Schmitt, You and Me
2016–2017
Video installation
HD video, 54”00, mirror text sculpture 23 x 511 cm, framed shooting target 61 x 91 cm
Video edited with Rebecca Scheckman
Sound mixing by Sam Bair
Courtesy of the artist
In the town of Skowhegan, Maine, Mismar frequented a local gun shop, hanging out with its owner Bruce and shop manager Bailey. The two eventually took their new friend to a shooting range, giving him a crash course on guns and aiming. In turn, Mismar asked Bruce and Bailey if they would read excerpts from Carl Schmitt’s 1932 text The Concept of the Political, where he identifies the political as boiling down to the distinction between friend and enemy, and the extreme case of conflict between the two as going to war.
With and through Bruce and Bailey, the text finds temporary protagonists who find difficulty uttering Schmitt’s archaic language but nevertheless speak Schmitt’s intentionality. As the protagonists read and re-read Schmitt’s text, we viewers sense the entrapment that Schmitt’s text creates for all of us today, a cul-de-sac that Bruce and Bailey admittedly encounter themselves. In the end, they are compelled to ask: Does Schmitt provide a solution to the friend-enemy-possibility-of-war concept?
Artist’s Bio:
Omar Mismar is an interdisciplinary artist based in Beirut. Influenced by conceptual art, critical studies and design, Mismar’s work is project driven. His process entails drifting through a given city, clinging parasitically onto different frameworks and situations, wherein he forms temporary alliances to the space and the publics he encounters. His work explores the entanglement of art and politics and the aesthetics of disaster via a particular interest in performative obliqueness, rehearsal, and translation.