The Ballad of Special Ops Cody
2017 - Film & Video (Film & Video)
20:00 minutes
Michael Rakowitz
The Ballad of Special Ops Cody by Michael Rakowitz is a serio-comic stop motion animated film in which an everyday African-American G. I. character, personified through an action figure that comes to life. The protagonist breaks into Chicago’s Oriental Institute to “liberate” Mesopotamian votive statues, who are likewise animated through voice-over narration, from their imprisonment in the museum’s vitrines. This set-up allows for meditations on various war and colonial histories; as a barbed twist on the Bush-era rhetoric of promoting “democracy” in the Middle East through regime change, the G. I. cannot understand why the statues wish to remain in the museum and not return to their (currently war torn) “homelands”. The particular proxy of “Cody” is no accident; in 2005 an alleged Mujahideen group released a video in which they claimed to have captured an US soldier who they would behead if the US didn’t release a demanded set of prisoners in 72 hours. As it turned out, this ransom was a hoax; a 20-year old independent Iraqi citizen used various special effects to make it look as if a “Special Ops Cody” doll was the detainee in question. These dolls were readily available in Iraq as they were marketed to local children as surrogates for parents fighting the war. Like the rest of Rakowitz’s practice, The Ballad of Special Ops Cody riddles a complex discourse on war but also on the complicated diplomatic issues of representation and repatriation.
Michael Rakowitz uses the novel charm of everyday things to excite new and oblique approaches to loaded geopolitical subject matter. This is most evident in his delicate reworking of food packaging, such as those found to wrap dates of Middle Eastern origin, into replica assemblages of ancient Mesopotamian artifacts that are both under threat by client-statist wars and the looting that occurs in their wake. Beyond his practice, Rakowitz is known as an artist of great integrity who practices what he preaches; the artist withdrew from the Whitney Biennale as a form of protest against the museums Vice Chairman who owns a private security firm which was implicated in tear gassing “alien” asylum seekers at the US border. Instead of marginalizing foreign cultures through the rhetorical misrepresentation of who they are and what they stand for, Rakowitz brings disparate people together through wry political scenarios that defamiliarize glib stereotypes. For example, in his Enemy Kitchen project, American school children learn how to cook and share Iraqi food as a way to introduce alternative discourses about a “demonized” population.
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