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Simple Math was conceived in 2003 as an installation work. It has been presented in such form in two locations to date: at The Minneapolis College of Art and Design, and as part of the P.R.S.S. exhibition at the Minneapolis Institute of Arts. Since the time of first installation I continue showing Simple Math as part of my lectures, and thus the work was presented to audiences internationally and throughout the U.S. In the installation setting the project operates continuously. Every time the execution video is played the number next to it advances. A special soundtrack has been composed for this work and was implemented for the MCAD installation. (You can download this composition from the Labor Camp audio archive.) This is the online version of the project in which the numbers advance indefinitely every time the video is viewed by anyone anywhere in the world. A central database collects and displays the totals with every viewing. Such rendition of the Simple Math statement gains a new, however subtle, dimension: since the numbers advance only when the video is viewed, we are effectively in the position to decide whether the totals will grow or not.
There are two main threads defining the personal genealogy of the Simple Math work. One has to do with the short video clip presented in the project, and the other with the U.S. invasion of Iraq.
Many years ago, in my class called POLITPROP, devoted to study of political propaganda for art and design students, we were discussing the situation in Chechnya. A week later one of the students showed in class a series of short videos he downloaded from the Internet. The videos were shot by Chechen Rebels, and depicted scenes of torture and executions of hostages captured in the Russian/Chechen struggle. We watched in horror, and even though we understood that the purpose of these images was precisely to elicit exactly this kind of intense emotional response, we could not help but feel entirely and completely overcome by it. I kept the videos, thinking that I might use them in class on another occasion. But I never did. In fact I never looked at them again. I didn't need to. They were burned in my memory. Vivid, precise, sharp, as if I just watched them.
There was something especially striking about one of the films. In it a man was cutting of fingers of another man. It was a long continuous take, and right after the close-up of the hand, camera zoomed out, and panned across the room to show some other hostages watching the scene. The striking thing was that during the pan you could see a little more of the room: an office actually, with a desk, a computer on it, some general purpose office supplies, and a substantial amount of American currency piled up next to it. Among all the video clips this was the only one that allowed the viewer to place the images in any historical context: it was clear that the record of violence was contemporary.
We like to think that extreme violence, such as depicted in these films is geographically and historically distant from our reality. The petrifying truth of the videos from Chechnya was that our time was no different from any other historical carnage, that we were as capable of perfectly inhuman hatred now, as we ever were beforeÉ I put the files away. I did what we all like to do: I tried to get the images out of my memory, out of my life.
Some years later, something insidious, sinister and dark was gathering in the air. It was becoming very clear to everybody: we were about to engage in another war. There will be more dead. And as always, they will be dead for no reason other than our desire to kill. The drive towards war was overwhelming in the U.S., and many felt powerless to stop it. I felt this way too. But the need to do something about it persisted, and I began working on a project that would confront this (one of the hardest in my opinion) issues.
During the months leading up to the Gulf War II, American media were abuzz with various estimates attempting to predict numbers of potential casualties. Mainly American casualties. It seemed as if though we were simply trying to figure out, just how many dead soldiers we can afford, how many lives was this transaction going to cost. The whole discourse was appalling, but what made it unbearable was that no one was talking about the people we will be killing in Iraq. This, by the way, continues to be the standard operating procedure for American media to this day: everyone knows that, as of writing of this text, just over 2000 American soldiers were killed, but do you know how many Iraqis lost their lives as a result of American invasion? If you do, it is probably because you checked with one of the online resources such us Iraq Body Count (http://www.iraqbodycount.net/), not because you learned about it from TV. Today (11-6-05) it is estimated that minimum of 26,797 and maximum of 30,163 Iraqi civilians died as a result of the invasion.
One of the functions of art is that it fills the void generated by the silence in/of the mass media. Art can, and often does confront us with these aspects of reality, which we voluntarily suppress, and which popular media will never embrace. And so my first instinct was to think of those who no one will think of: people of Iraq, who would (and now do) die by the thousands. I looked for any hard information I could find about the tragic outcome of the Gulf War I: I wanted my work to serve as a factual reminder of what we have done before. I continue to believe that as a society we are capable of learning, that we advance, become smarter collectively and individually. My research lead me to an article published by Philadelphia Inquirer on Wednesday, Feb 12, 2003. The story was about a senior researcher at Pittsburgh's Carnegie Mellon University, Beth Osborne Daponte, a Census Bureau demographer who postulated in 1991 that 158,001 Iraqi men, women and children died during and shortly after the Persian Gulf war. About a quarter, 40,000, were Iraqi soldiers killed in combat. The rest were civilians, including 13,000 who got caught in the cross fire. This is: 86,194 men, 39,612 women, and yes: 32,195 children. Beth Osborne Daponte was hired to research this issue, however her findings proved to be too uncomfortable to the Pentagon and the White House. The then-Defense Secretary Richard Cheney dismissed the data saying that "we have no way of knowing precisely how many casualties occurred" during the fighting "and may never know." Beth Osborne Daponte was fired from her prestigious posts, and the only officially approved number of casualties of the Gulf War I is the 146 of U.S. military deaths. In pursuit of factual and true assessment of the Gulf War damage Daponte continued her research, and today she believes that 205,500 Iraqis died during the war and postwar period.
Another simply staggering piece of information I have found in my own investigation, was an introductory chapter entitled "The Century of Megadeath" from Zbigniew Brzezinski's book "Out of Control; Global Turmoil on the Eve of the 21st Century" published in 1995 by Simon and Schuster. The text methodically adds up the tragic toll of the 20th century killings:
"To sum up, the appalling total killed deliberately during this century-not in actual combat but in cold blood, for various ideological or religious reasons-comes to upward of 80,000,000 lives Thus, during the twentieth century, no less than 167,000,000 lives--and quite probably in excess of 175,000,000--were deliberately extinguished through politically motivated carnage. That is the approximate equivalent of the total population of France, Italy, and Great Britain; or over two-thirds of the total current population of the United States. This is more than the total killed in all previous wars, civil conflicts, and religious persecutions throughout human history."
Every time I read this, the last sentence echoes in my head with utter disbelief: we killed more people during the 20th Century, than in our entire history: ever before.
A depressing realization was beginning to emerge: that the bloodshed was not about to end, and that in fact we continue getting better at the craft of killing. Which is when I realized that my project should not focus on any particular number from the past, but on the tendency of that number to continue to rise indefinitely.
As I was getting engrossed in the grim calculations I realized that I myself fell in the trap of simply wrangling the numbers. Perhaps it is simply impossible to picture hundreds of millions of dead bodies... Perhaps it is simply easier not to try... Either way I now remembered the Chechen videos and decided to confront the numbers with images. But the videos were gone: I searched through piles of discs and drives to no avail. I have lost the files. I managed to remove them from my life. And now I needed them back. I searched the Internet, and couldn't find them. I contacted my former student to see if he still had the files, he didn't, but he promised to search for them. A couple of weeks later he had found one of the videos. It was a short version of a longer file we saw years ago, poorer quality, and rendered as a black and white version of the color original.
The video depicts a brutal murder of a young man, in all likelihood a Russian soldier captured and executed by rebel forces fighting for Chechnya's independence. None of the historical specifics are apparent from the image alone. Tight close-up of the man's face renders it as a universal portrait of death. When I saw this video again, I knew that this image would have to become the central element of the project. I realized that, because it was clear that no number, no matter how large, could ever express the horror behind it. We can talk about the numbers, think about them, contemplate and calculate them. It is, however, considerably more difficult to actually feel them. In this work I want to re-connect each and every one of those numbers with the unalterable truth they stand for. I want us to feel them, and ultimately, find them unacceptable.
[piotr szyhalski, Minneapolis, November 6, 2005]
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