The Ballad of Special Ops Cody

In the video work The Ballad of Special Ops Cody, Michael Rakowitz reflects on the human and cultural costs of war during the U.S. invasion of Iraq. The video plays off a hostage situation in 2005 where an Iraqi insurgent group posted a picture of a captured American soldier called John Adam, threatening to behead him unless prisoners held in US jails in Iraq were freed. When no enlisted John Adam could be found, it was revealed that the hostage was a US infantry action figure, Special Ops Cody. The dolls were sold in US bases in Iraq and were often sent home to soldiers’ families as surrogates for the deployed parent or partner. Rakowitz gives life to the doll through the voice of Iraq-war veteran Gin McGill-Prather, whose own harrowing story in Iraq unfolds in Cody’s monologue. When Cody encounters Mesopotamian votive figurines – surrogate worshippers left by temple visitors in antiquity – he offers to liberate them from the vitrines at the Institute for the Study of Ancient Cultures in Chicago.   

But they stand still, unable to move or return.   

Listen to Cody´s monologue by the sound shower next to the vitrine.

Still from Michael Rakowitz, The Ballad of Special Ops Cody, 2017.