Remembering and (Re)defining Combat through Papermaking

• In Event: Canons, Collecting, and Object Homes in American Art

Abstract

In 2007, after six years in the United States Army, Drew Cameron collaborated with artist Drew Matott to form the Combat Paper Project. A performance project, Combat Paper welcomes service members as well as artists, activists, and community members to gather together, eat, listen to music, dance, type a collective journal on an antique typewriter, and destroy military uniforms, pulping them to press into paper. With their portable paper mill, the group travels, hosting gatherings throughout the United States. According to Cameron, the “fiber, the blood, sweat and tears,” of “brutal violence” are “held within” the uniforms. Combat papermaking compels participants to destroy this combat material to create new, communal objects and experiences.
An homage to paper as an historical object of records and contracts with the authority of newspapers and intimacy of letters, and to papermaking as obsolete labor, Combat Paper refuses modes of commodification that prioritize speed, convenience, and expansion. Most of the paper produced, however, is scrapped or torn for reuse; thus, Combat Paper also resists traditional archival practices. It is a process of (re)creation, rather than utility, producing the conditions of possibility for writing but not writing itself. Cameron and Matott also defy prescriptive narratives of therapy, healing, and redemption. For the group, the organic shredding and cutting function as both catharsis and pleasure, undermining the narratives of victimization, (dis)ability, and rehabilitation that circumscribe veterans’ writing and art communities once they return to the U.S.
This paper argues that through its destruction of the uniform, Combat Paper engages a Benjaminian form of remembrance that counters the compulsory healing demanded from Veterans returning home. This remembrance keeps “moral injury,” or the primary injury of war, open and volatile, and thus functions as a critique of U.S. militarism. In doing so, it remakes spaces of art performance and production, as well as domestic military support, into transient sites of critical, communal action.

Author

• Maria Faini, University of California, Berkeley (CA)