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Friday, December 16, 2011

Visual Art Re-viewing the Art of This Iraq War

Posted by Jen Graves on Fri, Dec 16, 2011 at 11:50 AM

Ben Davis at Artinfo has done a terrific job pulling together a slide show of artworks made in response to the Iraq War on the occasion this week of American troops returning home.

A few projects stand out. Domestic Tension (2007), by Iraqi-born Wafaa Bilal, was an experiment in which the artist lived alone for a month in a small room in Chicago, where he set up a webcam and a paintball gun remote-controlled by Internet viewers, whom he invited to "shoot an Iraqi." He was shot at 40,000 times.

I wish I'd had a chance to visit Jeremy Deller's traveling exhibition about the war, It Is What It Is, which began at the New Museum in New York in 2009 (it came west but did not get north of Los Angeles). It didn't produce objects, it produced conversations. Deller brought experts with him, and people directly involved in the war, so that visitors to the museums could delve into the issues with real people, not through newscasts. There is a road diary here.

Then there's artist Michael Rakowitz, who was in the news earlier this week with a great story: As an art project, he'd been serving food on dinner plates looted from Saddam Hussein's palace—and now they were being seized from his performance in order to be repatriated (there's a really nice three-minute video of the whole story here). Davis focuses on the storefront that Rakowitz used as an import/export business to and from Iraq to demonstrate the complexity of just trying to get some Iraqi dates.

By Suzanne Opton

Opening January 5 here in Seattle, at Platform Gallery, are Suzanne Opton's photographs of soldiers, each one pictured lying on the side, only the head within the frame. It's a powerfully simple device. Opton will give a talk at the Henry Art Gallery on February 3.

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I remember once, during my first tour in Iraq, we took contact from a group of three hadjis with recoiless rifles inside a two story building just outside Haditha.

They wouldn't let us use our mortars, so I had one of my joes put an AT-4 round through the wall.

I guess they must have been right next to that wall or something, because when we cleared the building, there was just pieces left.

Anyway, onto my point. On the opposite wall from the blast, there was a spray of blood so deep and vivid that I actually stopped - while still taking intermittent contact from another building down the street - in the entry point to admire it. I don't know if it was the adrenalin or what, but that blood splatter was the most oddly beautiful thing I ever saw over there.

I should have took a picture.

Posted by jj41243 on December 16, 2011 at 12:09 PM

*facepalm*

Posted by sonder on December 16, 2011 at 3:49 PM

Americas finest. Generation psychopath....Double *facepalm*

Posted by Johny Quest on December 21, 2011 at 9:35 PM