John Keane’s exhibition of paintings, Gulf, depicting the Desert Storm campaign,footnote1 aroused controversy because, faced by the righteous exercise of Western military might, it failed to demonstrate the standard mixture of endorsement and high-minded awe, rather making unaccountable suggestions about the operation of financial and media interests in the conflict. The painting that aroused most ire was Mickey Mouse at the Front,footnote2 a collection of reminders of the more inconvenient aspects of the great victory. Laid out in front of a fortified city are various elements: a palm tree hunched over unnaturally like some rearing worm, its fronds brushing the ground, serving to indicate environmental catastrophe; a shopping trolley full of weaponry, a symbol of conspicuous military consumption where combat becomes a consumer good, a motif which nicely links the expenditure of ‘ordnance’ with the inviolable Western freedom to consume; worst of all (for the press), a grinning Mickey Mouse squatting upon a plinth as if defecating, an image of America, and more broadly of chewing-gum culture, complacently and even blissfully presiding over the catastrophe.

Painting from 1991 entitled 'Mickey Mouse at the front'. Thick and dynamic brushstrokes see a stretch of urban beach-front muddied and tumbling, with dead trees topped and strung with bunting, a flag of Kuwait trapped under the wheel of a shopping trolley holding rifles, tank traps lining the seafront, and in the foreground a figurine of Mickey Mouse on a grey plinth.
Painting from 1991 entitled 'every time we say goodbye'. The painting figures a warplane in the middle of the sky, with two bombs flying beneath it. Framing this image are a sequence of tiles that depict the process of the bomb through the sky and as it finds its intended target, which reads contiguously from left to right around the picture.

Keane is evidently a liberal, anti-war artist of noble intentions and it might seem that such work should be welcomed as a break with the bellicose British consensus. Yet in looking more closely at his painting it becomes apparent that Keane is not merely against this war but war as such, and also no doubt against pain, sin and death. While this position allows him a vague critical perspective on the Gulf War, it blinds him to its specific horrors. Indeed his work is as much symptom as representation, a precise register of liberal confusion about the conflict. As such, it merely continues the long, honourable tradition of impotent and subjective outrage with which artists (sensitive souls) have greeted war. For Alan Borg, the director-general of the Imperial War Museum, ‘Artists from Goya to Picasso have set down their emotional responses to war, which are often bleakly despairing and equally often touched with irony. Keane’s work stands within this eminent tradition and it is perhaps not surprising that some people find it upsetting; but who could not be upset by the Basra road or the burning oil wells.’footnote3 It is of course unfortunate that some in the West have been ‘upset’ by the collateral effects of Desert Storm, but art makes them look this salutary moral lesson in the face—before assigning it to the eternal narrative of man’s inhumanity to his fellow human beings (and artists’ powerful condemnations of the same). What is most lacking from this view is any conception, other than in purely utopian terms, that such acts could be avoided, and of the details of this violent episode committed in our name and with our resources against specific people and in a highly particular way.

Painting from 1991 entitled 'Scenes on the road to hell 1), which looks down a highway littered wit vehicle wrecks. In the central background, a tank has reared up onto the road's safety barrier, and a man with his arms in the air stands on top of it. In the foreground, a woman and two children smile facing forwards. The style has broad brushstrokes, and smears of paint figure this scene.

Keane’s work in the exhibition fell into two main types: documentary, genre scenes of the military camp; and large, symbolically loaded works which attempt a modernized history painting. Keane was first assigned to the raf, and as a commissioned artist of record made paintings of their encampments which draw on old devices and are not so very different from many works made during the two world wars. These pictures are often quite pretty, for the artist could hardly but be fascinated by the unfamiliar light and space of the desert, and within it the disposition of military equipment and personnel. In Artillery, for instance, the handling of colour and space has a strongly picturesque aspect, while Draughts portrays a game played under the attractive dappled light produced by camouflage netting. This allure also operates in works which portray things that Keane could not have seen directly and is ironically grafted onto depictions of military equipment. Every Time We Say Goodbye is a thickly painted, light, even lush picture of a Tornado releasing smart bombs, framed with the familiar military photographs of the projectile’s destructive progress. It may be that the appealing cast of this picture is supposed to stop the viewer short, to provoke thought about the spectacular nature of the war, yet there is little to suggest this intrinsically. The pictures produced by these weapons are by now positioned within a uniformly positive discourse of Allied military competence which is hardly questioned by Keane’s decorative use of them here.footnote4