Missing in action: the art of the Atlas Group/Walid Raad - Critical Essay

ArtForum, Feb, 2003 by Lee Smith

Walid Raad is writing a history of contemporary events in Lebanon, a seemingly comprehensive essay using video, the Internet, performance, collage, and digital photography, not to mention prose in English, French, and Arabic. Given its scope and the obsessive nature of the cataloguing, it's not surprising that Raad has enlisted help in the form of the Atlas Group, a foundation comprising various individuals and institutions, some of which exist independently of their relationship to Raad and some of which don't. That is, the Atlas Group is real, but some of its components are made from a fictional fabric.

Hostage: The Bachar Tapes (#17 and #31) English Version, 2001, tells the story of Souheil Bachar, whose testimony deals with Western hostages kidnapped in Beirut in the '80s. Bachar addresses various dimensions of the crisis, like writing the experience of captivity and how Arab and Western masculinity is figured in the writing. The author of the work, who as it happens doesn't exist in reality, was given to imagining himself as the sixth and only Arab hostage. My Neck Is Thinner Than a Hair, 2001-, a file devoted to the history of the approximately 2.45 car bombs detonated in Lebanon between 1975 and 1991, derives from the notebooks and photographs of a certain Dr. Fadl Fakhouri, who during his lifetime, according to Raad, was the preeminent historian of the Lebanese civil wars. But there is no Dr. Fakhouri, and the vehicles seen in the collaged sheets that comprise the work, though based on the actual cars used as bombs during the seventeen-year period, were photographed recently on the streets of Lebanon b y Raad.

Missing Lebanese Wars, 1996--, presents volume 72. of Dr. Fakhouri's notebooks, a series of photographs of horse-race finishes cut out from the Lebanese newspaper An-Nahar and taped to yellow notebook pages. The story is of a group of Lebanese historians who gathered weekly at a Beirut track to gamble, although not on the races themselves: They bet on how far the winning horse would be from the finish line the moment the photograph was taken and whether the horse would have crossed the line or would be approaching it. Their notes, the winning time, the date, etc. are recorded. The aphoristic descriptions of the winning historian were ostensibly written by Dr. Fakhouri, but in fact they are composed of found passages Raad culled from English-language newspapers.

For all Raad's involvement, the Atlas Group is a collective, which includes but is not exclusive to the real author and imaginary ones. For instance, in the car bomb piece, it consists of, among others, those who will contribute architectural models and interview subjects who witnessed or were victimized by the bombs. Indeed, it even arguably includes the various militias that used the car bomb to terrorize and kill, since their contribution is an indispensable "document" of the military, economic, political, and social history of Lebanon.

Raad's work has enjoyed international success this past year. Included in Documenta II, he also was selected for the 2002. Whitney Biennial, where he presented a multimedia artist's talk in which some of the questions were scripted beforehand for planted audience members, as were some of the answers. Given the seamlessness of Raad's self-presentation, in his performances and his prose, and the amount of control he exercises over every detail of the project's composition and dissemination--continually retitling and refiling the work, revising biographies and histories--it's not surprising that much of the recent critical attention has focused narrowly on the nature of its authorship. The main story is commonly understood to be the Atlas Group itself rather than a further elaboration of the various stories the documents tell.

The conceit, after all, is undeniably a part of the work's appeal. The forged institution is part of the legacy of Conceptual art and literary modernism, kin to Broodthaers's Museum and Borges's library. Thus, there's certainly a temptation with Raad's work to see its central issues--which I take to be authority and authenticity--almost exclusively as markers for a certain style of writing and making that is a little suspicious of those activities.

The other critical temptation is to assert that the work, grounded in the realities of violence, the Middle East, and geopolitics, is an emanation of the really real, where authority and authenticity are taken for granted. Even if the prospect of a native Arab perspective is seductively urgent given the historical events of the past couple of years, this reading seems a little less plausible. To be sure, the Lebanese wars gave rise to the Atlas Group's various projects but we're also meant to see the wars as somehow participants in the constantly expanding collective of the Atlas Group. To take its foundations down to the real (politics, war, violence) or to the imaginary (Conceptual art, literature) seems just another way of asking, Who's really responsible for the Atlas Group? Another, maybe more useful question is, Who is the Atlas Group responsible to?