life in iraq

an update. in light of declining media "interest" in the occupation ,if you read one article on iraq this year, this would be a good one.

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the always brilliant new york review of books published an excellent article, as iraqis see it, on everyday life in iraq, focusing on a fantastic blog written by a number of iraqi journalists and unedited by the publisher (McClatschy Newspapers). given (or perhaps because of) the original enthusiasm in the US war, the mainstream media seems to me to have been largely silent on the subject of living in iraq and what day-to-day life is probably like in this war devastated country. that is, unless it fed the master narrative. unlike all those statistics, this blog puts the consequences of the US attack and its consequences into very real terms.

with between 150000(WHO) and 600000(Lancet) civilian deaths (these numbers are sickening.) as a result of the united state's aggression, a blog like this should really be required reading...particularly for all of the war's conspirators, cheerleaders and enablers (read: democrats).

pictures

after visiting the cindy sherman exhibit last fall, began a couple of interesting readings on photography. seeing a collection of cs's works helps put late 20th C. popular or mass media photography into broader context, from her early stills of unrealized filmic scenes through her centerfolds series to the monstrosities of her later creations and a brief detour through renaissance aesthetics. there's a continuum of accepted beauty/aesthetic here....how these are defined by popular culture and what this means to the subjects and viewer. taken to an extreme by sherman (particularly, it seems to me, through the centerfolds - an originally rejected commission by artforum) in her elaborate stagings. there is protaganism-antagonism in each of her pieces. though who is which is a question left open. all in all quite an impressive and exhaustive exhibit.

thinking on the matter of photography led me back to my bookshelf to re-read walter benjamin's work of art in the age of mechanical reproduction. discussions of the "aura" of a unique work of art and its place in ritual through out most of our history lead to the place of photography and later, film.

WB: For the first time in world history, mechanical reproduction emancipates the work of art from its parasitical dependence on ritual.

leading WB to believe that the new goal (in 1936) was art as a means for political ends (namely, communism). he contrasts this with fascism - where art is utilized for social control.

Followed this by reading Susan Sontag's on photography which argues for the predatory nature of photography. diane arbus' pictures (like the one above) of US society's outcasts and abnormals offers one piece of evidence.

Despite Wikipedia informing me that much of her argument has been discredited or discounted by those who study this sort of thing, it seems to me that there is, in part, something to this - or may have been, until being preyed upon either as the subject or the viewer of photography became a kind of norm. and in this day and age of flickr, google streetview, utube and government surveillance (not to mention the surrounding debate on the latter), perhaps we're all a bit more comfortable being prey. or maybe it's even more than that - we want to be preyed upon, to find ourselves in pictures, to be observed. sherman carries on where warhol left off. and we all have learned that 20th C. axiom inside out - everyone wants/gets their 15 minutes of fame. I 've cut out and saved the grainy newsprint pictures where I happen to be in the crowd.

and thinking about all these things together, I can't help but wonder if Benjamin had it wrong - or at a minimum his hopes were left far from realized - regarding photography if not art in general. the drift from unique to the infinite, from ritual to political. photography and visual media seem to have become at the same time less political and a means of social control. through controlling what we see and defining how we are to see it. Or are those two ideas contradictory...

The 2008 Iowa Caucuses were last night. As we throttle up into the election year madness, it's certainly worth considering both the control and impact of visual media on these primary elections as one example. to what degree are we controlled or acting or acted upon? are we prey or predator, subject or object?