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.










__________________________
(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.

________________________
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.

___________________________
(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

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

Chapter2 Section 1

The list of some writers who have bearing on an explanation of how Domestic Tension relates to space and virtuality has to start with Wafaa Bilal and his cowriter Kari Lyderson who together wrote his memoir of the piece, his biography and his subsequent work in the book Shoot an Iraqi: life art and resistance under the gun. In the service of thepiecew however, we can also consider the primary sources in the chat room exchanges between Bilal and those that viewed the piece via the internet. Another primary source is the video blogs that Bilal eventually posted to youtube, creating a secondary channel for discussion and contact as the piece proceeded and continued the dialogue after the primary action of the piece had ended. The allusion of the piece to video games can be followed through the lenses provided by Johan Hhuizinga, specifically in his book Homo Ludens, and subsequent writers Nick Dyer-Witheford & Greig de Peuter who discuss the relevance of Digital games to global capitalism.Their work is based on the writing of Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri, specifically in their book Empire and their subsequent volumes, Multitude: War and Democracy in the Age of Empire and  Commonwealth. Hardt and Negri's discussion of Empire as they term the space created by globalised capitalism, can be further unpacked via Henri Lefebvre's The Production of Space. 

Chapter 1 Section 4- Spaces between Comfort and Conflict

Wafaa Bilal speaks about the contrast of  space of comfort and the space of conflict. His displacement of virtual and physical presence reflects his experience, throughout his life, of being in overlapping zones of conflict. From his early childhood, with his often violent father, to his neighbourhood that became increasingly divided by religious factionalism, through the internal violence of Iraq's repressive Ba'athist regime, to Iraq's external conflict with Iran, Kuwait and the American lead coalition. Yet as an emigre, and a university Professor, he now resides in what is ostensibly a zone of comfort. Yet he finds that zone troubling, partially because so few others recognise it as such(1). So his work seems to often involve placing the audience as an active participant within an unfamiliar setting. He deliberately chose to set up Domestic Tension as a performance that requires spectator involvement, that subverts expectations of a triple A first person shooter game and that creates a space for those who might normally ignore or simply denigrate conceptual and performance-based art. That he can cross these ideological divides suggests how in the age of Empire, typical moves to create space as a project of 21st century capitalism can be resisted, subverted or evaded. At the same time, Bilal's project is very much a product of twenty first century US culture, with it's references to digital games, paintball and internet sociality.

Bilal explicitly opposed didactic readings of his work(2). He did not ban people who posted vicious words, although he did restrict players who attempted to alter the physical operation of the paintball gun,  effectively turning it into a machine-gun for example. That the rules were simple- fire the paintball gun if you want, hit want you  can and write what you will in the chat-room- left space for many different responses.

1. Bilal p. 
2. Bilal p.

Chapter1 Section2- Who is Wafaa bilal?

Wafaa Bilal is assistant Arts Professor in the department of Photography and Imaging at New York University's Tisch School of the Arts. His works span from paintings and drawings he did in his native Iraq through to performances such as Domestic Tension, Virtual Jihadi and his latest work ....And Counting. In his memoir Shoot An Iraqi, he recounts how his early works were often aimed against the oppression of Saddam Hussein's Baathist regime and the violence that plagued Iraq both from the outside- the Iran/Iraq war, gulf wars 1 & 2- and the internecine violence between Sunni and Shia Muslims as well as violence against opponents to the regime which in turn exploited these conflicts to maintain its grip on political power. Bilal's art works, often critical of the Iraqi government eventually caused a reaction from the state that forced Bilal to flee for his life first to a Saudi refugee camp, then eventually to the United States, where he continued his studies of art.

Bilal was born in Kufa, Iraq in 1966. The third of 7 childrenCK, he attended Baghdad university, majoring in Geology although his efforts were primarily focused on painting. These paintings were often critical of the Baathist regime, and Bilal would hide them, for example, by rolling up the canvasses and storing them within hollow bedposts(1). Several of the shows he put on during that period were closed by the regimes security apparatus(2). Paintings as innocuous, in the Canadian context, as portraying people living in poverty, were seen as anti-government, with some of them being seized(3).

Bilal publicly refused to volunteer for military service with the threat of an American lead coalition looming as a result of Saddam's invasion of Kuwait, in 1991( p.68) After leaving Bagdad University, lest he "disappear" as other dissident students had, Bilal fled Iraq, eventually being interned at a refugee camp in Saudi Arabia. There he attempted to continue painting, despite the declining conditions and threats of rape and abuse at the hands of the Saudi guards. He and his brother, Alaa were granted refugee status, arriving in the United States in September, 1992. He would subsequently enroll in the school of Arts at the University of New Mexico.

Bilal's artistic production after leaving Iraq dealt with such themes as violence and dehumanisation as in his Honours exhibit Sorrow of Baghdad. This gallery installation used the sounds of a baby crying from within a coffin, a be-suited pig laughing at short videos and a room with the faces of Iraqis trapped in a space, with the only exit a window looking out onto a battlefield.( ) His subsequent works include The Absinthe Drinker(200TK), which would electronically insert the gallery spectator into the digital frame, causing the central figure to become animated and react to the movement of the spectator. This general approach would be repeated in The Bar of the Follie Bergeres(200TK), and One Chair(200TK). In each case, the work makes a direct reference to an antecedent art work; those on the impressionists, in the first two cases, and to DaVinci's The last Supper, in the case of one chair. All of them allow the visitor/spectator to interact with the work, and in the case of The Bar of the Follie Bergeres have a presence with in the frame. This would become even more actualised in Domestic Tensions.


1966 Born, Kufa , Iraq p.5
1968 Ba’ath party stages coup, taking power in Iraq p.34

1979 Age 13 Bilal makes a stand against his Father’s violent temper and increasingly violent behavior.   When his father shatters a plate over Bilal’s head, he seizes a shard a chases his father out of the house and locks him out. p.23

1979 Saddam Hussein becomes President of Iraq
September 1980 Iraq invades Iran, ostensibly as a result of an Iranian assassination attempt on foreign Minister Aziz. Iraq moves to seize oil rich areas, strategic canals and supress the spread of the shiite Islamic revolution from Iran to the Shiite majority in Iraq.p.39

August 1990 Iraq invades Kuwait

Bilal publicly refuses to volunteer for military service- leaves University and 
flees repercussions. p.68

January 1991- American forces begin bombing campaign against cities and military in Iraq

February 1991- American ground forces invade Kuwait and attack Iraqi troops. Iraqi troops withdraw from Kuwait after 100hour campaign.

Kurds and Shiites rebel against Sadaam’s rule. The baathist regime brutally supressed the rebels with helicopters, artillery and ground troops (fixed-wing aircraft were grounded by American decree)
Bilal travels to the Kuwait border to shelter in refugee camp at Safwan. He fled the regime’s pogrom against dissidents and the actual military force used against perceived rebel communities p.99-100
1991 Arrives in refugee camp.p. Experience of seeing of abuse, rape and murder by Saudi guards which leads to uprising in spring 1992.p.123 & 135
September, 1992 Leaves Saudi Arabia p.141
Arrives in America
Enrolls in UofNM p.
Honours thesis was interactive exhibit p

“Absinthe Drinker” wins award from New  Mexico museum of Art
Iraq invades Kuwait

1999 Bilal graduates from University of New Mexico with BFA.p.

US and Coalition invade Iraq

2003 Graduated with an MFA from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago.
 
December 2003 Sadaam is captured by US forces in Iraq.

2004 Brother, Haji killed in American airstrike. His father dies three months later, 
from grief.p.125

Bilal's artistic production after leaving Iraq dealt with such themes as violence and dehumanisation as in his Honours exhibit Sorrow of Baghdad. p.

Writing about Bilal's personal history and that of Iraq which is intertwined with it is grueling. The brutality on all levels is highly disturbing, as is the collusion with western powers in such atrocities as the Halabja massacre of 1988. I will leave the editing for tomorrow.

1. Bilal & Lyderson p. 64

2. ibid p. 64

3. ibid p. 65

tk http://www.wafaabilal.com/html/sorrowBaghdad.html

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