BY Lucy Duda DESIGN Alex Westfall
BRIDGING MoMA PS1, the Museum of Modern Art’s contemporary outpost in Queens, occupies an outwardly unassuming space in a converted school building. The museum’s entrance is a squat structure of grey concrete, an exercise in brutalism so understated that I walked straight past it a few times before realizing I had arrived. But the contents of its cavernous whitewashed galleries on that grey day in February could hardly be described as unassuming. Theater of Operations: Gulf Wars 1991-2011, an ambitious and sprawling exhibition, occupied PS1’s entire building from November 2019 through March 2020, closing right before the wave of institutional shutdowns due to the coronavirus pandemic. This was my final trip to a museum before quarantine, and the experience has stuck with me, not just as a last blast in the outside world (all the way to New York!), but as a rich source of philosophical questions and moral quandaries that I now have time—maybe too much time—to mull over. The United States’ 1991 military engagement in the Gulf War officially lasted only 42 days. But its aftermath, including the war in Iraq from 2003 to 2011, has resonated through the decades, heralding a slew of cultural changes that continue to haunt the world today: increased surveillance, drone warfare, and a 24-hour news cycle that profits off mass hysteria. By presenting an array of works by well-known Western artists alongside the perspectives of Iraqi artists who have received less international renown, Theater of Operations presented a startling juxtaposition of aesthetic and everyday experiences on either side of the continental divide. It charts the war’s divergent trajectories, from sanctions and the looming shadow of violence for artists in the Persian Gulf region to American TV pundits endlessly debating oil and terrorism alongside banal popular culture.The show was rife with contradictions, most visibly the aesthetic contrasts staged intentionally by the curators. But there was also the cognitive dissonance of learning about the war from the comfort of a sterile white box, seemingly detached from the outside world, and an acute awareness of the museum’s own uncomfortable relationship with its artists’ political statements. I spoke with one of the curators, Ruba Katrib, who told me that the curatorial team had several goals for the exhibition. They aimed to highlight the toll of US intervention on the Persian Gulf region both during and after the wars, the transformation of military and media technologies, and the lived experience of Iraqi and Kuwaiti citizens, outside the broad stereotypes familiar to American audiences: “terrorists, oil sheikhs, and women covered in black from head to toe,” in the words of featured artist Nuha Al-Radi. In particular, the curators hoped to bring the work of Iraqi and Kuwaiti artists to the forefront and place them in opposition to Western art-world darlings like Thomas Hirschhorn and Martha Rosler, who have been showered with praise for commenting on the war from a
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safe, intellectual distance. Katrib told me that because of the show’s subject matter, “the art press has not understood the show at all…it’s been the non-art press that has really gotten it.” Several reviews from the art world criticized the exhibit for being too blunt in its messaging, raising a debate about whether art sacrifices aesthetic depth when it pursues polemics. Other reviews have praised the show for giving attention to an under-examined history. However, this recognition of the exhibit’s political nature also invites critics to hold it to a higher standard of ethical scrutiny. MoMA has been embroiled in controversy since it reopened after renovations in October of 2019. In anticipation of the museum’s relaunch, grassroots activists and artists began calling for MoMA board member Larry Fink, CEO of BlackRock, to divest from ICE contracts, private prisons, weapons manufacturing, and fossil fuels. When Theater of Operations opened at PS1 a month later, 37 artists featured in the exhibition signed an open letter calling for MoMA’s board of trustees to cut ties with its chairman, Leon Black. Black’s company owns Constellis Holdings, formerly known as Blackwater—a defense contractor infamous for its war crimes in Iraq. In the ensuing months, several artists continued to protest by having their work removed from the show. They pointed out the hypocrisy of MoMA mounting an antiwar exhibit without acknowledging its own relationship to American imperialism, demanding to know: how can the museum claim to radically critique recent history while remaining complicit in the present? +++ Walking into the labyrinthine exhibit, I could immediately see the curators’ wide-ranging approach and selections at work. There was a clear attention to sensory balance and catharsis: I first entered a darkened room with a jarring, sensory-overload video installation, followed by a gallery whose wide expanse of smooth white wall was punctuated by small, richly colored etchings of allegorical figures, and elsewhere encountered a palate cleanser of pieces which dated from the era but related only indirectly to the war. One monumental work, Hanaa Malallah’s She/He Has No Picture, occupied a gallery near the entrance, serving as a chronological and emotional anchor. Malallah used burnt and torn canvas scraps to create a mural with portraits of people killed by American laser-guided missiles at a public shelter in Baghdad in 1991. Only 100 of the 408 victims had a photo, so the 308 others are represented instead by their names converted into a string of numbers, each letter replaced by its value in the Arabic system of numerology, interspersed with laser-cut brass plaques that reflect the viewer’s own face. On the opposite wall, black and white geometric drawings by the American conceptual artist Sol
Lewitt complement the somber atmosphere without competing for attention. Lewitt’s signature technique provides detailed, numerical instructions for drawing that can be followed without the artist present, usually drawn directly onto the wall, and eventually erased or painted over. He uses the technical and creative labor of the people remotely assembling his works to play with questions of authorship, standardization, and ephemerality in the way society values art. The two artists face each other across the gallery in monochrome harmony, but the visual dialogue between the works also generates a subtle tension between the personal and mechanized aspects of art and war: who gets the luxury of seeing minimalism, detached rationality, and calculated precision as aesthetic choices, when for others they represent the imminent threat of dehumanizing violence? As the exhibit went on, this affective and philosophical contrast in artists’ relationship to wartime culture became increasingly evident, just as the curators had intended. American and European artists, who experienced the war primarily from a distance, tended to lean into the brash, garish imagery of early-2000s popular culture and political commentary. In his essay “The Gulf War Did Not Take Place,” cultural theorist Jean Baudrillard argued that the media’s oversaturation with images and discussion of the war—especially its framing as a “war” in the first place, implying a level of organized combat occurring far away from civilian lives—actually prevented people in the West from understanding it as a real and immediate atrocity. In line with Baudrillard’s thinking, the exhibit’s Western artists showcased their understanding of the wars as a site of capitalist corruption and technological alienation, but in doing so contributed to the very information overload their works sought to critique. French photographer Jean-Luc Molène’s La Guerre - 17 janvier 1991 (which translates to War - January 17, 1991), for example, shows a seemingly ordinary day on a Parisian street, with the title and a few subtle splashes of red the only hint of conflict. Similarly, American artist Cory Arcangel’s “Bomb Iraq” is a simple desktop computer game that prompts the player to launch missiles at a blank blob of a country, demonstrating how the impersonality of drones makes it possible to carelessly end lives. These artists sought to confront the war’s banality in everyday European and American life, but simultaneously created new artifacts of that detachment. When they did confront the brutalities of war on the ground, American and European artists overwhelmingly portrayed the violence through the trappings of military technology—armored soldiers, guns, and bombs. Even a work like Tony Cokes’ Evil.16: (Torture.Musik), which places the viewer in a room blasting American rock music at top volume alongside neon lights and projected text, describing and simulating a method routinely used to torture Iraqi detainees, wields its high-tech political commentary like a blunt instrument.
24 APR 2020
