34C3 - The Work of Art in the Age of Digital Assassination

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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