Loading ...Lebanese artist Walid Raad layers fantastic truths at MoMA
Scratching on things I could disavow, the centrepiece of a mesmerising art exhibition by the Lebanese artist Walid Raad at the Museum of Modern Art (MoMA) in New York, begins unappealingly enough as a lecture – a sort of technologically abetted address or generic PowerPoint presentation suffered by legions of bored souls in conference rooms across the globe.
In front of a small audience assembled several times a week for the occasion, the artist stands in the flesh before a wall blinking with data and names of things arranged into a giant flowchart. The sprawling story he tells incorporates many sundry elements: people, places, percentages, equations, all linked up and interconnected.
Dressed in jeans, T-shirt and a baseball cap, Raad plays the role of a conceptual artist concerned with matters of art, the market, museums, a high-tech military cabal and cultural institutions taking up new positions in the Middle East. He talks about complicated money trails and moral quandaries shared among artists in international scenes in Los Angeles, London, Beijing, Mumbai and Mexico City.
At one point he takes leave of the flow chart and leads his audience around the exhibition space, as their collective confusion grows in proportion to his increasingly detailed explanations and rationales.
His historical facts are verifiable and true, Raad promises, before changing direction toward the allure of “other kinds of facts”.
Talk turns to the impossible: artists have sent him telepathic signals from the future about nefarious colours of paint, Raad says, and then there was the time when a gallerist in Lebanon ruined all his work by shrinking it, mysteriously, to 1/100 of its original size.
The audience looks on, perplexed, as Raad says he remembers thinking at the time: “I might be in the middle of a psychotic episode.”
Raad’s artwork, on show over two floors at MoMA in the artist’s first major survey in the United States, often plays with the condition that attends processing reams of information that simultaneously do and do not make sense.
Focusing on some of the artist’s long-term projects, the exhibition brings together more than 200 works rooted in photography, video and sculpture – as well as the performance tour that channels Raad’s extraordinary narrative ambitions.
At the centre of them all is the surreality of what is most commonly believed and disbelieved, especially as related through art with origins in an Arab world defined by conflict and misperception.
Raad was born in Lebanon but emigrated to the US as a teenager in 1982 to flee the civil war. He wanted to be a photographer initially and came upon the many vagaries of documentary art early on: what kind of truth can an unthinking medium impart? What kind of truth can even exist when seemingly all matters of truth are in dispute – in Lebanon and everywhere else?
In her essay in the exhibition catalogue, curator Eva Respini, who worked with the artist in assembling the MoMA show, writes: “Raad’s personal experience of the last decade of the war was as an émigré, dealing in partial information, rumour, mediated news reports, and conversations with family members over crackling phone lines.”
His own truth of it was abstracted, and the truth of the typical exhibition-goer in New York can be assumed to be more abstracted still.
Part of the exhibition catalogue is devoted to a collage-type essay that Raad assembled with quotations from other artists and writers, relating to the inescapability of conflict in contemporary Arab art. Some of them signal the preposterousness of that inescapability (see an interview question asking, in all earnestness and naive simplicity, “What impact did the wars in Lebanon have on you and your work?”). Other citations are pithy and epigrammatic (“The political is not the opposite of the stupid”).
Source: www.thenational.ae