Entries Tagged 'AFGHANISTAN' ↓

At last! Formalist sculpture has a use-value…

The futuristic Kandahar International Airport terminal was built between 1956 and 1962 by Pacific Architects and Engineers, Inc., for a cost of US$ 15 million under the USAID program. It never took off (as a tourist destination), alas. And here’s a contemporary postcard…

and in construction…

(and thanks to i.mcgrath for the perspective at the top of this post)

Here’s some more reflections on the work of ZEROSIX at KAF…

Unofficial war art? War zone street art? Even if you’re familiar with the work of recent official Australian war artists (for example, in war zones, Charles Green and Lyndell Brown, or Shaun Gladwell, and in peacekeeping zones, Jon Cattapan and eX de Medici) you’re unlikely to have seen what the soldiers themselves are up to. Only from George Gittoes’ movies (notably Soundtrack to War, shot in Iraq in 2004) do we gain some sense of the culture of everyday life for members of the armed services in such arenas as Iraq and Afghanistan.

Unofficial war art is another thing altogether. Here we see the work of the stencil artist ZEROSIX downtown in the Kandahar ISAF base. While you might say that the work of the official war artists is largely a matter of matching their highly protected experiences of being embedded against their existing personal styles and strategies, in this case it is the vernacular of street artists like Banksy and others which provides a set of visual conventions for ZEROSIX and others to work with.

David Fincher’s 1999 film Fight Club – based on a 1996 novel by Chuck Palahniuk – created the character Tyler Durden (played by Brad Pitt), who is also ambiguously the narrator of the film. While Fincher makes no claims for Tyler’s beliefs – “[the] movie couldn’t be further from offering any kind of solution” -  here ZEROSIX revisits Tyler’s values in a much more challenging context.

The Kandahar base is a massive fortress housing approximately 30,000 personnel. Its incongruous village-like atmosphere (the boardwalk, the fast food franchises) was criticised last year by the “notoriously sober” General Stanley McChrystal, who was reported as having said: “This is a war zone – not an amusement park.” Closing the fast-food outlets was an unpopular decision, since reversed. However it’s not so surprising that in any community of this size you will find at least a couple of artists. In this otherwise bleak environment, it’s probably the only mode of creative release available. That 06′s street art – or his tag – is permitted at all is itself unexpectedly humane.

Read about the shenanigans at the Kabul Bank here in the NYT by Alissa J. Rubin and Rod Nordland.

or not… cogently assessed in The New Yorker, by Steve Coll.

by Ahmed Rashid, in the NYRB.

Forgive me. Trying to fit Afghan war art into a western canon of art history sometimes results in jokes at our own expense. Putting “our” art history to one side, this is a detail of one of the few Afghan “war carpets” I have seen that could be said to represent the outsider symbolically. Images of snakes and dragons are a common way of representing the evil Other in the pictorial carpet tradition. And given that the word “Omar” is written in Roman script (that is, not in Dari or Pashtun) one could say that it is meant for the outside world to take heed… Let me just tweak the colours a bit so you can read the letters on the cuff…

The disembodied hand itself is not new. Precursors exist in the propaganda posters of the 1980s, and subsequent carpets, representing the Soviet Union.

P.S. And, to bring  the metaphor into the present, Reuters reports (ex WikiLeaks):

“Cut off the head of the snake,” the Saudi ambassador to Washington, Adel al-Jubeir, quotes the king Abdullah  as saying during a meeting with General David Petraeus in April 2008.

write about art. As much as I enjoy the afternoon surprises at ArtDaily, most of it is press release hype.  The looking is great, but the reading can be excreable. This, for example:

“It’s all about knowing the rules of the game. Those who don’t know the rules will never recognize the order that governs things…. I am of the opinion that each thing also contains its opposite.” Boetti’s practice was governed by his own systems wherein rules extend to not only his visual vocabulary, but to his name, incorporating himself, as artist, in his studio practice. With the addition of “e” (and) between his first and last names in 1967 the artist became “Alighiero e Boetti,” exploring dualism within identity.

“But beyond individual expression, Boetti sought to create conceptual riddles that unravel questions of humanity, society, nature and the world. Singularity and multiplicity, repetition and variation, order and disorder, alternating and dividing, etc., the artist used time itself as a medium to paraphrase principals of nature and mathematics. The placement and order of stamps on a letter could begin as a puzzle or mathematical exercise in permutation, but would end as an aesthetic creation. Likewise the ballpoint and embroidery works were conceptually Boetti, but produced by others within his rules or more accurately the rules the artist already saw existing in nature. “The ballpoint drawings are concentrated time” and concurrently pure gesture. Perhaps the most apposite statement about Boetti comes from the artist’s own woven text – concisely stated “Un’idea Brillante” (A Brilliant Idea).”

N.B. The embroideries “produced by others” were made to order in Afghanistan. Their millions of “pure gestures” were paid at a pittance and sold for a fortune. Relatively. Now that’s a brilliant idea. Not.

This three dimensional poster-portrait of the Australian Prime Minister is to be found on one of those non-specific telecommunication boxes outside the Ian Potter House at the Melbourne end of Canberra. It’s another play on the Redhead matchbox theme. Here we see the Afghan artist Khalid Ali capturing the image on his iPhone. The poster appears to have been complicated by the addition of the grafftti’d  slogan “bring the troops home”. And the poster appears to be signed “Lister” – and Uncle Google wonders whether this could be the work of the graffiti/muralist artist Anthony Lister?

You’ll find more detail than usual on the situation for the ADF in Oruzgan province here via ABC Drum Unleashed