|
By
Jiska Hartog, Michiel Henneman
and
Jonas Staal
The project ‘Bomb Wreck
Jewellery’ represents the second stage in a series of projects related
to two car bomb wrecks resulting from an attack on Al Mutanabbi Street
in Baghdad, Iraq, in March 2007, which claimed the lives of thirty-eight
people. Al Mutanabbi Street was the site of a book market and also
served as a meeting place for artists and writers. There is still only
limited access to the area, and it has lost its function as a centre of
cultural gathering and exchange.
In the months following the attack, independent curator Robert
Kluijver initiated the transportation of the two objects to the
Netherlands. In close cooperation with Iraqi students in Baghdad, the
wrecks were used to broaden the perspective of the Iraq war in the West.
The idea was that direct confrontation with these remains could bring
about a different vision of the Iraq issue to replace the apathy amongst
the public toward the vacuous death count which, after a period
of intense yet short-lived interest for Iraq, was repeated over and over
by the media.
In April 2007, I became involved in this process as a result of a
series of works I had produced a year earlier: reconstructions of car
bomb wrecks which I placed illegally in public spaces in Rotterdam (‘Car
Bomb – Studies I-II’).
In September 2007, three months following their arrival in the
Netherlands, and after being held up in transit by both the United
States army and the Iraqi army and enduring various sandstorms and other
obstacles, the wrecks were exhibited in the public space of Rotterdam as
part of a presentation for Museum Boijmans van Beuningen.
The wrecks were elevated on
simple steel supports which afforded the objects a sculptural dimension.
The primary intention of writer and visual artist Jack Segbars and
myself was to display the wrecks as soberly as possible, such that the
‘artistic act’ actually possessed a kind of ‘ready-made’ feel. The sole
basis of this presentation was the act of decontextualising the wrecks (i.e.
moving the wrecks out of the context of Iraq to the Netherlands) so that
their meaning could once again be called into question outside the
symbolic order of the media and politics.
The project, entitled ‘Anatomy of a Car Bomb Wreckage’, was
concluded by a symposium in which writers, journalists, visual artists
and art critics attempted – from the vantage point of their various
disciplines – to shed light on the meaning of the wrecks in a Western
context: as journalistic artefacts, moral crowbars, media symbols and
sculptures: as visual art. Speakers included social engineer Joost
Janmaat, writer and journalist Chris Keulemans, theorist Vincent W.J van
Gerven Oei and art critic Rutger Pontzen from the newspaper De
Volkskrant.
In March 2008, I met with visual artists and jewellery makers
Jiska Hartog and Michiel Henneman to discuss a subsequent stage of the
presentation of the wrecks. The primary matter at hand was how, after
the exhibition and symposium, the process of displaying the objects
could be further developed. How could the meaning of the bomb wrecks be
further explicated in a Dutch and Western context? The project ‘Bomb
Wreck Jewellery’ is the result of this.
In the project ‘Bomb Wreck Jewellery’, we have developed a
jewellery collection made up of scrap pieces from the bomb wrecks on Al
Mutanabbi Street, consisting of glass melted by the heat of the blast,
metal shards, wire and motor parts. Only minimal additions have been
made to these ‘shards’ to allow them to be worn as jewellery. Processed
black silver was the material used to put the segments together so they
could be worn and so they would be recognisable as jewellery. In each
piece, these silver constructions follow the contours as they were found.
In fashioning them, we adhered to the rule that in no case could any
material be added to the jewellery which would increase its economic
value, such as would occur if gold, for instance, were mounted to it:
the tension in the jewellery is created precisely by imparting economic
value to the ‘worthless’ pieces of glass and metal which only acquire
relevance by virtue of their historical significance as remnants of an
attack.
The collection of objects consists of the primary selection
standard to the jewellery sector: a chain, broach, ring, earrings and
bracelet. For each of these, one unique model has been fashioned.
The main focus of the collection is the value of the scrap
pieces from the bomb wrecks. The melted, coagulated pieces of glass and
the rusted, twisted pieces of steel salvaged from the wrecks are of
course, in terms of the material itself, worthless. It is the history
of the material, the incomprehensible suffering hidden within, which
determines the value of the objects. In principle, however, this is not
a value that can only be defined in economic terms – quite the
contrary, in fact: its value is simultaneously moral in nature.
This is thus the main tension which ‘Bomb Wreck Jewellery’ addresses.
The selected form of the jewellery forces the bomb wreck remains into a
Western, capitalistic system, while its actual value cannot be
determined by this system in its entirety: here the observer is faced
with an individual, ethical conflict. The attractiveness of the objects
as unique pieces of jewellery, which can be directly acquired as long as
the visitor is prepared to pay, stands in stark contrast to the access
that these offer into thinking about the distant events we hear about on
a daily basis, but which, in essence, are not confrontational.
With this project we also delve into the fetishistic nature of the
bomb wrecks, which in the original form (i.e. in the decision to
transport them from Iraq to the Netherlands) of course already played an
important role, but which was less explicit in the presentation than as
in the form of the jewellery, which represents an extreme object of
desire. This forces the observer to take up a moral standpoint, not
only with respect to this project and the events surrounding the bomb
wrecks, but with respect to global capitalism itself. It is a
fact that the modern jewellery industry is just as likely made possible
by the suffering of other anonymous individuals who dig up stones, often
under miserable circumstances, while this is not visible in the
final product. The shock generated by the ‘Bomb Wreck Jewellery’ project
is thus actually one of transparency: the historical background
of the material, which in fact constitutes an intense moral provocation,
is continually visible and palpably present. As such it counteracts a
usual form of consumption: the object is unavoidably linked to moral
consciousness.
The theme of so-called ‘disaster tourism’ features in
this project. The term pertains to the urge to visit places where acts
of extreme violence have occurred or to see objects which have been used
to bring about such events. Take, for instance, the Torture Museum in
Amsterdam or the site of Ground Zero in New York City. Other
examples include the wood splinters sold under the guise that they were
part of the cross used to crucify Jesus Christ and rubble from the
Berlin Wall which many people still take with them or buy for the sake
of ‘exhibiting’ them at home. It is often said that visual art is the
instrument that ‘makes the invisible visible’: an instrument that can
(and should) serve to expose false truths and hypocritical moral
standards.
Contrary to this, we have made the conscious decision to allow the
invisible to remain invisible: as a physically violent layer of
reality that is in truth impossible for us to ‘understand’. It is
precisely this fundamental lack of understanding that typifies
our position with respect to non-Western conflicts which only actually
concern us because we possess the means (and thus feel the obligation)
to report on them.
As a result, today’s world is characterized by this desire to
penetrate to the ‘innermost’ reality by means of journalism and
real-life television. The cameraman who kept filming in the Twin Towers
as they burned; the process of destroying animals meant for consumption,
from birth in a battery cage to systematic gassing on a conveyor belt; a
film in which we follow a bullet from its production to its expulsion
from a firearm and subsequent penetration of the skull and brain of the
victim. Isn’t then the exhibition of two bomb wrecks at the entrance of
a museum in this respect the product of ultimate decadence in this
obsession for the all-revealing image?
And isn’t the chief characteristic of today’s world in fact the
absence of this ‘innermost’ vantage point, this ‘core reality’ – the
place ‘where it actually occurs’? And that the ‘core’ always
refers to another reality, meaning or layer of experience? And isn’t the
inability to accept this the essence of our modern condition humaine?
The characteristic ‘non-understanding’ in the 21st century is, as a
condition, the subject of a great deal of theoretical and philosophical
debate, but yet our visual culture continues to fundamentally
propagandise the opposite: ‘after the break, you’ll be the first
to see what no one has ever seen before’, ‘this news bulletin
keeps you up-to-date on everything, at all times’, ‘the world
is within your reach’… The primary default in the debate on
globalism is to discuss this condition as though it were an insightful
and entirely consciously initiated construction: as if we could
be everywhere and see everything because globalism was ‘conceived’,
managed and controlled by us, the West.
With ‘Bomb Wreck Jewellery’, we are arguing for a different
approach, another kind of awareness: we do not make the invisible
visible; we deliberately imbed the invisible in our approach toward
the world around us. The work we display does not function as an end
point, but as a link: a point from which it is possible to set
new parameters for current ideological constructions which serve as the
basis of our obsession for mediated reality – our hysterical desire for
the visible to be real.
What we see, that which is visible, is presented by our culture as
reality. Contrary to this, we contend that these moments of visibility
function merely as temporary points of order by which the invisible and
our inability to accept the invisible as such only becomes more palpable
in its presence and in contrast with which our attempts to refute this
become increasingly more hysterical and grotesque.
With ‘Bomb Wreck Jewellery’, we are therefore in the first place
not presenting jewellery or artwork; we are presenting you with a new
design for an ongoing human conflict.
© 2009 Hartog, Henneman and Staal |
|
