kagablog

music composed by james webb
filmed at the market theatre as part of the multi-media theatre presentation the shooting gallery written and conceived and directed by catherine henegan

Saturday 9th June
Goethe-Institut
Jan Smuts Avenue
Johannesburg

15:00: Seminar: DISSIDENCE CONSIDERED AS ONE OF THE FINE ARTS: DOCUMENTARY, FREEDOM AND THE DANGERS OF STATE INTERVENTION IN THE ARTS

Panel includes: Steve Drake (Lecturer in Film Production at AFDA), Aryan Kaganof (filmmaker/writer), Cedric Sundstrom (filmmaker), tale motsepe (department of arts and culture) and others. Chair: Trevor Steele Taylor

world premiere screenings of two new short films by aryan kaganof

suprematist composition #9: Endlosung
(4min44sec)
(music m ward)

TOO DRUNK TO FUCK
(2min02sec)
(image catherine henegan, edit kaganof, music nouvelle vague)

check out christine nesbitt hills’ website
she is selling images from the shooting gallery

coming soon to a nightmare near you

Robert Fisk
The Independent UK Monday 06 November 2006

So America’s one-time ally has been sentenced to death for war crimes he committed when he was Washington’s best friend in the Arab world. America knew all about his atrocities and even supplied the gas - along with the British, of course - yet there we were yesterday declaring it to be, in the White House’s words, another “great day for Iraq”. That’s what Tony Blair announced when Saddam Hussein was pulled from his hole in the ground on 13 December 2003. And now we’re going to string him up, and it’s another great day. Of course, it couldn’t happen to a better man. Nor a worse. It couldn’t be a more just verdict - nor a more hypocritical one. For if Saddam’s immorality and wickedness are to be the yardstick against which all our iniquities are judged, what does that say about us? We only sexually abused prisoners and killed a few of them and murdered some suspects and carried out a few rapes and illegally invaded a country which cost Iraq a mere 600,000 lives (”more or less”, as George Bush Jnr said when he claimed the figure to be only 30,000). Saddam was much worse. We can’t be put on trial. We can’t be hanged.

“Allahu Akbar,” the awful man shouted - God is greater. No surprise there. He it was who insisted these words should be inscribed upon the Iraqi flag, the same flag which now hangs over the palace of the government that has condemned him after a trial at which the former Iraqi mass murderer was formally forbidden from describing his relationship with Donald Rumsfeld, now George Bush’s Secretary of Defence. Remember that handshake? Nor, of course, was he permitted to talk about the support he received from George Bush Snr, the current US President’s father. Little wonder, then, that Iraqi officials claimed last week the Americans had been urging them to sentence Saddam before the mid-term US elections. Anyone who said the verdict was designed to help the Republicans, Tony Snow, the White House spokesman, blurted out yesterday, must be “smoking rope”. Well, Tony, that rather depends on what kind of rope it might be. Snow, after all, claimed yesterday that the Saddam verdict - not the trial itself, please note - was “scrupulous and fair”.

The judges will publish “everything they used to come to their verdict.” No doubt. Because here are a few of the things that Saddam was not allowed to comment upon: sales of chemicals to his Nazi-style regime so blatant - so appalling - that he has been sentenced to hang on a localised massacre of Shias rather than the wholesale gassing of Kurds over which George W Bush and Lord Blair of Kut al-Amara were so exercised when they decided to depose Saddam in 2003 - or was it in 2002? Or 2001? Some of Saddam’s pesticides came from Germany (of course). But on 25 May 1994, the US Senate’s Committee on Banking, Housing and Urban Affairs produced a report entitled “United States Chemical and Biological Warfare-related Dual-use exports to Iraq and their possible impact on the Health Consequences (sic) of the Persian Gulf War”. This was the 1991 war which prompted our liberation of Kuwait, and the report informed Congress about US government-approved shipments of biological agents sent by American companies to Iraq from 1985 or earlier. These included Bacillus anthracis, which produces anthrax; Clostridium botulinum; Histoplasma capsulatum; Brucella melitensis; Clostridium perfringens and Escherichia coli. The same report stated that the US provided Saddam with “dual use” licensed materials which assisted in the development of chemical, biological and missile-system programmes, including chemical warfare agent production facility plant and technical drawings (provided as pesticide production facility plans). Yes, well I can well see why Saddam wasn’t permitted to talk about this.

John Reid, the British Home Secretary, said that Saddam’s hanging “was a sovereign decision by a sovereign nation”. Thank heavens he didn’t mention the £200,000 worth of thiodiglycol, one of two components of mustard gas we exported to Baghdad in 1988, and another £50,000 worth of the same vile substances the following year. We also sent thionyl chloride to Iraq in 1988 at a price of only £26,000. Yes, I know these could be used to make ballpoint ink and fabric dyes. But this was the same country - Britain - that would, eight years later, prohibit the sale of diphtheria vaccine to Iraqi children on the grounds that it could be used for - you guessed it - “weapons of mass destruction”.

Now in theory, I know, the Kurds have a chance for their own trial of Saddam, to hang him high for the thousands of Kurds gassed at Halabja. This would certainly keep him alive beyond the 30-day death sentence review period. But would the Americans and British dare touch a trial in which we would have not only to describe how Saddam got his filthy gas but why the CIA - in the immediate aftermath of the Iraqi war crimes against Halabja - told US diplomats in the Middle East to claim that the gas used on the Kurds was dropped by the Iranians rather than the Iraqis (Saddam still being at the time our favourite ally rather than our favourite war criminal). Just as we in the West were silent when Saddam massacred 180,000 Kurds during the great ethnic cleansing of 1987 and 1988.

And - dare we go so deep into this betrayal of the Iraqis we loved so much that we invaded their country? - then we would have to convict Saddam of murdering countless thousands of Shia Muslims as well as Kurds after they staged an uprising against the Baathist regime at our specific request - thousands whom webetrayed by leaving them to fight off Saddam’s brutal hordes on their own. “Rioting,” is how Lord Blair’s meretricious “dodgy dossier” described these atrocities in 2002 - because, of course, to call them an “uprising” (which they were) would invite us to ask ourselves who contrived to provoke this bloodbath. Answer: us.

I and my colleagues watched this tragedy. I travelled on the hospital trains that brought the Iranians back from the 1980-88 war front, their gas wounds bubbling in giant blisters on their arms and faces, giving birth to smaller blisters that wobbled on top of their wounds. The British and Americans didn’t want to know. I talked to the victims of Halabja. The Americans didn’t want to know. My Associated Press colleague Mohamed Salaam saw the Iranian dead lying gassed in their thousands on the battlefields east of Basra. The Americans and the British didn’t care.

But now we are to give the Iraqi people bread and circuses, the final hanging of Saddam, twisting, twisting slowly in the wind. We have won. We have inflicted justice upon the man whose country we invaded and eviscerated and caused to break apart. No, there is no sympathy for this man. “President Saddam Hussein has no fear of being executed,” Bouchra Khalil, a Lebanese lawyer on his team, said in Beirut a few days ago. “He will not come out of prison to count his days and years in exile in Qatar or any other place. He will come out of prison to go to the presidency or to his grave.” It looks like the grave. Keitel went there. Ceausescu went there. Milosevic escaped sentence.

The odd thing is that Iraq is now swamped with mass murderers, guilty of rape and massacre and throat-slitting and torture in the years since our “liberation” of Iraq. Many of them work for the Iraqi government we are currently supporting, democratically elected, of course. And these war criminals, in some cases, are paid by us, through the ministries we set up under this democratic government. And they will not be tried. Or hanged. That is the extent of our cynicism. And our shame. Have ever justice and hypocrisy been so obscenely joined?

(photo suzy bernstein)

After a few years of decline at the end of the Cold War, arms sales have turned around. The world market in weaponry, with total sales of $40 billion, grew 8 percent in 1996. Leading the list of buyers was Saudi Arabia at $9 billion. For several years that country has also led the list of countries that violate human rights. In 1996, says Amnesty International, “reports of torture and ill-treatment of detainees continued, and the judicial punishment of flogging was frequently imposed. At least 27 individuals were sentenced to flogging, ranging from 120 to 200 lashes. They included 24 Philippine nationals who were reportedly sentenced for homosexual behavior. At least 69 people were executed.” And also: “The government of King Fahd bin ‘Abdul ‘Aziz maintained its ban on political parties and trade unions. Press censorship continued to be strictly enforced.”

For many years that oil-rich monarchy has been the top client for U.S. weapons and British war planes. Arms and oil, two key factors in national prosperity: the healthy trade of oil for weapons allows the Saudi dictatorship to drown domestic protest in blood,

while feeding the U.S. and British war economies and protecting their sources of energy from threat. A skeptic might conclude that those billion-dollar purchase orders bought King Fahd impunity. For reasons that only Allah knows, we never see, hear, or read anything about Saudi Arabia’s atrocities in the media, the same media that tend to get quite worked up about human rights abuses in other Arab countries. Best friends are those who buy the most weapons. The U.S. arms industry wages a struggle against terrorism by selling weapons to terrorist governments whose only relation to human rights is to do all they can to trample them.

In the Era of Peace, the name applied to the historical period that began in 1946, wars have slaughtered no less than 22-million people and have displaced from their lands, homes, or countries over forty million more. Consumers of TV news never lack a war or at least a brushfire to munch on. But never do the reporters report, or the commentators comment, on anything that might help explain what’s going on. To do that they would have to start by answering some very basic questions: Who benefits from all that human pain? Who profits from this tragedy? “And the executioner’s face is always well hidden,” Bob Dylan once sang.

In 1968, two months before a bullet killed him, the Reverend Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. declared that his country was “the world’s greatest purveyor of violence.” Thirty years later the figures bear him out, every ten dollars spent on arms in the world, four and a half end up in the United States. Statistics compiled by the International Institute of Strategic Studies show the largest weapons dealers to be the United States, the United Kingdom, France, and Russia. China figures on the list as well, a few places back. And these five countries, by some odd coincidence, are the very ones that can exercise vetoes in the UN Security Council. The right to a veto really means the power to decide. The General Assembly of the highest international institution, in which all countries take part, makes recommendations, but it’s the Security Council that makes decisions. The Assembly speaks or remains silent; the Council does or undoes. In other words, world peace lies in the hands of the five powers that profit most from the big business of war.

So it’s no surprise that the permanent members of the Security Council enjoy the right to do whatever they like. In recent years, for example, the United States freely bombed the poorest neighborhood in Panama City and later flattened Iraq. Russia punished Chechnya’s cries for independence with blood and fire. France raped the South Pacific with its nuclear tests. And every year China legally executes ten times as many people by firing squad as died in Tienanmen Square. As in the Falklands war the previous decade, the invasion of Panama gave the air force an opportunity to test its new toys, and television turned the invasion of Iraq into a global display case for the latest weapons on the market: Come and see the new trinkets of death at the great fair of Baghdad.

Neither should anyone be surprised by the unhappy global imbalance between war and peace. For every dollar spent by the United Nations on peacekeeping, the world spends two thousand dollars on warkeeping. In the ensuing sacrificial rites, hunter and prey are of the same species and the winner is he who kills more of his brothers. Theodore Roosevelt put it well: “No triumph of peace is quite so great as the supreme triumphs of war.” In 1906, he was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize.

There are thirty-five thousand nuclear weapons in the world. The United States has half of them; Russia and, to a lesser degree, other powers, the rest. The owners of the nuclear monopoly scream to the high heavens when India or Pakistan or anyone else achieves the dream of having its own bomb. That’s when they decry the deadly threat of such weapons to the world: each weapon could kill several million people, and it would take only a few to end the human adventure on this planet and the planet itself. But the great powers never bother to say when God decided to award them a monopoly or why they continue building such weapons.

photo suzy bernstein

for an extremely concise but detailed overview of the shooting gallery, reviews, responses etc, please click here

Dear Aryan
Please could you either remove/purhcase my images that are on your website.
These were e-mailed to Cathryn for perusal purposes only. She made an
enquiry about usage and that was the last I heard….
I quoted an exceptionally reasonable price to her.
We do all try and make a living in the arts!
Yours truly

Suzy Bernstein
suzyb@artslink.co.za
082 445 1952/011 646 9453
Fax: 086 500 1343

hi suzy
i am confused by your mail
since you never asked my permission to take photographs of my body
i sincerely presumed that the very least you could do is allow me to use images of MY body on MY web site
i think it is only fair that we leave it at that
unless you are prepared to PAY ME for each image that you took of MY BODY
best wishes
aryan

Hi Aryan
I thought you might go somewhere like that with this… Actually I did ask permission.
You were on the floor when I asked to take permission of the show …
I don’t think it is fair that we leave it at that….
Best wishes
Suzy

Mr K - good day

oh my goodness i have an impending sense of war about to break out
she wants R50 a picture ?
she did ask permission to take pics in Grahamstown
she didn’t ask you personally… but i said sure
i recall you were under the blanket at the time

cathy
it’s outrageous
i am not going to buy images of myself???
it’s absurd
it is common courtesy for a photographer to allow the subject matter free access to the photos
i am prepared to litigate
she does NOT have MY permission to sell photos of me
no way!

(photo eran tahor)

(photo eran tahor)

The Hanged Man is every hero committed enough to the adventure to die for it.

Basic Card Symbols

A man hanging by one foot from a Tau cross - sometimes from a bar or tree. His free leg is always bent to form a “4,” his face is always peaceful, never suffering. Sometimes his hands are bound, sometimes they dangle. Sometimes coins fall out of his pockets or hands.

Basic Tarot Story

The Fool settles beneath a tree, intent on finding his spiritual self. There he stays for nine days, without eating, barely moving. People pass by him, animals, clouds, the wind, the rain, the stars, sun and moon. On the ninth day, with no conscious thought of why, he climbs a branch and dangles upside down like a child, giving up for a moment, all that he is, wants, knows or cares about. Coins fall from his pockets and as he gazes down on them - seeing them not as money but only as round bits of metal - everything suddenly changes perspective. It is as if he’s hanging between the mundane world and the spiritual world, able to see both. It is a dazzling moment, dreamlike yet crystal clear. Connections he never understood before are made, mysteries are revealed.

But timeless as this moment of clarity seems, he realizes that it will not last. Very soon, he must right himself, and when he does, things will be different. He will have to act on what he’s learned. For now, however, he just hangs, weightless as if underwater, observing, absorbing, seeing.

Basic Tarot Meaning

With Neptune (or Water) as its planet, the Hanged Man is perhaps the most fascinating card in the deck. It reflects the story of Odin who offered himself as a sacrifice in order to gain knowledge. Hanging from the world tree, wounded by a spear, given no bread or mead, he hung for nine days. On the last day, he saw on the ground runes that had fallen from the tree, understood their meaning, and, coming down, scooped them up for his own. All knowledge is to be found in these runes.

The Hanged Man, in similar fashion, is a card about suspension, not life or death. This is a time of trial or meditation, selflessness, sacrifice, prophecy. The Querent stops resisting; instead he makes himself vulnerable, sacrifices his position or opposition, and in doing so, gains illumination. Answers that eluded him come clear, solutions to problems are found. He sees the world differently, has almost mystical insights. This card can also imply a time when everything just stands still, a time of rest and reflection before moving on. Things will continue on in a moment, but for now, they float, timeless.

Thirteen’s Observations

Neptune is spirituality, dreams, psychic abilities, and the Hanged Man is afloat in these. He is also 12, the opposite of the World card, 21. With the World card you go infinitely out. With the Hanged Man, you go infinitely in.

This card signifies a time of insight so deep that, for a moment, nothing but that insight exists. All Tarot readers have such moments when we see, with absolute clarity, the whole picture, the entire message offered by a spread. The Hanged Man symbolizes such moments of suspension between physical and mystical worlds. Such moments don’t last, and they usually require some kind of sacrifice. Sacrifice of a belief or perspective, a wish, dream, hope, money, time or even selfhood. In order to gain, you must give. Sometimes you need to sacrifice cherished positions, open yourself to other truths, other perspectives in order to find solutions, in order to bring about change. One thing is certain, whether the insight is great or small, spiritual or mundane, once you have been the Hanged Man you never see things quite the same.

(photo natalie payne)

i did catch the last performance of the shooting
gallery on sunday afternoon.
once again, i really enjoyed it. and on the second time, james webb’s
sound design was much more apparent to me.
there was a wonderfully “brechtian” moment at the end of the
performance. just after you, aryan, and the black poet (mac manaka)
had sped off in the merc, a middle aged white couple appeared in the
brightly lit doorway. they peered into the darkness of the auditorium,
conferred ernestly between themselves, and then walked in and took
their seats in the front row. it seems they were lost and trying to
find some other performance, but there was that moment when they could
have been the coda to the shooting gallery.

beste
christo doherty

(photos by derek davey)

aryan
 
the show was a blast - dit was tit! - thin with the word but the strongest visual story i’ve been to. mir was upset with the violence, erna kept eyeing your dick, & len loved the bucket. best moments for me were on screen before they hauled you up, and the vulture, a bit later. we all left with a headache, bit of a coincidence, nah, part of your design. it’s just richard who refused to get it, but he’s a journalist, and he was being stubborn
 
dawit malan

(photo - derek davey)

Howzit mista K

Just came across this on the web… i met a guy (roger van wyk - from cape town) who is working on setting up an exhibition on the relation between african art, SA artists and DADA - i am going to send him a package about the shooting gallery.

i see now how much what we did relates to this movement as a CABARET FOR ARTISTIC AND POLITICAL PURPOSES…

Dada Manifesto (1916, Hugo Ball) EXTRACT

How does one achieve eternal bliss? By saying dada. How does one become famous? By saying dada. With a noble gesture and delicate propriety. Till one goes crazy. Till one loses consciousness. How can one get rid of everything that smacks of journalism, worms, everything nice and right, blinkered, moralistic, europeanised, enervated? By saying dada. Dada is the world soul, dada is the pawnshop. Dada is the world’s best lily-milk soap. Dada Mr Rubiner, dada Mr Korrodi. Dada Mr Anastasius Lilienstein. In plain language: the hospitality of the Swiss is something to be profoundly appreciated. And in questions of aesthetics the key is quality.
I shall be reading poems that are meant to dispense with conventional language, no less, and to have done with it. Dada Johann Fuchsgang Goethe. Dada Stendhal. Dada Dalai Lama, Buddha, Bible, and Nietzsche. Dada m’dada. Dada mhm dada da. It’s a question of connections, and of loosening them up a bit to start with. I don’t want words that other people have invented. All the words are other people’s inventions. I want my own stuff, my own rhythm, and vowels and consonants too, matching the rhythm and all my own. If this pulsation is seven yards long, I want words for it that are seven yards long. Mr Schulz’s words are only two and a half centimetres long.
It will serve to show how articulated language comes into being. I let the vowels fool around. I let the vowels quite simply occur, as a cat miaows . . . Words emerge, shoulders of words, legs, arms, hands of words. Au, oi, uh. One shouldn’t let too many words out. A line of poetry is a chance to get rid of all the filth that clings to this accursed language, as if put there by stockbrokers’ hands, hands worn smooth by coins. I want the word where it ends and begins. Dada is the heart of words.
Each thing has its word, but the word has become a thing by itself. Why shouldn’t I find it? Why can’t a tree be called Pluplusch, and Pluplubasch when it has been raining? The word, the word, the word outside your domain, your stuffiness, this laughable impotence, your stupendous smugness, outside all the parrotry of your self-evident limitedness. The word, gentlemen, is a public concern of the first importance.

(photo derek davey)

Hi Aryan
 
I am a friend of Anton Krueger’s. I met you through him about a year ago – at ‘The Ant’ in Melville. Saw ‘Shooting Gallery’ yesterday, and thought it was excellent. Is it possible to see some of your films? I tried the Purchase link on your site, but it was inactive.
 
I think that what you are doing is fresh and probing – a real pleasure after so much cliché.
 
Antony

aryan
You reminded me that my ignorance
kills the anonymous anonymously.
The media intensifies the ignorance.
I do read the dailies very seldomly.
And  . . I will keep that habit.

Thanks to you, to Catherine and to James Webb.
and to the combined smell of muscle cream and wine.

the Smiths peeling apples
It’s a sunny day so I meet you at the cemetery gates
Jurgen Meekel

(photo natalie payne)

at the current evolutionary stage of humanity, violence is still not only all-pervasive but even on the increase, as the old egoic consciousness, amplified by the collective pain-body, intensifies prior to its inevitable demise. if films show violence in its wider context, if they show its origins and its consequences, show what it does to the victim as well as the perpetrator, show the collective unconsciousness that lies behind it and is passed on from generation to generation (the anger and hatred that lives in humans as the pain-body), then those films can fulfill a vital function in the awakening of humanity. they can act as a mirror in which humanity sees its own insanity. that in you which recognizes madness as madness (even if it is your own) is sanity, is the arising awareness, in the end of insanity.
 
such films do exist and they do not fuel the pain-body. some of the best antiwar films are films that show the reality of war rather than a glamorized version of it. the pain-body can only feed on films in which violence is portrayed as normal or even desirable human behavior, or that glorify violence with the sole purpose of generating negative emotion in the viewer and so become a “fix” for the pain-addicted pain-body.
 
- eckhart tolle

(photo suzy bernstein)

I went to go see this piece on its closing day. There were some amazingly beautiful moments, such as when aryan swung naked from the ceiling, blowing out candles in remembrance, or his hilarious first phone call about war being great for his career. A comment on mass media as producing reality, some important messages in the piece (tho occasionally the piece itself felt a little too mediated). Definitely a historical landmark for networked performance in South Africa, if not the world.
nathaniel stern

this review first appeared on nathaniel’s blog