wodiczko:october:2008.pdf

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OCTOBER 123, Winter 2008, pp. 172179. 2008 October Magazine, Ltd. and Massachusetts Institute of Technology.

KRZYSZTOF WODICZKO

Though I am not an expert in political and cultural anthropology, I will

attempt to elaborate on some conditions and issues that may have contributed tothe passivity and silence of artists, intellectuals, academics, and those from withinthe cultural domain.

The War

Unlike during the Vietnam War, we have no ofcial military draft, which isan important condition for the potential of a nationwide antiwar movement.

And unlike before the Vietnam War, the U.S. was indeed att acked (in2001)not by any country, and certainly not by Iraqand thus, for many, retalia-tion seems legitimate. The cultural and larger publics, including artistic audiencesand institutions, are confused by their complex relation to the popular support our troops slogan.

I lived in Poland during the Vietnam War and cannot be a witness here, but from what I hear from my American-born colleagues, the resentment, resistance,and fear of military draft in the context of the illegality of the war (because theU.S. was not directly attacked) were critically linked with, and to some degreefueled by, powerful and emotionally charged reports and images of war.

The Media

In the current war, there is no attempt to present politically insightful infor-mation and images of war; particularly absent is the damage done to civilians andto cultural and social life in Iraq.

To make it worse, the real picture of war damage inicted on the U.S. popula-tion (including trauma transmission and dissemination) is not being taken intoaccount by the media. (I will come back to this issue in the later part of my response.)

The damage to immigrants and their families caused by Homeland Securitysdomestic war on terror(the subject of my interior projection titled If You See Something . . . ) is also neither seen nor heard.

Through skillful imposition of the editorial technique of omission, the govern-ments public information machine has silenced the complexity and magnitude of the toll of war and successfully manipulated a confused and disappointed middle-class and its centrist public sphere. In this way, the government turned media intoits publicity. The art of the front-page image (no more than trite photographic

war icons) in the New York Times and afliated Boston Globe testies to this. Antiwar discourse between cultures, classes, and generations needs evocative,


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Questionnaire: Wodiczko 173

passionate, and agonistic war reports and images, ones that compete for truth-telling. Artists and intellectuals, especially visual artists and their audiences, rely today only on media imagery. In order to construct new forms and methods forcritical thinking, resistance, and rescue, artists and intellectualsand the public

at largeneed to see and hear information and imagery that reports, testies,explores, and uncovers the war.Ernst Friedrichs Anti-War Museum and Krieg dem Kriege! [War against War!]

project, which relied on photographic documents as evidence of the horrors of war, would be as difcult today as it was then, in the time of German censorshipduring World War I. John Hearteld would have had have a hard time as well (but I am sure that his sense of humor would have helped him nd a way to unmaskand ridicule the empty sentimentality and hypocrisy of the medias war imagery and the workings of the censorship itself. He would have embraced the Internet and the methods of Electronic Civil Disobedience, just as he mastered themethod of photomontage and the use of the most advanced printing technology,rotogravure).

Reading the Morning Newspaper . . .

Our postdeconstructive artistic efforts (analytical, critical, and pro-active)are not only sporadic and lonely but also overshadowed by the spiritual impact of media imagery.

The media provides for a daily spectacle of humanized and universalized war trauma. Television, radio, and the Internet provide spiritual assistance to

ones confused life. The physical, mental, or moral injury and suffering of those inIraq and Afghanistan are being turned into soft and digestible parareligiousmedia representation. Aimed at comforting our ethically confused souls, todaysart of media culture is elegant and hermeneutical in its careful choice and omis-sion of critical issues. The phantasm it inspires has a sublime and metaphysicaleffect. Hegel said:

Reading the morning newspaper is a kind of real Morning Prayer. Oneorients ones attitude against the world and toward (in one case) God,or (in the other case) toward that which the world is. The former givesthe same security as the latter, in that one knows where one stands.

Made long before the advent of the newspapers advanced color photography andits iconic impact, Hegels observation seems surprisingly accurate today. Present day image reproduction technology adds quality to Hegels real MorningPrayer. The large-scale, holy image on the front page of the New York Times func-tions as an altar in front of which we justify our political passivity in real life. They are skillfully created to be used by a reader as empathy objects.

As long as we look at the tragic media icons with feelings for the vict ims


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OCTOBER 174

establishing a bridge of empathy with them, or, more precisely, with their icons we feel that we are part of a larger human family. We may imagine and wish (pray)that the suffering of these war survivors and victims may redeem us, or offer asort of salvation, and relieve us from an obligation to try to do anything about

their and others situations. Ones empathy functions here as a substitute for action. When in the time of war the middle classs spiritual, humanistic, and aestheticneeds seem to be fullled by the art of the media, the critical artist and his or herart are put out of business by the art of an ofcial and powerful media artist.

Is there a way to confront the artistic impact of the media? To disclose andchallenge what it is shown, how it misrepresents, and what it hides about the war?

If You See Something . . .

In my interior projection If You See Something . . ., a reference to the Home-land Security signs still displayed in the public transportat ion systems of New Yorkand other cities that read If You See Something, Say Something, I focus on thetragic effects of our Ministry of Interior, U.S. Homeland Security, on the limitsof our perception and imagination effected by the interior of our uninformedminds (our subjectivity), and most importantly on the invisible people, the work-ing residents of our country who are struggling to survive the U.S. governmentsunjust actions conducted against them in the name of the war on terror.

With the use of high-denition video projection, the windowless space of Galerie Lelong was transformed into an illusion of an interior with windows. Onthe other side of milky glass windows (Chelsea-style), as if outside on the side-

walk, one could see the foggy images of those others suffering arrests, detentions,and deportations, the aliens from whom we are alienated. They actors workedaccording to scripts written themselves; they recalled and reenacted scenes fromreal life, situations that happened and could happen again to them on the New

York streets.The psycho-political and aesthetic aims of the projection were as follows:To come close enough to these strangers, who one usually does not

notice, to see and hear some unexpected details of their painful, often brave andcomically tragic experiences, and to realize how incomplete our understandingand access to their experience is.

To engage the survivors emotionally and aesthetically as coartists in theproduction and animation of the projection; to help them develop rhetorical sur-

vival skills and emotional capacit ies by publically art iculating their traumaticencounters with Homeland Security.

To help organizations attract media and public attention for their clientssituations.

To take advantage of the cultural production situation in order to buildnew connections between immigrants and social support networks.


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another form will need to be invented now and in the future. What was good yes-terday may not be good for today, what is today may be not good for tomorrow.

Why, then, have we been attempting since the 1990s to bury all kinds of polit icaland engaged art? Why havent we just gone ahead and invented new ones?

I absolutely agree with your questionnaires implication that the market-driven cultural economy alienates us from the collective and/or coalition basedoppositional practice of the 1960s, 70s, and 80s. Emphasis on an individualartists oeuvre (demanded by the market) and the fashionable aversion to any kindof socially focused, critical art (a bad name, if not a curse), is a serious backgroundfor the lack of any socio-aesthetic act ion and movement (another bad name).

The Internet

Contrary to October s implied skepticism about the effect of the Internet, andin accordance with the more optimistic position of Critical Art Ensemble andother technologically and politically minded groups and artists, I believe that theInternets communication technology and culture are NOT socially alienating anddepoliticizing factors.

I hold that the Internet continues to be a great political and artistic vehiclefor all of us and the vital means of collective being and action. The creative use of the Internet, in conjunction with digital imaging technology, cellular telephonecommunication, and other media, is an organic part of the public oppositionalpresenceas much as physical gatherings, actions, and events. Through variousinterfaces and cross-organizational networks, the Internet can enforce, protect,

and disseminate oppositional projects, developing them collectively and coordi-nating them, often globally. The Internet allows the social actions in electronicspace to be organically linked with social actions in urban, suburban, and distant environments.

In addition, todays oppositional projects and protests do not always need totake the form of massive street demonstrations or marches on Washington. Theactions that take place between these big gatheringsactions prepared throughthe use of digital media and communication technologiescan be effective.

The War Silence

The U.S. populations silence is in part a result of vast war fallout at homethe rapid spread of the secondary trauma transmitted by returning soldiers totheir families. Soldiers psychologically and socially harmful (posttraumaticstressrelated behavior) directly affects their close and extended families.

This war is unprecedented in U.S. history for its excessive use of the NationalGuard and military reserves and for recalling older individuals, who typically have

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large families, three or four times. Each traumatized soldier retraumatizes ve tonine members of his or her own family. Secondary war trauma is spreading sorapidly across the country that it will cripple and destroy the lives of a third of theU.S. population. The soldiers families are as much war veterans as the soldiers

themselves. For too many back home, the peace is a continuation of war by othermeans. As a result of new boot camp desensitizing techniques, 80 percent of U.S. sol-

diers are trained and armed to kill in Iraq and Afghanistan (only 20 percent didso in World War II). In this situation, it must be very difcult for returning soldiersto resensitize themselves back home, and there is no comprehensive and effectivegovernment program for such reintegration.

For every U.S. soldier killed, there are sixteen wounded comrades, anunprecedented ratio of survival, which means an enormous number of veterans

will suffer deep physical and mental wounds. New kinds of brain, bodily, and emo-tional injuries are multiplying. These emotional, moral, and physical injuriesaffect the lives of veterans as well as those of their children and grandchildren.

Those soldiers recalled several times to Iraq are not only traumatized, but also retraumatized, and in turn they traumatize, retraumatize, harm, and even killothers or themselves.

The Iraq human trauma is, of course, far greater than the one among U.S.soldiers and families. Eighty percent or more of the children in Iraq suffer post-traumatic stress, joining the vast majority of Iraq as a traumatized population.Countless Iraqis have lost their lives; countless Iraqis have lost their closest kin,their friends, and their community; countless Iraqis live wounded and impover-ished, and seek uncertain and traumatic refuge abroad.

The Tasks

There is enormous emotional and political illiteracy about the scale of todays war and the spread of war trauma, about war as a lived-through experience, as anexperience with resulting generational and cultural fallout.

The silence of those who know what the present war isthat is, the silenceof one-third of the U.S. population, and the silence of the entire population of Iraqis reinforced by the common sense passivity on the part of cultural, artistic,and academic worlds.

In this situation it is difcult, if not impossible, for the younger generations,artists among them, to learn and comprehend the existential dimension and scaleof the present war. They do not know what war is from the point of view of Iraqicivilians or Iraqi insurgents, nor from U.S. soldiers and their families. There isno agonistic democratic discourse, based on fearless speech by all parties.

Young people do not have any cultural base from which to develop their eth-ical and political acts of public speech and art in opposition to the war. The war



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impact will soon be so large that they will have many everyday experiences withthe social epidemic of secondary trauma, but without a larger social discourse they

will have no equipment to understand the scale and depth of its existential fall-out. The younger population has no idea what war is.

Since 2001, I have been engaged in teaching workshops and seminars as apart of my Interrogative Design Group at MIT. The courses explore public art,media art, methodologies in advancing designs and technologies of protest, dis-sensus and social inclusion, and critical and agonistic memory; I have focusedmore recently on the design of communication and mobility equipment designfor todays war veterans.

Each year I receive more student demand for images and information on sol-diers and civilians lived war experience. War veterans are invited to speak to thestudents, alternative lms from the war are shown, and the Internet communica-tions about the war and its falloutand online antiwar art and cultural projectsare reviewed.

In the isolated academic environment, it is almost impossible to break the wall of silence, reinforced by the media and cultural worlds, that separates twoalienated populations: those who know what war is and those who do not. The

wall of silence, passivity, and ignorance must be dismantled. Tactical cultural projects must be urgently developed with those who know, with the veterans, theirfamilies, and those who work directly with them.

Art for the Political

If, since the 1990s, our objective has been to contribute to the political,rather than to politics, to the polis rather than the police, to that which is poten-tia and multitude rather than potentates, to revolt rather than revolution, to agonand dissenus rather then consensus, to Democratic parrhesia and public interpel-lation rather than patriotic or civic responsibility, to nomadology rather thanthe state apparatus . . . let us then continue our effort in inventing art for the politi-cal. There have been new and versied methodologies developed in this directionby artists, artistic and cultural groups, collaborative networks, and coalitions.

Lets hope they will focus on the methods of war against war as a new, post-deconstructive project. In this context, I would like to mention some names of oppositional artistic groups and projects (some of them are among the respon-dents to the October questionnaire):

Walid Raad and the Atlas Group, Critical Art Ensemble (ElectronicCivil Disobedience and other projects), Todd Hirsch and works by

Autonomedia, 16Beaver, the Yes Men, Naeem Mohaiemen and the Visible Collective, John Melpede, and the programs and projects of the Vera List Center for Art and Politics, the projects and teaching of MITs

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Interrogative Design Group (including the War Veteran Vehicle Project presently under development), and many others.

It is my conviction that if these and other artists, artistic groups, networks,and coalitions further focus their attention on the present war and on fallout forlater generations, we will contribute not only to the end this war, but to a situationin which it will be much more difcult for society to allow an unjust, irresponsible,interventionist war to reoccur.

Developing my Interrogative Design Group and the War Veteran VehicleProject in collaboration with Theodore Spyropoulos, preparing new interior andexterior public projections with war veterens, as well as learning and teaching themethods and techniques of oppositional art, I try to contribute in this direction.

August 2007


KRZYSZTOF WODICZKO is an artist who lives and works in New York and Cambridge, Massachusetts.


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