Last week I told (the probably mythical) you about the new Morro Bay Art Association show, A Shift in Perspective, opening this Sunday — and the wall-hung photo I submitted for it.
As it happens, for the same show I also submitted the image at the top of this article, with the title The Great Adventure.
The photo and the title both come from an exhibition at Te Papa, the national museum of New Zealand, in Wellington. The exhibition chronicles New Zealand troops’ participation in a catastrophic military campaign in World War I, wherein British and Commonwealth troops invaded the Gallipoli peninsula in an attempt to capture the Dardanelles Strait, lock up the Black Sea, and capture Constantinople, knocking Turkey out of the war. Instead, the attackers suffered withering casualties in a months-long battle against well-entrenched and -armed Turkish soldiers, and eventually slunk away in defeat.
The campaign was the brainchild of then-First Lord of the Admiralty Winston Churchill, who would go on to demonstrate repeatedly throughout the next World War that as a military strategist he was an excellent politician.
But I digress.
The unforgettable Te Papa exhibition on Gallipoli gets its power from brilliantly executed, larger than life dioramas of dramatic moments from the battle such as the one depicted above. In the photo, the eye is confused as a strikingly real looking NZ soldier lunges forward in the foreground, firing his pistol even as his lifeblood drains from a mortal wound; while at the same time in the background, an uninvolved young man chats with a friend, ignoring the battle seemingly raging a few feet away.
The exhibition signage in the farther background announces “The Great Adventure,” a description that is undercut by both the obscene tragedy of the Gallipoli debacle, and the nonchalance of the young visitor.
Ronald Crittenden 