We Are Building Killers

And we’re doing a great job.

Making her first artistic splash in the 1970s with experimental film and performance, Marina Abramovic watched some of her colleagues slam into a brick wall when they realized they couldn’t keep up with the amount of energy required to plan and execute the demanding pieces. Resolute to never wind up in the same place of artistic death, Abramovic continues creating much-discussed videos.

One of her most recent, 8 Lessons on Emptiness with a Happy End, depicts children carrying all sorts of automatic weapons. Abramovic has often focused on death and even used big weapons in her art. But this was different. It involved children. And as a result, it was unnerving in a way that was different from a skeleton resting on top of her naked body, the skeleton rising and falling with each breath. For the most part, the guns in 8 Lessons look large in the subjects’ young hands. Yet somehow, the children look natural and comfortable with these large killing machines strapped over their shoulder, held in the ready position, pointed in the air.

To accompany this video, Abramovic created a number of photographs that also depict these child soldiers in various settings. The series of photos, titled “The Quiet in the Land,” are numbered or lettered, each as frightening and disarming as the last. In “The Family I,” Abramovic photographs a group of children, all with weapons held in just one hand and pointed toward the sky. None of the soldiers are wearing shoes, with one exception—a grown woman who appears to be the leader of this childish group of fighters. Wearing the same all-green fatigues as the rest, Abramovic does with this photograph what she does in her performance art. She puts herself in the midst of the art, admitting a potential complicit relationship with the straight-faced, young subjects.

Then in a tender-turned-terrible moment (“The Family III”), Abramovic pictures seven green-fatigued girls tucked away in a fantastically feminine bed, complete with plush pink pillows and pink satin blankets. Resting carelessly, gently in each girl’s right hand is the same M-16 pictured in other photographs, the muzzles pointed toward the foot of the bed, the scopes secured tightly on top of the guns, prepared to find a target and destroy when the time is right. But for now, these delicate girls must sleep. After all, young killers require at least eight hours of sleep each night.

These scenes are not typical, and they put fear in many viewers’ hearts. They dread the day when these images could come to fruition in America. But they have already, have they not? Our young killers may be 18, but they’re still children. They’re still young enough to need their mothers, and most of them can’t even cook for themselves, yet they’re old enough to join the armed forces. But don’t think these killers are only after flesh and blood. Oh no, that would be too simple, too easy a prey. Some are going after much more. The more devious and acceptable killers don’t go for the jugular. They’re destroying people’s insides. Taking away good literature, changing a novelty into a lifestyle, reducing art to nudity, and glorifying dribble to the place of art.

Thankfully the war has not yet been won. The battles rage on through generations, and the only hope is perseverance. So be on guard and prepare to fight, keeping a gun in hand just in case.

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