Chapter1 Section 3 How Wafaa Bilal creates spaces for discussion of the political issues his work addresses.

A significant theme that Bilal annunciates through out Domestic Tensions is his wish to "Keep the conversation going"(1). While the second Gulf War has provoked highly polarised rhetoric within the United States and between the citizens of it's allies, who have mostly opposed the invasion of Iraq, actual debate has been relatively absent, with few cases of either side expressing respect for the other's opinion. In that respect, Bilal's paint ball project has been highly successful, in that it drew people into contact that would have been unlikely to ever interact, let alone discuss the issue. It would be a gross mistake to assume these conversations were uniformly measured, thoughtful and polite. However, these chatroom conversations did place people with a position on the violence and significance of the American invasion of Iraq in touch with each other. Some would use these chatroom spaces to hurl racist epithets and jingoistic rants at Bilal and those others in the chatroom who opposed the war in Iraq. But verbal abuse is as much a part of what Bilal refers to as a zone of conflict(2) as mental and physical abuse. 

This contrast that Bilal draws, between the zone of conflict and that of comfort is central to his artistic choice. He wants to place himself, living a comfortable life as an academic and artist in a large US city, again in a zone of conflict as a means of expressing solidarity with his family who would not or could not leave Iraq(3). More over, he has written that this performance was intended to provoke a crisis for those residing in a zone of comfort "shielded from the actual horrors of" the campaign in Iraq(4). As his biography makes clear, he is no stranger to threats of violence and intimidation, through the wars, repression and bigotry he has encountered both with in and with out Iraq as well as his home town of Kufa and even his own home there.


Yet this space of conflict he had created, by providing a means of committing physical violence, via the paintball gun, a means of discussion via the internet and within the gallery space, itself, and by means of spectators viewing his Youtube blogs and the media reports generated, has allowed communication to take place that would have otherwise been unlikely to have happened.

Comments like:
"Make that chair spin"
FIRE!!!!
fuckin' Iraqis

contrasted with:
Peace to you and your people, Wafaa
This guy has heart
Don't shoot him, he's fucking human being!!

The expansion of the discussion space arose when the popular internet reference site, DIGG.com picked up on the performance via an article in the Chicago Tribune. This reference in DIGG lead to a geometrical increase in visitors to the Domestic Tension website, as the more people drawn to the site via DIGG in turn "digged" the story, pushing it up to the top of the lists, leading more people to encounter and explore the story(5). This social networking operated in concert with Bilal's attempt to create a community, although I sense that this was serendipitous as he more straightforwardly publicised his performance in atypical websites(for a high art project) of paintballnation.com. The net result was over 80 million hits, from 136 countries during the course of the performance(6). Ascribing the quality of space to a chatroom, the quality community to people who may be shooting at you, and the quality of discussion to among other things a low velocity projectile fired at one's body may seem to be stretching the definitions of these terms. But the relationship of these terms to Bilal's performance may be better understood if we look at both Bilal, and his companion-for that is how he came to describe the paintball gun(7)- as boundary objects.

A boundary object is

"both plastic enough to adapt to local needs and the constraints of the several parties employing them, yet robust enough to maintain a common identity across sites...They have different meanings in different social worlds but their structure is common enough to more than one world to make them recognizable, a means of translation"(8)

This concept was developed by Susan L. Star and James R. Griesemer as way of considering how different social groups, and their members might interact using an object that carries different significances how either group. Thus the paintball gun might be perceived simultaneously as a weapon, an art object, a threat a toy depending on the social milieu of the person activating it. At the same time, Bilal himself, appearing rather like a non-player character(an NPC, essentially a "robot" simulating a person, animal, monster or some other agent in a digital game) functions as a boundary object: at once an artist, a target, a human being and so on. This multitude of meanings allowed different participants to be drawn into the performance without immediately confronting a didactic message that might have caused those opposed to Bilal's anti-war stance or those unfamiliar with contemporary art practices to remain disengaged from the discussion of the Iraq war and the common lack of engagement with the broad and profound implications of a military conflict. He recounts how he was an anti-war symbol, a target for hateful bigots, entertainment and company for the bored, lonely or flirtatious, or topic for academic and philosophical discussion, among other roles(9).

A common response was for participants to fire a paintball round at Bilal, then often feel guilt and then engage in conversation. Obviously, some participants simply enjoyed the anonymous physical and mental abuse that they could express. The degree to which this was prevalent rather shocked Bilal(10). Yet the variety of peoples comments and responses suggests how successfully he engaged large numbers of people in what Henri Lefebvre would call a "representational space, embodying complex symbolisms...linked to the clandestine...side of social life, as also to art"(11). Lefebvre's conception of space includes art works, as well as architectural structures, that hide power relations. How Bilal's project negotiates these spaces I will discuss in depth in Chapter 4 of this thesis.


1. Bilal explicitly states this during the video blogs of days'

2. Bilal & Lyderson p.4.

3. ibid p.11

4. ibid p.1

5. ibid p. 79

6. ibid p.xvi

7. Bilal, Wafaa (mewafaa)The paint ball project day 10 http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mz6zAwrkolc accessed 2010-08-27 11:55:53 Bilal also mentions this on page 93, during the day 16 section of Shoot An Iraqi.
 
8. Star, Susan Leigh  and James R. Griesemer. "Institutional Ecology, 'Translations' and Boundary Objects: Amateurs and Professionals in Berkeley's Museum of Vertebrate Zoology, 1907-39" in Social Studies of Science, Vol. 19, No. 3 (Aug., 1989), pp. 387-420

9. Bilal & Lyderson p. 110


10. ibid p.78


11. Lefebvre, Henri The Social Production of Space. Blackwell, 1991 p.33