An Alternate Reality: Iraq and America Today

Blake Ruehrwein, Air Force Veteran and Curatorial Intern at The Drawing Center 

On April 5, 2013, the List Art Center at Brown University hosted a one-day symposium titled Art and War in Iraq. This year marks ten years for our most recent involvement in Iraq, and although the importance might seem like a given, if you really look at the number of events, exhibitions, and articles, about this and related topics, the frequency may be far fewer than you think.  In a culture whose technology and international prominence has lead us to describe ourselves as globalized, what could be the reasons for these marginalized issues? One plausible answer came from a discussion with one of the speakers at the symposium, Israel-based historian and photographer Meir Wigoder, over some aptly provided humus and falafel in the lobby following the day’s events.

Wigoder lamented what he perceived as the lack of venues in the U.S. that tackle such heavy topics as the interactions between two countries at war. Given the highly visible commercialization of the art market domestically, it is easy for those outside the U.S. (or those in the U.S. who are not aware of the activities on the front lines) to conclude that exhibition spaces in the U.S. only show work that sells, and that we stay away from art that might be deemed political. It is unfortunate to admit that events like the Art and War in Iraq symposium are not as high profile as the latest billion-dollar auction at Sotheby’s.  On one hand, if you are looking for them, the interested parties are out there, however, on the other hand, Wigoder is right. Considering the controversy and ongoing struggles, the responses seem disproportionate, which is what Brown University has attempted to address.

Wafaa Bilal, Chair, 2003-2013, archival inkjet photographs, 40″ x 50″

The symposium accompanied two concurrent exhibitions at the Bell Gallery, Wafaa Bilal’s The Ashes Series, and Daniel Heyman’s, I am Sorry It is Difficult to Start. The five presenters and the panel moderator offered glimpses of a complex world so much under the radar of everyday American consciousness that it is nearly an alternate reality. The work of Wafaa Bilal brought up great questions. In the second decade of the twenty-first century, Bilal observed, more and more people can be described as “finding freedom through exposure.”[1] The current modus operandi in the art world, Bilal went on, is to encode ideas in a new (or technology-based) media; a practice he labeled as remediation. This chosen vessel for our ideas can also tell us about the people behind them, and would seem to apply to Bilal as well. In his 2007 work, Domestic Tension (also known as Shoot an Iraqi), Bilal lived in a gallery for 30 days, with a remote-operated paintball gun, allowing people all over the world to log on to the Internet and shoot at him by controlling the gun. By the end of the 30 days, over 65,000 shots had been fired, however the turning point of visibility was not a major media outlet, but a social news website, www.digg.com.[2] Bilal depended on his own exposure to the Internet-watching public to carry out this marathon performance, exposure as well as technology. Bilal’s use of cutting-edge computerized equipment is reminiscent of the work of Krzysztof Wodiczko, who is known for working with those who have experienced trauma and providing them with a platform to speak out on their own behalf, often in digitized videos.  In fact, in Bilal’s classes at NYU, he includes Wodiczko’s work in his curriculum.

Daniel Heyman, There Were Three Interrogators, 2007, watercolor and gouache on paper, from the Istanbul Accordian Book

It is not just Iraqis who are worried about the ethics and human rights that may be transgressed, but Americans are also questioning our own practices. Another speaker at the symposium was American artist Daniel Heyman. In 2006 Heyman traveled to Jordan and Turkey to witness the testimonies of former detainees of the Abu Ghraib military prison, who were in many cases tortured, and in all cases released without being charged. As the victims gave statements to lawyers, Heyman sat in the room painting their portraits in watercolor and gouache, and scribbling their words onto the paper with their likenesses. Heyman’s efforts were in cooperation with an American lawyer who is building a case against those responsible for the controversial treatment of the prisoners.

Susanne Slavick, also an American artist, echoed this concern. At Brown she presented from her research for the book Out of Rubble (2011).  In the book and exhibition she featured the work of over 40 artists and architects, including herself, that have reacted to past and current wars. Her presentation on the work of Syrian-born and Brooklyn-based artist Diana Al-Hadid and American Adam Harvey, relate the extent to which artists are delving into such sensitive subjects as the fleetingness of life and lack of privacy today.

Top theorists and thought-leaders agree that the aesthetics of the recent interrelations between Iraq and America are worthy of interest. At the symposium, Wigoder shed greater light on Bilal’s work, The Ashes Series (2003-2013), and linked it to ideas such as simulacra and the representation of reality and meta-realities. Other critical analyses came from the evening’s panel moderator, Nada Shabout. As one of the foremost art historians writing, presenting, and curating about Modern and Contemporary Arab art, Shabout’s example lends credence to entire careers based on these issues.

Finally, the issues in question are not one-sided. As Americans question our actions over the past ten years, so should Iraqis. Rijin Sahakian, the final speaker at the symposium did just that. Founder of Sada, a non-profit organization that creates opportunities for education and artistic practices in Iraq and elsewhere, Sahakian pointed out the constraints of a Muslim society on studying the nude form, as well as those targeted by street artists in Iraq.

From left: Rijin Sahakian, Wafaa Bilal, Nada Shabout, Meir Wigoder, Daniel Heyman, Susanne Slavick

The big-picture does actually look hopeful though. At Art and War in Iraq, people saw the differences in perspective and opportunities for expression between Iraqis and Americans. The contemporary tendency of self-exposure does not always translate into seeing eye-to-eye. This non sequitor is why both sides of any issue need to question their own motives and ethics, and encourage leaders in relevant fields to devote their attention to these challenges. In the end, each participant brings his or her individual background and responses to bear on the shifting ground of a history that has linked the United States and Iraq; a history that is still being written.

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[1] All quotations taken from the symposium.

[2] That averages out to Bilal being shot at about once every 40 seconds for a one month time period. However, the first half of the month was much less than this, and many times in the latter half of the month shots were being fired almost continually for hours on end.

Videos of the presentations from the Art and War in Iraq symposium can be viewed here.

Ground Control to Major Gong: On the Ontology of Art and the Chinese Space Race

Jason Waite, Curatorial Fellow, Whitney Museum of American Art Independent Study Program

In the text Art and Space, Heidegger questions the ontological relationship of what can be seen today as sculpture/installation and the ‘technical scientific’ realm of space. Does the Newtonian absolute space subsume all, homogenizing interior and exterior to form a singular objective space in order to provide a monolithic grounding for modernity? If certain tendencies of modernity are set on the domination of space, then Heidegger argues that art is concerned with place. As opposed to the enclosure and delimiting of space, art opens up a site for affinities to freely gather, ‘making-room’ for the assembly of objects and ideas to linger. It is art that can provide a place for other places to inhabit, and open up a site of consideration and critique. This site of free gathering is in stark contrast the colonization ideology in space.

“The future space station China is trying to build might be compared to a spacious villa,” remarked the Chinese first astronaut, Yang Liwei. This celestial floating mansion, the ultimate national status symbol, is an extension of the rein of sovereignty into the exclusive neighborhood of space. Here, space is restricted and enclosed with military precision. This insular capsule encircling in the sky – the traditional location of authority in China – can be seen as representative of aspirational lifestyles as well as the valorization of capital, a stellar luxury item that spatializes the stratospheric inequity – the distance between the majority of the population and the precipitous rise of the elite few.

Souvenir postage stamp commemorating the docking of the Shenzhou 9 manned spacecraft with the Tiangong 1 orbital Laboratory

An inequality that is further marked by the destructive creation of the space station which requires the launching of numerous booster rockets to put the station in orbit and then service it. These large disposable missiles, fired over mainland China, come crashing back down destroying homes, apartments and crops – a cosmic rain of terror – that demolishes terrestrial abodes to make way for a pied-à-ciel far from the rabble on the ground.

Detritus of the Chang’e II rocket in rural China, 2010.

In the center of the David Winton Bell Gallery, a large model of the Chinese space station, Tiangong 1, silently rotates. Transformed by the artist Jin Shan into a farcical fetish object – a rotating disco-ball – whose mirrored sides question the superficial nature of this disarmed accoutrement of power. Is the party celebrating its launch or imagined crash? Or rather a spectacle for the sake of spectacle? An inversion of the existing logic of power, folding it back in on itself to expose its vapid superstructure.

My dad is Li Gang! (2012) by Jin Shan. Photograph by Shane Photography.

The intensity of reflected light slowly melts the molded glue tricycle that hovers suspended above the space station while the surrounding false walls bear the imprints of the hands of those who labor with tricycles in Shanghai to collect refuse for recycling. A precarious position that provides the matera prima for the ‘world’s factory’, the sprawling industrial system that is the economic engine which makes possible the space station. Despite this link in the cycle of production the positions of the recycler and the means of production are separated by the invisible veil of corruption alluded to in the title My Dad is Li Gang!, the scandal involving a young member of the elite who drove over two students with impunity, proclaiming his family ties as a societal carte blanche. The irreconcilability of the positions of power and its vulnerable absence, demarcates a potentially parallax positioning, one that requires a clearing of the ground in order to re-establish a more equitable equilibrium.

It is here that the satire of Jin Shan is able to provide a place to dismantle ideological apparatus and supplant it with a Deleuzian patchwork of places – a heterogenous assembly of people, narratives and ideas that offers the possibility of not only critique but a place to come together and rearrange. A reorientation of strategies to face the bewildering expanse of power and capital. It is perhaps the subtle shift of focus from space to place that offers a means of making-room for more than what is given. An opening appears, for a larger recognition that the present economic engine is coming back down from orbit and that this crash might not just be destructive, but also produce a new framework for relations in its wake.

Zimoun – a live performance

Mark Cetilia, PhD Student, Department of Music

On Saturday,  February 4, Zimoun, the Swiss sound artist, came to Brown University’s List Art Center to give a performance in conjunction with the exhibition Nostalgia Machines at the David Winton Bell Gallery. Most readers will be familiar with Zimoun through his installations, which involve simple systems that exhibit incredible complexity through minute variations between multiple, seemingly identical, physical objects. These installations most commonly include prepared industrial-grade DC motors (of which Zimoun swept up a hefty stock when a Swiss manufacturer went out of business) in conjunction with other materials such as cotton balls, steel wire, and cardboard boxes. However, Zimoun also has a long history with experimental music-making. In 2003, Zimoun and graphic designer Marc Beekhuis founded Leeraum, a label and “networking hub” for artists who “explore forms and structures based on reductive principles and careful yet radical use of materials.” Since then, Leeraum has released recordings by artists such as Dale Lloyd, Richard Garet, Kenneth Kirschner, Mise en Scene, and numerous works by Zimoun himself. It is not often that one gets a chance to see Zimoun perform in the States, so I was very curious to experience his work first-hand.

His performance at the List Art Center was comprised of two pieces. The first featured a handful of DC motors, each of which was connected to a thin steel wire hosting a ping pong ball, and its speed varied using a custom control surface. The DC motor assemblies were mounted atop a single cardboard box, and as the motors rotated, the ping pong balls struck the box, which acted as a resonant chamber. The resulting sounds were then amplified via a number of contact microphones and then sent to a small mixing board, giving Zimoun the ability to change the equalization parameters for each microphone and adjust the overall contour of the piece. As in his installation work, the simplicity of the system allowed for complex results ranging from complex rhythmic patterns to dense textural material. His presence on stage was not performative; instead, he acted as a guide through the potential sound worlds created by his mechanical devices. Earlier in the day, Zimoun gave an informal talk about his work; during the talk, he spoke in depth about his documentation process, which involves a number of camera angles and microphones combined with careful equalization, mixing and editing. In a way, this piece served as real-time documentation of a miniature sound installation, allowing the audience entry from different vantage points which slowly shifted over time.

The second piece was a quadraphonic recording presented in complete darkness, and seemed to be comprised of manipulated recordings taken from his installation works. Though we had all been forewarned, the sudden darkness at the beginning of the performance took everyone somewhat off-guard. As the piece began, sounds of machinery in the distance mixed with the rustling and fumbling about of audience members as they gradually adjusted to their new environment. Eventually, everyone settled into the darkness and a new phase began, in which all in attendance were given over completely to listening. By stripping away the visual information, and thus the ability of the audience to see the “source” of the sounds they were experiencing, more intent focus was given to the sounds themselves. As in the first performance of the evening, this piece was not built on a recognizable narrative structure or compositional arc, but instead seemed to be centered around creating an environment for the audience to inhabit, a world where tiny machines roam the earth freely without need for light or human intervention.

“We Propose” by Alexander Lembersky

Ian Alden Russell, Curator, David Winton Bell Gallery

Alexander Lembersky, "We Propose" (1988), silkscreen. (B95 97.48)

Late last week, I was preparing for a class visit by Stefan Gunn’s printing making and graphic arts students in the Brown Visual Art Department. Stefan was interested in inspiring his students with strong examples of formal imagery and typographic experimentation in the medium of print, and after a brief consultation of the Bell Gallery’s collections, we decided that the Bell Gallery’s lesser known collection of recent Soviet posters would be a unique body of works to show.

In this collection there is a total of approximately 280 posters from the Soviet Union produced between the late 1970s and late 1980s, with many strong examples of large-scale silkscreen prints. The subjects of the posters range from political issues to arts and cultural marketing to campaigns for social issues, and taken together constituted a remarkable show at the Bell Gallery in 1988 entitled “The Contemporary Soviet Poster.”

The example above is a silkscreen print by Alexander Lembersky – entitled “We Propose.” In the image, we see a bold, monochrome bomb being cut in two by a two-man saw created by the flags of the United States of America and the Soviet Union. Lembersky’s print is one of a discreet group within this poster collection that features anti-nuclear propaganda. A bold statement in favor of nuclear disarmament, Lembersky’s poster utilizes the structures and styles of formalist and constructivist propaganda inservice of a distinctly anti-Cold War message – an aspiration for a trans-national partnership between the United States and the Soviet Union in the deescalation of the nuclear arms race.

The machine as seen

Domenico Quaranta, Contemporary art critic and curator

Karl Gunnar Pontus Hultén 1968 The machine as seen at the end of the mechanical age. Museum of Modern Art, New York.

Some time ago I came up with the ambitious (let’s say crazy?) idea to work on a follow-up to Pontus Hulten’s seminal exhibition The Machine as Seen at the End of the Mechanical Age (1968). It should be called, of course, The Machine as Seen at the Beginning of the Information Age. The need for such an upgrade is so obvious that I won’t even try to demonstrate it here. Half a century later, the process prophetically announced by Hulten in the Sixties has completed. We now live in a Post Fordist society, and if a young Charlie Chaplin would like to depict today’s alienation and shoot Modern Times again, he should choose a completely different set. Probably a call center, or a Chinese gold farm.

Role playing game "gold farmers" in China.

We still have machines, but most of them are computer-operated, and rely on software and algorithms. We still love them, because we have been told to love them and because of the love for big, strong things we inherited from our childhood. When my 3 years old toddler sees my laptop, he immediately urges me to show him garbage trucks videos on Youtube; but he’s more familiar with laptops than with garbage trucks, and he will most likely work with the first than with the latter. This turn in society, and this evolution of the machine along the last decades, showed up in art practice in many ways, and I’m sure it would be great to see an exhibition talking about it.

This project is still a secret wish (well, not so secret anymore), but it came to my mind when I visited Nostalgia Machines, the exhibition curated by Maya Allison for the David Winton Bell Gallery. Nostalgia is of course a major feeling in our current relationship with machines. When we grow up, the childish love I described turns into nostalgia. We miss what we loved when we were children. We miss mechanisms we can understand, design, build and repair, because we are surrounded by mechanisms we can’t understand, design, build and repair. We miss an age in which we had the time to perceive novelties as such, be amazed by them, and slowly adapt to them, because we live in an age in which things become old in a day. We miss machines that looked like machines, with their wires and gears, because we live in an age in which machines look like everything else but what they actually are. Sometimes they look like humans, and they are frightening.

An example of the "uncanny valley" of robotic engineering.

And yet, surprisingly enough, Nostalgia Machines is not a nostalgic exhibition. The machines on show may trigger nostalgia thanks to their aesthetics, to the way they display their inner mechanism and working processes. They often make us think about time, deconstructing and reconstructing history (Jasper Rigole), reverting processes (Jonathan Schipper), emulating (Zimoun) or reproducing them (Gregory Witt, Meredith Pingree). But they don’t look back to a specific moment in the history of machines. They don’t use obsolete machinery saved from the rubbish dump, quite the contrary. They are automata that don’t need any input from the spectator. They use contemporary technologies – processors, webcams, Arduinos – and materials. Nostalgia Machines is the proof that we may miss the homeland – whatever it is – but also that the trip (nostos in Greek) is worthwhile.

"Odysseus und Kalypso" by Arnold Böcklin (1883), oil on canvas.

On Being OUTNUMBERED

Prof. Ed Osborn, Visual Arts Department

Jasper Rigole, Outnumbered, a brief history of imposture, 2009. Camera, photograph, computer, robotics, projection. Courtesy of the artist.

Any resemblance to persons living or dead is purely coincidental.  

Jasper Rigole’s OUTNUMBERED, a brief history of imposture (2009) takes this disclaimer and makes it both a starting and end point for the experience of photographic and documentary experience.  The phrase functions as an amen to any work of fiction (purported or otherwise): this is where disbelief ends its suspension and reality resumes. You laughed, you cried, just don’t call a lawyer.  The disclaimer exists because there is a chance that a legitimate claim of belief in resemblance could be made; it is a recognition of the existence and agency of the viewer.  It recognizes that the strength of the narrative it shields derives its power in part from the experiences we bring to it and our investment in it.

OUTNUMBERED is built around a quick illusion and revelation. A video projection of what appears to be a documentary, complete with British-accented narration and slow scanning of an old group portrait photo, occupies one space. In an adjacent space the video is shown to be derived from an elaborate construction in which a computerized camera glides across the face of an “historic” panoramic photograph.  The wide portrait image was made by a panoramic camera whose lens and iris pivoted horizontally across the scene and negative simultaneously.  We see not one moment in time, though it looks that way, but instead the several seconds it took for the camera to scan the courtyard. Even before Rigole got to it, the image is not what it appears to be. The chipcam that moves across the photograph’s face appears to reanimate it, but it was an unstill image to begin with. It used to be said that the camera never lies (that has long been an open question), but certainly here it never lies still.

Because the piece shows its hand almost instantly, it rapidly runs through the nominal questions any work of mediated experience might raise: What is it? What is it doing? How is it done? Is it for real?  That the piece makes no pretense of hiding the answer to this last question leaves several larger ones in its place: Are any images for real? How can they be trusted? How can we be trusted with them?

Looking at Rigole’s image-producing contraption, we seem to be standing in the place of the man behind the curtain, the place where the illusion is controlled.  But the reason the man was hidden was that he had an illusion to control, and in OUTNUMBERED we have neither illusion nor control: we are left with no narrative space – fictional or otherwise – and without it no agency of viewership.  We also have no place to hide from the fact that these images have no reliability even in fiction. There is no way to invest ourselves in the narratives here, even knowing that they are utterly fictional: they are so infinitely variable that any meaningful ordering of them depends solely on us, and the longer we look at the work the more undependable we become.

Before this piece we are outnumbered, our stories are outnumbered, our history is outnumbered.  Our objections would be outnumbered, except that there is nothing to which to object, least of all the object that spells all this out in flat detail. And this is the point. Objection needs veracity in order to exist, and this is precisely what OUTNUMBERED withdraws from us.  Not just the truth of the spoken narrative, which is revealed quickly to have no basis in anything beyond its own database, but more critically the chance to measure ourselves in relation to it. Once the construction of the piece is revealed, the question about whether its narratives are real or not ceases to matter.  And this cessation leaves a disquiet that easily settles over any constructed image, documentary ones most especially. I spent extended time with the piece on several occasions, and while it is fascinating to experience firsthand, even repeatedly, I know nothing more about the world after having seen this work than I did before. I probably know less.  This experience requires no disclaimer: nothing to believe here, folks, now move along.

“The Three Trees” by Rembrandt van Rijn

Jaclyn Melicharek, Class of 2012, Human Biology

Rembrandt van Rijn, "The Three Trees" (1643), drypoint etching.

One artist. Two colors. Three trees. At first glance, what seems like a simple country landscape soon becomes a natural inspiration, a sketch of the world. Rembrandt Van Rijn’s The Three Trees renders contradiction in the most detailed of etchings. One is immediately drawn to the central force of nature – the scratched wood bark, the haphazardly fine branches, the carefully arranged yet appropriately scattered billow of leaves. The three trees dominate.

A man fishes in the left-hand corner, almost lost in the shadow of darkness, the impending clouds. In the background, a farmer tends to his fields, an artist sketches on the hillside, a traveler walks alongside his wagon. A windmill turns, a bird flies. Light sweeps from the right, illuminating the facing leaves and letting the ground shine amongst the shadows. Bushes overpower the foreground, as clouds creep across the still, silent sky. An everyday scene, or a portrayal of man’s vulnerability to the overwhelming strength of nature?

Collectively, Rembrandt’s work demonstrates themes of contradiction: sight versus touch or vision versus knowledge. But does every work of art need a conflict, a story, a reason? One can almost always be found. The Three Trees – a representation of religious significance? A depiction of the force of nature? Or the capture of a moment in time? Any given day, to any viewer, it can be one, all, or something else entirely. Each requires a different engagement, a new perspective, an analysis of every etched line. Sit under a tree and think about it – after all, there are three to choose from.