The Fanonite

Two years back, Jonathan Steele and dear friend Dahr Jamail wrote a powerful piece in the Guardian on the destruction of Fallujah entitled ‘This is Our Guernica’. The analogy was apt and like Picasso’s famous painting, it captured the horrors inflicted on the citizens of Fallujah. In the wake of the US siege and its eventual destruction, in the words of Dahr and Steele, Fallujah was turned into a “decade’s monument to brutality”.

While the treatment of Tony Blair’s exit has been predictably unctuous and sycophantic on BBC and the rest of the British mainstream media, outside of the establishment circles, not every mind has been domesticated. In an act of splendid defiance, Michael Sandle has produced art that promises to be the Guernica for our age.

Guardian reports:

The skilfully choreographed end of the Tony Blair decade is about to receive an unwelcome gatecrasher as a centrepiece of one of London’s most popular summer visitor attractions.

A huge and controversial artwork showing the prime minister and his wife, Cherie, being expelled naked from 10 Downing Street amid the chaos of Iraq will be unveiled at the Royal Academy on Wednesday.

Composed in an emotional burst of energy over 10 days by the prominent sculptor and academician Michael Sandle, it will dominate the annual summer exhibition, the world’s largest open-entry art show, which had more than 150,000 visitors last year.

Although some eyebrows were initially raised at the submission, the 4.5m x 1.5m (15ft x 5ft) drawing has been given extra prominence by winning the exhibition’s annual Hugh Casson prize for drawing. The RA’s president, Sir Nicholas Grimshaw, is expected to highlight the Sandle’s work at the academy’s annual dinner this month, which is usually attended by government figures.

The charcoal drawing was modelled by the artist, who is 71 and has sculpted many public commissions, on medieval paintings of Adam and Eve leaving the Garden of Eden in disgrace. The embarrassed central characters outside No 10 are flanked by one panel representing brutality by British troops in Iraq and another showing a pile of Iraqi corpses under an Hieronymus Bosch-like rain of body parts.

The brutality panel is based on the case of Corporal Donald Payne, who admitted inhuman treatment of Iraqi civilians at a court martial last year in which other soldiers in his unit were cleared amid controversy. Sandle has called the panel “Corporal Payne’s Chorus” because the soldier invited others to hear what he called his “choir” of victims screaming.

“I wasn’t going to submit this year, but I suddenly felt overcome with anger at the way Blair has messed up,” said Sandle, who originally thought he had missed the submission deadline.

He worked non-stop, including fixing up the framing required for all entries, after staff reminded him of the 10 days of grace allowed to academicians entering work. “There he was, elected by a huge majority, and he has allowed his vanity to destroy it all,” added Sandle. “He doesn’t appear to feel a twinge of conscience about Iraq because he is so sure that he did the right thing.

“They have talked about the original perpetrators of violence being the ones who should apologise, but what about the 650,000 Iraqis who have died since the invasion? Who is going to apologise to them, and how?” …

The stark drawing, entitled Iraq Triptych, will hang in the exhibition’s Gallery V alongside a group of romantic watercolours and a drawing of British troops on the Somme battlefield in the first world war at an outpost nicknamed Moo Cow Farm…

The gallery was hung by the Scottish artist Barbara Rae after Sandle’s work triumphed in the complex judging process which whittles more than 9,000 entries down to about 1,200. Sandle said: “I was expecting them to find it a dark corner somewhere so this is all a very nice surprise.

“It’s particularly good to have won the Casson prize. I was apprehensive about the whole thing once I’d taken it to the academy. But I’m glad I did. I just had to do it - I thought: this guy just can’t get away with what he’s done.”