At Home and Abroad

Abstract

Art and War in Iraq symposium Brown University Providence, RI April 5, 2013 Wafaa Bilal: The Ashes Series David Winton Bell Gallery Brown University Providence, Rhode Island April 3-May 26, 2013 Daniel Heyman: I Am Sorry It Is Difficult to Start David Winton Bell Gallery Brown University Providence, Rhode Island April 3-May 26, 2013 The tenth anniversary of US invasion of Iraq passed with little fanfare in Washington. The White House released a brief statement honoring fallen soldiers and reminding everyone war ended over a year ago. Various administration figures, past and present, suggested we ought to wait a bit before making any definitive statements about how it all went. And in an article for New York Times, Tim Arango collected responses to anniversary from Iraqi citizens, discovering, for most part, a profound disinterest in marking exactly how long it had been since ongoing devastation and displacement of occupation began. That war is, in many respects, over was especially in dispute at Art and War in a symposium hosted by David Winton Bell Gallery at Brown University in April. The event drew a lively crowd to a diverse line-up of artists and academics. Significantly, issue of art in Iraq debuted rather late in day, after a series of presentations that focused primarily on work made well outside conflict zone. This disconnect set stage for a tense roundtable discussion of what, exactly, we ought to do and say about a war that is over and over, ours and ours, visible and invisible. The afternoon began with artist lectures by Wafaa Bilal and Daniel Heyman, whose exhibits The Ashes Series and I Am Sorry It Is Difficult to Start, respectively, had opened at gallery on April 3. Bilal's presentation, Making Invisible Visible, introduced audience members to his past work through its formal and informal documentation, underlining his concern with engaging those unwilling to engage in dialogue. Alongside a video clip from Domestic Tension (2007), for example, he displayed photographs of bruises he sustained as a human paintball target during thirty-day performance event, and described a visit to gallery by a Marine who came to replace a lamp that a remote shooter had previously destroyed. Discussion of The Ashes Series (2003-13) continued Bilal's exploration of the space between destruction and longing. To produce ten images, Bilal built and then photographed three-dimensional models of destroyed domestic spaces. Each carefully replicates one of now-ubiquitous images of Iraq's rubble-filled palaces, marketplaces, and hospitals. While Bilal excises any human figures, he reintroduces substance of human by including twenty-one grams of human ashes distributed among ten models (a reference to weight said to leave body upon death). Prefiguring late-coming discussion of art in Bilal connected work to a sense of despair and isolation of not being there. Heyman began his presentation, Remarks on Truth and Knowledge: Using Art to Bear Witness to Torture in Iraq, with big questions--just kind we might hope a symposium on art and war could begin to answer: What makes something art? Does an artist have a right or obligation to participate in moral, ethical, and intellectual debates? With frame set, Heyman described genesis of works included in I Am Sorry It Is Difficult to Start, noting that much of what is displayed is a response to photographic images of war (and their elisions and limitations). After initially incorporating infamous Abu Ghraib photographs into his work, he became concerned that using them might perpetuate a process of dehumanization. Then, in 2006, Heyman began working with Susan Burke, an American lawyer suing US military contractors on behalf of those tortured at Abu Ghraib. …