http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/18864872/site/newsweek/page/0/
Shoot the Iraqi!
A powerful art installation places a man alone in a room for a
month—and a gun in your hand. Would you pull the trigger?
WEB EXCLUSIVE
By Brian Braiker
Newsweek
Updated: 12:34 p.m. ET May 25, 2007
May 25, 2007 - The other night, moments after Wafaa Bilal went to bed
in his Chicago pad, he had a terrifying nightmare: as he was walking
down a dark set of stairs he encountered two friends who started
shooting him at point blank range. “I’ve had to deal with PTSD
[posttraumatic stress disorder] from being chased by Saddam’s
soldiers” more than a decade ago, he says. “I see the beginning of it
coming back now.”
You probably would, too. The Iraqi-born artist was speaking to a
NEWSWEEK reporter 19 days into a grueling monthlong project that
sounds, at first blush, suspiciously gimmicky: until June 4, Bilal is
living his entire life inside one room at Chicago’s Flatfile Gallery,
which anyone with a Web connection can log on to watch. Oh, and to
shoot him. With “Domestic Tension" Bilal has turned his makeshift
living quarters into a 24-hour-a-day war zone. Viewers can peep in on
him anonymously at any time, and even chat with him online. On the
installation’s Web site, his audience can fight for control of the
camera and pan it around the room. Since the camera is affixed to a
rifle-sized paintball gun—and the Web site has a button that allows
viewers to fire the gun—they also have the opportunity to shoot at
him, or anything else in his room. Which they have done an astonishing
40,000 times in the project’s first two and a half weeks.
“Domestic Tension” is a breathtaking work of political art, forcing
even casual surfers to ask themselves: Would they shoot a man if all
it took was one noiseless click of the mouse? Are there any physical
repercussions to what you do online? Those who stick around longer may
even begin to think about the consequences of starting a seemingly
painless, videogame-style war with overwhelming force in a faraway
country. The Webcam resolution on the project’s site is very grainy,
but it’s clear that plenty of people have no problem with pulling the
trigger. The once-white gallery walls have been pummeled with neon
yellow paint pellets over and over again. And so has Bilal, who wears
only ski goggles for protection—so many times, in fact, that he has
lost count. “This is an encounter instead of didactic art,” he
explains over the phone as the gun can be heard firing in the
background. “I had no [BANG] control over how it would come out. The
only hope is to engage in [BANG, BANG] in conversation.”
Which he has. Every day he posts a new entry in his video diary on
YouTube, and every day commenters—be they outraged, sympathetic,
thoughtful or asinine—usually find something to say. When the project
was linked to on the popular communal news site Digg.com, someone
hacked into the gallery’s server and fired the gun 20,000 times in 24
hours. Bilal is visibly shaken by it in his diary, repeating over and
over, “it’s so disturbing.” Soupforbrains asks “You think this is
disturbing? Why? You're a man in a room with a [paintball] gun,
inviting people to shoot you.” Cosmicsiren replies “I don't care who
you are, having paintballs shot at you every few seconds (we're
talking more than 20,000 in less than 24 hours) is going to make you
paranoid.” And until ers1337 quips “Can you please come out so we can
get some clear shots?” it almost sounds like a conversation.
The idea for the project came to Bilal, a professor at the Art
Institute of Chicago, while watching an interview with an American
soldier firing missiles into Iraq from the safety of her Colorado
base. She said her intelligence was solid and the people she was
killing were bad—end of story. Bilal, whose brother was killed by
stray shrapnel during a 2005 American siege on Najaf, wasn’t buying
it. “I wanted to be physically and emotionally [BANG] closer to my
family at home so I could see what they are going through.” His
father, he says, died months later from the heartbreak of losing his
son. With the exception of one brother who lives in Detroit, the rest
of his family, he says, is confined to their homes. To go outside,
even to shop for food, is to risk death.
This is where human nature, the good kind, creeps back into the
picture. Bilal eats only what is donated to him by strangers, either
people who trot into the gallery on foot or send him packages from one
of the 126 countries that have logged on to watch (and, yes, shoot)
him. One public-radio host sent him a pizza after their interview. A
community of viewers has sprung up that takes turns shooting the gun
away from Bilal so others are deprived control of the gun for a
moment. When his last remaining desk lamp was destroyed, shot hundreds
of times in one day by a bored Estonian, an ex-Marine named Matt
dropped a new one off. Telling the story on his daily video diary,
Bilal is moved to tears. It’s a moment that could put a lump in any
cynic’s throat—that such a small unbidden gift can make a grown man, a
man who has been beaten by Saddam’s henchmen, cry.
Indeed Bilal is emphatic that his art installation is not a pro-Saddam
statement. In the 1990s he was jailed for his political artwork and
forced to flee the country when he refused to enlist in the invasion
against Kuwait. “I was very [BANG, BANG] much against what he had
done,” he says. “That being said, I was against the war because I
understand there is another [BANG] way to take Saddam out without
subjecting the country to the mess we’re in now. One must understand
this is not only about Iraq. [BANG] You have over 3,000 American
soldiers who have died. How can you support the troops and put [BANG]
them in harm’s way?” The yellow of the paintballs, he says, was a
deliberate choice, meant to echo the yellow “Support Our Troops”
ribbons.
And the little yellow pellets, which travel at 350 feet a second, have
destroyed the gallery walls. Susan Aurinko, the gallery’s director and
owner, says she will have to re-drywall the entire room. Paint has
also seeped into the basement, forcing Aurinko to move artwork that
has been stored there. “I live upstairs from the [BANG] gallery, so I
hear it all night long,” she says. “I’m up with him, too.” Most of the
shooting, curiously, occurs between midnight and 4 a.m., meaning Bilal
averages two to four hours of sleep a night. And even then, he must
endure the nightmares.
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