War as Performance Art

"[W]e would drive into towns in Bosnia and find bodies crucified on the sides of barns or decapitated, burned and mutilated. That is why those slain in combat are treated as trophies by their killers, turned into grotesque pieces of performance art."Chris Hedges qouted in Malou Innocent Fabricated Myths about War

Chapter 4 Section 2- Local responses to global power: At the cusp of boundaries

Chris Salter argues in his paper"THE KULTURSTAAT IN THE TIME OF EMPIRE Notes on Germany Thirteen Years After"(1) that

"capitalism “produces producers.” In short, in bioproduction, capitalism is the ultimate autopoietic machine. It not only produces commodities, it produces new forms of subjectivities and social relations to consume and reproduce these commodities, constructing and catalyzing economic, social, and cultural life in an endless self- reproducing cycle.(Salter p.2)"

His discussion centers on the decline of state support for culture— he focuses on both 'prestige ' institutions and more challenging organisations in the realm of performance, such as the Deautsche opera and the Frankfurt ballet—and how this is an aesthetic response to global capitalism. While allowing that this has challenged German cultural practices, heavily dependent on state sponsorship, Salter argues that a new generation of german artist is now embracing  "DIY" artistic practices(Salter p. 13). To be sure he also presents resistances from the kulturstat which both rejects 21st century artistic practice and defends a 19th century sensibility that suggests these new practices and the economic milieu out of which it arises as "American"(Salter p.9-10).

This critic of new artistic practices is not essentially supported by Salter's analysis. He suggests that these resistances are both restrictive, as they ignore the current social environment, and counterproductive to artistic goals that challenge and supersede the concept of Empire as a monolithic structure that endlessly encompasses what various discussions, including his, Hart and Negri's and seminally, Michel Foucault's, as biopower. Salter asserts that biopower can indeed turn and rupture the apparently all-encompassing force of Empire  and that examples of that  demonstrate how. The scope of his paper, however does not give detailed analysis of how such ruptures are achieved.

His specific examples include works by German director/artist Christoph Schlingensief, such as Church of Fear, presented at the Venice Biennale of 2003. Functioning both in (experimental) theatre, political theater(Schlingensief ran for Chancellor in 2000) and experimenting with 'low culture'(does that include mass market video game?) this German artist presents a specific example of art work that moves beyond early modern models of artistic production into more contemporary situations. As salter puts it "Schlingensief’s blend of political/aesthetic action combined with popular entertainment and trash culture embodies much of what is common across the Berlin performance and visual art worlds. Soap operas, TV talk shows and the like provide the content and context for many “off theatre” and performance troupes who exist outside of the stadttheater scene as well as for the less established visual arts scene."(Salter p. 12)
Looking closely at Schlingensief's body of work, we see similarities in his concerns between regional interpretations of state power, with Schlingensief's work rooted in German concerns as Bilal's are in Iraq, but both addressing American expressions of power in an age of global capital.


including avoiding the triumphalism of what is often characterised as American capitalism that seems to arise within the critique of that economic system when we look at writings about Empire.










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(1)Salter, Chris. "The Kulturstaat in the Time of Empire: Notes on Germany Thirteen Years After"
 in PAJ: A Journal of Performance and Art, PAJ 77 (Volume 26, Number 2), May 2004, pp. 1-15

Chapter 4 Section 1- Thinking About Producing An Artistic Space

Boundary objects create a space for interactions between groups

Bilal's enunciated goal for Domestic Tension was to create a space of conversation. The production of space is much the focus of French philosopher Henri Lefebvre. lefebvre's thought contends that social spaces are specific to the societie that produce them. Thus in Bilal's case, his space of conversation, in sofar as he creates it, is much a product of the society out of which creates it. This apparent tautology in Lefebvre's case indicates some of the limitations of using his philosophies of spaciality to describe Domestic Tension. In Bilal's case his performance approaches space that includes and transcends virtual versus embodied space. This porosity between screen space and embodied space occurs through boundary objects. The discussion of boundary objects, a concept originally developed by sociologist Susan “Leigh” Star and philosopher James R. Griesemer, posits objects(which can include items such as the paintball gun robot of Bilal's performance, ideas and people) can have multiple and vary significances which none-the-less allow different groups of people to interact. This concept has bearing on the actor-network Theory of Bruno Latour and John Law, amongst others, as their theories grant agency to objects commonly thought of as being inanimate. This notion significantly can create a particular aesthetics, especially for interactive performances. Some criticisms of boundary objects have been raised by Charlotte P. Lee, who argues that the boundary object concept inadequately describes the relationships between groups and writes "Theories are needed to explain how collaborators from different communities of practice, that lack pre-existing standards, use material artifacts to collaborate."(Lee p. 314). These negotiated boundaries, boundaries which in this case are present in virtual spaces in the case of Bilal's performance, provide a theoretical hinge for discussing performance art, including those performative arenas we can refer to as digital games. The immediate implications for Domestic Tensions I will discuss in the final, concluding  chapter of this thesis. Some more general questions raised by this discussion I will elaborate here.

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Lee, Charlotte P. "Boundary Negotiating Artifacts: Unbinding the Routine of Boundary Objects and Embracing Chaos in Collaborative Work" in Computer Supported Cooperative Work (2007) 16:307–339

Chapter 2 -Section 2 Goya and the framing of violence and protest

Francisco Goya, The Third of May 1808,
1814, Oil on canvas, 268 × 347 cm image source: Wikipedia

The face of the defenceless in the face of violence has a particular poignancy. As works of art, both Wafaa Bilal's Domestic Tension and Francisco Goya's share some similarity, in as much as they take a stand against war, especially against the toll paid by non-combatant's caught in zones of conflict. However, the differences in content and form suggest differing forms of resistance from two artists separated by time, but united in an opposition to militarism. Where as Bilal's performance put a true non-combatant(he had fled conscription into the Iraqi army) in the line of fire, his performance was strongly inspired by the death of his brother, who was manning a check point barricade, defending his community, when he was killed by a missile strike from a U.S. Army helicopter(1). The civilians portrayed in Goya's painting were in fact local militia, who had defended Madrid against the invading troops of Napoleon. Goya, like Bilal almost two centuries later, found himself living with in the regime that killed his loved ones, as Goya was appointed to create paintings for the puppet king Joseph the first(2).
These two artists, Bilal and Goya, share a fraught relationship with the respective invaders of their countries, as Bilal fled to the freedom that the USA offers, especially in comparison to the ba'thist regime of Iraq, and Goya like many artists and intellectuals of his time believed that Napoleon would disseminate the enlightened goals presented by the French revolution(3). In that case, Napoleon's machinations- He had convinced the Spanish monarch to ally against Portugal. King Ferdinand was deposed and fled when he realised the French had no intention of leaving. It was only after the defeat of the Napoleon's armies in the Peninsular war that Ferdinand regained his throne. A despot himself, it is not clear that there was a material improvement for the majority of Spaniards. Indeed, Allegory of the City (1810 oil on canvas) was originally painted during the French occupation, and art historian Sarah Symmons notes that the painting was modified several times to reflect political changes(4). For example, inscriptions portrayed on a large lozenge to the upper right of the painting. The changes honoured the Spanish constitution imposed by the French king, Joseph Bonaparte, and then the subsequent restoration of the Bourbon monarchy lead to additional changes representing the concurrent changes of the Spanish constitution, until finally the inscription honours the Spanish insurrection of the 2nd of May, 1808.

Symmons notes that the image of the Third of May, 1808 does not show partisans of the Iberian peninisula, from whom the term guerilla originally arose, as warriors but rather as casualties and victims(5) that perhaps reflected Ferdinand the Vlll's desire to quell any popular resistance to his autocratic regime(6). Indeed, the central figure has a obviously Christ-like pose, suggesting sorrow and terror rather than stoicism or defiance. The communication of a loathing for war would be more poignantly realised in Goya's The Disasters of War(1810-1815) etchings, with their often macabre and grotesque portrayal of the brutalities of war, especially on the civilian population. In that respect, Goya and Bilal follow interesting but divergent trajectories that none the less offer a resistance to the political power that ultimately be said to have supported them. Goya's sympathy for the Spanish resistance is tempered by his portrayal of the violence committed by the respective regimes of Joseph Bonaparte then the Bourbon Ferdinand, though both were his patrons at some point in time. Bilal's open dialogue of Domestic Tensions, with its illusions to First Person Shooters (but a mechanic more closely adhering to the early NES game, Duck Hunt) gives way to his portrayal of himself as a Saladin-like character in his video-game-based performance work, Virtual Jihadi, where he embraces a more violent representation of himself as an islamic guerilla, rather than a non-combatant. These different trajectories perhaps reflect the nature of power as it is exercised in a modern constitutional democracy versus an autocratic monarchy. The choice of art works reflects the means offered by the productive capabilities of a essentially pre-industrial culture versus that of a post-modern, digital society. How we can analysis the means by which an artwork interacts with its artist and audiences I will explore in chapter 4.

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(1) Bilal & Lyderson
(2)Vega, Jesusa "Dating and Interpretation of Goya's Disasters of War" in Print Quarterly, 1994 p.3
(3)Bareau, Juliet Wilson. Goya's Prints, The Tomás Harris Collection in the British Museum. British Museum Publications, 1981.
(4) Symmons, Sarah. Goya. Phaidon, 1998 p.234
(5) Symmons, Sarah, p.TK
(6) Boime, Albert Art in the Age of Bonapartism 1800-1815. Chicago and London. U Chicago Press.1990