It's difficult to say if it was good or not, tricky to ascertain if the experience was worthwhile, and almost impossible to declare what merit Rakowitz's art actually has. Simply, because, I couldn't understand it. Or at least that's what I thought until I started writing about it. Reader, read on.
I didn't pay much to go in there. The day I went, the Whitechapel were doing one of those 'pay whatever you can afford' entrance thingies. I can't afford much these days. A blogger's life is not a rich one.
Rakowitz, an Iraqi-American, was born in 1973 and lives in Chicago and came to prominence with some really rather heartwarming and great ideas (inflatable shelters for homeless people and a food truck serving Iraqi cuisine - neither of which, sadly, are evident in this show). His human headed winged bull is currently situ on the fourth plinth of Trafalgar Square and it seems to me you'd probably get a better idea of his worth as an artist by visiting that or spending a night in one of his inflatable shelters in Chicago while chowing down on baytinijan maqli, fattoush, and tabbouleh than you'll get at the Whitechapel.
Eight installations, spread over two floors and two decades, hope to tell stories about buildings, modernity, and, I think - we've already established I was pretty much permanently discombobulated during my visit, memory - and how it sometimes tricks and fails us.
Dull Roar (2005)
Dull Roar (2005)
The show gets off to a good start. 2005's Dull Roar is one of the better, probably the best, things on display. The inflatable model of a tower block, which inflates and deflates live in front of your eyes, is based on the mid-century 'vertical neighbourhood' Pruitt-Igoe in St Louis, Missouri. Built in 1956 by Minoru Yamasaki and inspired by Le Corbusier, it housed over 10,000 people - segregated by colour as was the law in St Louis at the time.
Yamasaki's original idealistic plans had to be sacrificed for financial reasons and so playgrounds, gyms, and even landscaping of the gardens were done away with resulting, predictably, in vandalism and a building that soon fell into disrepair. In 1972 the entire building was demolished as a failure. It had lasted less than seventeen years. Even the Twin Towers that Yamasaki would build in New York one year after Pruitt-Igoe's destruction would last longer!
The rubble from Pruitt-Igoe was carted off to serve as landfill for luxury homes elsewhere in Missouri, an area that, in 1972, was the most expensive place to live in all of North America. The rich people literally pulled down the poor people's homes and built on their remains.
Yamasaki's original idealistic plans had to be sacrificed for financial reasons and so playgrounds, gyms, and even landscaping of the gardens were done away with resulting, predictably, in vandalism and a building that soon fell into disrepair. In 1972 the entire building was demolished as a failure. It had lasted less than seventeen years. Even the Twin Towers that Yamasaki would build in New York one year after Pruitt-Igoe's destruction would last longer!
The rubble from Pruitt-Igoe was carted off to serve as landfill for luxury homes elsewhere in Missouri, an area that, in 1972, was the most expensive place to live in all of North America. The rich people literally pulled down the poor people's homes and built on their remains.
But Michael Rakowitz is not that artist. What kind of artist he is I really don't know. I was soon to claim him for myself, though. To the side of Dull Roar there are some light, not unskilled, pencil drawings. These aren't apolitical. White man got no dreaming was made in collaboration with an Aboriginal community in Sydney, a political act in itself in these days of populism and rampant nationalism - though it must be noted it is over ten years old, who live in a place called The Block. The Block was acquired by the Aboriginal Housing Company to provide affordable homes in 1972, the year Pruitt-Igoe was pulled down.
White man got no dreaming (2008)
Real estate (2005)
There's also a model of Tatlin's utopian tower nearby (not every piece has a title under it in this write up because not every piece in the show does). The Monument to the Third International, to give it its other name, was proposed by Vladimir Tatlin in 1917, following the Bolshevik Revolution, as the HQ for world communism in St Petersburg. Unlike Pruitt-Igoe and the Twin Towers this one never even got off the ground in the first place which, architecturally at least, was quite a shame. It would have been the tallest building in the world, dwarfing the then title holder - the Eiffel Tower in Paris.
Bamiyan samples (undated)
So, the downstairs of the exhibition is reasonably easy to get one's head around - if you put a bit of work in. It's about architecture. It's about how architecture sometimes fails us. It's about the symbolism of architecture, hence samples of the statues from Bamiyan in Afghanistan that were destroyed by the Taliban in 2001. It's about how architecture often comes from idealistic places but is often hijacked and co-opted by capitalist forces and used to carry out an agenda very different from the one it was designed for. It is, and I'm riffing now, essentially a comment on how the rich have power and how they refuse to cede an inch of it in case the hoi polloi enter the room and start to take control of the narrative.
You want a vision of the future. It's Mark Field, MP for Cities and London of Westminster, manhandling a Greenpeace protestor. Forever. That's what the downstairs rooms were all about to me but it was once I'd climbed the stairs that things got really confusing.
I can understand how the once revolutionary music of The Beatles has, like architecture, been co-opted and defanged so that it no longer holds any threat (tbh, with songs like Hey Jude and Yesterday, McCartney was already working hard on that anyway) but I was struggling to make the link with that, Yasser Arafat, and Libya. As far as I know the role of The Beatles in the Arab Spring was minimal, if non-existent. Unless I missed something and Ringo Starr was instrumental in the overthrow of Zine El Abidine Ben Ali.
John! Paul! George! Ringo! Gamal! (2014)
Rakowitz, an ardent Beatles fan (we're told), imagines the band staying together and touring North Africa and the Middle East. There's a live concert recording you can watch (it was too busy and too long - so I didn't, I know what The Beatles sound like anyway), a radio show, fan club memorabilia, and the stuff I've included here.
Somehow, Rakowitz manages to tie in, pretty clunkily I'd contend, the death by heart attack of the Egyptian president Gamal Abdel Nasser in 1970, minarets, and the rise and fall of Pan-Arabism. It makes for some striking images but other than the suggestion that the career of The Beatles and the concept of Pan-Arabism were coterminous (a stretch but, hey, it's art) there's really not much else to say for it. It seems to me that Rakowitz loves The Beatles and he's interested in Arab politics so he's welded them together for a bit of fun.
Study for The Breakup - The Summer of Setback (2010-ongoing)
Study for The Breakup - The Summer of Setback (2010-ongoing)
Study for The Breakup - The Summer of Setback (2010-ongoing)
Study for The Breakup - The Summer of Setback (2010-ongoing)
Nothing wrong with that per se, but I'd had my expectations heightened by the political and architectural dimensions of the previous rooms. 2015's The flesh is yours, the bones are ours, commissioned by the Istanbul Biennale, falls somewhere between The Beatles and Tatlin's Tower.
It's undoubtedly pleasing to the eye, there's a lot to look at, which is still of some intrinsic value in art, I feel. In fact there's probably too much to look at. I didn't know where to start or how long I should spend looking at it. That's the trouble when there's too much stuff. I feel defeated by it and give up a bit. I probably shouldn't but it was sunny outside and I wanted to go and sit in the park.
Suggesting, quite obviously, that the art wasn't enthralling me as much as it might/should have. The concept here is to celebrate the architectural heritage and aesthetic of Armenian artisans like Garabet Cezayirliyan (me neither) who made the beautiful facades of modern Istanbul. But, it seems, what Rakowitz is trying to make us think about is the Amenian genocide of 1915 in which the Ottoman government systematically exterminated between one and a half and two million Armenians.
Turkey still refuses to recognise the event as a genocide and under the populist leadership of Recep Tayip Erdogan that doesn't seem likely to change in the near future. In fact, Erdogan is doing his own bit to crack down on anyone he considers undesirable (Kurds, left-wingers, right-wingers who don't agree with him, the press) and, no doubt, that's one of the things that Rakowitz is hoping to make us think about.
The flesh is yours, the bones are ours (2015)
The flesh is yours, the bones are ours (2015)
The flesh is yours, the bones are ours (2015)
The flesh is yours, the bones are ours (2015)
It's a noble, and admirable, intention - and art shouldn't have to always ask direct questions. It can ask abstruse and difficult ones. That's often its role. But the dark times we're in and the even darker times we're heading for (a racist, bullying, sexual assaulting, incompetent lying president of America has just this week been whipping a crowd in North Carolina up into racist chants of "send her back" and next week we seem set to have Boris fucking Johnson, another known liar and racist, in power in Britain) call for stronger action.
We've tried talking people out of authoritarianism, racism, sexism, and hate with logic, rational arguments, and reasoned debate and it's failed. These people don't go to art galleries, they don't read books, they don't employ critical thinking so, realistically, all you can do is give them a really fucking hard kick in the bollocks - and they usually do have bollocks (physically, metaphorically they've got no balls) because they're usually men.
The flesh is yours, the bones are ours (2015)
The flesh is yours, the bones are ours (2015)
The flesh is yours, the bones are ours (2015)
The fact I've got so aerated about it suggests, possibly, that Rakowitz's art has politicised me and has therefore succeeded. But then to not be angry when you see what these people are doing to the world is to be complicit. You can only put your head in the sand so long before you start to choke.
There's some stuff about ISIS (one of the few groups who hate women more than Trump, possibly a big influence on his politics what with putting people in cages and all that), and a little bit about Rakowitz's fourth plinth commission before the show ends with The Ballad of Special Ops Cody (which sounds like it might be the title of the new Coen Brothers film) and The Visionaries.
The Ballad of Special Ops Cody features a stop-motion video of a toy soldier interacting with Mesopotamian votive statues which you'd have to agree is fairly niche. I think the toy soldier is supposed to represent John Adam, an American hostage of a militant Islamist group who apologises to the statues for America's role in destabilising the region. When they impassively refuse to accept his apology, he joins them in the museum. No longer a soldier, no longer a man, but, like them, a mere victim of a geopolitical game played out way above his head. The memory of him is now more important than the actual experience he, or they, ever had of being human. Like The Beatles, like the radical post-war architectes he's been co-opted to serve a capitalist agenda.
The Visionaries is set in Budapest, a place that under Viktor Orban is being beaten down by the shitty stick of populism also. Collages have been created against the backdrop of a drawing by French architect Yona Friedman. Friedman, now 96 years old, proposed (back in 1956) a 'spatial city' so that people could more easily move around Europe. Something he'd probably be put in prison for now.
Rakowitz wandered around Budapest in 2006 wearing a sandwich board inviting the city's citizens to take part in a "project of the imagination" in which they'd imagine what could fill the spaces still left empty, and known as 'missing teeth', after being destroyed by retreating German forces in the 1940s.
There's some stuff about ISIS (one of the few groups who hate women more than Trump, possibly a big influence on his politics what with putting people in cages and all that), and a little bit about Rakowitz's fourth plinth commission before the show ends with The Ballad of Special Ops Cody (which sounds like it might be the title of the new Coen Brothers film) and The Visionaries.
The Ballad of Special Ops Cody features a stop-motion video of a toy soldier interacting with Mesopotamian votive statues which you'd have to agree is fairly niche. I think the toy soldier is supposed to represent John Adam, an American hostage of a militant Islamist group who apologises to the statues for America's role in destabilising the region. When they impassively refuse to accept his apology, he joins them in the museum. No longer a soldier, no longer a man, but, like them, a mere victim of a geopolitical game played out way above his head. The memory of him is now more important than the actual experience he, or they, ever had of being human. Like The Beatles, like the radical post-war architectes he's been co-opted to serve a capitalist agenda.
The Visionaries is set in Budapest, a place that under Viktor Orban is being beaten down by the shitty stick of populism also. Collages have been created against the backdrop of a drawing by French architect Yona Friedman. Friedman, now 96 years old, proposed (back in 1956) a 'spatial city' so that people could more easily move around Europe. Something he'd probably be put in prison for now.
Rakowitz wandered around Budapest in 2006 wearing a sandwich board inviting the city's citizens to take part in a "project of the imagination" in which they'd imagine what could fill the spaces still left empty, and known as 'missing teeth', after being destroyed by retreating German forces in the 1940s.
The Ballad of Special Ops Cody (2017)
The Ballad of Special Ops Cody (2017)
The Visionaries (2006)
The Visionaries (2006)
The Visionaries (2006)
They came up with some pretty good ideas. I particularly like the cars (below) driving through some kind of architectural caprice that seems to be both bridge and tunnel. But what they came up with, to me, doesn't seem the important thing. The fact they were asked to be creative seems to be what matters.
People, given the chance, are endlessly creative. Most of them want to live in a world that's better, fairer, nicer to look at. They want to live in a world where they're looked after if need be, a world where people hold doors open for each other instead of slamming them in each other's faces, and a world where those with the means to help others choose to do just that.
Rakowitz's art may have been, and was, confusing and often unclear, but the underlying message I got from this exhibition (and, to tell the truth, it only really became clear in my mind when I started putting this blog together) is that Michael Rakowitz is on the side of good.
Descending from Iraq, he's seen that country destroyed both by a strong leader (Saddam Hussein) and the unjust and unjustified war that at least removed Hussein from power. Living in Chicago he'll have witnessed huge wealth disparity and seen the damage that can do to parts of large cities. Undoubtedly he'll have come to the conclusion that these populist leaders, these demagoges du jour, are out only for their selves.
They're filthy rich greedy fucking parasitical bastards but they can only be like that if we allow them, if we vote for them, and if we provide platforms and power for them. They get (some of) us to do that by lying to us, by promising us things they neither intend to deliver nor ever could, and they do it by creating monsters and bogeymen and then pretending it's only them who can save us from these invented demons.
There's an old film where a woman is running away from who she believes is her potential killer. She runs right into the arms of the man who always planned to kill her. It's just a dumb b-movie if I remember rightly but if we don't make a seriously large u-turn very very soon we're making exactly the same mistake. Rakowitz might not have made me think that much about art but he did make me think about architecture, about politics, and about how terrifying our future will be unless we make a stand and make it now.
The Visionaries (2006)
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