Terrorism and the Arts: Practices and Critiques in Contemporary Cultural Production 2020045953, 2020045954, 9781138359222, 9780429433818

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Terrorism and the Arts

This book assesses the key definitions, forms, contexts and impacts of terrorist activity on the arts in the modern era, using historical and contemporary perspectives. Its empirical case studies include theatre, literature, music, visual art, mass media, film and the mores of ‘ordinary life.’ While its immediate reflective context is Islamic fundamentalist terrorism, the book reviews a broader range of definitions and counter-definitions of ‘terrorism’, ‘state terrorism’ and ‘states of terror,’ examining uses of the terms through a series of comparative analyses. Chapters focus on the intersection of these definitional questions with heuristic analysis of art forms, cultural activities and their socio-historical contexts. This book will be of interest to scholars in art history, terrorism, politics and the media and visual culture. Jonathan Harris is Emeritus Professor in Global Art and Design Studies at Birmingham City University. Cover image: Bashir Makhoul “Skein 4. v2” (detail), 2019, oil on canvas, 78 × 78 cm. Part of the “Punishment of Luxury” series.

Routledge Research in Art and Politics

Routledge Research in Art and Politics is a new series focusing on politics and government as examined by scholars working in the fields of art history and visual studies. Proposals for monographs and edited collections on this topic are welcomed. Migration, Diversity and the Arts The Postmigrant Condition Moritz Schramm, Sten Pultz Moslund and Anne Ring Petersen Social Practice Art in Turbulent Times The Revolution Will Be Live Kristina Olson and Erec J. Schruers Modernity, History, and Politics in Czech Art Marta Filipová Italian Modern Art in the Age of Fascism Anthony White WPA Posters in an Aesthetic, Social, and Political Context A New Deal for Design Cory Pillen The Political Portrait Leadership, Image and Power Edited by Luciano Cheles and Alessandro Giacone Art and Activism in the Age of Systemic Crisis Aesthetic Resilience Edited by Eliza Steinbock, Bram Ieven, and Marijke de Valck Terrorism and the Arts Practices and Critiques in Contemporary Cultural Production Edited by Jonathan Harris For a full list of titles in this series, please visit www.routledge.com/Routledge-Researchin-Art-and-Politics/book-series/RRAP

Terrorism and the Arts Practices and Critiques in Contemporary Cultural Production

Edited by Jonathan Harris

First published 2021 by Routledge 52 Vanderbilt Avenue, New York, NY 10017 and by Routledge 2 Park Square, Milton Park, Abingdon, Oxon, OX14 4RN Routledge is an imprint of the Taylor & Francis Group, an informa business © 2021 Taylor & Francis The right of Jonathan Harris to be identified as the author of the editorial material, and of the authors for their individual chapters, has been asserted in accordance with sections 77 and 78 of the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988. All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reprinted or reproduced or utilised in any form or by any electronic, mechanical, or other means, now known or hereafter invented, including photocopying and recording, or in any information storage or retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publishers. Trademark notice: Product or corporate names may be trademarks or registered trademarks, and are used only for identification and explanation without intent to infringe. Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Names: Harris, Jonathan, editor. Title: Terrorism and the arts : practices and critiques in contemporary cultural production / edited by Jonathan Harris. Description: New York : Routledge, 2021. | Includes bibliographical references and index. Identifiers: LCCN 2020045953 (print) | LCCN 2020045954 (ebook) | ISBN 9781138359222 (hardback) | ISBN 9780429433818 (ebook) Subjects: LCSH: Terrorism in art. Classification: LCC NX180.T47 T47 2021 (print) | LCC NX180.T47 (ebook) | DDC 700/.4581—dc23 LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2020045953 LC ebook record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2020045954 ISBN: 978-1-138-35922-2 (hbk) ISBN: 978-0-429-43381-8 (ebk) Typeset in Sabon by Apex CoVantage, LLC

Contents

List of Figures List of Contributors Introduction: Figure / Trauma / Terror

vii x 1

J O N ATH A N H A RRIS

1 The Migrant Image: Fear of ‘Replacement’ and the Resurgence of White Nationalism

24

DORA APEL

2 Facing Franco’s Terror: Visual Arts and the Fate of Memory

41

PAU L A B A R R E IRO L Ó P E Z

3 A Transgenerational Reparation for the Damage of Torture Through Drawing Dreams and Performance

58

M A R I SA C O RN E JO

4 After Mosul: The Cultural and Political Economy of Destruction and Reconstruction

81

A N TH O N Y DOWN E Y

5 ‘They Make a Desert and They Call It Peace’: States of Terror and Contemporary Artistic Response in the Middle East

106

J O N ATH A N H A RRIS

6 Re-Inscriptions of Terror and Terrorism Since Mallarmé: Wassily Kandinsky and Gerhard Richter

121

L E W I S J O H N SO N

7 Harold Pinter and State Terrorism A L E K SA N DA R SASH A DUN DJE ROVIĆ

140

vi Contents 8 ‘Terrorism,’ ‘Rebellion,’ ‘Resistance’: Excavating the Role of Art in Activist Social Transformation

156

J O N ATH A N DAY

9 Shakespeare and Terrorism

173

DAV I D RO BE RTS

10 All That Is Certain Vanishes Into Air: Tracing the Anabasis of the Japanese Red Army

182

N A E E M M OH AIE ME N

11 Media Hijack: Chris Burden and the Logic of Terrorism

196

M ATTH E W T E TI

Index

208

Figures

1.1 The bodies of Salvadoran migrant Oscar Alberto Martínez Ramírez and his nearly two-year-old daughter Valeria on the bank of the Rio Grande in Matamoros, Mexico, June 24, 2019, after they drowned trying to cross the river to Brownsville, Mexico. 1.2 Adrian Paci, Centro di Permanenza Temporanea (Centre of Permanent Temporariness), 2007, video, color, sound, 4’32” (still from video). 1.3 Kenny Karpov, refugees in the Mediterranean Sea after setting off from Libya to Malta on a flimsy inflatable raft before being rescued, 2016. 1.4 A two-year-old Honduran asylum seeker cries as her mother is searched and detained near the US-Mexico border on June 12, 2018, in McAllen, Texas. 1.5 Overcrowding of families observed by the DHS Office of Inspector General on June 11, 2019, at Border Patrol’s Weslaco, TX, station. 2.1 Núria Güell, Resurrección, 2013. 2.2 Eduardo Merino, Always Franco, 2012. 2.3 Agustín Ibarrola, engraving without title and year. 2.4 Fina Miralles, Masked, 1976. 2.5 Cover of Cuadernos Para el Diálogo, 1975. 2.6 María Ruido, Plan Rosebud (photogram of the last commemoration of Franco’s death at the Valle de los Caídos on 20 November 2007), 2008. 2.7 Núria Güell, Resurrección, 2013. 3.1 Eugenio Cornejo and Guillermo Deisler in an article about the exhibition Graphica from a newspaper in Plovdiv, Bulgaria, 27 May 1978. 3.2 Marisa Cornejo, Grabados, ink on paper, 32 × 40 cm, 2012. 3.3 Eugenio Cornejo and Marisa Cornejo, no title, engraving, ink on paper, 41 × 33 cm, Plovdiv, Bulgaria, 1977. 3.4 Documentation of the performance La Huella 1, in Espacio Flor, 2013. 3.5 Documentation of the performance La Huella 5, Escotilla 8, Estadio Nacional, Santiago, Chile, 2013. 3.6 Marisa Cornejo, Wallpaper La Huella 1, Unified Fragmented Experience, imprints from performance in Espacio Flor, 210 × 91 cm, digital print, 2014.

25 26

27

31 34 42 43 48 49 50

52 53

61 62 63 64 69

71

viii Figures 3.7 Eugenio Cornejo, unknown title, linoleum engraving on paper, 40.50 × 28.50 cm, 1977. 3.8 Eugenio Cornejo, unknown title, linoleum engraving on paper, 26 × 40 cm, 1977. 4.1 Michael Rakowitz, The Invisible Enemy, 2018 02, Michael Rakowitz, The Invisible Enemy Should Not Exist, commissioned for Trafalgar Square’s Fourth Plinth, 2018. 4.2 Michael Rakowitz, The Invisible Enemy, 2018 036, Michael Rakowitz, The Invisible Enemy Should Not Exist, commissioned for Trafalgar Square’s Fourth Plinth, 2018. 4.3 Michael Rakowitz, The Invisible Enemy, 2018 033, Michael Rakowitz, The Invisible Enemy Should Not Exist, commissioned for Trafalgar Square’s Fourth Plinth, 2018. 4.4 Hiwa K, The Bell Project 1000, Hiwa K, The Bell Project, 2007–2015. 4.5 Hiwa K, The Bell Project 1000, Hiwa K, The Bell Project, 2007–2015. 4.6 Hiwa K, The Bell Project 1000, Hiwa K, The Bell Project, 2007–2015. 5.1 Joana Hadjithomas and Khalil Joreige, Wonder Beirut: The Story of a Pyromaniac, Photographer First part of the project (1997–2006), C-prints with face mounting, 100 × 70 cm. 5.2 Lamia Joreige, installation view of Under-Writing Beirut—Mathaf in Artes Mundi 7, Cardiff National Museum, UK, 2016–2017. 5.3 Larissa Sansour, still from Nation Estate, film, 9’, 2012. 5.4 Jananne Al-Ani, production still from the film Shadow Sites II, 2011. 5.5 Bashir Makhoul, Fata Morgana, 2019, 22,000 porcelain houses, size variable, from the Punishment of Luxury series, installation shot, A Stitch in Time exhibition, Today Art Museum, Beijing. 5.6 Bashir Makhoul, Enter Ghost, Exist Ghost, 2013, lenticular lenses, photographs and cardboard boxes, size of installation variable, installation, Yang Gallery, Beijing. 5.7 Bashir Makhoul, The Occupied Garden, Otherwise Occupied installation, Venice Biennale, 2013. 5.8 Bashir Makhoul, Fata Morgana, 2019, 22,000 porcelain houses, size variable, from the Punishment of Luxury series, installation shot, A Stitch in Time exhibition, Today Art Museum, Beijing (detail). 6.1 Wassily Kandinsky, Cossacks (Battle), 1910–11, oil on canvas, 94.6 × 130.2 cm. 6.2 Wassily Kandinsky, Composition IV, 1911, oil on canvas, 159.5 × 250.5 cm. 6.3 Gerhard Richter, Arrest II, 1988, oil on canvas, 92 × 126 cm, Museum of Modern Art, New York. 6.4 Gerhard Richter, Hanged, 1988, oil on canvas, 200 × 140 cm, Museum of Modern Art, New York. 6.5 Gerhard Richter, Blanket, 1988, oil on canvas, 200 × 140 cm, Böckmann Collection, Neues Museum, Staatliches Museum für Kunst und Design, Nuremberg.

72 74

83

85

88 92 93 93

109 110 112 113

115

116 116

117 124 125 129 131

132

Figures 6.6 6.7 6.8 7.1 8.1 8.2 8.3 8.4 8.5 8.6 8.7 8.8 10.1 10.2 10.3

10.4

10.5 10.6 11.1

11.2

11.3

Gerhard Richter, September, 2005, oil on canvas, 52 × 72 cm, Museum of Modern Art, New York. Gerhard Richter, Stammheim, no. 1, 1994, oil on printed paper, 19 × 11.6 cm. Gerhard Richter, Stammheim, no. 22, 1994, oil on printed paper, 19 × 11.6 cm. The Trial of Harold Pinter (Sudjenje Haroldu Pinteru) JoakimInter Fest, Kragujevac, Serbia, 10 October 2006. Anonymous viral image. Jim Kuhn, ‘Fred the Shred, Holborn Station.’ Advertisement for Prison Brand Clothing. Jonathan Day, Political Graffiti, backstreet, Minsk, 1994. Jonathan Day, Children of the Revolution, backstreet, Minsk, 1994. Jonathan Day, Audience, Alternative Theatre, Minsk, 1994. Jonathan Day, Video Still at the Alternative Theatre, Come Together, 1994. Ai Weiwei, Belarus Free Theatre. Eric Baudelaire, The Anabasis of May and Fusako Shigenobu, Masao Adachi and 27 Years Without Images, 2011 (two film stills). Eric Baudelaire, The Anabasis of May and Fusako Shigenobu, Masao Adachi and 27 Years Without Images, 2011 (two film stills). Masao Adachi, Jogakusei Gerira/Female Student Guerrilla, 1969 (two film stills), as featured in Eric Baudelaire, The Anabasis of May and Fusako Shigenobu, Masao Adachi and 27 Years Without Images, 2011. Koji Wakamatsu, Seizoku/Sex Jack, 1970 (two film stills), as featured in Eric Baudelaire, The Anabasis of May and Fusako Shigenobu, Masao Adachi and 27 Years Without Images, 2011. Eric Baudelaire, The Anabasis of May and Fusako Shigenobu, Masao Adachi and 27 Years Without Images, 2011 (two film stills). Eric Baudelaire, The Anabasis of May and Fusako Shigenobu, Masao Adachi and 27 Years Without Images, 2011 (two film stills). Palestinian hijacker Mouna Abdel Majid interviewed in Amman, August 1970, from Johan Grimonprez, dial H-I-S-T-O-R-Y, 1997, digital video, 68 min., color and black & white, sound. General strike of airline pilots, United Nations, New York, ca. 1971, from Johan Grimonprez, dial H-I-S-T-O-R-Y, 1997, digital video, 68 min., color and black & white, sound. Airline employees being interviewed after a skyjacking episode, n.d., from Johan Grimonprez, dial H-I-S-T-O-R-Y, 1997), digital video, 68 min., color and black & white, sound.

ix 133 135 136 141 158 160 161 164 165 167 168 169 184 186

189

190 191 192

200

201

202

Contributors

Dora Apel is a cultural critic and art historian whose work focuses on issues of trauma, memory, national identity, globalization and the ruins of capitalism. She grew up in an immigrant community as the daughter of Holocaust survivors and is interested in the power of visual imagery to stimulate ethical thinking. Her most recent book, Calling Memory Into Place, is a deeply personal work that considers how memory can be mobilized for social justice; it examines the way memorials, photographs, artworks and personal stories can be used to fuel a process of cultural and political ‘unforgetting’ by reinterpreting the past or bringing to light what has been repressed or forgotten. Her other books include Beautiful Terrible Ruins: Detroit and the Anxiety of Decline; War Culture and the Contest of Images; Lynching Photographs (co-authored with Shawn Michelle Smith); Imagery of Lynching: Black Men, White Women, and the Mob; and Memory Effects: The Holocaust and the Art of Secondary Witnessing. She is the W. Hawkins Ferry Endowed Chair Professor Emerita in Modern and Contemporary Art History at Wayne State University. Paula Barreiro López is a full professor of the Université Grenoble-Alpes/Laboratoire LARHRA UMR 5190 and head researcher of the international platform MoDe(s) (Decentralized Modernities). Since 2007 she has worked at several European research institutions and universities in France, the UK, Switzerland and Spain, including the Institut National d´Histoire de l´Art [INHA] in Paris, the University of Liverpool, the Université de Genève and the Instituto de Historia of the Consejo Superior de Investigaciones Científicas [CSIC] in Madrid and, recently, at the University of Barcelona (Ramón y Cajal programme). Her research focuses on art criticism, cultural networks and politics in Spain, Western Europe and Latin America during the Cold War as well as the diverse and divergent developments of modernity reflected in the art historic accounts within an increasingly globalized world. Her publications include the books Atlántico Frío: Historias Transnacionales del Arte y la Política en los Tiempos del Telón de Acero, 2019; Avant-Garde Art and Criticism in Francoist Spain, 2017; Modernidad y Vanguardia: Rutas de Intercambio Entre España y Latinoamérica, 2015 (edited with Fabiola Martínez); Crítica(s) de Arte: Discrepancias e Hibridaciones de la Guerra Fría a la Globalización, 2014 (edited with Julián Díaz); and La Abstracción Geométrica en España, 2009. Marisa Cornejo is an artist based in both Switzerland and France and living in the Geneva area. She has a bachelor’s degree in visual arts from the UNAM, Mexico, and a master’s degree from the CCC, HEAD, Geneva, Switzerland. Marisa was born in Santiago de Chile in 1971 and left with her family after the coup d’etat in

Contributors

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1973 to live in exile in Argentina 1973–76, Bulgaria 1977–78, Belgium 1978–80 and, finally, Mexico 1980–98. There she studied dance until she was 18 and visual arts while collaborating producing contemporary art in La Panadería in México City, one of the leading art spaces of the ’90s. In 1998 she moved to England, where she became a mother, and 2002 found her in Brussels, Belgium, and in 2005 she moved to Geneva. Since 1998 her work has been guided by drawing her dreams as a daily practice. In 2007 she went back to Mexico to rescue her father’s archive of exile after he died. With that material and her dreams, she started to work as a research artist to articulate exhibitions, publications and conferences around the theme of memory, identity and forced migration. Jonathan Day works as a writer, musician and visual artist. He is Co-Director of Performance Research at the Birmingham Institute of Creative Arts/Birmingham Conservatoire. He has released a series of musical recordings; published four books of musical and visual arts philosophy and exegesis, one of which has been translated into Chinese, and numerous articles; and has been anthologized on a number of occasions. He performs internationally, most recently in Austria, Italy, Australia, Hong Kong, China, India, Finland, Thailand and Cyprus. His releases include Postcards From the Road (University of Chicago Press), Atlantic Drifter (Proper Records), The Politics of Navigation (VDM), Carved in Bone (Proper Records), The Stain of Time (Aalto University) and The Dim Lit Subterranea of the Ancient Mind (Princess Galvani Vadhana Institute of Music Press). His recording A Spirit Library is a current Folk Radio Album of the Year. His work has been called ‘seductive, complex and poetic,’ ARTnews, New York; ‘scratching at the transcendent,’ the Independent, London; ‘expansive, intelligent and eloquent,’ South China Morning Post; ‘breathtakingly beautiful,’ Folk Radio UK; ‘visionary,’ fRoots; ‘a voice like Scott Walker and Jim Morrison—dark as chocolate on a still night,’ Stirrings Magazine; and ‘stunning,’ Bob Harris, BBC. Please see jonathanday.net. Anthony Downey is Professor of Visual Culture in the Middle East and North Africa (Birmingham City University). He sits on the editorial boards of Third Text (thirdtext.org) and Digital War (digital-war.org) and is the series editor for Research/ Practice (Sternberg Press, 2019–). Recent and upcoming publications include Unbearable States: Digital Media, Cultural Activism and Human Rights (forthcoming, 2021); Critique in Practice: Renzo Martens’ Episode III (Sternberg Press, 2019); Don’t Shrink Me to the Size of a Bullet: The Works of Hiwa K (Verlag der Buchhandlung Walther König, 2017); and Future Imperfect: Contemporary Art Practices and Cultural Institutions in the Middle East (Sternberg Press, 2016). In his capacity as Cultural Lead, he is a Co-Investigator on a £2 million GCRF Network Plus award to develop a four-year project that will support education provision, visual culture and digital technologies in the Middle East (2020–2024). In 2021 he will curate two UK exhibitions and a programme of events focusing on digital methodologies and cultural practices from the Global South. Aleksandar Sasha Dundjerović is Professor of Performing Arts at the Royal Birmingham Conservatoire and Director of the Centre for Interdisciplinary Performative Arts (CIPA) and is an internationally recognized theatre author and director. His experience includes teaching and directing in the UK, Ireland, Serbia, Romania, Canada, Russia, Colombia, Brazil and Iran. A professional theatre director who

xii

Contributors set up the award-winning Kolectiv Theatre in Liverpool in 2000, he has published extensively on social action theatre, interdisciplinary performance, Brazilian collaborative theatre and the performing arts. He is a world-leading scholar on theatre and films of the Canadian Robert Lepage. Since 2019 Professor Dundjerović has been a principal fellow of the UK Higher Education Academy.

Jonathan Harris has been a writer on modern and contemporary art over a 35-year period and has taught at many universities around the world, most recently as Head of Birmingham School of Art, Birmingham City University, in England. He is author and editor of 22 books, including Art in Modern Culture: An Introduction (Phaidon, 1993), Federal Art and National Culture: The Politics of Identity in New Deal America (Cambridge University Press, 1995), The New Art History (Routledge, 2001), The Utopian Globalists: Artists of Worldwide Revolution 1919–2009 (Wiley-Blackwell, 2013) and The Global Contemporary Art World (Wiley-Blackwell, 2017). Harris has been a member of the UK Arts and Humanities Research Council Strategic Reviewers Group for Art and Design since 2013. Lewis Johnson is a historian and theorist of art, media and visual culture, living and working in Istanbul. He has published widely on art and its institutions—in particular pictorial art across early modern, modern and postmodern cultures—in the UK, Europe, Turkey and South Africa, with notable publishers, including WileyBlackwell, Manchester, Cambridge, Chicago and Liverpool University Presses, and in journals such as Angelaki and Third Text. He edited the volume Mobility and Fantasy in Visual Culture, developed out of a conference hosted in Istanbul, bringing together the work of 25 scholars, with further contributing artists, both established and early in their careers, published by Routledge in 2014. Helping to develop and initiate several innovative programmes of study in art, design and visual studies at institutions of higher education in the UK and Turkey, he was an invited member of the selection panel for the Turkish Pavilion at the 2015 Venice Biennial, cited for his curatorial work with emerging artists. He is currently working on a history of art as intervention, and was recently appointed Theodore Randall International Chair in Art and Design, Alfred University, NY. Naeem Mohaiemen researches rhizomatic families, malleable borders and socialist utopias, beginning with Bangladesh’s two postcolonial markers (1947, 1971) and radiating outward to unlikely transnational alliances. The idea of a future global left, against current categories of race and religion, drives the work. He is author of Midnight’s Third Child (Nokta, 2020) and Prisoners of Shothik Itihash (Kunsthalle Basel, 2014), editor of Chittagong Hill Tracts in the Blind Spot of Bangladesh Nationalism (Drishtipat, 2010) and co-editor with Eszter Szakacs of Solidarity Must Be Defended (Tranzit, 2020) and with Lorenzo Fusi of System Error: War Is a Force That Gives Us Meaning (Sylvana, 2007). His work has exhibited at Mahmoud Darwish Museum (Ramallah); Bengal Foundation (Dhaka); SALT (Istanbul); Kiran Nadar (Delhi); Tate Britain (London); MoMA PS1 (New York); Documenta 14 (Athens/Kassel); Sharjah, Lahore and Venice Biennials; and the Yokohama Triennale. Naeem was a 2014 Guggenheim Fellow and a 2018 finalist for the Turner Prize. He is currently a Mellon Fellow at Heyman Center, Columbia University, New York, and senior fellow at the Lunder Institute of American Art, Maine, and is on the board of the Vera List Center for Art & Politics, New York, and the film council of ICA, London.

Contributors

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David Roberts is Professor of English at Birmingham City University. He specializes in seventeenth- and eighteenth-century drama and literature. He has published five titles with Oxford University Press and two with Cambridge University Press. His latest monograph, Goerge Farquhar, A Migrant Life Reversed (2018), was published by Methuen, who also published his new edition of William Congreve’s The Way of the World (2020). David’s work has appeared in numerous leading journals. The author of two novels and numerous short stories and programme essays for the Royal Opera House and other theatres, David is currently a trustee of the Birmingham Hippodrome and Birmingham Repertory Theatre. Matthew Teti is an art historian, writer and educator with a broad set of specialties in global modern and contemporary art. He holds an MA and PhD in art history from Columbia University, where his dissertation on Chris Burden’s early minimalist and post-minimalist sculpture and his transition to performance art in 1971 won him a fellowship from the Pierre and Tana Matisse Foundation. An excerpt from his dissertation, titled ‘Occupying UCI: Chris Burden’s Five Day Locker Piece as Institutional Critique,’ appeared in RACAR (Revue D’Art Canadienne/Canadian Art Review) in 2018. In general, Matthew’s research focuses on the United States during the cold war, especially work that engages with socio-political themes, such as war, protest, terrorism, civil rights, climate change and space exploration, and primitivism in twentieth-century global art. His current research projects include ‘Minimalist Primitivist: Robert Morris and the Mound Builders’; ‘Who Owns the Future? On Close Encounters and Environmental Neurosis Through the Lens of Johan Grimonprez’; and ‘André Breton, Oceanic Art, and the Foundation of Surrealism.’ Matthew is an independent scholar who lives and works in the United States.

Introduction Figure / Trauma / Terror Jonathan Harris

Contexts / Meanings / Practices The idea for this book had its origins in a conference held in 2016 at Birmingham City University in England, an event organized by writers, artists and performers in what was then a new faculty of art, design and media.1 The intention to interrogate the meanings, rhetoric, actions and contexts of terrorism had seemed urgent in the months immediately preceding that meeting. A spate of attacks had occurred in Western European and US cities—and would continue after it—carried out in the name of Jihad, or ‘Holy War,’ by radical Islamists both living in these ‘host’ countries and moving into and across them from the Middle East.2 By contrast, in Asia, and in the Middle East in particular, such violence has been endemic for many decades and ‘normalized’ within Western media reporting, and it was the rise of international Jihad embodied in the New York World Trade Center attacks on 11 September 2001, followed by the US-led invasions of Afghanistan and Iraq in subsequent years, that led to the apparently now permanent global state of emergency—fuelled by and fuelling media attention—with the knowledge that no country appears immune to attack. As the chapters here demonstrate, the authors in this collection are as concerned with such state and state-sponsored violence, its motivations and justifications—with the idea, therefore, of ‘state terrorism’—as they are with the ‘non-state’ actors, historically and recently, who have usually been identified (by these states) as the ‘terrorists.’3 It should be clear at the outset, then, that one of the key objectives of this anthology is to examine these and related terms and to assess what purposes their use has served and now serves. Although some of the authors of the chapters included here occasionally concur on the details of answers to such questions, the book overall offers no consensus or single, final verdict—except in agreeing that the intentions and effects of naming acts and agents ‘terrorist’ and ‘state terrorist’ are themselves a critical part of the phenomena under examination. For this reason there is in this introduction what might appear to be an inordinate amount of scare quotes placed around these terms. (This isn’t an apology: Definitions and applications of these words, whatever other purposes they may serve, have, and are intended to have, an emotive charge. By wrapping them with inverted commas here I want to signal an ambition to ratchet down their emotional register as part of the rational investigation of their application.) Local factors in 2016 also made Birmingham, a city of 1.1 million people, a particularly sensitive location in which to hold the conference. The previous year a Fox television news report in the US had claimed that Birmingham—which includes a population of about 300,000 people of Asian descent—was effectively a ‘no go’ area

2

Jonathan Harris

for the police, ridden, a journalist claimed, with radicalized Muslims.4 Though a patent absurdity to anyone who actually lived in the city, this instance of malign alarmism threw a spotlight on the role of corporate mass media in naming, reporting and representing ‘Islamic terrorism,’ its agents and objectives. A research project investigating contemporary international mass media was underway at Birmingham City University at the time (focused on the Middle East and Global South), and it was decided that the conference specifically would examine the relationship between those activities that have been or are named ‘terrorist’ and forms of artistic, media and other cultural representations, practices including, for instance, painting, photography, performance, theatre, music and film, all of which were being taught and researched at the university.5 In addition to this local factor, in the UK at that time the then Conservative government had recently introduced new legislation and a code of practice (Prevent Duty Guidance) intended to combat what was called the threats of ‘terrorism’ and ‘extremism’ in public institutions, including universities. Mass media attention had been intensely focused on the activities of some students and academics in British universities deemed ‘radicals,’ particularly Islamist groups.6 The conference also convened to consider, therefore, what had become the immediate legal conditions and limits of debate and activism in higher education organizations at a time when ideas of ‘academic freedom’ and ‘free speech’ were being subjected to novel proscriptions and security forces’ surveillance. That universities were required as part of this Prevent legislation to undertake their own risk assessment, monitoring, policing and review of academic activities and events brought intimately home to us all the institutionalization of the ‘terrorist’ emergency—however defined—from which it is now, in 2020, virtually impossible to imagine any exit.7 Academic research of the terms and meanings of ‘terrorism’ now runs to many thousands of essays, books and conference papers; it is an industry that has grown exponentially in Western countries, especially since 2001, and includes the roles of dedicated university research centres and groups and individuals engaged in government ‘counter-terrorist’ activities as well as in producing putatively independent and critical analysis. It is not the purpose of this introduction or the chapters in this book, however, to review or evaluate this literature. Far fewer accounts of terrorism, though, as understood in relation to the arts, have been produced, and that absence was another reason why the assembly of this collection seemed particularly timely.8 It is the case, however, that governments, security organizations and university research centres engaged in ‘counter-terrorism’ have identified ordinary cultural activities as the social ground upon which ‘radicalization’ and ‘extremism’—two additional significant terms requiring examination—develop.9 One of the most common and influential definitions of ‘culture’ is as a set of everyday social activities through which individuals and groups form identities, bonds and collective values. Religious beliefs, group worship, rituals and theological texts are some of the stuff of this ordinary culture, although the category blurs into specialized definitions of ‘the arts’ when, for example, texts, such as the Bible or the Koran, are considered literary products or when devotional paintings and designs in churches and temples are construed as part of the history of art.10 Though ‘Islamic fundamentalism’ and its links to contemporary ‘terrorism’ and ‘extremism’ are clearly central to what I shall call ‘terrorism as a discourse’ (yet another scare-quoted phrase, discussed later), most of the authors in this anthology are really more interested in non-religious forms, as this introduction explains.

Introduction

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Although the definition and discussion of culture understood as ordinary life are certainly germane to the following chapters, as all their authors are concerned with the socio-political contexts and effects of specific art forms, the practices under consideration here mostly fall within specialized areas of cultural activity and study associated with the literary, visual and performing arts. These are all part of long-standing historical traditions (the oldest text under detailed scrutiny is Shakespeare’s play Macbeth, first staged in 1606, examined by David Roberts) and, since the twentieth century, have often been combined in forms of multi- and interdisciplinary presentation, representation and performance (for example, in rock music concerts and site-specific theatre, discussed here by Jonathan Day and Aleksandar Sasha Dundjerović). This anthology is evidently and necessarily both highly selective and limited in terms of its range of chapters—it pretends to no overall review or inclusiveness of possible topics or examples—and is intellectually speculative. The authors, to repeat, reach no consensus on the meanings or impact of ‘terrorism,’ as they infuse the subject with social and political significance through discussion of the topic in relation to a specific artwork, whether it is a play or a film or a performance or a photograph or painting. It is the primary purpose of this introduction to draw together some of the important analytic elements from these chapters, illustrating significant continuities and disjunctions as these arise in and across the definitional, historical, critical and socio-political analyses they offer.

Theatre / Performance / Representation It will be clear from the chapters that our definitions and accounts of ‘terrorism’ are multiple, contested, provisional and shifting. Their authors demonstrate this to be the case through historical examples and the comparative analysis these accounts collectively comprise. I will consider some of these definitions and accounts shortly. It is worth starting, however, with some observations intended to clarify and situate that discussion. As I’ve explained, this book is concerned with the conjunction of two equally important topics and themes: ‘Terrorism’ in relation to the arts and the arts in relation to ‘terrorism.’ However, all the authors are specialists in artistic practices of one sort or another. Many are also teachers in universities as well as active in various professional contexts—for example, in theatre directing, performance, visual arts production and musical presentations. None are ‘terrorism’ or ‘counter-terrorism’ experts. That this job and expertise now exist in higher education—part of the industry I mentioned at the outset: An intellectual subset of, amongst other things, criminology, international relations, psychology, IT and media studies—indicates the degree of the entrenchment of the ‘emergency’ as well as the solidification of knowledge that always underpins the creation of any discipline that can be academically researched, taught and assessed. Part of the significance of understanding ‘terrorism as a discourse’ is that, setting aside for a minute the question of what ‘terrorism’ refers to (its referents outside universities), the subject has become a robust, institutionally reproducible social practice and culture generating jobs, identities, activities, funding streams, expertise, orthodoxies and counter-orthodoxies.11 Because all the authors in this book are specialists in the arts understood as forms of social practice, their interests organically lie in examining, for example, films, plays, performances or paintings also understood as products of this discourse. Additionally, in some cases the chapters here take as their subject practitioners who themselves specifically sought to examine ideas of

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‘terrorism’ in their art. Matthew Teti’s discussion of performance artist Chris Burden’s live, on-air ‘hijack’ of a TV station in California in 1971 is a good example. A compelling, if perhaps disturbing, symmetry is identifiable in the social character and locutions of ‘terrorism’ and the arts. Common to all the former’s definitions is a public performance aspect. Its perpetrators and their interlocutors all agree that ‘terrorist actions’ are carried out visibly, in public, for public effect.12 These ‘acts,’ or ‘plots,’ whatever else they may do or symbolize, are kinds of performances. Further, they are intended to be representational, to communicate some intended meanings, though no act or plot, whether it’s part of a play or a film or a bombing or an armed attack on a building, necessarily generates (only) the meanings or symbols intended by the actors responsible for it. ‘Terrorist’ and artistic actions—construing photographs, for example, to be records of actions as well as kinds of actions in themselves—always generate a range of meanings and effects that are dependent on the contexts in which they occur as well as on influential mediating forces, such as television or other media attention. (Further, since the 1960s, the social figure of the ‘terrorist’ has interpenetrated that of the heroic ‘guerrilla’ fighter, symbol of global decolonizing struggles as well as emergent postmodern cultural avant-gardism—their diverse agents, political objects and activist tactics both feeding and feeding off world socio-political crises of all kinds: ‘Those images that yet/Fresh images beget,’ as W.B. Yeats’s poem ‘Byzantium’ observes.13) ‘Terrorist acts,’ then, are inherently dramatic and dramatizing; they stage a form of social theatre ‘live-streamed’ for an intended audience, both one that is physically present when an attack takes place and a physically absent, television audience that will see or come to hear of the attack—its recording likely to be re-presented incessantly—given the now perpetual presence of mass media and social media in virtually all human environments. Venues for attacks are chosen because they are likely to be saturated in media surveillance.

Ideologies / Images / Narratives Philosophical (especially ethical) debate about ‘terrorism’ has pondered though failed to resolve basic definitional and socio-moral problems. Thomas Hobbes bleakly observed in the mid-seventeenth century that ‘terror’ was a constant general human capacity, inseparable from all concerted efforts to gain and keep power over others through the use of violence. The modern state, the ‘Leviathan’ for Hobbes, represents that necessary solidification of jealous monopoly required to maintain order.14 Philosophical inquiry, however, is only marginally relevant to the concerns of this anthology. Let us approach the issues, experimentally, from another direction by acknowledging at the outset, instead, that all uses of the term ‘terrorism’ (along with ‘state terrorism’ and ‘terrorist states’) can be identified to be the products of certain agents at particular historical conjunctures for specific reasons. This recognition is intended to be observationally neutral. All the uses and meanings of ‘terrorism’ generated in this book, including in this introduction—for instance, the idea of ‘terrorism as a discourse’—are also such products. Accepting this starting point implies, I hope, conceding, at least while you read these chapters, not a disabling relativism making all judgements, moral and otherwise, impossible, but rather that there has been and is no single, definitive, historically fixed meaning of ‘terrorism.’15 This is the case partly because, while some powerful nation-states have generated judicial definitions of ‘terrorism’ enabling individuals and groups to be arrested and

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punished for their acts, there has been and is no internationally agreed, enforceable process of law-making and sanction—though bodies such as the European Court of Human Rights and the Intergovernmental International Criminal Court attempt to operate as if there were. Force majeur, however—a phrase meaning ‘irresistible compulsion’ or ‘superior strength’—has always intervened within and against such idealistic and practical attempts to establish and enforce international law. Force majeur is the will and capacity of a particular state (or ‘proto-state’ agency) to act unilaterally in its own interests, deploying violence freely both inside and outside its national boundaries when so motivated. Paula Barreiro López’s discussion in this book of the fate of the visual arts and artists under what she calls the ‘state terrorism’ of Francisco Franco’s dictatorship in Spain between 1939 and 1975 highlights a signal case.16 The moniker ‘state terrorism’ was coined to account for the operation of force majeur in modern history (its first use recorded in the Oxford English Dictionary was in 1795, in reference to ‘the terror’ of the Directoire government then in power in Revolutionary France). Its use has never been objective nor agreed. Whether, for instance, the US, Israel, Russia, UK, Syria, Iran, China or any other country is deemed to have been a ‘state-terrorist’ actor is always finally a matter of political dispute and rhetoric rather than of technical or legal nit-picking. This may suggest that abandoning use of the term ‘terrorism’ altogether could in some ways be a productive analytic development. Several authors here, however, are emphatic that their concern is with ‘state terrorism,’ whether they go on to define the term explicitly or not, and they see no reason to jettison using it and its range of meanings. Marisa Cornejo’s account of her performances, which she sees as forms of trauma therapy helping to ‘decolonize’ the subjective and social impact of Chilean ‘state terrorism’ under the Pinochet dictatorship in the 1970s and 1980s, is a case in point.17 Complicating matters further, US governments, for instance, have had a history of designating certain countries ‘terrorist states,’ including, recently, North Korea, Iraq and Iran. Studies such as the 2010 anthology Cultural Cleansing in Iraq: Why Museums Were Looted, Libraries Burned and Academics Murdered—discussed here in Anthony Downey’s chapter on the fate of cultural heritage in Iraq after the USled invasion in 2003—claim that an entire nation-state and people’s traditions were targeted in a conflict that became simultaneously a civil war and a proxy struggle between multiple regional and continental powers, with the intention, superintended by the US, its editors argue, effectively to destroy the whole society built up since the 1980s by its ruler, Saddam Hussain. If, as in this example, the designation ‘terrorist state’ was intended to refer, metonymically, to the ruling elite and its core apparatuses of power rather than to all the people of Iraq, then even more complicating have been declarations that entire democratically elected governments and the majority of people who voted for them are ‘terrorist.’ This was and remains the US and Israeli position on Gaza, for instance, since Hamas (a proscribed ‘terrorist’ organization, according to the US) took over the government there, following its popular election in 2006.18 Flying in the opposite direction, Dora Apel, in her chapter here concerned with US mass media coverage of the central American migration crisis, describes President Donald Trump’s 2016–2020 administration as acting as a ‘terrorist state’ in its treatment of those seeking to cross the border into the north during those years. Assessing uses of all these terms—attending to their diverse and specific representational deployments, contexts and effects—involves moving towards what I’ve called an understanding of ‘terrorism as a discourse.’ Two chapters here in particular are

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concerned with this task. Naeem Mohaiemen examines the Japanese Red Army (JRA) group, active in the late 1960s and 1970s, while Lewis Johnson considers the violent conjunctures in which the artists Wassily Kandinsky and Gerhard Richter were active—the revolutionary period in Russia and the fate of the imprisoned Red Army Faction members in West Germany. Mohaiemen’s focus is on literary and filmic representations of JRA activities (including films made by some of its adherents), while Johnson looks in detail at Kandinsky’s and Richter’s paintings. My chapter on works by contemporary Palestinian and Lebanese artists outlines the broader significance of the shift from the activities and objectives of the mid-twentieth century revolutionary Palestinian Liberation Organization, committed then to a socialist future for the dispersed Palestinian people, to that of the ‘dependent-state’ Palestinian Authority, governmental product of the Oslo agreements of the 1990s, whose powers actually conceded to Israel all critical aspects of its claimed sovereignty.19 Before considering in detail the interconnected themes of all the book’s chapters, I will examine one definition and account of ‘terrorism’ more deeply. The following statement is part of the British government’s discussion of the term in its Prevent guidance document mentioned earlier: The current UK definition of ‘terrorism’ is given in the Terrorism Act 2000 [. . .]. In summary this defines terrorism as an action that endangers or causes serious violence to a person/people; causes serious damage to property; or seriously interferes or disrupts an electronic system. The use or threat must be designed to influence the government or to intimidate the public and is made for the purpose of advancing a political, religious or ideological cause.20 (emphasis added) Closely related to this is a paragraph on the defnition and context of ‘extremism’: ‘Extremism’ is defined in the 2011 Prevent strategy as vocal or active opposition to fundamental British values, including democracy, the rule of law, individual liberty and mutual respect and tolerance of different faiths and beliefs. We also include in our definition of extremism calls for the death of members of our armed forces, whether in this country or overseas. Note that, according to the frst statement, ‘terrorism’ is, apparently, never a matter of economic, social or cultural objectives and that, within the second, there is no elaboration of the meaning of the phrase ‘fundamental British values’ or of the examples offered (for instance, ‘democracy’). While it may be agreed that such summaries of anti-terrorism laws could not reasonably be expected to include lengthy explanations, it is nevertheless important to note that they do raise important problems, and some troubling questions, when understanding ‘terrorism as a discourse.’21 These cursory definitions are intended for domestic, UK use only; otherwise, the 2003 force majeur US-led invasion and occupation of Iraq, which included British troops, would clearly meet its criteria as a (state) ‘terrorist’ act. The Prevent guidance is designed for use by British public organizations tasked with monitoring and reporting on ‘radicalization activities’ that may be happening in universities, schools, prisons and hospitals, all of which receive specific advice. Within this guidance ‘vulnerability’ to ‘radicalization’ is the lynchpin of a discernible and corrigible claim—rather than

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stipulation—that emerges in the document. While what the document’s author calls ‘non-violent extremism’ in itself is not illegal, it is those who are ‘vulnerable’ to adopting extremist values who may be radicalized into undertaking terrorist actions—such as those who may come to believe, for instance, the author claims, that there is a ‘narrative of “them” and “us”’ separating Muslims and British ‘and that Muslims living here [in the UK] should not participate in our democracy.’ The most clearly political and ideological aspects of the guidance are articulated at this point, actually tying together explicitly questions of domestic and international terrorism. On the matter of Islamist ‘radicals,’ it is stated that these extremists purport to identify grievances to which terrorist organizations then claim to have a solution [. . .] Islamist extremists regard Western intervention in Muslim-majority countries as a ‘war with Islam,’ creating a narrative of ‘them’ and ‘us.’ (emphasis added) This, then, is the critical point to move from an introductory discussion of ‘terrorism as a discourse’ to a deeper account of the themes and arguments of the chapters that follow because this last statement from the Prevent guidelines contains an important discursive shift—from the state-juridical ‘objective’ register (the Law) to an argumentative rhetoric wholly congruent with that of the authors in this anthology. ‘Purport’ and ‘creating a narrative’ in the Prevent text are terms within a now explicit attempt to persuade and infuence the reader; they are the words of a perceptible if still anonymous state intellectual (a ‘civil servant’ or member of government) saliently trying to make an argument using ‘claim,’ ‘evidence’ and ‘fndings’ in a way discernibly similar to those ways in which all the following chapters were written.22 Prevent’s ostensible attempt here to persuade, using language in a way that is in one sense far distant from the legal-juridical cockpits of parliamentary and courthouse edict, is rooted—though perhaps only ideally—in procedures and acknowledgements of self-interest (based on the stated values of ‘democracy,’ ‘the rule of law’ and ‘individual liberty and mutual respect and tolerance of different faiths and beliefs’) and the consequential use of testable hypotheses and evidential reasoning. But these procedures, acknowledgements and values were tested and found wanting, particularly in the conduct of the invading and occupying Western forces sent into Iraq after 2003. The rancour, violence and social chaos unleashed there helped to create the individuals and groups that then brought terror back to European countries and the USA. These events strongly suggest that domestic and international definitions and accounts of ‘terrorism’ and its multiple agencies cannot be kept separate, however convenient, necessary or urgent the distinction may seem to state authorities in their law-making. These same procedures, acknowledgements and values also—though perhaps only ideally—underpin the free intellectual debate associated with university teaching, research and writing. I add this caveat again because such idealism invoked to defend ‘academic freedom’ and ‘open, non-coercive exchange’ has been and is compromised at many levels in the actual societal organization of higher education—because activities in UK universities have been subject to Prevent guidance proscriptions, because some academics and departments have been incorporated into ‘counter-terrorism’ operations and, more broadly, because universities the world over offer themselves or are prey to manifold partial interests—commercial and governmental—that powerfully

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condition, limit and shape their capacities to offer robustly independent information, research and recommendations.23

Terror / Trauma / Figure In Dora Apel’s account of the role broadcast media organizations—along with photographers and artists—played in representing the Trump administration’s response to the migration crisis in Mexico and Central America since 2016, the author is definitively clear that the US government has perpetrated a form of state terror. Apel characterizes this as a set of measures constituting systematic ‘violence perpetrated by a government against non-combatants’ (28). These actions constitute what she calls ‘a new reign of terror’ aimed at Muslims, Central Americans seeking asylum and ‘immigrants of color from anywhere’ (28). Trump has led and himself symbolizes what Apel calls an ‘intensification and mainstreaming of white nationalist terror’ (28). Do these policies, in fact, instance a state-sanctioned variant of the ‘white supremacist’ terrorism that UK Prevent guidelines only parenthetically mention to offset their emphatic focus on Islamist radicalization? Scepticism, if not sarcasm, becomes irresistible once the dismal kinship between state definitions of ‘terrorism’ and critical accounts, such as Apel’s, of the actions of elected, democratic Western governments (both domestically and internationally) is set alongside them. Though UK legislation, for instance, attempts to define ‘extremism’ as necessarily linked only to religious, political or ideological causes, couldn’t capitalist neoliberalism, dominant in Western societies and across the global economy since the 1990s, also be seen as another ‘extremism’ liable to generate activists, such as Trump’s ‘Make America Great’ supporters, vulnerable to ‘radicalization’?24 It was revealed in 2019 that the non-violent climate change activist network ‘Extinction Rebellion’ had been identified by British state security forces as a terrorist organization, though it was later removed from the listing.25 Apel attacks US-led neoliberal global capitalism for its responsibility in generating what she calls the ‘conditions of war, poverty, violence and ecological disaster’ (28) that have produced the circumstances in which populations seek collective migration as a radical but rational social solution. The reaction from the Trump administration—mass detentions without trial, separations of parents from children, which Apel considers through discussion of highly publicized photographs of drowned and arrested migrants—constitutes, she notes, a form of ‘white nationalist state terror,’ a rolling back of civil rights gains in the USA, setting the stage for ‘even more egregious forms of racist, anti-immigrant terror’ (35). Roundups and threats of roundups by government ICE (Immigration and Customs Enforcement) personnel of undocumented immigrants and their families already in the country comprise ‘another way of terrorizing’ (36). Some Trump supporters have, indeed, been convicted of domestic terrorism in the US, including three members of the ‘Crusaders’ militia group, each sentenced to twenty-five years in prison for plotting to massacre Somali Muslims in Kansas. Apel observes that Trump’s anti-migration policies, lending support to white nationalists, have also encouraged a reinvigoration of white masculine identity, a tonic intended to counter the prevalent ‘white extinction anxiety’ underpinned by fears that ‘that whites will become a minority stripped of race-based privilege’ (37). Apel’s chapter includes an account of artist Adrian Paci’s 2007 video film Centro di Permanenza Temporanea (‘Centre of Permanent Temporariness’), which features

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aircraft boarding stairs on a runway, crowded with refugees, but at the top steps, where there is no aeroplane doorway, no means to leave (Figure 1.2). These people are off the ground but remain stranded—several aircrafts pass by, but none picks them up. They are, Apel says, ‘rightless’ and ‘placeless’ (26). Her discussion, shifting from a consideration of mass media photographs and the role of broadcast organizations to video artwork, indicates both the continuum that is cultural production—‘the arts’ in the widest sense includes all media—and the socio-political distance (if not always opposition) between the products and platforms of commercial news media corporations and the marginal place and status of artists and artworks.26 Paula Barreiro López’s chapter, shifting historical focus, is concerned with the activities and role of dissident artists in Spain under the fascist dictatorship of General Franco. It begins with consideration of an installation artwork created by the contemporary Catalan artist Núria Güell called Resurrección (Resurrection) made in 2013 (Figure 2.1). This piece, including a video film, filing cabinet and various archival and other elements, sought to draw attention to the murders of republicans by the Franco regime, the continuing support for Franco’s rule in Spain after the dictator’s death in 1975 (after which the country ‘transitioned’ into a democracy) and the situation that still exists, where the so-called Amnesty Law passed in 1977 makes it illegal to officially investigate or attempt to send to trial Franco’s still living state torturers.27 Barreiro López identifies what she calls ‘processes of institutionalized oblivion’ at work in contemporary Spain—both the loss and banning of knowledge of ‘the Franco dictatorship terror’ (41) after the country once again became a democracy. For her, the role of Güell’s artwork is to instigate critical debate and to offer new knowledge of the Franco period and its aftermath. Franco’s state apparatus used ‘terror,’ Barreiro López explains, as an open and quotidian weapon of control and intimidation. An official in the regime explained: ‘We have to terrorize, we have to show we are in control by rapidly and ruthlessly eliminating all those who do not think as we do’ (43). Mass killings in the post-Civil War period (after 1939) took place with the consent of the new state, forming ‘rituals through which social and political control could be re-enacted’ (44). Though there was an attempt by the state to ‘soften its face’ to gain international acceptance, especially in the 1960s, terror as an ‘instrumentalization of fear’ continued up until the end of the regime. The use of terror, Barreiro López underlines, is different from that of ordinary state repression because its function is public and pedagogic: It is intended ‘not just to harm the victim but to terrorize others and alter their behaviour’ (45–6). At the same time, the Franco government inaugurated its own ‘counter-terrorism’ laws aimed at leftwing dissidents in Spain, designed not only to punish violence against the state but also aimed at any kind of ideological and cultural criticism. ‘Illegal ideologies or collectives’ (46), Barreiro López notes, were punished with maximum prison sentences. Art installations like Güell’s have reopened a creative and critical dialogue connecting the events of Franco’s ‘politics of terror and revenge’ to contemporary Spanish society, within which there is, Barreiro López observes, ‘the on-going trauma of the civil and political society, confronting us with the faults of the Spanish judicial and political system today’ (54). This theme of the public ‘trauma of state terrorism’ (72) is central to artist Marisa Cornejo’s contribution, concerned with the individual and social impact of the coup d’etat in Chile in 1973 that saw the suicide of elected socialist president Salvador Allende and the installation of the regime of another right-wing general, Augusto

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Pinochet, who held dictatorial power in the country until 1990. Cornejo’s focus is on her own performance events, understood as prompts for therapeutic and sociopolitical remembrance, personally, as her father was tortured by the Pinochet regime and her family subsequently had to flee Chile, but also for all victims, their relatives and Chilean society as a whole, and this objective she identifies as a form of ‘decolonization’ from the trauma of terror.28 Cornejo’s performance events combine visual representations such as prints of parts of her own body and her interaction with these images in front of a live, participating audience (Figures 3.4 and 3.5). She has also reconstructed photographic images of her father (whose premature death was as a result of the torture he suffered) and held performances in public arenas in Chile where Pinochet’s state staged its rituals of mass ‘disappearance’ (murder) and torture. Cornejo describes her performances as a form of action intended, she hopes, to ‘gain relief from the traumatic imprints of state terrorism’ (59). It is clear, however, that the psychological impact of her suffering as the child of a torture victim can never fully be extinguished and that performance for Cornejo has actually become a therapeutic way of living. She takes part in events to mark and ‘decolonize’ other traumas of state terror in South America, where a common factor has been clandestine US support for and collusion with right-wing dictatorships in Chile, Brazil, Argentina, Uruguay, Paraguay and other countries in the later twentieth century. ‘Operation Condor,’ funded by the Central Intelligence Agency, saw these regimes cooperate in systematic detention and assassinations of opponents. ‘In the context of the Cold War,’ Cornejo explains, ‘the dictatorships exchanged prisoners between countries and cooperated in the persecution of all the left-wing movements through terrorist operations’ (11). Like Barreiro López, Cornejo discusses the public purpose and impact of state terrorism—its own ‘performance’ role—beyond the damage or killing of its direct victims. The tortured survivors who were returned to society were effectively transformed, she notes, into social ‘weapons,’ bringing back to their communities ‘distrust, fear and shame’ that alienated and divided their families and the polity beyond. In the context of the rise of transnational neoliberal capitalism in the 1980s, the use of torture by US-backed state terrorist regimes in Latin America was a strategy, Cornejo observes, with the objective of denuding populations of their ‘social, political, national and cultural identity’ (70). Terror became a means through which to ‘try to impose [. . .] individualism and consumerism’ and to force ‘a total break of the bonds of solidarity’ (70). Cornejo’s judgement echoes the account provided by Apel. The causes of the migration crisis in Central America on the border of the USA are inseparable from the despoliation of the environment and unemployment under neoliberal post-industrial capitalism linked to the imposition of those ‘state-terror’ regimes (and resistance to them) since the 1970s. This exemplifies the action of a negative ‘feedback loop’ in global environmental geopolitics that has been at the centre of the concerns of social historians, including Mike Davis and Naomi Klein.29

Idealisms / Abstractions / Agencies Anthony Downey’s chapter focuses on the Middle East, where a similarly destructive feedback loop has been activated. His concern is with the actions and consequences of the ‘proto-state’ called Daesh (also known as the Islamic State), a would-be ‘caliphate,’ or Islamic religious society, created through force majeur, in parts of Iraq and Syria in the years after the 2003 US-led invasion, war and subsequent occupation.

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If the British government’s Prevent guidelines were chiefly aimed at the dangers of ‘extremist’ beliefs radicalizing Muslims living in the United Kingdom, then it was to Daesh that some of those Islamists went to participate in and propagate an emergent religious society, declared by major Western governments at the time to be the paradigmatic example of a ‘terrorist state.’30 Downey’s particular concern is with what discernible ‘cultural policy’ the Islamic State regime can be demonstrated to have implemented and why. He examines this question through initial discussion of a recent artwork called The Invisible Enemy Should Not Exist, created by the Iraqi-US artist Michael Rakowitz, whose sculpture of a ‘lamassu’—a mythic winged bull that traditionally acted as a protective deity—was placed on the fourth plinth in Trafalgar Square in London in March 2018 (Figure 4.1). Ingeniously made from thousands of metal Iraqi date syrup tins (a comment on the history of the Iraqi economy and its export relations with Western countries), Downey uses this work as a point of departure for assessing the apparent religious iconoclasm of the Daesh regime, which in 2015 destroyed an actually surviving lamassu sculpture (made in 700 BC), alongside other artefacts in the Mosul Museum, the second most important museum in Iraq. While Downey acknowledges the destructive actions of Daesh and of the US-led occupation—responsible, he notes, for ‘imminent and ongoing cultural annihilation, sectarian brutality, internecine warfare’ (82)—he stops short of identifying either force as ‘terrorist’ or ‘state terrorist.’ This choice is perhaps an instance of a decision not to use the term as an analytic category, though Downey does note the ‘extremist ideologies’ of Daesh (82) and, implicitly, those of US troops that underpinned the Western-led intervention in Iraq—‘shock and awe’ forces of Klein’s ‘disaster capitalism’ (96). Downey’s view, however, is that Daesh’s apparently conventional religious iconoclasm (Islam’s proscription of images) should actually be understood as part of a wider—a ‘post-digital age’—‘system of iconographic, if not iconic, image production,’ within which images, including photographic images of iconoclastic actions, are actually ‘disseminated and consumed by global audiences’ through broadcast and social media (82). Daesh had become financially wealthy, Downey relates, ‘at an unprecedented pace for a terrorist organization,’ according to an official from the US Bureau of Economic and Business Affairs, because of the profit it made from donations but also from its sale of oil and taxation activities and from the ‘appropriation and sale of antiquities’ (89). While the US, as the chief occupying force after 2003, initially failed to protect any sites of national cultural importance in Iraq—against long-established UN protocols—only defending the Ministries of Oil and Internal Affairs, Daesh forces in their advance a few years later quickly moved to occupy and plunder Mosul Museum (under renovation at the time) when they arrived in the city in June 2014.31 Their spectacular, filmed destruction of certain antiquities, such as the lamassu, went hand in hand with the regime allowing the sale of cultural artefacts on the world market—making adept use of social media to do so—and the import of many of these into the US, despite the government having passed a law in 1990 banning the movement of any property from Iraq into the country. The insistent claim in the important book Cultural Cleansing in Iraq is more disturbing, however, as Downey explains. Its authors argue that this export of plundered antiquities, before and after the rise of Daesh, was part of a comprehensive broader strategy, both explicitly and tacitly supported by the then US government and its corporate backers, to seek to destroy the cultural heritage of the country as

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it had developed under Saddam Hussein since 1980. This was attempted through targeted assassinations of over 500 academics, lawyers, artists and writers and the forced exile of many more (a phenomenon Cornejo also foregrounds in her chapter about South American ‘state terrorism’). Downey notes that the rhetoric of traditional Middle Eastern atavistic extremism was mobilized by the US and its allies to justify and mask its own neocolonial violence as occupiers of Iraq, when the ideology of neoliberal freedoms making the country over as a new bastion of free enterprise capitalism was publicly espoused by US leaders in their doctrine of ‘regime-change’ (96). Echoing Cornejo’s comments on the role of art and performance in ‘decolonization,’ Downey concludes by observing that museums everywhere now have an active role to play—through creative use of their collections, exhibitions, governance structures, communication and future development—in supporting this task. In my chapter, I discuss a number of artworks by Middle Eastern practitioners focused on the fate of Palestine and neighbouring Arab countries since the creation of the state of Israel in 1948. The impact of this crisis, compounded by the refugee catastrophe caused by Israel’s expulsion of hundreds of thousands of Palestinians from their homes that year, has been deeply felt in the region, especially in Lebanon, where many Palestinians fled. Beirut was at the centre of that country’s civil war, fought between 1975 and 1990, as well as the target of multiple Israeli military incursions aimed at destroying Palestinian armed resistance and the apparatuses of its governance in the Palestinian Liberation Organization. I consider works by Lebanese artists who have represented Beirut’s traumatic history and experience, indicating continuities with the concerns of chapters here by Barreiro López, Cornejo and Downey. ‘States of terror’ and ‘terrorist states’ both seem to be highly apt phrases—whatever their analytic shortcomings—in describing the degrading miseries that people in Lebanon and Palestine have suffered since the mid-twentieth century. The chapter broadens to consider global historical developments since the rise of European fascisms in the 1930s and the concurrent victory of Franco’s coup d’etat in the Spanish Civil War. Through consideration of a recent artistic controversy in Germany concerning its Nazi past and ways in which history and memory are both intertwined and elided in state and popular consciousness, I raise a series of questions about the meanings and motivations of contemporary artistic practice attempting to deal with extremes of violent societal conflict. The artists I discuss— such as the Palestinian Bashir Makhoul—have made works that both reference and interrogate these personal and social experiences, yet that also seek, through different strategies, imaginatively to transcend these circumstances, imaging utopian or dream-like counterfactual worlds beyond the present actual (Figure 5.5). The chapter ends by looping back to the present and the situation in contemporary Spain, where artists and filmmakers are attempting to revive understanding—memorial and historical—of Franco’s era of state terror and its continuing impact on life in that country today. Lewis Johnson examines in his chapter what he calls ‘the problematics of terror and terrorism’ (121) through a wide-ranging account of violent socio-political instability in fin de siecle France under the Third Republic and during the revolutionary period in Russia. He then moves to discuss the Red Army Faction in West Germany in the 1970s, the members of which were famously memorialized, in visually and morally highly ambiguous ways, in paintings by Gerhard Richter (Figures 6.3, 6.4 and 6.5). (Compare Johnson’s account with Naeem Mohaiemen’s assessment of the

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near-contemporaneous Japanese Red Army group, discussed later.) Johnson’s comparative historical and conceptual focus reinforces the merits of understanding ‘terrorism as a discourse.’ He details what he calls some ‘ascriptions of terrorism,’ showing how significant examples of these attributed causes have been closely related to statements and actions (including the ‘actions’ that are artworks) made by critics and artists.32 Johnson also discusses legislative-judicial ascriptions, noting that state agencies in France, Russia and elsewhere reacted against those acts they deemed ‘terrorist’ with ‘violent suppression’ (121). In describing the works of artists such as Richter, whose 1988 October 18, 1977 series of paintings depict the mysterious deaths in custody of Red Army Faction members, Johnson echoes Cornejo’s use of the idea of the imprint, in visual and socio-psychological ways ‘re-inscribing senses of terrorism and terror’ (121). While Richter’s portraits rework what Johnson calls a kind of ‘utopian abstraction’ extant in European modernism since the production of paintings such as Kandinsky’s 1911 Cossacks (Battle) and its closely related Composition IV—where themes of rebellion and counter-rebellion in the 1905 revolution are obscure, and perhaps obscured, but nevertheless obscurely present—Johnson refers us to the prescient moment about ten years earlier in France when the critic Stephane Mallarmé, in response to a question about a bomb thrown into the Paris Chamber of Deputies earlier that day (9 December 1893), was recorded to have said, ‘I know of no other bomb, than a book’ (122). Whatever the ambiguities of such a comment, subsequently translated into English in several other ways, Mallarmé’s statement echoes the observation that ‘terrorist’ (including ‘state-terrorist’) acts, like artistic acts, are forms of public performance, loaded with intended meanings that bring about both calculated and inadvertent effects; Mallarmé’s statement itself probably qualifies as something of an artistic event. ‘Anti-terrorist’ legislation instituted in France in 1881, possibly the first to be introduced in Europe, Johnson relates, curtailed freedom of speech when such speech advocated murder or revolt, and such speech was punishable by seizure of assets and detention and sped up the French state’s repression of the anarchist press in the country. Two years later it was made illegal in France to sympathize with anarchist views or join anarchist associations, following a spiral of bombings, army reprisal killings and the state execution of the anarchist known as Ravachol (Francois Claudius Koenigstein). Johnson observes that Mallarmé’s statement, ‘as if standing against having to stand against violence’ (123), has been ‘re-inscribed’ since in many different frames of reference and—if not ‘terrorist’ itself, then ‘enacting a sort of violation of expectations of such referring, subverting authority’ (123)—constitutes a ‘traumatism of the future,’ an idea consonant with Cornejo’s and Barreiro López’s assessments of the intended psychosocial impact of state terror (122). Abstract painting carries on this dislocating referral activity as a set of performances isomorphic with acts of ‘terrorism’ and ‘terror.’ For instance, while Kandinsky’s lyrical abstract work may have tended toward conjuring away fears and anxieties, the emergence of a sort of disabled vocabulary reworking pictorial referral as part of a re-invented textuality of and for sensory fluidities can be recovered, re-inscribing traumatic experiences, if also their representability, connected with the 1905 revolutionary uprisings in Russia, (123–4)

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Johnson tells us that Composition IV, Kandinsky insisted in a 1927 letter, inscribed ‘formalities’ in the painting that ‘allowed’ it not to be read ‘as representing a Cossack charge’ against the revolutionaries in Moscow (126). The techniques of mark making and colouring in Kandinsky’s works constitute what Johnson calls ‘a site of fantasy,’ enabling not only an apparent absence or obscurity of reference (fuelling the idea that abstract art isn’t ‘representational’ and doesn’t ‘show the world’) but also, echoing Cornejo’s performance art, precisely embodying novel ‘ways of reimagining the spatio-temporalities of experience, including the traumatic experience of terror’ (126). Richter’s paintings seventy years later of Ulrike Meinhof, Gudrun Ensslin, Andreas Baader and Jan-Carl Raspe dead in prison are also, for Johnson, kinds of deflective ‘re-imaginings’ of representations, but this time those of West German televisual broadcast images, mediated through FDR police release. These photographs both screen off, Johnson notes, but also bring back ‘senses of possibilities of worse to come’ (128). Richter’s paintings, utilizing the deathly stillness of photographic stills, institute what Johnson calls a ‘kind of monument to that “repetition to come”’—of media images endlessly repeated (echoing Downey’s system of image circulation), of lessening distinctness as the photographs are reprocessed in Richter’s paintings. This series—having no ‘authorized sequence’—recalls something of ‘the dislocations of referral,’ Johnson observes, ‘traced [. . .] in Mallarmé’s response in view of demands to take a stand in relation to terrorism’ (130). Given the claims and circumstantial evidence that the prisoners were unlawfully killed, rather than committed suicide in prison, Richter’s photo-painting series confirms the ambiguities of the meaning/purpose of their deaths while questioning the role of the West German state in causing them. The series, Johnson notes, precipitates us into such doubts and enquiries by referring us through its reinscriptions of images in which acts of looking were caught, addressed as they were by the claims of the forces of counter-terror, re-inscriptions that open up particular senses of duration to looking, implicating that activity in omissions, discoveries or re-discoveries concerning the realities those images were claimed to serve. (134) Paintings specifcally, and art forms generally, raise questions about the reality of and in representations, and their use of artifce and invention as formal devices to instruct us in the actual nature of the world. Modernist art and criticism, of which Mallarmé was an early proponent, put this interrogation front of stage in the development of advanced art and literature in the late nineteenth century, where the performative function of a pictorial or literary sign was intended to disturb rather than confrm existing meanings and values—artistic and social.33 ‘I know of no other bomb, than a book’ functions in this register: The statement’s effect was and remains to shock (if not to terrorize) and shake one’s sense of the order of things.

Audience / Abjection / Anabasis Disturbance was also the purpose of the ‘interdisciplinary, site-specific promenade performance’ that features at the centre of the discussion in Aleksandar Sasha

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Dundjerović’s chapter ‘Harold Pinter and State Terrorism.’ This contribution is, on the one hand, a meditation on that playwright and human rights activist’s work over many decades, where the focus of Pinter’s interests came to lie in exposing US military interventions around the world. On the other hand, it is a vivid account of a multimedia theatrical event that Dundjerović coordinated in 2006 in a factory—bombed by NATO forces in 1999 during its war in the former Yugoslavia—called Zastava (‘Flag’), located in Kragujevac, Serbia (Figure 7.1). Dundjerović describes Pinter’s later plays as broadsides against the activities of US ‘state created terrorism’ that, in the name of free market democratization and liberation, attacked those opposing Western imperialism (142). Dundjerović’s chapter exhibits important continuities with arguments made in chapters here by Apel, Cornejo, Downey and Harris. Pinter’s ‘anti-war texts’—the one-act plays New World Order, Mountain Language, One for the Road and Party Time, together with his 2005 Noble Prize speech and volume War Poetry— constitute the playwright’s theatrical philippic, Dundjerović judges, on the ‘fabricated “humanitarian wars” and state-supported terror’ of the US in its self-declared ‘war on terror’ since 2001 in Iraq, Syria, Libya and Ukraine.34 Dundjerović’s ‘practice-based research performance’ was called The Trial of Harold Pinter and involved a multimedia montage ‘soundscape installation’ (x). No conventional theatre play, this ambitious, experimental interactive work took place in a series of locations staged at the Zastava factory, where the historical events evoked in the work, experienced by all the participants as they moved between these sites, had occurred. Dundjerović explains that the factory had not been a military target; by the time it was bombed by NATO it was already a defunct industrial building due to the impact of foreign economic sanctions deployed in the early 1990s. The attack on the factory was rather an assault, literally and symbolically, on the urban identity of those who lived in Kragujevac—mainly a population of students (the university was the second biggest science and technology campus in the country) and working class people, many of whom would have known someone who’d worked in the plant, which had been one of the largest factories in the region. The factory site was chosen by Dundjerović to engage dramatically ‘with the significance of collective memory,’ as it was an environment ‘symbolic of war trauma,’ serving to evoke a range of different relevant contexts—‘industry,’ ‘shelter,’ ‘military barrack,’ ‘bombed site’—using a plurality of media, including excerpts from Pinter’s plays, video projections (including video of original TV footage of the actual bombing of the factory), soundscape and dance, with a mixture of live and recorded scenes. Connections with Cornejo’s performances are obvious in Dundjerović’s account of the events he coordinated in Kragujevac. These focus on the traumatic personal, psychological and social impact of terrorizing actions as they spread both spatially and historically, along with the use of multiple performance techniques and interactivity with an audience intellectually, socially and therapeutically. Dundjerović calls these activities ‘engaging an audience that had suffered a traumatic war event and helping them see through self-observation their past and present chronic anxiety’ (147). Dundjerović stresses the ‘research’ component of the performance. It was designed to provoke all the participants into reconsidering ‘questions of the current situation experienced in the present.’ These questions are epistemological, ontological and moral: ‘What is the truth? What has happened in the present that defines their lives?’ (146–7). Dundjerović defines this work of coming to know through participation in the performance an example of ‘genealogical criticism of the current situation,’ allowing

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us to understand the ‘history of the present’ (147). The montage of ‘scenes’ and ‘locations’ in the performance questions and threatens to collapse distinctions between non-theatrical and theatrical life, between senses of what is real and what is artificial, ‘made’ and ‘made up.’ The audience initially gathered outside the theatre in the city centre (the performance took place during an arts festival) at midnight—they were not aware of what awaited them. They took their seats on a bus and were blindfolded. Police cars accompanied the bus away from the theatre. Scenes from a Pinter play were performed on the bus. At the factory gates, the IDs of audience members were checked by real security guards. Scenes from Pinter’s Mountain Language were performed in front of the only remaining factory wall. Soldiers escorted the audience into surviving building areas to watch film of the actual bombing in 1999, while other texts by Pinter were performed. Finally, the audience reassembled to hear Pinter’s poems recited and then waltzed the night away. Jonathan Day in his chapter also recounts a multimedia performance event involving rock music, a lightshow and visual images that he organized in 1993 in Belarus, part of the former Soviet Union that had disbanded just two years earlier (Figure 8.7). Alongside this he reviews the definition of ‘terrorism’ in a discussion of the UK Prevent guidelines and their implications for institutions, particularly universities. Bearing in mind the revelation, mentioned earlier, that British government security agencies had designated the non-violent climate change group Extinction Rebellion a ‘terrorist’ organization, Day insists on the importance of distinguishing between ‘activism’ and ‘terrorism’ (the loaded terms ‘extremism’ and ‘radicalization’ would also feature in this task). In agreement with Johnson’s observation that serial, multiple and contradictory ‘ascriptions of terrorism’ populate the historical record, Day concludes that the term ‘is a shifting, chimerical notion, applied in an astonishing array of contexts and manners’ (156). Though most uses, he observes, are pejorative—juridico-legal stipulations intended by states to be seen as ‘objective’—there have been some instances of individuals and groups self-applying the label. Day gives the example of Peter Brown’s 2010 documentary film Confessions of an Eco-Terrorist, which narrates the attempt by Greenpeace activists to stop whale hunting through direct action against the whaling ships.35 Day moves on to consider some representations of ‘terrorism,’ ‘states of terrorism’ and ‘state terrorism’ in the arts, including George Orwell’s well-known portrayal in his work of fiction Nineteen Eighty-Four: A Novel (first published in 1949). As this date suggests, Orwell’s story projects into a relatively near-future moment (1984) something of his sense of the global polity of the late 1940s, when the nation-state propaganda battles of the Second World War transmogrified into the early Western and Eastern ‘bloc’ propaganda battles of the Cold War, by which time nuclear war had become a practical possibility and the world was dividing into the antagonistic camps of capitalism and communism. However, there is no neutral depiction of this opposition—even the representation of the Cold War state of affairs as an opposition has been and remains disputed36—and perhaps this is a lesson to be learnt about use of the term ‘terrorism’: It tends, and is usually intended, to set in play a Manichean distinction, or opposition, which nevertheless is all too easy to unpick with partial historical examples and moral arguments. This suggests that the term’s analytic value—defended in many chapters in this anthology in practice, if not theoretically—will always be questionable. That is to say, unlike many other core analytic terms that are also contested yet remain commonly

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in academic use—e.g. society, cultural production, criticism, ideology—‘terrorism’ appears to be meaningful usually within emotively divisive binaries of opposed terms (e.g. ‘terrorist-non terrorist,’ ‘terrorist-freedom fighter,’ ‘terrorism-counter terrorism’).37 The designation can always be unpicked through selection of examples that undermine both its interested definition and analytic usefulness—who uses the term against whom else and why and when. To take a well-known example, was the Zionist Jewish ‘Stern Gang,’ members of which bombed British officials in Jerusalem hotels before the creation of the state of Israel in 1948, a ‘terrorist’ or ‘freedom fighting’ organization? Were its adherents technically ‘terrorists’ because violent attacks on civilians in legitimately existing states are by definition ‘terrorist acts’? Who defines what ‘legitimate’ means? Would such a judgement (that the Stern Gang were terrorists), even if accepted, nevertheless be morally vacuous because their cause was just, at least as far as Zionists and their supporters were and are concerned, thus demonstrating that what Johnson calls ‘ascriptions of terrorism’ are always finally only a matter of partial ‘interestedness’?38 Such unpicking can be demonstrated using many examples—Palestinian militants, US torturers at Abu Ghraib prison in Iraq, Irish republican gunmen, Israeli military rocket attacks on Gaza, Islamist suicide bombers, the Russian army invasion of Afghanistan— depending on the point of view of the person doing the unpicking. In Orwell’s Nineteen Eight-Four, Day explains, the world is divided into three camps, each sequentially at war with one of the others while an ally of the third, and each uses the threat and actual experience of ‘terror’ as a ‘false flag’ tool to control, socio-psychologically through fear, their own populations, by bombing their own people and blaming the attack on their then current enemy. There is no shortage of theories—conspiratorial and otherwise—that actual states and their security forces have violently attacked and do violently attack their own people and then blame it on the actions and extremism of others—those they call the ‘terrorists.’39 The idea of ‘terrorism as a discourse’ is intended to relativize, mediate and condition our understanding of the use of the label in many ways, insisting that the ‘ascriptions,’ modes and contexts of the term’s application tell us important things about its varied meanings, representations and use values. David Roberts subjects the term to a literary-historical examination in his discussion of Shakespeare’s play Macbeth, reconsidering the conjuncture when this play was first performed in England, arguing that part of the bard’s objective was precisely to draw the audience ‘into understanding, sympathizing and even identifying with the mind of the terrorist’ (174). Though the term was not in use in 1606 when the play was first staged in London, this was the label, Roberts tells us, that would have been applied, had it existed, to those Catholic conspirators, including famously Guy Fawkes, who planned to blow up the Protestant English Parliament in the 5 November 1605 ‘Gunpowder Plot,’ thus killing a random group of civilians. Roberts confirms that this plan meets a key criterion in the definition of ‘terrorism’: It comprised ‘a symbolic act designed to influence political behaviour by extranormal means’ (174). In 1606 Macbeth was thus a play, then inescapably linked historically and socio-politically to revelations about the Gunpowder Plot of the previous year, which enacted the murder of a legitimate king: A ‘regicide.’ In the context of the early seventeenth century, however, this could have no more been portrayed as ‘an act of terror’ than the murder of Julius Caesar (accounts of which had influenced the form of Shakespeare’s Macbeth). For Roberts, though, the terminological possibilities are not critical. Instead, he notes, ‘what matters about such acts [. . .] is less their intention than their impact’ (174).

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The dramatic acts comprising Macbeth drive home what Roberts, embracing anachronism, calls the ‘visceral, barely explicable effect of terrorism on the wider community.’ The play’s political ambiguity lies, he stresses, in its ‘double immersion in the acts of the terrorist and the actions of state terror’ (174). ‘Treason,’ Roberts points out, had been defined in England in 1351 as both attempting to kill but also imagining the death of the king, and an update of the law in 1534 had gone further, promiscuously including such ‘imaginings’ encoded in writing. So simply watching and listening to a performance of Macbeth—in which Lady Macbeth herself reads a treasonous letter—implicated the viewer, Roberts notes, ‘like it or not, in silent communion with the terrorist’ (x). What the play continues to offer, centuries after that almost literally explosive moment in the early sixteenth century, is a form of ‘imaginative immersion in the business of the outsider, the criminal other, the killer, the terrorist’ (179). These are social types that Roberts mentions in relation to a wide group of writers that, he observes, are either ‘haunted by the fear of not being read’ or in whose stories ‘the terrorist is imagined as some sort of rival to the writer’—from Henry James and Fyodor Dostoevsky to Don DeLillo and J.M. Coetzee—whose ‘externality,’ and sense of externality, to normal society is isomorphic with the social externality, and sense of externality, of the ‘terrorist.’ Naeem Mohaiemen’s chapter, concerned with the Japanese Red Army (JRA) group of revolutionaries active in the 1960s and 1970s, is the most searching contribution here in terms of its author’s pursuit of this matter of social externality—what it consisted of and how it was represented, particularly in films made about and by some members of the JRA—and, mostly implicitly, its conditions and consequences for ‘outsider’ individuals and groups that come to form sects, the Latin root of which means ‘cut from a larger whole.’ As Roberts points out, avant-garde artists and writers, like political radicals, also have had a history of social exclusion and self-exclusion, often forming monads or marginal and marginalized groupings that counterpose themselves to normal society. JRA members, involved in plane hijackings and kidnappings in the 1970s, carried out in association with Palestinian guerrillas (most memorably the Lod Airport killings in Israel in 1973 and the Dhaka hijack of 1977) espousing revolutionary ideas and programmes attacking capitalism, imperialism and patriarchy, were telegenic (especially in the West) for a variety of reasons—not least because of their Asian character and as a result of Western ideas about the nature of Japanese society. Plane hijackings (a focal point in Matthew Teti’s chapter discussed later) were of course staged to gain media attention, while the Lod Airport massacre, described as ‘the first suicide mission in the history of the unfolding Mideast conflict,’ still exerts, Mohaiemen notes, ‘a magnetic pull on historians’ (188). A prurient orientalism thus underpins some of the interest in the JRA’s personnel and actions, which Mohaiemen examines through discussion of books and films about the group. Theories of trauma, perhaps unsurprisingly, are prevalent in these accounts—both in psycho-sociological attempts to make sense of the ostensibly formative impact of ‘conformist’ Japanese society on JRA members and in describing the pathology and consequences of their internecine behaviour that involved both sexual abuse and violence. Contemporaneous films co-produced by JRA members and supporters fed media fascination with this ‘sex and violence’ theme, including JRA adherent Masao Adachi’s 1969 Female Student Guerrilla and Koji Wakamatsu’s 1970 Sex Jack, whose script was also written by Adachi. A good portion of his chapter is devoted to a discussion of Eric Baudelaire’s 2011 documentary film The Anabasis of May and Fusako Shigenobu, Masao Adachi and 27 Years Without Images. Baudelaire tracked down

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Adachi, back in Japan, decades after the JRA had ceased to exist, who then asked the filmmaker to shoot footage in Lebanon, where Adachi had lived in hiding for twenty years before being returned to Japan for trial. ‘Anabasis’ comes from the Greek and means both ‘to embark’ and ‘to return.’ Baudelaire used the term, Mohaiemen observes, ‘to indicate a “movement towards home of men who are lost, outlawed, and out of place.”’ In this film, he says, We find echoes of that same landscape, with Lebanon playing itself, but also standing in for Japan, and finally for Adachi—alone without a nation. While we hear Adachi’s voice or read his emails, lingering shots of a highway fade into the horizon. Somewhere on screen, or in the timbre of Adachi’s voice (now hesitant, now certain), is the moment when a foretold failure became the actual. (193) The romanticism here is unmistakable—it is that of the isolated and self-isolated individual, a social type and trope in modernist literature and the arts, especially since the late nineteenth century, and its symmetry with the ‘outsider’ status of the revolutionary, the extremist, the ‘terrorist’ is undeniable, as Roberts observes.40 But romanticism is also a perspective, a way of seeing something, and not the whole or necessary truth of something. The Palestinians are involved, whether they like it or not, in an anabasis—they were forced, in their hundreds of thousands, at the points of guns in 1948, to leave their homes in what became the state of Israel. They had to leave, but they had no home to return to, yet they have tried, politically, socially, and symbolically through art—as well as, of course, in desperation, through violent means—to effect this return. Whether one opts to describe this latter attempt as ‘terrorist’ or ‘freedom fghting’ (or decides to avoid the binary choice altogether) will depend on one’s interests and values and on what one hopes or expects use (or non-use) of the designations to achieve in terms of a social effect.

Inconclusive Matthew Teti’s chapter on performance artist Chris Burden’s live ‘hijack’ of a TV station in Irvine, California, in February 1972 crystallizes many of the points and themes discussed across all the chapters in the anthology. Burden’s own subsequent account was that he had ‘demonstrated a TV hijack by holding a knife at [the show host’s] throat,’ threatening ‘her life if the station stopped live transmission’ (197, emphasis added). Teti appears to agree that Burden’s ‘performance’—the show’s producers, who invited the artist on, had no idea what he had planned to do—was not a ‘terrorist act’; rather, it is known, Teti notes, ‘to posterity as a demonstration of a media hijacking carried out within the realm of fine art and aesthetics’ (198). Burden’s objective appears to have been to simulate, in the TV studio, some of the conditions and planned consequences of an actual ‘terrorist hijack.’ Teti delineates these, quoting the social scientist Alex P. Schmid, pointing to such an act’s symbolic nature, its involvement of ‘civilian and non-combatant targets of violence, its sometimes provocative [aims], the disruption of public order and [. . .] the creation of a climate of fear.’ (198)

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The background to Burden’s performance had been the rapid escalation of plane hijackings in the US during the late 1960s, a period when the government’s Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) had reported 170 attempted domestic hijackings in 1968 and 1969 alone. Many of these, though, were not claimed by their perpetrators, or by the police or media, to be ‘terrorist’ in nature. In the early 1970s, following a further spike in the number of these acts, the FAA frst began to institute screenings of passengers by metal detectors. It was the mass media coverage of hijackings that fed their rise and that led to a form of news coverage, Teti notes, which blurred ‘the lines between journalism and entertainment’ (199). ‘Skyjackings’ became a biweekly event in many TV news cycles of the period, though pressure was increasingly exerted on the US media by a variety of interests to ‘curb its sensationalizing reports,’ though the very routinization of hijacking and its reporting meant that television news became, Teti observes, ‘preoccupied with banal, extra-diegetic details of the skyjacking experience, such as the eating habits of the terrorists’ (202). This decadence, arguably, was at the root of Burden’s objectives in his performance. While ‘demonstrating’ the TV hijack he demanded and got the station’s only video copy of the live event as it happened. He destroyed this, Teti claims, so that no one could ‘use his image or the record of his actions’ in a manner that may have manipulated his intentions. Teti notes that by doing this Burden ‘thus maintained control over the final product [of his actions] in ways that other terrorists had not yet been able to accomplish’ (204, emphasis added). This remark contains an interesting conflation. Teti appears to infer by this comparison with ‘other terrorists’ that Burden’s action was an act of terrorism, rather than merely a ‘demonstration.’ However, I construe this to be a peculiar use of the term with a positive meaning with which this introduction can usefully end. Burden’s action was intended, arguably, as a form of well-meaning pedagogy. Though his ‘demonstration’ did involve the actual threatening of the life of the show’s host, no one was injured, and we can reasonably presume that Burden never intended to hurt her or anyone else. Furthermore, Burden destroyed the only copy of the video of this live event, thus abolishing its potential afterlife in media spectacle. Accounts of the event live on, as Teti says, only in ‘the realm of fine art and aesthetics’ where ‘performances,’ ‘plots’ and ‘acts’—though they may share formal characteristics with the violent actions of individuals, groups and states, whether we decide to designate these ‘terrorist’ or not—have other objectives, meanings and interests.

Notes On behalf of all the contributors I would like to acknowledge support for this publication from the research project MoDe(s)2: Modernidad(es) Descentralizada(s): Arte, política y contracultura en el eje transaltántico durante la Guerra Fría, 2 (HAR2017–82755-P), funded by the Spanish government. Part of the research for this book was done within the framework of this project. I would also like to thank Lisa Deml in Berlin for her assistance. 1. My thanks to Bashir Makhoul, David Roberts, Tim Wall, Sue Rice and Karen Adams for their indispensable help in organizing the BCU conference in June 2016. I am very grateful to Paula Barreiro López for her valuable comments on an earlier draft of this introduction to which I have attempted to respond. I’d also like to thank all the contributors to the book for their support and patience as the publication project was finally brought to fruition.

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2. These attacks principally included the April 2013 bombing in Boston, USA, that killed three people; the November 2015 attacks in Paris, France, that killed 137; the December 2015 killing of fourteen in San Bernardino, California, USA; and the March 2016 bombings in Brussels, Belgium, that killed thirty-two. During the same period hundreds of attacks took place across Asia (especially the Middle East) and Africa, with responsibility claimed by or ascribed to radicalized Muslims in the context of the civil war in Iraq and the rise there of the Islamic State/Daesh (discussed later in notes and in Anthony Downey’s chapter in this book). 3. See Retort (Iain Boal, T.J. Clark, Joseph Mathews and Michael Watts), Afflicted Powers: Capital and Spectacle in a New Age of War (Verso: London, 2005), William Blum, Killing Hope: US Military and CIA Interventions since World War II (Zed Books: London, 2003) and Milan Hauner, The Soviet War in Afghanistan: Patterns of Russian Imperialism (University Press of America: New York, 1991). 4. The journalist, Steve Emerson, later entirely retracted his statement, apologizing for his ‘inexcusable error,’ 11 January 2015. See https://investigativeproject.org/4730/emersonwith-judge-pirro-no-go-islamic-zones (accessed 11/5/2020). 5. This project is ‘Check Global: Developing a Verification and Anti-Disinformation Network for the Global South’ (2014–), which works with partners across the Middle East and North Africa, in East Africa, Southeast Asia and Latin America. Visit https://meedan.com (accessed 11/5/2020). 6. See Prevent Strategy (June 2011) at https://assets.publishing.service.gov.uk/government/ uploads/system/uploads/attachment_data/file/97976/prevent-strategy-review.pdf (accessed 11/5/2020). 7. The outbreak of the COVID-19 virus global pandemic in 2020 ironically seemed to have brought about, however informally and temporarily, at least a reduction in violence, though a ceasefire the UN Security Council had tried to formalize in a resolution in May of that year was unsuccessful. See https://www/theguardian.com/world/2020/may/08/ un-ceasefire-resolution-us-blocks-who (accessed 11/5/2020). 8. But see, for example, Vladimir Marchenkov (ed.), Arts and Terror (Cambridge Scholars Press: Newcastle-Upon-Tyne, 2014), Graham Coulter-Smith and Maurice Owen (eds.), Art in the Age of Terrorism (Paul Holberton Publishing: London, 2005), Stephen Graham (ed.), Cities, War and Terrorism: Towards an Urban Geopolitics (Blackwell: New Malden, MA, 2004) and Sylvain Chamberlain, Art and Terrorism (Lulu.com, 2013). 9. These terms are explored later. See also Tariq Ali, The Clash of Fundamentalisms: Crusades, Jihads and Modernity (Verso: London, 2002). 10. See, for example, Raymond Williams, The Long Revolution (Chatto and Windus: London, 1961) and ‘Culture is Ordinary’ (1958), in Raymond Williams, Resources of Hope (Verso: London, 1989). 11. To gain a sense of this vast transnational commercial and state-supported field of research, inside and outside of universities, visit the Rand Corporation’s Terrorism, Security and Resilience page at www.rand.org/randeurope/research/defence/terrorism-security-resilience. html (accessed 12/5/2020), and for a critical analysis of the development of this industry following the attacks on 11 September 2001, see Naomi Klein, The Shock Doctrine: The Rise of Disaster Capitalism (Penguin: London, 2007). 12. See ‘The State, the Spectacle and September 11’ in Retort, Afflicted Powers: Capital and Spectacle in a New Age of War (16–37), and, from a different perspective, Raymond Williams, ‘Drama in a Dramatized Society’ (1974), in Raymond Williams (ed.), Writing in Society (Verso: London, 1984). 13. W.B. Yeats, ‘Byzantium’ (The Poems of W.B. Yeats: A New Edition [Macmillan: London, 1933]). On the mutating figures of ‘terrorist’/‘guerrilla,’ see Paula Barreiro López, ‘Collectivization, Participation and Dissidence on the Transatlantic Axis During the Cold War: Cultural Guerrilla for Destabilizing the Balance of Power in the 1960s,’ Culture & History Digital Journal, 4(1): e007, 2015. http://doi.org/10.3989/chdj.2015.007, Ana Longoni, Vanguardia y revolución. Arte e izquierdas en la Argentina de los sesenta-setenta (Ariel: Buenos Aires, 2014), Jacopo Galimberti, ‘A Third-Worldist Art? Germano Celant’s invention of Arte Povera,’ Art History, N. 36, Wiley Online Library, 2013, Paula Barreiro López, ‘Un Vietnam en el campo de la cultura: objetos promiscuos en el arsenal de la guerrilla,’ and Paula Barreiro López (dir.), Atlántico frío: historias transnacionales del arte y la política en los tiempos del telón de acero (Brumaria: Madrid, 2019): 117–154.

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14. ‘He hath use of so much Power and Strength conferred on him, that by terror thereof, he is inabled to forme the wills of all. . . . And in him consisteth the Essence of the Commonwealth,’ Thomas Hobbes, Leviathan, ed. by C.B. Macpherson (Penguin: Harmondsworth, 1968 [1651]). See also C.A.J. Coady, Morality and Political Violence (Cambridge University Press: Cambridge, 2008). 15. Some national and transnational organizations in the period since the mid-twentieth century certainly converged in their definitions, suggesting partial consensus on the meaning or purpose of ‘terrorist’ actions, though with far less or no agreement on either their causes or moral implications. See, for example, Javier Ruperez (Executive Director, Counter-Terrorism Committee Executive Directorate 2004–7, United Nations), ‘The United Nations in the Fight Against Terrorism,’ www.un.org/sc/ctc/wp-content/uploads/2017/01/2006_01_26_ cted_lecture_pdf (accessed 12/5/2020). 16. Listen also to Winston Churchill, British Secretary of State for War in 1920, defending his authorization of RAF Middle East Command to use chemical weapons ‘against recalcitrant Arabs’: ‘I do not understand this squeamishness about the use of gas. [. . .] I am strongly in favour of using poisoned gas against uncivilized tribes [to] spread a lively terror,’ quoted in Retort, Afflicted Powers: Capital and Spectacle in a New Age of War: 175. 17. See William Blum, Killing Hope: US Military and CIA Interventions since World War II: especially chapters 27, 28, 29, 30, 33, 34, 36, 37, 38, 43, 45, 49, 50, 54, 55. 18. For the US position see Congressional Research Service, ‘The Palestinians: Background and US Relations’ (November 2018): https://fas.org/sgp/crs/mideast/RL34074.pdf (accessed 13/5/2020). 19. See Bashir Makhoul and Gordon Hon, The Origins of Palestinian Art (Liverpool University Press: Liverpool, 2013). 20. See www.gov.uk/government/publications/prevent-duty-guidance/revised-prevent-dutyguidance-for-england-and-wales (accessed 13/5/2020) All following quotations from this site. 21. Though the Prevent legislation summaries talk mainly about the prevalence of the threats from Islamic ‘extremists’—and of those who are ‘vulnerable’ to it, ‘open to moral or ideological attack’ or ‘radicalization’—they also mention ‘terrorists associated with the extreme right. [. . .] The white supremacist ideology of extreme right-wing groups has also provided both the inspiration and justification for people who have committed extreme right-wing terrorist acts.’ 22. On the role of state intellectuals, see Nicos Poulantzas, State, Power, Socialism (New Left Books: London, 1978). 23. The BCU conference had been titled ‘Terrorism and Cultural Freedom’ given the then recent appearance of the Prevent guidelines and multiple reports of censorship in the media. The government’s Office for Students found that 60,000 events and speakers at universities in England were considered under the Prevent duty in 2018; see www.theguardian.com/uknews/2019/jun/27/uks-prevent-strategy-biggest-threat-to-free-speech-on-campus (accessed 13/5/2020). In March 2019 the UK Court of Appeal found the ‘government’s Prevent duty guidance to universities is unlawful and must be rewritten, judges [. . .] ruled after a successful judicial review argued that it violated freedom of speech.’ See www.theguardian. com/uk-news/2019/mar/08/uks-prevent-guidance-to-universities-unlawful-court-rules (accessed 13/5/2020). 24. This theme is pursued in Tariq Ali, The Extreme Centre: A Warning (Verso: London, 2015). 25. See ‘Terrorism police list Extinction Rebellion as extremist ideology: Police scramble to recall guide issued to teachers putting climate activists alongside far-right groups’: https:// www.theguardian.com/environment/2020/jan/27/terror-police-list-extinction-rebellionshared-across-government (accessed 14/11/2020). On Extinction Rebellion, see Zion Lights, ‘Hot-Earth Rebels,’ New Left Review, 120: 107–116, Nov/Dec 2019. 26. See, for example, Julian Stallabrass, Killing for Show: Photography, War and the Media in Vietnam and Iraq (Verso: London, 2020) and Anthony Downey, Art and Politics Now (Thames and Hudson: London, 2014). 27. For a full treatment, see Paula Barreiro López, Avant-garde Art and Criticism in Francoist Spain (Liverpool University Press: Liverpool, 2017). 28. See, for example, Walter Mignolo and Catherine E. Walsh, On Decoloniality: Concepts, Analytics, Praxis (Duke University Press: Durham, NC and London, 2018).

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29. For example, on the growing likelihood of serial viral pandemics, see Mike Davis, The Monster at Our Door: The Global Threat of Avian Flu (Holt: London, 2006), and on poverty-inequality-climate change feedback loops, see Naomi Klein, No is Not Enough: Defeating the New Shock Politics (Penguin: London, 2018). 30. On how the conditions in Iraq were created for the rise of Daesh following the criminally irresponsible US-led invasion, war and occupation, see Thomas E. Ricks, Fiasco: The American Military Adventure in Iraq (Penguin: London, 2007). 31. See Raymond W. Baker, Shereen T. Ismael and Tareq Y. Ismael (eds.), Cultural Cleansing in Iraq: Why Museums were Looted, Libraries Burned and Academics Murdered (Pluto Press: London, 2010). 32. On the ‘actions,’ for example, of Joseph Beuys, whose artistic and radical political objectives were sometimes dramatically combined and confused, during the 1960s, see Jonathan Harris, ‘Some Kind of Druid Dude: Joseph Beuys’s Liturgies of Freedom,’ in Jonathan Harris (ed.), The Utopian Globalists: Artists of Worldwide Revolution 1919–2009 (WileyBlackwell: New Malden, MA, 2013): 165–210. 33. For such a codification of modernism’s historical ambitions, see, for example, Michael Fried, Art and Objecthood: Essays and Reviews (University of Chicago Press: Chicago and London, 1998). 34. On the war in the Balkans, see Diana Johnstone, Fools Crusade: Yugoslavia, NATO and Western Delusions (Pluto Press: London, 2002). 35. For more on activist responses, see W.J.T. Mitchell, Cloning Terror: The War of Images, 9/11 to the Present (University of Chicago Press: Chicago and London, 2011). 36. See, for example, Guy Debord, The Society of the Spectacle, trans. by Donald NicholsonSmith (Zone Books: New York, 2006 [1967]). 37. The Retort authors indicate their own ambivalence over the term: ‘“Terror” and “terrorism,”’ they note, ‘are unavoidable non-concepts, which we believe can be given a measure of cognitive force only gradually,’ Afflicted Powers: Capital and Spectacle in a New Age of War: 12. 38. See Thomas Suarez, State of Terror: How terrorism created modern Israel (Skyscraper Publications: Bloxham, 2016). 39. The burning of the Reichstag building in Berlin in February 1933 is the Ur-case of a ‘false flag’ attack in the twentieth century. Blamed on the communists by the Nazi party, there has been widespread support amongst historians for the view that the Nazis themselves arranged for the arson to be started to engender support for Hitler. For a sceptical overview of the dispute, see Sven Felix Kellerhoff, The Reichstag Fire: The Case against the Nazi Conspiracy (The History Press: Cheltenham, 2016), and on this and other Nazi controversies, see Richard J. Evans, The Hitler Conspiracies (Oxford University Press: Oxford, 2020). 40. On the aesthetic consequences of this outsider status, see Frank Kermode, Romantic Image (Fontana: London, 1971 [1957]), especially ‘The Artist in Isolation’: 13–42.

1

The Migrant Image Fear of ‘Replacement’ and the Resurgence of White Nationalism Dora Apel

A twenty-five-year-old man tries to swim across the river Rio Grande with his nearly two-year-old daughter on his back; she is tucked under his t-shirt with her arms around his neck. He doesn’t make it. A current sweeps them away and they drown, their bodies washing up facedown along the shore, in the reeds, with blue beer cans bobbing nearby. The child has slipped to the side, one arm still around her father’s neck, evidence of a diaper under her red shorts. A photo of their corpses in the water goes viral, distributed by the Associated Press around the world and picked up by major media, a picture that allows us to look down upon them from a height of safety.1 Is it a picture of a foolhardy venture or an act of desperation driven by terror (1.1)? The man is Óscar Alberto Martinez Ramirez with his daughter Valeria. Mexican photojournalist Julia Le Duc took the photo. Ramirez and Valeria had traveled from El Salvador and spent some months in Mexico trying to negotiate the nearly impossible asylum process before Ramirez decided to swim from Matamoros to Brownsville, Texas. His wife, Valeria’s mother, swimming some way behind them, saw them go down and returned to shore. Ramirez and Valeria are only two of thousands who have tried, one way or another, to make the crossing, only to die—by drowning, thirst in the desert, gunfire, animal attack, or abandonment in airless locked trucks by the “coyotes” who took their money and promised to escort them to safety. The hopeful path to a presumed haven in the U.S. is marked by an endless stream of dead bodies. In an essay in the New York Times Magazine, Teju Cole traces the responsibility of many U.S. presidents for the deaths of those like Ramirez and Valeria. He notes that Ronald Reagan and George H.W. Bush both supported El Salvador’s military-led government in a civil war in which tens of thousands of Salvadorans died and hundreds of thousands fled to the U.S. Bill Clinton conferred only “temporary protected status” on them, forcing them to go back at the end of the war, and many formed or joined gangs now heavily involved in the violence there. Barack Obama oversaw an increase in the apprehension and deportation of almost three million undocumented immigrants, more than any other president so far. In 2016, Donald Trump was elected president after repeatedly calling migrants “drug dealers,” “rapists,” and “criminals,” even though evidence shows that immigration correlates with lower crime rates. His administration funded Salvadoran security forces that illegally executed dozens of suspected gang members. Both Democratic and Republican administrations have clearly played a major role in producing the ongoing social, economic, and humanitarian crisis. In 2018, Trump declared an end to the temporary protected status of almost 200,000 people from El Salvador who had fled a series of earthquakes there in 2001, cutting off their support to relatives at home and further devastating the Salvadoran economy.

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This was followed by a “metering” policy that slowed the processing of asylum claims to almost nothing and created a huge backlog, the one in which Ramirez and his family were trapped. Trump then declared that no further aid would be given to Guatemala, Honduras, or El Salvador until they reduced migration to the U.S., exacerbating the very conditions that were driving desperate migration in the first place.2 Teju Cole asks, “Do we need the spectacle of corpses to make the story real?” Cole questions the newsworthiness of picturing destroyed brown bodies, observing that destroyed white bodies seldom make the front page of the newspaper. “These photographs are mirrors, not windows,” asserts Cole, reflecting the fact that the crime was committed by the viewers of the photograph . . . not personally but as a member of the larger collective. It is you who have undermined their democracy, you who have devastated their economy, you who have denied their claim to asylum.3 But this is wrong-headed. We must not ignore the class divide in the U.S. any more than in Guatemala, Honduras, or El Salvador. It is the ruling class—whose interests are defended by Democratic and Republican presidents alike—that has undermined democracy, devastated economies, and denied asylum claims to those fleeing from violence, poverty, and the destructive effects of climate change on agricultural farms. The oppression of migrants is rooted in social and economic structures marked by class

Figure 1.1 The bodies of Salvadoran migrant Oscar Alberto Martínez Ramírez and his nearly two-year-old daughter Valeria on the bank of the Rio Grande in Matamoros, Mexico, June 24, 2019, after they drowned trying to cross the river to Brownsville, Mexico. Source: AP Photo/Julia Le Duc

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contradictions, a system ruled by profit that devalues the poor and people of color as socially expendable. We do need to see the pictures—to galvanize organized political opposition, document the atrocities, and hold those who are responsible accountable. This is the power of images. A plethora of art exhibitions on the plight of refugees opened across the U.S., including The Warmth of Other Suns: Stories of Global Displacement at the Phillips Collection in Washington, D.C., in partnership with the New Museum in New York City (June to September 2019). Works in these exhibitions, such as Albanian artist Adrian Paci’s short video Centro di Permanenza Temporanea (‘Centre of Permanent Temporariness’), help illuminate the perspective of refugees and migrants, who feel compelled to leave their country despite becoming stateless and rightless.4 In Paci’s video, a group of refugees approach in single file a set of isolated airline boarding stairs standing near a runway in an open landscape. They climb up to the platform and fill the stairs. Then they wait. Several planes trundle by and take off, but none approach the boarding stairs Centre of Permanent Temporariness (1.2). Paci focuses on the feet and faces of those who wait, suggesting their fatigue while scanning facial expressions of patience, resignation, numbness, disgust. They remain quietly crowded together on these stairs to nowhere in a no man’s land, apparently abandoned and forgotten. They are rightless people stranded in a placeless place. Paci’s video conveys the ultimate loss of identity and home through migration and displacement. Another real-life version of a doomed venture is pictured by Detroit-based photographer Kenny Karpov in his series of migrant rescues on the Mediterranean from his Detroit exhibition and book Despite It All We Never Learn. Karpov spent more than

Figure 1.2 Adrian Paci, Centro di Permanenza Temporanea (Centre of Permanent Temporariness), 2007, video, color, sound, 4’32” (still from video). Source: Courtesy of the artist and kaufmann repetto Milano/New York and Peter Kilchmann, Zürich

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four years accompanying rescue crews from a number of non-governmental organizations, whose mission is to save as many people as possible from drowning; they also treat injuries and offer food, water, and clothing to migrants escaping from war-torn countries such as Syria, Afghanistan, and Iraq or in search of jobs to support their families. His photo of a white dinghy floating in the sea is overcrowded, with about 180 primarily Nigerian men aboard (Figure 1.3). According to Karpov, the refugees have no idea how long the journey will be when they set off from Libya to Malta and are told by smugglers—sometimes former cops or politicians, who charge them enormous sums for a spot in a raft—that they will reach land in three hours. In reality it will be at least four days—about two days longer than the flimsy rafts can stay afloat. Sometimes smugglers also sell them cheap life vests that will not keep them from sinking for more than five minutes and will not keep their head above water. The far more effective bright orange life vests the men wear in the photo were provided by the rescue ship. And if they are rescued, what happens to most? European countries have slowed acceptance of refugees and established increasingly restrictive policies, or they are put in migrant detention centers, or they end up in underground economies as prostitutes or selling weed, or they are sold into forced labor for slave wages on farms and in restaurants.5 The journeyers in Karpov’s photo are so crowded together that those along the edges of the raft swing their legs over the side, their feet nearly touching the water,

Figure 1.3 Kenny Karpov, refugees in the Mediterranean Sea after setting off from Libya to Malta on a flimsy inflatable raft before being rescued, 2016. Source: Courtesy Kenny Karpov

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while the bodies crammed together and the repetition of dark limbs against the white raft evoke the teeming cargoes of slave ships. Like those once subjugated people, these refugees adrift on the high seas have no control, no agency, no recourse to safety unless they are spotted by a rescue ship. Since 2015, about 16,000 people are estimated to have drowned in similar rafts (though the number may be higher), death traps that are bought by smugglers by the shipping container from China for a few hundred dollars each. The refugees are therefore as subject to death by drowning, injury, or illness as to rescue and survival, and the white raft, like a flattened white whale, becomes an emblem of a quest that often ends in disaster. Karpov makes it a point never to represent the rescued refugees at their most abject, refusing, in effect, to point the camera down from a privileged position and causing some NGOs to fire him for this reason; instead, he insists on preserving the dignity and humanity of the refugees who have been terrorized in their home countries, abused and deceived by smugglers, and are often terrorized once more if they manage to reach a foreign shore.

The Violence of White Nationalism If we understand state terrorism to mean violence perpetrated by a government against non-combatants, we may regard the election of Trump as inaugurating a new reign of terror aimed particularly at Muslims, Central Americans seeking asylum in the U.S., and immigrants of color from anywhere. Most of those who make it across the U.S.-Mexican border are imprisoned in detention camps and live in horrendous conditions of squalor, abuse, deprivation, and extreme overcrowding, rendering the U.S. government one of the world’s most active and malicious agents of terror today. Caged and terrified children, who are traumatized, helpless, and forcibly separated from their parents, effectively represent the vulnerability of all refugees produced by global capitalism, who are infantilized, dehumanized, and discarded by the increasingly paranoid and conservative white elite striving to maintain its wealth and privilege. Neoliberalism’s attendant conditions of war, poverty, violence, and ecological disaster, which drive the migration of populations, also drive the intensification and mainstreaming of white nationalist terror, which has found an ardent exponent in the person of Donald Trump and his administration. In a speech he gave in Poland in 2017, Trump called for the defense of Western civilization, which was widely understood as a white nationalist dog whistle endorsing Islamophobia. Steve Bannon and Stephen Miller, Trump’s white nationalist advisers, shaped this speech, and, despite Bannon’s departure from the administration, Miller continues to shape immigrant policy. As novelist Pankaj Mishra argues, the pseudoscience of racial inferiority and “higher races” has “reached its final and most desperate phase, with existential fears about endangered white power” now rampant in the white Anglosphere. Trump expressed these fears when he asserted in his speech, “The fundamental question of our time is whether the West has the will to survive.” Mishra points out that the global migration and race mixing of the late nineteenth century paved the way for eugenics, social Darwinism, and restrictive immigration laws. In the U.S., this peaked with the 1924 immigration law—admired by Hitler and by former Trump Attorney General Jeff Sessions—that set immigration quotas that impeded Jewish immigrants, among others, and completely barred Asians. “By the early 20th century,” writes Mishra, “violence against indigenous peoples, immigrants

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and African Americans reached a new ferocity, and nativist and racist demagogues entrenched a politics of dispossession, segregation and disenfranchisement.” We have seen a revival of such violence and white nationalist entrenchment, from Republican efforts to disenfranchise black voters anew in state and national elections to Trump’s ominous war on Muslims and immigrants.6 In Europe, the European Union—a set of treaties designed to maximize profits by increasing exploitation of workers across Europe—has had a devastating impact on working conditions and living standards, from imperialist centers such as England, Germany, and France to economically distressed countries such as Greece, Ireland, Poland, and other East European countries. This has emboldened racist, right-wing demagogues like Nigel Farage in Britain and outright fascists like Marine Le Pen in France, Norbert Hofer of the Freedom Party of Austria, and Geert Wilders in the Netherlands. These white nationalist politicians, along with parties such as Alternative for Germany (AfD), Finns Party in Finland, and the Danish People’s party, also campaign against migrants and asylum seekers; they are anti-Muslim as well as antisemitic.7 Are white nationalism and white supremacy different? Most analysts see them as the same or overlapping or regard white nationalism as a rebranding of white supremacy, which has developed negative connotations, while promoting white nationalism as merely a matter of “ethnic” and “national” pride. Both white supremacists and white nationalists believe that whites are a “race,” one that is innately superior to people of other races, and that racial discrimination should be incorporated into law. White nationalists focus on a belief in a predominantly white nation in which whites maintain political, economic, and cultural dominance. This means not just protecting a white majority by severely restricting immigration but also forcibly expelling nonwhite citizens. One of Trump’s first acts in office was the attempt to ban immigrants from seven majority-Muslim countries. He further opposed immigrants from Haiti, El Salvador, and certain countries in Africa he called “shithole countries” while promoting immigration from places like Norway, an undisguised appeal to white supremacism and “racial purity.” He promoted the “birther” lie that Barack Obama was born in Kenya and earlier called for the execution of the Central Park Five, a group of young black men accused of rape and murder who were proven innocent. Trump has been consistent in his attempts to normalize and mainstream virulent white nationalism and has garnered sympathetic allies among white nationalist politicians abroad. Trump also made clear that his cruel policy of separating children from their families— with no plan for reuniting them with their parents—was designed to terrorize migrant families and deter future migration, despite the legal right to seek asylum in the U.S. and the fact that many seek to escape from the homicidal gangs that effectively run their countries, which the U.S. played a key role in bringing about.8 Moreover, the fivefold increase in the number of migrants from El Salvador, Guatemala, and Honduras making their way to the southern border between 2010 and 2015 coincided with an unusually dry period, produced by climate change, that cut crop production or wiped out entire harvests and that left many with not enough food—a problem that continues to get worse. According to a report by the World Bank, climate change will produce at least 1.4 million climate migrants from Mexico and Central America during the next three decades.9 The Trump administration has done its utmost to impede the process of American citizenship. For those already living in the U.S. there is a backlog of 900,000 cases, so that the waiting period for an asylum claim to be heard in court can be years. Families

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often have children and find jobs in that time, and because only about twenty percent of claims are granted, those denied asylum often stay anyway. At ports of entry, the courts have allowed the Department of Homeland Security to order asylum seekers to wait in Mexico for their cases to proceed, often with no access to lawyers and in terrible conditions, while “metering” slows processing to a trickle. As of 2019, some 16,000 migrants were waiting in Mexican towns such as Tijuana.10 Trump has “jokingly” encouraged U.S. soldiers to fire on asylum seekers, suggesting that shooting migrants may be the only effective way to keep them out of the country. One self-styled militia, the “United Constitutional Patriots,” went on patrol and detained 200 migrants at gunpoint. According to a police report, when one militia member suggested putting away their weapons and acting only as observers, another, arguing Trump’s logic, said, “Why are we just apprehending them and not lining them up and shooting them? We have to go back to Hitler days and put them all in a gas chamber.”11 Indeed, Trump has called migrants “animals” who are “invading” the country or suggested they will “infest” the U.S., using language reminiscent of the Nazi designation of “vermin” for the Jews. Immigrant detention facilities are clearly inhumane. In a report condemning the “egregious” conditions at ICE (Immigration and Customs Enforcement) facilities, the Office of Inspector General recounts examples of the intense overcrowding: A cell with a maximum capacity of twelve held seventy-six detainees; a cell with a maximum capacity of eight held forty-one detainees; a cell with a maximum capacity of thirty-five held 155 detainees. The report plaintively asserts that detainees “cannot continue to be held in standing-room-only conditions for weeks.”12 As of June 2019, nearly 50,000 people were detained in ICE facilities, and more than 2,300 children were separated from their parents. Over 900 children were taken from their parents after Trump “officially” ended the policy of family separation for reasons as minor as a parent not changing a baby’s diaper or having a traffic citation for driving without a license. Twenty-four adults have died in ICE custody since Trump took office, and at least seven children have died in the custody of other immigration agencies during the same period.13 An NBC News investigation found that under both the Obama and Trump administrations ICE has routinely placed immigrant detainees suffering from mental illness or medical issues in solitary confinement, where their pleas for medical care are routinely ignored. Some commit suicide. Some are so ill they die shortly after being released. Migrant children have died of the flu, in hospitals, or at highway checkpoints while being moved from one facility to another. One seven-year-old, Jakelin Caal Maquin, died of an infection that caused multiple organ failure after being sent on a ninety-mile bus ride to another location by Customs and Border Protection even though her father told authorities she was ill and vomiting. These are grim and lonely deaths. Human rights lawyer Leah Chavla cites concerns about lack of hygiene, nutritionally inappropriate food, and being woken throughout the night. A Human Rights Watch report notes frigid temperatures in the facilities and children sleeping under thin Mylar blankets or foil wrappers.14 A report by the ACLU released in May 2018, based on 30,000 documents obtained through the Freedom of Information Act, includes allegations of physical, verbal, sexual, and psychological abuse of migrant children and the denial of clean drinking water and adequate food. Children report being incapacitated by Tasers, denied medical attention, forced into stress positions, threatened, beaten, subjected to sexual violence, and forced to sleep on concrete floors. Many have written their own reports of

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being terrorized and abused. The failures of the U.S. government to provide adequate safeguards and humane protections for children in the custody of Customs and Border Protection, notes the report, “have allowed a culture of impunity to flourish within CBP, subjecting immigrant children to conditions that are too often neglectful at best and sadistic at worst.”16 In June 2019, the Trump administration announced it would end schooling, recreational activities, and access to legal aid for children in detention. Perhaps the most egregious example of abuse is that of Darlyn Valle, ten, who died after entering Office of Refugee Resettlement custody, though her death was not revealed to the public for nearly eight months. She entered custody as a medically fragile child with a history of congenital heart defects and underwent a surgical procedure at a facility in Arizona with later complications that left her in a coma. She was kept in custody for seven months before ORR sent her to Nebraska, just three days before her death, in an effort to reunite her with her mother. She died of fever and respiratory distress.17 The legal limit for Border Patrol to detain children is seventytwo hours; they are then supposed to be transferred to the custody of the Office of Refugee Resettlement for a maximum of twenty days. Even these oppressive rules have been ignored, and the Trump administration has proposed detaining children together with their parents indefinitely while criminal or immigration proceedings are being resolved, a process that can take months or years.18 A small child in a red sweatshirt cries miserably as she stands between a van and her mother in the darkness while a Border Patrol agent body searches her mother, his

Figure 1.4 A two-year-old Honduran asylum seeker cries as her mother is searched and detained near the US-Mexico border on June 12, 2018, in McAllen, Texas. Source: Photo by John Moore/Getty Images

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blue-gloved hands at her waist. The child and mother are turned toward each other, the mother’s body the only thing between the child and the man, but the mother’s arms are stretched out, her hands against the van, unable to hold or comfort her child while the patrol agent looms over them both. According to the photographer, John Moore, the child began crying in despair the moment her mother was forced by the patrol agent to set her down. Moore has shot the image from the child’s perspective, cutting off from view the shoulders and heads of the adults (1.4).19 The terrified little girl displays the intense separation anxiety that all migrant children who are forcibly wrenched from their parents must feel, though here her helpless mother is only inches away. The photo is one of two pictures by Moore of the child crying that made news around the world and became the face of Trump’s “zero tolerance” policy requiring the arrest of all undocumented immigrants who cross the border and the separation of children from families. The mother, Sandra Sanchez, and her daughter, Yanela, were asylum seekers who had rafted across the Rio Grande from Mexico and were detained by U.S. Border Patrol agents before being sent to a processing center for possible separation (though in the end they remained together). Sanchez told Moore that they had been on the road for a month.20 We can only imagine the hardships a lone woman and child might endure on such a perilous journey, the terror and dependence of the child on the mother. In other attempts to halt immigration, subject to legal challenges, Trump would permit anyone to be stopped on the street by federal agents and asked to “show proof” that they were citizens or have lived in the U.S. for more than two years. This would allow the arrest and deportation of asylum seekers without a hearing before a judge and even risk the deportation of U.S. citizens if they couldn’t prove their citizenship in a satisfactory manner. In another tactic, the Trump administration announced it would deny protections to immigrants who failed to apply for citizenship in at least one country they passed through on their way north. This would prevent nearly all Central Americans who seek asylum from entering the U.S., as well as those from Haiti, Cuba, countries in Africa, and elsewhere.21 In a medieval throwback, there’s also the Trump wall, a central plank of his presidential election campaign. Once in office, Trump shut down the American government for five weeks in the failed hope of securing billions of dollars for a proposed expansion of the existing barrier on the southern border, despite his repeated assertions during the campaign that Mexico would pay for it. Following this longest shutdown in American history, Trump declared a national emergency along the Mexican border, with plans to transfer funds from the Pentagon budget, bypassing Congress, and taking money from such projects as schools on military bases. The proposed border wall, like the Separation Barrier that Israel built on Palestinian land around Jerusalem, represents a form of repressive architecture that attempts to turn the entire country into a “gated community” based on race and ethnicity. The border wall symbolizes the alienation of the migrant as illegal, different, inferior, dangerous, and criminal.22 In a work created by the French artist who goes only by the initials JR, a cardboard cutout of a curious little boy in Tecate, Mexico, peers over the barrier wall that borders San Diego County. The giant child rising almost seventy feet in the air reasserts a sense of immigrant agency as he looms over the Border Patrol agents who gaze up at him, seemingly helpless, from the other side. Posted by JR on Instagram, this photo of his work quickly went viral. The Mexican boy suggests a far greater physical and historical presence than the dwarfed white men, while his playfully flexed fingers on the barrier wall suggest he might easily tip it over, as if it were a

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toy fence—a metaphor for the ultimately fruitless attempts to prevent the “browning” of America by a white nationalist minority. In a fitting irony, the installation was completed just after Trump first announced his attempted cancellation of the Obama-era DACA (Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals) program, suggesting the unstoppable power of future generations of immigrants. The DACA program affects nearly 800,000 young people known as “Dreamers,” who were brought to the U.S. illegally as children but have grown up in the U.S. Under DACA, they are protected from deportation and allowed to work legally in the U.S.23 The work is based on JR’s photo of David Enrique, nicknamed “Kikito,” a one-yearold who lives with his mother and grandparents in Tecate.24 “The history of humanity is the story of people migrating,” observes JR. “For this little kid, there are no walls and borders.”25 Kikito’s mother told JR, I hope this will help people see us differently than what they hear in the media, that they will stop treating us like criminals or rapists. I hope in that image they won’t only see my kid. They will see us all.26 Despite the demonization of people south of the U.S.-Mexican border as monstrous invading aliens, JR’s border installation offers a perspective of innocence and latent power.

What’s in a Name? The ICE detention centers are concentration camps, as Congresswoman Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez told her Instagram followers, causing a backlash from those who argued that Ocasio-Cortez was trivializing the Holocaust. It was not only the conservative right that objected; even the U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum issued a formal statement that the Museum “unequivocally rejects efforts to create analogies between the Holocaust and other events, whether historical or contemporary.” This is an astonishing pronouncement, which rejects any efforts to compare the Holocaust to any other events, in the past or the present. In response, a public letter with 580 signatures, including many Holocaust scholars and leading academics from the United States, Canada, Europe, Israel, Asia, and Australia, urged USHMM to retract this statement, pointing out, “The Museum’s decision to completely reject drawing any possible analogies to the Holocaust, or to the events leading up to it, is fundamentally ahistorical.”27 Timothy Snyder in Slate wrote that the Holocaust Museum “has made nonsense of the slogan ‘never again’ and provided moral cover for ongoing and oppressive American policies.”28 In a Facebook post, the original authors of the letter argued that the museum’s statement is at odds with USHMM’s own programs on the comparative study of global genocides, that it’s a form of thought-policing, that comparison is fundamental to understanding history and the world, and that the statement distances the museum from a large body of historical scholarship.29 Concentration camps do not have to look like Auschwitz. There have been concentration camps in France, South Africa, Cuba, the Soviet Union, and in the U.S., with the internment of the Japanese. As Andrea Pitzer, author of One Long Night: A Global History of Concentration Camps, asserts, “We have what I would call a concentration camp system, and the definition of that in my book is, mass detention of civilians without trial” based on group identity.30 The conservative intellectual

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Figure 1.5 Overcrowding of families observed by the DHS Office of Inspector General on June 11, 2019, at Border Patrol’s Weslaco, TX, station. Source: Photo by U.S. Department of Homeland Security, Office of Inspector General

Michael Anton, whom Trump hired as a senior White House adviser, defined this group identity as “Third World foreigners.” Jewish groups, however, mobilized in cities across the country holding signs that said “No Kids in Concentration Camps” and “Never Again means never again for anyone (1.5).” It is not the Holocaust that is trivialized by recognizing these detention centers for what they are; on the contrary, it is critics of the concentration camp designation who are trivializing the officially sanctioned cruelty and unconscionable abuse of these refugees and asylum seekers, both adults and children. The camps are a form of governmentperpetrated violence based on mass detention without trial; they construct a form of white nationalist state terror promulgated and expanded by the white-nationalistin-chief who occupies the White House.

A Legacy of White Nationalism Neo-Nazis, right-wing militias, and neo-Confederates of all stripes have been elated and emboldened by Trump’s election. They regularly turn up at Trump rallies, and his rhetoric has encouraged a huge increase in hate crimes in cities across the United States. One of the best known examples is the murder of anti-racist protester Heather Heyer and the injury of nineteen others by a white nationalist, who plowed into them with his car at a “Unite the Right” rally in Charlottesville, Virginia, in 2017. For his part, Trump condemned violence “on both sides” and suggested that the white nationalists in Charlottesville included some “very fine people.”

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He may have been thinking of his father, Fred Trump, one of seven men arrested on Memorial Day in 1927 while participating in a march by a thousand white-robed Klansmen through a Jamaican neighborhood in Queens, New York. Fred Trump was also notorious for his refusal to rent to potential black tenants in the real estate and construction business now owned by Donald Trump. In 1973, both father and son were sued by the U.S. Justice Department’s Civil Rights Division for racial discrimination. In July 2019, Donald Trump caused a firestorm by tweeting—his favored form of official public statement—that four Democratic women of color who opposed a bill funding border police facilities should “go back and help fix the totally broken and crime infested places from which they came,” though all four are not only U.S. citizens but also duly elected members of the U.S. House of Representatives. The taunt echoes a well-worn racist trope, recalling, for example, the nine black teenagers who integrated a school in Little Rock, Arkansas, in 1957, while a mob of a thousand white people shouted, “Go back to Africa.” By accusing the freshman congresswomen—Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez of New York, Ilhan Omar of Minnesota, Ayanna Pressley of Massachusetts, and Rashida Tlaib of Michigan—of “hating America” and “supporting Al Qaida” and telling them to leave the country, Trump demonstrated the vicious racial animosity that was the basis of his campaign strategy starting in 2015. He reinforced his inflammatory remarks a few days later at a rally in Greenville, North Carolina. Stoking racial controversy, he cast those who oppose him as anti-American and dangerous extremists—especially Ilhan Omar, a Muslim born in Somalia—in an effort to normalize his own white nationalist extremism, roll back the gains of the civil rights movement, and set the stage for even more egregious forms of racist, anti-immigrant terror. All four women received death threats, especially Omar, including a phone call to her office by a man threatening to “put a bullet in her.”31 Sinking even lower, if possible, the Trump administration quietly sent letters to the immigrant families of hospitalized children with severe and life-threatening illnesses in the U.S., informing them that medical deferments were withdrawn and giving them thirty-three days to remove their children from lifesaving treatments and leave the country. This was so vile and inhumane that no official announcement was made. When news leaked and outrage spread, the administration reversed itself. The question, then, is who has the right to be an American? The volatile debate over immigration and the creation of “new Americans” exposes a fundamental contradiction in American life that originates with the founding of the U.S. as a nation, when “equality” meant equality for white men only, not for indigenous people, not for women, and not for the millions of black people who were enslaved. Many of the men who wrote or signed the Declaration of Independence and led this country from its inception, loudly proclaiming the right to liberty, equality, and the pursuit of happiness, were slaveholders. It took a civil war to end slavery, but equality has never truly been achieved. Perhaps it is no surprise that white nationalists believe this country was founded as a nation for white people.

Mass Protests and White Extinction Anxiety Trump’s slogan,“Make America Great Again,” is widely understood—by both Trump’s supporters and his detractors—as “Make America White Again.” If this means forcibly expelling families who have lived in the U.S. for years, many of whom have children

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who were born here and are therefore citizens, or whose children will die if withdrawn from lifesaving treatment, compelling them to “go back where they came from,” this wrings no tears from white nationalists. ICE roundups and threats of ICE roundups across the country are another way of terrorizing undocumented immigrants and families who fear being torn apart. In July 2019, widely publicized ICE raids began in more than a dozen cities, but of the more than 2,100 migrants who were targeted, only thirty-five were arrested, including collateral arrests of people never targeted and at least two U.S. citizens, both of whom had the proper paperwork, one of whom was detained for thirty hours and the other for almost a month. The advance notice gave immigrant advocates time to counsel families about their rights, which included not opening the door or answering questions, and on social media, community groups shared information about sightings of ICE agents. In addition, thousands of protesters and “protectors” took to the streets across the nation and even shut down ICE headquarters in Washington, D.C. Protestors turned out in many cities and at the underpass outside the Fort Sill military base in Oklahoma. The base was once used to cage indigenous people and Japanese Americans and was about to open as another child concentration camp. The following month, in a quietly coordinated operation, about 600 ICE agents arrested almost 700 immigrant workers at seven chicken processing plants in Mississippi, and many children came home to find that their parents had simply disappeared. The slogans “Make America Great Again” and “America First” revive a memory of native and European fascist movements; Trump’s authoritarian claims on state power and the attacks on migrants and asylum seekers as well as on blacks, Latinxs, Muslims, the LGBTQ community, and Jews—considered non-white by white supremacists— arouse increasing alarm as violence and threats of violence continue to surge. In October 2018, a shooter identified as a white nationalist killed eleven Jews and injured seven more at a synagogue in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, after posting antisemitic comments online that also referred to Central American migrant caravans and immigrants. In January 2019, three Trump supporters belonging to a militia group called the “Crusaders” were each sentenced to twenty-five years in prison for plotting to massacre Somali Muslims in Garden City, Kansas. That same month, two more Trump-supporting militia group members pleaded guilty to bombing a Somali mosque in Minnesota. These acts of domestic terrorism take Trump’s rhetoric to its logical conclusion. The Southern Poverty Law Center notes that white nationalists in the U.S. have been inspired by Pat Buchanan’s 2001 book The Death of the West, which argues that “declining white birth rates and an ‘immigrant invasion’ will transform the United States into a third world nation by 2050.”32 Many white nationalists cite this text as responsible for their “awakening,” or “red pill.” Their goal is to establish a white “ethnostate” that would not only restrict immigration but would also dismantle social welfare programs. Mostly downwardly mobile, lower middle-class men who experience economic displacement because of globalization and neoliberal economics, these men who believe they are entitled to something better—to an “American Dream”— feel emasculated, as sociologist Michael Kimmel argues. White nationalist organizations offer not only a sense of belonging but also a restoration of masculinity.33 White nationalists are also obsessed with declining white birth rates and believe that white women should assume as their primary responsibility the role of wife and homemaker in order to raise white children. Many white nationalists were inspired, among others, by Anders Behring Breivik, who killed eight people by detonating a van

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bomb in Oslo, then massacred sixty-nine young people at an island summer camp to publicize his white nationalist manifesto in which he blamed feminism for a European “cultural suicide” and called for the deportation of all Muslims from Europe. White nationalists were also inspired by the male shooter who massacred fifty-one Muslims and injured forty-nine more inside two mosques in Christchurch, New Zealand, in 2019. The gunman was a white nationalist who supported the Identitarian movement premised on the “Great Replacement” or “white replacement” conspiracy theories that posit a concerted plan to replace whites with non-whites through immigration, abortion, intermarriage, racial integration, and land confiscation. In 2017, the white nationalists in Charlottesville chanted, “You will not replace us!” and “Jews will not replace us!” demonstrating their embrace of “replacement theory” as well as the global connections among white nationalists, who fear an existential threat to their existence. An anti-immigrant screed written by the white male shooter who killed twenty-two people and injured two dozen more at a Walmart in El Paso, Texas, in 2019 also cited the “great replacement” theory. His racist manifesto, posted online minutes before the massacre, said his attack was a response to a “Hispanic invasion of Texas.” There are a variety of sources for replacement theory, which has been expressed in Europe, North America, South Africa, Russia, and Australia, including the neo-Nazi concept of “white genocide,” which refers primarily to contraception and abortion, and French right-wing theorist Renaud Camus’s 2012 book The Great Replacement, which focuses on the replacement of Christian white people in France with Muslims. The two ideas have merged into “white extinction anxiety,” a phrase coined by New York Times columnist Charles Blow, which refers to the fear that whites will become a minority stripped of race-based privilege. This belief that whites must maintain political, economic, and cultural hegemony, along with a form of aggressive white patriarchal masculinity, has become the basis of Trump’s rhetoric. Trump uses the gendered, racialized body of the white male as a “proxy for the nation” and locates threats to the nation in “women’s and non-white male bodies.”34 Theories of white replacement have been mainstreamed on the news channel Fox News, which is well known as an important propaganda pipeline for Trump, especially through the prime time commentators Tucker Carlson and Laura Ingraham. Both commentators use blatant racist language and have variously suggested that immigrants make America dirty, have compared children in cages to summer camps, and hosted antisemites and white nationalist conspiracy theorists. Commentators on Fox News employed images of the migrant caravan to raise fears of an “invading horde” about to “rush the border,” relentlessly warning of an “invasion” in the days before the 2018 midterm elections. One guest on the news program, former immigration agent David Ward, claimed, without evidence, that migrants traveling in a caravan through Mexico were bringing leprosy, tuberculosis, and smallpox—the latter a disease that no longer exists. An analysis by the anti-extremism think tank Institute for Strategic Dialogue found 1.5 million tweets referencing the “great replacement” theory from 2013 to 2019. But the fear of replacement, according to sociologist Kathleen Blee, dates at least to the Jim Crow era, when white plantation owners in the South feared being outnumbered by freed slaves and Northerners who moved south after the Civil War.35 The erection of hundreds of Confederate monuments, especially in the 1910s and the 1960s, coincided with the election of blacks to public office, as well as the suffragist and civil rights movements, and was meant to uphold the racial, class, and gender hierarchies of the white elite in the public sphere.

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There are, for example, hundreds of busts, monuments, and statues of Jefferson Davis, president of the Confederate States, in parks, schools, museums, and civic sites across the South. In the 1910s and 1920s, the United Daughters of the Confederacy planned the Jefferson Davis Memorial Highway as a transcontinental highway that began in Arlington, Virginia, and ended in San Diego, California. Though it may never have existed in the form originally intended, the most famous part of the highway today is that portion of U.S. 80 that runs from Selma to Montgomery, Alabama, where Martin Luther King, Jr., led the voting rights march in 1965. Montgomery, the first capital of the Confederacy, is home to fifty-nine monuments, markers, and memorials to the Confederacy, including Jefferson Davis’s home, known as the “First White House of the Confederacy,” which celebrates his life as a “great American patriot” while making no mention of slavery as a cause of the Civil War in the historical presentation of the house. Davis is further lionized by a statue that sits in front of the Alabama State Capitol in Montgomery—once the most active southern port in slave trading—overlooking the city’s main thoroughfare and the city itself from its perch on the capitol hill, like a revered founding father regally embodying the white supremacist values of the former Confederacy. White supremacists who challenge the premise of equal rights for racial, ethnic, and gendered identities and coalesce into white nationalist movements are described by two international studies scholars as the New Right—“the latest iteration of a reactionary challenge to Liberal belief in human universality by those that believe in fundamentally ‘natural’ inequalities.”36 This has important implications for international relations. The New Right—including Trump and Putin—envisions the dismantling of multilateral norms and institutions and their restructuring in favor of national competition grounded in the strength of birth-cultural identity, which attributes inherent natural qualities based on birth. This “Reactionary Internationalism” focuses on the drive for sovereignty first, deploys anti-immigration approaches, and seeks to negotiate bilateral agreements with other countries based on strength and threats to get the best “deal.” It replaces liberal assumptions about universal humanity with the promotion of inequality among identities and the belief that the “natural” qualities of birth cultures must be “liberated” from the constrictions of liberal internationalist norms.37 We have seen this enacted as part of Trump’s agenda in relation to a variety of international treaties and institutions, such as Trump’s withdrawal from the Iran nuclear agreement and the Paris climate change accords. We also must understand Trump’s “fake news” dismissal of press criticism and his manipulation of the Justice Department based on personal “loyalty” to him as premised on a fascist-inspired emphasis on the authority of the leader to the exclusion of all else. Trump’s admiration of right-wing dictators around the world is consistent with his attempts to bypass Congress and the Constitution to enact his agenda, whether banning Muslim and Central American immigrants, indefinitely incarcerating children, or threatening to deport undocumented immigrants living in the U.S. and awaiting hearings. Fanatical devotion to the “leader” may be seen at Trump rallies, such as the Greenville, North Carolina, rally where Trump attacked Ilhan Omar, defining her as an outsider who doesn’t belong, causing thousands of his supporters to chant “Send her back,” just as they chanted “Lock her up” in the campaign against Hillary Clinton. Trump considers anything negative about him to be “fake news,” but the promulgation of real “fake news”—deliberate misinformation and lies—has in fact been perpetrated not by Trump’s critics but by Trump himself and his supporters. According to

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numerous media outlets, including the New York Times and the Washington Post, as of January 2020, Trump had made more than 16,000 demonstrably false or misleading claims since assuming office. These include claims about the economy, trade agreements, the size of his inauguration crowd, jobs, unemployment, the wall on the southern border, criminal activity by some of his campaign advisers, his impeachment for extorting a foreign government for help in his own reelection, and, not least, claims about immigrants. Though vulnerable, immigrants are not just victims but also a vital component of a multiracial working class in the U.S., often forced into the most dangerous and exploitative jobs. Some unions have declared themselves “sanctuary unions,” offering legal advice and writing certain protections into contracts, such as prohibiting employer retaliation based on immigration status.38 In a world of ever-growing numbers of refugees from persecution, war, and famine, the right to have rights by those who are rightless will not be permanently achieved within a capitalist framework, but only through transformative social struggle that eliminates privatization and the reign of corporate power to create a just society for all. In the meantime, unions must go further and organize a class struggle defense of immigrant rights, including the right to full American citizenship for anyone who makes it to this country.

Notes 1. For the image, see Kirk Semple, “I Didn’t Want Them to Go,” New York Times, June 28, 2019, www.nytimes.com/2019/06/28/world/americas/rio-grande-drowning-father-daughter.html. 2. Teju Cole, “Crime Scene,” New York Times Magazine, July 14, 2019, 7–10. 3. Ibid, 10. 4. The video may be seen at www.youtube.com/watch?v=2EY1fpo0DRc. 5. Interview with Kenny Karpov by author, Hamtramck, Michigan, February 20, 2020. 6. Pankaj Mishra, “The Religion of Whiteness Becomes a Suicide Cult,” New York Times, August 30, 2018, www.nytimes.com. 7. For a comprehensive list, see Martin Smith and Tash Shifrin, “Fascism and the Far Right in Europe: Country by Country Guide, 2019,” May 19, 2019, www.dreamdeferred.org.uk. 8. For more on the how the gangs run the system, see Sonia Nazario, “Pay or Die,” New York Times Sunday Review, July 28, 2019. 9. See World Bank Group, “Internal Climate Migration in Latin America,” Groundswell http://documents.worldbank.org, and Kirk Semple, “Central American Farmers Head to the U.S., Fleeing Climate Change,” New York Times, April 13, 2019, www.nytimes.com. 10. Miriam Jordan, “Immigrant Advocates Sue to Block New Rule Restricting Asylum Claims,” New York Times, July 17, 2019, A20. 11. Eric Levitz, “The President’s ‘Jokes’ about Shooting Migrants Are No Laughing Matter,” Intelligencer, May 9, 2019, http://nymag.com/intelligencer. 12. John V. Kelly, Acting Inspector General, “Management Alert—DHS Needs to Address Dangerous Overcrowding Among Single Adults at El Paso Del Norte Processing Center (Redacted),” May 30, 2019, www.oig.dhs.gov. 13. Hannah Rappleye and Lisa Riordan Seville, “24 Immigrants Have Died in ICE Custody under the Trump Administration,” NBC News, www.nbcnews.com; Eric Levitz, “With Trump’s Migrant Camps, the History We Should Fear Repeating Is Our Own,” Intelligencer, June 20, 2019, http://nymag.com/intelligencer; Camilo Montoya-Galvez, “Top Border Protection Official is ‘Confident’ in Agency’s Data on Migrant Child Deaths,” CBS News, May 23, 2019, www.cbsnews.com; Miriam Jordan, “No More Family Separations, Except These 900,” July 30, 2019, New York Times, www.newyorktimes.com. 14. Nicole Acevedo, “Why Are Migrant Children Dying in U.S. Custody?” NBC News, May 29, 2019, www.nbcnews.com. 15. For a reading of migrant children testimonies by New York children, see “Hearing the Words of Detained Migrant Children,” New York Times, July 18, 2019, www.nytimes.com.

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16. The University of Chicago Law School International Human Rights Clinic, ACLU Border Litigation Project (San Diego and Imperial Counties), and ACLU Border Rights, “Neglect and Abuse of Unaccompanied Immigrant Children by U.S. Customs and Border Protection,” May 2018. For summary and link to full report, see https://www.aclusandiego.org/. 17. Ibid. 18. As of March 2020, there is great concern among health officials and others that the already overcrowded and unhealthy conditions of the federal immigration detention system will become a disastrous COVID-19 pandemic breeding ground. 19. For the image, see Jason Hanna, “‘Crying Girl’ Picture Near U.S. Border Wins World Press Photo of the Year,” CNN, April 12, 2019, www.cnn.com/2019/04/12/us/crying-girl-johnmoore-immigration-photo-of-the-year/index.html. 20. Avi Selk, “‘I Wanted Her to Stop Crying’: The Image of a Migrant Child that Broke a Photographer’s Heart,” The Washington Post, June 18, 2018, www.washingtonpost.com. 21. On September 9, 2019, a federal judge instated a nationwide injunction preventing implementation of the new policy, which put the fate of the policy in the hands of the Supreme Court. 22. See Massimiliano Demata, “A Great and Beautiful Wall,” 101–121, in Language Aggression in Public Debates on Immigration, Andreas Musolff, ed. (Amsterdam: John Benjamins Publishing Co., 2019). 23. The Trump administration’s attempt to end DACA was met with a slew of lawsuits that effectively blocked it, but some lawsuits are still working their way through the courts. 24. “French Artist JR Exhibit’s ‘Kikito’ Overlooking the US Border,” La Croix, September 8, 2017, www.la-croix.com. Kikito’s family allowed JR to place the photo in part of their garden, though it can only be seen properly from the U.S. side. 25. Melena Ryzik, “JR’s Latest: A Child Caught between the U.S.-Mexico Border,” New York Times, September 7, 2017, www.nytimes.com. 26. Alexandra Schwartz, “The Artist JR Lifts a Mexican Child over the Border Wall,” The New Yorker, September 11, 2017, www.newyorker.com. 27. The letter was initiated by Andrea Orzoff, associate professor of history and honors at New Mexico State University, and Anika Walke, associate professor of history at Washington University in St. Louis, and was covered in major media outlets, including the New York Review of Books, www.nybooks.com. Full disclosure: I was a signatory to this letter. 28. Timothy Snyder, “It Can Happen Here,” Slate, July 12, 2019, https://slate.com. 29. See www.facebook.com/anika.walke/posts/2127179610744506 30. Quoted in Jack Holmes, “An Expert on Concentration Camps Says that’s Exactly What the U.S. is Running at the Border,” Esquire, June 13, 2019, www.esquire.com. 31. Kenneth Garger, “’I’ll Put A Bullet in Her’: Man Accused of Threatening to Kill Ilhan Omar,” New York Post, April 5, 2019, https://nypost.com. 32. Southern Poverty Law Center, “White Nationalist,” www.splcenter.org. 33. Cited by Dave Gilson, “You Can’t Understand White Supremacists Without Looking at Masculinity,” Mother Jones, July/August 2018, www.motherjones.com. 34. B. Gökarıksel and S. Smith, “‘Making America Great Again’?: The Fascist Body Politics of Donald Trump,” Political Geography (2016), http://doi.org/10.1016/j.polgeo.2016.07.004. For a discussion of the contemporary return of the memory of fascism and Nazism among both far-right political movements and liberal and left critics of the right, see Neil Levi and Michael Rothberg, “Memory Studies in a Moment of Danger: Fascism, Postfascism, and the Contemporary Political Imaginary,” Memory Studies 2, no. 3 (2018): 355–367. 35. Dan Frosch, Zusha Elinson, Sadie Gurman, “White Nationalists Pose Challenge to Investigators,” Wall Street Journal, August 5, 2019, wsj.com. 36. Pablo de Orellana and Nicholas Michelsen, “Reactionary Internationalism: The Philosophy of the New Right,” Review of International Studies, Cambridge University Press, July 3, 2019, www.cambridge.org/core/. 37. Ibid. 38. Workers Vanguard, “Down with Trump’s Anti-Immigrant Drive!” no. 1158, July 25, 2019.

2

Facing Franco’s Terror Visual Arts and the Fate of Memory Paula Barreiro López

In 2013 the Catalan artist Núria Güell produced the art installation Resurrección (Resurrection), in which she addressed the processes of institutionalised oblivion of the Franco dictatorship terror since Spain had entered the democratic transition (2.1).1 Presenting a video together with a filing cabinet containing documentation, the piece targeted the Fundación Nacional Francisco Franco (FNFF), an NGO that had been founded in 1976 (some months after Franco’s death in November 1975) for defending “the truth, the legacy” and “the memory” of the Spanish dictator.2 Forty years later, when Güell developed her artistic project, this institution continued to fulfil this self-proclaimed aim, guarding his archives with personal and public documents, publishing books and organizing events. Actually, Resurrección was an artistic reaction to the juridical actions against the Spanish artist Eugenio Merino for allegedly offending the memory and honour of the dictator with his artwork Forever Franco, presented at the 2012 edition of the Spanish art fair ARCO (2.2.).3 It was created within the framework of the Plataforma de Artistas Antifacistas (Platform of Antifascist Artist) and is to be understood as a response to the FNFF’s combative stance against all expressions of opinion that do not conform to its revisionist point of view. Using the means of transnational and global capitalism, the piece by Núria Güell consisted in (nominally) “resurrecting” six Catalan Republican militia soldiers, or maquis, whose active struggle against the dictatorship on Spanish soil long after Franco’s troops had won the Civil War had been banned from the collective memory. She included their names in the governing council of an already existing legal association and purchased subsequently a set of “francoist glorifying” objects from an online shopping platform linked to the webpage of the FNFF with a credit card issued in the name of one of those six—the 24-year-old Salvador Gómez Talón.4 This merchandise was then buried, thus re-enacting with the Franco memorabilia the ultimate fate that thousands of Republicans have met. Connecting past and present, Güell’s project opens the debate about the politics of terror implemented by the Francoist dictatorship as well as its insufficient visibility and acknowledgement in the public space and Spanish law. Her piece raises key questions about the place of violence in Spanish history as well as the role the visual arts have assumed in dealing with it during and after the dictatorship. If during the regime’s years leftist-committed artists contributed greatly to making visible the political violence exerted over the civil population, today, visual artists like Güell are playing a significant role in the processes of contestation regarding the memorial consensus crafted during the Spanish democratic transition as an exemplary and

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Figure 2.1 Núria Güell, Resurrección, 2013. Source: Courtesy of the artist

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Figure 2.2 Eduardo Merino, Always Franco, 2012. Source: Courtesy of the artist

non-violent process; a memory for a long-time hegemonic pact that, in 2019, shows clear symptoms of exhaustion within different cultural and political factions of Spanish society. Contesting such heritage implies digging deeply into the violent politics, structures and ideology of the Francoist regime crafted since the years of the Civil War.

Politics of Terror in an Ongoing Civil War Relying on his experiences from the colonial wars in North Africa after the coup d’état on 18 July 1936, Franco had consciously implemented during the following war against the Spanish Republic and its democratically elected government a methodical campaign of ideological and physical warfare with violent repression of all—real or assumed—opposition. General Emilio Mola, the nationalist commander, who had originally led the military uprising that would culminate in the Spanish Civil War, had been very frank from the beginning about the use of terror, public violence and humiliation (as tools of control and intimidation) for political ends, stating: “We have to terrorise, we have to show we are in control by rapidly and ruthlessly eliminating all those who do not think as we do”.5 Hence, mass killings took place throughout

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the war and post-war years with the tacit consent of the insurgents’ leadership and afterwards the new state, acting, in the words of Helen Graham, “as rituals through which social and political control could be re-enacted”.6 Mola’s motto sums up well the warfare strategy that was implemented when rebels conquered Spanish territories as well as their general attitude, especially in Republican zones, after Franco had won the war.7 A wide range of repressive measures against the civil population were carried out with the aim of punishing dissidents and to impose the values and beliefs of the new system. The traumatic experience of the war was followed by a long period of fear and persecution in which opponents, liberals and so-called “freethinkers”—a generic term applied to people suspected of having collaborated with the Republican government—were eradicated.8 These “cleansing and punishment operations” labelled persecutions were fuelled by the desire to “purge” society of the left-wing “disease”.9 Associating radical violence with a religious cause (it must be noted that the Civil War had been baptised by the insurgent military as a new Catholic crusade), the regime and its intelligentsia developed, as Graham shows well, a discourse “of disease and racial impurity in which the Republicans’ ‘marxist barbarism’ were explained as a lethal virus, the germ of ‘anti-nation’ which if not ‘cleansed’ out to the last trace, would contaminate the healthy body of Spain”.10 This course of action entailed such violent repressions of the civil and social body that it led Paul Preston to coin the term “Spanish Holocaust”.11 The Francoist (material, moral, political and cultural) “reconstruction” of the country that followed the destruction of the Civil War applied to only one part of Spanish society—the coup’s supporters—while the regime’s opponents (or even those who had in the eyes of the new rulers not backed sufficiently the coup) lost their rights and their voice. Physical and psychological torture, military summary trials with subsequent death penalties, public humiliations (especially of women) and abuses typical of the war years became quite common in Spain. Antonio Carzola Sánchez summarises that by the end of 1940 there were 240,916 political prisoners in Spain, with more than 7,000 of them awaiting their execution.12 If extreme violence became institutionalised during the 1940s in the Spanish legal system, with the bilateral agreement between the USA and Spain in 1953 and thus Spain’s entrance into the Western camp of the Cold War the dictatorship’s appearance would change—but not its means. While a more sympathetic face of the regime and the political leadership was exported, aiming for financial aid, international investments and tourists coming to the sunny coast of Spain, surveillance, violence and control mechanisms continued to be implemented. However, being aware of the repercussions that drastic measures could have for international relations, Francoist tactics of repression and open terror adjusted in the following decade.13 To keep up appearances, the regime opted for a targeted retaliation (of assumed oppositional forces, including workers, students, intellectuals and visual artists) and a juridical cover for the systematic disregard of human rights via repressive laws as well as multiple states of exception to discipline the Spaniards. In short, although the regime tried to soften its face to favour its international acceptance, terror was implemented during the whole dictatorship. Making repression and the instrumentalisation of fear an essential part of its structural basis, the regime legitimised the endemic violence within the recurrent states of exception and its politics, which constantly referred to an ongoing Civil War that had never ended. In 1958, the painter Agustín Ibarrola (by then a member of the illegal

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and clandestine Spanish Communist Party) described the climate of suspicion and paranoia within the Spanish cultural scene in a letter to his fellow artist of the geometric abstract group Equipo 57 Ángel Duarte: “Everyone is afraid = there is a very strong repressive intellectual and political direction. Every man a little rebellious or intelligence suspect is publicly denounced as a communist or dangerous person.”14 Denunciations, mostly between neighbours and even within families, incited by the regime since the Civil War and recurrent in the early years of the dictatorship were still common practices in the late 1950s and an effective way to create a collective dimension of collaboration, complicity and guilt in Spanish society. Invoking the phantoms of Spain’s violent 19th and early 20th century history, Franco saw the Spanish Civil War as proof of the immaturity of the Spanish people; this idea led the dictator to develop one of the leitmotifs of his rule, according to which his intervention as a saviour father was needed to bring lasting peace. It is expressed in his famous dictum “Españoles, no se os puede dejar solos” (“Spaniards, you cannot be left alone”), a token still garnishing various memorabilia to commemorate the dictator that were also presented in Güell’s art installation Resurrección. Even if it is undeniable that the Franco dictatorship transformed along the way, the entire project of the coup d’état enablers, characterised by Graham “as a colonial enterprise in which the target was Spain as a whole”, was pretty much alive throughout its entire existence.15 The execution of the communist leader Julián Grimau García in 1963 vividly reinforced this idea in opponents as well as supporters.16 Grimau, former Republican policeman and afterwards operating clandestinely within the country as leader of the Partido Comunista de España (PCE), the Spanish Communist Party, had been caught in November 1962. Summarily judged, he was sentenced to death by the Tribunal de Orden Público (Court for Public Order), a new structure that had assumed the functions of the former Tribunal Especial de Represión de la Masonería y el Comunismo (Special Court for the Suppression of Freemasonry and Communism) originally established during the Civil War and active during the earliest years of the regime. Though the new court’s name did away with the national socialist overtones of its predecessor, it continued in its footsteps of adjudicating political crimes with the purpose of thwarting oppositional activism through the imposition of harsh punishments.17 For this reason, Grimau was not convicted for being a covert communist, which was punishable by a prison sentence, but for his activities during the Civil War, for which he was condemned to death by firing squad.18 This harsh sentence was a way for the regime to set an example for the oppositional movements that were growing bigger during the 1960s, maintaining a climate of an ongoing Civil War. One of the anti-Francoist pamphlets circulating clandestinely in response stressed that Grimau’s death sentence in fact perpetuated the “spirit and procedures of civil war, maintaining hatred as the inspiring norm of conduct, deepening and not closing the open blood pit between Spaniards”.19 Years later, in 1973, this idea of a war that never ended reappeared also in the right-wing camp when the assassination of General Carrero Blanco by ETA was answered with the slogan “War is not over”;20 and its continuing application even during the democratic transition proves the persistence of an ongoing war climate that had been consciously nourished by the regime, reinforcing the idea of two Spains, which is still palpable today. Discussing the complexities of dealing with the differences between state terrorism and state repression, Ruth Blakeley points out instrumentality as a key element; and the question regarding the former is not to just harm the victim but also to terrorise

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others and alter their behaviour.21 As the examples pointed out so far show clearly, the military and authoritarian core of the Franco regime was working on the basis of such instrumentalisation of fear, especially during its first decade, but also later on. Cazorla Sánchez explains how “the dictatorship did not try to bring reconciliation amongst Spaniards; on the contrary, it fuelled and used fear opportunistically to achieve its own objectives”, amongst them to impose state control over all sectors of society and facets of social life.22 Such control was coerced via illegal detention, torture, assassination and targeting of specific social, gender and political subjects. Political violence had become in Francoist Spain part of a wider, institutionalised policy that aimed to “correct” Spanish society. This aim survived all through the dictatorship’s existence even if challenged by a growing oppositional movement that developed across different sectors of society, increasing social mobilisation, the creation of separatist groups like ETA and antifascist organisations such as the FRAC and GRAPO, the latter three opting for a belligerent response to the violence exerted by the regime. By August 1975, just four months before Franco’s death, the dictatorship armed its legal system once more, this time to target any kind of dissidence. Seemingly acting against terrorist operations that had rooted in Spanish dissidence, the regime approved a new antiterrorist law that was not just used against physical violence but also cunningly applied against any kind of ideological and visual criticism by considering “direct[ly] or indirectly defending or stimulating illegal ideologies or collectives” clear terrorist acts and punishing them with maximum prison sentences.23

Bearing Witness in a “Time To Kill”24 Although the government tried to show that it was in full control of economic and social changes, it could not hide the tensions that were becoming increasingly manifest in Spanish society. The so-called Late Francoism, the phase of the regime defined by strong economic development from 1957/59 until 1975, was accompanied by a growing social and political consciousness that challenged the system and wanted to denounce its most depraved face.25 Political violence and torture became a great concern in Spanish society—even conservative circles that abided by a Catholic moral code could not anymore justify such abuses. A growing movement of contestation developed making the cultural field a participating party; in the 1960s not just workers and students but also a great many intellectuals, art critics and artists would increasingly take an active position against the dictatorship in the social and political sphere. In fact, since the 1950s avant-garde art had become part of what the PCE called the cultural forces against Francoism, with artists joining the oppositional movement that increased strongly throughout the 1960s.26 Declaring themselves rightful heirs of Republican-committed artists, such as Pablo Picasso, and along with a genuine interest in formal and aesthetic experimentation, they understood their work within the anti-Francoist cause. This multifaceted movement against the dictatorship developed across various sectors of Spanish society and used international pressure to its benefit. It asked for amnesty and democracy and was key to denouncing the crimes of the regime. Transnational anti-Francoist networks (via the Comité National de Defense des Victimes du Franquisme, trade unions and international political organisations) enabled the international circulation of reports on the victims’ penances to raise public awareness of the violent face of the regime—an extremely important task for putting external

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pressure on the dictatorship. Pamphlets circulated denouncing the “Franco crimes”, “francoist terrorism” and “fascist violence” of the regime that deployed its forces against its own people.27 However, documenting images of the different faces of violence rarely surfaced due to rigid control and censorship. The existence of torture, for example, could be proven just through testimonies of political prisoners and their families. Artists acquired an important role, as they could visualise but also deal with the trauma resulting from what could not be seen, what stayed behind closed doors and was being denied by a state that—although non-democratic—was looking for international legitimisation and approval. From the 1960s onwards, the violence against workers, students and intellectuals became subject matter for oppositional artwork. Different leftist artists evoked on their canvases beatings of workers by the Guardia Civil (a topic often treated by Agustín Ibarrola); the violent police repression of demonstrations and even assassinations (recurrent in Juan Genovés’s and Equipo Realidad’s paintings); brutal interrogations and humiliation of workers’ wives, who would suffer beatings and even rapes and might also have to endure the same punishment of Republican women during the Civil War, with the shaving of their hair due to prior support of their husbands’ strikes (as Eduardo Arroyo painted in 1970); daily routine in prisons (a recurrent topic in the works of Pepe Ortega or Ibarrola, who approached it during his stay in the Burgos prison); and, finally, the cruelty of a death sentence by the old-fashioned garrote or firing squad that Franco employed until his last breath (visible in multiple artworks, especially those of Equipo Crónica and Juan Genovés). Even though some abstract explorations of these topics were developed by Antoni Tàpies or Joan Miró, most artists followed different kinds of realism that had been developed during the 1960s in the artistic field. They assumed that “words, the cinema and a fountain pen [were means or weapons] to denounce and to intervene”, as the critic Antonio Giménez Pericás put it at the beginning of that decade.28 Participating thus with their own means in the cultural forces of anti-Francoism, artists responded to the Sartrean imperative of bearing witness of the repression that the regime had enforced upon different sectors of the population.29 Ibarrola explained that bearing witness “of the times in which we have lived with anguish [aimed to show] the situations of which we wanted to take note and take sides”.30 His engravings and paintings focussed on the class struggle and insisted on the suffering of the workers caused by the hands of the police. Coming from a working class background, having been tortured and imprisoned various times for political activism, Ibarrola identified himself with that collective. However, although a member of the Communist Party, he developed a distinct aesthetics of a critical realism that was far away from the conventions of socialist realism. Ibarrola would use schematic figurations and strong diagonal compositions of faceless individuals that were indebted to his constructivist work developed between 1957 and 1962 within the artists’ collective Equipo 57 (2.3). His engravings show workers as victims of state cruelty brought about by repressive security forces or the penitentiary system. The absence of any individual characterisation of the workers or the Guardia Civil (military police) stresses the duality between the two sides and hints towards the endemic violence over the working class, which the regime had sustained since its beginning. Writing from the same prison where Ibarrola was confined, Giménez Pericás (an art critic, communist militant and close friend of the painter) distinguished in a poem between those who

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Figure 2.3 Agustín Ibarrola, engraving without title and year. Source: Courtesy of the artist

were born “in the time to kill or in the time to bear witness”, stressing furthermore the necessity to take a side.31 The identification of the artist with the victim and with her/his vulnerability in a system without rights was a recurrent motif for anti-Francoist painters connected to the clandestine Spanish Communist Party. The painter Juan Genovés was explicitly dealing with the state’s violence over defenceless citizens and had produced since 1965 multiple collages of generic men and women (flat and distorted bodies) standing with their backs against a wall, aggressed and taken away in handcuffs. Paradoxically, those works were shown in the exhibition space at the Biblioteca Nacional (National Library) in Madrid, a public space that was widely attended and which received ample media coverage in a moment when the regime wanted to show its shiniest face during the large-scale propaganda campaign XXV Años de Paz (25 Years of Peace).32 Genovés, like Ibarrola, approached in his paintings the collective suffering, but while the latter identifies the workers as the targeted class, Genovés’s artistic research focusses on militants and the ordinary people who were harassed and controlled by the state. In the 1970s, the experimental practices of the conceptual artists provided new means to address the violent conditions of existence during the dictatorship in a more subtle but unsettling way—by performing violence and, in the words of Catalan artist Jordi Benito, “using violence as a possible therapy against the same violence”.33 If

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Figure 2.4 Fina Miralles, Masked, 1976. Source: Museu d’Art de Sabadell

Western body artists (like Chris Burden and Gina Pane) were exploring the persistence of torture in modern states by “constructing replacements” at the peak of the Vietnam war, the performative work in a country like Spain (where the systemic practice of torture was part of everyday life in the basements of police precincts) had other overtones.34 Via photography and performative actions, Jordi Benito, Fina Miralles and Francesc Torres “staged” torture and explored the infliction of pain on and reception of pain by the body, blurring the limits between sides that were so clearly delimited by the painters. For example, Miralles’s Enmascarados (1976), consisting of a series of photographs of half-length portraits of the naked theatre actress Ana Lizarán, evoked multiple scenes of torture: Her mouth gagged; her head covered with a plastic bag; unable to breathe and hooded—role play in which the torturer and the tortured became interchangeable.35 Hence, while Ibarrola and Genovés were bearing witness and creating a

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clear division between victim and perpetrator, Miralles’s work consciously blurred the division between these two “roles” (2.4). The artwork of Miralles was produced in a very specific moment, after the revelation of multiple cases of police violence in 1976, when an open media campaign against the practices of torture took off in Spain for the first time. Amparo Arangoa, a young trade unionist from the Basque Country, became a symbolic figure of that campaign when photographs of her bruised body after five days of police detention and interrogation circulated. These pictures sparked a fierce storm of protestation that was immediately answered by strict censorship and punishment of those members of the media that had dared to reproduce them.36 At that time Cuadernos Para el Diálogo, a journal with a democratic pedigree since 1963, had prepared a special issue on the practise of torture during the dictatorship and its persistence after Franco’s death. In the end just its cover was kept, reproducing Genovés’s canvas Seis Jóvenes along with the word “torture” in capital letters and an explanation regarding its cleansed content.37 The almost photorealistic painting depicted against a white background six young men, blindfolded and handcuffed, awaiting their sure death by firing squad.

Figure 2.5 Cover of Cuadernos Para el Diálogo, 1975.

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The defenceless figures evoked the five militants of ETA and FRAP executed on 27 September 1975, the last capital punishment of the regime that Franco personally confirmed from his deathbed. Behind the choice of this image was the empathy with the victims that Genovés’s work stressed as well as the painter’s political militancy. His straightforward depictions were used not just as a visual icon by Cuadernos Para el Diálogo but also by different leftist platforms and organisations aiming for a visual representation of their declarations and reports against Francoist terror (2.5).38

Exhuming and Activating the Past Challenging the system was undertaken at great peril. Artists and intellectuals who used their voice to denounce inside or abroad the ruthless practices of the regime became targets of surveillance and retaliation of different degrees, all under the auspices of the laws that the regime had created at its own discretion to discipline its subjects. However, despite the fear of retaliation, artists found ways to become active participants in the forces for cultural freedom, putting through their work in Spain and abroad a great deal of pressure on the regime. As part of the anti-Francoist movement, they contributed decisively not just to denounce the politics of terror that the regime constantly implemented but also to help deal with the trauma of an ongoing civil war that never seemed to end and that was supposed to finally get some closure with the transitional process (from Franco’s death to the first democratic elections in February 1977). But events would turn out quite differently. The transition to democracy was sealed with an amnesty law signed by all political parties in October 1977 at the Moncloa Palace, which gave general amnesty to the huge number of political prisoners but forbade as well future prosecution of the Francoist crimes and also refused any kind of reparation to those who had lost the Civil War. Even though the transition from dictatorship to democracy has been presented by mainstream accounts as peaceful and exemplary, it was built on the basis of a collective amnesty—if not amnesia— of the violence perpetrated from the civil war to the institution of democracy.39 At the same time, and directly in connection with it, the transition implicated another direction for the cultural and artistic world—from the politicised avant-garde of Late Francoism committed to bearing witness to a de-politicised trans-avant-garde that responded to the neocapitalist updating of the young Spanish democracy to the European standards.40 This “programmed oblivion” of the past had serious consequences on the perception, study and recognition of the disdain for human rights during the Franco regime.41 Although scholarship on the repression and authoritarian core of the dictatorship in legal, political and economic terms has increased steadily in the last 30 years, so far Spanish law has allowed neither the pursuit of the crimes of the Franco regime nor the opening of the process towards any kind of reparation for the victims.42 In 2007 the socialist party (PSOE) made, with the passing of Ley para la memoria histórica (Law for a historic memory), a step in the right direction (of course, causing disagreement with the right-wing party PP and inciting a great polemic). Nevertheless, in the end this attempt granted just moral recognition for “francoist victims” but did not provide any real basis for reparations (such as exhumation of bodies, identification of the victims by DNA analysis, not to mention juridical means for prosecution of the perpetrators).

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In the last 15 years, artists have continuously been challenging the comfortable “amnesia” that is still perpetuated by systemic structures in Spain, dealing, for example, with the trauma of the perpetrated violence or developing spaces for debate and even providing concrete actions towards reparation—which politics so far have failed to do. For example, in 2002 the artist Francesc Abad created, together with historians, activists and family members of deceased victims, the Open Archive, a multimedia project that wants to shed light on the killings perpetrated at El Camp de la Bota, an execution site during and after the war in the city of Barcelona.43 Another example is the artist Francesc Torres, who joined in 2004 the Asociación Para la Recuperación de la Memoria Historica (Association for the Recuperation of the Historic Memory) for an excavation of an unmarked mass grave near Burgos. He documented the exhumation of 46 anonymous bodies by a group of volunteers and created on the basis of this photographic reportage the artwork The Dark Is the Room Where We Sleep;44 and in 2008, one year after the approval of the Ley de la memoria histórica, the video artist María Ruido produced the visual essays Plan Rosebud 1 and 2. She investigated the persistence of fascism and the cult of the deceased dictator by different sectors of Spanish society, the politicised debate on memory and the attempts to legislate it (2.6).45

Figure 2.6 María Ruido, Plan Rosebud (photogram of the last commemoration of Franco’s death at the Valle de los Caídos on 20 November 2007), 2008. Source: Courtesy of the artist

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Figure 2.7 Núria Güell, Resurrección, 2013. Source: Courtesy of the artist

Güell’s previously mentioned artwork Resurrección participates in this critical genealogy, addressing specifically Francoist violence and its continuing impunity. In the installation visitors could see documented on film how purchased Franco merchandise that had arrived by mail was driven in the evening sun into the woods, unpacked in the trunk of a car, shown to the camera and finally buried in the darkness of the night on a non-specified roadside (2.7). In 2015, after a crowdfunding art initiative of the Platform of Antifascist Artists, a filing cabinet was added to the installation. It contained individual folders with forensic photos of dismembered bodies that had been exhumed from Republican mass graves by the association Coordinación Para la Recuperación de la Memoria Histórica (Coordination for the Recuperation of the Historic Memory) near Burgos.46 With regard to Abad’s work, Albarrán has stressed the archive’s “capacity to identify and name in order to reveal the structural violence that the State intended to hide”, commenting furthermore that this kind of artistic work actually can “endow the archive with a new utility as a container for the memory of the victims”.47 Such observations could be applied to Güell’s installation as well. However, in her case the ambition goes beyond a general memorialisation of the victims. The artwork proposes a juridical resuscitation of six guerrilla fighters active in Spain during the Civil War (such as Salvador Gómez Talón, ?–1939) of the 1930s as well as the urban guerrilla of the 1950s (Francesc Sabaté Llopart, 1915–1960; Josep Lluis Facerias, 1920/30–1957; Teresa Pla Meseguer, 1917–2004; Ramón Vila Capdevila, 1908–1963; and Marcellí Massana Balcells, 1918–1981). By choosing maquis (resistance fighters), who had suffered Francoist persecution and severe punishment all through the dictatorship (imprisonment, torture, often murder and the traces of

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their fates erased from public accounts), the artist revives the memory of an “uncomfortable” anti-Francoist guerrilla and the continuing fight against the regime, even after the Communist Party stopped supporting armed struggle in 1956, which had often been silenced in anti-Francoist historical accounts.48 The art piece encompasses more facets of Francoist state violence than just illegitimate mass killings. Actually, not all of the nominally mentioned maquis had been assassinated during the dictatorship. Some reached France and lived there (like Marcellí Massana Balcells), and others, like Teresa Pla Meseguer, suffered severe punishment. By including Pla Meseguer, Güell’s installation also opens up questions regarding gender, discrimination and criminalisation. As Teresa, the daughter of a poor peasant, had been born intersex, she was treated as an outcast from very early on by being denied regular school visits. After a sexual aggression suffered at the hands of the Guardia Civil in the 1940s, Pla Meseguer joined the guerilla fight against Francoism, taking the male identity of Florencio, and was captured in 1960. Pla Meseguer’s initial death sentence was eventually commuted to a 17-year prison sentence.49 Taking Pla Meseguer’s case into account, Güell’s art piece also refers to the regime’s homophobic DNA as well as the intersection between gender and class within the anti-Francoist armed groups. Resurrección serves as an artistic pièce de résistance in the proper sense. It resists the induced double oblivion of memory, but rather than presenting the maquis as victims of the Francoist apparatus, it shows them as defeated freedom fighters within an armed battle against the dictatorship. Furthermore, it actually rehabilitates their combative identities, providing them after all that time of silencing again with agency. A statement provided by the artist and presented in the installation declares the purchase of these goods a “confiscation” by this ghostly militia because payment for the memorabilia was cancelled after they had been shipped. This way, symbolically, the fighters take back control and avenge themselves, delivering the cheap merchandise to the same fate that thousands of Republicans had to endure. With Resurrección, Núria Güell found a way to address the complicated issues regarding the dictatorship’s legacies, pointing out different layers and their impact on today’s world. This proposition opens a proactive dialogue between Franco’s politics of terror and revenge and the ongoing trauma of the civil and political society, confronting us with the faults of the Spanish judicial and political system today. It reminds us, furthermore, of our collective responsibility to unearth what has been mouldering in the ground for so long and proposes, at last, a way to face Franco’s terror.50

Notes 1. For details regarding the artwork, see www.nuriaguell.net/projects/30.html (accessed 14 March 2019). 2. For details regarding the foundation, see https://fnff.es (accessed 14 March 2019). 3. Eugenio Merino exhibited in 2012 at the ARCO art fair in Madrid the piece of art Forever Franco, featuring a lifelike figure of Spain’s former dictator inside a refrigerator that was decorated with a red and white design reminiscent of the Coca-Cola logo. This catchy work made international headlines all the more, as the FNFF, headed by the dictator’s 87-year-old daughter Maria del Carmen Franco Polo, sued the artist for moral damages. Eventually, Merino was cleared of all charges but deprived of the possibility to exhibit at the following edition of ARCO (see https://elpais.com/cultura/2013/12/16/actualidad/1387207901_520878.html, accessed 10 February 2019).

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4. He had been killed on 12 September 1939 by a firing squad at the Camp de la Bota in Barcelona and buried in a non-identified mass grave. 5. Quoted in Paul Preston, The Spanish Holocaust: Inquisition and Extermination in TwentiethCentury Spain (New York: W. W. Norton, 2012), p. xiii. 6. Helen Graham, The Spanish Republic at War, 1936–1939 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002), p. 118. 7. In the Republican zone during the first months of the war, popular violence—directed above all against the clergy as well as other representatives of the privileged classes—went uncontrolled. Most of these attacks, however, ended when the government was able to reassert itself, by December 1936 (Preston, p. 385). 8. The most recent scientific study does not just document the execution of 4,288 persons up to 1955—that is, 16 years after the end of the war—but also analyses an entire group of mass graves at San Rafael near Málaga, covering the same period, which seems to be the largest of its kind in Western Europe (Andrés Fernández Martín and Francisco Espinosa Jiménez, San Rafael (Málaga). Las Fosas: Febrero 1937-Noviembre 1955 [Antequera: Aratispi Ediciones, 2019]). 9. Preston, pp. xv–xvi. 10. Graham, p. 119. 11. Preston, p. xvi. 12. Antonio Cazorla Sánchez, Fear and progress. Ordinary lives in Franco´s Spain, 1939–1975 (Chichester, Malden: Wiley-Blackwell, 2010), p. 31. Not all death sentences were applied; some were commuted to long prison terms. 13. Franco was well aware that one “should not take drastic measures that would not be considered correct by befriended countries in the rest of the world”; Francisco Franco, quoted in Muñoz Soro, Cuadernos Para el Diálogo 1963–1986 (Madrid: Marcial Pons, 2015), p. 84. 14. Letter CINN 0001, Equipo 57 Archives, Centro Andaluz de Arte Contemporáneo, Seville. The artists belonging to Equipo 57 were Agustín Ibarrola, José Duarte, Ángel Duarte, Juan Serrano and Juan Cuenca. In addition, Thorkild Hansen, Néstor Basterretxea and Marino di Teana participated in the group during its beginnings. 15. Graham, p. 120. 16. See Pere Ysàs, Disidencia y subversión: La lucha del régimen franquista por su supervivencia, 1960–1975 (Barcelona: Crítica, 2004), p. 161. 17. Juan José del Águila, El TOP. La represión de la libertad (1963–1977) (Barcelona: Planeta, 2001). 18. Grimau was the last to be tried and sentenced to death for his actions during the Civil War. 19. Anonymous pamphlet denouncing the death sentence of Julian Grimau, “Veinticuatro años después de sonar el último disparo de la guerra civil”, no date, typewritten, archives of Jesús Martínez Guerricabeitia, folder “Demandas concernientes a los presos políticos en España. Los documentos sobre la lucha contra la represión y las torturas, 1961–1965”, Institute of Social History, Amsterdam. 20. Blas Piñar, leader of the radical right group Fuerza Nueva (New Force), stated after the assassination, “War is not over”, a declaration that was used by the radical right during the democratic transition (quoted in Sophie Baby, Le mythe de la transition pacifique. Violence et politique en Espagne (1975–1982) [Madrid: Casa Velázquez, 2012], p. 71). 21. Ruth Blakeley, “State Violence as State Terrorism”, in: Marie Breen-Smyth (ed.), The Ashgate Research Companion to Political Violence (London: Ashgate, 2012), pp. 63–78. Available online: http://kar.kent.ac.uk/24178/ (accessed 11 February 2019). 22. Antonio Cazorla Sánchez, Fear and Progress: Ordinary Lives in Franco’s Spain, 1939– 1975 (Chichester: Wiley-Blackwell, 2010), p. 19. On the post-war implementation of this ‘politics of fear’, see Cazorla’s chapter 1, pp. 17–56. 23. See “Decreto ley 10/1975, de 26 de agosto, sobre prevención del terrorismo”, Boletín Oficial del Estado (August 27, 1975), pp. 18117–18120. Available online: www.boe.es/buscar/ doc.php?id=BOE-A-1975-18072 (accessed 20 March 2019). 24. This quote refers to a poem by Antonio Giménez Pericás, published in a book by him, Agustín Ibarrola et al., Burgos prisión central (Paris: Librairie du Globle, 1965), p. 60. 25. Nigel Townson (ed.), Spain Transformed: The Late Franco Dictatorship, 1959–75 (Hampshire, New York: Palgrave, 2007).

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26. See Paula Barreiro López, Avant-garde Art and Criticism in Francoist Spain (Liverpool: Liverpool University Press, 2017). 27. “1963 Pueblo de Gipuzcua”, September 1962, pamphlet typewritten from the committees for helping the political prisoners in Guipuzcua, “Tous ce soir 18.30”, pamphlet for a demonstration in Paris against the assassination of Julian Grimau, 23 avril archives of Jesús Martínez Guerricabeitia, folder “Demandas concernientes a los presos políticos en España. Los documentos sobre la lucha contra la represión y las torturas, 1961–1965”, Institute of Social History, Amsterdam. 28. Antonio Giménez Pericás, ‘En la sala Abril cinco grabadores’ (1960), collected in Díaz Sánchez and Llorente Hernández, La crítica de arte en España (Madrid: Itsmo, 2004), p. 419. 29. See Barreiro López, p. 179. 30. Interview with Agustín Ibarrola and Txato Etxaniz, conducted by the author, Oma, 2 April 2011. 31. Poem of 20 April 1964, Antonio Giménez Pericás, Agustín Ibarrola et al., Burgos prisión central (Paris: Librairie du Globle, 1965), p. 60. In 1962 Giménez Pericás was imprisoned with Ibarrola for illegal political activism during the general strike movement of Asturian miners that had for the first time paralyzed the north of Spain for several months, triggering a state of exception for Asturias, Vizcaya and Guipúzcoa. During their stay in prison they collaborated on the book project Burgos: Prisión Central, featuring, amongst others, poems of Pericás and drawings of Ibarrola that evoked life in prison. 32. The exhibition was organized with the support of the Dirección General de Bellas Artes (General Directorate of Fine Arts). Its existence was owed to the personal initiative of its technical director, Pepe Escassi, who was well aware of the delicate subject and the risks they were taking to exhibit the works of Genovés. The painter later recalled his uncertainty regarding the consequences of the exhibition: “I organized it with the painter Pepe Escassi, Technical Director of the General Directorate of Fine Arts, who kept telling me, ‘They’re going to fire me, but they’ll put you in prison’”; quoted in Concha Tejedor, “El pintor valenciano Juan Genovés expone sus obras inéditas en homenaje a Salvador Victoria”, in Levante. Available online: www.levante-emv.com/portada/3732/pintor-valenciano-juan-genoves-exponeobras-ineditas-homenaje-salvador-victoria/374780.html (accessed 27 November 2015). 33. Jordi Benito, quoted in Juan Albarrán Diego, “Sentir el cuerpo: performance, tortura y masoquismo en el entorno de los nuevos comportamientos”, Arte, individuo y sociedad, 25.2 (2013), p. 312. 34. See Sophie Delpeux, “Document d’époques. Fiction et torture”, ArtPress, hors serie (2001), pp. 104–108. 35. Albarrán, p. 311. 36. See Baby, pp. 356–361. 37. Seis jóvenes, 1975 (Acrylic on canvas, 169x135 cm) 38. For example, Genovés’s painting Contra la Pared was used in an anonymous report about repression and torture in Franco’s state: “La lucha contra la represión”, undated, Archives, Martinez Guerricabeitia, Institut of Social History, Amsterdam. 39. See Baby, passim. 40. A useful analysis of these processes can be found in Juan Albarrán (ed.), Art/ansicion Tra/ ansicion. Arte y transición (Madrid: Brumaria, 2018), as well as in Jesús Carrillo Castillo, “Amnesia y Desacuerdos. Notas acerca de los lugares de la memoria de las prácticas artísticocríticas del tardofranquismo”, Arte y política de identidad, 1 (December 2009), pp. 1–22. 41. Juan Antonio Ramírez, “La sobriedad crítica de Bozal”, Revista de Libros de la Fundación Caja Madrid, 135 (March 2008), p. 23. Available online: www.revistadelibros.com/articulos/ la-sobriedad-critica-de-bozal (accessed 15 July 2014). 42. For example, the exhumations and first measures of reparation for the Francoist victims (by giving to the families the bodies of the victims that rested for decades buried in the ground of the Spanish soil, most of them in unidentified mass graves) had been mostly taken care of by independent associations (for example, the Asociación de la Memoria Histórica), with very little and problematic governmental support. 43. www.francescabad.com/campdelabota (accessed 30 July 2018). 44. About Abad and Torres Works see Miriam Basilio, Visual Propaganda, Exhibitions, and the Spanish Civil War (Surrey, UK and Burlington, NY: Ashgate, 2014), pp. 225–238.

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45. Plan Rosebund 1, 2008 (Video, 114 mints, Betacam/DVD) and Plan Rosebund 2, 2008 (Video 120 mints). Available online: www.workandwords.net/es/projects/view/493 (accessed 1 April 2019). 46. In 2014 “Espacio Tangente” and the “Plataforma de los Artistas Antifascistas” launched a crowdfunding campaign to finance the exhumation of several mass graves. Amongst others, Resurrection was offered as a reward for participating in the crowdfunding. Since the exhumation took place, the artwork includes the cabinet with its forensic photographs. See Núria Güell, Resurrection, Espagne (2013), journal published in the framework of the exhibition Picasso et l’exil, Les Abattoirs, Musée-Frac Occitanie Toulouse, France, 2019. 47. Albarrán, 2013, p. 313. 48. After the end of the Spanish Civil War the Spanish Communist Party continued to support the armed struggle against the dictatorship, developed by maquis mostly in rural and mountainous regions. Eventually, in 1948, it then decided to stop supporting this path, focussing on political action (even if different groups continued to operate until the 1960s). By the mid-1950s, becoming aware of the legitimisation of the dictatorship with the USA bilateral agreement, the Party sought collective action amongst several other opposition groups, including the Spanish Socialist Party (PSOE), a coalition of Catalan socialists and communists under the banner of the PSUC and the Christian Democrats. The guerilla past became within that new strategy an uncomfortable reality and was thus obscured in official accounts of the PCE during Francoism and especially during the following democratic transition (Maquis Secundino Serrano, Historia de la guerrilla antifranquista [Madrid: Temas de Hoy, 2006]). 49. For details regarding Teresa’s joining the maquis as well as her/his self-perception, see Miquel Alberola, “Entrevista a Florencio Pla Messeguer (La Pastora)”, El Tiempo (29 February–5 March 1988). Available online: www.buscameenelciclodelavida.com/2012/07/ entrevista-florencio-pla-messeguer-la.html (accessed 20 March 2019). 50. Güell explains: For me, political art is the art that manages to disarticulate the dominant discourse that sustains us as a society, and this necessarily involves questioning the spectator, affecting him or her until he or she is forced to take a position. (Jorge Carrión, “La artista pirata”, El País Semanal, April 7, 2015. Available online: https://elpais.com/elpais/2015/04/01/eps/1427897666_153187.html (accessed 28 February). This paper done in the framework of the research project MoDe(s)2: Modernidad(es) Descentralizada(s): Arte, política y contracultura en el eje transaltántico durante la Guerra Fría, 2 (HAR2017–82755-P) funded by the Spanish Government.

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A Transgenerational Reparation for the Damage of Torture Through Drawing Dreams and Performance Marisa Cornejo

Just after some major land redistribution reforms and the nationalization of natural resources, done by democratically elected governments, in the 1960s and 1970s South America was taken hostage by brutal dictatorships supported by the US government and its Central Intelligence Agency (CIA). Hundreds of thousands of people were killed, tortured, or imprisoned during these “dirty wars” in Latin America.1 Thousands of people left. The people who managed to escape prison, torture, and death (now we finally call them “the disappeared”—murdered), belonged to a generation that wanted to realize profound changes in their society. Their absence is still felt. My father was one of them. He was called Eugenio Cornejo (born 1940, Santiago de Chile, died 2002, Puebla, México). He was an art teacher and a victim of prison and torture in the dictatorship of General Augusto Pinochet,2 without refugee status, and died prematurely of alcoholism and unprocessed trauma, without being able to go back to his country and without receiving any reparation from the latterly democratic Chilean State. Before the damage he suffered from state terrorism, he benefited from public education in El Pedagógico, Universidad de Chile, an emblematic public institution built by generations of democratic efforts to improve the qualifications of the teachers. They had been influenced by the leading schools of that time, such as Lowenfeld3 and Reggio, centers of art pedagogy inspired by Frankfurt School adherents who put the development of the child’s personal subjectivity and expression at the focus of resistance to sameness and alienation. My father practiced this pedagogy along with decolonial strategies, such as taking his university art students to a decentralized art school in Osorno created by democratically elected President Salvador Allende’s government to visit local Mapuche loom weaving and house building and to learn and document the sustainable way of living of the Araucania.4 The victims of torture, if not treated, are “retraumatized” if they live in a society that denies or minimizes the damage or where impunity to prosecution is law. A society where you can run into the man who tortured you doing his shopping at your local supermarket doesn’t feel safe. In the summer of 2018 I received an official report published by doctors in Chile,5 which was presented to the Committee Against Torture in the UN, proving that the surviving victims of torture in Chile lost an average of 17.6 years off their lives. With this new information in my consciousness I went to swim in Lake Geneva before dawn, and I found myself sobbing in the middle of the water, almost drowning. The rhythm of swimming allowed me to feel this new knowledge deep in my belly and have this outbreak of pain: The unacceptable truth in my mind telling me that my father could still have been alive if he hadn’t been tortured. That 28 October 2018, marked 16 years since he died. I thought of my three children,

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British and French citizens, and the unfairness of not having had the support of this grandfather, so wise and patient, while growing up in this complex world. This is the transgenerational damage that I have tried to repair every day: I witness epistemicide on a daily basis.6 This knowledge helped me to suddenly see that all of my work of the last 16 years conducting memorial art projects was not a form of madness, but rather a “normal” response to this injustice. How may we heal from that imposed past that still unfolds in the present with irreparable consequences? How can we gain relief from the traumatic imprints of state terrorism? What is left to me is what might be called “epistemic justice”: As a migrant woman, the ability and will to write about my experience and knowledge. Art and performance have given me tools to not become a passive victim of still-delayed institutional reparation for the crime suffered by my father and visited on his family. From the point of view of historian Steve J. Stern, the work of the artist is an effective vehicle for transmitting this recent history. Stern asks us, “Is it really possible to tell the truth of a violence so extreme and lacerating that it exceeds the imaginable? Will it be an illusion of the idea of truth?” In the essay El Nuevo Dilema Post Auschwitz Desde América Latina: Arte y Sociedad a Partir de las Llamadas Guerras Sucias,7 Stern dialogues with the well-known saying of Theodor Adorno that to write poetry after Auschwitz was a barbaric act and explains how even Adorno had to fight with his own saying. Somehow, Stern explains, Adorno wanted to rescue art, considering it a project of implacable tension between reality and imagination, and it had certain value in the sense that art helped destroy lying [.  .  .] it is just because the world survived its own collapse that it needs art to write its unconscious history. [. . .] In the long term, the posture of Adorno was paradoxical. He condemned art as an impossibility and at the same time affirmed art as the only possibility.8 Stern continues: We are talking about a tumultuous political time of the revolutionary projects that started with the Cuban revolution in 1959 and that finished with the election of Salvador Allende in 1970. This historical moment entered into crisis in the ’70s and ’80s when the dream turned into a nightmare. These projects not only produced the revolution but also the military governments, characterized by a new technocratic and authoritarian order. The dirty wars destroyed the convergence of the political and the cultural.9 The modernist and statist project of supporting utopian art projects collapsed,10 the commercialization of culture dominated and serious cultural work became weak, though opening spaces for artists, working in less asphyxiating and more fragile environments, like Luz Donoso11 and Elias Adasme. More recently I met in Trieste, Italy, artist Guillermo Giampietro,12 who still works with performance and who belonged to the group Cucaño, an urgent collective that gave “voice” in the public sphere to the incomprehensible terror that was unfolding with the multiple “disappearances” in 1979 in Rosario, Argentina. Parallel struggles of “reterritorializing” the “deterritorialization” of public art, as Guattari would say, were produced by artists such as Mono Gonzales and Patricio Madera, to name a few members of La Brigada Ramona

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Parra13 in Chile who resisted the dictatorial regime by painting murals in the streets. The recent history of an acute economic crisis in capitalism, of a reduction of public spaces and state-funded art practices, makes it a necessity to revisit these artists. With such large and tangled up damage affecting our contemporary communities and the experience of living in the zone of nonbeing14—zones where human rights are non-existent following the implementation of modern structures of power—I have decided to work as an artist and part of a victim’s family since 1998, collecting the archives of our story on the one hand, as most art memorial practices do, and, on the other hand, drawing my dreams, as some shamanic traditions do in Mexico: Two separate art practices.15 For a specific artistic research project16 I wanted to work with the personal archive of the time when my family lived in socialist Bulgaria as exiles between 1976 and 1978, after fleeing the dictatorship in Argentina, and recollect the art practices of that time. Soon after I started this project the deep invisible layers that inhabit and build my identity entered a dialogue of interpretation through a dream I had on 4 November 2012.17 I think that the readings of Walter Benjamin induced me to have a dream in which a humble object of that period becomes a rescuing auratic relic due to its fragile affective value. In this case, the object was an engraving print I had done with my feet, reproducing an engraving plate done in Plovdiv, Bulgaria, by my father with some pieces of linoleum he’d found in the rubbish in 1977. In my dream he was inviting me to play with that gesture—the gesture of reprinting his engravings with my body. He was inviting me to do it as an exercise without a final aim, just like a game or an experiment, to have fun. I had to take the engraving plates with me and go back to Chile, from the North, to reprint them. In the dream a friend also tells me that trees can communicate with the wind. I woke up worried that I would not be able to find these engraving plates, but I found them. They are linoleum engraving plates produced when my father and Guillermo Deisler worked as artists for the Communist Party and participated in the mail art movement in the ’70s that was mapping the diaspora of exile from Plovdiv, Bulgaria.18 The engraving plates travelled in our archive of migrant refugees to Belgium, then Mexico, and finally came back to Geneva in 2008 after my father died (3.1). The print, in which my steps are imprinted on a humble piece of paper, was a rare, private object; at most a curiosity of the past. The surprise here is how that object acquired so much value through a dream. According to neurobiologist Ernest Hartmann, “dreams are hyperconnective,”19 while “compartments were entirely separate while they were awake. [.  .  .] It took a dream to make the connection—to cross the boundary from one compartment to another.” The dream not only tells me that the object is very precious but also tells me to repeat the action it embodies: The connections (made in dreams) are guided by emotion, which we consider a basic characteristic of dreaming in general. These dreams too turn out to be creations [. . .] art in general can be thought of as making new connections guided by emotions, which is exactly the way we have described dreaming [. . .] a function that [.  .  .] involves weaving in new material—combining of new material with what is already present in memory stores in the cortex, always guided by emotion. Emotion tells us what is important to us. In other words I suggest that the emotion-guided making of connections not only produces the dream image but also integrates and updates our memory systems in the cortex. This making of

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Figure 3.1 Eugenio Cornejo and Guillermo Deisler in an article about the exhibition Graphica from a newspaper in Plovdiv, Bulgaria, 27 May 1978.

broad connections guided by emotion has an adaptive function, which we conceptualize as “weaving in” new material.20 This dream became a methodology and a document of transmodernity (3.2).21 Modernity builds knowledge with the aim of achieving progress at the cost of deleting the uncomfortable sources, creating uneven accounts of reality to then profit from constructed superior standpoints. With this dream I rescue other layers of knowledge: We are not just victims, we also know how to have fun. Putting the logic of modernity aside, the dream interweaves lost memories and information22 belonging to other traditions that modernity would consider useless, worthless of being revisited or forgotten but fundamental to process reality in an “ecosophical” manner. The subjectivity of the dream can rescue what is necessary to recover in a specific social and environmental territory in spite of the knowledge neocolonialism could have deleted due to trauma or negligence, so that specific communities can aspire to be autonomous and not to follow blindly foreign, unrealistic dreams of being “rescued.” This comes from the oldest traditions: In animistic cultures healing plants were revealed in dreams by women, in the biblical texts dreams warn of catastrophe, etc.

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Figure 3.2 Marisa Cornejo, Grabados, ink on paper, 32 × 40 cm, 2012.

Migration, racism, and apartheid in our globalized world are fast growing phenomena in which there are people with full rights and a majority of people with no human rights. As a vision toward a solution, Ramón Grosfoguel points toward the concept of transmodernity developed by Enrique Dussel: “Transmodernity acknowledges the need for a shared and common universal project against capitalism, patriarchy, imperialism and coloniality. But it rejects a universality of solutions where one defines for the rest what ‘the solution’ is.”23 So in the present moment Europe faces a mass migration of refugees without precedent, people whose lives have been affected dramatically by violence due to state terrorism and/or war or climate change, and people are arriving in new territories with post-traumatic stress, among many other problems. So how are we going to deal with a traumatized refugee when there is nothing left behind? By interviewing Miguel D. Norambuena,24 a survivor of the Chilean dictatorial persecution and a patient and collaborator of Félix Guattari, about the practices of esquizoanalise developed in the ’70s,25 I learned that the political and social context of transversal solidarity became a healing factor for the subjectivity of deterritorialized peoples instead of being “fixed” by pharmaco-pornographic politics.26 So this is why the third methodology I use is not only to draw my dreams and acknowledge them in my petit bourgeois comfort zone but also to practice their suggestions and ideas as an experiment in my conscious life in its social dimension. For this reason I did a series of performances inspired by the dream I called La Huella

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Figure 3.3 Eugenio Cornejo and Marisa Cornejo, no title, engraving, ink on paper, 41 × 33 cm, Plovdiv, Bulgaria, 1977.

(The  Print) (3.3).27  They  helped to rescue lost material, reuniting long fragmented groups of people in distant decentralized zones of non being to articulate an ecosophic reparation process in Guattari’s sense.28 These performances reconnected fragments of the past that the institutional reparation process could not even see by articulating a different ethical politics of relations and actions. The performances changed my relations with the destroyed social tissue from where these experiences came; I could go back as part of the family of a victim and also bring a dissonant aesthetic experience that challenged my own prejudices. The performances reunited heterogeneous fragments of our communities that had been apart for decades due to shame and guilt. After doing an apparently innocent call of an artistic action, for the first performance of La Huella 1 in Espacio Flor,29 my mother told me, “You reunited the Communist Party of Ñuñoa,” our neighborhood, something I did not plan at all but that happened (3.4). The aesthetics, the title of the project, and maybe simply the location of the performance—an engraving collective, artist-run space that flourished during the dictatorship “Caja Negra” and survived—attracted comrades who had not seen each other for years due to old grievances, ideological disputes, all consequences of the damage of state terrorism that divided to rule, divisions that none of the institutional reparation measures addressed.

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Figure 3.4 Documentation of the performance La Huella 1, in Espacio Flor, 2013. Source: Photo by Livia Nuñez

In 2003 the Ricardo Lagos government in Chile created the Valech Commission to clarify the cases of political imprisonment and torture. In Chile we only know the names of the victims and some anonymous descriptions of the methods of torture. The victims who are still alive, or their widows, have received some monetary compensation. But what is missing in these reparations and reports is what these people did to merit these punishments, what the reasons for their persecution were, and what their collective dreams were. Our generation lost “the Battle of Chile”;30 the Valech Commission collected the evidence from the victims or their families and proclaimed an amnesty law for 50 years that prevents us from examining the archives of the experts’ report on human rights abuses in Chile. We are the perfect laboratory of neoliberalism. A “re-victimization” process for 28,000 people occurred. Interestingly, the armed forces never shared any documents of their actions, while the victims were the only ones that had to provide the proof of what happened to them. And this is what is called “institutional reparation.”

Performance As a Tool for Healing: A Dialogue With Reality After writing about my dream of the performance of reprinting engravings, I went to Chile in January 2013 to participate in the symposium Arte, Memoria y Derechos Humanos31 at the Museo de la Memoria in Santiago de Chile, where I did a presentation of my art research project until then called Identidad, Memoria y Territorio. I shared the table with Wally Kunstman, president of the association of victims of the concentration camp Estadio Nacional; Mario Irarrázabal, a sculptor who has produced works in Uruguay, Italy, Spain, Germany, and Chile, monuments reflecting on

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human rights abuses; and Roser Bru, an emblematic painter and engraver, a survivor child from the Spanish Civil War who arrived in Chile in 1939 on the historic ship the SS Winnipeg.32 There, Kunstman invited me to take part in an activity her association was organizing. As a daughter of one of the victims, that day I was going to do my first performance La Huella (The Print), in Espacio Flor. I went in the morning to that activity in the Estadio Nacional, all of this in Ñuñoa, the neighborhood I come from and from where we were expelled by a military tribunal on 28 December 1973. Kunstman told me,“It is a healing activity.”The activity was a testimony given by one of the ex-prisoners, Hugo Valenzuela, accompanied by El Gato, a musician who sang revolutionary Victor Jara’s songs with his guitar, along with Leslie Araneda and a group of master’s students in human rights studies from the University of Chile and family and friends with flowers and candles. All of this was done in El Caracol, one of the ex-torture chambers, now some half-destroyed and abandoned modernist circular public toilets. This experience changed my life because the place I feared the most, the one that since a child I had known was a taboo place, was transformed that day into a place of hope, love, and healing, a place where we could remember and embrace our past. “Remember” means also being able to loudly let our voices sing the songs of Victor Jara that were forbidden during the dictatorship, in the same place where our loved ones were tortured and forced to listen to loud commercial radio all the time, as if sound from our recovering bodies could clean the energy of the place.33 When we finished singing in the silent chamber I told, with my own voice, my father’s history—who he was, that he existed, even if he had died in exile. I was heard by a silent, empathetic, and respectful group of people. Here is an extract from the unpublished autobiography of Hugo Valenzuela, the survivor that day who opened the floor for my own narration: My story starts in my workplace, I was the president of the workers union SUMAR (“Sindicato Sumar”), a very combative place where we faced the air force’s Puma helicopters. From there I was taken to the Estadio and made prisoner until its closure in November 1973, then we were taken to Chacabuco (another concentration camp in the far north of Chile); there I stayed for a year, then I got liberated just for a few weeks because I continued to work against the military regime. And then I was arrested in my house and was taken into the public prison (before it got demolished), then to the penitentiary, Tres Alamos and Cuatro Alamos. I managed to escape before the court-martial, and through La Vicaria de la Solidaridad we managed to get a plane to Argentina to then continue to Europe. But once in the plane they took me down in a spectacular operation, and I was taken to the house of torturer Jose Domingo Cañas, where I was with Lumi Videla before she was murdered. I remember her sharing a spoon of rice with some of us. I was tied and blindfolded in a closet for a month and a half. When I finally managed to get out of this hell I found refuge in the embassy of the Vatican and I moved to Mexico, where I lived for 18 years.34 When recently I saw the film Colonia Dignidad35 it made me cry because I knew it failed to convey the real history of the horrors of Operation Condor,36 when prisoners who had believed they were finally safe in the airplane were pulled back into secret prisons.

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I did the performance La Huella I in Espacio Flor that afternoon from a different place after listening to Valenzuela’s testimony. After this I lost the fear of doing performances by learning from a direct witness how human bodies were treated during torture. Doing a performance became an act of freedom, an act of love for our lost ones, and for my narcissistic traumatized being; instead of being self-conscious, I could feel for those absent and for all of us, the public. I felt we could liberate us all from the guilt and shame imposed by torture in our communities by breaking the alienating separation between the victims and the witnesses. I was wearing a red dress, the same I had worn while visiting El Caracol, and I used black ink for engraving. I had the support of Chilean printmaker Bernardo de Castro, the son of a still disappeared publicist. The audience was our community. I got lost in the work for the departed, and when I let my weight fall into the Chilean floor, using my body as a stamp to reprint the engravings, naturally I cried; the floor was my father-mother land. I gave the public printed versions of the engravings. Tiffany Koppmann, an architect friend, dressed all in white at the end, told me, “I felt the spirit of your father was here.” That first ritualistic performance with proper black ink for engravings left me completely dirty, smelling like a factory worker. It took hours and a special soap to take out the sticky ink from my body. It was like entering the matter of trauma, being like a black goddess dealing with that dark sticky energy. It felt right; it felt as if I was not scared anymore of the shade, of the powerless unmanageability that our neoliberal society wants to deny has an existence. With my body prints I created an exhibition that stayed in the gallery for a week. Back in Geneva I shared all this with fellow colleagues. Revisiting the Estadio Nacional as an artist-researcher attached to an academic institution helped me to have courage and not feel so alone. Many Chileans today want to forget about those places and don’t want to know what happened—it “poisons” their lives, some family members said to me. It is in the past. Having witnessed my father’s life and death has transformed me into a kind of “shade” that overshadows—disturbs their success, their privilege, their shopping sprees. I cannot stop seeing that those who have privileges today at some point had to stay silent. So I have the privilege to have some feedback from far away, living in Europe and accepting that my diaspora still unfolds today as a consequence of history. Distance gives vision. Closeness keeps people defensive. For La Huella V, I was joined by José Miguel Guzmán, a social worker from CINTRAS,37 an NGO that deals with the mental health of victims and their families. We met by chance when he felt intrigued by the exhibition title El Ancestro, a show I curated with my father’s work in Casa Memoria José Domingo Cañas38 the day before the performance in November 2013. He talked to me about “transgenerational trauma,” something that sounded right but that I had never heard about before. When I explained to him that I was doing the performance La Huella V the next day in the Estadio Nacional, the only place where I had any certainty that my father was imprisoned and tortured, he said, “I will come to help you and bring you some books.” He came the next day to the performance and became the emergency cameraman; the other photographer, José Errazuriz, was doing the fixed camera, while the friend who had offered to do the filming could not come. By visiting my most distant archive of exile in Bulgaria 1977–78, I also had to reach the most hidden taboo in my body, the invisible transgenerational transmission of the trauma of torture, by being a close relative to one of the victims—as if the reflection of

A Transgenerational Reparation 67 the outside with the inside is the only way to establish new paradigms that individually we are unable to visualize. After this fifth ritualistic performance, which this time I included in my work Escotilla 8 in the Estadio Nacional, nobody showed up, which gave me an unexpected new experience. I could feel physically different, but how could I prove that? I couldn’t. But I felt much more free. Relieved. Cured. When I did the performance La Huella V, I used only blue, my favorite color (it is the king in my best drawings; it is the color of nostalgia and melancholia and exile—I don’t know why—while it is also the color of cutting and liberating, according to Tatiana, a woman I met in the print workshop of Bellavista in Santiago; it is the color of the sky and sea, where there are no boundaries; it helps the flow of emotions and freedom). But Bernardo de Castro told me blue was also the color of the spirit and peace instead of war (red) for the Mapuche people. Of course we know it is the color that Yves Klein used for his Anthropometries performances, though it is not the only color he used, but still it is very associated with his style. I was aware of that and the fact that I am using my body as an instrument to create something. Yves Klein said that his Anthropometries were a way to pass from the flesh toward the spirit, from the visible toward the invisible. I agree with him, with this “way of passage,” but here I am collaborating with a dead person, my father, who did the engravings, to bring from the invisible something visible. In this process I am insisting on bringing back the hidden memory, the secret invisible tragedy, the trauma-taboo that for the official history of the Chilean transition disturbs the economic success and should have disappeared, to re-appear, through my flesh in reality, on paper, photographs, and videos. The objective of sending people into exile was to make them vanish in the vast world, dissolve them into the invisible. So, with La Huella, I insist on bringing back our values. I bring back the memory of the anonymous ancestors; I bring back the memory of Salvador Allende, La Guitarrera, the social struggles, and the iconography of the Unidad Popular as a tantrum of a lost child in a civilized, amnesic society. I am bringing back from the invisibility of the dispersion of exile the images that should have disappeared. I performed a ritualistic act in the place where systematic torture was imprinted on the bodies of the “enemy” to leave here the layers of the imprint of torture and take with me the rest: The healthy father I should have had. And when doing the performance, it’s true I am working fast without rest—I don’t have a man, a visible man, telling me what to do. I am doing it with my own will, inspired by a dream, because my body is the only trusted medium to commemorate history, to give it a way out of it too. To unfold the repressed energy of the past. So when I am doing the performance, I am also choosing which iconography will be printed with which part of the body. This time I started by printing what I called The Ancestor with my feet because that is the root. Having practiced hatha yoga and contemporary dance for years it’s clear that feet are what roots us in the ground. For the legs, I choose according to the dimensions of skin and engraving plate, the larger surface from the body for the bigger engraving plate, but also for the legs, which are my vehicle, I choose the images of a strong woman: La Guitarrera and Salvador Allende. Legs keep me mobile, nomad, migrant, adaptable. For the stomach this time I choose what I call La Marcha (the riot) as a mobilizer of energy in the chakra of willingness and communication. This time is the first time I am using my whole body. I use my ass to print the engraving I project as equality in love. This is also the root chakra of muladhara, and I want to be rooted in equality in love—no more pedestals

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for anyone. For my back I use an engraving plate that depicts also a back, but the back of a victim, with his arms attached by a cord in the back, and it’s wide and fits perfectly in my body. And when I am looking up toward the roof of Escotilla 8, while printing this back of a victim in the detention corridors of the concentration camp, I can see a blue square above—it is the sky—and I can rest a bit in the performance, take a breath, feel human and vulnerable but alive, and be grateful for being who I am where I am because I know I am a feminine body that this time will not be abused like the other broken bodies of women who could not escape their vulnerability. I enjoy the perfect blue of that “escape view,” the way out, probably the same blue that the victims sought in order not to lose hope of coming out alive. Then I continue the performance, and I print the most painful engraving with my chest, the chakra of financial and emotional balance, where we can love or fear. This is one of the most damaged parts. How could we trust people and the world after what happened here? I had too much fear, so I used the engraving plate of suffering and printed my chest against the floor of Escotilla 8, and it’s as if I am giving away all that fear; I pray to give back my fear to the floor of the Estadio Nacional (3.5). Then I have my shoulders that protected me, where I received the hardest weight, and I print with my shoulders the engraving plate that I called eye crying. Probably crying is the best answer when we cannot defend ourselves anymore. Then I had a small engraving left: One of two children with a dove, the dove of freedom, so I print this with my arm. I see a boy coming out—it might be my future nephew and an old ancestor walking. The engraving of doves I print with my arms, imagining my arms can be like wings to fly through the blue square of blue over my head. I am happy. I smile at the camera. I ask my helpers if I should print with my face, and one of them says yes. I also knew I had to, but I needed to think this through anyway, and to print with my face I chose the most mysterious of all the engraving plates, one of a free body, without a head. I press my face as if with a lover, with kindness and respect. I print for the first time with my face, and the result matches the image I have of myself. I am ready to get out of Escotilla 8, into the stadium grades. I have printed with all my body. I stand up and go up the stairs that lead to the seats of the stadium. I am naked and covered in stains of blue, which is not very original. I am aware of that, but it protects me from a maintenance man who is outside. I stand up in tadasana, the posture of the mountain, for a few seconds to enjoy the air and the sun that surround my body. I walk outside. I am a body, imprisoned as a body, and in what was a place where prisoners had no way out, I realize that the people imprisoned here could not escape—it wasn’t their fault, they could not do much about it—got an indelible mark, and that war is a really bad thing. I ask for peace. And it’s finished. The performance was a healing tool, drawing courage from the dream. According to recent theories, one of the possible functions of dreams is “threat simulation that selectively selects negative situations, to prepare the subject for potential dangers.”39 I will call them challenging situations’ face when we are awake. I had passed the stadium hundreds of times, but as a powerless citizen in a place to avoid, the dream found the strength to go back to a territory of defeat and build a new layer of positive emotions made of sharing and belonging. I can only explain my process by this seemingly personal and narcissistic approach, in the context of post-atrocity trauma. When there is shame, a bit of narcissism is not too bad, a therapist once told me.

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Figure 3.5 Documentation of the performance La Huella 5, Escotilla 8, Estadio Nacional, Santiago, Chile, 2013. Source: Photo by José Errazuriz

In the book Guzmán passed to me there is a definition of torture and the chronicity of the damage: • • • • •

The impunity that most of the perpetrators still enjoy. The social silence on the subject of torture and the aftermath. The stigmatization of the people who suffered. The poor reparation done by the state to the survivors. The difficulty of establishing a collective memory that identifies them and that recognizes them as social fighters that were inspired by social justice.40

The purpose of torture was accomplished: Transforming human beings into weapons to bring back to communities distrust, fear and shame, alienating them. I felt like being liberated, not by silence and repression but by sharing, speaking, and offering to the spirits and the people who needed representations of what happened, what had been our cross. People who have not found proper reparation for the damage done by a terrorist state use all kinds of right and wrong forums to liberate themselves from the pain. In my case I use art to digest the spiritual sickness. Dealing with the violence of a terrorist state is too big for anyone; the artistic tools offer a channel to trust and work with others—the people who our project attracts are the right people. In the terms of Franz Fanon or Benjaminian thinking the project was to search for the recognition of those who had also been forgotten, not repaired.

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Because they do not find a place in the official historic memory, the victims of torture and imprisonment become a subculture, which the historian Steve Stern has defined as “emblematic memory,” characterized in some cases by being “a lacerating break unresolved” and in other cases “by living a life of struggle, that was testing the consequence and commitment with the positive values, faced in a reality of fear and repression” (3.6).41 The lack of respect toward my father’s body, as toward all the anonymous, darker, poorer damnés de la terre,42 indigenous ancestors of the human genealogical tree, drags us down, I feel, into human extinction. So I use the only tool left in the fragmented neoliberal society, a body, as a vehicle and affective archive, to bring back the roaming artworks of a forgotten victim of the dictatorship to use them in a memorial place and build in collective action, to get shame reorganized into pride. Even if not finally receiving official recognition, something moves inside: Torture searches the punishment and coercion to try to impose an alien ideology to our own, and transform the subject in a being without personality, thoughts, feelings and self-will. The ultimate objective of torture is the loss in the population of its social, political, national, and cultural identity to try to impose “through terror, individualism and consumerism and a total break of the bonds of solidarity.”43 It’s our anonymous indigenous side, unknown to ourselves, that part of us that we desperately try to rescue, but we always fail because in the dominant epistemic system of our values it is designated as useless, primitive, uneducated, dirt, barbarian, the other. The ancestor, since colonization, has been in the shadows or prisons of progress. The institutionalized racism operated in the secret prisons of the dictatorial regime; the darker and indigenous bodies often suffered more brutal treatment. In the testimonies of Miguel D. Norambuena, he said he was less hurt compared to the indigenous prisoners who were brutally tortured. Mapuches got their toenails removed to make them talk, but even then they did not talk; they did not give the names of the guerrilleros.44 In the testimony of ex-Minister of Health Helia Molina, it says she was imprisoned and interrogated in 1974 by the DINA when she was five months pregnant: I was detained some days. But I was lucky, they did nothing to me. I have taught a lot about it and I believe it was because this is a very racist country: the green eyes and blond hair helped me. They called me “doctor” to interrogate me. But to more humble people, people with darker skin and black hair, they screamed at them, they hit them.45 The system in Chile understood governability more like an absence of conflict than a collective way of processing it, in this way the politics of memory don’t contribute to vanish the ghost of the memory, remembrance brings back an uncontrollable conflict. People don’t find in the political arena the symbolic representations that could help them mirror to name and then appropriate the past. Without words and symbols to account the past, society chooses silence. And memory chooses to appropriate people through the door of their fears [. . .] citizenship requires a political system, a “neutralized” representation of a society without a past in which no one can recognize himself-herself. Actually this perpetrates memory in its most destructive way: as resentment, fear and shame—and that gets installed in the stage of social time.46

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I am talking about acknowledging the implementation of electricity through copper wires (extracted from our mines, maybe those nationalized by Allende and then given back to the large corporations after the coup d’etat) on the bodies of the local people to delete their memory and make them fragile. At some level I witnessed that and pretended it didn’t happen for 40 years. Alejandro Jodorowsky’s film La Danse de la Réalité47 shocked and purified me. It’s the first time that I saw with my eyes on a large screen the techniques of torture that my father, as one of many detainees of Casa Memoria and all the secret prisons of the military regime, went through. Jodorowsky showed us without any “neutralization” the electricity applied to the naked body of an innocent man. A painful and horrifying shock for me, but after I felt relieved, as if by seeing it I could accept the worst of the past. With the filmed image I could acknowledge the real dimension of the cruelty and sickness of those acts and not use my own mind to imagine what happened, which was a painful, useless, nearly pornographic fantasy of my mind for years. Finally, we will not have to be attacked by an uncontrollable imaginary remembrance of the past. The wound is like the mine you have to enter with courage to transform the matter of

Figure 3.6 Marisa Cornejo, Wallpaper La Huella 1, Unified Fragmented Experience, imprints from performance in Espacio Flor, 210 × 91 cm, digital print, 2014.

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trauma into a jewel, the nigredo. In alchemy48 the term nigredo is the inverse operative system of capitalist extractionism that enters the mine to extract pure material wealth. Nigredo is the putrefaction49 of the archive of history and the acceptance of that process of grief and of the loss of youth, wealth and health and not trying to fill it with external distractions that justify the minimization of the damage (for example, it’s for the good of the economy). When entering the wound the first time there is fear, rage, and pain. I had entered the mine of my archive, and the performances gave me strength to extract the pain, hopes, and dreams of the persecuted people. By choosing one of them, the closest one, my father, I am choosing one body of the social matter that the extractionist model of neocolonialism needed to exterminate. Theory can be a healing tool. I can take it less personally: The startling horror of executions and torture taking place between September and November 1973 that the International Red Cross estimates reached “some 7,000 prisoners on September 22.” Between 12,000 and 20,000 Chileans and foreigners were detained in the Stadium for periods ranging from two days to two months.50 The potential of this archive is to open a discussion around the force of acting in the public sphere to heal the wounds of state terrorism. The current democratically

Figure 3.7 Eugenio Cornejo, unknown title, linoleum engraving on paper, 40.50 × 28.50 cm, 1977.

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elected government in Chile has made some efforts to put in place institutions to establish truth and justice through national commissions and other state bodies, but most of the work came from the civil society. However, most of the official organizations have limited their work to human rights violations, without taking into consideration a more complex field. The objective of the coup d’etat was not only to suppress activists and their ideas but also, mostly, to implement an economic system to facilitate the extraction of goods belonging to the people. Now the problems that emerge from state terrorism and forced migration are some of the major sources of social injustice. These are some of the questions that haunt this artistic work. I had to come back to the territories of the exile as an adult to reactivate through a series of performances a new mystic and corporal memory. In this way a stronger memory, a memory as an adult, gave me the strength to revisit the material archives of this history: The silence, the delay in the multiple grievings, the way the information of what happened got processed in the families, the losses and uprootedness, the imprints of torture and prison, the slowness of the institutional reparations, the proof of the consequences of state terrorism had to be revisited. After doing the performances in Chile, Switzerland, and Bulgaria, I could scan the slide photos my father left—another layer of the imprints of forced migration (3.7). I found the box full of slide images of Chile before the trauma. Many of them are of the south, a rich region that many called the Switzerland of Latin America—a region of lakes and woods, a region where the Mapuche, the indigenous people of the south, resisted colonization until the beginning of the twentieth century. It is a land that has now become part of a militarized state, where the Mapuche are constantly condemned by an “anti-terrorist” law that was designed in the constitution of the dictatorship. When they try to defend their land from the huge, so-called development projects, carried out without their consent by transnational corporations to build dams or destroy native woods to produce cellulose, they are criminalized and sent to prison. In the photos I also found two slides of El Estadio Nacional with a colorful crowd and five photos of the train station in Bulgaria when we were departing to never come back and where intuitively I did the performance La Huella IV. The gratitude is vast. I had been working with Eugenio all the time. This was not a waste of time (3.8). Social actors such as my family left with cultural capital, archives, and life experiences that, according to Guattari’s concept of ecosophy, could be the pieces of the puzzle that are missing in the memories of those territories and could become the tools to repair the subjectivities, communities, and environment as a connected whole. The recovery of the memory of the affective territory of people forced to migrate is the anti-memorial, the future of the mapping of another world, the world that colonization exterminated. Dreaming and remembering our dreams is a subversive action to bring attention to our own inner values and local realities and stop projecting our ideals onto the false monuments of the individualistic, narcissistic neoliberal society that trashes our limited resources. Jungian thinking also will say that humanity finds gods and goddesses inside us in our dreams, and as a last resource, to rescue the knowledge of the communities in danger of extermination, we can use dreams as an honest archive. Ramon Grosfoguel (when seeing a presentation of my project in la HEAD, Geneva, 2014) observed: I don’t see you giving much credit to the mystical, spiritual dimension of your work, to say that someone told you to do a performance in a dream is not common language. Who is talking to you? Where are you receiving this information from?

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Figure 3.8 Eugenio Cornejo, unknown title, linoleum engraving on paper, 26 × 40 cm, 1977.

An Agreement With Mother Earth A dream that I managed to put into practice recently, though it took me 16 years, was the first one I had featuring my father after he died.51 In that dream I was having problems with my papers (I was a migrant). I was alive but in a rush, and suddenly he was crossing me in the opposite direction, looking beautiful and relaxed and wearing some beautiful embroidered white cotton indigenous clothes while riding a bicycle easily toward Chiapas, Mexico, where he was going to join his last girlfriend, Celia. So when the first historical encounter of the “political, artistic, sporting, and cultural International Congress of Women Who Fight” was called by the Zapatista Army of National Liberation in Chiapas, Mexico (EZLN), in March 2018, where around 9,000 women from all over the world engaged in the defense of women’s rights and the protection of mother earth, I trusted the dream and went.52 In that context I felt more loved and safe than in 12 years living “safely” in the settlements of the Geneva headquarters of the international organizations. Once there, trying to choose from the hundreds of seminars proposed, I went to a workshop on feminist internet,53 bringing awareness about how the internet has become a shopping mall, how we are enriching multinationals led by privileged white men, and how these companies extract wealth from our personal information. The workshop exposed how Instagram and Facebook use censorship and make political decisions as well as promote individualistic narratives to exacerbate celebrity culture and competition as the only way to have a life.

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I also heard the Compañeras from the landless movement in Brazil, breaking the silence regarding the situation of women in the agroindustry of the northeast of Brazil, where most of the pineapples and tropical fruits exported into US and European markets are leaving their drinking water full of chemicals due to monoculture and the excessive use of pesticides. They explained how the women of these communities are facing premature illnesses on their own, the lack of health facilities, and the poisoning of the land. If there is something to say about terror today we should listen to them. I also listened to the collective Subversiones, an autonomous publishing house presenting the book Nosotras, a jewel at a really affordable price, where the testimonies of other women, their struggles and victories to recover their bodies, territories, memories, and dignity, give us useful tools. While in the encounter, I proposed 9 March 2018 to the organizers of this event as a date for the women from the EZLN to do an art demonstration and sell the engraving I called The Ancestor, which my father did. The authorities of the autonomous organization granted me permission and offered me a piece of cardboard and a public space to reprint and sell my engravings. I became part of the art market in 15 minutes in an autonomous community! I have been trying to find a commercial gallery for my work for 12 years in the modernity of Geneva and haven’t gotten there yet. I was told, “Your art is not contemporary,” by a publicly funded art institution when I showed them a drawing of the dream of my father on the bicycle, as if I were coming from another time. But in this encounter I found my place effortlessly and joined the grand majority of women of this planet, whose only heritage is the memory of the violence neocolonialism is using to dispossess them from earthly wealth and human rights, leaving them only with the testimonies of how their grandfathers, men, fathers, and sons received the brutality of patriarchal capitalism in its—hopefully—last stages. So, yes, I am coming from another time, the time of the zone of nonbeing, where the lack of basic human rights leaves us exposed to a slow progress, full of obstacles called injustice, but also full of sisters traveling toward transmodernity, the pluri-modernities in which we are all contemporary because we are. There I found the first enthusiastic collectors of the engravings of my father and had enough money to buy the art of the other local artist. And where are we? In the dream, the daydream, or the nightmare? When we come to Europe we are not contemporary enough because in the nightmare there is always a wall, a labyrinth for those who come from the dream of another world where there is an us. And the daydream I leave to those who live in the nightmare and don’t even see the wall or the labyrinth. The Zapatista women and this encounter gave me all the hope I needed: I was in the dream and I wasn’t sleeping. They give us a place to sleep, organic food produced in their communities, and a pedagogy that the whole planet needs urgently—something I had never seen happening in Geneva. They gave us all of that but with one condition: To make an agreement with them to stay alive and fight without fear for our right to live.

Notes 1. Stern, Steve J. 2013. El nuevo dilema pos-Auschwitz desde América Latina: Arte y sociedad a partir de la llamadas guerras sucias. Chile: Universidad Diego Portales/University of Wisconsin-Madison.

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2. Comisión Nacional sobre Prisión Política y Tortura. 2005. Informe de la Comisión Nacional sobre Prisión Política y Tortura. Santiago de Chile: Ministerio del Interior Comisión Nacional sobre Prisión Política y Tortura. 3. Lowenfeld, Viktor. 1939. The Nature of Creative Activity. New York: Harcourt Brace. 4. Araucanía is a territory of Chile that included the provinces of Arauco, Cautin, Malleco, and Bío Bio, now is the name of the IXth region, inhabited by the Araucan rebels, also called Mapuches, who were equally opposed to the domination of the Incas as to that of the Spanish. Araucanía was not colonized by the Chilean state until late in the XIX century. 5. Fonis, Fondo Nacional de Investigación en Salud, Facultad de Medicina. 2018. “Estudio de mortalidad en sobrevivientes de Tortura y Prisión Política en periodo de Terrorismo de Estado 1973–1990,” Ps. María José Jorquera González, Dr. Carlos Madariaga Araya, Dr. Rubén Alvarado Muñoz. 6. “Epistemicide” refers to the killing of other knowledge systems. In this case, the knowledge my father held came from having observed house building and wool weaving in Mapuche communities, local cooking and wood carving techniques, and many local practices and traditions that shaped his lifestyle and way of living and kept nonmodern knowledge alive. 7. Stern 2013. 8. Ibid, p. 9. 9. Ibid, p. 12 and p. 14. 10. For several decades in democratic states, the estate projects, like the construction of public buildings, were supported and realized by builders, designers, architects, and artists trying to materialize high-quality services for dignified users. The designs were conceived to serve citizens with full rights. The neoliberalization that followed the coup d’etat in Chile transformed this logic, now serving customers, and cut costs, impoverishing the materials, designs, techniques, and dimensions of those projects, homogenizing the materials and aesthetics globally. A good example can be seen in Limbo (Universidad de Concepción, Concepción Chile, 2011), a project by the artist Leonardo Portus. His work created a bridge connecting the vanished modernist estate model and the nostalgia of those ruins looked from now. While doing research about the buildings constructed during the modernist movement in Chile, he came across the INP building done by architects Abraham Schapira and Raquel Esquenazi in 1970. Leonardo said, It seemed that this place (built for the former Private Employees Savings Bank EMPART, today INP Instituto de Normalizacion Previsional, the state office in charge of the social security of popular and deprived sectors of Chile’s population; and the Ministry of Work) was created precisely when the zenith of the Modern Movement acquires its greatest splendour, but at the same time announces the threshold of its decline, together with the traumas of our recent history. It reminds us of the deep social function of architecture back then, engaged with humanist and progressive ideals. There is a series of buildings of this kind, like the building that hosted in 1972 the Third UNCTAD Conference in Santiago, Chile. Portus (2011), by revisiting this precise ruin, said, Rescuing this model interpolates the current uncontested speculative irruption of the Market, only interested in a bigger pay off in the balance of cost and benefit with regards to real estate, decontextualizing the urban weave and its relationship with its inhabitants, generating non-places that promote the impersonal, profitable and quick flow of the citizen-consumer, hopefully pushing him/her to the periphery of the city. . . . It is possible to ask whether this social function of a “place of formalities” is the motor of the realization of a pleasant environment, thinking of its future users, an aesthetic experience that dignifies and contrasts with its current apparent deterioration. We could speculate about its becoming in the last 40 years comparing the public sphere that symbolizes the contemporaneity of its genesis, with a current shrinking State as a result of neoliberal policies developed in the last years. (p. 4) 11. Varas, Paulina. 2011. Una acción de otro es una obra hecha por la Luz Donoso. Valparaíso: CRAC.

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12. See https://guillermogiampietro.wixsite.com/escuchame. 13. Florencia San Martin, “Politics of Collectivity: Muralism and Public Space in the Practices of the Brigada Ramona Parra during the Unidad Popular,” www.seismopolite.com/politicsof-collectivity-muralism-and-public-space-in-the-practices-of-the-brigada-ramona-parraduring-the-unidad-popular. 14. Grosfoguel, Ramón. 2013. “Epistemic Racism/Sexism and the Fourth Genocides. Epistemicides of the Long 16th Century, the Structure of Knowledge in Westernized Universities,” Human Arquitectures: Journal of the Sociology of Self -Knowledge, Vol. XI, No. 1, Fall. U.C. Berkeley. 15. Cornejo, Marisa. 2010. General. Geneva: Art&fiction; Cornejo, Marisa. 2013. I am. Inventaire des rêves. Geneva: Art&fiction. 16. In the framework of the CCC Master’s Program (HEAD), University of Geneva (2012–2014). 17. Cornejo 2013, p. 167. 18. Varas, Paulina, Mariana Deisler and Francisca Garcia. 2014. Archivo Guillermo Deisler. Textos e imagenes en accion. Santiago de Chile: Ocho Libros Editores. 19. Hartmann, Ernest. 2010. “The Dream Always Makes New Connections: The Dream is a Creation, Not a Replay,” The Nature and Functions of Dreaming. New York: Oxford University Press, p. 12. 20. Ibid, p. 15. 21. Dussel, Enrique. 2002. “World-System and ‘Trans’-Modernity,” Nepantla: Views from South, Vol. 3, No. 2, pp. 221–244. 22. Hartmann 2010. 23. Grosfoguel 2013, p. 88. 24. See https://vimeo.com/247532669; Guattari, Félix and Miguel D. Norambuena, 1989. Cartografía del deseo. Santiago de Chile: Ed. F. ZEGERS. 25. Preciado, Beatriz. 2008. “Pharmaco-pornographic Politics: Towards a New Gender Ecology,” Parallax, Vol. 14, No. 1. 26. Schizoanalysis is a practice that Miguel D. Norambuena described to me by telling me about when he went to Guattari’s “consultation” on a regular basis to repeat several times the narrative of his exile as in classic psychoanalysis, always repeating himself. But Guattari “interrupted” the session when the phone rang and took him to participate in a demonstration in Paris, where other refugees or subjects with similar struggles were fighting for their civil rights. For schizoanalysis the cure is not to make the patient fit into a dysfunctional society; the aim is to make the patient an agent that engages affectively to transform dysfunctional capitalism. Deleuze and Guattari evade all attempts to define truth, and they situate themselves in the logic of the affections; there is no possibility of understanding and thinking if the subject is not affected by what the subject interacts with. See www.psiconotas. com/esquizoanalisis-definicion.html. In Chaosmosis, Guattari explains that “rather than moving in the direction of reductionist modifications which simplify the complex,” schizoanalysis “will work towards its complexification, its processual enrichment, towards the consistency of its virtual lines of bifurcation and differentiation, in short towards its ontological heterogeneity” Guattari, Félix. 1992. Chaosmosis: An Ethico-Aesthetic Paradigm. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, p. 61. 27. The series of performances: La Huella I, in Espacio Flor, Santiago de Chile (2013); La Huella II, Photo studio, HEAD, Geneva, Switzerland (2013); La Huella III, Usine Kugler, Geneva, Switzerland (2013); La Huella IV, Train Station of Plovdiv, Bulgaria (2013); La Huella V, Escotilla 8, Estadio Nacional, Santiago, Chile (2013); La Huella VI, El Caracol, Estadio Nacional, Santiago, Chile (2015). 28. Guattari, Félix. 1989. Les Trois Ecologies. Paris: Editions Galilée. 29. An ephemeral and humble gallery run by artist Enrique Flores, now nonexistent due to gentrification. 30. The Battle of Chile by Patricio Guzman is a historical documentary that in the ’70s and ’80s was distributed in 35 countries around the world. It is not a film made from archives; it is a documentary filmed as the events took place. Its author and director worked with a crew in the middle of the events. The virgin material (16 mm black and white film) was a contribution of the French documentary maker Chris Marker, and the editing was possible thanks to the collaboration of the Cuban Cinematography Institute (ICAIC). Jorge Müller

78

31. 32.

33. 34. 35. 36.

37. 38. 39. 40.

41. 42. 43. 44. 45.

46. 47. 48.

Marisa Cornejo Silva (the film’s cameraman) was kidnapped by Pinochet’s military police in November 1974. His whereabouts are still unknown. He is one of the 3,000 that remain “disappeared” in Chile today. The Battle of Chile has been subject to censorship in Chile and has never been shown by public television. See www.museodelamemoria.cl/actividad/iv-coloquio-“arte-memoria-y-derechos-humanos”/. SS Winnipeg was a French steamer notable for arriving at Valparaíso, Chile, on 3 September 1939, with 2,200 Spanish migrants aboard. The refugees were fleeing Spain after Franco’s victory in the Spanish Civil War (1936–39). The Chilean president Pedro Aguirre Cerda had named the poet Pablo Neruda Consul in Paris for Immigration, and he was charged with what he called “the noblest mission I have ever Undertaken,” shipping the Spanish refugees, who had been housed by the French in internment camps, to Chile. Chornik, Katia. 2013. “Music and Torture in Chilean Detention Centers: Conversations with an Ex-agent of Pinochet’s Secret Police,” The World of Music (new series). A Journal of the Department of Musicology of the Georg August University Göttingen, Vol. 2, 1. Valenzuela, Hugo. 2012. Testimonio: de pronto apareció el fascismo. Santiago de Chile, unpublished. Florian Gallenberger 2016. Operation Condor was a US-backed campaign of political repression and state terror involving intelligence operations and assassination of opponents, officially implemented in 1975 by the right-wing dictatorships of Chile, Argentina, Uruguay, Paraguay, and Brazil. In the context of the Cold War the dictatorships exchanged prisoners between countries and cooperated in the persecution of all the left-wing movements though terrorist operations. For a more detailed historical source, see McSherry, Patrice J. 2005. Predatory States: Operation Condor and Covert War in Latin America. London: Rowman and Littlefield, 2005. www.cintras.org/ (NGO helping the mental health of the families of the victims) Casa Memoria José Domingo Cañas. See http://josedomingocanas.org/. Valli, Katyja and Antti Revonsuo. 2009. “The Threat Simulation Theory in the Light of Recent Empirical Evidence: A Review,” The American Journal of Psychology, Vol. 122, No. 1. www.jstor.org/stable/27784372. Brinkmann, Beatriz, Mariana Lagos, Vera Vital Brasil and Miguel Scapucio. 2009. Daño transgeneracional, consecuencias de la represión política en el cono sur (Trans-generational Damage, Consequences of the Political Repression in South America). Santiago, Chile: Gráfica LOM, p. 34. Stern 2013, p. 9. Fanon, Franz. 2004. The Wretched of the Earth. Translated by Richard Philcox. New York: Grove Press. Brinkmann, Lagos, Brasil and Scapucio, p. 104. Norambuena, Miguel D. 2009. Temuco. Genève: Editions du Tricorne. Salas, Maria Jose. 2014. “La difícil vida de la nueva ministra de Salud,” Helia Molina, ministra de Salud. www.paula.cl/entrevista/la-dificil-vida-de-la-nueva-ministra-de-salud/? fb_action_ids=10152133534954563&fb_action_types=og.recommends&fb_ source=aggregation&fb_aggregation_id=288381481237582. Brinkmann, Lagos, Brasil and Scapucio, pp. 46–47. Jodorowsky, Alejandro. 2013. La danza de la realidad. France. Latone c’est une façon masqué de designée la prima materia durant la phase de la putréfaction, celle de l’oeuvre au noir (nigredo). La couleur noir réunit, dans l’opus, l’esprit et le corps. On sait que le soufre (sol), et le mercure (luna) sont encore connus sous le nom du soleil et de son ombre” [. . .] La putréfaction (nigredo) ouvre la voie à l’union (conjunctio) et à la fécondation. Elle est la clé de la transmutation [. . .]”“Trimosin parle d’un ange (c’est un nom qu’on donne à la fraction de mercure sublimée de la matière) qui aide “un homme noir comme un Maure” à sortir d’une “décoction bourbeuse” (c’est le dépôt putréfié au fond de la cornue), le revêt de pourpre et s’envole avec lui dans le ciel. Il s’agit ici d’une métaphore pour illustrer la fuite momentanée de l’esprit et de l’âme hors du corps “après une coction modérée”; ils réintègrent ensuite ce même corps, qui gagne alors en consistance par la “force de l’esprit.” Roob, Alexander. 2001. Le musée hermétique, Alchimie & Mystique. Bonn, Germany: Taschen, p. 79, p. 132, p. 199.

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49. To make pure (‘purus’ = pure; + root of facere = to make) It literally means ‘free from extraneous matter.’ 50. See https://web.archive.org/web/20110811054833/www.drclas.harvard.edu/revista/articles/ view/704. 51. Cornejo 2013, p. 41. 52. I was invited by Natalia Arcos from Casa GIAP, an art residency based in San Cristóbal de la Casas that she manages with her companion, Alessandro Zagato, to do research on the aesthetics of political art and autonomy. 53. See dominemoslatechnologia.org.

Bibliography Brinkmann, Beatriz, Mariana Lagos, Vera Vital Brasil and Miguel Scapucio. 2009. Daño transgeneracional, consecuencias de la represión política en el cono sur (Trans-generational Damage, Consequences of the Political Repression in South America), Santiago, Chile: Gráfica LOM. Chornik, Katia. 2013. “Music and Torture in Chilean Detention Centers: Conversations with an Ex-agent of Pinochet’s Secret Police”, The World of Music (new series). A Journal of the department of musicology of the Georg August University Göttingen, Vol. 2, 1. Comisión Nacional sobre Prisión Política y Tortura. 2005. Informe de la Comisión Nacional sobre Prisión Política y Tortura. Santiago de Chile: Ministerio del Interior Comisión Nacional sobre Prisión Política y Tortura. Cornejo, Marisa. 2013. I am. Inventaire des rêves. Geneva: Art&fiction. Dussel, Enrique. 2002. “World-System and “Trans”-Modernity”, Nepantla: Views from South. Vol. 3, No. 2. Fanon, Frantz. 2004. The Wretched of the Earth. Translated by Richard Philcox. New York: Grove Press. Fonis, Fondo Nacional de Investigación en Salud, Facultad de Medicina. 2018. “Estudio de mortalidad en sobrevivientes de Tortura y Prisión Política en periodo de Terrorismo de Estado 1973–1990”, Ps. María José Jorquera González, Dr. Carlos Madariaga Araya, Dr. Rubén Alvarado Muñoz. Grosfoguel, Ramón. 2013. “Epistemic Racism/Sexism and the Fourth Genocides. Epistemicides of the Long 16th Century, the Structure of Knowledge in Westernized Universities”, Human Arquitectures: Journal of the Sociology of Self -Knowledge, Vol. XI, No. 1, Fall. U.C. Berkeley. Guattari, Félix. 1989. Les Trois Ecologies. Paris: Editions Galilée. Guattari, Félix and Miguel D. Norambuena. 1989. Cartografía del deseo. Santiago de Chile: Ed. F. ZEGERS. Hartmann, Ernest. 2010. “The Dream Always Makes New Connections: The Dream is a Creation, Not a Replay”, The Nature and Functions of Dreaming. New York: Oxford University Press. Lowenfeld, Viktor. 1939. The Nature of Creative Activity. New York: Harcourt Brace. McSherry, Patrice J. 2005. Operation Condor and Covert War in Latin America. Lanham: Rowman and Littlefield Publishers. Norambuena, Miguel D. 2009. Temuco. Genève: Editions du Tricorne. Portus, Leonardo. 2011. Limbo. Chile: Universidad de Concepción. Preciado, Beatriz. 2008. “Pharmaco-pornographic Politics: Towards a New Gender Ecology”, Parallax, Vol. 14, No. 1, 105–117. Roob, Alexander. 2001. Le Musée hermétique, Alchimie & Mystique. Bonn, Germany: Taschen. Salas, Maria Jose. 2014.“La difícil vida de la nueva ministra de Salud”, Helia Molina, ministra de Salud. www.paula.cl/entrevista/la-dificil-vida-de-la-nueva-ministra-de-salud/? fb_action_ids= 10152133534954563&fb_action_types=og.recommends&fb_source= aggregation&fb_ aggregation_id=288381481237582. San Martin, Florencia. “Politics of Collectivity: Muralism and Public Space in the Practices of the Brigada Ramona Parra during the Unidad Popular”.

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Stern, Steve J. 2013.El nuevo dilema pos-Auschwitz desde América Latina: Arte y sociedad a partir de la llamadas guerras sucias. Chile: Universidad Diego Portales/University of Wisconsin-Madison. Valli, Katyja and Antti Revonsuo. 2009. “The Threat Simulation Theory in the Light of Recent Empirical Evidence: A Review”, The American Journal of Psychology, Vol. 122, No. 1. www. jstor.org/stable/27784372 . Varas, Paulina. 2011. Una acción de otro es una obra hecha por la Luz Donoso. Valparaíso: CRAC. Varas, Paulina, Mariana Deisler and Francisca Garcia. 2014. Archivo Guillermo Deisler. Textos e imagenes en accion. Santiago de Chile: Ocho Libros Editores.

4

After Mosul The Cultural and Political Economy of Destruction and Reconstruction Anthony Downey

On March 28, 2018, the Iraqi-American artist Michael Rakowitz unveiled The Invisible Enemy Should Not Exist, an installation for the Fourth Plinth project in London’s Trafalgar Square. Consisting of tin packaging from 10,500 cans of Iraqi date syrup, this monumental work engaged with a number of issues, not least the wholesale decimation of the date production industry in Iraq following years of sanctions and conflict.1 On a personal level, the tins of date syrup evoked wistful memories of Rakowitz’s grandfather Nissim Isaac David, who, following his exile from Iraq in 1946, set up an import/export business—which included the importation of dates from his home country—on Long Island in New York City.2 The narrative of modern-day conflict and historical displacement, reified here through the commerce of dates and the symbolism associated with their packaging, bears plaintive testimony to a contentious history of forced migration, topographical dislocation, precarious resettlement, and the usurpation of cultural and natural diversity. In a broader geopolitical context, The Invisible Enemy Should Not Exist discloses an incendiary chronicle of invasion and neocolonial conflict that continues to undermine the social, political, economic, cultural, and historical fabric of Iraq (4.1, 4.2, 4.3). This abiding sense of destructiveness and annihilation is central to the formal elements of The Invisible Enemy Should Not Exist, which depicts a lamassu—a winged bull that traditionally acted as a protective deity—that had stood sentry since approximately 700 bc at the entrance to the Nergal Gate in the former Assyrian city of Nineveh, not far from what is modern-day Mosul in northern Iraq. In February 2015, the deity was destroyed by the then rampant forces of the self-styled Islamic State (IS), hereafter referred to as Daesh, alongside numerous artifacts in the Mosul Museum—the latter, in terms of its collection of cultural artifacts, being second only to the renowned National Museum of Iraq in Baghdad.3 Produced by Daesh and transmitted via news and social media outlets on February 26, 2015, a global audience learned of this destruction through the carefully timed release of an apparently ad hoc video. In it we witness a number of lamassus being destroyed, including the one that Rakowitz based his original designs on. Reproduced in its full original size, and unveiled during the largest humanitarian and refugee crisis since World War II, Rakowitz has referred to his deity as a “ghost of the original,” or “a placeholder for those human lives that cannot be reconstructed, that are still searching for sanctuary.”4 In its manifestation as a contemporary cultural artifact and the double of a now destroyed artifact, this life-size sculpture is an all too timely, if spectral, manifestation of the trauma surrounding recent forms of cultural deracination, regional

82 Anthony Downey upheaval, and inescapable destruction. The degree to which trauma is often associated with displacement and uncanny returns is a pertinent reminder of how the repressed event—the original violence associated with a traumatic episode—is often negotiated through associative (largely substitutive) objects and narratives. Rather than offering us a reassuring space or artifact upon which to defer consideration of that originary trauma, however, Rakowitz’s intervention speaks directly to the contemporary, anxiety-laden moment of imminent and ongoing cultural annihilation, sectarian brutality, internecine warfare, and neocolonial exploitation. Cumulatively, at the time of writing, these contiguous physical violations and cultural desecrations continue to threaten (and have effected) the obliteration of entire communities, ethnic groups, and cultural legacies across the Middle East, nowhere more than in modernday Iraq and Syria. In what follows, I will examine the ramifications of Rakowitz’s installation, alongside another project that engaged with the destruction of the lamassus in Mosul, specifically Hiwa K’s The Bell Project (2014–2015), and how they both relate to the political and visual economy of cultural destruction and reconstruction in modernday Iraq. I will focus, to begin with, on what were, at least initially, considered to be indiscriminate acts of iconoclasm, transmitted in February 2015 by Daesh, and the degree to which—as news and social media would have us believe—they were actually borne of extremist ideologies. The performance of destruction for a global, digitally connected audience, as we will see, discloses substantially more about the politics of conflict and cultural destruction in modern-day Iraq than the observable iconoclastic tendencies of Daesh. Today, base iconoclasm, in all its destructive infamy, is indelibly imbricated within a digital system of iconographic, if not iconic, image production, and this needs to be more fully considered in relation to how such images are disseminated and consumed by global audiences in a post-digital age. Who are these images of destruction made for and who benefits from them? What, furthermore, do these transmitted images effectively (rather than ostensibly) tell us now about the economy of cultural destruction and reconstruction in a country that has long been subjected to military interventions, short- and long-term occupations, the historical and arbitrary division of provinces and territories, civil and national conflict, and the ignoble international rituals associated with human rights legislation and political accountability?5 The destruction of, inter alia, a lamassu in Northern Iraq and its subsequent reconstruction as an emblem and actual artifact in both Rakowitz’s and Hiwa K’s projects not only reveals the precarious regional state of the cultural artifacts in the Middle East today but also offers a significant critical juncture through which we can more fully recognize the extent to which cultural practices engage with and redefine how we understand the global politics of cultural destruction and reconstruction. The Bell Project, in a manner similar to Rakowitz’s The Invisible Enemy Should Not Exist, raises imperative questions about how the turmoil that was unleashed across Iraq following the U.S.-led invasion of 2003 substantively and inescapably prepared the ground for the cultural destruction visited upon Mosul in 2015. In effect, these two projects make evident, in their reconstitution of base metals (tin and spent materiel, respectively) into cultural artifacts, the base consideration of materiality—in the forms of resources extracted from the country—that continues to underwrite the visual economy and political logic of cultural destruction and reconstruction in Iraq today.

Source: Caroline Teo and Gautier DeBlonde, Courtesy of the Mayor of London

Figure 4.1 Michael Rakowitz, The Invisible Enemy, 2018 02, Michael Rakowitz, The Invisible Enemy Should Not Exist, commissioned for Trafalgar Square’s Fourth Plinth, 2018.

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84 Anthony Downey

“We were ordered by our prophet to take down idols and destroy them”: The Economies of Cultural Destruction On July 21, 2017, following three years of occupation by the forces of Daesh (who had taken over the city June 10, 2014), Iraqi forces reclaimed control of Mosul.6 During that time, Daesh had committed atrocities that involved the abduction, torture, enslavement, and mass murder of thousands of civilians in and around the city.7 The persecution of religious and ethnic minorities, alongside the rape and sale of women, including children, into sex trafficking, was curtailed by a large-scale offensive against Daesh that nevertheless resulted in the estimated deaths of a further 40,000 civilians in Mosul.8 The cumulative physical destruction during this time, including that of cultural artifacts and monuments, was likewise all-encompassing, with the entire Old City of Mosul—including the Great Mosque of al-Nuri—destroyed.9 Acts of destruction, of which there were many, included the aforementioned winged lamassu, one of two that stood guard at the Nergal Gate in the ancient city of Nineveh. Located in the northern sector of the Acropolis walls that surrounded Nineveh, the Nergal Gate is one of fifteen that encircled Mosul.10 Several of these would have been faced with stone colossi, or lamassus, and of the two lamassus guarding the Nergal Gate (as we witnessed in the video released on February 26, 2015), it was the one to the right that was destroyed by Daesh militants armed with a jackhammer. The lamassu to the left of the gate, already missing its upper half (which was apparently taken in the 19th century and broken down for its lime deposits), seems to have been largely ignored, but two further lamassus, both less well preserved than those standing sentry at the gate, were for the most part destroyed. The specific trauma associated with the damage wrought upon the most extant lamassu of this quartet involved both its original destruction at the hands of militants and the ensuing, all too enduring, images of it being destroyed. While the exact date upon which the destruction took place at the Nergal Gate remains uncertain, the video of the lamassu being destroyed was transmitted on February 26, 2015, and was, thereafter, picked up by multiple media outlets and amplified by social media links. The first part of this video was largely concerned with the destruction of artifacts in the museum in Mosul, some of which later turned out to be gypsum casts of sculptures and reliefs mostly held, for safe-keeping, in the National Museum of Iraq in Baghdad since 2003. The viral visual spectacle of destruction that resulted when the original footage was disseminated through social media and other networked systems of communication captured considerable global attention, for a period of time at least.11 With the exception of the perpetrators, it seems very few people witnessed the actual destruction of the lamassu and the nearby artifacts in Mosul’s museum, but its recording and digital dissemination—not to mention avid consumption—ensured that it became an iconic image of an iconoclastic event, so to speak. The video of the destruction in Mosul, released three years prior to the unveiling of Rakowitz’s project in Trafalgar Square, begins with a verse from the Koran on idol worship and is followed by an admonishing lecture of sorts on Assyrian and Akkadian polytheism, the latter used as the ostensible reason for destroying the supposedly idolatrous statues.12 Standing in the museum, with various artifacts surrounding him, an unnamed man in a black skullcap issues a running commentary on the destruction: “These statues and idols, these artefacts,” he says, “if God has ordered its [sic] removal, they became worthless to us even if they are worth billions of dollars.”13 The

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destroyed sculptures in the museum originated from Hatra, a Roman period city situated in the desert to the south of Mosul that would later be destroyed in 2015, and a collection of Assyrian artifacts from Nineveh that had been gathered from surrounding sites, such as Khorsabad and Balawat.14 While the iconoclastic acts depicted in this footage ensured its notoriety and subsequent widespread dissemination, the video also revealed a far more complex story than the de facto destruction of priceless artifacts. First, the five-minute film in question was made with a specific digital audience in mind, one connected by social media and other networked systems of communication. It is notable, for one, that the footage has been “branded” with the black flag of Daesh, further reinforcing its trademark insignia, and that it comes complete with its own soundtrack of Koranic recitals and first-hand commentary on the unfolding devastation. For added effect, and for anyone unsure of what is actually happening, the footage is slowed down in some parts to give an additional temporal dimension to the performative elements of destruction. The relatively improvised, handheld camera footage is further focused on and framed by the activities of a few militants as they destroy numerous objects. The restrictive framing, concentrating the viewer’s attention further, adds to the sense of immediacy and, thereafter, seems to confirm the raw

Figure 4.2 Michael Rakowitz, The Invisible Enemy, 2018 036, Michael Rakowitz, The Invisible Enemy Should Not Exist, commissioned for Trafalgar Square’s Fourth Plinth, 2018. Source: Caroline Teo and Gautier DeBlonde, Courtesy of the Mayor of London

86 Anthony Downey authenticity of the footage in question—the latter being, for some at least, a crucial element in any decision concerning the broadcast of such material via international media outlets. The subsequent take up of this video by news media and its upload to blogs, social media outlets, and various online newsfeeds ensured not just the viral infamy associated with the acts themselves but also served to acknowledge the formal considerations that Daesh applied to the aesthetics of producing the video. This was a strategic and far from unsophisticated form of image production in its own right, in which we see statue after statue being toppled or pulverized. It becomes increasingly notable, during this relatively short video, that digital images of this stage-managed demolition were intended to reach the widest possible audience and—bearing in mind the demands involved in a twenty-four-hour non-stop news cycle and the imperatives of the ratings metrics deployed by commercially driven global media outlets—in the full knowledge that it would serve to scandalize, in particular, a Western audience. Western news outlets, and the networked systems of communication that underwrite social media outlets, could, in short, not ignore this footage, none of which is to say that audiences in the Middle East were not equally scandalized by Daesh’s actions. Rather, it is to note the level of sophistication in the choice of subject matter—designed to cause maximum offense—and how the style of the film was designed to ritualistically perform an atrocity and, thereafter, appeal directly to a (suitably shocked) Western audience. Even if Western media outlets were to pause and investigate further the more covert reasons behind the production of these images (which, as we will see, had less to do with ideology and more to do with profit), they were already circulating in the so-called blogosphere and were, thereafter, newsworthy as images in their own right.15 This digitized spectacle, alongside its apparently improvised, cinéma vérité–like aesthetic, ensured that the footage was widely transmitted.16 In affective terms, the slowed down images also increased the emotive sense of irredeemable damage that comes with an all too direct underlying message: Daesh not only controls Mosul and its neighboring environments in a military sense but also holds sway over its cultural artifacts and heritage, not to mention its people and their fate. A series of interconnected questions emerge here, not least how the content of this video—the event of iconoclastic destruction being pursued in the apparent name of a puritanical, aniconic ideology that prohibits imagistic depiction of sentient beings, including the Prophet Muhammad—and its formal components (including the use of a handheld camera, shaky footage, expeditious editing, rousing soundtrack, compressed framing, and slow-motion techniques) would suggest that we need to more fully consider its intended audience: Who exactly was this video made for? In releasing this deceptively improvised and yet highly stylized five-minute video, Daesh were not only appealing to and thereafter exploiting the networks that underwrite social and digital news media, they were also sending a clear message of their own military, cultural, and religious ascendancy.17 If we have garnered this much power in such a short space of time, this video implies, then surely our caliphate is eminently achievable, if not historically inevitable. On a simplistic level, it is a display of force that is directed to the West and, contiguously, a show of omnipotence directed to Daesh’s militant followers. This video is a public relations ploy in all but name, but it also carries, crucially, a number of other meanings that tend to obscure a less obvious, but no less important, reason behind the destruction of these artifacts: Unlike other

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objects that were sold for profits to support Daesh’s activities, the objects we see destroyed in this now infamous video were deemed either too unwieldy to transport or were arguably too well known to sell through the so-called black market. This latter point, among others, has been forcibly made throughout Helga Turka’s comprehensive volume, The Destruction of Cultural Property as a Weapon of War: ISIS in Syria and Iraq (2017), where she noted a number of occasionally conflicting motivations behind the release of such images and their subsequent distribution through digital means: Throughout its campaign of destruction in Iraq and Syria, ISIS has undoubtedly pulverised priceless artefacts, but it does not do so indiscriminately. Indeed, ISIS appears to destroy items that are too large to transport (e.g., buildings or heavy statues) or too difficult to sell on the black market (e.g., items that have already been registered with the authorities and are easily detectable by international law enforcement). Those items that cannot be sold on the black market to finance their campaign are sacrificed and carefully videotaped to show followers and sympathisers ISIS’ might and ideology, and simultaneously prove to it enemies their powerlessness.18 The advanced technologies of digital image production employed by Daesh for the dissemination of images have an economic underpinning that is intimately linked to the trade and sale of looted cultural artifacts. There is, to return to my earlier point, a form of systemic complicity at work here: The trade in artifacts (icons) by Daesh and the trade in images (iconography) by Western media are intimately entangled, with the latter indisputably creating a market for the former.19 The “spectacle” of destruction (its performative gesturalism, its widespread dissemination, and the opprobrium directed toward it) is an example of an advanced form of image production that serves multiple manifest purposes, not least the fagrant announcement that Daesh at that point controlled vast swaths of western Iraq and eastern Syria, the region’s natural resources (including, of course, oil production), and, signifcantly, its cultural property. Despite the avowed religious and ideological intentions detailed in the Mosul video, it appears that—to the then upper echelons of Daesh, in particular—the fnancial value of such objects did matter and that their illicit resale on international markets was fueling and fnancing the expansion of Daesh’s genocidal intent. This looting and traffcking of artifacts was, in effect, implementing three interrelated goals: Raising money for Daesh’s war on those it considered non-believers or “inferior,” disclosing its ascendancy in the most brutal of terms, and denuding an entire population across Syria and Iraq of their cultural heritage. We should also observe here yet another relatively covert reason for such widespread destruction: It ensured that, after the destruction in Mosul, no one could defnitively say what had been destroyed and what had been looted for resale.20 The politics of cultural destruction, recorded and relayed through digital means for widespread dissemination (and concomitant condemnation), was not an act fueled by a misplaced form of aniconism that was in turn paraded under the banner of ideological extremism; rather, it was a carefully rehearsed and strategically deployed series of iconoclastic events that reveal a fundamental economic necessity and series of financial calculations about what was and what was not to be destroyed. Daesh effectively “curated” cultural forms of destruction—and what remained thereafter was largely

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Figure 4.3 Michael Rakowitz, The Invisible Enemy, 2018 033, Michael Rakowitz, The Invisible Enemy Should Not Exist, commissioned for Trafalgar Square’s Fourth Plinth, 2018. Source: Caroline Teo and Gautier DeBlonde, Courtesy of the Mayor of London

for sale to Western outlets and collectors. In a far-reaching article published in 2016, The New York Times noted that the traffic in looted cultural objects was in part enabled by applications such as WhatsApp, where photographs of such objects could be briefly uploaded for potential purchasers. The same article quoted a report by the Washington-based Foundation for Defense of Democracies that observed that the main buyers for looted objects were, and presumably remain so to this day, customers in the U.S. and Europe. The report continues, “The main buyers are, ironically, history enthusiasts and art aficionados in the United States and Europe—representatives of the Western societies which I.S. has pledged to destroy.”21 Consciously or unconsciously, Western buyers for artifacts plundered by Daesh were financing the destruction of an entire cultural heritage, for one, and the annihilation, if not genocide, of entire communities. Just as some institutions and largely anonymous individuals in the West consumed the spoils of Daesh’s campaign, in the form of the looted icons, audiences consumed the images and iconography of cultural destruction via social and digital media outlets. Under cover of the manifest symbolism of iconoclasm, in conjunction with its undoubted violence and a culturally defined economy of image production, there was an equally efficient latent system of image exchange at work. There was a partially concealed message in both image economies that belied the news headlines and social media feeds: Whereas broadcasted images showed members of Daesh apparently engaged in indiscriminate acts of destruction in Mosul, Palmyra, and other cities in Northern Iraq and Syria, these infractions were being committed

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with the full knowledge that they would be not only broadcast, via unquestioning media outlets, but would also potentially raise the prices for such looted works. The timing of the release of videos, as noted by Robert Fisk, was in part associated with a calculated effort on Daesh’s behalf to ensure that the price of cultural artifacts from, say, Mosul or Palmyra increased over time. Quoting the Lebanese-French archaeologist Joanne Farchakh, Fisk further observes that the dramatization of destruction over a matter of days or weeks ensures that prices increase on the international antiquities markets. “Isis is in the antiquities business,” Fisk writes, “and Isis is manipulating the world in its dramas of destruction.”22 In a report delivered at the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York on September 29, 2015, seven months after the release of the Mosul video, the Deputy Assistant Secretary for Counter Threat Finance and Sanctions, Bureau of Economic and Business Affairs, Andrew Keller, observed that Daesh had “amassed wealth at an unprecedented pace for a terrorist organization . . . over $1 billion in 2014 alone.”23 These monies, Keller noted, were not from donors as such but from natural resources, including revenue from oil sales, extortion/taxation, and the plundering of other natural resources under its control. And core to that plunder was the appropriation and sale of antiquities. Observing that there were, in late 2015, over 5,000 archaeological sites located in Daesh-controlled territory, Keller argued that “ISIL has encouraged the looting of archaeological sites for two purposes: making money and erasing the cultural heritage of Iraq and Syria.”24 He based his assertion on a previous raid carried out by U.S. Special Forces on the Syrian compound of Abu Sayyaf, the so-called head of Daesh’s antiquities division. Documents obtained in this raid demonstrated, Keller argued, “that ISIL is well-organized to traffic in looted antiquities, that it devotes considerable administrative and logistical resources to this activity, and, most importantly, that it profits from this activity.”25 These activities need to be put into further context, inasmuch as the information garnered from the original raid on Abu Sayyaf’s compound pointed to the fact that Daesh was making a considerable amount of money not only from the looting and resale of artifacts but also from taxing the act and proceeds of looting. Keller continued: They authorize certain individuals to excavate and supervise the excavation of artefacts in ISIL-controlled territory, and in some cases to detain anyone searching for artefacts without the prior approval of the Diwan of Natural Resources. Documents uncovered from the Abu Sayyaf raid confirm that ISIL is collecting a 20 percent “khums tax” on the proceeds of looting, which the group has enforced across the territory it controls.26 The plundering of cultural artifacts was effectively franchised to local looters and rendered taxable as a result. It was, in sum, a business, and Daesh not only outsourced its practice of looting but also outsourced images of destruction to social and news media outlets for global dissemination. To the extent that these images undoubtedly alerted various authorities to the cultural decimation that was being orchestrated by Daesh, and that in some cases provoked interventions that ameliorated (but did necessarily stop) further destruction, there was less progress made in halting the actual trade in artifacts that was fueling the performance and choreography of cultural annihilation in the first place. Daesh’s symbiotic business plan, so to speak, was based on the notion that scarcity equals increased value. This supply and demand model, in

90 Anthony Downey turn, was actively abetted by a system of social and news media that, in a post-digital age, is irredeemably entwined with the aggressively competitive economy of image production, dissemination, and consumption that motivates digital media platforms and the venture capitalist models of so-called big tech companies in Silicon Valley. Arguably, it is the unchecked, unedited, unbridled, user-friendly model of image production that substantiates social media and other networked sites of communication and that gives rise to the proliferation, if not production, of images of atrocity in the first place. Why else produce such images if not for viral consumption? Add to this the algorithmic bias of sites such as YouTube, which have been proven to direct viewers to more extremist material, and we have an all too productive, and opaque, mise en abyme of networked communications for Daesh and its followers to covertly and overtly operate within with relative impunity.27 The fact that Daesh had its own committed antiquities division, alongside an entire outfit dedicated to determining what sites were to be destroyed or preserved—the so-called Kata’ib Taswiyya (settlement battalions), who would select targets for demolition—belies the widely circulated images of ideological and seemingly indiscriminate destruction we saw in Mosul and throughout the region. Judging from this, and other evidence, it would appear that the aims behind the destruction in Mosul were pervasively financial, in the first instance, and that the ideological throatclearing we witness in many of the propaganda videos was precisely that: A form of lip service that fully exploited—and was in turn amplified by—the predilections and biases of social and news media.28 It seems that the neocolonial image of the intractable, atavistic, extremist, havoc-wreaking, and iconoclastic Arab or extremist devotee of Islam can still skewer, if not fatally obstruct, how we understand events in the Middle East.

“Weapons from most of the countries come here; they all come back to me”: The Geopolitics of Cultural Restitution I earlier noted that Rakowitz’s The Invisible Enemy Should Not Exist refuses any sense of reassuring replication or duplication of a now destroyed artifact—his lamassu is not meant to replace or reconstitute that which has been destroyed. To interpret the work in redemptive, if not restitutive, terms is to deny how it confirms, despite it physical presence, the extent to which the cultural heritage of Iraq, in particular, is and has been under siege for some time now, its lamassus long since transported to the Louvre, the British Museum, the pergamonmuseum in Berlin, and the Metropolitan Museum in New York, to name but a few of the more obvious public institutions that currently house extensive collections of artifacts from the region.29 The history of cultural appropriation and the traffic in cultural artifacts, needless to say, did not begin in Mosul in 2015. On the contrary, the ontology of such acts has a long and disreputable history that remains contiguous with colonial and neocolonial ventures. The illegal trade in looted artifacts from the Middle East and elsewhere, as well as their subsequent sale to Western institutions and private individuals, is a historical feature of a cultural economy that Daesh was all too aware of and eager to exploit with their far from aniconic approach to looting and their understanding of how social and news media operate in a post-digital age no longer dazzled by advances in imaging technologies. While the plundering, resale, and destruction of artifacts are often historically coterminous with one another, the events leading up to Mosul need to be

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contextualized within more recent events in Iraq’s recent history, not least the Iran– Iraq War (1980–1988) and the so-called first Gulf War (1991), both of which remain indelibly related not only to one another but also to the inevitable rise of Daesh. These cataclysmic events, and their historical consequences and legacies of upheaval, come together in Hiwa K’s The Bell Project (2014–2015), where, as we will see, the aftermath of war and conflict in the 1980s and, crucially, 2003 not only gave impetus to the formation of Daesh and its violent ascendancy but also effectively paved the way for what happened in Mosul a decade or so later (4.4, 4.5, 4.6). The starting point for Hiwa K’s The Bell Project—which is composed of two distinct elements, a two-channel HD video installation, Nazhad and the Bell Making (2007–2015), and a bronze bell secured in a wooden frame—was research he undertook into, respectively, the Iran–Iraq War and a scrapyard in Northern Iraq.30 The owner of the scrapyard, the eponymous Nazhad, is an entrepreneur who was born in a settlement south of Sulaymaniyah in Kurdistan, not far from where the artist was born in 1975. Recalling the origins of the work in question, Hiwa K has recounted how, in 2007, he was researching the countless mines that remained in the mountains between Iraq and Iran, the latter being the hazardous and explosive residue of the eight-year pyrrhic war the two countries had fought in the 1980s.31 Through the artist’s research, he discovered that many of the deactivated mines would end up in Nazhad’s scrapyard, where, after the precious metals were extruded from the spent ordnance, metal ingots would be produced for sale in countries such as China. In the film, we see how Nazhad turned the skills learned in the aftermath of the Iran–Iraq War toward deactivating armaments and recycling other residue from the two successive Gulf Wars (1991 and 2003) and, more recently, the remnants of the conflict with Daesh. Through practical, often dangerous, experience Nazhad accumulated a significant body of knowledge about both the composition of various metals (metallurgy) and weaponry.32 At several points in the video, he displays his encyclopedic knowledge of the armaments in his scrapyard as he casually picks through 11 mm shells, 12 mm shells, 152 mm shells, and bullets from a heavy machine gun, a so-called Dashka (or DShK), which was produced in the former Soviet Union. At one juncture in the video, Nazhad observes that “weapons from most of the countries come here; they all come back to me” and comments that over forty countries are represented in his scrapyard through their sales of weapons to both Iran and Iraq, including, to name but a few, the United States, Italy, Germany, Japan, China, and Turkey. Presiding over a veritable index of conflict in Iraq, Nazhad is the de facto archivist of a military-industrial complex that has come to define, and consistently undermine, the geopolitics of the region. A narrative of upheaval that includes repeated invasion, war, civil conflict, revolt, the tactic of so-called shock and awe warfare deployed by U.S. forces in 2003, and the ensuing onslaught of Daesh is present here in synecdochic form—its parts signifying the trajectory of violence by proxy that has underwritten Iraqi history since at least the Anglo–Iraqi War of 1941. Focusing as it does on the materialization of the bell that lies at the center of the project, this film also discloses the genesis of Hiwa K’s intervention in this cycle of destruction. For the actual bell to be made, the artist needed three hundred kilograms of bronze, and the material was sourced from the smelted metal that Nazhad produced as ingots in his scrapyard. This metal, once checked for purity, was thereafter shipped to a foundry in Crema, in northern Italy, where it was molded into a bell

92 Anthony Downey with a strike tone of B-flat minor (a chord that consists of the notes B-flat, D, and F).33 Given that Nazhad had already verified that ordnance from the ongoing conflict with Daesh that was present in his scrapyard, it is feasible that some of this would have subsequently found its way into the construction of the actual bell in Crema. As the artist relates in the accompanying notes to The Bell Project, the manufacture of a church bell from the metal waste of the Iran–Iraq War, along with other conflicts in Iraq (including the ongoing campaigns against Daesh), effectively reverses a historical process—prevalent throughout medieval times and until at least World War I—that saw bells being melted into weapons and cannons.34 The materiel deployed by Daesh, having found its way to Nazhad’s scrapyard, could have also found its way into Hiwa K’s resurrected bell. The origin of this materiel/material is further complicated by the fact that a significant number of the armaments used by Daesh, following the fall of Mosul in 2015, were captured from retreating Iraqi forces, who had been in receipt of weapons from the U.S. army.35 This would suggest that the metallurgic makeup of the bell in question chronicles a number of stages in the economy of these armaments, ranging from the original U.S.-produced weapons that were allocated to Iraqi forces to those that were subsequently sequestered by Daesh and then those that were decommissioned and smelted down by Nazhad. All of these stages coalesced and were extruded into ingots for a foundry in Crema, Italy, and, for now at least, are compounded in a bell that is capable of ringing out a strike tone chord of B-flat minor rather than, somewhat pointedly, the percussive punch of a bomb or the high-velocity sonic boom of a bullet. During the subsequent production process in Crema, the artist observed how news broke, in February 2015, of the serial attacks by Daesh on artifacts in the Mosul Museum and the surrounding city. He affirmed how, having seen the video, he became aware of the scale of destruction being wrought upon Mosul, a city three hundred kilometers northeast of his own birthplace in Sulaymaniyah. Of the many objects destroyed in the city, a number stand out because of their historical stature and presence in this notorious video, as discussed earlier, specifically the lamassu that stood at

Figure 4.4 Hiwa K, The Bell Project 1000, Hiwa K, The Bell Project, 2007–2015. Source: Hiwa K, Courtesy of KOW Berlin

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Figure 4.5 Hiwa K, The Bell Project 1000, Hiwa K, The Bell Project, 2007–2015. Source: Hiwa K, Courtesy of KOW Berlin

Figure 4.6 Hiwa K, The Bell Project 1000, Hiwa K, The Bell Project, 2007–2015. Source: Hiwa K, Courtesy of KOW Berlin

the Nergal Gate in Nineveh. Traditionally, bells would be adorned with religious iconography, but, as Hiwa K relates, his bell is emblazoned on its “waist” with an image of the destroyed lamassu of Nineveh. As we watch the bell mould being removed in the film, the lamassu motif seems to be in the process of being unearthed (which is fitting given that it was originally reburied following its excavation in 1849 by Sir Austen Henry Layard), its reappearance allegorically reversing the instances of destruction then being wrought by Daesh across northern Iraq and parts of northern Syria.36 The artist explains: I was thinking about the whole market for oil and weapons and how ISIS are involved in that trade, especially in the looting and trade of artefacts, so I used

94 Anthony Downey some of the insignia from various objects that were being destroyed by ISIS at the time I was making the bell.37 It is not only the symbolism of the lamassu that is registered here but also the conversion of materiel formerly associated with acts of destruction—including the Iran–Iraq War, the 2003 U.S.-led invasion of Iraq, and the equally ferocious campaign of Daesh—and its reconstitution in the form of a bell, the latter being variously associated with worship, time-keeping, diurnal order, liberty, commemoration, impending strife, harmony, musicality, and, of course, death. The various states of destruction (whether brought about by internationally supplied ordnance, sequestered weapons, or the jackhammers of iconoclasts) and reconstitution (be it of the metallurgical makeup of a bell or the motifs of destroyed artifacts) are rendered fuid in The Bell Project, their liquidity literalized in the smelting process and their states of de- and re-materialization testament to, in part, the historical endurance of cultural artifacts and symbols. More ominously, however, The Bell Project symbolically references the conficts leading up to the emergence of Daesh. To the extent that the Iran–Iraq War brought about further instability in the region, it was the ensuing 2003 invasion of Iraq that effected a profound nationwide splintering along ethnic and religious grounds. It was this series of ruptures that enabled Daesh to gain a signifcant foothold in the country, and, while some debate still exists, it has been widely and compellingly argued—not least by one of the architects of the invasion, Tony Blair, who was the prime minister of the UK at the time—that the fateful decision in 2003 to invade Iraq, followed by the ineptness and perhaps willful mismanagement of the occupation thereafter, incontrovertibly resulted in Daesh’s inauspicious rise.38 To see a direct connection between these two events is to countenance more than just the catastrophe that engulfed Iraq during this period (and that continues to define its historical, social, political, economic, and cultural realities today); it is to also investigate the degree to which the events of 2003 led inexorably to the destruction of Mosul in 2015. The U.S.-led invasion of 2003 set a precedent, with regard to the widespread looting and further entrenchment of a global market for plundered artifacts, that was an effective dress rehearsal for the events we witnessed in 2015 and thereafter. The recent systematic erasure of Iraqi cultural diversity began not in Mosul, or Palmyra, or Hatra, but in Baghdad in 2003 and, more precisely, in the aftermath of the U.S.-led invasion of the country. This proposition is given substantive corroboration in a volume first published in 2010, which has since turned out to be one of the most exhaustive indictments of Western-led interventions in Iraq.39 Throughout Cultural Cleansing in Iraq: Why Museums Were Looted, Libraries Burned and Academics Murdered, a detailed and disheartening account emerges of the looting of museums, the burning of libraries, the evisceration of cultural institutions, and the unparalleled assassinations of intellectuals across Iraq from 2003 onward. However, this is not intended to be a litany of depressing facts but an acute indictment of historical folly: The plunder witnessed in the aftermath of the 2003 invasion of Iraq was not an inevitable aftereffect or, indeed, side effect of military incompetence and negligence (which would at least offer a partial degree of mitigation by virtue of blithe idiocy), but rather the direct consequence of policies that actively disregarded the imperative of protecting cultural landmarks. Although the U.S.-led coalition forces had prepared a list of

After Mosul 95 twenty key sites in need of immediate protection, with the National Museum of Iraq being first on the list, the only one that received such protection was the Ministry of Oil.40 The other museum to be looted at the time, in what we now must view as a dress rehearsal for events in 2015, was the Museum of Mosul, which had remained closed as it underwent renovation only to be subsequently occupied by Daesh upon its arrival in the city in June 2014.41 In terms of cultural destruction, despoliation, and restitution, the reaction to the looting and resale of artifacts in 2015 has been slow in coming and rarely fit for the purpose, but this was also the case in 2003. The International Council of Museums (ICM), for example, has released an increasing number of so-called Red Lists for Syria (in 2013) and Iraq (in 2015), both of which detail the daunting scale of the problem at hand and the continued dangers of historical inaction.42 Interestingly, the 2015 report on Iraq was an update of a previous Red List that was issued in the wake of the 2003 U.S.-led invasion of the country. To note these dubious milestones, alongside their all too durable continuities, is to further underscore how the market for looted cultural artifacts from Iraq was initially exacerbated by the breakdown of law and order that resulted after the 2003 invasion of the country and how these events, directly and indirectly, laid the groundwork for more recent examples of mass plundering by Daesh and its variously enfranchised (and duly taxed) looters. The prioritization of the strategic and the economic over and above the cultural and social in 2003 not only left a country profoundly bereft of the very artifacts and cultural heritage that are needed to give nations a coherent, albeit contested, sense of communality and historical purchase but also rendered it susceptible to the further fracture and future loss of its cultural heritage. Social and political stability begets cultural continuity, and culture in Iraq, from its looted museums to its burned libraries and willful and invariably unprosecuted murders of intellectuals and academics, was effectively annihilated—a term that broaches no nuance of a quick or even mid-term recovery.43 The targeted assassination of over five hundred intellectuals, lawyers, artists, and academics in Iraq following the invasion of the country in 2003, as detailed throughout Cultural Cleansing in Iraq, as well as the concomitant flight into exile of countless more, remains one of the most sobering and disreputable events in what has become an unmitigated disaster for the people of Iraq.44 The events in Mosul and elsewhere, in this context, are merely the latest iteration in a reprehensible roll call of short-term interventionism, profound political mismanagement, historical disregard, and hasty and singularly ill-conceived military withdrawal from Iraq, not to mention the international level of legislative abjuration when it comes to fully considering the fundamental importance of cultural heritage in the fostering of communities in Iraq. This negligence was iconoclasm by default, and the legacy accompanying the abandonment of the National Museum of Iraq, its subsequent looting, and the aftermath of destruction, both material and immaterial, is still ricocheting around Iraq and the Middle East today, not least when we look at the scarred ruins of Mosul, Palmyra, Hatra, and other destroyed cities.

What Is Left After Mosul? One of the inevitable historical aftermaths of the destruction in 2003—apart from the unleashing of forces that have yet to fully abate—was Mosul in 2015 and the

96 Anthony Downey ensuing devastation of large swaths of the region on the basis of ethnic, cultural, tribal, political, and religious affiliations. In understanding what occurred in Mosul as an aftereffect of the war and invasion of Iraq in 2003, however, it is crucial that we also observe the sheer mendacity behind the intervening processes in that continuum of destruction: The rationale behind the invasion of the country was not to rid it of a dictator as such and offer the stabilizing hand of “democracy” to its people, it was to reduce the nation and its people to a de-culturalized and deracinated serf state and, thereafter, realign its economic activities with the demands of a neoliberal, global economy based on the servitude of marginalized and largely expendable subpopulations. To suggest as much is to acknowledge an all too credible argument put forward in, for one, Naomi Klein’s The Shock Doctrine, where she perspicaciously details the extent to which the ascendancy of neoliberal doctrine was central not only to the “shock and awe” inspired invasion of Iraq but also to an insidious form of “disaster capitalism.”45 While the didactic ascendancy of neoliberalism at all costs has been central to U.S. foreign policy since at least the 1950s, it was fundamental to U.S. economic and political dogma following the invasion of Iraq in 2003. The dominance of neoliberal policy was assured under the then stewardship of Paul Bremer, the shortlived, but no less catastrophic, presidential envoy to Iraq (from May 2003 until June 2004). It was Bremer, as Klein observes, who issued the infamous Order Number 1 on May 16, 2003, that essentially dissolved the entire former Iraqi army—under the guise of the de-Ba’athification of the Iraqi army and civil service—and sowed the seeds of insurgency and internecine conflicts that continue to this day. Customs duties were abolished, alongside import tariffs, and Iraqi industry and manufacturing— already reeling from years of sanctions—collapsed, alongside, as noted earlier, the market for dates and their export. As part of these new policies, to highlight one particularly egregious example, investors could take one hundred percent of profits made in Iraq back to their home countries without reinvesting any of it in the country of extraction. Crucially, the issuing of Order Number 1, alongside Order Number 2 (which specified the exact entities to be dissolved), unleashed the factions that were to, in a relatively short time, mutate into Daesh and thereafter give rise to forms of cultural destruction that were unprecedented, even in the atrocious aftermath of the 2003 invasion.46 Within this neoliberal, global political economy, images of conflict need to be monetized and circulated in an economy of meaning based on commercial value. A significant part of that value is not so much financial as it is ideological: The Middle East, adumbrated as a homogeneous entity, can only be seen, under this image-based economy, through the self-serving manufacture of conflict and threat—how else could anyone plausibly justify an invasion and the establishment of “order”? Such concerns, voiced in the wake of Daesh’s emergence across the region, remind us that colonial paradigms are not only far from defunct but also all too easily resuscitated through an evolving neocolonial preoccupation with topics such as an (apparently) irresolvable form of atavistic conflict brought about by an equally irredeemable strain of dogmatic extremism that has been long directed toward the Middle East. The one singular— and most effective—way to produce atavistic conflict and dogmatic extremism and thereafter maintain it, as we now know and knew then, was to prosecute a largescale invasion of an entire country and ensure the immiseration of its population. And images, in their deployment as the digitized, networked harbingers of threat and

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terrorism emanating from the region, played a foundational and rationalizing part in that process. There remains a systemic complicity at work in the production and consumption of iconoclastic images from the Middle East: The trade in artifacts (icons) and the trade in images (iconography) found a locus of sorts in acts of apparently wanton demolition (iconoclasm)—which turned out to be anything but—that distracted us from the sinuous political economies that historically underwrite destruction and reconstruction in the region. The restitution—be it in the form of an actual object or its replica— of an icon through cultural practices, as I argued earlier, supports a critical apparatus for understanding if not ultimately deconstructing these all too durable processes. The two cultural interventions by Rakowitz and Hiwa K offer a significant means to more fully recognize this and, critically, to determine how cultural artifacts and activities— in the moment where they visualize the operative logic of such processes—redefine how we understand the affiliations that exist amid the apparently discrete, but all too integrally supportive, ontologies of digital media, networked systems of communication, cultural destruction, and neoliberal economic policies. The cultural economy of destruction and reconstruction is, in sum, a political economy, and through considering it via the prism of iconoclasm and the remaking of destroyed artifacts and demolished edifices, we can also more readily address other, no less important, concerns associated with the politics of cultural diversity and the rights of minorities under international law. The despoilment, looting, and resale of cultural artifacts in Iraq from 2003 onward, readily disclosed throughout both Rakowitz’s and Hiwa K’s projects, should, by way of further research and critical engagement, alert us to a core belief espoused in UNESCO’s Universal Declaration on Cultural Diversity, specifically articles 1 and 4: The effective and sustainable relationship between cultural diversity and human rights is a sine qua non element in the continued wellbeing of a population and should be considered as such, nowhere more so than in the face of cultural despoliation, rampant iconoclasm, ethnic cleansing, and genocide.47 In a 2015 article for The Guardian, a journalist quoted Kino Gabriel, a leader of the Syriac Military Council, as saying, “In [sic] front of something like this, we are speechless. . . . Murder of people and destruction is not enough, so even our civilisation and the culture of our people is being destroyed.”48 Following the publication of the United Nations Security Council Resolution 2199, issued on February 12, 2015, which sought to condemn Daesh’s destruction of cultural monuments as de facto war crimes (and render them accordingly punishable as such), UNESCO Director-General Irina Bokova branded cultural destruction “a form of cultural cleansing,” drawing on the indictment inherent in the phrase “ethnic cleansing” and reminding us of the arguments made throughout Cultural Cleansing in Iraq when it was first published in 2010. Bokova, addressing the UN General Assembly in New York on May 28, 2015, observed that [t]he deliberate destruction of cultural heritage is a war crime—it is used as a tactic of war, in a strategy of cultural cleansing that calls on us to review and renew the means by which we wish to respond and to defeat violent extremism.49 The nomenclature of genocide and ethnic cleansing, not to mention the fact of death, and its elision within the terminology of cultural destruction should likewise alert us

98 Anthony Downey here to another far from resolved concern.50 If we trace the release of videos from Daesh, beginning in Mosul in February 2015, then again in March 2015 (when we saw the demolition of Nimrud), the destruction of Hatra (seen in videos released in March 2015) and, in August 2015, the leveling of the Temple of Bel in Palmyra and the further efforts to demolish the entire city throughout that year, we can identify a timeline that mirrors the full gamut of the atrocities that were inflicted on the residents of Mosul and other communities across the wider region throughout that same period. The question that remains here was whether the videos being released were also serving another clandestine purpose: To further displace Western media attention onto more easily digestible atrocities concerning objects—artifacts—that could be more readily processed and thereafter ignored, rather than focus on the actual subjects, such as the abandoned residents of Mosul, who could not leave following its capture, and the Yazidis, who, fleeing Sinjar following the fall of Mosul, found themselves trapped in a mountainous region facing summary execution by Daesh if they returned to their homeland or, if they stayed in the mountains, death by starvation.51 For all too many, there was no after Mosul, in the sense that the traumatic legacy of the events that occurred in the city will no doubt resonate across Iraq and the broader region for many years to come.

Notes 1. In the 1970s and ’80s, the date industry in Iraq was the second largest after oil production, eventually producing, by 2000, over 1,000,000 tonnes per annum; however, by 2007— during what was then the height of civil conflict in the country—this output amounted to less than 350,000 tonnes and has since been struggling to regain its former economic importance. There have since been several efforts to restore this industry to its earlier levels of output, as outlined in a United Nations Industrial Development Organisation (UNIDO) report of 2011. See Independent Evaluation Report (Iraq) Rehabilitation of the Date Palm Sector. UNIDO Project Number FB/IRQ/07/003. For fuller details, see here: www.unido.org/sites/default/files/2012-03/Iraq%20dates%20evaluation%20report%20 final_120214_0.pdf [accessed February 1, 2019]. 2. In 2006, the artist opened Davisons & Co. in a storefront on Atlantic Avenue in Brooklyn to import Iraqi dates. For further details, see the artist’s website and the work RETURN, 2004–. See www.michaelrakowitz.com/return/ [accessed March 21, 2017]. 3. There is a significant degree of controversy over how best to refer to the so-called Islamic State group. Originating as a jihadist militant group in thrall to a fundamentalist, Salafi doctrine of Sunni Islam, it has been variously referred to as The Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant (ISIL) and the Islamic State of Iraq and Syria (ISIS). The group has made it known that it prefers the nomenclature Islamic State (IS), but throughout the Arab world it is often referred to pejoratively as Daesh, a term that has no meaning as such but does resemble the Arabic word “Daes,” which is often used to refer to “one who crushes (or tramples down) something underfoot.” Throughout this chapter, I have opted for the term “Daesh,” as it is in popular use across the Arab world. For further discussion of Daesh’s emergence, its preferred nomenclature, and its various incarnations to date, see Michael Weiss and Hassan Hassan, ISIS: Inside the Army of Terror, Regan Arts, 2015; Jessica Stern and J. M. Berger, ISIS: The State of Terror, Ecco/HarperCollins Publishers, 2016; Patrick Cockburn, The Rise of the Islamic State: ISIS and the New Sunni Revolution, Verso, 2015. 4. See www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-england-london-43565870. In March 2018, it was estimated that 2,297 migrants had died in the Mediterranean. While this represented a nominal decrease from the previous year (3,139), it is estimated that the proportion of deaths per crossing has been rising since 2018. For full figures and references, see https://missingmigrants. iom.int/region/mediterranean [accessed January 27, 2019].

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5. Putting to one side the arbitrariness of the Sykes–Picot Agreement, covertly drawn up— with the active connivance of the Russian Empire—between the United Kingdom and France in 1916, the Kingdom of Iraq was not formally granted full independence by Britain until 1932, which in turn prompted a series of coups and countercoups among its many tribal affiliations. The Anglo–Iraqi War of 1941 saw the United Kingdom invade Iraq to quell such coups and reinstate its then preferred government. Military occupation thereafter continued until 1947, although the UK still had air bases in the country until 1954. From 1958 onward, following yet another coup, the Ba’ath party emerged as the single biggest political force in the country. The movement came under the control of General Saddam Hussein, as he was then known, who ascended to the presidency and assumed control of the Revolutionary Command Council (RCC), giving him, in turn, supreme power over Iraq. There followed a catastrophic war with Iran (1980–1988), during which Iraq received support from the United States, the Soviet Union, France, and most Arab countries (all of whom sought to isolate Iran and restore the autocratic rule of Shah Pahlavi), and an equally ruinous invasion of Kuwait (1990). This was in turn followed by military intervention by coalition forces (in the first Gulf War in 1991) and an all-out invasion—by an allied force led by the United States and Great Britain—in 2003. Since then, Iraq has endured internecine violence on an unprecedented level, felt the full force of the Syrian civil war (2011–), and been overrun by the forces of Daesh and, as of 2018, was still struggling to deal with an estimated 14,000 to 18,000 militants spread across Iraq and Syria. The latter figures are courtesy of the UN Secretary General António Guterres and published in a report released on February 1, 2018. See “Eighth Report of the Secretary-General on the Threat Posed by ISIL (Da’esh) to International Peace and Security and the Range of United Nations Efforts in Support of Member States in Countering the Threat,” February 1, 2018. Available here: https://undocs. org/S/2019/103 [accessed December 12, 2018]. For an extensive and accessible account of Iraqi history since the period of the British Mandate in the 1920s, see Phebe Marr and Ibrahim Al-Marashi, The Modern History of Iraq, Routledge, 4th ed., 2017. 6. By late 2015, an immense swath of western Iraq and eastern Syria, with a population estimate of 2.8 to 8 million people, was under the effective control of Daesh. Prior to this invasion of the city, Mosul’s population was approaching 2,000,000 people, the majority of which were Arabs. 7. On August 3, 2014, as part of the same advance that brought Mosul under its control, Daesh militants captured Sinjar in northern Iraq (twenty-five kilometers to the west of Mosul). Sinjar was a largely Kurdish-controlled area inhabited by Yazidis, an endogamous ethnic group whose demographic includes present-day Iraq, Turkey, and Syria. Daesh subjected the community to what has since been internationally recognized as a campaign of genocide. See “They Came to Destroy: ISIS Crimes Against the Yazidis,” a report published on June 15, 2016, by the United Nations Human Rights Council (UNHCR), which documents the genocide of the Yazidis by the forces of Daesh and other crimes against humanity. The report opens with the following unequivocal statement: “ISIS has committed the crime of genocide as well as multiple crimes against humanity and war crimes against the Yazidis, thousands of whom are held captive in the Syrian Arab Republic where they are subjected to almost unimaginable horrors” (emphasis added). The full report can be read here: www.ohchr.org/Documents/HRBodies/HRCouncil/CoISyria/A_HRC_32_CRP.2_en.pdf [accessed June 19, 2016]. The issue of how the international community can ex post facto respond to the atrocities perpetrated by Daesh in Syria and Iraq has become all the more urgent following the dwindling influence and dissipation of the militant group that, at the time of writing (February 2019), was largely confined to the village of Baghouz in eastern Syrian. For a report that focuses on the crime of genocide as perpetuated by Daesh and the recognition of the crime by several international institutions and states, see Pieter Omtzigt and Ewelina U. Ochab, “Bringing Daesh to Justice: What the International Community Can Do,” Journal of Genocide Research, 21:1 (2019), pp. 71–82. 8. See Patrick Coburn, “The Massacre of Mosul: 40,000 Feared Dead in Battle to Take Back City from ISIS as Scale of Civilian Casualties Revealed,” The Independent, Wednesday, July 19, 2017. Available here: www.independent.co.uk/news/world/middle-east/ mosul-massacre-battle-isis-iraq-city-civilian-casualties-killed-deaths-fighting-forces-islamicstate-a7848781.html [accessed July 22, 2017]. It was further estimated that almost

100 Anthony Downey

9. 10.

11.

12. 13.

1,000,000 people were displaced as a result of the city’s liberation. See “Humanitarian Situation Dire in ‘Liberated’ Mosul.”Available here: www.aljazeera.com/news/2017/07/humanitariansituation-dire-liberated-mosul-170710070230074.html [accessed June 12, 2018]. Speaking on July 4, 2014—a month after Daesh took control of Mosul—to a congregation at the Great Mosque of al-Nuri in Mosul, Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi declared himself caliph of Daesh and called on Muslims worldwide to support him and a so-called Islamic caliphate. Until 612 bc, when it was sacked by a Babylonian alliance, Nineveh was the largest city in the world. The lamassus in question, which could weigh up to 30,000 kilograms, were commissioned and installed by King Sennacherib (705–681 bc), who is credited with making Nineveh one of the most important and resplendent cities of the ancient world. The shifting media attention was attenuated by the sheer scale of destruction that started in Mosul in February 2015. This was only the beginning of a pattern of cultural despoilment that was to see, in March 2015, the demolition of Nimrud, an Assyrian city that dated from the 13th century bc. The video depicting the destruction of Nimrud was not released until April 2015, one month after the iconoclastic events that took place there. This would suggest that the destruction at the Nergal Gate may have occurred any time after the capture of the city—on June 10, 2014—but before the release of the video on February 26, 2015. Reports of the destruction of Hatra were also released in March 2015, while in August 2015, six months after the video of events in Mosul was released, Daesh destroyed the Temple of Bel in Palmyra, which was accompanied by a concerted effort to demolish the entire city. For a comprehensive account of this litany of destruction, see Helga Turka, The Destruction of Cultural Property as a Weapon of War: ISIS in Syria and Iraq, Palgrave Macmillan, 2017, passim. This information and the following quote are cited from Kareen Shaheen, “ISIS Fighters Destroy Ancient Artefacts at Mosul Museum.” Available here: www.theguardian.com/ world/2015/feb/26/isis-fighters-destroy-ancient-artefacts-mosul-museum-iraq. The impromptu historian, warming to his subject, continues: These ruins that are behind me, they are idols and statues that people in the past used to worship instead of Allah. The so-called Assyrians and Akkadians and others looked to gods for war, agriculture and rain to whom they offered sacrifices. . . . The Prophet Mohammed took down idols with his bare hands when he went into Mecca. We were ordered by our prophet to take down idols and destroy them, and the companions of the prophet did this after this time, when they conquered countries.

This translation has been sourced from an in-depth, two-part document by Christopher Jones, released on the website Gates of Nineveh in the days following the video’s online posting. The document usefully details the exact constitution of the various statues, along with the physical makeup and location of each lamassu. See https://gatesofnineveh.wordpress. com/2015/02/27/assessing-the-damage-at-the-mosul-museum-part-1-the-assyrian-artifacts/ [accessed 28 June, 2016]. 14. For further information on the destroyed statues provenance, see https://gatesofnineveh. wordpress.com/2015/02/27/assessing-the-damage-at-the-mosul-museum-part-1-the-assyrianartifacts/.The provenance details noted here are drawn from that article and a further one,published on March 3, 2015, which is available here: https://gatesofnineveh.wordpress.com/2015/03/03/ assessing-the-damage-at-the-mosul-museum-part-2-the-sculptures-from-hatra/. 15. This point, among others, is taken up by Suzi Mirgani when she notes how terrorist organizations, with the aid of information and communication technologies, no longer have to court media networks, but publicize their own messages, resulting in the globalization of their ideologies and an increase in the quantity and quality of their cultural production. In a perverse reversal, corporate news networks, in their constant search for content, publicize terrorist activities, and sensationalize these stories as part of their profit-maximizing operations. See Suzi Mirgani, “Spectacles of Terror: Media and the Cultural Production of Terrorism,” in Nele Lenze, Charlotte Schriwer, Subaidah Abdul Jali, eds., Media in the Middle East: Activism, Politics, and Culture, Palgrave Macmillan, 2017, pp. 107–142; pp. 108–109.

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16. There is an interesting counterpoint to be had here with the work of Rabih Mroué, a central figure in post–civil war Beirut’s avant-garde scene and a leading practitioner in defining how digital and social media are used under the conditions of conflict. Discussing the Syrian civil war in particular, and the cinéma vérité–like aesthetic deployed by activists, he observed similarities between the video recordings coming out of the Syrian revolution and the pared back manifesto deployed by the Dogme 95 organization in Denmark. He notes that, for the latter, there is an instruction that you should not use a tripod, for example, but for the Syrians shooting images of violence, “it’s not a choice—it’s still very, very, difficult to use a tripod to record their reality.” Mroué continues: And there is another issue in Dogme 95, where it stipulates that you should not record violent scenes, or weapons, because they don’t want to fake these things. So it’s not necessary to use them. For the Syrians, they add to this dictate insofar as the violent scenes being recorded are actually for real and the stipulation is also correct—do not record violence—insofar as the weapon could kill them and the scene of killing is thereafter real. There is no attempt to fake death here—it is all too real.

17. 18. 19.

20.

See “Lost in Narration: Rabih Mroué in Conversation with Anthony Downey,” Ibraaz, January 5, 2012. Available here: www.ibraaz.org/interviews/11 [accessed January 28, 2019]. In a show of apparent religious and ethnic ascendancy, the program of genocide directed toward the Yazidis by Daesh was coterminous with a “forced conversion” program to the form of Sunni Islam practiced by the militants. Helga Turka, The Destruction of Cultural Property as a Weapon of War: ISIS in Syria and Iraq, Palgrave Macmillan, 2017, p. 48. Turka also notes the performative elements at work in Daesh’s propaganda: “First, the destruction is not a collateral effect of the armed conflict, but rather a well thought-out performance, with sophisticated means of image production” (emphasis added), Helga Turka, The Destruction of Cultural Property as a Weapon of War: ISIS in Syria and Iraq, Palgrave Macmillan, 2017, p. 4. This point was made by Robert Fisk, “ISIS Profits From Destruction of Antiquities by Selling Relics to Dealers—And Then Blowing up the Buildings They Come From to Conceal the Evidence of Looting,” The Independent, September 3, 2015. See www.independent. co.uk/voices/isis-profits-from-destruction- of-antiquities-by-selling-relics-to-dealers-andthen-blowing-up-the-10483421.html [accessed June 22, 2018]. Fisk quotes the LebaneseFrench archaeologist Joanne Farchakh, who observes that “[a]ntiquities from Palmyra are already on sale in London,” and that [t]here are Syrian and Iraqi objects taken by Isis that are already in Europe .  .  . the destruction [of sites such as Mosul] hides the income of Daesh [Isis] and it is selling these things before it is destroying the temples that housed them . . . then afterwards it destroys the site and the destruction is meant to hide the level of theft. It destroys the evidence.

21. See Steven Lee Myers and Nicholas Kulish, “‘Broken System’ Allows ISIS to Profit from Looted Antiquities,” The New York Times, January 9, 2016. Available here: www.nytimes. com/2016/01/10/world/europe/iraq-syria-antiquities-islamic-state.html [accessed June 12, 2018]. 22. See Fisk, op cit. www.independent.co.uk/voices/isis-profits-from-destruction- of-antiquities-byselling-relics-to-dealers-and-then-blowing-up-the-10483421.html [accessed June 22, 2018]. 23. Andrew Keller, “Documenting ISIL’s Antiquities Trafficking: The Looting and Destruction of Iraqi and Syrian Cultural Heritage: What We Know and What Can Be Done.” Available here: https://2009-2017.state.gov/e/eb/rls/rm/2015/247610.htm [accessed December 17, 2018]. 24. Keller, ibid., passim. In his presentation to the museum, Keller further observed that Abu Sayyaf’s personal involvement in the antiquities trade is even clearer given the wide assortment of actual artifacts that were found in his physical possession and recovered during the raid. The cache comprised an assortment of archaeological artifacts and fragments, historical objects, modern/contemporary items, and replica or faked antiquities.

102 Anthony Downey 25. Keller, ibid., passim. In an article published in The New York Times in June 2015, a journalist had previously outlined the aftermath of a Delta Force—an elite special mission unit of the United States Army—commando raid in May 2015 that brought to light a number of interconnected facts about Daesh and their overarching motivations behind a string of iconoclastic events. Focusing largely on the intelligence gathered on the leader of Daesh, Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi, and the extent of his networks and whereabouts, the article noted that the group was inextricably involved in exploiting not only natural resources but also the antiquities looted from the numerous archaeological sites that were then under their control. See Eric Schmidt, “A Raid on ISIS Yields a Trove of Intelligence,” The New York Times, June 8, 2015. Available here: www.nytimes.com/2015/06/09/world/middleeast/us-raid-in-syria-uncoversdetails-on-isis-leadership-and-finances.html [accessed December 17, 2018]. 26. Keller, ibid., passim. 27. In an era of so-called post-truth and fake news, YouTube has been criticized for its use of an algorithm that encourages readers to visit sites that promote conspiracy theories and extremist material. See Jack Nicas, “How YouTube Drives People to the Internet’s Darkest Corners,” The Wall Street Journal, February 7, 2018. Available here: www.wsj. com/articles/how-youtubedrives-viewers-to-the-internets- darkest-corners-1518020478?utm_content=bufferf25b7&utm_ medium=social&utm_source=twitter.com&utm_campaign=buffer [accessed June 25, 2018]. For a fuller discussion of these issues in the context of cultural practice, see Anthony Downey, “Transposing the Vernacular: Moving Images in the Work of Akram Zaatari,” New Art Exchange, Nottingham, 2018, pp. 3–19. 28. It is important to note here that although Daesh raised considerable amounts of money through the looting and resale of cultural artifacts, it was also funded by Qatar and the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia. The current political conflict between Qatar and the KSA notwithstanding, they both financed Daesh at some point, admittedly for different and often inconsistent reasons (largely to do with the spectrum of aggression the militant group advocated toward Shia Muslims and their support for a Salafi-inspired caliphate). For a nuanced account of who funded what, whom, and why, see Lori Plotkin Boghardt, “Qatar Is a U.S. Ally. They Also Knowingly Abet Terrorism. What’s Going On?,” October 6, 2014, The New Republic. Available here: https://newrepublic.com/article/119705/ why-does-qatar- support-known-terrorists [accessed February 12, 2019]; and Lori Plotkin Boghardt, “Saudi Funding of ISIS,” The Washington Institute, June 23, 2014. Available here: www.washingtoninstitute.org/policy-analysis/view/saudi-funding-of-isis [accessed February 12, 2019]. The funding of Daesh by Qatar was one of several reasons given by the Saudi government for its original and ongoing attempts to politically and economically isolate Qatar. For one of the most extraordinary accounts of the other reasons behind these hostilities, including the ransoming of a Qatari hunting party captured in Iraq’s Muthanna Province, see Robert F. Worth’s essay “Kidnapped Royalty Become Pawns in Iran’s Deadly Plot,” The New York Times, March 14, 2018. Available here: www.nytimes. com/2018/03/14/magazine/how-a-ransom-for-royal-falconers-reshaped-the-middle-east. html [accessed March 18, 2018]. 29. There is an extended and important discussion to be had here around how museums, with respect to their collections, governance, planning, exhibitions, future development, and communications, effect a program of decolonization. See Decolonizing Museums, 2015, published online by Internationale, available as PDF here: www.internationaleonline.org/ media/files/02-decolonisingmuseums-1.pdf [accessed June 12, 2018]. 30. The following paragraphs are largely drawn from a series of conversations conducted between myself and the artist in Berlin in February and November 2016, respectively, and a chapter on Hiwa K’s artistic practice included in Anthony Downey, ed., Don’t Shrink Me to the Size of a Bullet: The Works of Hiwa K, Buchhandlung Walther König, 2017, pp. 9–38. 31. The war between Iran and Iraq lasted eight years—from September 22, 1980, when Iraq invaded Iran, until a UN-brokered cease-fire on August 20, 1988—and began in the aftermath of the Islamic revolution in Iran, which saw the overthrow of Shah Pahlavi in 1979. It is estimated that over one million Iranian and Iraqi soldiers died as a result, with some estimates suggesting twice that amount. It is difficult to get full figures of civilian casualties on both sides, but Human Rights Watch (HRW) estimates that between 50,000 and 100,000 Kurdish people were killed during the so-called Anfāl campaign waged by Iraq

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32.

33.

34. 35.

36.

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from 1986 until 1989, including an estimated 5,000 civilian deaths in Halabja following the infamous chemical attack there. The Halabja attack, which resulted in the deaths of between 3,200 and 5,000 people and injuries to 10,000 more, is still historically recognized as the single most devastating use of poison gas on a civilian population. For fuller details, see the HRW report published in July 1993: www.hrw.org/reports/1993/ iraqanfal/. For fuller details of the Iran–Iraq War, see Efraim Karsh, The Iran–Iraq War, 1980–1988, Osprey Publishing, 2002. Some of the armaments were brought to Nazhad by individuals who could not deactivate them, which was left to him to do despite the fact that he was wounded in 2003 while dismantling the bullets from a DShK machine gun, which are highly volatile. Nazhad was also the victim of a land mine during the Iran–Iraq War, which left him with a pronounced limp. For more on the bell’s metallurgical structure and tone, see “Performative Resonances: Hiwa K in Conversation with Anthony Downey and Amal Khalaf,” in T. Brayshaw, A. Fenemore and N. Witts, eds., The Twenty-First Century Performance Reader, Routledge, 2019, pp. 245–256 (originally published 2015). See Don’t Shrink Me to the Size of a Bullet: The Works of Hiwa K, op cit., pp. 213–214. Adding further ignominy to this sorry state of affairs, it has been pointed out that Daesh made specific use of these captured weapons in propaganda films posted to social media. See Cassandra Vinograd, “ISIS Shows Off Its American-Made M16 Rifles,” NBC News, September 1, 2015. Available here: https:// www.nbcnews.com/storyline/isis-uncovered/ isis-shows-u-s--made-weapons-n419371 [accessed January 15, 2018]. Vinograd also states that following the fall of Mosul, 2,300 U.S.-made Humvee vehicles were ceded by Iraqi forces to Daesh. My citation of this news report was sourced from an extensive corollary report, first published in December 2017. Compiled by the organization Conflict Armament Research, this important document chronicles the result of more than three years of field investigation into Islamic State supply chains. Detailing more than 40,000 items recovered from Daesh between 2014 and 2017, including U.S.-made rifles, the full report, “Weapons of the Islamic State,” is available here: www.conflictarm.com/reports/weaponsof-the-islamic-state/ [accessed January 15, 2018]. See https://gatesofnineveh.wordpress.com/2015/02/27/assessing-the-damage-at-the-mosulmuseum-part-1-the-assyrian-artifacts/ [accessed 28 June, 2016], where the following is explained: The gate and its lamassu were first excavated by Sir Austen Henry Layard in 1849 but then re-buried. The left lamassu (seen above behind the ISIS narrator) was uncovered again sometime before 1892, and a local man paid an Ottoman official for the top half of it, cut it off and broken [sic] down over a fire in order to extract lime. The right lamassu remained buried until 1941 when heavy rains eroded the soil around the gate and exposed the two statues. The gate was later reconstructed around them and they have remained on display ever since.

37. See Don’t Shrink Me to the Size of a Bullet: The Works of Hiwa K, op cit., pp. 213–214. 38. See Kimiko de Freytas-Tamura, “Tony Blair Says Iraq War Helped Give Rise to ISIS,” The New York Times, October 25, 2015. Available here: www.nytimes.com/2015/10/26/world/ europe/tony-blair-says-iraq-war-helped-give-rise-to-isis.html [accessed November 11, 2018]. See also Hal Brands and Peter Feaver, “Was the Rise of ISIS Inevitable?,” Survival, 59:3 (2017), pp. 7–54. In this article, Brands and Feaver offer one of the more insightful and focused studies on the inevitability or otherwise of Daesh’s ascendancy, convincingly arguing that [f]irst and foremost, the rise of ISIS was indeed an avertable tragedy. Had US policymakers made different but nevertheless plausible choices at one or more of several key junctures, ISIS probably would not have emerged as the full-blown threat it ultimately became. Apart from the 2003 invasion, the authors also highlight fundamental miscalculations that allowed for the expansion and dominance of Daesh, including “the US political disengagement from and military drawdown in Iraq in 2010–11) .  .  . [and] the

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39.

40.

41.

42. 43.

44. 45.

46. 47.

48. 49.

50.

decision not to intervene more robustly in the Syrian civil war between 2011 and 2013.” A core element in Brands and Feaver’s analysis also points to the fateful decision, in late 2013–early 2014 “not to strangle ISIS in its cradle by taking military action before it conquered much of western Iraq and swooped down upon Mosul.” See Brands and Feaver, pp. 8–9. See Raymond W. Baker, Shereem T. Ismael and Tareq Y. Ismael, eds., Cultural Cleansing in Iraq: Why Museums Were Looted, Libraries Burned and Academics Murdered (London: Pluto Press, 2010). This volume is one of the more important accounts of the profoundly far-reaching implications of not only destroying cultural artifacts but also the long-term effects upon the intellectual life of a country. In the wake of these ignominious events, three White House cultural advisers, appointed by George W. Bush, resigned. Martin Sullivan, chair of the administration’s Advisory Committee on Cultural Property for eight years, told Reuters news agency that “[i]t didn’t have to happen” and was preventable. The other two resignations were by Richard S. Lanier and Gary Vikan. For a fuller report, see “US Experts Resign over Iraq Looting,” BBC, April 18, 2003. Available here: http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/entertainment/2958009.stm [accessed June 14, 2018]. Rakowitz’s The Invisible Enemy Should Not Exist began as an idea in 2007, with a project that examined the looting of artifacts from the National Museum of Iraq in 2003 and the whereabouts of those still missing. For full details, see www.michaelrakowitz.com/theinvisible-enemy-should-not-exist [accessed June 27, 2017]. Reported in Steven Lee Myers and Nicholas Kulish, “‘Broken System’ Allows ISIS to Profit From Looted Antiquities,” The New York Times, January 9, 2016. This sentence and the one that follows draw upon my research for an earlier essay, published in 2016. See Anthony Downey, “Future Imperfect: Critical Propositions and Institutional Realities in the Middle East,” in Downey, ed., Future Imperfect: Contemporary Art Practices and Cultural Institutions in the Middle East, Sternberg Press, 2016, pp. 15–46; p. 25. See Dirk Adriaensens, “Killing the Intellectual Class: Academics as Targets,” in Cultural Cleansing in Iraq, op cit., pp. 119–148. See Naomi Klein, The Shock Doctrine, Penguin, 2007, passim. Similar arguments are made in Wendy Brown’s Undoing the Demos: Neoliberalism’s Stealth Revolution, MIT Press, 2015, pp. 142–150. See also Patricia Ventura, “Biopower and Operation Iraqi (Governing thought) Freedom,” in Neoliberal Culture: Living with American Neoliberalism, Ashgate Publishing, 2012, pp. 107–134. The connections between neoliberal economic policy and human rights abuses are likewise significant elements in David Harvey’s volume A Brief History of Neoliberalism, Oxford University Press, 2005, passim. For a complete list of Bremer’s edicts, see https://web.archive.org/web/20100206084411/ www.cpa-iraq.org/ regulations/. The UNESCO Universal Declaration on Cultural Diversity was published on November 2, 2001. Article 1 is titled “Cultural diversity: the common heritage of humanity,” while Article 4 is titled “Human rights as guarantees of cultural diversity.” The issues of cultural diversity and human rights are indelibly interlinked from the outset of these documents. For the full text, see http://portal.unesco.org/en/ev.php-URL_ID=13179&URL_DO=DO_ TOPIC&URL_SECTION=201.html. Kareen Shaheen, “ISIS Fighters Destroy Ancient Artefacts at Mosul Museum.” Available here: www.theguardian.com/world/2015/feb/26/isis-fighters-destroy-ancientartefacts-mosul-museum-iraq. For a full report of Bokova’s speech to the UN General Assembly, see https://whc. unesco.org/en/news/1287/. The United Nations Security Council Resolution 2199, issued on February 12, 2015, can be accessed here https://unesdoc.unesco.org/ark:/48223/ pf0000232164. This nomenclature is a feature of a recent report, Cultural Genocide and the Protection of Cultural Heritage, authored by Edward C. Luck, J. Paul Getty Trust Occasional Papers In Cultural Heritage Policy, No. 2: 2018. Available here: www.getty.edu/publications/pdfs/ CulturalGenocide_Luck.pdf [accessed November 23, 2018].

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51. Reporting from Al-Shikhan in Iraq, 50 kilometers to the north of Mosul, Mohammed A Salih and Wladimir van Wilgenburg captured the predicament of Yazidis who found themselves trapped on Mount Sinjar from early August 2014, facing either death through starvation and dehydration or death by Daesh militants, in the title of their article “Iraqi Yazidis: ‘If We Move They Will Kill Us,’” August 5, 2014. Available here: www.aljazeera.com/news/ middleeast/2014/08/iraqi-yazidis-if-move-they-will-kill-us-20148513656188206.html [accessed June, 14, 2018].

5

‘They Make a Desert and They Call It Peace’ States of Terror and Contemporary Artistic Response in the Middle East Jonathan Harris

Wasteland, Desolation, Solitude, Desert1 In 2019, something of a storm erupted in Germany over the apparent revelation that the modern artist Emil Nolde—whose paintings Chancellor Angela Merkel chose to hang in her government office in Berlin—had held Nazi views throughout the 1930s and up until Hitler’s death in 1945, joined the Nazi Party in 1934 and even developed his own plan to expel all the Jews from Germany.2 Photographs on the internet, taken before the story broke, show Merkel in her office, in front of and partially obscuring Nolde’s 1915 painting Blumengarten (Therstens Haus)—an innocuous enough looking picture of a garden in front of the gables and façade of a house in the country, with three figures approaching its central doorway. The diminutive study Brecher, the other oil painting, done in 1936, shows waves crashing near a coast.3 Artworks—perhaps especially paintings—like memories, are sometimes cast to the back of the mind, like the back wall of a room, where they might serve as a context of sorts, or go out of focus and become effectively invisible, though they remain there and can be brought back into focus if the conditions are right.4 Some accounts of the Nolde story in the German mainstream press and in other countries in 2019 suggested that these ‘revelations’ had just emerged. Yet the details of Nolde’s antisemitism and commitment to the Nazis had always been there, in print, in the second volume of his 1934 autobiography, Jahre der Kampfe (Years of Struggle), a title similar to Hitler’s own Mein Kampfe, first published in two volumes in 1925–1926.5 A clue to part of what happened later lies in the fact that a second, edited version was published in 1958 in what was then West Germany, ‘authorized’ by the artist and his ever-supportive spouse, Ada.6 Reading about this controversy I tried to remember what I had learned about Nolde when studying art history as a young man nearly 40 years ago, in the early 1980s. But I could dredge up nothing definitive either way—I couldn’t remember what I think I had known or hadn’t known then. I did have a recollection that, as a 21-year-old (I am now 60), I had written an undergraduate essay about some German painters from the 1930s, keen as I was particularly on the communists, George Grosz and John Heartfield.7 I couldn’t know, however, if I had known anything about Nolde, it seems. Then I remembered the artists’ writings source book that had then been something of a bible for Anglo-American modern art history. This was Hershel B. Chipp’s 1968 anthology Theories of Modern Art, ‘with contributions from Peter Selz and Joshua C. Taylor.’8 I managed to find my copy, purchased, apparently, on or about 19 February 1985—the date I had written inside the cover.9

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I scanned Chipp’s index. The first reference to Nolde is in an introductory paragraph by Selz, containing basic information: The artist’s birth and death dates, his membership in the expressionist group Die Brucke (The Bridge).This is followed by some arthistorical gloss based on the artist’s autobiography. According to Selz, Nolde had ‘a close affinity to primitive art’ (the latter term is unqualified—this is Anglo-American mainstream art history, remember, just before its socio-political radicalization). Nolde went ‘to experience it’ (the ‘primitive’) in German New Guinea. There he contemplated writing a book ‘on the art of the aborigines,’ which he felt was ‘uncorrupted,’ like what Nolde called ‘healthy German art.’ Nolde, Seltz observes, was a ‘mystic,’ a ‘visionary,’ and an ‘evangelist.’ Selz mentions the artist’s autobiography at this point, describing Nolde’s psychosomatic illness in 1909 as an ‘almost ecstatic episode.’10 The second index reference is to an extract from Nolde’s autobiography—in English translation—from the 1934 first edition.11 These pages illustrate Selz’s earlier reference to the artist’s illness. Much here is about Nolde’s ‘struggles,’ but these are with religion, tenderness, the Holy Ghost, the spirit, etc. The editors were not aware of or did not see fit to mention or include any reference, from the autobiography, to Nolde’s antisemitism or connection with the Nazis. There is a pertinent paragraph in this excerpt, however, where something of the artist’s political inclinations—and paranoia—becomes inferable. Nolde remarks: The number of Christians is small. Barely a third of humanity! The number of ‘live’ Christians is infinitesimal. Why did happiness and enthusiasm end so soon? Why was Buddhism able to resist, how could the teachings of Mohammed destroy large parts of humanity, my God, why?12 Art historians Bernard Fulda and Aya Soika—curators of the 2019 exhibition at the National Gallery in Berlin, ‘Emil Nolde: The Artist During the Third Reich,’ that sparked this controversy—have attempted to explain the contemporary lesson of their historical recovery. Fulda noted in a press interview: ‘There is a way you can use the complex and diffcult and indeed negative German past to say “it’s still relevant today, and we’re not just looking the other way.”’13 That ‘looking the other way’ has certainly gone on—as the excerpts and accounts of Nolde’s art in Theories of Modern Art, as well as in later anthologies, indicate.14 It has gone on, however, not only in Germany but also in many other countries in the decades since the rise of the interwar fascisms in Europe. Paula Barreiro López, in this volume, has drawn our attention to the situation in Spain, in the era since the rise of Franco’s dictatorship at the end of the Spanish Civil War in 1939 and throughout his time in power until his death in 1975. After that event, and as part of the country’s return to parliamentary democracy, the government passed a law, still in place, preventing the offcial investigation and trial of Franco’s torturers—the ‘Amnesty Law’ (dubbed the ‘amnesiac law’)—passed in an attempt to draw a line under state terrorism in the Spain of that period.15 Marisa Cornejo, too, has shown in her contribution here how her interactive performances have been able to dredge up the traumas of the state terror instituted under Pinochet in Chile from 1973 to 1990, acting as a form of socio-personal therapy. As the historical circumstances of the mid-twentieth century shifted, the interwar standoff between the parliamentary democracies and European fascism was replaced, at the end of World War II, by global Cold War between capitalist and communist

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blocs, by NATO and the Warsaw Pact military alliances. Under these new conditions, from the late 1940s onwards, anti-imperialist struggles were fought out in Asia and Africa, the neocolonialization of the Middle East took place, and South America saw the rise of the new neoliberal dictatorships clandestinely and directly supported by US foreign policy under successive presidents. The global proliferation of terrorism, state terrorism, and terrorist states was inseparable from these epochal events and later, tumultuous developments: The end of the Soviet Union in 1991 and US aerial bombing of the former Yugoslavian states in the late 1990s that Jonathan Day and Aleksandar Sasha Dundjerović have written about here. The Trade Centre aerial bombings in New York and on the Pentagon in Washington on 11 September 2001 were followed by the US-led invasions of Afghanistan and Saddam Hussain’s Iraq, the latter the subject of Anthony Downey’s chapter here on the struggle between the Islamic State and the US-led occupation over the future of that society and its cultural heritage. All of these developments and their attendant disasters lie in dismal continuity with our era now in the early 2020s. Together they constitute the social order and disorder of ‘neo-Cold War’ under globalized conditions.16 In an exhibition I co-curated at the Today Art Museum in Beijing, China, in late 2019 examining contemporary art concerned with the interrelationships of climate change and global geopolitical crises, I included several artists from the Middle East—western Asian epicentre of regional and global turmoil for the past 70 years and more.17 Lebanese artists Joana Hadjithomas and Khalil Joreige, featured in the show, have created a body of work—a ‘conceptualist’ project, it might once have been called—based on a fictional photographer they called ‘Abdallah Farah.’ Several sets of photographs produced by ‘Farah’ have been exhibited by Hadjithomas and Joreige around the world over many years now. These include two groups of postcard format images called the ‘Historical Process’ and ‘War of the Hotels’ series, which were shown in Beijing (Figure 5.1).18 The overall title Hadjithomas and Joreige have given to their longstanding project concerned with the fate of their city is Wonder Beirut, a name suggestive of two meanings. The first is more obvious. Wonder Beirut refers to the spectacular destructiveness this city symbolizes and embodies as a result of the protracted civil war in Lebanon between 1975 and 1990—as well as multiple invasions by foreign armies over a longer period—a conflict fought out in its streets and from the international tourist hotels of the downtown and seafront ‘Lebanese Riviera’ areas. Postcards featuring these large, modern hotels, built in the 1960s and early 1970s, remain on sale today even though most of them were badly damaged or destroyed altogether during the fighting. Hadjithomas and Joreige’s fictional photographer ‘Farah’ materially burns his images of these buildings—this ‘War of the Hotels’—and the disturbing physical decrepitude of these ‘postcard views’ is congruent with that of the architectural structures themselves, subject to incessant, battering damage during the civil war. A second meaning of ‘wonder’ is to imagine, to think, to question—an ideational, wholly mental process. Hadjithomas and Joreige prompt us, through the creation of their photographer avatar ‘Farah’ and the framing device of the serial postcard format, to step back from ‘first order’ reality, from our sense of what certain knowledge is or what particular memories mean. The Wonder Beirut representations ask, How does knowledge or memory—as well as forgetting or denying—exist and operate? How do words and images achieve certain meanings, or lose them, and then go on to acquire new ones? (These are the same questions that Fulda and Soika ask of Nolde’s

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Figure 5.1 Joana Hadjithomas and Khalil Joreige, Wonder Beirut: The Story of a Pyromaniac, Photographer First part of the project (1997–2006), C-prints with face mounting, 100 × 70 cm.

paintings that used to hang in the Berlin Chancellery.) In a sense, our own ‘neo-Cold War’ era and all of modern history dating back, at least, to the 1970s are somehow rolled up into these contemporary representations. A critical but mournful retrospectivity, both subjective and historical, infuses Wonder Beirut, whose photographs, ‘negatives,’ prints, and postcards embody a kind of materialized ‘chronotope’—an ambiguous yet potent screen of projected memories, images, dreams, and hopes.19 Common to all the elements comprising Wonder Beirut is an interest in mediation, in the forms and stages of intervention that come between what is held to be ‘reality’ and its ‘representation,’ both in terms of material processes of image production and display and the wider question of whose experiences, preconceptions, and values might be, or could be, represented and why. Hadjithomas and Joreige have conjured up a set of narratives—fictive, made up ‘memories,’ as well as materialrepresentational artefacts—around the meanings of ‘Beirut,’ around wondering what the meanings of Beirut might be, have been, or could become in the future, if conditions changed. Another Lebanese artist, Lamia Joreige, made her 2013 work, Object of War—a sculptured form cast in concrete, several times enlarged—from the hole blasted by a shell fired into the National Museum of Beirut by a sniper during the civil war (Figure 5.2). Graphically and materially, this literally lumpen artefact, enabling something that was absent (the hole in the wall) to become present (the sculpture), demonstrates that museums and galleries—often thought of as a separate world for

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Figure 5.2 Lamia Joreige, installation view of Under-Writing Beirut—Mathaf in Artes Mundi 7, Cardiff National Museum, UK, 2016–2017. Source: Photo by Jamie Woodley © Artes Mundi

aesthetic contemplation—have never actually been separate from the socio-political realities and experiences of the peoples and places in the Middle East that for decades have been subject to terrorism, state terrorism, and terrorist states.20 Joreige’s collective title for a group of her works that were shown in the Beijing exhibition is Under-Writing Beirut. Like Wonder Beirut, this name proposes another self-conscious, critical metaphor. Art, it suggests, can be a form of ‘care for the future’ of something in the way that financial insurance is intended to be. That’s the older meaning of this term in English: If you ‘under-write’ something, you agree to support it financially, should it fail or suffer an accident or disaster (like a business, or a house, or a country, or people). Its other sense is close to the more philosophical meaning of ‘stitch’ or ‘articulation’ that served as the theme for the Beijing Today Art Museum show: To ‘under-write’ in this broader sense signifies ‘to make sense of,’ ‘to interpret,’ and ‘to understand’—a process that is always a matter of different and sometimes conflicting interests, as I shall now go on to demonstrate.21

‘Abandoned in the Sands’ In June 1982 Israeli Defence Force soldiers broke into the Beirut research centre housing the Palestinian Liberation Organization (PLO) archives and took away its entire collection of 25,000 volumes in Arabic, English, and Hebrew, along with a printing press, microfilm, and manuscripts. Israeli troops also broke into, ransacked, and stole items

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from the Beirut-based Institute for Palestinian Studies, set up in 1963 by a group of intellectuals from a number of Arab countries.22 These weren’t the disorderly actions of a few undisciplined soldiers. Israeli troops systematically seized documents from PLO offices all over southern Lebanon that year before the war—which Israel’s government called ‘Operation Peace for Galilee’— was brought to an end in the autumn. On their way out the Israeli soldiers removed the word ‘Palestinian’ from the PLO sign hanging over the research centre’s entrance. In February 1983 a car bomb wrecked the building housing the centre, killing eight of its employees along with six others. Hana Sleiman, a special collections librarian at the American University of Beirut, estimates that the Israeli State Archives now contain about 4,000 linear metres of Palestinian archive documents taken from Ottoman and British Mandate eras, in addition to materials stolen from Egyptian, Jordanian, and Palestinian sources.23 Sleiman reports that the Israeli historian Raphael Israeli (then an academic at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem) was granted immediate access to this PLO archive when it was rehoused in Israel. His edited collection of these papers, entitled PLO in Lebanon, published in 1983, featured 74 documents—originals and translations— taken from these various PLO offices.24 Israeli made of the archive what any loyal Israeli state propagandist then would have: He constructed the familiar Western version of the Cold War narrative. The PLO was, he noted, a ‘terrorist’ organization in league with the Soviet Union and Arab and Islamic countries, along with other actors, which ‘allow subversive groups to operate, like many countries in Africa, Asia and Latin America.’25 Sleiman observes that Israeli’s access to the PLO documents enabled him to claim to know and demonstrate the ‘truth’ of the organization and its objectives. By the end of 1983, however, the Israelis had done a deal with the PLO and agreed to a ‘prisoner swap’ in which the archive (itself treated as ‘a prisoner of war’) was exchanged for six Israeli soldiers.26 In that prisoner swap the PLO also got back 4,500 Palestinian prisoners, demonstrating something of the relative value of human lives in this conflict. What the Israelis returned as the archive—shorn, no one is sure, of what elements—Yasser Arafat later had shipped to a PLO army base in the desert in Algeria, amid plans, apparently, to re-establish it either in Cyprus or Cairo, though neither plan was carried out. The archive remains in the desert, although there are claims that misuse, lack of care, and the actions of the local rodent population have led to its destruction. ‘Abandoned in the sands,’ Sleiman notes, ‘the documents began to decay.’27 An inventory of its contents, carried out in 2003, made an attempt to rerecord the materials in the boxes. Each sheet of this 120-page text is headed ‘State of Palestine, the PLA [Palestinian Liberation Army], Al-Qastal Forces Command, Algeria.’28 This notation gives us a valuable hint as to what had happened. While the Israelis had used the PLO archive to enable its ‘official intellectuals’ to write their version of history, the PLO had changed dramatically between 1982 and the signing of the Oslo Peace Accords in 1993 and 1995, agreements that led to the establishment of the present Palestinian Authority territory.29 The PLO went from being a self-proclaimed revolutionary, socialist, national independence-seeking organization to seeing itself as a legitimate ‘state-in-waiting’ or even a ‘proto-state.’ It went, in terms of slogans, from the PLO’s ‘Revolution Until Victory!’ dictum to a sense something like the less heart-racing motto of the then new Palestinian Authority Archives: ‘Memory of the Nation and State.’ The PLO emblem had included two Kalashnikov machine guns

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crossed over a map of ‘historic’ Palestine (effectively the map of Israel). Most PLO documents had been printed with a letterhead featuring this map of Palestine and the motto ‘liberation’ written underneath. Official letters started with the salutation ‘A revolutionary greeting’ and ended with ‘It is revolution until victory.’ By contrast, the emblem of the Palestinian Authority is a stolid eagle with the Authority’s flag colours on its breast. Sleiman notes that the final draft of the constitution in 2001 referred neither to the PLO nor to the Palestinian Authority but to a sovereign state of Palestine that would ‘absorb the constituting body of the PLO.’30 She further observes: The year 1993 marked a point when the Oslo-era leadership of the PLO relinquished its demands for the lands of historic Palestine, essentially departing from the goals that the organization was founded to serve. Since the Research Centre archive epitomized the PLO’s previous goals, and as the Palestinian Authority became increasingly invested in the discourse of the two-state solution and peaceful coexistence, the PLO Research Centre archive stood out as an anomaly.31 Palestinian Authority offcials, since the mid-1990s have attempted, then, to ‘write’ (or ‘under-write’) the territory’s own new version of its past, with the PLO and its history and interests removed, ‘written out.’ The Palestinian Authority bureaucracy had ‘retooled’ the use of historical documents for this purpose, no less so than the Israelis had done when they stole the PLO archive from Beirut. But this ‘retooling’ has happened within the circumstances and under the conditions of an ever-eroding, ever-shrinking actual Palestine.32 Nation Estate, a nine-minute, single-channel video film made by Palestinian Larissa Sansour in 2013, imagines (‘wonders’ about) the Palestinian people all rehoused in an ultra-modern skyscraper whose levels contain the different cities, towns, and resources of their lands currently either occupied by Israeli troops and Jewish ‘settlers’ assimilated into Israel in 1948 or part of the Palestinian Authority territorial bantustans created after the Oslo Agreements (Figure 5.3).33 The film’s décor and tone are pure ‘science fiction’: The proposition of a high-rise building ‘standing in’ for an

Figure 5.3 Larissa Sansour, still from Nation Estate, film, 9’, 2012.

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actual country, Sansour suggests, is as likely, or as farfetched, as the possibility of an actual territorial agreement that accommodated Palestinians fairly or addressed the historical issues around their dispossession, refugee status, and subjugation within Israel’s current borders or the lands currently occupied by its army, protecting Jewish homemakers. With reference to a famous 1930s British Mandate tourism poster of ‘historic Palestine’ before the creation of Israel, included at the beginning of Nation Estate, it is clear that Sansour is articulating these ideas, representations, and symbols in a highly self-conscious manner. The English word ‘estate’ draws attention to two similar-sounding but quite different ideas: First, the ‘state’—the permanent entity of sovereign government, which the Palestinians lack (given that the Palestinian Authority exists only because Israel allows it to and controls all the territory’s borders and key natural resources).34 Second, Sansour’s title gestures toward the term ‘real estate,’ or the commercial value and sale of land and buildings, the worth of which is subject to perennial speculation. In so doing, Sansour draws attention to the broader context of Middle Eastern geopolitics within neoliberal global capitalism. It has been the vicissitudes of commercial, ethnic, religious, and class interests across the Middle East (and beyond) that have hindered the creation and maintenance of broad active support for the Palestinians from their regional neighbours in their fight for land, peace, and autonomy since the 1970s.35 Two films made by the Iraqi-Irish artist Jananne Al-Ani constitute meditative statements on land as territory in the Middle East, displaying both ‘analytic’ and ‘transcendent’ aesthetic qualities. Photographed from a light aircraft in the air in the early morning light favoured by forensic archaeologists, Shadow Site I (2010) and Shadow Site II (2011) are austerely beautiful filmic representations of a landscape and its resources, both natural and human-made (Figure 5.4).36 Contrary to the tradition of western landscape painting, however, in these films we see the land only directly from above, as the camera moves, or appears to move, closer to the ground; there

Figure 5.4 Jananne Al-Ani, production still from the film Shadow Sites II, 2011.

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is no depicted sky or horizon—though there is light and tone, which makes visible this earth and its component elements. The camera angle and continuous downward movement vertically (though the films are edited) suggest the aerial images seen from bombers and drones as they home in on a ground target before they release their explosives or show the consequences of their actions. This ‘analytic’ perspective is inseparable from questions of power, domination, and subordination. During the First Gulf War (1990–1991) and the US-led invasion of Iraq in 2003, such film footage was constantly released and disseminated by the US military to demonstrate, supposedly, the ‘shock and awe’ of American power, represented as omnipotent.37 The subsequent, extended conflict on the ground, especially in Iraq, however, indicated that such vaunted ‘aerial mastery’ is not actually mastery of or on the ground—a lesson the US had once appeared to learn (though subsequently forgot) in the war in Vietnam in the later 1960s and early 1970s, after years of trying to eradicate the communist forces in that country. Al-Ani’s films invoke this geomilitary iconography but at the same time open it up to other forms of ‘wondering.’ These films also ask, who looks? What do those looking hope to find? Why? While she is interested in the social history of this territory in the Middle East, Al-Ani’s camera’s gaze is also differently ‘interested,’ if not ‘disinterested.’38 That is, her films are artworks that belong, apart from anything else, to the Kantian philosophical tradition, with its ideal of aesthetic transcendence of the social world, though they ask questions of the relentless re-colonization and exploitation of the Middle East and the ways in which that historical process over hundreds of years has shaped the land and the people who live in and by it. Bashir Makhoul’s artwork has always been bound up with his own dislocated relationship to Palestine, his childhood and extended family in Galilee, a region near the Lebanese border absorbed into Israel after the war in 1948.39 An immigrant to England in the late 1980s, Makhoul’s art has always also been about the fate of Palestine in its relationship to and partial subsumption within the state of Israel. This dislocation is personal but also political, intellectual, and artistic. Though Makhoul has made films, paintings, prints, sculptures, and installations over several decades dealing with Palestine, Israel, and the Middle East, his psychological and social distance has also resulted in a generalization of attention to themes in his works exemplified by the fate of the Palestinians. His 2019 installation, Fata Morgana, for instance, made for the Today Art Museum exhibition in Beijing, asks us to consider the globalization (and generalization) of refugee status—homelessness—both literally and in terms of national citizenship and loss of human dignity: Examples across the world are multiple and growing (Figure 5.5). Makhoul’s installation comprises an ‘island’ of thousands of very small, multicoloured ceramic boxes resembling basic refugee camp houses—a kind of oneiric vision, much as the idea, or ideal, of a future ‘Palestine’ has perhaps become (echoing Sansour’s filmic conceit in Nation Estate that its land and people are in some sense now fictive or a matter of sustained imagination).40 The title Fata Morgana is an allusion to a sorceress of medieval legend, the sister of King Arthur, who has sometimes been portrayed as the ruler of a reputed island paradise— ‘Avalon.’ Makhoul’s primary compositional unit in his construction of installations has been the box and its multiples—cardboard boxes, initially, but subsequently also made from metal and ceramic (Figures 5.6 and 5.7). In earlier works, such as photographic prints, Makhoul had also focused on images of shell-torn concrete buildings

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Figure 5.5 Bashir Makhoul, Fata Morgana, 2019, 22,000 porcelain houses, size variable, from the Punishment of Luxury series, installation shot, A Stitch in Time exhibition, Today Art Museum, Beijing.

found across the Middle East; in recent works the box has also featured as motif in oil paintings and tapestries. The cardboard box was chosen originally because it is a rudimentary, cheaply available, practical material that serves to symbolize the newly rudimentary, and impoverished, world made for and by millions of humans for themselves and others in the precarious circumstances of globalized neo-Cold War.41 But the implications of Makhoul’s own distance and dislocation from Palestine— both its historical reality and imaginary past and future existences—are notable in terms of the complexity and ambiguities of his most compelling works. Far from being ‘agitprop’ pieces, or even forms of analytic intervention (though they are often also that), Makhoul’s art is deeply interested in beauty and the possibilities of ‘aesthetic autonomy’ in artistic form.42 This might be characterized as a question to do with the consequences of recognizing the ‘split duality’ of modern artworks recognized by the Marxist philosopher Theodor Adorno. He observed that artworks detach themselves from the empirical world and bring forth another world, one opposed to the empirical world as if this other world too were an autonomous entity. Thus, however tragic they appear, artworks tend a priori towards affirmation.43

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Figure 5.6 Bashir Makhoul, Enter Ghost, Exist Ghost, 2013, lenticular lenses, photographs and cardboard boxes, size of installation variable, installation, Yang Gallery, Beijing.

Figure 5.7 Bashir Makhoul, The Occupied Garden, Otherwise Occupied installation, Venice Biennale, 2013.

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Makhoul’s installations, such as Fata Morgana, do intervene to comment on and perhaps to condemn the world as it is (note a part of the installation, the commercial adjunct to the island of boxes, a nearby vending machine at which the museum visitor may purchase a shiny box to take home, a souvenir of the artwork and of considering the refugee experience to which it refers), but they also present spectacular and beautiful aesthetic forms that offer to transcend that world—that soar or veer away from the daily reality and the socio-political conditions that have produced the reality of refugee-status homelessness for millions of people in Palestine and elsewhere (Figure 5.8). In this sense, Makhoul’s artworks manage to be deeply moral and amoral— demonstrating ‘aesthetically disinterestedness’—at the same time. Artworks can, then, both tell us about the world and the past and stand apart from this experience, offering valuable introspective solace rather than mere distraction. Our own contemporary moment, I’ve suggested in this chapter, can’t be detached from the long, global history of the Cold War stretching back into the twentieth century, back further to World War II and its causes in the rise of fascisms across Europe after World War I. Nazism in Germany, Italian fascism under Mussolini, and falangism in Spain led by Franco all partly emerged also as a reaction to the 1917 Russian Revolution, an opposition to the growth of consequential support for communism and socialism across the world. The fractious emotions and arguments aroused recently by, for example, the British referendum decision to leave the European Union and by

Figure 5.8 Bashir Makhoul, Fata Morgana, 2019, 22,000 porcelain houses, size variable, from the Punishment of Luxury series, installation shot, A Stitch in Time exhibition, Today Art Museum, Beijing (detail).

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the question of Catalonia’s future within the nation-state of Spain are also part of this continuous history, inseparable, though related in complex ways, to Cold War and neo-Cold War histories and art histories—global, regional, national, local. Tacitus’s ‘desert of peace’ hasn’t only been created in the Middle East. The situation in contemporary Spain, 40 years after inception of the 1977 ‘Amnesty Law,’ intended as a kind of ‘pact of forgetting’ aimed at dissolving, or at least burying, memories and remembrance of Franco’s state terror, raises up from the historical grave the same issues I’ve addressed in this chapter dealing with the neocolonial states of terror the Palestinians, Lebanese, Iraqis, and Syrians have had to confront: The bodies buried under the motorways, the refugee camps of displaced millions, and the changing meanings of the paintings apparently invisible on the wall.44

Notes 1. These words in my opening subtitle are taken from four different English translations from the close of chapter 30 in The Agricola by the Roman scholar Tacitus, one of the earliest historians, written in ad 98, recounting the life of Tacitus’s father-in-law, Gnaeus Julius Agricola, an eminent Roman general and governor of Britain, ad 77/78–83/84. The Agricola also deals with the geography and ethnography of ancient Britain, favourably contrasting the liberty of the native Britons to the corruption, tyranny, and greed of the Roman Empire. 2. See Adam Tooze, ‘To the Bitter End,’ London Review of Books vol. 41, no. 23; 5 December 2019, available online at www.lrb.co.uk/the-paper/v41/n23/adam-tooze/to-the-bitter-end 3. See Bernard Fulda, Aya Soika and Christian Ring (eds.), Emil Nolde: The Artist During the Third Reich (Prestel: Berlin, 2019)—the book accompanying the 2019 Nolde exhibition in Berlin discussed later. 4. This chapter is based on a lecture I gave at the University of Barcelona in January 2020 at the conference ‘Resonances/dissonances of history and memory in global contemporaneity,’ organized by Paula Barreiro López and Olga Fernandez Lopez on behalf of the MoDe(s) alternate modernisms research group funded by the Spanish government. I am very grateful to Paula and Olga for the opportunity to pursue these ideas at this event. 5. Emil Nolde, Jahre der Kampfe, 1902–1914 (2 vols; Rembrandt: Berlin, 1934). 6. Emil Nolde, Jahre der Kampfe, 1902–1914 (2nd edition, enlarged; Christian Wolff: Flensburg, 1958). 7. Reconsideration of ideas of history and memory—and the relations between them—formed the basis for the Barcelona conference, with the fraught Spanish context of contemporary public ‘memorialization’ and ‘remembrance’ of the Franco fascist era ever-present that day. I return to this question briefly at the end of this chapter; also see Paula Barreiro López’s chapter in this collection. 8. Herschel B. Chipp (ed.), Theories of Modern Art: A Source Book by Artists and Critics (University of California Press: Berkeley, CA and London, 1968). 9. Evidently I had been using a university library copy while an undergraduate at Sussex, 1980–1983. 10. Chipp (ed.), Theories of Modern Art: 126. 11. Chipp (ed.), Theories of Modern Art: 146–151. 12. Chipp (ed.), Theories of Modern Art: 147. In mitigation, Nolde also muses: ‘For centuries, we Europeans have treated the primitive peoples with irresponsible voraciousness. We have annihilated peoples and races—and always under the hypocritical pretext of the best of intentions’ (151). 13. See www.france24.com/en/20190412-tainted-nazism-merkel-returns-two-nolde-paintings (accessed 25 April 2020). 14. The imperializing volume, one of three, that supplanted Chipp’s in the 1990s, editors’ Charles Harrison and Paul Wood’s Art in Theory 1900–1990: An Anthology of Changing

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15. 16.

17. 18. 19.

20. 21.

22.

23. 24. 25. 26. 27. 28. 29. 30. 31. 32. 33. 34. 35. 36. 37. 38.

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Ideas (Blackwell: London, 1992), demoted reference to and excerption of Nolde’s writings to a single page, while reproducing Chipp’s absence of mention of the artist’s Nazi affiliations; see 101–102. See Paul Preston, The Spanish Holocaust: Inquisition and Extermination in Twentieth Century Spain (Harper: London, 2013). Although the world order/disorder is certainly now multi-polar, Western (and still USled) antagonism with Russia and China has reignited and is played out both directly and through proxies in regional conflicts such as those in the Middle East, hence my use of the term ‘neo-Cold War.’ I develop this argument in Harris, The Utopian Globalists: Artists of Worldwide Revolution, 1919–2009 (Wiley-Blackwell: Oxford and Malden MA, 2013) and The Global Contemporary Art World (Wiley-Blackwell: Oxford and Malden MA, 2017). ‘A Stitch in Time,’ The Fourth Documents exhibition, co-curated with Huang Du, The Today Art Museum, Beijing, 13 December 2019–15 March 2020 (extended due to the COVID-19 pandemic). See www.hadjithomasjoreige.com. The Russian semiotics theorist Mikhail Bakhtin developed the idea of the ‘chronotope’ in his 1937 essay ‘Forms of Time and of the Chronotope in the Novel.’ In the chronotope, Bakhtin noted: ‘Time, as it were, thickens, takes on flesh, becomes artistically visible; likewise space becomes charged and responsive to the movements of time, plot and history.’ See M.M. Bakhtin, The Dialogic Imagination: Four Essays, trans. Caryl Emerson, ed. Michael Holquist (University of Texas Press: Austin, 1981): 84–85. See www.lamiajoreige.com. The theoretical inspiration for my contribution to the objectives of this exhibition was the writings of Ernesto Laclau on socialist politics and revolutionary theory in South America. See Laclau’s Politics and Ideology in Marxist Theory (Verso: London, 1977)—written during the period of CIA-backed coups in the Americas that ousted social democratic governments in Chile, Argentina, Uruguay, and Bolivia—and, with Chantal Mouffe, Hegemony and Socialist Strategy: Towards a Radical Democratic Politics (Verso: London, 1985). See Hana Sleiman, ‘The Paper Trail of a Liberation Movement,’ available online at www. academia.edu/29941950/The_Paper-Trail_of_a_Liberation_Movement and ‘Israeli Looted Archives of PLO Officials Say,’ The New York Times October 1 1982 (Section A: 8), available at www.nytimes.com/1982/10/01/world/israeli-looted-archives-of-plo-officials-say. html (accessed 27 May 2020). Hana Sleiman, ‘The Paper Trail of a Liberation Movement’: 46. Raphael Israeli (ed.), PLO in Lebanon: Selected Documents (St. Martin’s Press: New York, 1983). Hana Sleiman, ‘The Paper Trail of a Liberation Movement’: 49. Hana Sleiman, ‘The Paper Trail of a Liberation Movement’: 50. Hana Sleiman, ‘The Paper Trail of a Liberation Movement’: 51. Hana Sleiman, ‘The Paper Trail of a Liberation Movement’: 51. See Edward Said, The End of the Peace Process: Oslo and After (Granta: London, 2000). Hana Sleiman, ‘The Paper Trail of a Liberation Movement’: 59. Hana Sleiman, ‘The Paper Trail of a Liberation Movement’: 55. See Jonathan Harris, ‘Contemporary Art and Post-National Identities in the State of Palestine,’ The Global Contemporary Art World: 155–172. See https://larissasnsour.com. See Eyal Weizman, Hollow Land: Israel’s Architecture of Occupation (Verso: London, 2007). See Khalil Nakhleh, Globalized Palestine: The National Sell-Out of a Homeland (Red Sea Press: Trenton NJ, 2012). See https://janannealani.net. See Retort (Iain Boal, T.J. Clark, Joseph Mathews and Michael Watts), Afflicted Powers: Capital and Spectacle in a New Age of War (Verso: London, 2005) and Thomas E. Ricks, Fiasco: The American Military Adventure in Iraq (Penguin: London, 2007). See Terry Eagleton, ‘The Kantian Imaginary,’ in The Ideology of the Aesthetic (Blackwell: London, 1991): 70–101.

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39. See www.bashirmakhoul.co.uk. 40. See Edward Said’s Out of Place: A Memoir (Granta: London, 2000) for this author’s musings on real and imagined Palestine, in a life lived mostly away from his country of birth. 41. See, for example, Bashir Makhoul, Enter Ghost, Exit Ghost (Yang Gallery: Beijing, 2011), exhibition curated by Gordon Hon, with essays by Jonathan Harris and Ryan Bishop, and Mike Davis, Planet of Slums (Verso: London, 2007). 42. On the historical and critical complexities of ‘aesthetic autonomy,’ see Ernst Bloch, Georg Lukacs, Bertolt Brecht, Walter Benjamin and Theodor Adorno, Aesthetics and Politics: Debates between Bloch, Lukacs, Brecht, Benjamin, Adorno (Verso: London, 1980). 43. Theodor Adorno, Aesthetic Theory (Continuum: London, 2008 [original German edition, 1970]): 2. 44. See the BBC Four Storyville 2019 documentary film The Silence of Others, directed by Almudena Carracedo and Robert Bahar. On the founding of the state of Israel through terrorism, see Thomas Suarez, State of Terror: How Terrorism Created Modern Israel (Skyscraper Publications: Bloxham, 2016).

6

Re-Inscriptions of Terror and Terrorism Since Mallarmé Wassily Kandinsky and Gerhard Richter Lewis Johnson

What follows aims to provide an account of how art, in particular pictorial art, can be understood to re-enable thinking and feeling in connection with problematics of terror and terrorism. It aims to situate paintings by Wassily Kandinsky as re-inscribing experiences of street violence in the Russian Empire in 1905 but also problematics of ascriptions of terrorism accompanied by violent suppression of protest by state agents, among others, providing motives for an exploration of inner margins of pictorial artistry opened up within Kandinsky’s apparent drive towards abstract art. It will also identify a comparable dynamic in play in Gerhard Richter’s 1994 series Stammheim, which, reworking utopian abstraction, can be understood to follow as a decisive supplement to what is perhaps the most renowned series of paintings concerning terrorism, his October 18, 1977 of 1988, deriving from official press photographs and televisual stills concerning the deaths in Stammheim Prison of members of the Red Army Faction, with both series re-inscribing senses of terrorism and terror. Before this, to help conceptualize how such re-inscriptions can be understood to work to re-enable psychic, social and political relations to instances of terror and terrorism, an oft-cited response to a journalist’s enquiries by Stéphane Mallarmé can serve as explication of how spatio-temporal margins operate to suspend and re-route responses to what might be understood, shown or seen concerning terrorism, on the very threshold of the passing of what is typically identified as the earliest anti-terrorist legislation, the ‘lois scélérates,’ the villainous laws, in France in December 1893. Mallarmé’s oft-misquoted response to journalist Paul Brulat can help to formalize ways in which artistic work has operated to re-enable responses to terrorism as well as provide an opportunity to sketch in a history of responses that have idealized possibilities of artistic work concerning issues of violence and terror—sometimes idealizing terrorism as such—but typically in ways that have tended to misconstrue, if not simply underestimate, the significance of demands to oppose terrorism. With techniques of digital data snooping now inviting the criminalization of browsing websites of proscribed organizations, problematizing curiosity about, if not research into, such topics, rights concerning freedoms of expression and association, not to say thought as such, have come under threat, more clearly and in more and more polities. Mallarmé’s response can be understood as early testimony that acknowledges drives to abrogate legal protections against the very forces of law, re-routing such drives towards a reexamination of issues of violence and terror as well as operative positions on terrorism. Thus, what follows will draw on an inheritance of anarchist theory, without which an informed history of terrorism would be altogether less likely. Asked over dinner for his response to Auguste Vaillant’s bomb thrown into the Chamber of Deputies earlier that day, 9 December 1893, Mallarmé is recorded to

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have said, ‘Je ne sais pas d’autre bombe, qu’un livre,’ or ‘I know of no other bomb, than a book.’ Published in Le Journal the next day, Mallarmé’s response is also in Brulat’s extant manuscript, already re-inscribed, ready for publication. As Leslie Hill has pointed out, however, in 1930 that same journalist misquoted his own source, rendering Mallarmé calmer, to the point of dispassionate aestheticism: ‘There is no other explosion than a fine book’ (‘Il n’y a d’autre explosion qu’un beau livre’). Later recitations deviate from what is also something of a virtually deviant original in ways that echo Brulat’s own misreadings, misrememberings and/or misrepresentations, which are, nevertheless, perversely faithful in their infidelity to what Hill calls the ‘dispersion’ of the quotation. In 1953 Sartre turned the sentence into something of a heroic, unequivocal, if aestheticist, defiance of the authorities, what he termed a ‘terrorism of politeness’: ‘I’m unaware of any bomb other than a book’ (‘Je ne connais pas d’autre bombe qu’un livre’). Sartre had already read Blanchot on Mallarmé, so was likely responding to his laconic and ontologizing ‘There is no explosion but a book’ (‘Il n’est d’explosion qu’un livre’) in advance of its insistent reiteration in his L’Ecriture du Désastre from 1980.1 Blanchot’s is perhaps the most refined version of its kind, with its philosophical scruple, darkly humorous, to the effect that explosions exist only in excess of, or perhaps short of, that stability of identity required of ontological predication, a refinement that extends to not acknowledging Mallarmé as source as such, as if responding to the demands of interrogation and witness. If Blanchot did imagine protecting Mallarmé from the authorities, as well as promoting a legacy of anarchic, if not anarchist thought and argument, then I want to insist on recovering more of that legacy and the history of its difficult presents and futures, including that of terrorism, by attending to the awkward passage from bomb to book in the text Brulat initially recorded as Mallarmé’s response. The tendency to smooth over the breaches in senses and syntax, saturating it with the explosion Mallarmé likely imagined but did not mention, has the virtue of pointing towards what Derrida identified as the ‘unforeseeable and incalculable’ of a threat of worse to come, typically lost in ‘auto-immunitary’ disorders brought on by violent events and suggestive of what he termed a ‘traumatism of the future,’ addressing which may enable a chance of better responses to terrorist events.2 Arts of relative responsiveness may sound meek by comparison with a promise of explosive books, or the explosion of the book or of other objects of cultural legitimacy, but it picks up on such disturbances of traditions, their genres and hierarchies, as Mallarmé’s later writings more emphatically enacted,3 while admitting the traumatic character of violence. Vaillant’s attack and arrest occurred only two days before the legislation later termed ‘les lois scélérates,’ with, first, an amendment to the 1881 law concerning freedom of the press, criminalizing advocacy of murder or revolt, punishable by seizure of assets as well as detention, enabling the state to accelerate its repression of the anarchist press, as T. J. Clark has pointed out.4 Associating with well-known anarchists, such as art critic Félix Fénéon, it would have been obvious enough that someone such as Mallarmé would have already become an object of state agents’ suspicions. He had been cautious enough to withhold clearly stated views about anarchist ‘saints and martyrs,’ as he termed Kropotkin and others, when asked for comment in 1892.5 Passed on 18 December 1893, a new law criminalized being an anarchist sympathizer as well as anarchist associations, along with conspiracy to commit anarchist acts such as propaganda of the deed, providing legal justification for detention and

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prosecution of a widening circle of Vaillant’s associates. Vaillant affirmed his bombing of parliament as revenge for the execution of Ravachol, whose bombings in Paris in early 1892 had not been lethal but had targeted an army barracks and residences of a judge and prosecutor in the Clichy trial, following the killing at Fourmies of nine people demonstrating for an eight-hour working day by soldiers with machine guns and the conviction of two of the three people beaten in custody in Clichy. Sentenced to imprisonment in Paris, Ravachol was soon after conveniently found guilty of three murders in Montbrison and guillotined in July 1892. Not repealed until 1992, despite seven parliamentary motions to do so before the First World War, the spiral of repressive legislation, abuse of legal power and violence continued, with mass arrests and arraignments, from January to the end of June and the assassination of President Carnot on 24 June 1894. Further legislation ensued in July criminalizing anarchist plots and leading to the circulation or encouragement of anti-militarist propaganda, the execution of Carnot’s killer Caserio, and the Trial of Thirty from August to the end of October. Pissarro left for Belgium for a year after the assassination, while Fénéon was among those tried, defended in court as ‘one of the most subtle and acute critics we have’ by Mallarmé, who may or may not have known his associate had bombed a restaurant.7 The trajectory of Mallarmé’s ‘I know of no other bomb, than a book’ passes across particular or changing views concerning anarchism and propaganda of the deed or its perpetrators. No one had been killed by Vaillant, or Fénéon, though the autoimmune reaction was well underway. If Mallarmé did not say precisely that he did not know of another bomb to come, what he did say moves from such a moment, the moment of interrogation, through the ‘unforeseeable and incalculable’ of the threat of worse to come, to a citation of the most traditional object of cultural value now rendered as if bomb-like. As if standing against having to stand against violence, Mallarmé’s cited, written and printed utterance, re-inscribed in many ways from that night on, dislocates referral to a single frame of reference and to any space of sovereign rule and regulation, enacting a sort of violation of expectations of such referring, subverting authority, a disabled performative of undecidable perlocutionary outcome. Such a dislocation of referral can also be traced in a history of painting that comes with this history of terrorism, politics and legislation, re-inscribing terror and terrorism in and across genres of image- and mark-making. Sharing in the disability enacted in Mallarmé‘s sentence, it is not quite a matter of arguing, by analogy, that painting is performative. Rather, it is a matter of thinking through the comparison of opening intervals between what is typically meant by painting as ‘performative’: understood to be either a record of a series of acts in which what it means to paint is part of a painting’s meaning, or when painting is more like a—disabled—performative, where the ‘new realities’8 such as promises are conceived to bring about are suspended in favour of a witnessing of realities of (in this case) terror and terrorism; where official senses of the latter are supposed to dictate as if in advance those of the former, mortgaging senses of future to traumatisms—limited and limiting versions—of the past. Echoing the fissuring of realities in the dislocation of referral between bomb and book in Mallarmé’s phrasing, this chapter proposes something of a small history of abstraction in painting in which abstract mark-making makes contact with destruction, death, dissolution—or threats of the same—but which, partly as already engaged with such threats, reworks meanings given to terror and terrorism. For, while Kandinsky’s lyrical abstract work may have tended towards conjuring away fears and anxieties, the

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emergence of a sort of disabled vocabulary—reworking pictorial referral as part of a reinvented textuality of sensory fluidities—can be recovered, re-inscribing traumatic experiences, if also their representability, connected with the 1905 revolutionary uprisings in Russia. Attesting to this complex reworking of referral, Kandinsky’s autobiographical essay ‘Reminiscences’ was published in 1913, accompanied by three other pieces unusual among his extensive writings for being three of only four pieces he had published on particular paintings. The pieces ‘Composition VI’ and ‘Picture With a White Edge’ were also written in 1913, with that on the earlier Composition IV (Figure 6.2) and its pictorially close relation Cossacks (Figure 6.1) sometimes subtitled (Battle) going back to March 1911, with the two paintings having been painted just prior to this, in 1911 and late 1910.9 The question of which painting actually preceded the other might be kept open, despite the usual assertions that Cossacks in the Tate Collections is a sketch for the larger work in Düsseldorf, in line with a scrambling of sequence and series of events characteristic of the recollection of trauma, as well as with the emergence of a novel kind of compositional solution to such uncertainties that came to mark much of Kandinsky’s later work. It is of vital importance in the conceptualization of trauma and its representation, and of recovery, too, that the multiplicity of elements involved in such representations be acknowledged. Re-inscriptions of trauma are immanently plural, not simply according to the counter-intuitive suspension of the pleasure principle remarked on by Freud in his accounting for war neuroses and the representation of traumatic events in dreams. Tending to collapse the ‘unpleasure’ of

Figure 6.1 Wassily Kandinsky, Cossacks (Battle), 1910–11, oil on canvas, 94.6 × 130.2 cm. Source: Photo © Tate

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Figure 6.2 Wassily Kandinsky, Composition IV, 1911, oil on canvas, 159.5 × 250.5 cm. Source: © bpk-Bildagentur/Kunstsammlung Nordrhein Westfalen, Düsseldorf/Achim Kukulies

the event recollected with that of its recollection, echoing the early psychiatric goal of the abreaction of undesirable memories,10 Freud provides a sort of reverse echo of Kandinsky’s version of traumatic events, with Cossacks and Composition IV both inviting a sense of a pleasure at the imagined recollection or witnessing of events suggested—if indeed not precisely represented—in them. In ‘Reminiscences,’ Kandinsky famously claims that an ‘infinite succession of new worlds’ were conjured up in his early experiences of his first paint box and its colours, experiences that were to provide him with one of the sources of a sense of ‘inner impulse’ that, in turn, led him to an art of ‘internal necessity [. . .] capable of overturning every known rule and limit.’11 An inner, however, that is attended, if not determined, by an outer, Kandinsky’s account of the discovery of an art of ‘internal necessity’ pulls that ‘inner impulse’ along with it—‘the mysterious play of forces unknown to the artist,’ as he admits—undermining claims that this work should be taken simply as separate and autonomous. With unknown events subtending this ‘inner impulse,’ the stability and discreteness of their sequence and series are also brought into question, opening up that ‘infinite succession’ to a paradoxical greater play of apparently finite, particular events. In the case of Composition IV, in a letter of 1927 Kandinsky insisted not only on a particular reading of this important painting but also on a sort

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of displaced admission that its formalities allowed it not to be read as representing a Cossack charge in Moscow in 1905: ‘In 1911 no-one was capable of recognizing the objective element in this picture, which is very indicative of the visual attitude of that time.’12 Thus, we enter into a reversal of typical teleologies of the experience of abstraction and its relation to representation, with Kandinsky promoting the former as an expansion of the latter rather than as its cancellation. Within this margin, the suggestiveness of abstraction may be cultivated more and less, evading public as well as psychic censors, though unreliably, with the exceeding of the latter threatening to implicate the former. Tensions over this sort of gamble would thus have already played their part in Kandinsky’s articulating a sense of ‘the expression of [artists’] inner life’13 with discourses of the spiritual, most obviously in Concerning the Spiritual in Art, published in 1912, though composed in 1910.14 We can retrace something of the ‘psychic scenarios staged in abstract painting and the picture surface as a site of fantasy’15 if we allow that, for Kandinsky, relative abbreviation and concision of mark-making, along with polarities of colour—from the warm–cool axis of yellow and blue to the different ‘discords’ of white and black, the motion and rest of red and green and the spatial dramas of orange and violet—act to provide for ways of re-imagining the spatiotemporalities of experience, including the traumatic experience of terror. An account of Maeterlinck’s use of language and stagecraft in section III prepares for this, with Kandinsky noting a use of repetition that removes words from their ‘external meaning,’ generating senses of objects that ‘create a greater sense of terror’ than in nature.16 This argument is extended by a footnote in which Maeterlinck’s as well as children’s use of simple materials is extolled, admitting such appeals to the spectator’s imagination play a part in modern theatre, ‘especially in that of Russia.’ His account of colour polarities, in the long section VI ‘The Language of Form and Colour,’ offers a model of expressive synthesis forming a ‘circle [. . .] between life and death,’ echoing and sustaining the transcendence of a spiritual vocation of art that would ideally encompass any possible traumatic event. It is notable that in both the smaller Cossacks and Composition IV Kandinsky tends to deploy these paired colours more carefully and clearly than in previous work. With the figure of the rainbow overdetermined as a legend of the importance of the use of colour, a link between near and far—across an abyss of murky central passages in the smaller painting—and a sort of feint towards a thematic dominant suggestive of overcoming, we may approach why Kandinsky found Composition IV ‘more powerful’ and ‘more precise’ than earlier work but also of ‘too great a clarity.’17 The yellow and blue in the lower right in Cossacks act both to frame and to isolate figures whose orientation is thus more undecidable, with the profiles of the zones reminiscent of standard Cossack papakha hats, long tunics and lances, as if turning towards left and right, but with faces obscured by those weapons imaginably facing and approaching the spectator. Kandinsky’s fundamental colour polarity, with yellow moving ‘bodily’ towards the spectator and blue moving away, points towards this effect as part of his intention. The use of red can also be tracked, as if displaced upwards from the standard red tunic to pick out the hats of Cossack-like figures wielding violet sabres. Looming above the dramatic black on white lines, recalling groups of lances emerging above and across hilly horizons in front of built masses, there is further confirmation of Kandinsky working at suggesting his ‘objective element,’ as in the title to this painting.

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This should not, of course, be taken as its plain, denoted truth. Doing so would obstruct access to ways in which this celebrated piece from the Tate Collections could also serve senses of the power and potentiality of the Cossacks, prize cavalry of the Russian imperial army, tributary to mythicizing tendencies that occur across much of Kandinsky’s early work but also to those dislocations of referral across the cultural text that are indicative of responses to terror and terrorism, negotiating political tensions between the two. The unleashing of the cavalry on those barricading the streets in Presnya, Moscow, on 18 December 1905, belying the Tsar’s assent to the October manifesto promising freedom of conscience, speech and assembly, and rule by the Duma, following days of shelling, ended the revolution that had begun with widespread strikes in late 1904 and had spiralled following the Bloody Sunday massacre of petitioners on the steps of the Winter Palace in St. Petersburg on 22 January. Returning from Geneva, Lenin commented in terms reminiscent of propaganda of the deed that ‘the point’ of the struggle in Moscow was ‘not about victory but about giving the regime a shake and attracting the masses to the movement.’18 Despite his later indications, it is likely Kandinsky did not witness events in Moscow first-hand. He had exhibited with the Moscow Association of Artists earlier in the year, returning to the city he had first been taken from at the age of five, as he had since 1900.19 Perhaps he later mixed up reports of the violence in Moscow with experiences of the violence of the anti-Jewish pogrom he did witness in Odessa from 18 November that year, which began when opponents of the October Manifesto, unhampered by the authorities, attacked and killed Jews in the city over several days, about which he wrote to Gabriele Münter, stating he would never again wish to be called an ‘Odessan.’20 Years before, Kandinsky’s family had moved to Odessa from a Moscow he came to idealize, frequently praising its light and colours, terming it ‘the tuning fork for my painting.’21 If Kandinsky did mix up these recollections, then this can serve to exemplify how Cossacks and the less tendentiously titled Composition IV function to invite the recollection of traumatic violence while also allowing for its disavowal, public and private, notwithstanding the artist’s claim concerning the latter painting’s ‘objective element.’ Kandinsky’s careful expressionism of abbreviated and schematic figuring—not to say figuration—invites a re-experiencing of pictorial space through rhythmic concision of its zones. Roger Fry noted something of this when he claimed Kandinsky for ‘pure visual music,’ arguing for a progressive clarification, ‘more definite, more logical and closely knit in structure.’22 Contrary to Fry’s notion of a telos of abstraction, however, a sense of a structure of a series of zones that are more and less closely knit, echoing his account of Maeterlinck, is a persistent one in Kandinsky’s work. More compressed than in Cossacks, Composition IV’s rainbow bridges a more clearly marked out terrain that is also a more difficult imaginary traversal, with rows of repeating lines in black rising up ahead, some approaching, some crossing those to the upper left, the latter identified by Kandinsky as horses. Anxious about ‘clarity,’ he also remarks on the ‘sharp, abrupt movement (battle) and light cold delicate colours,’ echoing in his syntax and punctuation some of the ways in which, in passing from zone to zone, the look shifts, sometimes easily, sometimes abruptly, along and across painted marks and in and out of figurative effects. The indexical effects of style play a part in this, too, however. Concerned about defusing tension over ‘clarity,’ Kandinsky’s account insists on ‘concord’ and a ‘harmony of calm masses,’ but it does also admit to ‘sharp

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movement’ in zones of the composition as well as a kind of predominance of colour and a blurring of forms. However, with Kandinsky stressing ease and harmony, the tensions of the composition tend to come back into view, notably in what he termed the ‘lying figures’ in the lower centre and to the right and the two black lances now at the centre of the composition, stretching across the pictorial space. Emphatically strong, the lines of the lances act to reframe the lying figures, as if out of reach, with their vulnerability communicated by the relative delicacy of lines suggestive of their limbs and torsos. As if snaring our look in a tight central corridor, refracted around the grip of the hands on them, if also casting that look out of the picture, read across Kandinsky’s promises of ‘concord’ or ‘resolutions,’ these weapons invite an imaginary of a greater violence than that already rendered, underway but in suspension, uncompleted, above. Thus, Kandinsky’s memorable mark-making moves towards generating a dislocating series of referrals suggestive of an unimaginably violent event, negotiating the violence of a repressive state apparatus as well as an associated violence of ethnic identity secured against its abjected other. Turning to what is perhaps the most renowned series of paintings concerning terrorism, Gerhard Richter’s October 18, 1977 of 1988, if also to his less well-known series Stammheim from 1994, there is a recurrence of re-inscriptions of terror and terrorism that reverts to abstraction even while operating in relation to spaces of contention concerning representations of terrorism—and this more obviously than the work by Kandinsky—while sharing indirection in the communication of senses of terror through problematics of violent state reaction, characteristic of that autoimmune reaction to terrorism identified by Derrida. For, as he argued, if repetitive media representations of terrorist events function to screen off, while also bringing back, senses of possibilities of worse to come, then Richter’s series offers a chance of thinking this through in relation to painting, deriving as most of the earlier series does from stills from broadcast televisual coverage and much-reproduced photographs released by the FDR police in connection with the deaths in detention of Ulrike Meinhof, Gudrun Ensslin, Andreas Baader and Jan-Carl Raspe, members of the Red Army Faction, the socalled Baader–Meinhof Gang, found dead in their cells in a section of Stammheim Prison purpose-built in Stuttgart to house them. Like Kandinsky’s work, this series also needs to be thought through in connection with the two other strands of Derrida’s autoimmune disorder occasioned by terrorism, ‘resources of terror’ that ‘overdetermine one another . . . especially in the unconscious.’23 Measures to extirpate terrorism stretch, as noted earlier, from violence and other extraordinary actions of law enforcers to extensions of the powers of the law, along with the rescinding of its protections. States of exception, as measures such as so-called extraordinary rendition or enhanced interrogation techniques have been called, participating as such in forms of discursive normalization as well as leading to collateral damages in an unknown series, are part of a complex textual weave that, for Derrida, also includes a historical thesis whereby terrorism has been that which instrumentalizes resources from within the societies and cultures it attacks. This last strand, which has attracted some hostile commentary, in particular in connection with the so-called 9/11 attacks in the U.S.A.,24 is also in play in Richter’s series in ways that a more historically informed reading of them than has been given can help to expose.

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October 18, 1977 has been passionately celebrated as ‘perhaps the only great art yet made of terror and counterterror in the contemporary world’25 and passionately criticized for ‘generating more discursive heat while shedding less light of common understanding than anything else in the art of the last half century.’26 Thus, even the writer of the latter strongly critical of more dismissive responses to the series following its showing at the 2002 retrospective of Richter’s work at MoMA New York, which acquired the work in 1995, admits a certain resistance to comprehension. Not long after 9/11, provoking but frustrating desires for comprehensive apprehension and knowledge in relation to an understanding of terrorism in New York was hardly likely simply to be celebrated. Derrida’s axioms of autoimmune disorder inter-relate in unpredictable ways, as he stipulated, while depending on an acknowledgement of uncontrolled reaction dictated by trauma. Indeed, it is perhaps to an uncontrolled, if not wholly inexplicable, repetition characteristic of the traumatized that the internal recurrences of the series attest most obviously, referring viewers as if to the same or similar source photographic images, across Arrest I and II (Figure 6.3); Confrontation I, II and III; Dead I, II and III; and Man Shot Down I and II. Yet this referring is ‘as if’ and not certain, not simply because the series of paintings stands apart without the source photos and televisual images that some who lived through the controversies of the end of what came to be called the German Autumn in 1977—including, of

Figure 6.3 Gerhard Richter, Arrest II, 1988, oil on canvas, 92 × 126 cm, Museum of Modern Art, New York. Source: Gerhard Richter 2020

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course, the artist—would have seen but also because it refers us through a logic of trauma to this seeing. A kind of monument to that ‘repetition to come,’ October 18, 1977 invites realization of possibilities of recurrent viewings, returning to reinspect that which has already been viewed. Whether more in horrified fascination or forensic curiosity, the series solicits acknowledgement of modes of traumatized viewing, despite or, rather, more powerfully as a consequence of having no established, authorized sequence. Typically, the series has tended to be read according to a sense of the numbering of internal mini-series, following through with a predominant logic of mourning, where what is represented becomes more indistinct, indicative of a telos of a letting-go of those who have passed. Yet the series does not nor cannot prescribe only being viewed in such sequences and also operates to re-inscribe the opposite tendency, of recommencing mourning ever anew, as if in disavowal of having begun. This sort of tension in the meanings of the series will ever escape readings that insist on one or other emotional relation to what is shown, whether affirmative or not. A clue to what is also an affective excess may be followed through in the way the internal recurrence of source imagery resounds beyond the series, as with the painting deriving from what was a less blurred version of Hanged (Figure 6.4), now re-obscured by white and black oil paint dragged horizontally, leaving swelling, pitted clouds of pigment, retitled Blanket (1988) (Figure 6.5).27 This title points towards what is now the least re-obscured section of the painting, a dark area to the left that refers us to part of that blanket that was said to have been found draped over the hanging, dead body of Ensslin, but that was ‘put to the site[sic] [side]’28 before being photographed. Partaking of that ‘something both shadowy and inescapably real’29 that has come—bidden or unbidden—to haunt Richter’s photo-paintings, the processes of viewing October 18, 1977 thus recall something of the dislocations of referral traced earlier in Mallarmé’s response in view of demands to take a stand in relation to terrorism. Further, these processes also make contact with mark-making that, shading over into the abstract, delays, suspends and reinvents the space-times of traumatic events, including events of representation, not simply in Blanket, or the smaller but more numerous paintings on book pages of Stammheim, which nevertheless play out something of a rediscovery of that negotiation with censorship encountered earlier in Kandinsky and that are already in play from within the representational. The re-enabling of thought and feeling that Richter’s work conducts concerning terror and counter-terror has recommenced since these two series, and this despite certain statements concerning taking his leave from the politics and history associated with the German Autumn and from photo-painting. That history—something that was ‘being pushed away,’ as he said—was significant enough for him to reinitiate photo-painting, calling up his first work of this kind since 1975. He has, however, also denounced the ‘illusions’ of violent revolutionary politics, remarking on those who died ‘so young and so crazy, for nothing.’30 The meanings of such a position are perhaps not as evident as these two statements together suggest. Processes of mourning involve anger and frustration, and even if the RAF’s guerrilla terrorism betrayed the causes of extending workers’ struggles in the FDR to those of migrant ‘gastarbeiter’ and beyond, politicizing investments by multinationals beyond Europe,31 then Richter’s work might mean their deaths would not be left without significance. Evidence that such a drive has accompanied this work by Richter is suggested, indeed, in that

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Figure 6.4 Gerhard Richter, Hanged, 1988, oil on canvas, 200 × 140 cm, Museum of Modern Art, New York. Source: Gerhard Richter 2020

notable return to photo-painting, September (2005) (Figure 6.6), deriving from a still of one of the planes crashing into the south tower of the World Trade Center on 11 September 2001. This later painting brings photo-painting together with the dragging and leaving of paint Richter has deployed since 1980 in the making of abstract paintings, with his use of a screen print squeegee, where he has not so much ‘narrowed the gap’32 between the abstract and representational or painted a painting that ‘analogizes the destruction that it shows’33 as conjured powerful dislocations and, like Kandinsky, temporal distensions of referral, brought about through a problematizing of what has been called indexicality. Recent moves away from semiological and semiotic conceptualities have themselves delayed the emergence of more persuasive accounts of this work on terror and counter-terror, if also much else. In reviving questions of how such images signify, I am indebted to the account by David Green, who argued that October 18, 1977 ‘stalls the recession of the photograph into the past,’ offering up ‘in repetition of one moment, or the stilling of others’ an experience in which ‘the time of the photograph is forced to yield to the time of painting.’ As Green has it, the repetition of the same moment

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Figure 6.5 Gerhard Richter, Blanket, 1988, oil on canvas, 200 × 140 cm, Böckmann Collection, Neues Museum, Staatliches Museum für Kunst und Design, Nuremberg. Source: Gerhard Richter 2020

from Dead I to III, with their different framings and degrees of clarity, serves to delay what would be a typically quick reading of the photograph of the stark reality of the dead body of Ulrike Meinhof. In Confrontation I–III, for Green, Richter renders the passage of the body of Gudrun Ensslin, who had been photographed by a camera hidden behind a picture in Stammheim, ‘as if in slow motion.’34 Such accounts can be developed and made more precise, however, in both what Peirce would have called their objects and their arguments. The spread of digital photography has revived questions concerning the indexical character of photographic images, both in relation to edited images and processes of image registration, where indexical means what Peirce termed an ‘existential connection’ between what functions as sign and of what—what he called its ‘object.’35 Peirce gave a wide role to the indexical, indeed, also making it a key to how language effects and affects worlds, with ‘direct’ linguistic indices of demonstrative pronouns such as ‘this’ or ‘that’ becoming, as adjectives, more ‘indirect,’ according to Peirce, trying to maintain a clear distinction between ‘dicent’ and ‘rheme’ indices, where the former serves accounts of facts or actuality and the latter a sense of possibility.

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Figure 6.6 Gerhard Richter, September, 2005, oil on canvas, 52 × 72 cm, Museum of Modern Art, New York. Source: Gerhard Richter 2020

It is in the erosion of such a distinction, however, that Richter’s photo-painting operates. Thus, where Green argued the series ‘poses’ as an ‘imperfect index,’ an understanding that photographic images are not perfectly reliable indices, that they are not simply transparent to the objects and arguments they serve, can be opened up further. Painted images also operate indexically in several ways, including via indications of senses of style and technique—often today termed ‘performative,’ as noted earlier—across more general issues of realistic representation. Perhaps surprisingly, October 18, 1977 would be a less imperfect series of indices insofar as it refers us to questions of the realities that the series of photographic images mustered by the authorities served in support of their claims that Ulrike Meinhof and, later, Andreas Baader, Gudrun Ensslin and Jan-Carl Raspe all committed suicide in prison.36 The recommencement of mourning that the series sustains, or threatens, is confirmed through this sort of greater flexibility of indexical referring, which, as noted earlier, does not simply go from the less to the more blurred. Viewing can shift from the illegible zones around the neck and face of the figure of the dead woman in profile in Dead III back to the more detailed Dead II and I or from the radiant horror of Man Shot Down II back to the more informative Man Shot Down I, with its emaciated arm extended with what looks like gun in hand. Does the blurry figure of a man on

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a diagonal in Arrest II (Figure 6.3) look as if he is undressing and stepping out of his trousers, as Holger Meins was required to do by police when he was arrested on 8 June 1972? Arrest I has no such figure, encouraging us to ascribe a sense of significance to that small, somewhat brighter area on the main front-left-to-midground diagonal of Arrest II. Meins died while on a hunger strike in 1974, with Richter reworking, if not wholly obscuring, his painting deriving from a related photograph.37 Under the heading ‘Selbstmord,’ or ‘suicide,’ Stern reported German police claims that Meinhof had killed herself by hanging on 9 May, citing the imminence of her likely being sentenced to life plus fifteen years, tensions among group members in prison and a growing awareness of her ‘political mistake.’38 Doubts over such claims are insistent, however, with an international report concluding in 1978 that it was reasonable to infer, from omissions and inconsistencies in the autopsy and other evidence, that ‘she could not hang herself’ and that there were ‘warning signs’ of third-party involvement, with the same report also raising doubts over the later deaths of Baader, Ensslin and Raspe.39 Richter’s series precipitates us into such doubts and enquiries by referring us through its re-inscriptions of images in which acts of looking were caught, addressed as they were by the claims of the forces of counter-terror, re-inscriptions that open up particular senses of duration to looking, implicating that activity in omissions, discoveries or rediscoveries concerning the realities those images were claimed to serve. There is, of course, no final declaration to be made concerning the position of the series on the events involving these members of the RAF and the forces of the FDR. While speaking out against political terrorism, Richter has also admitted to an ambivalence stemming partly from the very ‘hate fantasy,’ as he put it, that the series serves, of putting the dead terrorists and their accoutrements on show. ‘The terrorism inside all of us [. . .] that’s what I don’t want,’ said Richter in June 1989, ‘any more than I want the policeman inside myself.’40 The infection cannot quite be contained, however, given the observation of Ensslin in Confrontation I–III or the re-inscriptions of the provisions to political prisoners in Record Player or the books in Cell or Hanged suggestive of an expanding inventory of indications of state power that would signify the re-emergence of the terrorist, soliciting opposition to the same as it does so. Questions of indexicality help us to understand better how dislocations of such referrals operate, across different genres of inscription, through pictorial images, linguistic texts and, indeed, beyond. For we can reconstruct how Richter’s series also refers us to the spaces of what German media theorist Friedrich Kittler referred to as the ‘lifeworld’ of ‘white-washed’ high-rise buildings, where terrorists disposed of the detritus of bombmaking down their vertical garbage chutes, along with ‘the world’s densest highway system,’ which their BMWs traversed at speed.41 Kittler’s account of the German Autumn explores some limits of conceptualities of media, reworking the writings of theorists Innes and McLuhan on territories, roads and vehicles from the vantage point of a more recent phase of terrorism in which the high-rise had become a key symbolic target. Starting off colourful, as Richter said, his September painting becomes greyer, as if more indexically monotonous, while the rhythmic leavings to the left and right of more grey paint are suggestive of a desire, if futile, to reassume control across the horizontal space of the attack on the south tower.42 The earlier redeployment of a monochrome palette in October 18, 1977 tends more towards a re-exploration of the meanings of the vertical. Claimed

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as an affective as well as material ‘liquidation,’ the vertical blurring—for instance, in Cell and Hanged—also contests the vectors of the architectural spaces that, from the prison to the foot of the high-rise in Arrest I and II, link the deaths to be mourned here, as in the teeming surface of Funeral, where three coffins are lifted up on their way to interment, to the administered spaces of the FDR, as if via what Kittler called its ‘earthy residues’ breaking out from ‘under layers of concrete and asphalt.’44 Confirmation that Richter’s re-inscriptions of the spaces through which RAF terrorism moved approach the retracing of senses of earth, ground and participation in social life can be found in the later, more intimate series Stammheim. From the first in the series, it is as if Richter has joined in with a series of chthonic vectors that now guide streams of paint, no longer the greys of earlier monochromatic media culture, often ascending from the lower edges of the 23 pages removed from the 1986 book Stammheim: The Case Against the RAF by Pieter H. Bakker Schut.45 Painting on the torn pages of this book, typically obscuring most, but not all, of their printed surfaces, thus repeatedly suggesting a contestation of this account of the capture, imprisonment and deaths of members of the RAF, only a minority of Richter’s 1994 series involves horizontal mark-making. From the first picture, with its thin waves of thick dark purple paint that snake from side to side and more up than down, Richter’s pared-down vocabulary of instrument and gesture leaves its careful but intense series of traces. The unusually small scale of these 19 × 11.6 cm pieces appears to have provided for a

Figure 6.7 Gerhard Richter, Stammheim, no. 1, 1994, oil on printed paper, 19 × 11.6 cm. Source: Gerhard Richter 2020

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Figure 6.8 Gerhard Richter, Stammheim, no. 22, 1994, oil on printed paper, 19 × 11.6 cm. Source: Gerhard Richter 2020

sense of constraint against which an expansive expressivity develops, calling up what Peirce would have identified as iconic qualities of the elemental, from the possibly unseen as much as the naturalistically natural, from the weeds, like the ‘long purples’ of Ophelia’s ‘crownet weeds’ of the first (Figure 6.7); the squally clouds or sea of the fourth; the potently vegetal of the eighth, seventeenth, eighteenth, twenty-first and twenty-second (Figure 6.8); or the twisting volute of the liquidly earthy seventh, to the metallic ores of the ninth, tenth and last, via the watery carbons of the thirteenth and fourteenth. Working on the limits of the boundaries of suggestion, cancelling and contesting but also relaunching associations, Richter’s Stammheim series acts as a supplement to the better known October 18, 1977, letting loose something of what got lost in the traumatisms of the lethal struggles between the German State and RAF over the space-times of the post-war world and the difficult politics of their re-making and representation. Re-inscribing vocabularies of abstraction, compositional as well as colouristic, Stammheim reopens a sort of imaginary niche of intimiste abstraction, as if Kandinsky might not have sought to stabilize his emergent practices of abstraction in the key part of an historic opening up of art to and for wider publics. Such counterfactual historical speculation may remind us not to think that theorizations of visual

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communication work simply to comprehend all accounts of all kinds of images or that we can simply do without such theorizations in favour of totalizing interpretations, in particular when it comes to making sense of the ways in which terror and terrorism have tended to dictate oppressive and repressive autoimmune reactions and the ways artistic work can be understood to witness resistance and reinvention of possibilities in relation to such reactions.

Notes 1. Leslie Hill, Maurice Blanchot and Fragmentary Writing: A Change of Epoch (London: Continuum Books, 2012) 282–283. 2. Giovanna Borradorri and Jacques Derrida, ‘Autoimmunity: Real and Symbolic Suicides. A Dialogue with Jacques Derrida’, in Philosophy in a Time of Terror: Dialogues with Jurgen Habermas and Jacques Derrida (London: University of Chicago Press, 2003) 94. 3. Barnaby Norman, Mallarmé’s Sunset: Poetry at the End of Time (Oxford: Legenda, 2014) 121–139. 4. T. J. Clark, Farewell to an Idea: Episodes from a History of Modernism (New Haven and London: Yale UP, 1999) 99–100. 5. Thierry Roger, ‘Art and Anarchy in the Time of Symbolism’, Journal for the Circle of Lacanian Ideology Critique, 9 (1981): (58–81) 70. 6. Michael Kemp, Bombs, Bullets and Bread: The Politics of Anarchist Terrorism Worldwide, 1866–1926 (Jefferson, NC: MacFarlane and Company, 2018) 82–83. 7. Clark, Farewell, 99–103 and Roger, ‘Art and Anarchy’, 70. Also Joan Halperin, Félix Fénéon, Aesthete and Anarchist in Fin-de-Siecle Paris (New Haven and London: Yale UP, 1988). 8. This phrase theorizing the effects of the performative has been much used, perhaps since Hannah Arendt, The Human Condition (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1958) 200. 9. Kenneth C. Lindsay and Peter Vergo, eds. Kandinsky: Complete Writings on Art (New York: Da Capo Press, 1984) 355. 10. Judith L. Herman, Trauma and Recovery: The Aftermath of Violence: From Domestic Abuse to Political Terror (New York: Basic Books, 2015) 181 (1st published 1992). 11. ‘Reminiscences’, Kandinsky: Complete Writings, 372–373. 12. Letter to Hans Hildebrandt, 25.03.1927 in Kandinsky: Complete Writings, 356 and note 2, 886. 13. Wassily Kandinsky quoted in Richard Stratton, ‘Preface’, Concerning the Spiritual in Art, trans. M.T.H. Sadler (New York: Dover, 1977) vii. 14. See George Heard Hamilton, Painting and Sculpture in Europe 1880–1940 (Harmondsworth: Penguin Books, 1983) 208. 15. Briony Fer, On Abstract Art (New Haven and London: Yale UP, 1997) 161. 16. Kandinsky, Concerning the Spiritual, 15. 17. ‘Composition IV’, Kandinsky: Complete Writings, 383. 18. Orlando Figes, A People’s Tragedy: The Russian Revolution (Harmondsworth: Penguin Books, 1996) 199 19. Hajo Duchting, Wassily Kandinsky, 1866–1944: A Revolution in Painting (Los Angeles: Taschen, 2000) 94.Also https://artinvestment.ru/en/auctions/?c=64001. Accessed 17.11.2018. 20. Peg Weiss, ‘Evolving Perceptions of Kandinsky and Schoenberg: Toward the Ethnic Roots of the Outsider’, in Juliane Brand and Christopher Hailey, eds. Constructive Dissonance: Arnold Scheonberg and Twentieth Century Culture (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1997) (35–52) 39, note 13. For an account of the pogrom see Robert Weinberg, ‘The Pogrom of 1905 in Odessa’, in John D. Klier and Shlomo Lambroza, eds. Pogroms: AntiJewish Violence in Modern Russian History, (Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1992) 248–289. 21. ‘Reminiscences’, Kandinsky: Complete Writings, 382. 22. Roger Fry, ‘Review of Sixth London Salon of Allied Artists’, The Nation, 2.08.1913, 677, in Hamilton, Painting and Sculpture in Europe, 209.

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23. Borradorri and Derrida, ‘Auto-immunity’, 100. 24. Among the more receptive responses to Derrida’s arguments, if tending to neglect trauma, see W.J.T. Mitchell, ‘Picturing Terror: Derrida’s autoimmunity’, Critical Enquiry, 33 (Winter 2007): (277–90) 287–288. 25. Alex Danchev, ‘The Artist and the Terrorist, or the Paintable and the Unpaintable: Gerhard Richter and the Baader-Meinhof Group’, Alternatives: Global, Local, Political, 35(2) (April–June 2010): (93–112) 94. 26. Peter Schjeldahl,‘In the Mood: New Works by Gerhard Richter’, The New Yorker, 5.12.2005, www.newyorker.com/magazine/2005/12/05/in-the-mood-2. Accessed 27.11.2018. Schjeldahl was in part responding to a notoriously hostile review by Jed Perl published on 1 April 2002 in The New Republic. 27. See www.gerhard-richter.com/en/art/paintings/abstracts/abstracts-19851989-30/blanket7729/?&referer=search&title=Blanket&keyword=Blanket. Accessed 28.11.2018. 28. See www.gerhard-richter.com/en/art/paintings/photo-paintings/baader-meinhof-56/hanged7690/?&referer=search&title=Hanged&keyword=Hanged. Accessed 28.11.2018. 29. Alex Potts, Experiments in Modern Realism: World Making, Politics and the Everyday in Postwar European and American Art (New Haven and London: Yale UP, 2013) 249. 30. Richter, ‘Interview with Gregorio Magnani’ (1989), in Dietmar Elger and Hans-Ulrich Obrist, eds. Gerhard Richter—Text: Writings, Interviews and Letters 1961–2007 (London: Thames and Hudson, 2009) 222. 31. See Red Army Faktion, ‘Serve the People: The Urban Guerilla and Class Struggle’, 2.04.1972, http://germanguerilla.com/1972/04/01/serve-the-people-the-urban-guerillaand-class-struggle/. Accessed 27.12.2018. 32. See Robert Storr,‘September: A History Painting’ (2009), www.gerhard-richter.com/en/videos/ works/september-38 (19’ 21”) 13’. Accessed 14.12.2018. 33. Kaja Silverman, lecture, ‘Panorama: New Perspectives on Richter’, Tate Modern, London, 21.10.2011, www.youtube.com/watch?v=XLsQeSL39iM, (1: 24’ 17”) 1: 21’. Accessed 14.12.2018. 34. David Green, ‘From History Painting to the History of Painting and Back Again: Reflections on the Work of Gerhard Richter’, in David Green and Peter Seddon, eds. History Painting Reassessed: The Representation of History in Contemporary Art (Manchester and New York: Manchester UP, 2000) (31–49) 46. 35. For clarification of Peircean terminology, in particular concerning digital photography and indexicality, see Martin Lefebvre, ‘The Art of Pointing: On Peirce, Indexicality, and Photographic Images’, James Elkins, ed. Photography Theory (Abingdon and New York: Routledge, 2007) 220–244. 36. The text of such a claim is reiterated in the last panel of Naeem Mohaiemen’s phototext piece United Red Army: Timeline (2012). Though other work by Mohaiemen, such as his essay ‘All That Is Certain Vanishes Into Air: Tracing the Anabasis of the Japanese Red Army,’ (in this volume), tends to support an understanding of continuities of eroticizing violence across internal group relations that extend to suicidal impulses in Red Army groupings, the citation of this silencing claim as printed text in plain teleprinterlike sans serif style can also be read as dislocating referral to the very styles of factuality used in reporting and, as such, also as a less imperfect use of such effects of the indexical. 37. See www.gerhard-richter.com/en/art/paintings/abstracts/abstracts-19851989-30/abstractpainting-hm-7756. Accessed 28.11.2018. 38. See ‘Selbstmord/“Das alles schreit nach Lösung”’, Stern, 16.06.1976, 190–191. 39. International Committee of Inquiry, Der Tod Ulrike Meinhofs: Bericht der Internationalen Untersuchenkommission, 2nd edition, (Tübingen: Bernd Polke Verlag, 1979) 5–6. 40. ‘Conversation with Jan Thorn Prikker Concerning the Cycle 18 October 1977, 1989’, Gerhard Richter, The Daily Practice of Painting: Writings and Interviews 1962–1993, ed. Hans-Ulrich Obrist (Cambridge, MA and London: MIT Press/Anthony d’Offay Gallery, 1995) 186. 41. Friedrich Kittler, ‘Of States and Their Terrorists’, Cultural Politics, 8(3) (2012): (385–397) 387.

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42. Contra ‘timelessness’ from interview with Nicholas Serota, ‘Gerhard Richter in the Studio’, ‘Panorama’,Tate Modern, 6.10.2011–8.1.2012,www.youtube.com/watch?v=ExfNJDh4K1g, 4.4.2012, 19. Accessed 18.12.2018. 43. Kaja Silverman, lecture, ‘Panorama: New Perspectives on Richter’, 33’ 50”. 44. Kittler, ‘Of States and Their Terrorists’, 388. 45. Pieter H. Bakker Schut, Stammheim. Der Prozeß gegen die Rote Armee Fraktion (Kiel: Neue Malik Verlag, 1986).

7

Harold Pinter and State Terrorism Aleksandar Sasha Dundjerović

Introduction This chapter comes out of my practice-based research multimedia performance event The Trial of Harold Pinter (2006).1 In October 2006, I adapted and devised with the cast a site-specific, interdisciplinary, and multilingual performance as an immersive promenade theatre, using as a central location the destroyed halls of the Zastava (The Flag) factory in Kragujevac, Serbia. The industrial complex that produced (in)famous Yugo cars in the 1970s and 1980s and electronic household appliances (making TVs, fridges and ovens for socialist and third-world countries) also manufactured military arms. The performance took place seven years after the US-led NATO bombing of what was left of former Yugoslavia.2 This adaptation of a multimedia performance event was founded on the creation of events through the audience’s participatory role (Fischer-Lichte, 2008). The performance text was devised through a montage of a David Butler soundscape performance under the same name, ‘The Trial of Harold Pinter,’ media imagery of the bombing of Serbia and the city of Kragujevac, and Harold Pinter’s anti-war texts: His one-act plays One for the Road (1984), Mountain Language (1988), The New World Order (1991), and Party Time (1991). Together with the text of his 2005 Noble Prize speech and 2003 War Poetry volume, it created a starting point for a multimedia, site-specific performance. In this performance, the media intertextuality—understood as a matrix of intermedial relations between audience and the way they perceived a performative event—was materialized in an environment where the chosen site-specific location was of great importance for the meeting of spectators and actors. The dramaturgy of The Trial of Harold Pinter emerged from the location; it presented a narrative that connected to the audience’s interpretation at political, historical, and social levels (Dundjerović and Navarro Bateman, 2006). The consideration of a dramaturgy of the space—in addition to the use of a real place (a bombed-out factory)—integrated the plurality of media in the creation of a mise-en-scène that represented an imaginary location through the use of Pinter’s text, video projections, soundscape, and dance. The relation between a site and performance can be understood within Roland Barthes’s notion of theatricality and Patrice Pavis’s idea of mise-en-scène as something giving a meaning to the performers’ texts. For Barthes (1972 A: 26), theatricality depends on the language of theatre, which consists of all the elements used on stage as theatre signs, and he regards theatricality as ‘theatre-minus-text.’ For Pavis (1991: 30), ‘Mise-en-scène tries to provide the dramatic text with a situation that will give meaning to the statements of the text.’ Mise-en-scène does not constitute an interpretation

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of the text or an expression separate from the dramatic text but is a ‘reading actualized,’ the mise-en-scène giving it a possible collective reading. This chapter attempts to analyze Harold Pinter’s political activism reflected in his anti-war and anti-oppression literary works, questioning principles of liberty and equality, political commitments, and state propaganda, through my performance practice-led research project that has grown out of this event. Pinter’s human rights political activism, along with the interpretation of his work in the 1980s and early 1990s, shifted to criticize state apparatuses that stimulate terror under the light of US-led wars and open activism against these exploits. With the US-led bombing of

Figure 7.1 The Trial of Harold Pinter (Sudjenje Haroldu Pinteru) JoakimInter Fest, Kragujevac, Serbia, 10 October 2006. Note: The event took place on a promenade starting in front of the Festival Theatre, on the bus, and finishing at the site of the disused and bombed Zastava military factory. The performance was a special event commissioned for the inauguration of the international festival. It won the prize (St. George’s Cross award) by the city council of Kragujevac for best arts event of 2006. See the full performance recording at www.youtube.com/watch?v=jBKV7y4guAk.

142 Aleksandar Sasha Dundjerović several nations from the 2000s onwards, Pinter’s plays have been interpreted within another international context as activism against Western imperialism and American state-created terrorism. What was once a place for the Western liberal intelligentsia to criticize the extremes of dictatorial regimes became a locus for promoting state terror in other countries under the banners of democratization and liberation. This chapter will reflect on the relation between oppressor and victim in devising/adapting a multimedia performance event. Performativity functioned through the mixture of artistic languages and audience participation within a site where space had layers of the meaning-making of the performance event within a community-applied theatre intervention. By constructing the environment for the audience’s experience of terror, performance invoked what was suppressed and made into self-invisible presence—the act of violence (bombing over three months) that destroyed individuals and the community (Thompson, 2005, 2009; Thompson et al., 2009).

International Pinter—dialectics for the 21st century A blindfolded man sitting on a chair. Two men (Des and Lionel) looking at him. DES: Do you want to know something about this man? LIONEL: What? DES: He hasn’t got any idea at all of what we’re going to do to him. LIONEL: He hasn’t, no. DES: He hasn’t, no. He hasn’t got any idea at all about any one of the number of things

that we might do to him. (H. Pinter, The New World Order, 1991) Via his Twitter account, US President Donald Trump posted that Iran would ‘suffer consequences the likes of which few throughout history have ever suffered before’; the US President often uses social media to issue statements about unspecified ‘consequences.’3 In regard to North Korea, the dominant US narrative is that there are a number of options the US has, and, as Des says, there are a ‘number of things that’ the US ‘might do.’ Knowing what has been done to Yugoslavia, Afghanistan, Iraq, Libya, Syria, etc., Pinter’s characters are very much following the US foreign policy script of pressuring and intimidating through threatening unspecified consequences and promising uncertainty to instill a politics of fear. Successive US governments, in the post-9/11 world, have efficaciously constructed such a ‘culture of fear’ through increasing the perception of dangers to which American citizens are now exposed. ‘Prevention of terror’ becomes the justification for the blindfolded, silent man’s torture, providing a new context for Pinter’s politics. Within the international arena Pinter’s politics echo voices against Western state terrorism. The opening image of his short play The New World Order, created in the early 1990s, painfully and accurately resonates with the world of the 2000s; Pinter’s theatrical dystopia in the post-9/11 world confirms the abuse of power in the name of democracy. Audiences witness two investigators inflict punishment (in the contemporary context of Guantanamo-style imprisonment) on a ‘guilty’ man. Blindfolded men—as the guilty others—have no idea what ‘we,’ as the West, the power center,

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‘can do to him.’ The play postulates fear, uncertainty, and collective pain as the pinnacles of Western state terrorism evident in the doctrine of the new world order. Basil Chaisson, in a 2017 book, traces Pinter’s political activities, positioning a ‘late Pinter’ opus from 1980 to 2005 in opposition to his early and middle period work. Pinter, according to Chaisson, does not follow in the traditions of absurdism in the 1950s and 1960s or British political theatre’s ‘kitchen sink’ era in the 1970s. Instead, he offers through his dramatic oeuvre in his work before the 1980s a politics of interpersonal relationships and in the post-1980s period a response to social and state violence, the manipulation of political rhetoric, and an understanding of power relationships through language that usurps authority, personal space, and freedom. His political/personal views from the 1980s up to his death in 2008 were voiced in numerous public condemnations of American neocolonial and imperial tendencies in foreign policy. In the latter years of his career, the consequences of Western governments’ activities in global politics are central to Pinter’s political engagement. Pinter works within international contexts focussed on dialectics where state power structures oppose people whose freedom they suppress through menacing individuals.4 Pinter’s plays in the 1980s, One for the Road (1984) and Mountain Language (1988), and in the 1990s, Party Time (1991) and Ashes to Ashes (1996), open up characters to the influences of the world of dictatorship regimes, local non-democratic state powers, and public interference in personal life. The British criticism of Pinter’s political dramas that usually pointed out how they didn’t address conditions beyond closed local circumstances fell by the wayside with 21st century changes in international conditions and the ‘War on Terror’ narrative from US President George W. Bush. Pinter started to be understood as engaging with the global forces in the world around him, even becoming an activist against US wars. Pinter’s dramatic sketch, The New World Order (1991), was seen by critics as a response to the first American war with Iraq in Kuwait, and the expansion of US international insurgencies became the reference point in the stage interpretation of many of his one-act plays. With the change in global politics in the 2000s, and after the 9/11 terrorist attack gave the US carte blanche to invade whomever came under their sphere of interest, Pinter’s antitotalitarianism one-act plays became staged together, grouped into a response against US international interventions. They became known as the New World Order Cycle.5 As an intuitive writer, Pinter had felt that the Western export of what it called freedom and democracy was a cancer—a cancer that reproduces its own abnormal cells and takes out the original, healthy cells (Mazur, 2013). His later dramatic material did not reference a random abuse of power by a group of Western political con men but actually foreshadowed the maladies of US-led global capitalism and the aggressive takeover of geostrategic resources (oil, gas, water) by rich and powerful countries. Starting from intervention in former Yugoslavia in the 1990s, the invasion and breakup of ‘rogue’ countries, all in the name of ‘security, peace and democracy,’ can be seen in Slavoj Žižek’s 1989 criticism of the capitalist society position of the ‘state’ center as representative of ‘wholesomeness’ (US, UK, West) and the individual or the other as representative of the ‘excluded’ (Iraq, Libya, Syria, North Korea, Russia, China, etc.).6 Žižek proposes that ideology through the opposition process, using Hegelian dialectics, structures the identity of who is good and in opposition to the bad guys, or, to borrow US President Trump’s terminology on global politics, ‘very bad people.’ In this simplification of ‘the bad guys’ we can see Žižek’s ‘non-identity.’ Žižek dialectically positions non-identity where ideology resides in a de-realization of fantasies, in things that one can see and believe, as in what they are, but also those that

144 Aleksandar Sasha Dundjerović one will not want to see and believe.7 Selectivity in who will be ‘excluded’ is driven by what the center wants to see and believe and does not want to see and believe. ‘International Pinter’ (as opposed to ‘Local Pinter’) is perceived to be exploring, through this dialectical opposition, global capitalism as a vehicle of political oppression. The geopolitical context in the 21st century and American wars on different nations under the narrative of ‘war on terror’ offered another level of interpretation of Pinter’s politics, the one where he is defining the ‘center’ (the state) by its dialectical, ideological opposition to the ‘periphery’ (the other) as the oppressor and the other simultaneously identified as ‘seen’ and ‘not seen.’ The ‘West’ (US) is now proliferating oppression on an international level, and the plays from the New World Order Cycle have become a global response to these geopolitical circumstances.

Bombing as a Humanitarian Intervention I have been particularly interested in the term ‘humanitarian intervention’ as used by NATO to justify its bombing of Serbia [.  .  .]. The bombing of Nis, far from being a ‘mistake’ was, in fact, an act of murder. It stemmed from a ‘war’ which was in itself illegal, a bandit act [. . .] we are told [. . .] taken in pursuance of a policy of ‘humanitarian intervention’ [. . .] civilian deaths were described as ‘collateral damage’ [. . .] George W. Bush, in the great American presidential tradition by referring to ‘freedom loving people’ [. . .]. The word ‘freedom’ has resulted in torture and death. I am referring to Guatemala, Turkey, Israel, Haiti, Argentina, and Chile, killed in all cases [. . .] by the United States. (Harold Pinter ‘Humanitarian Interventions,’ speech attacking NATO for bombing of Serbia in 1999, at the award of an honorary degree by the University of Florence in 2001 Roy et al., 2001: 47–48)

The interdisciplinary, site-specific promenade performance, The Trial of Harold Pinter, responded to the contemporary circumstances of the city of Kragujevac, a community devastated by the Yugoslav Civil War in the 1990s and bombing by US and NATO forces in the war of 1999. The destruction of the space, the industrial complex Zastava, as part of a ‘humanitarian intervention’ called, for PR purposes, ‘Angel of Mercy’ was the bombing of a national landmark, a devastation of a space known as the symbol of Yugoslavian socialism. Zastava was not a real military target; the industrial complex was already a defunct factory, due to imposed sanctions, since the early 1990s. The factory produced nothing for years, but it was central to national identity and collective memory. So, it was not just another factory for making a profit or preventing the manufacture of weapons—it was not about money! Zastava had been once (in the pre-1990s) a giant industry, the biggest factory in the region. The bombing was also the destruction of urban identity, as the city consists of a significant working-class population and students (having the second largest science, technical, and engineering university in the country) that interlinked with the factory on a number of levels. Everyone in the city of Kragujevac had someone or had known someone who worked there. Zastava was in many ways a monument to national independence and, after the Second World War, the pride of a new Communist Yugoslavia that was building up a working-class population among a peasant majority. Historically, in 1853, Serbian Prince Aleksandar Karađorđević, with the approval of Napoleon III, commissioned

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Charles Loubry, the controller of a private French gun foundry, to set up an industrial complex called Topolivnica (foundry), manufacturing cannon barrels. From 1880, the factory manufactured a full range of military equipment and in 1888 produced a rapid-fire military rifle considered the best in the world at that time. Before the Second World War, the Zastava factory had 12,000 workers. It was among the largest military factories in Europe. The Nazis destroyed it during the war, and in 1944, after the liberation, when it reopened, only 670 workers came back to the factory. After the war, under President Tito, all the way until 1992, when its manufacturing and exports were severely disrupted and diminished due to UN sanctions on Yugoslavia, the Zastava factory was one of the leading suppliers of the Yugoslav National Army and an exporter of all grades of military weapons to non-Allied countries. Most of its workforce was made unemployed, which is still the case today. Unemployment causes much tension in the community. The performance was engaging with the significance of collective memory about heritage and the 1990s post-war landscape shaping the post-war environment. The site-specific event was also applied theatre that in a participatory way engaged audiences and used performativity based on a montage of physical and visual images and soundscape and a mix of live and recorded scenes. The created environment intended to relive collective experience of state-induced terrorism during the NATO bombing of Yugoslavia, either through a terrorizing of the people by its government (the Milošević regime) or terrorist acts undertaken by various fractions in the civil wars, often with knowledge and approval of foreign governments (US) and by NATO bombing of civilians. The war in which the US was there supposedly to protect the victims, under the guise of the ‘humanitarian intervention’ codenamed ‘Angel of Mercy,’ was in fact killing people on all sides of the conflict (over the independence of Kosovo). Noam Chomsky, in his essay ‘Visions of Righteousness,’ calls the US’s carefully created PR image a pretense of ‘aggravated innocence.’ When writing about the Vietnam war he pointed out, decades before the ‘war on terror’ became US policy, a major theme of our history from the earliest days has been a combination of hideous atrocities and protestations of awesome benevolence. It should come as no great surprise to students of American history that we are the injured party in Indochina. (1986: 18) Evidently, Pinter was very vocal in his support for pacifism, human rights, and opposition to war and state-imposed terror used against a civilian population. He was critical of human rights abuses and the use of systematic and state-supported torture generally associated with underdeveloped democracies (e.g., Turks over Kurds or dictatorial regimes in East Europe). Pinter’s political activism is well documented and present throughout his career from being involved in the British Anti-Apartheid Movement (1959–1994), and he was an active member of the Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament (CND) in the UK and was part of several anti-war movements. As a member of organizations such as the PEN club and Amnesty International, and through the contacts of his second wife, Lady Antonia Fraser, Pinter started to engage proactively in the UK national political scene. In June 1988, with a number of leading intellectuals, he formed the social and political group June 20, which was resisted by the mainstream and labeled ‘left-wing,’ with the negative context in popular media of

146 Aleksandar Sasha Dundjerović being ‘left,’ and seen in a clichéd representation as being anti-democratic and antifreedom.8 While in the early 1990s Pinter’s politics embodied in his one-act plays could still be seen as ‘Western liberal commentary’ on totalitarian regimes and as criticism of human rights abuses in non-Western countries, a dramatic shift in Pinter’s politics occurred throughout the 1990s. As I’ve mentioned, with the change in global politics and Bush Junior’s ‘War on Terror’ following 9/11, Pinter’s one-act plays became grouped into the New World Order Cycle. The Bush administration exploited Middle Eastern catastrophe to create financial profit, outsourced the running of the war in Iraq to the private companies Halliburton and Blackwater, and in the middle of the engendered civil war handed over control of the country’s rich reserves of oil to Shell and BP. Indeed, the administration created what Naomi Klein (2008) refers to as ‘disaster capitalism,’ whose main argument is that the West engineered conflict to acquire access to abundant oil resources and resulting financial power. Pinter became a vocal opponent of fabricated ‘humanitarian wars’ and statesupported terror, focussing his activism in the latter years of his life against US-led wars. In 2003 he published an anthology of his poetry entitled War, his anti-war response to the bombing and invasion of Iraq, winning the Wilfred Owen Award. One-act plays, poetry, and the text of his Nobel Prize lecture in 2005, Art, Truth, and Politics, formed the textual resources for the experience of the performance event. A central focus for Pinter’s Nobel Prize speech was truthfulness and the duty of the poet (and, subsequently, the dramatist) to seek truth in a time of ‘darkness’ and suppression of the individual by the socially imposed norms of ‘the center’ and dominant global power. Pinter’s activist response in his Nobel speech to Western doctrines of ‘New World Order’ global politics became evident in his transference of the actants of oppression from local dictatorship regimes to the US’s ‘righteousness’ in defending itself while becoming an actant of state-promoted terror. Promoting blind military oppressive behavior to solicit compliance under the pretence of ‘helping’ or ‘protecting’ (alongside the promotion of a culture of fear and scaremongering) became the norm for the state terrorism against which Pinter rebelled. At the end of the second decade of the 21st century, it is obvious that with the catastrophic and failed US democratic interventions in the breakup of Yugoslavia, Iraq, Libya, Syria, and Ukraine (to name a few examples), state terrorism has been orchestrated though false justifications for military interventions. Pinter’s writings gained another level of meaning, understood as an activist response to an imperialist campaign using terror to advance their agenda, giving birth to a theatre form that became local, immersive, and experiential for Western audiences. The performance event approach to Pinter’s body of work was through questioning the current problems of today by locating the text within a space that embodied the past, which is looked at in its genealogical context, not as a history, but as an example of Foucault’s concept of ‘history of the present’—as he pointed out, ‘not to write a history of the past in terms of the present, but write the history of the present’ (1977: 31). The central idea—to use history as a means of critical engagement with the present—is not reduced to ‘presentism’ (reading the present through the past by ‘discovering’ the same in the past). Foucault’s genealogy means to begin the analysis from a question posed in the present. Genealogy’s starting point is a concrete, specific, critical, ‘practice-oriented’ observation about the present, an object that is constructed and experienced in the present. The Trial of Harold Pinter performance event presents, self-consciously, questions of the current situation experienced in the present. What is the truth? What has

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happened in the present that defines their lives? The body of space—the industrial, empty, broken factory that is barred and derelict—and the body of performers/audiences in the present moment formed a genealogical criticism of the current situation through Foucault’s ‘history of the present.’

The Performance: Intermediality of Space as Text In 1958 I wrote the following: ‘There are no hard distinctions between what is real and what is unreal, nor between what is true and what is false. A thing is not necessarily either true or false; it can be both true and false.’ I believe that these assertions still make sense and do still apply to the exploration of reality through art. So as a writer I stand by them, but as a citizen I cannot. As a citizen, I must ask: What is true? What is false? Harold Pinter, Nobel Lecture: Art, Truth, and Politics, 2005.9

The performance event in Zastava used as the main text a soundscape, also called ‘The Trial of Harold Pinter,’ created by sound artist David Butler. It also used fragments from Pinter’s one-act plays, One for the Road, Mountain Language, Party Time, and New World Order, which were edited into the performance. The abandoned space in the bombed factory Zastava and various found objects as physical resources were understood as an environment symbolic of war trauma. The found objects in the site referred to different uses of the space as industry, shelter, military barrack, and bombed site and were therefore also part of the performance. The space as a location was essential as a text that embodied the soundscape, film projections, and fragments of Pinter’s texts. The performance event started outside of the main international theatre festival building Joakim Interfest, held in the oldest theatre in Serbia, the Knjaževačko Srpski Teatar. The title for the performance came from Butler’s ‘The Trial of Harold Pinter,’ whose soundscape juxtaposed Harold Pinter’s 2006 Nobel Prize speech with oneline comments from Pinter’s characters. His characters are ‘talking back’ to him, putting Pinter on trial. The multilingual (Serbian and English) performance came from a mixed cast of English and Serbian performers mixing two languages. Three performers came from the Kolectiv Theatre Manchester and eight performers from the host theatre, Knjaževačko Srpski Teatar, Kragujevac. No one had entered the bombed-out factory site since 1999. It was severely bombed out by NATO forces, and after its destruction the factory was largely abandoned and, apart from a few small units, closed off. The location, left in the same condition of destruction site, provided a spatial narrative, contextualizing the performance event. The place had been locked up and kept away from the public until we were given permission to enter the site and use it as a performance space, bringing the place and all memories embedded in the location to life. Moreover, the cultural significance of the location was multilayered and immense. Seven years after the bombing, whatever had been left of the factory complex was sold off in the process of privatization. These decisions left thousands of workers unemployed. The starting research aims of the performance project were to explore aspects of an open and flexible creative process within a ‘found’ and created environment: •

engaging an audience that had suffered a traumatic war event and helping them see through self-observation their past and present chronic anxiety;

148 Aleksandar Sasha Dundjerović •

the creation of media intertextuality performance through the collage of various media texts and relations between site, performance, spectator, and different visual and soundscapes.

The performance making was infuenced by Robert Lepage’s transformation of performance mise-en-scène and the process of creating spontaneous transient events by using a system of performance that devises RSVP scores.10 Lepage’s method was that of taking one performance as a resource to develop another (Dundjerović, 2007). Transformation of mise-en-scène comes out of what the French director Roger Planchon referred to as ‘écriture scénique’ (stage writing) and Richard Schechner’s notion of performance text. The emphasis in mise-en-scène is no longer on fixed narrative and character but on the development of a performance text, the one embedded in a performance mise-en-scène. The concept of écriture scénique derived from discussions in the early 1960s about how to adapt and modernize a classical text for contemporary theatre. The director, as an author, would have to ‘rewrite’ the fixed classical text through the mise-en-scène and create his or her own écriture scénique to render the text more contemporary. Planchon claims that from Brecht he learned the concept of the ‘total responsibility’ of écriture scénique for the nature of the performance (Bradby and Sparks, 1997: 41). The plurality of media in performance mise-en-scène entails that the place is of great importance as a context for the relating of spectators and actors. The relation between a site and performance can be seen within Roland Barthes’s notion of theatricality and in Pavis’s idea of performance mise-en-scène as something giving a meaning to the performers’ texts. According to Pavis, ‘Mise en scène tries to provide the dramatic text with a situation that will give meaning to the statements [énoncés] of the text.’ Mise-en-scène does not constitute an interpretation of the text or an expression separate from the dramatic text but is a ‘reading actualized,’ the mise-en-scène giving it a possible collective reading (Pavis, 1991: 30). The media intertextuality performance consisted of a sequence of events relating directly to the site-specific location (Birch and Tompkins, 2012; Pearson, 2010). The events used space and actions placed in a dialectical opposition against each other: A festival theatre that becomes a gathering center for refugees, a bus transporting them to the undisclosed location, and an airplane where the English-speaking stewards give directions before takeoff; a bombed factory that becomes a VIP lounge waiting room for a trip of their lifetime. The whole mise-en-scene was devised with these juxtapositions in mind, following a unity of dialectical oppositions. Media projections and sound acoustics related to the experiences of the bombing of Serbia and numerous international American military interventions in the last decades. Pinter’s texts were understood in the context of these multiple references to transgress the local and had global significance. The present oppression, implicit violence, and menace in the room where his characters reside are developed now with a different matrix of understandings informed by international circumstances. Within the global context, his characters represented narratives for victims of Western wars (the oppressors), victims recognized by Pinter in relation to their own experience of being oppressed. Throughout the performance in the hall of the bombed-out factory, with the use of dialectical opposition, we had a continuous location for the audience—a VIP airport lounge with a highly sexualized female hostess who entertained them as they waited to be taken on a dream holiday. The idea for the binary opposition within

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performance events was simple: The audience is in a transit area, waiting to board the plane, an imaginary VIP lounge in an undisclosed airport. On the way to the gate, they encounter horrors from Pinter’s play about state abuse and violence. The starting point was in front of the theatre. The bus journey was part of the performance journey as another performance score. The environments were transformed, from the festival to the bus and then to a bombed-out factory. With these transformations, the role of the audience also changed from festival theatre-goers to blindfolded passengers (but also prisoners), mountain people, and, finally, those in a holding room waiting for their deaths. The sequence of events: •

• •

•

•

•

•

•

•

Gathering on the square. The audience gathered in front of the festival theatre building at midnight on the main city square. This was the only site announced to the audience. On the bus. Getting the audience on the buses and giving them blindfolds as if they are going to a surprise party. Police cars were escorting the buses. Journey. Because the shortest route to the site involved going through the old town in the direction opposite to the one-way street system, the police had to close off roads and escort the buses. Scenes from Pinter’s Party Time were performed on the bus. At the gates. Stopped by real security guards at the gates until they got clearance from the central main office while they checked some of the passengers’ identity cards. In front of a wall. The only remaining wall of the building, in front of which edited scenes from Pinter’s Mountain Language were performed. Behind was a demolished warehouse with part of the roof and sections of the walls missing. Inside the main hall. Soldiers escorted the audience into the empty hall, where three simultaneous actions took place in different locations: Documentary film projection of NATO bombing of the factory they were in, Butler’s audio installation soundscape, and video projection of a solo performance of a silent man sitting on a metal hospital-like bed reading a newspaper. VIP lounge. The hostess entertained (dancing, talking individually, offering drinks) the guests, who were now in the VIP club, while reciting Pinter’s anti-war poetry. Rooms. During these simultaneous actions, the audience was taken in small groups by soldiers from the main hall into side spaces (one in the courtyard and the other in another wheelhouse), where the edited text of One For the Road and New World Order was performed. Dance of death. The end was when all the audience came back in the main hall for the final reciting of Pinter’s poems, after which there was simulated bombing and actors (now dead characters) engaged the audience (also dead) in dancing the waltz.

The performativity responded to popular events and images from Serbian iconography in the last two decades—civil unrest and protests, street anti-government demonstrations, war, refugees and imprisonment, collective punishment through imposed sanctions, bombing, and selling of public properties to the highest private bidders in a forced capitalist commercialization of Serbia. The new ‘scores’ became waiting

150 Aleksandar Sasha Dundjerović in front of the theatre, the bus journey, in front of the wall, the factory hall, Pinter’s soundscape, projections of the bombing, the erotic VIP hostess, live projections of the man (a worker) on a metal bed, and soldiers controlling the audience. Some of these scores developed linearly, as with the journey from the theatre to the factory. Other scores, such as the projections, the hostess, the soldiers, and the soundscape, took place at the same time, overlapping and affecting the audience simultaneously. Co-existence of the live and the digital (visual and audio) served both to disorient the audience’s experience and understanding of theatrical time and to challenge the notion of temporal montage. The performance engaged the audience with an existence outside of time on stage (Dixon, 2005: 78).

Reflections on Truth As every single person here knows, the justification for the invasion of Iraq was that Saddam Hussein possessed a highly dangerous body of weapons of mass destruction, some of which could be fired in 45 minutes, bringing about appalling devastation. We were assured that was true. It was not true. We were told that Iraq had a relationship with Al-Qaeda and shared responsibility for the atrocity in New York on September 11th, 2001. We were assured that this was true. It was not true. We were told that Iraq threatened the security of the world. We were assured it was true. It was not true. The truth is something entirely different. The truth is to do with how the United States understands its role in the world and how it chooses to embody it. Harold Pinter, Nobel Prize Lecture: Art, Truth, and Politics, 200511

Pinter foreshadowed ‘post-truth’ politics and the ‘art of the lie’ that expanded throughout the 2010s with media, new technology, and communication and through social networking, becoming as acceptable and influential as mainstream media, influencing public opinion through emotions and personal stories and beliefs. However, Pinter was an author who functioned within a state center and had a mainstream, culturally iconic position. The site-specific performance, The Trial of Harold Pinter, was a representation of Pinter’s ideology that was both confirmed and questioned, put on trial by characters—actors and the audience—who were participants in a play. To follow Žižek’s assertation, ideology is the matrix that regulates misconceptions and misrepresentations (2008: 25–27). Before going to the festival, I decided to keep the key resources as fixed elements. These were the soundscape from the acoustic installation, ‘The Trial of Harold Pinter’; scenes from Pinter’s one-act plays; the erotic hostess entertainer; and Pinter’s anti-war poetry. The flexible elements were connected to the site and space as dramaturgical context. First, we needed to find a location. The site presented itself once I got confirmation from the city authorities that we could use the bombed and abandoned Zastava military factory as the location for our performance. Second, we needed to find relevant video material and photographs relating to the NATO bombing of the city and the factory. These were simultaneously projected on two opposite walls of the hall. The projections of NATO’s bombing of Serbia were created by RTK, a local TV station, from their archives. They were on a five-minute loop on one side of the hall, where the VIP hostess was located. On the other side of the hall, there was a live projection of an actor who was simultaneously present on the stage. He was silently ‘living in his space’ on a metal bed, reading a newspaper and drinking his morning

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Turkish coffee, ‘resisting’ the violence through these ordinary actions. Third, the actors from Knjazevacko Srpski Teatar were only brought into the project seventy-two hours before performing in Mountain Language and the VIP lounge installation. Fourth, the audience’s experiences of past events served as an interpretative connection for different segments of the performance. For example, the audience was blindfolded and transported in buses from the theatre building to the disused bombed factory, which was the primary performance site. The performance was not included in the official festival programme (which was competitive), and, more importantly, it was intentionally kept away from the ‘public eye.’ From the start, the performance was supposed to be an open event planned to take place sometime during the festival and somewhere in the city, using Pinter as a reference point but leaving all other production elements flexible. Our rehearsal time of three days was used to write and ‘montage’ the performance rather than to rehearse—find a performance space, prepare video material, translate English material into Serbian, and work with the Serbian actors. In addition to the live performance, the project involved the filming of the performance by a local TV station that participated in co-organizing by providing archival footage of the bombing. The ‘truth’ is what is needed for a center or the dominant power to achieve its overall objectives. A similar type of fake ‘truth,’ as with Iraq WMD, was imposed during the bombing of Yugoslavia, and the audiences at the performance event were aware of it. It was part of the ‘context’ they brought with them to the performance. They observed the conditions of terror they were subjected to, reliving it in the present through the established relations between actions in the performance event. However, they also observed themselves frozen in time as they were taken back to the site and time (space, performance action, video footage, sound installation) where the violence took place that created collective trauma. Once the performance had finished (after 2 a.m.), the audience stayed for another hour in front of the venue (factory) talking and slowly coming back to real life after experiencing the ‘history of the present’ moment. If we look at the audience’s experiences of this event from the human response theory to threat or trauma, we can see the audience behavior as a collective freezing. In addition to two other physiological states, flight and fight, freeze is an acute stress response to perceived threats. As Barlow’s description of the adaptive alarm model may suggest, in some threatening situations a response takes place, known as freezing or tonic immobility, which may take over other competing reactions. Accompanying this negative affective state is a strong physiological or somatic component. This somatic state may be the physiological substrate of readiness, often described as vigilance or hypervigilance, which may underlie a state of preparation to counteract helplessness (Barlow, 2002: 14). In these situations, a freeze tendency becomes the central response to the threat. Freezing serves as protection by stopping any further damage and preserving energy. Indeed, freezing is a response caused by a feeling that there is no hope of survival or escape, as happens in car accidents, rape, or when being robbed at gunpoint. At the heart of this construct is a sense of uncontrollability, mainly focussed on the possible future threat, danger, or other challenges that may have an adverse outcome. Thus, this condition could be characterized, roughly, as a state of helplessness because of a perceived inability to predict, control, or obtain desired results or outcomes. The production was not part of the official festival selection; it was announced only on the day of the performance as an event taking place at midnight in front of the main theatre building. In this way, The Trial of Harold Pinter was a guerilla

152 Aleksandar Sasha Dundjerović one-off performance event. It was kept a secret from the festival audience, and it was not included in the festival promotion. It was only advertised the very evening of the performance as a free event, a street performance. The word spread around: Are you going to The Trial of Harold Pinter? Would you like to go to see The trial of Harold Pinter? Space (the bombed-out factory), as a location, was a frozen site in time, not only physically but also emotionally, as a response to a violation that took place—space that was left in a state of trauma. When we entered the site to try out the scores, we saw floors covered in shattered glass, machine parts thrown around by bomb blasts, and even a left worker’s boot whose top part was cut by shrapnel. The story was that there had been a number of workers inside as a live shell fell inside the factory the night the factory was blasted. The audience responded to the performance event as a familiar occurrence, both as a location and as an experience they were witnessing. The performance related to the collective memories and lived experience of the audience, who went through more than three months of intensive NATO bombing of Serbia in 1999, in which more than 5,000 people lost their lives or were declared missing. The audience did not want to be reminded and again positioned in the same circumstances. Since flight and aggressiveness were likely to be ineffective, the participatory, promenade, sitespecific performance experience engaged the audience’s memories and their collective freeze response to ongoing decades of threats of sanctions and bombs. The hostess inside the hall, in a white dress, bore the same name as NATO’s bombing operation in Serbia, ‘Merciful Angel,’ and the title was projected on her as well as on the images of the bombing. She was a fake constructing the truth—an imaginary subject in a posttruth politics Pinter exposes. The VIP lounge hostess represents manufactured reality conceived for the public by the leading world powers to justify actions taken against sovereign states. An audience member’s testimony gives an account of their experience during the performance: The soldiers slowly lead the audience into a Hall, a large room, to face the two existing poles of their reality. They become aware of their own isolation and the fact that numerous conditions are regularly being imposed upon them. The Hostess is relating to the demolished room as if it is a luxury VIP lounge. The audience is barely aware that the man sits silently alone on a hospital bed, but there is no further explanation of why he is there or how long he will be there, why he is alone and what happened to him. Did he lose his family? Was he wounded? The unspecified opening of this scene reminds us of the beginnings of Pinter’s plays, and the audience can question the history of the character in the same way Pinter does it: who was the dead body, who found the dead body, was the dead body abandoned? Only the pictures of the bombing and the destruction that are projected on the wall inform the situation. The stark reality of the man is further supplemented by the poorly furnished surroundings and his helplessness in front of the external forces that shattered his life to pieces. Although the man has no lines in the play, the character seems to develop simultaneously with the action; the actor assumes the character as the story progresses. His complete silence during the whole play bears much more significance than the empty talking of the hostess. (Pavićević, 2007)

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From this account, we can see connections the audience made between separate simultaneous actions (‘scores’), based on their own experience, that contextualized seemingly different acts.

Conclusion This project did not aim or work towards any particular production outcomes. Instead, we had only environments that we wanted the audience to be in, and we tried to expose them to the familiar iconography of war in Yugoslavia. The ‘scores’— such as the bus journey, in front of the wall, the factory hall as a VIP lounge, Pinter’s soundscape, the video projections of the bombing, the man on a metal bed—were all done as separate narratives whose connections were left for the audience to make. Also, performing at what remained of the Zastava site following the NATO bombing provided a rich context that gave various layers of meaning with which to build upon the relevance of Pinter’s anti-war, anti-terror arts and politics. The audience was left to establish their connections and interpret and respond to the performance. Just a few weeks before the performance event, former employees, who had been made redundant during Serbia’s ‘privatization’ and ‘democratization’ process, demonstrated in front of the factory (secured by the same guards who took part in the performance). As a one-off performance intervention, it had been seen by not more than 200 people. However, a regional TV channel, TV Kragujevac, filmed the event and broadcast it. Once on DVD the project became part of the University of Kragujevac’s library and was included in the post-graduate programme in multimedia studies. The project generated discussion and debate among Serbian activist groups, receiving in 2007 the St. George’s Cross award for the best cultural event of 2006. Although Pinter was as much a character as the author of the material collaged, the relationship between past and present was embedded within the event. Even using the word ‘trial’ in the title has significant resonance in Serbia. The International War Tribunal for former Yugoslavia in The Hague defined Serbian reality post-1990s conflicts and after the bombing. Serbia’s future and membership in the European Union in the first two decades of the millennium, although changing government and trying to come out from the position of ‘exclusion,’ depended on the outcomes of an endless succession of trials at The Hague tribunal of different Serbian politicians and military leaders from the 1990s. Although seven years had passed since the bombing, the problem had not been resolved. The community living in the present was still in a collective frozen response with regard to the wars of the 1990s.

Notes 1. The Trial of Harold Pinter received the highest prize for culture and art in 2007 from Kragujevac City Council—the St. George’s Cross for best cultural event of 2006. 2. In 1999, Serbia and Montenegro remained together in federation, sharing centuries of the same national, historical, and religious Orthodox Christian heritage. 3. ‘Iran “will suffer” Trump’s EXPLOSIVE rant at Rouhani as he threatens “mother of all WARS”’ Express 23 July 2018 See www.express.co.uk/news/world/992775/world-war-3iran-donald-trump-nuclear-deal-hassan-rouhani. 4. We will accept the Hegelian concept of dialectics as a medium of finding truth through oppositions and Marx’s dialectical materialism as the unity of contradictions that is in a perpetual state of movement and change.

154 Aleksandar Sasha Dundjerović 5. Examples of this interpretation of Pinter’s The New World Order cycle, in addition to my own directing and adapting of the cycle in June 2009 for the Royal Court Theatre, Kragujeavac, Serbia (see Dundjerović A., ‘Freezing of Collective Memory,’ Performance Research 18–6, 2014), were done in May 2011 by Hydrocracker Theatre in Brighton Town Hall for the Brighton Festival as a site-specific promenade performance. According to a general critical interpretation, Pinter’s work done as immersive political theatre is showing the underpinning of abuse of power in the name of freedom and democracy. See www. theguardian.com/stage/2011/may/16/new-world-order-brighton-review. 6. Žižek (1989) argues that people, through commodities, embody values, although they know that relationships between people are behind the relations between things, pointing to this duality of oppositions that forms social reality through antagonism, which forms capitalist ideology. 7. Žižek (2010) sums up the changes in the world post-fall of the Berlin wall and establishes Marxist commodity fetishism as a collective response of the West to economic meltdown and entrapment in ideological fantasy. 8. See the write-up in Obituary (25 December 2008), ‘Harold Pinter: the most original, stylish and enigmatic writer in post-war British theatre,’ The Telegraph. Available at www. telegraph.co.uk/news/obituaries/3949227/Harold-Pinter-the-most-original-stylish-andenigmatic-writer-in-the-post-war-revival-of-British-theatre.html (Accessed on 6 February 2018). 9. For the full speech, see www.nobelprize.org/nobel_prizes/literature/laureates/2005/pinterlecture-e.html. 10. The initials ‘RSVP’—please reply—are a communication tool, an invitation to the audience to respond, but also to the other performers, in an improvised manner. This creative process was conceived by Lawrence and Anna Halprin, a landscape architect and environmental planner and his wife, a dancer, choreographer, and artist. 11. See www.nobelprize.org/nobel_prizes/literature/laureates/2005/pinter-lecture-e.html.

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Mazur, P. (2013) ‘Freezing of Living Cells: Mechanisms and Implications’, http:ajpcell.physiology.org. Pavićević, J. (2007) ‘Pinter on Trial: Multimedia Representation and Reception’, Unpublished MA thesis, University of Kragujevac, Kragujevac, Serbia. Pavis, P. (1991) Theatre at the Crossroads of Culture, London: Routledge. Pearson, M. (2010) Site-Specific Performance, Houndmills: Palgrave Macmillan. Pinter, H. (2005) Nobel Lecture: Art, Truth and Politics, www.nobelprize.org/nobel_prizes/ literature/laureates/2005/pinter-lecture-e.html. Roy, A., et al. (2001). ‘Humanitarian Intervention’, In War Is Peace, edited by Ken Coates, Nottingham: The Spokesman, The Russell Press Ltd. Thompson, J. (2005) Digging Up Stories, Manchester: Manchester University Press. Thompson, J. (2009) Performance Affects, Houndmills: Palgrave Macmillan. Thompson, J., J. Hughes and M. Balfour (2009) Performance in Place of War: Enactments, London and Chicago: Seagull and University of Chicago Press. Žižek, S. (2008, 1st edn 1989) The Sublime Object of Ideology, London: Verso.

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‘Terrorism,’ ‘Rebellion,’ ‘Resistance’ Excavating the Role of Art in Activist Social Transformation Jonathan Day

Definitions and Commitments The somewhat romantic idea of the artist-activist is a celebrated social refrain. From the imagined terrors of Goya, John Heartfield’s incisiveness, and Diego Rivera’s polemic to Pablo Picasso’s or Frida Kahlo’s far more enduring and subtle work— influenced nonetheless by their passionate communism—the political and social positions of artists have been lauded and demonized. I wonder whether even Vincent Van Gogh could have painted the astonishing celebration that is Starry Night without his earlier attempts at social intervention and deep empathy with poverty and suffering? This association with activism does, though, seem rather counterintuitive given that the fine art school and the historical notion of ‘fine art’ rely heavily on Emmanuel Kant’s ideas around the necessary ‘disinterestedness’ of the work. So is the artistactivist really a thing, and, if so, why? This question is given particular urgency by the still fairly recent introduction of Prevent legislation by the UK government and the duty institutions have under law to report any observations of involvement in ‘terrorist’ activity. Given that the charity Greenpeace and the citizen environmental network Extinction Rebellion have been listed among the proscribed organizations, it is clear that our understanding of ‘terrorism’ and the extent to which it is possible to separate it from ‘activism’ has become very significant. ‘Terrorism’ is a shifting, chimerical notion, applied in an astonishing array of contexts and manners. Although most often used pejoratively, it is even sometimes selfapplied by people who, though they may be willing to stretch the envelope of the law, generally work within it. Peter Brown’s film Confessions of an Eco-Terrorist1 refers to the work of Paul Watson with Greenpeace and the charity Sea Shepherd and is one such self-application. Among the most disturbing applications of the term are cases involving children. In this respect, George Orwell missed the mark with his novel 1984.2 He was 30 years too early. The book presents us with the then utterly unlikely notion of two-way TVs, through which the state monitored its individuals. Such screen-based devices are now in almost every home and pocket, and children are, as he predicted, dragged from classrooms and interrogated for terrorism. In one such situation a ten-year-old boy was questioned by police after he misspelled ‘terraced’ as ‘terrorist.’ Reuters reported on January 20, 2016, that a ten year old Muslim boy has been questioned by Police in the north of England after mistakenly writing in an English lesson that he lived in a terrorist house, the

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BBC reported today. The boy had intended to write that he lived in a terraced house but teachers did not realize he had made an error and reported the boy to the Police in accordance with new counter terrorism rules. ‘He’s now scared of writing or using his imagination,’ his cousin was quoted as saying.3 Another child was questioned about Isis/Daesh after discussing environmental activism: A Muslim schoolboy was questioned about Islamic State after a classroom discussion about environmental activism, The Guardian has learned. The parents of the 14 year old are taking legal action after the boy said he was left ‘scared and nervous’ by his experience with school officials in north London and was left reluctant to join in class discussions for fear of being suspected of extremism.4 This is not to say that vigilance is unnecessary or to try to portray children as always uninvolved—history teaches us otherwise on that. For our argument, though, this latter case very clearly reveals the elision, in some minds, of activism and terrorism. We could argue that, for a law-abiding subject (of a monarchy) or citizen (of a republic), this should not be a problem. This would be a sound argument if states were immune to corruption and wrongdoing. In Orwell’s book, he posited three global power blocs practicing ‘false flag’ terrorism on themselves to control their populations and assure compliance through fear. This, interestingly, is just the thing suggested by a large number of online discussion boards, chat rooms, and bloggers. While neither the author nor the publisher affirms or attests to the truth of any of these in any way, claims—for example, around the funding of groups such as Isis/Daesh—present extensive and often plausible arguments. In FreeGolanHeights,5 a blogger very cogently and carefully constructs an argument detailing its writer’s suspicions around current motivations and stakeholders in the Syrian conflict. While it is speculative and controversial, we are all very aware historically of the ways in which states and corporations have interfered covertly and nefariously in every aspect of society and civilization. Bloggers argue for systematic corporate/political sponsorship of a number of so-called rebel, or terrorist (depending on the position of the writer), groups and the systematic destabilization of the region for the purposes of the acquisition and shipment of oil. Arguments draw on public domain oil company documents, on visual evidence, and on financial trailing of assets. Whether or not they are right in any or all of their suspicions—on the basis that opinion without evidence is prejudice—their claims are at least well referenced. Here are the sources: www.huffingtonpost.co.uk/2015/09/07/dont-bomb-syria-campaign-onlineagainst-airstrikes_n_8097720.html http://uk.businessinsider.com/why-isis-uses-toyota-trucks-2015-10?r=US&IR=T https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tony_Hayward www.businessinsider.com/why-isis-uses-toyota-trucks-2015-10 www.genelenergy.com/contact-us/contact-us/ www.genelenergy.com/about-us/our-senior-team/board-of-directors/ www.genelenergy.com/about-us/our-senior-team/senior-management/ www.theecologist.org/News/news_round_up/2986289/israel_to_annex_golan_ heights_after_billion_barrel_oil_find.html

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Figure 8.1 Anonymous viral image. Source: www.nationofchange.org/2017/01/15/cheney-rothschild-fox-news-murdoch-drill-oil-syria-violatinginternational-law/ (accessed November 27, 2019)

www.securitycouncilreport.org/atf/cf/%7B65BFCF9B-6D27-4E9C-8CD3CF6E4FF96FF9%7D/Golan%20Heights%20A%20Res%2064%2095.pdf http://genieoilgas.com/about-us/strategic-advisory-board/ www.globes.co.il/en/article-israel-buys-most-oil-smuggled-from-isis-territoryreport-1001084873 http://edition.cnn.com/2015/08/21/middleeast/israel-golan-heights-attacks-syria/ www.nytimes.com/2011/05/15/world/middleeast/15prince.html If there is any truth here, then groups who are paradigmatically terrorist in the media are, as in Orwell’s novel, sponsored by the heart of the establishment that they purport to terrorize—essentially enacting Orwell’s predictions. Many others argue, again often convincingly, that elected offcials and members of government are also perpetrators of terror. Ariella Azoulay’s proposed Museum of Regime Made Disasters in Tel Aviv6 is a reminder of the legion instances of state- and government-perpetrated human rights outrages. These outrages are both overt and systemic—and we ignore their subtle knife at our peril. Italian judge Roberto Saviano, renowned for his involvement in Mafa trials, said at the Hay Literary Festival that the ‘UK is the most corrupt country in the world,’7 citing systematic corruption embedded in the country’s political and fnancial institutions. While we cannot here validate or deny his statement, if there is any truth to it, then resisting/rebelling against this corruption is not only justified but also essential. To further emphasize the situation we need look no further than the unaccountable dominance of a very small and socially unrepresentative ruling class in supposedly democratic UK politics. Two of the last three prime ministers and a recent Chancellor of the Exchequer were all members of the tiny, elite Bullingdon dining club. Boris Johnson, David Cameron, and George Osborne were all members of the group, based

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at Oxford University, at the same time. Membership is by invitation, and the club is renowned for scandalous public sexual acts and, most famously, for burning money in the presence of homeless people. The Sun newspaper described it on February 15, 2018, as follows: The club was founded in 1780 as a hunting and sport club, notably playing cricket. Membership has reportedly declined to just a few members as Oxford students are not keen to be associated with the upper class elitism and contempt for the poor it represents. Former members include former PM David Cameron, Boris Johnson and former Chancellor of the Exchequer George Osborne—who were famously pictured together in 1987.8 This kind of nepotism, alongside widely published abuses of process and contempt for law—evidenced by the most senior ‘leaders’ of many countries, including both the UK and USA—reemphasizes the importance of resistance. In the same way that politicians and governments require constant oversight, so, too, do the actions of corporations. A number of bloggers point out the apparent injustice surrounding corporate misdoings. Here images represent the banker, Fred Goodwin, who was in charge of the Bank of Scotland when it collapsed. The company’s problems are central to economic and financial difficulties impacting millions of people. Cartoonist Steve Bell depicted the banker wearing a parachute marked ‘RBS’—a reference to Goodwin’s departure from the company with a significant pension—and his trousers overflowing with gold pieces. Written across the trousers is ‘The greatest golden trousering in British corporate history,’ a reference to the benefit he continues to derive from the company, despite its losses and devastating consequences for others. Malcolm Higgs, an occupational psychologist at the University of Southampton, described highly paid yet apparently ethically lacking executives as ‘corporate psychopaths.’ He said in The Independent newspaper, ‘The big question is: how do these “corporate psychopaths” get to the top? They’re actually quite engaging people, they can appear very visionary. But they can’t take any negative feedback, so they lose contact with reality.’9 It is clear that, as subjects and citizens, we are not at all in safe hands. Activism, then, is essential, but do we need art school activists? Aldous Huxley said in 1962, in Berkeley, California: There will be in the next generation or so a pharmacological method of making people love their servitude and producing dictatorship without tears, so to speak, producing a kind of painless concentration camp for entire societies so that people will in fact have their liberties taken away from them but will rather enjoy it.10 Charlie Brooker in his science fction work Black Mirror (February 25, 2013) eloquently picks up Orwell’s and Huxley’s themes with his story of Waldo, an animated bear that is used as a sympathetic popular mouthpiece for social control. If the contested ground in all of this is imaginative and intellectual, then there is clearly a potentially important role for artistic endeavor.11 Albert Camus proposed a modus vivendi in response to the kinds of forces I’ve described here that embodies personal revolution and seems to me appropriate for those of us engaged with art as a prophetic—in the truth-telling sense of that

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Figure 8.2 Jim Kuhn, ‘Fred the Shred, Holborn Station.’ Source: Courtesy of Jim Kuhn, www.flickr.com/people/takomabibelot/ (accessed November 26, 2018)

word—activity. Although I have never personally found this in his oeuvre, there is a famous ‘quotation’ that very well summarizes his thought, in an image-friendly sound bite: ‘The only way to deal with an unfree world is to become so absolutely free that your very existence is an act of rebellion.’ This is most often paired with a wonderful Henri Cartier-Bresson portrait from 1944 showing the philosopher/writer on a cold city street with the stub of a cigarette in his mouth. It’s a pervasive image, shared virally across a host of online pages and sites. This ‘quotation’ is widely used—and arguably abused. Rebelogix is a Texas-based American evangelical Christian website offering life and Bible coaching services at a cost.12 Its website features a row of well-dressed, coiffured, middle-aged white women smiling enthusiastically for the camera, with Camus’s quotation as the strapline. I’m not assuming or imputing anything related to these models or the company who

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employed them, but the clash between the visual world of the image—with its apparent endorsement of conservative, affluent, white, middle-class American attitudes— and more studied and considered interpretations of Camus’s position on rebellion is striking. Unfortunately, Rebelogix declined to allow reproduction of their image. Prison Brand Clothing—founded in 2012 and self-identified as ‘Bad Ass Clothes for those who are off their assess and DOING LIFE’13—uses Camus’s imputed words to help sell its apparel. Using this ‘quotation’ from Camus is easy for some (myself included) but not for others. Saudi blogger Raif Badawi was arrested in 2012 and subsequently sentenced to a prison term and 1,000 lashes.14 Frank Schaeffer wrote in the Huffington Post15: Here are actual quotes from his blog, the ‘Saudi Free Liberals Forum,’ shut down after his arrest in 2012. On 12 August 2010, Badawi warned about the stifling of

Figure 8.3 Advertisement for Prison Brand Clothing. Source: Courtesy of www.facebook.com/Prison-Brand-Clothes-499440050113540/ (accessed May 31, 2016)

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Jonathan Day creativity: ‘As soon as a thinker starts to reveal his ideas, you will find hundreds of fatwas that accused him of being an infidel just because he had the courage to discuss some sacred topics. I’m really worried that Arab thinkers will migrate in search of fresh air and to escape the sword of the religious authorities.’ His final thought quoted Albert Camus: ‘The only way to deal with an unfree world is to become so absolutely free that your very existence is an act of rebellion.’

More recently Samar Badawi, Raif’s sister, was arrested in Saudi Arabia, resulting in a diplomatic crisis. On August 3, 2018, Foreign Policy CAN (@CanadaFP), the Twitter presence of Canada’s foreign ministry, reacted this way: ‘Canada is gravely concerned about additional arrests of civil society and women’s rights activists in #SaudiArabia, including Samar Badawi. We urge the Saudi authorities to immediately release them and all other peaceful #humanrights activists.’ An example of the Twitter response from the Saudi Ministry of Foreign Affairs (@KSAmofaEN) is as follows: ‘#Statement | Any other attempt to interfere with our internal affairs from #Canada, means that we are allowed to interfere in #Canada’s internal affairs.’16 This was accompanied by the expulsion of the Canadian ambassador to Saudi Arabia and a Saudi embargo on new trade between the countries. Camus’s imputed words play a small but signifcant part in these major political events, representing a balance to the more frivolous and superfcial usages cited earlier, revealing the power for change in the words. Of dubious attribution or not, the position advocated in the ‘quotation’ represents aspects of Camus’s thought very well, which is why it is popular. Camus (authentically attributed this time) wrote: In art, rebellion is consummated and perpetuated in the act of real creation.17 [. . .] The aim of art can only be to increase the sum of freedom and responsibility to be found in every man and in the world. It cannot, under any circumstances, be to reduce or suppress that freedom, even temporarily.18 Camus developed his ideas in his 1955 version of The Myth of Sisyphus,19 whose eternally rock-pushing hero represents the only valid response to the vicissitudes and challenges of existence. Since humanity must exist in a ‘metaphysical tension or opposition that results from the presence of human consciousness—with its ever-pressing demand for order and meaning in life—in an essentially meaningless and indifferent universe,’20 Camus proposes three responses to this condition. The most noted is revolt. This refers to both a path of resolved action and a state of mind. It can take extreme forms such as terrorism or a reckless and unrestrained egoism [both of which are rejected by Camus], but it essentially consists of an attitude of heroic defiance or resistance to whatever oppresses human beings.21 We can argue—reductively perhaps—that ‘revolt’ is a necessary response to the absurdity of a world in which politicians and corporations act in the ways described earlier, these latter being truly absurd. Camus, of course, is referring to a more complex situation in which one has the choice to behave ethically and honorably (according to one’s lights) in spite of the absurdity and, in the light of time and death, ultimate

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pointlessness. Jean-Paul Sartre’s notion of living in ‘bad faith’—the contrary to an authentic life—also echoes this.22 Camus’s ideas chime interestingly with philosopher Gilles Deleuze’s notion of the minor. Casey Ford and Suzanne McCullagh, editors of the Praksis Project in Minor Ethics, describe this approach: Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari propose the figure of the ‘minor’ as a supplement to the ‘major’ narratives, norms, and systems that govern the way we think about the history of philosophical thought, no less than the arts and politics.23 At the heart of ‘minor’ is the notion of contrariness or revolt—that people will always rebel against orthodoxy and dogma, in search of a fner, nearer understanding. This state of constant preparedness for revolt is described by Camus: ‘[A]rtists scorn nothing: they are obliged to understand rather than to judge.’24 So the artist embodying rebellion in creativity, and being obliged to understand, creates works and symbolic representations that critique, engage with, challenge, and nuance ‘major’ narratives. Significantly, the title of a 1955 Quaker manifesto—Speak Truth to Power—very well describes this position and is often used to describe the mission of universities, organizations within which most art schools now exist.25 Camus’s description of revolt and his rejection of terror and egoism are crucial for us and, I suggest, constitute the punctum for this chapter. Perhaps it is violence that separates activism and terrorism. Gandhi is famous for his non-violent protest: His most famous and enduring ‘quotation’ is ‘be the change you wish to see in the world.’ Gandhi didn’t actually say this—it was Arleen Lorrance, a New York high school teacher, writing in 197426—but he said things very similar to it, and it does embody his philosophy quite well (also, far fewer people have heard of Lorrance). I would like to continue by presenting an example of ‘being the change you wish to see’; it is a micro history of a lived example of artist activism. The employment of micro histories is a growing practice in the ongoing search for how to do history well since it allows a plethora of voices to replace the traditional, problematic, and easily corrupted ‘grand narrative.’ I take my lead in this from Svetlana Alexievich’s celebrated 2016 book, Secondhand Time, which won her the Nobel Prize for Literature. In it, she collates micro histories drawn from interviews she undertook with those who lived in Belarus in the years immediately following the collapse of the USSR. As it happens, since it occupies the same place and time, our artist-activist history adds a voice to hers. It is constituted of a series of acts of non-violent creative opposition, undertaken as support for people adversely affected by the reactor fires in Chernobyl and as a counter to antagonistic exchanges between Western Europe and the USA—member states of NATO—and the former Soviet Bloc. As an encouragement it was successful, but as an act of resistance it seemed to me for many years to have been inconsequential. Aspects related to it are, though, encouragingly re-emerging.

Art School Activism In 1993 a group of musicians, actors, dancers, and visual artists toured a message of solidarity and friendship, sponsored by the YMCA Sputnik—the Soviet youth

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Figure 8.4 Jonathan Day, Political Graffiti, backstreet, Minsk, 1994. Source: Courtesy of the author

organization—and the Nordrhein-Westfalen regional government in Germany. The so-called Iron Curtain had recently been demolished, physically in Berlin and symbolically through perestroika and glasnost, the policies of ‘openness’ and ‘restructuring’ introduced by Mikhail Gorbachev. The tour brought together people from Britain, Germany, and Russia and aimed to evidence unity and mutual support as a balance to a deal of Western crowing over the demise of the communist bloc. In addition to this message, the tour collected and delivered medical equipment for a hospital in Voloshin, a town seriously affected by radioactive fallout as a result of the Chernobyl reactor fire. The performance combined music with projected images, spoken narrative, objects, dance, and mime. These performances embodied the unresolved and little addressed association between avant-garde art practice and cutting edge popular music. British art schools have famously spawned a surprising number of leading musicians, even if many of them felt the call of the stage before completing their studies. Keith Richards of The Rolling Stones attended Sidcup Art College; Ultravox was founded as part of a ‘design for living’ brief at the Royal College of Art; Faris Badwan of the Horrors studied illustration at St. Martins and handed in lyrics and sketches for his modules; Ray Davies of The Kinks was at Hornsey; the rapper MIA was at St. Martins, as was Jarvis Cocker of Pulp; and Freddie Mercury of Queen studied at Ealing, David Bowie at Bromley, and The Temperance Seven at Chelsea. My own work has developed over many years, paralleled by discussions and negotiations

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around interdisciplinary, intermedia, and transmedia work and still negotiates image and sound.27 In the context of my discussion I believe this is a story worth telling—a story told through images and journal entries, those officiants (libraries/repositories) of memory: The reality of Minsk, Belarus, was like the reality of every strange, far away, and mysterious place. The sublime, ridiculous, but principally mundane, creation of our sublime, ridiculous, and mundane race. The streets were busy about their morning tasks. Someone yawning, mourning a cold but, necessary, waking. Another was intent on a sparkle-eyed future, dark-coated, striding along the boulevard, wrapped impregnably in the scarves of self-absorption. Their eyes were mist-blinkered, blind to the bare trees’ tracery and the water jeweling the early blossoms. Over everything was the smell of bread and strong coffee. Communism was officially over, a domino fall with the Berlin wall, though here the same men still sat in the Government House. Democracy was the new way, but it was less a cry than a question. These Belarusians were slaves a hundred years or so ago and had not yet learned to be political. Those who were politically active were also unimpressed: One graffiti writer said of the government, ‘Same people, different mask.’ Expectation and uncertainty sparkled in the frozen air, cut with a little fear and boredom.

Figure 8.5 Jonathan Day, Children of the Revolution, backstreet, Minsk, 1994. Source: Courtesy of the author

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Jonathan Day We stopped at the office of our official hosts, Sputnik. This was the former Soviet youth association and a partner in our Peace Network tour. Like everyone else their future was uncertain, but they would carry on until someone told them to stop. Soon enough, we were out again beneath the merciless sky. We drove into the gray cold, through a city, disoriented, in dark boulevards, past the crackled limbs of leafless trees. At the end of a wide gray street, its surface as slick as the gliddings of a river’s tidal mud, we arrived outside Tourma Minska, the city’s prison. Army guards with machine pistols on their shoulders herded us through a narrow entrance into a chainlink holding compound. While our papers were checked, we stamped to keep warm in the rain puddles that gilded the hardcore. A huge brindled mastiff snarled at us from behind the wire. I believed in the power of kindness then and talked about a dog in a hall of mirrors. A dog that wants to fight has a thousand enemies, but a dog that smiles has a thousand friends. This prison dog wanted to fight. I began to howl quietly, as I would with my own dog. The brindled killer stopped growling and slowly joined in, raising his muzzle and his dog song to the low gray sky. Inside, along a courtyard of gravel and tarmac, we sauntered in a western way, so sure of our freedom, casual and irreverent as the ranks of prisoners with shaved heads marched perfectly under the eyes of guards with machine guns. The prisoners’ black padded cotton and the fur-collared combat fatigues were inescapably cinematic. The venue was a wood-paneled hall with a high stage and proscenium. A side room was occupied by the prison’s tape librarian, who was charged with recording the event for posterity. He was an inmate. Without the slightest falter he told us, in German, of the double murder he had committed. The hall filled quickly with 800 men, far more than it was equipped for. The front rows were mostly occupied by large men with rather smaller men on their laps. Mick Williams, one of our party, like the rest of us, could not speak a word of Russian. Through gesture and an interpreter he told tales of his British street ‘Viking life’ with the most outrageous of twinkles and a clear delight in the assembled company. Those 800 men returned his enjoyment. His compassion and empathy were so self-evident that words were almost incidental. The gathering roared with laughter and applauded enthusiastically until the handful of guards indicated that they should stop. They did so, immediately. Our images and music were met with warmth and interest. Broken and faltering attempts to sing our songs back to us were profoundly moving and profoundly strange in this overcrowded hall, smelling of wood, warm beneath the frozen heavens, lost somewhere in a settling downtown, street lit and smoke trailing, nestling in the immense Eastern European night. The night was forbidden and inaccessible to the men in this hall, circumscribed by barbed wire, contained by watch towers and sirens. A singer called Martine took the lead and showed no signs at all of any qualms she may have been feeling. It was an act of generosity and selflessness that affirmed all of our humanity and spoke of something wonderful and noble within the complexities and contradictions of power and weakness, service and self-gratification that accompany such performances. After the music, as the hall was slowly emptying, we went and talked with the prisoners. I chatted in poor German with a man who had killed his parents. Mick talked to a poet who was there for six years because of his writing. The dim hall slowly emptied, and we loaded our bus and were gone. The steel and barbed wire sealed behind us, separating emphatically once again our world from theirs.

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Another of our concerts was in Voloshin, a town devastated by the invisible radiation rained down from Chernobyl. The town had 10,000 times the normal background radiation, and many of its children were born tragically deformed and were in hospital. We played in the village opera house, fully equipped in what was barely more than a hamlet—a quintessentially Soviet notion. We also visited the hospital and delivered our limited medical supplies. Our final performance was in the ‘Alternative Theatre,’ a mostly finished building occupied and operated by artist activists, encouraged by the epochal events across Eastern Europe. We were filmed by Belarusian state TV and broadcast to around two million viewers, showing that the occupation of the theater and activism were tolerated, at least, at that time. We played alongside Ulis—a Belarusian rock band who prefigured by several decades Pussy Riot and the Belarus Free Theatre’s I’m With the Banned shows. Two of the members of Ulis were state-funded sculptors, who made the social realist works that decorated almost every road junction. The musical group had named themselves after James Joyce’s novel Ulysses, seeing powerful links between the historical oppression of Ireland and that of Belarus. Their album continued the idea eloquently. It was called A Long White Cloud Land, from ‘Aotearoa,’ the Maori name for what Westerners call New Zealand, another land, they argued, of oppressed minorities. The musicians’ days were spent carving heads for the adornment of village squares and schools, their nights singing about freedom from the Russian yoke—in Belarusian, of course. They were also interested in America. ‘America is not a place, it’s a dream,’ said one of their songs. I remember their bass player wearing a guitar lead around his neck as a tie, the equating of rock and roll with freedom.

Figure 8.6 Jonathan Day, Audience, Alternative Theatre, Minsk, 1994. Source: Courtesy of the author

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Figure 8.7 Jonathan Day, Video Still at the Alternative Theatre, Come Together, 1994. Source: Courtesy of the author

Our tour, then, reached a reported two million Belarusians courtesy of Belarus State TV and was cited as an example of international cooperation at a German–Belarusian government summit. The tone and possibility for the tour had been set by Gorbachev, with the fall of the Iron Curtain creating a near euphoric atmosphere in Europe at the time. All things seemed possible. Perestroika and glasnost were, though, short-lived in Belarus, and the country returned to authoritarian rule as a Russian buffer state (its history is as a battlefield). As with Crimea and Eastern Ukraine, there are clearly certain territories (and peoples) for which Russia has a particular fondness. Though rock music has risen in popularity in recent years, the Belarusian government has suppressed its development through various legal and economic mechanisms. Because of these restrictions, many Belarusian bands prefer to sign to Russian labels and to perform in Russia or Ukraine.28 Investigative writers and musicians Lemez Lovas and Maya Medich, working for pressure group Freemuse, authored a 2006 report on censorship in Belarus. They wrote: Independent music-making in Belarus today is an increasingly difficult and risky enterprise, the Belarusian government puts pressure on ‘unofficial’ musicians— including ‘banning’ from official media and imposing severe restrictions on live performance. [. . .] A musician from Belarus told Freemuse that ‘every time the

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Figure 8.8 Ai Weiwei, Belarus Free Theatre. Source: Courtesy of Belarus Free Theatre, https://moc.media/en/events/21

band is invited to a big festival we are asked to bring the lyrics to be scanned by the Committee for Ideology and Censorship, for offensive stuff.’ ‘Offensive stuff’ refers to lyrics addressing the president, officials and the government. [. . .] When I went to a radio station to be interviewed I was asked by the interviewer, ‘Please don’t pronounce on the air words like “politician,” “choice,” “to choose,” “to be free” and all the stuff that makes people think about the political circumstances in the country.”’29 This sounds so familiar and replicates the conversations we had with Ulis in the early 1990s and their descriptions of their situation pre-glasnost. So was it worth it? Did we achieve anything at all? Svetlana Alexievich and the Nobel Prize have brought attention back to Belarus even though she feels ‘that was our best chance at freedom—those days won’t easily come again’ (BBC Newsnight interview, May 31, 2016).30 Not easily, but they

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may—and without resistance/activism it is arguable that they are less likely to. Belarus Free Theatre continues the work of the Alternative Theatre, at which we performed, with a growing international profile, helped by the BBC’s support for their I’m With the Banned performances. In a park in Warsaw, in the early 1990s, on the way to Belarus, I visited an impromptu gallery. A mannequin made of coat hangers silver-glittered its potential to take on forms in fabric. Domestic appliances stuck out of the coving at unexpected angles. We so often sit and argue the value of art with self-satisfied rhetoric—a proponent on Newsnight of some wave of this or that, rubbishing everyone else publicly, and of course no one especially cares. But here, after communism, or 1917 St. Petersburg, some of the people burning furniture for firewood burned with a new vision of the world, and Gabo and Tatlin dreamed of a new art for and of the people. This work was important, away from the fopperies of the gallery system. Here art was stripped to the bare bones of beings describing themselves and their world, to the communication of new ideas and visions, without which people might hunger and perish. Vision without which, as Guillaume Apollinaire said, man’s divine image of the universe collapses with dizzying speed.31 Perhaps art is a symptom of that which destroyed the despot kingdoms of Stalin, Honecker, and Ceausescu. Perhaps it is the virus. Socialist realist artists expressed their vision: An idealized humanity, expressed in formulaic ways, controlled by bureaucrats, safe, subversion-free, hated, and yawned over. It could never be enough. Why else was the first expression of the passing of the old the destruction of the statues? In the chaotic mathematics of history, who knows which butterfly wing beat will start the hurricane? Important, then, to keep flapping.

Notes 1. Brown, P. Confessions of an Eco Terrorist, 2012, Snag Films: Williamsburg. 2. Orwell, G. 1984, 1949, Secker and Warburg: London. 3. See www.reuters.com/article/us-britain-security-boy/british-police-question-boy-who-spelledterrorist-by-mistake-idUSKCN0UY12O (accessed 29 October 2018). 4. See www.theguardian.com/education/2015/sep/22/school-questioned-muslim-pupil-aboutisis-after-discussion-on-eco-activism (accessed 29 October 2018). 5. See https://freegolanheights.wordpress.com/2016/01/06 (accessed 29 October, 2018). 6. Keynote address, International Conference on Photography and Theory, 2012, Agia Napa, Cyprus, https://static1.squarespace.com/static/5a203d0fa9db09f7aabb8037/t/5a456b, 72c83 0250c20ff91c8/1514498937596/ICPT2012_Abstracts.pdf, accessed 16 February 2002. 7. See www.independent.co.uk/news/uk/home-news/roberto-saviano-britain-corrupt-mafiahay-festival-a7054851.html (accessed 29 October 2018). 8. See www.thesun.co.uk/news/2833129/bullingdon-club-oxford-why-burn-50-notes/ (accessed 29 October 2018). 9. See www.independent.co.uk/news/business/news/fiddling-while-rbs-burned-new-bookreveals-fred-the-shred-goodwin-s-fatal-obsessions-8795202.html (accessed 29 October 2018). 10. Huxley, A. The Ultimate Revolution, March 20, 1962, Berkeley Language Center— Speech Archive SA 0269. Transcript available at https://publicintelligence.net/aldoushuxley-1962-u-c-berkeley-speech-on-the-ultimate-revolution/ (accessed on 29 October 2018). 11. As an extension of this, since the space between ‘revolutionary,’ ‘freedom fighter,’ ‘partisan,’ and ‘terrorist’ is contested and contingent (‘history is always written by the victors’ is the axiom variously attributed to Churchill, Hitler, Machiavelli, and Benjamin) and since we live at the leading edge of history, in which it is, at this moment, unwritten, the fear of

‘Terrorism,’ ‘Rebellion,’ ‘Resistance’

12. 13. 14. 15. 16. 17. 18. 19. 20. 21. 22. 23. 24. 25. 26. 27.

28. 29. 30. 31.

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the wrong kind of labeling has implications for personal and artistic freedom. Acknowledging and exploring this here is an attempt to ameliorate and minimize such effects. See http://rebelogix.com (accessed 29 October 2018). See www.facebook.com/pg/Prison-Brand-Clothes-499440050113540/posts/?ref=page_ internal (accessed 12 November 2018). Black, I. The Guardian, 14 January 2015, www.theguardian.com/world/2015/jan/14/-spsaudi-blogger-extracts-raif-badawi (accessed 12 November 2018). Schaeffer, F. Huffington Post, 6 December 2017, www.huffingtonpost.com/frank-schaeffer/ je-suis-raif-badawi_b_6477410.html?guccounter=1 (accessed 12 November 2018). See www.vox.com/world/2018/8/6/17656864/saudi-arabia-canada-ambassador-personanon-grata-samar-badawi (accessed 12 November 2018). Camus, A. The Rebel, 2013, Penguin: London, p. 270. Camus, A. “The Artist and His Time,” Resistance, Rebellion, and Death, 1961, Hamish Hamilton: London, p. 236. Camus, A. The Myth of Sisyphus, 1955, Hamish Hamilton: London. Simpson, D. “Albert Camus,” IEP, www.iep.utm.edu/camus/ (accessed 12 November 2018). Simpson, D., op cit. Sartre, J. P. Essays in Existentialism, 1993, Citadel Press: London, pp. 167–169. Ford, S. and McCullagh, S. Minor Ethics, www.praksis.ca/minorethics/ (accessed 26 November 2018). Gregory, A. and Camus, A. Nobel Prize Library: Camus, Churchill, 1971, Helvetica Press: New York and www.nobelprize.org/prizes/literature/1957/camus/speech/ (accessed 26 November 2018). Cary, S (chair), 1955, Speak Truth to Power, A Quaker Search for an Alternative to Violence, http://quaker.org/legacy/sttp.html (accessed 26 November 2018). Lorrance, A. and Kellough, R. Developing Priorities and a Style: Selected Readings in Education for Teachers and Parents, 1974, MSS Information Corp: New York, p. 85. Camus’s ideas also, significantly, extend into music. This is perhaps most notable in Miles Davis’s 1959 record Birth of the Cool, thanks to the influence of Miles’s Parisian girlfriend, Juliette Gréco, and her friend Jean-Paul Sartre. Davis’s notion of ‘cool,’ the individual unfazed and not overly impressed by the vicissitudes of existence, equates closely to Camus’s ‘absurd man.’ Sartre also, famously, in Nausea (1938) writes of a jazz record that for his protagonist ‘trumps Freud, cures the ill, and solves existential angst,’ as Ted Gioia writes, www.modernliterature.org/2018/08/09/jean-paul-sartre-cured-existentialangst-jazz-record-ted-gioia/ (accessed 26 November 2018). Blacklisted bands play in Poland, https://freemuse.org/regions/europe/belarus/, published on March 17, 2006 (accessed 18 March 2007). Medich, M. and Lovas, L. Hidden Truths: Music, Politics and Censorship in Lukashenko’s Belarus, 2006, Freemuse: Denmark, p. 4., https://freemuse.org/graphics/Publications/PDF/ Freemuse_Belarus-report.pdf (accessed 26 November 2018). BBC. Newsnight interview, watched live by the author, May 31, 2016. Apollinaire, G. The Cubist Painters: Aesthetic Meditations, 1913, Wittenborn Schulz: New York, p. V.

Bibliography Apollinaire, G. The Cubist Painters: Aesthetic Meditations, 1913, Wittenborn Schulz: New York Brown, P. Confessions of an Eco-Terrorist, 2012, Snag Films: Williamsburg Burke, E. Reflections on the Revolution in France, and on the Proceedings in Certain Societies in London Relative to that Event. In a Letter Intended to Have Been Sent to a Gentleman in Paris, 2003, Penguin: London Camus, A. “The Artist and His Time,” Resistance, Rebellion, and Death, 1961, Hamish Hamilton: London Camus, A. The Myth of Sisyphus, 1955, Hamish Hamilton: London

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Camus, A. The Rebel, 2013, Penguin: London Gregory, A. and Camus, A. Nobel Prize Library: Camus, Churchill, 1971, Helvetica Press: New York Lorrance, A. and Kellough, R. Developing Priorities and a Style: Selected Readings in Education for Teachers and Parents, 1974, MSS Information Corp: New York Medich, M. and Lovas, L. Hidden Truths: Music, Politics and Censorship in Lukashenko’s Belarus, 2006, Freemuse: Denmark Orwell, G. 1984, 1949, Secker and Warburg: London Santayana, G. The Life of Reason: The Phases of Human Progress, Vol. 1, 1968, Columbia University Press: New York Sartre, J. P. Essays in Existentialism, 1993, London: Citadel Press

9

Shakespeare and Terrorism David Roberts

A group of five men from the English Midlands, religious zealots at odds with the times, have been meeting to discuss their plans. They are below the official radar. No one pays much attention when they rent a house; when they begin to tunnel beneath it, no one notices. Explosives they smuggle in month by month. They have a particular moment in mind, a moment calculated to cause the greatest loss of life at the most public sites. Then, on the fringes of their circle, a man gets wind of the plot—a man whose own brother-in-law will, it turns out, be an unintended victim. An anonymous letter changes hands and falls into the lap of government, and officers of the law are mobilized. The plotters are hunted down, caught, and tortured. Meanwhile, a man with an eye for opportunity is considering his options. He is a successful writer, mindful like many others since that the word ‘plot’ lends itself as easily to fiction as it does to crime and therefore often encompasses both. His next piece will respond to the news sensation in a way few others before or since have dared. He will not, like his friend Ben, satirize plot mania by showing an idiot Englishman abroad sensing assassins on every street corner. Instead, he will go out of his way to maximize the clear and present danger, yet in the process succumb to a fascination so radical as to be almost taboo. He will draw us into understanding, sympathizing, and even identifying with the mind of the terrorist. There are many objections to such a narrative of how the 1605 Gunpowder Plot inspired William Shakespeare to write Macbeth or why his Catholic friend Ben Johnson wrote into his Volpone the half-wit Sir Politic Would-be. No attempt to contemporize the story of what was planned to happen in the cellars of Parliament on 5 November 1605 can disguise fundamental anachronisms. Robert Catesby, Thomas Winter, Guy Fawkes, and their fellow conspirators did not plan what today would be construed as a terrorist attack—that is, an attempt to kill random groups of civilians. Still less, obviously, were the plotters agents of what is now called ‘state terrorism.’ The words ‘terrorist’ and ‘terrorism’ were, the OED indicates, children of the French Revolution. Students of the relationship between terrorism and literature are inclined to identify the late nineteenth century as the period when writers developed a sustained interest in plotting the business of political and extra-political agitation.1 In our strict sense of the phrase, the Gunpowder Plot was no more an ‘act of terror’ than the murder of Julius Caesar, Shakespeare’s treatment of which supplied him with one blueprint for Macbeth.2 The politics and psychology of state assassination were for him career-long preoccupations, from his Henry VI trilogy (1593–94) and Titus Andronicus (1594) to Richard III (1594) and Richard II (1598). On top of all that, the recent crowning of James VI of Scotland as James I of England arguably gave Shakespeare every prompt

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he needed to write a play about the historical Macbeth. James’s dual interest—indeed expertise—in Scottish history and witchcraft was an obvious cue for the chief playwright of the company known as the King’s Men.3 However, no one disputes that Macbeth borrows key words and tropes from reports of the Gunpowder Plot. Whole books have been devoted to the subject.4 It has long been commonplace for editors to point out that Macbeth and his Porter’s use of the terms ‘equivocate,’ ‘equivocator,’ and ‘equivocation’ appears to pick up on the March 1606 trial of the Jesuit priest Henry Garnet, implicated in the plot and given to ‘defending Equivocations, with many weak and frivolous Distinctions’ that permitted him to lie under oath.5 Equally clear is that Catesby and Winter had strong Warwickshire connections Shakespeare must have known, a network recently and thrillingly expounded by James Shapiro.6 Later in the seventeenth century, it was natural to associate play with plot. At least from the 1664–65 theatrical season, a version of Macbeth was frequently performed by the Duke’s Company on Bonfire Night—something of an irony since the Duke in question was the Catholic who would become James II.7 On 5 November 1664, Samuel Pepys was late home after seeing the play because of the number of bonfires in the streets.8 More broadly, although the intention of the Gunpowder Plotters was to destroy government rather than people, what matters about such acts, strictly ‘terrorist’ in the modern sense or otherwise, is less their intention than their impact. As he had done in Julius Caesar, Shakespeare went out of his way to stress the visceral, barely explicable effect of terrorism on the wider community. In Macbeth that effect is figured first as an attack on the state and then as perpetrated by it. The play’s political ambiguity is partly attributable to its double immersion in the acts of the terrorist and the actions of state terror. Far from predating modern definitions of terrorism, in other words, the play appears to predict and comprehend them. Indeed, one might argue that for all the categorical anachronisms, the Gunpowder Plot itself satisfies one widely cited definition of a terrorist attack. In a seminal article, Thomas Perry Thornton wrote of ‘a symbolic act designed to influence political behaviour by extranormal means, entailing the use or threat of violence.’9 Catesby and Winter clearly intended to ‘influence political behaviour’ by the use of violence because they felt all other means of redress for England’s Catholic population had been closed off. In Margaret Scanlan’s study of the novel and terrorism, it is the frustration of terrorists who cannot be heard that makes them appealing to writers haunted by the fear of not being read. Scanlan refers to the diaries of Henry James and Joseph Conrad, authors of novels that feature terrorists successful and otherwise, finding evidence of ‘struggles against a sense of futility, their fears that they had few readers.’10 Her narrative extends to recent authors such as Doris Lessing and J. M. Coetzee, writers who despair of ‘gaining a hearing in the ordinary language of civic life’ and paint their terrorist characters as failures; in a rival tradition running from Dostoevsky to DeLillo, the terrorist is imagined as some sort of rival to the writer, their plots vying for public supremacy. Each tradition, Scanlan argues, stems from a romantic yearning for the lone, effectual voice that can be heard above the babble of the mass media, chief engine of plot hysteria and paranoia. Writer and terrorist share the burden of disenfranchisement from modern life. It is easy to imagine a reading of Macbeth built on the premise that Shakespeare’s part-Catholic heritage, with all the manifest deprivations and disenfranchisements suffered by believers, leant him a comparable degree of sympathy for the plotters. Indeed, the raw material for such readings is not in short supply.11 However, the

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main concern of this chapter is with the relationship between the theatrical modes of Macbeth, its engagement with audiences, and its consequent conception of terrorism and terrorists. ‘Modes’ because it is a play of hybrid form, and its hybridity is key to what makes it both successful and (more often) problematic in live performance. Macbeth is both a masterpiece of radical interiority and a peculiarly festive celebration. Imagining the psyche of the terrorist, whether in opposition to or embodying the state, the play evidently served in the first decades of its life as a public exorcism of state anxiety through the happy medium of ripping entertainment. It might be performed on Bonfire Night or, pantomime-like, over Christmas. When Samuel Pepys saw it in December 1666, probably in an adapted version, he hailed it as ‘a most excellent play for variety.’12 With or without adaptation, one of the play’s best modern editors has observed that while an evening at King Lear may be unbearably harrowing, going to Macbeth should be fun.13 Of course, its theatrical landscape makes the Gunpowder Plot itself seem rather routine. Shakespeare serves up not merely secret letters, safe houses, murderous scheming, and sudden interventions of justice but also vanishing witches, floating daggers, disappearing ghosts, visions appearing out of cauldrons, human organs falling into them, and even walking trees, as though John Le Carré had been made over by J. K. Rowling. There need be no suggestion of authorial anxiety as per Scanlan’s reading of fiction from James to Coetzee: The play is fully part of the way terrorism is adumbrated in the public sphere. Its impact on audiences, through a yearly carousel of festive acts, is predictably and instantly both present and apparent. Still, that impact emerged through a gradual process. The only surviving version of the original text, the one printed in the 1623 First Folio, was almost certainly not Shakespeare’s original but a reworking by Thomas Middleton.14 It was the latter’s task to supply an overlay of ostentatious witchcraft and associated spectacle notably absent from Simon Forman’s 1611 eyewitness account of a performance at the Globe Theatre, in which Macbeth and Banquo merely encountered ‘3 women feiries or Nimphes.’15 Forman makes no mention of a scene usually cut from modern productions in which Hecate, ancient Greek goddess of witchcraft, somewhat incongruously enters to berate the weird sisters for not letting her join in their fun.16 By 1674 at the latest the play had been further adapted by Sir William Davenant to accommodate more songs, dances, painted scenery, and fly tower technology, in addition to simplifying Shakespeare’s language and expanding the roles of Macduff and his wife.17 If the gain was the greater variety Pepys enjoyed, the cost was the very risk of silencing a nuanced, questioning interplay of history and psychology and offering instead a tabloid Satanic plot that cheats us by purporting to represent the answer. Such was the bigoted deceit practiced by John Milton in his Latin poem ‘In Quintum Novembris,’ which claims gunpowder was invented in hell, while Catesby, Winter, and gang were employed by Satan and subcontracted to the Pope.18 The insertion of Hecate into Macbeth performed a comparable fantasy, and it was a fantasy that lived on in the aftermath of 9/11 and all through the hunt for Osama Bin Laden: Posit a single source of evil and dream that his eradication in a cave or house somewhere in the Middle East will somehow disable the enemy. In the late 1670s, when London was alive with rumors of a Jesuit plot to assassinate Charles II and replace him with his Catholic brother, James, Macbeth’s engagement with politico-religious paranoia reached a new level of intensity, its new-style scenography creating, in the words of Jean I. Marsden,

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‘bleak pictures of corruption and the potential for social disintegration . . . designed to startle the audience into recognizing the potential ramifications of topical problems.’19 Performed in June 1680 while the Popish Plot trials were continuing, it complemented the King’s Company’s popular production of Elkanah Settle’s scabrously anti-Catholic play about Pope Joan.20 To be poised between official festivity and radical interiority is to feel the pull of opposites. By its nature, arguably, festivity aims to neutralize interiority. Recent memorial acts and creations spawned by terrorism—whether plays, blockbuster movies, or mass renditions of the Marseillaise—are both theatrical in nature and, as celebrations of the idea of cultural freedom, intended to constitute it.21 Defiantly public, ritualistic, and communal, they invert the sordid privacy of the terrorist in assertions of nationhood designed to unify generations, races, and classes in a single narrative of values and character. In Hollywood that often means valorizing the white, male, bluecollar hero—the heroic fireman of Oliver Stone’s World Trade Center, for example, or the loyal security guard from Olympus Has Fallen, a film that is its own species of atrocity.22 The sensitivity that surrounds threats to another November celebration is explained not just by its massing of royalty and politicians: Remembrance Day has become, de facto, a counter-narrative to terrorism, reinforcing belief in war as the incarnation of national freedom and the maudlin chant of Laurence Binyon’s ‘For the Fallen’ as the essence of public verse.23 If such cultural events and productions embody in their response to terror a concept of freedom that feels too ideologically loaded to convince us that it is really freedom they promote, what sort of events do? The sort represented by Macbeth, perhaps? One seminal study of the play offers scant encouragement. When Henry Paul wrote The Royal Play of Macbeth he cast the piece as a highly wrought instance of Stuart propaganda, devised less in the shadow of the Gunpowder Plot than in the anticipation of a state visit in August 1606 by James I’s Danish brother-in-law, King Christian IV.24 The crowning glory of the performance in Paul’s reading was the masque-like scene in Act IV in which Macbeth, looking into a mirror, sees James’s reflection at the end of a line of legitimate Scottish kings that begins with the murdered Banquo—an exercise that sailed as close to the legal wind as it was possible to get in an age when stage impersonation of living royalty was strictly forbidden: ‘And yet the eighth appears, who bears a glass which shows me many more.’25 Some of Shakespeare’s other risks make Paul’s royalist thesis less plausible. Celebrating the arrival of a royal visitor with a play that features the murder of a king in the guest bedroom has always seemed an unlikely recommendation for any Master of the Revels, however much James may have fancied the idea when faced with the notoriously bibulous and lecherous King of Denmark.26 And as David Norbrook has comprehensively demonstrated, the whole subject of Scottish history was strongly contested.27 Shakespeare’s habitual source, the Chronicles of Raphael Holinshed, presented primogeniture as the native mode of succession, a view consistent with the mirror scene in Macbeth. Given James’s lateral relationship to his predecessor Elizabeth, however, even that was hardly good news. So much worse was the tradition championed by James’s own former tutor, George Buchanan, who argued Scottish kings had traditionally been chosen by a process of tanistry, or election by tribal chiefs—a nightmare for any monarch that revived ghosts of the pre-Tudor chaos we now call the Wars of the Roses.28 That contested view of legitimate succession lies behind the

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odd confusion in Shakespeare’s play about why Macbeth becomes king when Malcolm is named as the murdered Duncan’s heir. In other words, if you want to keep the new king happy, don’t mention the Scottish succession, and don’t call it The Royal Play of Macbeth. Shakespeare’s risk-taking in the heady months after November 1605 led him to tantalize audiences into doing something that an ancient statute, more recently revised, forbade just as explicitly as representing the king on stage. In 1351 treason was defined—to translate from the Anglo-Norman—as ‘compassing or imagining the death of the king.’29 In 1534 the act was updated to include imaginings encoded in that wickedly prevalent form of communication called writing—hence the double frisson of Lady Macbeth’s first appearance as a woman reading a treasonous letter and the various seditious messages passed between hands in King Lear.30 We might be struck by parallels with the surveillance that ransacks email and social media interaction—or even primary school homework—for the least sign of imagining atrocities at airports, hotels, or underground stations. It’s more pertinent here to point out that the first time Shakespeare opens out Macbeth’s thought processes, he shows a man doing the originating, treasonous thing and so drawing us into it: Why do I yield to that suggestion Whose horrid image doth unfix my hair And make my seated heart knock at my ribs, Against the use of nature? Present fears Are less than horrible imaginings.31 The language circles around the thing imagined, deferring its defnition. It looks like a case of acute phobia: The patient is more able to describe the physical symptoms of aversion than their object. The hair prickling on the back of the neck, the thumping heart declare a specifcity denied to ‘that suggestion’ that has only an unnamed ‘horrid image’ attached to it. The clear and present danger of war with Norway is nothing compared to these unlicensed, deviant, ‘horrible imaginings.’ The play tricks us into the same thought patterns by refusing to let us see what Macbeth imagines. Filmmakers from Roman Polanski (1969) to Justin Kurzel (2015) let us into Duncan’s bedchamber to see the murder happen, in Kurzel’s case through a traumatic series of flashbacks too.32 In spite of a longstanding fondness for onstage death, Shakespeare makes the deed central to what Henri Lefebvre called the ‘obscene,’ the reverse of what we are meant to see.33 It is tempting to view that suppression as, Henry Paul–like, a fundamental gesture of loyalty; the regicide, such an argument goes, was just too risky to depict graphically. But the real risk was the one Shakespeare took. Keeping the bedchamber at bay, he leaves us with no choice but to do the treasonous thing: Imagine the death of the king. To return once more to Margaret Scanlan, there is no tension here between the writer and the noise of mass media, and the reason is not the absence in early seventeenth-century London of anything resembling mass media. Reports of the Gunpowder Plot were carried in newsletters and through sermons and other means. The writer’s voice is public; his enactment of plot hysteria is fully embodied in what his actors are doing and what his audience is experiencing. Emerging from the bedchamber after discovering the murder, Macduff reinforces the point in a language actors and audiences find challenging because its very excess

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appears to mark a failure of communication. The deed cannot be named except by blustering repetition: ‘Oh horror, horror, horror!’ It sounds like a tabloid headline, screeching in revulsion at the deed. What follows, however, comes as a guilty shock, reversing the logic of revulsion: ‘Tongue nor heart cannot conceive nor name thee.’34 Our own experience says they can. From the moment Macbeth speaks of his horrible imaginings, conceive and name them are what any audience does. The intimacy he extends to us he denies to everyone else, his wife included. ‘Why do you keep alone,’ she asks him, ‘of sorriest fancies your companions making?’35 But it is we, the audience, who are his companions. With him we see the air-born daggers and ghosts. We share his incredulity that no one else is able to. What to others is unspeakable is what we have already murmured to ourselves. We are, whether we like it or not, in silent communion with the terrorist. How this deadly interlocutor speaks and how his speech unfolds through the play are of course as subject to ideological determination as anything else. The best way to position a loyal Jacobean audience to be horrified was to ensure that no one could be more appalled by the assassination than the assassin. It is part of the reason why he draws us in so. James Shapiro describes Macbeth’s complex language as a symptom of Shakespeare’s progressive withdrawal from acting, a victory of private thinking over public speaking.36 If true, that career choice coincided here with a story in which the difficulty of speaking is not only a topic but also a principle of communication, not least when the illusion of sincerity is greatest. Contemplating the likely aftermath of Duncan’s murder, Macbeth’s first full soliloquy tries to compress the whole business into a repetitive sequence of monosyllables: ‘If it were done when tis done, then twere well it were done quickly.’37 The pressure to avoid the subject produces a banality that could apply to any action and so provokes an opposing reaction—a Latinate concert of polysyllabic grandeur: ‘If the assassination could trammel up the consequence.’38 It is a brilliant reversal of rhetorical convention, which normally dictates that the simple gloss comes second, not first, especially when one of the Latinate words is used here in the English language for what the OED tells us was the first time: ‘Assassination.’ The audience knew what it meant because the word ‘assassin’ was already familiar. Use of the neologism aligns Macbeth with the biblical Cain as a foundational murderer (Macbeth’s dramatic godfather, Hamlet’s uncle, Claudius, draws the same parallel, invoking ‘the primal eldest curse’).39 When Macbeth wonders whether he could achieve through Duncan’s ‘surcease success’ we enter new territory that cuts against Shapiro’s idea that Shakespeare was thinking more about writing than speaking.40 The actor is handed the opposite of a tongue-twister in a deliberately facile, whisper-like running together of near-homophones: ‘Surcease’ (Duncan’s death) sounds all too similar to ‘success’ to the killer. It is meant to sound simple; Macbeth knows it isn’t. In these cases, he observes, the murderer commends the ingredients of the poisoned chalice to his own lips. When a later Macbeth laments his inability to escape the tormenting visions that keep him awake at night, he lights upon the term that best described the authorities’ dealings with Catesby, Winter, Fawkes, and friends: Better be with the dead, whom we to gain our peace Have sent to peace, than on the torture of the mind To lie in restless ecstasy.41

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But having murdered again to stamp out his torturing visions as much as his likeliest enemies, he fnds there is nothing left. Deadened, insensate, an emotional suicide, he has ‘almost forgot the taste of fears.’42 His fnal confding in us might, out of context, be read as a statement of nihilism, but there is something else at stake: Tomorrow and tomorrow and tomorrow Creeps in this petty pace from day to day To the last syllable of recorded time, And all our yesterdays have lighted fools The way to dusty death. Out, out, brief candle. Life’s but a walking shadow, a poor player That struts and frets his hour upon the stage And then is heard no more. It is a tale told by an idiot, Full of sound and fury, signifying nothing.43 The price Macbeth pays for treachery is spiritual death; it is how we might prefer to conceive of the mind of the terrorist, as a pure negation of life. The price we pay for our complicity in Macbeth’s imaginings is to have the whole shoddy illusion of acting held up for inspection. So this is what we’ve been watching: Idiot writer, hammy actor, meaningless rubbish. And yet, of course, the illusion is sustained precisely because the actor dares to mention it. He hides in plain sight. If Shakespeare submits Macbeth to the destructive regime of fear and trembling his anti-hero imposes on Scotland, he creates space for the audience to believe in him even as he appears to betray our contract with him. In his spiritual deadness he remains living, daring us to disbelieve him. That is ultimately what squares the circle of the play’s tension between the festive and the interior. Exceeding the surface theatricality of magic, chanting witches, and vanishing ghosts, Macbeth’s moment of epiphany embodies a deeper kind of festivity: The fundamental celebration that is theater’s rich embodiment of human presence, trumping the gothic decoration overlaid on the play by subsequent adapters, the prescriptive sentences of state punishment, and the facile narratives of Milton and Middleton. Something about Macbeth’s final moment of confiding answers to Emmanuel Levinas’s description of an ethical life as residing in living apprehensions rather than constative propositions.44 In the case of Macbeth, our apprehensions are a threefold blend of observation, subjection, and implication. We take in. We receive the ideological instruction and are duly terrified. But in doing so we are made to participate in the extraordinary risk Shakespeare took in the months after November 1605, when troops were mustering in Warwickshire and plotters were being flushed out of hiding to be stretched out on the rack—the risk, that is, of imaginative immersion in the business of the outsider, the criminal other, the killer, the terrorist. It is a risk it takes a great artist to take and a diminished understanding of the bigger problems posed by terrorism to ignore.

Notes 1. For example, Margaret Scanlan, Plotting Terror: Novelists and Terrorists in Contemporary Fiction (Charlottesville and London: University Press of Virginia, 2001), pp. 4–13. 2. OED dates the first instance of ‘terrorism’ as 1795 in the sense of ‘Government by intimidation’; ‘terrorist’ appeared in the same year to describe the Jacobins. The close relationship

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4. 5.

6. 7.

8. 9. 10. 11.

12. 13. 14. 15. 16. 17.

18. 19. 20.

David Roberts between Shakespeare’s Julius Caesar and Macbeth is a given in critical studies and founded principally on the rendering of Brutus’s and Macbeth’s inner lives leading up to their respective murders. See, for example, Julius Caesar II.i.61–69 and Macbeth I.iii.130–141. All subsequent citations are from the Complete Works of Shakespeare, ed. Peter Alexander (London and Glasgow: Collins, 1951). James’s writings, already substantial by his accession to the English throne in 1603, were collected as The Works of the Most High and Mighty Prince James (London, 1616). A useful modern edition is Johann P. Somerville, ed., King James VI and I: Political Writings (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1994). See, in particular, Arthur F. Kinney, Lies Like Truth: Shakespeare, Macbeth, and the Cultural Moment (Detroit: Wayne State University Press, 2001); Garry Wills, Witches and Jesuits. Shakespeare’s Macbeth (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1996). John Chamberlaine, Letter to Winwood in the latter’s Memorials, II.205–206, cited in Kenneth Muir, ed., Macbeth (London and New York: Methuen, 1951), p. xvi. For use of the terms in the play, see II.iii.10–14 and V.v.43. Shakespeare had used ‘equivocation’ before, in Hamlet, V.i.133. James Shapiro, 1606. William Shakespeare and the Year of Lear (London: Faber & Faber, 2015), pp. 121–154. The performance on 5 November 1664 is recorded in The Diary of Samuel Pepys, ed. Robert Latham and William Matthews, 11 vols (London: Bell & Hyman, 1971), V. 314. Records of further 5 November performances are in William Van Lennep, ed., The London Stage Part One (Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press, 1960), pp. 123 and 176. It appears that during the Popish Plot crisis the preferred play was The Tempest, a more reassuring presentation of the relationship between power and magic. See Van Lennep, p. 264. Pepys, Diary, 5 November 1664, in Latham and Matthews, V.314. Thomas Perry Thornton, ‘Terror as Weapon of Political Agitation’, in Harry Eckstein, ed., Internal War: Problems and Approaches (New York: Free Press, 1964), pp. 71–99 (p. 73). Scanlan, p. 4. James’s The Princess Casamassima (1886) and Conrad’s The Secret Agent (1907) and Under Western Eyes (1910) all feature terrorist plots or acts. In addition to foundational work by Catholic critics such as Peter Millward and Peter Levi, see the following recent studies: Richard Dutton, Alison Findlay, and Richard Wilson, eds., Theatre and Religion: Lancastrian Shakespeare (Manchester and New York: Manchester University Press, 2003); Richard Wilson, Secret Shakespeare: Studies in Theatre, Religion and Resistance (Manchester and New York: Manchester University Press, 2004); Dennis Taylor and David Beauregard, eds., Shakespeare and the Culture of Christianity in Early Modern England (New York: Fordham University Press, 2003); Alison Shell, Shakespeare and Religion (London: Bloomsbury, 2010); Velma Bourgeois Richmond, Shakespeare, Catholicism and Romance (London: Bloomsbury, 2015); John Yamamoto-Wilson, ‘Shakespeare and Catholicism’, Reformation and Renaissance Review, vol. 7, no. 2 (2005), pp. 347–361; and Clare Asquith, Shadowplay: The Hidden Beliefs and Coded Politics of William Shakespeare (London: Public Affairs, 2005). Pepys, Diary, 28 December 1666, in Latham and Matthews, VII.423. Nicholas Brooke, ed., Macbeth (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1990), p. 32. For a detailed account, see Stanley Wells and Gary Taylor, William Shakespeare: A Textual Companion (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1987), pp. 543–544. From Simon Forman’s MA Bocke of Plaies, reproduced in Wells and Taylor, p. 543. III.v in modern editions and in the First Folio. Davenant’s version was first published in 1674, but Pepys’s appreciation of its qualities in 1666 indicates the adaptations may have been performed before that date. For an excellent discussion, see Barbara A. Murray, Restoration Shakespeare. Viewing the Voice (Cranbury and London: Associated University Presses, 2001), pp. 50–63. John Carey, ed., Milton. Complete Shorter Poems (Harlow: Longman, 1968), pp. 36–45. Jean I. Marsden, ‘Spectacle, Horror, and Pathos’, in Deborah Payne Fisk, ed., The Cambridge Companion to English Restoration Theatre (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000), p. 179. Elkanah Settle, The Female Prelate, Being the History of the Life and Death of Pope Joan (London, 1680).

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21. On 17 November 2015, before the football friendly at Wembley Stadium between England and France, fans and players from both sides sang the French national anthem to mark the Paris bombings of the previous week. 22. World Trade Center, dir. Oliver Stone (Paramount Pictures, 2006), with Nicholas Cage as John McLoughlin; Olympus Has Fallen, dir. Antoine Fuqua (Millennium Films, 2013), with Gerard Butler as Mike Banning. 23. Binyon’s poem, written in 1914, appears on numerous war memorials across the world as well as being read at the 11 November Remembrance Day service. 24. Henry N. Paul, The Royal Play of Macbeth (New York: Macmillan, 1950). 25. Macbeth, IV.i.119–120. 26. Shapiro, p. 290. 27. David Norbrook, ‘Macbeth and the Politics of Historiography,’ in Kevin Sharpe and Steven N. Zwicker, eds., The Politics of Discourse. The Literature and History of SeventeenthCentury England (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1987), pp. 78–116. 28. Buchanan’s Rerum Scoticarum Historia was published in 1582, Holinshed’s Chronicles of England, Scotland and Ireland in 1577. 29. For a study of unfolding treason laws and their impact on drama, see Rebecca Lemon, Treason by Words. Literature, Law and Rebellion in Shakespeare’s England (Ithaca and London: Cornell University Press, 2006). 30. Macbeth, I.v.1–11; King Lear, IV.vii.257–264. Within the extensive critical literature on women’s literacy and transgression in the period, see Paul Salzman, Reading Early Modern Women’s Writing (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2006), and N.H. Keeble, The Cultural Identity of Seventeenth-Century Woman. A Reader (London: Routledge, 1987). Jean Jasper’s unpublished thesis, Seditious Billes: Letters in Renaissance Drama (Birmingham City University, 2011), is a fine study of anxieties about writing and personal correspondence. 31. Macbeth, I.iii.134–138. 32. Macbeth, dir. Roman Polanski (Playboy Productions, 1971), with Jon Finch as Macbeth; Macbeth, dir. Justin Kurzel (Film4, 2015), with Michael Fassbender as Macbeth. 33. Henri Lefebvre, The Production of Space, trans. Donald Nicholson-Smith (Oxford: Blackwell, 1974). 34. Macbeth, II.iii.62–63. 35. Macbeth, III.ii.8–9. 36. Shapiro, pp. 36–38. 37. Macbeth, I.vii.1–2. 38. Macbeth, I.vii.2–3. 39. Hamlet, III.iii.37. 40. Macbeth, I.vii.4. 41. Macbeth, III.ii.19–22. 42. Macbeth, V.v.9. 43. Macbeth, V.v.18–28 44. Emmanuel Levinas, Otherwise than Being, or Beyond Essence, trans. Alphonso Lingis (The Hague, Boston and London: Martinus Nijhoff, 1981).

10 All That Is Certain Vanishes Into Air Tracing the Anabasis of the Japanese Red Army1 Naeem Mohaiemen

When I was a child, I was told that when people died they became stars. I didn’t really believe it, but I could appreciate it. We three Red Army soldiers wanted to become Orion when we died. And it calms my heart to think that all the people we killed will also become stars in the same heaven. As the revolution goes on, how the stars will multiply! —Közö Okamoto, interview in Israeli prison2

The news item was brief and nondescript.3 In a four-sentence summary, a Japanese news service announced that Osamu Maruoka, a “former Japanese Red Army member,” died in a prison hospital at age sixty. A year earlier, he had unsuccessfully appealed for a suspension of his sentence on the grounds that he suffered from a serious heart condition. The report included a brief précis of his life’s work, almost mimicking bulleted points in a resume: a) Conspired with Palestinian guerrillas in hijacking a Japan Airlines plane over Amsterdam in 1973, b) Hijacked a JAL jumbo jet and forced it to land in Bangladesh in 1977, and so on. The circumstances of Nihon Sekigun (Japanese Red Army, or JRA) member Maruoka’s arrest were quotidian: He was apprehended in Tokyo in 1987, when he entered the country on a forged passport. As follow-up research to a film I completed in 2011, I had been tracing the eleven Japanese revolutionary party members4 who had been on board the hijacked Japanese airplane that flew from Dhaka to Algiers in 1977; nondescript finales were the norm for many of these key protagonists. In the recordings of the negotiations between the lead hijacker (codename “Dankesu”) and the hostage negotiator (Bangladesh Air Force Chief A. G. Mahmud), the hijackers (an initial team of five, and six who were released from Japanese prisons as part of a hostage exchange) remain an obstinately ghostly presence. BANGLADESHI JOURNALIST: How many hijackers were on board? JAPANESE STEWARDESS 1: Five . . . past . . . five men. BJ: Did you see their face? JS1: Fes? JAPANESE TRANSLATOR: Fays! Face! [mimes] JS1: Yes, but [mimes] covered. Covered. BJ: Could you guess if they are young or old or middle-aged? JS1: About . . . JAPANESE STEWARDESS 2: They said .  .  . about [shows two fingers]

twenty years

about two .  .  .

All That Is Certain Vanishes Into Air BJ: Very young then! JS2: No, the youngest and JS1: About thirty years BJ: Between 30–35, JS1: Yes BJ: Which one?5

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the oldest, twenty, about twenty years . . . difference

25–35, or 25–30?

The Japanese and Bangladeshi press followed this 1977 hijacking very closely, but after the hijackers arrived in Algeria, very few traces were left behind. Even the breathless details remembered by an American hostage were minimal: “[C]ruel eyes, he had very cruel eyes, I can’t remember anything else.”6 Only at the time of the future arrests did things come back into focus. Maruoka was arrested in 1987 on a false passport; another member was apprehended while shoplifting dried cuttlefish in a Tokyo store. The computerized system in a Tokyo police station had matched his fingerprints with an Interpol database. An international hijacking career ended over a craving for salty snacks. Maruoka could possibly have been the lead hijacker of that Bangladesh flight— codename “Dankesu”—captured on the tape recordings of the hostage negotiations. In the last moments of the hijack, he had insisted on staying illegible: MAHMUD:

Danke . . . uh, tell me, what is your name? Because I have told you my

name. My name is .  .  . number twenty. When we establish people’s republic of Japan, I’ll tell you my original name.7

DANKESU:

If number twenty was Maruoka, he died in prison in full view of the state. But he left little in the way of records that could help a researcher trace the origins of this group or create a social mapping of its membership. The experience of the JRA in captivity stands in contrast with that of Germany’s Rote Armee Fraktion (RAF), whose time in Stammheim Prison was documented on television and in print. Along with recent flm adaptations and books,8 fragments of the RAF’s own archives keep trickling out—from Meinhof’s pre-underground articles9 to Astrid Proll’s collection of photographs.10 RAF members, thriving at a particular conjuncture of media-is-message, always had one eye on the record for posterity, documenting themselves throughout their own times. The brevity of Maruoka’s obituary underscores that no similarly voluminous self-generated or posthumous archive exists for the Japanese Red Army— especially not in English. In this chapter, I look at four very different works about the Japanese New Left11 groups. All of them provide incomplete snapshots, and an artist’s film comes closest to holding a steady gaze on the group’s survivors, rather than the dramatic event. I will first parse two genres of academic writing—William Farrell from policy circles and Patricia Steinhoff from sociology. Think tank–affiliated Farrell relies on contemporary media reports, with an eye to assisting future policing; that is, his writing looks at Japanese New Left through a predictive forensic lens. Sociologist Patricia Steinhoff takes a more distanced view of the groups, looking at the Japanese corporate model to explain militancy and secrecy. From these texts, I will move to two filmmakers who provide views of the lived experiences of members. I first look at Masao Adachi, who made sympathetic films for, and aligned with, the Japanese Red Army’s actions—a

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Figure 10.1 Eric Baudelaire, The Anabasis of May and Fusako Shigenobu, Masao Adachi and 27 Years Without Images, 2011 (two film stills).

record of the imaginative space of the Japanese New Left while events unraveled. Finally, I look at artist Eric Baudelaire’s film, a look back at Japanese Red Army members (including Adachi) many decades after events. It is in Baudelaire’s work, especially in his friendship with Masao Adachi, that we get a feeling for the afterlife of the Japanese members. This is a survey of a period long after the movement has ended, when survivors have to reconcile their past enthusiasm with a current moment when none of the Japanese New Left’s revolutionary possibilities exist any longer.

Think Tank Identikit and “Salaryman” Japan William R. Farrell’s Blood and Rage is a poorly written “analyst” volume, useful as an example of the terror-industrial complex’s publication circuit. His interest in the Japanese Red Army is primarily to probe the mind of the “modern terrorist.” Written in 1990, it begins with breathless warnings that come, pointlessly, long after the group’s demise—“We will hear more from the JRA. The noise will be loud and the effect deadly.”12 The book’s acknowledgments lay out the think tank network that Farrell’s text relies on: The Jaffee Center for Strategic Studies in Tel Aviv, the Institute for Social Engineering in Tokyo, Business Risks International in Nashville, and the Naval War College in Rhode Island. The last organization seems an anomaly until we read in Farrell’s first chapter that in 1988 JRA member Kikumura Yu (“more like a ne’er do well than an agent of death,” says Farrell) was arrested on the New Jersey Turnpike. During the trial, it was alleged that Yu’s target was the US Naval Recruiting Station in New York, which explains how the Naval War College library came to build up an extensive Japanese-language dossier on the JRA. These sources guide Farrell toward a pathologized view of the members’ motivations. Even Yu’s diminutive “5 feet 2 inches” leads to Farrell’s clumsy witticism that this man had “planned to stand tall” in the annals of terrorism. Although two of the JRA’s most notorious actions are the Lod Airport killings of 1973 and the Dhaka hijack of 1977, analysis of the group often includes references to the Asama-Sanso murders of 1971 even though that event was carried out by a different group—Rengō Sekigun (United Red Army, or URA). The incident began

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with URA members hiding in mountains for training and “self-purification” in the form of a series of recriminatory self-critique sessions. Ritual beatings were inflicted on weaker members, and if a comrade died from this, it was considered haibokushi, or “death by defeatism.” The police siege of Asama-Sanso was broadcast on Japanese television, increasing the shockwaves among a Japanese public already frightened by the upheavals of the late 1960s and early 1970s. One of the survivors of Asama, Kunio Bandō, was later released from prison and joined the JRA members in the 1977 Bangladesh hijack. Asama therefore became the overdetermined basis for understandings of Japanese underground groups, often read as group-induced pathology and sexual competition. Farrell’s analysis of the “bastard child”13 Japanese Red Army is closely aligned with the psychoanalytic view in Japan that Asamo was an expression of repressed sexuality. We see this projected to the group’s post-Asama arc as well. Individual cell leaders are stand-ins for group dynamics, and Farrell spends a great deal of time looking into the autobiography of the more “disturbed” members, such as Nagata Hiroko.14 For his descriptions, Farrell depended on Japan Times reports from March 1972 that focused on the rage Nagata directed at female URA members in Asama because she was a “mentally unstable, radical queen.” Farrell discarded this closeted queer characterization and focused on the ravages of unfulfilled lust as foundational to Nagata’s psyche. He detailed a 1969 encounter between Nagata and her onetime mentor Kawashima Go. Visiting the arrested Kawashima in prison, she berated him for his lack of revolutionary zeal—an encounter later leaked to the press by the prison guards. Farrell quoted from post-Asama press to allege that Kawashima had raped Nagata on their first encounter, after which they eventually became lovers. He was, in Farrell’s words, “a lover who took, not shared,” planting a traumatic experience in Nagata.15 It is this trauma that purportedly led her to violence within the group, first through “sexual experimentation” and then “revolutionary zeal.” Farrell’s working definition of trauma is aligned with early twentieth-century theories of the weak-willed receptor detailed in Fassin and Rechtman’s Empire of Trauma.16 Farrell’s dependence on military institutions as interlocutors privileged this view of certain people’s natural receptiveness to traumatic events (hence the emphasis on Nagata’s puberty experiences). Before the rise of micro-scale urban guerrilla warfare, as well as the memorialization of natural disasters, trauma was frequently observed during industrial accidents and in the theater of war. Forensic psychiatry, which previously had been focused on the evaluation of criminals or “abnormal” inmates, looked to the detection of trauma neurosis as an expansion of their field of expertise. French psychiatrist Pierre Janet argued that trauma arose from an external shock (perhaps an event in early childhood) that created a mechanical psychological reaction.17 Sigmund Freud developed his theory in two stages that were distinct from Janet (who focused on external shock). In the first variation, which Freud called seduction theory, he argued that hysteria was generated by a sexual trauma in infancy. Later, Freud abandoned seduction theory and moved to fantasy theory, which argued that the sexual is already traumatic in the unconscious. In Farrell’s book, we find a mixture of Janet’s external shock theory (e.g., Nagata’s reception by classmates, the rape by a comrade) as well as Freud’s sexual as already existing trauma. He states that “sexual behavior was very much on the mind” of URA leaders, delineating a rupture between two group factions after massive police actions (the URA had formed from the wreckage of two other radical groups). One faction

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argued that women were to be supporters, sexual and domestic, while men did the “soldiering.” The second faction, led by Nagata, argued that sexual relations had to be subservient to the movement, and engaging in such relations was counterrevolutionary. Farrell settled on the beating to death of Shindo Ryuzaburo, accused of flirting with female members, as evidence of repressed sexuality as a prime mover of violent energies. Sociologist Patricia Steinhoff’s research is a helpful contrast to Farrell’s overheated and sensationalist analysis. Instead of responses to an external trauma in childhood or puberty-onset sexual misadventures, Steinhoff focuses on the Japanese ideal office type (“Sararīman,” or salaried man) as the model to understand the violence of the Japanese New Left groups, especially the confrontation at Asama lodge.18 It is this socialization itself that she identified as the root of their violent subjectivation. In Louis Althusser’s interpellation narrative, the act of naming can only attempt to bring the addressee into being—there is always the possibility of mishearing, refusal, or defiance. Steinhoff’s argues that young Japanese people are socialized into becoming model employees of corporations; ergo, they could more easily be interpellated into other models of obedience, including the underground New Left factions. She argued that rather than being misfits at the margins, the JRA recruits were socialized normally, and this is what made them ideal candidates for the breakdown, leading to fratricide in search of “purity,” along with other acts of violence, during a decade of hijackings. Steinhoff regarded the internal structure of the JRA as a reinvention of the Japanese managerial style. She highlighted two specific ideal salaryman attributes that the JRA espoused; at the same time, because of their underground status, the JRA did not absorb these elements fully, leading to contradictions that would implode group cohesion. These two attributes are the JRA’s strong hierarchical structure and its rituals that emphasized membership. In the case of the Rengō Sekigun (United Red Army)—the new group that was formed from the merger of two different organizations (Sekigun and Kakusa)—hierarchies were maintained, but not without dispute. Sekigun leader Mori Tsuneo became the head of the new group, while Kakusa’s leader, Nagata Hiroko, reported to him. According to Steinhoff, such a hierarchy is generally acceptable in Japanese society, but because of the revolutionary self-articulation of the

Figure 10.2 Eric Baudelaire, The Anabasis of May and Fusako Shigenobu, Masao Adachi and 27 Years Without Images, 2011 (two film stills).

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New Left, Nagata felt compelled to reject gender roles and push against this hierarchy. For Steinhoff, the planning and decision-making process was “characteristically Japanese,” especially the use of autonomous groups, the obsessive degree of detail in event planning, and the implementation of systematic procedures to maximize “learning from failure.”19 Although replicating the Japanese corporation within the secret cell, Steinhoff argued that the Japanese underground groups always lacked a standardized output, a stable site, and social acceptance and were therefore plagued by inter-member conflict. Steinhoff emphasized that in conflict situations, it was precisely standard “politeness” that aggravated the dispute. The technique of breaking down unproductive defenses, by making the person acutely aware of them in a group consciousness exercise, was practiced in American group psychotherapy; Steinhoff posits that the same model was implemented in the JRA.20 However, the lack of any trained practitioners of psychotherapy made the JRA lose control of the process. Thus, when Nagata berated member Toyama Mieko for her “feminine demeanor,” only to have Toyama remain silent in a display of “standard polite Japanese response,” Nagata was compelled to continue the attack with even more fervor. Steinhoff argues that members may also have been trying to display amae (seeking favor by creating a relationship of dependency) even though the Japanese student movement of the 1960s (which gave rise to some parts of the JRA) had already rejected amae as antithetical to a “revolutionary spirit.” Steinhoff’s analysis depended on a particular essentialization of “Japanese politeness” as well as a combination of several analytic models. On the one hand, we are told that the JRA network was a faithful replication of the Japanese corporation. On the other hand, the network is supposed to have been infiltrated by American group therapy techniques—an “alien” practice that “Japanese politeness” could not digest. Steinhoff is perhaps on firmer ground when discussing conceptual innovations developed in response to member defiance. For instance, Mori was the innovator of the concept kyosanshugika, which is translated as “communist transformation” or “communization.” This term had first been used in Sekigun’s written material (“communization of revolutionary soldiers”), but no practical steps had been defined for reaching it. The time in Asama led to the design of kyosanshugika as relentless self-critique sessions. According to Steinhoff, fuzzy thinking was in evidence among both leaders and followers—the former innovated in new, illogical ways and the latter followed without questioning. Mori had, by this time, fused together two terms: Jikohihan (self-criticism) and sokatsu (collective examination of organizational problems). The emotional appeal of transformation “from bourgeois Japanese college student to revolutionary soldier” made all aspects of past life or present thought suspect. Just how much self-criticism would be needed before sokatsu could transform the organization? Unfortunately, the organization, or in this case the individual bodies, could not survive the examination process. Steinhoff thinks the “traditional Japanese practice of decision making by consensus” doomed the process, as no individual follower could take control of the situation and call for a halt to kyosanshugika.

Pink Remediation and L’Anabase Farrell and Steinhoff represent schematic ways of looking at the Japanese New Left’s underground groups. Farrell gave credence to tabloid reports of childhood trauma, while Steinhoff mapped the movement onto a corporate organogram gone awry. Both

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authors focused on the event arc that came to public knowledge after the Asama lodge event and ended with multiple airport hijacks. The Lod attack, described as the “first suicide mission in the history of the unfolding Mideast conflict,” exerted a magnetic pull on historians.21 The Japanese Red Army also presented it as a central event in their self-framing as a world revolutionary group. The Lod attack was intended to erase the media memory of the Asama mountain fratricide even though that was carried out by a separate faction. By attacking Lod Airport in the name of the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine (PFLP), the JRA positioned themselves at the center of a purportedly global network of revolutionary organizations and patron governments. Artist Eric Baudelaire pushes against this narrative skein that begins and ends with the dramatic plane hijackings. Instead, in The Anabasis of May and Fusako Shigenobu, Masao Adachi and 27 Years without Images (2011), he traces what happened to the members of violent Japanese groups in the aftermath of the 1970s, long after the television cameras had left and Arab governments had lost interest. In many cases, the host countries were exploiting the Japanese commandos and hijackers as an example of the global reach of the Palestinian struggle, both to redirect domestic dissent and to claim leadership of an amorphous, de-territorialized transnational network. Young members of JRA were thrust into the role of being figures for a transnational movement, but once the euphoria of the event had faded, they were often adrift in their new host countries. One of the early hijackings that involved ransom money was the September 1974 takeover of the French Embassy in The Hague. After a crisis lasting several days, the hostages were released in exchange for a $300,000 ransom. The JRA then tried to fly to Yemen but were refused permission to land and eventually had to settle for Damascus. The Syrian government received them cordially but immediately informed them that hostage taking for money was “un-revolutionary.” The money was seized, but where it went no one seems to know. By the time of the 1977 hijack in Bangladesh, the ransom had risen to $6 million, but this was also impounded by the government at the final destination of Algeria. When we read about JRA members showing up on police radars, alone and penniless, in cities as distant from their initial refuge as Bangkok and Lima, we can presume a financial and political abandonment. This was accelerated by the Israeli invasion of Lebanon, which showed the dangers of offering refuge. By the mid-1980s, Japanese New Left survivors were revolutionary orphans, bereft of a mission and ejected from multiple homes. Baudelaire is intrigued by this aftermath, which offers the possibility of looking at revolutionary commitments after the disappearance of the cause. To explore this, he tracked down filmmaker Masao Adachi, part of an organizing cell in Lebanon. Until 1971, Adachi was a film director’s assistant, working with renowned “pink” erotic film director Kōji Wakamatsu. Both were JRA sympathizers, and the films that Wakamatsu made in this period can be read as erotica that doubled as propaganda. Jasper Sharp’s work on the pink industry describes Wakamatsu’s appreciation of the freedom of the erotica format: “They gave me a free rein as long as it included some shots of women’s naked backs and some love scenes.”22 Yuriko Furuhata reads Wakamatsu’s films as part of the cycle of intensified “mediatization”23 in the Japanese avant-garde. This was a period when some of Wakamatsu’s films included newsreel footage of JRA events that occurred the same year the films were made. (Adachi, who was in active communication with JRA members, often collaborated on these films.) The speed of this repurposing can be seen in the 1970 film Sex Jack (selected for Cannes in 1971), which drew on the same year’s Yodogō hijacking that had ended with the hijackers

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defecting to North Korea. The film appropriated the Yodogō hijackers’ slogan “We are Tomorrow’s Joe” (itself appropriating the manga Ashita no Jō), circulating a media reference through the actual event and into a film, the entire cycle taking less than a year before it reached theater screens. Furuhata says Wakamatsu was working in extreme proximity to journalism around JRA events and eagerly remediating these into his films. These media appropriation techniques also appear to include self-criticism of the movement, often in plain sight, and not to be explained away as an ironic gesture. In tandem with Wakamatsu’s most well-known JRA-inspired films Seizoku/Sex Jack (1970) and Red Army/PFLP: Declaration of World War (1971), Adachi’s 1969 film Jogakusei gerira/Female Student Guerrilla appears to make the self-criticism of the group explicit. In it, semi-nude Japanese women fire guns at school officials and say they will never return to class because the revolution has started (recalling Lindsay Anderson’s 1968 film if....). Awash in assemblages of breasts, guns, and slogans, the film could be a spoof of radical chic—except for the fact that a JRA ideologue would not satirize the movement. Or would he? Fast forward to Sex Jack (screenplay by Adachi, directed by Wakamatsu). In a climactic scene, a revolutionary group disintegrates as one member after another takes turns having sex with the two female members. As one woman lies on the floor, “submitting” to her comrades, the other woman, with trembling hands, rapidly reads from a manifesto: Woman 2: On our own initiative we consciously revoke our own nationality. [moans from the sex scene interrupt] And force our way across the border. [moan] It’s only the beginning. We reject any notion of phases. Our unit is capable of struggling for world revolution and building a world headquarters. Fight on a worldwide scale, spilling into North Korea. [moan] We will grow and progress towards Vietnam, Laos, Cambodia, Korea, the Near and Middle East. We call on all our Japanese comrades. We call on all revolutionaries. Long live communism. Long live world revolution.24 The scene lays bare the hypocrisy of the JRA’s revolutionary ethos and the position of women within it. But this film was made in 1970, and Wakamatsu and screenwriter Adachi (writing under the collective pseudonym Izuru Deguchi) were enthusiastic supporters of the JRA. Why did they make a film that seemingly lampooned

Figure 10.3 Masao Adachi, Jogakusei Gerira/Female Student Guerrilla, 1969 (two film stills), as featured in Eric Baudelaire, The Anabasis of May and Fusako Shigenobu, Masao Adachi and 27 Years Without Images, 2011.

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Figure 10.4 Koji Wakamatsu, Seizoku/Sex Jack, 1970 (two film stills), as featured in Eric Baudelaire, The Anabasis of May and Fusako Shigenobu, Masao Adachi and 27 Years Without Images, 2011.

the group? How do we understand this film when compared to Dziga Vertov Group’s Ici et ailleurs (1976), a project more legible as a critique of Left violence, made in a moment when hope had not been yet discarded? For the Dziga Vertov Group (JeanLuc Godard, Jean-Pierre Gorin, Anne-Marie Miéville), events intervened to bring emotional distance and an ironic doubling to the script. The work on the original film, Jusqu’à la victoire (1970), was interrupted by events in the region. By the time they returned to the footage, some of the Palestinian guerrillas they had been profiling had been killed in Black September.25 Facing the chasm between filmed images of inevitable triumph and the ruins of the movement, Godard turned the camera around, questioning the specter of guns that do not fire and audiences that will a reality into existence. Ici et ailleurs is the result: A postmortem of a failed movement whose members have not yet fully absorbed the knowledge of that failure. Are Wakamatsu’s films very different from this, or do they inhabit a similar sense of impending failure? Furuhata argues that Wakamatsu’s work carried an element of “belatedness,” where events are recycled, thus allowing the viewer a line of sight into the gap between journalism and cinema.26 I posit that Wakamatsu expected that the disjuncture would provoke in audiences a cynical eye toward the news cycle, which was usually hypercritical of the JRA. However, in the scene I described earlier, the emotional poverty of the group becomes stark, inviting a critique of claims about their “revolutionary spirit.” What is extraordinary in the film is that the JRA is being sharply dissected from within during their high point—by one of the group’s own ideologues and fellow travelers. If such premonitions of contradiction appear in a film made when the JRA was at its zenith, how has Masao Adachi navigated the space of revolutionary exile—when failure is much more visible? To explore these questions, Eric Baudelaire began meeting with an aging Adachi in Japan. Thinking through this space of the stranded protagonist’s exile, Baudelaire introduced the idea of l’anabase, or “anabasis.” The word comes from the Greek, meaning both “to embark” and “to return.” Baudelaire uses it to indicate a “movement towards home of men who are lost, outlawed, and out of place.”27 In his book Le Siècle, Alain Badiou has a chapter on anabasis; he regards it as an allegory of the twentieth century drawing to a close and of the drifting of a soul caught

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28

between two options: “[D]isciplined invention and uncertain drifting.” According to Badiou, this idea first appeared in 401 bc, when Cyrus the Younger led thousands of Greek mercenaries across the Tigris. During the ensuing battle, the Persian army killed Cyrus, rendering the Greek soldiers suddenly headless, stranded in enemy territory. Their unguided wandering through this unknown land became the plot for the play Anabasis, attributed to Xenophon, a student of Socrates and a professional soldier.29 Xenophon becomes the protagonist of the play when he is elected rearguard commander after Cyrus’s death. In Anabasis, Xenophon uses the term to also symbolize the collapse of a sense of order after the sudden shift in subjective position from heroic warriors to leaderless strangers in a hostile land. Reviewing the twentieth-century use of the term by poets Alexis Leger (pen name Saint-John Perse) and Paul Ancel (pen name Paul Celan), Baudelaire suggests that there are two opposed literary motifs at play: A search for home and the invention of a destiny in a new home. When Baudelaire finally contacted Adachi, a second dislocation had swept through the latter’s life after two decades of hiding in Lebanon. Improvements in facial recognition technology finally led to Adachi’s arrest. He was flown to Japan to stand trial, but the court failed to prove that Adachi had a direct role in JRA attacks. He was a spokesperson for the group in Lebanon but was not involved in violence. The films he wrote for Wakamatsu, with their melding of guns and sex, were not admissible as evidence (they were only fiction, his lawyers may have said). In the end, Adachi was charged only with forging passports and was released from prison after three years. Later, when European interest in Wakamatsu’s films picked up, Adachi was invited to come to a festival in France (this trip would have paralleled his 1971 trip to Cannes, when a stopover in the Middle East resulted in the film Red Army/PFLP: Declaration of World War and an extended stay in Beirut). But, instead of traveling again to France, Adachi discovered that the Japanese authorities would not issue him a passport—he was “home” now but trapped within its borders. Baudelaire’s research led him to Adachi but not to an interview in Japan. Instead, Adachi, who wanted to return to filmmaking, asked Baudelaire to help him recover fragments of the Lebanon he could no longer visit: “When you go to Beirut, please shoot some images for me to use in my next film.” Fulfilling this part of the agreement, Baudelaire made a trip to Beirut and then returned to Tokyo with 16 mm footage of a changed city, its post-Hariri construction

Figure 10.5 Eric Baudelaire, The Anabasis of May and Fusako Shigenobu, Masao Adachi and 27 Years Without Images, 2011 (two film stills).

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boom rendering the place unrecognizable to Adachi. At this point in the film, the audience may have expected to finally be rewarded with Adachi’s recollection of the early days of the JRA: A what-why-how sequence that would give us an understanding of the group’s ideology (a better understanding than Farrell and Steinhoff provide). Instead, Baudelaire presented an elliptical series of encounters in which Adachi mourned his filmmaking life and the loss of Beirut: Adachi: If I had continued working, I might have been able to make many more interesting films. If I had stayed in Japan without going to the Middle East, I would have shot many more films. But on the other hand, I am a heavy drinker. I might have died from alcohol abuse 20 or 25 years ago if I had stayed in Japan. . . . So perhaps it’s all the same. The question of “here” or “there”—being in Japan or the Middle East, it may be different in a geographical sense, but I think actually there is only one “here.” If you are in the Middle East the Middle East is “here.” Wherever you go, there is only “here.” The point is to pursue a “here” “elsewhere.”30 The flm ends here, fading to black. Adachi had brought us back to the unfamiliar familiar—“elsewhere” as a metaphor for the universal. The Japanese Red Army failed to start a world war, a universal insurrection. Many years later, this surviving sympathizer seems to want to create a language for a different universal project. Describing his fieldwork in Northern Ireland, Allen Feldman talked about a rare first-hand photograph of an IRA member. He called it a “souvenir I needed to bring home,” conveying the “visual ideology” that undergirded the structure and experience of political violence in Northern Ireland.31 In the case of the JRA, I do not as yet have a large amount of first-hand material generated in unguarded moments. However, the composite of fragments, especially Baudelaire’s film, may show a path to parse the messianic and self-propulsive affect that members were able to access. Adachi encapsulates a bittersweet look at youthful possibilities, which are suffused with what many fellow travelers would later call a “historic mistake.” His meditation on “elsewhere” provides a trace of why people join dissident movements, choose certain modes of confrontation, and carve out emotional vectors “in the heat of the moment.” There is always belief that transformation is “around the corner” and all it needed was a “little push.”

Figure 10.6 Eric Baudelaire, The Anabasis of May and Fusako Shigenobu, Masao Adachi and 27 Years Without Images, 2011 (two film stills).

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In Don DeLillo’s Mao I, Lebanon’s political landscape feels strangely familiar even before we encounter l’anabase: “It is the lunar part of us that dreams of wasted terrain. She hears their voices calling across the leveled city. Our only language is Beirut.”32 Anabasis, or wandering in the hopes of creating, is a theme we glean from the wreckage of movement energies. In the context of Baudelaire’s film, Pierre Zaoui recounts the original story of Xenophon’s Greek soldiers in chapters that match the path of the Japanese Red Army in the turbulent 1970s: First the initial conflict between thirst for the outside and mercenary interest, then the death of Cyrus and the subsequent wandering in the desert. That wandering was not aimless, but rather a journey that required crime to sustain itself—that is, the defeated army needed to plunder to survive. As for the Greeks, so perhaps for the Japanese exiles, who entered into ever more fragile alliances by the end of the 1970s: Algeria, Syria, and Libya. “Nostalgia for the kingdom of water” drove the sojourners, but when they finally reached home, nothing was as it was promised to be. Adachi seems to realize that, by the end, the largest collateral damage of the JRA project may have been its own members. The cities that were the stage for their actions—Dhaka, Lod, Tokyo, The Hague—survived, but men did not. Zaoui reminds us that “Anabasis is not the tale of a ruin of the ruined, but of a ruin of ruiners, or people who are the chief architects of their own ruin.”33 Baudelaire’s film on Adachi encapsulates a bittersweet look at youthful possibilities. This is a reversal of the heroic narrative we expect in these moments—uprisings that do not result in victory for the vanguard. Binary notions of failure/success do not necessarily illuminate, and sometimes even obscure, the optimism that was embedded in these moments. Adachi’s collaborations with Wakamatsu exploited the anarchic sexual energy of pink film; at the same time, they were also tinged with the pathos of (possible) failure. That possibility may have even encouraged Adachi and the JRA to push a little faster, a little harder, to get past the moment of doubt. Adachi’s own earlier film A.K.A. Serial Killer (1969) gives us another lens through which to consider his time in exile. In that film, bleak landscapes draw our attention to the constant vagrancy that shaped the protagonists (and the filmmaker). In Baudelaire34 we find echoes of that same landscape, with Lebanon playing itself but also standing in for Japan and, finally, for Adachi—alone, without a nation. While we hear Adachi’s voice or read his emails, lingering shots of a highway fade into the horizon. Somewhere on screen, and in the timbre of Adachi’s voice (now hesitant, now certain), is the moment when a foretold failure became the actual.

Notes 1. This chapter was expanded from an essay originally published in e-flux Journal, #63, 2015. 2. Patricia Steinhoff, “Portrait of a Terrorist: An Interview with Közö Okamoto,” Asian Survey, vol. XVI (Sept. 1976), 842. 3. Kyodo News Service, “Ex-Red Army Member Maruoka Dies in Prison Hospital,” May 29, 2011. 4. While the 1977 hijacking of JAL 472 is sometimes described as a “Japanese Red Army” hijacking (including in my 2011 film), the actual affiliations were heterodox. The hijack team possibly included Kunio Bando of Rengō Sekigun (United Red Army, or URA) and Norio Sasaki of Higashi Ajia Hannichi Busō Sensen (East Asia Anti-Japan Armed Front, or EAAJAF). It is because of Sasaki’s presence that two of his comrades from EAAJAF (Ayako Daidōji and Yukiko Ekida) were included among the six high-value prisoners released by the Japanese government during the prisoner exchange that ended the hijack.

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5. Naeem Mohaiemen, United Red Army (The Young Man Was, Part 1), 70 min. (2012), 00:56:14. 6. Author interview with Carole Wells, Los Angeles, March 2013. 7. Naeem Mohaiemen, United Red Army, 01:04:10. 8. Charity Scribner, After the Red Army Faction: Gender, Culture, and Militancy (New York: Columbia University Press, 2014). 9. Ulrike Meinhof, Everybody Talks About the Weather . . . We Don’t: The Writings of Ulrike Meinhof (New York: Seven Stories Press, 2011). 10. Astrid Proll, Baader Meinhof: Pictures on the Run, 1967–77 (Zurich: Scalo, 1998). 11. Several small Japanese political groups went underground at the same time as the Japanese Red Army, and as in the 1977 Bangladesh hijack, lines of action sometimes overlapped. While I am primarily interested in the Japanese Red Army, as other parties also pass through some of the material I have looked at, I sometimes use the term “Japanese New Left” to indicate the 1960s Japanese movement that split from the “Old Left” of the Japanese Communist Party and Japan Socialist Party and eventually, by the 1970s, after several internal splits, pursued a path of armed insurgency. 12. William R. Farrell, Blood and Rage: The Story of the Japanese Red Army (Lexington: Lexington Books, 1990), xi. 13. Ibid., 3. 14. Nagata Hiroko described herself to Japanese police as a “very sensitive person” with parents who “gave her all that she could want.” Farrell argues that the arrival of puberty set off a spiral of self-loathing in Nagata, as her “husky voice” and “slightly bulging eyes” reduced her “femininity.” Nagata compounded this by wearing “wrinkled clothes” and “rarely applying makeup.” Ibid., 4. 15. Ibid., 5. 16. Didier Fassin and Richard Rechtman, The Empire of Trauma: An Inquiry into the Condition of Victimhood (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2009). 17. Giuseppe Craparo, Francesca Ortu, and Onno Van der Hart, eds. Rediscovering Pierre Janet: Trauma, Dissociation, and a New Context for Psychoanalysis (Abingdon: Routledge, 2019). 18. According to Steinhoff, the young men and women drawn to become members of the underground group were “quite normal individuals” who were “well-socialized members of Japanese society.” Patricia Steinhoff, “Death by Defeatism and Other Fables: The Social Dynamics of the Renko Sekigun Purge,” in Japanese Social Organization, ed. Rakie Sugiyama Lebra (Hawaii: University of Hawaii Press, 1992), 195. 19. Patricia Steinhoff, “Hijackers, Bombers, and Bank Robbers: Managerial Style in the Japanese Red Army,” The Journal of Asian Studies, vol. 48, no. 4 (Nov. 1989), 730, 731. 20. Although Steinhoff does not mention Werner H. Erhard’s EST program by name, it may be what she is thinking of when she compares these JRA confrontations to “consciousnessraising techniques familiar to American women’s groups” (Steinhoff, “Death by Defeatism and Other Fables,” 198). 21. Eric Baudelaire, L’Anabase de May et Fusako Shigenobu, Masao Adachi, et 27 années sans images [booklet] (Centre D’Art Contemporain la Synagogue de Delme, 2011), 12. 22. Jasper Sharp, Behind the Pink Curtain: The Complete History of Japanese Sex Cinema (Guildford: FAB Press, 2008). 23. Yuriko Furuhata, Cinema of Actuality: Japanese Avant-garde Filmmaking in the Season of Image Politics (Durham: Duke University Press, 2013), 100. 24. Koji Wakamatsu, dir., and Masao Adachi, screenplay, Seizoku / Sex Jack, 70 min. (1970). For an extended discussion of Wakamatsu and Adachi’s films: Go Hirasawa, Koji Wakamatsu: Cinéaste de la Révolte (Paris: Imho, 2010); Go Hirasawa, Masao Adachi: Le bus de la révolution passera bientot près de chez toi (Rouge Profond, 2012). 25. Black September was a battle between the Jordanian Armed Forces (JAF) and the Palestine Liberation Organization (PLO) in 1970. Although the Jordanian authorities initially tolerated the presence of Palestinian guerrilla camps inside their country, by 1970 King Hussein considered the PLO under Yasser Arafat to be a direct threat to his control over Jordan. After an attempted assassination of Hussein, as well as a hijack at Jordan’s Dawson’s Field, Jordan declared martial law and launched a fierce attack against the Palestinian fedayeen in his territory. There were two unintended consequences of the Black September killings.

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26. 27. 28. 29. 30. 31. 32. 33. 34.

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The first was the departure of the fedayeen from Jordan into Lebanon, where they eventually joined the 1975 Lebanese Civil War. The second was the formation of the Black September Organization, which first carried out reprisal attacks against the Jordanian government and then moved to Israeli targets, including the 1972 Munich Olympic games. Furuhata, Cinema of Actuality, 114. Baudelaire, L’Anabase de May . . . [booklet], 28. Alain Badiou, Le Siècle (Paris: Editions du Seuil, 2005), 121. (Excerpts translated by Eric Baudelaire). Michael A. Flower, Xenophon’s Anabasis, or the Expedition of Cyrus (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2012). Eric Baudelaire, L’Anabase de May et Fusako Shigenobu, Masao Adachi, et 27 années sans images [film] 85 min. (Centre D’Art Contemporain la Synagogue de Delme, 2011), 01:21:00. Allen Feldman, “Violence and Vision: The Prosthetics and Aesthetics of Terror,” Public Culture, vol. 10, no. 1 (1997), 24–60, Duke University Press. Don DeLillo, Mao I (New York: Penguin Group, 1991), 239. Pierre Zaoui, L’Anabase de la Terreur: vouloir (ne pas) comprende, trans. Matthew Cunningham (Centre D’Art Contemporain la Synagogue de Delme, 2011), 45. Eric Baudelaire has made a subsequent film inspired by Adachi’s 1969 landscape theory film AKA Serial Killer. Titled AKA Jihadi, Baudelaire’s 2015 film traces French men who traveled to Syria in 2012 to join Islamic State.

11 Media Hijack Chris Burden and the Logic of Terrorism Matthew Teti

‘Clockwork Orange County’1 On February 9, 1972, the American sculptor and performance artist, Chris Burden, went with a small crew, consisting of a videographer and two still photographers, to the studio of a local Irvine, California, cable access channel, where he was supposed to tape an interview. About a month earlier, Phyllis Lutjeans, an art critic and administrator at the Newport Harbor Art Museum in Orange County (now the Orange County Museum of Art), had invited Burden to make a work of performance art on her half-hour fine art talk show called All About Art. As a colleague of Burden’s at the Newport Harbor Art Museum, where the artist occasionally worked as a preparator, Lutjeans knew his work well and had written about it in her newspaper column of the same name.2 In addition to that, Lutjeans’s husband, Alfred, was a close friend of Burden’s at the time and photographed three of the artist’s seminal early performances, including Shoot (1971), the latter of which he took one of the iconic images.3 Phyllis Lutjeans also attended several of Burden’s early performances and had already had occasion to interview him in 1971.4 Familiar as she was with Burden’s audacious, and sometimes violent, practices, Lutjeans was without a doubt taking a risk by asking the artist to make a work on her talk show; she recently told an interviewer that she felt ‘“edgy” when Burden accepted [her] invitation.’5 Burden, too, said that he began to feel anxious about the opportunity because the ‘pieces that [he] proposed had all kind of been rejected or diluted.’6 In his official description of the work, written subsequent to the performance, Burden explained that ‘several [of his] proposals were censored by the station or by Phyllis.’7 One such proposition, which Burden recounted in later interviews, was to eat the tape of the show as it was being shot, which was, of course, technically impossible.8 However, Lutjeans remembers it differently, and after Burden died she claimed that the artist had called her several times seeking encouragement to do a piece on the air, though she refuted the fact that he made any proposals that were censored by her or anyone else.9 Partly out of frustration with the situation and the tension building up to the as yet unrealized work, Burden finally ‘agreed to an interview situation where [. . .] Phyllis would ask [him] about some of the pieces that [he] had decided not to do on the show for various reasons.’10 On the day of the taping, Burden arrived at the television station with his own documentary crew, comprised of Phyllis’s husband, Alfred Lutjeans, and artist colleagues Barbara T. Smith and Gary Beydler, both of whom had also participated in and documented Burden’s performance work before.11 Burden brought these three

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observers because he intended to make a record of the proceedings for himself, for which purpose his friends were equipped with video and still cameras. Burden was dressed in a white T-shirt, white pants, worn-out white tennis shoes, and sunglasses, which he wore during the interview. In plain view, strapped to the belt on Burden’s left-hand side, was a sheathed knife, which solicited a query from Lutjeans before they began the interview. In jest she asked, ‘Oh, Chris, are we going to have a little bloodletting today?’12 Burden later commented that his knife may have ‘set the whole tone for the day.’13 Once the interview had begun, Burden ‘requested that the show be transmitted live, [s]ince the station was not broadcasting at the time.’14 Despite being taken aback by the brazen young artist’s request, the station manager agreed to preempt the community bulletin board that the station aired between programming and broadcast the taping of the interview live, the thought being that no one would really be tuned in at that time anyway.15 Thus, on a random Wednesday at the beginning of February 1972, over the cable access airwaves, channel 3, Irvine/Newport Beach, the scrolling community announcements abruptly cut, without introduction, to an interview in progress between Phyllis Lutjeans and Chris Burden. Lutjeans proceeded to ask Burden about some of the pieces he was considering doing for the show, at which point, as the artist later wrote, ‘I demonstrated a TV hijack. Holding a knife at her throat, I threatened her life if the station stopped live transmission.’16 Burden later told Willoughby Sharp that his piece, TV Hijack, was simply a simulation of something that he had resolutely decided not to do because he could not go through with it; he could not carry out the violence against another person that his threat implied. In Burden’s mind, the premise of such an act, if it were to be devoutly carried out, would necessitate that he be able to end the hostage’s life if his demand was not met. In discussion with Sharp, Burden was clear that he was not prepared to go there, and therefore he could only stage a demonstration of the hijacking: ‘I’d have to be ready to [kill] even though it might not come up.’17 Nonetheless, even Burden’s exhibition of a hijacking was terrifying to those in attendance, not to mention Lutjeans herself. Barbara T. Smith, who was there and helped Burden document the piece, said Lutjeans was scared to death, confirming that the host really had no foreknowledge of Burden’s intentions.18 The artist told Avalanche magazine that for all intents and purposes, it looked like he was taking Lutjeans hostage.19 A year after Burden’s TV Hijack, Esquire magazine named him a ‘man of the seventies,’ noting ‘that no observer had the nerve to find out if he was bluffing’20—in this case, certainly not the station manager, who readily acquiesced to Burden’s demand for continued live transmission, while Alfred Lutjeans looked on. Alfred was presumably the videographer (since Beydler and Smith both contributed still shots of the piece to Burden’s first monograph), but he must have been so rattled by Burden’s knife and the encroaching dread of what was about to happen that he never hit record and did not, in fact, videotape any of the performance. Smith said that she had an inkling of what Burden was up to, but as always the artist’s close confidants allowed him to proceed without interfering in the work, no matter what its level of violence and intensity.21 After Burden released Lutjeans and the dust had settled in the studio, Burden asked the station manager for the master videotape of the interview, which contained the artist’s entire exchange with Lutjeans. While this particular request bore no threat of violence, the station manager unwittingly complied, whereupon Burden proceeded to

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unwind the tape and douse it with acetone, destroying the footage. The destruction of the master recording of the performance ensured that Burden, who had engaged his own documentarians, would be the sole possessor of all images of his act, which had probably only been seen by a few incidental viewers, if any, when it aired live. Burden intended to destroy the evidence of the pieces he discussed with Lutjeans—those he was not allowed or not willing to do—so that only he would retain a record of them and thereby control the content and messaging surrounding them. For that reason, Chris Burden’s TV Hijack is known to posterity as a demonstration of a media hijacking carried out within the realm of fine art and aesthetics, in addition to on live cable TV, rather than a terrorist act.

Skyjack TV One of the most significant referents connoted by the title, TV Hijack, is the phenomenon of airline hijacking, also known as skyjacking, which, during the course of the 1960s, became one of the most numerous acts of domestic terrorism faced by people living in the United States. The phenomenon was popularized during the Cold War as a means by which refugees sought political asylum.22 In the U.S., many—if not the majority of—airline hijackings of the 1960s and early 1970s were carried out to facilitate the hijackers’ passage to Cuba, thus expressing sympathy with the communist nation and its cause.23 Demands for transportation, the release of political prisoners, and extortion were by far the most common demands made by airline hijackers in America at the time. In those cases where the hijackers expressed any ideological motivation whatsoever for their actions, the U.S. government considered skyjacking to be an act of terrorism. Terrorism, both the word and the actions it signifies, means many things to many people, and the term has historically been associated with a wide range of practices. Alex P. Schmid, a social scientist who has spent his career studying terrorism, recently updated and revised the academic consensus definition of terrorism that he and his team first developed in the 1980s. The definition is based on a series of questionnaires that were solicited from experts in government, the private sector, and academia as well as over 250 published definitions of terrorism, and while such a definition cannot suffice in all cases, it is generally recognized as the most comprehensive and inclusive summary of the research. Schmid’s definition elucidates the core characteristics shared by much of what we call terrorism in the West—namely, its symbolic nature, its involvement of ‘civilian and non-combatant targets of violence, its sometimes provocative [. . .] aims, the disruption of public order and [. . .] the creation of a climate of fear.’24 While acts of terrorism usually attempt to realize a political, religious, or otherwise ideological project for which the perpetrators do not have mass support, Schmid’s definition allows for the absence of such goals as well. What is most interesting in regard to Chris Burden’s TV Hijack is terrorism’s inherently symbolic character, which is to say that, in most cases, terrorism seeks to influence audiences much broader than those it actually targets by carrying out representative acts of violence. It is widely recognized that terrorism fulfills the imperative to strike fear in the general public through the use of the mass media to spread images of terrorist violence well beyond the statistically small populations directly affected by any single act of terrorism. Media-minded definitions of terrorism can sometimes even go so far as to say that the ‘true goal [of terrorism] is to exploit the power of the media—particularly

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the visual media—to horrify the viewing public and erode its confidence in government and democratic values.’25 Regardless of what share of the role it plays in perpetrating terrorism, the mass media definitely serves to emphasize the randomness of terrorist violence and reinforces the premise upon which the threat of terrorism is based—that everyone in a specific society has something to fear from such an attack. The US government report noted ‘in 1968 the rate of [skyjackings] in the United States and abroad rose significantly,’ leading to what some called a rash or epidemic of airline hijackings.26 The Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) and Department of Justice reported 170 domestic hijacking attempts from 1968 to 1969. In the heyday of skyjacking, American commercial airliners were being abducted ‘often at a clip of one or more per week.’27 In the month prior to Burden’s performance of TV Hijack in early 1972, skyjack attempts surged. Between January 7 and February 9, six American airliners were hijacked, two of which involved planes destined for or emanating from Chris Burden’s hometown of Los Angeles.28 Three of these incidents happened in the span of three days, between January 26 and 29, 1972. This proportion of skyjackings was unusual compared to declining figures from 1971.29 The week of Burden’s performance, The Economist’s ‘American Survey’ also reported that, due to the spike in skyjackings since January 1, 1972, the FAA implemented a new ‘system for screening passengers and their luggage’ with metal detectors, which caused inevitable travel delays but made the skies safer to fly (sky marshals were another precaution, already in place, for deterring airline hijacking).30 The increase in domestic skyjacking in the late ’60s and early ’70s has, in part, been attributed to the unprecedented coverage the phenomenon received in the U.S. media, especially on television. It has been suggested that ‘air piracy is the most telegenic form of terrorism’ because reports deftly blur the lines between journalism and entertainment, capitalizing on the sensational aspects of hostage crises.31 Others would say that television was the ideal medium for all kinds of terrorism because the dissemination of televisual images carries with it a matter-of-fact instantaneity that reinforces the imminent threat of terrorist violence. However, on the opposite end of the temporal spectrum, kidnapping and hostage situations, such as hijacking, were particularly effective at garnering media attention due to the fact that they played out over time and provided story arcs and characters alternately worthy of sympathy, shame, and scorn.32 Not only did hostage situations create dramatic entertainment, which was easy for the media to assimilate into the standard frames that govern news reporting, but they were also punctuated by events that provided the media with cause to update and review stories as they developed.33 In this regard, television was a medium particularly well suited to reporting on hijackings since special news bulletins could preempt regularly scheduled programming and provide updates that kept viewers tuned in.34 On top of that, special reports and long-form documentary news programs, as well as news and political commentary shows, provided a layer of interpretation and increased the television airtime that was given to hijacking and other hostage situations.35 No work of art better demonstrates Cold War–era skyjacking’s pervasiveness on television than Belgian artist Johan Grimonprez’s 1997 film dial H-I-S-T-O-R-Y, which is an experimental documentary that examines airline hijacking through the lens of historic media representations. The film dial H-I-S-T-O-R-Y presents a befuddling picture of how American television news turned skyjacking into a media circus that overcame the political ideology of the liberation movements it otherwise might

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have served with total spectacle. Grimonprez’s film shows hijackers conducting television interviews and press conferences and standing trial, which gave them a larger-thanlife media presence, sometimes over very protracted periods of time (Figure 11.1). Celebrity hijackers, whose lives themselves were compelling narratives of lawless risk and reckless abandon, were gold to the TV news industry. Take, for instance, America’s most famous skyjacker, the extortionist by the name of D.B. Cooper, who parachuted out of a plane over Washington State in November 1971 with $200,000 in ransom money. Since he was never found or captured, Cooper became an instant legend, spawning, in addition to several imitators, folk songs, feature and documentary films, books, and at least two comic book series. In a 2007 interview, Chris Burden referenced the celebrity status of D.B. Cooper as having informed his piece TV Hijack, noting in particular the historic specificity of that moment in time when terrorists and hijackers were a kind of quintessentially American anti-hero.36 With the sharp increase in skyjacking in the late 1960s, social scientists and security experts were critical of the media’s role in supporting such acts, which they inherently did by giving a voice and publicity to the events and their perpetrators.37 Psychiatrist David Hubbard conducted tests on 40 captured hijackers and, among other conclusions, claimed that the media helped to perpetuate the phenomenon of skyjacking by

Figure 11.1 Palestinian hijacker Mouna Abdel Majid interviewed in Amman, August 1970, from Johan Grimonprez, dial H-I-S-T-O-R-Y, 1997, digital video, 68 min., color and black & white, sound. Source: Johan Grimonprez 2020

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38

making it seem risky and exciting. In the late ’60s and early ’70s, various organizations, not least of all the labor unions that kept the airline industry running, put pressure on the U.S. media to curb its sensationalizing reports of skyjacking (Figure 11.2). In the realm of dramatic television, there was buzz among the heads of the major American TV networks in 1971 that narrative plots involving hijacking would be censored outright.39 Although no network was willing to admit to censoring the dramatic content of fictional programs, there was nonetheless a general self-awareness and sensitivity to the influence the media had over the American public in such matters. However, the news media was not quick to walk away from the attention-grabbing and attention-holding potential of the hostage crises produced by skyjacking. The American television news found ways to continue to cover skyjacking stories such that they deemphasized the hijackers and their demands and turned the camera on the passengers, pilots, and stewards, who were the victims of such acts (Figure 11.3). This strategy was based, in part, on David Hubbard’s Freudian assessment of the hijackers’ psychological profile, which recommended infantilizing or emasculating terrorists as a means of deterrence—in this application, ignoring them. At the very least, television could try to discourage extortionists and celebrity-seekers, as well as stifle terrorists’ ability to communicate through mass media channels, by neglecting them in reports

Figure 11.2 General strike of airline pilots, United Nations, New York, ca. 1971, from Johan Grimonprez, dial H-I-S-T-O-R-Y, 1997, digital video, 68 min., color and black & white, sound. Source: Johan Grimonprez 2020

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Figure 11.3 Airline employees being interviewed after a skyjacking episode, n.d., from Johan Grimonprez, dial H-I-S-T-O-R-Y, 1997), digital video, 68 min., color and black & white, sound. Source: Johan Grimonprez 2020

and subsequent discussions of skyjacking. Ironically, one thing that aided the media in this effort was the sheer regularity of hijacking in the U.S. during the late ’60s and early ’70s. Since skyjacking was a biweekly event in many news cycles of the time, only notable cases were being reported anyway, such as when force was used to thwart a hijacking attempt. In fact, the American media took a cue from what had become a somewhat regular occurrence and tailored their reporting to focus on the mundane and routine aspects of hijacking, as if it were just a common discomfort of air travel. In dial H-I-S-T-OR-Y, Grimonprez’s editing reveals how the television news became preoccupied with banal, extra-diegetic details of the skyjacking experience, such as the eating habits of the terrorists. These changes in focus—both the decision to foreground the experiences of the victims and to transform hijacking into a quotidian hassle—are exceptionally well documented in Grimonprez’s film. In press conferences and interviews with skyjack victims, what comes through is a sense that being hijacked was not only normal but also did not seem nearly as life-threatening as it really was. One former hostage spoke of his shock, surprise, and fear, but when asked about the living conditions aboard a 727 for three days, he said, ‘Actually, it wasn’t bad at all.’40 The film dial H-I-S-T-O-R-Y deftly shows how former hostages became the new stars of the

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hijacking ordeal, partly by virtue of their fearless nonchalance in the face of a mortal threat. Furthermore, what becomes clear is the way in which the victims’ stories all fit into a standard narrative, or what Grimonprez called the ‘routine pattern’ of the skyjacking event, which was a trope established through the media coverage of airline hijacking.41 Grimonprez’s dial H-I-S-T-O-R-Y is perhaps the best documentary of the way in which skyjacking was effectively neutralized in the American media. Early in the film, there are relatively long clips of celebrity hijackers speaking in interviews and at press conferences. Whereas in the late ’60s terrorist hijackers spoke for themselves and had their demands and political ideologies reported and debated across television news platforms, in the early ’70s the media attempted to counter skyjacking by denying ideological terrorists the ability to spread their propaganda through the media. As it is commonly understood, terrorism functions symbolically on civilian and non-combatant targets to communicate something to a wider audience, of which the victims are representative. By stifling the terrorist hijacker’s ability to communicate with the public, in the early ’70s American television news fundamentally undercut the efficacy of skyjacking as a form of political or ideological terrorism by censoring perpetrators out of the skyjacking narrative. This, in tandem with legislation mandating enhanced security measures, led to a decline in airline hijacking in the U.S. by the end of 1972, a year that has been identified as a turning point in the history of air piracy. However, the year opened on an alarming note. Despite a decrease in hijackings in the U.S. the year before, in the first days of 1972, one month prior to Burden’s performance of TV Hijack, skyjack attempts were unusually prevalent. It is likely that, during the course of this month of prolific skyjackings, Burden conceived of hijacking Lutjeans’s television show but was unable to tell his colleague what he was planning or fully go through with it. After the piece was over, Burden continually referred to the performance as a ‘demonstration’ of a hijacking, but like actual acts of terrorism, Burden’s piece nevertheless used the threat of violence to take control of a cable television station. If one crucial aspect of what I have identified as the logic of terrorism is to communicate an ideological or political message, as in the modern appellation ‘propaganda of the deed,’ which was used by anarchist factions in nineteenth-century Europe, then what Burden demonstrates in TV Hijack is a way in which terrorists or other political activists could harness the power of the media to spread their message. In a 1967 manifesto, situationist artist and theorist René Viénet echoed popular manuals for insurrections emanating from South and Central America when he called for ‘guerilla warfare in the mass media’ via the use of pirate strategies.42 While such calls to attack the media were usually meant to disrupt preexisting flows of information, American guerrillas, following Abbie Hoffman’s Steal This Book (1970), advocated ‘tapping in’ to existing media streams, pirating the airwaves, and sending out independent content produced by the user.43 Given the media’s de facto censorship of skyjackers in the early 1970s, pirate radio or television was much more likely to produce conditions advantageous for the self-distribution of unpopular ideas. With television networks curtailing their coverage of certain terrorist attacks, Chris Burden demonstrated the potential of heading straight for the source of media flows and hijacking their preexisting infrastructure. Though he himself had no message to impart to whatever miniscule audience actually caught him taking Lutjeans hostage on air, Burden was attentive to what elements

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of the television medium particularly worked for the terrorist or media pirate as well as what aspects of the medium were prohibitive to their guerrilla tactics. As previously alluded to, live transmission of emergencies in progress had a gripping appeal to television viewers, who hung on the edge of their seats while hostage situations unfolded in real time. Live air ensured that, whatever one wanted to do, they would have a captive audience and, furthermore, be free from censorship. In his post-performance description, Burden said that he was facing censorship on the part of the station, which he offered as one explanation for the TV Hijack turning out the way it did. During a live transmission, the station arguably did not have the veto power they did with a prerecorded show, so Burden was, in a sense, free to push the boundaries he felt inherently imposed upon his work for television. Despite the fact that terrorist attacks and hostage situations are an effective method of garnering attention through the media, once the dramatic action has concluded, control over the message behind the act and its legacy becomes the sole province of the media and gets fitted into its various predetermined narrative frames. Within such configurations, with their stark roles for character typologies, terrorists and pirates are always coded as the bad object in relation to the innocent civilian population to which the media’s audience also belongs. All nuance, message, and individuality are drained of the attack through mediated reiterations. Burden destroyed the station’s video copy of the event so that no one would be able to use his image or the record of his actions in subsequent reports that could have manipulated or altered his intentions. By taking the media hijacking one step further and destroying all record of the attack, Burden thus maintained control over the final product in ways that other terrorists had not yet been able to accomplish. Thus, TV Hijack presented a potentially effective model by which political dissidents could utilize the media by breaking through the common codes and frames that delimited news reporting on hijackings in the early ’70s. Although TV Hijack was seen live by a statistically negligible segment of the population and known to few—even in the art world—at the time, it nevertheless represented a growing awareness and frustration on the part of political activists in the United States with the way in which their protests were being censored and compromised by the media. The socio-political significance and historic specificity of Burden’s piece are reinforced by a skyjacking event that took place just two months after TV Hijack. On April 13, 1972, a Mexican American and native of Los Angeles, Ricardo Chavez Ortiz, hijacked Frontier Airlines flight 91 from Albuquerque to Phoenix. Armed with a .22 caliber pistol, Ortiz asked to see the pilot, to whom he conveyed an extraordinary request. Ortiz had traveled as far east as New Mexico looking for work to support his struggling family. Unsuccessful, he boarded a plane to hijack it, but instead of demanding ransom money, which may have superficially addressed his woes, Ortiz demanded to be flown to Los Angeles, where, in exchange for not hurting anyone, he wanted to speak to the Spanish-language news media.44 In the U.S. in the late ’60s and early ’70s, when the public’s focus on civil unrest shifted from the civil rights movement to the student protest and anti-war movement, the Latinx, or Chicanx, civil rights movement was struggling for visibility. Frequent protest bombings of banks, schools, and other symbolic targets of oppression rocked the Los Angeles area at the time, but many such acts were simply not covered by the mainstream media. By demanding to speak to the press, to whom he delivered an impassioned plea for human rights on behalf of Hispanic Americans, Ortiz demonstrated the same awareness that Burden did in TV Hijack, both in terms of recognizing the consequences of

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a media blackout and in countering censorship by including the media as an essential element of his ‘terrorist’ plot. Like Burden, Ortiz demanded and received direct access to the media, which guaranteed that his message would go out live and not be compromised, at least the first time around. This episode, more than any other, reinforces the cultural continuity between Burden’s work and the actions of terrorist hijackers who operated in the U.S. in the early 1970s. More than anything, TV Hijack demonstrates how the structure of television news undergirded the logic upon which Cold War terrorism operated; it also showed a generation of artists fascinated by the potential of the newly available medium how to break through the corporate stranglehold on TV and pirate guerrilla airwaves for authentic media actions.

Notes Author’s acknowledgments: Funding for this project was provided by the Graduate School for Arts and Sciences, Columbia University, and the Pierre and Tana Matisse Foundation. Thanks to Nancy Rubins and Joshua Feigenbaum of the Chris Burden Estate and Liza McLaughlin of the Chris Burden Studio for making my work possible. For their valuable feedback on early drafts of this chapter, I would also like to thank Branden W. Joseph, Alexander Alberro, Noam Elcott, Kellie Jones, and Janet Kraynak. For their personal support, I wish to acknowledge Raymond and Charlotte Teti, Michelle Hobart, Jeff Seelbach, Jeremy Bass, and Jordana Kozyreff. 1. Terry McDonell, ‘Man is Shot for Art’s Sake,’ LA (November 18, 1972), p. 18. 2. Phyllis J. Lutjeans, ‘All About Art,’ The Irvine World News (February 18, 1971), p. 5. 3. Alfred Lutjeans also photographed Prelude to 220, or 110 and You’ll Never See My Face In Kansas City (both 1971). The images of Burden by Lutjeans were first published in Chris Burden 71–73 (Los Angeles: Chris Burden, 1974), p. 13, 21, 25–29. 4. Phyllis Lutjeans, quoted in John Rabe, ‘RIP Chris Burden, Beloved Even by the “Victim” in “TV Hi-Jack,”’ Off-Ramp (May 13, 2015), available online at www.scpr.org/programs/ offramp/2015/05/13/42817/rip-chris-burden-beloved-even-by-the-victim-in-tv/ (accessed November 15, 2018). 5. Lutjeans, quoted in Rabe, ‘RIP Chris Burden.’ 6. Chris Burden and Willoughby Sharp, untitled interview transcript, Avalanche Magazine Archives, folder III.54, The Museum of Modern Art Archives, New York. 7. Chris Burden 71–73, p. 36. 8. McDonell, ‘Man is Shot for Art’s Sake,’ p. 18; Chris Burden, ‘TV Hijack,’ in Failure, ed. Lisa Le Feuvre (London: Whitechapel Gallery, 2010), p. 127. 9. Phyllis Lutjeans, personal communication, October 11, 2016. 10. Burden and Sharp, Avalanche Magazine Archives, folder III.54. 11. Smith’s own photos of Shoot were also published in Chris Burden 71–73, pp. 30–33; and she and Beydler were both part of the F Space collective in Santa Ana, where Burden exhibited several of his first mature works. 12. Rabe, ‘RIP Chris Burden.’ 13. Burden and Sharp, Avalanche Magazine Archives, folder III.54. 14. Chris Burden 71–73, p. 36. 15. McDonell, ‘Man is Shot,’ p. 18. 16. Chris Burden 71–73, p. 36. Burden also wrote in his description, ‘I told her that I planned to make her do obscene acts,’ but several of the artist’s later statements claim that the only thing he vocalized to Lutjeans were assurances that he was not really threatening her life but only demonstrating a hijacking scenario; Willoughby Sharp and Liza Béar, ‘Chris Burden: The Church of Human Energy,’ Avalanche 8 (Summer/Fall 1973), p. 57; Dickran Tashjian, ed. A Hotbed of Advanced Art Four Decades of Visual Arts at UCI (Irvine: The Art Gallery, University of California, Irvine, 1997), p. 32. 17. Burden and Sharp, Avalanche Magazine Archives, folder III.54. 18. Barbara T. Smith, personal communication, October 26, 2016. 19. Sharp and Béar, ‘Chris Burden,’ p. 57.

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20. ‘Proof That the Seventies Have Finally Begun,’ Esquire 79:5 (May 1973), p. 164. 21. Barbara T. Smith, personal communication. Frazer Ward’s essay ‘Gray Zone: Watching “Shoot”’ raised the issue of implied consent of the audience at Burden’s early performances (October 95 [Winter 2001], pp.  114–130), but Nancy Buchanan recently countered that assessment, saying in essence that Burden’s peers did not necessarily sanction what he was doing, but they would respect and defend his right to do whatever he would for his art; see Nancy Buchanan, ‘A Few Snapshots from F Space Gallery, 1514 E. Edinger, Santa Ana,’ in In the Canyon, Revise the Canon: Utopian Knowledge, Radical Pedagogy, and Artist-Run Community Art Space in Southern California (Annecy, France: ESAAA Editions, 2015), p. 51. 22. John Harrison, International Aviation and Terrorism: Evolving Threats, Evolving Security (London: Routledge, 2009), pp. 57–58. 23. Peter St. John, Air Piracy, Airport Security, and International Terrorism: Winning the War against Hijackers (New York: Quorum, 1991), pp. 11–14. 24. Alex P. Schmid, ‘The Definition of Terrorism,’ in The Routledge Handbook of Terrorism Research, ed. Alex P. Schmid (London: Routledge, 2011), pp. 86–87. 25. Robert Kupperman and Jeff Kamen, Final Warning: Averting Disaster in the New Age of Terrorism (New York: Doubleday, 1989), p. 155. 26. Terrorism. A staff study prepared by the Committee on Internal Security, United States House of Representatives, Ninety-Third Congress, Second Session (Washington, DC: U.S. Government Printing Office, 1974), p. 97. 27. Brendan I. Koerner, The Skies Belong to Us: Love and Terror in the Golden Age of Hijacking (New York: Broadway, 2013), p. 8. 28. Edward F. Mickolus, Transnational Terrorism: A Chronology of Events, 1968–1979 (London: Aldwych Press, 1980), pp. 295–298. 29. One source (Mickolus, Transnational Terrorism, pp. 239–294) counted 29 domestic skyjacking attempts in 1971, while another (National Advisory Committee on Criminal Justice Standards and Goals, Disorders and terrorism: Report of the Task Force on Disorders and Terrorism [Washington, DC: The Advisory Committee, 1976]), counted 21. 30. ‘High on Hijacking,’ The Economist (February 5, 1972), p. 50. 31. Annette Vowinckel, ‘Skyjacking: Cultural Memory and the Movies,’ in Baader-Meinhof Returns: History and Cultural Memory of German Left-Wing Terrorism, eds. Gerrit-Jan Berendse and Ingo Cornils (Amsterdam: Rodopi, 2008), p. 258. 32. Kupperman and Kamen, Final Warning, pp. 159–160. 33. Harrison, International Aviation and Terrorism, p. 50. 34. Vrääth Öhner, ‘On Seeing, Flying and Dreaming,’ in It’s a Poor Sort of Memory that Only Works Backwards, eds. Johan Grimonprez and Benoit Detalle (Ostfildern: Hatje Cantz, 2011), pp. 241–243. 35. The ABC news program, Nightline, hosted by Ted Koppel for 25 years, developed out of one such special report, which began to air during the Iran Hostage Crisis in 1979 (The Iran Crisis: American Held Hostage); see Kupperman and Kamen, Final Warning. Many such programs were produced to cover airline hijacking and the perceived crisis that it caused in the late ’60s and early ’70s. 36. Glenn Phillips, California Video: Artists and Histories (Los Angeles: Getty Research Institute, 2008), p. 63. 37. H.H.A. Cooper, ‘Terrorism and the Media,’ in Terrorism: Interdisciplinary Perspectives, eds. Yonah Alexander and Seymour Maxwell Finger (New York: John Jay, 1977), pp. 141– 156; Kupperman and Kamen, Final Warning, pp. 155–165. 38. David G. Hubbard, quoted in Robert J. Trotter, ‘Psyching the Skyjacker,’ Science News 101:7 (February 12, 1972), p. 110. See also David G. Hubbard, The Skyjacker: His Flights of Fantasy (New York: Macmillan, 1971). 39. Dave Kaufman, ‘ABC-TV Bans Skyjack Stories,’ Variety (June 2, 1971), pp. 1, 11; ‘No Skyjack Ban Sez ABC-TV’s Barry Diller; Can’t Restrict Medium,’ Variety (June 16. 1971). 40. The interviewee, PepsiCo executive Herbert Brill, was aboard a flight out of Japan, which was hijacked to North Korea by radical students who wanted to join the communist revolution. See also Vowinckel, ‘Skyjacking,’ p. 259. 41. Herman Asselberghs and Johan Grimonprez, ‘No Man’s Land: Politics in the Sky,’ in It’s a Poor Sort of Memory that Only Works Backwards, p. 206.

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42. René Viénet, ‘The Situationists and the New Forms of Action against Politics and Art’ (1967), trans. Tom McDonough, in Guy Debord and the Situationist International: Texts and Documents, ed. Tom McDonough (Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press, 2002), p. 182. See also, Justin Hoffman, ‘Sabotage as a Means of Artistic Performativity,’ in Legal/illgal: wenn Kunst Gesetze bricht = Art Beyond Law, ed. Hans Winkler (Stuttgart: Schmetterling, 2004), p. 211. 43. See the section ‘Guerrilla Broadcasting,’ in Abbie Hoffman, Steal This Book (Cambridge: Da Capo Press, 1996 [1970]), pp. 138–145. 44. Koerner, The Skies Belong to Us, pp. 96–99.

Index

Abad, Francesc 52, 53 Abu Ghraib prison Iraq 17 Adachi, Masao 18–19, 184, 188–193 Adasme, Elias 59 Adorno, Theodor 59, 115 Al-Ani, Jananne 113–114 Alexievich, Svetlana 163, 169 Allende, Salvador President 9, 58, 67 Al Qaida 35, 150 Alternative for Germany (AfD) 29 Althusser, Louis 186 American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) 30 American University of Beirut 111 Amnesty International 145 Amnesty Law (Spain) 9, 107, 118 Anglo-Iraqi War (1941) 91 Anti-Apartheid movement 145 Anti-Terrorist legislation in France 1881 13, 118–119 Apollinaire, Guillaume 170 Arafat, Yasser 111 Arroyo, Eduardo 47 Asama-Sanso murders, Japan 184 Asociación Para la Recuperación de la Memoria Histórica (Spain) 52, 53 Azoulay, Ariella 158 Baader, Andreas 14, 128, 133–134 Badawi, Raif 161 Bando, Kunio 185 Bank of Scotland 159 Bannon, Steve 28 Barlow, D.H. 151 Barthes, Roland 140, 148 Baudelaire, Eric 18–19, 184, 188–193 Belarus Free Theatre 167, 170 Bell, Steve 159 Benito, Jordi 48, 49 Benjamin, Walter 60, 69 Beydler, Gary 196 Bible 2 Binyon, Laurence 176 Birmingham City University 1

Blackwater 146 Blair, Tony Prime Minister 93 Blanchot, Maurice 122 Blanco, General Carrero 45 Blow, Charles 37 Bowie, David 164 BP (British Petroleum) 146 Breivik, Anders Behring 36–37 Bremer, Paul 96 Brigada Ramona Parra, La 59–60 British Mandate in Palestine 113–114 British Museum, London 90 Bromley art school 164 Brooker, Charlie 159 Brown, Peter 16, 156 Bru, Roser 65 Brucke, Die (The Bridge) 107 Buchanan, George 176 Buchanan, Pat 36 Burden, Chris 4, 19–20, 49, 196–205 Bush, George H.W. President 24 Bush, George W. President 143, 144, 146 Butler, David 140–153 Byzantium 4 Caesar, Julius 17, 173 Cameron, David, Prime Minister 158–159 Camus, Albert 159–163 Camus, Renaud 37 Carnot, Sadi President 123 Cartier-Bresson, Henri 160 Casa Memoria José Domingo Cañas 66 Ceausescu, Nicolae 170 Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) 58 Chaison, Basil 143 Chelsea art school 164 Chernobyl nuclear reactor fire 164, 167 Chile coup d’etat 9–10 Chipp, Hershel B. 107 Chomsky, Noam 145 CINTRAS (NGO Chile) 66 Clark, T.J. 122 Clinton, Bill President 24

Index Clinton, Hillary 38 CND (Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament) 145 Cocker, Jarvis 164 Coetzee, J.M. 18, 174, 175 Cold War 16, 44, 107, 111, 117, 198–199, 205 Comité National de Defense des Victimes du Franquisme 46 Committee for Ideology and Censorship, Belarus 169 Compañeras movement (Brazil) 75 Conrad, Joseph 174 Cornejo, Eugenio 58 Crónica, Equipo 47 ‘Crusaders’ militia 8, 36 Cuadernos Para el Diálogo 50–51 Cuban Revolution 59 Cucaño 59 ‘Daesh’ (ISIS, Islamic State) 10, 11, 81–105, 108, 157 Danish People’s Party 29 Davies, Ray 164 Davis, Jefferson President of Confederate States 38 Davis, Mike 10 de-Ba’athification of the Iraqi army 96 Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals (DACA) 33 Deisler, Guillermo 60 Deleuze, Gilles 163 DeLillo, Don 18, 174, 193 Derrida, Jacques 122, 128, 129 Dhaka hijack 1977 18, 184–185 Directoire 6 ‘disaster capitalism’ 11 Donoso, Luz 59 Dostoevsky, Fyodor 18, 174 Dussel, Enrique 62 Dziga Vertov Group 190 Ealing art school 164 Ensslin, Gudrun 14, 128, 132, 133–134 Equipo 57 45 ETA (Euskadi Ta Askatasuna) 45–46, 51 European Court of Human Rights 5 European Union (EU) 29, 117, 153 ‘Extinction Rebellion’ network 8, 16 Fanon, Franz 69 Farage, Nigel 29 Farrell, William 183, 185, 187 Fawkes, Guy 173, 178 Federal Aviation Authority (FAA) 20, 199–202 Fénéon, Félix 122, 123

209

Foucault, Michel 146 Foundation for Defense of Democracies 88 Fourth Plinth project, Trafalgar Square 81 Fox News Network 1–2, 37 Finns Party Finland 29 First Gulf War (1991) 91, 114, 143 First World War 92, 123 Franco, Francisco General 5, 9, 12, 41–57, 107, 117–118 Frankfurt School 58 Fraser, Lady Antonia 145 Freedom of Information Act (US) 30 Freedom Party of Austria 29 Freemuse (Lemez Lovas, Maya Medich) 168–169 French Revolution 173 Freud, Sigmund 124–125, 185 Fry, Roger 127 Fulda, Bernard 107–108 Fundación Nacional Francisco Franco (FNFF) 41 Gabo, Naum 170 Gandhi, Mahatma 163 García, Julián Grimau 45 Genovés, Juan 47, 48, 49, 50 Giampietro, Guillermo 59 Globe Theatre, London 175 Go, Kawashima 185 Godard, Jean-Luc 190 Gonzales, Mono 59 Goodwin, Fred 159 Gorbachev, Mikhail, President 164, 168 Gorin, Jean-Pierre 190 Goya, Francisco 156 Green, David 131–132, 133 Greenpeace 16, 156 Grimonprez, Johan 199–202 Grosfoguel, Ramón 62, 73 Grosz, George 107 Guattari, Félix 59, 62–63, 73, 163 Güell, Núria 9, 41–45, 53–54 ‘Gunpowder Plot’ 17, 173–179 Hadjithomas, Joana 108 Halliburton 146 Hamas 5 Hariri, Saad, Prime Minister 191 Hartmann, Ernesto 60–61 Hay Literary Festival 158 Heartfield, John 107, 156 Hebrew University of Jerusalem 111 Hiroko, Nagata 185–187 Hitler, Adolf 28, 30, 106 Hobbes, Thomas 4 Hofer, Norbert 29 Hoffman, Abbie 203

210

Index

Honecker, Erich 170 Hornsey art school 164 Hubbard, David 200–201 Human Rights Watch 30 Hussain, Saddam 5, 12, 108, 150 Huxley, Aldous 159 Ibarrola, Agustín 44, 47, 48, 49 Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) 8, 30, 33, 36 Institute for Palestinian Studies Beirut 111 Institute for Strategic Dialogue (US) 37 Intergovernmental International Criminal Court 5 International Council of Museums (ICM) 95 International War Tribunal for former Yugoslavia 153 Iran-Iraq War (1980–1988) 91, 94 Irarrázabal, Mario 64 Israeli Defense Force (IDF) 110–111 Israeli, Raphael 111 Israeli State Archives 111 James, Henry 18, 174 James VI of Scotland (James I of England) 173–174, 176 Japanese New Left 183, 186, 187–188 Japanese Red Army 6, 12, 18, 182–193 Jihad (Holy War) 1 Jim Crow era (US) 37 Jodorowsky, Alejandro 71 Johnson, Ben 173 Johnson, Boris, Prime Minister 158–159 Joreige, Khalil 108 Joreige, Lamia 109 Joyce, James 167 ‘JR’ (French artist) 32 K, Hiwa 82–105 Kahlo, Frida 156 Kandinsky, Wassily 6, 13–14, 121, 123–128, 131, 136 Kant, Immanuel 114 Karadordevic, Prince Aleksandar 145 Karpov, Kenny 26–27 Kimmel, Michael 36 Kinks, The 164 Kittler, Friedrich 134 Klein, Naomi 10, 11, 96, 146 Klein, Yves 67 Knjaževačko Srpski Theatar, Serbia 147, 151 Kolectiv Theatre Manchester 147 Koran 2, 84–85 Kropotkin, Peter 122 Kurzel, Justin 177 Laden, Osama Bin 175 ‘Law for a historic memory’ (Spain) 51

Layard, Sir Austen Henry 93 Lebanese Civil War 109–110, 114 Le Carré, John 175 Lefebvre, Henri 177 Lepage, Robert 148 Le Pen, Marie 29 Lessing, Doris 174 Leviathan 4 Lod Airport killings 1973 18, 184–185, 188 Louvre Museum, Paris 90 Lutjeans, Aldred 196–197 Lutjeans, Phyllis 196–198, 203–204 Macbeth 3, 17–18, 173–179 Madera, Patricio 59 Makhoul, Bashir 12, 114–118 Mallarmé, Stephane 13–14, 121 Mapuche people (Chile) 73 Maruoka, Osamu 182–183 Meinhof, Ulrike 14, 128, 132, 133–134 Mercury, Freddie 164 Merino, Eugenio 41 Merkel, Angela Chancellor 106 Meseguer, Teresa Pla 54 Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York 89, 90 MIA 164 Mieko, Toyama 187 Miéville, Anne-Marie 190 Miller, Stephen 28 Milošević, Slobodan, President 145 Milton, John 175 Middleton, Thomas 175 Miralles, Fina 49–50 Mishra, Pankaj 28 MoDe(s)2 research project 20 Mola, General Emilio 43 Moore, John 32 Moscow Association of Artists 127 Mosul Museum (Iraq) 11, 81, 95 Museo de la Memoria (Chile) 64 Museum of Modern Art, New York (MoMA) 129 Napoleon III 144 National Gallery, Berlin 107 National Museum of Beirut 108 National Museum of Iraq, Baghdad 81, 84, 95 Nazism 12, 106–109, 117, 145 NBC News 30 ‘neo-Cold War’ 108–109, 115, 117–118 New Museum New York 26 Newport Harbor Art Museum (Orange County Museum of Art) 196 Nineteen Eight-Four: A Novel 16, 17, 156–157 Nolde, Emil 106, 109 North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) 15, 108, 140, 144, 145, 147, 149, 150, 152–153, 163

Index Obama, Barack President 24, 29, 30, 33 Ocasio-Cortez, Alexandria 33 Occupation of Iraq 1, 7, 10–11, 82–105, 108, 114–115, 146 Office of Refugee Resettlement (US) 31 Okamoto, Közö 182 Omar, Ilhan 35, 38 ‘Operation Condor’ 10, 65 Ortega, Pepe 47 Ortiz, Ricardo Chavez 204 Orwell, George 16, 156–159 Osborne, George 157–158 Oslo agreements 6, 111–112 Owen, Wilfred, Award 146 Pachi, Adrian 8–9, 26 Palestinian Authority 6, 111–112 Palestinian Authority Archives 111–112 Palestinian Liberation Organization 6, 12, 110–111 Pane, Gina 49 Partido Comunista de España (PCE) 45 Pavis, Patrice 140, 148 Peirce, C.S. 132, 136 PEN club 145 People’s Party (Spain) 51 Pepys, Samuel 174, 175 Pericás, Giménez 47 Phillips Collection 26 Picasso, Pablo 156 Pinochet, Augusto 5, 9–10, 58, 107 Pinter, Harold 15, 16, 140–153 Pissarro, Camille 123 Planchon, Roger 148 Platforma de Artistas Antifascistas 41, 53 Polanski, Roman 177 Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine (PFLP) 188 Pressley, Ayanna 35 ‘Prevent’ Duty Guidance 2, 6–7, 8, 11 Prophet Muhammad 86 PSOE (Spanish Socialist Party) 51 Pulp 164 Pussy Riot 167 Putin, Vladimir President 38 Queen 164 Rakowitz, Michael 11, 81–105 Raspe, Jan-Carl 14, 128, 133–134 Ravachol (Francois Claudius Koenigstein) 13, 123 Reagan, Ronald President 24 Realidad, Equipo 47 Red Army Faction 12, 121, 128–137, 183 Richter, Gerhard 6, 12–14, 121, 128–137 Rivera, Diego 156 Rolling Stones, The 164

211

Rowling, J.K. 175 Ruido, María 52 Russian invasion of Afghanistan 17 Russian Revolution 117 Ryuzaburo, Shindo 186 Sansour, Larissa 112–113 Sartre, Jean-Paul 122, 163 Saviano, Roberto 158 Sayyaf, Abu (‘Daesh’ head of antiquities division) 89 Sea Shepherd charity 156 Second World War 16, 81, 107, 144–145 Selz, Peter 106–107 Separation Barrier (Israel-Occupied Territories) 32 September 11 2001 attacks on New York (‘9/11’) 1, 108,128–129,131, 142, 146, 150 Sessions, Jeff 28 Schechner, Richard 148 Schmid, Alex P. 19, 198–199 Shakespeare, William 173–179 Sharp, Willoughby 197 Shell oil 146 Silicon Valley 90 ‘skyjacking’ 20, 198–205 Sleiman, Hana 111–112 Smith, Barbara T. 196 Soika, Aya 107–108 Southern Poverty Law Center (US) 36 Spanish Civil War 12, 43–57, 65, 107 Special Court for the Suppression of Freemasonry and Communism (Spain) 45–46 SS Winnipeg 65 Stalin, Joseph 170 Steinhoff, Patricia 183, 186, 187 ‘Stern Gang’ 17 Stern, Steve J. 59, 70 Stone, Oliver 176 Tacitus 118 Tate 124 Tatlin, Vladimir 170 Taylor, Joshua C. 106 Tito, Josip Broz President 145 Tlaib, Rashida 35 Today Art Museum, Beijing 108, 114 Torres, Francesc 49, 52 Trump, Donald President 5, 24–25, 28, 29–30, 31–32, 34, 37, 38, 39, 142, 143 Trump, Fred (Ku Klux Klan supporter) 35 Trump Wall (US-Mexico border) 32 Ulis 167, 169 Ulysses (James Joyce) 167 UNESCO 97

212

Index

‘United Constitutional Patriots’ 30 United Daughters of the Confederacy (US) 38 United Nations (UN) 11, 58, 97–98 US Civil War 37 US Holocaust Memorial Museum 33 US-led invasion of Afghanistan 1, 108 Valech Commission (Chile) 64 Van Gogh, Vincent 156 Viénet, René 203 Vietnam war 49, 114 Wakamatsu, Koji 18, 188–191 War in former Yugoslavia 15–16, 140–153 Warsaw Pact (‘Soviet Bloc’) 108, 163 Watson, Paul 156

Wilders, Geert 29 World Bank 29 XXV Años de Paz (25 Years of Peace) 48 Yeats, W.B. 4 YouTube 90 YMCA Sputnik youth organization 163, 166 Yu, Kikumura 184 Yugoslavian civil war 144 Zapatista Army of National Liberation (EZLN) 74, 75 Zastava factory, Kragujevac 140–153 Zionism 17 Žižek, Slavoj 143, 150