The Brooklyn Rail

Could there be any more dispiriting topic than that of the gun? A topic veering between devastating personal histories, “shoot first” laws and arrogant entitlements, and weak pronouncements about sensible gun control? Perhaps the theme of firearms—let alone guns and art—is a little too topical. It is too much of the moment, after all—the headline we’d rather not read. Students shelter in place as if on the clock. “Lone Wolf” gunmen inflict terror in grocery stores, massage parlors, houses of worship, night clubs. Ghost guns are the weapons du jour; “thoughts and prayers,” our deadening mantra. The list is as traumatic as it is tedious. The subject is at once so close, quotidian, overcharged, and redundant, that taking distance from such material seems not just methodologically sound but emotionally necessary.

But perhaps the gun’s proximity demands that we get closer. Too many of us have no choice in the matter. Perhaps we need to consider how we’ve effectively taken up the gun as a domestic complement to how the world gets made and unmade, whether we carry, collect, hunt, shoot for sport or practice abolitionist self-defense. The title of these pages, “Martial Intimacies,” dramatizes this sensibility: that small arms—their histories, technologies, ideologies, affordances, and even aesthetics—are naturalized as tools of everyday militarism. They are co-creators of a material, social, cultural and affect world that we both inhabit and reproduce, and no more so than in the United States. As many of the following texts make plain, art and visual culture play no small role in the constitution and horizon of this world.

From empire to industrialization; from racial capitalism to war; from chronicles of old and new media to the discursive machinations of the law; the gun is a veritable prosthetic in advancing such epochal phenomena. Compared to generative AI and the latest developments stemming from Silicon Valley, the gun may hardly seem to rank as modish or “technological.” To dwell on its proliferation might seem a foregone conclusion. But the contributors to these pages know otherwise. Drawing from perspectives at once intimate and analytic—family and personal histories, legal and Black Studies, Indigenous and settler narratives, media genealogies, border politics, geopolitics, activism, and art practice—they collectively demonstrate that our relationship to the gun is no mere theoretical exercise but a set piece in the quotidian depredations of power.

Joshua Aiken addresses the abstractions of the law as they militate against lived experience and black social death, centering the legal fiction of the “armed individual” versus the racialized archetype of the “armed criminal.” Lucy Raven speculates on two early pressure tests within early cinema, to think about the formative relationship between the gun and the genre of the Western.

Reflecting on family in both Vietnam and the United States, as well as his art with the Propeller Group, Tuan Andrew Nguyen writes on stray bullets and the children who fall victim to them, suggesting that stray bullets are the rule and not the exception in the militarization of American life. Joseph Mizhakii Zordan considers ornamental representations on the Colt revolver with respect to the colonization of the American West, stressing the perpetuation of settler violence against Indigenous people through the decoration of the gun’s rotating chamber

Mary Ellen Carroll looks to the border of Southern Texas to consider the confluence of mass shootings, the migrant crisis and climate catastrophe, with the figure of the unaccompanied immigrant child (UIC) standing at the intersection of these emergencies. In an excerpt from her artist’s statement for the exhibition, Mask/Conceal/Carry (2022, 52 Walker, New York City), Tiona Nekkia McClodden writes on her personal relationship to firearms and self-defense, exploring issues of embodiment, practice, autism, masking, and the multivalence of “training to failure.” Finally, Joan Kee considers something as seemingly banal as an emoji—specifically, Apple’s “gun” emoji—to shed light on the importance of visualization for thinking about the pervasiveness of guns in daily life, drawing comparisons between American and South Korean contemporary art.

In the Arms and Armor galleries at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, the noise of current debate is silenced. Vitrines of antique guns draw a reverential audience of small arms completists. No AR-15s are on display here, no Glocks, SIG Sauers, or the marquee brand names that would render the space a contemporary gun show. One is struck if not entirely surprised by the demographic mostly populating the galleries: witness a theater of white masculinity opining on the beauty of a Kentucky rifle. The observation broadcasts something critical about the gun as aesthetic artifact enshrined in a house of culture, right up there with medieval panel paintings and Roman portrait busts.

The museumification of the gun as decorative fetish belies the actuality of firearms in the present. While design scholars and some curators have addressed the display of such objects in searching detail—and historians of industry and technology have produced exacting accounts of the gun’s geopolitical imbrications—consigning small arms to the realm of connoisseurship distances them from the roles they perform outside the vitrine, and the bloody networks they forge across time and space. Recent histories of the gun surface one such connection. William C. Church, co-founder of the NRA in 1871, was also a pivotal figure in the establishment of the Met—“a fellow in perpetuity”—founded just a year earlier.¹

Such connections are not incidental but dramatize the reaches of everyday militarism as a routinized but ultimately, unsustainable intimacy. And yet it is precisely because these relations are unsustainable—or unbearable, to invert the rhetoric of the Second Amendment—that some of the contributors see an opening elsewhere, a world otherwise.

1. See Frank Smyth, The NRA: The Unauthorized History (New York: Flatiron Books, 2020): p. 17