"I'm not surprised if someone comes to the work and says, this is just formal crap," said Walid Raad. He was referring to his own photographs of the 1982 siege of Beirut, taken when he was only 15. (Hear the entire conversation on my weekly podcast, In/Visible.)
The large images, hung in rows that climb an impossibly tall wall at the Henry Art Gallery, are certainly guilty of being distant and beautiful. The prints are new, and their surfaces are smooth, but the images appear to be old, scratched, and discolored, because Raad produced them from degraded negatives. The gun on top of a tank, seen from below, juts heroically into a hot-pink-flecked sky with aquamarine blotches. Other skies are decorated with the smoke-trail sketches of ghostly warplanes and the tracers of missiles that may as well be firecrackers. What's with all the nostalgic loveliness? Innocence regained? A morose prediction about future violence in Beirut that happens to have recently come true? Redemption through aesthetics?
Well, those are all natural readings, and yet they miss the cheerlessness that duels with the romanticism at the heart of Raad's project. Ultimately, he isn't repairing the damage done by violent assaults, he's reporting on an emptiness that appears in their continual wake. If the substance of the situations seems to have withdrawn from these photographs—the flesh and blood of the disasters and their environments—then in its place is only winsome visual static. And it's the withdrawal of the world and its traditions, in the aftermath of a "surpassing disaster," as Raad's favorite writer, Jalal Toufic, would have it, that Raad wants to emphasize—not the static.
Part of why the images can be misleading is that it's tough work pointing to something that's missing. It's also hard to believe, as brilliant and doctrinaire as Raad is, that the dead ends aren't built in for a purpose, too. Misdirection is his stock in trade, after all. Around 1999, he founded The Atlas Group, a collective devoted to archiving the ephemera of war in contemporary Lebanon, from reconstituted car bombings (using details from exploded cars and interviews with doctors who treated victims) to the acts of the invented historian Dr. Fadl Fakhouri (who made a film based on frames snapped every time he thought war was over). The idea was to create a world in which the leftover bits of fragmentary evidence made sense.
Last year, at the Anthony Reynolds Gallery in London, Raad presented the same photographs now at the Henry under the parenthetically titled, (We Decided to Let Them Say "We Are Convinced" Twice. It Was More Convincing This Way.), but attributed them to a character named Marwan Hanna, who doesn't exist. Raad, in the past year, has closed the archive of The Atlas Group and changed tacks. Now, he puts his name to his own photographs, calling himself the author of his questing counterfeits. Are we convinced? Raad convinces us, as he convinces himself, of nothing.
A new In/Visible podcast is available for download every Thursday at www.thestranger.com/visualarts.
