Terrorism of the Image

Walid Raad is a media artist born in Lebanon in 1967 and an American citizen since 2006. He was detained by the police at Rochester International Airport in 2004 and questioned concerning the contents of his luggage. As a photographer exploring representations of violence, in particular how car bombings effect the way urban populations relate to space, he had a few suspicious elements in his bags, notably photos of federal buildings, bombings and explosions, in addition to a slew of receipts, airplane tickets, airplane security cards and the calling card of an FBI investigator. He was allowed to leave after about 2 hours.

As introduction to the performance Raad created in response to his experiences and those of other Americans and Canadians wrongly profiled as potential terrorists, he offers the following reflections:

“No matter where, it seems, a camera regularly happens to be there, when something happens to happen. So much so that it has become a cliché, a veritable commonplace, to say that today things don’t happen unless a camera is there. Of course, it takes not just a camera, but an entire network of editing, transmitting, distributing, and viewing technologies -- and agents -- that extend out from the camera, to make what McLuhan so famously and confusingly called a “global village.” But it begins with the camera and its operator, with the fact of their already having been there. […] The corollary, of course, of the cameraman’s being there is that, in some sense, we are too. The camera metaphorizes the becoming-public of the event, because we who watch and listen are also caught in the double intersection of the sniper’s and the cameraman’s viewfinders -- not as potential victims exactly, but in some other sense as targets of those vectors (borrowing the word in this sense from McKenzie Wark in Virtual Geography).”(1)

If the camera makes people and events real for the purposes of public discourse, Raad’s presence on stage in “I Feel a Great Desire to Meet the Masses Once Again”, at the Centre Pompidou for two nights last week, poses a number of questions. The technogically sophisticated and visually appealing Power Point presentation Raad spent two years researching and creating and spends one hour delivering is performance in the vein of the Chinese-Australian photographer William Yang, who delivers monological accompaniment to his slide shows of Aboriginal peoples and Sydney night life, and art in the style of the late Mark Lombardi, who drew elaborate pencil charts detailing the financial and judicial imbroglios surrounding major international banks and investment houses. The Village Voice has mused that Raad’s art « is like a detective report or a communiqué from a secret agent », with all the aesthetic and emotional feel of these. His stage presence is cool, though not impersonal; his delivery is measured, but not flawless. He is a presenter of facts compiled through his own investigations, and now that his conclusions regarding the collusion of the CIA and private aviation to transport suspected terrorists around the globe are no longer revelatory (the New York Times reported on this in 2005) - indeed, to the extent that nothing he tells us outside of the details of his detention is news, whether it be the circumstances surrounding the arrest and prosecution of fellow artist Steve Kurtz or the trial of the “Lackwanna Six” - his « show » is fatally dated in a world of 24/7 news, a conclusion Raad himself has already come to, as he tells the audience early on in the evening. So what is the significance of “I Feel a Great Desire…”? Why perform it anymore, or even at all?

To answer the above questions requires moving away from the first-degree tone of scandal and conspiracy that pervades the presentation, to examine underlying issues of identity and the uses of the image. As a reflection on the latter, “I Feel a Great Desire…” offers avenues of reflection, but on a more intimate level than the ones usually touched by the now well-documented “war on terror” and its reporting by the media. The visual uses he makes of his detention by airport police (with photos of each incriminating item) lead it to exist for us in a way it never could have otherwise, his story being only too banal amidst fear and ever stricter airport regulations. At the same time, he told me informally after the show, the image he created of that same experience – the performance - became too dangerous to circulate in the United States while his naturalization application was being reviewed, which is why he has never presented “I Feel a Great Desire…” in his new country.

As such, it seems that a much more interesting story is being told here, whether Raad is aware of it or not. The presentation begins and ends with Raad leaving Lebanon by boat under Israeli bombs: the first time in 1983, the second time in 2006. The images he records on his camera at a distance of 23 years deliberately compliment each other but the persons recording them are not the same. The first voyage is undertaken by a fearful adolescent leaving the security of home and country for the unknown (life in the United States with an older brother); the second not only has the feeling of déjà vu but is also framed by Raad’s new status as a US citizen, which allowed him to leave Lebanon on US military transport to return “home” to his wife and child in New York. Immigration Service stamps on his Lebanese and American passports testify to his travels and subsequent changed identity.

Of this evolution, its reasons and consequences, Raad remains silent, favoring collective history over individual stories, and even though the samples of work he had in his luggage that infamous day at Rochester Airport are unquestionably studies of identity. Similarly, as a widely exhibited artist and full-time professor at the Cooper Union, the implications of his performance and all the choices which informed it cannot pass unnoticed to him. Yet they are never explored here nor are they given time to germinate in the mind of the spectator, who must process a vast amount of factual information to merely follow the plot of his story.

Heeding McLuhan’s warning that “the price of eternal vigilance is indifference”, Raad repeated to me after the show that he felt very strongly he no longer wished to perform “I Feel a Great Desire…” and to move towards new themes and ways of exploring them. I noticed however that he took the calling card of a representative of the European Parliament who wished to invite Raad to preach to the masses in Strasbourg. The reign of the image of the “war on terror”, how the image presents a certain representation of this, and perhaps even inures us to its vastly destructive implications, will likely continue.

(1) Thomas Keenan, “Publicity and Indifference (Sarajevo on Television)”, PMLA 117.1 (Jan 02): 104-116 (cited in French in the program to “I Feel a Great Desire to Meet the Masses Once Again”).

Photo credit: Walid Raad