How I Filia About Friendship

When I think about friendship I think—with words forever brandished by a sporty swoosh—of the impossible as possible. Filia. That impossible is something like ‘love.’ Or, if I’m less hesitant, strike out the something like and say the word ‘love,’ in its full awkward, gawky, goopy, sentimentalising disclosure. Because, to ‘love’ in—maybe equally awkward, sentimentalising (not gangly, not goopy)—‘a relationship,’ is the hardest thing we choose to do because we think we want to do it. The work of it. The labour of love, lost and found. In comparison, the ‘art of friendship,’ or, ‘the work of friendship,’ (‘art’ and ‘work’ being the same (thanks ‘mechanical reproduction’)) can, more often than not, yield a love not caveated by anxieties, doubts, difficulties and death-drives. And this is a kind of possible impossible love. Where your protestations of the ‘L word’ are made without worrying over syntax or semantics or symbology of the saying. In this way it is gawky. In this way it is direct return (a boomerang comes back as a boomerang and not as a missile or moon dust). In this way you may avoid the tragic consequences of caring for someone way too much. Toxicity you didn’t see. So much so, to borrow that best of song titles, love goes to building on fire. Friendship, the kind that flutters your heart, your memory of time, the present-present, may be a building not on fire. Not going to either. (Here, I do not of course discount the possibility of falling out with your friend in the most anthraxxy way: stinking silence; enmity; disappointment that weighs more than all the ore in the earth.) What I’m saying, in a way that is fundamentally against the simplicity of the sentiment I’m evoking, is that friendship is fuelled by love rich in pleasure and low in pain. Filia. Feels good. Looks good. Keeps its head out of trouble. Makes the world more of a world you want to be part of. Can be part of. Filia. I feel that. I feel that way. Two.

Art Fair Tropes (Contemporary Istanbul)

I wandered around Contemporary Istanbul today, the second iteration of the art fair, which has gotten more Congress Centre massive, and drew in huge coiffured crowds on its opening night. Anyone who has been to an art fair knows how difficult it is to evaluate them outside of purely commercial criteria (surely how galleries on show are obliged to measure success). The thing is. Whatever good will you start with is quickly diminished. The more you see the less you want to see more. Art fairs are parables of the absolute power and impotence of images. Add to that – the complete demystification of art’s supposed mystique.

In the end, it may be us who are to blame for our own disappointment, disaffection and, even, digust – because we go to an art fair wanting to see ‘art,’ in its Platonic intact form, salve, salvation. The thing is (2): Either art fair art is Real Art and everything else is Pretend Art, or, it’s the other way around. Whichever. You would never go and watch a Kate Hudson movie and throw your arms up in the air when you are not served Bela Tarr. ‘Would you?’

‘Point taken, Shumon.’

‘You’re welcome.’

Now that is clarified, I will make a terminology portrait of what I saw trope-wise today at Contemporary Istanbul. Non-pejorative. ‘Observational,’ obvs.

Interior Design Art On par with a must-have couch or fetching lamp

Purple Art The colour, not the metaphor

Anguish Art Bodies writhing, contorting, protesting, existing, very, very sadly

‘O’ Art O is for Orientalism. Like, paintings of the insides of Ottoman mosques. Not to be confused with Ataturk Art

Ataturk Art Guess

Celebrity Art Such as a painting of Angelina Jolie putting on lipstick. Celebrity Art is to art what McDonalds is to a visit to a foreign country: comforting familiarity, universally universal. Tastes like chicken

Whimsical Iconoclastic Art A Day-Glo Pharoah

Unappropriation Art Such as reprinting Warhol portraits of Basquiat or Warhol himself at a fraction of their real size and without any of the heartfelt conviction of Sturtevant. Probably a sub-set of Celebrity Art

Art History Art Ghengis Khan attacks Keith Haring. Ghengis Khan attacks Manet. Someone attacks Picasso’s Three Dancers. A subset of Unappropriation Art or its Step Father

War Art Classical statue holding an AK-47

A-Level Art Reminds me of when I was 16 or 17 and carried a copy of Kafka everywhere I went because the world is shit everyone is false I am so miserably misunderstood. Sex, Love, Death! Can I have this week’s pocket money please?

Bonbon Art Literally, bonbons blown up to the size of an NBA basketball player. In many flavours. On small plinths

Aggregate Art Faces and figures made from a single unit of something repeated. eg coins, bike chains, bottle caps. The faces in these instances are often asleep. Possibly because they’re bored of the ubiquity of this technique

Prim Porn Art An echo of what gets through Turkey’s robust internet censorship system – which allows everything except pornography. Prim Porn Art channels the libidinal thrust of pornography but refuses to money-shot you with anything hardcore. eg lots of thongs

Cheap Sapphist Art Girl-on-girl. Because? No reason!

This is What I Meant When I Said What I Said

Written for SCHIRN magazine, on the occasion of the installation ‘Framework‘ by Bettina Pousttchi at Frankfurt Schirn.

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What does it mean? What does it mean to mean? What does it mean to express? What does it meant to impress? What does it mean to regress? What does it mean? What does it mean to matter? What does it mean to manipulate matter? What does it mean to manipulate the means with which matter matters? What does it mean to matter less? Matter more? Does it matter? Does it mean? What does it mean to copy? What does it mean to paste? What does it mean to open a new window? What does it mean to adjust levels? What does it mean to lose all your files? What does it mean to fail again, fail better, and then just fail? What does it mean to win? What does it mean to blow-up? What did it mean to Antonioni, his paranoid, forensic lens, the dead body at the centre of life? What does it mean to zoom-in? What does it mean to zoom-out, the way Michael Snow did in Wavelength? What does it mean to prefer the middle-ground? What does it mean turn foreground into background? What does it mean to you, to him, to her? What does it mean to a society, if such a thing still can exist, to find solace in the symbols of the past? What does it mean to say that you have hypochondria of the heart? What does it mean to people holding passports like yours? What does it mean to people holding passports like yours but not skin like yours? What does it mean to be your skin? What does it mean to turn attention to skin? What does it mean to a building when it is skin deep? What does it mean to obsess about the soul, the soul of a country, of a people, of a time, of an era, of a history of the now that is defined by who cannot share that same history? What does it mean? Who do you mean? What does it mean to care? What does it mean to care anymore about impossible things? Were things ever possible? When was that? Do you have the time? Whose time? Yours? What does it mean to tell the time? To whom? My time? What does it mean to claim that the world is flat, then not flat, then smooth, then striated? What does it mean to stock exchanges, derivatives, fluctuations and finely tuned financial instruments? What does it mean to you? What do you mean to them? Is this what you think when you think about your place in time and space, in space and time, when you stand in front of black and white lines arranged in repetitive rows according to an interpretation of geometries from faraway lands, mystic aesthetics, image prohibitions, Mohammadean anti-idolatory? What does miscegenation mean to you, to him, to her? What happens when images miscegenate? What happens when miscegenation miscegenates? What does it mean, mother? Father? Brother? Enemy? What does it mean to stand and stare and stop to think and not shy from the consequences of that thought? What does it mean to listen, not the way drones listen, but the way flowers listen? What does it mean to speak? To say? What does it mean to mean all these things, at once, like a meteor shower in the blackest of skies with someone you love? What does it mean to encounter? What will it mean? I meant every word I said.

Welcome to Beyond the Thunderdrome: Cinema verifies Post 9/11 Decade

Fiction is confirming that we have moved beyond the thunderdrome that came after the ‘End of History’.

I submit this as cordial evidence: went to see two films last week. The first — Avengers Assemble — is a Marvel comics mega-mash up, brought to us directorially by Buffy-inventor, Joss Whedon (which means more one-line quips than would normally be otherwise). The second was The Dictator, Sacha Baron-Cohen’s latest obscenely, excessive, stereotype cipher. I don’t really want to review either of them here (the former: enjoyable, yawningly patriotic, predictable; the latter, unpredictably hilarious); rather, suggest that both films could never have been released before this year — 2012 — because they’re both ‘Post 9/11 Decade Films’.

That decade began eponymously when the digits say it did; then seemingly ended (farcically) first in 2008 with the global financial crisis, only to truly die again (like Buffy, coincidentally) last year, when the remote-camera-wired Navy Seals crashed into Osama Bin Laden’s lazy TV viewing evening, and finally smoked him out with all the technological panache of the most expensive first-person video game in the world. Bin Laden at this point apparently had been reduced to amassing prodigious amounts of (American!) porn in his basement, perhaps because the Arab Spring (/Uprising/Awakening/Thing) was well underway, yet still way before the so called Islamists and Salafists would step into the void left by the liberal Twitterocracy afterwards. Awkward period. Osama had no bizness left to bother with in 2011. His belated, biological death was — again like Buffy — a second death, coming after the symbolic waning of his symbolic power. That his body was disposed so seamlessly and invisibly at the bottom of the sea perfectly bookends the decade that started with suicidal airplanes, smoke and sky.

Soon after, Hollywood’s habitual fetish of blowing-up Manhattan in the movies became total taboo. Death-drive, wish fulfilment, thank you Herr Freud: now we really get it. ‘Fantasy realised,’ paraphrases Zizek in The Perverts Guide to Cinema, ‘has another name: nightmare.’

Fast-forward to May 2012 — the year anniversary of Osama’s assassination — and Manhattan is painstakingly destroyed in glorious CGI 3D by salamander alien spaceships and Thor’s pissed off step-brother. Avengers: Assemble is no longer in the 2001-2011 prohibition era. Manhattan is fictive fair game again. Watch the Empire State building crash and crumble as the mechanized tail of the serpentine invader lashes liberal death to order and metropolitan civilization. It’s like aliens can’t take over the world until they’ve turned Manhattan into a demeaned dust crater. Until we see our precious symbols subjugated by what we secretly — terrifyingly — desire the most.

The Dictator does Post-9/11 Decade differently. Now that so many of Ameeraka’s flamboyant, mortal enemies are dead-dead-dead (Qaddafi, Kim Jong-il — though Osama seems to be staying in a guest-suite in the state of Wadiya), and Arab Spring sequels into scary sectarianism, all the ludicrous details can be retrospected. Sacha Baron-Cohen’s Dictator is hauled in front of the UN to make a statement about Wadiya’s nuclear proliferation. Wadiya is therefore, in part, Iran: Amerika’s enemy du jour. Now that the ‘difficult’ Sunni’s have been brought into line (or shoved down to Sudan, Somalia and Nigeria), it’s time to deal with the Shi’a mother ship. Because you gots to have a Nemesis, a spectral foe, whether its from outta space or inner Communism or immanent terrorism. Widespread acceptance that Iran is now the primary source of badd future is another symptom of how the decade that was, now no longer is. The Dictator careers through a litany of liberal and illiberal clichés that adorned the various fought wars on beards and burkinis and anti-universalisms. I’d like to list what all of these are but it’s easier to urge you to see the film for yourselves.

I’ve written here about how Mission Impossible: Ghost Protocol was a sign that Dubai had emerged from its 2001-2008 era where cinematic fiction was unemployable and impotent in the face of nation state fiction-realism.

True Lies. Total Recall. As if our dreams secreted out into the streets via the silver-screen.

Travels in Pseudoreality: The Only Way is Fake

Published in the ‘Nostalgia‘ issue of Tank, Spring 2011

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Illustration by Olivia Meier

From TV to Wikileaks, the Only Way is Fake

“I can’t imagine having real boobs again, can you?” The other girls in the Jacuzzi, sipping champagne, immersed in bubble bath, nod their heads in vigorous approval. No, like Chloe Sims (cup size: 34EE), they too can’t, won’t and never will have to experience what it means to bare breasts that are entirely their own. Chloe Sims – not of the virtual reality computer game The Sims, but the hit TV show The Only Way is Essex - isn’t nostalgic for a former time where bodies were genuinely real. Authentic. Pure.

Chloe and her pneumatically prodigious, perma-tanned, hair-extensioned, Botox-baring best friends live their lives truthfully – on camera, for us to envy and disparage equally – with this mantra permanently in mind: the only way is fake.

The programme in which this scene so honestly unfolds cannot be as clearly categorised as the breasts under scrutiny – ie “fake”. In fact, some of the most popular TV shows of the past couple of years in America and Britain - The Hills, The City, Jersey Shore, Geordie Shore, Made in Chelsea, Desperate Scousewives - have fuzzed the flimsy wall between real and fake, fact and fiction. They introduce a format capturing the audience’s jaded attention spans today: pseudo-reality.

Ever since Laguna Beach: The Real Orange County aired in 2004, pseudo-reality programmes have given us a mash-up of documentary and soap opera. They proffer “real people” with “real names” (Whitney, Spencer, Chloe) whose lives pre-date the shows and continue to spill out into “real life” once the cameras stop rolling. Pseudo-reality programmes are full of “larger than life characters”, but Whitney, Spencer and Chloe are not fabrications from a scriptwriter’s keyboard. Life has delivered them to TV as ready-made chancers, seen on the E! channel, cascading down the steps of the Chateau Marmont in their off-screen time. Even the PR agents, skulking behind the bushes, are for real. Believe it.

Yet Whitney and Spence’s daily machinations of love, betrayal and very big hair do not manifest on-screen in the garb of realist documentary film. Instead, these programmes have a slick, carefully crafted look akin to aspirational, MTV-friendly dramas such as The O.C. and Gossip Girl. Shot/reverse shot. Lingering close-ups. Cool fade-ins/outs of brightly coloured indie songs. No one in pseudo-reality ever fluffs a line, is ever lost for words, talks over each other, or has their back clumsily facing the cameras – facing us.

This is pseudo-reality’s core capitulation: “real” people living hyper-real lives. Watching these programmes is like being in an ontological freefall sans metaphysical parachute.

FARAWAY, TOO CLOSE.

In the 1960s, film director Jean-Luc Godard popularised a theatrical device academics like to term “Brechtian distanciation”. Anna Karina would turn to Jean-Paul Belmondo, over a dead corpse, and inform him – and us – that “it’s not blood. It’s just red paint.” Decades later, and the UK comedy Peep Show is filmed entirely in direct address – towards us. Bertolt Brecht’s Verfremdungseffekt, or “alienation effect”, was described by himself as “stripping an event of its self-evident, familiar, obvious quality and creating a sense of astonishment and curiosity about [it].”

This tactic told you what you were seeing was not really a reality but something staged, constructed, scripted. Life-size quote marks. However, the pretext in cinema and theatre is already clearly signposted for us: we are observing fiction. What else are stages, screens, costumes and strange character names for, if not to transport us elsewhere? To alert us to the artificiality of the artificial is a neat, even cute conceit in these safe contexts and only truly disturbing if you think that cinema and theatre are, in the first place, a presentation of “the real”.

Tony Wood, creative director of Lime Pictures, which makes The Only Way is Essex, pitched the format to ITV as”Big Brother without the walls”.

An example of this occurs in an episode of Made in Chelsea when Ollie dumps Gabriella on the deck of a Thames pleasure cruiser, lit up by fairy light pathos. Daran Little, story producer on the show and The Only Way is Essex, said that Ollie had called the production team and informed them he was about to end things with his girlfriend. The shot and setting were swiftly orchestrated (cue fairy lights) by the production team. In the scene broadcast on TV, Gabriella seemed genuinely upset by the news. There were actual tears, in fact, and disbelief. But how much is set up, how much is sincere?

All of this probably sounds like the next evolutionary step in the interminable future of entertainment froth, but, seen from an even broader meta-perspective, it insinuates much about that fragile delineation between so-called fiction and so-called fact in our own off-screen lives.

Big Brother without the walls. It is a very neat equation. A perfect pitch for a pilot. One that describes contemporary reality as a whole. Think about it. Think back to Truman Burbank in The Truman Show, who believed he lived in authentic, suburban bliss, only to find out his reality had been meticulously constructed for the viewing pleasure of millions around the world. Millions who paid to watch him laugh, love and cry. In our own pseudo-reality, of course, there is no huge, Buckminster Fuller-type dome covering us, as there is in Truman’s town Seahaven, rigged as it is with theatrical lighting, 5,000 cameras and switch-controlled weather. In our pseudo-reality, there may not be a “backstage” as such, but there  are control rooms, directors, producers and scriptwriters we don’t know about and most definitely do not see.

Theirs is a one-way mirror upon us.

When WikiLeaks burst the information dams and the crusading antics of Anonymous exposed fragile corporate firewalls, we entered a new climate of super-structure exposé. WikiLeaks made the walls in international politics disappear so that real-reality seeps out into constructed reality. Or is it vice versa? That all this myth busting happened to happen the same time that pseudo-reality TV topped viewers’ preferences is all part of the pseudo-real plan.

Here’s a question. What was the most shocking thing about WikiLeaks’ various cables concerning Saudi Arabia, Iran, America and Europe? Answer: it was how unshocking most of it was. Unlike Gabriella when she was spurned by Ollie, we didn’t feel alarmed by what was revealed in diplomatic communiqués. It affirmed what we already knew but couldn’t, or wouldn’t, accept. Not unlike when watching The Hills or Desperate Scousewives,  we refuse to acknowledge that the whole thing is staged. Why?

The “shock” of the global economic crisis played out in eerily reminiscent fashion. We discovered that capitalism has engineered fictional frontiers of virtual money, and that this fiction cannot go on forever. The crisis is a sensational season-ending episode to 20th-century economics where the world’s “richest” countries are also the ones with the greatest deficits. Money, the ultimate pseudo-real invention.

BELIEVE IN ME.

The falsehood of reality has been an ongoing pet favourite of philosophers from time immemorial. Think Plato’s Theory of Forms and the shifty shadows in the Timeas’ cave. Descartes could only guarantee that our mind exists and that is only because it is able to think. Everything else? Big question mark. More recently, Baudrillard continued with this theme, focusing on the society of spectacle in which we drink the “simulacrum” of Coke rather than the real thing. You pay to be cheated.

Of The Only Way is Essex, Tony Wood has said: “At the heart [of what we do is] always a desire to put in the audience’s mind: ‘Is this real? Are they acting? Is it scripted? Is it not?’” And to leave  that as an open question for them.

Duplicity, paranoia and uncertainty: the pseudo-real building blocks of philosophy, politics and popular TV. Perhaps computer image specialists Hany Farid and Eric Kee at Dartmouth College in New Hampshire can help. They have invented a technique that measures how much a digital image has been manipulated. How someone’s eyes have been lightened, their crow’s feet removed, wrinkles removed, skin unsagged, and freckles, blemishes and unwanted hairs zapped away by Photoshop. This new software winds back the “impossible human beings” presented to us as fetishistic gloss, and shows us the “actual human beings”.

The ones like you and me.

To alert us to the artificiality of the artificial is a neat conceit in these safe contexts and only truly disturbing if you think that cinema and theatre are, in the first place, a presentation of “the real”.

To rewind to Chloe Sims’ rejection of the real, surrounded as she was by double-E implants, we may need to  heed her insight. For perhaps, like Descartes or Baudrillard, she can see through the nostalgia for authenticity.

The “real” was always just an iteration of the pseudo-real. More than ever, there is no uncorrupted core to aspireto, no loss to lament. If there is one thing we can take away after we have switched the TV off, it is that these programmes do not fictionalise reality in a duplicitous way. It is reality that fictionalises itself all the time.

Mission Possible and the Ghosts of Desert Protocol

I didn’t want to watch Mission Impossible 4: Ghost Protocol until I was in Dubai. It seemed appropriate, given how much ballyhoo (is that a real word? in 2012?) was made about the fact that Tom Cruise & crew had managed to break through the obdurate Virtuality Curtain that has kept Dubai out of international cinema’s prurient gaze since … well, sort of since forever. Bits of the city-state appeared fleetingly as a recognisable but fictionally named ‘other’ emirate in Syriana.

But, you’d have thought this confection of neo-liberal fantasy – what Rem Koolhaas once called ‘a film-set with real problems’ – would have been hounded by the silver-screen from the get-go, laden as it is with ‘iconic’ backdrops, many of which would have started out on the same kind of 3D visualisation software that goes into making something like Ghost Protocol. So, why the coy injunction all this time? And why alleviate that prohibition now?

I first heard about the Mission Impossible+Dubai equation from a consultant for the Dubai Media Authority in 2010. She told me, both frankly and in hushed confidence, that most film-scripts submitted to the government for permission had always cast Dubai in a stereotypical negative darkness: dodgy financial dealings and naturally as a nexus of Jihadist terrorism. Each of these scripts had simply been batted away by the DMA – as had Sex & the City 2, for different, un-coy reasons (or they can smell a stinking dud even before it’s been filmed).

Not until Dubai had hemorrhaged from sublimely silly levels of debt, exposed in the sandstorm of 2009′s financial crisis, did it decide to embark upon – awful phrase coming up – a ‘rebranding exercise’.  Suddenly it needed the supplement of fiction, now that the fiction of its so called reality had financially imploded, and begun to sink, like The World is sinking back into the sea.

That would be the second reason no major feature films – or indeed fiction of any kind – have been staged here, till now (FYI, the next James Bond novel is to be set, at least partly, in Dubai). From 2001 to 2008, the place was a torrid, twisted excess of fiction you could Google Map. A Utopia sans social teleological project. Endless epic billboards and smooth video-promotions promising an unbridled future – but without, in Deleuze and Guattari’s words, a community to come.

Entertainment fiction had no work to do here.

It was unemployable.

When Tom Cruise – aka Agent Ethan Hunt – tells his colleagues that they’re, ‘going to Dubai’ in the next scene, the cinema audience at Dubai Mall cooed with self-recognition, and a smidgen of cringe. We’d all known about the Burj Khalifa as acrobatic prop (which I wrote about in conjunction with the skyscraper’s first recorded suicide here, which Sophia Al Maria portraits piquantly here, and footage of which exists mesmerically here) – but how smoothly would the unlikely setting fit within the overall arc of the film? (A similar moment occurs in Contagion: the deadly, unknown infection targets Hong Kong, Chicago, Macao, Atlanta, London – and Abu Dhabi. Oh, that’s right. They – Imagenation Abu Dhabi – co-produced the film. Sorry!)

Back to Ghost Protocol. What soaring symbol do you greet the audience with, to lull them into a sense of specific place?

Camels. Yes. That’s the preferred transition device from Budapest to the Burj. For some mysterious reason, Cruise and crew’s drive from Dubai airport to Sheikh Zayed Road involves careering past luscious, dappled, desert dunes – and thousands of free range camels. Some have even established home in the middle of the dirt-track. Watch out Tom! Those aren’t speed bumps! More like speed humps! (Camel jokes are always lame.)

Sadly, real reality contests this dromedarian account: the trek from airport to downtown Dubai actually passes hoards of mirrored towers, finished and under construction, six lane highways, sinewy underpasses, a Pyramidal Raffles hotel, the immense Grand Hyatt, and a lot of advertising. Notice: no camels.

The New Orientalist fantasy continues when they arrive at the Burj, and the only extras in the background are Emiratis. No indication that in fact, Emiratis comprise only approximately 11% of the entire population, which is made of some 200 nationalities. Typically, lobbies are one of the spaces par excellence where you feel this decentred complexion.

When Tom runs – and as we know, he is obliged, contractually, to run very fast at least once in each of his films – out of the Burj, into a Biblically sized sandstorm, instead of slamming his face on the side of Dubai Mall or get drenched in the world’s biggest dancing fountain display, Tom’s, like, lost in the smog of a ‘traditional’ souk – not dissimilar to the quaint olde market the harpies, I mean girls, in Sex & The City 2 go to to have an ‘authentic ‘Arabian outing. Bargains! Old Men with beards! Handicrafts!

Mother-fuckin’ jump cut. Galore.

Of course, block-buster films are, by habit, ontologically loose with the limits of reality (most of the Los Angeles we’ve ever seen on-screen is actually Vancouver in drag) – but – it’s nevertheless interesting that the cinematic shorthand preferred here, in Ghost Protocol, is a kind of retro-fictional ghost of the post-crash Dubai its Emir has striven for it to be perceived against. Camels, dunes, locals, and a lone, fiendishly sophisticated skyscraper that has to be thwarted to save the world. Remember – all this had to have been sanctioned by the authorities for it to have happened there at all.

When Sheikh Mohammed – Ruler of Dubai – published his book of poems in 2009, this was the front cover:

Note: no camels – but also no Burj Dubai (as it was known then), no serrated skyline denoting supermodernity, no hulking machinery of industrial transmogrification and heaving human toil. The ghosts of the future and the ghosts of the past that never happened combine – in cinema’s present – as a living fantasy that serves the best purposes for ideology. I mean, er, fiction.

Goodbye Artifice

What do we mean when we say, ‘life is imitating art’? Does some conventional causal logic flip around? Is art fancier than life, in a gilded, auction-house-happy kind of way?

If art once ennobled life by dramatizing it in stylish ways—the Woah Factor—early 21^st century life has seemingly rendered art an impotent imposter to the real thing. The more art enumerates its importance—petulantly, waving a wad of cash in the air, citing Another French Philosopher—the less important it actually is.

This starts, for me, with those pictures from Abu Ghraib prison. Beyond announcing the reality of systemic torture by the US Army, the stylizations of the photos were an idiot-accident-collage of Francis Bacon’s flesh-mounds, Pasolini’s pleasure fascism in Salo and, most chillingly, the carefree snap-happy amateurism of soldiers on holiday. Thumbs Up! Thumbs down: this was no Disneyland. It was Iraq.

I challenge you to find any artist authored images from that moment on that can rival the unadorned wrecked humanity of these pictures. This is a trend—if that’s the right word—that has escalated since, empowered by those precious little witness-machines we carry in our pockets: mobile phone cameras.

We make searing images in a milli-second. We consume difficult images everywhere. We laugh. We shudder. We don’t need artists to do any of this. Do we?

Things once cordially hidden or silenced have made their way to the surface of our attention-deficit attentions. The word ‘leak’—once limited to usage by plumbers or seafarers—is now prefixed by ‘Wiki’, or Al Jazeera. Our ignorance has run out of excuses.

Take the Arab Uprisings. When foreign journalists were not allowed in to Libya or Syria, we relied on discordant choruses of mobile phone clips. We become remote-witnesses. These clips are chaotic, unedited, over saturated with clashing sounds and terrible, true images. There is nothing artful about this ‘style’—and yet they convey a fragmentary sense of what it is like to be a mortal body caught in mortally threatening situations. Goodbye artifice.

The natural habitat of these documents is not the gallery or the museum but television, in its expanded form. Here these documents are immediate, their witnessing still raw. The emotional effect is also immediate. If indecipherable, unverifiable.

The poet Rilke wrote, ‘Events move in such a way that they will always inevitably be ahead of us. We shall never catch up with them.’

You only need to try and piece together the death of Muammar Qaddafi to discover how true this is. The best approximation to his last few minutes comes shaped in a series of non-continuous amateur video clips. The roar of the crowd is deafening, but that’s also because the microphone on the camera is not sensitive enough. Qaddafi is alive. Then he is pulp. A universe of non-special effects make this a cinema of the most ethically and aesthetically troubling kind.

When asked, why do novelists tend to prefer writing historical stories, Hillary Mantel replied that because a novel takes so long to produce, if you try and write about the present, it always slips through your grasp. The novelist needs a target to appear to be fixed so they can reveal the slippery secrets repressed by history.

If there is going to be a substantial response by contemporary art to the currents events in the ‘region’ it is, sadly, necessarily only once the life of those events has subsided into the past—for better or worse, with body counts as tragic proof that the present happened. Until that moment, life wins.

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Published in the first issue of Harpers Bazaar Art