Museum as Preface: Walid Raad’s History of Art in the Arab World

To mark the 2012 inauguration of the Louvre’s new wing devoted to the Department of Islamic Art, in Paris, Lebanese artist Walid Raad was invited as a resident artist to produce an exhibition in response to the museum collection.⁰¹ Raad developed a mixed-media installation that included a video of some objects in the collection as they underwent an unforeseen metamorphosis, and a series of metal cut-outs that reproduced the contours of typical museum spaces. Suspended from the ceiling, the silhouettes floated in mid-air where they were hit by neon vertical lights casting linear shadows of doorways and corridors onto the walls and the floor of the Salle de la Maquette.⁰² This spectral doubling of the museum architecture, dramatically intensified by the projected shadows, both echoed and highlighted the framing function of the gallery, its crucial yet often occluded role in the definition of artistic and historical value. Exhibited in 2013, the installation was tellingly titled Preface to the First Edition.⁰³

Jacques Derrida discusses the irony of prefaces in the extended preface to his 1972 book Dissemination. A text written after but intended to be read before the main text, Derrida points out how prefaces seem to have always been composed ‘in view of their own self-effacement … [p]receding what ought to be able to present itself on its own’.⁰⁴ Although typically viewed as an external and even negligible element, prefaces, both authorial or allographic, perform an important hermeneutic function in extending and reframing the text proper, often revisiting it through the eyes of a present to which the new edition is addressed. Together with other peripheral elements – titles, appendixes, footnotes, but also book covers, illustrations and other graphical elements – prefaces are an instance of what literary theorist Gérard Genette calls the paratext. Paratextual elements, as Genette writes, serve ‘to ensure the text’s presence in the world, its “reception” and consumption’; they are ‘what enables a text to become a book and to be offered as such to its readers and, more generally, to the public’. In view of their liminal status, of their being ‘neither on the interior nor the exterior’ of the text, and yet such an important key to its access, Genette calls these elements ‘thresholds of interpretation’.⁰⁵

In naming his work a preface, Raad ironically points to the prefatory function of the museum’s commission. As the imperial origins and epistemic foundations of museum collections across the West come into sharper focus – raising inescapable debates about how they should be presented and contextualised, or whether they should be there at all – contemporary artists are often summoned to provide these objects with a critical palimpsest that lends a veneer of performative self-reflexivity to the spoils of colonial plunder.⁰⁶ Yet, such artistic prefaces, more suited to the new critical exigencies of the historical present, are appended to an already existent exegetic apparatus, bolstered by centuries of practice. In replicating the contours of the museum – those doorways that visually recall Genette’s ‘thresholds of interpretation’ – Raad wittily reveals how not only his artwork, but the institution itself, is already a preface: an introductory, ever-present, yet self-effacing frame guiding our perception of its contents. With its practices of collection, documentation and classification, its technologies of framing and display, the museum presents through its material holdings a particular version of the past, and yet by naturalising such a presentation, cancels out its prefatory function.

Despite its title, Raad’s piece is not a preface to a missing history of art yet to be written; rather it is a caustic epilogue to a history that has already been written.⁰⁷ It serves as a wry commentary to a canon already established through ‘the power of colonial knowledge-gathering’: the forced severance of objects from the people who made them; their hierarchical classification and the coercive imposition of new meanings, values and uses; the destruction, depletion and continued exploitation of the living contexts (people, cultures, environments) they were once part of.⁰⁸ The scripted history that the museum tells is haunted by the lack of what could have been read or heard in its place: the omitted violence through which artefacts were acquired; the absence of what was lost or destroyed in the pillage; the lasting traumas that haunt the present; the cultural forms – epistemologies, cosmologies, knowledges – that were discredited, discontinued or forgotten.

Preface to the First Edition is part of a larger, multi-volume project that Raad has been developing since 2007. Titled Scratching on Things I Could Disavow: A History of Art in the Arab World, this miscellaneous corpus of works comprises an interrelated series of narratives, photographs, videos, sculptures, installations, theatrical stagings and performances. As the subtitle hints at, the project both proposes a personal and peculiar history of art in the Arab world and looks at how that history is currently being reframed and rewritten.⁰⁹ Initiated in parallel to and prompted by the construction of new, internationally integrated infrastructures for the visual arts across the Arab region,¹⁰ the project investigates the institutions, historiographical concepts, taxonomies, chronologies, pedagogies and economies that are being developed and elaborated as part of such a process. Instead of the backbone of the archive famously deployed in The Atlas Group (1989–2004),¹¹ in Scratching Raad uses the device of the museum display, the curatorial voice and the gallery tour as means to question art historical narratives and museological practices.¹² Notably, most of the series of works that fall under Scratching, are named after one of the different components of a virtual book – in all likelihood an academic publication. Besides a handful of sections of scattered chapters, one finds a disorderly profusion of paratexts: a translator’s introduction, an index, appendixes, footnotes, an acknowledgement, several prefaces to a fast-growing number of editions (one of which in Arabic), a postscript and a prologue. However, the manuscript made up of all these fragments is never conjured in its entirety: the text to which the various addenda refer is the blank centre of the project, the void of an impossible history.

In shaping his works as paratexts, on the one hand, Raad directs our attention towards the material, institutional and discursive infrastructure that, paraphrasing Genette, enables a work to become an artwork and to be offered as such to its viewers and, more generally, to the public. He directs our attention to structures of reception and how they are adopted, adapted and altered. On the other hand, and in line with Derrida’s project of dissemination, Raad’s production of supplements can be seen as a strategy that serves to undo, from within, the master narrative of the art historical canon. Both addition and substitute, for Derrida, supplements create an ungovernable excess: a remainder that has the potential to resist gestures of recuperation within the unitary and totalising structure of the Book.¹³ Like a homoeopathic treatment that turns the poison into its cure, the uncontrolled proliferation of various kinds of paratexts foils and thwarts attempts of epistemic mastery and containment.

Misrecognitions

Most of the pieces that comprise Scratching revolve around the moment of art’s transmission and reception: the way in which objects and narratives are encountered, passed on, translated, interpreted and represented. Yet, as the tradition these objects were once part of was forcibly interrupted by colonial violence, wars and occupation, transmission is far from smooth. All the ‘reception events’ that Raad stages are chronically haunted by unexpected alterations, delays, withdrawals, literal blockages, occlusions, mistranslations and inconsistencies. Such imperfect reception typically takes place within the museum walls, a space rife with epistemic fissures, interpretative foreclosures and equivocations. Besides being tethered to the circuits of global capital, as we have seen, museums also embody a sedimentation of professional practices, conceptual habits and cultural dispositions that might be said to belong to what Ann Laura Stoler defines as ‘imperial duress’. With its inference of ‘hardened, tenacious qualities’, the concept of duress denotes how the histories and afterlives of imperialism and colonialism continue to actively shape a supposedly postcolonial present.²⁷ It also points to the way in which the ongoing effects of such histories are disavowed through ‘acts of obstruction – of categories, concepts, and ways of knowing that disable linkages to imperial practice’.²⁸ In the discipline of art history, such processes of occlusion often result from a more or less inadvertent reliance on Eurocentric or North-Atlantic taxonomies of cultural difference that are still entrenched in both academic scholarship and institutional apparatuses, in what Stoler characterises as ‘the disparaged remainders cast out from the categories and concepts of colonial narratives’.²⁹ Part of Stoler’s venture is, then, to understand, unlearn and undo these occlusions, so as to open alternative genealogies and ways of thinking otherwise.

In Raad’s Preface to the Seventh Edition (2012), an instance of such occlusions is rendered as a play of optical illusions and misperceptions. Commissioned by and first displayed in Mathaf: Arab Museum of Modern Art in Doha, the piece consists of a series of six paintings that, as we learn from the accompanying wall text, were for a long time regarded as ‘canonical examples of early twentieth century Arab abstraction’ and exhibited as such in a hypothetical Emirati museum. Yet, the eventual discovery that each work was in fact a ‘painting of a painting’s shadow’, and thus actually an example of figuration, caused their sudden removal from the museum display. Losing their status as paradigmatic examples of modern Arab abstraction, the paintings were crossed out from the newly formed canon. In one of the versions of the work’s narrative, the paintings are bluntly characterised as ‘paintings of western paintings’ shadows’, making explicit the Eurocentric tendency to consider non-Western modernisms as ‘derivative’ and ‘inauthentic’: a mere, second-rate imitation of a Western template. As Iftikhar Dadi explains, in Western perception and narratives, non-Western modern art has been construed either as ‘a belated and impoverished derivative response to Western modernism’ or as a betrayal of a purported local aesthetic tradition, always invariably situated in the premodern era.³⁰

It is not a coincidence that Raad’s anecdote of misrecognition plays out around specious abstractions. The genre of abstract art is considered more closely associated to an indigenous tradition of premodern Islamic art whose dominant forms are geometry, the arabesque and calligraphy, whereas figurative art – particularly in the format of oil painting – is seen as a nineteenth-century European import, introduced in the region’s bourgeois homes and newly established beaux-arts academies during the colonial period.³¹ In an attempt to recuperate and cultivate notions of Pan-Arab culture, postcolonial and national histories of modern Arab art, which have often developed through state-centric patronage, have tended to privilege native motifs (like abstraction) and to exclude what does not qualify as recognisable ‘Arab’ art, thus unwittingly echoing Western expectations of cultural ‘authenticity’. In Raad’s tale, the discovery of a figurative inscription in what was hitherto seen as an original example of modernist Arab abstraction disturbs such attempts with a disruptive form that does not map smoothly in constructions of cultural continuity with an autochthonous heritage. On the other hand, however, the paintings of a painting’s shadow also fail to line up with the criteria of medium-specificity, anti-illusionism and self-reflexivity that famously constitute the hallmarks of the Greenbergian version of formalist abstraction and modernist painting. These unclassifiable paintings conform neither with narratives of an unbroken continuity with a fully recovered past tradition nor with Euro-American formalist constructions of modern art as an autonomous and self-reflexive field. They are rather, in Kobena Mercer’s definition, ‘discrepant abstractions’ incommensurable with the ‘institutional narrative of abstract art as a monolithic quest for “purity”’ – whether that be the Greenbergian purity of the medium or the purity of national origins.³² The equivocation of Raad’s narrative points to the necessity of reconceptualising the theoretical construction of the field of abstract art, as well as the histories of other genres of modern art, so that they are made to bear upon different genealogies.

‘Reckoning with genealogies of the modern’ in the postcolony, as Jessica Winegar has amply demonstrated in her study of modern Egyptian art, is fraught with contradictions. Yet, the recognition of the often-omitted plurality of such ‘genealogies’ – the multiple ‘twists and turns’ that the concept of the modern has taken over time – serves as an antidote against singular, historicist narratives that emphasise origins and originality.³³ Genealogy is a particularly appropriate term here. As proposed by Friedrich Nietzsche and famously taken up by Michel Foucault, genealogy does not amount to a search for pure origins (Ursprung). The genealogist finds ‘something altogether different’ behind things; not immutable and timeless essences, but rather the discovery that there are no essences to start with. Or, as Foucault would say, that their essence was ‘fabricated in a piecemeal fashion from alien forms’.³⁴ In fact, in reconstructing, for instance, the history of abstraction along divergent or discrepant genealogical lines, one may find cross-cultural routes of exchange and influence that invalidate versions of unilateral borrowing or Euro-American primacy, as well as the tendency to reify culture through a narrative of authenticity. Refusing a search for distilled origins, this genealogical method is tuned in to “differential histories” and “interrupted imaginaries”, as well as ‘those haphazard moments when narratives are revised’.³⁵ In presenting a stereoscopic mode of vision by which a painting can be simultaneously figurative and abstract, Raad makes us see otherwise.

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With its accretion of prefaces and other paratextual elements, Raad’s project denaturalises familiar ‘ways of seeing’ and unchecked conceptual habits within the iterable spaces of the museum. In making visible the ‘thresholds of interpretation’ that always frame our encounter with cultural production and in questioning our capacity to truly access what seems readily available, his speculative fictions work to foreground the contradictory ways in which the reception of art continues to be filtered through cultural mistranslations and colonial holdovers. Recognising such occlusions appears a vital step so that an alternative preface could perhaps be written.