1 00:00:00,000 --> 00:00:14,974 *34c3 intro* 2 00:00:14,974 --> 00:00:16,058 Saud Al-Zaid: What I want to talk about 3 00:00:16,058 --> 00:00:22,780 today is the conundrum of reality and non- reality of our world and the fictional or 4 00:00:22,780 --> 00:00:27,420 artificial worlds and works of art and everything from what graces museums and 5 00:00:27,420 --> 00:00:34,480 galleries to what enters our living rooms in the form of television or video games. 6 00:00:34,480 --> 00:00:38,550 The title as you may know is in reference to the works of Walter Benjamin, the 7 00:00:38,550 --> 00:00:45,660 most important procrastinator in modern history. Benjamin is a pioneer in Media 8 00:00:45,660 --> 00:00:50,710 Studies with his study of cinema and how we consume media on a societal level in 9 00:00:50,710 --> 00:00:55,789 dark movie theaters from Berlin to New York watching technically reproduced 10 00:00:55,789 --> 00:01:00,239 images like the one we have in this Beamer and today streamed on the Internet over 11 00:01:00,239 --> 00:01:05,500 and over again his essay is one of the most assigned texts in the humanities 12 00:01:05,500 --> 00:01:11,110 itself technically reproduced and culturally consumed on a hyper meta level. 13 00:01:11,110 --> 00:01:15,859 Its primary theoretical focus is on ideology specifically Benjamins rather 14 00:01:15,859 --> 00:01:21,340 unique Marxist perspective about political progress and the fascist political order 15 00:01:21,340 --> 00:01:27,130 that he was working under during World War 2. What I want to connect this to is what 16 00:01:27,130 --> 00:01:32,280 I call the current conflict what others call the war on terror and the things that 17 00:01:32,280 --> 00:01:38,240 go along with it. So over here is a the first page of a legal memo regarding the 18 00:01:38,240 --> 00:01:43,409 applicability of federal criminal laws and the Constitution to the contemplated to 19 00:01:43,409 --> 00:01:49,090 the contemplated lethal operations against Anwar al-Aulaqi. Aulaqi was not a military 20 00:01:49,090 --> 00:01:55,479 general or a terrorist tactician he was primarily a propagandist. This authorizes 21 00:01:55,479 --> 00:02:00,200 the killing of an American citizen without trial by jury an authorized violation of 22 00:02:00,200 --> 00:02:06,200 the Constitution in both the 6th and if you think about it the 1st amendment. The 23 00:02:06,200 --> 00:02:09,860 violation of the 6th amendment hasn't happened in the American in the American 24 00:02:09,860 --> 00:02:16,230 context since the Civil War and this one was executed by a Reaper drone. This is an 25 00:02:16,230 --> 00:02:21,920 artifact from reality. This artifact I want to connect to the artifacts of our 26 00:02:21,920 --> 00:02:26,920 current fiction such as those found all over in popular media of an intolerant 27 00:02:26,920 --> 00:02:31,440 Muslim world raging with anger against your freedoms. 28 00:02:31,440 --> 00:02:36,830 As the West violates our lives and bodies in the hundreds of thousands and indeed 29 00:02:36,830 --> 00:02:43,280 violating its own rules. And why art? It's because the relationship between art and 30 00:02:43,280 --> 00:02:47,900 reality is not an easy one. I want to point that even the most basic terms of 31 00:02:47,900 --> 00:02:52,230 our current reality say a word like assassination or assassin have multiple 32 00:02:52,230 --> 00:02:58,440 layers and historical residues. The term assassin comes from the Arabic Hashashin or 33 00:02:58,440 --> 00:03:03,900 those who take hashish or stoners. It was during the Crusades that the assassin word 34 00:03:03,900 --> 00:03:08,720 entered into European languages and as meaning specifically as someone who does 35 00:03:08,720 --> 00:03:14,900 targeted political killing. It's based on a myth or fictional propaganda against a 36 00:03:14,900 --> 00:03:20,400 small sect in Islam known as the Ismailis. The story went that there was an old man 37 00:03:20,400 --> 00:03:24,500 of the mountain who would take young men to the garden and give them so much 38 00:03:24,500 --> 00:03:29,010 hashish that they believed they were in heaven. In more elaborate versions there 39 00:03:29,010 --> 00:03:34,665 were gardens full of naked women music wine you know you get the idea. When the 40 00:03:34,665 --> 00:03:40,320 hashish wore off and they're kind of going over there hashish hangover the old man 41 00:03:40,320 --> 00:03:45,650 would convince the young men that the only way for them to go back to heaven is by 42 00:03:45,650 --> 00:03:49,788 killing one of his enemies in what is effectively a suicide mission. When the 43 00:03:49,788 --> 00:03:53,980 young assassins, the hashashin, were killed the immediately in a sense come 44 00:03:53,980 --> 00:03:58,900 back to the garden. The purpose of this story is to make the assassins look weak 45 00:03:58,900 --> 00:04:03,547 willed and even stupid - though the sect may have performed political 46 00:04:03,547 --> 00:04:08,790 assassinations, marijuana was not likely involved. The story is probably completely 47 00:04:08,790 --> 00:04:14,930 bullshit. But now we're stuck with the word assassin. It's a fictional error or 48 00:04:14,930 --> 00:04:20,490 propaganda glitch in our current linguistic reality. Can you spot the 49 00:04:20,490 --> 00:04:26,590 difference? In case you need the slide explained to you: at the top its drone 50 00:04:26,590 --> 00:04:34,460 operators up there and in the bottom its Cheech and Chong. Assassins - hashashin or 51 00:04:34,460 --> 00:04:39,400 vice versa. My argument is that the difference between reality and fiction or 52 00:04:39,400 --> 00:04:44,569 our serious acknowledgement that this is real and that over there is myth, just a 53 00:04:44,569 --> 00:04:49,630 story, just the TV show, just a video game is an ideological difference on the level 54 00:04:49,630 --> 00:04:55,590 of ideas during the current conflict. Ideas that have a life of their own that 55 00:04:55,590 --> 00:04:59,650 are animated by new technologies like pieces of paper in the Middle Ages that 56 00:04:59,650 --> 00:05:05,190 propagated the crusader myths of the assassins. Cultural ADIF artifacts reflect 57 00:05:05,190 --> 00:05:12,128 multiple facets those signs of human advancement and human tragedy. The work of 58 00:05:12,128 --> 00:05:17,160 art even as an object has a political valence the artist and the and the artwork 59 00:05:17,160 --> 00:05:22,082 are all constituent parts of what we colloquially call the art scene. That 60 00:05:22,082 --> 00:05:26,630 somewhat kind of toxic social construct that in turn makes up the art market and 61 00:05:26,630 --> 00:05:32,511 even more toxic construct. Does anyone recognize the unimpressive painting? You 62 00:05:32,511 --> 00:05:36,780 normally wouldn't - except it was done by a young struggling Austrian artist by the 63 00:05:36,780 --> 00:05:42,520 name of Adolf Hitler. Hitler was rejected from art school struggling to pay rent in 64 00:05:42,520 --> 00:05:46,990 a gentrifying but vibrant Vienna, the first steps in a sequence of events that 65 00:05:46,990 --> 00:05:52,710 gave us the most devastating leader of the last century. In case you're wondering: 66 00:05:52,710 --> 00:05:59,020 yes I'm saying the art world gave us Hitler. Speaking about art I don't want to 67 00:05:59,020 --> 00:06:04,200 make like the Fasil with the Trump transition but it's hard to avoid. 68 00:06:04,200 --> 00:06:08,270 Television creatives were the minds behind The Apprentice and the creation of Trump 69 00:06:08,270 --> 00:06:13,760 as a public persona with leadership qualities. Maybe life imitates art maybe 70 00:06:13,760 --> 00:06:18,360 art imitates life but reality television might be remembered as the highest form of 71 00:06:18,360 --> 00:06:25,830 terrorism. Okay so let's move on to good or better arts at least. Chris Burden's 72 00:06:25,830 --> 00:06:33,530 1981 art installation a Tale of Two Cities is composed of 26 tons of sand rocks 73 00:06:33,530 --> 00:06:41,620 plants and thousands of toys depicting a war zone. It shows the frontier of two 74 00:06:41,620 --> 00:06:46,160 bordering states at war with one of the states being larger and more developed 75 00:06:46,160 --> 00:06:50,811 than the other. There is a harbor and airport and mountainous region, toy 76 00:06:50,811 --> 00:06:56,169 airplanes and fighter jets hang overhead in flight. There is a small town an urban 77 00:06:56,169 --> 00:07:02,113 center and what looks like a tribal area and here you can see the relief of the 78 00:07:02,113 --> 00:07:06,847 mountain side. One side is scarred with evidence of bombing and 79 00:07:06,847 --> 00:07:11,889 devastation. The other appears unharmed though it is surrounded by military 80 00:07:11,889 --> 00:07:17,580 infrastructure. Burdens installation was on display several times since 1981 and 81 00:07:17,580 --> 00:07:22,091 changed kind of organically over time until it took kind of a final shape in the 82 00:07:22,091 --> 00:07:27,420 new museum retrospective in 2013 and it was replicated in the permanent collection 83 00:07:27,420 --> 00:07:31,860 of the Orange County Museum of Art which I'd like to thank for the images. A Tale 84 00:07:31,860 --> 00:07:36,360 of Two Cities straddles the historical timeframe of the so-called war on terror - 85 00:07:36,360 --> 00:07:42,510 2 decades before and one decade after 9/11 and one can help imagine that the two 86 00:07:42,510 --> 00:07:48,040 cities became a metaphor for North America and the Middle East. Burdens work is both 87 00:07:48,040 --> 00:07:51,893 a premonition and a testament to the nature of the current conflict. The 88 00:07:51,893 --> 00:07:56,919 juvenile nature of war from the aggressors side no less shows how removed Western 89 00:07:56,919 --> 00:08:02,460 democratic societies are from the side of conflict. It is a game going on over there 90 00:08:02,460 --> 00:08:10,310 far away. My question for today is how can people in the West even make political art 91 00:08:10,310 --> 00:08:14,449 with so much historical baggage in the contemporary moment? The following are 92 00:08:14,449 --> 00:08:21,170 collages by a Syrian artist his name is Aeham Jaber who mixes scenes of the war in 93 00:08:21,170 --> 00:08:25,720 Syria and the refugee crisis with these kind of kitschy surreal movie images from 94 00:08:25,720 --> 00:08:30,500 from Hollywood of the 1950s and 60s - showing kind of the bombing of places like 95 00:08:30,500 --> 00:08:35,808 Damascus is being perpetuated by UFOs. Instead of Russians Americans and 96 00:08:35,808 --> 00:08:43,289 Emiratis. Placing the surreal devastation of Aleppo as an extraterrestrial 97 00:08:43,289 --> 00:08:49,930 experience as if Syria is not even on the planet Earth. Jabbar's play on scale and 98 00:08:49,930 --> 00:08:55,360 perspective attempts to contextualize and the historical heaviness of the current 99 00:08:55,360 --> 00:08:59,939 refugee crisis by showing these kind of over sized children sleeping on the beach 100 00:08:59,939 --> 00:09:06,269 side or the overreaction to displays of Western culture of Muslim culture in the 101 00:09:06,269 --> 00:09:12,660 West like the burkini incident in France. The horror of surpassing the imagined 102 00:09:12,660 --> 00:09:17,370 futures of the past, where control centers determine the fate of poor innocent 103 00:09:17,370 --> 00:09:20,800 people, seen through the glassy gaze of technology, trying to 104 00:09:20,800 --> 00:09:27,100 ensure the security of faraway States that are completely unaffected by the conflict. 105 00:09:27,100 --> 00:09:32,209 This next section I kind of put in jest but I am also like partially serious and I 106 00:09:32,209 --> 00:09:35,740 want to kind of leave you with the idea that for better or worse the two most 107 00:09:35,740 --> 00:09:40,800 important artists today working today are probably Banksy and Anish Kapoor and still 108 00:09:40,800 --> 00:09:45,820 in a way that their work embodies the issues of the art world with within the 109 00:09:45,820 --> 00:09:51,189 sent the idea of the current conflict. From below and above the art world feels 110 00:09:51,189 --> 00:09:55,399 compelled to be political to the point that if you make non-political art its 111 00:09:55,399 --> 00:10:00,999 some ways it's perceived as not only goosh but devastating or shows the you are kind 112 00:10:00,999 --> 00:10:05,040 of so removed from reality that you occupy and it's always interesting when we think 113 00:10:05,040 --> 00:10:09,000 about how art collectors seem to be indifferent to the actual art itself and 114 00:10:09,000 --> 00:10:13,779 think of it only as market value. As consumers and critics we need to voice our 115 00:10:13,779 --> 00:10:19,279 concern about the context and not just the content of the art we are subjected to. 116 00:10:19,279 --> 00:10:23,149 From the artists point of view they feel the compulsion to affect the world through 117 00:10:23,149 --> 00:10:28,660 their spray can or massives art commissions. But those energies remain in 118 00:10:28,660 --> 00:10:33,750 their niches they become self-serving as ways for careers to be made, they need to 119 00:10:33,750 --> 00:10:38,509 be translated into something far more concrete, more sincere and more human than 120 00:10:38,509 --> 00:10:47,240 the absurd unending wars we're constantly in and *Pause* yeah I guess we have plenty 121 00:10:47,240 --> 00:10:52,480 of time for questions as I said I found out about this presentation 9 p.m. 122 00:10:52,480 --> 00:10:58,139 yesterday and was a little worried I was going to take off way more time so thank 123 00:10:58,139 --> 00:11:09,639 you very much for listening. *Applause* Herald: Thank you Saud. We have time for 124 00:11:09,639 --> 00:11:17,487 questions. If anyone wants to ask please go to one of the microphones in the row. 125 00:11:17,487 --> 00:11:31,910 There is two on each area. Saud: Don't all rush all at once. Yeah 126 00:11:31,910 --> 00:11:38,440 that's actually my second chaos in a row speaking so *Laughs* this one is far more 127 00:11:38,440 --> 00:11:42,879 chaotic than the first I must say oh yeah. But yeah thank you very much everyone. 128 00:11:42,879 --> 00:11:49,699 Herald: Thank you Saud. You said that you had squezed in ten ... 129 00:11:49,699 --> 00:11:52,910 Saud: yeah. like Herald: lectures into this talk, can you 130 00:11:52,910 --> 00:11:55,950 tell us about that? Saud: Yeah I had more artists that I 131 00:11:55,950 --> 00:12:01,110 wanted to talk to but again the context of how to fit in Harun Farocki or you know 132 00:12:01,110 --> 00:12:07,059 sort of bigger more intellectual projects and the putting Burden 133 00:12:07,059 --> 00:12:12,010 versus Jaber for me was in one hand using a very 134 00:12:12,010 --> 00:12:17,120 established conceptual artist who's known to someone who is unknown who's just 135 00:12:17,120 --> 00:12:21,230 working actually entrapped in Syria and can't leave and I went to show that there 136 00:12:21,230 --> 00:12:26,170 is a genuine difference even if the intention of the artist is good that the 137 00:12:26,170 --> 00:12:34,449 the content and the context is an in a sense devastating when you put it in 138 00:12:34,449 --> 00:12:42,250 the larger sphere of the war. And *Pause* I to connect everything from television 139 00:12:42,250 --> 00:12:47,450 shows and video games to gallery art as being part of the same ecosystem is not an 140 00:12:47,450 --> 00:12:51,709 easy thing you can do, yeah in 30 minutes or in my case 10. 141 00:12:51,709 --> 00:12:57,165 Herald: And you have been working on this for quite some years? 142 00:12:57,165 --> 00:13:01,941 Saud: This is like postdoctoral work so this is the stuff I didn't in my PhD work 143 00:13:01,941 --> 00:13:06,029 I actually do the aesthetics of the Islamic movement from themselves so it's 144 00:13:06,029 --> 00:13:11,581 actually kind of a more internal thing than from the external parties, yeah. Now 145 00:13:11,581 --> 00:13:17,231 this is kind of a 1 circle removed from what I was actually trained in but yeah. 146 00:13:20,387 --> 00:13:28,110 Herald: In this case we don't see any more questions, unless there is anyone running 147 00:13:28,110 --> 00:13:34,158 to the microphones now - O someone is running to microphone number 3. So 148 00:13:34,158 --> 00:13:41,850 microphone number 3 please, that is you actually, please make sure to speak 149 00:13:41,850 --> 00:13:48,015 clearly into the microphone please. Microphone 3: Yes, hello, yes I'm on maybe 150 00:13:48,015 --> 00:13:52,362 you can just tell us some more about the pictures you've shown us? 151 00:13:52,362 --> 00:13:59,540 Saud: *mm-hmm* Oh the collages Jaber work? He actually is a self trained well or 152 00:13:59,540 --> 00:14:02,769 Chris Burden? Mic3: Maybe put the pictures on? 153 00:14:02,769 --> 00:14:05,449 Saud: Sure, sure, sure. Mic3: Thanks 154 00:14:05,449 --> 00:14:14,526 Saud: So well I guess Burdens installation is kind of famous. He himself am i on? I 155 00:14:14,526 --> 00:14:24,899 think I'm switched off. Hello? Okay, yeah Burdens work his first work is that he got 156 00:14:24,899 --> 00:14:29,739 famous for was called shoot where he was actually shot by a colleague of his in a 157 00:14:29,739 --> 00:14:35,040 gallery by a 22 rifle and it was recorded on video and this was his kind of 158 00:14:35,040 --> 00:14:41,029 performance art that broke him into the conceptual art world and his art works in 159 00:14:41,029 --> 00:14:44,699 the 70s got bigger and bigger and this is one of the ones that culminated and kind 160 00:14:44,699 --> 00:14:50,899 of a very tongue-in-cheek anti-war - Is the image? No it isn't. So he I was 161 00:14:50,899 --> 00:14:55,049 trying to put like the context of someone who was kind of very very established to 162 00:14:55,049 --> 00:15:02,049 someone who's basically working on his laptop using illustrator and Photoshop. 163 00:15:02,049 --> 00:15:09,779 And that at the end of the day I think that *Pauses* the current conflict 164 00:15:09,779 --> 00:15:14,630 depicting itself in these images is in a sense its own constant. Oh yeah. 165 00:15:15,005 --> 00:15:20,241 Herald: We are sorry we won't be able to get the english sub right now. We are also 166 00:15:20,241 --> 00:15:27,257 still throwing all that technology in this new location. Yes i think you have a 167 00:15:27,257 --> 00:15:40,748 question? Is there someone on microphone number 4? Do you have a question? Please 168 00:15:40,748 --> 00:15:45,233 speak into the microphone. Microphone 4: No 169 00:15:45,233 --> 00:15:50,044 Herald: Ok . So Thank you everyone. Saud: Thank you everyone 170 00:15:50,054 --> 00:15:55,890 Herald: Thank you very much *Applause* 171 00:15:55,890 --> 00:16:00,830 *34c3 outro* 172 00:16:00,830 --> 00:16:17,000 subtitles created by c3subtitles.de in the year 2018. Join, and help us!