Unreliable Informants: A Walid Raad Primer
Sense
I agree with Thomas Micchelli’s statement, “The purported function of The Atlas Group is documentary and archival, which resides predominantly in the arena of aftermath, not with action as it happens.” In that sense, Ra’ad’s works succeed as ways to document and archive the ongoing conflict in the Middle East. I appreciate how there’s a distance between the work and the viewer, like “an aesthetic distance, akin to the fourth wall in theater.” By doing this, it doesn’t have to be a literal representation for me to understand the overall content that the artist has laid out.
Nonsense
I found that there is also a nonsense in the sense. For instance, why does Ra’ad choose to produce his works in more subtle ways when the Atlas Group was established as “a declaration of purpose evidently immersed in the infinitely paraphrased maxim?” By creating that fourth wall, it felt like a mild form of indifference to present events.
Jalal Toufic: Oversensitivity (Credits Included Chapter)
Sense
I see why Toufic quotes Jean-Luc Godard’s protagonist in King Lear, “We are in a time now when movies and more generally art have been lost, do not exist, and must somehow be reinvented.” Like with Shakespeare’s King Lear, all works of art are continuously resurrected over and over. Basically everything that exists has been reinvented and resurrected after a surpassing disaster. For instance, Toufic references how “in Tarkovsky’s last film, The Sacrifice (1986), the shot of the bedroom curtain flapping in the wind and modulating the light while the child sleeps is reminiscent of the scene in the hotel room in Nostalgia (1983) in which the advent, change in intensity, and then cessation of rainfall alter the light coming through the windows.”
Nonsense
I didn’t understand what the surpassing disaster of Pierre Menard had to do with the chapters of his book, Don Quoxite. I have never read any of his works, so my initial reaction to reading that passage was confusing, especially the part where Toufic asks, “What surpassing disaster could Borges have felt for him to think of writing such a text, specifically in September 1934? Had this something to do with the recent congress of the Nazi party at Nuremburg in the same year and month?”
