In response to another post on Jeremy Deller here Maryam Rashidi (PhD, Printmedia) writes: “I was surprised by how little credit or recognition Jeremy Deller or the organising institutions have given to the precedents for this work. There are two other bodies of work on which Deller appears to have drawn: Firstly Al-Mutanabbi Starts Here, 2007 and 2008, a project organised by a group of artisans, mainly booksellers, printers, and readers, and exhibited mainly in libraries across America. See this site; and secondly War on Error where this bomb-wrecked car was originally exhibited as a component of an installation in the Leidseplein, 2007 in Amsterdam, a political activism project organised by Partizan Publik, a group of “young enthusiasts” all of who “share a proud Partizan past.” For further information about this event go to the Partizan Publik site, or watch some of this event on Youtube. Deller footnotes the prior events in the following way:
In May of 2007, after four months of negotiation, Dutch curator Robert Klüijver succeeded in shipping this and another bombed vehicle from Al-Mutanabbi to the Netherlands for an event entitled “War on Error,” which included a daylong discussion and performances, as well as the exhibition of the vehicles on Leidse Plein Square in Amsterdam. One or both of the cars have subsequently been exhibited in Rotterdam, Enschede, Utrecht, the Hague, and Houston, Texas. Concept: Partizan Public; Logistics and organization: Robert Klüijver for the “War on Error Event.” Project support: IKV Pax Christi, Hivos and the Green Party. Donated to the New Museum by Robert Klüijverre
The contrast between these three events is instructive. My point here is that the museological context which confirms the work in question as a “Jeremy Deller”, with its debatable title “It is what it is”, is absent from both the other events. Beginning with the Museum’s supporting text, one finds the Deller “project” is described as “one in a long line of projects on precisely this subject that Jeremy Deller has dreamed up over the past decade”. However the Museum context is not just a neutral space in which such “projects”may occur: the publicity points out the New Museum and Creative Time have commissioned this work as part of the Three M Project: “The Three M Project was conceived and developed by the New Museum together with the Museum of Contemporary Art, Chicago, and the Hammer Museum in Los Angeles, to jointly commission, exhibit, and acquire important works of contemporary art by artists whose work has not yet received significant recognition.”
Despite such acknowledgement, and the different nature of the precedents, the Museums have obviously considered this work an “important work of contemporary art” which fits in their shared agenda, as a “collaborative vision and entrepreneurial spirit, and the belief that ambitious projects on a national scale can be produced through efficiency, knowledge, and resource sharing.” Astonishingly, Jeremy Deller is being described as an artist “whose work has not yet received significant recognition,” and in this sense such promotion serves to enhance the “Jeremy Deller” status of this “work” – previously discussed on other sites… Hence Deller’s claim that it is about “invoking dialogue” for the sake of “filling gaps in our knowledge” about Iraq or the war is seen by some as of secondary importance to the enhancement of his career.
Further, [Rashidi continues] I’m not convinced that all of the visual elements of the whole installation – the maps, the photographs, the car, the furniture – are necessary to invoke the dialogue that Deller intends – indeed others have commented on the semiotic confusion that results from the entirety of the installation. Nonetheless what interests me about Deller’s work is that it consists mainly of a process in which the visual and the dialogical are very closely interconnected: the collaborative, dialogical process results from the visual experience of the ‘objective’ fragments of the work. The intrigue, the ‘entrapping’ element of this whole work (to use Alfred Gell’s analogy for art objects in Vogel’s Net: Traps as Artworks and Artworks as Traps and elsewhere), is the bomb-wrecked car, which Deller (one hopes ironically) calls a “conversation piece.”
Without further discussing this point here, and both accepting and rejecting some critics’ criticisms of this car as not ‘even’ having the qualities of a post-Duchampian ready-made or found object, consider for example, Ken Johnson, in his New York Times review, who argues “to call it a found-object sculpture would be to trivialize it” . One might ask: If the displayed car (see the NYT photo by Benoit Pailley) had been a sculpture ‘made’ to look like a bomb-wrecked car, instead of actually being a bombed car, in my opinion, the work would have been no different to an ordinary (or much formally or otherwise repeated) painting that one would hang in a gallery for the audience to maybe throw a glance at once or twice and then walk past.
[editorial comment: Is this not the dimension that limits the effectiveness of such examples of dialogical art? Does not its presentation as an art object (named, claimed, authored, owned, and re-contextualised as contemporary art) insulate it from the real and tragic politics of its "creation"? And is this not a potential limitation on all "dialogical art" when it is trapped in the white cube of the museum - and, incidentally, of which the New Museum is a paradigmatic example? Maryam Rashidi's comments are drawn from a paper, Dialogue ‘Matters’: experiments in dialogical art practice, presented on March 16, 2009 at the ANU Research School of Humanities.]
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I want to thank Maryam Rashid for her recent post on the Jeremy Deller exhibit. I was contacted early on by an assistant of Mr. Deller who was looking for information on al-Mutanabbi Street for this very exhibit. I shared what I had and also asked if Mr. Deller might incorporate some aspects of the work that the Mutanabbi Street Coalition has been doing. He declined, saying that his focus (on Mutanabbi Street) had shifted somewhat. I wrote to the Hammer Museum (I am in San Francisco) asking if they might consider showing some of the broadsides that have been printed as a response to the attack on Mutanabbi Street, or include a reading from an upcoming anthology ‘Mutanabbi Street Starts Here’, or show some of the photographs by a small group of Iraqi women created from a project called ‘Open Shutters Iraq’, or, perhaps show two documentaries, one by a Baghdad film student Emad Ali on the Shabandar Cafe (which was gutted in the attack) and one from the Iraqi documentary filmmaker Maysoon Pachachi, one of the contributing editors to the anthology. After several months they said they had decided not to have any ‘supplemental’ programs. They did offer me an ‘expert’ chair in the Deller show, which I told them would not work for me if I could not show all the responses (Broadsides, Photographs, Documentary) and the voices of Iraqi wrtiers who so treasured Mutanabbi Street. I, too, felt the danger of having the bombed out car slip into “art object” leaving behind the 30 killed and 100 wounded on Mutanabbi Street. I’d like Maryam Rashid to contact me, Beau Beausoleil at overlandbooks@earthlink.net and perhaps this University can join our broadside project (which is entering our third call for letterpress work) or to show the photographs from the Open Shutters Iraq Project.
A dialogue needs to begin, it will be long and sustained, and I think that Art in its many shapes and forms can contribute to it. I do think that Jeremy Deller has begun something here, but the danger is in making something that is about ‘us’, I think as Artists and Writers we need to make and say someting but also try to take ourselves ‘out of the way’ so that the work itself prompts visceral questions from the viewer/reader. I think there needs to be an overload of context since this tragedy endured by so many Iraqis on a daily basis has remained at the far edge of our consciousness here in America. I could go on (for some time) about this but I welcome these comments on what exactly a Museum can do to help us understand ‘the present’ as well as the Impressionists.
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