crowns joined in the middle of the picture as he were a Siamese twin, the two necks reaching towards the bottom, and the top of the frame as if he were upside down to himself. The doubled head is painted in dark purple and the face deeply lined, scarified like hard earth. The oblong head of a Rwandan machete victim with its long, bloody cut can hardly be looked at it. The hideously deformed body of a Philippines torture victim, thrown from an automobile as a warning to others is held together only by netting and has practically no recognizable head and face at all. These paintings recreate the indelibility of such persons and events through the specific resources of the medium: through furrowed lines, jagged use of impasto, horridly intense colour, and a curvature of the anatomy which de-realizes the ordinary relation between body and head, head and face, person and eyes that is the abject relation of torture.

Gittoes recently completed an extended visit to New York, during which he completed a series of photos about fear and violence in that city. What his eye has picked up from the streets of that traumatized city is astonishing, almost derealizing. Fear.com, a photo of a poster advertising a movie, becomes emblematic of his vision of the scars, the rumblings, the aggression of that city. Having recently returned to the United States after seven years abroad, in South Africa, I find his sense of the disturbing turn the United States has taken after 911 to be all too accurate. We are brazen, terrified, filled with bravado, uncertain, one dimensional.

It is very hard to say what happens when one is presented with Gittoes’ telecommunications line from initial on-site drawings to paintings done in studio. One thing that happens (I have said) is that the art presents itself as an alternative to processes of circulation controlled by the media. Another is that we become aware of how distant we usually are from suffering (one of twentieth century art’s incessant subjects) when we view art in the studio or gallery. Gittoes shocks us with art’s capacity (in his hands) to evaporate distance, to place us there. At art’s rare capacity to do this, for since the time of the avant-gardes, art has existed--in spite of its efforts to break through--in a bubble. The paradox of the contemporary art world, inherited from the avant-gardes, is that while the avant-garde challenge was to break through the encapsulating world of the museum into larger social and political realities, the experimentation and innovation by which art aimed to do this more or less insured its ongoing insularity. For in large part, only the cognoscenti could grasp the message in the medium, meaning only those already encoded into the art world. Art is a relatively closed market; the media an open one. Art is mostly a closed activity; the media constantly expanding its global publics.

Gittoes is among the few to break through the closed circle of contemporary art, perhaps because he is Australian (in spite of his having learned to draw in New York) and loves to exist on the outside of things, to look in with fascination and irony, more likely because he is at heart a man of immense gentleness and compassion, and that motivates him more than any other thing. And he is able to draw from underneath a tank. What is exemplary about his work is that it shows how hard it is to break out of the encirclement of the contemporary art world, and that it is possible.