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

ArtForum, Feb, 2003 by Lee Smith

Raad was born in Chbanieh, Lebanon, in 1967 and raised in predominantly Christian East Beirut. The '80s were an especially rough period, beginning with Israel's 1982 invasion, and in '83, he fled the country. Western nations, particularly Canada and the United States, made visas available to Lebanese Christians, and Raad left to study medicine at Boston University before transferring to the Rochester Institute of Technology for photography, and then going on to the University of Rochester, where he earned a doctorate in visual and cultural studies.

Raad, who now teaches at Cooper Union and lives in Brooklyn and Beirut, explained in a recent interview that the US wasn't just a sanctuary during those years. "I never got to learn anything about the history of the Arab world," he said of his school years in Beirut, "or the history of Lebanon in a serious way. That training was in the United States." Nonetheless, Raad is probably not wrong to assume that most of his American audiences don't know much about Middle Eastern history. Thus, to avoid seeming to stack the deck on this particular subject, he'll usually have someone in the audience planted to answer those questions. The one Middle East topic he will handle himself is Iran-Contra, a strategy that places Raad in a lively cultural-historical tradition.

In the disastrous, illegal Iran-Contra affair, the Reagan administration forwarded profits from arms sold to the Iranians along to the Nicaraguan contras. In addition to the exchange of cash for weapons, the Iranians were to pressure their Lebanese clients, Islamic Jihad, to release the five Western hostages who had been in captivity for years; these men were included in Hostage: The Bachar Tapes. One of the hostages, Rev. Benjamin Weir, wrote after his release that during their captivity, "there became available a few books in English, provided not only for our recreational interest but presumably for our education. There was Edward Said's Covering Islam."

This is a nice scene, sufficiently literary for the Atlas Group's files (though I don't believe it's remarked upon there). It's hard to imagine the intellectual somersaults required of both the hostages and their captors to engage a metanarrative like Said's, which, as Weir succinctly put it, "dealt with the misunderstanding of Islam in the West." And yet the question isn't so much how, at gunpoint, there could be much mediated misunderstanding, but rather when does the other, Islam, the Arab world, stop seeing itself as the other and trying to explain itself from that position.

It would be difficult to overstate Said's influence during the last quarter century. His 1978 book Orientalism, arguing that Western representations of the Orient were in league with efforts to control and dominate the Orient politically, inspired strong cultural and academic work from the Middle East, Asia, Africa, Latin America, and various Western minority and diaspora communities to remake images of themselves after their own political desires. And yet only stewardship of the industry changed. It was no longer a case of, say, a white male Orientalist explaining the Orient, but the Orient was still the other, and the consumer, someone somewhere in the West, was essentially the same.