You inspire me…
Thanks for filling me with love and compassion every time Im around you.

For You…

June 20, 2007

Chicago looks like
his apartment, desert cammys and my messy notebook
it sounds like
screaming, the Blue line and my silence
smells like
sewage, tea and sweat
tastes like
coughdrops, Sultans and wine
Chicago feels like
Aaron
like leaving
like living

Thanks Lovella you make me smile and…
I was in the dark and bumped into you and then there was a spark of light.
I was really lost the past few months but just in the past few days I’ve been feeling like I have a direction again.
Direction in the dark. The dark of our culture of war, greed, hate, consumption… I have a lantern of creativity lighting my way through in this dark space and a heading directed tords love, compassion, hope!!! This is what will sustain us through this journey in the dark… beautiful dark with only room to create, construct, and rewrite culture… We, the two of us, have to support each other, empower each other, and then we will not drift away into the dark to be consumed… lost.

Summer Intensive English Language Institute
SIELI Students-Columbia College Chicago

So I wanted to share some thoughts, images, and readings before I came to speak with you all on Monday.

I recently finished a book called “Hope in the Dark” by Rebecca Solnit. In this book she talks about the power of creativity in regards to change in times of “darkness”. This intrigued me as we are surrounded by the “darkness” of war, of waist, of greed…

She notes that in regards to the Zapatistas in Mexico against the World Traid Organization and NAFTA
“They (Zapatistas) understood the interplay between physical actions, those carried out with guns, and symbolic actions, those carried out with words, with images, with art, with communications, and they won through the latter means what they never could have won through their small capacity for violence.”

So my work functions as a struggle between “art” and “activism” in hope that in the gray between there are possibilities for change, for beauty, and for metaphors that can deconstruction the cultural, political, and social walls that bread dehumanization.
I believe that we as artist of all mediums are the creators of culture, of thought, of narratives, and of the ideas that shape how we live. Therefore as creators we have a responsibility to humanity.

How does your art impact the people around you?
Should art deal with these kind of ideas?
How has art had an impact on your life?
How do we consume culture?
How is art used by culture, politics, economies, ect?

In regards to WAR
Perhaps video has now replaced photography in Walter Lippmann’s 1922 Quote, “Photographs have the kind of authority over imagination today, which the printed word had yesterday, and the spoken word before that. They seem utterly real.”

What lies and truths do the videos and pictures we look at tell?

Joy Garnett talks about Susan Sontag and Leon Golub’s work and the gaps in what is accepted as real and what is culturally constructed as real.
(please check out video at this link (click on leon golub) click here)

Leon Golub says, “I’m nuts on images. I cut them out of books and newspapers, mostly books and magazines. And this is absolutely crucial to me, because this is one of the ways I tap into the world. It’s the way I visualize it. But I see the world not just out of my own obsessive attitude. I see the world because it comes to me through media. Through film, through newspapers, through TV…we’re surfeited really. We’re over exposed. We’re shoved at all the time by media. And I’ve often said it’s kind of a half joke, you know how they say you’re sixty or eighty percent water? Well, actually we’re made up of twenty-five thousand photographs, eleven thousand films. All of this has moved through us and is affecting us in some way or the other. So we’re media creatures. We’re living in an extraordinary visual world.”

Susan Sontags book “Regarding the Pain of Others” talks about how we use images and how they are consumed. I have made a link to a PDF of the last chapter. Please read through it.
click here
The book raises good questions on images in the mass media, War, pain, and how we communicate these events. All of these questions are important for me to consider as I struggle through “art” and activism.”

How do we as artist deal with this history and maintain hope in the dark… hope through creativity that can make human connections.

ART:
Video click here
The Tourist Photographs from Iraq are a series of 4′x4′ oil self-portraits which attempt to interpret the posture assumed as a soldier/tourist in the surreal space of Iraq.

ACTIVISM:
Video click here
Iraq Veterans Against the War click here
Operation First Casualty: Chicago, IL
In an effort to illuminate the true reality of the conflict in Iraq, members of Iraq Veterans Against the War engaged in a series of street theater actions around the Chicago area on Monday, June 18. Entitled, “Operation First Casualty” (OFC) because the first casualty of war is truth, this action was made up of reenactments which highlight various aspects of life in combat in Iraq. The action is treated like a military operation with participants in full military uniform, however, no weapons were used at any time. This was IVAW’s fourth OFC.

THE STRUGGLE BETWEEN:
Ahmed
Video click here
This video is based on my relationship with Ahmed Jabar Shareef, a nine year old Iraqi boy. I met Ahmed in New York City through the Global Medical Relief Fund.

Drawing for Peace:
Video click here
This was performed at the intersection of Wright and Green Streets in Champaign, Illinois against the war in Iraq and for Peace. It is an attempt to claim a strategic space in order to challenge the everyday and its constant motion for a moment of thought, meditation, and PEACE. It was submitted to the collaborative art site Learning to Love You More for assignment #34.
This project lead to:
Drawingforpeace.org click here

One more talk from the radio: click here

Been running with veterans…

What do you think of that?
What does it mean?
What does it imply?

My professor once told me that you cannot escape “narrative.”

When I got back from the war I did not want to tell anyone anything but instead just to reflect and think. I wanted people to have there own space and I wanted mine. I wanted to escape “narrative.”

For these reasons I feel in love with abstract paintings. Paintings that were solely what they were. Resisting narratives of myths and heroes. Instead the paintings were presented as sublime universal struggles with materiality. Abstract paintings like Rothko’s would give me space to sit and reflect on life, death, the war, and humanity almost like Siddhartha sitting the river. I though for some reason abstract paintings had escaped the systems that built up the culture that allowed war and dehumanization. I though perhaps they had escaped the narratives we write of humanity for a second glimpse at a united eternity.
But I was wrong.
Abstract art was constructed out of its own heroic narrative with the painter at center.

Disgust.
But in that disgust a realization that I am seeking after a new narrative. That is why I turn to art. In order to create a new narrative… One with out the cultural baggage of heroes, others, and consumption… Perhaps a true honest narrative of an instant of humanity can never be found… but this does not mean I can stop seeking it out.

Fly one: I hate this job.
Fly two: yeah I know we are really tide down

or
Its hard to make a joke on a fly.

or
Darn it. Why did I have to grow up when everything was made of plastic?

or…
what do you think? Let me know what you think would be a good joke for this image.

The first Iraq war veterans National Speak Out
Help break through the fog.
Help the nation understand.
Help stop the victimization of the Iraqi people.
Help give a voice to our brothers and sisters that are deployed in the dead desert dusts.
Help break through the impersonal quantifying ideologies of politicians and the media.
Help stop the dehumanization and save the lives of the Iraqi people and our brothers and sisters in arms.
Help stop the war and foster peace.

Give the nation the personal complex reality of being on the ground in Iraq and share your story/testimony of the war with other Iraq war veterans and the public at the National Vietnam Veterans Art Museum. The testimonies will be documented for “Winter Soldiers Speak Out” a full-length film to be released at selected theaters.

Winter Soldiers Speak Out: Recreating the conceptual space of “winter soldier” in order to empower Iraq War veterans to speak out and give testimonials of their experience in Iraq.

Bring together between 100 - 500 Iraq War veterans to Chicago this Veterans Day weekend (Nov. 9 - 11) for documenting there testimonies and creating a Vets for Vets national event hosted at the
National Vietnam Veterans Art Museum and sponsored buy other veterans organizations (VFP and IVAW in particular). This event should also attract media coverage to include national newspapers, local TV and radio stations, Indy media outlets as well.

Documentation:
The Testimonies along with the event will be filmed in order to create a full length documentary film to be screened at national film festivals, selected box offices, and more importantly distributed as a DVD.

Dates outline:
Wednesday Nov. 7th: registration and set up
Thursday Nov. 8th: registration Filming begins
Friday Nov. 9th: Filming continues and registration continues
Saturday Nov. 10th: Filming continues
Sunday Nov. 11th: Veterans day morning at the memorial (Filming), Vets for Vets lunch (no filming), concert community event in park hosted by IVAW national (IVAW speeches, fundraiser for vets. organizations and museum).

Space:
National Vietnam Veterans Art Museum and park next door Chicago, IL.

CALL FOR SUBMISSIONS
UNEDITED: IRAQ WAR VETERANS, DAY IN DAY OUT REALITIES.
This exhibition will feature the unedited videos of the Iraq war through the perspective of soldiers. The videos are not intended to entertain, to shock, to arise sympathy. Instead this is a collection of videos which, represents the mundane, complex, anxious, tired, bleak, dust covered day in day out reality of the American soldiers in Iraq.
Mass consumption of images, video, audio is the norm.
Driving through southern Iraq on MSR Tampa our MK-19 (Mark 19) gunner had his little hand held camera running. Filming hours of the passing landscapes filled with Iraqi children, military convoys, taxies, check points, cities… which made up nothing and everything that was the journey from Kuwait to BIAP to Anaconda. The footage was never close to the intensity of the hyperreal mainstream films and the media but it was honest.

CALL FOR SUBMISSIONS:
The National Vietnam Veterans Art Museum is looking for unedited videos from Iraq war veterans to exhibit to the public. The exhibition will be a collage of looping footage on a series of monitors in one space in order to present an array of perspectives in order to complicate mass media’s ideal narrative of what it means to be a soldier in Iraq.

PALIMANARY DEADLINE:
APRIL 23, 2007

PARTICIPATE:
Submissions can include any quality digital videos created with either a digital still camera or video camera.
Entries must be unedited. Submissions can be submitted anonymously or if submitter wishes to be credited please include your NAME, TITLE, MILLITARY BRANCH, UNIT, and LOCATION were filmed.

YOU CAN ENTER YOUR MOVIES IN ANY OF THE FOLLOWING WAYS:
MAIL A CD CONTAINING YOUR MOVIES (If desired write NAME, TITLE, MILLITARY BRANCH, UNIT, and
LOCATION were filmed on cd.)

C/O Aaron Hughes
National Vietnam Veterans Art Museum
1801 South Indiana Ave.
Chicago, Il 60616

EMAIL FILES THAT ARE 10 MB OR LESS (If desired include NAME, TITLE, MILLITARY BRANCH, UNIT, and
LOCATION were filmed.):
aarhughes@gmail.com

UPLOAD AND SEND FILES LARGER THAN 10 MB USING YOUSENDIT(HTTP://WWW.YOUSENDIT.COM/) TO: aarhughes@gmail.com

Please direct any questions regarding the exhibition or submissions to: Aaron Hughes / aarhughes@gmail.com / (312) 326-0270

Perhaps video has now replaced photography in Walter Lippmann’s 1922 Quote, “Photographs have the kind of authority over imagination today, which the printed word had yesterday, and the spoken word before that. They seem utterly real.”

Do we reinterpret war and life only through the interpretations of the past?

“Dead Troops Talk (A vision after an ambush of a Red Army patrol, near Moqor, Afghanistan, winter 1986) 1992
Transparency in lightbox 2290 x 4170 mm
Mr. David Pincus
Cinematographic photograph
© The artist
In Dead Troops Talk, Wall merges conventions from war and horror movies with those of the history painting of previous eras to create an elaborate, grotesque fiction. The picture presents a hallucinatory scene in which soldiers who have just been killed on the battlefield are re-animated, engaging with each other in what the artist describes as a ‘dialogue of the dead’. As the title indicates, the troops are a Soviet patrol ambushed in Afghanistan during the war and occupation of the 1980s. Each figure or group seems to respond differently to the experience of death and reanimation. The three soldiers clowning with their own wounds provide a note of macabre levity. Wall has suggested that their black humour is as plausible a reaction to their circumstances as the more serious or distressed responses of their comrades. As carefully constructed as a film or epic painting, the work was shot in a large temporary studio, involving performers and costume, special effects and make-up professionals. The figures were photographed separately or in small groups and the final image was assembled as a digital montage.”
From the TATE Modern http://www.tate.org.uk/modern/

After reading the introduction to The Spectacle of the Real, and chapters 1 and 9 of Regarding the Pain of Others, what are some of your thoughts on how artists and art should play a role in portraying pain and beauty?

Why do you wish to pursue the arts? Do you have an artistic responsibility to an abstract idea such as humanity, beauty, love, modernity, or God?

Skim through the first chapter of Guy Debord’s The Society of the Spectacle… How do we as artist contribute to the “spectical”? How can we deconstrcut the “spectical”?

1

In societies dominated by modern conditions of production, life is presented as an immense accumulation of spectacles. Everything that was directly lived has receded into a representation.

2

The images detached from every aspect of life merge into a common stream in which the unity of that life can no longer be recovered. Fragmented views of reality regroup themselves into a new unity as a separate pseudoworld that can only be looked at. The specialization of images of the world evolves into a world of autonomized images where even the deceivers are deceived. The spectacle is a concrete inversion of life, an autonomous movement of the nonliving.

3

The spectacle presents itself simultaneously as society itself, as a part of society, and as a means of unification. As a part of society, it is the focal point of all vision and all consciousness. But due to the very fact that this sector is separate, it is in reality the domain of delusion and false consciousness: the unification it achieves is nothing but an official language of universal separation.

4

The spectacle is not a collection of images; it is a social relation between people that is mediated by images.

5

The spectacle cannot be understood as a mere visual deception produced by mass-media technologies. It is a worldview that has actually been materialized, a view of a world that has become objective.

6

Understood in its totality, the spectacle is both the result and the project of the dominant mode of production. It is not a mere decoration added to the real world. It is the very heart of this real society’s unreality. In all of its particular manifestations — news, propaganda, advertising, entertainment — the spectacle represents the dominant model of life. It is the omnipresent affirmation of the choices that have already been made in the sphere of production and in the consumption implied by that production. In both form and content the spectacle serves as a total justification of the conditions and goals of the existing system. The spectacle also represents the constant presence of this justification since it monopolizes the majority of the time spent outside the production process.

7

Separation is itself an integral part of the unity of this world, of a global social practice split into reality and image. The social practice confronted by an autonomous spectacle is at the same time the real totality which contains that spectacle. But the split within this totality mutilates it to the point that the spectacle seems to be its goal. The language of the spectacle consists of signs of the dominant system of production — signs which are at the same time the ultimate end-products of that system.

8

The spectacle cannot be abstractly contrasted to concrete social activity. Each side of such a duality is itself divided. The spectacle that falsifies reality is nevertheless a real product of that reality. Conversely, real life is materially invaded by the contemplation of the spectacle, and ends up absorbing it and aligning itself with it. Objective reality is present on both sides. Each of these seemingly fixed concepts has no other basis than its transformation into its opposite: reality emerges within the spectacle, and the spectacle is real. This reciprocal alienation is the essence and support of the existing society.

9

In a world that is really upside down, the true is a moment of the false.

(Skipping ahead)
34

The spectacle is capital accumulated to the point that it becomes images.