Capturing the movement: antiwar art, activism, and affect.

On March 20, 2003, just over a month after an all-day, global antiwar rally, "Operation Iraqi Freedom"--the American invasion of Iraq not sanctioned by the United Nations--began. Led by the American and British armies, the "Shock and Awe" campaign lasted less than a month. By April 2003, the Iraqi Army had collapsed, Baghdad had fallen, and former dictator Saddam Hussein was on the run. (1) What initially appeared as success, however, quickly morphed into a much more complicated situation as the American-led coalition was bogged down in a series of political and military conflicts far different from the initial invasion. As the quick solution of "shock and awe" fell apart within a matter of months, the United States government and army were rapidly caught up in the fermentation of a potential civil war and a growing insurgency and unrest--all complicated on an international scale by the inability to find any Iraqi weapons of mass destruction (the stated reason for the invasion). A hot global war of positioning was underway, revolving around oil, the trauma left by the attacks in New York City and Washington, DC, on September 11, 2001, and profit. (2)

At each step, the war and occupation of Iraq has been greeted by global resistance, or perhaps more accurately, by global resistances. In this essay, I focus on this opposition, and on a number of antiwar artworks that explore the point where "shock and awe" dissolves into what philosopher Brian Massumi has called "shock to thought"--that is, a moment of thought that encourages an interpolation of the viewer with the image, and a subsequent critical rethinking of its (political) context. (3) I use as examples primarily works that compel the (North Atlantic) viewer into an affective confrontation through the contrast of familiar and comforting materials with the hyper-technological circulations of capital, information, and media that define the current context of war. I argue that the result of this contrast, combined with the emotional impact of the works and, importantly, their tactility, offers a potentially more nuanced response than the simple reiteration of antiwar sentiment. The contrast creates, in addition, the opportunity for rethinking one's own participation in the global conditions that perpetuate conflict. In order to unfold these ideas, the chosen works use as material what lies close to the body--clothing, fabrics, and wool. Using as examples knitted landmines, a cosy for an army tank, and a series of graffitied garments, my purpose is to contrast the low-tech simplicity of materials with the high-tech complexity of the military-media-industrial-entertainment complex of war, and also to suggest how both are implicated in a series of simultaneous biopolitical relations that define the contemporary movements of bodies, communications, and conflict.

Perhaps not surprisingly, the theory behind "Shock and Awe" developed directly out of the study of the networked and technologized conditions that have defined many recent studies of globalization. War is part of a network of circulating flows of power, influence, and profits. According to a number of theorists, it is increasingly less a "state of exception," and more a military-media-industrial-entertainment complex that strives toward inexhaustibility. (4) Although war flares up in specific locales, seemingly disconnected struggles are linked through networks of profit, communication, and instant mediation that consume any boundary and extend the war's impact across global, cultural, social, and political spheres. "Shock and Awe" is a manifestation of the perceived need to control this situation.

As defined by its authors Harlan K. Ullman and James Wade, who together wrote the theory of "Rapid Dominance" in 1996, "Shock and Awe" is a blitzkrieg-style mass dropping of bombs and rapid invasion, combined with complete knowledge of the territory and infrastructure. This supposedly results in confusion, fear, and wonder at the power of destruction and ultimately a submission and lack of will to resist. "Shock and Awe" produces total control, not only of geography, but also of the physical and psychic situation and event. (5) Rapid dominance is hence not only a military control, but also the knowledge of and dominance over all cultural, social, geographic, and military elements of the area under siege. Ostensibly, the rapidity of the campaign results in few casualties to either side, while already established global networks of capital and entrepreneurship make rapid social, infrastructural, and cultural rebuilding possible in the aftermath.

The outcome expected of a "Shock and Awe" campaign did not materialize in Iraq, and according to some critics, rapid dominance of another sort was used on the home front, resulting in the sidelining of critique and resistance, particularly in the U.S. Thus, the conditions of the war and its resistances are in fact closely intertwined, leaving a question for political artists of how to work both within and against these conditions. In other words, how does one critique a system of which one is intrinsically a part? What is the antidote to "shock and awe"? Or, more precisely, how might one activate a resistance that both takes into account the acceleration of technological change in current day war, and also takes account of its own position within the increasingly networked communications that underlie both recent war(s) and resistance(s)?

In making this argument, I am not suggesting that war affects all equally, for however it is characterized, a war always has (at least) two sides. This is not necessarily the same as stating that there are two sides fighting any given war, for where allies and alliances, enemies and victors, might dissolve in an instant, there is always a necessary experiential division between those who are there and those who are not. War inevitably affects differently, but in questioning the distance between and within those vectors of difference, spaces of resistance can be opened.

Take, for example, the work of Pakistani fashion designer Zain Mustafa, whose recent installation "Clothesline" (2003) uses twenty-one kurtas (the traditional unisex clothing of Pakistan) that were unstitched and inscribed by protesters at a massive antiwar rally in Santa Fe, New Mexico, in February 2003. (6) The fraying kurtas were then hung from a clothesline and displayed as part of the sixth Sharjah Biennial in the United Arab Emirates. The kurta, writes Mustafa, is itself a garment that denies hierarchies: worn by rulers and peasants, by women and men, it is "a tangible manifestation of ... yin yang concepts, east meeting west, the interplay, clash, intercourse, education of one with the other, trade, dialogue and the need to realize that we are one...." (7) Mustafa calls the kurtas a "utopian architecture," and it is the slow movement of the garments on the line, swaying in the breeze, and the bringing together of East and West through the simple strategy of writing on fabric, that is of interest. Capitalism, conflict, globalization, and protest came together in an ambiguous relationship that carries with it a powerful antiwar message in the signatures of protesters in Santa Fe who signed traditional Pakistani garments for display in one of the numerous biennials that make up the contemporary global art world (and market). Though the work of a single artist, "Clothesline" implicates many in its oppositional yet unifying statement, while its simplicity contrasts markedly with the hyper-control of rapid dominance.

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The strategy of "Shock and Awe" is, in essence, the control of the network. What I am interested in here, however, are the numerous points and nodes where the flows of information are slowed down, halted, or even reversed. Although the antiwar art I describe is viewed thousands of miles from the actual fighting, its impact can offer a way of collapsing geographic and psychic distance and, for an instant, a way of bringing the traumatic impact of the actual war directly into the body of the distanced viewer. For this reason, I see the network described above as less like a grid, and more like a piece of fabric, where the fluid folds and wrinkles offer the potential of connection across distance, as if they are two corners of cloth brought together. As Michel Serres suggests, in the pliable forms of textiles, philosophy might find a "metaphorical matter" with which to think through, and to unravel, the tangled and fluid concatenations of power and communication. (8) The way fabric folds in on itself suggests a metaphoric link to the open communications systems that define the contemporary spread of power. Though a war obviously cannot be experienced by someone who is not there, the question that I ask is whether an empathic moment can be created through art that connects two sides through a fold that encourages empathy and consequent action against conflict. (9) In Mustafa's "Clothesline," for example, two sides of the globe are brought together through the marking of text on textile, and a moment of potential empathy is opened through shared knowledge.

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