Contested lands are never absent
from warfare. In the virtual
realm of computer war games, while there is no actual territory, simulated
terrain remains integral to the narratives that drive the fantasies and logic
of gaming. Eddo Stern sculpts
games to reveal how land sublimates ideology.
Three recent videos :Sheik Attack (2000), Vietnam Romance
(2003) and Deathstar (2004) , are positioned amidst history and nostalgia,
technology and mythology, documentary and entertainment.
Each treats a different reconciliation theme, respectively, the decay
of foretold ideals, everlasting redemption recouped from futility, and sadistic
vengeance perpetrated on a ghost. Their
back-stories are populist accounts of the establishment of the Israeli state,
American adventures in Vietnam and the current "war on terrorism."
The perspective is from California (the base for Stern, an Israeli,
over the past several years), the perceived indicator of social change, the
capital of the high-tech industry, corporate, and defense industries and,
moreover, the intersection of these interests.
From Hollywood's canyons and hills, familiar locations for fabulist
depictions of the passage of the Old World to the New, new digitally simulated
battlegrounds, invented or reinvented, ensue authoritatively.
The long cooperation
between the U.S. Defense Department and the computer industry is well established,
famously noted in a December 1972 Rolling Stone article by Stewart
Brand entitled "Spacewar." Games produced for recruiting purposes
: see America's Army (2002) and America's Army Special Forces
(2003) at www.goarmy.com Ð define industry
standards for realism and playability. Commercial games, for instance those inspired
or produced by author Tom Clancy: Rogue Spear(1999) and Ghost Recon(2001) ,
are widely played by military personnel, to the extent that they have become
recognized training tools. With soldiers and former soldiers demanding that games
be faithful to their combat experiences, in an era when journalistic reporting
from combat zones is sharply curtailed, it may be concluded that war games
convey a modicum of documentary veracity.
Of course they preclude the points of view of other witnesses. Under the modern motto of "An Army
of One," the main consideration is personal conduct and behavior.
Due to his mastery of game play,
the behavioral content of Stern's videos is difficult to ascertain. Their excerpts have been highly selected
and determined against built-in constraints. Stern shows the strain between computer display (magic, desire)
and its inherent technology (science, law). Medievalist fantasy, wherein such oppositions are convoluted,
forebodes contemporary political mayhem with the intellectual premises of
the Renaissance, Reformation and Enlightenment, and so forth, once assumed
settled, now openly questioned. Sheik
Attack begins with a wide-eyed vision of Zionism, grounded in the kibbutz
ethic of hard work and strict principles fulfilling a covenant with God. Amazons scurry over virgin landscape, constructing utopia with
hammers and nails. The action
is dated to 1966, concurrent with the Six Day War with Egypt. Cut forward to the complicated present,
the "Relentless City" of Tel Aviv, Israeli commandos engaged in
covert night raids into Lebanon, the blanketing of a nation in mystifying
darkness and restorative sleep, and a culminating debacle, an assassination
in which both enemy and hostage are killed.
Breaking the laws of engagement and the rules of the game, Stern reveals
an event to which testimony is eliminated. Musical accompaniment, folk-pop songs drawn from Israeli radio,
alludes to the professions of innocence necessary to carry on.
In a game mission, only behavior
is tested. Everything else is
fixed and presumed normal. In
Vietnam Romance, the antagonists have already been taken out by the
artist-as-shooter, so the viewer confronts an empty virtual stage set.
Stern manipulates the scenery to approximate, as closely as possible,
classic shots from Full Metal Jacket, M*A*S*H (quasi-Vietnam),
Apocalypse Now and The Deer Hunter. Pop songs redolent of 1970s and Ô80s nostalgia for the '60s
condition an emotional response, just as they did in the movies, however they
are rendered from midi (computer music) files entirely, except for a brief
snippet of Nancy Sinatra's voice. They
knit the temporally and spatially erratic sequencing, which itself pays homage
to great disorienting narratives of the American Vietnam experience like Francis
Ford Coppola's definitive 2001 cut of Apocalypse Now Redux or Stephen
Wright's 1983 novel Meditations in Green.
Falling rain, psychotic rifle fire at a skull, the final floatation
of a dead soul over jungle from which the earth has been digitally hacked
away, are Stern's poetic evocations of a war that refuses to subside in the
popular imagination.
In games, dead warriors are resurrected
to fight again. In Deathstar,
pilloried caricatures of Osama Bin Laden, scavenged from folk game sites,
become a disturbing cascade of mockeries and mutilations perpetrated on a
villain who cannot die enough. On these primitive sites, the figure as standing target is
almost entirely divorced from setting, but in fact Bin Laden's disappearance
has made him a man of the hills. The
pummeling of Afghanistan and scouring of Pakistan equate warfare to landscape
yet again. Close-ups transform
the body into topography. Traces
of punishment inflict cartographic markings in the flesh. Display cursors resemble aerial bombsights.
The epic soundtrack, sweeps the imagination upward to higher plane
still, a god's-eye view on folly and catastrophe.
Assistant Curator, Contemporary Art