Ken Turner

Ken Turner – Anthem For Doomed Youth – Wilfred Owen 

Tremenheere Sculpture Garden, Penzance

What passing-bells for these who die as cattle?

— Only the monstrous anger of the guns.

Only the stuttering rifles' rapid rattle

Can patter out their hasty orisons.

No mockeries now for them; no prayers nor bells;

Nor any voice of mourning save the choirs,—

The shrill, demented choirs of wailing shells;

And bugles calling for them from sad shires.

What candles may be held to speed them all?

Not in the hands of boys, but in their eyes

Shall shine the holy glimmers of goodbyes.

The pallor of girls' brows shall be their pall;

Their flowers the tenderness of patient minds,

And each slow dusk a drawing-down of blinds.

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Maxine Flaneuse de Cornouaille

Ken Turner’s painting was accepted for this exhibition but was not hung as it was deemed to ‘overpower and dominate the other paintings’, some might say perfectly matching the power in Wilfred Owen’s poem. 

After the opening accusatory question and the monstrous anger that answers, it is the noise of battle that takes over the substance and rhythm of this poem. There is immense anger here alongside searing pity. It is the ability to think at once of the soldiers who died needlessly in their thousands and of those back home deprived of loved ones that makes this poem so much more than many other war poems. The two stanzas carry us from the shrill field of battle to those quiet shires where we see genuine tenderness for the dead, for the young. From noise and movement, the poem moves to utter stillness.

Ken Turner’s painting gives us none of the tenderness of the second stanza. There is monstrous anger here. The central figure has been stripped of its humanity and left to decay in the mud of the battlefield. The title of the poem has made a crown of thorns for this crucified figure with arms outstretched and gaping, grinning teeth reminiscent of a bandolier of bullets.  The sense of sacrifice is strong, the sons have been given up for slaughter. There is something of the Icon about this painting, those incredible intrusions of royal blue that leak out around the letters that also sanctify as a halo. The eyes do not shine with holy glimmers but are supremely powerful in their emptiness. These are eyes that have seen too much and now see no more. Both painting and poem ask the question ‘Why?’ and both leave us with a silence into which we cannot easily put an answer.

Miklos Legrady

This poem makes more sense if we look back at our own youth, because there have been disappointments and losses which wounded us dearly, but we healed through the veils of forgetting. As we remember we’ll identify with these words.  Our personal tragedies were actually necessary in order to awaken the best of our character, which otherwise would remain sleeping in the depths of our mind.  We need challenges to become ourselves and the darkness of our shadow reveals the brightness of the light we walk in.  Unless you die.

We cannot imagine that war, how many died, brothers, sisters, cousins, uncles and aunts erased, no longer there.  In the First World War, tactics were chaotic; thousands of young conscripts were sent walking into machine-gun fire, their commanders not knowing how effective such fire was, so the kids died like flies. Their lover will miss them.
   

The painting shows the smile of someone ravaged by the unbearable. The mood is insane.  The teeth show horror.  In fact, that painting’s too much; because it looks stupid, our mind rejects the insane message and will think the artist is nuts.  For those who experienced their friend’s death in the trenches, seeing the bones, such a painting is cathartic, know that we too feel what you feel, you are no longer alone with your memories, we share the same pain.

For those of us whose protected lives shielded us from insane horrors, the painting and poem won’t mean much, they push us away.

Bart Gazzola

I recently read Goddamn This War!, a graphic novel about WWI with art/story by Tardi with a 'chronology' by Jean-Pierre Verney. The opprobrium of the true genesis of the 20th century makes me long to read the original French, as surely it’s more shrieking in that tongue (the shrill, demented choirs of wailing shells).

Entire pages in War! feature the disfigured faces of soldiers. It’s been suggested the surfeit of 'monster' films in the 1920s was society's way of 'dealing' with these 'monsters' (“No mockeries now for them”). Correspondingly, words are often less brutally evocative than images: not Anthem for Doomed Youth by Wilfred Owen. “What passing-bells for these who die as cattle?”: Temple Grandin has more mercy in her slaughterhouses than Owen knew, here. 

Turner's painting is a fussy contrivance. I've recently been compelled to revisit the Group of Seven, and one of their number, Frederick Varley, rendered For What? (1917 – 1919) with mounting corpses muddy, wheelbarrow overflowing with deathly war machine slag (“no prayers nor bells”...). His words: “We are forever tainted with [the war's] abortiveness and its cruel drama....we’d be healthier to forget...we never can.” 

Yet Turner mimics a 'war banner': this perverts (corrects?) the vainglorious 'king & country' militant madness that never asks “what does it mean—to kill your children? Kill them and then…go in there and sing about it!” (Findley). It’s been suggested I've a 'Russian' (dark?) soul. I answer Owen with Solzhenitsyn: “Dwell on the past and lose an eye. Forget the past and lose both eyes.”

Critical Writing about Art & Politics

bartgazzola.com

Pendery Weekes

Like a burial shroud, chilling to say the least, this work by Ken Turner strikes a chord in my soul. Though I was involved in the Vietnam war protests that helped end that war, this piece is a reminder of my passivity and inaction for not protesting more. Even if soldiers today no longer lose their lives in such vast numbers as in Wilfred Owen’s poem, civilians on the ground are certainly losing their lives, their limbs and livelihoods. Thanks to videogame technology, soldiers from miles away can aim their killer drones, indifferent to the moving figures on the screen, later no longer running, lifeless. Their blood is very real but for the soldiers seems a game, though PSTD lingers, popping up in nightmares and daymares for years to come. What’s next, Venezuela?

Ken’s banner reminds me of the famous burial shroud in Turin, said to have been used to wrap Jesus of Nazareth after his crucifixion, bearing imprints of a man’s image. Instead, what remains here are the imprints of teeth and part of a skeleton with endless blood spattered everywhere. Even more powerful is Owen’s poem on the back of Ken’s work, written like a final, dramatic message to the dead. It is not surprising it was selected to be displayed in the exhibition at the Tremenheere Sculpture Garden, but at the hanging was excluded because it would overpower the other works. Yes, the violence of war is overpowering, too much so for Cornwall now.