Baghdad in No Particular Order (Dir. Paul Chan)

[Yoshie Furuhashi <furuhashi.1@xxxxxxx>]

*****   Baghdad in No Particular Order

This disarming 60-minute video of everyday life in prewar Baghdad was
shot by Paul Chan during a sojourn to Iraq in late December and early
January, organized by the antiwar group Voices in the Wilderness. His
"ambient documentary" records a local cafe, a Sufi poetry
performance, a wedding party, a dozing monkey, and a group of
middle-aged uniformed women at a military parade who brandish
automatic rifles and chant, "Hey thunder, Saddam is your son!" Many
Iraqis playfully address the camera, and Chan decenters the
perspective by occasionally handing the camera to one of them and by
adding allusive female voice-over in six different languages.

<http://www.chireader.com/movies/sidebars/SELECT2003.html>   *****

*****   Baghdad in No Particular Order. 2003. USA. Directed by Paul Chan.

Chan spent a month in Baghdad as a member of the Iraq Peace Team, a
group initiated by the Nobel Peace Prize-nominated organization
Voices in the Wilderness that is working to end the sanctions against
Iraq. This work is a reflection of the video ephemera Chan collected
while in Baghdad. 60 min.

Saturday, December 13, 3:00 (introduced by the director)

<http://www.moma.org/visit_moma/momafilm/docu_fort_2003.html>
<http://www.moma.org/visit_moma/momafilm/>   *****

*****   The Retriever - Features
Politics At No Extra Charge: Paul Chan's Multi-Dimensional Artwork
Richard McNey
Retriever Weekly Staff Writer

For the last several weeks, images of Iraq have monopolized the news.
Video of burning buildings, bombs exploding, and soldiers with raised
guns have become Iraq's representation in American eyes. These
pictures are pumped daily into our homes and over all of them is
always some journalist's voice telling us what we are looking at.
Paul Chan's video art filmed in Iraq speaks for itself by displaying
the lives Iraqis lead; the lives not shown on television.

InterArts and the Visiting Artists Lecture Series presented a lecture
by New York City artist Paul Chan. A full UMBC Fine Arts lecture hall
listened to Chan, who is a 2003 Rockefeller Arts Fellow and teaches
video and film at the University of Pennsylvania, discuss several
pieces of his artwork.

"I do digital work," said Chan sitting on the back of a chair,
dressed in all black save for brown pointy shoes that only an artist
could pull off. He continued, "which basically means I make shit on
computers."

The shit the artist refers to includes digital video, new media
artwork and interactive media. Chan has dual interests in politics
and art. As a result, much of his artwork has political implications.

From Dec. 14 to Jan. 14, Chan lived in Baghdad filming the people and
the culture. He traveled to Iraq as a member of the Iraq Peace Team,
a group initiated by Voices in the Wilderness, an independent
international campaign that since 1996 has attempted to end the
economic sanctions and warfare against the people of Iraq. Members of
Voices include teachers, artists and church workers who live in Iraq
at different times documenting the lives of Iraqi citizens. The Iraq
Peace Team began in Sept. 2002 in an attempt to prevent a U.S. attack
on Iraq through the use of non-violent actions. Today the team
remains in Iraq recording the Iraqi citizens' experiences throughout
the war and occupation with the goal of increasing awareness of the
situation.

"This is too tragic and woeful of a time to be remembered only
through op-ed pieces and human interest stories," Chan said. "Voices
in the Wilderness knew that artists and writers and poets had to be
involved, had to be on the ground to remember what is happening down
there because we can't count on the journalists and the historians
and the Pentagon. I was really touched; I was really moved by this
idea that a political group was thinking aesthetically."

Chan was so moved that he signed up and lived in Baghdad for a month
filming the Iraqi people. The piece he is in the process of editing
will probably be titled, "Baghdad in No Particular Order" and is a
montage of scenes filmed in single channel digital video.

"It is amazing how determined things are when you watch it on the
news," Chan said. "When you watch video footage or stills someone is
always talking over it as if they are telling you how to look. It is
refreshing that I didn't do any interviews or I didn't want to show
any talking heads."

Indeed, in the clips Chan showed, the images spoke for themselves. In
one scene, a man covering his head and face with a red turban stands
near a beat-up yellow car while the beautiful singing of the Islamic
call to prayer fills the air. The scene following shows water
spraying out of a small hole in a pipe on a Baghdad street. The
sounds of nearby traffic and the sprinkling water are the only sounds
heard. Following the scene are close-ups on the twitching face of a
monkey dreaming in a cage in the lobby of the hotel where Chan
stayed. There were also scenes of twin girls dancing and other
children smiling, seemingly without worries. Another scene shows the
outdoor book market in Baghdad where piles of books sit on the
street. The wind blows the pages so that they look like the wings of
birds. The video ends with female English majors at Baghdad
University singing.

Much of the work Chan showed was political. In another piece
entitled, "RE: THE_OPERATION," Chan imagines George W. Bush's
administration were soldiers in the war against terrorism. The
project began when Chan made desktop replacement icons depicting
Bush's administration as wounded soldiers. The idea evolved into a
series of video portraits in which each member of the administration
reads a letter written home to a loved one over digital snapshots of
their involvement in the war.

The final piece Chan showed was a digital installation piece
entitled, "Happiness (finally) after 35,000 years of civilization."
The piece, which has been displayed in several museums, is an
animation project that combines the drawings of eccentric artist
Henry Darger with the writings of Utopian socialist Charles Fourier.
In the museum installation the animation is projected onto a green
translucent fabric hung in the center of a room. The end result is a
strange hypnotic animation that combines and updates the two men's
utopian views and artistic techniques. The colorful animation shows
many young girls on a grassy, flower-filled, rolling landscape
running, flying, eating grass and going to the bathroom. Eventually a
group of men in suits go to war with the girls, but in the end the
girls prevail and kill all of the men. The combination of absurd
images and the audio track of sounds taken from nature and girls
laughing and playing creates a hypnotic experience that can only be
described as strange.

Chan said he wants his art to incorporate ideas of freedom and no
judgment. He also believes that politics and art often do not mix.

"One of the reasons I am in art is because I want to surround myself
with intense people," Chan said. "When art doesn't do it for me, I
jump over to politics, and certainly there are intense people in
politics."

<http://trw.umbc.edu/articles/4150?Newspaper_Session=bb1a7dc92052a096131ff694a8d9479f>
*****

--
Yoshie

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