Few contemporary artists create work about war and its effects. This is somewhat strange, considering that in the past, war inspired all kinds of remarkable art, whether we’re talking about the counterculture works of the 1960s and 1970s or the Surrealism we’re all so obsessed with today, which was a response to the First World War. If you’re middle-aged, the United States has been at war for the majority of your life. It’s impossible that most working artists don’t have some opinion about those wars. Could it be as simple as the fact that people don’t want to buy art inspired by war? Consider the unintended symbolism of that time artist-turned-dealer Tony Shafrazi graffitied Pablo Picasso’s Guernica (1937).
The Iraqi-American artist Michael Rakowitz (b. 1973) creates some of the most explicit art about war being made today. His new show at the Stavanger Art Museum, “Proxies for Poets and Palaces,” constitutes his first major survey in Norway and offers a strong overview of his practice at a time when American saber-rattling has turned in the unlikely direction of Europe.
At the center of the exhibition are eight reliefs conceived for the show as part of his ongoing series The Invisible Enemy Should Not Exist, which began in 2006 as an attempt to recreate the over 7,000 objects looted from Baghdad’s Iraq Museum in 2003 or otherwise destroyed at archaeological sites in the war-torn country. These new works take the form of eight wall reliefs made from cardboard, Arabic newspapers and food packaging.
