*34c3 intro*
Saud Al-Zaid: What I want to talk about
today is the conundrum of reality and non- reality of our world and the fictional or
artificial worlds and works of art and everything from what graces museums and
galleries to what enters our living rooms in the form of television or video games.
The title as you may know is in reference to the works of Walter Benjamin, the
most important procrastinator in modern history. Benjamin is a pioneer in Media
Studies with his study of cinema and how we consume media on a societal level in
dark movie theaters from Berlin to New York watching technically reproduced
images like the one we have in this Beamer and today streamed on the Internet over
and over again his essay is one of the most assigned texts in the humanities
itself technically reproduced and culturally consumed on a hyper meta level.
Its primary theoretical focus is on ideology specifically Benjamins rather
unique Marxist perspective about political progress and the fascist political order
that he was working under during World War 2. What I want to connect this to is what
I call the current conflict what others call the war on terror and the things that
go along with it. So over here is a the first page of a legal memo regarding the
applicability of federal criminal laws and the Constitution to the contemplated to
the contemplated lethal operations against Anwar al-Aulaqi. Aulaqi was not a military
general or a terrorist tactician he was primarily a propagandist. This authorizes
the killing of an American citizen without trial by jury an authorized violation of
the Constitution in both the 6th and if you think about it the 1st amendment. The
violation of the 6th amendment hasn't happened in the American in the American
context since the Civil War and this one was executed by a Reaper drone. This is an
artifact from reality. This artifact I want to connect to the artifacts of our
current fiction such as those found all over in popular media of an intolerant
Muslim world raging with anger against your freedoms.
As the West violates our lives and bodies in the hundreds of thousands and indeed
violating its own rules. And why art? It's because the relationship between art and
reality is not an easy one. I want to point that even the most basic terms of
our current reality say a word like assassination or assassin have multiple
layers and historical residues. The term assassin comes from the Arabic Hashashin or
those who take hashish or stoners. It was during the Crusades that the assassin word
entered into European languages and as meaning specifically as someone who does
targeted political killing. It's based on a myth or fictional propaganda against a
small sect in Islam known as the Ismailis. The story went that there was an old man
of the mountain who would take young men to the garden and give them so much
hashish that they believed they were in heaven. In more elaborate versions there
were gardens full of naked women music wine you know you get the idea. When the
hashish wore off and they're kind of going over there hashish hangover the old man
would convince the young men that the only way for them to go back to heaven is by
killing one of his enemies in what is effectively a suicide mission. When the
young assassins, the hashashin, were killed the immediately in a sense come
back to the garden. The purpose of this story is to make the assassins look weak
willed and even stupid - though the sect may have performed political
assassinations, marijuana was not likely involved. The story is probably completely
bullshit. But now we're stuck with the word assassin. It's a fictional error or
propaganda glitch in our current linguistic reality. Can you spot the
difference? In case you need the slide explained to you: at the top its drone
operators up there and in the bottom its Cheech and Chong. Assassins - hashashin or
vice versa. My argument is that the difference between reality and fiction or
our serious acknowledgement that this is real and that over there is myth, just a
story, just the TV show, just a video game is an ideological difference on the level
of ideas during the current conflict. Ideas that have a life of their own that
are animated by new technologies like pieces of paper in the Middle Ages that
propagated the crusader myths of the assassins. Cultural ADIF artifacts reflect
multiple facets those signs of human advancement and human tragedy. The work of
art even as an object has a political valence the artist and the and the artwork
are all constituent parts of what we colloquially call the art scene. That
somewhat kind of toxic social construct that in turn makes up the art market and
even more toxic construct. Does anyone recognize the unimpressive painting? You
normally wouldn't - except it was done by a young struggling Austrian artist by the
name of Adolf Hitler. Hitler was rejected from art school struggling to pay rent in
a gentrifying but vibrant Vienna, the first steps in a sequence of events that
gave us the most devastating leader of the last century. In case you're wondering:
yes I'm saying the art world gave us Hitler. Speaking about art I don't want to
make like the Fasil with the Trump transition but it's hard to avoid.
Television creatives were the minds behind The Apprentice and the creation of Trump
as a public persona with leadership qualities. Maybe life imitates art maybe
art imitates life but reality television might be remembered as the highest form of
terrorism. Okay so let's move on to good or better arts at least. Chris Burden's
1981 art installation a Tale of Two Cities is composed of 26 tons of sand rocks
plants and thousands of toys depicting a war zone. It shows the frontier of two
bordering states at war with one of the states being larger and more developed
than the other. There is a harbor and airport and mountainous region, toy
airplanes and fighter jets hang overhead in flight. There is a small town an urban
center and what looks like a tribal area and here you can see the relief of the
mountain side. One side is scarred with evidence of bombing and
devastation. The other appears unharmed though it is surrounded by military
infrastructure. Burdens installation was on display several times since 1981 and
changed kind of organically over time until it took kind of a final shape in the
new museum retrospective in 2013 and it was replicated in the permanent collection
of the Orange County Museum of Art which I'd like to thank for the images. A Tale
of Two Cities straddles the historical timeframe of the so-called war on terror -
2 decades before and one decade after 9/11 and one can help imagine that the two
cities became a metaphor for North America and the Middle East. Burdens work is both
a premonition and a testament to the nature of the current conflict. The
juvenile nature of war from the aggressors side no less shows how removed Western
democratic societies are from the side of conflict. It is a game going on over there
far away. My question for today is how can people in the West even make political art
with so much historical baggage in the contemporary moment? The following are
collages by a Syrian artist his name is Aeham Jaber who mixes scenes of the war in
Syria and the refugee crisis with these kind of kitschy surreal movie images from
from Hollywood of the 1950s and 60s - showing kind of the bombing of places like
Damascus is being perpetuated by UFOs. Instead of Russians Americans and
Emiratis. Placing the surreal devastation of Aleppo as an extraterrestrial
experience as if Syria is not even on the planet Earth. Jabbar's play on scale and
perspective attempts to contextualize and the historical heaviness of the current
refugee crisis by showing these kind of over sized children sleeping on the beach
side or the overreaction to displays of Western culture of Muslim culture in the
West like the burkini incident in France. The horror of surpassing the imagined
futures of the past, where control centers determine the fate of poor innocent
people, seen through the glassy gaze of technology, trying to
ensure the security of faraway States that are completely unaffected by the conflict.
This next section I kind of put in jest but I am also like partially serious and I
want to kind of leave you with the idea that for better or worse the two most
important artists today working today are probably Banksy and Anish Kapoor and still
in a way that their work embodies the issues of the art world with within the
sent the idea of the current conflict. From below and above the art world feels
compelled to be political to the point that if you make non-political art its
some ways it's perceived as not only goosh but devastating or shows the you are kind
of so removed from reality that you occupy and it's always interesting when we think
about how art collectors seem to be indifferent to the actual art itself and
think of it only as market value. As consumers and critics we need to voice our
concern about the context and not just the content of the art we are subjected to.
From the artists point of view they feel the compulsion to affect the world through
their spray can or massives art commissions. But those energies remain in
their niches they become self-serving as ways for careers to be made, they need to
be translated into something far more concrete, more sincere and more human than
the absurd unending wars we're constantly in and *Pause* yeah I guess we have plenty
of time for questions as I said I found out about this presentation 9 p.m.
yesterday and was a little worried I was going to take off way more time so thank
you very much for listening. *Applause* Herald: Thank you Saud. We have time for
questions. If anyone wants to ask please go to one of the microphones in the row.
There is two on each area. Saud: Don't all rush all at once. Yeah
that's actually my second chaos in a row speaking so *Laughs* this one is far more
chaotic than the first I must say oh yeah. But yeah thank you very much everyone.
Herald: Thank you Saud. You said that you had squezed in ten ...
Saud: yeah. like Herald: lectures into this talk, can you
tell us about that? Saud: Yeah I had more artists that I
wanted to talk to but again the context of how to fit in Harun Farocki or you know
sort of bigger more intellectual projects and the putting Burden
versus Jaber for me was in one hand using a very
established conceptual artist who's known to someone who is unknown who's just
working actually entrapped in Syria and can't leave and I went to show that there
is a genuine difference even if the intention of the artist is good that the
the content and the context is an in a sense devastating when you put it in
the larger sphere of the war. And *Pause* I to connect everything from television
shows and video games to gallery art as being part of the same ecosystem is not an
easy thing you can do, yeah in 30 minutes or in my case 10.
Herald: And you have been working on this for quite some years?
Saud: This is like postdoctoral work so this is the stuff I didn't in my PhD work
I actually do the aesthetics of the Islamic movement from themselves so it's
actually kind of a more internal thing than from the external parties, yeah. Now
this is kind of a 1 circle removed from what I was actually trained in but yeah.
Herald: In this case we don't see any more questions, unless there is anyone running
to the microphones now - O someone is running to microphone number 3. So
microphone number 3 please, that is you actually, please make sure to speak
clearly into the microphone please. Microphone 3: Yes, hello, yes I'm on maybe
you can just tell us some more about the pictures you've shown us?
Saud: *mm-hmm* Oh the collages Jaber work? He actually is a self trained well or
Chris Burden? Mic3: Maybe put the pictures on?
Saud: Sure, sure, sure. Mic3: Thanks
Saud: So well I guess Burdens installation is kind of famous. He himself am i on? I
think I'm switched off. Hello? Okay, yeah Burdens work his first work is that he got
famous for was called shoot where he was actually shot by a colleague of his in a
gallery by a 22 rifle and it was recorded on video and this was his kind of
performance art that broke him into the conceptual art world and his art works in
the 70s got bigger and bigger and this is one of the ones that culminated and kind
of a very tongue-in-cheek anti-war - Is the image? No it isn't. So he I was
trying to put like the context of someone who was kind of very very established to
someone who's basically working on his laptop using illustrator and Photoshop.
And that at the end of the day I think that *Pauses* the current conflict
depicting itself in these images is in a sense its own constant. Oh yeah.
Herald: We are sorry we won't be able to get the english sub right now. We are also
still throwing all that technology in this new location. Yes i think you have a
question? Is there someone on microphone number 4? Do you have a question? Please
speak into the microphone. Microphone 4: No
Herald: Ok . So Thank you everyone. Saud: Thank you everyone
Herald: Thank you very much *Applause*
*34c3 outro*
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