by Jon Lackman | 18 December 2006 | Museums
From a review by Hashim Al-Tawil of “Out of Iraq: Artists’ Meditations on Their Homeland,” a show now at the National Arab American Museum (NAAM) in Dearborn: “The decision to host this show raises serious and troubling questions about the capabilities and/or intentions of those responsible at the museum. There was an obvious lack of artistic evaluation in this choice, and a lack of understanding of the impact of visual art on the Arab community [...] As military control alone cannot achieve the entire conquest of an occupied people, the occupation has employed a very specific strategy by which to ameliorate authentic Iraqi culture altogether, deconstruct its very essence and replace it with something more accepting of the foreign presence. Hence a program of ‘de-Arabizing’ Iraq and to a certain extent ‘de-Islamicizing’ Iraq has been implemented since the early days of the occupation. The majority of Iraq’s prominent artists and intellectuals resented the occupation and have not collaborated with the deconstruction of Iraqi culture. They have either left Iraq to resettle in neighboring Arab states, other countries in Europe, the Americas, or Australia, or have chosen to live in seclusion without their usual creative activity. However, a few Iraqi intellectuals, artists of lower rank and amateur writers did choose to cooperate and support the occupation for various political and financial reasons. Many Iraqis in the United States have also collaborated with the U.S. occupation and extended their ‘expertise’ to supporting the creation of the ‘new Iraq’ in the various fields of art, culture and media work as well as military related activity. The presentation of modern Iraqi art in the States following the occupation has reflected the chaos and the total ignorance of American art critics and art historians about modern Iraqi art. So dismal has the American approach to this issue been that the media has created a fanciful cultural scene that totally ignored the long-established modern art and culture of Iraq. Scores of hybrid Iraqi ‘experts,’ amateur American journalists and so-called art curators – who have no knowledge of modern Iraqi art – have miraculously emerged as ‘authorities’ on modern Iraqi art. They go on fantasizing on the subject, highlighting insignificant Iraqi art students and amateurs, and praising mediocre art as the rising new ‘post-Saddam’ Iraqi art.”
