In this thesis I shall defend the position that Wafaa Bilal's use of space in his performance art work, Domestic Tension, both resists and reifies the notion of "Empire" as presented by Hart and Negri and discussed by Nick Dyer-Witheford and Greig de Peuter in the book Games of Empire. Wafaa Bilal is an Iraqi-born artist and academic whose work frequently addresses issues of politics, power and virtuality in relation to his native Iraq. Bilal recreated his living room in the Flatfile gallery in Chicago and lived within that space for thirty one days while visitors to a related website shot at him with a robotic paintball gun and/or communicated with him by internet chat. This performance is a response by Bilal to the death of his brother in an US air strike in their home town of Kufaa, and attempted to reach out, primarily via internet, to people who would not normally visit art galleries or engage with critical artistic discourses about the war in Iraq or about political conflict in general. The simulacra of a First Person Shooter(FPS) game that is simulated in Bilal's performance provides a means to reflecting on the similarities and differences between commercially available FPS and the dialogue between the two streams of visual/digital culture.
My first chapter introduces the general thrust of my argument, introducing the biography and work of Wafaa Bilal, his position as an artist of Iraqi origin and the stakes he raises by means of his artistic production. I pay particularly close attention to how he creates spaces for discussion of the political issues his work addresses. I briefly exposit how he uses youtube video blogs and a subsequent book to document his performance. I also introduce discussion of the 30 000 pages of internet chat that he recorded. This chapter concludes by outlining the relationship of the spaces Bilal creates to the notion of empire and it's antithesis, multitude, as discussed by Hart and Negri and Nick Dyer-Witheford and Greig de Peuter in their respective writings.
The second chapter of this thesis looks at the previous literature that discuss three themes that intertwine within this thesis. The first of these themes deals with performance art and conflict. By drawing on writing about extreme performance I suggest a direct line between Chris Burden's performance "Shoot!", and the short film that documented it through to Domestic Tension. The second theme touches on discussions about virtuality and space and especially the body of writing centered on Henri Lefevre's the Social Production of Space. The third theme deals with literature exploring the growing cultural ubiquity, and possible cultural dominance, of digital games and their relationship to 'Empire' and 'Multitude'.
The third chapter is a close reading of Bilal's video blogs of his performance and two primary written sources dealing with it; his book, written with journalist K Lyderson, Shoot an Iraqi:Life Art and Resistance Under the Gun and the record of internet chat that comprised a significant element of the performance, both as an expression of the multitude and an embrasure of Empire.
The forth Chapter explores the central arguments for 'Empire' and how these apply to art and digital games. Some of the discussion here turns back on artistic practices such as those of Marcel Duchamp, who understood that the resistances offered by his work would eventually be turned and subsumed into modernist, capitalist discourses and power structures. Much of this chapter serves to contextualise the concluding chapter of this thesis by demonstrating previous relationships between art, games and empire.
The final, concluding chapter will discuss the formal aspects of both Domestic Tension and FPS digital games and show how the space they create form lines of resistance between Empire and Multitude. This system can be presented on a semiotic square, with Empire and Multitude opposing on one axis, with resistance and embrasure opposing each other on the diametrical axis.
No comments:
Post a Comment