Di'van | A Journal of Accounts | Issue 6

N o. 6 July 2 0 1 9

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A Journal of Accounts Art | Culture | Theory

Stephanie Bailey | Jacob Dreyer | Patrick Flores | Ryan Inouye | Ian McLean Morad Montazami | Todd Reisz | Andrew Renton | Anca Rujoiu | Ala Younis

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A Journal of Accounts Art | Culture | Theory

Editor Alan Cruickshank Publisher DIVAN JOURNAL | University of NSW Art & Design Design Alan Cruickshank ISSN 2207-1563 © Copyright 2019 Alan Cruickshank in conjunction with the University of NSW Art & Design, Sydney, the authors and artists No part of this publication may be reproduced without permission d ɪˈv a n | A Journal of Accounts is published biannually by DIVAN ART JOURNAL and University of NSW Art & Design, Sydney Editorial | Subscription | Advertising inquiries: Email: artandculturejournal@gmail.com Post: University of NSW Art & Design Paddington Campus, Cnr Oxford St & Greens Rd, Paddington, SYDNEY NSW 2021 Australia The views and/or opinions expressed in d ɪˈv a n | A Journal of Accounts are those of the contributing writers and not necessarily those of the editor, DIVAN JOURNAL or the University of NSW Art & Design, Sydney divan: from the Persian dīwān, an account book; origin dēvan, booklet; also related to debir, writer; evolved through ‘a book of poems’, ‘collection of literary passages’, ‘an archive’, ‘book of accounts’ and ‘collection of sheets’ to ‘an assembly’, ‘office of accounts’, ‘custom house’, ‘government bureau’ or ‘councils chamber’, to a long, cushioned seat, which in this sense entered European languages divan presents a shift of content and meaning over time coexistent with evolving historical relationships between the East and West. d ɪˈv a n | A Journal of Accounts offers critical interpretations on contemporary art and culture, and its broader historical, socio-political and theoretical contexts, from the greater Asia (Middle East, South/Southeast/East Asia and Asia-Pacific) regions which determine historical and current socio-cultural affinities with contemporary Australian art and society

EDITORIAL ADVISORY BOARD NANCY ADAJANIA India Cultural theorist, editor, writer and curator, Mumbai STEPHANIE BAILEY Hong Kong/United Kingdom Writer and editor, Hong Kong/London THOMAS BERGHUIS The Netherlands/Australia Independent Curator and Art Historian, Leiden; Honorary Fellow, School of Culture and Communication, University of Melbourne DIANA CAMPBELL BETANCOURT Bangladesh Artistic Director, Samdani Art Foundation; Chief Curator, Dhaka Art Summit, Dhaka Artistic Director, Bellas Artes Projects, Manila FULYA ERDEMCI Turkey/The Netherlands Curator and writer, Istanbul/Amsterdam PATRICK FLORES The Philippines Professor of Art Studies, University of the Philippines, Manila BLAIR FRENCH Australia Director Curatorial & Digital, Museum of Contemporary Art Australia, Sydney ADAM GECZY Australia Senior Lecturer, Sydney College of the Arts, University of Sydney; author, artist, Sydney PAUL GLADSTON Australia Judith Neilson Chair Contemporary Art, University of New South Wales Art & Design, Sydney ALEXIE GLASS-KANTOR Australia Executive Director, Artspace, Sydney REUBEN KEEHAN Australia Curator Contemporary Asian Art, Queensland Art Gallery | Gallery of Modern Art, Brisbane VASIF KORTUN Turkey Curator, writer, Board Member, SALT, Istanbul LEE WENG CHOY Malaysia/Singapore Independent art critic, Kuala Lumpur IAN McLEAN Australia The Hugh Ramsay Chair of Australian Art, University of Melbourne, Melbourne VALI MAHLOUJI United Kingdom Curator, writer, critic and author, London GUY MANNES-ABBOTT United Kingdom Writer, essayist and critic, London CHARLES MEREWETHER Georgia Curator of Contemporary Art, National Museum of Georgia, Tbilisi NAT MULLER The Netherlands Independent curator and critic, Amsterdam DJON MUNDINE Australia Independent curator, writer and art critic, Sydney NIKOS PAPASTERGIADIS Australia Professor, School of Culture and Communication, University of Melbourne, Melbourne ROBIN PECKHAM China Independent writer, Shanghai TAN BOON HUI USA Director, Asia Society Museum, New York

Cover: Ala Younis, Tin Soldiers, 2011 Image courtesy the artist

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PHIL TINARI China Director, Ullens Centre for Contemporary Art, Beijing MURTAZA VALI USA/UAE Writer, art historian and curator, New York ALA YOUNIS Jordan Curator and artist, Amman

Accounts

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CONTENTS

16 Parergon

ALAN CRUICKSHANK

18 Making Space: (Re)Writing (Art) History Now: Who Does It, How, and Where?

STEPHANIE BAILEY

88 Michael Rakowitz: A Museum Without Walls For Baghdad MORAD MONTAZAMI

26 Global China: ‘With Universal Characteristics’

98 Crude Ètat

40 South by Southeast: A Curatorial Proposition

110 Ala Younis: Moving Images

48 The Aboriginal Memorial and the Militarisation of Australian History

120 Al Bahithun The (Re)searchers

62 Passages of Stillness: The Ethics of Landscape and Remembering in Shaun Gladwell’s 1000 Horses

131 Secret Keepers, Treasure Guardians, Custodians of the Book

TODD REISZ

JACOB DREYER

RYAN INOUYE

PATRICK FLORES

IAN McLEAN

ALA YOUNIS

ANCA RUJOIU

ANDREW RENTON

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IMAGE NOTATIONS

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Our Blissful Souvenirs NUR KOÇAK SE P T E M BE R 3 - DEC E M BE R 2 9

SALT Beyoğlu - SALT Gal ata

SALT founded by Garanti BBVA saltonline.org Free entrance

Viv re, 1974 , oi l on c a nvas, 162 x 130 c m

Opening September 10, 2019

XIAO Z E XIE : O BJE C T S O F E VID E N CE WANG D O NG L ING: INK IN M O T ION Asia Society Museum 725 Park Ave. (at 70th St.) New York City AsiaSociety.org/NY

IN FOCUS: LAKSHMI Xiaoze Xie. Chinese Library No. 66 (detail), 2018. Oil on canvas. H. 48 x W. 72 in. (102 x 183 cm).

Courtesy of the artist and Chambers Fine Art. Photograph courtesy of the artist.

Art is knowledge.

Asia Art Archive is a catalyst for new ideas that enrich our understanding of the world through the collection, creation, and sharing of knowledge around recent art in Asia.

www.aaa.org.hk

Asia Art Archive 11/F Hollywood Center 233 Hollywood Road Sheung Wan, Hong Kong T. +852 2844 1112 E. info@aaa.org.hk

AsiaArtArchive aaa.org.hk Opening hours Monday-Saturday, 10am-6pm

Image: Echo Morgan, ‘Delete’, 2018, performance documentation, courtesy the artist. Photo: Jamie Baker

CONTRIBUTORS

Stephanie Bailey is London/Hong Kong-based Senior Editor of Ibraaz, a contributing editor for Art Papers and LEAP, Editor-at-Large Ocula.com, and a member of the Naked Punch Editorial Committee. She also writes regularly for Artforum International, and Yishu Journal of Contemporary Chinese Art, and is the curator of the Conversations and Salon Program, Art Basel in Hong Kong, where she was born and raised Jacob Dreyer is a writer and editor based in Shanghai; having been educated at the University of London and New York University, he is employed by Palgrave as the senior editor for politics and economics in East Asia. He’s recently written for the New York Times and Modern Weekly and has been interviewed about Chinese urbanism for the Australian Broadcasting Corporation Patrick Flores is Manila-based Professor, Department of Art Studies, University of the Philippines and Curator of the Vargas Museum; curated South by Southeast, Philippine Pavilion,Venice Biennale, 2015; co-curator Under Construction: New Dimensions in Asian Art, 2000 and Gwangju Biennale (Position Papers), 2008; among his publications are Remarkable Collection: Art, History, and the National Museum, 2006 and Past Peripheral: Curation in Southeast Asia, 2008; member of the Guggenheim Museum’s Asian Art Council, 2011 & 2014; co-edited with Joan Kee the Southeast Asian issue for Third Text, 2011; Guest Scholar Getty Research Institute, Los Angeles, 2014; Artistic Director 2019 Singapore Biennale: Every Step in the Right Direction Ryan Inouye is a curator at the Sharjah Art Foundation; organised the solo exhibition, Ala Younis: Steps Toward the Impossible 2018-19; associate curator, 2014 Sharjah Biennial, assistant curator/curatorial assistant, New Museum New York, 2012 New Museum Triennial: The Ungovernables, and Museum as Hub initiative, an international partnership of art organisations in Cairo, Eindhoven, Mexico City, New York and Seoul, 2010-13; curatorial assistant REDCAT, Los Angeles, 2006-10; has written on the work of Abraham Cruzvillegas, Iman Issa, Steffani Jemison, Rayyane Tabet and Apichatpong Weerasethakul; holds an MRes in Curatorial/Knowledge, Department of Visual Cultures at Goldsmiths, University of London

Ian McLean is the Hugh Ramsay Chair of Australian Art History, University of Melbourne; has published extensively on Australian art and particularly indigenous art, including Indigenous Archives The making and Unmaking of Aboriginal Art (with Darren Jorgensen), UWA Publishing, 2017; Rattling Spears A History of Indigenous Australian Art, Reaktion Books, 2016; Double Desire: Transculturation and Indigenous Contemporary Art, Cambridge Scholars Publishing, 2014; How Aborigines Invented the Idea of Contemporary Art: White Aborigines Identity Politics in Australian Art, Power Publications, 2011 and The Art of Gordon Bennett, Craftsman House, 1996 Morad Montazami is an art historian, publisher and curator. As a director of Zamân Books & Curating, he is committed to transnational studies of Arab, Asian and African modernities; has published several essays on artists such as Zineb Sedira, Walid Raad, Latif al-Ani, Bahman Mohassess, Michael Rakowitz, Hamed Abdalla, Jeremy Deller, Francis Alÿs and Éric Baudelaire; curator Volumes Fugitifs: Faouzi Laatiris et l’institut national des beaux-arts de Tétouan, Musée Mohamed VI d’art moderne et contemporain, Rabat, 2016; Baghdad Mon Amour, Institut des cultures d’Islam, Paris, 2018; and Mohamed Melehi and the Casablanca Art School, The Mosaic Rooms, London, 2019 Andrew Renton is Professor of Curating, Goldsmiths, University of London; has curated many international exhibitions, including the first Manifesta, Rotterdam 1996, Browser in Vancouver 1997 and Tate London 1998, Total Object Complete with Missing Parts, Glasgow, 2001, Stay Forever and Ever and Ever, South London Gallery, 2007, Come, Come, Come into my World, Lisbon, 2007 and the first ArtTLV Biennial in Tel Aviv, 2008; founding Director of Marlborough Contemporary Gallery, London, 2012-17; author and editor of articles, books and monographs on art; jury member 2006 Turner Prize; trustee of several arts organisations such as Showroom and Drawing Room; has advised numerous European collections, museums and institutions, including the British Government Art Collection; most recently he has been involved in the establishment of Goldsmiths Centre for Contemporary Art

Todd Reisz is an Amsterdam-based architect and writer, whose work focuses on the cities of the Arabian Peninsula, from both historical and contemporary perspectives. Since 2012 he has been a regularly visiting faculty member at Yale School of Architecture; most recently as the Louis I. Kahn Visiting Assistant Professor in Design. In 2020 his book Showpiece: How Architecture Made Dubai will be published by Stanford University Press; he is co-editing a book with Sultan Sooud Al Qassemi about Sharjah’s modern architecture and the cultural landscape in which it is rooted; his work has been featured in several Venice Architecture Biennales, Sharjah Biennial 13 and publications such as The Guardian, Perspecta, Log, Jadaliyya, Journal of Urban History, International Journal of Middle East Studies, Architectural Design, Artforum, Volume and ARCH+ Anca Rujoiu is a curator and editor based in Singapore and Timișoara, Romania; exhibitions curator and head of publications NTU Centre for Contemporary Art Singapore, 2013-18; co-editor of Place. Labour.

Capital (NTU CCA Singapore and Mousse Publishing), 2018; since 2010 member of the curatorial initiative FormContent; co-curator of Collective Fictions, one of the selected projects in Nouvelles Vagues 2013, a program

by Palais de Tokyo, Paris, dedicated to young curators; with Maria Lind, co-curator of the Art Encounters Biennial,Timișoara, 2019 Ala Younis is a research-based artist and curator from Amman, Jordan who trained as an architect. Younis initiates journeys in archives and narratives, and reinterprets collective experiences that have collapsed into personal ones. Through research, she builds collections of objects, images, information, narratives, and notes on why/how people tell their stories.

Her practice is based on found material, and on creating materials when they cannot be found or when they do not exist. Her exhibitions include Home Works 5, 2010, Istanbul Biennial, 2011, Gwangju Biennial, 2012 and Plan for Greater Baghdad, 56th Venice Biennale All the World’s Futures, 2015; curated Kuwait’s first national pavilion at 55th Venice Biennale (2013), and is a contributing editor at Ibraaz. Her exhibition Ala Younis: Steps Towards the Impossible was presented by the Sharjah Art Foundation, 2018-19

ALAN CRUICKSHANK

Parergon

This year is the centenary of the Paris Peace Conference in 1919, the Treaty of Versailles being one of the treaties formulated as part of the peace negotiations at the end of the First World War. The Treaty of Versailles ended the state of war between the Allied powers and Germany, laying the guilt for the war on “the aggression of Germany and her allies”, one of which was Turkey, or more accurately, the Ottoman Empire. Far from Paris and Versailles, one of the beneficiaries of the Conference was Japan, at the expense of another ally, China.

At the beginning of the First World War China took control of the German-administered Shandong Peninsula. In 1915 Japan, which had joined the Allied Triple Entente in 1914 with the provision that it could take over Germany’s Pacific territories, demanded control of the previously German-influenced territories in China, the corrupt if not weak Anfu government capitulating to the Japanese threat of force. In 1917 China declared war on Germany, with the condition that Shandong be returned to Chinese control, and the presumption that the Allies would win the war. The Treaty of Versailles Article 156 in fact saw administration of the German concession of Shandong transferred to Japan, following its prior demands. Statseman Vi Kyuin Wellington Koo refused to sign the treaty, the Chinese delegation at the Paris Peace Conference being the only nation that did not sign the Treaty of Versailles at the signing ceremony. An extreme sense of betrayal and humiliation led to major demonstrations of hostility, and nationalism, especially the May Fourth Movement, which precipitated the fall of the incipient Chinese Republic’s government, and prejudicing relations with the West.

The May Fourth Movement was a student political, cultural, anti-imperialist movement that emerged in Beijing, advanced by what was perceived as their government’s ineffective response to the Treaty of Versailles, Japanese territorial aggression and Western powers’ indifference towards China. On 4 May, 1919, thousands of Beijing university students protested in Tiananmen Square at the Gate of Heavenly Peace. Following arrests and other altercations news of the demonstrations spread l

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quickly throughout the country, with protests being duplicated in other major cities. Workers and merchants joined the demonstrations, such that after several weeks the Chinese economy was nearly crippled. Under intense public pressure, the Beijing government acceded to the protesters’ demands, with the entire cabinet resigning (leading to the Chinese delegation in Paris unwilling to sign the Treaty). The May Fourth and its associated New Culture Movement introduced an anti-imperialistic, patriotic mood into Chinese life, decisively retreating from its cultural past, encouraging a shift towards political mobilisation and a revolution in social attitudes towards a mass base, away from traditional intellectual and political elites (while generating multiple proponents who opposed its anti-traditionalist directives), thus creating a precarious political landscape for the next thirty years.

Another Paris Peace Conference treaty, that of Sèvres (signed in 1920), marked the beginning of the partitioning and dismemberment of the Ottoman Empire (c. 1299-1923). Non-Turkish territory was given over to Allied administration, notably the creation of the British Mandate for Palestine and the French Mandate for Syria and The Lebanon; France, Greece and Italy established “zones of influence”, along with the creation of international, Kurdish and Armenian zones. Constantinople, now Istanbul was occupied by the Allies. The Ottoman Sultanate was abolished in 1922. Much like in China, the terms of this treaty incited hostility and nationalist feeling amongst the Turks, igniting the Turkish War of Independence, with Mustafa Kemal Ataturk leading the Turkish National Movement to defeat the Allied proxy armies in 1923. At Lausanne that year, another treaty ended the conflict, Turkey giving up all claims to what was left of the Ottoman Empire for Allied recognition of its sovereignty within its new borders. The collapse and partitioning of the Ottoman Empire led to the rise of Western Powers in the Middle East and brought about the creation of the modern Arab World, and its share of globally felt travails since.

While the expanse of postmodernism has determined an industry of critical judgement upon the moral relativism of assumptions of Enlightenment rationalism, and centuries of European colonialism and imperialism (if not all Western principles and values), focusing especially on the consequences of the rule and exploitation of colonised people, and the social, cultural and political narratives surrounding both coloniser and colonised, commensurate dissection of other historically parallel empires seems to be less abraded; apparently such obloquy being only of a unidirectional compulsion. In contrast, as an example, the Ottoman Empire, though well catalogued by East and West, has not sustained the same level of critical opprobrium by either, nor with much inclination to do so (think Edward Said; and if too penetrating, such an approach is currently legislated against as “insulting” nation and national identity; think Orhan Pamuk, 2005); a similar but infinitely more repressive omnipresence affects the post-1989 Chinese Dragon; compellingly, both Turkey and China are hankering for their halcyon days pre-Western hegemony.

The events of 1919 reverberate in their centenary. A resonant line can be drawn from the events in Beijing on 4 May that year to the Communist Revolution and the proclamation of the People’s Republic of China thirty years later in 1949; to 4 June forty years later, again at Tiananmen Square; and again another thirty years later in the streets of Hong Kong. The Treaty of Lausanne (rather than those of Versailles and Sèvres) presents a similar sonorous line to ongoing events in the Middle East. Turkish President Erdogan challenged its covenants in 2017 and 2018, stating “over time all treaties need a revision,” while the principles of a fifty-year constitutional document signed between Great Britain and the People’s Republic of China in 1997 continue to be eroded. This year the Venice Biennale proposed “may you live in interesting times” (supposedly a Chinese curse).

History underscores The Contemporary.

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Making Space: (Re)Writing (Art) History Now: Who Does It, How, and Where?

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This paper—which has been edited and expanded—was delivered as part of a panel titled, ‘(Re)writing (art) history now: who does it, how, and where?’ at the 2018 Salzburg International Summer Academy of Fine Arts Global Academy II, ‘Examples of Transcultural Exchange’. To respond to the title of the symposium, ‘Examples of Transcultural Exchange’ and the theme of this panel, I will draw on two case studies derived from personal experience, starting with one of the core tenets that defined the editorial approach of Ibraaz, an online publishing platform focused on visual cultures emanating from in and around the Middle East and North Africa. Ibraaz actively published from 2011 to 2017, with mainly essays, conversations and artist projects commissioned around six-month and one-year platforms. These platforms were defined by research questions that included, for example, “What role can the archive play in developing and sustaining a critical and culturally located art history?” and “How do we productively map the historical and contemporary relationships that exist between North Africa, the Middle East and the Global South?”1 Editorially, Ibraaz operated with one key idea: that the artist’s practice comes first. This was one of the first things that founding editor-in-chief Anthony Downey told me when I joined the team as an editor in 2012. The idea that practice comes first was especially important when Ibraaz was launched, as uprisings unfolded across the Arab world, starting in December 2010 in Tunis, where the Kamel Lazaar Foundation, which founded and supports Ibraaz, is based.

There is of course a decolonial rationale to this methodology. Ibraaz functioned on the principle that an artist’s practice comes first in order to counter the colonial gaze—the kind that reduces an artist to a mouthpiece for another agenda, be it diplomatic, commercial, or political.

This is something that happened a lot when artists from the Arab world began to be consistently framed as spokespeople for the so-called Arab Spring, itself a term inscribed with colonialist dynamics. The decolonial position, in this sense, would be to have the art work—and by association the artist—speak for itself, and to follow the nuances of that art work, not to mention the considerations of its maker. This position supposes that there is no frame to begin with—or one that is not yet discernably clear—while acknowledging the tendency to frame as an impulse that drives that logic.

This problem of framing is something that Ibraaz continuously navigated; a journey that culminated in Platform 010, Ibraaz’s final one-year publishing cycle before pausing, for which a simple question was posed: where to now? As this tenth platform progressed, it felt like Ibraaz had come to a point where it became necessary to stop in order to reflect on an intensive number of years spent mediating a constant flow of responses to urgent and timely questions that were related to the regions of the Middle East and North Africa, but not limited to those geographies either—from the current conditions of institutional practice, to the role of the globalised cultural economy on the production of contemporary visual culture. By the time Platform 010 ended, it also became clear that the ulterior motive to dismantle the regional frame without losing sight of it through the platform’s work had been achieved; Ibraaz was no longer a regional publication, so much as a platform operating from a different centre of gravity—global in its own right.

All of which relates to the title of this panel: ‘(Re)writing (art) history now: who does it, how, and where?’ Through the example of Ibraaz, everyone who contributed to the production of what is now a free and online archive of content charting the development of visual cultures in and around the Arab world over a very intense period of time—a history, you might call it—wrote, re-wrote, or challenged a history, or histories, in some way. A very clear example would be Shiva Balaghi’s essay, ‘Against the Market’, which refuted the common dismissal of Shirin Neshat’s work as a result of her

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market success, and the tropes that—as it has been said—have become, since Neshat first started using them, passé; thus limiting any discourse around her work to a very narrow set of parameters.2 In so many instances, the stories our contributors told, or wanted to tell, resisted ghettoising narratives in favour of readings that sought to open up meanings and particularities so as to link contexts and visual cultures with others. Artist Monira Al Qadiri, for instance, wrote an essay in 2015 about Keio University Professor Dr. Toshihiko Izutsu’s 1958 translation of the Qur’an, and what it taught her about Islam, describing how Izutsu’s lecture-turned-book, Islamic Culture (1991), led her to the conclusion that “Islam is abstract expressionism through poetic illustration.”3 That same year, artist Anahita Razmi presented a project that drew on Iranian film director Mohsen Makhmalbaf’s poetic, Sokout (The Silence) (1998), which narrates the life of a young blind boy enthralled by sounds and haunted by his landlord’s knock on the door; John Cage’s 4’33” (1952); and one particular instruction from Yoko Ono’s Instruction Pieces (1963), with typed letters on a piece of paper instructing the reader to “whisper all your secret thoughts to a pachinko ball”, a ball used in Japanese gaming parlours. These references converged into a reflection on the movement of Iranian men to Japan and back in the 1980s and the 1990s—a result of the economic impact of the 1979 Islamic Revolution, the Iran-Iraq war, and a mutual visa exemption agreement between Japan and Iran which lasted from 1974 to 1992—and a rumination on active silence and relevant noise when it comes to the politics of migration and assimilation.4

Such narratives opened up pathways to new ones, while simultaneously drawing unexpected—or unsung—connections. In one conversation, Hong Kong artist Leung Chi Wo spoke to Robin Peckham about a work he produced for the 4th Marrakesh Biennale in 2012, So I don’t really know sometimes if it’s because of culture (2012), a video installation whose soundtrack consists of a dialogue that was written based on the experience of two Moroccan women who lived in Hong Kong.5 In another discussion, artist Samah Hijawi interviewed curators Rasha Salti and Khristine Khouri about their extensive research project around the International Exhibition for Palestine in 1978, organised by the Palestinian Liberation Organisation in Beirut—a reflection of an international network of solidarity for Palestine that stretched from Europe to Asia.6

With so many trajectories, Ibraaz very much felt like a way-finding mission. The platform’s structure, from the foundation that funded it to the editorial approach, facilitated as free a flow of testimonies as possible—the idea being that the end result would be an archive that could double as a document of the present, and an ongoing conversation in the future.

But this fact does not deny that the platform didn’t come without its issues. One thing about Ibraaz’s position that was naturally treated with suspicion was that this was a project funded by a single foundation created by a private individual, which raised questions surrounding the agenda such a project might follow, or perpetuate. In response, I can say that the Kamel Lazaar Foundation did not influence any editorial decisions, nor did the editorial team ever really engage with the Foundation at all. Likewise, Ibraaz’s editorial approach was hands-off where it needed to be.

Our main priority was to facilitate the expression and articulation of ideas and testimonies that texture understandings of present events, art histories, and artistic practices—at times even challenging them.

In many ways, our structure was designed to feel like there was no structure, which actually brings to mind Adam Smith’s description of the “invisible hand of capitalism,” by which a free market ends up regulating itself. Which is to say that none of the freedoms I outlined above justifies the uncomfortable fact that Ibraaz was funded by a single foundation, though the autonomy that the l

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Making Space: (Re)Writing (Art) History Now: Who Does It, How, and Where?

platform enjoyed does say something of the various registers of complicity that exist when it comes to the politics of creative labour in the realm of art and culture, and how this relates to the various levels of decolonial work being undertaken by individuals working in the field, not to mention the interests that intersect along the way. This relates to another practical example of a platform that acts, in some ways, as a mediator of some kind of historical rewriting—the Conversations program at Art Basel in Hong Kong, a fair lodged deep in the belly of the global art market, located in a city with a history as a British colony-slash-freeport, and now an ongoing capitalist—now possibly capitocommunist—experiment under the thumb of the Chinese state.

The Conversations program in Hong Kong, for which I am curator, is by all accounts complicit, as am I, in the centralising dynamics of Art Basel as a global enterprise, in which clear hierarchies exist. In fact, the Guerrilla Girls performed a basic head count at the Hong Kong fair in 2018—part of their participation in Asia Art Archive’s ‘Women Make Art History’ program—and out of the 248 galleries showing in that year’s edition, fifty percent of which came from or have spaces within the Asia region, they found that seventy-six percent of total artists shown were men, thirtyseven percent of the galleries participating showed zero women artists, and twenty-nine percent showed only one woman.7 Of course, such numbers are not unique to Hong Kong and are indicative of a much larger global issue with regards to gender representation within the visual arts; and those in the field do what they can in whatever position they find themselves to challenge the status quo, if they are so inclined. In 2018, for example, when Art Basel Hong Kong’s Conversations was made free to the public for the first time, we counted a tally—not included in the Guerrilla Girls count—of nearly seventy women speakers to some fifty men on the schedule: a constellation of people from across Asia and beyond, who came together to share their knowledge of working in the culture industry, not only with each other, but with the audience.

Conversations is devised in close collaboration with Asia director, Adeline Ooi, the Art Basel team, and the network of practitioners who are engaged in the Art Basel network. At every point, we have tried to remain conscious of the program’s position as an economically instrumentalised site of cultural discourse produced from a Western—and capitalist (market platform)—structure that does not come untainted with colonial dynamics, when taking into account the fair format’s relationship to the imperialist spectacle of the World’s Fairs of yesteryear.8 At the same time, we are cognisant of the unique position Art Basel Hong Kong has as a global art fair positioned in Asia: a region that has been fast forwarding from a tumultuous twentieth century and remapping itself in the process, with the histories of the Cold War converging in the city, once hailed as the perfect embodiment of freemarket capitalism and now becoming absorbed by a contemporary communist state.

As a post-colonial city with an identity that has traditionally been predicated on being a portal between East and West, Hong Kong is now grappling with another form of colonisation by a new twenty-first century superpower with global ambitions. This context feeds into the idea of Conversations as a space where discussions can explore what lies ahead in a world where the West has become decentred, by bringing together cultural workers—who all engaged in seeking out what has been, what is, and what might be possible through their work—into dialogue with one another.

In general, the Conversations program occupies a peculiar space in Art Basel’s portfolio of sectors—in many ways it is the public arm of its three fairs (Basel, Hong Kong and Miami), with simultaneous translation available for all talks, which are recorded, often live-streamed, and available on YouTube within days of the event, sometimes even hours. But this does not defend what Art Basel as a global enterprise represents on a larger scale, given the impact the fair model

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has had on local art scenes, and the hierarchies it produces through the creation of a global network and an associated global class. Simply, the framing of Conversations as a public space—given that it is an un-ticketed open platform within the event itself—acknowledges the fact that this view is but one perspective of an infinite number of others that apply to a space like Art Basel, not limited to the issues that come with the market and the multitude of stakeholders that are connected to its global enterprise.

The Conversations program is where the space of the art fair can expand beyond the market, while also honouring the ancient concept of a market as a site where not only money is exchanged, but also knowledge and politics. The art fair, in this light, is a potent space where cultural traditions, politics, and histories cross-hatch openly and explicitly for the short period that the event runs: an overwhelming cross-section, or microcosm, of a wider world that, when the art fair closes, remains networked by an intricate system we know as the “art world” which is ultimately a transglobal —though by no means cohesive and singular—community bound by the idea of art.

To that end, if I were to apply the question of this panel to Art Basel—who (re)writes history, where and how—I would not say Art Basel writes history, but its structure certainly facilitates the production of it, taking into account that history is in fact a fractal word whose singular form encapsulates a plurality. This is very much the logic that has driven the development of the Conversations space in Hong Kong, which acknowledges the great opportunity this platform offers to not only reflect on the narratives that have defined the world through the many relations that have brought peoples together and apart, but to try to transcend them.

One talk that encapsulates this approach was ‘Decolonising “Ethnography”: Contemporary Representations’, a panel staged in 2018 with artists who have consistently engaged with decolonisation in their practice. Moderated by curator Qinyi Lim, speakers included Charwei Tsai, Yee I-Lann, Gala Porras-Kim, and Lisa Reihana, who represented New Zealand at the 57th Venice Biennale in 2017 with a vivid audio-visual re-telling of Captain James Cook’s voyages based on the early-nineteenth century French scenic wallpaper Les Sauvages de la Mer Pacifique (1804-05).9 There was a great moment in the question and answer session when someone from the audience asked why no men were included in the lineup, which was fair to ask, and I remember thinking, why should there have been? Sometimes it’s that simple, especially when thinking about the demographics that have dominated the study of ethnography for so long.

But it goes deeper than that when taking into account what Cultural Studies Professor Fred Inglis has said about culture being the study of power. In the Foucaultian sense, power is a material force that is produced, maintained, and imposed by a consenting body of individuals, values, and systems. By that definition, art is a domain where you are not only able to study power, but also participate in its mediation, fragmentation, valuation, circulation and renegotiation while observing its effects, and perhaps even affecting them in turn—sometimes in the most subtle of ways.

In fact, each artist on the decolonising ethnography panel described certain strategies and tactics that focused on co-opting languages, systems, and forms of defining in order to tell more nuanced stories—a common thread among those who contributed to Ibraaz, too. As Malaysian artist Yee I-Lann explained when talking about “the violence of admin,” her concern is not so much history as it is about the tools and methods of power and how it is learned,10 because that is what it really amounts to —representation and the struggle to participate in the production of its meaning. In this field, keeping things open enough for discussion is what counts, especially when the space for open discussion—as is the case in Hong Kong—is not always guaranteed. l

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Colombian-American artist Gala Porras-Kim touched on this idea, too, when thinking about decolonising ethnography and how this idea applies to her research, and I am both quoting and paraphrasing her here. It is not about “writing history not from a top down view… such as male, or global North… but from an individual, domestic perspective”—“a democratic way of looking at our shared history” that acknowledges the fact that “the representation of history is almost impossible to achieve,” given the multitude of views constituting historical experience.11 The suggestion here is that while a representation of history is almost impossible, a democratic attempt at knowing—and indeed, producing—history is.

This brings me to my final response to the question that this panel asks. To this I would say, all the components of the art world participate in the unwieldy and ongoing discourse we call art history, and by that virtue they all contribute to its writing. It’s a predictable answer, but that doesn’t make it less true.

This is the third text of a trilogy on decolonial practice, following ‘A World Affair: Biennials, Art Fairs and The 1851 Great Exhibition’, di’van | A Journal of Accounts Issue 5, 2018, pp. 20-33, and ‘Now Where?

On Navigating Without a Compass’, di’van | A Journal of Accounts Issue 4, 2018, pp. 32-45.

Notes 1 See www.ibraaz.org 2

Shiva Balaghi, ‘Against the Market: The Art of Shirin Neshat’, Ibraaz Platform 010, 25 September 2016; https://www.ibraaz.org/essays/164

3

Monira Al Qadiri, ‘How Toshihiko Made Me Understand Islam’, Ibraaz Platform 008, 26 February 2015; https://www.ibraaz.org/essays/119

4

Anahita Razmi, ‘Some Pachinko Pieces: On Silence and Noise in Times of Crisis’, Ibraaz Platform 010, 11 September 201; https://www.ibraaz. org/projects/142 5 ‘Is This about Culture? Leung Chi Wo in conversation with Robin Peckham’, Ibraaz Platform 008, 6 November 2014; https://www.ibraaz.org/ interviews/149 6 ‘Past Disquiet: Rasha Salti and Kristine Khouri in conversation with Samah Hijawi’, Ibraaz Platform 009, 30 July 2015; https://www.ibraaz.org/ interviews/169 7

Lisa Movius with additional reporting from Alec Evans, ‘No end to gender woes? Time’s not up in Asia’, The Art Newspaper, 29 March 2018; https://www.theartnewspaper.com/feature/no-end-to-gender-woes-time-s-not-up-in-asia

8 See Stephanie Bailey, ‘A World Affair: Biennials, Art Fairs and The 1851 Great Exhibition’, di’van | A Journal of Accounts Issue 5, 2018, pp. 21-33 9 For further reading on this work by Lisa Reihana, see Andrew Wood, ‘What Comes Over the Seas In Pursuit of Venus’ and Lana Lopesi, ‘Indigenous Futurisms, New Media and Contemporary Assertions of Indigeneity’, di’van | A Journal of Accounts Issue 4, 2018, pp. 120-129 and pp. 130-137 respectively 10

‘Decolonising “Ethnography”: Contemporary Representations’, Art Basel YouTube, 30 March 2018; https://www.youtube.com/ watch?v=dJucLbvCW1U

11

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Global China: ‘With Universal Characteristics’ The realm of freedom… begins only where labour… determined by necessity and mundane considerations ceases.1 LOSING A PASSPORT IN BEIJING SOUTH RAILWAY STATION What does it mean for the universal spirit—what Hegel called the “Weltgeist”—to move from the West to China? In the context of the supposed collapse of political liberalism in the United States of America and an atmosphere of high tension, not to mention propaganda about how China is polluted, Orwellian, and undermining the civilisational foundations of the West, why would any humans or cultural institutions leave there for China? As an American intellectual living in Shanghai, my economic wellbeing is directly related to disseminating the ideas developed by philosophers and economists who work for this totalitarian state. I benefit in access to opportunities and capital by my existence here, specifically those that people doing the same function that I do, in quasi-democratic societies such as the USA or United Kingdom, do not. In China, the land of philosopher kings, I work in publishing—there are fine hotels, travel, relationships, and friendships that have come into my life. I’ve been elevated to some sort of minor aristocratic post within this society that remains deeply feudal. My role as an intellectual in a society that elevates discourse and writing to a politically significant role has granted me access to experiences and knowledge that I would never have in the USA.

Nonetheless, I periodically indulge in narcissistic episodes of guilty conscience; on one recent such episode, I took my brooding to Beijing’s Beihai Park. The frozen lake reminded me of the mental landscapes of ‘pure land’ Buddhism (in which one abandons the self as a compound of desire and anger); later that same day, I went to the National Art Museum of China which was showing some African masks. I reflected that Chinese investments in Africa, sometime characterised as colonial, must necessarily be accompanied by such exhibitions; the economic base is articulated by the cultural superstructure in a closed circuit that gathers energy and capital to run back and forth, stroking certain privileged persons with warmth along the way. In fairness, I found the exhibition to be very good, and was impressed that on a Saturday morning the museum was filled with schoolchildren sketching the masks, which were presented respectfully, exactly as Chinese relics are, if not more attractively. (For example, the exhibition was much superior to the one of Chinese relics in the provincial museum of Sichuan, which I saw in December 2018; better attended, better lit, better taken care of).

In truth, though, as I speak to Chinese citizens who work in media or academia, I’ve become aware that although these sectors are privileged, many of the specific entitlements which are mine are intrinsic to my American passport. The Chinese have no choice, really; their wages and ability to negotiate conditions proceed accordingly, as a caged bird to its owner; for example, the condition

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of working in culture is residing in Beijing and accepting the power of the government that is there.

They are not able, as I am, to float from place to place, from Beijing to New York to London at will.

But, as a bird that lives in a cage perpetually open by choice, and because I enjoy the food which is regularly dispensed (the food I get is better), the owner wouldn’t want me to fly out to look for berries in the wild. My salary is higher than equivalent Chinese workers, I am treated with great respect by significant Chinese thinkers with links to the government and policy system, in a way that is neither true of my American colleagues in America, nor of my Chinese colleagues in China.

While it would appear that I am comparatively free, such freedom is entirely the product of my passport, and the military and economic power upon which that rests. Because of this, I discuss with agitation the conditions in Chinese prison camps while sitting in fine restaurants in the capital, rather than ever being worried about being placed in such centres. I am not sure what exactly I should do about this, but doing nothing is implicit acceptance and to a degree, complicity with the power structure, or rather, structures—oppressive economic and political hierarchies exist in the USA as well as in China—and my good fortune is largely the result of causing the two to coincide in a fruitful way.

In the Beijing South Railway Station, before boarding my train, I discovered that I couldn’t find my passport. I was immediately plunged into great anxiety: would I have to somehow stay in Beijing? Would I find my passport or get a new one in time for a trip to Vietnam planned in a few days? Abruptly, I experienced the horror which many Chinese friends of mine must have encountered; yes, the Starbucks is still there, my money and nice shirts still there, the girl in Shanghai I have a crush on is still there, every privilege of the warm and beautiful cage was unchanged, but the cage door has been slammed shut, in my mind, if only for a thankfully brief moment. If I was thrown into such disarray by being possibly unable to take a vacation due to my own incompetence, how must it feel to be a Chinese intellectual who, as a musician in Wuhan sadly told me, “was born in the wrong country”?

I did not find my passport, but the station attendants searched their computer system and put me on the train regardless—another instance in which China’s information and surveillance system has benefited, rather than disadvantaged me. (If my passport were to be located it would be entirely thanks to CCTV cameras, police officers, and citizens, the latter forced to become ‘good Samaritans’ because of China’s pervasive social credit system). As I sped through barren fields and smokestacks, sitting in a comfortable fast train, my momentary discombobulation resulted in a feeling of nervousness, agitation—flushed—in the way that the romantic heroes of nineteenth century literature—Stendahl’s Julien Sorel, for example, or Lermontov’s Pechorin—might have; but in the twenty-first century romantic heroes do not fight ‘the world’, but themselves, as mediated by their passports and their mobile phones. I knew that my passport, that battered trinket filled with optimistic lies about the freedom that supposedly exists in America, was sadly languishing in a coffee shop bathroom or some place like that. I could only hope that somehow, the omnipotent Chinese state would return my passport to me in Shanghai. This God comes with a sword, for the migrant workers which it evicts, the Muslims it incarcerates, or the intellectuals it stifles. But for me it’s likely to correct my mistakes—as an artificial intelligence is meant to—and, hopefully, locate my passport with a CCTV camera, deliver it via a synchronised urban computer system, and send it to me by way of a man working for low wages as a motorcycle deliveryman.

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ASIA: A PROPHECY For several hundred years, the English-speaking middle class, in search of validation and reassurance, has pretended that its civilisation is a universal one, and created institutions to match—banks, universities, museums and opium trading companies. It was a nice run while it lasted, but now it’s over. The subjectivity it thinks of as ‘universal’, locating it in both time (modern) and space (global) is actually reflective of economic structures that emerged in England in early modernity.

Capitalism divided a collective and religious English-speaking people into individual units, even as (with enclosures and the nascent property system) it divided the land. England’s best minds of that time devised landscape painting (Turner), poetry (Blake) or aesthetic critique (Ruskin) that reflected several things; one, that the subject capable of expressing ‘universal art’ is not universal, but specifically located in time, space and economic structures; two, that within even that time, space etc., it is a minority position, its status not quite ruling class but above working class—they called this “middle class”. Bourgeois art and the British Empire were created by slave labour and land enclosures (as Marx explains in Das Kapital, in his chapter on primitive accumulation), and the sinews and articulation points of our art history—painters, thinkers, writers, even central London itself, or settlements from Virginia to New South Wales—the latter a society (of people who thought of themselves as English) which could have collapsed inwards in revolution, or collapsed outwards into a global empire.

Our term for the path to universal consciousness, for the apprehension and experience of all things, is “economy”, from the Greek “oikonomia”, a portmanteau word combining “oikos” (household) and “nemein” (management), but our ‘homeland’ has become claustrophobic and void of emotional content; there’s not enough room for our existence and illusions to coexist on planet earth anymore. London and New York, as well as the provincial capitals, once were exciting, free spaces filled with imagined futures. Today, they are oppressive terrains that we circle around, in a predatory, culturally cannibalistic spiral of rearticulating and reappropriating previously made statements, rather than iterating anything new. It is important to recognise that the problems Western societies are currently experiencing reflect very real ecological and material realities; we’ve had our fun, but the neighbors hate us now; our conflation of universal values and military conquests worked for a while, until it didn’t anymore. Taking the broad view, our historical role as colonial administrators, from British trading house Jardine Matheson, to the biochemist, historian and sinologist Joseph Needham, to the officers of the Chinese Maritime Customs, has been an unlatching of the door for the Chinese people to enter a new plateau of consciousness—from our brief time in the centre, we are headed back to the periphery. Marxist thought, the child of the British Library, has found a powerful adulthood in China. What is the psychic experience of dislocation for English native speakers who are more or less realistic about the history of its civilisation, and how will contemporary artists iterate these phenomena? Will the middle class, sorry, ‘universal subjectivity’, relocate to China? “In the beginning, all the world was America,” John Locke wrote in Two Treatises of Government, in 1689. In the end, it’s going to be Shenzhen.

THE PANOPTICON VERSUS NEW SOUTH WALES The Chinese have had many experiences of nomadic clans invading them, such as the Mongolians and the Manchurians, and slowly, insidiously, being integrated into their superior way of life. In his paranoid memoir The Ugly Chinaman (1992), poet, essayist and historian Bo Yang wrote that Chinese culture, which he called a “stinking soy sauce vat,” with its fleshpots and shining lights, would

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inevitably integrate any attempt to suppress it, like the vines of a plant growing disruptively over structures intended to enclose it. The agricultural and sedentary civilisation founded by the Yellow Emperor (c. 2711-2598 BCE) and his engineer Da Yu can be conquered, but it’s paradoxically unconquerable, as it integrates everything it meets into Chinese civilisational logic. There’s no reason to think that our rootless global civilisation, which lives in the shell made by the British Empire —Hong Kong, Shanghai, London, Australia, British Polo Day—will be any different. The nomads (both the Mongol hordes and the English), have no history; they only have a geography. Former English colonies such as Virginia, New South Wales, or even Singapore today face a contradiction in which the material base of the lifestyles the inhabitants expect might only be granted by the Chinese economy and the comfortable vassalage that it offers. The logic of the global economy and its permanent expansion means that we need the Chinese population more than the Chinese state needs us, and so it seems inevitable that we’ll sacrifice some of our sovereignty in order to access China.

At Sydney’s White Rabbit Gallery, a private museum which exhibits its collection of contemporary Chinese art, democratic subjects of Australia can observe the horrors of China, but the ecological destruction they see, the vast new cities and the money generated, was made from Australian iron ore, and much of that money has been invested in Sydney real estate. *** The historical processes by which the people of a small European island spread around the world was arduous, replete with war and conflict, the ruling class constantly evading revolutionary change.

With ‘the people’ at its backs, it confidently strode through jungles and deserts, subjugating the inhabitants it met into its own civilisational logic by way of creating ownership of their societies.

In 1992, with Anglo-Saxon social forms of capitalist democracy globally dominant, we ‘arrived’ at “the end of history”,2 but some of us felt that history—ours, and that of other people, the love affairs doomed to failure, the lunches by the waterfront, the stimulation of the unknown—was more intriguing than the suburban safety in which we ended up, a place of unremitting ugliness, aesthetic and human. We’d travelled everywhere, done everything, or so it seemed, but wherever we went, we found ourselves—and the boredom and despair of sitting quietly in a room by ourselves greeting us everywhere—at the end of history, our victory was hollow indeed, and the lords of our economy at that time set to hollowing out the category “middle class”. The colonial administrators, no longer needed, began to revert to proletarian status.

Few would say, in retrospect, that history really ended in 1992; the 1990s were more of a pause, albeit certainly not for the Chinese. Some of us, including myself, had left our suburban homelands in search of adventure, in China for example; others were wandering around those suburbs committing random acts of violence. Both attitudes are, more or less, traditional to the naval authoritarian heritage of the British Empire. The “Dasein” (existence) of the Anglo-Saxons, as the Germans bitterly observed, was a naval one;3 the world we discovered around us when we came to consciousness, or Heidegger’s “Thrownness” (Geworfenheit), was a sometimes frightening, sometimes exciting set of warm continents surrounded by water, and a homeland where it rained every day and an oppressive class structure that made life predictably miserable; on the ships which the homeland sent out, floggings and rape were routine; as they would be for the ‘natives’ we encountered. Peace, harmony; we’ve never had much use for that sort of thing. We no longer call it an Empire, but rather a “global economy”—although the format hasn’t changed much. l

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During the initial settlement of Australia, philosopher and social reformer Jeremy Bentham argued in Panopticon versus New South Wales (1812), that colonial expansion simply postponed the reckoning with the dispossessed that the English had seen in the Gordon Riots in London in 1780,4 and watched what took place in pre-Revolutionary France with its financial crisis shortly after.

For Bentham, a system of mass surveillance and control was necessary; if they just told these people to go somewhere else, eventually the ruling class would run out of somewhere-elses. Bentham was ignored, but today, that frontier has not only been terminated, it is actively receding, as the changing climate threatens our cities. An alarming consideration is that the Chinese seem to have achieved in twenty years what took the West two hundred years, and have continued at the same tempo, technically placing them in our future. The globalised, relatively ecologically sustainable albeit polluted, authoritarian system run partially by algorithm, created for their population and that of new vassal states is, if anything, a best case situation for the English-speaking world’s future (consider for example, the USSR during the process of its collapse: corruption, despoiled rural areas, falling life expectancy, allies flaking away).

F.I.L.T.H. For centuries, the Western colonisation of Asia’s economy was conducted in English, Chinese, and above all in numbers, of populations, prices of homes or land, bank accounts and opium addicts. Ultimately, the goal of this universal economy is a quest for agency, a total control of one’s environment and the persons (subjects) one encounters there—a subjectivity which is sufficiently enhanced as to become objectivity.

F.I.L.T.H: Failed-In-London-Try-Hong Kong. This 1980s joke could be a shorthand for the collective economic strategy of the West, post-Thatcher. The best and brightest—as well as the worst—were exported as colonials; all in late capitalism’s gutter, but some looking at the stars.

For these universal sorts, life felt meaningless beyond the power hierarchy. Freedom engenders anxiety for the colonial/expatriate soul. Nothing new, of course: the history of English-speaking people is a history of running away from themselves. In China, it has been confronted by a mass impossible to presume to be ‘us’, and which, partly due to not believing their own rhetoric as thoroughly as we do, seems not to care about our noble lies about poverty alleviation in Africa, climate change, the idea that whichever novel won the Booker Prize this year is actually readable, and so forth. They simply get on with building metro systems in Ethiopia, inventing 5G networks that can be installed cheaply in developing countries, and reckoning with the issues of climate change as the world’s largest emitter of greenhouse gases. We can’t digest them, and they can’t digest us; romantic souls might say that we’ve finally met our match.

BETWEEN THE WARS In 2019, it seems clear that ideological conflict between the USA and China will define global politics for years to come, with countries and individuals in Europe, Asia and the rest of the world finding their own ways to respond. For Westerners who identify as cosmopolitan, global citizens, it is disconcerting to have the foundations of one’s home nation appear to have experienced a fundamental transformation.

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Cultural institutions and the discourse of art aspire to be ‘universal’, yet in practice, human hierarchies structure these institutions. For example, although the university, the museum, or the financial market seek in different ways to organise all the world’s knowledge, art or money, they are still physically located in one city or another, and the landlords and populations adjacent benefit accordingly. In the decade since the financial crisis of 2008, during which the Chinese Keynesian stimulus of debt-driven infrastructure was widely applauded as more effective than Western austerity, Western cultural institutions that understand themselves as universal have opened franchises in Chinese cities, notably Shanghai’s West Bund, with financial incentives offered by the Chinese government; around Rmb20 billion (about US$3 billion) has already been invested in turning the former industrial area into a “cultural corridor” on the Huangpu River. Chinese cities seem to be attracting the type of populations and institutions which call themselves global but are doing so with nationalist goals in mind; perhaps the globalists were just economic mercenaries all along, and some are starting to change sides.

New York University Shanghai, for example, has had 51% of its operational budget regularly supplied by the Chinese government, with real responsibilities to the funding bodies.5 “NYU Shanghai is a Chinese university,” highlighted Chancellor Yu Lizhong.6 But what does this mean? The Centre Pompidou, currently undergoing a 100 million euro renovation, signed a deal to open a Shanghai venue at the same time as President Macron announced that China would buy French airplanes, relax tariffs on French beef, and open a nuclear waste treatment facility operated

by French Avena;7 and the Victoria and Albert Museum is working towards a franchise of sorts in Shenzhen, lured by undisclosed amounts of money and access to the Chinese ‘public’ in and out of China. “We want the V&A brand in front of the biggest audience we can think of,” said Tim Reeve, the Museum’s Deputy Director. “And if that means more Chinese visitors in South Kensington (the Museum’s London address)—great. It’s important for the UK.”8 It has been exclusively developed

by China Merchants Shekou Holding (CMSK), a division of China Merchants Group, which is stateowned but based in Hong Kong. Universities and museums inside and outside China find the highly educated, culturally sophisticated and financially well-off Chinese middle class an irresistible target; but this class is structured by, and loyal to, the Chinese government. He who pays the piper calls the tune. This need not be sinister, but some clearly feel so, with large sectors of the Western political and media platforms given to paranoid Kremlinology, alongside well-substantiated issues including repression of political dissent and ethnic minorities, air pollution, island-building and spying, and other familiar imperial patterns. Are foreigners who invest their time and creative capital in China on a mission civilisatrice, or are they useful idiots of a fascist state? “There aren’t any global museums, because it’s not part of the culture or the history of Asia or Latin America to create encyclopedic museums—that’s a European thing,” observed Michael Govan of LACMA,9 which is cooperating with the West Bund’s Yuz Museum in the creation of a global museum ‘with Chinese characteristics’.

European encyclopedic museums, such as the British Museum, or the Pergamon Museum in Berlin clearly are collections of imperial loot, the latter of which is at the centre of activist calls to “decolonise this place”. Ought we therefore assume that, in decolonising Western capitals, the colonial apparatus is merely being relocated elsewhere? As long as there are economic hierarchies, it seems likely that there will be cultural ones as well; as long as there are centres, there will be peripheries.

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AMERICA AGAINST ITSELF What are the concrete reasons that the Chinese system has done well? Is their success simply that of authoritarianism, and in that sense, parallel to the success of the West during its expansionary centuries, which coincided with the creation of the world’s great museums? “Authoritarian” and “universal” are often synonyms, without a central force, a metropolitan cogito at the centre of society (one which is articulated by institutions such as museums and universities), there are no universal norms or standards. In the West today, as cultural institutions are often divided by controversy about representations of colonial history, race and gender, the notion of the universal is being called into question. That ‘universal’ was in practice formed on the ‘playing fields of Eton’, or at Harvard University, reasons why these institutions are now targeted by decolonialist activists.

The Chinese ‘universal’, whether that is understood to be the Belt and Road Initiative, the Chinese language through its global Confucius Institutes, or the new museums being built in the country, borrows crucially from the Western model. But in most cases, the Chinese state and its propensity for planning is at the centre of cultural policy. To quote Vivienne Chow from Artsy, Development of China’s cultural infrastructure and creative industries has been high on the country’s national agenda since the 12th five-year plan (2011-15), and the cultural sector remains one of the top priorities in the country’s 13th five-year plan (2016-20). Museums play a key role in this field. According to state media Xinhua, Liu Yuzhu, director of State Administration of Cultural Heritage, revealed in May that China has 4,692 registered museums as of the end of 2015, with 1,112 of them privately owned. These museums have been staging a total of 20,000 exhibitions each year, visited by more than 700 million visitors.10

Access to Chinese citizen-consumers is an important lure for Western institutions and individuals living through an age of austerity in their home countries; for such people, myself included, China offers a wide range of professional and personal opportunities, a life often much more rewarding than might be possible in the West. At the same time, it is difficult to dispel concerns about the structure of the Chinese government, with its well-documented past and present of repressive policies.

ENGINEERS OF A (UNIVERSAL) SPIRIT It’s not paranoid to suggest that intellectuals in China are required to serve the state—it has been official policy since 1941. In the 1941 Talks on Literature and Art at Yan’an, Mao Zedong laid out the principles of socialist realism in saying, “In the world today all culture, all literature and art belong to definite classes and are geared to definite political lines. There is in fact no such thing as art for art’s sake, art that stands above classes, art that is detached from or independent of politics.”11 This logic is hardly limited to China; in his bitter 1985 book How New York Stole Modern Art, Parisian Serge Guilbaut grumbled about how the CIA supported abstract expressionism, allowing New York to poach the limelight from Paris as the global centre for art. Artists like Jasper Johns, Robert Rauschenberg, Andy Warhol and Robert Smithson engaged with American iconography and landscapes in a discourse that made for a peculiarly American universalism; it would have seemed provincial if it hadn’t become the centre of the global economy, but in the post-war flush of its success, these artists were understood as being of global relevance. The role of the American government in disseminating its culture, even ‘dissident’ culture, is unquestionable; aside from basic realities (without a booming economy, there wouldn’t have been money for artists), Guilbaut and

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others demonstrated that culture was a key terrain for the Cold War. Similarly, high auction prices for Chinese art objects in the pre-2008 boom were often the result of bids from the Poly Auction Group, a front for the PLA;12 even avant-garde artists financed by (the Hong Kong based nonprofit art) K11 Foundation are clearly in a web of money and soft power connected to the Chinese ascent, which is controlled by the Communist Party. It is hard to reproach them for anything other than competence; Chinese political theorists, notably the current number five in the Politburo, Wang Huning, observed America and learned valuable lessons.

In his 1991 book America against America, Wang “highlights the contrasts between the world’s richest tycoons and impoverished American communities as well as between the muchtouted democratic system and the ‘undemocratic’ control exercised by the special interests of capitalism.”13 While the Soviet Union collapsed, due to what might be called corruption or ‘internal contradictions’, widely seen as an inspiration for Xi Jinping’s anti-corruption campaign and neo-authoritarianism, Wang’s trip to America may have been equally influential, as he started researching corruption as a concept immediately after his visit. Writing against official corruption in the immediate wake of the Soviet collapse as well as the Tiananmen demonstrations, Wang stated “that while the West emphasises malpractice mainly in the public domain, Chinese conceptions encompass both public and private domains”14 and a second book on the subject, co-edited and translated by Wang and his colleagues, was prefaced by the Chinese saying, “The stones from hills yonder can polish jade at home” or in other words, that an efficient system of government learns from the mistakes of others.15 China would be America—an improved version. Shortly thereafter, Wang Huning was invited to Chinese government summits at Beidaihe to turn his theories into practice. Political scientist Jude Blanchette writes that Wang “was concerned with how the ‘reform and opening’ policies were contributing to a hollowing-out of Beijing’s control over its far-flung territories.”16 Much as American neoliberal policies weakened the American state, even as they enriched individual Americans, the liberal policies of the 1990s weakened the Chinese Communist Party, even as they enriched China. By 2012, it was time to take back control, to recommence articulating a unified message; but by then, the economic base, the increasingly cosmopolitan population of the major cities, and the sophisticated knowledge economy of tech companies, universities and art practices meant that a unified China was also a ‘universal’ China, one whose message would need to have resonance around the world. As exiled poet Bei Dao wrote in defiance of Beijing’s authorities in the late 1980s, A new conjunction and glimmering stars Adorn the unobstructed sky now; They are the pictographs from five thousand years.

They are the watchful eyes of future generations.17 Notes 1 Karl Marx, Capital, vol. 3, chapter 48, ‘The Trinity Formula’; see https://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1894-c3/ch48.htm 2 Yoshihiro Francis Fukuyama argued in his 1992 book, The End of History and the Last Man, that the worldwide spread of liberal democracies and free market capitalism of the West, following the end of the Cold War and the collapse of the Soviet Union, signalled “not just... the passing of a particular period of post-war history, but the end of history as such: that is, the end point of mankind’s ideological evolution and the universalisation of Western liberal democracy as the final form of human government.”

3 Carl Schmitt, Land and Sea: A World-Historical Meditation, Stanford: Telos Press Publishing, Stanford University, CA, 2015. Originally published in 1942, at the height of the Second World War, Land and Sea: A World-Historical Meditation recounts Carl Schmitt’s view of world history “as a history of the battle of sea powers against land powers and of land powers against sea powers.” Schmitt here unfolds his view of world history from the Peloponnesian War to European colonial expansion to the birth pangs of capitalism, while polemically setting Nazi

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Germany as a continental land power against Britain and the United States as its maritime enemies. In Land and Sea, Schmitt offers his interpretations of the rise of Venice, piracy, “corsair capitalism”, the spatial revolution of European colonial expansion, the rise of the British Empire, and his readings of thinkers as diverse as Seneca, Shakespeare, Herman Melville and Benjamin Disraeli 4 The Gordon Riots of June 1780 are considered by some historians to be the closest Great Britain has ever come to a full-blown revolution.

Following legislation permitting Catholics greater freedom a huge petition seeking repeal of these Acts was drawn up by the Protestant Association, under the leadership of the enigmatic Lord George Gordon. On the morning of 2 June of that year a huge crowd of nearly 50,000 people marched to parliament to present the petition. Events descended into chaos. For a week thereafter violence raged across the capital—15,000 troops poured into London to quell the disturbances and nearly 300 rioters were shot dead by soldiers 5 See Yaxue Cao, ‘New York University Shanghai: What is the Deal’, China Change, 5 February 2015; https://chinachange.org/2015/02/05/newyork-university-shanghai-what-is-the-deal/ 6 See Stephanie Bailey, ‘An Investigation of NYU Shanghai’s Finances’, On Century Avenue, 9 May, 2018; http://oncenturyavenue.org/2018/05/ an-investigation-of-nyu-shanghais-finances/ 7 See ‘Emmanuel wins numerous contracts in China’, La Croix, 1 September, 2018; https://www.la-croix.com/Economie/Monde/En-ChineEmmanuel-Macron-decroche-nombreux-contrats-2018-01-09-1200904621 8 Fionnuala McHugh, ‘How the Victoria and Albert Museum in China signals a new design for Shenzhen’, CNN Style, 22 January 2018; https://edition.cnn.com/style/article/shenzhen-vna-musuem-osm/index.html 9 Nate Freeman, ‘Michael Govan on LACMA’s Major Expansion into China’, Artsy, 25 March 2019; https://www.artsy.net/article/artsy-editorialmichael-govan-lacmas-major-expansion-china 10 See Vivienne Chow, ‘Why London’s Victoria & Albert Museum is Launching an Outpost in China’, Artsy, 20 June 2016; https://www.artsy.net/ article/artsy-editorial-why-london-s-victoria-albert-museum-is-launching-an-outpost-in-china 11 See ‘Quotations from Mao Tse Tung’, Mao Tse Tung Internet Archive; https://www.marxists.org/reference/archive/mao/works/red-book/ ch32.htm 12 Elliott Wilson, ‘China’s Artefacts Come Home’, The Financial Times, 28 May 2011; https://www.ft.com/content/dafabaf2-6919-11df-aa7e00144feab49a 13 ‘Meet the Mastermind behind Xi Jinping’s Power’, Tribune Content Agency, 13 November 2017; https://tribunecontentagency.com/article/ meet-the-mastermind-behind-xi-jinpings-power/ 14

ibid.

15

‘Meet the Mastermind behind Xi Jinping’s Power’, Tribune Content Agency, op cit.; see also Yi Wang, ‘Meet the mastermind Behind Xi Jinping’s Power’, The Washington Post, 6 November 2017; https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/theworldpost/wp/2017/11/06/wanghuning/?noredirect=on&utm_term=.0721270285f4 16 Jude Blanchette, ‘Wang Huning’s Neo-Authoritarian Dream’, 20 October 2017; http://www.judeblanchette.com/blog/2017/10/20/wanghunings-neo-authoritarianism-dream 17 Bei Dao (Zhao Zhenkai), ‘The Answer’, The August Sleepwalker, (trans.) Bonnie S. McDougall, New York: New Directions Publishing Corporation, 1990

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South by Southeast: A Curatorial Proposition In my professional work as a Southeast Asian postcolonial art historian, the idea of a national art history seems to be a natural horizon for the necessary political work of representation within that narrative of art history. The enchantment with representation accrues to this disciplinal technology, however it may be characterised in the normative sense of Western, English-language art history, or alternatively annotated with the markers of “world” or “global” art history to decisively lay bare both the impedimenta of the colonial and the indicia of the still-possible ‘universal’. Surely, the desire to be present within a representational regime is one arising from the struggle of the colonial and the modern, and the assemblage that is the colonial-modern. Both terms demand intense theorisation as they come in contact with projects of détournement, such as the de-modern and the de-colonial. These projects of rupture or severance, remnant of the avant-garde unconscious, are productive, without doubt, only that they need to revisit their conceptualisation of the colonial and the modern, and their residues in the colonial and the global modern. It must be stated persuasively that their life-worlds have been substantially transformed by animate agencies through the instinct to transform and the exigency to survive, so that their ‘turning’ cannot be imagined as being merely operated upon the diffusion of stable forms—like the colonial and the modern. In other words, both have already been turned from within, with sufficient trickster improvisation across their everyday life and their afterlife, and that it has always been so since the time of their encounter.

This representational imperative, however, proves to be a limit, one that tends to over invest in the nation-state and the national as the exclusive framework of the history of art, or of history and of art, no matter how strategic they may be held up as elements to enhance the immune system of the local for it to defend itself against the virality of the global. When this framework extends into a realm called “the regional”, the latter merely absorbs the nation-ness, the nation-stateness, or the nationalism; it regularly fails to fulfill the promise of the inter-national in the most generative meaning of the prefix “inter” and of the worldliness of human labour and its incendiary social movements. The history of the modern and the national overdetermines the politics of the historical and the poetics of art. It is in this light that I endeavour to destabilise the median of the Southeast Asia region by experimenting with the ‘Southeast’ as a vector of relations. How could the region be freed from its geopolitical construction under colonial and Cold War auspices and give art the chance to remap its geography? In this manner, I propose to address the persistent questions pertinent to the anthropologist Clifford Geertz’s own inquiries into ‘the nation’. To paraphrase him, what is Southeast Asia if it is not a region? What is a region if it is not a locality of countries? What is a country if it is not a nation?1 This relay, I think, is a loop that runs on iterations and reversals.

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It is for this reason that I explore different idioms of mediating the national through the regional, regardless how fraught that rubric may be. To do so would be to harness another ensemble consisting of art historical work and curatorial practice, fields to which I respond intellectually and professionally. Such an ensemble is able to sift through the sediments of material that becomes object, and an ecology that becomes an exhibition. It is at this intersection that I concentrate on the category “southeast”—enlisted here deconstructively, that is, uttered ‘under erasure’, its almost default recognition refunctioned as a dilemma, or the schema that permits questions to be asked about the object of study through a subjectivity fretful about its intuition to objectify. The axiom of “Southeast Asia” therefore, is made to play out until its conceptual stamina wears down in the face of the poetics of art, or better still, the geopoetics of the exhibition to be broadly called “South by Southeast”.

The ‘south’ in this situation is subjected verisimilarly to a complication through the coordinate of the ‘southeast’. It is not the global south, reified in the ideology of inclusion or the politics of the decolonial, but ‘south by southeast’, which signals a laterality or adjacency to reorganise an area conveniently designated by government, scholarship, and the financial market as Southeast Asia.

The first presentation of South by Southeast in 2015 was held in Hong Kong at the Osage Art Gallery, produced by the Osage Art Foundation, and was modified in Guangzhou at the Guangdong Times Museum in 2016 with the subtitle, A Further Surface. The locations are salient in this regard, Hong Kong and Guangzhou being part of the southern sphere of the Chinese monolith. The series was envisioned to be of incremental exhibitions that would continually reiterate Southeast Asia alongside other articulations of the ‘Southeast’ elsewhere. It is not a thematic proposition, but a geopoetic one that offers an opportunity for the place to render contemporary art and for the latter to render the place. I take the cue from Indian anthropologist Arjun Appadurai who has in mind not nation-states or regions, but “process geographies” in which the life-world is formed by “precipitates of various kinds of action, interaction, and motion—trade, travel, pilgrimage, warfare, proselytisation, colonisation, exile, and the like. These geographies are necessarily large scale and shifting, and their changes highlight variable congeries of language, history, and material life.”2

This series required another procedure: collaborative curatorial work, introducing another knot in the meshwork, a co-conspirator in the enterprise of reinvestigating the mangroves of contemporary art. I co-curated the first exhibition with Anca Mihulet, an independent curator from Sibiu and Bucharest in Romania who currently resides in Seoul, South Korea. The project brought together contemporary art from Southeast Asia and Southeast Europe, dwelling mainly on the formation of subjectivity through image, memory, and material condition. In the critical project to resist the legacies of a Eurocentric or Orientalist fantasy, the category of ‘the South’ would be cast as a figure or a trope of many guises. Whether margin or periphery, colonised or developing, failed state or sweatshop, ‘the South’ has imbibed various valences. Always, however, it is charged by the tension deriving from the distribution of asymmetrical power. Such distribution has been subjected to numerous ways of calibration, given that its movement may be capillary and alternating, and not solely direct or linear. That being said, the exercise of power results in both unimaginable suffering and sweeping prospects for something overwhelming to happen.

It is readily apparent that the West underpins the points of the cartographic intelligence about the art of the time (contemporary art) and the time of the art (art history). It has become a habit to refer to it as the defining agency of art and history, institutionalised as it is by structures of exhibitions, collections, professions, and discourses. It is at this conjuncture of power and critique that an anticipated third moment might intervene, and the manifestation may well be curatorial,

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which in itself is a tricky venture, but one that proves catalytic in many ways. At the outset, the curatorial intimates a gathering of sympathies within a space in which a substantial density accretes; it is always and already emergent or imminent. A curatorial response to art history or the history of art ensures timeliness and urgency because it brings to the fore the question of modernity and cracks its codes across mediations and afterlives elsewhere. Curation, therefore, becomes a material gesture of exposure to a milieu of reciprocities, or to put it more precisely, of an ex-position in which art recovers its contingent state, its flux from the fixities and fixations that leash it, often inveterately.

When curators convene this gathering, they conjures what Foucault so felicitously phrases a “sudden vicinity of things” amid people who experience works in their time, asking questions about them and about themselves. It is these “intense proximities” and “productive adjacencies” that render the curatorial demonstrative: that it has to allude to crystallising moments and events in the critical phenomenology of reception so that the history of art becomes expectant once again, open to the surprises of unknowing and the untimely. How do we glean the silhouette of this curatorial foray? Will it take the form of an archive, object studies of “comparative contemporaries” or a survey of the horizon for sight lines? Whichever way the instance is acted out, it hovers above the question or crisis of representation, or better still, the representational aesthetic, the affect that the sign of the ‘Southeast’ stirs up ‘under erasure’ or strategically and essentially. Furthermore, it recovers a seminar within a space of encounter, a confrontation with the burdens and anxieties of modernity, alongside the prohibitive institutionalities that inhere (fetish, accumulation, authenticity, even climate control).

Ultimately, it choreographs the longing, the exasperation, the tedium and frustration, the melancholy of this modernity in contemporary time, feelings that are routinely belaboured and yet rarely transcended.

These queries may lie at the core of the exhibition that attempts to foreground a level of interaction between Southeast Asia and Southeast Europe. This kind of interaction endeavours to move beyond equally important procedures of explaining exchange between art ecologies by discerning, for instance, affinities between artistic productions across a region, an act that may consolidate a regionality to shore up varied interests. Such a notion of a region, or regionality, may also be critical and reflexive, assessing the place of nations within a region of art, or the category of the nation as a circumscription of an aesthetic tradition. In other words, it may be a foil to the nation itself or its progression into a geopolitical inter-national, or the radical particularisation of the local that precludes translation. Clearly, the local as well asserts its presence in relation to the national or the regional. On another level, this undertaking looks into the problematic of the global, or globality.

Where is the global and how is it formed? How is its history written? How is its art distilled from the welter of everyday spectacles and epiphanies? In constellating two modalities of ‘the Southeast’ or ‘Southeastern-ness’, the global is displaced, laterally, its hegemonic geometry bisected, as it were.

In pondering these concerns, South by Southeast might have been unconsciously in conversation with Alfred Hitchcock’s film North by Northwest (1959) in which Cary Grant plays the role of the main character who is mistaken for someone else. In many ways, South by Southeast may be regarded as a post-Hitchcock scenario as it effects a sharp shift from the distress over misrecognition, which is the central phase in the formation of subjectivity and inevitably leads to the capture of the subject in ideology. In such a mindset, it is mainly illusion and critique that frames the imagination of Southeast Asia, thus restricting the latter to a repetition of otherness and difference, authenticity and consciousness. It might be productive to delay this dialectic and recover in the interval a coordinate, or even a tangent, instead of a centre. It is an interval that may give rise to both tension l

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and cosmology not necessarily lying within the civilisational and the avant-garde, both of which sometimes lead to mass discriminations of people and revolutionary slaughter. It instead points to another intersubjective space of the impossible in which future and failure transpose: not yet and just too much to be possible.

It was also the aim of the exhibition to sail beyond the regional teleologies of countries.

For instance, we worked with artists from Sri Lanka, Taiwan and Hong Kong, places not considered part of Southeast Asia. In the same vein, we worked with artists from Turkey and Greece, sites not regarded as belonging to the Balkans. Therefore, we risked the insertion of these terrains into the emergent geography of contemporary art and in keeping with the spirit of Southeast Asia as a vaster domain, if we consider its Austronesian matrix that implicates as far away a place like Madagascar, and if we carefully probe how the region ‘inclines outwards’ via three restive bodies of water: the South China Sea, the Indian Ocean and the Pacific.

Southeast Asia is no longer just east of India, south of China, and north of Australia. It is all of these, of course, but a swarm besides in terms of natural diversity, cultural mixture, integrities of ethnicity, and migrations. Here the geopoetic curatorial disposition finds its bearings, largely because it does not preempt the place to yield its robust materialities. Rather, it sensitively facets the angles of the place to speak its forms, something that thematisation undermines as it reinforces the conceit of the cosmopolitan curator. Because the method unhinges this conceit, there is now difficulty in instrumentalising the project through the exhibition critique. This does not exempt it from conversations around the effort, but the project necessitates a rethinking as well of the language through which an annotation of the exhibition can transpire. It must be patient with close reading and must keep in mind the geopoetic movement within the exhibition space itself. In many ways, because the exhibition is not tempted to thematise, and without themes to administer the behaviour of the audience, the viewer is left to other devices of figuring, and figuring out. While it is easy to propose prompts like the trauma of fragmentation for the Balkans or racial violence and creole survival for South Africa and the Caribbean, it is not tenable in the long duration of attentiveness.

And as Southeast Asia has made manifest, the geography resists the regionalising mechanism even as the region furnishes it with an always-already disseminating identity. This being said, certain common contours surface. These are to be acknowledged as incipient grounds for comparison and possible convergence. They are not final testaments. The persistent haunting of civilisation and empire, the contentions of class and sexuality, the dissipation of personal ethos into historical vicissitudes, and the pressure of dissidence are all distributed in many artistic instantiations.

They are treated as trajectories, not a terminus of meaning, relevance, or context. What is cogent is the granular expression, the fine lines of the material ecology in which thought, action, urge, ambivalence, and claim come to form the problematic-poetics of art and the contemporary. With this expression and ecology comes a theoretical vernacular, honed in very distinct spaces and tenor of production and remediated in the site-specific exhibition. Being built up in this process, therefore, is not only an assembly of art, artists, curators, and an art world, but also the basis of interlocution that is freed from the obligations to rehearse the customs of knowledge centres. This is not to disavow, however, the heritage of this epistemic mythology. It is rather to summon a forum of translocal and transversal thinking. For instance, meditating on post-socialism in Southeast Europe should finesse an understanding of political art in the Philippines. Or the history of performance in Romania might be able to explain the travails of women artists in Indonesia.

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South by Southeast: A Curatorial Proposition

Present Passing was an iteration of the South by Southeast framework that sought to expand and heighten the imagination of Southeast Asia. Presented at Osage Gallery in 2019, it was co-curated with Natasha Becker, originally from Cape Town and now New York. This exhibition persevered to release the region of Southeast Asia from commonplace assumptions about its scope, and unburdening it from the inheritance of the colonial theatre and Cold War geopolitics. For this phase, the exhibition’s title was derived from the literary criticism of French feminist philosopher Hélène Cixous, whose sense of the present and the passage elicits the urgent and fragile ties between the southeast ecologies of art. This iteration focused on the ties between Southeast Asia, the Caribbean, which is southeast of the hegemonic North American mainland, and South Africa, which links to Southeast Asia and the Caribbean through seafarers. This option led us to revisit once again how we reflect on the place of region in the contemporary. It does not only broaden the solidarities of Southeast Asia, it gestures towards a theory of the global, the worldly, the hemispheric through not only the south but through the southeast: not the centre twice, not west and not north, the better for it to slide across the scales and registers of the geopoetic spheres of exciting mingling.

Here, the space of Southeast Asia would further mutate to include Cheju in South Korea and Okinawa in Japan. Ambiguous, or better to say, fluid spaces like the liminal Shan State were brought into sharper focus to disclose the conflicts at the fringe of nation-state territories.

As Southeast Asia complexifies through increments of co-ordination and co-incidence, so do the other indices of ‘the Southeast’ gather density and generosity. I surmise that as Southeast Europe, South Africa, and the Caribbean touch the nerves of Southeast Asia, their systems will enliven, too, and begin to open up to the sensibilities of a kindred formation elsewhere. No symmetry is anticipated in this proposition, only equivalence and the curatorial conjuncture for curators, artists, and the public to finally crisscross and interlace one another’s ‘normative commitments’.

As Artistic Director of the 6th Singapore Biennale: Every Step in the Right Direction, I also contend with the issue of the region in relation to Singapore, which in 2019 is commemorating the bicentennial of Great Britain’s establishment of it as a trading post, and then a colony. Such a colonial event is entwined with a modernity that propelled it from a Third World post-colony to a First World city-state, one that has been described by the architect Rem Koolhaas as a “Potemkin metropolis”.

Again, in this endeavour, I am guided by a method that allows me to concretise the geopoetic and the ethical gesture of art: to evoke the place of Southeast Asia and beyond as a generator of contemporary art and to present works from these places as a way to remap the world as a project of reconstruction, a kind of making right, one step at a time, what colonialism and globalisation had wrought and continue to deny.

Notes 1 Clifford Geertz, Available Light: Anthropological Reflections on Philosophical Topics, New Jersey: Princeton University Press, 2001 2

Arjun Appadurai, ‘Grassroots Globalisation and the Research Imagination’, Public Culture 12, no. 1, 2000, p. 7

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The Aboriginal Memorial and the Militarisation of Australian History The tradition of all dead generations weighs like a nightmare on the brains of the living [who]… anxiously conjure up the spirits of the past to their service, borrowing from them names, battle slogans, and costumes in order to present this new scene in world history in time-honoured disguise and borrowed language.1 How is it that some art is forever contemporary, speaking afresh to each new generation as if in it the dead advance their claims and the living seek their redemption? Even the state seeks its deliverance in such art, building magnificent museums to preserve and revere it and study its genealogies.

To stay contemporary requires the gift of reincarnation. Neither the artist nor the artwork can control this remaking and the new meanings it generates, but the upside is a certain immortality, a compact with the future and past, with the ancestors and those to come, and most of all with power. This is what a memorial is or does: it is the politics of memory.

This idea can be found in the conception of The Aboriginal Memorial (1988), which has been on permanent display in the cathedral spaces of the National Gallery of Australia (NGA) in Canberra for more than thirty years (except when it travelled overseas as art of the Olympic Festival at the turn of the twenty-first century). In its format of painted upright hollow logs, the artwork draws inspiration from the culmination of a traditional Yolngu mortuary ceremony. After the conclusion of the ritual singing and dancing around the painted log which houses the bones of the deceased clan member, it is left standing near the waterhole—the bones and sacrificial tree slowly decaying until they have returned to the watery home of the Serpent from which they originally sprang, ready to be born again. In guiding the deceased’s spirit to its waterhole (homeland) to ensure its reincarnation, the ceremony is future-orientated, not nostalgic. Turning to the past and future simultaneously, the clan reflects on a life passed in order to imagine a future becoming. In this respect, the upright log —upright like the tree from which it came—is a memorial site where can be heard the whispering of the dead and those to come.

The Aboriginal Memorial is not this ceremony and nor are its National Gallery of Australia viewers engaged in a Yolngu mortuary ritual, but The Aboriginal Memorial is intended to draw them into a national mortuary ceremony of sorts. As well as the painted trunk of a eucalypt, The Aboriginal Memorial shares with the traditional Yolngu mortuary ceremony a self-conscious temporality that, at a moment of passing, turns to the past and future simultaneously. The passing upon which it turned was the bicentenary of the symbolic birth of the nation on 26 January 1788, when the first British

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colony on the Australian continent was founded. The Aboriginal Memorial asks its viewers to reflect on the birth of the nation that issued from this colony, and particularly on the repressed, unhonoured histories of Aboriginal deaths in its “frontier wars”.

New South Wales (NSW), as the colony was named, was established as a prison ruled by a military dictatorship, not a free community from which nations are made. However, as prisoners served their terms and regained their freedom, and the colony attracted entrepreneurs seeking trade and profit, the prison acquired the rudiments of a free settlement. The first germ of an idea for an Australian nation appeared in the 1820s, when the rule of civil law replaced military law and some free settlers started campaigning for self-government. Gains were increasingly made over the coming decades and as the new century came around, by which time the continent boasted six selfgoverning settler colonies—those colonies federated into a nation-state with a constitution and law that guaranteed its newly won sovereignty. However, it was a premature state and not just because of its limited sovereignty, with “no power to declare war or peace… [unable] to make treaties with foreign powers and… no diplomatic status abroad.”2 Still in search of nationhood, its people were yet to detach themselves from the Empire, and the British monarch remained their head of state.

In the initial period of nation-building, settler colonists secured the continent through a militarised moving frontier that, over about one hundred years, “dispersed” (a settler euphemism for killing) the Indigenous populations across most of the continent. It was not a state organised military campaign of conquest but an ad-hoc clearing operation conducted at a local level. Because the British Empire had claimed the land according to the “Discovery Doctrine”, it was in the legal interests of the Empire and settlers to make it a wilderness, desert or terra nullius—unimproved land still in the state of nature over which only wild animals roamed.3

However, the Empire and its high ranking officers kept to the moral high ground, hesitating to condone this campaign of terror, which was a deliberate policy advocated by many settlers and widely supported by the local press. Their leading representative, William Charles Wentworth, forceful advocate of self-government and a free press, declared in a speech in the NSW Legislative Council in 1844: The civilised people had come in and the savage must go back... it was not the policy of a wise government to attempt the perpetuation of the aboriginal race… They must give way before the arms, aye! even the diseases of civilised nations—they must give way before they attain the power of those nations.4

In casting his argument in the tragic tenor of fate rather than conquest, Wentworth sidestepped moral responsibility for the resulting genocide and established the basis for terra nullius on the premise of savagery giving way to civilisation as if it were a natural or divine law. Thus, Wentworth tapped into a widely held sentiment of the time that justified the advance of European civilisation, most powerfully expressed in Herbert Spencer’s phrase “survival of the fittest”, conceived at this time. It became the motto of Spencer’s social evolutionism. The most influential sociology and philosophy of the second half of the nineteenth century, its values shaped the ethos of modernity.

In reflecting on this formation of the nation and particularly on those indigenes swept away in its frontier wars, The Aboriginal Memorial sought to imagine—in the spirit of the traditional Yolngu mortuary ceremony—an Indigenous future, and in conducting this imagining by aesthetic means, it aimed to touch the emotional nerve and sublime regions of the national consciousness. l

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Conceived by curator Djon Mundine,5 made by forty-three artists from fifteen clans living in the Ramingining area (an Indigenous community in the Northern Territory, east of Darwin), commissioned for the 1988 Biennale of Sydney and funded by the NGA, The Aboriginal Memorial was pronounced a masterpiece by the Biennale’s Artistic Director Nick Waterlow and the Director of the NGA James Mollison—thus striking a chord at both an aesthetic and institutional level.

Artist and critic Nigel Lendon observed that Mollison’s intervention ensured its destiny went beyond “a [biennale] setting given to ephemeral installations” and was incorporated “into the canon of Australian art in the National Gallery of Australia”6—though the Australian Bicentenary had inspired in this Biennale an unusual focus on the Australian national canon. “For the first time,” wrote Waterlow in the catalogue, “a small number of key Australian antecedents will be shown side by side their peers from other countries” and within an historical context, because only by learning “from our history” can we “come to grips with crucial problems of identity and creativity.”7

This historical frame of the 1988 Biennale, said Waterlow, “asked: where does Australian art come from?” In this respect, he continued, The Aboriginal Memorial is “the single most important statement of this Biennale.”8 Located about a kilometre from the original landfall of the colonial settlers,9 Biennale of Sydney viewers came to The Aboriginal Memorial in the low-lit cavernous space of Pier 2/3 at Sydney Harbour’s Walsh Bay after passing through contemporary installation art by international stars such as Rebecca Horn, Hermann Nitsch and Arnulf Rainer.

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Art historian Professor Terry Smith argued that the aesthetic innovation of The Aboriginal Memorial hinges on a structure of ambivalence evident across several registers,10 the most important of which according to curator Susan Jenkins, is “the ambiguity of a memorial within a gallery.”11 Unlike a monument, a memorial is a site of ritual that in its periodic participatory performances creates and sustains a sense of community by reifying a memorable collective event, in effect giving it an ancestral status. While the experience of art objects is conventionally more contemplative and individually focused, they also are sites of reification or religiosity through their aesthetic affects.

Mundine intended The Aboriginal Memorial to keep in play this ambivalent relationship between art and memorial—to be both a ritualistic site in its own right in which periodic performances would take place, as well as an artwork for more private meditation. Because a national art museum is a memorial to the nation, the NGA was the ideal site to keep this ambivalence in play.

Lendon argued that in its production and mode of reception, The Aboriginal Memorial is an example of what critics would later call relational (or participatory) art, which by the end of the twentieth century had become a normative genre of contemporary art.12 In this respect, The Aboriginal Memorial exceeded the conventional category of fine art object. Rather than passively taking its place assigned by a curator, relational art seeks to occupy the gallery space on its own terms as an already curated artwork. While it cannot escape the contingency of the existing discursive milieu of the art museum, The Aboriginal Memorial, said Smith, makes the space of the NGA “subject to it,”13 mobilising the art museum’s discourses to its ends. As a national gallery, the overarching function of the NGA is to articulate a cultural memory of nationhood, what the cultural historian Marek Tamm dubbed a “mnemohistory” or the creation of a narrative that selectively remembers and forgets in order to “stabilise and convey the nation’s self-image” in “the formation of national identity.”14 If The Aboriginal Memorial was located in the nearby Australian War Memorial,15 it would become subject to a similar sanctification but through the more performative modes that operate there (e.g. the annual ANZAC ceremony16), and be more obviously driven by a national narrative that is “inseparably associated with the wars it had fought.”17 l

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Militarised narratives are amongst the most powerful available to the nation-state’s memory politics. “From the very beginning,” writes the military historian Michael Howard, “the principle of nationalism was almost indissolubly linked, both in theory and practice, with the idea of war… war was the necessary dialectic in the evolution of nations… It is hard to think of any nation-state… which was not created, and had its boundaries defined, by wars, by internal violence, or by a combination of the two.”18 Yet for much of its history Australians imagined that their fathers had discovered and peacefully settled an “empty land”—as one Australian politician called his history of Australian pioneers, published in 1934.19 In part, this is why World War I played such a significant role in shaping the national consciousness in this land of terra nullius: it provided what was perceived, in the ethos of social evolutionism, “the one trial that… all humanity still recognises —the test of a great war.”20

The Aboriginal Memorial gestures to this militarised national narrative of the AWM but at the same time situates itself in a contemporary art discourse that, by 1988, was challenging national art traditions—the demilitarised zone of terra nullius then so evident in national tradition of Australian art on display in state art museums. In this respect, The Aboriginal Memorial called forth a new nationhood yet to arrive. In readily agreeing to Mundine’s request in the commissioning process that The Aboriginal Memorial be on permanent display in the NGA, Mollison seemingly endorsed this intervention in the national tradition of Australian art.

Along with Jackson Pollock’s Blue Poles (1952), Mollison made The Aboriginal Memorial a signature artwork of the NGA. He was keen to acquire both because in their time of purchase (about fifteen years apart) each declared his ambition for the Gallery. Blue Poles had announced Mollison’s determination in the 1970s, as the inaugural Director of the yet-to-be-built gallery, that he would tell the story of Australian art in the context of American contemporary art—a story that no other Australian state art gallery had yet presented in any substantial way. His purchase of two hundred painted poles from Bula’Bula Arts in Ramingining confirmed his next bold move, begun a few years earlier, to put Australian art in the context of Indigenous art; a context that had also been lacking in Australian state art museums but was now stirring them into action. It signalled a new national zeitgeist, as if a virus had taken hold of the national psyche that compelled it to re-imagine the inherited national story within an Indigenous frame. “You can pinpoint it to the 1988 Bicentennial,” Ron Radford (Director, 2004-14) said at the opening of the NGA’s new Indigenous art wing in 2010.

“That’s when people would come up to the front desk and say, ‘Can you direct me to the Aboriginal art?’ I can assure you that did not happen before the Bicentennial.”21

Mundine was determined to capitalise on this (post)national mood in a positive way.

More than an accusation, a protest or activist artwork, The Aboriginal Memorial retrieved a repressed memory of the frontier wars, raised it into the national consciousness and asked what now, or as Smith posed, “What was at stake? Obviously, the very idea of nation.”22 Reflecting on his intentions in 1989, Mundine put it this way: Dealing with this past is crucial to a constructive and creative future. It is a necessary foundation for improved black/white relationships, from which black people and white Australians may go forward, for the first time in a constructive partnership in facing the future as one strong nation, instead of being burdened by an unresolved past, continuing tensions and eternal guilt.23

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This new (post-)national zeitgeist was a local expression of the social transformations that occurred across the world from the 1960s that set in train the ongoing culture wars of postWesternism. By the end of the 1970s, the Australian nation had buried its foundation laws—the White Australian Policy and sections 51 and 127 of the Constitution that excluded as citizens the country’s indigenes from the Australian nation—and embarked on a new postcolonial multicultural narrative. This is the context of the making of The Aboriginal Memorial and its address to the future; it posed the question: what next; or as another artist (Gauguin) had famously put it some ninety years earlier, “Where do we come from? What are we? Where are we going?” The changing reception of The Aboriginal Memorial over the following decades is an index of how this question was answered, and of the shifting fortunes of a reborn national narrative. That the NGA would move it six times over the next twenty years suggests that imagining a new national narrative has not come easily.24

To imagine a different future for the nation requires the discovery of new ancestors and histories, of articulating new memories and forgettings. Did Mollison envisage the impossible demands his purchase would put on the imaginations of the NGA’s curators? Through the ways in which their collections are displayed, state art museums construct and polish the sacred mirror in which the nation, in seeing its form—its formation—comes to know and believe in its existence.

Mollison had planted a time bomb in this sacred site. However, he didn’t have to deal with it: he was preparing to leave by the time The Aboriginal Memorial arrived in the Gallery.

Mollison bequeathed a legacy to his successors that is yet to be realised, but his immediate successor and the first woman Director of an Australian state art gallery, Betty Churcher, did embrace the challenge. When Mollison received The Aboriginal Memorial after the Biennale of Sydney had closed, he had it installed next to Brancusi’s Bird in Space (c. 1931-36) and Joseph Beuys Stripes in the House of the Shaman (1964-72) in Gallery 9. In situating it beside these elders of Western modernism, Mollison honoured the intentions of Waterlow’s Biennale and at the same time welcomed it into the Gallery’s main Dreaming tracks, or ancestral narratives of modernism—though he likely meant this to be a temporary holding place until the NGA worked out its proper siting. To the applause of many, one of Churcher’s first decisions when she became Director was in 1991 to move The Aboriginal Memorial to the entrance of Gallery 1, which is the main entry point of the NGA’s collection. It was placed so that you couldn’t just walk past it. You had to walk through the two hundred life-size poles, which as Mundine explained, “are representations of a human form,” and as such speak to you collectively as an appeal from the dead. “Like a human being they are painted with body designs. Those body designs… are, in essence, what you are, what you could call a moral insistence. They’re about saying this is how my soul looks, this is how I am inside… This is how I am all the time. I have an outside appearance, but this is how my inside looks.”25

At the time, the installation and its placement were widely seen to have a powerful impact that testified to both the aesthetic presence of the work and the mood of the country. In 1991, Professor Virginia Spate (Director of the Power Institute at the University of Sydney and a member of the NGA’s council) spoke for many commentators who would echo her sentiments: “The new location forces reinterpretation, I think, of every other work of art in the building. Once we’ve passed through this forest of coffins, once we’ve absorbed ourselves in them, consciousness of their multiple meanings cannot be emptied from our minds as we look at other works.”26

However, this revelatory moment was short lived. Moved again in 1998 to a location deep inside the NGA’s labyrinthine space, The Aboriginal Memorial lost its former leverage. “It has now become the heart of the building” was the spin, but few accepted that.27 A better metaphor might l

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be digestion: absorbed and assimilated into the bowels of the institution. Tim Bonyhady spoke for many (in the art world at least) when he declared that its installation in Gallery 1 had been “one of the gallery’s greatest innovations.”28 However, it wasn’t an innovation upon which the NGA had capitalised. If, as Spate argued, the viewer’s mind would, after passing through “this forest of coffins” look at other works in the gallery differently, it hadn’t worked in the curators’ minds.

The remainder of the collection continued to tell the familiar mid-twentieth story of the national tradition as if the burial of the White Australia Policy and Sections 51 and 127 of the Constitution in the 1970s had never occurred. Instead of catalysing a new postnational art tradition, it seemed that by 1998 the questions asked by The Aboriginal Memorial were too difficult or created too much anxiety in the national polity.

Bonyhady, an academic in the law department at Australian National University, put his finger on the sore spot: the law that guaranteed the nation-state’s sovereignty. The footbridge that connects the NGA to its neighbour, the Australian High Court, is more than a pedestrian’s convenience; it locks each institution in a symbolic symbiotic relationship. Bonyhady wrote: A year before the High Court’s decision on Mabo (in 1992), the placement of the Aboriginal “war cemetery” in the gallery’s front-of-house was a clear statement that Australia was a conquered colony not, as the law had it, a settled colony or terra nullius. The Memorial was a manifestation of art expressing what the law denied: of the gallery being ahead of its judicial neighbour on the shores of Lake Burley Griffin. Seven years later, with John Howard committed to the 10-point plan and unwilling to say sorry, the Memorial remains as significant as ever.29

In 1998, the recently elected government led by Prime Minister John Howard weakened the Native Title Act (1993) that had resulted from the Mabo Decision,30 a culmination of successive movements in the law that since The Aboriginal Land Rights Act (1976) had been responding to the new post-national zeitgeist. Within ten years of retrieving the repressed memory of the frontier wars, raising it into the national consciousness and asking what now?—Mundine had his answer: Howard’s ten-point plan designed to water down the Native Title Act.

The election of the Howard government had the hallmarks of a rear-guard nationalism —as if it was an inflammation caused by a surge of anti-bodies attacking the post-national virus in the nation’s bloodstream. The culture wars were heating up around the globe. In Australia they sparked what became known as the “History Wars”,31 in which the idea of the frontier wars was hotly contested. However, the heat of this inflammation confirmed that the post-national virus had taken hold. Thus, the History Wars drew more, not less attention, to the frontier wars. Another ploy

by Howard was to substitute the revisionist militarisation of Australian history in the frontier wars with another war: WW1, and its well-established ANZAC myth, thus shifting the talk of war to other frontiers elsewhere in the world.

The ANZAC myth was first promulgated in Australia’s official WW1 history written by Charles Bean, the Australian Imperial Force’s official correspondent. Bean was a convert to what Australian novelist and critic Vance Palmer called, in 1954, the “Legend of the Nineties”—stories of men and mateship and the Australian bush fostered in the lead up to Federation. Whatever the “historical reality” of these stories, said Palmer, they bore all the hallmarks of myth or legend, in which “the genius of this young country… had a sudden vision of themselves as a nation.”32

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The “legend of the nineties” lost its initial vigour once Federation was achieved but, the historian Richard White argued, it returned reinvigorated as the ANZAC myth.33 In Bean’s official history, the steep cliffs of Gallipoli, Turkey (that flank Troy, the battleground of the Trojan War told in Homer’s Iliad, the founding model of Western tragedy) became the site of an antipodean tragedy where a bush-born Australia gained self-awareness and realised its national destiny. As Australian poet C. J. Dennis wrote of Ginger Mick (a character in two of his novels), in his classic idiomatic poem written shortly after the ANZAC troops were evacuated from Gallipoli following their defeat: “it took a flamin’ world-war fer to blarst ‘is crust away’.”

In Bean’s hands, those terrible eight months on the Gallipoli Peninsula forged a national myth that was first sketched in the 1890s but had failed to take hold with Federation—proof that more than a state is needed to create a nation. Coming towards the end of Australia’s long frontier war, and at the beginning of a thirty years’ world conflagration (1914 to 1945) that would crush Europe’s empires and usher in the postcolonial era, the ANZAC myth provided an effective narrative for Australia’s coming of age as a modern nation-state. Before WW1 shook their faith in Western civilisation, the colonists’ loyalty to Empire and sense of Britishness was as strong if not stronger than ever. After WW1 the ANZAC myth quickly became the symbolic marker of a new Australianness.

However, it was not accompanied by the militarisation of Australian history, let alone a celebration of it. In thus not derailing the myth of terra nullius—of a virgin country awaiting occupation—the ANZAC myth’s focus on egalitarianism and mateship didn’t unsettle the existing settler-colonial consciousness. Already “sketched in” by the “legend of the nineties”, “with the landing at Gallipoli… the ready-made myth was given a name, a time and a place.”34

Like other national war memorials built after WW1, the Australian War Memorial was constructed as a sacred site of the nation or people, not a monument to war. The AWM website proclaims, “The Memorial is more than a monument;” In keeping with the sombre, commemorative tone of the Memorial, Charles Bean was from the start concerned that it should not be seen to be glorifying war or triumphing over the enemy.

He urged… not to speak about “trophies”, preferring the term “relics”. He also urged that captions and text should not use derogatory terms for former enemies, such as “Hun” or “Abdul”… the galleries should “avoid glorification of war and boasting of victory” and “perpetuating enmity… for both moral and national reasons and because those who have fought in wars are generally strongest in their desire to prevent war”. In general, he decided, former enemies should be treated as generously as were Australians.35

The war memorials of the twentieth century were a direct repudiation of the monuments that had previously been built to glorify generals and kings. Howard’s particular militarisation of Australian history sought to remake the ANZAC myth for his own political ends, effectively transforming a memorial into a monument—a process that is ongoing and seemingly supported by both sides of parliament in what Australian historian Henry Reynolds has described as “the relentless, lavishly funded public campaign to make war the central, defining experience of [Australian] national life.”36

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While Marx’s overused aphorism that history repeats itself first as tragedy and then as farce is now a cliché, it is instructive to pause on what he meant. History, he claimed, repeats as farce in the hands of those who, blind to how the past is transmitted and the task of their time, nostalgically cling to old ideals. The crux for Marx was not that history repeats or returns, but whether this return, this “awakening of the dead… served the purpose of magnifying the given task [of the times] in the imagination”, or “recoiling from its solution in reality.” The first, he said, produces tragedy as it enables necessary change, the second produces farce as it disables change.37

Marx’s dichotomy is not as neat as he implies. Farce is rarely without tragedy, whether the disastrous loss of life or its classical manifestation in which the hand of fate is inescapable. What begins as farce too often ends in tragedy, as occurred in WW1—in the embrace of a doctrine in which the spilling of blood is imagined as a rite of passage for men and nations, combined with the pumpedup atmosphere of a narcissistic nationalism, Europe’s empires tripped headlong into self-destruction that is still playing out globally.

All new epochs and nations, Marx observed in the Empire rhetoric and social evolutionism of his day, are brought into being through the tragic mode of war and terror. Australia, which came into being when European imperialism was at its height, is no exception. Reynolds pointed out that Australians fought in “two very different types of war” in the run up to Federation: wars of Empire in faraway places (Africa and China) and a national war in which settler colonists and their police contingents (Indigenous and non-Indigenous) were engaged in a bloody frontier struggle, then at its height in a large sweep of country across northern and central Australia. Amongst the former, two can be counted in this period, both in Africa: the Sudan Campaign in 1885 and the Boer War from 1899-1902. Australian casualties in these two conflicts pale in comparison to the lives lost in the national ‘frontier wars’, yet these two Empire wars head the long list of “Australians at War” in the AWM, while ignoring the frontier wars that, according to Reynolds, was a truly national struggle “for land and sovereignty, fought, as many participants appreciated, for the power to determine the future of vast productive regions.”38

In shifting attention from the frontier wars to those honoured in the Australian War Memorial, Howard transferred the symbolic content of one to the other, effectively doubling down on the nation’s violent genesis and erasing the myth of terra nullius—of the nation’s peaceful discovery and settlement. Howard pushed the militarisation further by politicising refugees, hastily rushing to join the American ‘War on Terror’ in 200139 and instigated “The Intervention” of 2007,40 in which members of the Australian Defence Force were dispatched to remote Indigenous communities. In another move to placate their ghosts, Indigenous Australians who fought in Australia’s wars honoured by the AWM were to head the roll-call for special commemoration: “large well-funded research projects… exhaustively document the distinctive Indigenous contribution to official military history”. Reynolds caustically concluded, “Aborigines who fought for the white man are remembered with reverence. The many more who fought against him are forgotten.”41

The ascendancy of Howard’s politics at the turn of the twenty-first century didn’t sideline tales of the frontier wars as he had hoped. Instead, they became sites of increasing anxiety. Whether moved to the heart or the guts of the NGA in 1998, The Aboriginal Memorial refused its digestion into the normative myth of Australian art—despite art critic Benjamin Gennocchio’s claim in 2000 that “it’s one of the few works of… Australian art… that has any claim to being a national icon.”42 His claim was somewhat ironic given that Mundine had sought to challenge, not affirm, this national ethos.

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derived from the zeitgeist of the Australian Bicentenary has been sullied by the fallout from the History Wars and its unresolved anxieties, that continue to pull at the national psyche. As if not knowing what to do with these concerns, in 2010 the NGA interned The Aboriginal Memorial in a mausoleum-like structure to the side of the Gallery’s new front entrance, far from the rest of the collection, and on a lower area below eye level, where it can be quickly left behind, unseen. If this confirms that “history is written by the victors”, The Aboriginal Memorial is also defiantly there.

The victors are never safe from the dead: once stirred, the ghosts of the history wars are not easily stilled; their eyes are upon us.

In recent years, histories of frontier wars and related discourses have gained new energy as national histories around the world founded on colonial conquest, slavery, racial ideology and Westernism, especially those in former settler colonies, are coming under intense scrutiny.

The Aboriginal Memorial waits its turn, the harbinger of post-national histories being called forth.

The post-Western culture wars unleashed in the aftermath of World War II have a long way to run.

Notes 1 Karl Marx, ‘The Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte’, Marx/Engels Internet Archive, 2010, chapter 5 2

Richard White, Inventing Australia Images and Identity 1688-1980, Sydney: George Allen & Unwin, 1981, p. 111

3 First invoked in late-nineteenth-century international law, terra nullius is a legal concept that in special cases gave colonisers sovereignty over occupied territory. For centuries, the European “law of nations” paradigm had accepted that states could acquire territory through conquest, or through treaties with existing occupants or, in the case of unoccupied land, through the “Discovery Doctrine”. The latter required the discoverer to plant a flag and claim the land in the name of a Christian European monarch, and to report the discovery to the

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monarch who must subsequently occupy it. In order to explain how European sovereigns had acquired colonies like New South Wales, which had clearly been occupied at the time of colonisation and had neither been ceded by its indigenous inhabitants (through treaties) nor truly conquered by the coloniser according to international law, jurists adopted the term terra nullius to extend the meaning of unoccupied land to include “barbarous country” (Advocate-General of Bengal v. Ranee Surnomoye Dossee (48) (1863) 2 Moo N S 22, at p. 59), territory occupied by “backward” or “uncivilised” people, or “territory practically unoccupied” (Cooper v. Stuart Lord Watson (51) (1889) 14 App Cas, at p. 291). In this way, terra nullius emerged as a legal concept that gave colonisers sovereignty over occupied territory if, as it was claimed, the inhabitants were not united permanently for political action within the European comity of nations, and so lacked statehood. As it often does, the law made explicit or conscious what had long been implicit or taken for granted when Captain James Cook invoked the conditions of the Discovery Doctrine when he claimed New South Wales for the British Monarch; thus, the concept of terra nullius sharpened rather than overturned long held beliefs regarding the cultural and legal superiority of the European nations and their rights of sovereignty. For an excellent overview of the history of terra nullius as a legal term, see Andrew Fitzmaurice, ‘The Genealogy of Terra Nullius’, Australian Historical Studies, volume 38, issue 129, 2007, pp. 1-15 4 From ‘Report of a Speech by William Charles Wentworth, Australian Legislative Council 1844’, in Joseph Black et al. eds, The Broadview Anthology of British Literature, Toronto: Broadview Press, 2015, pp. 1750-51 5 Mundine workshopped the idea with “his senior advisors in the Ramingining community, Paddy Dhatangu and David Malangi, with whom he was in a grandfather/grandson classificatory relationship”, as well as others. Nigel Lendon, ‘Relational Agency: Rethinking the Aboriginal Memorial’, emaj 9, 2016, p. 8 6

ibid., p. 2

7

Nick Waterlow, ‘A View of World Art c.1940-88’, Biennale of Sydney: From the Southern Cross: A View of World Art c.1940-88 (exhib. cat.), Sydney: Biennale of Sydney/ABC Enterprises, 1988, page 9 8

ibid.

9

Lendon, op cit., p. 4

10

Terry Smith, ‘Public Art between Cultures: The Aboriginal Memorial, Aboriginality and Nationality in Australia’, Critical Inquiry 27, No. 4, 2001

11 Susan Jenkins, ‘It’s a Power: An Interpretation of the Aboriginal Memorial in its Ethnographic, Museological, Art Historical and Political Contexts’, Masters of Philosophy Thesis, Australian National University, 2002, p. 211 12

Lendon, op cit.

13

Smith, op cit., p. 646

14

Marek Tamm, ‘History as Cultural memory: Mnemohistory and the Construction of the Estonian Nation’, Journal of Baltic Studies 39, No. 4, 2008, p. 500 15 Australia’s official World War 1 historian, Charles Bean, initially conceived the Australian War Memorial in 1916 as a memorial to the sufferings of the soldiers in that war. By the 1950s the AWM had become Australia’s national memorial to the members of its armed forces and supporting organisations who have participated in all wars overseas, including some conflicts involving personnel from the Australian colonies prior to Federation 16 The annual ANZAC Day ceremony was first held in 1916 to commemorate the landing at Gallipoli by Australian forces on 25 April 1915.

By 1927 it had become a public holiday throughout Australia, “complete with semi-religious ritual, liturgy and hymnal.” White, op cit., p. 136.

Since the 1950s it has commemorated all Australians who served in overseas operations involving the Australian Armed Forces 17

Michael Howard, The Lessons of History, New Haven: Yale University Press, 1991, p. 39

18

ibid.

19

Sir John Kirwan, An Empty Land Pioneers and pioneering in Australia, London: Eyre and Spottiswoode, 1936

20

Charles Bean, The Official History of Australia in the War of 1914-1918, quoted in White, op cit., p. 125

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21

Reported in Raymond Gill, ‘Aboriginal Art’s new face at Canberra gallery’, Sydney Morning Herald, 1 October, 2010

22

Smith, op cit., p. 635

23

Quoted in Lendon, op cit., p. 5

24 In a symposium at the NGA in October 2018, the new Director Nick Mitzevich expressed his dissatisfaction with its current display and belief that it was the most important work in the collection 25

Djon Mundine, from an unpublished lecture given at the National Gallery of Australia, 6 November, 2010

26

Jenkins, op cit., pp. 24, 220

27

ibid., p. 221

28

Quoted, ibid., p. 232

29

ibid.

30 In 1992, the Indigenous activist Eddie Mabo won a long-running case in the High Court of Australia known as The Mabo Decision, in which the Meriam people of the Murray Islands, in the Thursday Island group, were awarded the first Australian example of Native Title, on the basis of their long and continued occupation of the place being recognised by the common law as having survived alongside the British Crown claims of sovereignty. The decision, which overturned previous decisions on Native land title based on terra nullius that extinguished all previous rights and interests in the land, established the model for the Native Title Act in 1993, which set out a procedure for Indigenous people to claim a limited form of land title within Australian Law 31 The “History Wars”, which were at their height at the turn of the twenty-first century, were sparked by scepticism towards accounts of the ‘frontier wars’ that had gained increasing attention since the 1980s. While the dispute was heated, the scepticism was driven by ideological concerns that failed to sustain their claim. Seen in a broader perspective, they were a manifestation of a post-Western culture war that is ongoing and global in reach 32

Vance Palmer, The Legend of the Nineties, Melbourne: Melbourne University Press, 1954, pp. 9-10

33

White, op cit., chapter 8

34

ibid., p. 128

35

History of the Australian War Memorial; https://www.awm.gov.au/about/organisation/history; accessed 5 May 2019

36

Henry Reynolds, Forgotten War, Sydney: University of New South Wales Press, 2013, p. 4

37

Karl Marx, ‘The Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte’, translated from the 1852 version

38

Reynolds, op cit., pp. 224-25

39 In the years leading up to 2001, increasing numbers of refugees sought asylum in Australia. In August 2001, the Howard government refused permission for the Norwegian freighter MV Tampa, carrying over 400 rescued refugees to enter Australian waters. This, along with the “children overboard affair” in October 2001, in which allegations (later proven false) were made that asylum seekers threw children overboard, was used by the Howard government to its advantage in winning a closely contested election in November that year 40 In the lead up to the 2007 election, the Howard government introduced The Northern Territory National Emergency Response, also referred to as “The Intervention”, which involved the unprecedented deployment of 600 military personnel to address allegations of extreme social dysfunction in Northern Territory Indigenous communities 41

Reynolds, op cit., p. 6

42

Quoted in Jenkins, op cit., p. 229

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Passages of Stillness: The Ethics of Landscape and Remembering in Shaun Gladwell’s 1000 Horses Shaun Gladwell’s video work 1000 Horses1 seeks out forms and sites of remembrance that are, by definition, consistently elusive. It marks a series of absences and a history of movements as a critical and yet open engagement with place and past. Commissioned to coincide with the centenary of the Battle of Beersheba in Palestine during World War I,2 it revisits the landscape as a means of contemplating the continued consequences of this formative moment in shaping a Middle East, which resonates still today. A literal form of return, when you know such a return is impossible, it re-enters the territory it is describing, if only to draw a larger map beyond this. It is a motion as unexpected as those Australian soldiers and their horses traversing Palestine towards the site of battle, fighting in a desert not their own, for a military outcome that would always be at some remove from their lived experience. Perhaps this is a condition of being Australian—a trope of distance?

Filmed in both Israel and Australia, Gladwell’s work recognises this distance, but also forms a bridge to draw parallels and uncanny associations.

The conditions, which brought that first event into being, are too soon forgotten. Perhaps the work, despite its negotiation of material monuments, recognises that it comes to the scene belatedly.

The nuances of it are almost immediately lost to another mode of reflection and retrospection. In this way, the monument, or any formal remembrance, is always already an interpretation. How does a monument come into being? Why? For whom? The processes of its formation are not simply about that act of memorialising, which appears on the surface of things—the object or space being marked and inscribed with names and dates—the remaking of something that happened a moment or long ago. And if the monument is a deliberate or accidental site of remembering, then it insists upon an embodied reading. As if, more or less, there is no remembering without embodiment, without a form of witnessing in time and place. Even if that act of witnessing is constituted within a series of absences. University of Massachusetts Professor of English and Judaic Studies James E. Young proposes the counter-monument; a viable, ethical, alternative form that recognises the monument as a site of what is unrepresentable, while at the same time asserting the importance of establishing a site itself:

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By defining itself in opposition to the traditional memorial’s task, the counter-monument illustrates concisely the possibilities and limitations of all memorials everywhere. In this way, it functions as a valuable ‘counter-index’ to the ways time, memory, and current history intersect at any memorial site.3

This condition consolidates the uncanny nature of the encounter with the object.

The absence is a mourned space, and remembrance may be configured through the negotiation of that space rather than a territorialising marker in the ground. Moreover, monuments fail when they over-literalise their subject. There’s nothing left to do. No place for you, so you become blind to them.

But how to mark what has gone?

Gladwell is no stranger to the problem of the unrepresentable. As an experienced Australian War Memorial commissioned war artist in Afghanistan and Iraq, his job has been to face up to the ethics of representations. That is, the ethics of facing up; to be elsewhere and to understand what it means to be out of place in this way. What can be represented? What can be seen in this field of vision? Art always asks these questions, but Gladwell intensifies the inquiry, and consistently puts himself into contested spaces, where this facing up is all the more fraught. Academic and author Paul Carter’s “spatial history” is a useful model here.4 For example, he writes of explorer Thomas Mitchell’s charting of Australian territory,5 mapping, surveying and naming, as he moves through it: “He was the means of transforming the dynamic space of travelling into the fixed and passive space of settlement. But he effected this transformation by positing a plausible place rather than by discovering it. He viewed the country he passed through as if through the eyes of the future.”6

Gladwell’s remapping offers a visualised version of that future perspective. While the nature of the moving image presupposes something linear, sequential, 1000 Horses works in several directions at once. The terms are established from the first frames—birth and the end of life simultaneously. And it is that simultaneity that needs negotiating by the viewer throughout.

Formally, the two screens of the artwork establish a mutual counterpoint, which resists singular reading. It is a device that Gladwell has used before, and has many precedents in film and video, going back as far as Abel Gance’s film Napoleon (1927). But perhaps we learn most about how this doubling works from philosophy, especially Derrida, who often deployed doubled columns of writing (notably in Glas, 1974) not only to pursue two narratives, two conflicting interpretations, but to propose that unreadability within this formal conceit is the opening onto an ethics of reading.

It is about positioning. With the double screens you hardly know when and where to look.

Your eye moves between the two and you adjust your sightlines in a kind of embodied looking.

In this way, the gaze is deeply ethical, insisting on the difficulty of images while at the same time recognising an obligation to them.

Again, Gladwell is operating in the realm of the unrepresentable, where the composition is nevertheless defined by an obligation to ‘see it through’. He has often deployed this strategy, notably in Double Field and Double Balancing Act (both 2009-10), which emerge from his work as a war artist. This ethical oscillation between two screens is crucial in such witnessing. But we also see it in more ‘urban’ works, such as Broken Dance (2012). Simultaneity is the condition of art that cannot be captured or stilled. It enables a subjective narrative to be configured by the viewer rather than the artist.

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Perhaps most purposefully, A Soldier of the Exalted Ottoman Empire (2017) might be read as a doubled doubling. It was presented in the same exhibition as 1000 Horses at the Tel Aviv Museum of Art, and in this context it read as a critical response from the other side of the 1917 Battle of Beersheba, while inhabiting the same territory, a ghostly resurfacing. While the exhibition itself marked the centenary of the battle Gladwell was determined to articulate an Ottoman perspective.

Found footage of Turkish soldiers is juxtaposed with the figure of a soldier who, for anyone viewing the exhibition as a whole, is clearly sited in the same landscape of 1000 Horses.

Doubling produces an undecidable encounter. But far from being without commitment, it establishes a ‘facing up to’ what is at stake here. In the absence of evidence, witnessing takes another, layered form. You witness the screen in this doubled manner. And in turn the screens establish a second layer of witnessing, another embodiment. The camera can inquire on your behalf, move through the secondary spaces that you witness as it is screened. This is different from the convention of looking at film which, while often a shared experience, is an act of unseeing both your surroundings and the medium itself in favour of a singular narrative. Gladwell never lets you forget that you are watching the madeness of the moving image, an embodied gaze, which is inevitably making decisions throughout.

In a land of simultaneous seeing and unseeing, the Zionist landscape painters of Palestine working under Boris Schatz at the Bezalel School of Art and Design, founded in 1906, through to the 1920s landscape painters such as Reuven Rubin, Yisrael Paldi and Arieh Lubin, painted what they wanted to see. Or rather, unsaw in their painting, what got in the way of their often preconceived vision of the land, an impressionist blurring, or even effacing, in the landscape of something that was there before this encounter. Art historian Dalia Manor sees this as a type of ideologised memory: The Zionist artists were not tuned to futuristic visions to present-day reality. They preferred to evoke the past, an idealised pre-Zionist, pre-modern past through landscape images. At times it was a Jewish past (and present), but not necessarily a biblical one; rather it was that of the so-called Old yishuv. The image of Palestine as portrayed by these artists was of the country as a kind of memory, a place to yearn for and to love from a distance.7

What becomes (or returns as) the Israeli landscape is defined as an image of itself through stylistic devices, whether it is the early Zionist optimism, which often sees through what is directly in ahead, or the muscular redefinition of the land through the new body which works it.8 This is always a paradox, because the absence represented in the land, the deserted space, is constructed as a site of return. The landscape painters ‘recognised’ it, or constructed an image of the land which became recognisable. There is another type of naming. The land is reclaimed, articulated again, through history. These are names you read in the Bible, so every naming becomes a renaming.9 This is a theology of return, defined in the passage through these spaces, moving through them and belated recognition lays claim to them—constructed landscapes which anticipate or respond to that recognition.10 And this is a site of another form of naming—marking place in someone’s name.

The land is over-written with dedications; ‘written’, in the sense that this marking is also always in someone’s name. Naming is a ritual which consolidates the object or event. Not necessarily what you might call monuments, so often things are built in the name of someone else, and/or in their memory. Indeed, public spaces or buildings or monuments are defined through this act of naming, and as such are rarely without this secondary association—a country of memorialising, with an ideological drive towards not forgetting.

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There are sites of remembrance that become monuments almost by accident. For example, along the highway between Tel Aviv and Jerusalem as you turn your head to the side of the road, you can see the rusting shells of burnt-out tanks, long since abandoned in a battle for this crucial artery —territory not defined just in terms of spaces, but also the routes you might be able to make through them. A certain moment of intention, or making, occurs at their point of abandonment. They should suggest loss and failure, but instead they assume a sculptural quality, accidental, but nevertheless material. And it is that materiality that asserts a presence-in-absence over the land. Perspective on the object is always transitional, fleeting. Close to Young’s counter-monument, these objects are almost unnoticeable (like many monuments, even the most monumental) and have the job of remembering put upon them.

Gladwell is often adjusting where foreground and background, centre and periphery, may be in permanent negotiation. This is not the cinematic convention of focus and depth of field, which is an entirely subjective imposition, but rather a series of adjustments which enable him to engage and leave the frame open. In the slow unfolding of the opening sequences of 1000 Horses the viewer must negotiate its framing, not in terms of composition, but as a counter to the persistence of subject to which you bear witness within the double screen. Nowhere and nothing to hide.

Gladwell develops a formalism throughout the projection of the video which runs counter to the subject. The framing is more than aesthetic device, it acts as a mechanism to throw responsibility back onto the viewer. The subject, the image, is simultaneously the thing and not what his work is about at all. In the video we see the horse mostly with its rider, who is dressed in the World War I Australian Light Horse uniform.11 Hardly moving, even when mounted, the soldier is seen leading the horses, or tending to its needs. We might be aware that this is staged, but the look of the relationship between rider and horse give the strongest sense of detached observation. The horse is both existential presence as well as a stand-in, an uncanny echo of the history that is being told.

Perhaps this is why the work begins with a birth and a death. Reality and reenactment occupy the same place, the same landscape. Neither one nor the other, your reading must accommodate both.

The horse marks space by its passage, at one with its rider, whose own passage is enabled by this intimate relationship. The horse is in perpetual motion, marking territory not in a localised way, but in an expansive movement. Gladwell’s work acknowledges those Australian ‘Walers’12 that were shipped to the Middle East to fight in the war, visualising beautifully a lifetime intimacy between horse and rider. Such intimacy is supported by contemporary narratives and found in Frank Hurley’s images of soldier and horse from his time as Australian war artist in Palestine.

The tragedy of this particular moment in history is that of the more than 130,000 horses which went to war from Australia, only one returned home.13

Gladwell is particularly moved by the plight of these horses. Soldiers often chose to kill their own to spare them from their fears of a life of cruelty.14 While not part of the official narrative of battle, here is another moment which must be marked by an absence. Gladwell’s solution in the final sequence of 1000 Horses, is to step out of the formally prescribed narratives. A low-fi coda grabbed from a computer screen shows a news report of horses abandoned in an American desert. It is a tangential, disruptive, existential counter to the controlled formalism of Gladwell’s stagings. It might be read as a gestural intervention that affirms a continued universal resonance of this very specific moment in history.

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But for those horses left behind, a natural history takes an evolutionary turn or diversion; a legacy of cultural/political interference.15 The figure of the horse becomes a trope of displacement.

Although eminently suited to the Middle Eastern terrain, the Walers’ displacement promotes a sense of something both at home with itself and not, out of place, but inside recognisable territory.

The horse in Gladwell’s configuration negotiates two places at once, visually and syntactically stitching together the landscapes of Australia and Israel.

Gladwell’s work begins in a moment of history. It is not a reenactment, but questions the repercussions of an event, and always occupies a space beyond the event. The significance of the Battle of Beersheba cannot be overestimated. It turned the Gaza-Beersheba Turkish line. Gaza fell the following week, and British troops entered Jerusalem on 9th December. History conflates the Battle of Beersheba with the Balfour Declaration,16 confirmed almost simultaneously on 31st October, prior to its publication three days later. Its consequences resonate, and continue to be contested, a hundred years on. The difficulties of revisiting this are not lost on Gladwell: It is a deep sadness that I make a work that somehow engages a battle that marked the eventual collapse of the Ottoman Empire, and its key successor state is now collapsing again. I never saw the conflict as a success beyond specific militaristic and geopolitical terms. After my limited research, the battle of Be’er Sheva (Beersheba) seemed to generate a field of great loss.17 But 1000 Horses isn’t about this historic battle, as such. It can be seen as consistent with so many other works of Gladwell’s which engage physically with the artefacts and actions of a culture.

The film is not even about the horses of its title, even though almost every frame is marked with their image. But perhaps we can observes a set of relations that are consistent with Gladwell’s encounter with, and in, the landscape—how we move through it, and what we need to do so. Everything you witness is fraught with a sense of presentness, ontological intensities, set against the residual objects of the past—objects which may mark that history (as monuments) and which are more inadvertently marked by that history.

In the same way that, say, the motorbike or skateboard in Gladwell’s earlier works function as prosthetic extensions to the body, redefining its limits, the horses define human engagement with its surrounds. For Gladwell, these performative moments are not just sharp observations of a culture (bikers, skateboarders, beatboxers) but are agents of transition or what might almost be its opposite —an achieved stillness. Gladwell’s own Study in Balance and Stillness (2014), for example, produces an existential tension at the moment the artist masters control of the bike. The bike defines itself as object only when in motion. Without the rider it is a merely an abstract object. The stillness Gladwell is seeking in this performance forces an intensity of experience. By extension the horse is bred across generations for its motion and stillness in equal measure.

There are many versions of this stillness in 1000 Horses, moments of life and death in the opening sequences, scenes of feeding and drinking, and others. But there is a particular quality of stillness which is achieved when the horse becomes an agent of perception within the intimate relationship between horse and rider. This is a complicity of action (or stasis) which must be read as ethical. The film repeatedly frames this encounter, face to face, or body to body. When the horse encounters its own sculpted likeness, it faces up to an almost contradictory representation of the horse in motion. At the ANZAC Memorial in Be’er Sheva,18 the monument assumes a scaled-up abstracted form of a horse. It is the first moment in the film where the images on the doubled screen become one. Gladwell opens up the memorial’s formal qualities, both in terms of what it serves l

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to remember, and another layer of functionality. A lookout; another take on the landscape, a site of, and for, contemplation. Observation is a strategy of control in war, in the manner of Foucault’s panopticism. The more you see the more you control. Gladwell’s horse is constantly shifting in and out of place. Here it is led up to the viewing platform, briefly suspended from its terrain. In another sequence it is framed by a tunnel of light formed within Dani Karavan’s nearby Negev Monument (1963-68). Echoes, here, of Nancy Holt’s Sun Tunnels (1973-76), where the viewer must adjust their body in and out of relation to the framed light offered in these passage or non-spaces.

Entering the landscape is always a political act, a form of engagement which is politicised through presence alone, one of unavoidable engagement. But what to do with this? Gladwell’s work has persistently engaged with the Australian landscape and the ethical implications of moving through it, territory defined not so much by mapping or finite borders, but by passages and movements. The condition of transitional engagement, seen in works such as Interceptor Surf Sequence (2009), function as a gesture that might be termed counter-colonising. Critical in its recognition, that to enter territory is to change it. This ‘contamination’, is unavoidable, such as it is. But often what you see in the landscape is residual, occluded and indirect. How to look for those traces?

There are moments of literal disruption and redemption, such as the ritualised nursing of kangaroo and wallaby roadkill in Gladwell’s Apologies 1-6 (2007-09). But more often it is the cumulative power and simultaneous ambiguity of narratives and mythologies which accrue through reportage, after the fact, a layering of memories and storytelling on the one hand, as well as the legacy of what has gone before.

Gladwell’s encounter with the Israeli landscape begins in a similar way, but is more out of sorts. There is less personal baggage to rely upon here, and movement must be tentative, questioning.

In this biblical land there are infinite stories which go back millennia, but that is not what is at stake here. Gladwell’s horse and soldier deliberately, barely, touch the territory. Not pushing forward, but often circling, pausing, seeking sightlines, making sense of a place that is not theirs.

Notes 1 1000 Horses was commissioned by the Sherman Contemporary Art Foundation, Sydney and Museum of Tel Aviv for an exhibition of the same name at the Museum, 31 October 2017 – 28 February 2018. For clarity, all references to “1000 Horses” in the text are to this work, unless specified, rather than the exhibition as a whole 2 This essay will default to the Anglicised spelling of the location when referring to the battle itself, rather than the more current transliteration from Hebrew ‫עַבֶׁש רֵאְּב‬, Be’er Sheva 3

Paul Carter, The Road to Botany Bay, an essay in spatial history, London: Faber & Faber, New York: Knopf, Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1987, 1988; Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2010 4

James E. Young, ‘The Counter-Monument: Memory against Itself in Germany Today’, Critical Inquiry Vol. 18, No. 2, 1992, p. 277

5 Thomas Mitchell (1792-1855) was appointed Surveyor-General of New South Wales in 1828. Responsible for the majority of the first surveys of Eastern Australia, he worked towards a unified survey of the territory, clarifying disputed boundaries. Four substantial expeditions charted much of the mapping of the state as well as surveying routes for the plotting of roads, the routes of which are often the same still used today 6

Paul Carter, op cit., p. 120

7

Dalia Manor, ‘Imagined homeland; landscape painting in Palestine in the 1920s’, Nations and Nationalism 9 (4), 2003, p. 551

8 A reversal of the body subject to anti-Semitism, reinvented as a Zionist ideal, strong and able to work the land. Max Nordau coined the figure of the “muscle Jew” at the Second Zionist Congress in 1989

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9 Meron Benvenisti, in his book, Sacred Landscape: the Buried History of the Holy Land Since 1948 (Berkeley: University of California, 2000) explores the politics of naming from 1949, through the government bodies such as Israel Exploration Society and the Committee for the Designation of Place-Names in the Negev Region. Arab names are Hebraicised, with an ideological zeal that proposed the Arabic names were themselves versions of an ancient Hebrew as an act of restoration, while elsewhere a past or a location is invoked in Hebrew coinages: “The irony was that the Jews were returning to their ancient homeland, but were able to identify the places there only because the people who had inhabited them during the Jews’ long absence had preserved their names.” (p. 46) Paul Carter, in The Road to Botany Bay, tracks a similar territorial impulse through naming by European explorers in Australia, when encountering local languages: “It is a name that refuses to admit the place was there before it was named, a name that celebrates the travelling mode of knowledge.” (p. 9) 10 It is no accident that Gladwell invokes and appropriates the photographer Sharon Ya’ari within his exhibition. Ya’ari is a chronicler of Israel’s ideological legacies through landscape. He looks at its modernisms, and pictures corners of the land where those histories and ideologies intersect with a landscape which is often revealed as constructed. Ya’ari’s images view such space with an ability to expose a layer of its history underneath. If the photograph makes a singular moment, then Ya’ari’s punctum is an indirect clue to this location’s past 11 The Australian Light Horse were were like mounted infantry in that they usually fought dismounted, using their horses as transport to the battlefield and as a means of swift disengagement when retreating or retiring 12 A colonial horse, with origins as far back as the First Fleet. Initially known as “New South Walers”, it developed in Australia during the nineteenth century, a workhorse with anonymous lineage, most likely combining strains of Thoroughbred, Arabian, Cape Horse and Timor Pony.“ The colony is specially adapted for the breeding of saddle and light harness horses and it is doubtful where these particular breeds of Australian horses are anywhere surpassed. The bush horse is hardy and swift and capable of making very long and rapid journeys when fed only on the ordinary herbage of the country: and in times of drought, when grass and water have become scanty, these animals often perform astonishing feats of endurance.” T.A. Coghlan, Wealth and Progress of New South Wales, Sydney: Government Printer, 1884, p. 348 13 Sandy, owned by Major General Sir William Throsby Bridges (who commanded the 1st Australian Division at Gallipoli, where he was killed in May 1915) 14 A popular poem published in 1919, ‘The Horses Stay Behind’ by Trooper Bluegum (a pseudonym of the war poet, Oliver Hogue), articulates this emotional attachment and, crucially, the impossibility of return. The persistent refrain of the title invokes a fantasy of return through “Mitchell grass” and “bush birds” with “other horses”. The final verse proposes that it would be better to shoot the horse rather than thinking of it “crawling around old Cairo with a Gyppo on his back” 15 Perhaps there is a corollary to be found in the camels imported into Australia from 1840s, as they were well-suited to travelling through the arid Australian terrain. They now roam the Australian bush and are subject to regular culling to keep their numbers in check. Never indigenous, as much as they have become a familiar site in the bush, their displacement is still marked, generations later 16 The Balfour Declaration was a public statement issued by the British Government positing a hope for a Jewish homeland in Palestine: “His Majesty’s Government view with favour the establishment in Palestine of a national home for the Jewish people.” The declaration is dated 2 November 1917, but was authorised on 31st October, the same day as the Battle of Beersheba 17

Shaun Gladwell, email to Andrew Renton, 19 August 2018

18

ANZAC is the acronym for the Australia and New Zealand Army Corps

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Michael Rakowitz: A Museum Without Walls For Baghdad There is no document of culture that is not at the same time a document of barbarism.1 How is it possible to resign yourself to watching Baghdad and Iraq pass from being the cradle of mankind to the grave of history, from the Mesopotamian dream watering its land to the conflicts of the last few decades, relentlessly burning it? In this tragic context, how are we to rethink the fate of the national heritage, when the museum-city of Baghdad has seen its vestiges first moved to European museums (in the colonial era), and then reduced to ashes by war (in the postcolonial era)?

Eventually how does contemporary art set forth on the trails of a heritage that is, if not erased, at the very least riddled with missing spaces? Undoubtedly Michael Rakowitz’s timely project The Invisible Enemy Should Not Exist (which he began in 2007 and is ongoing) stands out as most committed.

It shows a restless and Sisyphean effort to ‘recreate’ the looted objects from the Baghdad Museum2 since the invasion of the American armed forces and their allies in the Second Gulf War in 2003.

Playing an important role in raising consciousness about the destruction and loss of cultural heritage, the American artist of Iraqi-Jewish descent can be seen as attempting to establish not less than a museum without walls (or a nomadic museum) for Baghdad.

The artist is not shy about the implications of working on archaeological artefacts with a Western background. Indeed, he describes his work at Art Basel, Room Z, Northwest Palace of Nimrud (2018), as “a double iconoclasm,” adding that “institutions like the British Museum and others acquired many of these reliefs. What remained ended up being destroyed by ISIS.”3 This recent series (which shifts from the context of the American invasion to that of ISIS in 2014) feels like a culmination of Rakowitz’s long-term process. Working with a team of assistants, the artist has reconstructed, as a symbol of the Assyrian golden age, the monumental limestone reliefs that once lined the walls of King Ashurnasirpal II’s ninth century BC palace (near present-day Mosul in northern Iraq). Rakowitz operated with his landmark makeshift figuration, applied to reproduce like a copy the palace’s depictions of winged guardians and offerings of young date fronds, beneath cuneiform chanting of the King’s greatness (excavated by British archaeologists in 1854 and destroyed by ISIS in 2015). Room Z appears as it stood from the time of its dismantling with only l

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seven of thirteen panels displayed. Rakowitz recalls the previous removal of six panels by leaving a blank space and museum label underlining their integration to Western museums’ collections.

Thus acknowledging the continued history of displacement in Iraq, the artist creates what he calls a “palimpsest of different moments of removal.”4 By this almost metaphysical approach to the catastrophe, not to be studied from where it surfaces but from where it re-surfaces, such an artistic statement not only opens a breach to study the role of museology in colonial history, but also to imagine what could be the museum’s future, through the thin line between preservation and reinvention; re-rooting and nomadism.

Since 2007, Rakowitz has devoted himself to creating papier-mâché replicas of looted and destroyed artefacts, made to their true scale; a faithful attitude that expresses his ethics guiding the remakes and also his reluctance for spectacular or monumental strategies (one can mention the quite exceptional reconstitution of the Ishtar Gate at the scale of the original building in Rakowitz’s 2018 exhibition at the Chicago Museum for Contemporary Art). Nevertheless, their materiality shifted from the stone, marble, gypsum and clay to our mundane consumers condition: alluding to the imposed invisibility of the museum treasures, the replicas are made from the packaging of Middle Eastern foodstuffs sold in the USA (where Rakowitz now lives) and from local Arabic newspapers; thus highlighting the presence across America and Europe of Iraqis who have sought refuge from the fighting that has continued to ravage their country.

Utilising the University of Chicago’s Oriental Institute database (one of the first deep academic attempts to cope with the dismantling of Iraqi heritage), as well as information posted on Interpol’s website and other sources, Rakowitz has reconstructed more than seven hundred artefacts since 2007. As a ‘museum without walls’, his constructed collection of antiquities is displayed by series or individually, on pedestals, tables and vitrines of variable dimensions, thus emphasising the museum concept to which they belong and escape at the same time—though Rakowitz often intentionally uses a lesser number of vitrines (unlike in a proper museum) in order to enhance the visitor’s eye-contact experience with the objects. To accompany these objects, labels describe the origin of each item, incorporating misleading quotes, at times dramatic or humouristic when heard retrospectively, from either Iraqi archaeologists or American political leaders.

As a ‘museum without walls’ Rakowitz’s system underlines their display conditions, instead of acting as if they didn’t matter, and both question the lost heritage (following the lootings) and the colonised heritage (of Mesopotamian, Assyrian, Babylonian artifacts in French and German museums). By their provocative materiality and rough compositions (refined in their own way when it comes to miniature objects) the remakes of the Baghdad Museum appeals to reconnecting our subjectivity to ancient artifacts which the Western museum taught us to look at as “things from the past”; while the lost and dismembered heritage plays a big role in the blurring of national identities for younger generations of Arab people. The Invisible Enemy Should Not Exist explores the museum as the metaphor of a culture surviving somewhere between dream and nightmare, a culture which is showing itself to be all the more alive because it is resisting its programmed destruction—condemned not so much to extinction as to reinvention.

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It’s all the more so compelling to think that Rakowitz’s recreational but unachievable process has begun at a time (in 2007) of general dilapidation and disgrace for the Baghdad Museum.

This museum is now in a much better condition, as after having recovered around half of the approximately 15,000 objects initially looted, it has taken on a new life and been partially reopened to the Iraqi public. Probably as one of the most fascinating effects on us—and how it plays on different temporalities—The Invisible Enemy… performs alternatively the phantom-like and traumatic museum of Iraq—and its dream of a reinvented museum. When asked about his makeshift antiquities as symbols of resilience to the loss of culture and human life, Rakowitz commented, “It’s meant to do two things; to be a ghost that’s supposed to haunt, but also a spectral presence that’s supposed to offer some kind of light.”5

Contrary to what might be thought, this surviving symptom does not date back to the Gulf War, but relates to the history of the avant-gardes in the 1950s and 1960s, and the postindependence period of the 1930s, when the idea of the National Iraq Museum was born. The whole narrative begins with the National Museum, a pivotal resource in the making of modern Iraq from that period onwards, and the permanent symbol of an “antique modernity” to be reinterpreted by artists: the museum presentation of Islamic, Sumerian and Assyrian influences acts as a symbolic platform for the project of a new nation.6 It was also within this boundary that the forming of an artistic avant-garde would be played out. It featured such renowned artists as Jewad Salim, Lorna Salim, Shakir Hassan al Said and Dia Azzawi, who were keen to take part in this national movement of modernisation and, in a cross-disciplinary way, studied art, archaeology and architecture. They managed to create a hybrid aesthetic, inspired directly by national collections of antiquities, while at the same time ushering in an at once complex and straightforward dialogue with European modernism (references to Picasso, for example, recurred regularly, but more in the form of a visual and ironic citation than an ‘influence’ in the strict sense of the term).

We may well wonder if the history of the Iraqi national collections does not reveal a template—in both postcolonial and postmodern terms—of a form of modernisation understood as a process of formal hybridisation, or even formal self-conservation. In this respect, the national collection of modern art (presented in the 1960s in the Gulbenkian building in Baghdad before being transferred in the 1980s to the aptly named Saddam Art Centre) is all the more significant in that its works explicitly reinterpret the iconology and mythologies taken from collections of antiquities. This is a heritage intent on crossing borders (beyond the frontiers of the nation- and postcolonial-state), which is cosmopolitan and multifaceted, in the face of foreign and colonial domination (which certainly did not fade with the Independence of 1932) and faced more broadly today with the destruction of its heritage. Over and above past and present military invasions, many contemporary artists in Iraq and outside the country have devoted themselves to this protective impulse, be it in the form of allegory, parody, documentary or archival work (Walid Siti, Salam Atta Sabri, Latif Al Ani, Sherko Abbas, and Hanaa Malallah amongst others).

The 2003 looting of these collections has in fact given rise to as much illicit speculation as real scientific and heritage programs involving Iraqi and non-Iraqi protagonists (in particular in British and American universities). Auction houses and the black market became infested with the trafficking of looted objects circulating internationally and threatening the museums as well.

Various databases for tracing these objects, whether compiled by customs and police or academic, private or public bodies, kept growing in number, paradoxically offering a new life to these artefacts: theft and destruction are turned into systems of recollection and other areas of online circulation. l

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The cross-border spirit of Mesopotamia and that of the Internet meet up, for better or for worse, creating an anachronistic space to be navigated where artists like Michael Rakowitz help us find our way. The Invisible Enemy… has provided a most complete platform by acting both on the materiality of the objects and their circulation, through different international exhibitions and by museums acquisitions7 (which acquire smaller or greater parts of the The Invisible Enemy… like recently the Tate Modern in 2018). Maybe this interesting relation to trade, collection and circulation comes with a better example, if one is reminded that in 2006 Rakowitz opened a store in Brooklyn to sell dates, with the admitted goal of importing the fruit directly from Iraq, but packaged in boxes that advertised their true provenance. In the context of United Nations-imposed sanctions, Rakowitz’s goods would be the first imports labelled “Product of Iraq” to enter the USA in over twenty-five years. Hence these reproductions from the Baghdad Museum could appear no more as mere objects with their thought-provoking materiality, but as the value exchange or currency for enforcing these missing objects into our present of transitional condition, where the general stability of infrastructures and knowledge structures is challenged by nomadic collections and database museums.

As part of the Fourth Plinth project in London’s Trafalgar Square, in March 2018, The Invisible Enemy Should Not Exist extended into public space with a remake of the Lamassu statue, the Assyrian winged bull destroyed by ISIS in Nineveh in 2015; facing the National Gallery and the City of Westminster. Here we probably see Rakowitz’s most spectacular act in this sculptural history of removal and displacement, where modernism and antiquity meet in a preposterous contemporaneity of crisis (including the current global migrant crisis). The Lamassu statue remake stands for a symbol of displacement from the Ancient Nineveh, late Assyrian Empire (911 BC–612 BC), but also for its eventual collapse. As a symbol of power, it recalls the time when the Assyrian kings sponsored vast buildings and royal palaces decorated with glazed tiles and sculptured bas-reliefs representing the King’s glory, festivities and hunting scenes. It revives the cultural narrative of a pre-Islamic and cosmopolitan Iraq, as the ISIS video staging the destruction of the Nineveh Lamassu aimed at annihilating it. Indeed ISIS’s lethal operations entailed not only onsite propagandist filmmaking with the destruction of heritage objects, but also the deliberate blurring between reality and deception, as they sometimes staged the destruction of a fake object, with the real item kept for trafficking. Therefore Rakowitz’s Lamassu stands for a hope of transferring the object’s essence (or aura) into the replica that can be newly shared in a safe place.

But as a newly implanted monument in the heart of the City of London, the largest Western contemporary art capital, Rakowitz’s Lamassu also abruptly becomes a shadowed mirror to Western collections such as those in the British Museum, or New York’s Metropolitan Museum of Art, which hold such winged-bull statues expropriated from Iraqi archaeological sites. From an iconographic perspective, it draws our subconscious beyond the Assyrian borders to correlate it with a transhistorical stream of figures of orientalist sphinxes, neoclassical lions, baroque imagery or science-fictional monsters. Its public square siting gives it more strength to its literal outdoor presence and metaphorical ‘museum without walls’ destination. Perhaps the main metaphysical and political rupture signified by this gap in history can be explained by the role of the oil economy in modern (and museum) culture—underlined by the involvement in the 1960s of the Gulbenkian family in shaping the National Museum of Modern Art in Baghdad and Iraqi modernism in general, alongside British oil companies who supported, documented and financed parts of that Iraqi heritage.

A resulting irony would be to see this heritage destroyed only to reappear under the form of this

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Lamassu, at a precise time when we see concepts of “collapsology” and “survivalism” promoted in the mainstream media, based on the belief of a gradual decline of the industrial and oil-generated world in the next thirty years, concomitant with an overt growth of museum culture and investment in the Gulf States and in China, as the East and new art softpower strikes back.

By investing a central Western symbol of political power (the pedestal, upon which a nation exhibits its icons of sovereignty), Rakowitz’s Lamassu can be seen as a performance of cultural transfer and hybridity, and one of counter-orientalism: it stands out as the most provocative reminder of the Western nineteenth century Great Exhibitions and World’s Fair, from London to Paris, and Vienna to Chicago, where oriental countries were represented through fake statues, temples and bellydancers.8 A strategy that no longer looks at the Orient, but more so celebrates an oriental unconscious.

Interconnectedness becomes privileged to dependence, and Baghdad’s golden age nostalgia is thus expressed in its own emotional space to an international audience directly from the cultural temple of the City of London—where as it happened, major public demonstrations occurred protesting the second Gulf War in 2003.

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Michael Rakowitz: A Museum Without Walls For Baghdad

It should also be understood that the political rationale for Rakowitz’s art practice —informed by his role of Associate Professor of contemporary art practice at Northwestern University in Chicago, and at the International Academy of Art Palestine in Ramallah—is one of a ‘cultural archaeologist’ uncovering unexpected networks between history and fiction, relying on a critical, research-based approach. In 2010, Tate Modern in London presented his project The Worst Condition is to Pass Under a Sword Which is Not One’s Own (2009), which traces links between Western science-fiction and Saddam Hussein’s regime (revealing the Iraqi leader’s fascination with Jules Verne’s novels and Star Wars films). Rakowitz also follows a more socially committed and nongallery practice, for instance, with his project paraSITE (1998-ongoing), consisting of inflatable shelters for homeless people in the USA, inspired by the Bedouin who change the form of their tents every night in response to the wind. Equally, Enemy Kitchen (2006-ongoing) is an iterative performance in which hospitality fights against hostility by serving Iraqi food to the public. A major survey show was held at the Chicago Museum for Contemporary Art in 2017-18 and a retrospective of the artist took place at Castello di Rivoli, Turin and the Whitechapel Gallery, London in 2019.

In a more philosophical perspective, The Invisible Enemy Should Not Exist, supported by the trophy of the Lamassu erected in London, questions our capacity to cease obsessional ontology of the true and the authentic (going alongside the authority of the monument in Western culture) in order to welcome and act on a genuine empathy and even international resilience through the remake, the crafted and the nomadic. As true art rarely lies in the art of truthfulness.

Notes 1

Walter Benjamin, ‘Theses on the Philosophy of History’, Thesis VII, 1940

2 The museum’s official and historical name is National Iraq Museum, but is also informally called the Baghdad Antiquities or Archaeology Museum 3 Gareth Harris, The Art Newspaper, 12 June 2018; https://www.theartnewspaper.com/news/london-s-whitechapel-gallery-and-turin-scastello-di-rivoli-to-hold-joint-rakowitz-survey 4 Quoted in ‘The Invisible Enemy Should Not Exist’, Arte por excelencias, 4 November 2018; https://www.arteporexcelencias.com/en/news/ michael-rakowitz-invisible-enemy-should-not-exist 5

Quoted in Naomi Rea, ‘The Ghost of Iraq’s Lost Heritage Comes to Trafalgar Square as Michael Rakowitz Unveils his Fourth Plinth Sculpture’, Artnet News, 27 March 2018; https://news.artnet.com/art-world/michael-rakowitz-fourth-plinth-1254095

6 For a historical survey of the Baghdad Museum, see Lamia Al-Gailani Werr, ‘A Museum is Born’, The Looting of the Iraq Museum, Baghdad: The Lost Legacy of Ancient Mesopotamia, New York: Harry N. Abrams, 2005, p. 27 7 The project has been shown in multiple venues including the Sharjah Biennial (2007), Istanbul Biennial (2007), the Hessel Museum of Art in Annandale-On-Hudson, New York (2008), Modern Art Oxford (2009), the Hiroshima City Museum of Contemporary Art (2013), and the Oriental Institute, University of Chicago (2014). Parts of it are held in the following public collections: Van Abbemuseum, Eindhoven; The British Museum, London; Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York; Smart Museum of Art, University of Chicago, amongst others 8 See Zeynep Celik, Displaying the Orient: Architecture of Islam at the 19th Century World’s Fairs, Oakland CA: University of California Press, 1992

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Crude Ètat In October 1969, British Petroleum organised festivities to celebrate Dubai’s recently confirmed oil wealth, though the company wasn’t going to profit much from it. Six years earlier, they had relinquished most of their claims to Dubai’s petroleum potential over to American-based Continental Oil. Still, BP was celebratory enough to plan the party, having organised similar ones in their past decades of sniffing out oil in the region. In Dubai, the sum of their whole two-day ceremony was the city’s biggest event ever: VIPs filled the city’s most luxurious hotel, the Carlton, a film was commissioned for their viewing, a monument was built and revealed (including an “eternal flame” supposedly fed by bountiful oil reserves), fireworks were imported from England, and a motorcade of air-conditioned cars was assembled. Festivities weren’t for the general public, mostly just for oilindustry experts, other representatives from associated industries, their spouses, and important local leaders. It may have included the first fireworks display in Dubai, but the affair was tepid, and underreported by the international press.

Fireworks ended the first day’s dinner, which included, according to BP’s report, “no social entertainment”. The next day reportedly began with a performance of Dubai’s national anthem, even though Dubai is not a nation. At the monument’s unveiling, Dubai’s ruler lit the flame. Guests, largely British and American, applauded and returned to the motorcade to attend the film screening in Dubai’s first air-conditioned cinema. After they applauded the film, they made their way to lunch at a Dubai official’s Jumeirah villa, but it was rushed so that they could arrive on time for the day’s climax.

The final performance was scheduled to take place in the glare of an open, unadorned beach at the peak of the afternoon sun. Guests had been more comfortable in the air-conditioned cinema.

Now their dress shoes filled with sand, and salty air stung their perfumed necks. Hats weren’t really in fashion, so bald spots were exposed to the sun. As the invited guests found their balance in the sand, each of the motorcade’s drivers stood next to his car, ready to take guests back to the hotel rooms as soon as the event was over. Participants were instructed to wait and keep focused on the Gulf waters that hardly moved, a low leaden stratum that extended to an indiscernible horizon.

They tried to block the sun’s glare with slightly cupped hands over their brows, like limp salutes.

The approaching climax was heard before it was seen. Two DC-3 airplanes materialised from the north along the coast, over the construction site of Port Rashid, and headed toward the assembly. When they were nearly overhead, the planes veered right, out toward the sea and toward the source of the afternoon glare. From under their limp salutes, the guests watched the planes grow smaller, maybe wondering whether they would come back or drop some parachutists or release some coloured smoke. None of these happened. The planes had been hired as pointers simply to direct the guests’ sights outward. Ninety-seven kilometres beyond was Fateh Oil Field, where the Americans had struck oil. Not only was it too far away to be seen, but most of the work happened underwater. A submerged tank of extracted oil, a khazzan, was tapped daily by ships passing by.

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Intended not to come ashore on Dubai’s land, oil was sublimated to the conceptual.

The event had been crafted as a meditation on the abstraction of oil, on the calculations of geology, physics, and economics. With nothing to be seen, there was only the diminishing effect of the low-flying DC-3s. But, with nothing to be seen, there was also no obstruction to entrepreneurial imagination. Horizons were vague and therefore limitless. Guests continued peering out at the uninflected haze, toward a horizon that could not be formulated, toward “the invisible industry” as the journalists referred to it. Instead of oil, wealth came ashore in the form of money, ambitions, technologies, people and building materials—all arriving on a mounting current at nearby Port Rashid. The wealth from the sea did not arrive to erase history; it assumed it had never existed.

Memorialising Dubai’s oil wealth was no central theme for CRUDE, Art Jameel’s inaugural exhibition at the Jameel Art Centre in Dubai. Nevertheless, the art gathered together on Dubai Creek spoke clearly about the artfulness—the narrative power of petroleum—that helped create the new institute’s home. CRUDE brought together the work of living and deceased artists to explore how petroleum—its extraction, its sale, and its transmutation into other forms—imprints itself onto a public, and sometimes autobiographical, imaginary. Curated by New York-based Murtaza Vali, it proved a most fitting way to open the Centre’s much anticipated Dubai home.1

For almost anyone who visited Jameel Arts Centre during its opening months, it was the first time they had been to this part of Dubai. It is a site twice forgotten. The Centre’s new Dubai home owes its location to Dubai’s history of oil. In 1958, British engineers, Austrian contractors and Iranian and South Asian workers started transforming Dubai’s port from a marshy inlet into a fortified canal in preparation for the prospects of oil. Having thwarted Dubai’s economic growth for a century, British overseers now saw reason in triggering its first boom. Even if the first drilling sites were well beyond Dubai, its port, unbeknownst to local residents, was designated to accommodate the region’s imminent economy of extraction, exploitation, and effortless trade. The installation of the Creek’s steel-and-concrete training walls and piers, the erection of cranes and countless godowns, the spreading of slums and building concrete-block houses with air-conditioning units piercing their façades—all of this was pursued for the hope and promise of oil. Large-scale transformations in the 1960s were powered by optimism. Dubai’s boosters regaled investors and bankers with stories of how oil sales would eventually offset the costs of major development. The expectation of oil made Dubai’s present about its future. Urban development and the deployment of modern architecture were financial activation of a future city. Urban planning was financial planning.

Jameel Art Centre’s site marks where Dubai Creek makes a turn to the right as it reaches inland. The bend was dredged in later phases to prepare the city for waterside living. If Dubai had gone according to plan, Art Jameel’s Dubai location would have been claimed long ago for housing Dubai’s higher-income families. Not the ones who could afford marina-style living at the sealed edges of the Creek further inland but the ones who knew they didn’t want to live in the congestion of the older districts. The area would have been divided up into “neighborhood units” each supplied a community centre, a health clinic and shops. But Dubai didn’t turn out that way, which has much to do with oil, or the absence of it. Dubai’s hopes for great wealth were extinguished almost as soon as the oil was discovered, as forecasts remained consistently dimmed. No longer able to sell a city run on the profits of oil, its boosters had to rewrite the city’s narrative. It meant Dubai left the Creek. Dubai Creek’s history of drudgery, persistence, and a tough kind of cosmopolitanism was left behind, in the wake of an existential development overdrive toward the shiny towers that populate most outsiders’ views of Dubai today. l

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Instead of hosting an oil-boom city, Dubai’s leadership conjured a real-estate frenzy, one that rendered a vast desert into unlimited opportunity. If oil wasn’t going to make Dubai wealthy, then foreign investment would. The city’s leadership pushed development far beyond the existing city, stretching out toward its outmost border forty-five kilometres away. Like those who watched the DC-3s aim for the horizon, consultants were hired to propose a new city larger than the old one, abutting against Abu Dhabi, the neighboring emirate with the real oil wealth. With a new and larger port, a new airport, a city as a free zone was designed. Dubai was to start over, free of the past hopes and expectations grown stale at Dubai Creek.

In 2007, the Creek was rediscovered again, however briefly. It was the peak before the steep decline of Dubai’s post-2001 boom, one which Dubai had created largely on the oil profits of Saudi Arabia, Qatar, Iran and Bahrain. Before the crash, Culture Village was proposed. Marketing teams saw appeal in the Creek’s dusty history. They commissioned images of fantastical stackings of Dubai’s old barjeel houses. Culture was rediscovered, then exaggerated. Homebuyers would live in imaginary renderings of Dubai’s old Iranian houses, among museums, libraries, art classes, and dance studios. A multi-million dollar museum for modern Middle Eastern art was proposed, without mention of where the art, or the money to purchase it, would materialise. One year later, the Global Financial Crisis landed in Dubai, and Culture Village, and Dubai Creek, were forgotten.

Jameel Art Centre has now taken the place that oil, and the underperforming amounts of it, had kept free for the past decades. As it had happened in years before on Dubai Creek, money from outside was needed to regalvanise the site. Art Jameel had a collection and the funding to build a privately funded but publicly accessible cultural centre for the city. Taking over what was supposed to be land for a music venue, the Palazzo Versace, a hotel, was built. It looms over Jameel Arts Centre’s gardens, but fortunately it is much more sombre-looking than it sounds.

In making oil the topic of an art exhibition, Murtaza Vali taps its tumultuous urban history.

In the exhibition catalogue, he posits that “oil resists representation.”2 It does, however, manifest itself in vast arrays of materials and forms; more than that, it shapes lives. It’s affirming to Vali’s suspicions that so many artists who were born or have lived in the Middle East have made oil a topic of their work. CRUDE could have also looked at oil in Africa and South America, but for the most part its centre reverberates from the Shatt al Arab, whose flows of water have more than once conjoined with flows of oil. Oil is taken on as a material laden with hypnotic and protean capabilities.

Oil writes stories, or gets configured into what Robert Vitalis has called “oilcraft”.3 Unlike other sources of energy (solar, wood, dung, coal), oil was first collected to be exported. Its existence is essentially tied to global networks of trade and power. Power is a force almost every work in the exhibition has to confront.4 And Dubai, while able to proclaim some oil reserves, has grown and technologically advanced as a result of its leadership harnessing the roaming qualities of oil’s profits made elsewhere.

In some ways, CRUDE didn’t feel like an art exhibition. I heard others make this observation, meant as a criticism, finding it too structured, even pedantic. It was educational, in some ways. This reading might confront the questioned status of the museum—once a stalwart of the archive, the taxonomy, the explaining—these days, museums, or art institutions, often consciously avoid the pedantic. Rather than pedantic, however, I found CRUDE disciplined, in seeing art called upon to explain, to set the record, not just to pursue heard clichés like “creating the openings” and “challenging narratives”. Oil, especially in the context of Dubai, does have some explaining to do, as it’s never been held accountable. It’s slippery, literally and figuratively. In particular, Dubai’s official

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history has tried to efface oil’s role in its spectacular expansion. We’re constantly told that Dubai is the emirate not “blessed” with oil and that its economy is “diversified” but the actual story is not that simple. For the past two decades, Dubai’s marketers have reframed the city as one that grows without oil, but in reality, its real estate expansion relies on oil wealth from the region. With oil, represented, swirling inside its premises, Art Jameel forced the viewer, and the city itself, to reckon with myths that have made a city.

Seeing CRUDE through a lens of history is partly my own doing. Still, much of the art looked and performed as historical. One might sense that oil is the dirty toil of the past. There were only limited works, including that by Emirati artist Hassan Sharif, that portrayed oil as an ongoing, and mounting crisis. His Slippers and Wire (2009) mound of flip-flops, for example, foretold what we now know about the flotsam of petroleum-based plastics, that they inhabit our organs as colourful microscopic spheres, and by doing so, the space of petroleum now occupies our insides. It shapes us inside out, perhaps even passing the effects down to progeny. Most of the memorable work though, comes glazed in a patina. In this way, oil is the stuff our great aunts and uncles dabbled in, at a safe distance from our current lives.

The artworks’ descriptive texts, and the catalogue, provide considerable historical context.

Vali rightly establishes that oil is now part of a regional and global heritage, but one that remains metastasising, well beyond our own controls, with time and space playing out in their fullest range of quantification. When we touch upon petroleum, we speak of epochs and tectonic plates. Beyond that oil is now heritage, another reason for an apparent patina over the exhibition might have to do with the role oil played in many of the artists’ youth. The language, including visual, that many of the contributors employed points to oil’s early vocabulary, which materialised in the pages of Life, Aramco World and television commercials for oil companies. Saudi Arabian artist Manal AlDowayan’s photographs demonstrate how oil shaped the memorabilia found on a family member’s dressoir.

What was once sophisticated public relations messaging is today blatant in its tones of colonial control, positivist swagger, and ecological disingenuousness.

Another reason for the patina is that it enables a way toward a critical conversation in Dubai about oil. By being of the past, it is made more palatable. Dubai’s boosters have now positioned the city as post-oil, committed to “revolutionising” transit, energy, and biotechnology all at the same time.5 In fact, since the early 1970s, Dubai’s scriptwriters have downplayed the city’s reliance on oil profits. We can have a tough conversation about the old, petroleum-lubricated ways because they are framed as the past. There is a lot still to talk about in regard to the history of oil, so this is not a bad thing. In fact, we’ve hardly been able to assess the history, rarely going beyond the tracking of capital, state-making power structures, and installation of all that thinly inhabited, photogenic purpose-built infrastructure. In her recent book, Machineries of Oil: An Infrastructural History of BP in Iran (2018), Katayoun Shafiee argues that while we are “aware of the importance of oil to the history of the modern Middle East, surprisingly little is known about how its social and technical properties shaped that history.”6 She explores the ways oil has had “sociotechnical roles” in creating systems of knowledge, language, and law. Many of the artists in CRUDE did a great deal of work in figuring out who shaped what, but again, artists don’t usually want to be taken as historians.

Resisting the historian’s mantle does not keep these collected artists from the archives, from uncovering files, old maps, and family mementos and then displaying them, several of whom tapped such sources for “opening up new pictorial and historiographic experiences.”7 For example, it seems that Lebanese artist Rayyane Tabet’s Steel Rings (2013) and Letterhead (1950/2013) are meant

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to suggest a spatial experience constructed from found evidence of the Trans-Arabian Pipeline, or Tapline. Twenty-one simply framed pieces of Tapline stationery were hung in regimented form and parallel to an abstracted, anatomically correct section of the pipeline. Its construction also included found material evidence and coordinates of various locations of the pipeline’s traversal from Saudi Arabia’s Eastern Province to the Lebanese port of Sidon. The stationery sheets are blank, save for the embossed letterhead. Many are damaged by visually curious decay. The precise ordering of the pipeline’s ringed pieces and framed letterheads exude assertion and certainty. We are forewarned that the latter provide no “information” about the Tapline’s history, though Vali’s wall text informs the viewer that the blank stationery was salvaged from the company’s abandoned offices. Every archive is a turbid source of duelling emotions: the anxiety from an overwhelming amount of material and a sharp craving for all the missing parts. Tabet frames some of the pieces of paper, worn and torn at the edges, with preservationist fervour, as if he has salvaged papyrus sheets. There is no “information” to preserve besides the existence of each sheet itself, differentiated from the other twenty sheets only by its unique process of deterioration. It is undeniable that any historian working with an archive is attracted to the palettes of archive folders, the saturated imprints of bureaucratic stamps, and the fastidious dedication to cultivated handwriting. But the historian has to look beyond these, or at least incorporate them with other signals, what one might call “content”. Tabet, it seems, wanted to suggest that art can achieve another kind of informedness, without information.

One consequence from this is that we witness history in a very destabilised way. If the historian is seen—and this is a debatable stance—as one who provides order and linearity from found evidence, then the artist is providing us with something else. As a non-art critic I am cautious to suggest what that might be, considering the art world’s amassed discourse over archives. Tabet, in preserving and framing blank stationery, suggests that within the found evidence there is an aesthetic—such as the design and mass deployment of a letterhead embossment—that cannot be divorced from the menu of tactics deployed by power. Still, it is of a menu, and I am left to wonder how I am supposed to approach this apparent isolation of a tactic from the greater strategy.

One of several works presented by Canadian artist Hajra Waheed, The ARD: Study for a Portrait 1-28 (2018), excises, manipulates and recomposes evidence from an unknown, or perhaps fictitious archive. In one framed element of reconfigured evidence, cut-outs of institutional buildings and labour barracks are set against graph paper—the graph paper functioning like a structured background, more literal than figurative. Shown with screentone sheets that were once a part of an engineer’s drawing kit, the graph paper screams positivism. Waheed’s evocative work suggests that the archive, in the general sense, has been destabilised and recontextualised, its contents and context reshifted to explore other meanings. These actions, however, amount to suspicious practices, not because they are subversive but because there is the suggestion that archives are assumed structures, that they are ‘whole’. Caretakers of an archive might display it as categorised, tagged and enumerated, as its materials demand storytelling in order to be comprehended, whether by the historian, the anthropologist, the librarian, the social scientist, or the very person who wrote the last missive in the dossier, tied its cotton string, and sent it away to posterity. The act of sourcing an archive requires a need to engage and question the replaceable scaffolding that keeps it from drifting.

In the wall text accompanying Waheed’s work, the curator mentions William Mulligan, a double agent in petroleum history. His actions reveal how petroleum-smeared archives are inherently slippery. In his second foreword to his seminal work on the Aramco oil company in Saudi Arabia, America’s Kingdom: Mythmaking on the Saudi Oil Frontier (2007), Robert Vitalis explains how

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he gained access to archives that he was not meant to discover. When Mulligan, who Vitalis calls a “company historian”, retired from Aramco he illicitly took home company files. Upon his death, his wife donated them to Georgetown University in Washington, DC. Vitalis suggests that she might have known what she was doing. Whether an accident or a quiet betrayal, Mulligan’s widow not only provided a revealing window into Aramco’s geopolitical practices, she also revealed just how much of this history has been concealed. Even if good fortune, Vitalis warns of reading Mulligan’s papers “too authoritatively”.8 History, Vitalis reveals, must be assembled from countless fragments.

Since much of the work of nation-building in petroleum wealthy locales—through infrastructural, institutional and urban development—was executed by foreign consultants, much of the historically valuable records on these matters would be found in private company filing cabinets, like those of Aramco. Therefore, searching for and through archives related to the Arabian Peninsula brings with it additional layers of power and control. It is not uncommon for a consulting firm, which might have essentially built a city’s infrastructure, to claim that its archives were lost, non-existent, or as one long-time consultant claimed “buried in a warehouse fire”. Consultants have no reason to save the boxes from a fire or to honour history. In fact, expunging evidence might lead to new and more profitable contracts. An archive displayed exactly as found would represent a reshuffling, according to the last person who used it, or the professional archivist refiling its folios to fit a new catalogue system. To suggest discordance when that’s all that exists, is potentially a disservice to the search that is already necessarily at hand.

CRUDE also included poignant moments of interactions with archival materials that render the archive as highlighted material, full of assertive, expertise-fuelled bluster, but still discernible within the artists’ created realms. Egyptian artist Wael Shawky’s Asphalt Quarter (2003), deserved a more isolated experience, not limited to the headphones you might or might not deign to put on.

Part of the piece’s soundtrack is an unvarying voiceover reading the instructions on how to lay an asphalt road.According to Vali’s essay, this work is directly inspired by Saudi novelist Abdul Rahman Munif’s Cities of Salt (1984), a trilogy of allegorical novels quoted ad nauseum in Persian Gulf histories.

Shawky often relies on existing texts to create the narratives of his work, but fortunately here it does not get caught in Munif’s moral tale. Instead, it is a rich tapestry of illusions, however tragic they may turn out to be. Asphalt is both a product of petroleum and a consequence of petroleum wealth, a signal that these riches are being transformed into the public good. In Dubai in the 1960s, there was a direct funnel between port revenues and road building.9 As the money came in, engineers applied the quickest, cheapest, thinnest layer of roads so that there was a calculable and healthy relationship between wealth and kilometres of bitumen. Having children apply the asphalt in the film is a grim signal to the complex, not so easily measurable, relationships between audacious development ambitions and the senseless damage they deliver onto present and future ecosystems.

In contrast, the Iranian duo Nasrin Tabatabai and Babak Afrassiabi, in Seep 1 and Seep 2 (2012-18), provide a humorous account of trying to turn oil-drilling into good storytelling. Seep 1 includes a voiceover reading aloud a letter from a contracted filmmaker—corporate filmmakers were de rigueur in the twentieth century—warning his client that oil operations near Abadan, Iran, were proving unfilmable for two reasons: lacklustre weather and the inherent characteristics of oil which made it “so dull and depressing visually”. Reminiscent of the clichéd technique in documentary filmmaking of shooting closeups of preserved objects of historical events (a ship’s bow, a bust, a feather pen), the artists create fabricated versions of objects that might have been found in the AngloPersian Oil Company’s offices: a desk, a brick wall, a salon table. Seep 2 reveals how oil is filmable,

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with at once enticing and revolting shots of oil spills swimming in an otherwise pristine stream of water. The effects are aesthetic, yet also damning of the consuming viewer.

One of the most haunting manipulations of archives is in the work of the Venezuelan/ American collaboration of Alessandro Balteo-Yazbeck and Media Farzin, Chronoscope, 1951, 11pm (2009-11), a montage of scenes taken from an early 1950s American news show that took on the overlapping topics of USA foreign policy and petroleum affairs for the evening viewing on the sofa, before “energy security” became a household term. Whether coincidence or deep affirmation, the series was sponsored by the Swiss watchmaker Longines. In the advertising segments for Longines, we see the turning gears of a clock, revealing how time is controlled by the watchmaker, who might be a stand-in for the oilman, the engineer, and any of the war planners who feature in the work —the ones who transform oil profits (or the promise of them) into real, intricate infrastructure.

The show’s host promises “unrehearsed discussions” but the work shapes a near-conspiratorial build-up of tension, namely revealed in interviewees cornered into answering loaded questions that affirm a mounting message to the viewers at home: namely that losing access to Middle Eastern oil could drive the USA to war. The dramatic seriousness and expressive maleness of oil men, journalists and politicians seem at once relevant and outmoded today. Relevant because, veneers of apparent knowledge held by experts have determined so much of our current political and economic landscape—but outmoded, as witnessed this year when American President Donald Trump claimed he “thought about it for a second” before launching an attack on Iran and therefore a heightened reenactment of history’s prior attacks on oil-rich states.10 Chronoscope’s sharp editing reveals that the news show was normalising viewers to “oilcraft”—a constructed, rehearsed reality made for easy TV viewing, its experts helping Western consumers of petroleum to visualise an integral link between their need for oil and the possibility of war.

Making the world of petroleum visible, and specifically filmable, formed a current running throughout CRUDE. Both Hajra Waheed and Kuwaiti artist Monira Al Qadiri exploit—at scales beyond that of Seep—the arresting forms and colours of oil fires. Al Qadiri’s video Behind the Sun (2013) presented a collection of low-grade VHS recordings of oil fires in Kuwait. Paired with them is a deep-tone voiceover reading of Sufi poems, referring to flowers, the sun, and other majestically beautiful forms a higher being bestows upon us, as one looks at grainy footage of fires that embody the violent repercussions of consuming petroleum and the impossible beauty in its extraction. One line: “He has created this magnificent world” is translated in English as a subtitle below the horizon of a black landscape, as if it were planted underground in the abscesses of oil deposits. Above the horizon are multiple devastating fires. The smoke of even more fires malevolently fills the sky. It could be a scene of war, but it is a scene of extraction. One in the same. The pairing is not simply sarcasm or cynicism; it feels like a dare somehow. But it refuses the assertion that oil is not filmable.

It can’t be abstracted out of materiality and into the engineer’s calculations and the statesman’s selfassured brinkmanship.

CRUDE was an essential cultural moment in Dubai. For its few months, it made visible something that is often made invisible in Dubai. A high-stakes commodity that has so often been denied as the key element in making Dubai materialised, oil at least for a moment was brought to the fore. Whether it is oil from its own offshore fields or the petroleum profits that circulate through its ports, its real estate markets, and its supposedly sophisticated business-friendly guidelines, Dubai exists because of it. And it seemed to be stated that Jameel Art Centre exists because of and thanks to this economy still firmly ensconced in our world. l

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One last memory, involving an image that remains seared in my memory. The Iraqi photographer Latif Al Ani was hired by oil operators to capture how oil was made visual in Baghdad; to explain oil and to celebrate it. In the black and white photograph School Lunch, Baghdad, Iraq (1961) he captures a smiling girl in a schoolyard, raising a bottle of chilled fresh milk in one hand. The bottle seems too heavy for her, as if all the calcium she’s been drinking has made her especially strong enough to hold the bottle so confidently. Behind her, in half shadow, is a boy, his hair dishevelled, his clothes not as together as hers. He holds an empty tin cup. In full light, the girl is the present.

She holds plenitude, refrigeration, pasteurisation, vitamin D-enrichment, all brought to her thanks to the regulations, industrialisation, electrification, and physical infrastructure that oil brought to her life. A fresh, cold bottle of milk in the afternoon sun. The term ‘propaganda’ has only negative connotation these days, but would the viewer have the heart to deprive her of that bottle of milk?

Notes 1 Art Jameel’s even larger Hayy: Creative Hub will open in Jeddah in late 2019 or early 2020 2

Murtaza Vali, ‘A Crude History of Modernity’, CRUDE (exhib. cat.), Art Jameel, Jameel Art Centre, Dubai, 2018

3

Timothy Nunan, ‘De-Segregating International Relations: A Conversation with Robert Vitalis on “White World Order, Black Power Politics”’, 30 May 2016, Toynbee Prize Foundation website; http://toynbeeprize.org/interviews/robert-vitalis/ 4

Timothy Mitchell, Carbon Democracy: Political Power in the Age of Oil, London, New York: Verso Books, 2011, pp. 36-39

5 See for example ‘Dubai is revolutionising the energy sector’, Business Dubai, 28 November 2018; https://www.youtube.com/ watch?v=CjwdBzd76OQ 6

Katayoun Shafiee, Machineries of Oil: An Infrastructural History of BP in Iran, Cambridge, Massachusetts: The MIT Press, 2018

7 Okwui Enwezor, Archive Fever: Uses of the Document in Contemporary Art, New York NY: International Center of Photography; Göttingen: Steidl Publishers, 2008, p. 11 8

Robert Vitalis, America’s Kingdom: Mythmaking on the Saudi Oil Frontier, London: Verso, 2009, p. xvii

9 In the 1960s, Dubai’s port revenues were not a result of petroleum profits. But they were at least indirectly related to oil profits of other places, including Abu Dhabi 10 Ian Schwartz, ‘Trump to Chuck Todd: I Stopped Iran Attack Before It Happened, Killing 150 People Is Not Proportionate’, RealClear Politics, 21 June 2019; https://www.realclearpolitics.com/video/2019/06/21/trump_to_chuck_todd_i_stopped_iran_attack_before_it_happened_ killing_150_people_is_not_proportionate.html

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RYAN INOUYE

Ala Younis: Moving Images I want to draw a map, so to speak, of a critical geography and use that map to open as much space for discovery, intellectual adventure and close exploration as did the original charting of the New World—without the mandate for conquest.

Toni Morrison1 When we move from a definition, the definition moves.

Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak2 Over the past few years, art of the modern Arab world has received significant attention from both inside and outside the region, with many eager to embrace the experimental output of an era best remembered (perhaps, somewhat nostalgically) for its strident social and political transformation.3 Institutions have mounted major monographic exhibitions and historical surveys to bring the era’s art to public attention; commercial galleries and fairs have raised awareness by leveraging the market to elevate the social and economic value of works; biennials have brought lesser-known artists into dialogue with their international contemporaries; collections have preserved works and expanded Western-centric canons; archive initiatives have made material more accessible and scholars have contributed critical depth through research and publishing. This text, however, does not aim to weigh in on the individual merits of such efforts, but rather to approach the modern Arab world as an inspiring moment of mapping critical geography that could be used to model similar endeavours of collective discovery and intellectual pursuit.

In many of these institutional engagements, the definition of the modern Arab world has not been explicitly or critically engaged, perhaps for fear of unnecessarily over-complicating efforts that could stifle or confine important work. Recently, however, the editors of an excellent volume of primary source material (published by The Museum of Modern Art) commissioned a text by scholar Ussama Makdisi, who takes up the challenge of historicising the Arab world over the past two centuries. In ‘The Making and Unmaking of the Arab World’, he offers an insightful account that proposes an understanding of the region’s history through a dialectic tension between acts of selfdetermination on the one hand, and foreign manipulation on the other.4 As a scholarly intervention, the text succeeds in bringing to the fore the many people, cultures, classes and religions historically populating this region, as well as calling attention to the still apparent intervening influence of Western powers. l

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For artist Ala Younis, this history of the modern Arab world is often the subject of her work, and it is made and unmade in ways that augment both the aforementioned endeavours. It is a desire for ‘close exploration’ that best characterises the artist’s motivations and working method. Hers is an impassioned and intuitive practice of ‘study’, rather than a more formal interest in institutionalising a disciplinary field of ‘studies’ and reinforcing her place within it.5 In her artistic engagements, Younis locates the people and places of the modern Arab world in archives and the era’s material culture, and enlists their participation in a continual refashioning of this world in its own image rather than in response to outside interference. Many of her works advance historic projects of selfdetermination in order to cultivate an ever-deeper and more capacious interiority for a land, which in the past as well as at present, is challenged by the occupation of territory, foreign influence and intensely guarded borders. Through three of the artist’s works, this text looks at the cultivation of a shared critical interiority that could live up to its inherited potential.

TIN SOLDIERS Perhaps no figure has captivated contemporary imaginings of the modern Arab world more than the soldier. The enduring symbolism, combined with the continued militarisation of the region, left Younis surprised to learn that representations of the region’s contemporary armies had never been produced as toy figurines. In her research, she realised that the manufacture of tin soldiers had peaked after the First World War, precisely when the Middle East was being remapped as a result of the Ottoman Empire’s collapse and the partition of land into British and French Mandates under the 1916 Sykes-Picot Agreement.6 Tin Soldiers (2010-11) was initially conceived as a response to address this absence in material culture, through a home-grown effort originally produced by Beirut’s Ashkal Alwan for Home Works 5 (2010), and completed with the support of the 12th Istanbul Biennial (2011).

The work materialises the nine standing armies involved in wars that have shaped the contemporary Middle East. Reflecting their numbers at a 1:200 scale, each of the 12,261 metal soldiers that comprise the artwork bears a hand-painted flag on its arm and is arranged, by nation, in orderly rows atop a five-by-five metre plinth. When presented in a gallery, the installation’s visual mass and weight commands attention on first encounter but also draws the viewer in for closer scrutiny.

Despite the formal composure of this and other works, there is sensitivity in approach to making and the means through which art might participate in the world. The care with which each toy soldier is hand-painted reveals another project of accounting that overpopulates a corrective gesture of ‘giving voice’ or a mechanical critique of militarism. Even before the work’s presentation, Tin Soldiers seemed to solicit the identification and interaction of those around the artist. As Younis enlisted family, friends and fellow artists to help paint the figures, stories emerged through them, and some of these people wrote essays for her publication. Turkish artist Cevdet Erek spoke of joining a jazz band during his compulsory military service, as well as the makeshift calendars fellow soldiers would create to countdown the days before they could leave the army. Collaborators on other projects had sharp memories of their compulsory training in Egypt. A Marxist spoke of a life that amounted to defeat. Over time, as she worked at home in Amman, or in Beirut and Istanbul in preparation for the work’s exhibition, Tin Soldiers accrued the stories of those around her and came to embody lived experience—the residue of militarism became the matter in which a solidarity of subjectivity could mobilise across disparate places and times. Tin Soldiers led to the creation of exhibitions and a publication, expanding the project by inviting others to contribute to conversations

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its installation had set in motion. It is this edited volume that examines the militancy associated with the era’s emancipatory struggles. Through text and images contributed by a multigenerational group of peers, the book explores the history of not only those who served their country or saw combat but also the many ‘incidental soldiers’—those who trained but never reached the battlefield, those born into a period of war but came of age in times of peace, and those who continue to resist ongoing forms of dispossession, from the spectacular to the mundane. The emotional complexity of Younis’ endeavour is elucidated by fellow artist Ahmad Ghossein, whose recollection resonates the installation’s visual weight and introduces the language of loss and fragility: Regarding your project, I have to say, Ala, that I grew up with unfulfilled fighters from the communist party in the south, fighters that fought against Israel, and especially two brothers, one of whom was the head of the resistance during the eighties… a man who has lost most of his friends. Well, it is very emotional when it comes to this subject, the idea of losing and how to continue life. In the south there are many fighters who felt lost after 1990, because they had spent fifteen years fighting. But the weird thing is that all these films talking about those fighters filmed them from the back or with covered faces. Now we can see those faces, but how?7

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Younis also invited writer and curator Rasha Salti to contribute an essay, adding the ‘poetfighter’ to the artist’s ‘incidental soldiers’. Far from a symbolic device or romantic turn of phrasing, Salti’s text shows that the written word was instrumental in mobilising the Palestinian struggle.

The sheer size of the historical record, “the collective cultural canons and icons that make up the body of Palestinian cultural and artistic expression,” is testament to the fact that “the universe exists.”

For her, as for the artist, the question for today is a philosophical one of “how it could have practically been shared by all Palestinians across the world considering statelessness and dispersal.”8

Poetry would serve as a carrier of collective experience that could be “cross-fertilised, conjugated and combined” to sustain the movement and prepare its people for evolving phases of the struggle. In 1930, the poet Ibrahim Toukan (1905-41) provided a name for the Palestinian yearning for freedom, in the figure of the “fida’i”. Although perhaps most commonly translated in English as “freedom fighter”, Salti explores its many meanings—commando, guerrilla, redeemer—noting their militant and prophetic resonances, personalising the figure with men from different chapters of the struggle: Izz-ad-Din al-Qassam, for example, the first identifiable person to be associated with this figure, a man well-known for stressing that armed struggle would be the only way to defeat the British occupiers and Zionist coloniser; Abdel-Rahim Mahmoud, who fought in the Great War and died in combat in 1948, became one of the “first poet-fighters” and “poet-martyrs”. His plain and potent verse in Al-Shaheed would introduce the “willing martyr” to the figure of the “fida’I” and would circulate for years after his death, as an “incantation” or “anthem” to take up arms.9 From the 1960s, poets such as Mahmoud Darwish would take up the challenge of developing language for the revolutionary project, and with that, the articulation of a new sense of self. The Lebanese poet, Khalil Hawi, offers an intimate look at the poet’s place in this world-making endeavour: How lightly they cross the bridge In the morning.

My ribs, a bridge, stretch out for them, Reaching from the caves, from the swamps, of the East to the new East.10

In the unfolding horizon line of emancipatory struggle, personal observation is reimagined through collective action and feeling. Hawi trusts in the complexity that poetry permits, as if to suggest his vision could be carried further out by the advancing “fida’I”—a formulation that could be easily dismissed as pure metaphor if history had not spoken otherwise.

Just how far that vision would be carried out, and the distances travelled to be a part of it, is a question taken up by artist Oraib Toukan in her contribution to the publication. To the ‘incidental soldier’ and the ‘poet-fighter’, she adds the ‘radical filmmaker’ in her text on Masao Adachi and Koji Wakamatsu’s 1971 film Red Army/PFLP: Declaration of World War. Following in the footsteps of contemporary Maoists, the two Japanese filmmakers first visited Lebanon on their way back to Japan from the 1971 Venice Film Festival. They were received by Leila Khaled and Ghassan Kanafani, who offered access to the PFLP (Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine) in the Saida and Shatila refugee camps. Their trip ultimately led to a joint production by PFLP and the Red Army Faction of Japan’s Revolutionary Communist League, in which sweeping views of natural landscape and scenes of domestic life are interspersed with scenes of guerrilla fighters training for battle. The film would circulate as a political film about Palestine, yet as Toukan reveals, none of this footage was filmed on Palestinian soil. Toukan conceptualises the value of this act, which for the filmmakers, seemed an l

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unimportant detail. The subject of the revolution was not located in any specific type of depiction; instead, the moving image sutured revolution with daily life and landscape “on the one hand, as it is supposed to have existed, and, on the other, in order for it to exist.”11 Toukan also recalls that French writer Jean Genet wrote about living with resistance fighters, even though he never spent time in Palestine. Taken together, these observations suggest a widely accepted idea that the frontline of the revolution was not simply located in Palestine proper, or at the borders of neighbouring countries that stood in solidarity, but ran through the land writ large. Any ‘incidental’ piece of earth beneath one’s feet was ample ground from which to launch The Revolution.

ENACTMENT The human figure recurs throughout Younis’ artworks. Enactment (2017) is a ten metre-long series of framed photographs and drawings that trace the individual and the collective through history, and the permutation in meaning of those social constructs over time. Originally conceived as an investigation into the history of performance art in the Arab world prior to the 1990s, Younis began by consulting a book that surveyed artists working in Iraq, which then had a thriving art scene.

In a section on artist Ibrahim Zayer, she encountered a brief mention of his untimely suicide in 1972, which had coincided with an exhibition opening in his adopted city of Beirut. The timing reminded her of artist Xiao Lu’s performance, in which the artist fired a gun at her artwork during the opening of the now infamous 1989 China Avant-garde exhibition in Beijing.12 As an aesthetic gesture, Lu’s action is remembered for enacting critical questions about a moment in history of which she was a part, but that are not reducible to personal experience or biographical narrative.

Younis neither conceived of Zayer’s suicide as an artwork, nor wished to glorify his death as a hero, but rather aimed at granting this person the critical reception befitting a life given over to political commitment. In other texts and conversations with Zayer’s friends, she discovered he had moved from Baghdad to Beirut to join the PFLP, where he worked as a writer and illustrator for Al Hadaf (The Target), the magazine started by well-known writer Ghassan Kanafani in Beirut in 1969 that enjoyed wide distribution in Palestinian refugee camps in Jordan and Lebanon. She also learned of the artist’s earlier imprisonment in Baghdad due to his involvement as a member of the Communist Party, as well as his criticism of limited state-sponsored exhibition opportunities.

Others spoke of his deep disappointment in the dwindling promise of political movements in the Arab world, citing the Arab defeat in the 1967 Six-Day War, his break from the Party in Baghdad, the splintering of the PFLP into two factions in 1969, in addition to weakening pan-Arab solidarity.

Although Zayer does not appear in Younis’ work, his life and death directed her attention to political archives in search of embodied intent and collective gestures. Instead of a work on performance art, she found herself with a work of performances.

At one end of Enactment, Younis has incorporated a cover image from a 1969 issue of Al Hadaf, featuring two fedayeen leaping into the air, with only the open sky behind them. The image most immediately recalled Yves Klein’s photomontage, Le Saut dans le vide (The Jump in the Void) (1960), that featured the artist jumping into air from a building on a quiet street. Like the image of the leaping soldiers, Klein’s also enjoyed front-page placement in a publication, in this instance, Dimanche–Le Journal d’un Seul Jour (Sunday, The Newspaper of a Single Day), on 27 November, 1960.

There is an element of staging and construction at the core of both photographs: Klein worked closely with two photographers to document the action and compose the photomontage, and the PFLP had an active film unit that would have possessed the knowledge and capacity to compose

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such an image. In this way, both function as speculative studies but from different vantage points.

Whereas Klein’s image framed a definitive action by the artist, Al Hadaf’s focused on routine combat training by Palestinian fighters. Significantly, the soldiers’ informal rehearsals are serialised in the work as recurring performances, which multiplied by thousands, could be recognised as a process of mobilisation. That image of synchronised performance would stay with Younis throughout her research.

During a visit to the Berlin Wall Museum, Younis found resonances between the entangled bodies of the two fedayeen in flight and an image of East German officers and athletes physically supporting each other’s efforts to scale the Wall as a test of its fortification. Athletes and gymnasts performing in the 1973 World Youth and Students Festival in East Berlin also recalled young men training in Palestinian camps. In the English-language press, she found journalists fixated on the liberatory athleticism that marked the celebrations, while a festival-produced publication highlighted the diverse participation of delegates from Palestine, Morocco, Jordan, Lebanon, Egypt, Algeria and even Kuwaiti students studying in Moscow.

By the 1980s, the promise of the collective body had been overrun by political ideology and party politics. For Enactment, Younis surveyed cultural production from the period that registers this disillusion as bizarre mutations of human form and behaviour. Taking inspiration from artist Ahmad Nawash’s paintings that parody the moment in his depiction of comically disfigured bodies, the artist’s line drawings wield a dark humour: an arm grows a rifle, two bodies share one head, three heads must live with two arms, four legs and only one body. In the work and a related lecture, Younis refers to Mohammad Tommalaih’s 1984 collection of short stories, The Scoundrel Enthusiasts, which examines rampant complacency. Born in 1957 in Karak, Jordan to a Palestinian family, Younis speaks l

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of the author as a colourful figure, who came of age during a moment of conscious commitment to a larger struggle and futilely attempts to stem a new collective desire characterised by normalcy.

After briefly attending a Baghdad university in the mid-1970s, Tommalaih returned to Jordan, where he continued studying at Jordan University and is said to have repeatedly failed classes for a decade in order to remain active in the student movement. His book includes a number of tales that resemble early performance art. For example, a man wanders throughout a city calling everyone by the same name, or an entire population suffers from insomnia due to an epidemic of leaky taps, resulting in societal collapse. Tommalaih’s writing carves out a perspective increasingly estranged from his environment. Younis’ work goes on to explore the consolidation of leadership figured in stoic, unmoving monuments and other elements of material culture, and in some cases, their destruction.

FROM THE NEEDLE TO THE ROCKET Accompanying the five sewing machines that comprise the work, Nefertiti (2008), a video begins with Younis reading a statement from a speech by Egypt’s President Gamal Abdel Nasser, the leader of pan-Arabism, following al-Naksa (The Setback), the Arab nations defeat in 1967. Nasser asserted that whatever investments had been made in industry had been reaped as the fruits of industry. Following the Egyptian Revolution of 1952, which ended the constitutional monarchy, British occupation and led to the establishment of the new republic, Nasser saw the nationalisation of major industries as key to strengthening Egyptian sovereignty. The construction of factories was an important part of his vision to mobilise the country’s workforce and limit dependence on foreign goods. A state-issued guide from 1963 recorded a total of 457,600 employees, working in 3,280 factories across 132 towns or large villages in Egypt. Each of these factories employed ten or more workers and produced everything from processed foodstuffs, tobacco, leather items, building materials, television sets and refrigerators.13 Among these many goods was the Nefertiti sewing machine (made between the late 1950s and early 1960s), which was manufactured at a military factory along with meat grinders, surgical tools, hunting rifles and agricultural equipment.14 In this work, Younis writes the history of this sewing machine, and in so doing, charts a spiritual exploration of the country’s aspirations to domestically produce everything, as Nasser touted, “from the needle to the rocket.”

In Photo Cairo 4 in 2008, the biennial platform organised by Contemporary Image Collective, Younis presented five shiny, curvaceous, pistachio-coloured examples of the sewing machine along with an accompanying video. Despite overt allusion to ancient Egyptian glory, the artist presented Nefertiti as part of a decidedly modern enterprise to enable women to contribute to the nationbuilding effort while their men were away at war. Within the pages of the state-run publication, Al Musawar, known for its richly illustrated reports of cultural, industrial and political productivity in the new republic, Younis found an advertisement for the machine touting its practical operation —“by hand, foot pedal or motor”—seemingly by any means necessary, given a woman’s respective abilities, household conditions and financial resources. The machine also appeared in films of the day, picturing it as a source of household income and everyday fixture in homes.

In Younis’ artwork, Nefertiti finds a fan in another female icon of the era. Following the country’s 1967 military defeat, the singer Umm Kulthum toured the Arab world and Europe to raise funds for the country’s war effort. Kulthum was so taken by all that Nefertiti represented that she gifted the sewing machines to the families of fallen soldiers. In the video, Younis not only brings historical depth but also pathos to this relationship between woman and machine, by incorporating a song by Kulthum singing, “Misr tatahaddatho ‘an nafseha“ (“Egypt Speaks of Itself”). Based on a

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poem by Hafez Ibrahim (1871-1932), a writer from the late Ottoman and early colonial era committed to preserving the Arabic language, the singer’s performance recasts his words in a modern context, while connecting the present to a historical commitment to self-determination: “I am the crown of dignity/on the forehead of the Orient /and its jewels / are the gems in my necklace.” Kulthum’s revisitation of these lyrics amplifies and refracts Ibrahim’s poem in much the same way Younis’ presentation of the sewing machines as art, as opposed to an artefact or utilitarian object, offers critical distance. Taken together, the formulation enables consideration of whether the land is the soul of a people or the people are the soul of a land. Is the present the product of history or is history the product of the present?

Although Younis’ project has elevated the Nefertiti sewing machine to celebrity status, she had difficulty evaluating their significance when first stumbling upon a few examples at a Cairo flea market in 2008. The machine had all but disappeared from public view. She first approached a sewing machine repair shop for answers, and they tried to sell her a Singer. Others only had parts and said they were notoriously unreliable and had serious design flaws that never addressed in all their years of production. Sight of the Nefertiti triggered memories of entire households that lived off the repair of these machines or the income earned by selling goods made with it. The men, especially, spoke as if they were the products of a household once supported by a machine. Younis’ project asks: what if the soul of a nation was not locatable in any specific industry, figure or idea but that which ran through it?

There is a dreamlike quality that pervades Younis’ work, which in speaking about Nefertiti on her website, the artist describes as “a disheartening disappointment for the older generation yet a nostalgic icon from the heyday of nationalistic sentiments.” For younger generations, her work attempts to navigate a current impasse that is characterised by now obvious pitfalls of mining the past for exemplars of political resistance (the commodification of symbols, gestures, positions of contestation), as well as grappling with an inability to dream up the means for building a more desirable future.15 In her scrutiny of the history of the modern Arab world, the artist’s work models key forms—armed struggle, social and political movements, industrial projects—revisiting ideals and the ways through which entire worlds were set in motion.

For Younis, this exploratory project is best pursued in terms of culture rather than straightforward historical research, since recent interest in modern history speaks to the lack of a shared imaginary. Useful here for thinking about the value of not only looking at culture but working through it is the late British theorist Mark Fisher’s 2014 text, ‘Going Overground’, which discusses the importance of making work that has a critical stake in mainstream culture: “one of the problems with many of the horizontalist models of political action is that they assume that we already know what we think and feel, and we are simply prevented from expressing ourselves by oppressive power structures.” He continues: “yet mass mediated art could name and focus feelings that were not only suppressed—by ‘internal’ as well as external censoring agencies—but which were inchoate, unformed, virtual.”16 Although Fisher’s text most specifically addresses the role of popular music in mainstream culture, Younis’ work also attends to the relationship between emotion and the formation of recognisable ideas that impact the world in which it inhabits. Through her work, she mobilises collective study of the modern Arab world’s rich history. She takes this subversive interiority overground.

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Notes 1 Toni Morrison, Playing in the Dark, New York: Vintage, 1990, p. 3. The author first encountered the Morrison quotation in the essay, ‘Mappa Mundi: Frank Bowling’s Cognitive Abstractions’ by the late curator Okwui Enwezor, who Younis worked with on multiple occasions. Enwezor’s use of the quote in that essay was formative to the framing of this text 2 In her extemporary talk entitled, ‘Still Pushing for the Humanities’ at the London School of Economics, 29 May 2016, she spoke about the imperative to create definitions. She argued that we produce definitions “so that we can hold [an] idea in a single breath” in which we participate, where the institution has formalised learning through competition, granting degrees, etc. Remaining with this acknowledgement that we live in a particular world and not one of theory, she recognises the imperative to define in order to develop better definitions. The task of the humanities, according to Spivak, is to constantly provide the “incalculable supplement” 3

By “social and political transformation”, I refer to a wide-spread interest in the era’s liberation movements against colonial powers, antiimperialist struggles, state projects of economic uplift and political imaginaries that mobilised self-determination

4

See Ussama Makdisi, ‘The Making and Unmaking of the Arab World’, in Anneka Lenssen, Sarah Rogers and Nada Shabout eds, Modern Art In The Arab World: Primary Documents, New York: The Museum of Modern Art, 2008, p. 28

5 This text owes much to the formulation that makes a distinction between informal ‘study’ and the formalisation of disciplinary ‘studies’ in academic institutions (area studies, ethnic studies, gender studies, etc.) introduced by Fred Moten and Stefano Harney in their now widely read text ‘Debt and Study’ published by e-flux Journal. This idea was elaborated in their book The Undercommons: Fugitive Planning & Black Study, particularly in the sections ‘Debt and Study’ and ‘The General Antagonism: An Interview with Stephen Shukaitis’. See Fred Moten and Stefano Harney, ‘Debt And Study’, e-flux Journal, no. 14, 2010; https://www.e-flux.com/journal/14/61305/debt-and-study/ and Stefano Harney and Fred Moten, The Undercommons, Brooklyn: Minor Compositions, 2013 6 Anticipating the collapse of the Ottoman Empire, the United Kingdom and France met in secret to define their respective spheres of influence and control in the 1916 Sykes-Picot Agreement 7

Quoted in Ala Younis, Tin Soldiers, Amman: self-published, 2012, p. 10

8

All quotes Rasha Salti, ‘Once Fida’is. Of Redeemers, Poets, Insurgents from Palestine’, in Younis, ibid., p. 19

9

ibid., p. 23

10

ibid., p. 29

11

Quoted in Oraib Toukon, ‘A lecture in three parts, in between the odd discussion’, in Younis, op cit., p. 115

12 In Western art history these two acts recall Chris Burden’s Shoot (1971) in which the artist was shot in the arm by an assistant with a .22 rifle 13 K. M. Barbour, ‘The Distribution of Industry in Egypt: A New Source Considered’, Transactions of the Institute of British Geographers, no. 50, 1970, p. 169 14 AbdelAziz EzzelArab, ‘And as You Listen: The Oral Narrative of Muhammad Abdel Wahab, Minister of Industry of Egypt, 1984-93’, International Journal of Middle East Studies 41, no. 1, 2009, p. 3 15 The artist has been influenced by the writing of the late Mark Fisher (with whom she studied) on the relationship between culture and capitalism, which informs her artistic intervention outlined in the introduction of this text. In his book Capitalist Realism, Mark Fisher further develops Fredric Jameson’s conceptualisation of postmodernism as “the cultural logic of late capitalism” marked by the absence of or inability to imagine a future. He writes, “Capitalism seamlessly occupies the horizons of the thinkable. Jameson used to report in horror about the ways that capitalism had seeped into the very unconscious.” See Mark Fisher, Capitalist Realism, Winchester, UK: Zero Books, 2010, pp. 7-8 16 Mark Fisher, ‘Going Overground’, K-Punk, 5 January 2014; http://k-punk.org/going-overground/. Within the context of this text, Fischer must also be acknowledged for his penetrating diagnostic of late 20th century capitalism, and in particular, his foresight in identifying culture as the arena in which the battle for twenty-first century freedoms would play out

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Al Bahithun The (Re)searchers

A special edition stamp was issued on 1 June 1976, marking the fourth anniversary of the Republic of Iraq’s “great” oil nationalisation. It features a depiction of two men in embrace: then President Ahmed Hassan Al-Bakr and Saddam Hussein. Hussein was appointed as deputy to the President in 1968; they both came to power as a result of the third military coup in the decade-old republic. He led the negotiations with the foreign oil companies, including an articulate calculation of state sovereignty, compensations earned by law, and untimely arrogant manipulations related to the number of oil barrels exported by these companies. On 1 June, 1972, Al Bakr read the decree on national radio and television that nationalised the assets of the Iraq Petroleum Company (IPC). Between 1973 and 1975, the state continued to oust one European shareholder after another until all settlements were finalised in February 1979. Saddam Hussein assumed his new role as President in July of that year.

In many ways, this stamp can be read as a map—not of a defined geographic location or nation but rather of a process of production—charting Hussein’s ascent to power. Like a map, this stamp has borders, it does not demarcate a solid or monolithic state but instead enshrouds an expanse of a dense, interwoven pattern. Within the inner frame of the stamp: the figure on the right is younger, taller and is overpowering in appearance. His face and features are visible, and his arm is extended around the President—the back of the latter’s head being more visible than his face. l

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On the one hand, the stamp is celebrating another year of the state’s nationalisation of oil after decades of exclusive possession and control by foreign corporations. On the other, the image depicts an impatient Saddam Hussein as deputy, someone who has also accumulated great power within the ruling party and in the higher departments of the state. The stamp is thus a map of power relations made by the state, which exceeds the formal spatial coordinates of a geographic document of other realms, providing a window into an intimate moment that foretells the gradual transfer of power in Iraq’s first office and a sharper transfer in the control of its most precious resources. To read the stamp in this way is to understand that space is not given, it is not merely there, it is not a neutral entity. *** To further explore the ideas that shaped the collective aspiration of the Iraqi people in that decade, we can also map various scenarios presented in a feature film titled The Searchers, directed in 1976

by Mohammad Yousef Al Janabi, the same year the special edition stamp was issued. Produced by the Iraqi state’s Cinema and Theatre Department, the film follows a group of men searching for oil in the marshes area (Al Ahwar) in the south of Iraq. The team was comprised of a representative constituency of Iraqi society at the time—an engineer, a revenge-seeking peasant, an amateur historian and an uneducated explorer. The men live and work on the water and conduct their explorations with a strange looking tractor, a simple boat and various telecommunication devices.

When a phonecall alerts the team they are floating on a sea of oil, they erupt with joy, and two of the men split from the group to embark on a secret search for a legendary land of ‘lost paradise’.

After a long, tedious cruise that involves one of them leading the way based on what he senses as eerie sci-fi-like sounds and lights torching the sky, they finally arrive at the base of flaming oil

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towers in the Rumaila Oil Field. One man cries at the delusion of his ‘lost paradise’, the other is enchanted by the revelation that the oil field for him is a paradise. Rumaila Oil Field, said to be the fourth largest in the world,1 was nationalised in 1961 through a law put forward by Abdel Karim Kassem, then Iraqi Republic’s first Prime Minister, who assumed power following a military coup/ revolution that overthrew the Hashemite monarchy in 1958. Friction between the Iraq Petroleum Company and the Iraqi government did not become acute until after the 1958 revolution, although differences of opinion naturally existed between the IPC and the government in this early period.

National sentiments at the time were on a rise, and the IPC was seen as a Western entity exploiting Iraq’s resources without much benefit given in return to the Iraqi people. The monopoly over Iraqi petroleum production began in 1925 of the Kirkuk field, Baba Gurgur, a seventy-five year concession that would not end before 2000. Kassim’s Law 80 expropriated all IPC group concession areas not currently producing oil, but did not nationalise the IPC outright as Kassim would have liked.

He could not have nationalised the IPC in 1961 because the Iraqi government lacked the technical and managerial capabilities to run the its operations, and he feared a boycott from Western buyers of Iraqi crude as happened in the early 1950s in Iran.

Saddam Hussein was a young revolutionary when he failed to assassinate Kassem in 1959. But Kassem was overthrown in a subsequent military coup in 1963, led by his deputy and the Ba’athists. INOC, the Iraq National Oil Company was founded through legislation issued in 1964 (Law 97), but INOC had no physical plant for over four years. One year after Al Bakr and Saddam Hussein took over Iraq’s first office, the INOC became a going concern, courtesy of a Soviet Russia fifteen-year agreement that provided a technical team to advise over negotiations, drill wells in Rumaila, train INOC staff, provide pipelines and equipment, release several tankers, and most importantly, accept a commercial deal to take Rumaila’s crude in return to these services. Five hundred Soviet specialists arrived in Rumaila two months before the nationalisation of IPC in 1972.

Michael Brown, writing in the International Journal of Middle East Studies in 1979, stated that nationalisation of the IPC was feasible given the establishment and assured viability of the INOC as an alternative source of revenue for the Iraqi government, and the increased technical expertise of the INOC staff enabled it to run the IPC fields upon nationalisation. In 1970, government oil revenue was 186.1 million Iraqi dinars. An Iraqi dinar was worth US$2.80 throughout 1971, increasing to US$3.04 in 1972. Crude oil exports in 1971 were 523.2 million dinars, 99% of which the IPC accounted for its production. *** The sounds calling the men in The Searchers film were heard as eerie sounds, similar to those from popular sci-fi films of the era. Only one of the two men could hear them, and so became obsessed with the messages he thought he was supposed to decipher. As he realised that the ‘lost paradise’ he was looking for was an oil field he collapsed to his knees, trembling, weeping, and unable to speak.

Next to him was the scientist, the archaeologist or geologist, whose surprise was rechannelled into scientific reasoning, his instinctive response being of optimism, and national pride. This is your real paradise, he said: “Real signs for a physical Aden. An Aden that is capable of creating a coherent mix of myths and reality. Symbol and logic. I think this is what you were looking for, no?” The two men had lost contact with their team and thus were in a ‘paradise’, left under the sun without help or guidance. The coercing sounds could not be heard anymore.

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As they awaited inspiration for a solution to their dilemma, their other colleagues were already on a mission to find them, locating the two men with the help of a helicopter hovering over the mangroves, seeing them from a distance. The group reunites finally, the helicopter lands nearby, they found us! they shout joyously, and run to the helicopter. One scene shows the pilot in dark sunglasses with a thick moustache scrutinising them. The next scene shows their return to the work station in the middle of the river, riding the same weird water tractor. The last scene is of their return from the outdoor (of the fields) to the indoor (of their station). *** Given to them with their salaries, the workers of the Iraq petroleum companies were used to reading selected literary works, interviews with writers and artists, archaeological findings, some fashion or sport highlights, the news on the world’s oil industry and oil workers in Iraq, in a magazine published by Iraq petroleum companies, titled Al Amiloon Fil Naft (The Workers in Oil). Each issue’s front cover was in Arabic, often with an image of an Iraqi product or personality, and the rear cover would have a photo of the work stations of the Iraq petroleum companies.

An earlier IPC magazine came out in the 1950s, called Ahl Al Naft, the “people of the oil”, which ceased publication after the 1958 revolution. Al Amiloon Fil Naft began publication in 1961, with a circulation of 8000 copies, selling for 25-30 fils, and offering subscriptions. Its editorial was based in Baghdad, while its former version was based in Beirut. Reader’s letters were answered in the magazine’s first pages, and lists of accepted and rejected literary submissions were also indexed.

Though privately published, it nevertheless operated under the supervision of the Iraqi Ministry of Oil and Metals.

Images of the oil workers and oil fields appeared also on its covers, especially in the English section included towards the end of the magazine. The Arabic section was mostly dedicated to colour reproductions of Iraqi works of art. On the cover of the 53rd issue, August 1966, was a reproduction of a work by Nuha Al Radhi, a ceramic mural that had just been installed at the entrance of the IPC headquarters in Baghdad. Inside this issue an article elaborated upon how the twenty-five year old artist was one of the first in Iraq to revive the local ceramic heritage as art, and how her moderately priced works earned her the IPC commission. It also explained briefly how a ceramic piece is made, and what one saw as they entered the artist’s studio.

Although the work was generally abstract in design, the artist based it on the concept of oil.

Looking for a phrase connected with Iraqi oil, the Arabic lettering of which would provide the centre of her design, she hit upon the words “Baba Gurgur”, the name of the place near Kirkuk where the oil was first struck in 1927, which formed the beginning of one of the richest oil fields in the world. The two words were so designed as to combine Arabic letters, crescent shapes, and motifs resembling storage tanks and pipes. Decorative details were also based on oil motifsvalves, pipes, resembling towers, etc., with a periphery of traditional Iraqi ornamentation.

When firing the tiles, she minimised the glazed parts, in keeping with an ancient Sumerian practice, and did the background in an earthy yellow interspaced with brilliant suns suggestive of the visual effect of locations where oil was usually found.2

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A decade before The Searchers was made, Nuha al Radhi attempted to translate the sounds of the names of the oil fields in Arabic letters and formal constellations. She disconnected the letters to modernise their Arabic font, and included not one but many suns in her mural. The names of the oil fields also demonstrate the acknowledgement of the geographic or geologic features of a national fortune, despite the fact it was only partially accessible. It is interesting to think of her use of fired clay that sprang from the same earth as the oil fields, to make an art work of refineries marked with flames of fire. It is for us to imagine how under the very hot sun, ‘paradise’ promised by black liquid bubbles coming out from the earth under the workers feet and their machines, went from the hands of the searchers to the shareholders of IPC that had not a single Iraqi on the board of its directors.

But the IPC did have some Iraqi employees. In fact, Al Amiloon fil Naft is not referred to without crediting artist and writer Jabra Ibrahim Jabra as its chief editor, although his name never appeared in the magazine between 1962 and 1972. He contributed many articles and his own work was reviewed in the pages of the magazine. Jabra was a Palestinian who was displaced from Bethlehem/Jerusalem in 1948 to settle in Baghdad. He was a close friend of Jewad Selim and other prominent Iraqi artists, and took part in the local art scene’s foundational activities and early movements. It is said that Jabra founded Al Amiloon Fil Naft. Being a poet, writer, artist and translator, he managed to bring to the magazine works by young and established writers, poets and artists, but not the Marxists as one article mentions, who decided to boycott the magazine before and after its nationalisation. Contributors were paid from oil revenue, and they were often seen in his office at IPC. The last issue of Al Amiloon Fil Naft, its 119th, was in May 1972. In the following month, the Ba’athist government nationalised IPC, and its operations were taken over by the Iraq National Oil Company. After nationalisation, Jabra became an employee of INOC, and published a new magazine, Al Naft Wal ‘Alam (The Oil and the World). These local, visual and cultural magazine interventions motivated the local readership to reclaim some of the revenues monopolised by the petroleum companies. It is also what encourages researchers decades later to inspect the early works of writers and artists before they became influential in regional visual culture. Published articles and artworks combined with lists of rejected contributions which appear in the first pages of Al Naft Wal ‘Alam, illustrate an active authorship and readership.

When Iraq negotiated its share of oil in 1952, the increase in revenue activated the government’s Economic Development Board, which was legally entitled to 70% of all government revenues obtained from the oil industry. The increased revenues allowed the country to invest in infrastructure, invite star architects like Le Corbusier, Walter Gropius and Frank Lloyd Wright to visit and design projects, and enabled young Iraqi graduates to lead projects all over Iraq. These international guests were hosted by local artists and architects whose own experimental works were ‘breaking out’ around Iraqi cities, removed from political influence or interference.

These infrastructural works were redrawn and modified in the decade that followed, determined by continual political fluctuations: Iraq experienced a Presidential change in 1963, 1966, and 1968. Saddam Hussein also became deputy to President Ahmad Hassan Al Bakr in 1968. Al Bakr announced the nationalisation of oil on 1 June, 1972 in a televised speech, but this development was actually his deputy’s project. In a newsreel of the day, the President and his deputy are seen arriving at the television station, following which the former enthusiastically announces that the monopolies of the private companies exploiting the nation’s oil are finished as of that day. Iraq’s golden days were to follow. The state took over oil production and its revenues, living standards rose, new industrial projects were launched, and more people were not only sent abroad

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on scholarships but also lured back to the country after finishing their studies. One of the incentives given to graduates was a tax exemption to import a Mercedes car, prompting many to drive back to Baghdad. On this, the artist Nuha Al Radi made a sculptural work that she exhibited in Baghdad. It had only two components, a model Mercedes with human brains oozing from its windows, and the same brains flying Mercedes flags. Mercedes cars presented an indication of the academic status of their owners, especially in the university neighbourhood and in front of public housing. Additionally, graduates in general received free land or modern accommodation.

Oil industry workers in particular, and those who worked in camps in Mosul, Kirkuk or Basra, were given nearby housing, transportation, a one hundred-year plan for water and electrical supplies, electrical appliances paid in installments, 120 litres of oil directly to each household, laundry, drycleaning and barber services; there were also onsite hospitals with medical staff commuting to/ from London, entertainment clubs for single workers and social clubs for those married, subsidised canteens, and Al Amiloon Fil Naft with their salaries each month.

Nuha Al Radi made another mural in the 1980s for the newly developed Haifa Street, which was built between 1980 and 1987 with an large amount of public funding, for shopping areas, an art museum and high-rise buildings, including a collection named after the Dutch contracting company that built them. The Holland Apartments was a complex of fifteen-stories, dedicated to graduates and academics who had yet to secure housing through the government’s benefits program. Scholars were moving into this building while the Iraq-Iran war, which raged in nearby fields in the south, continued to drain hard currency from the Iraqi state. Architects as well as men of all professions were summoned to the battlefront or to army bases to respond to war developments.

From Le Corbusier’s construction site, a senior architect was relocated to a military airport to design an enlargement of an air base facility. That war ended in 1988. By late 1990, following a serious dispute over the pricing oil in an Arab summit, Iraq invaded Kuwait, instigating a new war and sustaining international sanctions limiting the export of oil and the import of numerous goods.

The buildings on Haifa Street, as monuments for social class rupture became visible during the blockade years. Academic salaries, just like the Iraqi Dinar, devalued early in the blockade, making it difficult for academics to maintain their social status acquired over the previous decade. Some had to secretly sell their libraries, one book at a time; others had already sold their Mercedes cars which had no, if not wildly expensive spare parts, as a result of sanctions.

Nuha Al Radhi this time created her installation Embargo Art (1995), in which she presented figures constructed from parts of machines that had become dysfunctional during the blockade.

Graduates were now not allowed to leave the country, and for those who needed to, had to deposit large sums of money as a guarantee of their return. These deposit amounts varied, based on the person’s education level, and for Nuha Al Radhi to receive a leave permit from Baghdad to show this installation in Amman, she had to claim she was illiterate and pay a reduced amount. Nuha Al Radhi wrote in Baghdad Diaries (1999) on this, and how she saw in a dream herself carrying a tree that had blossomed bread loaves, before giving them to people. In another dream, she saw groups of American soldiers stationed on Haifa Street, some in its alleys, embracing each other.

In 2007, four years after Saddam Hussein fell from power, Haifa Street became a fierce battleground, a fault-line where members of the former Iraqi army fought face-to-face as, and with, insurgents against the American forces and the new Iraqi army. Videos captured the American troops moving between the buildings of the neighbourhood, devoid of the once cultural and scholarly inhabitants. Video cameras following these soldiers as they entered the Holland l

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Apartments captured rare images of the interiors, not as domestic or private spaces but as pockets of the fallen regime. These years also saw Iraqi academics threatened with violence, kidnapping and assassination, sometimes based on misleading claims of their political affiliation. Specific names of scientists had circulated on the US Army wanted list. The Iraqi Association of University Lecturers reported that about three hundred academics, including doctorates working in Iraqi government ministries and university administration were killed before January 2007. Those murdered were mostly chemists, physicists and engineers, along with some physicians. The extent of this violence prompted an exodus of academics who wanted to leave Iraq. There was also an upsurge of bombings and the house of Jabra Ibrahim Jabra was destroyed in a suicide attack in 2010. His library of books and rare manuscripts, and a valuable collection of original artworks of his or gifted from his artist friends were lost. *** A dictionary of oil began as a list of words compiled by Saudi Aramco, given to the Arabic Language Society in Baghdad which organised a symposium in the second half of 1970 to discuss the terms of translation, from English to Arabic. It was finally published by the Egyptian Arabic Language Society in 1993, when Iraq was not on good relations with many other Arab countries. For every oil related English term, this dictionary provides an Arabic equivalent, attempting another nationalisation of the terminology of an industry that shapes the lives and fortunes, or misfortunes, of the Arab world.

In 1994, The Arabic Language Union of Societies organised in Damascus a seminar to revise the work that was done on this dictionary. Over three days, all participants, from Syria, Egypt, Jordan and Tunisia went through every page of the dictionary and studied around half of the terms translated.

Among their final recommendations was to use computers for the storage of the revisions, and to work towards unification of terms around all Arab countries. *** In my artwork related to these narratives, I have tried to play on the double translation of the Arabic word, Al Bahithun, found in the title of the 1976 film. “Al Bahithun” are the searchers, of those who go to look for oil, and the researchers who produce the knowledge on (oil), from (its revenue), and beyond (the nationalist claims of the structures of power it enables). The (re)searchers obsess over the details found in these complexities of nationalising knowledge with the money of nationalised oil. The strange water tractor is juxtaposed with the modular architecture of the Holland Apartments, cars are coming out of its walls, while books are crushed under its wheels.

The sun is essential here, big, hot, and encompassing. An oil bubble sits in Nuha’s ceramic material.

The ceramic is the seepage from which knowledge, or blood, is drawn from the pages that gave an Arabic name to each of oil’s technical terms. The searchers are the researchers, the black on black is the undecipherable sounds that called men, artists, writers, graduates, scholars, teachers, engineers to the fields.

Notes 1 Christopher Helman, ‘The World’s Biggest Oil Reserves’, Forbes, 21 January, 2010; http://www.forbes.com/2010/01/21/biggest-oil-fieldsbusiness-energy-oil-fields.html 2

Al Amiloon Fil Naft 53, August 1966

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Secret Keepers, Treasure Guardians, Custodians of the Book “And so everything I see in this world, it all moves backward and forward at the same time,” admits Hantà, the protagonist of Bohumil Hrabal’s novel Too Loud A Solitude (1976).1 For thirty-five years, Hantà turned books into pulp. He crushed tonnes of wastepaper, newspapers and unwanted books, unread, found, or simply discarded. Yet he rescued as much. He collected books in his flat, piled up to unstable, threatening tower blocks. He touched the paper ready to be compressed, absorbing the knowledge from the trash as if the ink could run through his body, like blood through the veins. When he admits he found beauty in destruction, he strikes a chord with the reader. How this savvy man, a rescuer of knowledge and books from the brink of oblivion can find beauty in their extinction?

In her ten-year, ambitious endeavour, Pulp: A Short Biography of the Banished Book, the artist Shubigi Rao unpacks in writing, film, photographs and drawings the histories of book destruction.

As with the Czech writer Hrabal (who was a paper crusher from 1954 until 1959), turning banned literature into pulp, Rao has experienced the painful destruction of her parents’ library: “Our library was devastated, vandalised, books like an early edition of Decameron ripped from their covers to be sold as scrap. Over the years, my parents would painstakingly rebuild their library, and we would still steadily haemorrhage books through theft, termites, water and house-moving.”2 The fascination with books with which she grew and formed her stunning knowledge is grounded on a lived history of their painful destruction.

The stories of book destruction in Rao’s project are delivered with the idiosyncratic flavour of a bookworm, the aspirations of a humanist, the exuberance of a storyteller, the lyrical tone of a perceptive spirit, and the sharp voice of the subaltern. The project stretches in time and space with an intimidating agility and flow of information that knows no geographical boundary, from the ancient library of Ebla on the current territory of Syria, to the nations that broke from the former Yugoslavia. Only the ten-year, self-imposed constraint by the artist will put an end to an otherwise endless research. In Pulp… (2016), the first volume of a projected series of five,3 Rao reveals the various sources and contexts in which destruction occurs, highlighting its pervasive force, visible or invisible across human culture. There are books and libraries falling victim to humanity’s brutality in wars, acts of revenge and attacks on rival cultures. There is censorship becoming an institution in Roman times or a state apparatus in the Eastern Bloc, developing complex forms and ramifications with devastating effects on people’s lives, freedom of thought and expression. There is outdated knowledge, to which the artist draws attention, that is discarded as if innovative attempts, even proven wrong, carried no importance in opening up a new field of inquiry. There is the less acknowledged systematic silencing of subjects under patriarchal, colonial and totalitarian regimes.

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One should be reminded that in the first decade of her practice, the artist chose to act in disguise under a male persona. She constructed S. Raoul, a slippery character with multiple biographies, but an appearance fixed to a singular image: a portrait of the artist herself with an elusive smile, defying the gaze of the viewer, and wearing a dashing moustache made from paper. Not only a tool for fiction, S. Raoul served as an artistic method to reveal how legitimacy in the field of knowledge is constructed through gender, class, and mastery of language.

In the history of book and library destruction, there are also natural disasters, fire and flood that conjoined by human’s negligence or poor crisis management lead to amplified loss. In 2018, Rao was commissioned by Anita Dube, the curator of the Kochi-Muziris Biennale, to produce a new work.

In the month of August that year, the Indian state of Kerala experienced the worst flood in nearly a century. The Pelagic Tracts (2018), the film component of her installation, was partially informed by the conversations with local members of the community, from librarians to boatyard workers and research on sites where the flood destroyed thousands of books. This was a devastating aftermath in a state that had the highest literacy rate, according to 2011 census in India. The title of the film combines the Greek “pelagic”, referring to the open sea, and “tract”, to pamphlets on political and religious topics, and a section of land. There is in the title an indication already on the relation of the sea to books, as in maritime trade and circulation of knowledge, but also as a body of water liable for their destruction. The sea features as well in the film’s script, a collage of artist’s writing merged with lines from Homer’s Odyssey. Filmed across four libraries in Kochi, the film intersperses a fabricated narrative of book smugglers of so-called “Pelagos” with accounts on historical destruction of books and libraries, extinct languages (such as Cochin Indo-Portuguese) during colonial times. Pelagos refers to a fictional island invented by the artist. Islands, as Rao explains, are “neither here or there”4 —they are strange forms of life that vanish or re-appear in cartographic representations, or spaces inhabited by the utopian imagination.

In her publications, Rao is an artist who very consciously employs conventions of bookmaking, drawing in particular to books from the rise of modern science. The book is for Rao not only a subject matter, but also a medium of production with a specific lineage and traditions. One can attempt to classify the publication Pulp: A Short Biography of the Banished Book as a form of cultural history. Yet, it is also an artist’s book, in its definition of a “genre which is much about itself, its own forms and traditions, as any other artform or activity.”5 The structure and design of Pulp is marked by self-reflexivity towards its medium and specific discourse. With a print run of one thousand copies, Pulp also behaves as a limited-edition artist’s book. Every cover jacket has a unique ink drawing of a global map, but each incomplete in line with Rao’s methodical resistance to a singular story.

Placed at the beginning of the introduction, a reproduction of a pleading to the reader, photographed from a forgotten book found by the artist in the Bodlein Library at the University of Oxford, illustrated a literary convention. A reproduction of a frontispiece, a decorative illustration conventionally placed on the verso side facing the title place, opens the first chapter of the book.

One section of Pulp is dedicated to the tradition of marginalia, scribbled notes in the margins of pages that reflect a wide span of interactions with the books from Middle Ages copyists to present readers.

In this manifestation of marginalia, personal, anectodical comments by the artist stand alongside the footnotes. Handwritten by the artist, these notes remind the viewer of the author’s subjectivity, but also of the multiple interpretations that one story or concept entails. Moreover, the footnote numbering and handwritten marginalia are rendered in a cinnabar-like colour, making reference to the use of vermilion and red in the history of book making.

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In current debates concerning the printed book’s future, digital culture is perceived as a threat. One is forgetful that in the book’s history, the invention and the spread of the printing press did not kill off handmade manuscripts. On the contrary, the printing press and manuscript production co-existed for centuries. As a reconciliation between print and digital media, but also an engagement with the battles around open access, the artist took a deliberate decision that the openspine binding, of thread sewn stitching would allow the book to be scanned flat. Any example of access does not end at that, there is much more to decode; one needs to peruse Pulp with the history of print in the background.

Unlike other film works from this project, where the prevailing form is documentary, with a focus on the interviewees’ accounts, The Pelagic Tracts reinserts the artist’s voice and subjectivity into the narrative, as in her books. Divided in several fragments, each is introduced with a reproduction from different chapter titles, the film has a fluid pace as when a breeze turns the pages of a book.

The chapter titles are extracted from Francis Tuker’s Yellow Scarf: An Account of Thuggee and Its Suppression (1961), an account that enhanced the colonial imagination on the pervasiveness of organised crime in India.6 The artist borrows the characters of smugglers instead and turns them into figures of anticolonial resistance. These fictitious book smugglers contributed to the circulation of knowledge, breaching in fact the monopoly of the coloniser. They were according to the artist “traders without a permit”—colonial subjects who managed to pursue their activities within the cracks of Empire.

While the film begins with images from the prestigious Artis Library in Amsterdam, it slowly shifts into scenes of wreckage of books during the 2018 Kochi floods. One man holds carefully a book damaged by water, with pages drenched and distorted, sentences rendered illegible.

One can still notice a piece of transparent tape used to glue the cover. Another scene captures a desolate landscape with the ground turning into a sea of damaged books, torn apart and mixed with mud and leaves, yet to be swallowed by the soil and wrecked by passersby. Yet what strongly emerges from these images of destruction is the materiality of the books. In these saddening scenes of drenched, trashed books, what is rendered visible is their form, the paper, the spine, the binding, the thickness of the cover, the corners—the naked body of the book. It is as if only when the book is emptied of content, one becomes fully aware of its physical body. This is experienced as well in one of Rao’s earlier projects and the first she made on the theme of book destruction, The River of Ink (2008). If Pulp documents the history of book destruction, The River of Ink performs it: hundreds of hand-drawn and hand-lettered books by the artist were soaked in fountain pen ink.7 It was the same ink she used in writing and drawing, which completely dissolved leaving the books alive, in their full materiality, but bare of content. And while we acknowledge the experience of loss, futility of destruction, an act of self-silencing, we are also captured by the aesthetic appeal that the ruins of these books convey.

“Images of books that have been destroyed through negligence or catastrophe or as the result of acts of war or the nibbling teeth of mice can have, on occasion, their shocking beauty,”8 writes academic Kate Flint. While her analysis focuses on artists’ altered books, Flint’s suggestion to turn to the theory of ruins in order to understand the phenomenon of book destruction on aesthetic ground, is relevant and helpful. Reading a damaged book like a ruin, one can understand the correspondence between the book and the human body that such images of destruction entail. It is a similar experience with architectural ruins. Our emotional response to these images is grounded on what we project upon the books, an anguish of time’s irreversibility. Flint embraced this perspective l

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as a form of “critical ruin gaze” or “ruinophilia”, as defined by Svetlana Boym.9 While nostalgia is personal, expressing longing towards a specific place and time, ruinophilia conveys a general care for the world, sadness for its afflictions, gratitude towards its survival. Harking back to Rao’s work, the experience of loss of her parents’ library expands into a wider care for the world’s libraries, underlining how the micro has only been a starting point for a macro approach, an acknowledgment of a history of violence that goes beyond one’s personal story and has roots in the past and links into the present.10

Boym underlines this contemporary ruin-gaze as not only an intellectual experience, but also sensual, one attuned to the material transformations that ruins encounter. The sea of damaged books in Kochi is an illustration of ruins’ specificity, the blending of human’s physical creations within the natural environment.11 Humanity’s creations become nature’s material. What ruins can also show us, stresses Boym, is the acknowledgment of different temporalities that co-exist in the present time and produce a state of disharmony. Modern times imply both destruction and creation, and ruins expose specifically these dynamics. Moreover, ruinophilia is not nostalgic towards the past, but rather stems from the past and projects into the future, it creates a space for utopian imagination.

The invented figure of book smugglers from Pelagos provides such a space for speculation, a possible reply to the question, what if?—when one encounters irreversible acts of silencing and destruction.

Part of the film’s cast is T.A. Saleen, a scrapyard worker who the artist met in Kochi during her research. Making a living out of trashed books and paper, he managed to save from the flood and passed to the artist a copy of Homer’s Odyssey, that became a threadline for this film. As with Odysseus’ epic return journey to home, the history of book circulation and survival is also a story of resilience. Digging into the trash to save a book from the flood, T.A. Saleen’s gesture brings us back to Hrabal’s protagonist. Risking his job, if not his safety, Hantà often was able to rescue with much joy a precious, physical copy of classical literature. Each book he saved, whether by taking it away from the press or learning its content was a counterreaction to the brutality of the communist regime. l

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But tyranny in any form is always temporary. Its weakness lies in its legitimacy being derived from the enforcement of a single doctrine, dogma and book. All it takes is a dissident or alternative idea to take root; paper will trump rock. The monolithic singular will always breed acts of resistance in print, and often they take a quieter more resilient form.12

This act of resistance in print, in the historical context of Czechoslovakia for instance, took different shapes. One prevailing form was the samizdat, the system of underground publishing in the former Eastern Bloc that entailed the production and circulation of unofficial literature. Too Loud a Solitude was initially published through this method. Book destruction is never complete, even in the worst of times experienced by humanity. We are left to speculate that Hantà in Prague or T.A. Saleen in Kochi are themselves descendants of book smugglers. As we are told in the film, the descendants were “indentured into dump yards, scrapyards and pulping factories, forced to haul books and papers to their death.” Book smugglers are the treasure guardians, custodians of the books, those who experience destruction and construction of which the book-ruins are both the remainders and reminders.13 They have the wisdom to understand best how in life history is possible for “progressus ad futurum” to meet “regressus ad originem”.14 For an artist such as Shubigi Rao, whose life and work is an expression of care for books and world’s libraries, the book smugglers are a constant reminder of relentless destruction as well as a performance of hope.

Notes 1 Bohumil Hrabal, O singurătate prea zgomotoasă, Bucharest: Editura Art, 2015, p. 92. For an English version, the writer used Michael Henry Heim’s translation of the book 2

Shubigi Rao, Pulp: A Short Biography of the Banished Book, Rock Paper Fire: Singapore 2016, p. viii

3

The second book, Pulp II: A Visual Bibliography of the Banished Book, was published in 2018. The third is due in 2020. A secondary publication, Written in the Margins, was released in conjunction with the first exhibition from the project in 2017 at Künstlerhaus Bethanien in Berlin, following a residency program

4

Conversation with the artist, 8 June 2019

5

Johanna Drucker, The Century of Artists’ Books, New York: Granary Books, 1994, p. 14

6

Conversation with the artist, op cit.

7

A project that made the transition to Pulp, it is also what according to the artist killed off S. Raoul

8

Kate flint, ‘The Aesthetics of Book Destruction’, in Book Destruction from the Medieval to the Contemporary, Gill Partington & Adam Smyth eds, London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2014, pp. 175-189

9

Svetlana Boym, ‘Ruinophilia’, The Off-Modern, London: Bloomsbury Academic & Professional, 2017, pp. 43-47

10

‘A So-Far True Conversation with Shubigi Rao, about her ten-year project, Pulp: A Short Biography of the Banished Book (2013-2023) by Wilma Lukatsch’, Written in the Margins, Berlin: Künstlerhaus Bethanien, 2017, p. 14 11

Boym includes Georg Simmel’s and Walter Benjamin’s reflections on the relation between human and nature creation in ruins

12

Rao, op cit., p. 265

13

Boym, op cit., p. 43

14

Hrabal, op cit., p. 92

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Page 16 May Fourth Movement protests in Beijing; https://supchina.com/2019/05/01/two-views-of-themay-fourth-movement/

Page 18 Shirin Neshat, Untitled from the Women of Allah series, 1996 Image courtesy the artist and Gladstone Gallery, New York and Brussels From the text ‘Against the Market The Art of Shirin Neshat’ by Shiva Balaghi, Ibraaz Platform 010, 25 September 2016; https://www.ibraaz.org/essays/164

Page 21 Screengrabs from Art Basel Hong Kong Conversations online videos, 2019 Image 1: Institutional Practice is Creative Work: A Roundtable on Leadership; https://www.youtube. com/watch?v=3x2FKHF5W-M&feature=youtu.be Image 2: The Art of Conversation: On Forums, Summits and Symposia; https://www.youtube.com/ watch?v=5VaYbB_qKJw&feature=youtu.be

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Page 22 Top: Leung Chi Wo, I’m still me even after all that’s happened, 2012 Image courtesy the artist From the interview, ‘Is This about Culture?

Leung Chi Wo in conversation with Robin Peckham’, Ibraaz Platform 008, 6 November 2014; https://www.ibraaz.org/interviews/149 Bottom: Raed Yassin, MAO I, MAO II, MAO III, MAO IV, 2015 Image courtesy the artist From the exhibition review, ‘Midad: The Public and Intimate Lives of Arabic Calligraphy at Dar ElNimer’ by Reema Salha Fadda, Ibraaz Platform 010, 26 June 2017; https://www.ibraaz.org/reviews/133

Page 26 Yue Minjun, Execution,1995 Image courtesy the artist Yue Minjun acknowledges that Execution, inspired by the bloody Tiananmen crackdown in 1989, is the most politically sensitive of his work… “I want the audience not to think of one thing or one place or one event… The whole world’s the background… the viewer should not link this painting to Tiananmen. But Tiananmen is the catalyst for conceiving of this painting…

People feel freedom, most themselves, at home in their underpants”; http://edition.cnn.com/2007/ WORLD/asiapcf/10/11/china.artist/index.html

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Pages 28, 30 Bo Wang and Pan Lu, Traces of an Invisible City: Three Notes on Hong Kong (screengrabs), 2016 Images courtesy the artists The film presents urban space in Hong Kong as a vivid showcase of the hidden logics of globalisation, capitalism and historical changes… [and] examines a series of urban landscapes in Hong Kong to illustrate the tension among their visual existence, function and ownership, and how the city’s public space has been constructed, used, owned and interpreted. The Exhibition: Art Basel Hong Kong holds at the Hong Kong Convention and Exhibition Centre, a building built in 1997 on reclaimed land solely to host the sovereignty handover ceremony.

The North Side: A reversed historical gaze. Hong Kong is bordered by Shenzhen from the north, a city built from scratch in only 30 years by the Beijing government; http://www.bo-wang.net/ toaic.html

Page 33 Top: On a wall inside the century-old Elliot Hall at the University of Hong Kong hang hundreds of pictures… All have been crossed with red markers.

What they have in common is that all these pictures appeared briefly on the popular Chinese social media platform Weibo before disappearing; https://www.scmp.com/news/hong-kong/politics/ article/3012182/art-getting-tiananmen-squarecrackdown-chinese-social-media Bottom: 1997 handover of Hong Kong to PRC rule poster found in a Beijing market; https://www.thatsmags. com/shanghai/post/19583/5-things-andrew-bull-shong-kong-handover-unity-rave

Page 36 Jia Zhangke, Mountains May Depart (screengrabs), 2015 Images courtesy the artist (The film’s title comes from a Chinese aphorism, that “time will transform mountains and rivers, but our hearts will remain the same”.) Jia has clashed with the Chinese government over the content of his films throughout his career… because [he] belongs to the so-called “sixth generation” of Chinese cinema—a more anti-establishment and confrontational approach to filmmaking that emerged in the late 1990s… the director begins his latest film in 1999, a year weighted with symbolic and actual importance for a resurgent China preparing to dominate the global stage. Jia is telling a story about his country that feels at once hopeful and bleak. This duality is perfectly reflected in the film’s opening and closing scenes, two very different dance sequences set to the same song.

As the opening credits roll, the camera pushes in on the protagonist Shen Tao and her friends as they dance to the Pet Shop Boys’ ‘Go West’.

A satiric anthem for the capitalist western world, ‘Go West’ has lyrics that might feel a bit on the nose for a film about China’s past, present, and future… Its characters are in search of some “promised land” be it financial success or romantic fulfillment, but as time passes, that goal appears to be stuck forever on the horizon; https://www. theatlantic.com/entertainment/archive/2016/12/ mountains-may-depart/511166/

Page 39 Ai Weiwei, Study of Perspective Tiananmen Square, 1995 Image courtesy the artist In what first appears to be a classic tourist snapshot, Ai sticks his middle finger up at Tiananmen Square Gate. Also known as the “Gate of Heavenly Peace” and formerly the front entrance to the Forbidden City… The central rule that objects closer to the eye must appear larger is being used to showcase an offensive gesture expressing Ai’s basic disdain for state power, which is by no means limited to China. When Ai was arrested and interrogated by the Chinese police in 2011, his interviewers limited their questions, however, to this particular photograph, demanding an explanation. Ai stated that he had meant to target “Feudalism”, explaining that the gate had been built by a Ming Emperor. While Ai’s interrogators could not acknowledge it, they were no doubt aware of another layer of visual symbolism. In its resemblance to “tank man”, an unidentified protestor photographed in 1989 facing a line of tanks, Ai’s finger, standing alone against symbols of state power at the centre of this image, is a provocative stand in for a figure strictly banned in the Chinese media, and therefore truly and brilliantly provocative; The Art Story, https://www. theartstory.org/artist-ai-weiwei-artworks.htm

Page 45 Kelly Sinnapah Mary, Notebook of No Return, Alice et Goliath, 2019 Image courtesy the artist and Osage Art Foundation, Hong Kong

Page 48 Ramingining artists, The Aboriginal Memorial, 1987-88 Image courtesy the artists and the National Gallery of Australia, Canberra

Page 40 From https://www.freepik.com/premium-vector/ southeast-asia-map_2610393.htm

Page 42 Kiyoko Sakata, Oscillating Vessels, 2016-19 Rowing the Sky, 2018 Image courtesy the artist and Osage Art Foundation, Hong Kong

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Page 51 Lieutenant-Governor George Arthur’s Proclamation of c.1828-30 Image courtesy the State Library of New South Wales, Sydney Often incorrectly attributed to Governor Thomas Davey (1758-1823), the Proclamation Board is actually Governor George Arthur’s (1784-1854) Proclamation to the Aborigines. The Board presents a four-strip pictogram that attempts to explain the idea of equality under the law. Those who committed violent crimes, in Van Diemen’s Land (now Tasmania), be they Aboriginal Australian or European settler, would be punished in the same way

Page 52 Godfrey Mundy, Mounted Police and Blacks, 1852 The Slaughterhouse Creek massacre of 26 January 1838 occured when New South Wales Military Mounted Police, under the command of Major James Nunn, set out in response to violence on the Liverpool Plains. At Slaughterhouse Creek, also know as Waterloo Creek, the Mounted Police battled with Gomeroi (Kamilaroi) warriors.

A trooper was wounded, having been speared in the leg, and one soldier estimated that 40 to 50 Gomeroi were killed. This image originally appeared in 1852 as the frontispiece to the first volume of Mundy’s memoirs, ‘Our Antipodes: or, Residence and Rambles in the Australasian colonies, with a Glimpse of the Goldfields’ (3 vols, London, 1852). It was one of twelve landscape and stylised action scenes he drew for the volume.

The lithograph was executed by W.L. Walton after sketches by Mundy and his wife, Louisa.

A professional officer in the British Army, Mundy was in Sydney from 1846 to 1851 as deputy adjutant-general of the British military forces in Australia. The Mounted Police at that time was made up of British soldiers, and when he arrived in Sydney Mundy heard about the incident from soldiers in the garrison. Mundy completed this print from his imagination Image courtesy the Australian War Memorial; https://www.awm.gov.au/collection/C174087

Page 62 Shaun Gladwell, 1000 Horses (production still), 2017 Image courtesy the artist, Anna Schwartz Gallery, Melbourne and Sherman Contemporary Art Foundation, Sydney ‘The Horses Stay Behind’ In days to come we’ll wander west and across the range again; We’ll hear the bush birds singing in the green trees after rain; We’ll canter through Mitchell grass and breast the bracing wind: But we’ll have other horses. Our chargers stay behind.

Around the fire at night we’ll yarn about old Sinai; We’ll fight our battles o’er again; and as the days go by There’ll be old mates to greet us.The bush birds will be kind Still our thoughts will often wander to the horses left behind.

I don’t think I could stand the thought of my old fancy hack Just crawling round old Cairo with a Gyppo on his back.

Perhaps some English tourist out in Palestine may find My broken-hearted waler with a wooden pough behind.

No; I think I’d better shoot him and tell a little lie: “He floundered in a wombat hole and then lay down to die.”

Maybe I’ll be court-martialled; but I’m damned if I’m inclined To go back to Australia and leave my horse behind.

Trooper Bluegum From the book Australia in Palestine, Sydney: Angus & Robertson, 1919

Page 56 The Australian War Memorial is Australia’s national memorial to the members of its armed forces and supporting organisations who have died or participated in wars involving the Commonwealth of Australia, and some conflicts involving personnel from the Australian colonies prior to Federation

Page 59 Ramingining artists, The Aboriginal Memorial, 1987-88 Image courtesy the artists and the National Gallery of Australia, Canberra

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Pages 66, 67 Bo Wang and Pan Lu, Traces of an Invisible City: Three Notes on Hong Kong (screengrabs), 2016 Images courtesy the artists “Deng Xiaoping in front of a background of Tiananmen in Beijing. Madam Thatcher in front of the Central District of Hong Kong. If you look up, does the white cloud resemble the map of China?

This also signifies that Hong Kong is an indivisible part of China”; http://www.bo-wang.net/toaic.html

Page 68 Rory Emmett, Colourmen (Artisan Memorial), 2017 Image courtesy the artist and Osage Art Foundation, Hong Kong

Page 65 Shaun Gladwell, 1000 Horses (production still), 2017 Image courtesy the artist, Anna Schwartz Gallery, Melbourne and Sherman Contemporary Art Foundation, Sydney The Battle of Beersheba enmeshed this archetype [They are horsemen, not men on horses]… as “the Australian centaur, bushman and horse at war.” Kit Messham-Muir, ‘The Silent Centaur: Shaun Gladwell’s 1,000 Horses’, Shaun Gladwell 1,000 Horses (exhib. cat.), Tel Aviv Museum of Art, 2017

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Page 69 ByungJun Kwon, Forest of Subtle Truth 2, 2017 Image courtesy the artist and Osage Art Foundation, Hong Kong

Pages 70, 71 Ramingining artists, The Aboriginal Memorial, 1987-88 Image courtesy the artists and the National Gallery of Australia, Canberra

Page 75 Monira Al Qadiri, OR-BIT 1, 2016 Image courtesy the artist and Art Jameel Foundation, Dubai

Page 79 Shubigi Rao, River of Ink, 2008 Image courtesy the artist

Page 72 Michael Rakowitz, The invisible enemy should not exist (Room G, Northwest Palace of Nimrud, Panel 19), 2018 Images courtesy the artist Page 76 Ala Younis, Nefertiti, 2008 Image courtesy the artist This project explores personal stories attached to the Nefertiti and to its time, a disheartening disappointment for the older generation yet a nostalgic icon from the heyday of nationalistic sentiments; https://alayounis.art/Nefertiti

Page 80 Top: Shaun Gladwell, study for 1000 Horses, 2017 Bottom: Shaun Gladwell, sketch for Impasse (Equestrian military advantage rendered dysfunctional via decay), 2017 Images courtesy the artist, Anna Schwartz Gallery, Melbourne and Sherman Contemporary Art Foundation, Sydney

Page 73 Michael Rakowitz, The Invisible Enermy Should Not Exist, 2018, Trafalgar Square’s Fourth Plinth Image courtesy the artist Page 77 Ala Younis, Tin Soldiers, 2011 Image courtesy the artist

Page 74 Alessandro Balteo-Yazbeck, UNstable-Mobile, 2006 Image courtesy the artist and Green Art Gallery, Dubai

Page 78 Shubigi Rao, Manuscript salvaged from the 1992 burning of the Oriental Institute, Sarajevo, BosniaHerzegovina, 2017 Image courtesy the artist

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Page 83 Shaun Gladwell, 1000 Horses (production still), 2017 Image courtesy the artist, Anna Schwartz Gallery, Melbourne and Sherman Contemporary Art Foundation, Sydney

Page 96 Michael Rakowitz, The Worst Condition is to Pass Under a Sword Which is Not One’s Own, 2009 Image courtesy the artist

Page 98 Raja’a Khalid, Fortune/Golf, 2014 Image courtesy the artist …forgotten archival traces… document the daily lives of expatriate Arabian American Oil Company (Aramco) executives and in particular their inexplicable desire to play golf in the desert.

An elite corporate pastime, the sport was the American equivalent of cricket in British India…

Throughout the decades, golf continued to be an indispensable part of expat life, played despite inhospitable climate and terrain.… Khalid uncovers the little-known genealogy of this bizarre and somewhat perverse urban feature of contemporary Gulf cities.

Murtaza Vali, ‘A Crude History of Modernity’, CRUDE (exhib. cat.), Art Jameel, Dubai 2019

Page 85 Top: front cover of Australia in Palestine, Sydney: Angus & Robertson, 1919 “A soldier’s book, produced almost entirely by soldiers in the field under active service conditions to send to their friends in Australia and abroad.”

Specifically, the story of the Australian Light Horsemen in the Palestine Campaign, 1916-1918 during the First World War Bottom: Sharon Ya’ari, ANZAC Monument, 2010 Image courtesy the artist and Sommer Contemporary Art, Tel Aviv … pictures of strange, seemingly utopian architectural structures that act as watch towers.

A camouflage net got caught on one of these buildings (Anzac, 2009-11)–a moment frozen in time, whose emergence in the past and its continued existence in the future we can leave only to our imagination. Sabine Schaschl; https:// kunsthausbaselland.ch/en/ausstellungen/sharonyaari

Page 87 Title page from Australia in Palestine

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Pages 89, 90, 93, 94 Images 1 and 5: Michael Rakowitz, The Invisible Enemy Should Not Exist, 2018, Trafalgar Square’s Fourth Plinth Images 2-4: Michael Rakowitz, The Invisible Enemy Should Not Exist, 2007-08 Images courtesy the artist In 2015, ISIS militants filmed themselves drilling into the face of the 700 BCE sculpture during an extensive spree of destruction that also included burning books, looting the Mosul Museum and other institutions, and targeting Iraq’s most precious and ancient cultural artifacts. Here, the Iraqi-American Rakowitz presents its ghost in the form of a replica constructed from more than 10,000 empty Iraqi date syrup cans; https://hyperallergic.com/436134/michaelrakowitz-fourth-plinth-trafalgar-square-london/

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Page 102 Top: Rayanne Tabet, Steel Rings from the series The Shortest Distance Between Two points, 2013 Image courtesy the artist and Art Jameel, Dubai

Page 113 Ala Younis, Tin Soldiers, 2011 Image courtesy the artist Page 102 Bottom: Latif Al Ani, Building the Darbandikhan Dam, Iraq, c.1961 Image courtesy the artist and Arab Image Foundation, Beirut Al Ani worked as a photographer first for the British-controlled Iraq Petroleum Company (IPC) from 1954-60 and then for Iraq’s Ministry of Culture and Guidance in the 1960s. His… photographs… are part of a visual repetoire through which the Iraqis came to recognise themselves and their nation as modern.

Murtaza Vali, ‘A Crude History of Modernity’, CRUDE (exhib. cat.), Art Jameel, Dubai 2019

Page 106 Top: Rayanne Tabet, Lettehead from the series The Shortest Distance Between Two points, 1950/2013 Image courtesy the artist and Art Jameel, Dubai Though archival in a sense, The Shortest Distance Between Two points, does not use the archive as a source of information through which to retell Tapline’s specific history. Instead [Tabet] reactivates it materially, conceptually and phenomenologically…

Murtaza Vali, ‘A Crude History of Modernity’, CRUDE (exhib. cat.), Art Jameel, Dubai 2019 Bottom: Latif Al Ani, School Lunch, Baghdad, 1961 Image courtesy the artist and Arab Image Foundation, Beirut

Page 109 Raja’a Khalid, Desert Golf III, 2014 Image courtesy the artist Page 104 Top: Hajra Waheed, Plume 1-24, 2017 Image courtesy the artist … found images of clouds and thick black smoke, carefully excised from their original context so that their exact source–fire or explosion, accident or conflict–remains uncertain. The serial presentation of this now generalised sign establishes it as a sublime typology of the formless, allowing us to read it through the title’s other meaning–an ornamental feather–recapturing some of the wonder of those early images of oil fires.

Bottom: GCC, Congratulant 5, 2013 Image courtesy the artists A scale model of an offshore rig… Congratulant 5 is one of a series of faux-trophies that wryly critique the rituals and protocols in the region… Here, the cherised souvenir becomes a generic object, infinitely reproducible and customisable and hence emptied of all possible significance…

Both Murtaza Vali, ‘A Crude History of Modernity’, CRUDE (exhib. cat.), Art Jameel, Dubai 2019

Page 111 Ala Younis, Nefertiti, 2008 Image courtesy the artist

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Page 116 Ala Younis, Enactment, 2017 with Tin Soldiers, 2011 Image courtesy the artist

Page 120 Ala Younis, 1976 special edition stamp from Al Bahithun [The (re)searchers], 2018 Image courtesy the artist

Page 121 Ala Younis, film stills from the film Al Bahithun, 1976 Image courtesy the artist

Pages 130, 132 Image 1: Shubigi Rao, The fictional scientist S. Raoul, 2009 Image 2: Shubigi Rao, Pulp: A Short Biography of the Banished Book Volume 1, 2016 Images courtesy the artist

Pages 122, 124, 126 Image 1: Ala Younis, Al Amiloon fil Naft 1961-72, from Al Bahithun [The (re)searchers], 2019 Image 2: Ala Younis, Haifa Street from Plan (fem.) for Greater Baghdad, 2018 Image 3: Ala Younis, Crude installation, 2019 Image 4: Ala Younis, Crude installation, 2019 Image 5: Ala Younis, Nuha Al Radi’s mural, from Al Bahithun [The (re)searchers], 2019 Image 6: Ala Younis, Nuha Al Radi’s nightmare from Plan (fem.) for Greater Baghdad, 2018 Images courtesy the artist In the early days of the first Gulf War in 1991, the Iraqi artist and writer Nuha Al Radhi dreamt of a tree sprouting loaves of bread. In another dream, American troops marched down Haifa Street, a newly-restored residential quarter in Baghdad, led by a woman wearing a cape. Haifa Street’s state of the art, futuristic high rises were part of a wider development plan initiated by Saddam Hussein in the early 1980s, as the city prepared to host two international conferences. Al Radhi published her diaries of the first Gulf War and its aftermath in 2003. Today, her dreams have been reproduced as 3-D renders and digital images in the Jordanian artist Ala Younis’ installation Plan (fem.) for a Greater Baghdad which was commissioned and presented by the Delfina Foundation in London. In the rendering, Al Radhi’s head is concealed by a palm tree and floating flat breads. The awkwardness of the image highlights the nature of the dream as a construct; https://ruyafoundation.org/en/2018/03/ ala-younis/ Pages 135, 136 Shubigi Rao, The Pelagic Tracts (film stills), 2018 Images courtesy the artist

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