War and Peace: Artists’ Voices
Various Artists
During a recent
interview for a publication on the impact of 9/11 on New York’s art world,
I declared that my work hadn’t been this political since GW’s father
was in office. Then I thought about what I had just said. Well, yes and no. I’ve
always engaged with gender representations in my artwork and Total Screen is
no exception. This work investigates representations of gender during wartime.
But when Bush I was in office weren’t we at war? It certainly felt that
way. No, I don’t mean Gulf War I but you know, that other war. The Christian
Fundamentalist War against Roe v. Wade. I was 21 years old when I started to
develop my first serious body of work photographing Clinic Actions and Pro Choice
Demonstrations. This work prompted discussions and debates I’ll never forget.
It put me in touch with networks of activist groups that put me in touch with
the Women’s Action Coalition that put me in touch with Gloria Steinem’s
publicist. The night before we met her mirror fell off the wall and broke. She
took it as an omen I thought it was good luck. Nonetheless, the thought of publishing
a book of photographs imaging clinic blockades at a time when abortion doctors
were being murdered sent her shaking. These were my first experiences with feminists.
Soon after September 11th, I was reading an article in the New York Times on
how artists were responding to the collapse of the towers. I remember reading
Elizabeth Murray’s statement. She seemed to say that her immediate reaction
was to run into her studio and make art at a feverish pace. My response was the
complete opposite. I froze up. Maybe it was the TV, maybe it was the constant
stream of e-mails from around the world, or the links to web sites constantly
updating. Whatever it was it took weeks if not months to come to. Unconsciously
picking up my Polaroid camera pressing it against the screen and taking a picture.
A minute later an image of a man with a scarf covering his face appeared. I took
another and another. In time I saw a pattern emerge: women veiling and men masking
eventually symbolizing something larger than what was seen.
After a while, I transformed my need to be glued to the TV screen into a process
of making new work. Thinking through new ideas concerning gender representations
and researching orientalist discourse. Entering a new perspective on feminism
and once again, it’s intersection with every day life— just like art.
In this special section I have brought together an interesting mixture of artists
and curators to share their impressions on how recent political events have flowed
through their work. Whether they combine art with activism as is the case with
Mary Beth Edelson and Ricardo Dominguez; create projects that invite audience
participation such as Trebor Scholz and Randall Packer; or remark on the formal
changes in their work like Tehran based artist, Golnaz Fathi or musician Elliott
Sharp. One thing is clear, art from the beginning of time has never turned its
back on world events and I am doubtful that it ever will.
Apex Art – Rebecca
Gordon Nesbitt
http://www.apexart.org
As I write, the armed forces of the United States, in close collaboration with
Great Britain, are poised to go to war in Iraq and it remains to be seen whether
or not they will seek a second United Nations resolution before they proceed.
As a British curator invited to organize a visual art exhibition within a mile
of the former World Trade Center, I feel I have a moral obligation to address
this situation in a wider context.
Between the Lines is just the tip of a rapidly melting iceberg, an attempt to
expose the media as anything but objective and to offer a glimpse of a few perspectives
worthy of serious consideration.
Nancy Atakan
http://www.nancyatakan.com
Recent wartime events have created a general lethargic atmosphere. Since they
now appear unimportant and insignificant, I have found it difficult to work on
any projects artistic events scheduled before the commencement of the war. Most
artists I meet on a daily basis in Istanbul complain of depression, and a feeling
of helplessness. Chrissy Conant
http://www.chrissyconant.com
I’m feeling insecure. The threat of Terrorism. I’m obsessed. I’m
choked up with fear. I can’t sleep at night. I can’t decide whether
to buy duct tape, or not. Do I really need to pack an emergency escape bag? I’m
listening to the radio. I’m watching CNN. I don’t know what I’m
feeling these days. I don’t know what to do. My body is my Homeland. At
least now, I can wear my own, personal sense of security for everyone to see,
right around my neck, no matter how often it changes.
Ricardo Dominguez
http://www.thing.net/~rdom/
YES to War Bunkers: big budgets, embedded networks and corporate contracts.
The war against Iraq, like the war on terrorism, is neoliberalism by other means.
We can only hope that Iraq will not become another Afghanistan, another forgotten
place. A place where only the Ministry of Oil is protected by the liberators,
where future terrorist are trained by the CIA and all the excuses for the war
against Iraq are forgotten during the next preemptive war target.
No to War Movements: no budget, lateral networked streets and questions.
The war against Iraq was countered by a mass network swarming that materialized
on the streets across time zones. These smart swarms carried with them a politics
of the question: can a super-state’s foreign policy exist beyond the politics
of war post 9/11? Such was the size of these
smart swarms that not even the embedded media before and during the war could
edit out these counter-voices completely.
Art and the Politics of Question: The network_art_activism that I have been involved
in developing with the Zapatistas, in Chiapas Mexico (ezln.org), The THING (bbs.thing.net)
and Electronic Disturbance Theater participated in a number No to War actions.
Electronic Disturbance Theater hosted a Virtual Sit-In by the e-hippies(UK)against
the Bush and Blair (in which over 800,000 people participated and brought down
the Blair’s .gov site for a day), The THING distributed international non-embedded
reporting and art work via hosted list-servs (such as nettime and undercurrents)
and I participated with street activist groups Reclaim the Streets, Rev. Billy
and 100,000‚s of other human beings around the world saying: Just Say No
to War!
Mary Beth Edelson
http://groups.yahoo.com/group/wacnyc
First comes total frustration over what my country is doing in my name. The carnage
resulting from a preemptive war that has yet to prove its just cause can not
avoid the issue of morality for our born- again Christian president. No chemical
weapons or weapons of mass destruction have been found and not even Saddam has
been found! This administration declares war in the name of democracy and liberation
, but instead has created carnage among the civilian population of Iraqi , and
has succeeded in destroying the world’s greatest archeological museum of
ancient Mesopotamia. Furthermore this administration has lost the support of
most of our allies and the UN, has created a huge debt that our children will
have to pay off, and the out and out incredulous disgust of people of good will
the world over. And this listing is just the tip of the iceberg.
Keeping sane in these difficult times from my point of view requires organizing
and taking action to give yourself back some of the power that the Bush administration
tries to horde for itself, and also keeping in mind that the next national election
is in 2004 and that you are going to work like hell to get the bastards out.
I am preparing works for an exhibition in Zurich titled “Making Peace”
which includes a postcard to send to people you wish to personally make peace
with. In addition to protesting at scheduled rallies in D.C. and NYC and making
banners for the same I am participating in WAC (Women’s Action Coalition).
Jennifer Farrell
For this project, it was suggest to me that I revisit the exhibition Empire/State
I co-curated with Kirstin Butler, Mercedes Vicente, and Yates McKee last year
in order to comment on how the war has affected my work. Flipping through the
catalogue a year later is a rather strange experience as the images of the work
and the words of the essays take on radically different meanings for me following
recent events. I am struck by Martha Rosler’s Boise Idaho, from her series
In the Place of the Public. At the time, I wrote about the image as representing
“‘the ultimate non-place,’ a generic and fundamentally interchangeable
site that reflected the logic of the network at its most basic level.” Now,
however, instead of the space of the airport itself, my eyes are riveted by the
illuminated map on which certain locations—in Western Europe, North America
and Asia, are marked with bulls-eyes and named while the majority of the world
is left unnamed, outlined not as nations, but as land mass. Josh On, futurefarmers
(Theyrule.com) and Mark Lombardi’s work (Banca Nazionale del Lavoro, Reagan,
Bush, Thatcher and the Arming of Iraq c. 1979-1990, 3rd version, 1996) both made
visible international networks of political and economic power. Reflecting on
their work one year later, I wonder how many people are aware of the connections
revealed in Lombardi’s flowchart-like drawing, termed by the artist as a
“narrative structure,” that documented political and financial relations
that would eventually end with the financially devastating failure of BNL at
a cost of hundreds of millions of dollars to the citizens of the United States
and Italy and the arming of Iraq.
I also wonder why, in the wake of so many devastating corporate scandals and
bankruptcies that have resulted in financial catastrophe for so many, the concentrated
power and extreme connectivity that exists between the most powerful corporations
of the United States has not been further explored, their financial interests
not investigated. Perhaps the most troubling work for me to revisit is Peter
Fend’s United States Global (Energy) Policy, a 2002 installation of text,
drawn images, illuminated signage and audiotape. Installed in what the artist
termed “a war room,” Fend’s project critiqued the country’s
dependence on petroleum and the resulting policies and environmental disasters.
His suggestions for sources of alternate forms of energy and reconfigured maps
of nation-states based on geophysical conditions and natural borders rather than
the constructed borders that have led to ecological and economic disasters was
particularly resonant in light of current events.
Golnaz Fathi
http://www.persiadesign.com/golnaz
After 9/11, the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq the dominant colors in my paintings
are black. I can’t use colors in my work. I am so unhappy and depressed.
I watch the television all the time and I hate TV.
Rainer Ganahl
http://www.ganahl.info
So did these recent events affect my art works? Yes. Since years now, I am doing
nothing else but observe the many ways the media tell and sell us their stories,
their visions and their pentagon press releases. I write about them, I copy them,
I trace them, I imitate them. But I also try to look for other voices, to look
for the voices of people that usually don’t get to talk. I try to do that
through my reading seminars. I am also in contact with communities from Afghanistan/Pakistan
regions and with Iraqi people. Together we are working on collaborations where
I invite people to respond to powerful network logos. But it goes without saying
that my degree of paranoia is high. Thought I am not afraid of terrorists but
of the war on terrorism and its devastating consequences for the communities
around the world and in the USA. I self sensor in many subtle ways which is an
artwork in itself.
But as these war times weren’t sent by god or fell from sky in forms of
3 hijacked air planes my work hasn’t taken dramatic turns as well. Since
I encountered the writings by Edward Said on Orientalism and the nexus between
power and knowledge production I have been engaged with works that address these
issues. I started to study oriental languages in 1991 and have been consequently
doing since. It is not a coincidence that I started to seriously study Arabic
last year, a work entitled “My first 500 hours basic Arabic” (500 hours
video tapes, in 25 boxes filled iwht 250 vhs tapes). The war as such just makes
me reinterpret my work, makes me focus on specific aspects of my work that had
been elaborated over many years, going back before Bush war I. My concerns about
interfaces has really made me become an artist. Today, I am working on “my
own private war archive” that consists of many thousands of images taken
from network news during these confrontations. The way the war was labeled, accompanied
with comments and head lines, titles and subtitles is a telling saga and a visual
bonanza for my work as an artist.
Joy Garnett
http://www.firstpulseprojects.net/
It’s possible that the violent global events of the past several years have
influenced me to some degree in terms of making my work. This work, which derives
in part from images of war culled from newspaper + tv media, has probably become
less distanced; I’ve been including figures, which had once been completely
omitted from my landscapes of destruction. Maybe that was going to happen anyway,
or maybe it’s happening now because violence and war and tragedy are closer
and less abstract for me now than they were before. I wonder if we all suffer
to some degree from a sense of demoralized shock about the current war/s. Also,
New Yorkers might suffer something akin to “prime-target-fixation syndrome,”
a kind of apathy or fatalism associated with communities who believe their city
is on a hit-list of some kind…
Genco Gulan
http://www.istanbulmuseum.org/
“Whenever I see a plane I remember the smell…” was a net-art piece
I produced almost a year after 9/11. After the fall of the Twin Towers the image
of planes started to remind me of the terrorist attack and the smell of the smoke
that covered the city for weeks. After I left New York City the planes kept on
reminding me of 9/11 but they also started to remind me of NYC.
These sad memories forced me to produce a net-art piece using two combined live
cams one from “Times Square,” and the other from “Boston Logan
Airport NYC”. The cams together create a different visual perception and
a different watching experience. More over, the planes that hit WTC were coming
from Boston Logan Airport hence watching the live images of planes taking off
from that airport and then watching people on the Broadway on the other cam,
reflected the paranoia of another terrorist attack to NYC.
At the beginning of the century I was thinking that the wars were over in the
information age. Still at
first the 9/11 and then the Iraq war proved to me that humans are still animals.
For me war and terror are both the same and they are both stupid. Though the
new technology could not stop the wars they should be used to speak loud how
unnecessary they are.
Kendal Kennedy
Until Death Do Us Part
This is an Image of Loss, An Image of Self. It is one Image among thousands of
Lived Images In thousands of Wars. Wars between People, One never meets, Wars
over Thoughts, One never thinks, Wars over Lives, One never Lives.
Isolde Kille
My work circles around time and space. There was always an awareness of time
but rather in a more abstract content. With the recent political development
I started to develop time documents. Create an archive with video tapes and articles
of specific dates. The enclosed pages show CNN Transcripts from the 11/13/2001.
News written on black and white – manifested as words on paper seen as a
document of time.
Larry Litt
– The Blame Show
This war, in fact our entire political situation, are the result of too little
participation by citizens and artists in the political process. It is not until
there’s a call to reaction against war that the art world becomes political.
A lot of preventive politics would have helped keep the holy conservative corporacy
of war profiteers out of the highest offices. For now we must continue to boycott
this war, then De-Tex America in 2004. Unless you love anti-war rallies and marches.
Paul D. Miller
a.k.a. Dj Spooky that Subliminal Kid
http://www.djspooky.com
Who are we fighting, and why? That is a question we all have to ask in these
times of terror.
We do not live in a police state, but I’m beginning to feel like I am. George
Orwell said a long time ago in his novel “1984” “Freedom is the
freedom to say that two plus two equals four. If that is granted, all else follows…”
The U.S. is the only super-power and it has the power to do so many things to
actually improve the life of the people of this planet. The Bush Administrations’
lack of respect for so many of the things that represent the way of life we in
America are going to war abroad for is the height of hypocrisy – and it’s
a reason so many in the world view the U.S. with anger and fear. I made this
mix to show that there’s a different America – one where tolerance, diversity,
and above all else – respect for human rights, marks the we live in this networked
and intensely interlinked global village. It’s a place where you are only
as good as the information that runs through the culture you live in, and that’s
what Saul is saying on “The Pledge to Resist.” As an American, I think
that we have to speak to ourselves about what our government under the current
Administration is doing in our names. Like Orwell – the Bush Administration says
“it is going to war for peace” and then asks us to not ask what is
the price. Like Orwell’s “1984,” The Bush Administration says
that “ignorance equals intelligence…” by showing us false information
to conduct an illegitimate war… I could go on, but I think you get the picture…
Chuck D. said so long ago that hip-hop is the CNN of the information age, and
music is one of the only places where we are seeing a real response to the crisis
condition the Bush Administration has put American civil liberties and any sense
of cultural progress in. America should be a beacon of hope and inspiration –
and it still can be. I’m proud to be an American working to create and express
a different vision of the country I live in. As an artist, writer, and musician,
I feel that Saul’s poetry in this mix represents a voice that speaks truth
to power. I can only hope that more will speak up.
the MP3’s are downloadable for free at http://www.synchronicrecords.com
Joseph Nechvatal
http://www.nechvatal.net
This war started me on a new computer virus series where the virus now eats away
images I have composed based on the elgin marbles from the Parthenon. They are
now in the British Museum and I saw them quite recently and was stunned by them.
What is striking is that the elgin marbles depict a war between the east and
the west. As I said, they were part of the Parthenon, which was a temple to Athena,
a warrior goddess.
Randall Packer
http://www.usdept-arttech.net
As Secretary of the US Department of Art & Technology, I call on coalition
artists to inspire other artists into action by undergoing aesthetic operation
as a form of magic designed as a mediation between our strange hostile world
and the human spirit. For more than 100 years, the avant-garde has gone forth
from its studios and garrets to fight for utopian aspirations and social transformation.
Today’s artists have entered a fierce struggle against a grave danger, the
existential darkness that has possessed our government, that grips its soul.
The US Department of Art and Technology is the United States principal conduit
for facilitating the artist’s need to extend aesthetic inquiry into the
broader culture where ideas become real action. It also serves the psychological
and spiritual well-being of all Americans by supporting cultural efforts that
provide immunity from the extension of new media technologies into the social
sphere.
The Experimental Party – the “party of experimentation” – is an artist-based
political party that has been formed to activate citizens across the country
in an effort to bring the artists’ message to center stage of the political
process. This is a political awakening, ‘representation through virtualization’
is the major political thrust of the Experimental Party, it is the driving force.
Miriam Schapiro
Women are often chastised for talking about their feelings. I have two possibilities.
1. I could vent my rage about living in a society which appears to be close to
losing its privacy, under the dictum that during war time we lose our privacy
to show our patriotism.
2. To shut up altogether.
Trebor Scholz
http://79days.net
http://get-carded.net
79 Days links a live image search of current war reporting to a database of media
coverage of the Kosovo war and interviews with Kosovars and Serbs.
Get Carded is an art activist e.card site that allows open submission. The site
launches with anti-war cards by 80 artists.
Elliott Sharp
http://www.elliottsharp.com
Since the coup d’etat that passed for the 2000 Presidential election, I
find myself filled with anger, a feeling only enhanced by the events of September
11 and the disinformation, warmongering, and blatant opportunism leading up to
the Iraq war. This has led me to intensive research on the Web about anti-war
and anti-globalization networks and about the interlocking connections operating
in our military-petroleum-government. Most importantly, I’ve found a new
determination to find ways to encode these thoughts and feelings in my composing
and performing. It, of course, brings up the question of how one may work with
abstraction and make politically-charged work without resorting to didacticism
and screed.
Thalia Vracholpolous
As a confirmed pacifist who would rather die than kill I am naturally horrified
at the recent events. Moreover as a civil rights activist from the Fifties what
surprised me most was the seeming lack of response from the art commentate. As
a survey of the gallery and museum scene would reveal most of the art produced
today is either lacking in critico/political discourse or is otherwise neutral.
The market is full of abstraction in one form or another and with fantastic and
surrealist based art. At the onset I assumed this was just the style of the times
until I realized that the galleries are in large part responsible for this lacuna
in political art. This became apparent when thinking of my many artist friends
who had for years produced work engaged with the issues of its time, critically
based, de-bunking and powerful but which had not commercially succeeded. Such
an artist is Despo Magoni whose paintings are about political discourses and
events. The drawing’s colors are strong oranges, reds and yellows reminiscent
of fire and conflagration and its line powerful and unrelenting on its journey
to form the character of their expressions. We must be grateful for art’s
ability to act as watchdog of our actions but even more importantly because art’s
role is to raise public awareness to the social problems making them more immediate
and impacting our actions.
White Box- Juan
Puntes
http://www.whiteboxny.org
As I proceed to draft this note, I am informed my middle brother has left this
world for good.
It is therefore with a heavy heart that I will proceed to recount the ways White
Box responded to the vertiginous moment our civilization is traversing.
White Box lends itself as a public forum where many aspects of live culture can
see the light through the lens of art. In the past several months upon visiting
many galleries in Chelsea, save rare exceptions, the most energetic works on
display were redundantly and once again, photographs of super explicit sex. To
that, a rather quotidian bag of the usual suspects was added, the theoretically
inclined, the post conceptual-pop de rigeur, the pseudo spiritual, and other
well worned visual soliloquies coincided in most gallery exhibits and institutions
alike. Business as usual and a full disregard for reflecting the times. One has
to wonder if the art Industry controllers are using the same production guidelines
as the Hollywood studios, always trying to earn a good buck feeding the public
more of what they expect.
Our choice exhibit opener for this season in hell was a two decades survey and
new works by an influencial political artist and activist. Opening early March
and running through April, Conrad Atkinson’s “Constantly Contesting”
curated by veteran Miranda Mc Clintic would bring to the fore a vital mixture
of aesthetic-political works infused with images and text pertaining to post-modern
viruses, saintly classical wounds, a set of “viral” fashionable suits,
political commentary on the media as well as dozens of ceramic replicas of land
mines decorated over with kitchen satire, Madonna and Child by Raffaello, Lady
Di rescuing wounded infants and a new series of works on 9/11. All in all, a
mired of beautiful and slightly humorous information that smoothly and successfully
bridged politics and aesthetics. Artworks that elicited from the viewer at the
very least a reflection about the very times we’re living in. To the exhibit
we added a conversation with two remarkable artists Atkinson has influenced,
Alfredo Jaar and Tim Rollins in the politically sagacious company of art critic
and author, Eleanor Heartney.
In the midst of this show we welcomed a one afternoon reading project organized
by Pablo Helguera. It consisted of inviting art folk and the general public to
read exerpts from Alexis de Tocqueville’s 1835 “Democracy in America”.
February was knocking on the door when we decided to invite a prodigious and
very timely project never before realized. In November/December 1966 as U.S.
troops were building up in Viet Nam, William Anastasi presented an idea to his
gallerist, Virginia Dwan. It consisted of painting all interior surfaces of the
gallery space, walls, ceiling, carpet floor plus furnishings and light fixtures
in standard U.S. Army olive drab camouflage. Time did not allow for the project
to see the light and Hanoi would be bombed that same December. With the help
of our internship, friends of White Box and volunteer artists, the project got
under way opening a mere three days prior to the bombing of Baghdad and the full
invasion of Iraq. Paradoxically, it closed the day Rumsfeld announced the conquest
of Baghdad.
Jody Zellen
http://www.ghostcity.com/crowdsandpower
The current political climate does make one reflect on what it means to be an
artist, and what kind of art resonates in a time of crisis. The recent wartime
events have helped me to focus on what is important and how art, even in times
of war, is a vital component to any society.
