George W. Bush, Top Gun and the Clichés of a ‘War on Terror’

‘“Three, two, one.” Then the world lights up. A glow enters the body that’s like the touch of God [...] There’s whole skeletons dancing in the flash.’ In Don DeLillo’s Underworld (1997), on December 1, 1969, a B-52 bomber called ‘Long Tall Sally’ is bombing Vietnam. Later on, the plane’s nickname resurfaces as a title of a giant installation developed by conceptual artist Klara Sax at an airforce base in the Nevada desert, which involves painting 230 junked planes.

Ahmet Öğüt's video Things We Count (2008) was filmed in Arizona on a similar location; it comprises a long, slow tracking shot of old and new military aircraft, accompanied by a background voice that enunciates a series of numbers in Kurdish, Turkish and English. It’s a coincidence Öğüt was unaware of, he says, but nonetheless perfect for an artist (born in Diyarbakir, in 1981) who loves to blur the boundaries between facts and fictions. While DeLillo’s book chronicles Cold War paranoia, before and after the fall of the Iron Curtain, Ögüt’s video (projected onto the gallery wall) teases the clichés of our current war on terror, and checks how hard it is not to mechanically tag the dusty and mountainous landscape as Middle Eastern or Central Asian – two areas for whose control the NATO military bases in Turkey and the Iraqi Kurdistan play a key strategic role. As the voiceover keeps counting uneventfully, without further comments, more images pop up: for instance, those of Top Gun’s epic cowboy aesthetics (incidentally, many of the airborne sequences in Top Gun were shot at Naval Air Station Fallon, Nevada), or even the surreal landing of George W. Bush, dressed in full Navy pilot gear, on the aircraft carrier USS Lincoln, displaying the infamous ‘Mission Accomplished’ banner. The list could easily get longer, because Öğüt leaves plenty of room for the viewer to come into play, and for the work to function as an open playground. Characteristically, he resorts to the subversive powers of irony to ease access. 

It’s also telling that Öğüt chose the title ‘Mind the Gap’ for an exhibition marking the first step of this new Milanese non-profit space, Peep-Hole, supported by the joint curatorial efforts of Anna Daneri, Vincenzo De Bellis and Bruna Roccasalva. The Swinging Doors (2009), installed at the beginning of the narrow corridor linking the main room to the smaller spaces at the back, is made of a couple of original Carabinieri anti-riot plastic shields bolted to the walls. Whenever somebody passes through, they violently bang against each other, producing the intimidating sound used by the police to scare protesters, but, simultaneously, bringing up plenty of Spaghetti Western and slapstick associations, as much as references to quintessential Pavlovian conditioning devices like Nauman’s corridors.

The three large drawings of Mission Calls (2008–9) suggest how to transform a stray dog into a well-trained rescue dog, simply by putting a red cross on his back, with predictably unpredictable consequences. Finally, with the help of two old stereoscopic View-Masters and a set of black and white slides, the public is asked to click-and-watch An ordinary day of a bomb disposal robot (2009), which ends with a small coup de théatre: instead of a bomb, the robot pulls out of the bag a harmless white rabbit, as if it was a magician’s hat. The audience, pleased and mesmerized, shall dutifully clap and applaud. Or maybe start asking where the trick is.