Chapter 2 Section 1 redux- Art and firepower

Wafaa Bilal's memoir  Shoot an Iraqi features the subtitle Life, Art and Resistance Under the Gun. This gives a clue to his explicit goals and also the historical place his work fits into. The portrayal of violence in visual culture dates back to the earliest extant paintings we know of such as images of hunting found in the cave paintings of Lascaux and Altamira. Images of archers in Classical Greek pottery are some of many found through out antiquity. But the particular significance of these images lies in their political or religious elements of the time. The celebration of the hunt, as portrayed in the images found in rock paintings dating back some 40 000 years, or the celebration of military victories, as often portrayed in Hellenic pottery are two examples of early missile weapons and the significance granted them. This significance is changed when we consider paintings such as Francisco Goya's(1746-1836)' The Executions of the Third of May 1808(1). which portrayed the massacre of Spaniards by occupying French troops during the Peninsular War. This portrayal of the unarmed citizenry against the troopers of a then powerful French empire seems to echo in the mechanism of Domestic Tensions, with its unarmed protagonist  facing an armed audience. A century later, Picasso's Guernica would make a similar protest against  an attempted imperial power, as the Luftwaffe was deployed against the civilian population in the town of Guernica as part of the fascist terror campaign against the Republican forces during the Spanish civil war. The editorial element, if I may describe the subjective elemnt of these art works, contrast with the formal elements found in the endurance based performance work of Vito Acconci and more specifically, the Work of Chris Burden. Burden's infamous performance Shoot of 1971 shows the artist being shot with  .22 calibre rifle at close range, and the performance was recorded on film. Many of his subsequent performances dealt with similar tests of his physical limits, such as Transfixed(1974) where he was nailed, crucifixion-style to the hood of a Volkswagon Beetle or Doomed(1975) where he lay beneath a sheet of glass until a random observer interfered with the piece (a security guard moved a pitcher of water to with in Burden's reach, causing him to end the piece after 45 hours).

Shoot was performed infront of a small group of invited friends(2) at F Space gallery in Santa Ana, California(3).

(1) Francisco Goya The Executions of the Third of May 1808. Oil on Canvas 1814

(2) Tumlir, Jan. "Chris Burden - First Break" in Art Forum, Dec 2001 downloaded from http://findarticles.com/p/articles/mi_m0268/is_4_40/ai_80856183/    19 November 2010

(3)Horvitz, Robert. "Chris Burden" in Artforum magazine, Volume XIV No. 9 (May 1976).pages 24-31. downloaded 19 November 2010

Chapter1 Section 5 Spaces of Conflict within Empire

Bilal describes his reaction to a 2007 TV interview with a young soldier who operated a robotic drone from her base in Colorado(1). She trusted the information and orders that she received causing her to launch missile attacks or guide other aircraft to attacks the targets she had acquired. This in turn filled Bilal with feelings of hatred and rage, as a similar remotely guided attack had killed his brother Haji. Yet, Bilal was able to reflect that these were "mostly just kids caught up in a cycle of greed and power they don't understand"(2)

Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri offer an analysis of this when the assert "the passage to  post-modernity  and Empire prohibits any such compartmentalization of the life world and immediately presents communication, production and life as one complex whole, an open site of conflict"(3) Hardt and Negri see this conflict as a creative militancy linked to biopower and as such inevitably functions within a world that knows no outside(4). Thus this attachment to the means of production means that the resistance of Bilal's 'virtual human shield' is analogous to the deployment of young cyber soldiers, as with the young drone pilot just mentioned. 

Empire is greatly predicated on production becoming the result of communication and on the absorption of  all spaces into Empire(5). In contrast to traditional Marxist analysis, Hardt and Negri assert there are no exterior spaces for capitalism to exploit; rather it must create new spaces within itself. However, the possibility of these spaces also offer a place for the "uncontainable rhizomes" through which the Multitude reappropriates fresh spaces that realise the desire of the multitude to construct concurrent freedoms(6). Hardt and Negri present the movement of workers from Mexico into the USA as an example of the contradictions of Empire, in that it requires the labour to function, but can only attempt to control it by rendering it illegal(7). At the same time they characterise the free circulation of biopower, of the proletariat, of people as a fundamental freedom desired by the multitude. Thus the networks of biopower serves both Empire and the Multitude that resists it.
 





1. Bilal p.10
2. ibid
3. Hardt, Michael &Antonio Negri.  Empire, Harvard UP, Cambridge, Mass & London, 2000. p. 404
4. ibid p. 413 
5. ibid p. 404
6. ibid p. 397
7. ibid p. 399