Missing the point ... overzealous participants have been taking shots at Wafaa Bilal rather than having a nice chat with the artist
What would you do if someone locked themselves in a room, switched on a webcam and invited you to fire paintball pellets at them all day long from a remote controlled gun? Would you take a pop? Iraqi artist Wafaa Bilal knows that the answer is most likely to be yes. Nine days ago he set himself up as a kind of human coconut shy in the back room of the Flatfile Gallery in Chicago. He's been dodging flying ordnance ever since.
If taking pot shots at an Iraqi man live on the web itches your trigger finger, all you have to do is log on here; wrestle control of the gun from dozens of other paintball assassins and take aim. While you are doing so you can ponder this question: does casting yourself a human target constitute art, a masochistic David Blaine-style stunt or a more nihilistic version of American Idol?
With the lucidity of the shell-shocked, Bilal says that it is art. And, when not dodging pellets, he is ecstatic that the project, entitled Domestic Tension, has proved so popular that the server handling the traffic has routinely gone into meltdown. But he's equally perturbed that visitors to the site have chosen to shoot at him with such enthusiasm.
You see, Domestic Tension might look like a video game, but it's worth remembering, as you choose to take aim, that the target is a live human being. And, being a publicity-hungry artist aside, Bilal would prefer you not to shoot. Not least because his body is starting to hurt. He has been avoiding an average of 1,000 shots a day. His living quarters are now littered with shrapnel and splattered with yellow paint. It might just be paintball, but those pellets travel at up to 300 feet per second and Bilal has got a multitude of bruises to prove it. If it really is art, he is certainly suffering for it.
While cynics and miscreant youths may argue that if you put your head above the parapet someone, somewhere will take a pot shot, those that have control of the gun have the option not to fire and chat with the artist instead. Most choose to shoot, of course, seemingly oblivious to the work's real aim: to highlight the plight of the Iraqi people and show how we have learned to disassociate an action on screen with an action in real life.
Nine days in and Bilal was looking battered and bewildered (see for yourself at his YouTube video diary). But worry not, oh miscreant youth, you haven't missed your turn to shoot an Iraqi live on the web, just yet. The stunt continues in Chicago for another four weeks.
