In a World Like Ours

The general population herds into the city's museums on the weekends to see its displays of dead art. By dead art I mean no disrespect, I am simply talking about art that once was pertinent, challenging, and new. I am talking about art that in the time of its creation made people uncomfortable. Our beloved Impressionist painters of the 19th century were once radicals that challenged the canon classical art. If you can believe it, people once said of Impressionist paintings, "This is not art!" Today we covet these works as examples of the great masters.

Eighteen years ago, Robert Mapplethorpe's The Perfect Moment was shut down after Dennis Barrie and the Contemporary Arts Center in Cincinnati were indicted for pandering obscenity. People stood outside the museum crying claims of indecency, beggin the question once again, "What is art?" Today, we drool over his beautiful monographs that sit front and center at mega-bookstores.

This cycle does not end here...

This past week a show at Rensselaer Polytechnical Institute in Troy, New York by artist Wafaa Bilal called The Night of Bush Capturing: A Virtual Jihadi was shut down on the grounds of a building code violation (mind you that prior to the opening of the show, the building was inspected and okayed. It was only after the opening that they cited a violation.) The show piece was a modded version of the video game Quest for Saddam. In the game, players target the ex-Iraqi leader. This game prompted an al-Qaida spin-off called The Night of Bush Capturing. Bilal then hacked that game and inserted himself as the suicide bomber who is on the mission to assasinate President Bush.

Bilal says, "This artwork is meant to bring attention to the vulnerability of Iraqi civilians, to the travesties of the current war, and to expose racist generalizations and profiling. Similar games such as “Quest for Saddam” or “America’s Army” promote stereotypical, singular perspectives. My artwork inverts these assumptions, and ultimately demonstrates the vulnerability to
recruitment by violent groups like Al Qaeda because of the U.S. occupation of Iraq."

Whatever his immediate intentions in creating this particular piece may have been, Bilal has a history of challenging our assumptions and of offsetting our comfort level. In his essay, "A World Like Santa Barbara," Hickey asserts that we do not acknowledge art today "as the conventional, civilized forum that it is," and by failing to recognize this, we " assume that ordinary citizens are not cognizant of its conventional nature either, and thus cannot be trusted to distinguish artifice from actuality, words from deeds, signs from referents, narratives from actions."

By censoring Bilal's video game, we are likening a game to reality in such a way that the virtual is a threat to the real. Not only are we giving the game too much credit, but we are not giving ourselves enough of it.

With some historical distance, every event shows its true impact. Maybe this event will show us that while art imitates life and life imitates art, art is not life, even in the virtual age, it is still artiface.