Project 19: Abdelali Dahrouch

Laura Kuo's Essay | Images from the Exhibition | Dahrouch Home Page Fall 2003 Archive

to an Iraqi poet

A desert for sound and a desert for silence,
a desert for eternal absurdity,
a desert for the tablets of the law,
a desert for school books, prophets and scientists,
a desert for Shakespeare,
a desert for those who look for God in the human being,
the last Arab writes:
I am the Arab that never was,
the Arab that never was.

Mahmoud Darwish
 

DESERT SIN

In a dark 25’ x 15’ room, resting on a field of blank white pages, a single television set screens a 30-minute video on a loop. Images of U.S. government officials, weaponry, military missions, Iraqi mothers and fathers, dead soldiers, and prisoners become ghostly shapes swelling into mysterious impressions, haunting and grotesque, they are undeniably seductive. The viewer is enlisted into a journey of hypnotic discovery—from that final moment of abstraction that inevitably dissolves into horror when the frame morphs from the luminous beauty of an impressionistic painting into what the viewer soon realizes is a city under the blaze of missile attacks and carpet bombings—from the ghostly sinuous silhouettes that sway in undulating black waves into the crystallization of bodies of veiled Iraqi mothers searching among a sea of corpses for their dead sons. The mood is ominous; there is no sound, and yet deafening drums of war can still shatter one’s eardrums. The pages of paper upon which the narrative plays represent tabula rasa—the blank slate—the white washing of American representation and history.

Artist Abdelali Dahrouch created the video installation, Desert Sin, in 1997 as a personal response to the daily bombardment of images and sounds by mainstream American media during the first protracted Persian Gulf War. 2 Through his depiction of corporate news footage of the 1991 combat, Dahrouch’s video captures discursive media constructions of war as they are linked to the tyranny and propaganda of imperialism.

Desert Sin, 1995
Grieving Iraqi Father

The images of Desert Sin are electronic remains of a suspended moment in time. The silent screen conveys the distortion of both image and information wielded by technologies of dissemination. Dahrouch manipulates the image and reduces it to its pixels in order to illuminate the filtered and murky reality of the battleground. He describes this process in a 1997 statement:

I used a Hi8 camcorder to appropriate these images, those fragments of information. In the editing room images were manipulated to a higher level of abstraction in order to convey a sense of concealment. Through the process of generations (a copy of a copy), the image degenerates slowly, and the pixels are revealed. Everything becomes abstract, fuzzy, and surreal. And by slowing down the tape, I attempted to suspend time, one continuous, cyclical suspended moment with no beginning or end. 3

Dahrouch continues:

Images appear, faintly, through the luminous screen as if matter and its connective molecules are breaking down. As we glimpse at a consciousness of illogical rectitude, a consciousness of maddening logic— as we listen to distant voices, echoes of insanity, words, code words, unaware of their weight, uttered by bodies unaware of their own existence—only through the negation and annihilation of the other, we, the telespectators, have become part of the visual cacophonous orgy through our collective and narcissistic voyeurism. (Dahrouch, 1997)

In her essay “The Imperial Imaginary,” Ella Shohat writes, “Television news offered its spectator what Donna Haraway, in another context, calls ‘the conquering gaze from nowhere,’ a gaze that claims ‘the power to see and not be seen, to represent while escaping representation.’”4 As Dahrouch writes, “The spectator has a virtual front row seat at the ‘theater of operation.’ S/he is simultaneously entertained and desensitized by displays of aggression experienced from an antiseptic distance, depicted not unlike fireworks on the fourth of July.” (Dahrouch, 1997) It would seem that Desert Sin desolately contemplates no end in sight to Independence Day.


DESERT SIN, REVISITED

There is an urgency to revisit the themes and issues that Dahrouch aimed to address a decade ago. Following the ensuing silent genocide of “Operation Desert Storm”—twelve continuous years of bomb raids, economic sanctions and civil subjugation—Post 9-11 unilateralism and the “Project of the New American Century” have launched a renewed epic of violence and destruction unfolding under the banner of “Operation Iraqi Freedom.” In her book, Power Politics, Arundhati Roy comments:

Powerful, pitiless and armed to the teeth. He’s the kind of king the world has never known before. His realm is raw capital, his conquests emerging markets, his prayers profits, his borders limitless, his weapons nuclear. To even try and imagine him, to hold the whole of him in your field of vision, is to situate yourself at the very edge of sanity, to offer yourself up for ridicule.5

Television news depicting the current Gulf War in the months after March 2003 reproduce and rely upon the identical imagery and tropes Dahrouch interrogated in 1995, such that Desert Sin represents the symbolic process of ahistoricism involved in American imperialist practices. The images of Desert Sin function with the same currency as they did a decade ago. They are perhaps even more salient now. Today the carnage ensues as national and international communities look on, linked through their simultaneous inculcation by and resistance to the American superpower and its media machine.

In other work, Dahrouch challenges these media conventions as they bear upon gender, racial, ethnic, and economic subjugation. In his installation, Narratives (2003), he foregrounds the silencing of Palestinian women's lives and legacies. Narratives comprises ten 8 x 11” framed pieces hung in linear fashion. Each piece contains a printed Zionist statement superimposed in ink upon embossed Palestinian women’s narratives (quotes, tales, folklore, interviews, testimonials). Along related themes, his installation, Resolutions (2002), interrogates the ineffectual role of the UN in relation to the occupation of Palestine. Hundreds of pages of UN documents are strewn onto the floor, wall to wall, with sounds of overlapping conversations between UN Security Council delegates debating, in vain, viable resolutions for the “conflict.” Liquid Cemetery was conceived in 2001 and explores working class migration of Moroccan laborers fleeing to Spain (the gateway to Europe), only to die in the treacherous waters of the Strait of Gibraltar. Projections of water are accompanied by sounds of mothers crying for their dead children. In Another Day of Harvest (2000)—which engages the ethnic cleansing of Muslims by Serbs in Kosovo—Dahrouch impresses the names of the dead and disappeared onto a bed of loose plaster, with sounds of thunder and rain reverberating through the installation space. His 1999 piece It Depends On What Meaning of the Word 'Is' Is focuses on Bill Clinton's famous retort when faced with perjury in the Lewinsky sex scandal. In one site-specific installation, Dahrouch creates a visual and auditory arena of chaos and cacophony exploring notions of semantics and their playing power. He juxtaposes Bill Clinton and the character Humpty Dumpty, in the fairy tale “Alice Through the Looking Glass,” as masters of language. In another exhibit, he creates a five-channel installation with distorted images and sounds of U.S. government officials attempting to placate the American public, surrounded by four walls covered with hundreds of seemingly innocuous military code words for weaponry and missions, such as “soft target,” “tacit rainbow,” and “big boy.” In these installations and others, Dahrouch pushes the boundaries of what counts as “representation.” He complicates his imagery further by projecting his film onto sculpted surfaces, and he engineers acoustics to transform the environment. Like Desert Sin, Dahrouch’s installations create atmospheres of critique and reflection, which leave the viewer contemplating questions of justice, equality, and truth.

It is 2003 and Dahrouch’s “art of conscience” has never been as charged with currency and overwrought symbolism. Desert Sin is revisited.


THE NATION STATE

The larger context of destruction to which both Dahrouch in Desert Sin, and Darwish in the epigraph A Horse For a Stranger, refer is the sin of hegemony. Memorialized in the obliteration of land and posterity, it is the sin of arrogance and the sin of colonization. These sins are embedded in legacies of colonial empire, politics of paternalism, and mythologies of self and other; good and evil; home and foreign land; First World and Third World; nation and border.

There is the illusion that the U.S. as a nation-state operates as an entity unto its own. Arundhati Roy quotes George Bush, Sr. in her book, War Talk, “I will never apologize for the United States of America,” the former President has said, “I don’t care what the facts are.”6 American imperialism functions on the premise that the nation is exempt from history and international law. This myth of independence is grounded on the premise that our national interest and our actions are privatized to our domestic sphere. However, the reality is that U.S. foreign policy and first world monopolizations of natural resources (i.e., oil and gas) are directly linked to global warming, the plummeting of Third World eco-systems, the colonization of land, and the subjugation, genocide, and ethnic cleansing of populations. In a recent statement speaking to the political relevance of his work, Dahrouch writes:

As Americans, we are conditioned to accept the idea of fixed community whereby the individual pledges allegiance to a flag, a language, and a political system as if every citizen’s heart beats in unison to the same drums of patriotism. “United we stand” and “God Bless America” are the unifying and fixed political and ideological borders of our citizenry. While they are seemingly affirming as textual slogans, in actuality, they are bankrupt in vision and scope for they rely on paranoia and hatred, while negating the inherent interdependence of our world (nations among nations) and our humanity as world citizens.7

The fictive construction of the U.S. nation-state as homogenous and monolithic endeavors to eradicate those communities existing in between cultures and nations. But another vision of nation is made possible through the work and life of Dahrouch. The nation of which Dahrouch speaks is one of transnational migration, cultural hybridity, and pluralism. Born in Morocco to a devout Muslim family, Dahrouch’s family migrated to France when he was three years old. Raised in the countryside of Southern France, Dahrouch experienced the marginality and racism common to working class immigrant communities. He retreated into a world of art and language, and emigrated to the United States at the age of 18 to study art. Trained as a painter, Dahrouch began to pursue multimedia art as a vehicle to address the political and social issues in which he was immersed as an activist and writer.

Arab and Buddhist; American citizen and Moroccan expatriate; linguistically French and fluently multilingual, Dahrouch is the penultimate insider-outsider. One might call his life a paradox, one of contradiction, but I would argue that the manner in which Dahrouch represents and manifests the gentle rhythm of synthesis and synergy in his art and politics is a life of interdependence and consciousness, one of fluid integration and necessary ambivalence. As an American in the U.S., his work complicates the logic of blind patriotism and nationalism. He embraces the reality of difference, and allows for its inevitable ambiguities to assert their presence. The political tenets of this cultural complexity, and the detrimental consequences of its disavowal by national rhetoric and politics (“If you’re not with us, you’re against us”) are what fuel Dahrouch’s work. He says:

As an artist and a subject—whose life has been and continues to be one of migration and exile, and whose physical realm is caught in time and space—I exist beyond a singular notion of nationhood and its totalizing political construct. The U.S., of which I am a citizen—both Arab and American—is both home and a foreign land. I belong nowhere, but I am a part of everything. Everywhere I go I see those who belong, but are unseen; those who participate and contribute, but go unrecognized. They surround me. There are two American nations—one representing diverse communities of scholars, activists, cultural producers, and laborers striving everyday for social change and justice, and another representing ghostly subjects who speak of vacuous lies and translate them into national rhetoric. This rhetoric endeavors toward the concentration of power through globalization and the erosion of welfare and humanity. (Dahrouch, 2003)


TRANSNATIONALISM AND FLEXIBLE CITIZENSHIP

This nation that Dahrouch embodies is one of travel, migration, and fluidity. It comprises
diverse peoples who make the U.S. a transnational society. Dahrouch writes:

Justice, peace, and the rule of international law do not have a home in Pax Americana. But even as the Bush Administration lends forth one idea of nation, there is another, and I believe it is stronger. It is composed of diverse communities of individuals in this country and beyond who represent cultures of difference and plurality, of mixing and travel, who work together across borders to build alliances of solidarity and projects of peace. The U.S. as a transnation represents one such space in which this collaborative work and community-building is forged, and as artists, this dimension of our contribution is perhaps most significant. (Dahrouch, 2003, emphasis mine)

Dahrouch’s work exemplifies the politics of flexible citizenry and transnational cultural production that Aihwa Ong highlights in her text, Flexible Citizenship: The Cultural Logics of Transnationality. Ong defines “transnationality” as “the condition of cultural interconnectedness and mobility across space.”8 For Third World subjects in the U.S., who often exist in between worlds—in between nations—culture is complex and abstract. We interpret and make sense of our worlds through food, cultural and religious practices, values, customs, and multiple languages (English, French, Spanish, and Moroccan Arabic, if you are Dahrouch). These aspects of difference become embodied within us, and make our lives as Americans distinct.

While the U.S. and Third World are often represented as separate entities, they do not operate exclusively of one another, especially for communities of color whose lives and identities are caught between geographical and political regions, and the fluidity of culture. Third World subjects in the U.S. and Third World are linked through international and global affairs, which are largely mediated by globalization.

Transnational interdependency situates the world in relation. It interrogates the position of the U.S. within a global field where our foreign policy directly affects the condition of other nations around the world, and within these nations vast communities of color, whose lives are not simply denigrated by a first world notion of “inequality,” but more gravely by first world imperialism and hegemony. Dahrouch’s international art—projects that have addressed the transnational social and political climates spanning Iraq, Palestine, Morocco, Bulgaria, Kosovo, the Czech Republic, Spain, France, and the U.S.—represents justice and activism within areas that mediate the lives, and subsequent oppression and exploitation, of Third World peoples, specifically in relation to national displacement and transnational belonging.


POLITICAL INTERDEPENDENCY

In her article, “Not you/Like you: Postcolonial Women and The Interlocking Questions of Identity and Difference,” Trinh Minh-ha describes the ideologies of dominance that underlie binary relations of self/other.9 She states that in as much as the “native other” is a construct, so too is the “self” and its legacy of colonization.

Interdependency occupies that indeterminate space between self and other. It is a mutually constitutive realm that reveals alternative realities of truth. These politics of interdependency dictate that what we do over here affects what happens “over there.” Simultaneously, what we do over there affects what happens to us over here. There would, in effect, be no First World, if there were no Third World; there would be no “insider” if not for “the outsider.” And as Desert Sin so keenly represents, inasmuch as the “Arab” is a myth, so too is the “American”: this us/U.S. in the U.S./Them binary.

As Dahrouch would point out, we need to look no further than 9-11 for an example of a political blowback, resulting from interdependency. Our foreign policy in the Middle East resulted in those two planes crashing into the World Trade towers. Interdependency directs our attention to the 100 billion dollars in U.S. foreign aid to Israel over the last 30 years, which has created the virulent state of occupation for Palestinians exiled or under siege; 12 on-going years of terror in Iraq, as a result of U.S. economic sanctions, 320+ tons of depleted uranium bombs, and relentless missile attacks that have obliterated the civil infrastructure of Iraq, and left a people starved, diseased, dying, and dead, not to mention radioactive for 4.5 billion years.


THE POSTMODERN WAR

In “The Imperial Imaginary,” Shohat speaks of the 1991 “Postmodern War.” She examines the collusion between American corporate media and the U.S. government, and interrogates media representations of the Gulf War as relying upon centuries-old legacies of racism and misinformation about Muslims and Arabs.

Shohat’s essay greatly influenced the conceptualization of Dahrouch’s Desert Sin. Indeed both Shohat and Dahrouch are eager to engage the manner in which “the Gulf War revealed not only the continued reign of the imperial imaginary, but also the limitation of certain variants of postmodernism.” (Shohat, 1994, p. 130, emphasis mine). Shohat is referring to Jean Baudrillard’s 1991 essay in Libération entitled, “La Guerre du Golfe n’a pas eu lieu (The Gulf War Has Not Taken Place).”10 Given the extent of media saturation around the war, Baudrillard asserts that the “event” was merely a fabrication of corporate media. According to Baudrillard, the war occupied a space of the “hyperreal,” where one could no longer be certain of the line drawn between the “real” and the “phony.” 11

Clearly there are serious consequences to Baudrillard’s quip and they chilled Dahrouch to his core. It is after all one matter to speak of the slick operations of postmodern corporate media strategies, and yet another matter entirely to suggest that two hundred thousand (at that time) men, women, and children had never been annihilated. As the late painter and activist Rudolf Baranik —teacher, mentor, and friend of Dahrouch—wrote in his essay, “Desert Sin: The Art of Abdelali Dahrouch”:

As an artist whose emotions and theoretical knowledge are always in balance, Dahrouch read with interest Christopher Norris’ Uncritical Theory: Postmodernism, Intellectuals and the Gulf War, in which Norris tore into shreds Baudrillard’s postmodernist contention that the Gulf War was a “hyperreal event, a media fabrication.” When Dahrouch looked at the screens brought by CNN, Frontline, ABC News and a tape made by an ordinary US soldier, he decided to ground those images in his art.12

Dahrouch’s Desert Sin allows for more honed and rigorous engagements with postmodernism that go beyond mere style, sensibility, and form. Employing the aesthetic grain of postmodernism, he considers a notion of postmodernism that encompasses a web of diaspora, immigration, and political exile imposed upon those communities whose lives are framed by postmodern difference.


POSTMODERNISM / POSTMODERNITY

I want to situate transnational aspects of Dahrouch’s work in relation to debates around postmodernism. Postmodernism has become such a floating signifier—this buzzword—such that many scholars, activists, artists, and cultural critics, enervated by its ambiguity either react to it with disdain or dismiss it altogether. It is not difficult to understand why, given comments like Baudrillard’s. Postmodernism has critiqued modernism’s pursuit of purity, master narratives (i.e., History), and the wholistic subject (i.e., the Individual) recognizing instead the ways in which culture, nation, and identity are the manipulation of already present codes, and exist across and between mediums and spaces, yielding endless plays of “difference” and fragmentation.

We might say, overall, postmodernism opposes meta-narratives and their comprehensive explanation of meaning. While this has great potential in recognizing disenfranchised spaces, does postmodernism become ineffectual through this endless assertion of difference? Is postmodernism no more than apolitical relativism? (Baudrillard) Relativism suggests that we are all different and hybrid, and within our mutual differences, we all have equal claims to “truth” as postmodern subjects. How, then, do we address how different legacies of injustice have affected different communities differently, and the manner in which these differences have become institutionalized? For instance, if whiteness becomes just another “color” in the mix—another element of postmodern multiculturalism— how do we speak to centuries of racism and inequity wrought by Western imperialism within different cultural and sociopolitical contexts, where whiteness operates as “a location of structural advantage” to use Ruth Frankenberg’s phrase.13 How do we engage uneven relations of power, or the fact that power does not simply operate vertically or linearly? Rather, systems of inequality and domination are scattered, producing—what transnational feminist theorists Inderpal Grewal and Caren Kaplan would call—“scattered hegemonies.” 14

Postmodernism becomes apolitical when it is seen as no more than a stage of modernism’s break up. Such practices of relativism therefore emerge from the separation of postmodernism, as an aesthetic or stylistic form (the “hyperreal”), and postmodernity, as the actual, lived conditions of heterogeneity and hybridity due to the reality of transnationalism and globalization. Stylistically, postmodernism represents fragmentary mixedness, but if this site of difference is not politically situated, postmodernism is nothing more than “form.” Theorizing postmodernism has often focused on pop culture (such as Pop Art), post-industrial society (Fredric Jameson), or semiotics (Roland Barthes). As such, it can be shut away in an Art History textbook as no more than an art period that has come and gone. Periodizing postmodernism is problematic for these reasons. There are interesting fin-de-siècle parallels in historical periodization (i.e., Impressionism/Post-Impressionism) that one can attribute to certain readings of postmoderism, which, in effect, minimize the cultural intricacy and political import of postmodern difference. As cultural studies critic Homi Bhabha would say, postmodernism is not an “after,” but rather a beyond.


BEYOND

Dahrouch’s Desert Sin demonstrates the consciousness of lived realities of postmodernity in relation to postmodernism. Without recognizing the consequences that affect lives of real people, postmodernism is merely descriptive and trivial. Those scholars of postmodernism—especially U.S./Third World transnational feminist scholars, such as Shohat, Haraway, Trinh, Ong, Grewal, and Kaplan—who have paved the way for far more sustained and productive engagements with postmodernism and its political utility, speak to the tenets that Desert Sin encompasses. They provide Dahrouch with the sustenance that makes his vision possible.

With complexity and grace Dahrouch’s Desert Sin offers grave scenery of depth and horror, but within this space lies the infinite possibility of recognition and justice, to which Dahrouch, in his art and activism, remains constant. To Dahrouch there is great wisdom in the humility of embracing a world beyond. A world beyond arrogance, beyond avarice, beyond destruction. A world beyond war. As such, the tabula rasa of his 1997 installation bears another connotation. These are now pages of promise, pages that are in the process of being rewritten, reclaimed, and re-envisioned. They are pages of peace.

Perhaps Rudolf Baranik has written the most poetic and evocative musing of his protégé’s work just before his death in 1998:

Has Dahrouch achieved an image more powerful than “reality”? Would the image of a young Iraqi boy-soldier, bleeding on the sand hundreds of kilometers from his home on the Tigris, be more powerful than the haunting and disturbing mystery of the meaning in Dahrouch’s fleeting figures? I think that in the videos and related works we are discussing here Abdelali Dahrouch limned an elegy for all the senseless wars. His “Desert Sin” has at this point been seen by few, but it will resonate as an important artistic statement of our time. (Baranik, 1998, p. 5)
 

Dr. Laura J. Kuo is a Visiting Assistant Professor in Women's Studies and Art History at Pomona College. She received her doctorate from the History of Consciousness Department at University of California, Santa Cruz. Her work explores transnational and women of color feminism in relation to art, activism, and popular media.

1 Darwish, Mahmoud. “A Horse for the Stranger” in The Adam of Two Edens (New York: Syracuse University Press, 2000), p. 111.
2 Desert Sin was conceived and completed in 1995, and formally exhibited on April 14, 1997 at Pratt Institute in New York. at Pratt Institute in New York. It has also been exhibited at the Trans Hudson Gallery in New York (1999); the Center for Contemporary Art in Prague, Czech Republic (2000); the Artes Plasticas Y Visuales, in Seville, Spain (2000), and BC Space Gallery in Long Beach, California (2003).
3 Dahrouch, Abdelali. Artist Statement, 1997.
4 Shohat, Ella. “The Imperial Imaginary,” in Unthinking Eurocentrism (New York: Routledge, 1994), p. 125.
5 Arundhati Roy. Power Politics. (Cambridge: South End Press, 2001), p. 36.
6 Roy, Arundhati. War Talks (Cambridge: South End Press, 2003), p. 77.
7 Dahrouch, Abdelali. Artist Statement, 2003
8 Ong, Aihwa. Flexible Citizenship: The Cultural Logic of Transnationality (Durham: Duke University Press, 1999), p. 4.
9 Trinh, Minh-ha. “Not You Like You: Postcolonial Women and The Interlocking Questions of Identity and Difference,” in Making Face, Making Soul (San Francisco: Aunt Lute Books, 1990), pp. 371-375.
10 Baudrillard, Jean, “La Guerre du Golfe n’a pas eu lieu,” Libération (March 29, 1991).
11 Norris, Christopher, “Baudrillard and The War That Never Happened,” in Uncritical Theory: Postmodernism, Intellectuals, and the Gulf War (Amherst: The University of Massachusetts Press, 1992), p.13. Norris summarizes Baudrillard’s incendiary comments in his essay, “Baudrillard and the War that Never Happened,” “In short the whole campaign is a media benefit, an extension of video war games technology by alternative means, a ‘hyperreal’ scenario (Baudrillard’s phrase) where truth is defined solely in performative or rhetorical terms.”
12 Baranik, Rudolf. “Desert Sin: The Art of Abdelali Dahrouch,” written just before Baranik’s death in March 1998. Paper will be published posthumously in the journal, Third Text.
13 Frankenberg, Ruth. White Women, Race Matters: The Social Construction of Whiteness (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1993).
14 Grewal, Inderpal and Caren Kaplan. Scattered Hegemonies: Postmodernity and Transnational Feminist Practices (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1994).