{"id":37356,"date":"2021-05-11T12:23:40","date_gmt":"2021-05-11T20:23:40","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.antiwar.com\/blog\/?p=37356"},"modified":"2021-05-11T12:23:40","modified_gmt":"2021-05-11T20:23:40","slug":"art-against-drones","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.antiwar.com\/blog\/2021\/05\/11\/art-against-drones\/","title":{"rendered":"Art Against Drones"},"content":{"rendered":"

At the High Line, a popular tourist attraction in New York City, visitors to the west side of Lower Manhattan ascend above street level to what was once an elevated freight train line and is now a tranquil and architecturally intriguing promenade. Here walkers enjoy<\/a> a park-like openness where they can experience urban beauty, art, and the wonder of comradeship.<\/p>\n

In late May, a Predator drone replica, appearing suddenly above the High Line promenade at 30th Street, might seem to scrutinize people below. The \u201cgaze\u201d of the sleek, white sculpture by Sam Durant, called \u201cUntitled (drone),\u201d in the shape of the U.S. military\u2019s Predator killer drone, will sweep unpredictably over the people below, rotating atop its twenty-five-foot-high steel pole, its direction guided by the wind. <\/p>\n

Unlike the real Predator, it won\u2019t carry two Hellfire missiles and a surveillance camera. The drone\u2019s death-delivering features are omitted from Durant\u2019s sculpture. Nevertheless, he hopes it will generate discussion.<\/p>\n

<\/p>\n

\u201cUntitled (drone)\u201d is meant to animate<\/a> questions \u201cabout the use of drones, surveillance, and targeted killings in places far and near,\u201d said Durant in a statement \u201cand whether as a society we agree with and want to continue these practices.\u201d<\/p>\n

Durant regards art as a place for exploring possibilities and alternatives.<\/p>\n

In 2007, a similar desire to raise questions about remote killing motivated New York artist Wafaa Bilal, now a professor at NYU\u2019s Tisch Gallery, to lock himself in a cubicle where, for a month, and at any hour of the day, he could be remotely targeted by a paint-ball gun blast. Anyone on the Internet who chose to could shoot at him. <\/p>\n

He was shot<\/a> at more than 60,000 times by people from 128 different countries. Bilal called the project \u201cDomestic Tension.\u201d In a resulting book, Shoot an Iraqi<\/a>: Art Life and Resistance Under the Gun<\/em>, Bilal and co-author Kary Lydersen chronicled the remarkable outcome of the \u201cDomestic Tension\u201d project. <\/p>\n

Along with descriptions of constant paint-ball attacks against Bilal, they wrote of the Internet participants who instead wrestled with the controls to keep Bilal from being shot. And they described the death of Bilal\u2019s brother, Hajj, who was killed<\/a> by a US air to ground missile in 2004. <\/p>\n

Grappling with the terrible vulnerability to sudden death felt by people all across Iraq, Bilal, who grew up in Iraq, with this exhibit chose to partly experience the pervasive fear of being suddenly, and without warning, attacked remotely. He made himself vulnerable to people who might wish him harm.<\/p>\n

Three years later, in June 2010, Bilal developed the \u201cAnd Counting<\/a>\u201d art work in which a tattoo artist inked the names of Iraq\u2019s major cities on Bilal\u2019s back. The tattoo artist then used his needle to place \u201cdots of ink, thousands and thousands of them \u2013 each representing<\/a> a casualty of the Iraq war. The dots are tattooed near the city where the person died: red ink for the American soldiers, ultraviolet ink for the Iraqi civilians, invisible unless seen under black light.\u201d<\/p>\n

Bilal, Durant, and other artists who help us think about US colonial warfare against the people of Iraq and other nations should surely be thanked. It\u2019s helpful to compare Bilal\u2019s and Durant\u2019s projects. <\/p>\n

The pristine, unsullied drone may be an apt metaphor for twenty-first-century US warfare which can be entirely remote. Before driving home to dinner with their own loved ones, soldiers on another side of the world can kill suspected militants miles from any battlefield. The people assassinated by drone attacks may themselves be driving along a road, possibly headed toward their family homes. <\/p>\n

US technicians analyze miles of surveillance footage from drone cameras, but such surveillance doesn\u2019t disclose information about the people a drone operator targets. <\/p>\n

In fact, as Andrew Cockburn wrote in the London Review of Books<\/em>, \u201cthe laws of physics impose inherent restrictions<\/a> of picture quality from distant drones that no amount of money can overcome. Unless pictured from low altitude and in clear weather, individuals appear as dots, cars as blurry blobs.\u201d <\/p>\n

On the other hand, Bilal\u2019s exploration is deeply personal, connoting the anguish of victims. Bilal took great pains, including the pain of tattooing, to name the people whose dots appear on his back, people who had been killed.<\/p>\n

Contemplating \u201cUntitled (drone),\u201d it\u2019s unsettling to recall that no one in the US can name the thirty Afghan laborers killed<\/a> by a US drone in 2019. A US drone operator fired a missile into an encampment of Afghan migrant workers resting after a day of harvesting pine nuts in Afghanistan\u2019s Nangarhar province. An additional forty people were injured. To US drone pilots, such victims may appear only as dots. <\/p>\n

In many war zones, incredibly brave human rights documentarians risk their lives to record the testimonies of people suffering war-related human rights violations, including drone attacks striking civilians. Mwatana for Human Rights, based in Yemen, researches human rights abuses committed by all the warring parties in Yemen. In their report<\/a>, \u201cDeath Falling from the Sky, Civilian Harm from the United States\u2019 Use of Lethal Force in Yemen,\u201d they examine twelve US aerial attacks in Yemen, ten of them US drone strikes, between 2017 and 2019. <\/p>\n

The report says at least thirty-eight Yemeni civilians \u2013 nineteen men, thirteen children, and six women \u2013 were killed and seven others were injured in the attacks. <\/p>\n

From the report, we learn of important roles the slain victims played as family and community members. We read of families bereft of income after the killing of wage earners including beekeepers, fishers, laborers, and drivers. Students described one of the men killed as a beloved teacher. Also among the dead were university students and housewives. Loved ones who mourn the deaths of those killed still fear hearing the hum of a drone.<\/p>\n

Now it\u2019s clear that the Houthis in Yemen have been able to use 3-D models to create their own drones which they have fired across a border, hitting targets in Saudi Arabia. This kind of proliferation has been entirely predictable.<\/p>\n

The US recently announced it plans to sell the United Arab Emirates fifty F-35 fighter jets, eighteen Reaper drones, and various missiles, bombs and munitions. The United Arab Emirates has used its weapons against its own people and has run ghastly clandestine prisons in Yemen where people are tortured and broken as human beings, a fate awaiting any Yemeni critic of their power.<\/p>\n

The installation of a drone overlooking people in Manhattan can bring them into the larger discussion.<\/p>\n

Outside of many military bases safely within the United States \u2013 from which drones are piloted to deal death over Iraq, Afghanistan, Yemen, Somalia, Syria, and other lands \u2013 activists have repeatedly staged artistic events. In 2011, at Hancock Field in Syracuse, thirty-eight activists were arrested for a \u201cdie-in\u201d during which they simply lay down, at the gate, covering themselves with bloodied sheets. <\/p>\n

The title of Sam Durant\u2019s sculpture, \u201cUntitled (drone),\u201d means that in a sense it is officially nameless, like so many of the victims of the US Predator drones it is designed to resemble. <\/p>\n

People in many parts of the world can\u2019t speak up. Comparatively, we don\u2019t face torture or death for protesting. We can tell the stories of the people being killed now by our drones, or watching the skies in terror of them. <\/p>\n

We should tell those stories, those realities, to our elected representatives, to faith-based communities, to academics, to media and to our family and friends. And if you know anyone in New York City, tell them to be on the lookout for a Predator drone in lower Manhattan. This pretend drone could help us grapple with reality and accelerate an international push to ban killer drones<\/a>.<\/p>\n

This article first appeared in The Progressive Magazine<\/a><\/i>.<\/em><\/p>\n

Kathy Kelly (<\/em>kathy@vcnv.org<\/a>) co-coordinates Voices for Creative Nonviolence<\/a>.<\/em><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

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