Our title, besides being a riff on the activist group-cum-slogan “Decolonize This Place,” is meant to make the negative image of cultural “decolonization” productive, especially as raised by the specific institutional and historical frame of “Theater of Operations: The Gulf Wars 1991–2011,” a recent exhibition at MoMA PS1 in New York. Activist reaction aside, we wonder how the immanent violence of the institution might be thought here in terms of the intellectual duties of exhibition. We are prompted also by a recent work by Francisco Godoy Vega, who has proposed a “recolonial” understanding of exhibitions of Latin American art staged in the Iberian peninsula during roughly the same period covered by “Theater of Operations”—a similar historical encounter between the avowedly redemptive cultural politics of “decolonization” and the political economy of colonialisms past and present. See Francisco Godoy Vega, La exposición como recolonización: Exposiciones de arte latinoamericano en el Estado español, 1989–2010 (The exhibition as recolonization: Exhibitions of Latin American art in the Spanish state, 1989–2010) (2018).
“Souvenirs of Gulf War Find Way to Museums,” New York Times, May 28, 1991 →.
Allan Sekula, “War Without Bodies,” pamphlet and article in Artforum, November 1991.
See Rijin Sahakian, “A Reply to Nato Thompson’s ‘The Insurgents, Part I,’” e-flux journal, no. 48 (October 2013) →. The historian Keith Watenpaugh has argued that the “history of modern humanitarianism tells us that at the center of humanitarian reason is a project of unstrangering the object of humanitarianism.” What he means is that humanitarianism belongs not to the liberal schema of stranger-ethics, that opening up of “compassion—as opposed to pity—to the generic stranger,” but rather positions its others as “knowable, similar, and deserving.” See Keith Watenpaugh, Bread from Stones: The Middle East and the Making of Modern Humanitarianism (University of California Press, 2015), 19. For a broader view on the epistemic implication of the humanitarian frame in the construction of “global” historical narratives, see Daniel Bertrand Monk and Andrew Herscher (and respondents) in “A Discussion on the Global and the Universal,” Grey Room 61 (Fall 2015): 66–127.
In private discussions with one of the authors of this article and various exhibition participants, the curators of this show have contended that PS1 and MoMA are distinct entities. This is essentially untrue. The chairman of the board of the Museum of Modern Art has a permanent appointment, ex officio, on the PS1 board. Insofar as PS1 is, for historical and logistical reasons relating to the public land it occupies, a separate legal entity, MoMA is the “sole corporate member” of that separate legal entity. Here is how MoMA has described this relationship in its tax filings: “The Museum as sole Member of PS1 Contemporary Art Center, Inc (DBA MoMA PS1). In 2000 MoMA PS1 and the Museum entered into an affiliation to promote the study, knowledge, enjoyment and appreciation of modern and contemporary art through a collaborative program of exhibitions, research, special projects and other educational and curatorial activities. MoMA PS1 retained its separate corporate status and is a support corporation of the Museum with the Museum as its sole corporate member. The Museum has the right to appoint all members of the MoMA PS1 board of Directors. MoMA PS1 and the Museum entered into a management assistance and services agreement whereby the Museum provides management assistance and service to MoMA PS1 in certain areas, including accounting and payroll, fundraising and development, coordination of MoMA PS1’s information technology, insurance and legal affairs.” Museum of Modern Art, Internal Revenue Service Form 990, Schedule I, Part IV, Page 2 (2016).
A. B. Krongrad served as the executive director of the CIA from 2001 to 2004; see his bio here →. He briefly served on the board of Blackwater, resigning after an incredible episode in which his brother, who was then the State Department inspector general and therefore responsible for investigating the company, perjured himself when asked under oath if his brother A. B. was on its board. See Scott Shane, “Brothers, Bad Blood and the Blackwater Tangle,” New York Times, November 17, 2007 →.
Mostafa Heddaya, “An Outsourced Vision? The Trouble with Iraq’s ‘Neocolonial’ Venice Pavilion,” ARTINFO, April 2, 2015 →. In a review of Tamara Chalabi’s 2011 family memoir, a New York Times reporter fondly recounts meeting her while embedded with US Special Forces: “The Chalabis occupied the one intact structure on the bombed-out, postage-stamp-size air defense installation, while we camped in the twisted ruins and fly-infested dirt. Tamara graciously shared with me the transformer shed she had rigged into a shower.” Linda Robinson, “By the Banks of the Tigris,” New York Times, January 21, 2011 →. Bookforum’s reviewer was less sanguine: →.
See Mike Stone, “Apollo Global in Talks to Buy Constellis,” Reuters, August 5, 2016 →.
Theater of Operations: The Gulf Wars 1991–2011, exhibition catalog, eds. Peter Eleey and Ruba Katrib (MoMA PS1, 2019), 10.
Theater of Operations, 27.
We are influenced in this formulation not only by the exhibition’s reanimation of Jean Baudrillard, to whom we will briefly return below, but also by Baudrillard’s emplotment in a broader intellectual history, one critically engaged by Lutz Niethammer’s Posthistoire: Has History Come to an End?, trans. Patrick Camiller (Verso 1994), and Hal Foster’s The Return of the Real: Art and Theory at the End of the Century (October Books, 1996), in which the term “posthistorical museum” also makes an early appearance. In an evocative footnote, Foster quotes the artist Ashley Bickerton’s posthistorical identification with an end of politics: “We are now in a post-political situation,” 257n34.
Kate Fowle, “Foreword,” in Theater of Operations, 7.
As Enwezor wrote about “The Short Century”: “Perhaps there is a need to clarify a central operating principle of this exhibition, namely to examine the link between independence movements and liberation struggles as methods for achieving African political autonomy and cultural self-awareness.” Okwui Enwezor, “An Introduction,” The Short Century: Independence and Liberation Movements in Africa 1945–1994, exhibition catalog, eds. Okwui Enwezor and Chinua Achebe (Prestel, 2001), 11.
Jason Farago and Tim Arango, “These Artists Refuse to Forget the Wars in Iraq,” New York Times, November 15, 2019 →.
See MoMA’s description of the exhibition on its website →.
Jean Baudrillard, The Gulf War Did Not Take Place (Indiana University Press, 1995), 24. The granting of keystone catalog real estate to that catastrophizing Cassandra of posthistory is meant as a keyword association with the Gulf War but is also a calling card for the “posthistorical museum” itself, which took shape during the very same period called into question by this exhibition. For Baudrillard, the Gulf War was a case study in the violent mediations of “anorexic history” that he, along with other diagnosticians of posthistory on either side of the Atlantic, had signaled in the penultimate decade of the twentieth century. “Theater of Operations” portends to dissolve this old posthistory, what with its past flattening of Iraqi agency, only to propose a new one that sounds just like it—a “contiguous globalized ether that presupposes a borderless relationality internally consistent with itself,” per the curatorial jargonization.
See Rijin Sahakian, “It Is What It Is,” Jadaliyya, February 22, 2012 →.
“Francis Alÿs on his Embedment with the Kurdish Army in Mosul,” Artforum, February 9, 2017 →.
Dia Azzawi darkened the gallery room that held his work Mission of Destruction (2004–07) on February 6, 2020, to mark the anniversary of Colin Powell’s UN speech claiming that Saddam Hussein possessed weapons of mass destruction. On the same day, and to mark the same event, Wafaa Bilal held a performance, October, that involved altering books that visitors had brought into the museum, which were to be sent to the College of Fine Arts in Baghdad.
In his words: “By remaking this piece yet again through its unmaking, I claim my right to resistance, in the museum, and in solidarity with Iraqis leading a revolution against their destruction and exploitation today.” See the video of Yass delivering his statement on YouTube →.
According to a spokesperson for the museum, “There are no circumstances under which MoMA PS1 would accept the destruction of artworks or aggression towards our staff or visitors. When a few dozen protesters arrived at MoMA PS1 on the last day of ‘Theater of Operations,’ they were offered public space within the museum to be heard. The protesters’ threats to staff, property, and art forced the temporary closure of several exhibition galleries to the public. We are proud of the unwavering respect and professionalism our team showed to all.” Quoted in Alex Greenberger, ARTnews, March 2, 2020 →.
The listing, which has since disappeared, was posted on the Constellis website →.
The term “toxic philanthropy” came into currency around the public strafing of Whitney trustee Warren B. Kanders in connection with that museum’s 2019 biennial, where, like “Theater of Operations,” liberal-ethical messaging (and contemporaneous media outrages) highlighted a longstanding institutional affiliation with carceral border policing, at least in the form of Kanders’s business interests. While the public humiliation of plutocrats is never unproductive, “toxic philanthropy” is nevertheless an imprecise sobriquet: it turns the identity of capital into a reformable trait. David Joselit recently proposed a parallel if ultimately different diagnosis of the “double bind” between artistic reaction and institutional messaging. See Joselit, “Toxic Philanthropy,” October, no. 170 (Fall 2019). For an example of the toxic philanthropy narrative used in the context of “Theater of Operations,” see Zachary Small, “Michael Rakowitz Wants to Pause His Video Work at MoMA PS1 as a Protest Against Museum’s ties to ‘Toxic Philanthropy,’” The Art Newspaper, December 2, 2019 →.
