Alan Gilbert

Walid Raad’sSpectralArchive, Part II:Testimony ofGhosts

Continued from “Walid Raad’s Spectral Archive,Part I: Historiography as Process” … we can no longer simply explain or simplycure.1

A city, perhaps like a person, remembersthe most when confronted with its destruction.The aftereffects of trauma are a different story.They frequently give rise to individual andcollective amnesias, along with thepsychological symptoms that congeal when atraumatic experience is too painful forconsciousness to address directly. In this sense,symptoms are strange documents. They areusually synonymous with a narrative – howeverfractured, however distorted, however unreal –that seeks to make sense of an event that carrieswithin it something fundamentally inexplicable.Trauma is a violent transmission of the unknown,oftentimes in the service of something larger andmore inscrutable than the event itself. Much ofWalid Raad’s art investigates not the failure ofimages to represent traumatic events but therefusal of the real to inscribe itself as a legibleimage. It’s a subtle difference, one rooted less inconceptual art strategies (though Raad’s work isfilled with these) and more in the complexregistering of the effects of traumatic historicalevents. In this model, historiography becomes thewriting of symptoms, and symptoms arerepetitively repressive structures. As asymptomatology of indiscriminate warfare,Raad’s serial car bomb projects are consciouslyfailed attempts to locate either the disease or itscure. My neck is thinner than a hair: Engines(2001/2000–03) builds on the earlier Notebookvolume 38: Already been in a lake of fire(1991/2002) to reproduce one hundred found andappropriated photographs of the only car part tosurvive relatively intact after detonation – theengine. (Here and in the following, first dates areattributions by The Atlas Group; the second referto Raad’s production of the work. Artworks withonly one date are not part of The Atlas Group’s“official” archive.) Unlike Notebook volume 38,this slightly later series expands the frame toshow the immediate environment after a carbomb has exploded: a small blast crater, soldiersor officials of some sort on the scene,consistently quizzical looks on the faces ofbystanders. Each black-and-white photographsits directly to the left of a reproduction of itsreverse side, which is usually marked withofficial stamps, dates, the photographer’s name,and notes in Arabic – most all of which seems tohave been added by the archives where Raadresearched the images. He floats these two adjacent images on anexpanded white background, at the bottom ofwhich appears basic information about the

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photograph and the details on its reverse side,though not nearly as thoroughly as in Notebookvolume 38 or Notebook volume 72: MissingLebanese wars (1989/1998). Rather, the image isleft to fend hopelessly for itself. The one hundred23 × 32 cm prints are arranged in a tight gridfeaturing five rows of twenty each, aninstallation decision that among other effectsaugments their repetitious quality (and relatesthe piece to conceptual-photo works such asMartha Rosler’s groundbreaking The Bowery intwo inadequate descriptive systems [1974–75] –right down to Rosler and Raad’s shared use ofdiminutive lowercase titles that de-emphasizethe autonomous art object). In Raad’sexplanatory note for the project, he writes,“During the wars, photojournalists competed tobe the first to find and photograph the engines.”2

Like the historians in Notebook volume 72, theycan never arrive on time. Rather, they appearafter the fact to help gather data about asituation that in the final analysis remainselusive. Similarly, Raad is unable or unwilling –conditions that in post-traumatic situationsbecome partially blurred – to register the fullexperience of the wars, even as someone whoexperienced them firsthand.

The Atlas Group/Walid Raad, My Neck is Thinner Than a Hair: Engines(detail), 1996–2004. One hundred pigmented inkjet prints. TheMuseum of Modern Art, New York. Fund for the Twenty-First Century.Copyright: Walid Raad.

1. Secrets in the Open SeaTestimony and witness, the two standard tropesof documentary photography (and especially warphotography), have either gone missing or areunder the severest duress in Raad’s work.3 InEmpathic Vision: Affect, Trauma, andContemporary Art, Jill Bennett differentiatesbetween “narrative memory” and “traumaticmemory.”4 Bennett argues that therepresentation of traumatic experiencenecessitates the creation of a new visual

language that downplays testimony, incorporatesfictional elements, and utilizes affect in order tomove our encounter with trauma “beyond therealm of the interior subject into that ofinhabited place, rendering it a politicalphenomenon”5; in this place, “perpetrators,victims, and bystanders are all compromised bya cycle of violence.”6 This pastiche of truth-claims captures the general and widespreadsymptomology of trauma. To record thiscondition, The Atlas Group vacates the authorityof the artist, the historian, or the spokespersonfor the underrepresented, in favor of the kind ofpersonal cosmology that makes Lebanon kinwith other sites of unremitting disaster: Baghdad… Grozny … New Orleans … Fukushima … Raad’s video We can make rain but no onecame to ask (2003/2006) explicitly signals theformation of such a traumatic semiotics duringan opening sequence in which dust cloudstransform into stars that then form aconstellation of car parts. “What I like about thispiece is that it is literally creating a cosmology,”Raad says in a New York Times profile, “It’s notlike people were idiots when they looked at thestars and told stories about them 2,000 yearsago. Now there are other stories. Now is thefetish moment of the car engine.”7 The videocaptures the failure of the image to effectivelywitness history (and an element of failure inwitnessing itself) as it disassembles – at times,dissembling – the survivor’s tale in order toillustrate how even this seemingly immediateand authentic mode of expression is alreadymediated. At one point, Raad briefly planned toassemble extensive files and construct small-scale dioramas for each of the wars’ 3,641 carbombs. One result is the sculptural installation Iwas overcome with a momentary panic at thethought that they might be right (1994/2005),attributed to either topographer Nahia Hassan orcar bomb expert Yussef Nassar, depending onthe exhibition, installation, and other work withwhich it appears. For this reason its dates vary;its earliest incarnation appears to have been fora cultural program accompanying the 2004Athens Summer Olympics. A spotlit white disc –or discs – made of dense foam, the sculpture ispunctured by holes of different sizes meant tomap every car bomb exploded during the war. It’sa burden light enough to be carried almostanywhere. We can make rain but no one came to ask isthe result of investigations Raad undertook withwriter Bilal Khbeiz and architect and visual artistTony Chakar into a single car bomb detonated inBeirut on January 21, 1986. Like the rippleeffects of damage that spread across the citywith each car bomb explosion, the video is

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Walid Raad, Scratching on things I could disavow: Walkthrough, 2015. Copyright: The Museum of Modern Art, New York. Photo: Julieta Cervantes.

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perhaps Raad’s most expansive vision of Beirutduring and after the war. Its catalogue of by-nowfamiliar motifs from The Atlas Group – archivaldocuments, car bombs, architecture, the colorblue, passionate yet quixotic chroniclers of thewar – extends to represent other devastatedcities confronted with the complicated dynamicbetween remembering and rebuilding. Less avideo per se, the piece more closely resembles aseventeen-minute digital slideshow consisting ofhundreds of stitched images and a hauntingsoundtrack. Its composition from still images isnot unlike La Jetée (1962) by Chris Marker, whoseessay films have clearly influenced Raad’s work.Its initial screen announces that the work ismeant to document the tireless efforts ofGeorges Semerdjian, “a fearless photojournalist”killed in 1990, and Yussef Bitar, “the Lebanesestate’s leading ammunitions expert and chiefinvestigator of all car bomb detonations.” Somewhat unexpectedly for those familiarwith The Atlas Group’s motley cast of fictionalcharacters, both are actual historical figures,though seemingly less likely is a declaration onthe next screen stating that they collaborativelyresearched the car bomb in question. Thereference to real participants, one of whom losthis life documenting the war, indicates that thevideo will partly function as an elegy, a relativelyrare mode in Raad’s work despite its persistentconcern with loss. (This elegiac tone alsoappears in the seven-and-a half-minute film ofrepeating sunsets shot from Beirut’s seasidecorniche, I only wish that I could weep[2002/2002].) The two opening text captions arefollowed by roiling plumes of fire and smoke seenthrough a thin horizontal slit on a black screenthat gives way to the sound and images of oceanwaves as the perspective opens onto apanoramic shot of Beirut jutting into theMediterranean. The screen then goes dark,voices on the soundtrack become distressed,and the previously mentioned constellation ofcar parts slowly takes shape as sirens fill the air. A photo of Bitar is introduced before animage of car bomb carnage appears followed byshort clips of a rebuilt Beirut along with birdsongand traffic noise. Next is an extended focus onarchitecture, which Raad depicts with movingimages, skeletal renderings, and croppedphotographs – sometimes superimposed oneach other. The architectural drawings areghostly versions resembling ones found in themaster plans for Beirut’s rebuilding.8 Throughoutthe video, Raad splits the screen into threequadrants so that a car or pedestrian moving outof one part vanishes into another. The civil warsconfined people in Beirut and its suburbs to theirimmediate neighborhoods within the largerdemarcation (indicated by the Green Line)

separating the Muslim-dominated western areaof the city from the Christian eastern section.Raad’s work refuses to allow a unified view, andthe urban landscape it depicts is never morethan a patchwork. In We can make rain but no onecame to ask, this fracturing occurs on multipleformal levels: from its segmented screen to itsnonlinear editing; from its combination of stillimages and short video clips to its associativelogic; from its constant fades and dissolves to itsdigitally manipulated perspectives. The screen goes blue after the passagethrough architecture, the color of Beirutunmoored between sky and sea. Then sounds ofconstruction and images of signs and storefrontsscroll by. This is followed by two headshots, onesolarized, one not, of Semerdjian that introducean extended stretch of car bomb photos similarto the ones in My neck is thinner than a hair:Engines but with an even broader view of thestreet and surrounding buildings. There are alsoa number of images of charred bodies – to myknowledge the only moment in the entirety ofRaad’s oeuvre when victims of the wars appear,which gives these pictures an added gravity. It’spossible (these kinds of concrete details can bedifficult to verify in Raad’s work) that thesephotographs are from the last roll of filmSemerdjian shot before he was killed four yearsafter the car bomb documented in the video.9

Moreover, it is difficult not to notice theresemblance to images of the World Trade Centersite in the days following September 11, 2001.The soundtrack goes silent, as these ghosts – ofpeople and of buildings – seek recognition amidthe earlier visual and aural evidence ofrebuilding. Contemporary Beirut again returnswith a camera pan of digitally fossilizedarchitecture before the video ends with shots ofbuildings, trees, and storefronts. The storefronts recall Raad’s first attemptto systematically document the architecture ofBeirut, The Beirut Al-Hadath archive, with itscatalogue of storefronts evoking Eugène Atget’sphotographs of Paris. Raad published the projectin Rethinking Marxism in 1999, and itforeshadows many of the strategies that wouldbecome associated with The Atlas Group, whichwas established around the same time:10 animaginary foundation established in 1967, theyear of Raad’s birth; a repository for documentsmade by other people; a fake list of funders(including a Mr. and Mrs. Fakhouri); a series ofgrainy, black-and-white photographs withsomewhat elusive captions and dubiousprovenance; a pretend exhibition; and anintroductory explanatory text written by afictional expert named Fouad Boustani. Raadwrites: “Al-Hadath critically confronts andexamines issues of power, space, time, and

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trauma as they were and are manifested in thehistory of Lebanon and of the Lebanese civil war,in photographic and documentary practice.”11

Important to note here is that the accompanyingphotographs evidence very little about the wars– Raad would soon come to pluralize “civil war”– while simultaneously functioning as pleasagainst forgetting.

The Atlas Group/Walid Raad, Sweet Talk: The Hilwé Commission, 2005.Digital Print, 116 x 116 cm. Courtesy the artist and Sfeir-SemlerGallery, Hamburg/Beirut.

2. The Withdrawal of TraditionThe seeds for The Atlas Group had been sown,not only in terms of its general format but also itsgrowing obsession with architecture. Along withAtget – whose influence is “explained” byBoustani as a critique of the earlier Frenchcolonial presence in Lebanon – Raad’s workowes much to Walker Evans’s crisp formalism aswell as Bernd and Hilla Becher’s serialtypologies. Like the Becher’s project – andperhaps Evans’s too – Raad’s art contains adegree of sentimentality overlaid with anexacting formalism. Like Benjamin’s ArcadesProject, Atget documents a Paris that arrives andvanishes simultaneously, just as Raad and Al-Hadath capture Beirut somewhere betweendisappearance and renovation. More ambitious and fully realized, Sweettalk: The Hilwé commissions (1992–2004/2004)finds Raad redeploying the Beirut Al-Hadatharchive conceit in which numerousphotographers – dozens for Sweet talk, onehundred for Al-Hadath – are sent out across thecity to photograph architectural conditions as

they existed before, during, and after the wars.Raad carefully crops the photographed buildingfrom its immediate environment (much as he didwith the cars in Notebook volume 38), frontallyaligns it to have a proper architecturalperspective, floats it on a white background, andinserts in the upper-right portion of the print aminiature, almost indecipherable black-and-white version of the original unmanipulatedimage, rotated ninety degrees to the left. AsUlrich Baer writes, “If we analyze photographsexclusively through establishing the context oftheir production, we may overlook theconstitutive breakdown of context that, in astructural analogy to trauma, is staged by everyphotograph.”12 Raad’s formal precision sheltersthese edifices while simultaneously interruptingtheir history to diagram the impact of trauma onour sense of context.13

This is not unrelated to Jalal Toufic’s idea of“the withdrawal of tradition past a surpassingdisaster,”14 which has inspired much of Raad’smore recent work, especially his first large-scaleproject after The Atlas Group: Scratching onthings I could disavow. For Toufic and Raad, this“withdrawal” effects not only history andtradition but also objects in the world, includingbuildings (as in The Beirut Al-Hadath archive andSweet talk: The Hilwé commissions) and artworks– Raad’s own and others. Paradoxically,acknowledging this withdrawal is the only way tosafeguard what has already disappeared. ForRaad and many other artists of his generation inLebanon, this is as much a question of form as itis of content, i.e., the utilization of war imagery.The care shown toward these forms issynonymous with ministrations for what hasvanished. As Eduardo Cadava explains in Words ofLight: Theses on the Photography of History:

The present no longer struggles to leadknowledge, as one would lead the blind, tothe firm ground of a fixed past. Instead thepast infuses the present and therebyrequires the dissociation of the presentfrom itself. In other words, the past – asboth the condition and caesura of thepresent – strikes the present and, in sodoing, exposes us to the nonpresence ofthe present. If it is no longer a matter of thepast casting its light on the present or ofthe present casting its light on the past (N50 / GS 5:578 [Cadava’s citation is toBenjamin’s writings]), it is because the pastand the present deconstitute one anotherin their relation. The coincidence of thisexposure and deconstitution defines apolitical event, but one that shatters ourgeneral understanding of the political. It

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tells us that politics can no longer bethought in terms of a model of vision. It canno longer be measured by the eye.15

Scratching on things I could disavow disruptsvision in the service of something like Cadava’santivisual politics by manifesting Toufic’s notionof withdrawal: from the literally miniaturemuseum of artworks collected/produced by TheAtlas Group (Section 139: The Atlas Group[1989–2004]) – imagine a less portable version ofMarcel Duchamp’s Boîte-en-valise – to the nearlyinvisible Arabic and English script of Index XXVI:Artists (2009), to the formal reductivism in theseries of prints collectively titled Appendix XVIII:Plates (2009), to the absent artworks in On WalidSadek’s Love Is Blind (Modern Art Oxford, 2006)(2009). Throughout Scratching on things I coulddisavow, artists and artworks have disappeared.So, too, has the political and historical imagerythat rooted The Atlas Group – for all of itsintentional elusiveness – in the Lebanese civilwars. Whereas Raad once compulsivelypreserved this imagery, his focus has now turnedto artistic traditions and aesthetic forms inLebanon and the larger Middle East. The prints inAppendix XVIII: Plates reproduce – albeitobscurely – the colors, fonts, and graphic designof books, catalogues, press announcements, andother materials used in the exhibition anddissemination of twentieth-century MiddleEastern art. In Index XXVI: Artists, it’s the colorred that has at some future point withdrawn.

3. New Hysterical InfrastructureInterruption, whether historical or psychic, is anoninstrumental intervention in Raad’s work.With an almost willful absurdity, he’s stampedToufic’s “surpassing disaster” on his art in orderto assert that it’s not the artist who is causinghistory – or, in his latest project, artworks fromthe Middle East – to withdraw, but conditionsthemselves. “It is the world itself that acts thisway and I’m just present,” as Raad tells H. G.Masters in a feature for ArtAsiaPacific magazine.“It’s getting away from a psychic model to a morephenomenological model … It’s no longer aboutmediation.”16 In the collective amnesia that is aresponse to the massive shared trauma of thecivil wars, history and culture have withdrawn,literally, and the task of the artist, according toToufic, is to register this withdrawal. Yet bothRaad and Toufic are aware that a generalizedmetaphysics of disaster is much more amenableto reactionary forces than progressive ones,specifically Christian, Islamic, and Jewish sacro-political fundamentalism. All three helped fuelthe Lebanese civil wars, and continue todestabilize the country and the Middle East. AsDerrida said of Benjamin’s obsession with

destruction: “One may well ask what such anobsessive thematic might signify, what itprepares or anticipates between the two wars,all the more so in that, in every case, thisdestruction also sought to be the condition of anauthentic tradition and memory.”17

Perhaps in response to this, Raad insists onconcretely framing the work in Scratching onthings I could disavow as a mode of institutionalcritique, and he describes in performances,talks, and interviews his tracking and gatheringof information related to a suddenly boomingarts infrastructure in the Middle East. Forinstance, Beirut didn’t have a traditional white-cube commercial art gallery until Sfeir-SemlerGallery (which represents Raad in Lebanon andGermany) opened a gleaming space in 2005.18 Inthe summer of 2009, a new Beirut Art Center wasprofiled in The New York Times.19 The ArtistPension Trust has expanded into the MiddleEast, assembling artists and art from the regionfor its fund, and there are now numerousbiennials and art fairs proliferating across theArab world. In Abu Dhabi, the Guggenheim isbuilding its largest branch – designed by FrankGehry – in terms of square footage, and hasestablished a sizable acquisition budget forpurchasing work from the Middle East to fill it.The Louvre is also opening a museum in AbuDhabi, and Zaha Hadid is designing the city’sperforming arts center, all of which – and more –Raad mentioned in his talk-performance Scratching on things I coulddisavow: Walkthrough: Of course these themes emerge naturallyfrom Raad’s previous work with The Atlas Groupaddressing the rebuilding of Beirut’sinfrastructure in the wake of the civil wars. This,too, was a highly contentious process, examinedat the time and since by various individuals andgroups both internal and external to Lebanon. Ina 1997 article published in Critical Inquiry, SareeMakdisi describes how then-Lebanese primeminister Rafic Hariri’s construction firm Soliderespearheaded the redevelopment of downtownBeirut without significant public input, andproceeded to destroy more of the area in a singleyear than the wars had ruined in the previousfifteen. Moreover, it did so before a finalreconstruction plan had been approved:

Not only were buildings that could havebeen repaired brought down with high-explosive demolition charges, but theexplosives used in each instance were far inexcess of what was needed for the job,thereby causing enough damage toneighboring structures to require theirdemolition as well … It is estimated that, asa result of such demolition, by the time

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The Atlas Group/Walid Raad, Hostage: The Bachar tapes (English version), 2001. Video (color, sound), 16'17''. The Museum of Modern Art, NewYork. Gift of the Jerome Foundation in honor of its founder, Jerome Hill, 2003. Copyright: Walid Raad

reconstruction efforts began in earnestfollowing the formal release of the new Daral-Handasah plan in 1993, approximately80 percent of the structures in thedowntown area had been damaged beyondrepair, whereas only around a third hadbeen reduced to such circumstances as aresult of damage inflicted during the waritself.20

Thus, when Raad documents pockmarked andcrumbling buildings in Let’s be honest, theweather helped, or We can make rain but no onecame to ask, or Sweet talk: The Hilwécommissions, he isn’t simply registering damagecaused by the war, but also damage caused bythe efforts to repair the damage caused by thewar. Such events provide a historical andmaterialist explanation for the small role causeand effect play in Raad’s world, allergic as it is toforms of instrumentality. Rather, Raad’s latestprojects address ongoing tears in the socialfabric and structural flaws within history itself.Whereas earlier artworks by The Atlas Groupregistered these effects on individual andcollective psyches, architecture eventuallybecame the edifice on which they were inscribed. In interviews and performances, Raad has

characterized his work as a series of “hystericalsymptoms”: “We urge you to approach thesedocuments as we do, as ‘hysterical symptoms’based not on any one person’s actual memoriesbut on cultural fantasies erected from thematerial of collective memories.”21 Although, ashe mentions in the ArtAsiaPacific feature, he’sstarted to shift this discourse away from thepsychological. A good example of an early projectthat combines a focus on symptoms with thepolitical economics of postwar Beirut is Secretsin the open sea (1994/1999), which consists of sixlarge (111 × 173 cm), lushly blue monochromeprints surrounded by a thin white border. In thebottom right-hand corner of each print is a tinyfaded black-and-white photograph. In hisdescription of the work, Raad states that twenty-nine prints were discovered in 1993 under theruins of Beirut’s central business district duringthe area’s demolishment in preparation forrebuilding. Given to The Atlas Group, six of theprints were then sent to overseas photo labs forexamination. It turns out that embedded withinthe blue images are group portraits – reproducedin miniature at the bottom of the print – of menand women who, The Atlas Group discovered,“drowned, died or were found dead in theMediterranean between 1975 and 1991.”22

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An even earlier version, entitled Miraculousbeginnings (1997), precedes The Atlas Group.23

Accompanied by a fictional archive andconsisting of grey instead of blue monochromes,it exists as one of Raad’s earliest publiclydisseminated solo works (Raad appropriated thetitle a couple years later for one of Fakhouri’s twoshort films). In both iterations, the exhumedimages are of suited men and women wearingdresses, signaling middle- and upper-middleclass status, i.e., business people, politicians,civic leaders. If the members of this groupconstituted a relatively cohesive social core thatcrumbled during the wars, they also serve assymbolic representatives of a functioning nation-state. This political legitimacy, Raad seems tosay, is as much imagined and projected as it isreal. Most modern claims of sovereignty are. Inan uncanny doubling, the documented absenceof members of this governing coterie was onlydiscovered during the razing of downtown Beirutby a related group claiming to represent thenation, but who in reality is another examplefrom Lebanon’s recent history of private intereststriumphing over the collective good. Is this why Raad specifically contextualizesthe rediscovery of a drowning fantasy within thepostwar leveling of downtown Beirut? As Raadburies and then reanimates Lebanon’s civic andbusiness leaders, there’s an undercurrent ofviolence to the work’s seductive surface. Yet it’s aviolence directed against violence. As MiriamCooke explains in her essay “Beirut Reborn: ThePolitical Aesthetics of Auto-Destruction”: “Afterthe Israeli invasion of 1982 the increasinglyvisible involvement of war profiteers changed theconditions of possibility for telling a moralstory.”24 For Cooke, both morality and narrativehave been made impossible by the war – but thisimpossibility persists after its conclusion. Thepostwar profits to be reaped duringreconstruction similarly trumped public memory,mourning, and the proposal of alternativenarratives for postwar Lebanon. Raad’s responseis the creation of imaginary and symbolicallycharged “representational spaces” that seek todisrupt the rationally ordered “representation ofspace” imposed by the master plan for a newBeirut: “To be more precise, and to use theterminology introduced earlier: in the spatialpractice of neocapitalism (complete with airtransport), representations of space facilitatethe manipulation of representational spaces(sun, sea, festival, waste, expense).”25 Yet noamount of building, and no amount ofcommentary, will explain away the blue. In Raad’s early work, convoluted oedipalrelations frequently entailed authority’s demise– whether the artist’s own, Fakhouri’s, or that ofthe ciphers buried beneath the surface of

Secrets in the open sea. Yet this authority –including Raad’s – continues to reassert itself.The initially hidden individuals in business dressmimic the functioning of repression and its slowexposure by psychoanalysis. Sarah Rogers goesso far as to compare Raad’s role to that of apsychoanalyst.26 Raad has repeatedly arguedthat the psychological symptom is very muchreal, and this reality is reflected by its repetitionon a more strictly formal level.27 The repressionwrapped in fantasy makes the figures’unexpected surfacing all the more haunting.After all, Secrets in the open sea is a series of so-called documentary prints that for all theirsplendor undermines conventional modes ofvision and witnessing. As an attack onrepresentation, it manifests a psychogeographyof loss amid the irruptions of a strangesublime,28 while its nonrepresentationalmonochromes counter the real estatespeculators’ linear blueprints.

4. Truth and ReconciliationTime helps, in ways that are wholly mysterious, tocomplete the process of forgiveness, thoughnever of reconciliation.29

A city, perhaps like a person, can only be atwar for so long. Sigmund Freud may have positedthe psyche’s death-drive toward inanimatematter, but the desire in any organism – aperson, a city – to remain animate is very strong.The ruling powers in postwar Lebanon decidedagainst convening a truth and reconciliationcommission. Instead, its parliament passed anamnesty law in 1991 pardoning most war crimes,which in turn allowed prominent figures in thecivil wars to become part of the country’s newgovernment. Much has been written concerningthe effectiveness of South Africa’s Truth andReconciliation Commission, the most famous ofthe dozens of such commissions establishedaround the world. If these have taught usanything, it’s that meaningful reconciliation iscontingent upon acknowledging difference. Notthe plurality of identities in a multiculturalsociety, but the difference between victimizerand victim, oppressor and oppressed – whilerecognizing that even within the most repressivesystem, as within marginalized communities,these distinctions can become blurred. We see this in Hostage: The Bachar tapes(#17 and #31)_English version (2000/1999). Theeighteen-minute video claims to be a portrait ofa Lebanese man named Souheil Bachar heldhostage for ten years during the civil wars, andwho for a few months in 1985 was kept with well-known Western hostages Terry Anderson, DavidJacobsen, Martin Jenco, Thomas Sutherland,and Benjamin Weir. (Bachar is fictional, althoughthere seems to have been an Arab hostage briefly

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held with the Western ones.30) When shown aspart of a performance, the video allows Raad todiscuss the geopolitics of the “Western hostagecrisis” whereby the United States covertly soldarms to Iran in exchange for the release ofhostages held in Lebanon, and used the profitsto fund the Reagan administration’s illegalsupport of the Contras in Nicaragua.31

The video focuses on Bachar’s time with theWestern hostages, culminating in a fairly graphicdescription of their attraction to and repulsion byhis physical body. Perhaps the least visuallypolished of Raad’s work, the piece at timesmimics the kind of videotaped statement acaptive makes, complete with taped-up flag orpiece of fabric on the back wall. After theirrelease, the Western hostages had access tocommercial publishers and movie producerseager to exploit their stories; Bachar had TheAtlas Group, a cheap video camera, and animaginary archive. As in the horse race-based Notebookvolume 72, Raad is very much interested in howhistories are written; but in Hostage, heilluminates the power behind these narratives,whether the willful failures of Congressionalcommittees investigating the Iran-Contra affairto engage with the larger ramifications of USforeign policy,32 or the influence of themainstream media over public discourse andmemory.33 As scholar of trauma literature Kalí Talwrites (at least five years before 9/11): “Thebattle over the meaning of a traumaticexperience is fought in the arena of politicaldiscourse, popular culture, and scholarly debate.The outcome of this battle shapes the rhetoric ofthe dominant culture and influences futurepolitical action.”34 Yet Raad is not after the truestory, or even a counter-story. The person whoplays Bachar is a famous actor in Lebanon, whichwould instantly alert viewers there that theywere watching a piece of sustained artifice – andsatire (Raad’s work has a morbid sense of humor,as conveyed in his titles, but it’s rarely satirical).Moreover, there are various infelicities in thevideo’s translation of Bachar’s narrative intoEnglish. Bachar asks that this English voiceoverbe female, and, given the chance to tell his ownversion of events, Bachar is constantlyinterrupted by the editing and purposefullyrudimentary technology. It’s essential to try andgive a voice to the politically and historicallymarginalized; but even this, Raad implies, is acomplex, mediated, and difficult form ofwitnessing. If truth doesn’t necessarily lead toreconciliation, as Rustom Bharucha wrotealongside the 2002 Documenta in which Raad’swork appeared and garnered internationalattention, then the artist’s fictional devices

might be understood as an alternative approach,one that approaches reconciliation outside ajuridical economy of truth.

The Atlas Group/Walid Raad, I might die before I get a rifle – Device II,1998-2000. Archival inkjet prints on archival paper. Courtesy the artistand Sfeir-Semler Gallery, Hamburg/Beirut.

5. Caring for ViolenceThus other works by Raad have again movedbackward in time from the postwar period to thewar itself. We decided to let them say, ‘we areconvinced,’ twice (2002/2006), a series ofphotographs produced from surviving butdamaged negatives Raad shot as a teenager in1982 during the Israeli invasion, features themost conventional war imagery he has produced:smoking buildings, fighter jets streaking acrossthe sky, Israeli soldiers napping against theirtanks in Christian East Beirut. In Let’s be honest,the weather helped, Raad placed fluorescent-colored dots of different sizes on street-levelphotographs to indicate where he discoveredstray bullets. In the photographic printsScratching on things I could disavow (1992/2008)– another recycled title – cutouts of collectedbullets, shrapnel, and small explosives areplaced in neat rows next to short descriptivephrases, ranging from “trade with cousin” (for anew bullet) to “I am convinced that this did notkill anyone” (for a piece of shrapnel) – an oddmoment of conviction in Raad’s incessantlyquestioning art, and one that finds kinship withBaer’s formulation that “photographs cancapture the shrapnel of traumatic time.”35

I might die before I get a rifle (1990/2008)purports to be twelve large color images printedfrom a CD-ROM made by a previous member of aLebanese Communist militia whose job after thewar required him to collect and photographweapons and unused ordnances: grenades,artillery shells, plastic explosives, bullets. I

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might die before I get a rifle is among Raad’s leastvisually mediated pieces, evoking the look ofdigital snapshot photography and involving verylittle of the cut, paste, and collage methodologyof his other sets of photographic prints. Raadmay be moving away from work that engages thepsychology of trauma, but the weapons of warfeatured in each of the twelve photographs aretreated and depicted as fetish objects parexcellence. A striking 160 × 203 cm tightlycropped shot of a latex-gloved hand holding a 50mm shell is as fastidiously presented as theminiature smoke plumes rendered in serialMinimalist fashion in Oh, God, he said talking to atree (2006–08). Many of Raad’s works are accompanied byan explanatory text, whether they’re presented inan exhibition or print publication format. The onefor Oh, God, he said talking to a tree isincorporated into the work as a separate print,the last of thirty-one. It states that theexplosions are from the summer of 2006 warbetween Hezbollah and Israel, and emphasizesthe absurdity in being forced to choose betweenthe two opposing forces. (The text, a version ofwhich appeared in the October 2006 issue ofArtforum, doesn’t mention that the photographswere appropriated from various media sources.36

For Raad’s on-the-ground reporting of the war –he was in Beirut with his family when fightingbroke out – see his published dialogue withSilvia Kolbowski.37) This refusal of partisanism iscrucial to Raad’s work, while also distinct fromneutrality. Despite his (imaginary) ordeals,Bachar never demands justice or retribution forhis ten years in captivity, perhaps wary of thelaws to which these notions are tied. Violence, asBenjamin argues, “is the origin of law,” andfrequently its result.38 Or perhaps Bacharunderstands that, as Upendra Baxi hasbeautifully written, “constitutional decision orpolicy-makers present themselves as being just,even when not caring … It is notorious thatconstitutional cultures remain rights-bound, notcare-bound.”39 A similar sense of care – eventoward violence – can be found in Raad’s work.At the very heart of its many fictions andprevarications is a sense that language andimage don’t do justice to the event. He stressesthis point by quoting Toufic’s book UndeservingLebanon not once but twice in an interview withSeth Cameron in the Brooklyn Rail that coincidedwith Raad’s MoMA retrospective: “Is trying tounderstand the event that happens to me (socio-economic, historical, political, etc.) enough? No.Is not understanding it but it in an intelligent andsubtle way enough? No. Is trying to render justiceenough? No, justice is never enough. We have toadditionally feel that we merit the event thathappened to us.”40

Raad’s work bypasses justice, truth, andreconciliation for expiation – a ghostly expiation,or, more precisely, an expiation of ghosts.

6. Between Past and the FutureWhy is there so little of the present in Raad’s art?Where are its human occupants? The few thatare seen, as in the video We can make rain but noone came to ask (its very title an invocation of thepast by the present), quickly disappear from theframe. Justice, truth, and reconciliation can existwithout care, but there’s no expiation withoutcare. Along with being a textbook sign of thetraumatic symptom, the constant repetitions inRaad’s art are wedged between conflict andreconciliation. While at times they may resembletranscendence, they instead create the space(and time) for a different way of understandingguilt and expiation. In a powerful reading ofBenjamin’s “early aesthetics” – where theexpressionless stands against retributive justice– in relation to his “Critique of Violence” essay,Judith Butler writes: “This power of obliterationconstitutes a certain kind of violence, but it isimportant to understand that this is a violencemobilised against the conception of violenceimplied by retribution. Understood as ‘a criticalviolence’, it is mobilised against the logic ofatonement and retribution alike.”41 In Raad’swork, these historical and temporal caesuras –Toufic’s “the withdrawal of tradition past asurpassing disaster” – just as readily inducemoments of profound uncertainty in their

movement away from a binary, sacrificiallogic and any totalizing belief that aregulative ideal (such as justice) may befully realized (a movement that is in myjudgment desirable) toward a problematiccondition of social emergency or crisismarked by the generalization of trauma astrope, arbitrary decision (or leaps of secularfaith across antinomic or anomic abysses),extreme anxiety, and disorientation, if notpanic.42

In this sense, it would be easier if Raad’s artwere about a counterhistory to the ones writtenby the victors. It would be easier if Raad’s artwere about the stutters and lacunae of traumaticexpression. It would be easier if Raad’s art wereabout the failures of historical representation. Itwould be easier if Raad’s art were aboutindeterminacy countering dogmatism. It wouldbe easier if Raad’s art were about nonjudicialjustice. All of these are engaged, but none areexhaustive. There is an additional and inexorably darkforce at work in Raad’s art – a disaster of the sortabout which Caruth, Toufic, Benjamin, and

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Maurice Blanchot43 write – beyondunderstanding, naming, and that certainlycannot be seen, and which in its refusal to makethe distinctions upon which retribution reliesasks for a burdened history to begin again,perhaps even anew, in the gaps of its traumaticreturning. Or if that’s too much, too excessive,then maybe it’s also possible to consider Raad’sart as part of an ongoing transitional justice,both in Lebanon and among diverse globalcommunities joined by the experience ofhistorical trauma (and increasingly linked atanother level by a globalized art world in whichRaad’s work circulates, and which Scratching onthings I could disavow partly“documents”). Lodged between the past and thefuture with the law still in formation, transitionaljustice maintains a dialogue with both until thenext histories are written. Raad interruptshistory to create moments of possibility andspaces of productive uncertainty, like the pathswalked by Raad’s audience through his singularand endlessly generative labyrinth of work. ×

Alan Gilbert is the author of two books of poetry, TheTreatment of Monuments (SplitLevel Texts, 2012) andLate in the Antenna Fields (Futurepoem, 2011), as wellas a collection of essays, articles, and reviews entitledAnother Future: Poetry and Art in a PostmodernTwilight (Wesleyan University Press, 2006). He lives inBrooklyn.

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1Cathy Caruth, “Trauma andExperience: Introduction,” inTrauma: Explorations inMemory (Baltimore: JohnsHopkins University Press, 1995),4.

2Walid Raad, in The Atlas Group(1989–2004): A Project by WalidRaad, eds. Kassandra Nakas andBritta Schmitz (Cologne: Verlagder Buchhandlung WaltherKöning), 96.

3Here, too, he summons Rosler’scritiques of liberal humanistdocumentary traditions, not onlyin The Bowery… itself, but in hersubsequent companion essay –Martha Rosler, “in, around, andafterthoughts (on documentaryphotography),” in Decoys andDisruptions: Selected Writings,1975–2001 (Cambridge, MA: MITPress), 151–206.

4Jill Bennett, Empathic Vision:Affect, Trauma, andContemporary Art (Stanford:Stanford University Press, 2005),23–24. Dominick LaCapra makesa related distinction in WritingHistory, Writing Trauma between“historical trauma” and“structural trauma” (Baltimore:Johns Hopkins University Press,2001), 76–78. This account alsoechoes Hal Foster’s descriptionsof archive-based work in “AnArchival Impulse,” October 110(Fall 2004):5, n. 8.

5Ibid., 151.

6Ibid., 18; emphasis in original.

7Amei Wallach, “The Fine Art ofCar Bombings,” New York Times,June 20, 2004http://www.nytimes.com/2004/06/20/arts/art-the-fine-art- of-car-bombings.html?_r=0

8See Robert Saliba, Beirut CityCenter Recovery: The Foch-Allenby and Etoile ConservationArea (Beirut: Solidere, 2004),204–272.

9André Lepecki, “‘After All, ThisTerror Was Not Without Reason’:Unfiled Notes on the Atlas GroupArchive.” TDR, vol. 50, no. 3 (Fall2006): 97.

10Walid Raad, “The Beirut Al-Hadath Archive,” RethinkingMarxism, vol. 11, no. 1 (Spring1999): 15–29; reproduced inRaad, Scratching on Things ICould Disavow: Some Essaysfrom The Atlas Group Project(Lisbon: Culturgest; andCologne: Verlag derBuchhandlung Walther Köning,2007), 33–47.

11Raad, “The Beirut Al-HadathArchive,” 19; Raad, Scratching onThings I Could Disavow, 37.

12Ulrich Baer, Spectral Evidence:The Photography of Trauma(Cambridge, MA: MIT Press,2002), 11.

13Walid Raad, “Sweet Talk orPhotographic Documents ofBeirut,” Camera Austria 80(December 2002): 43–53. One ofmany examples of Raad’srecycling of names, titles, files,and artworks, sometimes for thesake of expediency, and othertimes to further complicate thequestion of the document, thearchive, and the artist assingular producer, this secondSweet talk should not to beconfused with its initialincarnation as Sweet talk orphotographic documents ofBeirut (2002).

14See, most succinctly, JalalToufic, “The Withdrawal ofTradition Past a SurpassingDisaster,” in Scratching onThings I Could Disavow: A Historyof Modern and Contemporary Artin the Arab World / Part I_Volume1_Chapter_1 (Beirut:1992–2005), eds. Clara Kim andRyan Inouye (Los Angeles:California Institute of theArts/REDCAT, 2009), 1–53.

15Eduardo Cadava, Words of Light:Theses on the Photography ofHistory (Princeton: PrincetonUniversity Press, 1997), 71.

16H. G. Masters, “Those Who LackImagination Cannot ImagineWhat Is Lacking,” ArtAsiaPacific65 (September/October 2009):134.

17Jacques Derrida, “Force of Law:The ‘Mystical Foundation ofAuthority,’” Cardozo Law Review11 (1990): 1044–1045.

18In a gesture of (self-)institutional critique, one of theprints in Appendix XVIII: Plateselliptically records the gallerypushing for Raad and BernardKhoury to be included in aproposed Lebanese nationalpavilion at the Venice Biennale.See ../journal/appendix-xviii-plates-22-257/

19Patrick Healy, “Face of WarPervades New Beirut Art Center,”New York Times, July 7, 2009http://www.nytimes.com/2009/07/07/arts/design/07center.html

20Saree Makdisi, “Laying Claim toBeirut: Urban Narrative andSpatial Identity in the Age ofSolidere,” Critical Inquiry, vol. 23,no. 3 (Spring 1997): 672, 674.

21Walid Raad, “Let’s Be Honest,the Rain Helped: Excerpts froman Interview with The AtlasGroup,” in Review of

Photographic Memory, ed. JalalToufic (Beirut: Arab ImageFoundation, 2004), 44.

22Raad, in The Atlas Group(1989–2004), 104.

23Walid Raad, “MiraculousBeginnings,” Public 16 (1997):44–53; reproduced in Raad,Scratching on Things I CouldDisavow, 6–15.

24Miriam Cooke, “Beirut Reborn:The Political Aesthetics of Auto-Destruction,” Yale Journal ofCriticism, vol. 15, no. 2 (Fall2002): 400.

25Henri Lefebvre, The Productionof Space, trans. DonaldNicholson-Smith (Oxford:Blackwell, 1991), 33, 59.

26Sarah Rogers, “Forging History,Performing Memory: WalidRa’ad’s The Atlas Project,”Parachute 108(October/November/December2002): 77. Psychoanalysis, alongwith Marxism, formed a heavycomponent of Raad’s graduateschool studies.

27See Kaelen Wilson-Goldie, “TheAtlas Group Opens its Archives,”Bidoun, vol. 1, no. 2 (Fall 2004):24.

28See Toufic, “The Withdrawal ofTradition Past a SurpassingDisaster,” 53, n. 64.

29Walter Benjamin, quoted inJudith Butler, “BeyondSeduction and Morality:Benjamin’s Early Aesthetics,” inThe Life and Death of Images:Ethics and Aesthetics, eds.Diarmuid Costello and DominicWillsdon (Ithaca: CornellUniversity Press, 2008), 73–74.

30Vered Maimon, “The ThirdCitizen: On Models of Criticalityin Contemporary ArtisticPractices,” October 129 (Summer2009): 101.

31Hostage (in print) also offers anexpanded geopolitical contextfor the piece, drawnfrom research Raad conductedfor his PhD dissertation in theGraduate Program in Visual andCultural Studies at theUniversity of Rochester. Thisversion appeared in thecatalogue for Catherine David’straveling group exhibition“Contemporary ArabRepresentations,” which helpedintroduce Raad and othercultural producers from theMiddle East to the larger artworld. See Walid Raad,“Civilizationally, We Do Not DigHoles to Bury Ourselves:Excerpts from an Interview withSouheil Bachar Conducted byWalid Raad of The Atlas Group,”

in Tamáss: Contemporary ArabRepresentations, ed. CatherineDavid (Barcelona: FundacióAntoni Tàpies, Barcelona, 2002),122–137. See also Walid Raad,Beirut … a la folie: A CulturalAnalysis of the Abduction ofWesterners in Lebanon in the1980s, PhD dissertation,University of Rochester, 1996.

32Raad, “Civilizationally, We DoNot Dig Holes to BuryOurselves,” 128–129; Raad,Scratching on Things I CouldDisavow, 58–59.

33Raad, “Civilizationally, We DoNot Dig Holes to BuryOurselves,” 130; Raad,Scratching on Things I CouldDisavow, 60.

34Kalí Tal, Worlds of Hurt: Readingthe Literatures of Trauma(Cambridge: CambridgeUniversity Press, 1996), 7.

35Baer, Spectral Evidence, 7.

36Walid Raad, “‘Oh God,’ He Said,Talking to a Tree: A Fresh-Off-the-Boat, Throat-ClearingPreamble about the RecentEvents in Lebanon: And aQuestion to Walid Sadek,”Artforum, vol. 45, no. 2 (October2006): 242–244.

37Silvia Kolbowski and Walid Raad,Between Artists: Silvia Kolbowskiand Walid Raad (New York: A.R.T.Press, 2006).

38Walter Benjamin, “Critique ofViolence,” in Reflections: Essays,Aphorisms, AutobiographicalWritings, ed. Peter Demetz,trans. Edmund Jephcott (NewYork: Schocken Books, 1978),286.

39Upendra Baxi, quoted in RustomBharucha, “Between Truth andReconciliation: Experiments inTheatre and Public Culture,”Economic and Political Weekly,vol. 36, no. 39(September–October, 2001),3765.

40Walid Raad, “In Conversation:Walid Raad with Seth Cameron,”Brooklyn Rail (December2015/January 2016): 17. JalalToufic, Undeserving Lebanon(Beirut: Forthcoming Books,2007).

41Butler, “Beyond Seduction andMorality, 75.

42LaCapra, Writing History, WritingTrauma, 31.

43Maurice Blanchot, The Writing ofthe Disaster, trans. Ann Smock(Lincoln: University of NebraskaPress, 1986).

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