 What I want to talk about today is the conundrum of reality and non-reality of our world and the fictional or artificial worlds in works of art and everything from what graces museums and galleries to what enters our living rooms in the form of television or video games. The title, as you may know, is in reference to the works of Walter Benjamin, the most important procrastinator in modern history. Benjamin is a pioneer in media studies with his study of cinema and how we consume media on a societal level in dark movie theaters from Berlin to New York, watching technically reproduced images like the one we have in this beamer and today streamed on the internet over and over again. His essay is one of the most assigned texts in the humanities, itself technically reproduced and culturally consumed on a hyper-metal level. Its primary theoretical focus is on ideology, specifically Benjamin's rather unique Marxist perspective about political progress and the fascist political order that he was working under during World War II. What I want to connect this to is what I call the current conflict, what others call the war on terror and the things that go along with it. So over here is the first page of a legal memo regarding the applicability of federal criminal laws and the constitution to the contemplated lethal operations against Anwar al-Awlaki. Awlaki was not a military general or a terrorist tactician, he was primarily a propagandist. This authorizes the killing of an American citizen without trial by jury and authorized violation of the constitution in both the sixth and if you think about it, the first amendment. The violation of the sixth amendment hasn't happened in the American context since the Civil War and this one was executed by a reaper drone. This is an artifact from reality. This artifact I want to connect to the artifacts of our current fiction, such as those found all over in popular media of an intolerant Muslim world raging with anger against your freedoms as the West violates our lives and bodies in the hundreds of thousands and indeed violating its own rules. And why art? It's because the relationship between art and reality is not an easy one. I want to point that even the most basic terms of our current reality, say a word like assassination or assassin, have multiple layers and historical residues. The term assassin comes from the Arabic Hashashin or those who take Hashish or stoners. It was during the crusades that the assassin word entered into European languages and meaning specifically as someone who does targeted political killing. It's based on a myth or fictional propaganda against a small sect in Islam known as the Ismailis. The story went that there was an old man of the mountain who would take young men to the garden and give them so much Hashish that they believed they were in heaven. In more elaborate versions, there were gardens full of naked women, music, wine, you know, you get the idea. When the Hashish wore off and they're kind of going over their Hashish hangover, the old man would convince the young men that the only way for them to go back to heaven is by killing one of his enemies in what is effectively a suicide mission. When the young assassins, the Hashashin, were killed, they immediately, in a sense, come back to the garden. The purpose of the story is to make the assassins look weak-willed and even stupid. Though this sect may have performed political assassinations, marijuana was not likely involved. The story is probably completely bullshit. But now we're stuck with the word assassin. It's a fictional error or propaganda glitch in our current linguistic reality. Can you spot the difference? In case you need the slide explained to you, the top, it's drone operators up there and in the bottom, it's Cheech and Chong. Assassins, Hashashin, or vice versa. My argument is that the difference between reality and fiction or our serious acknowledgement that this is real and that over there is myth, just a story, just a TV show, just a video game is an ideological difference on the level of ideas during the current conflict. Ideas that have a life of their own that are animated by new technologies like pieces of paper in the Middle Ages that propagated the crusader myths of the assassins. Cultural artifacts reflect multiple facets, those signs of human advancement and human tragedy. The work of art, even as an object, has a political valence. The artist and the artwork are all constituent parts of what we colloquially call the art scene, that somewhat kind of toxic social construct that in turn makes up the art market and even more toxic construct. Does anyone recognize the unimpressive painting? You normally wouldn't, except it was done by a young struggling Austrian artist by the name of Adolf Hitler. Hitler was rejected from art school, struggling to pay rent in a gentrifying but vibrant Vienna. The first steps in a sequence of events that gave us the most devastating leader of the last century. In case you're wondering, yes, I'm saying the art world gave us Hitler. Speaking of bad art, I don't wanna make like the facile to Trump transition, but it's hard to avoid. Television creatives were the minds behind the apprentice and the creation of Trump as a public persona with leadership qualities. Maybe life imitates art, maybe art imitates life, but reality television might be remembered as the highest form of terrorism. Okay, so let's move on to good or better art, at least. Chris Burden's 1981 art installation A Tale of Two Cities is composed of 26 tons of sand, rocks, plants, and thousands of toys depicting a war zone. It shows the frontier of two bordering states at war with one of the states being larger and more developed than the other. There is a harbor, an airport, a mountainous region, toy airplanes and fighter jets hang overhead in flight. There is a small town and urban center and what looks like a tribal area. And here you can see the relief of the mountainside. One side is scarred with evidence of bombing and devastation. The other appears unharmed, though it is surrounded by military infrastructure. Burden's installation was on display several times since 1981 and changed kind of organically over time until it took kind of a final shape in the new museum retrospective in 2013 and it was replicated in the permanent collection of the Orange County Museum of Art, which I'd like to thank for the images. A Tale of Two Cities straddles the historical timeframe of the so-called War on Terror two decades before and one decade after 9-11. And one can't help imagine that the two cities became a metaphor for North America and the Middle East. Burden's work is both a premonition and a testament to the nature of the current conflict, the juvenile nature of war from the aggressor's side, no less. Shows how removed Western democratic societies are from the side of conflict. It is a game going on over there, far away. My question for today is how can people in the West even make political art with so much historical baggage in the contemporary moment? The following are collages by a Syrian artist called his name is Ahem Jebor, who mixes scenes of the war in Syria and the refugee crisis with these kind of kitschy, surreal movie images from Hollywood of the 1950s and 60s. Showing kind of the bombing of places like Damascus as being perpetuated by UFOs instead of Russians, Americans, and Emiratis. Placing the surreal devastation of Aleppo as an extraterrestrial experience as if Syria is not even on the planet Earth. Jebor's play on scale and perspective attempts to contextualize the historical heaviness of the current refugee crisis by showing these kind of oversized children sleeping on the beach side. Or the overreaction to displays of Western culture, of Muslim culture in the West, like the Burkini incident in France. The horror of surpassing the imagined futures of the past where control centers determined the fate of poor innocent people seen through the glassy gaze of technology, trying to ensure the security of far away states that are completely unaffected by the conflict. This next section I kind of put in jest, but I'm also like partially serious. And I want to kind of leave you with the idea that for better or worse, the two most important artists today, working today are probably Banksy and Anish Kapoor. And still in a way that their work embodies the issues of the art world within the idea of the current conflict. From below and above, the art world feels compelled to be political to the point that if you make non-political art, it's some ways it's perceived as not only gush, but devastating. Or shows you are kind of so removed from reality that you occupy. And it's always interesting when we think about how art collectors seem to be indifferent to the actual art itself and think of it only as market value. As consumers and critics, we need to voice our concern about the context and not just the content of the art we are subjected to. From the artist's point of view, they feel the compulsion to affect the world through their spray can or massive art commissions. But those energies remain in their niches. They become self-serving as ways for careers to be made. They need to be translated into something far more concrete, more sincere, and more human than the absurd unending wars we're constantly in. And, yeah, I guess we have plenty of time for questions. As I said, I found out about this presentation 9 p.m. yesterday and was a little worried I was going to take up way more time. So, thank you very much for listening. APPLAUSE Don't all rush all at once. That's actually my second chaos in a row speaking. So, this one is far more chaotic than the first, I must say. But, yeah, thank you very much, everyone. Yeah, like, yeah, I had more artists that I wanted to talk to, but again, the context of how to fit in Harun Faruki or, you know, sort of bigger, more intellectual projects. And the putting burden versus Jabur for me was, in one hand, using a very established conceptual artist who's known to someone who is unknown, who's just working actually entrapped in Syria and can't leave. And I want to show that there is a genuine difference, even if the intention of the artist is good, that the content and the context is, in a sense, devastating when you put it in the larger sphere of the war. And to connect everything from television shows and video games to gallery art as being part of the same ecosystem is not an easy thing you can do, yeah, in 30 minutes, or in my case, 10. This is like post-doctoral work, so this is the stuff I didn't... In my PhD work, I actually do the aesthetics of the Islamic movement from themselves. So it's actually kind of a more internal thing than from the external parties, but yeah. Now, this is kind of one circle removed from what I was actually trained in, but yeah. Hello, yes, I'm on. Maybe you can just tell us some more about the pictures you've shown us. Oh, the collages, Jabur's work. He actually is a self-trained... Or Chris Burden. And maybe put the pictures on? Sure, sure, sure. So, well, I guess Burden's installation is kind of famous. He himself... Am I on? I think I'm switched off. Hello? Okay, yeah, yeah. Burden's work, his first work that he got famous for was called Shoot, where he was actually shot by a colleague of his in a gallery by a .22 rifle, and it was recorded on video. And this was his kind of performance art that broke him into the conceptual art world. And his artworks in the 70s got bigger and bigger, and this is one of the ones that culminated in kind of a very tongue-in-cheek anti-war. Is the image? No, it isn't. So, I was trying to put the context of someone who is kind of very, very established, to someone who's basically working on his laptop using Illustrator and Photoshop, Fubar. And at the end of the day, I think that the current conflict depicting itself in these images is, in a sense, its own constant. But, yeah, I'm fine. Thank you, everyone. Thank you, everyone. Okay, thank you so much. Bye-bye.