Iraq as Art in Progress

By Claudia Parsons BAGHDAD, Nov 2 2006 (Reuters) - A senior U.S. general compared Iraq on Thursday to a work of art in progress and played down incessant violence and friction with Iraqi leaders as "speed bumps" on the road to stability...The chief military spokesman in Iraq, Major General William Caldwell, used a weekly briefing in Baghdad to urge patience. "Every great work of art goes through messy phases while it is in transition. A lump of clay can become a sculpture, blobs of paint become paintings which inspire," he said. "The final test of our efforts will not be the isolated incidents reported daily but the country that the Iraqis build."

To: Chrissie Iles, Curator, Whitney Film and Video, and Philippe Vergne, Curator, Walker Art Center; Co-Curators, Whitney Biennial, Whitney Museum of Contemporary Art, NY

From: Major General William Caldwell, Pentagon Central Command, 1st Division, 22nd Contemporary Art Brigade

Proposal for Site Installation/Situational Art Project "Democratization: Iraq Invasion #2"

Our site installation proposal presents an ongoing, dialectical critique of war through broad, multi-media installation and co-ordinated situational art happenings all across the actual nation of Iraq, recontextualizing an air, naval, and ground invasion as a massively transgressive process which critiques existing social, economic and political institutions throughout the country, leading, through explosive physical eradications of existing religious norms, military institutions, human bodies, and structures, towards the radical transformation of a brutal, autocratic society.

A) "The "Decider," to be exhibited as an individual performance in Washington D.C. and at a small farm site in rural Texas, will plan and execute an "invasion" of the nation, creating "reasons," such as "a connection to Al Qaida," or the need to find "Weapons of Mass Destruction," or other non-sensical, absurdist phrases. The counterpoint of this "invasion" rationale will be that the reasons are obviously false - this chanted dissociation intends to form mass critical consciousness of the toxic Self/Other dialectic which amplified by desire for power justifies social structures which permit war, as well as an anti-narrative that counters the hegemonic eisegesis of nationalism into moment which drives war, by repeatedly underscoring it's absurdity, turning clearly eisegesitic falsehood into hermeneutically-legitimized analysis.
B) Part II of the Situational performance will be the actual deployment of several hundred thousand "soliders" all across Iraq, armed with completely functional weapons and ammunition, who, working in a Fluxus event tradition, will actually risk their lives to engage the performance of "invasion." To maximize authentic feeling on the part of the "invaded", real gunfire, bombs, missiles and pointed sticks will be used against the "forces" of the "Dictator" (see below." Willfully subsuming their freedom and discretion to act, the U.S. artists will be controlled by "orders" from the "Decider." Their orderly and coordinated movements will be compositionally challenged by an organic group without clear direction, known as "The Insurgency," who will contrast the costume of the soldiers with an array of black masks - and lack of identifying costume altogether; subsumed into the population -the line between actor and spectator will be violently blurred.

C) "The "Dictator", posited here as the Other, will be "removed" from "office," where the manifestations of power expressed through ostentatious architecture, "taste"-defying material riches, brutalization of subservient humans, were omnipresent, and he will live in a small hole in the ground, converted to a rude apartment in an inverted simulacrum of his previous station, not leaving for several months.

D) Nodding to formal concerns, repeated multi-site and broadcast media-based hyper-complex logistical "maps" and digitized "plans" will dictate movements of "Troops," evoking through structure and subject matter Poussin's Rape of the Sabine Women, with a frentic, chaotic subject nonetheless heavily controlled and composed in geometric order by the decisions of the "Decider," and a cryptic, otherworld character known only as "Rumsfeld." The clinically clean graphics and "objective" maps will contrast markedly with the bloodletting and destruction in the actual places they describe.

E) This "Situationist" style set of events will be extensively but incompletely documented in national and international media- the artists insist that the penetration of the performance event penetrates mass culture; the artists will repeatedly prank and play on national attachments and love of country to "justify" the perfomance - whose obvious falseness will again serve as a critique of mass culture. At the same time, ongoing, robust physical destruction will critique over-traditional and faux-modernist trends in secular Iraqi architecture.

F) Update: we are having some trouble drawing the in-situ performance aspect of the event to a satisfactory conclusion. Please bear with us for an updated proposal.