(Before you read on, in all seriousness: I was around 40 when the Iraq War began. My boys were toddlers. I was against the war then and I am against the war now, for the same reason: I want each and every son and daughter to come home immediately. When my boys started playing with army men and the war started I couldn't stop thinking about all of our young men and women over there, and all of the suffering that goes on day after day. All of the art work I've done is with those thoughts in mind. Even though the works are created with toys, I'm not aiming for whimsy. I don't find anything funny about this war, or any other war. Let's have a draft that includes every able-bodied adult American. Maybe then our stupid interventionist wars would end.) Why Army Men? Well. Right before the Iraq war and after our Afghanistan misadventure had begun, my boys were beginning to play with toys that I could remember playing with when I was a kid. Hot Wheels. Marbles. G.I. Joe. ARMY MEN. An aunt and uncle of mine gave me a deluxe box of army men when I was nine or ten. This aunt and uncle's kids seemed to have every type of expensive toy whenever I visited their house, which I almost never did. Their kids' bedroom was like Toys R Us, not K-Mart, Treasure Island, Arlan's (a Milwaukee discount store) or dime store. (Yes, dime store. There was still penny candy.) So, naturally, the toy I got from them was one I would not even have known about unless it was in the Sear's Catalogue, which I would pore over and drool and circle all the toys my parents could choose from. (Why do parents even bother wrapping socks at xmas? Who knows. All I know now is that my own kids sometimes get sweaters, pants, or winter hats for Christ-mas and Hanukkah Harry.)
green and gray soldiers, tanks, vehicles, barbed wire, planes (I think). The bad guy Nazi's actually had...them. They had half-tracks, machine guns and Tiger Tanks. comics. I still remember when Rock and Easy Co. lifted a turret off a bombed tank and set it on a hill to blast the bad guys. Buddah-Buddah- Buddah, not Buddha Buddha Buddha. Wow.) I played with my set in the dirt in the backyard and it was the coolest, largest battlefield I could ever have imagined with real foxholes and bases and pill boxes and trenches. So when I had boys I decided to get them army men. And I soon discovered that I had as much fun buying them as I had getting them decades ago. And I could afford to buy deluxe toys, which in this case meant bags and bags of army men with all the tanks, etc. But at the same time real bombs were falling in Iraq and Afghanistan and real people were dying every day. This is partly why my wife was against having army men in the house. I preferred to let the boys have their fun. They would find about the real world soon enough. (In fact, my oldest boy was fairly youmg when he first saw Paths of Glory, All Quiet on the Western Front, For Whom the Bell Tolls, etc. He eventually started saying, "I'm NEVER going in the army.") Every time the boys played I thought of the real people dying and the real bombs exploding, my Buddha sense. The Vajrapani in me wants to ask the perpetrators: "What exactly is bombing going to accomplish? Show me how venn diagrams of terror will translate into providing food and shelter and schools for the innocents. How does terror make peace? Is it okay because it will create jobs afterward? Give it an eternal rest. So my artwork became a way for me to "play" with army men again, only this time in a serious way. Plus, I have an excuse to buy boxes of bag after bag of army men. You'll see two main types of army men: what I consider the classic WWII green and tan and a new type consisting of two sides of green. This was perfect: neither and both good and bad on both sides. I've seen "terrorist" figures but that's a little too realistic. What got me going initially was finding bags and bags of miniature green and tan at a dollar store. This blew my mind. I started making mini army men artworks because the idea of the tiny ones put me in mind of "larger" people making "little" people into army men. The first artwork to combine larger men and tiny men was XXXXX, the big ones cleaning up the little ones. |
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| Army Man Army Visuals |
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