BAD ART: The Iraq War Out
of Context
The Disassociated Press,
Taipei, November 7, 2006
By Eric Mader
"The logical result of Fascism is
the introduction of aesthetics into political life."
--Walter
Benjamin, 1936
I thought I'd seen the
headline of the year when I picked up the paper last Thursday:
Bush Tells
Iraqis that Patience has Limits
Sometimes a headline speaks
volumes. This one says more than
enough: the depressing ironies of the war, the blindness and arrogance of those
who led us into it, the complete disconnect between reality and White House
fantasy--they're all bound up in this seven-word title. Patience has limits indeed.
This week I'm hit by
another headline to be jotted down in our ever-burgeoning Compendium of
Orwellian Locutions. There again on the front page I read:
Iraq is a
"Work of Art in Progress," Says US General
Surely the only reason this
title made it front page is because our journalists, or some of them, retain a
sense of linguistic decency.
They're as offended by the general's art metaphor as you or I, and they
want to make clear again the sick depths to which our war rhetoric has
sunk. These journalists realize
the pass to which things have come: editorials are hardly necessary any more. To make the Bush administration and its
minions look like idiots, all you need do is report what they say.
The story under the
headline, reported in The Guardian,
reads in part:
A
US general in Baghdad called Iraq a "work of art" in progress on
Thursday in one of the most extraordinary attempts by the US military leadership
to put a positive spin on the worsening violence.
On a day in which 49 people were killed or found dead around the country, Major General William Caldwell, the chief military spokesman, argued that Iraq was in transition, a process that was "not always a pleasant thing to watch."
"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," Caldwell told journalists in Baghdad's fortified green zone.
"The
final test of our efforts will not be the isolated incidents that you report
daily, but the country that the Iraqis build," he added.
Perceptions
of how the war is going have become a central factor in next Tuesday's
congressional elections, which could determine US President George W. Bush's
freedom of maneuver in his last two years in office.
Reading this I couldn't
help but recall the widely condemned remark on 9/11 by the German composer
Karlheinz Stockhausen. Before the
smoke had even cleared, the composer was recorded in the German press as
calling the WTC attacks "the greatest work of art ever."
In fact Stockhausen's
remarks were taken out of context and misconstrued by initial reports. The composer wasn't praising the 9/11
attacks as something to be emulated, but was rather trying to stress the
Luciferian intensity of those who carried them out. He was comparing the mental preparation of those who planned
the attacks to the mental preparation of artists. Such a comparison was careless and in bad taste, no doubt,
and Stockhausen's words were quickly reprinted and attacked in newspapers
around the world--the composer's unwanted fifteen seconds of global fame.
Doubtless many in America who
read the press accounts considered Stockhausen's words just another example of
European anti-Americanism. It had
to be either anti-Americanism fueling such sentiments or the deranged
anti-humanism of the avant-garde.
The remarks struck a nerve because for many they sounded familiar in a
distasteful way: they fit a type.
Regardless what the composer was trying to say, the quote was instantly
newsworthy because it was so feasible.
After all, wasn't it likely that some loony from the "art
world" would come forward and call the 9/11 attacks a "work of
art"? Isn't that the kind of
sick thing artists do to get attention?
On a deeper level,
Stockhausen's remarks struck a nerve because aestheticizations of violence are
a part of Western history. The
quote reminded us of things we'd seen and heard before, in particular the
aestheticization of war and destruction that was a crucial part of Nazism. In this register Stockhausen's quote
also has consonance with the characterization of al Qaeda as a kind of "Islamic
fascism," a characterization I find apt. The purity of the kind of Islam bin Laden wants to see
established--a purity of political organization more than anything--and the
racial/cultural purity of the fascist order the Nazis tried to create have much
in common. Both Nazi theorists and
al Qaeda zealots see populations as malleable matter to be violently
reorganized; individual lives matter little to them. If it takes carnage to get the process going, so be it. Carnage, part of the final work, is more
than justified: it becomes actually beautiful. For bin Laden it is not only beautiful but holy.
And this is part of the
reason I find the American general's words so sick. In their homespun, dopey way, they echo an attitude to war
that is characteristic of fascism.
If Americans are repelled by the gruesome results of their government's
attempt to remake a Middle-Eastern country (and if, moreover, a congressional
election is just around the corner) this general thinks it is somehow advisable
to rechristen the endless carnage of the breakup of Iraq as "a work of
art."
So we've been
"artists" in Iraq all along, and didn't even know it. Yes, our labors are actually a long
Work in Progress--one that began with our support of Saddam and continued with
the recent invasion to overthrow him.
Sometimes, as the general says, the genesis of a great work of art is
"not always a pleasant thing to watch."
But consider our artistic
dedication. The medium we work
in--the Iraqi populace--has been finessed over the years by much dedicated
artistry. There was, for one, the
more Neoclassical artistry of the Bush, Sr. administration, which encouraged
the Shiites to rise up against Saddam, then cynically let them get slaughtered
when they did. That seems a long time
ago now, but was it? Never
mind. Great artists think of the
work ahead, not of what happened the day before yesterday.
Neoclassicism is a thing of
the past. With the fall of Saddam
under Bush, Jr., our aesthetic paradigm changed abruptly. The Iraqis were directed through a sort
of quick Impressionistic period: first looters destroyed much of their social
infrastructure, then ill-prepared American appointees (much artistic will but
no concrete plans) arrived to make a shoddy show of rebuilding. Think of Monet's Water Lilies in cement and burnt out power grids.
Impressionism was followed
by a kind of Symbolist movement.
No surprise there really.
With the failure to find WMD, the Work in Progress could only become
grander and more esoteric in scope.
It's true esotericism often scares away patrons, but our artists didn't
have to worry. Generous
contributions from the American taxpayer, a more or less captive patron,
ensured that the Work continued as unscheduled. Unscheduled?
Yes. Great artists must not
be rushed.
When the insurgency began
to rear its head--when it became clear that it wasn't simply a matter of a few
"foreign elements" mixed with Baathist dead-enders--it was time to
shift decisively to a Surrealist paradigm. According to this new aesthetic, Iraqi cab drivers and
vegetable vendors were artistically molded by the trained hands of our Abu
Ghraib interrogators, who'd gotten their MFAs on the quick by visiting profs
from the Neocon School of Fine Interrogation. Scarcely has new work gained so much international press
coverage as those memorable pieces: "Man With Black Hood Holding
Wires," "Smiling Troops with Stack of Naked Iraqis," "Muddy
Man on Leash." So you see our
patronage has paid off: the whole world appreciates our artistic
accomplishments.
It's true the Iraqi
elections, hailed as one of the high points of the Work, proved a somewhat
duller part of the creative process.
The elections never really fit into the exciting categorizations of art
history--the categories I refer to above.
What happened actually? The
three mutually hostile ethnic groups of Iraq predictably elected three mutually
hostile political groupings, the dominant Shia grouping, again predictably,
looking more toward Iran for its ideas than toward the artistes whose war had brought them to power. This instance of the unwieldiness of
our material (those Shiites are behaving just like, well, Shiites) has just
begun. But as our general said:
the Great Work is still in progress, so we shouldn't judge too hastily.
The problems with evoking
art as a metaphor for political violence are many, but what should most concern
us is the necessary arrogance of anyone who would do so. Human populations are not clay to be
molded by the hands of an artist.
You cannot smooth down a bump here and cut off a section there to make
the work fit what you want. Human
populations, unlike clay, each have their own long history, which means they
will go where they will. Any
attempts to shift them in a radically different direction can only end in
failure.
Aestheticization of
politics is one of the major themes taken up by social critics of the last
century: especially by critics of the major totalitarian movements. That we in Iraq are trying to build a
democracy (or were trying: I don't
think anyone is seriously hopeful any more) means that the case is somewhat
different. But it isn't acceptable
to find one of our military spokesmen resorting to grand metaphors about a
"work of art" to explain how we are (supposedly) slowly guiding
Iraq's people to stand in the configuration we want. Given that tens of thousands of people have died, many of
them horrible deaths, as a result of our misguided policies, any comparison of
ourselves to artists is distasteful at the very least. It becomes more distasteful if the
person speaking such words about the Great Work to come knows they are simply
not true: if, for example, the general knows that almost none of our goals have
been met in Iraq and that, come a year or two, we will most certainly be
scaling down our involvement in what has become a vicious civil war between
enemy tribes. And I suspect the
general knows this, and that his words are mainly just pre-election spin, which
makes them, given the stakes, nothing less than despicable.
Whole peoples are not to be
molded like clay according to blueprints thought up thousands of miles away by
officials with little knowledge of the cultures they intend to mold. America, with its great universities
and thousands of dedicated scholars, should know better. From now on Americans should leave it
to grander "artists" like Hitler, Pol Pot or bin Laden to dream of
remaking peoples according to the dictates of political fantasy. Lifted too much off the ground by the
(oil-) pipe dreams and delusions of the Bush administration, America needs
badly to return to reality.
--.
On Karlheinz Stockhausen's
9/11 remarks:
http://www.stockhausen.org/message_from_karlheinz.html
http://www.evbvd.com/newsnotes/911/010919a.html
Email: inthemargins03@hotmail.com
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