The Art of War, Or Coco Fusco's Occupation

The Art of War, Or [0[0 FUS[O'S Occupation Jonathan Beller I n lectures, books, performances, DVDs, classroo ms, theater spaces, gallery installation s, and museums that include the Wh itn ey, the MoMA, and the Guggenheim, Coco Fusco has been waging a counterattack on the Bush-era United States of America. "But,"one might ask of this endeavor, "is it art?" You won't find that question explicitly posed in Fusco's current work. However, her occupation of spaces and peo ple's time norma lly reserved for practices comfortab ly do miciled in the domain of art-with works like the DVD Operation Atropos (2007), in the Whitney Biennial (about her group's participatio n as students in a military interrogation course, which includes their being kidnapped , str ip-searched, and interrogated over several days), or her gallery exhibitio n, Buried Pig with Moros (2008) at The Project (composed of display cases with, of all things un aesthetic, history books and military communication s about the 30· Nka Journal of Contemporary Afr ican Art Filipino-American War, a monitor with an archival Hollywood film clip, and a screened PowerPoint presentati on mad e fro m a "2005 Lecture by Dr. Larry Forness, American Military University" [Audio recording with power point illustration, 18 minutes, 2008])-raises the issue.! But rather than naively setting about answering such a qu estion , better perhaps to allow the presence of Fusco's work in spaces ordina rily the preserve of art, aesthetic learning, and high culture to raise the more general question, "What is Art (now)?" This question , long debated, never adequately answered, is again upon us-particularly since culture has been taken up as another, if not the preeminent, medium of war. By steadfastly refusing to cater to the precious, witty, high- tech, cynical, or knowing options cur rentl y offered by art world product, ind eed by refusing any other gesture toward art beyond occupying the spaces where it normally appears, Co co Fusco, Buried Pig with Moms, 2008. Installation view. Court esy of t h e artist an d The Project, New York. Fusco's work seems to place the mainstream Chelsea-ified, China-ized, Modernism-ist concerns of contemporary art somewhere beneath the threshold of contempt. A careful consideration of Fusco's current work including the documents selected to foreground aspects of the little-known, but profoundly significant Philippine-American War (subsequently called "the first Vietnam") allows for the locating and tracking of certain cultural vectors of aggression that are today constitutive of state power.2 These vectors, while no less deadly than more commonly understood forms of state-sanctioned violence (including the deployment of armies, police actions, and the dropping of bombs), implicate cultural practice, and more pointedly perhaps, cultural practitioners. In a cultural space, Fusco's assemblage in Buried Pig clearly makes visible historical precursors to the racist aggression that Mahmood Mamdani, in his brilliantly indicting book Good Muslim, Bad Muslim, shows to be operative in the essentializing "culture talk" currently buttressing the deadly conjuncture known as the War on Terror.3 The exhibition helps to reveal cultural, political, and economic continuities between the early twentieth-century imperialist forays that brought U.S. expansion into the Pacific Theater in a quest for territory, labor, military power, and markets and the early twentyfirst -century strategems of neoimperialist aggression . Buried Pig foregrounds the century-long discourse of anti-Islamic cultural production— smelted in expansionist warfare, mythologized by official history and Hollywood alike—that has been bent upon portraying Islam as a savage, superstitious, irrational, and inhuman religion. The trajectory of this racialization and its over3 2 - N k a journal of Contemporary African Art lapping with other forms of U.S. racism is particularly significant in the transformed environment of media capitalism. The arena of culture itself seems to have taken on new significance. Indeed in my own work on the industrialization of the visible world, I have shown that the domain of cultural praxis itself has become something like a means of production.4 Readers of the New York Times have no doubt begun to notice that the basic distinction between "The Arts" and "Business" sections...