Honolulu Weekly

Walid Raad / Artist Walid Raad was born in Lebanon in 1967 and lived through the early years of its civil war (1975–1990) before being sent to the U. S. in 1983. Since 2002, Raad has been a member of the faculty at Cooper Union School of Art in New York City. A 2009 Guggenheim Fellow and twice included in the Whitney Biennial, Raad has exhibited widely, living in and between Brooklyn and Beirut.

He is currently artist-in-residence at Shangri La, the Diamond Head residence of heiress Doris Duke and now home to her extensive collection of Islamic art.

Your work is, in part, about coming to terms with history. Tell us a bit about your personal history.

I’d always been fascinated with photography, but never knew what that meant in terms of pursuing it as an artist. I am from a middle-class Christian family that wasn’t going to send a kid to the U.S. to study art–medicine, law, engineering, yes. So I studied pre-med for a year-and-a-half at Boston University. But I also took my first photography class and became more and more fascinated with the medium. I was aware of what photojournalists did from the war years in Beirut, and liked what I imagined about the lifestyle. These were people going to the edge to report for us on the things we didn’t witness for ourselves–except that in Lebanon, we sometimes did.

In 1989, when I completed my BFA at the Rochester Institute of Technology, the Civil War was still on and I couldn’t return [to Lebanon], so I entered the graduate program in art history at the University of Rochester. I met an artist, Jayce Saloun, who had made a tape about the Arab-Israeli conflict. He was going to Lebanon for a year, as the war was ending and rebuilding was beginning, and needed an assistant. That year, 1991, was foundational for my subsequent work; at the end of it I had gathered important source materials for The Atlas Group [a project established to research and document the contemporary history of Lebanon], and went to places in my own country that I had never seen because of the war.

The creation of The Atlas Group involves work in various media as well as some alter egos, or extensions of self. What does operating as a collective allow you to do that working alone does not?

It’s a little complicated… When I returned to Lebanon in 1991, I was trying to think about how one experiences events of extreme violence. I thought–mindful of Proust–of how memory functions. There are some things available for conscious recollection, and some that are part of involuntary memory. Through a chance encounter with a smell, a taste, for example, the memories come flooding back, providing access to a part of the self not usually available. It’s also a bit like Freud’s mechanism of repression, where some events are experienced in a way that isn’t part of the chain of memory, producing a symptom that is linked to the traumatic event but with the link submerged. Somehow in therapy the link is exposed and healed. I began to think that perhaps the violent events of the Civil War in Lebanon had happened but had not been fully experienced; so I decided to search the audiovisual culture of Lebanon produced during the war period to find those displaced references. This was not about burned buildings, or decapitated bodies, but what might seem tangential or inconsequential. So, for example, I started to collect images of the photo-finishes of horse races. That led to thinking about what it means to be “on time” for a significant event; what if one was a bit too early or too late–even for a war? This speculation led me from the documents themselves to the world in which they existed; this led further to the creation of the figure of a historian, who became my avatar. After two or three years, I had created several figures like this [Dr. Fadl Fakhouri, the historian of marginalia; Souheil Bachar, a fictional hostage] and they ultimately became my collaborators in The Atlas Group, which belongs to the period 1989–2004 and relates to a particular way of thinking about the violence of Lebanon’s war.

Is the work of The Atlas Group a way of gathering up the scattered fragments of the history of the Civil War? Is it restorative in some way?

I don’t think of the project as therapeutic in this sense. Jalal Toufic writes of the “Undeserving Lebanon”–not in the sense of karma, or retribution, but rather that war becomes an occasion to create new concepts, new forms of art. Think of how artists and writers have responded to Vietnam, or the Holocaust. Toufic says that Lebanese artists have not yet produced these forms and therefore don’t yet “deserve,” don’t yet have the kinds of insight and understanding those art forms might provide. This is what The Atlas Group is trying to do. We ask why figures that can lead us to this understanding emerge in fiction rather than in history–fiction is a space where things emerge that do not find a place elsewhere.

In a review of your work in The Village Voice, Jerry Saltz stated, “I’m not really sure Raad is an artist. He’s more of a social scientist using art or examining power.” I am wondering if this is ultimately less a criticism of your work than a call to rethink the connection between art and politics.

This criticism may be based on certain assumptions about why this distinction has become crystallized or polarized. I always need facts, but I don’t assume that facts are always historical in nature. A “fact” basically means “a thing done.” But that could be relevant in different contexts, where things exist on a continuum, without a rupture. Jalal Toufic speaks of the “aesthetic fact.” If, for example, I see something happen in a film–a figure walking into a Van Gogh painting–I need to ask, “What are the laws of the universe that make this ‘fact’ possible?” The artist explores those parameters, but so might the physicist who looks at subatomic particles. So rather than thinking about art vs. politics, I think about the connections between different kinds of facts–emotional, social, historical, aesthetic, political.