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

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