Tape shows Bin Laden alive and well

[imomus]

Who believes that Osama Bin Laden died in Pakistan on August 23 after suffering "from a severe bout of typhoid fever" and a bacterial infection provoking a paralysis of his lower body?

Not us at Click Opera. Much better-documented reports are reaching us from Japan, where artist Makoto Aida has leaked A Video Shot By A Man Who Calls Himself Bin Laden Who Is Hiding In Japan.

Those who have seen the document say it depicts "a terrorist growing chubby on tempura in his tatami-matted hideout, or an artist who sublimates his anger at US neo-colonialism into bizarre, Al Jazeera-bound broadcasts".

SF Weekly, who have also seen the tape, describe "the terrorist at a table in a traditional room littered with dishes and empty sake bottles. As the character sips sake, he announces that he's hiding out in Japan and that the U.S. can stop looking for him because he's done with terrorism. He attributes this transformation to the pleasures of Japanese living: The food is great, and "Sake is awesome." Apparently, life in the Asian nation is so comfortable that it can make even a die-hard like Bin Laden go soft."

Curator Roger McDonald describes Osama as "speaking in 'english accent Japanese' about the woes of being an international terrorist".

Instead of Al Jazeera, though, this tape was, for reasons known only to the man behind it, sent to various art galleries around the world. It can currently be seen at the Singapore Biennial. Like every other Bin Laden tape, this one was carefully screened for coded messages before being released to the public. As Ozaki Tetsuya reports in his Out of Tokyo column this week in RealTokyo, security concerns in Singapore dictated that cuts were made:

"According to officials, the Ministry of Information, Communications and the Arts espressed a couple of forceful "desires" concerning some of the rather politically inspired works to be shown... Aida Makoto's "Video of a man calling himself Binladen staying in Japan" was de facto only screened after a part ridiculing Japanese prime minister Koizumi Junichiro was erased".

Clear evidence that an older, wiser Bin Laden -- in rosy health and living in Ogikubo, apparently -- has discovered not only that life in Japan is sweeter than terrorism, but also that ridicule cuts deeper than any scimitar. Stay tuned to the art world for further developments.

Comments

[cap-scaleman.livejournal.com]

Ridicule in all honour, but what do you really think of satire, Momus?

[anti-peace-riot.livejournal.com]

That would make a great television show. For five minutes, a live feed of Osama in Japan!

Milking It

[(Anonymous)]

Nick

Completely unrelated, and I can only apologise... Just a quick note to let you know I received my shiny new copy of Ocky Milk in the mail on Friday, and I just wanted to say thanks for creating a record so totally idiosyncratic it makes Folktronic look like an album of Girls Allowed sampling eighties pop hooks. I had my worries when you said you were doing a 'friendly' longplayer, but you haven't disappointed!
And 'I Refuse to Die' has replaced 'The Artist Overwhelmed' as funeral song. Hell, maybe I'll try and squeeze both in!

Here's hoping you can manage to fit a few shows here in the UK. I'll buy you a pint to say thanks.

Weeping for the visions you saw,

Indebted, James Griffiths

[akabe.livejournal.com]

that is the finest piece o art i`ve seen this century. hope the didn`t butcher it too much in singapore

[imomus.livejournal.com]

They just took out the reference to Koizumi. Do you remember what that was?

Re: Milking It

[imomus.livejournal.com]

Glad you liked it, James!

I'm talking to some people about UK shows just now, more details when I know.

sorry did not know where to post this.

[(Anonymous)]

i added this to the ilx forum, to the syd barrett RIP thread, i thought i'd post it to you also in case you do not check that place, and felt like responding

By the way looking at your portraits i notice that you often twist your arms outward, showing the otherside / inside of your elbow, which is a rather unnatural position, arms do not really sit at the side like that.. Do you put on this visual representation of yourself on purpose to effect the vulnerable girlishness you seem to admire in the japanese female aesthetic?
_____________________________________________

this is in response to what Momus was getting out of Syd Barrett's silence and seclusion:

SUSAN SONTAG:

But the choice of permanent silence doesn't negate their work. On the contrary, it imparts retroactively an added power and authority to what was broken off; disavowal of the work becoming a new source of its validity, a certificate of unchallengeable seriousness. That seriousness consists in not regarding art… as something whose seriousness lasts forever, an "end," a permanent vehicle for spiritual ambition. The truly serious attitude is one that regards art as a "means" to something that can perhaps be achieved only by abandoning art; judged more impatiently, art is a false way or (the word of the Dada artist Jacques Vaché) a stupidity.

Though no longer a confession, art is more than ever a deliverance, an exercise in asceticism. Through it, the artist becomes purified — of himself and, eventually, of his art, The artist (if not art itself) is still engaged in a progress toward "the good." But formerly, the artist's good was mastery of and fulfillment in his art. Now it's suggested that the highest good for the artist is to reach that point where those goals of excellence become insignificant to him, emotionally and ethically, and he is more satisfied by being silent than by finding a voice in art…

So far as he is serious, the artist is continually tempted to sever the dialogue he has with an audience. Silence is the furthest extension of that reluctance to communicate, that ambivalence about making contact with the audience which is a leading motif of modern art, with its tireless commitment to the "new" and/or the "esoteric" Silence is the artist's ultimate other-worldly gesture; by silence, he frees himself from servile bondage to the world, which appears as patron, client, audience, antagonist, arbiter, and distorter of his work.

from:

http://www.popmatters.com/pm/blogs/crazedbythemusic_post/syd-barrett-silence-and-fan-contracts/

[jermynsavile.livejournal.com]

But surely this is a rehash of the 'Comedy Terrorist' (http://www.guardian.co.uk/weekend/story/0,3605,1004963,00.html) and he wasn't funny, or profound, the first time?

Re: sorry did not know where to post this.

[imomus.livejournal.com]

Do you put on this visual representation of yourself on purpose to effect the vulnerable girlishness you seem to admire in the japanese female aesthetic?

I think it does owe a little to Jap-girl body language. A lot of expressions I use and body posture I have now comes from them, simply because I spend so much time with Japanese women, and in some sense they're role models for me. But I think there's also a bit of Renaissance humanism in it. If you look at Michaelangelo's David, he also does that with his arms.

As for Sontag's point, you have to bear in mind that she comes from a 1950s tradition of "the literature of exhaustion" and "the theatre of the absurd" in which silence and futility are recurrent themes (Camus, Ionesco, Beckett, etc). In retrospect we can see this as the exhaustion and despair of the dog days of Modernism, not something built into "the human condition" itself. And I think it's a bit perverse to apply it to Syd, who clearly had a clinical psychiatric condition rather than an aesthetic satisfaction with silence.

[imomus.livejournal.com]

I don't think so. I think this is a way for an artist to look at the connection between art and terrorism, the same way Iris Murdoch and others have. It's a way to raise the awkward fact that Japan was, within living memory, the enemy of the US just as Bin Laden is (in fact, with a similar swing between friend and enemy, since OBL was originally aided by the US in his struggle with the Soviet Union in Afghanistan), and that Bin Laden has mentioned Hiroshima in his speeches as a great US injustice.

It's also a way for Makoto Aida to examine why Japan is so un-ideological; his Bin Laden totally forgets his religious-ideological quest, distracted by the earthly pleasures of good food and sake. It's a kind of "Last Temptation of Bin Laden" scenario.

[atarashi.livejournal.com]

i just saw this afternoon at the singapore biennale - it's quite funny in a tragicomic way. only saw a few minutes of it though, the curators put it in a very hot room and the sweltering heat drove me out.

and im not surprised about MICA censoring it - in fact a lot of the art at the biennale felt quite neutered in some way. sad.

I've so far always been off-topic with you.

[hook-and-eyelet.livejournal.com]

Have you ever written a song about vulnerable movements?

Also, if you don't mind, I do have a question for you about travel to Germany (I don't know any who knows it as well as you). If you don't mind, would you please e-mail me at hook DOT and DOT eyelet @ gmail DOT com? Danke, darling.

Pardon me!

[hook-and-eyelet.livejournal.com]

Not only did I use 'if you don't mind' twice, but I forgot to introduce myself! I'm Katherine.

[constructionism.livejournal.com]

That's fucking hilarious.

[joentdothat.livejournal.com]

YouTube?

[(Anonymous)]

That is good - to be transparent about one's body language influences. I wonder how much of this is intentionally put-on and how much of this is unintentional absorption of that which you are surrounded by. The latter would probably be the cooler, reflex answer, - but as a Brechtian you are probably not one to shy away from admitting to the kind of stylized self-reflexive theatricality that most would call contrived.

[(Anonymous)]

I would not reduce the despair in Beckett et al. to socio-historics, as if the silence, exhaustion and futility you find there is something to diagnose as the side effect of the dog days of Modernism. That is like looking at expressions of personal despair in literature today and linking that to living in the Terrible Twin Towers Times of Tumult. This is just as bad as Roger Waters who poses as a psychiatrist in music documentaries to refer to Syd as a schizophrenic.

Syd's own sister said that he had always been odd, and that the most the doctors could say about him is that he is "extravagant." There are also people who believe his odd behaviour with Floyd to be performance rather than illness. You had people going to see him during those days, expecting to find someone who is totally out of it based on how those like Waters would describe him, only to be surprised by someone quite coherent on the other side.

Syd's silence does not have to be the result of exhausting himself out of things to say, it could be the result of finding another kind of inexhaustibility. It does not have to be a resignation and realization of the futility of self-expression either. You like the idea of not resigning until the day you get fired. Perhaps Syd kept going too, except in a medium that does not require the voyeuristic presense and validation of an audience to feed itself. Perhaps his creativity in daily living does not self consciously label itself art and exhibitionistically display itself for others to comment on - but that does not make it any less art.

I am not so comfortable with the dichotomy between what it means to clearly have a clinical psychiatric condition, and aesthetic experiments with silence.