Photograph: Gautier DeBlondeĪ second, smaller consignment of 10 boxes did finally make it through, after a month in quarantine. ‘The date was to Iraq what the cigar was to Cuba’ … a close-up of the sculpture’s date syrup can cladding. His first tonne of fruit was despatched overland, only to be held up at the sweltering Jordan border for so long that they cooked and had to be destroyed. Return involved setting up a store in Brooklyn, like the one his grandfather used to run, but dedicated to the importation of dates. In the ongoing Enemy Kitchen, he serves meals based on his mother’s family recipes to school students, and from a food truck staffed by Iraqi refugees as chief chefs with American Iraq War veterans as sous chefs and servers. I describe the work I’m involved in as a process where problem-solving is also troublemaking.”įood has always played an important part in it. Rakowitz insists he is not interested in controversy or spectacle but concedes that his work asks difficult questions. “He was meeting with Nouri al-Maliki, so it was a ceremonial handover – a photo op … these 18 plates, which were a symbol of Saddam, going back on the plane of the Iraqi prime minister.” The plates were confiscated and returned to Iraq in a diplomatic deal that he says was brokered by Barack Obama. The project was halted after two months when the restaurant received a cease-and-desist letter from the US Department of State. Saddam Hussein's plates were confiscated and returned to Iraq in a deal that he says was brokered by Barack Obama The plates were to feature in one of his more mischievous works, Spoils (2011), in which he persuaded a Manhattan restaurant to use them to serve an Iraqi dish of venison and date syrup. He became addicted to eBay (“It’s like a search engine for me”), on one occasion buying 18 of Saddam Hussein’s dinner plates from a US veteran and a refugee whose father had been a high-ranking soldier in the Iraqi army. “When you get involved with galleries you have to come to terms with the thought that you’ve made something that’s going to be sold and at the same time all these artefacts were being put up for sale.” The start of the Iraqi looting coincided with Rakowitz’s own development, in his late 20s, from an artist who worked mainly in public spaces to one who was part of the gallery system. Though he has never set foot in Iraq, Rakowitz is saturated in the culture of a country where his mother’s family lived until 1946 when, fearing for their safety as Arab Jews in an increasingly divided region, his grandfather made the decision to move them to the US, continuing to run his import-export business from New York.įrom there, a generation on, they watched in horror as – in his mother’s words – the country they had escaped to invaded the one from which they had escaped. Lost artefacts … remains of wall panels and statues destroyed by Islamic State militants in Iraq. The Trafalgar Square lamassu is “armoured” with brightly coloured tin from 10,500 cans of date syrup, which Rakowitz quality tested by nailing them to the walls of the Chicago house where he lives with his wife and two children, to see if they would fade or rust in a climate not so dissimilar to London’s. The aim was not to replicate the looted objects, but to make them cheaply from papier mache or plaster and cover them with food packaging or Arabic newsprint to reflect their relationship with day-to-day life. So I had the idea of these lost artefacts coming back as ghosts to haunt us.” “As the artefacts disappeared, I was waiting for the loss to translate into outrage and grief for lost lives, but it didn’t happen. However, this pathos didn’t play out as expected. It wasn’t simply a local Iraqi loss but one for the whole of humanity.” This was “the first moment of pathos, in that it didn’t matter if you were for or against the war, we could all agree that this was a catastrophe. Until that moment, the suffering of the Iraqi people had been objectified, he explains. The idea was born as Rakowitz watched flickering green images of surgical strikes on Baghdad by the coalition – the invisible enemy – shortly after which the looting began. Photograph: Graeme Robertson/The Guardian ‘It was a loss for the whole of humanity’ … Michael Rakowitz.
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