Let's be honest, the weather helped: Walid Raad, unreliable narrator
A few weeks ago, I saw Walid Raad’s exhibition Let’s be honest, the weather helped at the Stedelijk Museum in Amsterdam. The exhibition is playful, witty, and deeply storied, full of implications for the peculiar alchemy of storytelling, and the material reality which is always upstream of culture - whether culture in its manifold manifestations Clifford Geertz described as ‘the stories we tell ourselves about ourselves’ or the capital-C Culture as found in galleries and museums.
Raad’s work revels in its evasive mysteries, with wall-text, audio-guide, and the works themselves making bold (and palpably false) claims about their origins, which appear to radically change the meaning and nature of each work we view. Each of these claims is in the form of a story - whether fiction, subterfuge, or lie - we cannot escape that they are just stories. As the Frieze review suggests:
In Raad’s practice, it is difficult to know what is real and what isn’t, whether it leads to lunacy or to an escape from suffocating historical circumstances. Raad’s work has never provided answers; rather, it seeks tenuous clearings between the lands of warring factions.
But, in turn, so what? If we can tell what’s real and what isn’t - what would that do? If we definitively ascertained that the stories we read about the works were all true, might that not be more devastating to the works than if we confirmed that they were all false? The creative ambiguity of the storyteller seems to be the subject of the work - and so the question of veracity is not just sidelined, but any answer is robbed of its potency, before the fact.
For example, the first room Preface to the ninth edition: On Marwan-Bachi shows drawings and paintings by Raad, apparently on the obverse of paintings from the Steidelijk’s archives, presented as if hung back-to-front, apparently an attempt from memory to recreate lost artworks by Marwan-Bachi; a few rooms later I feel a great desire to meet the masses once again _ VI, XVII, XXXIII presents elaborate wooden crates in which - we are told - deconstructed Lebanese monuments were stored to prevent their damage in the civil war, piled up in abstract shapes, their original configurations, apparently, forgotten. The longstanding project The Atlas Group (1989-2004), is presented straight as an archive from a fictional research group documenting the Lebanese wars, attempting to make visible the invisible, anticipating and subverting the ludicrous grandstanding of projects such as the shameless and lamentable Turner-nominated Forensic Architecture, which turns atrocity into entertainment while making the impossible and undignified claims to account for what actually happened using the techniques of art, and reducing human casualty to bourgeois entertainment.
To understand the narrative implications within these works, it is worth examining 2017’s Better be watching the clouds.
Walid Raad, Better be watching the clouds, 2017
This work is a series of large panels described in the following terms by Raad’s gallery when first exhibited:
The plates in Better be watching the clouds show pages from a book of flora native to the Middle East where the heads of political leaders involved in, or contemporary with, the Lebanese Civil War appear as efflorescences. […] The series is accompanied by wall text that reads: “The following plates were donated to The Atlas Group in 2000. The anonymous donation came in a box labeled with the following words: Comrade leader, Comrade leader, you’d better be watching the clouds.”
We’re also told in the wall panel that ‘The Atlas Group’ understands the book to have been a reference for a political code-maker in assigning the code names of these Lebanese and global figures, using the flowers on which their images are superimposed. And in the audio-guide, Raad draws attention to the fact that they are oversized, printed directly, with no attempt to create believable pages: rather these are self-conscious fictions.
This story turns the manifest reality - comical, Pythonesque collages with world leaders faces bursting from flora, into intriguing, covert, insights into a world of subterfuge - endlessly intriguing, and fracturing into further stories: Who was the code-maker? How were they used? Why did they reveal themselves in this way? Is there an associative link between the species chosen and the figure depicted, and so named? Having set the story running, it takes on a life of its own, generating chains of further stories in the mind of the viewer. This is how stories work.
It’s a sort of narrative alchemy which takes the banal and invests it with meaning, the silly and makes it serious, the sinister and makes it playful. In short, Raad’s storytelling seems to manage to make the material other than it is, even as he casts overt doubt upon the reliability of the narrative. In this way, Let’s be honest, the weather helped is testimony not only to the power of stories, but also to their impotence: they mystify, mislead, and entertain - they appear to make things other than they are, but nontheless, the material reality beneath them remains the same. The experience of the exhibition involves catching ourselves deeply engaged in a series of elegant lies. This becomes more than a metafiction, it’s a startling depiction of our storied gullibility, and the insubstantial nature of so much we take to be significant, and which is nothing but the stories we tell. While we’re mystified in this way, lives are won and lost, power remains unchallenged, and people, places, meaning is razed to the ground.
Walid Raad, Sweet Talk: Commissions (Beirut) _ Solidere 1994-1997, 2019
Perhaps for this reason, the mesmerising heart of the exhibition is Sweet Talk, a largescale panoramic and kaleidoscopic film which turn films of the demolition of bomb-damaged Lebanese buildings - reflecting and reversing the footage into wall-sized, silent, hallucinatory projections. Deeply storied in themselves, the physical manifestations of war, national interest, and division, life and death, imagining countless personalised tragedies and losses, the act of recreation as giant kaleidoscope casts the footage as something alienated and all together other. A meditation on being and nothingness, creation and destruction, the impermanence of all phenomena, these films employ the same false-story device (we’re told they were captured by survivors evacuated from the buildings, we’re told the name of the work is that of a corrupt government company undertaking the demolitions - but in watching, these stories seem both silly and marginal). In the awe-filled experience of watching them, they are stripped of this storying and become psychedelic, disembodied, experiences beyond narrative or narrative-ability, experienced as a metaphysically neutral, numinously transcendence. It is beautiful, troubling, intoxicating. It is relentlessly material as substantial, multi-story buildings are blasted to rubble. It insists on the thingness of things just as it evades the stories we tell.
This is how turning our attention to stories focusses our attention upon the material reality that narrative bends and mystifies - and the failure of stories to capture and contain. It is from that failure, that the dialectic possibilities of the not-yet-real emerge, and that, in turn, fresh stories can help us to approach possibility and make it real.
