Is This An Oil War?

[San Francisco]: Arch D. Bunker, [1991]. 11 x 17 in. Offset.

Poster and essay exploring the motivations for American intervention in Iraq, including not only oil interests, but the end of the Cold War and the military-industrial complex’s need for self-perpetuation.

Arch D. Bunker was an anonymous artists collective that mobilized in the early 1990s in response to the First Gulf War. The short-lived group detourned and criticized the distant and calculating language of military officials, arms dealers, politicians, and corporate media pundits. Produced in the first decade of cable news and the 24-hour news cycle, these prints also brought attention to the distorted ways in which most Americans were being shown the conflict, on television - the spectacle of war.

Though there is little recorded information about the group itself or the artists behind the initiative, we do know that Arch D. Bunker grew out of Processed World, the anti-authoritarian, anti-capitalist magazine directed at office workers, produced in San Francisco in the 1980s and ‘90s. Their pointed criticism of the mainstream media’s complicity in the everyday spectacle of modern war is prescient in the age of media overdrive, riot porn, and social media.