Mercado de la Muerte Installation Sculpture

On February 5th 1994, a single 120mm mortar shell struck an open air market in Sarajevo, leaving 68 Serbians and Muslims dead and 200 injured. “Some people were literally torn apart. Heads and limbs were ripped off bodies,” said one eyewitness. Javier de Villota’s extraordinary tableau, El Mercado de la muerte, is a three dimensional painting in the grand tradition of Francisco de Goya’s The Third of May, 1808 and the Disasters of War. It expresses Villota’s deeply felt reaction to the slaughter of innocent civilians in the market of Sarajevo. It was originally exhibited in Madrid in 1994 only ten days after the actual event. On a personal level, the tableau is the artist’s embodiment of a profound disquietude and pain. El Mercado de la muerte is more than an artistic recreation of a tragic historical event; it is a righteous portrayal of a war crime during the Bosnian conflict (1992-1995), a crime that is tragically repeated from one war to the next. Villota’s tableau exposes the viewer to the bloody reality of bomb attacks against innocent civilians. The exploded, brilliantly painted corpses are anonymous; yet, they symbolize every civilian victim of an explosive device, whether a military bomb or missile, roadside bomb or suicide attack. At the same time, the tableau is liberating because it is truthful and provides the viewer with a complex image that evokes the horror of the actual massacre and helps him to fully comprehend the human cost of these attacks against civilians. During WWII, the bombing of civilian targets by military forces became routine. Cities that were devastated by aerial bombardment include Guernica, Nanking, London, Rotterdam, Berlin, Tokyo, and Hiroshima. It was during the Algerian-French War of the 1950s that targeting civilians with explosive devices in restaurants, sports arenas, and airports became a major tactic of rebels fighting to free their country from colonial rule. The Irish Republican Army also used bombs against civilians extensively in the fight with Britain over Northern Ireland. The Bosnian War brought the devastation of Sarajevo to the attention of the world. The Seige of Sarajevo (April 1992 - February 1995) was the longest seige in modern warfare - 90 percent of the casualties were civilians. After the 1983 truck bombing in Beirut that killed 300 U.S. Marines, the tactic spread to other insurgent groups. Suicide bombing was initiated in 1987 by the Tamil Tigers in their struggle for independence in Sri Lanka. Suicide bombing became an effective tactic and a great test of the religious passion and commitment of the suicide combatant. Along with homemade rockets, suicide bombing by Palestinians became their front line of defense and their only effective counteraction to Israeli military attacks. The destruction of the World Trade towers and the attack on the Pentagon on September 11, 2001, by commercial airplanes commandeered by Saudi suicide bombers are the most lethal suicide attacks on record. The attacks had the effect of exacerbating the fears and anger of the American people, facilitating financial collapse in the United States, and fermenting two wars. Suicide bombs and car bombs have been used to terrible effect by insurgents in Iraq and Afghanistan and rival the use by coalition forces of aerial and artillery bombardment, cruise missiles and hellfire attacks by unmanned drones. In the ongoing war in Iraq 90 percent of the one million plus casualties have been civilians. Villota’s El Mercado de la muerte is a rare work of art that focuses on the destructive effect of explosives in modern warfare and on the horror that results from the virtually unrestricted attacks on civilians. John Martinkus’ book, Travels in American Iraq, contains his account of a car bomb attack in Karbala, Iraq. The following quote engages the realism, that is, the horror of the attacks against civilians that Javier de Villota’s artwork embodies: 2 March 2004: I reached the bomb scene not more than a minute after the explosion. The flood of people escaping the first blast had swept past, forcing me to take cover behind a pillar. The only ones left were those who had been caught in the explosion, and they were lying on the ground injured. I’d felt the heat from the explosion on my face. The panicked crowd had run the other way and suddenly the road was clear, so I simply walked over to where the bomb had gone off. Pieces of bodies lay all around the intersection . In the middle of the road one man sat upright, even though his body seemed to have split down the side like a ripped seam. Blood poured from his sides and his head onto the road. He was still alive but dying in front of me. It was suddenly quiet and there was no one near, just that man along with bodies and parts of bodies and another man lying on the ground with his legs kicking in a reflex action who - I think - was already dead. I saw what was a severed small child’s hand, half-shredded and wet, lying on the blood-covered road. There was no sign of the rest of the body. I was shaking and trying to hold my camera still. Under my foot I felt something slippery and my heel skidded. When I looked down, what I saw was unmistakable. It was part of a human brain. I gagged and my eyes filled with water as I tried to steady the camera and not throw up.2 **Texts by James Harithas. Station Museum of Contemporary Art Director

Sculpture:other on Other

Original:One-of-a-kind Artwork

Size:393.7 W x 590.6 H x 19.7 D in

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