BREIVIK - some thoughts

http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-2130364/Anders-Behring-Breivik-trial-Norwegian-killer-breaks-Vlad-Impaler-video-played.html

The Getty image above is not of an avatar in a life-like video game, or of a police officer armed and ready to shoot down criminals (or even those not guilty of anything), nor is it of a soldier involved in the killing of innocent Muslim civilians in Afghanistan. It is CCTV image of Anders Breivik, dressed in a police uniform shortly after a bomb he made killed 8 people in Oslo. He later shot dead 69 innocent people on Utoya island on 22 July, 2011 because he was afraid that Muslims were taking over Norway. This battle against Islam and right-wing extremism will be played out on the Internet and in other forms of media during Breivik's trial, which is expected to last ten weeks, but haven't we seen it all before? The terror of the 'war on terror' of the Reagan Administration in 1984, followed by President George W. Bush in 2001 and the endless, endless death of innocents by anonymous uniformed fighters? I ask myself why I was shocked last year when I heard this news item. Was it because Norway is so peaceful or is it because we are quite used to seeing news items about deaths in war, but are unused to seeing one individual kill so many of his own people? Having said that we Australians remember all too well militant young men with guns, Julian Knight, who maimed 19 people and killed 7 people during his shooting spree in Hoddle Street, Clifton Hill in 1987 as well as Frank Vitkovic, who killed 8 and wounded 5 people with his sawn-off shotgun in Queen Street, Melbourne in the same year. Martin Bryant who killed 35 people and wounded 21 people with a semi-automatic rifle at Port Arthur, Tasmania in 1996 and  Huan Yun "Allen" Xiang, who, loaded with five handguns killed two people and wounded five others at Monash University. I must admit that I get confused between watching footage of actual warfare, footage of police officers both in Australia and overseas who over-use weapons (guns and taser stun-guns) to kill, rather than apprehend the perpetrator and lone killers stalking their prey. All virtual entities, rather like the young children and adults, hunted and killed in front of a vast television audience in The Hunger Games (Gary Ross, 2012) or the real-time footage used in Coriolanus (Ralph Fiennes, 2011) and that's why we have to remember that the people who are killed are real; not just statistics.

Collisions: Julie Clarke + Mark Mcdean (19.09.2011)

Mommy's Boy. Julie Clarke (2011) Vintage postcard with text; black satin armband with cross, stitched in black upholstery cotton.

I was immediately attracted to this Vintage 1950s B & W postcard  (actual photograph) of a man sitting by a fjord in Lysefjorden, Norge (published by Enerett: Normanns Kunstforlag A.S., Oslo - photographer Arne Normann) because his back is towards the viewer and we cannot see his face. As such, he represents in my mind the loner, or any man who has turned his back on society. He gazes outwards to the distant mountains and is but another object in a landscape dominated by impenetrable and pervasive granite. The braces, which hold up his lederhosen (leather breeches, basically worn by workers for work or leisure wear) forms the letter X, the  particular shape of a chromosome. I find the soft, exposed flesh on his back and shoulders fascinating since they form a contrast to the hard, jagged, mountain edge; his partial nakedness a ‘natural’ state of being within the raw environment. His voyeuristic admiration of the scenery together with our voyeuristic objectification of his figure, feminizes him, for his body in this postcard, like that of the female in society has become a commodity, something to be consumed. I discovered this postcard in an opportunity shop not long after I’d heard of the bombing of government buildings and mass shootings of young people on 22 July 2011 in Oslo, Norway by Anders Behring Breivik. Since Breivik was a loner who had withdrawn from society, the postcard, which depicted  a  solitary man amidst such beauty appeared incongruous to Breivik's display of terror and violence. I could not comprehend why a young man who lived in such a peaceful country could kill seventy-seven of his own people. Part of the reason was given by Breivik in his Manifesto '2083: A European Declaration of Independence'. I've placed a quote from it as text over the postcard. It reads: I do not approve of the super-liberal, matriarchal upbringing as it completely lacked discipline and has contributed to feminise me to a certain degree (Anders Behring Breivik). In his manifesto Breivik spoke of his absent father and in one newspaper article he was referred to as a mommy's body. This is my response to Mark McDean’s recent artwork  in the Collisions project and his accompanying description that raises issues around the notion of the 'real man' and the 'sissy boy'.

Norway - what to make of it?

I'm a little surprised that we are all so devastated by the attacks on the government and those attending a summer camp in Norway on Friday 22 July 2011. Is it the number of deaths that propel such emotion, media reportage that saturates communications technologies with partial facts, speculation and fear, the fact that Norway is a peaceful country and we don't expect this kind of thing to happen in a place not already at war, or that Anders Behring Breivik the suspected perpetrator of this deed, disguised himself in a police uniform and was by all accounts a Christian fundamentalist? Is it because we consider the innocence of those who died in the attack and are more sympathetic to innocence than to the death of those already involved in killing or oppressing others on a day to day basis? Since these individuals were just going about their day to day activities, do we ask whether this might happen to us one day? Is all this fear and concern for others, really just a concern for self preservation? As I ponder these questions, I note with interest that approximately 150,000 people worldwide die every day and about a quarter of those people die because of poverty, the remainder through war, disease, injury and natural causes! Since only 90 people (and this figure may change) died in this attack, it surely can't be just this fact that has caused such emotion? No, I think that the media, with its capacity to focus in on particular, minute fragments (the family of those deceased, the character of the perpetrator, the possible reasons for his behavior, the feelings of the President, the public reactions, the rationale behind terrorist attacks) expands the event to something which becomes monstrous as it exponentially grows. We've seen this all before in the 9/11 reportage or more recent events like the tsunami that obliterated many prefectures in Japan; the continual loop and re-looping of the footage, the close-ups terror on people's faces, the postmortem, analysis and the sickening reiteration and glut of information that changes from minute to minute leaving audiences unable to decipher truth from facts. The ultimate point of it all to blame someone, an ideology, a position that is untenable and yet so much evil is conducted in the world that is not spoken of, or if it is, then those who have made it so will never be called to account!