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Recolonize This Place

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Recolonize This Place “The war in the Persian Gulf ended just three months ago,” the New York Times alerted its readers in May 1991, “but some museums are already collecting artifacts from the conflict.”1 Spooky spolia from America’s “first” Iraq 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 ÊÊÊÊÊÊÊÊÊÊIn 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 n regret. This reversal is characteristic of the a i k empathetic errand of “unstrangering” a h a foundational to modern humanitarianism and S n American counterinsurgency alike, for it drives i j i R the motor of military domination by juicing it d 4 n culturally. Though it verges on the paranoid, this a a y is one way a visitor to “Theater of Operations: a d The Gulf Wars 1991–2011” might have d e H understood how the curators at MoMA PS1 – the a f Museum of Modern Art’s affiliate in Queens, New a t s York, where the exhibition was on display from o M Ê November 2019 to early March 2020 – came to 0 2 deck their galleries with so many “hearts and 0 2 minds”: artistic victims, witnesses, and far-flung h c r observers of endless (Iraq) war. a m ÊÊÊÊÊÊÊÊÊÊWe empathize with our imagined visitor’s e — c paranoia. While the exhibition tinged its titular a 7 l 0 P 1 historical event with a generic humanist regret s # i l h for its toll, it all took place, after all, in an a T n e r z institution at whose organizational summit sits a u i o n j o certain Leon Black – billionaire investor, Iraq war l x o u l c f profiteer, and chairman of the MoMA board. e - e R (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 Apollo Global Management (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 12.21.20 / 21:31:57 EST 02/12 Installation view of Allan Sekula, War Without Bodies,Ê1991/1996.ÊOn view in the exhibition “Theater of Operations: The Gulf Wars 1991–2011” at MoMA PS1, New York, 2020. Photo: Matthew Septimus. 12.21.20 / 21:31:57 EST 03/12 Michel Auder,ÊGulf War TV War (still),Ê1991.Ê(Edited 2017). Hi8 video and mini-DV transferred to digital video,Ê102 min. Courtesy the artist and Martos Gallery, New York. 12.21.20 / 21:31:57 EST 04/12 Left: Cover of the catalog for “Theater of Operations”Ê(MoMA PS1, 2019). Right:ÊJeremy Deller,ÊIt Is What It Is: Conversations About Iraq, 2008, exhibition view at New Museum, New York. 12.21.20 / 21:31:57 EST Blackwater. 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 Erik Prince 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 ÊÊÊÊÊÊÊÊÊÊ“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 ÊÊÊÊÊÊÊÊÊÊCount 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 n examples of similar exhibitions that a i Management; seventeen Iraqi civilians murdered k “foregrounded this institution’s commitment to a h in the infamous Nisour Square massacre of 2007, a such historical presentations”: “EXPO 1” (2013); S perpetrated by mercenaries employed by n “Stalin’s Choice: Soviet Socialist Realism i j i R Blackwater – a company that is now part of 1932–1956” (1993); and “The Short Century: 8 d Constellis (and that was twice renamed after n Independence and Liberation Movements in a a said murders “tarnished its brand”); one million y Africa, 1945–1994” (2002). Fowle was right to a overall civilian deaths (too many to rebrand). d group them, since they all represent different d e ÊÊÊÊÊÊÊÊÊÊFirst the inventory, then the self- H reactions to the historical subjects of the a accounting. Near the beginning of their catalog, f posthistorical museum: the first exhibition by a t the exhibition’s cocurators, Eleey and Katrib, s moving toward the futural mode of “speculation” o M explain: “The artworks brought together here Ê (the house style of posthistorical historicism); 0 convey experiences and positions that counter 2 the second through rote semi-triumphalist 0 2 the essentializing tendencies of mainstream nostalgia toward the aesthetically and politically h c narratives, particularly those that seek to define r defeated; and the last, organized by the late a m certain people as the ‘enemy’ and attempt to Okwui Enwezor (it traveled to PS1), through a e — c place them beyond the reach of our empathy.”9 valiant postcolonial resuscitation of the task of a 7 l 0 P 13 Soon this revisionist empathy cracks up: Eleey, in 1 critical periodization. s # i l his longer essay later in the catalog, self- h ÊÊÊÊÊÊÊÊÊÊInstead of critical periodization, “Theater of a T n e r critically hedges that framing Iraqi artistic z Operations” punts the Gulf Wars in favor of a grab u i o n j production “through the reductive lenses of o bag of poorly articulated “stories” resolving to an l x o u l c violence and victimhood” might be f underlying curatorial ethos of confused regret, a e - counterproductive. Delirious acrobatics follow: e R 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 ÊÊÊÊÊÊÊÊÊÊHow to address an exhibition that professes York Times to cover the exhibition, arts writer to “counter É 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 Baghdad bureau chief.14 The abetted that war.
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