On January 2002, some five months after the 9/11 attacks, President George W. Bush delivered his annual State of the Union address in front of the US Congress and Senate, in which he coined the phrase “Axis of Evil.” Brainchild of David Frum, member of the president’s speechwriting team, the phrase combines two twentieth-century expressions.[1] “The Axis Powers,”—the name given by Mussolini to the alliance between Nazi Germany, the Japanese Empire, and Fascist Italy—and “evil empire”—used by President Reagan in his March 1983 speech to the National Association of Evangelicals in Orlando, Florida, to refer to the Soviet Union (the term is attributed to Reagan’s speechwriter, Anthony Dolan).
“The Axis of Evil” thus serves as a code for an entire history of fear of the American nation in particular and the Western world in general. Lenka Clayton’s video art, Qaeda Quality Question Quickly Quickly Quiet, rearranges the “Axis of Evil” speech alphabetically. Clayton removed the applause and dramatic pauses during the course of the speech, shortening it to a mere 18 minutes (instead of the original 50). Using very simple means, Clayton thereby provides us with an X-Ray of the kind of the rhetoric style that developed in the aftermath of 9/11. The indexical rearrangement of the speech generates a reading that undermines its original meaning, by neutralizing the order of words in a sentence, and hence also what is to be found between the words themselves.
The extraordinary use of language drives a wedge into its mechanisms of repetition. This has the potential for expropriating certain concepts (such as the Jewish Shoah or the Palestinian Nakba), shattering the image of uniformity produced by social norms. The failure to produce such uniformity brings to the fore silenced (excluded) voices, resulting in a condition of multiple standpoints and identities. The rebellion against the dominating voice exposes the various possibilities this voice excludes. The very same act could serve as a double-edged sword, however, when the expropriated concept or signifier turns into a commodity emptied of its content (such as, again, Shoah or Nakba).
[1] David Frum was forced to resign several weeks later, after his wife sent a mass email, bragging about how he was the one who came up with the term.
An alphabetical rearrangement of President Bush’s 2002 ”Axis of Evil” Speech; the President delivers his address from A to Z.
”Clayton’s Qaeda Quality Question Quickly Quickly Quiet is one of the most painstaking, tireless, intelligent, noteworthy releases... Apart from the quite mind-boggling effort and technique applied to the construction of this recording, what makes it so engrossing and worthy of your deepest appreciation is the lack of any commentary, though the message is completely clear... Lenka’s work is not only hugely humorous, ominous and prophetic, it achieves this without any intentionally distortive re-arrangement or splicing for effect.” (boomkat.com)
Catalogue no. 873
File: Mobile Archive / Kunstverein
Deviants 1919
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