The Iraqi Cultural Centre

Jeremy Deller’s ‘It Is What It Is: Conversations About Iraq’ (2009) has been exhibited in multiple locations across America in recent months, most recently at the Hammer Museum in Los Angeles (it tours to the MCA Chicago, 10 October-15 November). Exhibition visitors are given the opportunity to converse with a selection of guest speakers, almost all of whom are either intellectuals who grew up in Iraq or people with recent, first-hand experience of the situation there. The invited speakers are present in the exhibition space on a rotating programme, and are available to speak with anyone interested in entering into informal conversation with them.

‘Conversation’ may seem like an improbable strategy for an artist whose ambition is to incite discourse about a subject as fraught as that of contemporary Iraq. But the genteel nature of this approach is what Deller uses to turn the art of conversation into a model of something that is both the antithesis of war and an antidote to it.

Deller has also selected a series of images and artifacts that reveal unexpectedly common ground between the cultures of Iraq and America. A large hanging cloth, resembling a banner from the trade union movement, displays the exhibition’s title in English and Arabic. The divergent connotations of this mental collage bring to mind the troubled histories of organised labour, both in the Middle East and the West, and these connotations in turn suggest wider links between the suppression of dissent in both regions.

When the work was exhibited at the New Museum, New York, Deller also included two wall-drawn maps, which formed part of a proposal to twin a total of 36 cities across Iraq and the US. The hope, that peace and reconciliation will follow from something as modest as opening channels of communication between distant cities, is consistent with the exhibition’s conversational structure and the experimental impulse that underlies it. There is the feeling that mutual understanding is best achieved through the most innocuous of means — means such as dialogue, optimism, gestures of solidarity and art. Deller conveys a sense that what is best and most radical is what is most ordinary and least harmful.

An untitled photographic essay relates the history of the al-Mutanabbi book market in Baghdad. The photographs record how the market, which for centuries had been the centre and symbol of cultural life in Iraq, was destroyed by a car bomb in March 2007, with some 37 people murdered. Included in the exhibition is a single image of the market prior to the martyrdom operation that destroyed it.

At the New Museum, Deller hung this photograph close to the remains of an actual car from the 2007 bombing. The photograph, which may have been digitally manipulated, had an idyllic and dreamy quality that recalled Victorian Orientalist painting. Accompanying the photograph was a wall-text that read ‘Al-Mutanabbi Street, Baghdad, Prior to the U.S. invasion (n.d.)’. According to one Iraqi guest speaker, this somewhat misrepresents Iraq’s history, because the political and ethnic diversity for which the market was renowned was at its greatest, not prior but subsequent to the US invasion. During Saddam’s time, the market was under close watch of Ba’ath secret police — a fact that could not be gleaned from the tranquility of the scene portrayed in the photograph. It is a mark of the anti-dogma, pro-dissent sprit of the work, that the chronological inaccuracy of the wall-text in relation to the photograph was made apparent to me in conversation with one of the guest speakers.

The story of al-Mutanabbi market forms another thread in the network of correspondences, between the histories of America and Iraq. Conversations with several Iraqi guest speakers established that they had previously frequented the market themselves, conceiving it as a beacon of intellectual enquiry, freedom of expression, and political and religious tolerance; or at least aspiring to this condition. The speakers’ remembered presence in the market, and actual presence in the museum, drew an unexpected parallel in the mind between two such ostensibly unrelated institutions. The unexpectedness of the parallelism drew attention to the questions of whether and how an ancient Iraqi book market and an American museum of contemporary art can be repositories of the same enlightenment values.

The most spectacular part of the exhibition consists of the remains of the car, destroyed in the March 2007 suicide attack on al-Mutanabbi. The wreck is not only the most striking of the visual elements to have been included in the project, it is also the only one of those elements that Deller has included in every configuration of the project so far. The project has been shown in 15 cities to date, the car-wreck also having been exhibited in transit between each city, towed on a platform by an RV.

At least in the context of a museum devoted to contemporary art, the aesthetic appeal of the car’s twisted metal forges discomfiting links, between this relic from a terrorist atrocity, and a sub-genre of American art in which deadly, real-life events are transformed into gallery-ready product. It is difficult not to connect Deller’s bombed car to this tradition, and to perceive the wreck as alluding to art-works, ranging from Andy Warhol’s Saturday Disaster (1964) to Charles Ray’s Unpainted Sculpture (1997). Whether Deller’s car was the vehicle used by the car bomber, or perhaps belonged to a family murdered in the attack, was left unstated at the New Museum, but the deadliness of the bombing itself was not. For the sculptural properties of the memento mori to be fully operative, it seemed all the museum visitor needed to understand was that the car arrived at its final, pleasingly crumpled form through not just a violent-looking process, but a multiply fatal one.

‘It Is What It Is’ belongs to this sub-genre not by intent, but by theoretical oversight; Deller and the exhibition curators expressed unease, when it became apparent that viewers were responding to the car, not simply as a means to facilitate the conversations, but as an artwork all of its own. The curators had presumed that certain measures, such as not spotlighting the car, not giving it a title, not putting a ‘Do not touch’ sign next to it, would signal that the car was not art. But this presumption fails to take into account other factors, such as the extent to which context and intertextuality determine the perception of an object or image, including its status as art. (To confuse matters, this particular car had previously been exhibited as a work of art by Jonas Staal and Jack Segbars at Witte de With, Rotterdam.)

The curators have argued that none of the visual components of ‘It Is What It Is’ are ‘art’, only part of a secondary or paratextual apparatus that remains subordinate to the work’s verbal content. They maintained that the car has nothing to do with the morally problematic tradition to which Saturday Disaster and Unpainted Sculpture unapologetically belong. But even if the car can definitively be assigned a non-art status, it still remains unclear why this status absolves the artist of questions relating to sensationalism, responsibility to truth, and the ethics of turning the physical remains of tragedy into something akin to a conversation piece. When I raised these concerns with Deller, he responded that, ‘To call [the car] art takes away from what’s happened to it, and is to start to theorise and take an art journey away from its meaning and history.’

But isn’t one significant part of the car’s meaning and history determined by all that has happened to it since ‘what had happened to it’? How does calling the car ‘art’ take away from what had happened to it? How, by refusing to call the car ‘art’, are theoretical considerations in any way suppressed? Is this suppression necessarily a good thing? And, why are meaning and history not part of the journey that art and thinking about art can take us on and to?