Pirated Politics: Contemporary Art, Artists, and the Postproduction of the Middle East
Panel 217, sponsored byAssociation for Modern and Contemporary Art of the Arab world, Iran, and Turkey (AMCA), 2009 Annual Meeting
On Tuesday, November 24 at 1:00 pm
Panel Description
In this panel, we take up the concept of "postproduction" to reframe a critical discussion of one category of signs - those of global media including viral video, televised news networks like Al-Jazeera and CNN, and others - as they are redeployed by artists with ties to the Middle East. "Postproduction" is a technical term in television, film, and video that refers to the set of operations performed on recorded material - montage, subtitling, voice-overs, special effects and other applications. In the art world, it is a term that critic and curator Nicolas Bourriaud introduced to describe artistic practices he saw emerging in the 1990s in a climate characterized by the fall of the Berlin wall and the rise an international circuit of biennial art exhibitions. Common among these practices was to take appropriation strategies as a starting point to create novel intuition, feelings, or social groupings, so collapsing the historically distinct zones of production and consumption, and challenging, in part, traditional models of artistic authenticity and originality. In this mode, art participates in a postmodern culture of sampling but intervenes in it, taking control of particular 'signs' in conjunction with their social function and manipulating the two together as uniquely contemporary works.
Producing art in or about a region that is typically understood to passively receive or purchase non-indigenous forms (from 'democracy' to Ivy-league curricula), the artists to be discussed in this panel have adopted the attitude of postproduction and pushed its permutations in various ways. By their "postproduction," we assess this descriptive category as a model for investigating contemporary work that emerges from and/or about the Middle East. Questions to be raised include: How do artists identified as Arab, Muslim, or Middle Eastern participate in international biennial culture while grappling with more situated obligations to their nation, inherited Socialist causes of progress and consciousness-raising, or other personal mores? In exploring the significance of their work, can we acknowledge the pitfalls of global identity politics while also recognizing sources for the distinctiveness of this art apart from linear development narratives based on the Pioneers paradigm? What factors have made possible the emergence of these artists on the international scene, and what factors will sustain them there?
Information-based media share with some historical Islamic artworks a structure in which images are not mimetic but arise from text. Islamic text-based images have inspired many Western modern and electronic-media artists, who often draw specifically on Islamic aesthetics as a point of departure for aniconic and textual images. The art they produce sometimes sincerely explores Islamic aesthetics (as in new-media works by John F. Simon, Jr.), and sometimes dabbles in Orientalism. Thus when Arab and Muslim artists seek to use electronic media to explore traditional Islamic aesthetics, they find the formal vocabulary has been pre-emptively Orientalized. Postproduction in this context can mean accepting this vocabulary and playing into audiences’ desires to see a “Muslim” text-based electronic art. Or it may mean ironizing it, or deepening its associations with Islamic aesthetics of aniconism and transformation. Some font designers, such as Tarek Atrissi, are specifically adapting Arabic writing for the live-action medium of the computer screen. Analog and computer animation provides an ideal playing field for a (sometimes ironic) revival of textual aesthetics, for example in the work of Usama Alshaibi and Paula Abood. This talk will focus on the work of Moroccan video artist Mounir Fatmi, who plays profoundly with Islamic aniconism and with the performativity of calligraphy.
I examine the 2006 artwork "Abidin Travels - Welcome to Baghdad" by Iraqi-born artist Adel Abidin as a critique of contemporary forms of living during wartime. For this work, the artist designed a spoof travel agency whose sole destination is Iraq, simulating the agency interface for various exhibition settings by producing video clips, leaflets, posters, brochures, interactive computer screens, and even a tickets booking facility. I discuss how the work highlights the ironies of 'liberated' daily life in Baghdad by purporting to offer Iraq's (already expropriated) natural and cultural resources to audiences in an art biennial setting, itself a site for international tourism. Through social anthropology's insight into the intimate links between the ideological expansion of modern society and modern mass leisure, especially international tourism and sightseeing, I analyze how the piece manipulates viewers' habituated tourist behaviors. I also explore its similarity with satirical works produced for Third Worldist print media in the 1960s; the pairing of the textual clichés of tourist propaganda with the opposing visual clichés of images of decimation has a historical precedent in radical cultural practices. In suggesting multiple genealogies for Abidin's 'postproduction' of the cheerful tropes of the sightseeing industry, I am most interested in the ways they work together to deconstruct current symbols of power, as well as their position within the new identity politics of the contemporary art world.
The intent of this paper is to explore how the Iranian artist A1one is adapting the contemporary Street Art movement to the specific cultural context of the Iranian public visual sphere, a highly active and persistently shifting arena bursting with images. Largely working in Tehran and other metropolitan areas, A1one has inserted himself into an urban dialogue alongside the hegemonic visual arts program conducted directly by the government of Iran and its subsidiary organizations. Within these urban environments, the artist is utilizing the various medias typically employed by other street artists, including spray graffiti, stencils, wheatpastes, stickers, and three-dimensional forms, to subversively voice dissent at a time when few channels are open for Iranians to publicly oppose the Islamic Republic’s ideology. Major themes in the artist’s work include icons of globalization and capitalism (particularly the McDonald’s arch), Iranian cultural figures, his integration of Islamic calligraphy and graffiti writing dubbed “Calligraffiti,” and depictions of bombs (as in “Bomb childz”) and other military imagery. By manifesting a differing perspective in the public conscious, his work is illustrating how the current trends of modern street art are suitable for artists with an urgent need to work quickly and anonymously, with viscerally potent results.
Transcending these physical interactions, A1one also manifests his work in the digital landscape. He regularly uploads digital images of his street art in situ to his blog and various websites, allowing a new audience access to his artwork, which would otherwise be unavailable to most people outside of Iran. Bypassing the Islamic Republic’s restrictions on the internet, A1one manages to maintain a strong internet presence which allows for an almost immediate response and appraisal from Iranians and other viewers of his previous night’s work. When taken out of its original context, A1one’s art enters a postproduction of interplaying with and responding to the assumptions and prejudices of global viewers unfamiliar with Iranian artistic traditions.
In this paper, I examine the work of Hassan Musa, a Sudanese painter, art historian and art critic whose concerns about contemporary geopolitical situations manifest in his work. Musa appropriates figures from heavily disseminated media images and “masterpieces” of art’s history, carefully orchestrating their relationships onto pre-printed fabrics. In this way, disparate elements like prostitutes, motorcycles, bananas, and American flags come together as riddling critiques. In particular, I focus on the painter’s Great American Nude series. Here Musa points to connections between European colonialism and the war on terror in his juxtaposition of Osama Bin Laden, Édouard Manet’s infamous Olympia and actors from the Abu Ghraib torture scandal. In the process of transposing Arab for white or man for woman, he challenges the notion that power resides among particular races, genders, and nationalities, instead highlighting the role of economic and political power in cleaving difference.
Using Omer Fast’s recent video, The Casting (2007) as a point of departure, this paper examines a set of contemporary art practices that expose the ways in which the malleability of reality is manipulated by media practitioners and documentary filmmakers, especially as it relates to imaging current political events in the Middle East. In his 4-channel video installation suspended from the ceiling, the Jerusalem-born artist conflates fact and fiction by splicing footage from his two interviews of a U.S. Army sergeant just prior to the officer’s redeployment to Iraq. By weaving the original interview fragments into a new, noticeably ruptured script, Fast reproduces a fabricated reality that is then doubled by actors who interpret the scenes on diptych screens that back the two on which the interviews take place. The Casting serves as a case study that allows me to conduct a broader analysis of postproduction strategies, particularly video editorial effects, employed by other artists with ties to the Middle East; and allows me to explore questions related to the ways in which reworked images inform and navigate our often uncritical consumption of constructed political realities throughout the region. In this paper I conduct a critical examination of the politics of aesthetics, and discuss how (new) media specificity challenges commonly held assumptions about authenticity and originality as they concern much of the art that is currently produced in and about the Arab world. The artists I discuss share a common refusal to perform identity for their global audiences, and their work contains signs that likewise deny concrete or locatable ideological signification. I conclude by examining the effects of such artistic production on the expectations of consumers of the “global” art market.
