David-Baptiste Chirot's Raw War/The Walls of the Security State

David-Baptiste Chirot has been engaged in a project of visual/poetic art called "Raw War." About this work, he says, "I dream a lot of painting walls, or of walls on which visual poems are spontaneously taking place and are in movement. One of the great inspirations to me as an artist is Gulley Jimson, the fictional painter in Joyce Cary's novel THE HORSE'S MOUTH. Gulley loves to paint walls. I used to be a housepainter and painted many many walls, though not with words and forms until much later. These pieces are inspired by a dream I had the night before last, in which I dreamed of "War Torn Walls" in Palestine and Lebanon. I made these paintings in the dark in Lake Front Park in Milwaukee using grass, dirt, clay impression spray painting, rubBeings and even some gravel on one piece." Walls, of course, are rapidly becoming one of the embodiment of the new security wars--not simply as physical armorings of space against intruders, but as images of exclusions. There is a smart little poem by Samih Qasim on this subject for next time.