“The war in the Persian Gulf ended just three months ago,” alerted its readers in May 1991, “but some museums are already collecting artifacts from the conflict.”1 Spooky spolia from America’s “first” campaign – such as Barbara Bush’s fatigue jacket or cookies found in discarded Iraqi

01/12 uniforms – were making their way to assorted US military and state museums for public display. The objects said this is what we did, but these cast-offs of imperial plunder came also to be wrapped in revisionist identitarian empathy for the plunderers. The Times quotes a Smithsonian curator proudly proclaiming, “If you had come to this museum in 1960, it was essentially a white, Mostafa Heddaya and Rijin elitist story. We have tried to convey that this is a Sahakian much more complicated, much different story. Just as we have George Washington’s uniform, we want to have uniforms of a sergeant from a Recolonize This tank unit.”2 đđđđđđđđđđIn the aftermath of Operation Desert Storm, Place Allan Sekula described that asymmetrical liberal empathy surrounding the first American war in Iraq as a selective mathematics of “innumerable third world bodies” and “precisely enumerated first world bodies.”3 But today’s theater of American exhibition-making flips these terms: precisely enumerated “others” counterpose innumerable masters lost in the fog of American regret. This reversal is characteristic of the empathetic errand of “unstrangering” foundational to modern humanitarianism and American counterinsurgency alike, for it drives the motor of military domination by juicing it culturally.4 Though it verges on the paranoid, this is one way a visitor to “Theater of Operations: The Gulf Wars 1991–2011” might have understood how the curators at MoMA PS1 – the Museum of Modern Art’s affiliate in Queens, New York, where the exhibition was on display from November 2019 to early March 2020 – came to deck their galleries with so many “hearts and minds”: artistic victims, witnesses, and far-flung observers of endless (Iraq) war. đđđđđđđđđđWe empathize with our imagined visitor’s paranoia. While the exhibition tinged its titular historical event with a generic humanist regret for its toll, it all took place, after all, in an institution at whose organizational summit sits a certain Leon Black – billionaire investor, profiteer, and chairman of the MoMA board.

e - f l u x j o r n a # 1 0 7 — m c h 2 đ M s t H d y R i S k R e c o l n i z T h s P a (While PS1 began as an independent institution in 1971, it was acquired by MoMA in 2000.5) Black is the founder and CEO of the private equity firm (named for a god the Greeks called Ἀλεξίκακος – Alexicacus, “averter of evil”). He has profited from the Iraq campaign through Apollo’s ownership of a grim menagerie of private military contractors, including the civilian-murder outfit formerly known as

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Installation view of Allan Sekula, War Without Bodies,đ1991/1996.đOn view in the exhibition “Theater of Operations: The Gulf Wars 1991–2011” at MoMA PS1, New York, 2020. Photo: Matthew Septimus.

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Michel Auder,đGulf War TV War (still),đ1991.đ(Edited 2017). Hi8 video and mini-DV transferred to digital video,đ102 min. Courtesy the artist and Martos Gallery, New York.

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Left: Cover of the catalog for “Theater of Operations”đ(MoMA PS1, 2019). Right:đJeremy Deller,đIt Is What It Is: Conversations About Iraq, 2008, exhibition view at New Museum, New York.

12.21.20 / 21:31:57 EST . And Black’s connection to US war- refuses to construct an organizing counter- making in Iraq doesn’t stop there. On the board of narrative of its own, then admits that its Apollo sits A. B. Krongard, the executive director reckoning – “undoubtedly” – made things worse? of the Central Intelligence Agency during the run- One could say that the exhibition’s contortionist up to the 2003 ground invasion of Iraq. (Krongard contrition itself sounds a lot like the current was responsible for the CIA’s initial hiring of “mainstream narratives” of the Iraq wars, in Blackwater under a lucrative Afghanistan which critical-historical accounting for cause contract in 2002; he was repaid in turn when 05/12 and effect is voided by a scattershot plurality of Blackwater’s then-owner asked him times and places, people and events, stories and to join its board in 2007; and he quickly vacated mediations. Curatorially evacuated of historical his Blackwater board seat under subsequent and institutional consciousness, “Theater of conflict-of-interest scrutiny.6) Further, the Operations” has a posthistorical event par exhibition thanks and features works lent by the excellence – the titular “Gulf Wars 1991–2011” – person who has overseen the Iraqi national come home to roost at the posthistorical pavilion at the Venice Biennale since 2013, museum.11 Tamara Chalabi, scion and on-the-ground đđđđđđđđđđ“Rather than reducing this complex subject accomplice of a crucial CIA-funded “native” into a linear trajectory,” PS1 director Kate Fowle asset in that invasion, Ahmed Chalabi.7 One explains in her foreword to the catalog, “Theater could go on. of Operations offers a range of responses made đđđđđđđđđđCount on us for the vulgar tally: Three in the context of two US-led wars in Iraq.”12 That hundred artworks from around eighty artists; two much is clear, more or less – the two-wars curators (Peter Eleey and Ruba Katrib); one narrative, as her colleagues acknowledge in their exhibition (“Theater of Operations”) about a essays, is a fabulation of the public-relations twenty-year period (1991–2011) understood to apparatus of endless war. But there’s a linear represent the historical frame of the Iraq wars, trajectory right there in the exhibition title – a occupying all three floors of MoMA PS1. One chronology, perhaps even a period – that the billionaire MoMA board chairman (Leon Black); actual exhibition shirks at every turn. This failed nine formerly separate private military historical burden comes into view earlier in the contractors rolled into a conglomerate same foreword, when Fowle gives three (Constellis) now owned by Black’s Apollo Global examples of similar exhibitions that Management; seventeen Iraqi civilians murdered “foregrounded this institution’s commitment to in the infamous Nisour Square massacre of 2007, such historical presentations”: “EXPO 1” (2013); perpetrated by employed by “Stalin’s Choice: Soviet Socialist Realism Blackwater – a company that is now part of 1932–1956” (1993); and “The Short Century: Constellis8 (and that was twice renamed after Independence and Liberation Movements in said murders “tarnished its brand”); one million Africa, 1945–1994” (2002). Fowle was right to overall civilian deaths (too many to rebrand). group them, since they all represent different đđđđđđđđđđFirst the inventory, then the self- reactions to the historical subjects of the accounting. Near the beginning of their catalog, posthistorical museum: the first exhibition by the exhibition’s cocurators, Eleey and Katrib, moving toward the futural mode of “speculation” explain: “The artworks brought together here (the house style of posthistorical historicism); convey experiences and positions that counter the second through rote semi-triumphalist the essentializing tendencies of mainstream nostalgia toward the aesthetically and politically narratives, particularly those that seek to define defeated; and the last, organized by the late certain people as the ‘enemy’ and attempt to Okwui Enwezor (it traveled to PS1), through a place them beyond the reach of our empathy.”9 valiant postcolonial resuscitation of the task of Soon this revisionist empathy cracks up: Eleey, in critical periodization.13 his longer essay later in the catalog, self- đđđđđđđđđđInstead of critical periodization, “Theater of critically hedges that framing Iraqi artistic Operations” punts the Gulf Wars in favor of a grab production “through the reductive lenses of bag of poorly articulated “stories” resolving to an violence and victimhood” might be underlying curatorial ethos of confused regret, a counterproductive. Delirious acrobatics follow: e - f l u x j o r n a # 1 0 7 — m c h 2 đ M s t H d y R i S k R e c o l n i z T h s P a self-flagellating self-congratulation. It mirrors “In assembling this exhibition, we worked with the lack of serious investigation into the Gulf an awareness of these distorting pressures of Wars by most American left-liberals, who either reception, undoubtedly reinforced some of their believed that they “should not have happened” political deformations, which must also be or simply withdrew rather than tangle deeply understood to have affected Western artists, with the reality and spread of their ongoing albeit differently.”10 repercussions. When it came time for the New đđđđđđđđđđHow to address an exhibition that professes York Times to cover the exhibition, arts writer to “counter … mainstream narratives,” then Jason Farago decided to forego a traditional

12.21.20 / 21:31:57 EST review and instead printed a “conversation” with Venice, whose conditions of existence abutt and a former Times bureau chief.14 The abetted that war. latter wondered, after seeing the exhibition, đđđđđđđđđđAt the level of layout and content, the show “what contemporary art in Iraq might have itself was garlanded by 24/7 distraction, with looked like” if the wars hadn’t taken place. (Never cable television anachronized as material and mind that the Times had stenographed the case medium, a kind of Internet 1.0: the oversized for war to its credulous readers.) This exculpatory Necklace, CNN, a self-explanatory 2002 counterfactual speaks to the logic of 06/12 sculpture by Thomas Hirschhorn, was installed identification and identity at the center of this alone in the gallery opposite the building’s show’s morbid humanitarianism: Iraqis are entrance. Hirschhorn’s gold-foil-enrobed links indelibly marked by the travesty we have made of teased the sequence of large projections that their country, but their ethical nobility consists patterned the rest of the exhibition’s ground purely in their impossible resilience to this mark floor, where video works by Monira Al Qadiri we made. Our greatest form of empathetic (Behind the Sun, 2013) and Michel Auder (Gulf identification, then, is to spare them in War TV War, 1991/2017) framed the exhibition’s retroaction, un-marking them as we un-mark first impression with the grainy spectacle of ourselves. The only form of identification cable B-roll, blown up beyond the scale of even ultimately imaginable is for “us” to hold out for the biggest-screen TV, curatorially montaged into Iraqis the image we hold of ourselves: we, the canonical media works from Harun Farocki and shifty half of aggressor and aggressed – guilty, Dara Birnbaum, among others. And there are maybe, but whole and holier for it. many others. It is as if, since the Gulf Wars began đđđđđđđđđđThe loose suggestion of the exhibition’s some decades ago, there has been no central historical conceit – that it produces a examination that might compel the show to kind of Iraqi art history – is undercut by the update either its media-theoretical determinism cluttered and forced juxtaposition of artworks or clash-of-civilizations historicism, evident in made by so-called “Western” and “non-Western” lame distributions of passive and active agency: artists and the modish refusal to chronologize or East/West, viewer/soldier, Iraqi/non-Iraqi. The even synthesize these contents spatially as an wars were not even enacted by a strictly event-driven transnational history. Neither the geographic “West.” The first Gulf War was largely physical arrangements nor accompanying texts funded by Kuwait, Saudi Arabia, and the United do much to examine Iraq’s deep and deeply Arab Emirates. (The 2003 invasion and scattered modes of artistic production. In this, subsequent regional wars were made possible by “Theater of Operations” reenacts that most Qatar’s Al Udeid Air Base, which remains the tedious trope of postcolonial critique: the West largest US base in the region.) Many of the artists as concept, the East as content. in the show have lived outside of Iraq, in “the đđđđđđđđđđIn the rare moments where the show West,” for almost the entirety of their formation promises to narrate an Iraqi art history worth and career, again blurring the curatorial considering, as in Shakir Hassan Al Said’s vulgarism of identity. extraordinary twinned paintings Fragmentation đđđđđđđđđđThe purpose of the show was, ostensibly, to No. 1 and Wall #1, both from 1991, the wall texts examine “the legacies of these conflicts do little to explain how they fit into the histories beginning with the Gulf War in 1991, featuring to which they allude. To wit: “Al Said’s works over 300 works by more than 80 artists based in provide a crucial point of reference for many of Iraq and its diasporas, as well as those the artists in Theater of Operations, who have responding to the war from the West.”15 As looked to him as a leading advocate for the laudable and relevant as this may be, the establishment of abstraction as a key strategy in exhibition overdetermines the legacy of the wars Iraqi art.” This is a surprisingly important (or was it “conflicts”?) by pinning it all on the sentence to find secreted away in the middle of a screen, as if to say it was the media, stupid! A small paragraph in a remote gallery on the selection from Jean Baudrillard’s “Gulf War” exhibition’s second floor, and odder still that writings is the exhibition catalogue’s first outside these paintings are installed next to Paul Chan’s text, appearing sandwiched between essays by

2003 video Baghdad in No Particular Order, a e - f l u x j o r n a # 1 0 7 — m c h 2 đ M s t H d y R i S k R e c o l n i z T h s P a the show’s two curators. The first Gulf War’s work whose appearance here might perhaps be televisual, more-than-real mediation was best explained by applying its title to the infamously figured as noneventfulness by curatorial method of “Theater of Operations.” Al Baudrillard, who also wrote that Western Said’s work, like the Iraqi art history of which it is audiences all live “in a uniform shameful a part, cannot and should not be understood indifference.”16 But the idea that millions of within the singular framework of war, even and citizens were simply slackjawed out of historical especially as staged in the unexamined frame of consciousness by CNN soothsayers institutions, like PS1 or the Iraq pavilion in oversimplifies a much more enduring passivity, if

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NYPD at the MoMA Divest protest at PS1, March 1, 2020. Photo: MoMA Divest.đ

12.21.20 / 21:31:57 EST not complicity, in ongoing massacres in Iraq that Mumford and Francis Alÿs, the former embedded remain on display. As nicely packaged a theory as with US troops (2003–11), the latter embedded the medium it aims to critique, the delirium of with Kurdish forces in a 2016 commission by the cable news did not exactly spirit away our ability aforementioned Tamara Chalabi’s Ruya to confront his guerre du Golfe, nor fast-forward Foundation.18 “It Is Still Ongoing” is the title of a its brutal body count. The stupor was not catalog essay by one of the exhibition’s curators, alchemically induced but somehow willed. prompting one to imagine that the

đđđđđđđđđđMoreover, the exhibition’s swerve to 08/12 contextualization of Iraq’s ongoing violence has telecommunicative mediation seems at cross- in fact been subversively understood. Instead, purposes with its desire to foreground work by here the curators rehabilitate Iraq’s pop-military “Iraqi” artists. This appears to suggest that the narration and similarly constructed artistic civilian on the ground in Iraq was inaccessible to theater. American audiences as an ethical subject at the đđđđđđđđđđFixed squarely inside this exhibition is the time, justifying the exhibition’s concern with assumption that Iraqis should be grateful for an artistic practice as a kind of belated American institution of note finally humanization. Artists in Iraq, particularly young acknowledging these wars, however superficial artists who came of age during the invasion, have this acknowledgment might be. Yet the violence never lacked the desire or ability to create art. of these wars lives irrevocably on inside the US But globally visible contemporary art, as anyone and its “coalition partners,” and addressing that in the field knows, often assumes a ladder of is hardly a benevolent act. Perhaps worst of all prestigious art-school attendance, production for a contemporary art institution, the attempt to support, mentorship, residencies, international generalize and pluralize the theme of a brutal travel, and social skill, usually in English. At and ongoing campaign of terror resulted in an Iraq’s two main art schools in Baghdad, which exhibition that precisely mirrors the crux of the are free of cost, middle- and working-class problem when it comes to US thinking on Iraq: it students hardly have access to resources is not rooted in any substantial understanding or reserved for elites. Instead of journalists attempt to address the complexity of Iraqi speculating what Iraqi art could have looked like experience. Iraqis inside Iraq are today revolting – or curators failing to engage with artists against the iterative “theaters of operations” outside their comfort class – it would be more that have taken their voices and their lives and useful to consider how actually-existing forms of all but canceled their future. They are – production could be supported and understood. remarkably, and historically – resisting with their Young Iraqi artists never stopped working, and own protests and artworks. And these protests are informed – formally and informally – by the have no inroads into “Theater of Operations” at extensive visual and political histories that PS1 because the exhibition – outside of stretch from the Sumerian era to Baghdad’s profiteering board members – does not current sprawling metropolis. Which “Iraq” is communicate, in any way, with Baghdad. ultimately being recuperated in this exhibition? đđđđđđđđđđThe cost of the exhibition’s incapacity to đđđđđđđđđđOne of these is that of big-budget American stage a historically situated claim to artistic films like Jarhead (2005) and Hurt Locker (2008). production around the Gulf Wars, and the These Hollywood dramas exhibit Iraqis as an inevitable contradictions of its institutional enemy staged prophylactically against linkages to American capital (and therefore sympathetic and identifiable American forces, American war), was perhaps most evident in its though this extends even to Werner Herzog’s alienated and alienating treatment of the only Lessons of Darkness (1992), which was screened two artists in the show who had any recent on both the opening and the closing days of the residence in Baghdad, Ali Eyal (b. 1994) and Ali PS1 show. It applies as well to Jeremy Deller’s It Yass (b. 1992). Yass, currently living as a refugee Is What It Is (2009) videos, also screened for the in Berlin, planned to use proxies to intentionally show; these videos are part of a larger artwork tear his work on display at the show – childhood that included an American PSYOPS officer, an sketches that comprised 1992; Now, (2016–17) – American curator, an Iraqi military translator on the final day of the exhibition. Conceived as a newly arrived to the US, and Deller himself in an e - f l u x j o r n a # 1 0 7 — m c h 2 đ M s t H d y R i S k R e c o l n i z T h s P a protest against the museum’s silence regarding all-male traveling crew of supposedly “non- Black’s position on its board, Yass’s action was biased” experts on Iraq and/or the art of unauthorized, unlike several other politically conversation.17 (The translational gimmick of the flavored – and officially sactioned – “Theater of Operations” catalog cover calls back interventions on the exhibition’s public program to a banner Deller produced, its theater of Arabic of “performances.”19 This kind of reactive script curtaining the untranslated English of its antagonism toward the institution has long been contents.) Along with the film screenings, the accepted as a part of the officially unofficial exhibition included works by artists Steve culture of artistic discourse, an artistic “right” of

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Ali Eyal,đNightmare, 2020. Black ink on pillowcase. Courtesy of the artist. Photo:đDiana Cantarey.đ

12.21.20 / 21:31:57 EST which MoMA has a long history and to which Yass in the exhibition – have called on the museum to alluded in his own explanation.20 But here PS1 “divest” itself of Leon Black and other unsavory felt threatened by this insubordination, funders in an open letter. summarily deinstalling his work prior to the last đđđđđđđđđđThis “toxic philanthropy” narrative rushes to day of the exhibition and making the rare fill the void left by an absence of conceptual decision to escalate the presence of private precision and clear thinking about “empathetic” security guards by calling in armed police to the exhibitions like “Theater of Operations.”23 In the gallery in which Yass had choreographed an 10/12 case of the 2019 Whitney Biennial, Warren B. activist group (MoMA Divest) to express his Kanders was a peripheral figure easily sacrificed artistic position.21 to preserve the broader unity of the philanthropic đđđđđđđđđđEyal, for his part, discovered that an image apparatus. Leon Black is impunity incarnate, his of his work from the show, Painting Size 80x60cm wealth and power so vast that even publicized (2018), was being used on social media by PS1 to connections with the late pedophile Jeffrey advertise free admission for military veterans on Epstein, let alone war crimes in Iraq, have not the American holiday Veteran’s Day. The work is moved him from MoMA’s board. This may be one comprised of pillowcases on which the artist has reason why that open letter sent to the MoMA drawn illustrations and writing in Arabic, board, administrators, and curatorial staff was recounting the dreams of the members of an ignored, save for refusals of the artists’ requests Iraqi family who have lost loved ones in the war. to register their objections in the galleries by These acts of alternative memorialization are updating their work. Yes, these artists had not part of an ongoing series. The museum, which been previously aware of the relationship does not own Eyal’s work and did not remunerate between Black and Blackwater; they learned of him (or any other artist) for participating in the this long-public fact at the time of the exhibition, had not sought permission to use his exhibition’s opening from the authors of this artwork in this way. Eyal later produced a new essay. This is not a recrimination but a broader pillowcase work on the “nightmare” of having his comment on the political limitations of art cater to “the ones responsible for the haphazard or belated artistic denunciations of destruction in my country.” In his youth he had “toxic philanthropy.” Not only is such experienced American soldiers as a violent philanthropy immanent to the social basis of art occupying force, abusing civilians in his under capitalism; curatorial malpractice here neighborhood and invading the home he shared and elsewhere exacerbates and disguises the with his mother south of Baghdad. In their problem, trolling the political consciousness of above-quoted preface, the curators toggle artists by pressing catchall liberal-ethical conceptually and grammatically between objects messaging into ever greater and more explicit (“artworks”) and subjects (“certain people,” i.e., contradiction with the facts of the museum’s Iraqis). These objects are subject-oriented: economic reality. according to the curators, the exhibition of the đđđđđđđđđđAs far as haphazard and overwhelming former is meant to produce “empathy” for the thematic exhibitions go, “Theater of Operations” latter. A paradox of autonomy, because those to was in some sense par for the course: An whom “empathy” is due (“certain people”) are, of unwieldy conceit. A doddering artist list whose course, also producing artworks for their magnitude and claims to exposure and discovery exhibition. belied its procurement from a small number of đđđđđđđđđđOn the exhibition’s opening day last prominent private collections. An eccentric November, Constellis posted a job listing for a catalog, to which one of the authors of this piece “Designated Defensive Marksman” – which is to contributed an essay. For all of the show’s say a sniper – for its Baghdad theater of problems, there remain works that should be operation.22 The same week that the call for a seen, conversations that ought to be had, sniper to join Leon Black’s company went out, failures that need to be documented. more than 250 Iraqi protesters were killed by Unfortunately, while the exhibition’s curators military-grade tear gas canisters and live fire rightly noted that the time for an examination of from an array of irregular “security forces” in Iraq is overdue, there seems to have been little

Iraq, including snipers. The countrywide youth- e - f l u x j o r n a # 1 0 7 — m c h 2 đ M s t H d y R i S k R e c o l n i z T h s P a research or thought given to the specific time led protests, past their half-year mark, have period addressed – a period which, properly galvanized the Iraqi public’s frustration with framed, could have allowed PS1 to show how crushing corruption, unemployment, and heavily advanced creative work can turn received ideas deteriorated living conditions – in short, the about history on their head. immeasurably traumatic and ongoing legacies of đđđđđđđđđđ× the Gulf Wars. Inevitably, some artists and organizations – MoMA Divest, the Veterans Art Movement, and thirty-seven artists participating

12.21.20 / 21:31:57 EST Mostafa Heddaya is a critic and PhD candidate in art đđđđđđ1 history at Princeton University, USA. Our title, besides being a riff on đđđđđđ5 the activist group-cum-slogan In private discussions with one “Decolonize This Place,” is of the authors of this article and Rijin Sahakian is a writer and former director of Sada, meant to make the negative various exhibition participants, a nonprofit project for young artists in Baghdad. image of cultural the curators of this show have “decolonization” productive, contended that PS1 and MoMA especially as raised by the are distinct entities. This is specific institutional and essentially untrue. The chairman historical frame of “Theater of of the board of the Museum of Operations: The Gulf Wars Modern Art has a permanent

11/12 1991–2011,” a recent exhibition appointment, ex officio, on the at MoMA PS1 in New York. PS1 board. Insofar as PS1 is, for Activist reaction aside, we historical and logistical reasons wonder how the immanent relating to the public land it violence of the institution might occupies, a separate legal entity, be thought here in terms of the MoMA is the “sole corporate intellectual duties of exhibition. member” of that separate legal We are prompted also by a entity. Here is how MoMA has recent work by Francisco Godoy described this relationship in its Vega, who has proposed a tax filings: “The Museum as sole “recolonial” understanding of Member of PS1 Contemporary exhibitions of Latin American art Art Center, Inc (DBA MoMA PS1). staged in the Iberian peninsula In 2000 MoMA PS1 and the during roughly the same period Museum entered into an covered by “Theater of affiliation to promote the study, Operations” – a similar historical knowledge, enjoyment and encounter between the avowedly appreciation of modern and redemptive cultural politics of contemporary art through a “decolonization” and the collaborative program of political economy of exhibitions, research, special colonialisms past and present. projects and other educational See Francisco Godoy Vega, La and curatorial activities. MoMA exposición como recolonización: PS1 retained its separate Exposiciones de arte corporate status and is a latinoamericano en el Estado support corporation of the español, 1989–2010 (The Museum with the Museum as its exhibition as recolonization: sole corporate member. The Exhibitions of Latin American art Museum has the right to appoint in the Spanish state, 1989–2010) all members of the MoMA PS1 (2018). board of Directors. MoMA PS1 and the Museum entered into a đđđđđđ2 management assistance and “Souvenirs of Gulf War Find Way services agreement whereby the to Museums,” New York Times, Museum provides management May 28, 1991 http://e- assistance and service to MoMA flux.com/journal. PS1 in certain areas, including accounting and payroll, đđđđđđ3 fundraising and development, Allan Sekula, “War Without coordination of MoMA PS1’s Bodies,” pamphlet and article in information technology, Artforum, November 1991. insurance and legal affairs.” Museum of Modern Art, Internal đđđđđđ4 Revenue Service Form 990, See Rijin Sahakian, “A Reply to Schedule I, Part IV, Page 2 Nato Thompson’s ‘The (2016). Insurgents, Part I,’” e-flux journal, no. 48 (October 2013) đđđđđđ6 https://www.e-flux.com/journ A. B. Krongrad served as the al/48/60042/a-reply-to-nato- executive director of the CIA thompson-s-the-insurgents-pa from 2001 to 2004; see his bio rt-i/. The historian Keith here Watenpaugh has argued that the https://www.apollo.com/stock “history of modern holders/corporate-governance . humanitarianism tells us that at He briefly served on the board of the center of humanitarian Blackwater, resigning after an reason is a project of incredible episode in which his unstrangering the object of brother, who was then the State humanitarianism.” What he Department inspector general means is that humanitarianism and therefore responsible for belongs not to the liberal investigating the company, schema of stranger-ethics, that perjured himself when asked opening up of “compassion – as under oath if his brother A. B. opposed to pity – to the generic was on its board. See Scott stranger,” but rather positions Shane, “Brothers, Bad Blood and its others as “knowable, similar, the Blackwater Tangle,” New and deserving.” See Keith York Times, November 17, 2007 Watenpaugh, Bread from Stones: https://www.nytimes.com/2007

e - f l u x j o r n a # 1 0 7 — m c h 2 đ M s t H d y R i S k R e c o l n i z T h s P a The Middle East and the Making /11/17/us/17brothers.html. of Modern Humanitarianism (University of California Press, đđđđđđ7 2015), 19. For a broader view on Mostafa Heddaya, “An the epistemic implication of the Outsourced Vision? The Trouble humanitarian frame in the with Iraq’s ‘Neocolonial’ Venice construction of “global” Pavilion,” ARTINFO, April 2, 2015 historical narratives, see Daniel https://web.archive.org/web/ Bertrand Monk and Andrew 20160330151727/http:/www.blo Herscher (and respondents) in “A uinartinfo.com/news/story/11 Discussion on the Global and the 26765/an-outsourced-vision-t Universal,” Grey Room 61 (Fall he-trouble-with-iraqs-neocol 2015): 66–127. onial. In a review of Tamara

12.21.20 / 21:31:57 EST Chalabi’s 2011 family memoir, a đđđđđđ14 YouTube New York Times reporter fondly Jason Farago and Tim Arango, https://www.youtube.com/watc recounts meeting her while “These Artists Refuse to Forget h?v=yXEMyzfGzcg. embedded with US Special the Wars in Iraq,” New York Forces: “The Chalabis occupied Times, November 15, 2019 đđđđđđ21 the one intact structure on the https://www.nytimes.com/2019 According to a spokesperson for bombed-out, postage-stamp- /11/14/arts/design/iraq-wars - the museum, “There are no size air defense installation, art-momaps1-review.html. circumstances under which while we camped in the twisted MoMA PS1 would accept the ruins and fly-infested dirt. đđđđđđ15 destruction of artworks or Tamara graciously shared with See MoMA’s description of the aggression towards our staff or me the transformer shed she exhibition on its website 12/12 visitors. When a few dozen had rigged into a shower.” Linda https://www.moma.org/calenda protesters arrived at MoMA PS1 Robinson, “By the Banks of the r/exhibitions/5084. on the last day of ‘Theater of Tigris,” New York Times, January Operations,’ they were offered 21, 2011 đđđđđđ16 public space within the museum https://www.nytimes.com/2011 Jean Baudrillard, The Gulf War to be heard. The protesters’ /01/23/books/review/Robinson - Did Not Take Place (Indiana threats to staff, property, and art t.html. Bookforum’s reviewer University Press, 1995), 24. The forced the temporary closure of was less sanguine: granting of keystone catalog real several exhibition galleries to https://www.bookforum.com/pr estate to that catastrophizing the public. We are proud of the int/1704/tamara-chalabi-s-me Cassandra of posthistory is unwavering respect and moir-sidesteps-her-father-s- meant as a keyword association professionalism our team role-in-the-iraq-invasion-66 74. with the Gulf War but is also a showed to all.” Quoted in Alex calling card for the Greenberger, ARTnews, March 2, đđđđđđ8 “posthistorical museum” itself, 2020 See Mike Stone, “Apollo Global which took shape during the very https://www.artnews.com/art- in Talks to Buy Constellis,” same period called into question news/news/ali-yass-moma-ps1- , August 5, 2016 by this exhibition. For protest-removal-1202679638/. https://www.reuters.com/arti Baudrillard, the Gulf War was a cle/us-constellis-m-a-apollo - case study in the violent đđđđđđ22 idUSKCN10G26P. mediations of “anorexic history” The listing, which has since that he, along with other disappeared, was posted on the đđđđđđ9 diagnosticians of posthistory on Constellis website Theater of Operations: The Gulf either side of the Atlantic, had https://constellis.jobs.net/ Wars 1991–2011, exhibition signaled in the penultimate search?missing_job=true. catalog, eds. Peter Eleey and decade of the twentieth century. Ruba Katrib (MoMA PS1, 2019), “Theater of Operations” đđđđđđ23 10. portends to dissolve this old The term “toxic philanthropy” posthistory, what with its past came into currency around the đđđđđđ10 flattening of Iraqi agency, only to public strafing of Whitney Theater of Operations, 27. propose a new one that sounds trustee Warren B. Kanders in just like it – a “contiguous connection with that museum’s đđđđđđ11 globalized ether that 2019 biennial, where, like We are influenced in this presupposes a borderless “Theater of Operations,” liberal- formulation not only by the relationality internally ethical messaging (and exhibition’s reanimation of Jean consistent with itself,” per the contemporaneous media Baudrillard, to whom we will curatorial jargonization. outrages) highlighted a briefly return below, but also by longstanding institutional Baudrillard’s emplotment in a đđđđđđ17 affiliation with carceral border broader intellectual history, one See Rijin Sahakian, “It Is What It policing, at least in the form of critically engaged by Lutz Is,” Jadaliyya, February 22, 2012 Kanders’s business interests. Niethammer’s Posthistoire: Has https://www.jadaliyya.com/De While the public humiliation of History Come to an End?, trans. tails/25300. plutocrats is never unproductive, Patrick Camiller (Verso 1994), “toxic philanthropy” is and Hal Foster’s The Return of đđđđđđ18 nevertheless an imprecise the Real: Art and Theory at the “Francis Alÿs on his Embedment sobriquet: it turns the identity of End of the Century (October with the Kurdish Army in Mosul,” capital into a reformable trait. Books, 1996), in which the term Artforum, February 9, 2017 David Joselit recently proposed “posthistorical museum” also https://www.artforum.com/int a parallel if ultimately different makes an early appearance. In erviews/francis-alys-on-his- diagnosis of the “double bind” an evocative footnote, Foster embedment-with-the-kurdish-a between artistic reaction and quotes the artist Ashley rmy-in-mosul-66451. institutional messaging. See Bickerton’s posthistorical Joselit, “Toxic Philanthropy,” identification with an end of đđđđđđ19 October, no. 170 (Fall 2019). For politics: “We are now in a post- Dia Azzawi darkened the gallery an example of the toxic political situation,” 257n34. room that held his work Mission philanthropy narrative used in of Destruction (2004–07) on the context of “Theater of đđđđđđ12 February 6, 2020, to mark the Operations,” see Zachary Small, Kate Fowle, “Foreword,” in anniversary of Colin Powell’s UN “Michael Rakowitz Wants to Theater of Operations, 7. speech claiming that Saddam Pause His Video Work at MoMA Hussein possessed weapons of PS1 as a Protest Against đđđđđđ13 mass destruction. On the same Museum’s ties to ‘Toxic As Enwezor wrote about “The day, and to mark the same event, Philanthropy,’” The Art Short Century”: “Perhaps there Wafaa Bilal held a performance, Newspaper, December 2, 2019 is a need to clarify a central October, that involved altering https://www.theartnewspaper. operating principle of this books that visitors had brought com/news/michael-rakowitz-sa exhibition, namely to examine into the museum, which were to ys-moma-ps1-curators-repeate

the link between independence be sent to the College of Fine e - f l u x j o r n a # 1 0 7 — m c h 2 đ M s t H d y R i S k R e c o l n i z T h s P a dly-denied-his-requests-to-p movements and liberation Arts in Baghdad. ause-video-work-in-gulf-war- struggles as methods for exhibition-as-a-protest-of-m achieving African political đđđđđđ20 oma-trustees. autonomy and cultural self- In his words: “By remaking this awareness.” Okwui Enwezor, “An piece yet again through its Introduction,” The Short Century: unmaking, I claim my right to Independence and Liberation resistance, in the museum, and Movements in Africa 1945–1994, in solidarity with Iraqis leading a exhibition catalog, eds. Okwui revolution against their Enwezor and Chinua Achebe destruction and exploitation (Prestel, 2001), 11. today.” See the video of Yass delivering his statement on

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