The Silent Sullen People Shall Weigh Your Gods and You 2004
The Silent Sullen People Shall Weigh Your Gods and You
Catalogue raisonné no. 665
Artist's CR 606b
2004
Kinkell
Oil on canvas
60 x 48 inches / 0 cm
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Gerald Laing: From 1963 to the Present, Bourne Fine Art, Edinburgh, 2004chevron_right
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Gerald Laing: Iraq War Paintings, Kings College, Cambridge, 2005chevron_right
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Gerald Laing: Iraq War Paintings, Spike Gallery, New York, 2005chevron_right
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Gerald Laing: From 1963 to the Present, exhibition catalogue, Bourne Fine Art, 2004chevron_right
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Keith Bruce, 'All Fired Up Again', Herald, 8 Octoberchevron_right
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Jeremy Watson, '‘Immoral’ War Inspires Art Legend', Scotland on Sunday, 5 Septemberchevron_right
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Gerald Laing, 'Artist’s Notes on War Paintings', unpublished manuscript, 2004chevron_right
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Iain Gale, 'Pop Goes the American Illusion', Scotland on Sunday, 29 Augustchevron_right
Selected Citations and Comments
[That] The Silent Sullen People Shall Weigh Your Gods and You takes its title from Kipling’s poem ‘The White Man’s Burden’, indicates the complexity of Laing’s creative imagination. A grotesque, semi-naked figure of a gas-masked soldier has supplanted Leonardo’s Vitruvian man from the perfect circle of the Humanist ideal, putting mankind off-balance. With a skeletal hand he drops cluster bombs on two decapitated Iraqi soldiers and a limbless little boy.
This is tough, uncompromising stuff. And, of course, Pop was always political. But chiefly it celebrated a love affair with America. What Laing has done is turn that on its head. That is what makes these new paintings so immediately effective. He’s out-Warholed Andy, not least in the two works here which deal specifically with death. Such imagery, when splashed across the tabloids and TVs of a nation, soon sinks into the oblivion of our communication system. Take it out of that system and dress it up as art and it you re-empower it with true meaning and readdress the full horror of the original.Pop goes the American Illusion, Scotland on Sunday, 29 August 2004,