The "free" art of occupation: images for a "new" Iraq.

• Author: Shabout, Nada

ART IS INDEXICAL OF SOCIETY. It is expressive and reflective of its culture. Visual production has a continuous dialectical relationship with culture. Within the spaces shaped by this dialogic, new identities are negotiated and contested forming new and renewed cultural icons to the extent that Mieke Bal argues that "art thinks culture." (1) The dynamics of this relationship is impacted by political upheaval and is further complicated by outside interference often reflecting a new imposed modus operandi. Contemporary Iraqi art in the aftermath of the US-led invasion has taken on various roles, be that of resistance, documentation, testimony, prediction and hope.

In the postmodern era of image-making, possibilities of interpretation are as limitless as those of creation. Jean Baudrillard's definition of simulacrum, for instance, shattered the eternal art historical concern with the relationship between origin and copy. He argued that a movement from "representation" to "simulation" distorted the relationship between sign and referent. Some contemporary Iraqi works evoke Baudrillard's "simulacra" in its hyper-realist definition of the "absence of reality," specifically in their disconnect with their lived reality. (2) Baudrillard places the postmodern age in what he classifies as the third order of simulacra, which is dominated by a "precession of simulacra," where the representation precedes and determines the real, as "copies without originals."

Within the framework of occupation, these contemporary works further expose a campaign for "visualizing" Iraqi culture and spatially reconfiguring Baghdad in an effort to construct images for a "new" Iraq through ideological cultural reconstruction. In other words, these works could not be examined within the context of an art historical tradition attentive to styles and aesthetics. After all, Baudrillard declared that seeing is "no longer believing," and Mirzoeff added that it "is interpreting." (3) Given the exorbitant events taking place in Iraq since 2003, one cannot simply view its visual production in terms of cultural icons and their new meanings as transformations reflecting the formation of a "new nation," or the metamorphosis of the Iraqi nation within the current debate.

This essay is concerned with the discourse of power within which these works were produced. These objects of art are thus examined from the perspective of the ideology of their making (artist/patron) and that of their promotion/reception (viewer). Any visual analysis offered here is incidental and does not reflect a detailed stylistic evaluation. These works are seen as existing outside the development of Iraqi modern art insofar as they are disjunctured and reflect isolated incidents that have not been accepted or contextualized by Iraqi artists, but rather subsist on the periphery of established Iraqi art discourse. (4) "Art no longer has a link with history and continuity, but is caught in a chain reaction, that of simulacra and simulation." (5)

CONTEXTUAL BACKGROUND

The power of visual language led to a subjugation of art and artists to the authority of politics, as attested by the various cases found in the history of art throughout the ages. Since the revolution of 1958 which ended the reign of the Iraqi monarchy, art in Iraq has served periodically (or systematically) as a propaganda apparatus. Much has been said about the Baath's and Saddam's exploitation of art to further their agendas. Arguably, there were initially some perceived benefits in Saddam's policies for the arts. There were however, equally long lasting damages. The relationship of Saddam Hussein to the development of the visual arts needs much examination and elaboration that is beyond the purpose of this essay. The Baath's censorship in regards to visual arts nevertheless, seems to be specifically misunderstood. The consensus among Iraqi visual artists is that while Saddam did not force any artist into producing propaganda art, he certainly rewarded those who did. (6)

For the purpose of this argument, my main contention with Saddam's policy would be in adopting and supporting Social Realism as the visual style of choice to represent his social revolution. Social Realism as an art style detached from its sources as a movement has been the preferred style exploited by many totalitarian governments around the world during the twentieth century. (7) It not only influenced popular taste in Iraq, it also halted the progress of the Iraqi abstract movement considered the most advanced in the Arab world. More significantly, the general censored atmosphere at the time subdued the optimism and excitement of the previous decades and crushed the spirit of experimentation. One of the most direct implications of this has been the complete misinterpretation of contemporary Iraqi artists' preference for abstraction as a necessary means of evading Saddam's censorship, and not because of artistic considerations and/or decades of development. Of particular interest to note here is that most Iraqi artists, after the end of their imposed isolation and prohibition, and in exposure to global postmodernist trends, are currently reevaluating the notion of abstraction perceived by them as the ultimate progress and goal.

While there were several layers restructuring Iraq's historical memory since 1958, Saddam has been strongly condemned for his vision of Iraqi history and the policies he has enforced to create a new identity and image, both visually and literary, to fit this vision. This vision could easily invoke Baudrillard's second order of simulacra, where reality is ideologically masked. Moreover, representation of reality has always been ideological insofar that interpretation is always constructed by simulacra. In the realm of art history, Saddam has been accused of reinterpreting much of Iraq's past through various historical periods from Mesopotamia to the modern age. This could be illustrated through a simple comparison between Saddam's Victory Arch (8) and Jawad Salim's Freedom Monument, Nasb al-Hurriyah which are both historical public monuments regardless of the disparity in style and expression.

An uncontested masterpiece and a landmark of Baghdad, Nasb al-Hurriyah was the first public monument in Iraq to be built by an Iraqi artist, a bas-relief mural in bronze (50m x 8m), commissioned by the new Iraqi military regime in 1959 to celebrate the revolution. Its dynamic yet ordered composition of twenty-five connected figures, divided in ten units, visually narrating the revolution and the events which surrounded it, resembles letters of an Arabic verse in their movement and flow from right to left. (9) On a formal visual level, Salim succeeded in combining the linear quality of Arabic characters and stylized forms of Sumerians and Babylonians with modern Western styles, creating within the framework of modernism a nationally significant iconography. The narrative was organized in several interconnected groups, expressing injustice, resistance, solidarity, hope and ambition, and portrayed in a style of abstract expressive symbolism.

The Victory arch, on the other hand, represents the arms of Saddam with a sword in each fist in reference to the sword of Sa'ad ibn-abi-Waqas, the commander of the Muslim army that defeated the Persian Sassaninan Empire in A.D. 637. The structure rises to forty meters above the ground with five thousand Iranian helmets appropriated from the battlefield dribbling at the base like peanuts from a bag. In the Mesopotamian tradition, as in the Babylonian Ishtar Gate, the arch was duplicated on the other end of the vast new parade ground in central Baghdad. The image was sealed with a televised inaugural public ceremonial performance by Saddam himself on a white stallion...