Soldiers in their Youth

Probably the most powerful work in the show is by Chicago artist David Oresick. In his two videos, Soldiers in Their Youth (2008) and After the War (2009), Oresick has essentially constructed a consumer "found documentary" from video clips posted online by U.S. soldiers in Iraq and their friends and family. Youth is a revealing and multifaceted look at these men and women. In one snippet of footage, the soldier with the camera hides under furniture, audibly praying, "Lord, please let it stop..." while he and his comrades are fired upon. One of the men is moaning in fear, and another soldier tells him, "Shut the fuck up, somebody will think you're hurt." It's a stark account of the incidental nature of terror. Other video was shot in military convoys. In one clip, we see an explosion ahead and the truck in front stopping. "Um, yeah, fucking stop in the kill zone," the soldier driving mutters in a voice so jaded that he sounds like he's bitching about traffic on the 610 Loop. The most dramatic shot captures an IED blowing up in front of a vehicle. The asphalt road suddenly becomes a giant bubble that cracks and explodes. The driver swerves around it, and the soldier filming gleefully announces he caught it on film: "Woohoo!"

Other clips capture soldiers hazing each other with a jocular brutality. They tape one man to a truck bumper, making torturing detainees seem like a given. They play soccer with Iraqi children. Elsewhere, a soldier terrifies a little boy, saying, "Hey, you want candy? I don't have any fucking candy; you want hand grenade?" In other clips, soldiers mug for the camera, lip-synch songs and send messages home. Meanwhile, a woman strips down to her bikini and shaves her legs for her boyfriend in Iraq.

In the After video, there are tearful reunions, surprise reunions anddrunken reunions. One of the most disturbing, especially after one has just seen a fragment of what the soldiers experienced, are the videos of family and friends playing pranks on soldiers dozing on the couch. They throw things at them or sound airhorns to startle the sleeping men, who leap to their feet terrified for their lives. The pranksters don't seem to understand why the soldiers get so mad. Oresick's found clips give us a better sense of soldiers in Iraq than the national news media has given us in six years.



Kelly Klaasmeyer
"Site Scavenging: Internet content is the "found object" of the 21st century."
The Houston Press
September 24, 2009

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