An-My Lê
Murray Guy

An-My Lê’s last show at Murray Guy, in 2004, presented black-and-white photographs of a virtual Iraq that the US military has constructed in the American West. It was about reality and fiction. In Lê’s new show, titled “Events Ashore,” the pictures are in color, and their more straightforward subjects at first seem to bring us one step closer to the simply real.

There are pictures of the huge hovercraft used to unload returning troops onto American beaches, of small-arms practice on the deck of military ships, and of a woman dressed for combat on the deck of an oil rig off the Iraqi coast. But even these realities seem mostly chosen for the hint of the unreal one finds built into them. The targets taking small-arms fire are perched on the very edge of a ship’s deck, with the open sea beyond. There’s something odd about a bunch of navy marksmen shooting out toward the empty horizon. It seems an inescapable metaphor for unreachable goals and missions forever unaccomplished. The “materiel” around the woman on the rig includes teak garden furniture that might as well be poolside in a suburb. The photograph seems to witness the full melding of the domestic and the martial. It isn’t an ironic in the mode of Martha Rosler’s classic images—but it hints at such effects. Another of Lê’s pictures might be a classic Vietnam War photo: White men in green camo disappear into the verdure of a tropical forest. But something about their relaxed poses—or maybe the Australian setting announced in the photograph’s title—defuses any sense of threat. This training exercise for battle ends up looking stangely sylvan, almost Poussinesque.

—Blake Gopnik