This disarming 60-minute video of everyday life in prewar Baghdad was shot by Paul Chan during a sojourn to Iraq in late December and early January, organized by the antiwar group Voices in the Wilderness. His "ambient documentary" records a local cafe, a Sufi poetry performance, a wedding party, a dozing monkey, and a group of middle-aged uniformed women at a military parade who brandish automatic rifles and chant, "Hey thunder, Saddam is your son!" Many Iraqis playfully address the camera, and Chan decenters the perspective by occasionally handing the camera to one of them and by adding allusive female voice-over in six different languages.
<http://www.chireader.com/movies/sidebars/SELECT2003.html> *****
***** Baghdad in No Particular Order. 2003. USA. Directed by Paul Chan.
Chan spent a month in Baghdad as a member of the Iraq Peace Team, a group initiated by the Nobel Peace Prize-nominated organization Voices in the Wilderness that is working to end the sanctions against Iraq. This work is a reflection of the video ephemera Chan collected while in Baghdad. 60 min.
Saturday, December 13, 3:00 (introduced by the director)
<http://www.moma.org/visit_moma/momafilm/docu_fort_2003.html> <http://www.moma.org/visit_moma/momafilm/> *****
***** The Retriever - Features Politics At No Extra Charge: Paul Chan's Multi-Dimensional Artwork Richard McNey Retriever Weekly Staff Writer
For the last several weeks, images of Iraq have monopolized the news. Video of burning buildings, bombs exploding, and soldiers with raised guns have become Iraq's representation in American eyes. These pictures are pumped daily into our homes and over all of them is always some journalist's voice telling us what we are looking at. Paul Chan's video art filmed in Iraq speaks for itself by displaying the lives Iraqis lead; the lives not shown on television.
InterArts and the Visiting Artists Lecture Series presented a lecture by New York City artist Paul Chan. A full UMBC Fine Arts lecture hall listened to Chan, who is a 2003 Rockefeller Arts Fellow and teaches video and film at the University of Pennsylvania, discuss several pieces of his artwork.
"I do digital work," said Chan sitting on the back of a chair, dressed in all black save for brown pointy shoes that only an artist could pull off. He continued, "which basically means I make shit on computers."
The shit the artist refers to includes digital video, new media artwork and interactive media. Chan has dual interests in politics and art. As a result, much of his artwork has political implications.
From Dec. 14 to Jan. 14, Chan lived in Baghdad filming the people and the culture. He traveled to Iraq as a member of the Iraq Peace Team, a group initiated by Voices in the Wilderness, an independent international campaign that since 1996 has attempted to end the economic sanctions and warfare against the people of Iraq. Members of Voices include teachers, artists and church workers who live in Iraq at different times documenting the lives of Iraqi citizens. The Iraq Peace Team began in Sept. 2002 in an attempt to prevent a U.S. attack on Iraq through the use of non-violent actions. Today the team remains in Iraq recording the Iraqi citizens' experiences throughout the war and occupation with the goal of increasing awareness of the situation.
"This is too tragic and woeful of a time to be remembered only through op-ed pieces and human interest stories," Chan said. "Voices in the Wilderness knew that artists and writers and poets had to be involved, had to be on the ground to remember what is happening down there because we can't count on the journalists and the historians and the Pentagon. I was really touched; I was really moved by this idea that a political group was thinking aesthetically."
Chan was so moved that he signed up and lived in Baghdad for a month filming the Iraqi people. The piece he is in the process of editing will probably be titled, "Baghdad in No Particular Order" and is a montage of scenes filmed in single channel digital video.
"It is amazing how determined things are when you watch it on the news," Chan said. "When you watch video footage or stills someone is always talking over it as if they are telling you how to look. It is refreshing that I didn't do any interviews or I didn't want to show any talking heads."
Indeed, in the clips Chan showed, the images spoke for themselves. In one scene, a man covering his head and face with a red turban stands near a beat-up yellow car while the beautiful singing of the Islamic call to prayer fills the air. The scene following shows water spraying out of a small hole in a pipe on a Baghdad street. The sounds of nearby traffic and the sprinkling water are the only sounds heard. Following the scene are close-ups on the twitching face of a monkey dreaming in a cage in the lobby of the hotel where Chan stayed. There were also scenes of twin girls dancing and other children smiling, seemingly without worries. Another scene shows the outdoor book market in Baghdad where piles of books sit on the street. The wind blows the pages so that they look like the wings of birds. The video ends with female English majors at Baghdad University singing.
Much of the work Chan showed was political. In another piece entitled, "RE: THE_OPERATION," Chan imagines George W. Bush's administration were soldiers in the war against terrorism. The project began when Chan made desktop replacement icons depicting Bush's administration as wounded soldiers. The idea evolved into a series of video portraits in which each member of the administration reads a letter written home to a loved one over digital snapshots of their involvement in the war.
The final piece Chan showed was a digital installation piece entitled, "Happiness (finally) after 35,000 years of civilization." The piece, which has been displayed in several museums, is an animation project that combines the drawings of eccentric artist Henry Darger with the writings of Utopian socialist Charles Fourier. In the museum installation the animation is projected onto a green translucent fabric hung in the center of a room. The end result is a strange hypnotic animation that combines and updates the two men's utopian views and artistic techniques. The colorful animation shows many young girls on a grassy, flower-filled, rolling landscape running, flying, eating grass and going to the bathroom. Eventually a group of men in suits go to war with the girls, but in the end the girls prevail and kill all of the men. The combination of absurd images and the audio track of sounds taken from nature and girls laughing and playing creates a hypnotic experience that can only be described as strange.
Chan said he wants his art to incorporate ideas of freedom and no judgment. He also believes that politics and art often do not mix.
"One of the reasons I am in art is because I want to surround myself with intense people," Chan said. "When art doesn't do it for me, I jump over to politics, and certainly there are intense people in politics."
<http://trw.umbc.edu/articles/4150?Newspaper_Session=bb1a7dc92052a096131ff694a8d9479f> *****
-- Yoshie
* Bring Them Home Now! <http://www.bringthemhomenow.org/> * Calendars of Events in Columbus: <http://www.osu.edu/students/sif/calendar.html>, <http://www.freepress.org/calendar.php>, & <http://www.cpanews.org/> * Student International Forum: <http://www.osu.edu/students/sif/> * Committee for Justice in Palestine: <http://www.osudivest.org/> * Al-Awda-Ohio: <http://groups.yahoo.com/group/Al-Awda-Ohio> * Solidarity: <http://www.solidarity-us.org/>