Baghdad tableau
Reminiscent of some kind of 19th century British painting, television presents us over and over with this colonialist, exoticised tableau of downtown Baghdad– a mosque beside a traffic circle festooned with date palms. The landscape is predominantly depopulated and very little happens in it. Occasionally there is smoke, presumably form the cluster bombs. Yesterday an American tank crawled up the traffic circle like some menacing dung beetle. We are drawn to this image because it is live and yet banal – free from the troublesome burdens of information that might make us judge. On the internet, the real time stream of images from this ancient city are juxtaposed with pornography.
