Detail of "A Flame" from Crile's "The Fires of War" series.
On Wednesday, March 9, artist Susan Crile will deliver an artist’s talk on her series, “The Fires of War” at Foundry Vineyards. The paintings mark the beginning of Crile’s trajectory as an artist willing to embrace difficult political topics.
Following is an excerpt from an interview between Crile and Associate Professor of German Studies and Philosophy Julia Ireland, who published an article on Crile’s chalk drawings of the Abu Ghraib torture photographs in a volume edited by Professor of Politics Shampa Biswas and Professor of Interdisciplinary Studies and French Zahi Zalloua for Whitman’s Global Studies Symposium on torture. This past summer, Ireland participated in a documentary on Crile’s political work, to be released in 2023.
Ireland: What connection do you see between “The Fires of War” and the academic theme “Climate Reckonings, Climate Justice”?
Crile: When I went to Kuwait after the first Gulf War, there were over 600 oil wells still burning. As my plane approached the Gulf, the sky darkened and went pitch black at noon, from the smoke of the burning oil wells. The scientist Carl Sagan had predicted the possibility of a nuclear winter if that smoke plume got into the stratosphere. Only good luck prevented such a worldwide catastrophe.
Ireland: You have related Iraq’s invasion of Kuwait with Russia’s invasion of Ukraine. Can you say more?
Crile: It was clear to me that the war in Kuwait was in good part about the control of oil. And here we are, 30 years later, with geo-political issues that still have to do with the same power politics about natural resources. Yet we are only marginally dealing with the biggest issue of all time: protecting our planet from human-made extinction, as with the current crisis in Ukraine.
“The Fires of War” is jointly sponsored by Whitman College and Foundry Vineyards. The show runs March 3 through April 17 at Foundry Vineyards, 1111 Abadie St.
