Just two years ago, Hannah Feldman was a graduate student at Columbia University. But now it’s Professor Feldman to you. With a doctorate in art history, Feldman is teaching a course this quarter on art during war. Not only does she teach the class, she’s writing the book – it’s both an extension and a revision of her dissertation, soon-to-be-titled Art During War: Visible Space and the Aesthetics of Action, Paris 1956-2006. She sat down with PLAY to discuss the role of art in warfare.

PLAY: What is the book about?

Hannah Feldman: The book starts from the premise that, traditionally, this period of French art history and urban studies has been thought of and theorized in terms of the end of World War II and called “post-war.” This becomes problematic because the war that I’m interested in is the Algerian War for Independence. One of my premises is, What happens to the received trajectory of modern art and to the determination of “what is aesthetic” when we consider that period as not being post-war, but very much still explicitly engaged in war? What does it mean for certain definitions of national identity – of geo-political problems? I look at a number of different urban planning strategies, at work produced by a number of different artists, and finally at several different manifestations in the city of Paris and how these things fit together. I’m trying to get across essentially the idea that art produced during this period of time was, and is, political. The way we’ve traditionally understood it – which is divorced of politics – has not allowed us to see what the political issues of the time were.

PLAY: Why did you decide to write this book?

HF: One of the responsibilities I think about, being an art historian in particular, is to constantly interrogate the received histories as you’ve taught them and to look at them from the standpoints we know now. Part of what I’m interested in, even more currently than France from 1956 to 2006 is what it means to be making art, or looking at art, or producing and distributing art now, during another time of war. What do we not know about the history of modern art that has not prepared us to understand something about the present moment? I’m filling in the gaps, trying to re-write the history with a different sign.

PLAY: Is this more for the artist or the historian?

HF: It’s a book for the historian. I describe and analyze images, but it’s not a picture book and will provide a lot of historical information, as well as a lot of analytical or theoretical context.

PLAY: What is art for you and how did that shape what your focus was on in the book?

HF: To some degree I would say that my focus was shaped not as much by what I thought art was, but by what was produced during the period. And some of what gets produced during the period doesn’t engage the historical context in a way we might have expected it would. Some of what I suggest is that we need to look at more popular, less stable kinds of objects: graffiti, posters, and demonstrations – things that happen on the streets.

PLAY: Why do you think it is important for people to understand art in the context of war?

HF: Again, that would have to do with my belief that art has a responsibility, in part to its time and in part to its public, to represent experience. I think the experience in the 20th century has largely been one of war. In part, the traditional art history cannon has become static and needs to be reinvigorated in ways that also better prepare for what is now called the global art market or global production. And in order to understand that distinction between post-global and pre-global, we need to go back and think about the distinction between post-colonial and colonial, all of which comes to a head in the 1950s and the 1960s. Basically, as part of the historical background, we need to understand contemporary work and work that doesn’t get produced from Paris, New York or Berlin.

PLAY: What role do you think art plays in Iraq?

HF: I don’t know yet. That war is ongoing and we certainly don’t see much of what happens in Iraq at all. Part of what the responsibility of art is to take things that are invisible and make them visible. I’ve seen some exhibitions and some work that is made in specific response to the war and it’s usually in order to denounce the war but I don’t know that that’s necessarily what art has to do. That chapter hasn’t been written yet.