anwonaeDrers DAM EBONY ‘oxTHY LenOwT2 299004 ETP RN BOUCHE, LDU ANNE HLER ORAL ECL PrELESTS CAROL DEH, ELEANOR HEAATAEY, WARN HEFERIAN, FROIAROKALINA, PEPE KARMEL, RAPHAEL RURINSTEN, INS SANDLER, {FEL STULAAN POET STOP, (URLESATUCKEY, GREGORY VOLK, Leatouan RCOERTL PINCUE ‘LL BERKSON, MARK VAN PROVEN PUREE / SARAH MEFADOEN rtin / FEATURES INTERNATIONAL @ REVIEW erica Museum the italian artist and context on hi ieverent sculptural instalation. 112 MAURIZIO CATTELAN: ALL IN ONE INTERVIEW BY MICH! Contemplating pect t Now Yor’ provocateur dec facts of te 118 CLYFFORD STILL, UNPACKED BY HILARIE M, SHEETS: 128 THE PHANTOM PHOTOGRAPHER BY ABIGAIL SOLOMON-GODEAU Wal Raad fragment subjective nature of history. 134 TRANSFORMER BY DANIEL BELASCO wit and a lush pelette, Dan il satire. 144 LOST & FOUND INE CR hd hore for the frst tine, in fscsiite, fantasia recounts @ Marcel Duchamp press IN THE STUDIO: MATTHEW BRANNON WITH STEEL STILMAN The printmaker an ton artiet desenbes hie evolution from backwoods youth to cagey Imanipuistor of artistic styles and al DEPARTMENTS CONTRIBUTORS EDITOR'S LETTER MIXED MEDIA Foter Norion cache for sate; a Norton and John Bue; idges opens; Gary Nader 18S aN auction house in Miami ‘chute brings a bright painterly i 3s the boundaries ofthe photographic medium to reveal the bert Rauschenberg's ca, 1960 textual ference held in a Greyhound bus station,aa«RRR aa eae a ea THE PHANTOM PHOTOGRAPHER Reflecting on Lebanon's seemingly endless conflicts, Walid Raad challenges “truth” on every level, beginning with the documentary image. BY ABIGAIL SOLOMON-GODEAU WHAT DO SUSAN MEISELAS, Lee Friedlander, Sophie Calle, Sobastide Salgado and Walid Raad have in common? Vary little, but all uso photography (in one form ar ancther) and all have been recipients of Sweden's prestigious Has solblad Prize for iftime achievement in the medium. With ‘cash grant of $150,000 and an accompanying exhibition, the award (made yearly by the Hasselblad Foundation in Gothenburg) Is perhaps the world’s premier prize devoted to the medium. This past March, it was bestowed! an the Lebanese-American artist Walid Raad {b. 1967), previously a recipient of the $47,000 Deutsche Bérse Photography Prize (2007) and the $20,000 Camera Austria Avvard (2008), Ina certain eenee, those honors simply bolster an already eminent position in the international art world, evidenced by Rad's many exhibitions, including "Walid Raed: Miraculous Beginnings," a traveling 20-year retrospective that origi- nated last fal at the Whitechapel Gallery, London. Until he Initiated an ongoing project focused on contemporary art ‘and its institutions in the Arato-speaking world, most of his, production was rooted, however obliquely in the history of Lebanon's wars since 1975, a complicated series of largely Internecine conflicts that prompted his move to the U.S. In 1982, But these awards conferred by foundations devoted to photography are especially significant for a number ot reasons, On the most obvious level, Raad is not a photog repher, if that term suggests an artist's primary medium—a caveat that might apply to several other recent Hasselblad prize winners (e.g., Calle). Nonetheless, photography jour nals such a8 Aperture, Afterimage and Camera Austria have ail featured essays on Raad’s work, even though the photographie image is only one element within his multipart ensambles, which routinely employ texts, vid- etal rom Walid Baad» Gnileatinaly, we do not ig poles fo Bury ourselves: (eat. Faitou Phatograahs 962-986, 24 digtal prints, ines ea Al photos tis aticlo courtesy Paula Cooper fry, New York 208, PowerPoint presentations, live lectures with planted uesticners, and other diverse components Moreover, to the extent that the photographic image does figure within Raad’s work, It Is used against the grain ofits traditional documentary or indexical func tions, and seamlessly integrates analog and digital forms. Which is not to say that such photographs necessarily fall Into the categery of constructad or staged Imagery, 50 ‘widespread In contemporary art. As often as not, espe- cially in the various series Rad exhibited under the aegls of the fictive Ailas Group (he now shows his work, new and old, under his own name), photographs are present fed as though gleaned from varnacular or documentary sources—and sometimes, In fact, thay aro. This “as though," however, begs the quastion of authen- ticity as well as authorship. The uncertainty of the answer is precisely the artist's uncierlying theme. Rea! or simulated, both kinds of imagery are enigmatic, albeit in different ways, and it is the enigmatic character of all photographs that informs Rad's particular uses af the medium. Consider, for exainple, the photographs of the historian Dr, Fad! Fakhouri, who features in a number of works under the umbrella ttle of "Missing Lebanese Wars" (1886-2008). Inaccompanying captions and glosses, Fakhour Is dentiiod by his profession, hobbies and class, but his rligious sect is unspecified. In one subcategory, “The Fakhouri Flas” (1996), he appears in a series of black-and-white touristic snapshots, Identiied as made during his revels to Paris an Romie in 59, But Fekhouti, who Raad states ls a fictonel char- Cannot be the subject we see, He must be jaferred, in effect, frorn the figure who impersonates him. Furthermore, the man in question has been photographed by an invisible usually from a distance, sometimes closer up, straight photos, which they certalnly look to be, fone wonders whe look the snapshots of the Or, Fakhourl character arid in what circumstances—espacially since they include some close-up shots taken in his hotel bedroom or as he dines alone in a restaurant, Might they be simulated pictures, lke those that feature in Zoe Leonard and Chery! Dunye's project "The Fe Richards Photo Achive” (1893-06), in which entirely convineing “vintago" black-and.wwhite pictures of an invented subject have been canny fabvicated by the art- ists? Or were Raad's photographs actualy excavated fram the remnants of a studio archiva or someone's personal slur, and the suibject proviced with a new identity ex post facto?OF NOTE HERE IS RAAD'S membership on the board of the nonprofit Beirut-based Arab Image Foundation, a pho- tographic archive from whose holdings Raad curated (with, Lebanese artist Akram Zaatar\) the internationally touring 2002-05 exhioition *Mapping/Sitting: On Portraiture ang Photography." Presumably, photographs conserved by the foundation are a source for certain Raed ‘mages. How: ever, the artists blurring of discuralve boundaries (0.04. fact vs. fiction), along with the ambiguity of his methods (eq., archive sourcing? Photoshop?}, constantly throws. historical accuracy into question. in bestowing its award, the Hasselblad jury, lie that of the Deutsche Bérse, has thus acknowledged, with litle fuss, the effective demise of medium specificity in the artistic use of photography. ‘These awards ignore—or dismiss—ontolagical distinc tions between analog and digital representation, photo graphic “truth* and fiction. (Conventionally, the analog image, although by no means immune to menipulation, is associated with empirical reailty; the digitel image has no euch warranty.) By ignoring such distinctions, the awards suggest that the dismay expressed by so many photog: raphy eritics at the advant of digital photography—with Above, Hostage: The Bachar Tapas (Engish version), 2000, single channel video, approx. 16 minutes. fight, BEY@2_Cly si (rom the series “Untitled (1982-2007), 1982-2007, color nk print, 4716 by rivsinches, Opposite, United_Davice 1 "fa90 or 2008, Inket pri 68 by 84 inches, its highly problematic reletionship to evidentiary truth—is now largely beside the point. Debates about the indexical or teatimonial capacities of the camera have beon ovortakon (or subsumed) by more complex considerations of ideology, instrumentality, reception and meaning production, Accord ingly, Raad’s artworks have been categorized by critics as "doculictionat" or “parafictional’—hybrid monikers that seam to signal the eclipse of “factographic” or "archival" practices based on the camera's capacity to witness." No fess important is the (also implicit) acceptance of diverse means of representation within a given work, includ: ing installation, multipart assemblages, textual documenta: tion, ete, which often involve viewers in the production of meaning, even when not, strictly speaking, employing interac- tive mechanisms, We are thus very fer from the position of ‘once-powerful institutional arbiters of photography (such as the photography denartment of New York's MoMA) that in the 1980s dismissed art by Martha Rosier, Cindy Sherman or Barbera Kruger as ‘not photography” and therefore irrelevant to the museum's consecration of that medium as art. Phatog- raphy—analog, digital, found or appropriated—Is now such a ubiquitous element in contemporary art production as to moot any notion of definitional purity From his much-ramarked contribution to Documenta Xl in 2002, under the Atlas Group (launched in 1989), to the recent work exploring the art networks and institutions springing up in the Arab world ("Scratching on Things I Gould Disavow: A History of Art inthe Arab World”), Raad’s projects are cre: ated through the orchestration of a shadow id of archives and images, documents and testimonies, historical and contempora fictions that may Intersect with one another. Llust as the Atlas Group was effectively Rad himself, so toa are the works’ protagonists his inventions: Dr. Fakhourl and his wife, Zainab; Operator 17, a member of a surveil tance unit charged with recording the activ- ity on Beitut's Corniche; and the hostage Suheil Bachar, who in the video Hosiage: The Bachar Tapes (2000) recounts his cap- tivity by a millia that held American and Brit- ish hostages, with whom he claims he was briefly quartered.RAAD'S ELABORATE SIMULATIONS EVOKE, WARS BUT REFUSE TO EDUCATE VIEWERS ABOUT THEM, RAISING QUESTIONS OF HOW HISTORY IS CONSTRUCTED. Within these elaborate simulations, which evake the wars In Lebanon (or the Israel invasions of 1882, 2002 and 2006), bul by no means educate viewers about them, each pro ect raises questions of how history, wiinessing, memory ‘and sociopoltical identifcation—even referenco—are con- structed. Rlaad’s use of photography, simulated or “ral,” provokes what could be termed “hermeneutic doubt” as to the accuracy, inclusiveness or adequacy of what passes for tha historical zecord. Perhaps because of the exceptionally violent histories of the 20th and Ztst centuries, this skeptical ‘approach has become a major tendency in contemporary art Raad's insistence on an idiosyroratic, fragmentary, allur sive, elliptical and ullimately subjective reading of people and events effectively blocks ary attempt to establish cul: Pabilty for Lebanon's wars and their devastating human cost. In his writing and lectures, the artist withholds his ‘own ethnic and religious origins, eluding the very Identity Issues thal have fueled Lebanon's conflicts. He also refuses to affirm any poltical position, a dodge consistent with his ‘suspension of such historical catagories as "cause" {espe- cially casus ball). The artist thus strassas the collactive as ‘opposed fo individual character of historical trauma (what Raad’s sometime collaborator Jalal Toufic calls “surpass Ing disaster") that irrevocably alters subjectivity, perceation, collective memory and, Inevitably, cultural production ® Raad’s "The Truth Will Be Known When the Last Witness |s Dead,” which exists, as doas most of his work, in several formats, refers to this rupture in the fabric of “objective” his- torical accounting, Its tte is equivocal, for the work wilfully Contracts ts own proposition thet historical truth is recov- erable—eventvally, aprés coup. Rather, its point is that the act of witness is inescapably subjective, partial and emation- ally reught. Reasonable objectvity—it possible at al—may require temporal distance, but that in self iso quaranten. (The stil contasted history of Lebanon's ‘wars provides ample evidence of this.) ‘As Raa remarked in an interview, "We The Atlas Group] have elvays urged our audience to treat our documents as ‘hys- {erical documents" inthe sense that they are not based on any one pereon's acta memories but on ‘Tantasias eracted from the material of collective memorlas.™ BUT WHAT MEANING CAN an art- work produce in the absence of viewer memory, experience, even knowledge of the happenings in question? (How many viewers of Hostage: The Bachar Tapes really understand the 1982-92 hostage crisis and its relation to the Iran-Contra, scandal? Or, for thal matter, anything about the history of Lebanon's wars in the past 50 years?) This is perhaps the core issue for any artist who rejects idacticlsm in favor of Interragative or allusiva modes of expression. ‘As an academic, currently teach- ing at the Cooper Union in Now York, Raad is harcly ikely to overestimate his audience's knowledge, especially regarding "peripheral" regions of the world. The "work® of the work, espe- cially those projects dealing with Lebanon's wars, is to remind us that the past invariably exceeds the matorial evidence It produces, and that material evidence itself Is, insufficient to yield full historical understanding, ‘This is particularly evident in the Fakhour| files section of "Missing Lebanese Wars.” Its text describes a group of Leb- anase historians, of different sects and liberal political alia. tions, all gamblers, Including Dr. Fakhour, who meet regular ly at the Sunday horse races during the 1990s. They bet not on a particular horse but on the distance of a given horse from the finish ine, as registered by the decisive photo finish (an Urimage when it comes to evidentiary function) that will appear in the next day's newspaper, The album pages are inscribed with the amounts of the wager®, the distances pro posed by the gamblers and the winning bet, translated from Ihe penelled Arabie netations and giossed by Fakhour's wife, who provides brief descriptions of the victorious gambler. Serlaly organized, these pages allude to Conceptualism, but the photo ‘nish images might evoke Eadwoard Muybridga's famous sequence of a galloping horse, a visual experiment likewise staged to resolve a wager (not about speed but about the action of a horse's feet in motion), The stunning triviality of this elaborate documentation, its slision of a disturbing context—Lebanon’s wars, slages, car bombings and kidnappings; the destruction of large parts of Beirul—is, of course, the point. A similar logic pervades ‘notebook $7 of the Fakhoutl files, No, fines 's Neither Here nor There, which consists of photographs of bust ress signs for doctors, pharmacias, dentists and £0 forth SSE EEE Eee Rane SSCLRAAD OFTEN EMPLOYS DIVERSE MEANS, INCLUDING INSTALLATION AND TEXTUAL DOCUMENTATION, WHICH INVOLVE VIEWERS IN THE PRODUCTION OF MEANING. in French or Arabic. The gulf separating the disaster that is Lebanon's recent history from these iaconic placards is the measure of the inadequacy of al visual documentation, As with the apparently authentic black-and-white photos of the carbonized engines produced by car bomb explosions, inthe series “Already Been in a Lake of Fire” (1993-2002), the distanca between the images and the event is utterly nbridgeable. This is, needless to say, no less true of jour: nalistic news pictures displaying, more or less spectacu- larly, the actual carnage, despite their higher shock value. But Raad’s commitment to the Arab Image Foundation attests that, respective of his skeptical anproach to his- torical documantation, he believes photographic images do tell us sorething—nalwithstanding their lacunae, thelr instrumental applications, their malleabilty, evan their deception, Yet what thay tellis not reducible to thelr nomi ral contents, for they are not windows on the real, but closar to runes, to shards, to phantom trac we make constructions, conjectures, imperfect and partial propositions. We may have lost our Innocence about the ‘camera's capacity to yield an ontological truth, but that does nat mean that photas always lie, Their mare cr lass elusive {and allusive} "something," sparking the circuit between past and present, Is what makes photography 30 much greater than ils parts, and makes Raad’s recent photographic awards so appropriate. c 1 Soe Carve Lambert-Beatty “Moke-Belove: and Pleusibllty” October 129, Summer 2008, 9 fs, m Ihe sama issu, Vered Malmon, “The Tha jen: On Modal of Caliealty m Contemporary Artistic ‘acti¢as," pp. 85-112, Hannah Fakiman, "Excavating Images © Jer* Tre Text, Vol 23, 90.2, May Hainach Foteman and Aer nis ort a Canversation Al 2186, no. 2, Ah 2 Tins work was éxhbiled at Paula Coo} 95 I was the frat pert of @ cont ‘Part {Volume 1_Chapter | (Berut. 190 20 Included a miniatvized wetalion of Raad's pre aia Marco D aite-en-vaice. 8 72 Witharawal of Tradition Past @ Surpassing araliction ‘31-84d Paad ABIGAIL SOLOMON-GODEAU Is protoscor emer i at the Unversity of Galfornia, Santa Barber aaa