This chapter explores the recent work of Australian artist Ben Quilty on combat fatigue and post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD) collected in the exhibition, After Afghanistan. After Afghanistan presents a series of large-scale paintings of soldiers and veterans evoking the bodily imprints of combat fatigue and PTSD. The bodies are naked, in the grasp of sensations and emotions. The chapter argues that this work has an ambivalent relationship to militarisation whereby it proposes an alternative iconography of the modern soldier which seeds transformative potentials against the militarisation of the body; simultaneously, however, the iconography of the body of the soldier in pain has been co-opted as a militarising technology that silences opposition and contestation to war in the name of compassion towards the soldiers.

Overall, the chapter offers some considerations about the challenges and possibilities opened by representing the body of the soldier in pain in war art. In particular, it questions how far such visual representations are in fact able to exercise the agency they are often said to have. It is often assumed that representations of suffering soldiers are able to communicate the embodied consequences that war bears on those who fight and thus invite onlookers to question the ethics of how the state treats and provides for those it has sent to war. The chapter suggests that the very notion of visual images having agency is misconceived: when hegemonic public discourse is powerful enough to silence the processes of critical questioning that war art like Quilty's ostensibly invites, art is instead liable to become militarised.

I take militarisation to be the process of making war and war preparation a normal and desirable social activity. soldier, that is, to be able to kill and be killed in the name of the state, a body must be militarised. This happens in basic training, where recruits are taught the rationalities of killing and death. This requires fit and obedient subjects, but, above all, their ability to control their emotions. The militarisation of bodies relies on discursive and figurative representations of the stoic, courageous and patriotic soldier. Consider, for example, the iconic Australian painting ANZAC, The Landing, 1915 (1920–2), commissioned by the Australian War Memorial from artist George Lambert to memorialise Australia's first intervention in war as an independent nation. Australian soldiers are represented as brave in the face of danger.