The Anti-Art of War

• Rex Butler
• Paris Lettau

Maybe we should just look at the portrait for a moment. It shows Ben Roberts-Smith, awarded the Medal for Gallantry in 2006 and the Victoria Cross in 2011, standing crouched, arms thrust out, thumbs cocked, as though to fire a gun at an invisible enemy.

It’s threatening, over-bearing, macho, hypermasculine, celebratory, and enormous, like the man himself—some 220 centimetres wide and 160 centimetres high.

And here is a photograph of it being unveiled at the Australian War Memorial (AWM) in Canberra in September 2014, with the then-Director of the AWM Brendan Nelson, the artist Michael Zavros, and Roberts-Smith.

The war in Afghanistan was always complex and morally ambiguous. The United States decided to invade and occupy the country in response to Al-Qaeda’s strike upon the World Trade Centre and the Pentagon on September 11, 2001. The US then got its allies, Britain and Australia, to go in with it to make its actions seem less arbitrary and contentious.

The Allies stayed in Afghanistan for some twenty years, in the process tracking down and killing (in Pakistan) Osama Bin-Laden, and seeking to deradicalise and democratise the country, turning it into a partner that would serve the West’s interests in the region.

The whole operation failed abjectly, with America finally shamefacedly withdrawing from the country in August 2021 under President Joe Biden, after at least three previous Presidents full well knowing the disaster that was unfolding doing nothing about it. Today, of course, the Taliban’s rule is as fanatical as ever, enacting oppressive policies against women, LGBTQ people, and anyone raising a voice in opposition.

Australia followed the US unquestioningly into the war under Prime Minister John Howard and remained there under successive Prime Ministers, both Liberal and Labor, until we too officially withdrew in June 2021.

During this time the AWM commissioned artists to commemorate selected soldiers, a project running alongside the more well-known official war artist program, in which artists were appointed to record the activities of Australian forces abroad. (This is the program that Ben Quilty, for example, was involved in.)

It was Roberts-Smith who picked Zavros from a shortlist of artists as the one best suited to paint his portrait. Indeed, in a newspaper article on the commission, he is fascinatingly quoted saying that, upon meeting Zavros and his family, he realised, “We’re the same kind of guys. It’s one of those times when it dawns on you that you can come from different walks of life but have a similar mindset.” And Zavros for his part was quoted in the same article as saying that, during a studio sitting, after Roberts-Smith began to adopt a fighting stance: “He went into this whole other mode. He was suddenly this other creature and I immediately saw these other things. He showed me what he is capable of … It was just there in a flash.”

And here is the outcome: Pistol Grip (Ben Roberts-Smith, VC) (2014). What is it to say about our times, Australians’ attitude to war, what the AWM thought was an appropriate commission to hang on its walls, and what Roberts-Smith saw of himself in Zavros?

These are questions we will be grappling with for years to come. What did the Australian artists who depicted the Afghanistan war, both the official war artists and those commissioned back here, have to say about contemporary Australia? What does their work reveal of a country that could so willingly and yet so submissively invade and occupy another with so little justification? (And just to demonstrate that there are all kinds of possible answers to these questions, have a look at Marcus Wills’s portrait Corporal Stewart Baird VC MG (2021–22) where it is evident that the late Corporal Baird is the unwitting and defensive subject of unknown forces around him.)

On Thursday, 1 June 2023, Ben Roberts-Smith was found by a judge of the Federal Court of Australia to have committed war crimes—unjustified acts of civilian murder—and to have sought to cover them up during and after his tour of duty.

Look closely at Zavros’s portrait, and it is all there. Robert-Smith’s intimidating brutality; the moral complicity of both ourselves and our institutions. Roberts-Smith said it all in 2014, in the same newspaper article in which his original meeting with Zavros is recounted: “I truly believe that everything happens for a reason, and sometimes I don’t know what that reason is, but in years to come it generally becomes clear.”

And that is true. In fact, although it is not often mentioned, Zavros made two portraits of Roberts-Smith: the one we have been discussing and another, much smaller one of Roberts-Smith standing at ease that is often hung to its left.

The defamation case and its verdict are already in the two paintings. It is as though Roberts-Smith is shooting at himself, the artist is shooting at himself, and even we are shooting at ourselves in allowing our soldiers to be sent to such wars as Afghanistan.

Altogether Pistol Grip and Ben Roberts-Smith VC are masterpieces of a sort. They are outstanding examples of our ideological end times and the emptying out of all moral, political, and artistic values.