Spotlight on Michael Rakowitz: An Artist's Response to the Destruction of War

‘The dismal Situation waste and wilde, 
A Dungeon horrible, on all sides round
As one great Furnace flam'd, yet from those flames
No light, but rather darkness visible’

- John Milton, Paradise Lost

In April 2003, following the US-led invasion of Iraq, 15,000 artefacts were looted from the National Museum in Baghdad. Once filled with carefully-preserved treasures from the ancient world, the museum was left derelict. In a war where nearly half a million lives were lost, a nation’s cultural heritage was also under threat. In response to the looting, it became the mission of Iraqi-American artist Michael Rakowitz to bring these artefacts, which might otherwise have been erased from history, into the public eye. 

Today nearly half of the items looted from the National Museum of Iraq are still listed as either missing or stolen on the University of Chicago Oriental Institute’s database, ‘Lost Treasures from Iraq’. In 2007, Rakowitz began reconstructing the remaining 7000 lost objects using recycled materials such as Arabic newspapers and Middle Eastern food packaging. The Invisible Enemy Should Not Exist is an ongoing project which uses the brightly-coloured disposable materials of mass production to represent irreplaceable treasures. The use of papier-mâché highlights the fragility and vulnerability of the ancient sculptures. Rakowitz is emphatic that the aim of the project is not to replace the lost artefacts, but rather to reconstruct them in a way that commands our attention through an uncomfortable tension between ‘culturally visible’ commercial materials and the ‘ghosts’ of Iraq’s cultural heritage.

In recent years, Rakowitz has seen growing recognition for his ambitious and visionary projects. Currently based in Chicago and working as an associate professor at Northwestern University, he won the Nasher Prize for contemporary sculpture in September 2019. In 2018, he was commissioned by the City of London to create a statue for the fourth plinth in Trafalgar Square. Lamassu is part of a continuation of The Invisible Enemy Should Not Exist: a reconstruction of one of the many ancient Sumerian winged deities which were destroyed by Isis in 2015. Sitting outside the National Gallery, Rakowitz’s eye-catching statue is made from 10,500 Iraqi date syrup cans. It faces in the direction of its home of Nineveh, Iraq, where it had guarded the city’s gates for thousands of years – part of an ancient site which was reduced to dust in a matter of days. 

Art has long been a constructive force which can serve to counterbalance human destruction – from the ancient Japanese art of Kintsugi (repairing broken ceramics with gold) to the creative surge of Modernism following the First World War. Just like T.S. Eliot’s response to the devastation of war in his polyglottal poem The Waste Land, Rakowitz’s distinctive sculptures speak a universal language. Globally, there have been several recent exhibitions which explore how artists respond to war: earlier this year, the Smithsonian American Art Museum in Washington DC exhibited ‘Artists Respond: American Art and the Vietnam War.’ The Imperial War Museum is currently hosting a season of exhibitions, ‘Culture Under Attack’, which explores the threat of war on cultural heritage (on show until January 5th, 2020). Perhaps, with 2020 in motion, museums sense that the turn of the decade is an appropriate time for reflection. Michael Rakowitz’s video art, Return, is currently featured at MoMA PS1’s ‘Theater of Operations: The Gulf Wars 1991-2011’ (on show in New York until March 1st, 2020). However, the artist recently requested that the museum’s curators pause the video following allegations that MoMA has invested in ICE detention centres.

Rakowitz’s exhibitions express the hope that one day there will no longer be a need for his art – that the objects featured in The Invisible Enemy Should Not Exist will be recovered and repatriated. Although it may seem impossible that art alone could heal the wounds of war, Rakowitz does shine a light on an often overlooked consequence of modern warfare. Like Milton’s description of hell in his epic poem Paradise Lost, Rakowitz’s striking statues make ‘darkness visible’, forcing the viewer to confront the human capacity for destruction – yet also creation. Through tireless reconstruction, Rakowitz makes these lost treasures conspicuous in their absence, ensuring that their visibility will not fade any time soon.

• Lamassu will be on the fourth plinth in Trafalgar Square until March 2020

• Michael Rakowitz’s exhibition Imperfect Binding is at Castello di Rivoli Museum of Contemporary Art, Italy, until Jan 19th, 2020

• Culture Under Attack is at the Imperial War Museum, London, until Jan 5th 2020

https://www.moma.org/calendar/exhibitions/5084

https://www.iwm.org.uk/seasons/culture-under-attack

https://www.castellodirivoli.org/en/mostra/michael-rakowitz-imperfect-binding/

Olivia Lund

MADE IN BED Features Editor