JOSH AZZARELLA
UNTITLED # 13 (AHSF), 2006, UNTITLED # 14 (LYNNDIE), 2006
UNTITLED # 23 (LYNNDIED), 2006, UNTITLED # 24 (GREEN GLOVES),
ARCHIVAL DIGITAL C-PRINT, EDITION OF 7 + 3AP. 20” X 30”
COURTESY THE ARTIST + DCKT CONTEMPORARY
Visual representation of the war can be characterized as being divided between “spectacular visibility and near invisibility” — of keeping some images present in the memory and by consigning others to obscurity and oblivion. The work of Josh Azzarella begins with this examination of collective memory and the question of iconicity. What characteristics mark an image as iconic and keep it in the public mind as an emblem of an era? Who or what entity deems an image iconic? Azzarella scans the media and Internet for such images and then subverts their power by painstakingly erasing their volatile content and offering a glimpse of trauma undone: the planes fly by and the Twin Towers don’t fall; Lyndie England poses in an empty hallway in the Abu–Ghraib prison, pointing at nothing; a guard looks into the face of his digital camera next to an empty box. While simultaneously positing a sanitized alternative, the works call into question the influence that these images — disseminated by the mass media and replayed ad nauseum — have in constructing a historical narrative and their subsequent imprint on our collective memory. By manipulating the images of these climactic moments and damaging evidence, Azzarella’s work also brings into question the production and censorship of images in the coverage of war.
DANIEL BEJAR, RULES OF JIHAD, 2007
MIXED MEDIA MONOPRINT, 24” X 17”
COURTESY OF THE ARTIST
As an artist working in multimedia today, my career began in illustration and these images
belong to a body of work that exists parallel to my multimedia practice. I see these prints as visual commentary on global, political, and economic current events using the language of metaphor through a visually graphic manner. Influenced by WWII propaganda posters of the Nazis, Russians, as well as posters of the Cuban Revolution, these images can be found in the pages of the New York Times, Time, Newsweek, Playboy, and Rolling Stone illustrating the events of our day.
WILLIAM BETTS, MOTEL ROOM, 2007
ACRYLIC ON CANVAS, 40” X 108”
COURTESY OF THE ARTIST +
MARGARET THATCHER PROJECTS, NEW YORK
The dislocation of presence tied to knowledge finds its correlative in the ubiquity of surveillance camera: without agent or audience, cameras roll and a 24/7 profusion of images are recorded and stored. Painting for an age of surveillance and threat, William Betts has based his work on images taken from surveillance videos (some found, others staged). Because of their context, a sense of the ominous pervades these cold, dispassionate scenes. Bett’s method of painting mimics the impersonal nature of surveillance technology. Though they seem at first like pointillist marks, Betts actually uses computer controlled linear motion technology to apply the paint, experimenting with, “how far back from the process you can stand and still make a painting.” Tens of thousand paint drips are thus applied mechanically to underlying grids implying that the paintings, like the video footage, could be produced without end.
THE BLUE NOSES, CHECHEN MARILYN, 2005
C-PRINT 55” X 39”
In a “deadly funny” updating of an American icon, Marilyn Monroe is reborn as Chechen Marilyn, (2005) in the hands of the Siberian collective known as Blue Noses (Vyacheslav Mizin and Alexander Shaburov). The famous image of Monroe standing above a subway grate, her dress blown up above her waist, is transformed into a suicide–bomber in a burqa, her skirt uplifted to reveal a battery of grenades. The famous line “Isn’t it delicious?” which accompanied Monroe’s pose in The Seven Year Itch, inflects Blue Nose’s terroristic avatar and suggests that this is the new prototype for what has come to be termed (by CNN) “celebrity terrorism.”
JAKE CHAPMAN + DINO CHAPMAN, UNTITLED,
FROM DISASTERS OF WAR PORTFOLIO, 1999
ETCHING 5 7/16”; X 6 1/2”
COURTESY OF THE YALE CENTER FOR BRITISH ART
The continuity of horror and the depths to which humanity can succumb during war is underscored by the Jake and Dinos Chapman’s reworked or, in their terms, “rectified” renderings of Goya’s The Disasters of War which recorded the violent brutalities surrounding the Peninsula War of 1808–1814 when Napoleonic troops invaded Spain. In 1999 the Chapman’s published The Disasters of War, a book of eighty–three hand–painted etchings based on Goya’s series. Then in 2003 with Insult to Injury, the artists actually drew over a set of Goya’s etchings with hand–painted cartoon heads and smiling skeletons enacting the ultimate of artistic taboos through the desecration of a canonical work. While the Chapman’s claim that their work is not political, the despoliation of an original forces us to question the viability or efficacy of artistic statements against war. Unlike Goya, who showed the war from a perspective of horror and empathy for the mutilated and abused victims (on both sides), the Chapman’s show war from a variety of angles, some callous, some perhaps cynical and still others childish. These transgressive interventions unquestionably challenge the boundaries of taste and of establishment, but do they subvert the horror which the originals evoked by their sardonic humor?
ZOYA CHERKASSKY, JEWISH TERRORISTS
(FANNY KAPLAN AND HERSCHEL GRYNSZPAN), 2002
CERAMIC FIGURINES, EACH 25”
COURTESY OF THE JEWISH MUSEUM, NEW YORK
Zoya Cherkassky’s Jewish Terrorists (Fanny Kaplan and Herschel Grynszpan) (2002), shows porcelain figurines of two tragic Jewish terrorists pointing. On August 30, 1918, Vladimir Ilyich Lenin was speaking at a Moscow factory. As he left the building and before he entered his car, Fanny Kaplan, a Russian revolutionary and descendant of a Jewish family, called out to him. When he turned towards her, she fired three shots. When it became clear that Kaplan would not implicate other political opponents of Lenin, she was shot on September 3. On November 7, 1938 17–year–old Herschel Grynszpan walked into the German Embassy in Paris and shot Third Secretary, Ernst von Rath, to avenge the brutal abduction of Jewish Poles from Germany, among them, his parents. For the Nazis the shooting supplied the pretext for massive pogroms launched against Jews in Germany, Austria and the Sudetenland — the Kristallnacht, the Night of Broken Glass. In the next 24 hours Nazi storm troopers along with members of the SS and Hitler Youth beat and murdered Jews, broke into and wrecked Jewish homes, brutalized Jewish women and children, destroyed synagogues, hospitals and schools and looted Jewish businesses. 30,000 Jews were sent to concentration camps. Shown in Tel Aviv during one of the most deadly years of the Second Intifada — when Palestinian organizations where sending suicide bombers to Israeli towns, and the Israeli military re–occupied refugee camps and initiated targeted killings in Gaza and the West Bank, Cherkassky’s Fanny and Herschel stood accusing.
In the summer of 2007, just as I arrived to Beirut, fighting in Tripoli, a city in northern Lebanon broke out. This time it was different; the conflict escalated and for the first time random car bombings took place; a different sense of terror took over, leaving everyone in a cautious state of being; suspended in uncertainty, a strange fear not easy to define but palpable only to sight.
Adrenaline makes you experience things differently, every sense goes into high gear; time slows down, colors have an enhanced significance; but above all, sounds become an experience on their own, bells announcing mass, a call for prayer reverberates all around, all mixed and underlined by a soft lament, a silent cry.
JEANETTE DOYLE, ST. PATRICK’S DAY, 2007
OIL PAINT AND LACQUER ON 3 TELEVISIONS WITH
DIGITAL STILL IMAGE AND DIGITAL VIDEO LOOP ON
ORIGINAL PACKAGING, DIMENSIONS VARIABLE
COURTESY OF THE ARTIST
In a triptych of three television sets, Jeanette Doyle’s St. Patrick’s Day conjures thoughts of surveillance and the omnipresent threat of violence and militarism that mar an otherwise benign public gathering. On each screen, Doyle has painted an image of a “cop” sticking out his tongue taken (from a frame of video of the 2006 Saint Patrick’s Day parade in New York). At center, he presides over footage of the close of the 2007 parade as seen across from the entrance to the Metropolitan Museum of Art while the flanking screens play DVDs of solid green and blue. The work subtly questions the slippage between participating in the construction of a national identity and the rise of authoritarianism and xenophobia.
HARUN FAROCKI, WAR AT A DISTANCE, 2003
58 MIN. COURTESY OF THE ARTIST +
GREENE NAFTALI GALLERY, NEW YORK
In his video, War at a Distance (2003), Farocki examined State Terror’s internal and external manifestations through footage produced by “smart bombs” and surveillance cameras. In this piece, automated assembly–line footage, traffic control computer models, security cameras, aerial photography and the smart bomb’s self–documentation, all manifest the new form of non–human image–making of person–less cameras. Opening the piece with an actual aerial footage of a bombing in the First Gulf War, the viewer encounters an image of annihilation that is in itself annihilated — no figure, perspective, scale referencing or color are present to help us with a possible narrative, context, time or location. No humans, no story, no drama, no war. All we are left with are stains and grids. Like the production process, warfare has been abstracted and with it, the images it produces. Coining the term “Suicide cameras” in regards to “smart bombs” armed with recording devices, Farocki is personalizing this otherwise anonymous form of warfare.
COCO FUSCO, OPERATION ATROPOS, 2006
VIDEO, 59 MIN
COURTESY OF THE ARTIST + THE PROJECT GALLERY
As much as our visual culture is intent on avoidance of the “consciousness of war,” it can be argued that there is a very deliberate sublimation of issues of humiliation and horror into a sham spectacle of the real. The ironic, though perhaps not accidental, rise in popularity of the Reality Show genre – where the humiliation or “betrayals” of the perceived weakest member and “sudden death” scenarios are intrinsic to the entertainment value – serves to normalize standards of behavior that would have been inconceivable in popular culture until recently. Coco Fusco enlists this reality show ethic in Operation Atropos (2007). “… I decided to take an extended trip into the fantasy world of military interrogation…To make sense of the ways that torture was being normalized in my own culture, I thought I needed to get a sense of how American interrogators were trained to see what they do as necessary and just. My sense was that they learn through the discipline of military training, while the rest of us are coaxed to acceptance through the pleasures of viewing.”
Accordingly, Fusco and several colleagues took a course at the Prisoner of War Interrogation Resistance Program run by a private concern called Team Delta, based in Philadelphia. The program and its techniques, recorded in Operation Atropos,, comprised of a grueling four–day immersion in methods of physical and mental persuasion, with the participants simulating the experience of being both captive and captor. While the viewer knows (as in Reality TV) that this is a controlled situation, the fiction versus reality aspect of the video becomes increasingly confused. The strip searches, the orange coveralls the women are made to wear, their heads and faces covered with blackout hoods, the unremitting images of them being pushed, jabbed at, forced to their knees and made to perform meaningless repetitive tasks by the (male) interrogation team seems increasingly horrific and emotionally more real than the “fictive” situation would imply.
JOHAN GRIMONPREZ, DIAL H–I–S–T–0–R–Y, 1997
VIDEO, 01:08:00 MIN
COURTESY OF THE ARTIST + SEAN KELLY GALLERY
Direct footage of airplane hijackings in the 1960s and 1970s provides the guiding visual thread of Johan Grimonprez’s dial H–I–S–T–0–R–Y, (1997). Photographic, electronic, and digital images, from news reports, science fiction films, found footage, and reconstituted scenes filmed by the artist are fused to highlight the value of the spectacular in our catastrophe culture. Grimonprez’s film presents the color saturated image as the essence of the portrayal of Terror. While the footage, true to the rhetoric of liberation that the hijackers used, relies on Marxist–Leninist iconography, the piece examines Terror as a format made for TV. Color and sound, violence and videotaping, young people and explosives, tourism and live broadcast — all constitute this spectacle of Terror. In his video, War at a Distance (2003), Harun Farocki examined State Terror’s internal and external manifestations through footage produced by “smart bombs” and surveillance cameras. In this piece, automated assembly–line footage, traffic control computer models, security cameras, aerial photography and smart bomb’s self–documentation, all manifest the new form of non–human image–making of person–less cameras. Opening the piece with an actual aerial footage of a bombing in the First Gulf War, the viewer encounters an image of annihilation that is in itself annihilated — no figure, perspective, scale referencing or color are present to help us with a possible narrative, context, time or location. No humans, no story, no drama, no war. All we are left with are stains and grids.
KENT HENRICKSEN, I’M TURNING INTO AN ANIMAL, 2006
EMBROIDERY THREAD AND GOLD LEAF ON SILK, 47” X 62”
COURTESY OF THE ARTIST + JOHN CONNELLY PRESENTS
The image of the hood which Coco Fusco identified as one of the “cultural icons of the global left,” used to block both speech and sight and which “mirrors the hood–as–mask that is typically worn by torturers to conceal their identity from the public,” features prominently in Kent Henricksen’s “paintings without paint.” In a manner akin to Kara Walker, Henrickson enacts a subverted version of the past in his interventions on “genteel” decorative accoutrements such as embroidered textiles and wallpapers. The aesthetic of repetition inherent to these mediums (the repeat) are connected to patterns of behavior which repeat from past to present, with particular emphasis on the human capacity for cruelty. Henricksen intrudes on these images of the haute bourgeoisie at play in the countryside with a dark narrative that unravels as the spectator is drawn into the surface action of the work. He embroiders masks and hoods onto the characters, an image originally inspired by the suicide bombers of the Tamil Tigers of Sri Lanka who would parade around promoting their struggle for independence: “They masked themselves as they were demonstrating their will to die for a cause.”
Henricksen’s latest work utilizes historical images drawn from the American Revolution and Civil War, scanned and silk–screened onto canvas, as the new ground for his interventions. These prints originally functioned much as photographs do today in war reportage, the “meaning” underscored by captions. In The rope around us is getting tighter and tighter (2006) and I’m turning into an animal waiting to die (2006), images of both capture and carnage are accompanied by texts from the diary of a 14 year old Polish girl, Rutka Laskier who was living in a Jewish ghetto in Nazi–occupied Poland. (Rutka died during the war, but told a friend where she had hidden the diary, which only came to light in 2006). The combination of two disparate events in image and text creates a new reality, an experience that is both timeless and out of time. But these new paradigms reflect the never– ending human desire for dominance and the lack of limits that we self–impose pursuing that goal.
JENNY HOLZER, HAND PRINTS GREEN WHITE, 2006
OIL ON LINEN, 4 ELEMENTS, 58” X 176” X 1.5”
COURTESY OF THE ARTIST + CHEIM & READ, NEW YORK
The black stain of invisibility spreads over the canvases of Jenny Holzer’s “Rendition Paintings.” Damning reports (recently made available under the Freedom of Information Act) that document the abuses of power and particularly the use of officially sanctioned torture in Iraq, Afghanistan and Guantánamo Bay, are silk–screened onto large canvases complete with the censor’s ink which blots out names and other sensitive material sometimes to the point of illegibility. The paintings serve, as Roberta Smith commented in a review on the work, to “Hang those dirty linens in public.”
Holzer’s movement to painting from her more signature LED and engraved monument works to make visible these damning documents allows for that abstraction, that blurring or erasure of the pictorial that is essential to the apparatus of state terror. These works strikingly references the entanglements of aesthetic form and political formations and deformations of state control. Whether through fluorescent staining or marks and grids made by the censor which create an elaborate pattern across the document, these paintings play on visibility and its obverse, and work as a powerful exposure of the politics of censorship and the normalization of the obscene.
JON KESSLER, READY TO DIE, 2008
MIXED MEDIA WITH CAMERAS, MONITOR
LIGHTS + MOTORS 72” X 57” X 105”
COURTESY OF THE ARTIST + ARNDT & PARTNER, BERLIN
The omnipresence of surveillance and the connection between image production and representations of warfare are central to the work of Jon Kessler. Kessler’s work utilizes found images of politics, war, advertising, fashion magazines and reality television shows and turns them back on themselves to both undermine their seduction and to link the apparatus of terror/war and consumerism. These disparate images, together with masks and ersatz action figures, are combined into a network of kinetic sculptures, each of which incorporates surveillance cameras acting in tandem with the sculpture’s movements to create video imagery occurring in real time. All of the parts used in the sculpture – wires, gears, cameras, motors etc., are in plain view. Ready To Die (2008) is one such elaborate image–production machine whose miniature surveillance cameras scan postcards of airplanes and airports (one being Munich), together with rotating segments from the type of emergency procedure folders found tucked into the pockets of airline seats. These images are then transmitted to both the GPS “screen” of a dashboard made from an SUV advertisement and a monitor external to the structure. The cameras from time to time capture viewers in the dizzying span over the rotating images suggesting their participation in the spectacle of a plummeting airplane.
In these works, the mechanism of events caused by the kinetic parts is inseparable from the production of images. As Kessler puts it “the spectacle and the event are symbiotic — you can’t have one without the other.”20 The viewer feels compelled to understand and trace the connections between the monitors and the image–producing machine, to connect the dots, to try to trace and anticipate the machine’s next move, stay one step ahead. Putting this in a political context, one could call this response a kind of post 9/11 paranoia, a fixation with image, or what has been dubbed the CNN effect. Kessler remarks that viewers of the work are more comfortable with the images on the monitor than with the machine and it’s “real” events, even though the monitors, particularly through scale, distort the reality. Kessler adds: “in 9/11 people could see the towers collapsing from their apartment windows but found it much more real to watch it unfolding on TV.”
FRANSJE KILLAARS, FIGURES, 2008
TEXTILE AND MANNEQUIN INSTALLATION,
DIMENSIONS VARIABLE
COURTESY OF THE ARTIST +
DE EXPEDITIE GALLERY, AMSTERDAM
With camouflage patterning entering daily “civilian” use in fashion and design, we are witnessing the migration of notions of warfare and political violence to our daily practices. In Dutch artist Fransje Killaars‘s Figures, 2006, abstract and camouflage patterns are juxtaposed with human scale in the form of mannequins covered and draped with textiles, some in the manner of a chador or burqa, while others are draped, cape like, from the shoulders. In a political reality of Fundamentalists culture–wars on the veiling of women in the Netherlands, Killaars’s work insists on a formalistic interpretation, focusing on the material–oriented shapes and contours of the fabrics with their glowing colors. Her installations create a stunning simultaneous effect of presence and silence, tapestry and veiling, decapitation and brightly colored grids which cause a formalistic and associative push–pull between aesthetics and social reality.
YITZIK LIVNEH, (FROM THE DYING SOLDIERS SERIES) 2006
DS2 47.2” X 49.2&”, OIL ON CANVAS
COURTESY OF THE ARTIST +
SOMMER CONTEMPORARY ART, TEL AVIV
The use of abstraction as technological metaphor also lies at the heart of the resurgence of the camouflage motif in much contemporary artwork. Again, Warhol’s acrylic camouflage paintings from the mid 1980s have proved prophetic. Yitzik Livneh’s close up renderings of dying soldiers pictured in camouflage–like monotone color scales, combine the essential characteristics of the paradigm of visibility and extreme invisibility. The subject is initially “hidden” from view in a seductive surface, the rich color fields playing — as the camouflage allows — on tonalities of green, grey, purple, pink and orange. Drawn into this surface of paint, the viewer experiences a shock of recognition as a face, contorted in the agony of death, becomes apparent. The source of the image for the dead soldiers were figures sculpted by the 17th century sculptor, Andreas Schluter [1659–1714]. For Livneh, “They were like snapshots taken in a battlefield – photos carved in stone, frozen on the instant of death. Death is sudden, the mouth opens with pain and surprise.” What struck Livneh about the work of Schluter was his attempt to capture not just the traditional heroic dead soldier but the terror and essentially arcane nature of the moment of death. “Death is not an image. It cannot be described. Death masks look like sleeping faces, calm and peaceful. The urge to describe the indescribable may result in kitsch and pornography.”21 Livneh chose to paint “his”soldiers in a flat abstract manner to delay the moment of recognition. What is camouflaged here, the artist reminds us, is death itself.
BJØRN MELHUS, DEADLY STORMS 333, 2008
9 CHANNEL VIDEO INSTALLATION, 7:04 MIN. LOOP
Courtesy GALERIE ANITA BECKERS, FRANKFURT AM MAIN
DEADLY STORMS is based on appropriated audio footage from the US American news network FOX NEWS. During the last 10 years Rupert Murdoch’s FOX NEWS became one of the most powerful and influential news networks in the United States. Claiming to be “fair and balanced”, the over designed propaganda machine creates an atmosphere of permanent alert and fear. DEADLY STORMS tries to focus on the overall tone, the manipulative carrier of the content, rather than on the grotesque political content itself. In DEADLY STORMS, nine identical figures, which have been separated and arranged into three triptychs (each consisting of three vertical plasma screens), repeat phrases and statements of alert and threat as well as what appears to be seemingly happy journalism. The repetitive elements and structures are set to a composition of rhythms which exercise a hypnotic power on the viewer that, together with the utterances and emotionally charged language, serve the traditional rhetorical strategy of enchantment and persuasion. The gaze directed out of the picture is suggestive of a direct appeal and refers to composited framed “talking heads” in news broadcast, who while reporting the news, are always addressing the viewer as if having a one–on–one conversation. The psychological effect of the image is intensified in Melhus’ work by the rhythmic and often melodic articulation of the text, which is spoken synchronically and with varied vocal emphasis.
NAEEM MOHAIEMEN, RED ANT MOTHERHOOD, 2008
PHOTOGRAPHS AND TEXT, 16” X 24”
COURTESY OF THE ARTIST
Naeem Mohaiemen looks to history as a lens through which to make sense of the present for, he believes, the accelerated speed of events can be overwhelming to a politically engaged artist:
I started feeling like a hamster on a wheel. There was something soul–deadening about always responding to the news. Because so much of that project was constantly in reactive mode and headline driven, it was not just activist art interventions, it started becoming emotionally exhausting. Every day there would be a fresh outrage in the New York Times (or the Times’ under–reporting itself would be the outrage) and you would feel compelled to respond through your work. It eventually crowded out any space for contemplation. Partially as a reaction to that I started retreating further into history––– to find a quiet space where I could find a vantage point to consider confrontation and the revolution impulse.29
Red Ant Motherhood, Meet Starfish Nation (2007) is part of a series in which Mohaiemen investigates historical sites of death. In this triptych, Mohaiemen contemplates the mass graves of the 22 members of the Sheikh Mujib family (Mujib was the founding leader of Bangladesh) killed in the 1975 military coup that overthrew the elected quasi–socialist Mujib government. The third panel quotes text from Lawrence Lifschultz’s report on alleged CIA involvement in the coup. These warm, rusty red images were captured as Mohaiemen sat all day by the graves, “through a (surprisingly) uneventful Friday. No visitors came: no mourners, no politicians. Only some insects (soldier ants) and the gardener who waters the grave sites.” Part of the Mohaiemen’s motivation here is to explore what he feels is the almost fetishistic interest in excavating a “foreign” connection to events, a grand theory of conspiracy that is layered onto even the most dramatic historical moments. “Everybody just “knows” the link exists, no hard evidence needed. Smoking guns are assumed.”
CLAUDE MOLLER, IF VIETNAM WERE NOW, 2004
SCREENPRINT ON PAPER, 17.5” X 23”
COURTESY OF THE ARTIST
The work of Claude Moller, a San Francisco–based activist/street artist who has been making murals, stencils and screen prints since the early 1990’s also begins in the critique of a mass media whose content seems to be only serving the interests of a powerful few. The now iconic image from the Vietnam era of a Saigon police chief killing a Viet Cong prisoner during the Tet offensive in 1968, became emblematic of the cruelty of the American and South Vietnamese side during the war.25 But, Moller suggests in If Vietnam were Now (2004), that if Vietnam were now, such an image would be subject to much greater censorship in the current climate and all you would see would be a soldier’s face, while the gun and his victim would be cropped from the scene.
RICHARD MOSSE, KILLCAM, 2008
HD VIDEO AND YOUTUBE DOWNLOADS
05:52 MIN QUICKTIME MOVIE HD
COURTESY OF THE ARTIST +
JACK SHINMAN GALLERY, NEW YORK
The intersection of violence and popular culture, particularly in the form of video games, is made apparent in Richard Mosse’s Killcam (2006). Working in Walter Reed Veterans Hospital near Washington DC, Mosse witnessed scores of wounded US war veterans playing Iraq–themed combat video games on several giant plasma screens. Pairs of veterans, some of them amputees, some of them suffering post–traumatic stress disorder, had teamed up to fight against other teams of veterans in the streets of Baghdad or Fallujah or in Saddam Hussein’s palace, inside the game world. In alternating and seamless sequences, video footage of wounded veterans playing Call of Duty IV is cut into leaked footage downloaded from YouTube and other streaming video websites showing actual killing of insurgents by US and coalition forces in Iraq. The voices in the YouTube clips merge almost indistinguishably with the voices of the young soldiers at Walter Reed, all of them affected by adrenaline and post traumatic stress disorder. Whether it is America/Iraq, video–game or reality, the borders between here and there, real and virtual violence seem breached and reversible.
YVES NETZHAMMER, WE BELONG TO OUR ORGANS,
SO WE CAN ONLY PARTLY PLAN OUR LIVES, 2008
VIDEO INSTALLATION, DVD 20MIN LOOP
COURTESY OF THE ARTIST +
GALERIE ANITA BECKERS, FRANKFURT AM MAIN
The binary logic that governs so much discussion and representation of terror is undermined in Yves Netzhammer’s installations and videos. In his pulsating image world, born only in the computer, Netzhammer’s creations have no referent in the real to limit their rules of engagement. The distinction between animate and inanimate fades as shapes morph and recombine, changing from organic to inorganic, human to machine, dissolve in blood or become part of the mechanisms of destruction. His is a “poetic picture cosmos”26 combining cartoonist humor with a vision of a very dark universe rendered all the more sinister by the formal clarity and precision of the imagery. Elephants, without any sense of incongruity, can walk in line with tanks. Wounds become leaves and figures caught on wire escape as butterflies. Netzhammer’s installations operate around a reversal of feeling and emotion as they subtly challenge and skew the parameters by which we define ourselves in the world by suggesting unfamiliar connections between normal objects. As Netzammer says, “My work reflects on the un–representable linkages between violence and its very intention by abstracting from themes and imagery of the private realm to reach a more general perception of the effects of terror in the psychology of a society.”
MIGUEL PALMA, EUROPA 2000, 1999
TABLE TENNIS WITH NET, 107” X 59” X 29”
COURTESY OF MANUEL SANTOS COLLECTION, LISBON
Miguel Palma’s work functions to dislodge the viewer’s relationship to self and architecture, technology and art, human and machine, the catastrophic and the mundane. From eco systems to the construction of proposals as a simulation of urban planning in which its failure is clearly visible, to the creation of mini “virtual” disasters, Palma has expanded the field of contemporary sculpture as an agent of social critique. Ecologist, and utopian thinker, he sees man as not a victim of fate but very much a participant in the making of his own world or disasters. The highly complex installation, Platform (2008) which Palma created for the current exhibition, presents a large–scale model inspired by the architecture of the Woolworth Building. Four buoys, floating on water tanks, support the building’s structure. An electronic system controls the level of the water in the tanks and as it fills and empties the towers sway in a delicate balancing act that is at once both beautiful and terrifying. Whereas the kind of urban architecture synonymous with the Woolworth Building was once a symbol of the power and might of capitalism in America, this installation, according to Palma, now reflects on the instability and fragility of our environment. An earlier work, Europa 2000 (1999), also illustrates what has been described as the “sabotaging function of Palma’s devices.” A ping pong table, with a net defining the two areas of play, is rendered dysfunctional by craters on the tabletop which disrupt both form and function of the object.
CRISTI POGACEAN, THE ABDUCTION FROM THE SERAGLIO, 2006
WOOLEN CARPET, MANUFACTURED, 43” X 62”
COURTESY OF THE ARTIST + PLAN B, CLUJ
In Cristi Pogacean’s The Abduction from the Seraglio (2005), the “Abduction” refers initially to the kidnapping of three Romanian journalists in Iraq who were posed by their captors for a “demonstration of life” photograph. The image of the guarded hostages was replayed endlessly in newspapers, on the Internet and television, a fascination subsequently fueled by rumors that the press had staged the event themselves. This collision of fact and fiction involving questions central to the image making aspect of the terrorist act is examined by Pogacean in the context of the Oriental wall carpet. The Oriental carpet functions as the symbol par excellence of the exotic East — the flying carpet of Aladdin, the most visible accoutrement in the décor of Gerome or Delacroix’s harem scenes. The very title of Pagacean’s piece is taken from Mozart’s opera, The Abduction from the Seraglio, a story pitched toward the orientalist fantasies of the time that detailed a Western woman’s kidnapping and subsequent rescue from the harem. By the fusion of two types of stereotypical images — the carpet and the “hostage and capture” genre, Pogacean’s work seems to challenge our assumptions of knowledge whether of our supposed enemy and their traditions or the truth value factor of any media representation of war and terror.
DAVID REEB, LET’S HAVE ANOTHER WAR, 1997
ACRYLIC ON CANVAS, 63” X 55”
COURTESY OF THE ARTIST
David Reeb, sees the act of painting somewhat akin to walking a tightrope, or stepping between raindrops, “On the one hand the political stance which does express itself in the paintings after all, and on the other the creation of objects of art… Working from projections in a half darkened room, Reeb paints from photographs (particularly the work of Miki Kratsman) or from images taken from the television news covering the Arab–Israeli conflict, but he is conscious that these painterly creations are being remade by him for the “aesthetic” eye that will be viewing them in museums or galleries. In conversations and interviews, Reeb always stresses the primacy of the painting process rather than its “content”; he wants the eye of the viewer to focus on surface, the movement of paint on canvas, and as much as possible, retrace his steps of the painting as he transformed photographic image to paint. Yet through this very primacy of vision, of placing the viewer back in his process of transformation, the images are “refreshed” — we see them with a clarity that is often lost in the constant stream of network media image production. This consciousness of the relation of vision to location — both as in the position of the camera to the subject, the painter to the image, the viewer’s relationship to both and, from the metaphorical/political sense, the ideological position of where one ‘stands,” has its painterly expression in the dissection of the canvas into “frames”. In the series Let’s have another war, where the painting is dissected into two images along the horizon line of the painting’s slogan, two competing senses of occupation/security, power/liberation, oppression/freedom et. al are enacted in the juxtaposed images. In Jerusalem Picture, #2 (1997) for example, the upper section of the canvas depicts army tanks rolling through the streets of Jerusalem while the lower section shows Hasidic Jews praying at the Temple Wall. Military power and might is pitted symbolically against religious law (with memories of persecution), those who fight brought against those who refuse, and rights of existence against displacement. However from a compositional point of view, the painting is dissected by the line of the front tank wheel and its mirroring in the dark trousered leg of the central player. The diagonally opposite sections of the painting are united by a much heavier application of black paint on the one hand, balanced by a lighter brush stroke and paint application on the other. In this way, the world of overt politics is fused into the space of art as a referential trace.
ROEE ROSEN, (FROM THE MARTYR PAINTINGS SERIES)
MARTYR LUCY, 1991, 29 1/2” X 22 2/3
COURTESY OF THE ARTIST +
ROSENFELD GALLERY, TEL AVIV
Roee Rosen’s Martyr Paintings (1991–1993) consist of a series of portraits of friends and self–portraits of the artist bringing the martyrs of early Christianity into the context of the new martyrs of recent Islam. These multi–layered paintings by Rosen all involve young women and men offering themselves as martyrs and enduring excruciating pain and torment caused by pulling out, tearing off and plucking of limbs. Playing on the anachronistic mixture of death and faith, Rosen’s reactivation of these figures juxtaposes militant belief and martyrdom with iconophilia and self–portraiture with suicide.
MARTHA ROSLER, (FROM THE BRINGING THE WAR HOME SERIES),
BEAUTY REST, 1967–1972
PHOTOMONTAGE, 22” X 26”
COURTESY THE ARTIST + MITCHELL–INNES & NASH, NEW YORK
Martha Rosler’s photomontages, Bringing the War Home, serve to address the issues of visibility and exclusion, accountability and subterfuge inherent to our visual culture. The combination of disparate images to create a new visual reality, pioneered by the Berlin Dadaists, has long been an art form associated with criticality of the dominant imagery of the status quo. Combining Richard Hamilton’s pop aesthetics of his 1956 collage, Just what is it that makes today’s homes so different, so appealing? with the Dada sense of subversion, Rosler converges interior design and political violence as an act of image sabotage in a world in which the idealizing tactics of Photoshop have become the norm. In her two series of photomontage, Bringing the War Home 1967–1972 and 2004–2008 (The title is taken from the Weatherman Underground cry from the Vietnam War era “Bring the War Home!”) news photos of the Vietnam War and the war in Iraq are combined with images and advertisements from contemporary architectural, life style and design magazines. In both series, the prosperity and leisure of America is integrated with images of soldiers, interrogators, corpses and the wounded, raising not only questions about the connections between advertising, journalism and politics, sexism and violence, but also the constant manipulation and commoditization of war imagery.
STEPHEN j SHANABROOK, ON THE ROAD
TO HEAVEN THE HIGHWAY TO HELL, 2008
DARK CHOCOLATE, 29” X 12” X 35”
COURTESY OF THE ARTIST
The “sanitizing” forces of the media are completely thrown out, as is any vestige of “good taste,” in the installations of Stephen j Shanabrook. Shanabrook is less concerned with the politics or ideologies of terror, than with what is left in the aftermath of death or the suicide attack and how such scenes have been edited out of public consumption. Cast in chocolate, his body parts from morgues or the exploded bodies of suicide bombers, not only make these realities visible, but do so in a manner that complicates revulsion with pleasure and destruction with beauty. For Shanabrook it is exactly the banality of the chocolate that makes the image difficult images so powerful and catches the viewer off guard. The familiarity, smell and the hidden psychological effect of chocolate — particularly its connection with pleasure and desire — make the connection with death so problematic. How is it that we should desire to eat the representation of another’s pain? Shanabrook asks. How closely does the smell of chocolate and the stench of blood align? To what extent does consumption, the sublimation of desire, ward off our fear of death?
IVANA SPINELLI, GLOBAL PINUP DRAWINGS, 2008
INDIAN INK ON PAPER, DIMENSIONS VARIABLE
COURTESY OF THE ARTIST
Ivana Spinelli takes this notion of “terrorist chic” a stage further in her Global Sisters: Series 2 (2008). In these drawings and paintings, Barbie like glamour figures hold hands, don gas masks and hoods, and strike coquettish poses with suicide belts and hand grenades strapped across their otherwise nude bodies. Spinelli feels that the codes or stereotypes that fashion employs to represent women are linked to the codes with which the media represents war and terror, a connection which serves to link desire and fear. The use of the stereotype, of course, blocks complexity; it is intended for easy consumption — absorb the idea and move on or, as Spinelli says, “We use empty shapes to fill them with fast understanding about world.”22 Using photographs taken from the web or newspapers and copying the poses, Spinelli has generated an archive of the new female warrior, without context, without narrative, with only the silent white background of the paper on which they are drawn. Spinelli likens this silent blankness to Naomi Klein’s scenario of the psychic shock that envelops a population following a traumatic disaster — be it war or a natural calamity. Capitalizing on this collective shock, the government can suspend civil rights to establish a new economic or social system without opposition.23 Spinelli bolsters her branding of these global pin–ups in bright pink headlines, marketing them through dolls, tote bags, posters and books, because, in pink, “everything becomes fascinating.”
AVDEY TER OGANYAN, (FROM THE SERIES ABSTRACT RADICALISM)
LEFT: “THIS WORK SEEKS TO CHANGE THE CONSTITUTIONAL SYSTEM
OF THE RUSSIAN FEDERATION BY FORCE”; RIGHT: “THIS WORK CALLS FOR ATTEMPTS ON THE LIFE OF THE
GOVERNMENT OFFICIAL V.V. PUTIN IN ORDER TO PREVENT HIM FROM
GOVERNMENTAL AND POLITICAL ACTIVITIES”
DIGITAL PRINTS ON CANVAS 2004–2008, 39.4” X 59.06” EACH
COURTESY OF THE ARTIST + MARAT GUELMAN GALLERY, MOSCOW
Avdey Ter–Oganian accused of a similar “desecration” of canonical work, in this case Christian icons, was forced to leave Russia and request refugee status in the Czech Republic. In Radical Abstractionism (2004), Ter–Oganian’s investigation into the relationship between truth, belief and image–making led him to juxtapose what appears to be apolitical visual pleasure, Suprematist–like abstract imagery, with provocative phrases such as: “This image calls for hatred on a National basis”; “This image calls for the changing of the Russian constitution”; “This image calls for threatening the life of the political figure Vladimir Putin for the purpose of terminating his political activity.” The unbridgeable gap between text and image, the inaccessibility of truth and the possibility of putting whatever spin we choose on innocuous imagery are the preoccupations of this series.
JAN TICHY, 1391 A, 2007
PAPER MODEL (8” X 11” X 13”),
VERTICAL VIDEO PROJECTION (60” X 80”)
COURTESY OF THE ARTIST + PAINE & PARTNERS
Jan Tichy works with small architectural models that make viewers feel they have entered a rabbit hole and become giants straddling a Lilliputian world. Highly charged and tense, installed in darkened galleries with search–light style projections, his installations suggest both entrapment and the category of state institutions which are deliberately kept “unseen,” out of the radar of public visibility, such as nuclear facilities and secret prisons. Working with paper and sand to create the models, Tichy collects as much information as possible from the Internet and constructs a replica based on this research as well as his own suppositions of what the place might look like. A two dimensional plan often accompanies the model so it can be studied in detail and the unseen become more visible. Facility 1391 (2007) recreates a prison located close to the border between Israel and Palestine. It resembles many of the Tegart–style heavily fortified police stations built during the British Mandate. Many of these serve today as military bases, their location revealed through roadside signs showing only a number. Facility 1391 is not marked on maps and has been erased from aerial photographs much like the prisoners who disappear into its “black hole.”
SHARIF WAKED, CHIC POINT:
FASHION FOR ISRAELI CHECKPOINTS, 2003–2007
VIDEO, 7 MIN, COURTESY OF THE ARTIST
In his Chic Point: Fashion for Israeli Checkpoints, (2003–2007), Sharif Waked explores the connections between fashion and political violence, surveillance and humiliation. For this video, Waked designed and staged a fashion show in which male models parade and display clothes which prominently feature nets, hoods, zippers, and split fabric, all designed to strategically cover and reveal their torsos. While the stylized fashion show presents us with what seems to look like eccentric clothing, the catwalk eventually fades to the sight of black and white still photos documenting Israeli checkpoints. In these scenes, Palestinian men are systematically detained and searched by Israeli soldiers, lifting articles of clothing to check whether they are wearing suicide belts or concealing weapons. In this reality, the human body itself is perceived as a constant threat and a potential armed weapon.
CATHERINE YASS, WALL, 2005
ONE CHANNEL PROJECTION,
SUPER-16 FILM TRANSFERRED TO DVD, 32:50 MIN
COURTESY OF THE ARTIST +
GALLERIE LELONG, NEW YORK
Catherine Yass invokes the blockade of visibility as the dominant viewing condition of state control. Yass shot Wall during a visit to Israel in 2005, while driving along various sections of the Separation Wall, some still under construction. The wall takes over the frame, besieging it, blocking out everything but a highly–textured surface, a raw material from which a violent reality bursts forth, attesting to the splitting of a territorial sequence. This non–narrative film depicts no people and records no voices but coolly lingers on this seemingly endless snaking form. The film portrays terror as an enhanced process of abstraction — the wall, with its monolith–like presence, is deciphered only by the tempo of seams between its blocks as the camera crawls along its path.
The exhibition The Aesthetics of Terror was, in its first incarnation and continues to be, an investigation through art of a subject critical to our times.
