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ROAD TO WAR—The Burning of History Gone Evil onto a Pathetic
External Hard Drive
The recent wars
with Afghanistan and Iraq didn’t need roads. No "Autobahn" or
interstate highway system was necessary in order to secure victories. These
were guaranteed by satellite-controlled air forces so dominant that no military
other than the U.S. and its allies could compete with it. These days, military,
technological, and economic supremacy combined with political arrogance and
control of international media depends neither on a ROAD TO WAR nor on a
ROADMAP TO PEACE (G.W. Bush). ROAD TO WAR and COUNTDOWN IRAQ were only
headlines, used by big TV-news networks for branding in the run-up to the most
recent war with Iraq.
Afghan Dialogs—Embroidering Politics
All works presented in this
exhibition have been created since September 11, 2001. They are mostly made in
response to the reactions of the U.S. government and its “coalition of the
willing” to these tragic events. When bombs fell over Afghanistan, I wondered
what Afghan people might have to tell us. I remembered the unsolicited
political commentaries added by the embroiderers to the works of Alighiero
Boetti, as well as the traditional Afghan hand-knitted carpets that feature
tanks and Kalashnikovs in place of traditional motifs. Inspired by all this, I
envisioned <k>Afghan Dialogs<k>,
a series of silk embroideries with reactions from Afghans to network logos,
headlines, names of conflicts and military operations that we have now come to
know for selling, branding, justifying, authenticating and even cheerleading
belligerent news content. I encountered Pashtuns from a New York Kebab shop who—as I only later found out—stemmed
from the tribal area between Peshawar and Kandahar. These very generous people
helped me to organize the production of these works. My preparatory materials,
including instructions to write in reactions to the network logos, were taken
to the embattled region to be produced and then returned to New York City about
ten to 14 months later. The first shipment of work returned without any added
comments due to miscommunication. The following embroideries returned with
individual comments although I was never able to clearly find out who was
responsible for each inscription. The last shipment was confiscated by
Pakistani custom agents. Although I was asking for any kind of comment—political as well as private—I only received political commentaries with no additional
elements added. The only exception was a praying hand stitched into one of the
margins.
All the reactions I received
were the result of an anonymous dialog-work and not my brainchild.#1# The following are all replies in works shown in Vienna;
***note to designer, all the following replies, except words in capitals, are
bolded*** AMERICA STRIKES BACK—If America
is hurting others, it should first find out how much pain it can take herself; NEXT TARGET?—G8 members
should make their decisions wisely; NEXT TARGET?—Attacking Muslim countries, America should
respect at least American opposition;
LATEST DEVELOMPMENTS—The life of Pharaoh is a
lesson for the world till doomsday;
HOMELAND SECURITY—The entire Muslim world
is with America against terrorism; AMONG
THE RUINS—With the attacks on Afghanistan,
did America prove to be a peaceful nation?; AMERICA AT WAR—To finish and destroy
terrorism, the entire Muslim world is with America; LIVE, LIVE, LIVE …EVIL—What can helpless people do except to pray that
the almighty gives us power and strength to bear these difficulties and take
care of us. Because the whole world is chasing us you should make some
arrangement for our safety.
Before this Afghanistan war
was declared over, regional TV-experts with “in-depth reports” were already
anticipating—in front of NEXT TARGET? network
graphics—the military steps to come. NEXT
TARGET? was superimposed over a map showing Iraq and Iran in its center,
illustrating perfectly well the administration’s lust for war-shopping. At the
time, embedded reporting was not yet popular. The indications towards Iraq as a
NEXT TARGET motivated me to learn Arabic; I therefore extended my <k>Dialog
Project<k> to the Iraqi and
Middle Eastern situation. During COUNTDOWN IRAQ, as branded by one network, I
initiated a ceramic tile project#2# with
Iraqi expatriates living in Western Europe.
Iraq Dialogs—Breaking News, ”Burning Stuff”
In the course of
these different <k>Iraq Dialog<k> projects, I have worked with
various Iraqis who all had remarkable stories to tell. Aside from one
exception, they all hated Saddam Hussein’s regime. The majority of Iraqis had
their lives and that of their close family seriously threatened. Some of them
expressed fear of Hussein even while living in European countries. My dialog
partners also talked about the hardship of leaving Iraq and entering Europe.
Some even made the journey via the very expensive and dangerous help of
professional smugglers, and then embarked upon the subsequent struggle to make
a life in their host country. Over the course of a year, I was able to use most
of my invitations for exhibiting in Europe to formulate these dialog pieces,
working in each place with different Arab individuals.#3#
The first person I engaged
with was ***note to designer, the following name is bolded*** Ghazi Al
Delaimi, an Iraqi expatriate who lives
in Düsseldorf as a graphic designer, calligrapher and artist. He was
recommended to me by the German Arab Society. Our dialog started in the winter
of 2002/03, about six months before the invasion took place. We were able to
meet and work in an artisan's ceramic studio to produce the works together.
While various assistants painted the network logos as laid out by me, Delaimi
painted his reactions to them. We finished these works before SHOCK AND AWE was
shown on the first night of the war. It is interesting to note that some of Al
Delaimi’s reactions dismantled the key argument for the forceful, illegitimate
invasion: Weapons of Mass Destruction (WMD). His reaction to the graphic titles
HOMEFRONT SECURITY and COUNTDOWN IRAQ was simply: “A disgusting smear campaign
against Iraq built on lies.” Years into the occupation, even
<k>W<k> admitted that no WMD's were found and that there existed no
direct link between Iraq and the planning of 9/11. But political spin and the
media managed to leave an impression on the American public (as polls are still
confirming to this day#4#) that
linked not only Saddam Hussein with Al Qaeda—they
were actually enemies—but even attributed a role
in the tragedy of 9/11 to him.
In Utrecht, for a one-person
show at Casco, I was collaborating with ***note to designer, the following name is bolded*** Hikmat, an elderly immigrant who moved to the city in 1998. His
brother had been killed by Saddam’s#5# security forces for carrying audiotapes with recordings of parts of the
Koran. We also worked with a young Iraqi-Kurdish man who participated on some
afternoons but preferred to remain anonymous. The men, both living in Holland
and from the same country but of different ethnic identities, did not get along
very well. Hikmat, too, preferred to only give his first name given concerns
about the security of is wife back in Iraq and potential problems with his
immigration papers. Both men painted their reactions to the LATEST DEVELOPMENTS
in their native country. The Iraqi-Kurdish man repeated on all pieces
variations of the same sentence: ”Free Kurdistan.” Hikmat carefully prepared
his contributions far in advance and put his heart into non-violent political
pressure and U. N. sanctions. His beautiful style reminded me of medieval book
illustrations: “IRAK PEACEFUL LIBERATION / from Saddam's dictatorial regime /
No war on Iraq / No invasion of Iraq / Serious International pressures / Human
Rights Organizations / Amnesty International, Doctors without Borders;
Restrictions on Saddam's Regime; World Media - Weapons Inspectors—UN—Arab League—ISLAMIC CONFERENCE WORLD POWERS. IRAQI OPPOSTION
groups, inside and outside Iraq, / DEMOCRACY, FREEDOM, HUMAN RIGHTS / THE
COLLAPSE OF SADDAM'S DICTATORIAL REGIME.” These sentences were conceived before
the invasion, though our production process began after the falsely declared
end of the war. Then, Hikmat’s reactions changed: “Furious. UK and US confusion
on not finding any WMD. No case for war against Iraq,” “All US soldiers are
mercenaries looting in Iraq,” and “Shame on the USA and UK occupation: killing,
destruction, security collapse, demolition of the Iraqi establishment, thieves
in day light, American military rule.”
In Bremen, we were able to
gain the confidence of ***note to designer, both the following names should be
bolded*** Binan Finjan and Ahmet
Baban. Baban was born in the Kurdish
city of Mosul and immigrated to Bremen in 1982 to escape the Iraq-Iran war. He
is now a social worker dealing mainly with immigration and integration issues.
Finjan is a businessman who reached Germany in 1992 under dangerous conditions.
He belongs to the Christian minority of Mandaeans. Members of his family were
killed for political reasons by Saddam Hussein’s regime. The panels in the
Bremen exhibition were displayed in a public space, which was not as easy as
anticipated. Private property owners all rejected our initiatives. On one
occasion we were given permission but it was immediately withdrawn when the
owner realized that Arabic text would be displayed. Even installing these works
in spaces controlled by the city wasn't easy. The calligraphic part wasn’t
painted by Finjan or Baban but by a third party. Here are some examples of
their responses made before and after the invasion: Finjan: “NO, NO to terror,
yes to security,” “If the Americans had guarded the buildings as well as they
secured the oil fields, lootings wouldn’t have happened.” Baban also responded
with questions referring to violence in other parts of the Middle East and Iraq
sanctions: "In the end, what will the throwing of stones (Intifadha) bring
and what will the shortage of medicine and milk for children bring?”
In
Vienna, I worked with Baghdad-born art dealer ***note to designer, the
following name should be bolded*** Amer Abbas. He came
to Vienna to study several decades ago and stayed, though most of his family
still lives in Baghdad. His ambivalent reactions were slightly hawkish and
optimistic about the invasion but showed some skepticism through the
interrogative syntax he employed. “Finally, America dared to march into Iraq.
Will they bring an end to fear? Will they become liberators?”, “Shock and Awe,
the bomb fire will not exempt children. Rockets choose their targets on their
own. These are the times of war, my friend.” “Fighter jets open the path to
justice, but victims do not count as the price of war. The looters have first
announced the fall of Saddam. Damned coincidence!”
Arab Dialogs “Truth is
the Opposite”
With
only one exception, all the tiles I used were produced in Sassuolo, Modena,
Northern Italy. When I was invited to Modena for a public art project, I
immediately decided to work with the factories of the region which employ
mainly Arabic seasonal workers. During the Summer of 2003 while working on my
<k>Arab dialog project<k>, I spent a couple of weeks living with
immigrant workers in a miserable place near the tile factories. The rather
non-accommodating environment was in itself worth understanding and observing
given the depressing conditions of demanding, underpaid, manual labor. In
addition to artificially inflated rents for immigrants, the availability of
housing was discriminatory. Locals paid considerably less for much nicer
apartments which weren’t even offered to Arab workers.#6# That summer, fierce, bloody fighting in parts of the
Middle East began to spread through the region. Europe's Arab population’s
identification with the tragic, lethal conflicts throughout the Middle East
grew. Though I could have found Iraqi workers in Sassuolo as well, I decided to
widen the scope of my contacts and engage with anybody associated with the Arab
world. I also altered my "modus operandi" and worked with larger
printouts of various materials taken from U.S. network newscasts addressing the
Middle East violence. In the preparatory phase I solicited written reactions to
these printouts by some of the many Arabs in factories, in the streets, in
run-down housing projects and in public transport areas. Almost everybody who
participated expressed concerns about negative consequences and joked about
"going to prison" for their comments. I was also half-seriously asked
whether I was working for the CIA, MOSSAD and so on.
The reactions varied,
ranging from peace and hope for a better world to outright anger and hatred:
***note to designer, the following name should be bolded*** Hhadrani Mohamed
Hedi from Tunisia responded to the
headline news logo CIVILIAN DEATH UNAVOIDABLE with: “I hope for peace for
everybody.” #7# A more somber political statement by ***note to
designer, the following name should be bolded*** Ali, a Moroccan laborer who preferred not to give his full
name was “The war against Iraq initiates the war against all Arabs.” The
ceramic worker ***note to designer, the following name should be bolded*** Adil
Assouss, a Moroccan, demanded justice
when confronted with the headlines POSTWAR DANGERS, MILITARY RESPONSE:
“Whatever the political problems between peoples are, children and the civil
population are innocent. For this reason the United Nations should bring to
justice soldiers who kill children and civilians.” References to Islam were
also common, as was the case with ***note to designer, the following name
should be bolded*** Ghodbane, a
Tunisian worker who wouldn't disclose his full name. His partially defensive
reaction to the print out featuring FOX NEWS CHANNEL, WAR ON TERROR, SABOTAGE
reads: “Islam = Peace. Allah created people for knowing others, and not for
making war and I think that Islam is for peace.” Religious metaphors also
played a role in ***note to designer, the following name should be bolded*** Siyam
Mohsen’s reply to CNN.COM, ISRAELI
MISSILE STRIKE KILLS 1, WOUNDS OTHERS IN GAZA: “Gaza was not pleading in the
past and will not do so in the future, nor was David begging Goliath.”
Palestinian born Siyam Mohsen is an architect, artist, calligrapher and
cultural/linguistic mediator living in Italy for many years. He also replied to
CNN’s ID-sentence, THE MOST TRUSTED NAME IN NEWS with one of the most poetic
inscriptions: “When snow melts you can see the dirt underneath.” His wife ***note to designer, the following name should be
bolded*** Hakjma, an Italian-born
woman of Moroccan descent who also works as a cultural/linguistic mediator,
wrote, amongst other things (to the objections of her surprised husband): “The
real terrorist is not the one who defends his sacred places, his ideology and
his land. In reality the real terrorist is the one who attacks, sells, buys all
those things he doesn’t possess. … so if the word terrorism signifies the
defense of one’s nation and its sacred places, then we Arabs and Muslims, we
all are terrorists.” ***note to designer, the following name should be
bolded*** Naval, a Moroccan woman
who gave her job description as “bar man”#8#, noted in reaction to WAR ON TERROR: “It is proved
that all Muslims are terrorists but in reality the real terrorist is Bush, the
criminal. He made pregnant women cry, young kids orphans and old people
starve.” Last but not least, I want to pick out some reactions that address the
media and it's opinion making. In reaction to PENTAGON BRIEFING, RUMSFELD:
RECONSTRUCITON OF IRAQ GOING WELL, Siyam Mosen wrote: "Repeating lies,
until they (the people) believe you!” For FOX NEWS CHANNEL, THE MOST POWERFUL
NAME IN NEWS#9#, the same
interlocutor answered in Hegel’s and Marx’s spirit: “Truth is the opposite.”
Gastarbeit—A European
Transformation
From
all these various results, I made a selection and had those chosen painted onto
differently sized and differently arranged tiles with the help of two
assistants, Silvano Rutigliano and Siyam Mohsen. The generosity and capacity of
the tile factories#10#, and the original intention to lay them out on a public
plaza, enabled us to use large tiles and large formats. Very soon, I became
interested in trying my hand at painting the tiles, as I ended up having
nothing to do manually while everybody else was painting. Like a “Gastarbeiter”
of the domain of painting, I started to smear some words and logos onto tiles
with paint, while my dialog partners responded in Arabic. This spontaneity
allowed us to take headlines as they popped up, while scrolling on Internet
portals. I have had no practice or training in painting. These pathetic,
clumsy, dilettante graffiti reminded me of some of the smear defacing the
buildings and infrastructure in European cities, where people have to deal with
racial and inter-cultural conflicts. Falsely described as “culture wars”, these
urban conflicts have more aspects of a “class war,” a not-so-useful umbrella
term for problems of integration, economic stress, systemic discrimination,
racism and ignorance of cultural and religious differences. Ironically though,
“globalization” could be the determining factor that made migrant labor
necessary for European economies to compete internationally. Today, more then
ever, this is true. Guest workers, or "Gastarbeiter" as they were
euphemistically called in German speaking parts of Europe, not only rebuilt
war-destroyed Europe but also changed it into an open, multicultural society.#11#
Europeans started to eat
Middle Eastern food, girls dressed in long pants plus skirts (a fashionable
imitation of immigrant women), and northern Europeans began vacationing in
Turkey and Northern Africa. The
demographic decline of the traditional European population is accelerating the
necessity for immigration to keep up standards of production, consumption and
living.#12#
Until recently
in Europe, integration wasn’t seen as an important goal and wasn't fully
understood to be a fundamental change, touching the whole society. It is only
recently that some people have started to understand that this migration has
accelerated the end of the myth of an idealized nation state with a mystical
body of homogenous people adhering to the same belief systems and habits. The
very image and notion of what a “European” is, looks like and believes in is
now changing. A university-educated, Tyrolean-accented, native Austrian citizen
with a fine arts career can now be dark skinned or Asian in appearance,
addressing his <k>mama<k> in kitchen-Urdu or teenage-Turkish. In my
summer class in Damascus, I was studying Arabic next to several German students
and professionals who tried to improve their skills in the native language of
their parents.
Religion—Truth Claims and Politics
People started
immigrating and arrived with more than just their feet, hands and backs. They
brought families, foods, dresses, habits, sentimental longings, languages and
gods. In spite of considerable resistance by local communities#13# mosques have been built and religious
communities are flourishing. Religions help
people to organize themselves and create enduring communities. Religious truths
claim to teach a concrete way of living, to re-narrate human fates and to
reflect them in scriptures, all the while trying to make sense of human life,
and life in general. They implicitly and explicitly regulate life through
traditions, founding texts and formative tales of virtuous or ideal conduct.
Religious practices and religious "Weltanschauungen" form
institutions, laws, economies, infrastructures, material manifestations and
cultures, intertwined with political decision-making. The very definition of
“religion”#14# already divides
opinions and shows how powerful are the interests that depend on religious
definitions and notions of secularism#15#, something that is increasingly worthy of discussion and
critical redefinition. It is interesting to note that in spite of mutually
shared lifestyles of second and third generations, very few Europeans became Muslims and very few people converted to
Christianity.
The social aspect of
religion makes all religions political, i.e. defining and regulating roles
between people in relationship to their worlds. In spite of the non-changing
nature of wholly ancient scriptures like the Koran, the Torah or the Bible,
teachings, interpretations and realities of religious practices are constantly
changing throughout history, regions and classes according to needs and
politics. The fundamentally political nature of religion shouldn’t be confused
with religious fundamentalism. Any belief system can be (and has been) used for
disruptive political reasons at some point. Christianization served as a key
instrument for genocide in the Americas and all over the world during the
period of predatory colonialism. In Europe, the general public has forgotten
the religious wars between different Christian doctrines that lasted centuries
and amounted to the genocide of a large population of Europeans. The 20th
century, with the Jewish Holocaust fuelled by Christian anti-Semitism, has
basically been dominated—more than many are aware of, or care to admit—by
religious violence. To the category of mass killings that uses religion as a
selective marker we have to add the genocide in the former Yugoslavia between
three religious denominations. As ideological instruments in the life-long
struggle with nature and social realities, religions are often very powerful
discourses that resist outside definitions. In fact, the more stress they
experience, the firmer the coherence is within a group. The Bible is filled
with stories of martyrs who stay very firm in their struggle against the Roman
Empire. Today’s Islamic suicide bombers are called—to the shock of everybody
else—martyrs.#16#
Fundamentalist
religious justifications for suicide missions#17# are strong
reminders of how desperation, anger and political strategies can mix with
perverted religious arguments to overcome humans’ strongest instinct for
self-preservation. But we know from men, women and children who survived or
abandoned death-bringing missions that religious arguments or motivation does
not push people into fatal annihilating-acts. The promise of a post-mortem
celestial reception might be a convenient explanation from an anti-Islamic
point of view, but we might be better off if we understand these ultimate
desperate acts as driven more by a multitude of complex reasons. Hegemonic
arbitrariness, unjust politics, bloody repressions, poverty, general
helplessness, and anger—combined with a myopic drive for retaliation without
consideration for the consequences—might be some of the other reasons producing
these disastrous acts of destruction and self-annihilation.
Whether suicide bombers are
Chechen woman in Russia, kids in Jerusalem or men in Mosul, Falluja or Baghdad,
these desperate people wouldn’t blow themselves up if they had other means for
fighting their asymmetrical wars. I’m sure they would prefer satellite guided
missiles, attack helicopters or functioning armies. Throughout history, total
warfare has been carried out not only through the mobilization of material and
human resources to the point of self-destruction, but also through ideological
resources, including religious ideals and truth claims. I am not suggesting
that these terrifying acts, which are referred to as terrorist incidents,
aren’t to be condemned. I am just trying to understand the complexity of such
phenomena and the many perspectives that inform, direct and provoke such acts.
In violent conflicts, there are always two perspectives. The winner, as the
stronger party, describes their own version of events, which differs to that of
the losers. It therefore comes as no surprise that “embedded reporting” allows
journalists to travel along with invading armies. It also shouldn’t be
surprising that, from time to time, journalists and media offices are the
targets of bombings, accidents and collateral damage, as well as having
restrictions placed on them that make journalistic work impossible.
New York
Times Drawings—Tracing the World onto Paper
The globalization of
powerful technology, satellite media and cheap mass-transport links migrant
communities with the origin of their culture. Nowadays, political and
ideological changes in migrant's countries of provenance immediately play an
influential role in their host countries and show impacts on second and third
generations. This fact played a crucial role in the resurgence of assertive
religious formations all over the world. Paradoxically, media played a large
part in the renaissance of religious awakening.#18# Religious habits overlapped with ideological formations
have informed some immigrant groups who are now demanding legal and cultural
changes in their host countries. The most radical demands#19# so far have culminated in hate crimes, like the murder
of Theo van Gogh in 2004. He was killed during the morning hours in Amsterdam
for having co-produced the ten-minute film <k>Submission<k>, which is critical of physical punishment,
sanctioned by the Koran, of disobedient women. A few years earlier, because I
had become an avid newspaper reader, I started tracing newspapers (and have
been doing so ever since), beginning with a biography of a young student from
the prestigious London School of Economics. He first volunteered in war-torn
Yugoslavia and then became a terrorist who masterminded some of the most
spectacular killings in recent years. The shock of Theo van Gogh's
assassination led me to start tracing articles on his murder: two of my
<k>New York Times<k>
drawings address that issue directly. The drawing <k>Militant Muslims
Act to Suppress Dutch Film and Art Show, New York Times, 1/31/05<k>, with the highlighted insert “Can Islamists
change the Netherlands’ open attitudes?,“ and <k>Fear of Islamists
Drives Growth of Far Right in Belgium, New York Times, 2/112/05<k> are articles, along with the layout and
surrounding headlines, traced with an ink pen. The Times
OP-ED <k>Our Friends, the Torturers, Bob Herbert, 2/18/2005<k>
is also remarkable: it addresses the outsourcing of torture under the name of
extra-ordinary rendition. In one such unfortunate case, as referred to in this
article, a Canadian Citizen changing flights in the USA was taken off the
plane, imprisoned, and sent to Syria for a one-year interrogation nightmare, in
which he was tortured before being let go without any charges brought against
him.
In the
summer of 2002, when Iraq became Washington’s main obsession (just as Syria and
Iran are now), I decided to trace all the New York Times articles leading up to
the war. It took a bit longer than anticipated and I stopped this laborious
project early on, with only a small number of articles traced. I felt like
"Don Quixote" with a 0.05-thin ink pen trying to keep these stormy
moments in our memory. The reporting itself turned nasty as the conflict went
on. During the actual war, I stopped reading The New York Times.#20# Nearly two
years later, during the phase branded by Fox News as COUNTDOWN IRAQ , an
editorial appeared in The New York Times criticizing the paper and its
reporting on Iraq. I couldn’t ignore tracing this article: ***note to
designers, please bold the following title***From The Editors, The Times and
Iraq, 5/26/04<k>:
But we have found a number
of instances of coverage that was not as rigorous as it should have been. In
some cases, information that was controversial then, and seems questionable now,
was insufficiently qualified or allowed to stand unchallenged. Looking back, we
wish we had been more aggressive in re-examining the claims as new evidence
emerged—or failed to emerge.#21#
News Paintings—Grisly
Harvesting between the Sublime and the Pathetic
When I finished my <k>Afghan<k>
and <k>Iraq Dialog<k>
series, the violent conflicts didn’t just come to an end. Media images worsened
and fighting intensified and turned more and more asymmetrical: insurgents with
roadside bombs and suicide missions opposed occupying forces at one end while
concentrated, ferocious reactions by the invading powers destroyed Falluja and
other places#22# at the
other. On the Middle East's Mediterranean coast, Israel stepped up its effort
to stop terror with targeted killings and violent incursions into the occupied
zones, leaving scores of mostly innocent people dead. Terrorist bombings also
occurred outside the region—in Turkey and Spain—that took the lives of
hundreds. Thus spectacular orgies of destruction appeared daily (and still do)
on our screens and in news outlets. From these online news sources, I started
printing out articles, exporting digital information onto a non-electronic
surface, i.e. paper. The media "down stepping" continued by passing
these printouts of atrocities, sold as news, to assistants#23# who painted them onto canvas with acrylic
paint according to instructions. Here too, my main concern was to freeze-frame
these constantly changing hybrid texts/graphic/images with their pop-up menus,
flash graphic ads and scrolling headlines.#24#
The results of these <k>news paintings<k>
are pathetic in every sense of the word. Pathetic, from the Greek word
‘pathos,' is not only defined as “provoking or expressing feelings of pity” and
sadness,#25# but also as “so
inadequate as to be laughable or contemptible.” This ridiculous aspect brings
to mind Karl Marx’s casual reinterpretation of Hegel’s predicament of history
as repetition. Hegel stated in 1830 in his <k>Lectures on the
Philosophy of World History<k>:
What experience and history
teach is this—that nations and governments have never learned anything from
history, or acted upon any lessons they might have drawn from it.#26#
In <k>The Eighteenth
Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte<k>, Karl Marx sloppily rephrases this
statement with his famous “pathetic” twist:
Hegel says somewhere that
all great events and personalities in world history reappear in one fashion or
another. He forgot to add: the first time as tragedy, the second as farce.
In the dawning age of media
and the spectacle of information, to which Marx was more susceptible than
Hegel, Marx seemed to have anticipated farce as a promiscuous force in
relationship to distancing irony and calculated cynicism. Eventually farce,
cynicism and entertainment will enter an obscene ménage#27# with indifference and calculated mass-ignorance. The
sublime distance of an "interessenloser," un-invested, disengaged,
“objective” media industry is by de facto opaque, veiling their own material
and ideological interests. It is quite ironic that Bush’s generals named the
initial phase of the attack on Iraq in 2003 SHOCK AND AWE. In the
<k>Critique of Judgment<k>, Emmanuel Kant redefines the sublime as
defined by Edmund Burke, who stated:
Whatever is
fitted in any sort to excite the idea of pain, and danger, that is to say,
whatever is in any sort terrible, or is conversant about terrible objects, or
operates in a manner analogous to terror, is a source of the <k>sublime<k>.#28#
Kant started to
strip the sublime of its terrifying qualities, discussing it in relationship to the distancing mind and its aesthetic
judgments that can keep overwhelming power and destructive terror at bay.
Today, sublime has become a meaningless adjective. With 9/11, the theoretical
framing of the sublime, i.e. the safe distance between conflict and reception
through the superiority of mind and sublimation, collapsed. It therefore comes
as no surprise that the military-recruited SHOCK AND AWE is a reminder of the
original meaning of the <k>sublime<k> as laid out by Burke. The
night of the initial attack, SHOCK AND AWE decorated the TV an amazing ten
minutes before the action started and was broadcasted live for a primetime TV
audience in the USA. This cynical branding of Bush’s military judgment soon
proved to be a total misjudgment resulting in the death of tens of
thousands—and many more crippled and blind—as well as the destruction of
resources.#29#
History
Paintings—Headline News and Commerce Embedded in the WWW
As with
the contents of my New York Times drawings, these stories are incredible and
deserve to be preserved in a format that has a history in historio-graphic
image making. The genre of “History Painting” was introduced in the 17th
century in France and was considered ahead of all other genres as the supreme
achievement in fine arts, right up until the middle of the 19th century. This
type of painting is preoccupied with idealized and allegorical interpretations
of historical subjects as well as with classical literature, mythology and
biblical scenes, stressing their moralizing and heroic qualities. It is quite interesting to note, as mentioned above,
that some of my Dialog partners made references to the biblical history of
David versus Goliath or Moses versus the Pharaoh. But not all subjects were as
“universal and historical” at the time as they look today in the Louvre. For
example, Eugène Delacroix painted <k>Massacres at Chios (Scio)<k>
only two years after the massacre was committed by Greek nationalists with broad
support by European volunteers and intellectuals
in the name of Greek independence from the Ottomans.#30#
On Chios, 20,000 islanders were “hanged,
butchered, starved or tortured to death. Untold thousands more [were] raped,
deported and enslaved.”#31# As a teenager visiting smaller
museums in northern Italy, I was quite moved and shocked when I encountered
19th-century paintings that showed the fight of Italian partisans#32# versus the
well-dressed Austrian army who mercilessly executed these young patriots
fighting for their independence. In these paintings, the resisting energy of
the nationalists as they challenged the hegemonic, arrogant Habsburgian army
was quite well preserved. Classical history paintings disappeared with the
arrival of more powerful media, which conveyed history at the moment of its
unfolding: photography and film.#33#
News Economics and Web
Portals
Running
texts are chopping up the world into info-bytes with automatic word counts.
They are often an integral part of TV design and other media packages. Due to
the fact that the news industry is mainly financed through advertisement, the
actual news surface often covers not much more than 50% to 70% of a page
surface. In The New York Times, news content in relationship to the actual page
can be as low as 20%, without counting pages filled with only paid ads. But ads
are informative, beautiful and seductive in themselves. The ads for insurance,
universities, cars, and love, next to logos and elements linking to other stories,
information and businesses, are aging as fast as the news content. They are not
only important for their visual attraction—this is their job—but also for
historical records.#34# Accompanying material on the Internet is even more
distracting than in print media since it is an interactive functional gateway
that lures visitors to click their way in all directions. Compared to city
space, where red light districts are often in proximity to “passages” and
railway stations, on the Web, pornography and sex are only a few clicks away.
In the Arcades of
19th-Century History, 20th-Century Theory and 21st-Century Technology
Myriads of offers on
info-portals render even department stores#35#, shopping malls, schools, banks and brothels obsolete
and anachronistic. Today’s flâneur doesn’t play with his
door keys in his jacket but has his fingers caressing a mouse pad. It is
interesting to revisit the perspectives gained from studying the beginnings of
industrialization and the subsequent commoditization of the world. Walter
Benjamin describes the Parisian arcades ("les passages")—already a
place in the street to be walked through—as the precursors of department stores
and shopping centers. Arcades were home to early-industrial luxury goods where
alienation could be consumed and enjoyed. Benjamin read "les
passages" as a miniaturized world that helped to construct the
unconscious. Today, I see the world partially through the organizing principals
and interfacial functions of computers. I wish I could have “undo” and
"search" functions in daily life, and “zoom into things” and “copy
and paste” my days. Apple’s recent ads suggest that we should learn and enjoy
life through i-pods’ “shuffle” function, a machine-generated randomness. The
panoptical of products is described as “Wunschbilder,” (desirable ideals), and
is part of a larger phantasmagoria that imbues the city and thus becomes the
instrument of power for the rising bourgeoisie. On the Internet, commodities,
services, information and people are all imploded into attractive images,
fascinating flash animations and now even phantasmagoric video clips that don’t
demand the defilement of the masses passing through arcades of displayed
products.#36# To access commodities
and services of all kinds online you only need to click—if they haven't already
flooded you with spam or unsolicited schemes that try to catch your attention
randomly, by zip code or even via intricate models of calculated
taste-formations guaranteed through cookie-aided and data-mining analysis of
your traced consumer behavior.
World exhibitions were
arranged periodically since the mid-19th century as national manifestations of
industrial pride. Nations presented their early products for sale as fetishes
which minimize their use value, opening up phantasmagoric excitement that made
alienation, manipulation and distraction sweet and desirable. On the World Wide
Web, no yearly pilgrimage to a world fair is needed anymore. The world is for
sale 24/7 throughout the year, without
national or linguistic barriers since major shopping sites offer their services
in multiple languages with regional adaptations. Utopia and the dream of a
classless society detected by Benjamin in the commodity displays of the 19th
century has also perversely tripped many people up who put their money and
dreams into an internet stock bubble that was pushing the economy past
“irrational exuberance” and over the edge. Students, house-wives, house-keepers
and even the unemployed turned into day-traders, with borrowed money, investing
in firms that had no business plan and no products or services to market. The
bubble burst but this didn’t stop the technological revolution in shopping, learning,
reading, writing and living online.#37#
The <k>Arcade
Project<k> is a very unusual
book. It is mainly a hybrid-accumulation of heterogenic fragmented materials,
articles, quotations, and various other textual and visual pieces. All this is
harvested, excavated, rediscovered, transcribed and collected meticulously over
an extended period of time from newspapers, letters, books, archives,
libraries, museums, department stores, police departments, clinics and other
places where knowledge leaves traces, trash and residues. Today, a novice to
the business of the information industry might get the feeling that this book
is just the result of using Google’s search engine and a laser printer for an
afternoon. In the book, Walter Benjamin expresses interest in the popular
panorama paintings and sees in them not only the taste of spectacle but also
the advent of photographic and cinematographic imaging as they showed
paradigmatic and chronological sequences, as well as art and technology and
pastoral themes, all expressing a new "Lebensgefühl" or a new feeling
for life. The new "Lebensgefühl" of today would best be translated as
digital lifestyle with permanent connectivity to the Internet and its
peripheral gadgets like PDAs, picture-taking and transmitting mobile phones,
i-pods, playstations and so on. It is quite interesting to look at these Web
based <k>news paintings<k>
of mine as also “panoramic” in the sense that they are "printed out,"
"saved as" moments clicked upon and selected from an endless stream
of information touching every aspect of life. The presentation and display of
these <k>news paintings<k>
in Vienna will therefore take a very unusual form: a selection of about forty
individual paintings will hang in two tight rows from the ceiling of the museum
and therefore give the visitor the impression of a series of “open windows” to
be closed.
Search Machines and
“Human Intelligence”
I have always
been interested in the graphics, language, architecture and organizing
principles of computers, the Internet and their interfaces. This is not only
expressed in my <k>news paintings<k> but also in the wall painting <k>Searching
‘terrorism’ on Google.com<k>.
The search engine presents “22,200,000
results for terrorism in 0.22 seconds.” The first 10
or so results are exported—a term often used in computer programs—into another
medium; in this case, the actual wall space of the museum. This work brings to
the forefront two industries that only came into existence in the last decade
or so: online search engines and the security industry, another kind of search
machine for humans with special distractive intentions. Both industries seem to
be expanding at a great rate and are about to change our lives. With the world
literally converting to digital format, new ways of orientation are necessary
to navigate. In this world of clicks and keystrokes, which all leave electronic
traces and map user activity, we can be monitored and are subject to profiling,
screening and data mining. Of course, analyzing the masses of moving people for
potential terror threats is not only performed digitally. Intelligence services
rediscovered that digital and satellite assisted searches are not enough and
express their need for human intelligence: in particular, they seek people who
understand and speak foreign languages.
Bildung—Domestic Sublime
and Transcending Fantasies
In the first half of the
19th century when emphatic history paintings with orientalist subjects were
commissioned in France—for example, Baron Gros’ <k>Defeating the
Egyptian Army at Aboukir<k> and
<k>The Battle of Nazareth<k>—the
greatest painter of the sublime in Germany was Caspar David Friedrich who
initiated a refocusing of the gaze towards subjective spaces. Although
observers of the paintings, directly put in the picture, are still staring at
ruins and out to sea with ships on the horizon, Friedrich's intentions are not
belligerent, conquering, colonial or directed at a distant object of potential
profit. Germany, at the time industrially backward and not yet active in
predatory imperialism, constructs a romantic subjectivity that revolts through
inner reflection, illustrating Kant’s version of the sublime. Friedrich’s
romantic and educating gaze, directed at ideally constructed landscapes at the
last moment before their disastrous exploitation, shifts indoors with the next
generation of "petit-bourgeois" painters. Friedrich’s <k>Woman
in the Window<k> is a good
transition to a new class of painting that has "Bildung" and
education as their subject in an era of endless waiting and heavy political
repression. In particular, I think of Carl Spitzweg's <k>The Poor Poet<k>, <k>Scholar in the Attic<k>, <k>Reading<k>, <k>Bookworm<k>, <k>Writer<k> and the studying man in the painting entitled
<k>A Visit<k>. His
subject matters in the paintings <k>The Intercepted Love Letter<k>, <k>Postal Service<k>, <k>Arrival of the Postal Carriage<k>, <k>Custom Watchman<k>,#39# <k>Patrol<k>,
<k>The Eye of the Law<k>,
<k>Praying Woman<k>,
<k>Oriental Woman with Rosary<k>,
<k>Flight to Egypt<k>,
<k>In the Harem<k>,
<k>Sitting Turkish Man with Red Carpet in Front of Him<k> and <k>Memnon-Colosse in Egypt<k> are all remarkable and telling for his time.
Here, the self-taught painter replaces the sublime with pathetic realism and
sarcastic humor at the very beginnings of the formation of a police state, in
which information not only becomes the elitist and exclusive "conditio
sine-qua non" for the leading class but also the daily business of the
representative and executive branches of the newly born or about-to-be-born
nation states. The "Bildungsbürgertum", a meritocratic society based
on educational and economic success, started competing and even out-performing
the aristocracy and was a major force in the formation of the nation state. The
university, together with museums and other cultural institutions, played a big
role in this. The dramatically expanding exploited class of impoverished
workers—called proletariat by Marx—was left behind without any possessions or
share in the production process. The oriental subjects in Spitzweg’s
paintings—he is only one example of many—show to what degree orientalist fantasies
played a role even in Germany, even though the country was only exercising an
academic involvement in the Orient and Africa. The painting <k>Scientist
in the Tropes<k> is a good
example of this.
Orientalism—Basics in
Representational Politics
Foreign-language learning
has been part of my life since I was a child. Obligatory school classes in
English were a nightmare, and cost my parents extra money for extra help to put
me through school. However I soon discovered a function of language acquisition
that was not disciplinary but pleasurable and turned me into an autodidact. It
was the freedom to communicate with other people beyond linguistic and national
horizons that excited me more than scooters, motorcycles and cars. I tried
“moving away from my mother tongue,"#40# something I am still in the process of doing.
Encountering the critical writings of Edward Said, Stuart Hall, Gayatri Spivak,
Frantz Fanon and others on Eurocentrism and orientalism made me look at my
language learning in a more political and ideological way.#41# In the early 1990s, I started learning languages as
part of my art practice, beginning with Japanese, followed by Korean, Modern
Greek, Chinese and finally, with COUNTDOWN IRAQ, Arabic. <k>Homeland
Security I—V<k> is a series of video clips in which five
different sentences are repeated in eleven different languages I have been
learning, beginning with Arabic and ending with English. Filmed as police mug
shots, and reiterated as in a language lab, I translate the following sentences
across my linguistic spectrum in front of an <k>Afghan Dialog<k> piece featuring CNN and LIVE; “I’m not a
terrorist,” “I’m not a religious fanatic,” “I don t give money to terrorist
networks,” “I don’t know how to build bombs” and “I’m not downloading dangerous
information from the Internet.”
The writers mentioned above
thoroughly taught me that representing other people and their cultures is
highly complicated, and political. Representational politics is at the very
nucleus of my artistic intensions. This is why I started to learn languages
versus just going out into the world shuffling pictures. This is why most of my
representational ambitions circle quasi-narcissistically over my head as a
learning subject, a clumsily moving linguistic interface, trafficking in
languages as the epistemological doorway for trans-cultural and inter-personal
understanding. This why I try to stay “boring in appearance” and quite
“constructed” and “theoretical” when directing a camera on something other than
my relationship to learning. This is also why my focus has been to create
platforms for those who have been left out. It also explains my exporting and
copying of media representations, i.e. big-voiced “power-faces” with megascopic
outreach. Finally, this is why I observe interfaces of all kinds; technological
as well as human ones. For me, language is the medium and doesn’t need to come
with a message. Language is a necessary interface for communication, an
essential condition of knowledge that navigates us through the world. Of
course, to a certain degree I am terrified by all these media representations
of Far- and Middle-Eastern conflicts that are converging into a show. I am
afraid that I might have just reconfirmed all these undifferentiated negative
representations that are so characteristic in western media and consequently in
our heads. All these pictures can be read in at least two diametrically opposed
ways: confirming the negativity of the Middle East region with its inhabitants
or creating an outcry over the conditions and the negative representations the
media foster. My language studies, which I try to keep politically neutral in
appearance, are ways to escape this dilemma. Spending hundreds of hours with
foreign language studies usually affects people and develops sympathies.
Learning Arabic has created an interest that goes beyond the capital letters of
headlines and the pixelization of violence.
Basic Arabic Studying
by Numbers and Hours
In early attempts to address
my work theoretically, I referred to many of my language-based art works as
by-products because my ***note to designer, please bold 'study sheets'*** study
sheets were to begin with just scrap
paper used while studying. The same applied to my video tapes with binding
titles that forced me to quantify my studious and often arduous endeavors:
<k>My First 500 Hours Basic Arabic, My Second 500 Hours Basic Arabic<k> and so on. Calling these works by-products expressed some of
the unease I had with creating representations. Frustration doesn't only come
from of the demanding and time consuming production of these works, i.e.
learning process. Frustration comes from many sources; the near impossible task
of viewing hundreds of video tapes stacked in commercial boxes with little
labeling; study sheets written in characters nobody can decipher; endless
fixed-camera videos showing very little, but mostly things you don't want to
see. I was at first quite concerned about the “narcissistic over-determination”
of these works. However, it very quickly became clear that the helplessness and
toddling stagnancy interrupted, by sporadic scratching (even nose picking) and
weird eye movements, turned the viewer into a voyeur eves dropping on a
practical, senseless or sometimes embarrassing phone conversation or other
non-scripted event. It is therefore no surprise that some people get nervous
seeing such videos, or even aggressive as they prefer the artist to be more “in
charge,” and less lost or distracted. With nearly 100 hours of tape-recording
from a Damascus language school, with many of them in a class room shared by
six to eight, or sometimes more, people, the degree of embarrassment is quite
pathetic and I wish these tapes would never be shown—at least, not when I am
around. Currently, I‘m working on <k>My Second 500 Hours Basic Arabic<k>.
<k>Basic
Arabic, (Study Sheets)<k> are works on paper that resulted from writing
exercises while studying. As visual documents they show the slow progress of
the study, the calligraphy and words, the texts or conversations I’m focusing
on, and the mindless scribbles and visual extras that end up on my study sheets
during the never-ending hours of engagement. Due to the precarious political
situation, I added dramatic headline news of the day and scribbled them down on
paper. While I was spending some weeks in Damascus, Israel claimed
responsibility for the assassination of a Hamas member in Damascus who had been
living in the city for more then a decade. They killed him with a car bomb in
the middle of the city during the day, endangering the lives of several
bystanders.#42# This happened
within a mile or so from where I was staying. It looked as if it was
retaliation for some holiday resort bombing in Egypt a short period earlier
that killed, along with many others, Israeli tourists.
<k>Basic Arabic
(Photographs)<k> is a series of
images that don’t include any violence or allusion to it. These images are not
media representations but consist of photographs I took in Syria, juxtaposed
with sentences I borrowed from my Arabic study manual handed out to me in the
school in Damascus. This material plays with the idea of study manuals which
usually use illustrations that are often quite patriotic in scope. In my
pictures, the relationship between text and image is never quite clear or
explicit since I prefer gaps and the possibility of getting lost. For the
photographs chosen, there is no real operative principle at work, though I have
had some pleasure confronting bits of my study material with images that met my
intuitive selection criteria of the moment. Anecdotal and associative qualities
of these images are not denied but also don’t need to be spelled out. These
photographs are part of my <k>Basic Language Photographs<k> and justifiable through the framing of my language
learning material.
Please, Teach Me Arabic
Tourism and Writing Home
Another way of how I have
addressed language issues, and everything that encompasses it for more than a
decade, is with a special on-going postcard project. Whenever I travel to a
country where a different language is spoken I send out over 100 postcards to
friends with a rubber stamp soliciting them to teach me the language spoken
there, though most receivers don’t know the language themselves. ***note to
designer, please bold the following sentence*** Please, teach me Korean; Please, teach me Swedish ; Please, teach me Creek; Please, teach me Greek etc. This project is never affiliated with any
institution and leaves nothing behind for myself except the costs of the large
amount of postcards and their postage. While in Syria, I found postcards
depicting a statue of Saladin, the Arabic hero from the Middle Ages who stopped
the crusades to the Middle East, for my <k>Please, Teach Me Arabic<k> project. During my time in Damascus I was
invited to a group show in Bayreuth with the title “Was ist Deutsch?” (What is
German?), a quote taken from a famous anti-Semitic text by Richards Wagner,
which was to be reinterpreted. For the first time, I modified the <k>Please,
Teach Me … (Postcards)<k>
project and sent various cards to Richard Wagner himself, regardless of his
biological status. I became exited with the idea of not confining myself to
just friends and people who are still among the living and started to send
another 80 or so cards to ***note to designer, please bold 'famous Germans*** famous
Germans. I expanded this idea to some
other countries, including Austria.
For
this exhibition, The Museum of Modern Art in Vienna received 56 cards addressed
to ***note to designer, please bold ‘famous Austrians’*** famous Austrians c/o
MUMOK. This list includes, along with the usual show-off Austrians like Sigmund
Freud, Mozart, Ludwig Wittgenstein, Arnold Schwarzenegger, bad ones like Adolf
Hitler and Karl Lueger (who pushed through an anti-Slavic, anti-Semitic right
wing agenda in late 19th century). The list also includes people who are
directly related to the Middle East: Leopold V, the Austrian crusader; Theodor
Herzl, the founder of modern Zionism and spiritual father of Israel; and
Muhammad Asad (born Leopold Weiß), who converted from Judaism to Islam and was
a journalist, writer, scholar, politician, diplomat, and translator of the
Koran, plus an early influential critic of Orientalism.#43# Every person addressed in this project has an
interesting biography and a smaller or bigger relationship to the Arab world.
The smallest might be zero, but more often then not some relationships—which
are sometimes surprising ones—might be found. This postcard
project reverses some of the standing logic, a few of which have been addressed
above. Another reversal consists of the fact that most of the addressees are
themselves “monumental,” with monuments in place and sometimes postcards made
of them. A different kind of upside-down logic is related to the official
Syrian stamp used in this project, which depicts the former president Hafez Al-Assad. In 1982, Al-Assad ordered the Syrian city
of Hama be destroyed as a reaction to its religiously motivated, rebellious
stand. Up to 40,000 civilians were massacred.#44#
Freedom Fries—In the Mail
Box
A different postcard project
involved unofficial U.S. Postmaster stamps and tourist postcards with New York
City landmarks on them. After 9/11, the Twin Towers were edited out of movies
and TV-series but survived very well in the postcard business, thereby
commercializing them—sometimes together with patriotic reminders—in the streets
of the Big Apple. I organized the postcards in different sets of twelve, with
each set carrying its own printed message by me, which reflected on the
politics in the WAR ON TERROR: ***note to designer, please bold the following
messages, up to the end ?*** Why do they hate us?; dirty people, dirty business, dirty money, dirty
wars, dirty bombs; Freedom Fries; “Either you are with us or with the terrorists”; Welcome To America, You must be fingerprinted and
photographed; Empire Building; You give me oil, we give you freedom &
democracy!; Basic Politics:
Spinning; Use a Bicycle and ?. The
postage was fabricated with the help of digital imagery and photographs taken
from a series of ball-point pen drawings featuring characteristic and
frequently-used terminology that filled the air after the traumatizing events,
dropped from the sky upon this city: ***note to designer, please bold the
following messages, up to Operation Iraqi Freedom*** 9/11; Al Qaeda;
War on Terror; Evil Doers; Axis of Evil; Afghanistan; Operation
Enduring Freedom; Enemy Combatant; Homeland Security; Patriot Act;
Weapons of Mass Destruction; Old
Europe; Freedom fries; Shock and Awe; and Operation Iraqi Freedom.
The postcards are arranged on a grid and paired with cards showing the front
side. Thus, one notices that not all cards arrived due to the irregular
postage.#45# The use of a
ball-point pen was not only inspired by its beauty and bureaucratic
non-artistic qualities but also by the warplane drawings of Alighiero Boetti.
This catatonic and nervous practice releases an esthetic charm that borders on
madness. For me, ballpoint pens create intensities and build psychological
profiles in the way leftover coffee, when dried and sedimented in a cup, is
interpreted by some.
Damascus
Bicycling—A City in the Cross Hairs
<k>Bicycling
Damascus<k> is a video-bicycle performance. Without
holding the handlebars, I cycled against the traffic while filming. For 90
minutes I rode around the ancient city videotaping straight ahead across the
handlebars, as if rendering them into cross hairs. This carried me through a
variety of different neighborhoods and places that offered a surprising
cityscape. The risky and unlawful engagement with the bicycle, the city and my
camera creates an anti-gravitational epic of traffic jams, busy people and
colorful Middle Eastern streets, all alive in a country that will hopefully
remain peaceful and not be pulled any deeper into a regional conflict.#46# The video images do not show any conflicts other than
me dealing with a half broken bicycle that was difficult to steer without
hands, and oncoming traffic. Like studying, risky cycling is a personal
involvement that serves as a justification for the production of these fleeting
images.
The
bicycle is not only my vehicle of transportation, but it also serves as an
urban eyeglass—as extension of my visual and acoustic organs and a social urban
interface. I'm a cyclist since early childhood. The first birthday present I
remember is a bicycle. I have never stayed in a place for long without a
bicycle, including Tokyo where I was harassed on a daily basis by the police (I
was considered a bicycle thief). Since 2001, I have used unlawful and risky
cycling as part of my work. <k>Bicycling Damascus<k>
is connected to <k>Bicycling Tirana, 2003<k>, <k>Bicycling New York, 2003-05<k>, and <k>Bicycling Hong Kong, 2005<k> as part of a series that has more mobile
cityscapes to come. The danger that is associated with riding against a flux of
cars without holding onto the handle bars is enforced through the danger
associated with negative media images relating to the authoritarian political
regime of Syria and its links to groups carrying out terrorist acts. Syria is
also accused of aiding the Iraqi insurgency.
These
days, the Bush administration suspects WMDs#47# to be
hiding in Iran and terrorists to be hiding in Syria.#48# President Bush’s second inauguration speech#49# reads as a “road-map to war” and repeats in lofty,
ideological phrasing what his preventive war doctrine spelled out in his first
term in office: “The survival of liberty in our land increasingly depends on
the success of liberty in other lands.” This leads to the conclusive formula of
his aim: “the ultimate goal of ending tyranny in our world.” The language is
ideological on paper, biblical on TV and apocalyptic in reality—worst of all,
it is militaristic on the ground and in the air. It also reads like an
amendment to the constitution although it’s “Realpolitik” is unconstitutional.
It definitely is a speech that resonates with the strategic papers of the
neo-cons, as published in The Weekly Standard and the Project for a New
American Century. Long before 9/11, the government laid out the total
re-mapping of the world. In the middle of the 1990s the clearly named
objectives were not HOMELAND SECURITY and FREEDOM AND DEMOCRACY but control
over the world’s most important resources and geo-strategic positioning.
Implementing AMERICAN STYLE JUSTICE#50# and American style democracy may be profitable for petrol-chemical
industries, big contract firms#51# and
the U.S. security industry but it has proved disastrous and bloody for the
Iraqi people. Death is becoming more and more "a master of American
making", with a U.S. and British accent. It is also touching Americans
troops, who alone lost over 1,500 so far, with over 10,000 officially counted as
(seriously) injured. These numbers do not include the bodies of contractors,
hired by the troops for military deployment. The real number of deaths and
destruction are all higher than those reported, and difficult to come by.#52#
But there is barely an image on TV or
in the papers from the region that doesn’t have ruins as a backdrop. If we
consider the ongoing waves of terror and the low-intensity civil war that has
touched Iraqi sand, we must really wonder whether all this talk of freedom—now
switched to liberty—and democracy is nothing but cynical. Does this formula of
destruction now have to be applied to Iran and Syria?
Sky Levels Versus Eye
Levels
Finally, I want to point out
that the idiosyncratic hanging and installation of this exhibition is inspired
by my Pashtun friends who seem to have returned to their homeland. When I was
invited to visit their home in New Jersey I was totally surprised by the way
they hung their pictures and clocks on the walls. Everything was either
directly touching the ceiling or resting against the wall on the floor. It had
a deep effect on me since it “opened up” their blue-paint space as an abstract
void and made me think of my unquestioned hanging conventions that organize
wall space in a Descartian way at eye level. Using “sky level” gave their
hanging objects a different and more marginal importance and redefined my
relationship to them as being more removed and therefore more respectful. To a
certain degree, I will try to follow the same principal in Vienna, by placing
most things on the floor or by hanging them high up on the ceiling, or near the
ceiling. Overcrowding the space is a highly desirable effect: it not only
creates a vision of the media overkill I attempt to address in my work, but
also evokes the beautiful chaos of oriental bazaars and carpet-seller shops. It
also reminds me of the fascinating oriental department at the Museum of Applied
Arts in Vienna before it was renovated and synchronized to the taste formations
of today’s art-loving public.#53#
Rainer Ganahl,
New York, March 2005.
Endnoten:
1 I therefore do
not automatically agree with their meaning. I don’t defend them and I don’t
reject them, I only consider them as results of this dialog-work. Some results
were insultingly anti-Semitic or directly hatred inciting and therefore
unsuitable for my purposes or for publishing in this context. I also received
such reactions while working on <k>Iraq Dialogs<k> and <k>Arab Dialogs<k>. Unfortunately I have heard
similar hateful and anti-Semitic comments all over Europe, even by respected
artists and educated people with remarkable and influential careers.
2 Petrification or “Burning
Stuff”—Ceramic tiles, invented in the Middle
East, are commonly used there in public spaces and religious institutions. Over
the past 4,000 years, mud, dust and water have been turned into clay, then
glazed and fired under high temperatures (if I
may reduce such a complicated process to these simple steps). Some of the
oldest, most beautiful and amazing remnants of tile work can be seen at the
Ishtar Gate in Babylon, made in 575 BCE. Unfortunately, widespread looting of
museums and archeological sites right in front of the eyes of the U.S.-lead
invasion team has hurt such artifacts. Bombings have reduced some back to dust.
The word ceramic is traceable to Sanskrit and means “burnt stuff”. “Burnt,”
i.e. fired, tiles don’t deteriorate if left untouched. They could possibly
endure the heat of a nuclear explosion. Their longevity is unlimited if they
are unbroken. Their extreme durability when handled and installed correctly,
and their relative fragility if handled carelessly, is almost a metaphor for
the situation on the ground. Glazed tiles share similar features and qualities
with glass. (In the last four years, we have witnessed, through the translucent
glass of TV screens, two wars and several regions burning. Unfortunately, while
I write this, the news still features violent confrontations between, on one
side, stone-throwing kids, teenagers, women and suicide bombers (who reduce
themselves and others to dust), and on the other, near-invulnerable high-tech
warriors with armored vehicles and helicopters.) These fired surfaces,
resisting natural decay, served perfectly well as a medium for communication.
The earliest writings known to man were produced on clay tablets around 3000
BCE by Sumerians in ancient Mesopotamia, today’s Iraq. Because of the
interactive aspect of this dialog-work, painting and subsequently firing the
tiles felt like burning information onto an unusual external hard drive.
Ceramic tiles are seldom used in the field of fine arts but are quite often
used in tourist shops and other memorative enterprises we associate with
"kitsch".
3 The production of these
complicated works was guaranteed by organizers of various exhibitions across
Europe, who generously helped me produce these works. I would like to thank the
following:
***note to designer, the
following name is bolded*** Second International Biennial of Ceramics in
Contemporary Art, Albisola: ceramic
studio—Ernan, Albisola; painting assistance—Alida Sini and Gianna Vacca. ***note
to designer, the following name is bolded*** CASCO, Utrecht: ceramic studio—Brigitte; painting assistance—Evelien
van Dongen, Lisette Smits, Maureen Kok, Elmer de Gruijl, Marscha Teune, Dino
van der Heide and Maaike Gottschal. ***note to designer, the following name is
bolded*** Kunstbüro Wien, Vienna:
painting assistance—Amer Abbas and two students from the Art Academy who don’t
want to be named. ***note to designer, the following name is bolded*** Gesellschaft
für Aktuelle Kunst, GAK, Bremen:
painting assistance—Okay Altinisik, Franz Ammann, Karine Fauchard, Lia Gulua
and Kalina Hristova. ***note to designer, the following name is bolded*** Going
Public, Modena and Sassuolo: produced
by Marco Scotini and Amaze (Claudia Zanfi,); ceramic studio—Forme2000; painting
assistance—Siyam Mohsen and Silvano Rutigliano. I am highly indebted to all the
people and various parties that have helped me with material, financial and
logistical support. But my greatest thanks go to all my dialog partners who
engaged and bore with me during this complicated process.
4 In answer to
the question “Is there evidence that Saddam Hussein worked with the 9/11
terrorists?” in an April-May 2004 poll, 25.2% said “yes,” 28.3% “I don’t know”
and 46.5% “no” (the correct answer). “Is there evidence that Saddam Hussein
worked with Al Qaeda?” was answered as follows: 39.3% said "yes",
30.7% "no" and 29.9% "I don't know." The poll reflects a
random telephone sample of 513 people in the U.S. and has a margin of error of +/- 3.5%.
See www.retropoll.org/results_poll_04.htm.
5 It is
interesting to note that the international press was on a “first name” with the
former Iraqi President and Dictator Saddam Hussein.
6 See my
detailed and illustrated text on these conditions: Going Public Modena and
Sassuolo, 2003 (www.ganahl.info/sassuolo_txt.html).
7 Most
translations into Italian, English or French were provided by the contributors
themselves. Translations from French or Italian into English were done by me or
Siyam Mohsen; Mohsen also translated the Arabic sentences into Italian or
English.
8 Meaning
“coffee bar” worker during the day.
9 Fox News
corporation has meanwhile changed their logo from “The Most Powerful Name in
News” to “Balanced and Fair.”
10 Special
thanks go to VIVA for generously providing us with tiles and to Dario Brugioni,
from FORME 2000, for his magic ceramic highway ovens and his generous
assistance with know-how, colors, logistics and space.
11 This needs to be compared
to the fascist uniformity of the first half of last century, culminating in
genocide and the Holocaust. In order to be more precise about the absence of
multiculturalism in Europe before WWII, it needs to be pointed out that the
Austrian empire and Vienna in particular constituted a multi-cultural society
but larger parts of Germany and today’s Austria were not. Partially due to the
anti-Slavic and anti-Semitic politics of Karl Lueger, as pointed out elsewhere
in this text, Vienna’s multiculturalism was perceived as negative and a
malaise.
12 Migrant labor
was first solicited through active recruitment programs in Turkey, Yugoslavia
and other cheap-labor countries. Today, Europe is looking for intelligent labor
and is suffering a considerable brain drain in science, technology and
medicine. In many fields, European talents prefer the USA to Europe because of
more flexibility, greater possibilities and higher pay. Another interesting
aspect of “demographic politics per fiat” is best illustrated with a quote by
an orthodox Israeli interviewed over the Ghaza withdrawal ordered by his
current government: “They [liberal and non-orthodox Israelis] have puppies and
dogs, we [the orthodox, conservative group] have children”. The interviewee is
a father of twelve. Though I can’t find the exact quote in The New York Times
anymore, the sentence sticks in my mind. This demographic argument is also most
certainly applicable to Europe, where relatively conservative religious
minority groups are having far more offspring than the liberal and secular
majority. David Frum, former White House speechwriter who coined AXIS OF EVIL
for G. W. Bush’s state of the union address in 2002, even went so far as to
explain the demographic drop of traditional populations in Europe as a result
of religious decline and secularism (Alexander Kluge und David Frum,
<k>Antiamericanism-Antieuropeanism-Antisemitism<k>,
Goethe-Institut, New York December 6, 2004).
13 Certain towns have tried to oppose Islamic
centers with unconvincing arguments, ranging from poor parking and construction
laws to Islamic radicalism.
14 Marx’s famous
and utterly hostile definition of religion as the “opium of the people” is only
one of a multitude of ways to define religion. He proposed historical
materialism as a lens through which we could see the causes and effects of
early industrial exploitation and misery. Twice a day for five years during
high school I passed a row of beautiful 19th century mansions (Villas) in the
heart of Feldkirch. With the exception of one—which belonged to the catholic
bishop of Vorarlberg—they all displayed the glory of the textile industry.
15 Talal Asad,
<k>Formations of the Secular: Christianity, Islam, Modernity<k>, Stanford University Press, 2003.
Asad’s book gives a critical account of secularism and tries to show how
secularism itself is an ideology, a political doctrine that is more than just
the separation of state and religion.
16 The day after
the election in Iraq, American officials suggested that the victims of violence
on that day should be called martyrs. See: commentary to photograph, The New
York Times, January 31, 2005, p. 1.
17 The
conservative network FOX NEWS refuses to use the word “suicide bomber.” It
refers to these attacks as “homicide bombings.” This completely dehumanizes the
attacker and eliminates any possible sympathy one might feel for people who
commit suicide.
18 Since
religious orthodoxy is associated with anti-modernity and technological
ignorance, an interesting paradox is created and shows how this awakening is
more the flip side than the reversal of modernity and post-modernity. Awakening
is a term claimed by anybody who is religiously busy, including Christians and
Muslims, e.g. www.islamicawakening.com or www.spiritualawakening.org.
19
Paradoxically, thanks to the democratization and mass access of powerful media
and info-technology—broad-band internet, mobile phones, text messaging,
satellite and cable TV—some forces defy the power of mainstream media,
democratic discourses and modern reasoning based on a notion of secular
politics.
20 I kept my New
York Times subscription but didn’t touch the papers. I still have the entire
pile of New York Times papers covering the official phase of the Iraq war. It
functions like a sacred art object that can’t be touched or thrown out. Due to
shipping costs, we cannot include this “piece" in the exhibition at MUMOK.
21 The Web site
http://www.nytimes.com/ref/international/middleeast/20040526CRITIQUE.html lists
numerous examples of its failed reporting.
22 What I never
understood was what happened to all the young civilian men who were not allowed
to leave the city and who were separated from their fleeing families at a point
where it was pretty clear that everybody encountered in the city was considered
an insurgent during a time of full war. Here soldiers shot dead wounded,
unarmed, vulnerable Iraqis inside mosques in front of TV cameras. One case
broadcasted by mistake was certainly no isolated incident.
23 I mostly
found my assistants online with a “looking for painter” posting. In most cases
a phone conversation about their studies convinced me that they could do the
job and would show up again with some results. In several cases I was wrong and
people just pocketed the advance payment without delivering anything. Also,
some of the results would probably not have passed a painting commission but
for my purpose they all are fine.
24
For this daily-depressing news harvesting, I visited main stream Web-site
info-portals with disregard to their reporting style: Fox News Channel, CNN,
ABC, New York Times, The Washington Post, USA Today, Yahoo.com and others.
25 From the
Microsoft Word built-in dictionary.
26 Hegel’s quote
can be found in a British anti-war blog entitled “What Experience and History
Teach” (http://backward.me.uk/2004/April/whatexperience.html).
27 Thomas
Hirschhorn brings this aspect to a point when he mixes media fragments of war
crimes with pornography. In my wall paintings—as mentioned in the text—porn and
censured soft-porn is only a click away via links.
28 Edmund Burke,
<k>A Philosophical Enquiry into the Origin of our Ideas of the Sublime
and Beautiful<k>,
Oxford University Press, 1990, p. 36.
29 See
www.iraqbodycount.net.
30 The Greek War of
Independence (1821—1832) was the first nationalist war initiated by purely
ideological and literal forces coming from outside the country at war. It was a
war in which the poet Lord Byron and other romantic intellectuals volunteered.
Only European powers were finally able to defeat the Ottomans, clearing the way
for further attacks and the final fall of the Ottoman Empire in the Middle
East. The first King of the Helens was, tellingly enough, King Louis I of
Bavaria, who was chosen during a conference of European powers in 1832. He was
so unpopular and incompetent that a military coup undercut his actual power.
Louis I of Bavaria was the brother of the romantic King Ludwig II of Bavaria
who commissioned Wagner’s operas. Doesn’t this sound similar to what we see in
Afghanistan and Iraq? Greece was some kind of “German Orient,” and one of the
reasons why I studied Modern Greek for a period of time (check Google: “history
of Greek Independence Wars”). This Greek episode is an almost-forgotten chapter
in a long history of "Culture and Imperialism," which is also the
title of a book by Edward Said.
31 “The Greek War of
Independence has already started. Now the islanders on Chios are asked to join
the rebellion against the Ottoman Empire. Their decision is a difficult one
but, within months, they find they have run out of time. Both the Greek
revolutionaries and Constantinople regard the wavering as a betrayal and around
20,000 islanders are hanged, butchered, starved or tortured to death. Untold
thousands more are raped, deported and enslaved. The Greek word "<k>katastrofi<k>"—also meaning 'destruction' and
'ruin'—is usually used to describe these events. The island itself is
devastated and the few survivors disperse throughout Europe in what is now
known as the Chios Diaspora.” <k>The Massacre At Chios<k> by Eugène Delacroix was first exhibited in
1824, two years after the massacre, and bought by King Charles X for The Musée
du Louvre in Paris (see www.Christopherlong.co.uk/per.chiosmass2.html). This
surprising information about the timing of Delacroix’s painting and the
ferocious massacre are only two reasons why I wish to carry an Internet search
machine with me when visiting places like the Musée du Louvre.
32 Today, these
“resistance fighters” and “liberators” would be referred to as “insurgents” and
“terrorists”.
33 In the 19th
century, when historical scenes became more realistic and less removed from
time—e.g. Jacques-Louis David’s <k>The Death of Marat<k>—painters
went to battle fields as observers. Horace Vernet—traveling with Napoleon—is
said to have refused the emperor’s demand to have a certain general removed
from his painting with the reply: "I am a painter of history sir, and I
will not violate the truth" (www.military-prints.com/napoleon.htm).
34 This brings to my mind a
meeting I had with an Austrian immigrant living in Harlem who listened to
classical music he taped in the 1970s from FM radio, including all the ads and
sales pitches for now obsolete products and companies.
35 Today’s
article in The New York Times confirms my assumption that department stores are
becoming obsolete, closing down or drastically transforming themselves into
multi-experience, multi-purpose entertainment and lifestyle malls with music
playhouses, cine-plexes, community halls, restaurants and upscale living. See
“No Longer the Belles of the Malls, Department Stores Try Makeovers,” The New
York Times, March 1, 2005.
36 Walter
Benjamin’s comments on the sex appeal of non-organic commodities apply even
better to images that move.
37 Even writing
has been changed with translation machines, thesauruses and complete books
available online. Many references are immediately recallable online and make
physical books nearly negligible. This text itself will first be available
online before it appears in print. I prefer finding data concerning my own
works and my own biography on the Web.
38 This fact of
language acquisition and intelligence services was clearly brought to my mind
when a proof reader and editor for a well-respected, critical left-leaning US
journal told me that she was paid for years by the government to study some—at
the time—“obscure sounding” language which today is the focus of attention of
the intelligence community. I have lost all contact with her but I am quite
convinced that she is obliged—maybe more then she might have imagined when
signing up to these study contracts—to do some work in that field. She
suggested I do the same. Just to make it crystal clear: I never did but I did
entertain the idea for a while, lured by money, the opportunity to study, and
the bizarre idea of experiencing this kind of “studying for sale” attitude.
This predated 9/11, after which the real meaning of government-paid language
jobs was turned inside out: questioning, interrogating and spying on thousands
of civilians with "legal alien" status in programs that are
unconstitutional, inhuman and will be entered into the history books the same
way the Japanese detention camps of WWII were.
39 Postal services were
developed and regularized like national languages and border controls in order
to create and assure the unity of the newly formed nation states. It is no
coincidence that HOMELAND SECURITY—more than only a border control agency—is
intercepting our electronic mail and telecommunications as well as overlooking
our travel movements in the name of national security. ATM’s, GPS-sensitive mobile
phones, credit card transactions as well as visits to libraries or Internet
sites are only a few things that leave electronic trails behind. ESCHELON, for
example, is a U.S. National Security Agency that records and screens nearly all
conversations leaving the country, making them automatically available for
security as well as commercial data-mining.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eschelon and numerous sites of international
newspapers make their indexes and archives electronically available.
40 “Moving away
from my mother tongue” is the title of an interview published in the catalog of
the Venice Biennial published in Austria in 1999. The text is also available on
www.ganahl.info/ti_torimitsu_ganahl_1999.html.
41 In 1978
Edward Said published <k>Orientalism<k>, a crucial study that shows how academic and
cultural formations have been directly influenced by political and
geo-strategic realities. A few years earlier, Talal Asad had already edited a
collection of influential essays with the telling title <k>Anthropology
and the Colonial Encounter<k>,
Ithaca Press, London, 1973.
42 “Car bomb
kills Hamas operative in Syria, Israel claims responsibility; Hamas vows
revenge,” The Associated Press, September 26, 2004.
43 Muhammad Asad’s pamphlets
and books—<k>Islam at the Crossroads<k>, 1932, <k>The Road to
Mecca<k>, 1954, and others—have been very influential in the Islamic
world and beyond. Some of his critics even see connections between his early
writings and contemporary Islamic fundamentalism, which he later came to
reject. Asad (19001992) drew direct connections between the crusades of the
Middle East and contemporary Imperialism, which he experienced (amongst many
other things) first hand with a six-year imprisonment. His critics condemned
the writings of western Orientalists for their misrepresentations of the Orient
and Islamic life. Asad also influenced the writing of the Pakistani
constitution and represented Pakistan in New York at the United Nations. His
son, Talal Asad, has been quoted earlier in this text and is himself a critical
and academic authority.
44 To make sure
that nobody escaped, former president Hafez
Al-Assad is said to have employed cyanide poison-gas
generators. Google “Hama massacre 1982“ and you will find numerous results from
a large spectrum of media outlets including respected news papers that will
make your blood freeze. While in Damascus, I met Syrian Kurds who told me quite
vividly of recent political crackdowns ending in unnecessary repression, death
and destruction. I was also surprised by a young student who told me how his
neighbor and friend was removed from high school, imprisoned, and his finger
nails pulled out for having bad-mouthed the sitting president. As a tourist and
student, life in Damascus is incredibly pleasant, stress free, relaxed and
beautiful. The idea of having it invaded by Americans and their
coalition-of-the-willing because of Syria’s alleged support of terrorism is
horrifying and can only bring more repression and destruction. I would also
consider it hypocritical since the USA engages with Syria in what is known as
“extra-ordinary rendition,” i.e. harsh investigation, also called torture.
45 Looking at
this do-it-yourself stamp project in a purely artistic and conceptual way, it
touches on free-speech issues and interpretations of legal boundaries. I
purchased from the U.S. postal service the same amount of stamps required for
sending these cards through the mail. These official stamps are invalidated on
separate sheets of paper that accompany the artworks and now serve as
certificates of authenticity. This should underscore that it has never been my
intention to defrauding the U.S. Postmaster.
46 Nowadays,
Syria is defined more and more as a rogue state orchestrating terrorism. The
assassination of the popular Lebanese anti-Syrian leader Rafik Hakiri and a
suicide bombing in Israel that soon followed are both attributed to Syria
though no proof has been delivered to date. Protests in Lebanon and accusations
by Washington make the current Assad regime in Damascus look more and more like
an obstacle to America’s idea of democracy in the region. The real reasons are
probably similar to those that brought about the removal of Saddam Hussein in
Iraq: Geo-strategic importance as a neighbor of Israel, Iraq, Jordan, Lebanon,
Turkey and Egypt; control of resources—oil and water—most desirable in the
region; the opening of a large consumer and financial market; and a stubborn
dictatorial regime that the current State Department doesn’t want to deal with
anymore. But given the very complex demographics and repressed nature of the
country, an invasion of Syria would be nothing but a repetition of the mistakes
made in Iraq, multiplying the number of people offering their lives (in the
form of suicide bombings and other attacks) to inflict wounds and scratches on
an overpowering enemy. It could also destabilize the region even more and
reignite civil war in Lebanon and beyond. Also, the Kurds of Syria are an
important factor and considered a threat to the central government of Iraq, as
well as Turkey. If plans laid out by the think tanks Project For the New
American Century or The Weekly Standard are to be implemented, Syria would be
ripe for regime change “made in the USA.” Unfortunately, people associated with
the biggest U.S. military and security contractors in the world, Bechtel and
Halliburton, are willing to take on the risks. It also can’t hurt the interests
of the oil producing business community, which includes the Bush dynasty. Since
W’s wars have been underway, the price of a barrel of oil has more than
doubled. Israel too might favor an invasion of Syria and take on the risks
since many Palestinians are living in Syrian territory. An invasion could also
help to resolve open questions concerning the Golan Heights, which were half
conquered by Israel for its water resources. Finally, it would make president
Sharon look like a winner, even though he risks ending up at a European
tribunal for crimes committed in Lebanon two decades earlier (James Bennett,
"Israel Rejects Belgian Court Ruling on Sharon," The New York Times,
February 14, 2003). The Syrian presence in Lebanon was a big obstacle in
defeating Hezbollah, an organization that opposes Israel. Last but not least,
one shouldn’t forget that it was the Syrian military that finally halted the
sectarian civil war in Lebanon and brought peace to the region. In spite of my
condemnation of a violent regime change in Damascus carried out by outside
forces, the fact still remains that Syria is a very repressive regime. It
should be brought to an end, or a drastic change in domestic and international
politics is needed—but not via AMERICAN STYLE JUSTICE.
47 The New York
Times of January 9, 2005 reports “Up to 480 Atomic Weapons still kept in
Europe, Study Says”, with a scary little paragraph clearly indicating who is
really willing to use WMDs against others: “The senior military official in
Europe would not discuss which countries or targets the weapons could be used
against, but military officials in the past have left open the possibility,
however remote, of using nuclear arms against targets in so-called rogue
nations, including Iran and Syria, if they threatened to use unconventional
weapons.”
48 A smaller dialog piece
was made with the logo NEXT TARGETS? The calligrapher Ghazi Delaimi answered,
like a seer in January 2003: Iraq, Iran, Syria (as a next targets).
49 President W.
Bush’s Second Term Inauguration speech, 2005:
“We are led, by
events and common sense, to one conclusion: The survival of liberty in our land
increasingly depends on the success of liberty in other lands. The best hope
for peace in our world is the expansion of freedom in all the world.
America's vital
interests and our deepest beliefs are now one. From the day of our Founding, we
have proclaimed that every man and woman on this earth has rights, and dignity,
and matchless value, because they bear the image of the Maker of Heaven and
earth. Across the generations we have proclaimed the imperative of
self-government, because no one is fit to be a master, and no one deserves to
be a slave. Advancing these ideals is the mission that created our Nation. It
is the honorable achievement of our fathers. Now it is the urgent requirement
of our nation's security, and the calling of our time.
So it is the
policy of the United States to seek and support the growth of democratic
movements and institutions in every nation and culture, with the ultimate goal
of ending tyranny in our world.”
See:
www.whitehouse.gov/inaugural.
50 This image is
part of <k>My Private War Archive<k>, a work that consists of hundreds of TV images
taken during the two recent wars and presented as permanent online slide shows.
The Iraqi version of <k>My Private War Archives<k> is projected during the
exhibition.
51 For example,
Dick Cheney, current vice president of the United States, was the former CEO of
Halliburton. This indispensable firm belongs to one of the most profitable and
most reckless enterprises in U.S. history. See the blog:
www.independent-media.tv/gtheme.cfm?ftheme_id=35.
52 Counting war casualties
and “collateral damage” is difficult and highly political: my numbers are
backed up by www.iraqbodycount.net and www.antiwar.com/casualties/.
See also: Todd Pitman, “U.S. Troops Deaths in Iraq Top 1,500”, The Associated
Press, March 3, 2005.
53 I utter these associations, fully aware
that they transport me into the problematic proximity of aesthetic Orientalism.
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