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WALID RAAD (RE)INVENTS THE ARCHIVE

BY ALAN GILBERT

In November 1991, Robert Frank was one of six internationally acclaimed

photographers who spent more than a week taking pictures of downtown
Beirut in the aftermath of the Lebanese civil war. Like much else pertaining
to that conflict, its origins and endings are ambiguous, but it is generally
agreed that the war began in 1975 and ceased in late 1990 or early 1991.
Frankalong with Gabhele Basilico, Rene Burri, Raymond Depardon,
Fouad Elkoury (the only artist of Lebanese descent included in the project),
and Josef Koudelkawas commissioned by the Hariri Foundation to
photograph Beirut's devastated downtown district before its rebuilding
began in earnest. Much of that reconstruction would be overseen by Rafik
Hariri's construction firm, Solidere. Hariri would soon be elected prime
minister of Lebanon and play a significant economic and political role
until his assassination in 2005. His death by car bomb, along with the
Israeli invasion of Lebanon in the summer of 2006, made some inside
and outside of Lebanon wonder if the Lebanese civil war had in fact ever
really ended.
The work of the six photographers resulted in a book, also funded by the
Hariri Foundation, titled Beirut City Centre (Editions du Cypres, 1992). The
majority of its photographs were shot in standard art-photography mode
for depicting architecture: precisely framed, rigorously composed, lush in
their black-and-white contrasts, encompassing yet detached, devoid of
human presence. During his time in Beirut, Frank took informal Polaroids
along with his officially commissioned photographs. He revisited these
Polaroids more than a decade later in Come Again (SteidI, 2006), in which

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Race Distance:
1600 m.
Winning Time:
01:13
Average Speed:

50.7 km/hr.

Distance Between Horse

and Finish Line:
220 cm.

Description of Winning Historian:

He will not respect you if you speak too literally.
If you don't know how to speak in parables, you're
nobody, he often said.

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the images are shown collaged onto graphed notebook paper,

Western hostage crisisbut causes and effects, undisputed

with the affixing tape and glue left visible. Frank's work in Come

truths, victors and vanquished, good and evil, beginnings and

Again is less photographically commanding and formally assured

endings are conspicuously missing.

than that in Beirut City Centre. The commonplace materials and

Notebooks and films produced by Fakhouri were among the initial

disrupted perspective resulting from taped, glued, and slightly

contributions to an archive established by a foundation named The

skewed Polaroids illustrate Frank's willingness to question his own

Atlas Group to document the recent history of Lebanon, with a

as well as his colleagues' prior attempt to definitively capture a

focus on the civil-war period. In reality, there was no such person

place and its history.

as Dr. Fakhouri, and The Atlas Group was an imaginary foundation

Currently based in New York City and Beirut, Walid Raad was

Raad created in order to systematically organize and present his

born in Lebanon and came to the United States as a teenager in

various artistic projects without the burden of having to occupy the

1983. In one of his earliestand to my mind, most engaging

position of a historically and culturally authoritative voice. Such

photographic projects, lined and torn stenographer's notebook

fictional conceits enabled Raad to reframe flexibly and on a regular

pages form the backdrop to an imaginary narrative concerning the

basis the ways in which his art was transmitted and received.

bets historians of the Lebanese civil war placed during weekly visits

Thus, performance is a vital component of Raad's work, and he

to the racetrack. But rather than gambling on which horse would

doesn't allow materials from The Atlas Group to be exhibited

win, these historians wagered on the amount of distance between

without making an accompanying public presentation. During

the winning horse's nose and the finish line, as captured in the

these PowerPoint lecturespart mock-artist's talk, part quasi-

photo-finish image published in the next day's newspaper. Raad

academic presentation, part deadpan theater of the absurdthe

titled this project Notebool< Volume 72: Missing Lebanese Wars

fictional nature of The Atlas Group is gradually revealed at the

and attributed it to a "Dr. Fad! Fakhouri." In Fakhouri's notebook

same time that Raad's role as official spokesperson and artist is

from 1989, which Raad reproduced in 1998 as a series of digital

both undermined and reframed.

photographic prints, the doctor listed the initials of the participating

Raad has given The Atlas Group project the dates 1989-2004,

historians; the bets they placed on the distance between horse

though (as with much about his art) even this remains open-

and finish line; the length, time, and speed of the race; and brief

ended, as he continues to produce work in the name of the

comments, frequently wry, on the historians themselves. Each

foundation. In a project for The Atlas Group titled Sweet Talk: The

notebook page also contained a taped or glued newspaper image

Hilwe Commissions (1992-2004/2004; here and in the following,

of the photo finish.

the first dates are attributions by The Atlas Group; the second

Raad printed these notebook pages surrounded by a large white

refer to Raad's production of the work), he made photographic

border that contained typed transcriptions into English of Fakhouri's

prints of building fagades in Beirut. Like the six photographers

scribbled English and Arabic notes. The project introduced one of

in Beirut City Centre, Raad is fascinated by the recent past and

Raad's central concerns: the impossibility of directly capturing

near future of the downtown area. However, in their final form,

history in either word or image. Like the set of guesses and

his documentary renderings share more with Frank's visually

predictions the historians made at the racetrack, Raad's work as

fragmented and compositionally disorienting Come Again than

a photographer, filmmaker, videomaker, installation artist, and

with formally resolute art photography or photojournalistic quests

performer generates a constellation of indirect representations

for the perfect or most immediate shot. In Sweet Tall<, a project

around historical events instead of rendering them explicitly. To

attributed to dozens of people commissioned by The Atlas Group

put it differently, Raad's artistic project is concerned as much

to photograph places of interest in Beirut, Raad cut out large color

with how history is written and depicted as with actual historical

photographs of buildings so that only their basic structure and

moments and their accompanying collection of

"facts" and

appendages (antennae, balconies, etc.) remain. In the upper-right

"evidence." Within the entirety of Raad's extensive body of work,

corner of the print, a poorly composed and badly reproduced tiny

the total amount of concrete information regarding the Lebanese

black-and-white image rotated ninety degrees to the left reveals

civil war would perhaps yield a few paragraphs. Major events may

the building in situ. Raad digitally manipulated the excised fagade

be referencedthe Israeli invasion of 1982, the names of some

to have proper architectural lines and a frontal perspective.

of the warring factions and the countries that armed them, the

Far from an exercise in conceptual and aesthetic reduction.

Sweet Tall< is an attempt to render architecture apparitional. For

Raad and other Lebanese artists and thinkers, the reconstruction

PAGES 60-61: Sweet Talk: The Hilwe Commissions, 1992-2004; OPPOSITE:
Notebooli Volume 72: Missing Lebanese Wars (plate 144), 1989.
of downtown Beirut and the larger rehabilitation of recent

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Lebanese history threaten to bulldoze the historical memory

lodged within the architecture and infrastructure that the war
left smashed and crumbling, pockmarked with bullet holes and
artillery shell wounds. Despite an understandable desire to move
on, repressing and ignoring this history increases its haunting,
retributive danger to the individual and collective psyche. This
is also the theme of Read's powerful video IVe Can Make Rain
but No One Came to Ask (2003/2006). Focusing on a single carbomb explosion in Beirut on January 21, 1986, the video could
more accurately be described as a seventeen-minute series of
photographic images that fade, dissolve, are sutured together,
and scroll across the screen. In We Can Make Rain, images of
storefronts and buildings give way to their skeletal diagrams;
archival photographs of car bombs and their charred victims
segue into a new Beirut.
We Can Make Rain combines a number of Raad's obsessions:
car bombs, before and after their detonation; architecture,
ruined and renovated; archival documents, imaginary and real;
collaboration, fictional and actual (the video was made with the
help of Bilal Khbeiz and Tony Chakar); the color blue (Raad's set
of stunning blue monochrome prints. Secrets in the Open Sea
[1994/1999], do for the Mediterranean what Sweet Talk does
for architecture). Raad's current photographic practice moves
chronologically backwardboth biographically and in terms of
the warfrom architecture to the weapons and ordnances that
damage it. An exhibition titled / Migiit Die Before I Get a Rifle
at the Heidelberger Kunstverein in the winter of 2008-9 brought
together a number of recent projects related to this theme. It
emphasized the appropriational aspect of Raad's work, employing
more fictional conceits: that it was a group show featuring the
work of five different artists and that it was originally presented in
Alexandria, Egypt, in 1989.
Two of these projects involve bullets Raad collected while an
adolescent in Lebanon during the war. In Raad's description
of Let's Be Honest, ttie Weather Helped (1998/2006), he
claims to have precisely documented in photographs the exact
location where he found bullets lodged in buildings, cars, and
vegetation. The images are peppered with colored circles of
varying sizes, each corresponding to a bullet hole as well as
the chromatic markings ammunition

manufacturers use to

identify their product. Raad in turn pasted these composites

into a munitions textbook to achieve the final image. At their
most empirical level, the series of photographs records the
various countries and companies that supplied the different

THIS PAGE: Let's Be Honest, The Weather Helped (USA), a series of

seventeen prints, 1998; OPPOSITE: Stills from IVe Can Make Rain but
No One Came to Ask, DVD projection, 2003.

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military factions figliting tlie Lebanese civil war. But they also put

claims to be reproducing images that were compiled and saved to

memory in conflict with history (and official historical narratives),

a CD-ROM by a former Communist militia member who, after the

as Raad's fantastical creations make the symptoms produced

Lebanese civil war, was given a job collecting and documenting

by personal and shared trauma as real (or unreal) as the reality

weapons and unexploded ordnances.

(or unreality) that provoked them. In one of the four images

For an artist who owes much to the conceptual and compositional

constituting Scratching on Things I Could Disavow (2004/2008),

strategies of Bernd and Hilla Becher, Walker Evans, and Eugene

above a piece of shrapnel is the phrase: "I am convinced that

Atget, / Might Die Before I Get a Rifle (1990/2008) is Raad's

this did not kill anyone"; above another: "I have been told, again

rawest work, closer to the aesthetics and technologies of Abu

and again, that this did not kill anyone."

Ghraib than to cool water-tower typologies. A bare hand holding

If for much of its existence Raad's art has subtlyand sometimes

up a grenade, a bag of Semtex, a detonator fuse, and a close-up

not so subtlyfinessed questions of certainty, why should he or his

of a 50mm shell are four of the twelve images Raad presented.

audience suddenly be so convinced? Along with the credence Raad

And yet also in the show was a piece (recently purchased by the

gives to psychological manifestations of trauma, it is important

Museum of Modern Art) titled "Oh, God," He Said, Talking to a

to see The Atlas Group and more recent works by Raad as both

Tree (2006-8)a set of small excised smoke plumes reproduced

a personal cosmology and a carefully considered conceptual

in a clean, minimalist serial form. An accompanying text Indicates

documentary project. Both are rooted in loss: loss of home and

that these images are from the 2006 war between Israel and

loss of the referent. Raad's response is not an easy indulgence

Hezbollah, and discusses the unreasonableness of having to

in postmodernist indeterminacy, for in the place of these losses

choose sides. Like every one of Raad's photographic projects,

he has fabricated a detailed, minutely cross-referenced universe

the images have first been filtered through a virtual world. In this

(The Atlas Group contains dozens of closely interrelated files), yet

process, Raad turns the digital technologies that threaten to

one situated within the very specific sociohistorical conditions of

make everything unreal and untrue into a critique of ideologies

Lebanon during Raad's lifetime. Among his newest works is a series

that attempt to arrogate to themselves the real and the true. As

of found photographs (from which the Heidelberger Kunstverein

Raad's work shows, it is a critique that can't be waged solely on

exhibition derived his show's title). In these large color prints, Raad

the terrain of competing facts.

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THIS PAGE: Scratching on Things I Could Disavow_plate 1 (2, 3, 4), 2004;

OPPOSITE: From the series "Oh God," He Said, Talking to a Tree, 2006-8.
Images the artist/courtesy Paula Cooper Gallery. New York

66 /

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COPYRIGHT INFORMATION

Author: Gilbert, Alan

Title: Walid Raad (Re)invents the Archive
Source: Aperture no198 Spr 2010 p. 60-7
ISSN: 0003-6420
Publisher: Aperture Foundation, Inc.
547 West 27th Street, 4th Floor, New York, NY 10001

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