Before its closes on Sunday 31 January, visitors to Walid Raad’s solo show at New York’s Museum of Modern Art can still claim a few spots to join the Lebanese-American artist in his 55-minute performance, Scratching on things I could disavow: Walkthrough.
The museum’s second floor atrium is taken over by an installation that also serves as the stage for the piece, in which Raad guides visitors through his meandering thoughts on the strange mechanics of the art market, the boom in museum-building in the Middle East and the cultural effect of decades of violence in Lebanon.
Raad is the consummate unreliable narrator. Many of the facts and figures, the subjects and events he cites never actually happened, although they are often based on real people and real organisations. Walkthrough opens with a quasi-investigative lecture into the Artist Pension Trust and its ties to Israeli military intelligence, but it quickly slips into a gallery tour spiced with a heavy dose of magical realism.
As Raad takes you through the various segments of his performance, you cannot help but be swept up by his sincerity, his candid self-deprecation that makes his most fantastical statements seem downright sensible. Of course his Atlas Group works were mysterious miniaturised to 1/100th scale on route to their first showing in Beirut; look, here’s the perfectly proportioned proof in a purpose-built model. Yes, he must be receiving telepathic messages from artists in the future; how else would be get those names scribbled on that wall? No, that rectangle of bright crimson paper is not red, that cerulean print is not blue.
The artist says he finds these performances one of the most rewarding part of his work, but it can be equally productive for the audience, raising questions about the role of contemporary art and culture in society. If, for example, his research into APT is not interesting enough to merit a work of art, as the artist claims in his lecture, what is it doing installed in the Atrium of MoMA?
Meanwhile, Paula Cooper gallery has announced that it will show a major sculptural installation by the artist, Letters to the Reader, as part of a show opening 27 February. In a typically enigmatic statement, Raad describes the inspiration for the work: “While visiting the recently opened museum of modern Arab art in Beirut, I noticed with great surprise that most paintings on display had no shadows. At first I was beside myself, convinced that religious zealots had destroyed the shadows. But there was no debris. I pondered anxiously whether the shadows had lost their bearings or grip. But I suppose I should have known all along that the shadows were not destroyed nor lost: they had simply lost interest in the walls where they were made to hang. I decided to build new walls on which I carved shadow-like forms—magnets of sorts—in the hope they’d attract the restless shadows. Thus far, not a single catch.”
• Walid Raad, Museum of Modern Art, New York, until 31 January 2016. The show travels to the Institute of Contemporary Art, Boston (24 February-30 May 30, 2016) and Museo Jumex, Mexico City (13 October-14 January 2017).
