Watching episodes of M*A*S*H* on television as a child, knowing nothing then of the Korean War or the irony of a medical team trying to save the very people who just had been mutilated by other branches of its own forces, I learned to see camouflage not as function but as style, to think of living in tents and eating collectively in a mess hall as a feature of an army job more than a burdensome requirement. “Army day” at summer camp involved lots of physical work – press-ups, mostly – shouting, and feeble attempts at quiet slinking around in the night, but didn’t involve real tactical maneuvers, weapons, or psychological preparation for pain, death, and the utter irrationality to which one must succumb in becoming part of a war machine. There, at summer camp, war was a game, one that ended as abruptly as it had begun and involving moral rectitude and obedience, but none of the ethical quandaries (or even the possibility of resistance) that accompany war as both concept and reality.

For all their familiarity as foils for tragedy, comedy and drama, filmic and televisual images of war have little to do with the wars that we see on the nightly news. These are wars for which causes are said to be identifiable, engagements that have been waged to be won, even when the terms that may constitute victory remain so desperately unclear. For dramatic purposes, war has everything: the conflict between duty and personal belief, the irreconcilable gap between the enemy as mythical invention and as individual, the function of co-combatants as colleagues and companions. All of life gets played out in war.

But if war can be used as a metaphor for life, however fallibly, it seems facile to suggest that the inverse proposition could be true. That life is war is fodder for business manuals, a cut-throat approach to relation in the world which sees victory as the only real goal, and all who are not willing to sacrifice themselves or others for this victory as potential collateral damage. This body of work by Heidi Schaefer exposes war and its ubiquity as both redolent and ridiculous.

The drawings in the Sticks and Stones series use the apparatus of war as subject matter, but treat the guns, tanks, missiles, and helicopters as comically hyper-masculinised objects of destruction, hairy and limp even as they explode and destroy. Squat military trucks travel in a convoy, dropping bombs, like turds, behind them; phallic missiles rain down from the sky, their improbably hairy surfaces a disruption of sleek destructive force. These line drawings, often elaborated with watercolour, blur the sharp edges between object of annihilation and hilarity, unsettling the sense of recognition by converting the recognizable forms into a kind of caricature. There are no people in these drawings, save the occasional nipple-like helmet protruding from a tank. The machines are disembodied agents of carnage, replacing humans with object-machines of human design.

While these works expose the crassness of masculism and war, they do not seek to replace or ameliorate either through versions of feminisation or emasculation. And while these drawings are perhaps absurdist, they are not blithe cartoons, but are meditations on the ways in which the language of war – visual and textual – escapes us because of its simultaneous familiarity and grotesquery. Abstract discussions of war are made more concrete through the iteration of numbers deployed, dead, wounded, but these numbers themselves are abstract. The continents of war are so difficult to comprehend that, too easily and too quickly, we may find ourselves not just unwilling but unable to speak, even in search of reason and articulation.

Sticks and stones may indeed break bones, as Schaefer references with the title of this drawing series, but in the context of war, words may also be used very hurtfully; indeed, the cause of so many wars can be traced to misunderstandings and claims to rightness or righteousness. Schaefer began producing this body of work in the early moments of the current war in Iraq as a method of negotiating her intense discomfort with the discourse being produced by such an event. These drawings bespeak great ambivalence about the ways in which war, for all its horror, is such a powerfully shaping force in society across history. Not only is modern Western society consumed with the currency of wars being fought elsewhere, but the contemporary consciousness is much informed by recent and historical wars that have determined national boundaries, spoken languages, and family histories.

In Wars We Have Seen, a reference to Gertrude Stein’s 1945 memoir Wars I Have Seen, Schaefer uses expanded foam as a lumpy substratum for small plastic soldiers wielding machine guns, toy airplanes, and the occasional lonely tree. Here, three-dimensional playthings have been embedded into the globular, volcanic surface of the foam, which has become a substance of entrapment. Soldiers are mired in the now-solid muck, up to their waists in craters, head down in caverns with their legs helplessly poking into the air, rifles pointed nowhere. In uniform, and cast from the same mold, these soldiers do not serve as representations of individual people but of faceless functionaries for an unspecified militaristic regime. In such ridiculous incapacitation, these tiny soldiers are trapped by their own plastic forms as much as by the material that surrounds them, replaceable by any other soldier also cast from the same mold. Indeed, the cheap plastic of the tiny tanks and soldiers stands for the cheapness and ready availability of military labour, highlighting the low value even of those who are enlisted to enact the most egregious of national, political, or religious agendas.

These sculptures, some bobbing in water, some elevated for scrutiny in Perspex boxes, are fields not of battle but of futility. Not only has the ground risen to swallow the armaments, but its surfaces are luridly coloured, obviating the need for camouflage to mask presence and intent. In the same way that Francisco Goya’s Disasters of War plangently represents the horrors of war’s sheer inhumanity, the works of Wars We Have Seen represents the carnivalesque inhumanity of battle field engagement. These scenes are darkly comic because we recognize in them an inversion of the iconic image of soldier as capable hero into floundering fall guy. Like the children’s play sets from which these figures are drawn, these objects of war are more decorative than threatening.

With these works that proffer levity in the face of sobre subject matter, Schaefer does not skim lightly over the difficult content of her work. Such strategic and pathetic comedy is used here to throw up the logic of militarism against the chaos of battle, the dispassionate language of war against the loss and subsequent identification that emerge from war’s enactment. With society so occupied by wars waged under banners bearing competing claims, we are well to be reminded with this work that war is indeed played as a game that is tactical, brutal, and which has ever-changing rules.

Jessica Wyman is a writer, curator, and art historian who lives in Toronto, Canada, and teaches in the Faculty of Liberal Studies, Ontario College of Art and Design. She is a member of the FUSE Magazine editorial committee, and has recently edited the first (of three) volumes of Pro Forma: language/text/visual art, published by YYZ Books, Toronto.