In the place where analogue and digital overlap, that's why you will find me in the kitchen at parties. Everything is at my site, http://blog.ivanpope.com
I think I have to unsubscribe from this Nmherman@aol.com list. I thought it= was some net art net discussion list, but I'm wrong again. It's funny, but it seems that every list ends up as a tribute list to an in= dividual. Maybe that's what the net is for. Maybe there's a piece of work in there so= mewhere. Ivan ----- Original Message ----- From: Nmherman@aol.com
> John Walker Lindh, the American who fought for the Taliban in Afghanistan, > entered a guilty plea as part of an agreement with U.S. prosecutors that > could keep him in prison for 20 years. In exchange, federal prosecutors > agreed to drop other charges that could have kept him behind bars for life. > "I provided services as a soldier to the Taliban last year," he said in > court. "I plead guilty." > > http://www.cnn.com/index.aol.html Rule of law? You guys just make it up as you go along. Ivan
>I saw the buildings fall with my own eyes too, > not through a camera lens, it was horrific , > it was not meaningless. > Anyone who says it was just a death disneyland ride, > they gotta broken soul. > I'm still struggling with it. > I probably will be struggling with it years from now. > I hope that I am.
There's no denying the personal impact on millions. But, I'm not sure whether its worthwhile to restate how horrific it all was to us individually. I'm interested in how we react as artists. We can't help this, its how the world goes round. I once read that when the Germans arrived to beseige Stalingrad in WW2 the first thing they did was shell the hospitals because they didn't want any help available to the occupants of that city. In historic terms, September 11th was trivial, though like all human experience, not to those who experienced it. This is how I contextualise the events. Maybe that makes me a bad person. Maybe America wants the events of September 11th to be bigger and badder than any other events because it is America.
>some of our reactions seem "shameful" and people are either >loathe to acknowledge them or to discuss them. I'm loathe to discuss some of my reactions, not because I feel they are shameful, but because I'm scared of what sort of response I will get. I know and understand my reactions. But I am a European whose jewish father came from Lithuania via South Africa and whose mother was born in Shanghai, her father being buried in Ho Chi Minh city. I can't but contextualise the world. Actually, a few thousand dead people can (and are) created regularly with basic military equipment (Sebrenica anyone?). The events of September 11th were fearsomely beautiful, which attracts everyones attention. And apart from that, an understanding that a country that has unleashed terror where and when it suits had experienced something in return. I'm not here to mourn for the dead. The dead are just the dead. It's the living I worry about.
Not to be square but I hear Ivan's point here again--what if "non-mediated events" actually don't exist, but are the sentimentalize culture-life we all eat here in disney land?
My ques to Ivan is: why is Kabul not disney land? Foucault says it is. I think foucault will back me on this one.
-- If the gulf war didn't happen then events in Afghanistan certainly didn't then events in New York ditto. Well, of course Kabul is disney land to me, you etc. To the current western political leadership its Storyland, one of those places where you can make up whatever narrative you like and get away with it. Last time there was a fight over Kabul 50,000 people were killed and that is a perspective statistic for me. Who were those people? No idea. Who was killed in New York? No idea. What do we know of New York? Kabul? Does such a place even exist? Even when we live there its a construct.
Boltanski once said 'I like to make sentimental art'. I've spent the last few years trying to figure out what that means in reference to his work, but I like the idea. Sometimes the simplest phrases are the most difficult to work out. I think Eryk's piece is sentimental art in the way that Boltanski's is.
I feel a need at this point to crit Eryk's work in some way that relates to new media or net.art or somesuch, but I can't. I just regard it as some piece of work that I saw that references my world and adds to it. And then we move on.
> more on the distance/mediation thing: > > To be fair, I think it was *easier* in some ways for those of us who > actually experienced it to deal with it. it was unreal enough as it was -- > my friends who happened to be out of town at the time needed to get back > in, to see to feel to hear what was going on without the mediation. those > of us who were right downtown watching had more to deal with sooner, more > horror if you will, but we had the gift of our own senses, our > insufficient physical and psychological "mediation" or self-protective > devices. we didn't have to make that leap from mediated horror to register > the reality -- it sounds crazy, but i've felt grateful that I had my own > experience of it >
I guess its a western luxury to be able to be grateful for the experience of being in a city when it is bombed. This is, of course, an experience had counteless times around the world by other individuals. Seldom do we hear that they are grateful for the experience. The warring factions around Kabul killed 50,000 by raining missiles randomly down on the city. I guess most inhabitants weren't grateful and would rather have watched in on CNN etc. Only it wasn't on CNN because the world had no interest at all. Picasso made a work about Guernica, the genesis of bombing civilians, though he wasn't there to experience it. Maybe he was the CNN of his day :) Sow the wind ... Ivan