WAR WALKS

Lawrence Weschler would probably call this a convergence.  I’m not sure what it is, but it doesn’t seem entirely a coincidence.

As we mark the 100 year anniversary of end of the First World War (“So then we all lived in peace, did we dad?”), I saw this painting by John Singer Sargent titled “Gassed,” painted in 1919. 

It’s owned by the London Imperial War Museum, which describes it thus:  

“A side on view of a line of soldiers being led along a duckboard by a medical orderly. Their eyes are bandaged as a result of exposure to gas and each man holds on to the shoulder of the man in front. One of the line has his leg raised in an exaggerated posture as though walking up a step, and another veers out of the line with his back to the viewer. There is another line of temporarily blinded soldiers in the background, one soldier leaning over vomiting onto the ground. More gas-affected men lie in the foreground, one of them drinking from a water-bottle. The crowd of wounded soldiers continues on the far side of the duckboard, and the tent ropes of a dressing station are visible in the right of the composition. A football match is being played in the background, lit by the evening sun.”

I kept looking and looking at this image, and admittedly I was only looking at a jpg – the painting is mighty big – 


but it took me a very, very long time to see that football match.  It’s there but the resolution is low enough that anyone might be forgiven for not spotting it:

The painting apparently, and clearly, references “The Parable of the Blind” by Breughel the Elder, 1568, which I absolutely believes shows no football match.

I was then reminded of “Blind Field Shuttle” a performance work by the artist Carmen Papalia, who is blind, and who leads people on walks as they follow behind him, hands on the shoulder of the walker in front, their eyes held shut. I’d have thought blindfolds would have make the work better, but probably there are health and safety  issues. The event, which obviously changes all the time, sometimes looks like this: 

And  then, out of nowhere, (and of course I realize that with the Internet, there’s no such place as nowhere, and perhaps there’s no such thing as a convergence, and certainly no coincidence, and no doubt it’s all algorithms) this image appeared on my Facebook, plugging Google. 

There’s no blindness, no hands on shoulders, and of course no gassing, and yet there does seem to be some resemblance or echo or something.  I’m still not sure if I ought to be outraged by this.