Hold Your Gun Arm Steady

on vietnamese propaganda

“Hold your gun arm steady to keep the color of the flower,” reads a revolutionary poster made in Vietnam, circa 1969. The subjects of the work—a red flower in mid-bloom, a female guerrilla soldier, and the rifle she grips in her right hand—occupy a cool, monochrome background of deep blue-gray. The vertical axis of the gun’s bayonet draws the eye upward to the vibrant petals of the straight-stemmed, strident, and supernaturally tall flower. Though it takes up very little surface area and sits right-of-center in a composition mostly weighted to the left, this flower is unquestionably the gravitational center of the work. The poster is both typical and exceptional of Vietnamese revolutionary art made during the Vietnam-American war. It is hand-painted, as most Vietnamese propaganda art was at the time, due to a lack of available printing technology in the country. It captures a sense of revolutionary optimism and collective spirit rather than express violence or hatred toward the enemy. But what makes this particular Vietnamese poster uncommon is the subtlety of its message and execution, and the rhetorical weightlessness with which it conveys perhaps the heaviest paradox of the revolutionary experience: that the future depends, in no small measure, on people’s willingness to kill and to die.

The gun that splits the poster’s composition straight down the middle, dividing the armed struggle of the present from the opening blossom of the future, is the ubiquitous icon of modern revolution: the AK-47. As one of the most widely used weapons in the world, especially in socialist countries and in third-world anti-colonial movements, a number of contemporary artists, including The Propeller Group and Le Brothers, have refashioned the AK-47 or Kalasknikov (so nicknamed after its inventor, Mikael Kalashnikov) in order to take its loaded past—as both a symbol and a weapon—and push it even further, in some cases even driving the gun’s associations into entirely different metaphorical spaces. Many of these works exist as multistage projects, conceived over a number of years and incorporating many different media, as if the object itself has become too oversaturated with reference to succeed as just one type of artwork.

on Le Brothers

Le Ngoc Thanh and Le Duc Hai, two Vietnamese artists and identical twins who collectively make work under the moniker Le Brothers, have embarked on a similar multiyear, multistage journey to transform the AK-47's iconography, to inject it with new meaning and buoyancy. Their latest effort culminates in The Game(2016), a 24-channel video, performance, photo, and sculptural installation that viewers approach by walking between two larger-than-life rifles—the AK-47 and M16—festooned with the ornate, floral curlicues of traditional Vietnamese lacquer painting (the Le Brothers were trained in traditional lacquer techniques as younger artists) and stationed on sculptural plinths. The performance, video, and photography components document a continuous, unresolved process where the Le Brothers attempt to reconceptualize and reconstitute different AK-47–type objects; green plastic toy guns grow in size, gain aesthetic complexity, and eventually take on a monumental scale and finish, invoking Vietnam's imperial past and the palatial architecture of Hue City where the Le Brothers currently live and work. As in The History of the Future, the trademark gun in The Game is remade again and again without final resolution, only the indication of further process. The gun must be remade, and differently each time, because The Propeller Group and the Le Brothers both seem to want this already overburdened symbol to perform the impossible: to embody both past and future, to reconcile the weight of death with the effervescence of new creativity.