Editor's note: The following catalogue essay was
republished in Resource Library on October 10, 2013 with permission
of the Portland Museum of Art. The catalogue was published in connection
with the exhibition Ahmed Alsoudani: Redacted, on exhibit at the
Portland Museum of Art through December 8, 2013. If you have questions or
comments regarding the essay or would like to obtain a catalogue, please
contact the Portland Museum of Art directly through either this phone number
or web address:
Neither / Nor: American
Dream, Exiled Hero
By Mark Bessire
In the competitive
world of art, culture, and commerce, the notions of myth, reality, and talent
have a complex relationship. Curators, dealers, critics, and collectors
search for the next sensation and the truly great artist who can bring forth
"new" art and resonance despite or in defiance of the "establishment."
Ahmed Alsoudani's biography is sensational and his art is becoming historical.
Yet his reality and surrounding mythology can obfuscate a close reading
of the work, including innovative resolutions of painting and drawing as
in Untitled, 2011 (fig. 1), and the complex mash-up of violent vigor
as in Untitled, 2011 (fig. 2). Challenging the viewer with nuanced
art historical arguments and blatantly difficult abject and grotesque imagery,
Alsoudani does what few artists can do: he translates the complexity of
contemporary politics into meaningful painting. In the process, he successfully
tackles the most difficult of artistic genres, the politics of today.
This exhibition, which brings together for the first time
work the artist has completed in the past two years and provides an in-depth
scholarly look at his art, offers us an opportunity to view Alsoudani's
art beyond his meteoric entry into the international art world and to gain
an understanding of how the work itself surpasses mythical contextualization
through an astonishing assimilation and projection of the iconography of
narrative, history, and art, grounded in our time.
Yet Alsoudani's work is also courageously tragic and violent
in its universality, transcending the specific, as in the aftermath of a
land mine depicted in Untitled, 2011 (fig. 3), and transforming it
into lasting historical imagery. A maelstrom of colorful, densely packed
interloping body parts and scorched ghostly flesh appear penetrated by exploded
peripheral fragments covering the canvas. Trees are upended and float in
the lower section of the canvas, adding a sense of displacement and transitory
space portraying the senseless death of the innocent. A penetrating
eye bears witness and implicates the viewer, while a pair of brightly striped
socks contains legs with no body. Eyes are present in many of Alsoudani's
paintings, and their sullen and threatening character appears within a duality
of the all-knowing and enigmatic. I have always seen the eyes in Alsoudani's
work as homage to the powerful, mesmerizing eyes found in Sumerian figural
sculpture of the Early Dynastic Period (2900-2350 BC) from Mesopotamia,
modern-day Iraq. This is not a painting to be approached lightly; it lends
itself to interpretations recalling a plethora of art historical references,
from Mesopotamia to Surrealism and German Expressionism, some true, some
imagined, but all helping us recall that artists and viewers are a sum of
all they have seen and known. Rather than place titles on his work, Alsoudani
chooses "Untitled," allowing the viewer to read the art without
a narrative or descriptive context which could either create specificity
or privilege a single reading.
How does an artist grow up in Baghdad, leave on the run,
sojourn in Damascus, move to Portland, enroll and graduate from Maine College
of Art and the Yale School of Art, attend the Skowhegan School of Painting
and Sculpture, and then show in New York, Berlin, Los Angeles, and London,
and even appear on the front page of the Style section of the New York
Times in a water taxi going to his opening at the Venice Biennale? The
script is so phenomenal that Alsoudani, who seems destined for fame, must
walk a tightrope as he tries to give his art its own voice. Can the work
in our media world ever speak for itself? Should it? Literary theory has
forced us to question genius and authenticity, but what happens when these
descriptors arise from circumstances beyond the artist's control? Do we
deny genius and authenticity as not fashionable? The artist can try to distance
himself from the hype, appearing aloof, or allow the hype to infuse the
work as part of the narrative. It is time to closely analyze the work and
the dexterity of Alsoudani, who works every day under such a microscope.
This exhibition tries to reconcile the biography and the art to uncover
who Alsoudani is and why he is crucial to understanding painting today.
He is becoming the painter of record in a period of international turmoil
and conflict because his treatment of history, war, violence, and torture
transcends the iconographic fragments of global conflict concentrated in
the Middle East and digests and interprets them through his personal and
detached experience via the history of art.
Yes, he did grow up in Baghdad in what one might consider
a normal family life under a totalitarian regime based on a cult of violence
and terror. His family owned a paint factory, and Alsoudani lived with his
parents, four brothers, and two sisters. In 1995 he fled Iraq after realizing
that a youthful act of defiance -- defacing a mural of Saddem Hussein --
though not necessarily meant as a political gesture, forced him to leave,
because the family worried about serious retribution if he was identified.
Awareness of the potential of retribution was a part of "normal life"
at all times, and violence could occur for no logical reason except to fortify
a governmental cult of fear and terror. From childhood until that moment,
Alsoudani, like most Iraqis, lived under a veil of threat that meant that
at any time, for any reason, a family or life could be placed in violent
jeopardy. He fled to Damascus, where a family friend, the Iraqi poet Mohammed
Mazlom, helped him settle and get work writing for an Iraqi opposition publication.
He began to paint, and the seeds of his future started to develop as he
was befriended by an American couple who admired his work in a show in Damascus.
Life was better, but there was little future in Syria, even then, for an
undocumented, exiled Iraqi. After continued diligence, in 1998 he received
political asylum from the United States and moved to Washington, D.C. Soon
after, he reconnected with the family of Reyed Ibrahim, a renowned poet
and fellow Iraqi exile in Syria whose family had gained political asylum
and moved to Portland, Maine. At their invitation he moved to Portland,
got a job working with the elderly, studied English, and applied to the
Maine College of Art in person and was accepted. In Portland he found a
welcoming but suspicious New England community and a very supportive group
at the College, including artists Sean Foley and Gail Spaine, who urged
him to apply to the Skowhegan School of Painting and Sculpture and attend
the Yale Summer School of Art and Music in Norfolk, Connecticut. In Norfolk
he met another important mentor, the artist Samuel Messer, who encouraged
Alsoudani to apply to the Yale School of Art. At Yale he became very close
to Messer and met many other key figures, including Robert Storrs (a Portland
native), and had influential studio visits by Wayne Koestenbaum, Mel Bochner,
and others. The combination of a hard-working ambitious artist anxious to
continually fine-tune his craft through excellent educational opportunities
and a series of contacts with major art figures and teachers made it no
surprise that Alsoudani sold out his first exhibition in New York before
he graduated from Yale. The art world was already identifying him as an
emerging stock-market tip.
I began viewing Ahmed's work in the early 2000s as he gained
notice in Portland at the Maine College of Art as a very serious student
with a strong voice searching for the vocabulary and skill to communicate
the vision he wanted in his painting. The work was full of energy and risk
as the figures, landscape, and fragments fought for space. Canvas and paper,
painting and drawing evolved into a battleground where Alsoudani played
out his developing vision. Under the influence of Sean Foley he culled through
art historical references and styles that added to the battle. The work
was as much about Iraq and his exile as it was the search for a signature
style and the desire to assimilate art history into the mêlée.
It became clear that Ahmed was collecting the skills and vocabulary that
would soon make him a force to be reckoned with. As he struggled to make
ends meet and live in a community with limited diversity, he became a very
disciplined artist who not only attracted mentors, but became a role model
for other students. He had no time to waste, nor patience for the uncommitted:
he was clearly focused on his goals.
During his time at Skowhegan in 2006 I had a chance to
view two very large works on paper. It was at an early stage in the work.
It felt like screening William Kentridge's work: literally the charcoal
and paint were doing battle with form and subject matter, similar to stop-action
film but on a flat static surface. You could clearly see where a figure
started and where it was headed and forms that were in constant flux. What
the work lacked in resolution in 2006 was of less concern than the immense
energy emanating from the paper. Even in this work I could see the beginning
of a mediated conversation to reconcile painting and drawing in a single
work, which would develop into works such as Untitled, 2010 (fig.
4) and Untitled, 2011 (fig. 5).
Following his move from Skowhegan to New Haven, Alsoudani
began to build a core iconography of symbols, and the figures in his work
moved from the vaguely literal to the distorted and maimed. The year 2009
evolved into a pivotal period with "Unveiled: New Art from the Middle
East" at the Saatchi Gallery in London and Goff + Rosenthal shows in
New York and Berlin. In Untitled, 2007 (fig. 6 [72 x 84, goff-rosen,
p44] and Untitled, 2008 (fig. 7 [72 x 96, goff-rosen, p48], both
larger paintings, Alsoudani explored the theater of painting, while in smaller
works such as Untitled, 2007 (fig. 8 [12 x 9, goff-rosen, p64] and
Untitled, 2007 (fig. 9 [12 x 9,goff-rosen, p65], figures are placed
under an analytical microscope revealing anxiety, tragedy, and pain through
flayed and dissected flesh. Almost appearing baroque, as if a rocket-propelled
grenade (RPG) had been exploded in a Rubens canvas, nails, gas masks, barbed
wire, surveillance equipment, human organs, orifices, eyes, pipes, uniforms,
uprooted trees, furniture, architectural elements, and barrels litter the
theater throughout these works, in which figures skirmish with time and
space. The precedents are Goya, Picasso, Dix, Bacon, Guston, and Spector,
but the voice of Ahmed Alsoudani is now channeling these great artists through
homage, not offering footnotes as reference. Amid the iconographic turmoil,
painting and drawing continue to do battle on paper and canvas. Reconciliation
is coming, but as Alsoudani gains critical, international attention, his
biography begins to overly define the work. The narrative of his work that
the art world has constructed is laced with a combination of the American
dream of the successful immigrant, the exiled hero, and the critical position
of a member of the diaspora who has become neither Iraqi or American. Through
this lens, the artist becomes culturalized: both championed and alienated.
And Alsoudani just keeps working.
Ironically at this point, when Alsoudani's story is foregrounded
in the media, his body of work, including Untitled, 2011 (fig. 10
[60 x 51 1/2], is coming together as a powerful painting and political message
with an abject and grotesque aesthetic. His narrative has become a sensational
cross-over story, enabling writers from the Wall Street Journal and
the New York Times to Architectural Digest and Art and
Auction to channel stories about Iraq, the Arab Spring, exile, the American
dream, and immigrant stories. There are few more difficult terrains for
a painter to mine than political and physical violence, especially when
it manifests itself in images of torture, pain, and hopelessness in bright
colors without irony or cynicism. Untitled, 2011 (fig. 11 [60 x 51
1/2] is an early foray into portraiture, where the sitter is not necessarily
a specific person, but a type presented as a mounted head for inspection
filling most of the large canvas. Again, as in earlier work, the Sumerian
eye bears witness and creates a tense link between viewer and specimen.
If you take away the uniform or signs of office of a leader, as Alsoudani
also does with Untitled, 2011 (fig. 12) [Assad) fig 160 x 156.2cm],
what is left? And once we look at the specimen, we may wonder how someone
strays into the realm of terror. And we may ask in light of current crises
of the Arab Spring, is this President Bashar al-Assad of Syria?
In a period when many artists avoid the difficulty of political
painting and seem to focus on the minutiae of art and aesthetics, Alsoudani
embraces an aggressive search for an anti-heroic and anti-monumental art
on heroic-sized canvases. The outcome transcends topical history, war, and
political painting to create universal images that become historicized the
moment they are painted. These paintings go beyond the specificity of the
artist's time and experience into a historical plea against the futility
and shame of crimes against humanity in the name of politics and war. They
are successful because even as they offer no refuge or answers and are anti-heroic,
they are also extremely bold, mostly large works that confront the history
of art through skirmishes between paint and drawing as well as form and
color.
------
Alsoudani's images also offer a stark contrast to the Stalinist
celebratory cult art of Saddam Hussein that was often linked to the revered
historic Muslim Shi'ite figure Imam Hussein and to Sa'ad ibn Abi Waqqas,
an early Arab warrior who brought Islam to Iran; and linked as well as to
other historical and ancient warriors and cultures of the Middle East. In
fact, after the completion of the 140-foot-tall Hands of Victory
monument (dedicated in 1989) celebrating the defeat of Iran, Saddam Hussein
rode under the monument on a white horse, a legendary and well-known reference
to the Shi'ite religious figure Hussein. The horseback image is repeated
in murals throughout Baghdad. The monument's two colossal hands grasping
crossing swords were modeled on those of Saddam Hussein, and the guns and
helmets of Iranian soldiers were melted and recast to build the monument.
The debris is evident at the foot of the monument in a grotesque and abject
celebration of death. In many ways the propaganda art of Saddam Hussein
appropriated historicizing precedents from classical Near Eastern art traditions,
such as the monumental sculptures praising and memorializing Assyrian kings
and their triumphs. Yet in comparison to the elegance of the Neo-Assyrian
royal art from Ashurbanipal's palace in Nineveh, the large-scale murals
of Saddam Hussein appear as a kitsch combination of Disney and Stalin. This
late twentieth-century propaganda art was an attempt to create a cult of
continuity from ancient rulers and heroes of Iraqi culture to Saddam Hussein.
He even constructed a giant billboard of himself towering over the ancient
Babylonian gate of Ishtar. Ironically Alsoudani was forced to leave Iraq
for defacing a mural of Saddam Hussein, and his work is an anti-heroic gestural
response to such monuments.
In a recent shift revealed in the exhibition, Alsoudani
transfers his analysis of chaos from an external view, as seen in Untitled,
2010 (fig. 13) and Untitled, 2011 (fig. 14), to a more internal one,
Untitled, 2011 (fig. 15), more deeply exploring the roots of chaos.
Instead of presenting a theater of the bureaucratic impact of institutionalized
chaos and terror, he begins to dissect the inner engine of a government
official in Untitled, 2011 (fig. 16), and the machinations of terror
that lead to chaos.
Ahmed Alsoudani's art is a revelation and a vessel for
multiple readings, whether we try to identify the sources for the portraits
and the art historical references in Untitled, 2011 (fig. 17), consider
the grid of prisoners in Untitled, 2011 (fig. 18), or deconstruct
the iconography or symbolism in Untitled, 2011 (fig. 19) It is hard
to imagine a more compelling subject for art than 9/11, but the difficult
task of translating the immense weight of such an event has proved too daunting
for most artists. Alsoudani has shown great courage to take on Iraq and
the Arab Spring in painting. Only at a few moments in history do we find
artists able to transcend critical political moments and transform them
into art; a short list could include Goya, Manet, Picasso, Leon Golub, Nancy
Spero, and Anselm Kiefer. The bigger the issue one addresses in painting,
the further an artist can fall if the work falls short of the expectation
that audiences and critics demand from the subject matter. Alsoudani risks
it all every time he enters the studio, and that risk is internalized in
the work, creating an oeuvre full of energy and hopelessness, and an archive
of terror for all to bear witness.
About the exhibition Ahmed Alsoudani: Redacted
On September 7, 2013 the Portland Museum of Art (PMA) opened
the exhibition Ahmed Alsoudani: Redacted, the first major museum
exhibition of 
the work of American-Iraqi
artist and Maine College of Art graduate Ahmed Alsoudani. The exhibition
will feature 20 of the artist's tumultuous and innovative paintings, which
reflect on the horrors of war with a unique artistic voice. Ahmed Alsoudani:
Redacted will be on view through December 8, 2013, in the PMA's celebrated
Third Floor Gallery for Contemporary Art. (right: Ahmed Alsoudani,
United States, born Iraq, 1975, Untitled, 2011, charcoal and acrylic
on canvas, 63 x 61 1/2 inches. ©Ahmed Alsoudani. Photo Courtesy of
Haunch of Venison, New York.)
"Challenging the viewer with nuanced art historical
arguments and blatantly difficult, abject, and grotesque imagery, Alsoudani
does what few artists can do: he successfully translates the complexity
of contemporary politics into meaningful painting," said PMA Director
Mark H.C. Bessire.
Through his personal experience as a child and adolescent
in war-torn Iraq, Alsoudani developed a keen sensitivity to the effects
of war, violence, terror, and political unrest on a global scale. His paintings
reflect his experiences as well as the mediated nature of war in our time.
"I'm not just commenting on Iraq but on an experience that becomes
universal," Ahmed Alsoudani said, referring to Untitled, 2007,
a loose, nearly abstract rendering of the moment the infamous statue of
Saddam Hussein fell in Baghdad in 2002. His splintered compositions, and
the overwhelming and sometimes harrowing scenes represented in a bright,
near-primary palette, address the uneasy balance in our culture between
scenes of disaster and objects of beauty.
Alsoudani cites historical figures Francisco Goya, Pablo
Picasso, Michelangelo Merisi da Caravaggio, and George Grosz, as well as
more contemporary painters Philip Guston and Francis Bacon as major influences.
Like his predecessors, he seeks to create works that depart from the glorification
of violence and the heroism of warfare. Instead, his large-scale paintings
offer graphic, often disturbing imagery that includes disembodied hands
or all-seeing bulging eyes juxtaposed with random mechanical parts and other
recognizable but misplaced imagery.
Ahmed Alsoudani was born in Baghdad in 1975 and grew up
under the regime of Saddam Hussein. He left Iraq as a teenager and lived
in Syria before immigrating to the United States in the late 1990s. He studied
in Maine at the Maine College of Art (BFA, 2005), and the Skowhegan School
of Painting & Sculpture (2006), and graduated with a MFA in painting
from the Yale School of Art (2008). In 2011, his work was featured in the
Iraq Pavilion at the 54th Venice Biennale, in the exhibition The World
Belongs to You, and at The Francois Pinault Foundation at the Palazzo
Grassi, Venice. His other major international exhibitions include: La
Route de la Soie at Tri Postal in Lille, France (2010); Unveiled:
New Art from the Middle East at the Saatchi Gallery in London (2009);
as well as shows at the National Gallery of Saskatchewan, Canora, Canada
(2007) and the Gwangju Museum of Art, Korea (2007). He lives and works in
New York.
The exhibition is co-organized and co-curated by Mark H.C.
Bessire, Director of the Portland Museum of Art and Dr. Sara Cochran, Curator
of Modern & Contemporary Art at the Phoenix Art Museum. The exhibition
was on view in Phoenix from March 13 through July 17, 2013. A full-color
catalogue will accompany the exhibition and is available in the PMA Store.
Generously supported by Louise Bessire in memory of Henry
E. Bessire and Sabre Yachts & Back Cove Yachts. Ahmed Alsoudani:
Redacted is also sponsored in honor of the Maine College of Art by:
Patricia and Cyrus Hagge, Chris and Betsy Hunt, Horace and Alison Hildreth,
and Candace Karu. Funded in part by a grant from the Maine Arts Commission,
an independent state agency supported by the National Endowment for the
Arts. Corporate Sponsors: The Bear Bookshop, Marlboro, VT and The VIA Agency.
Please click here
to view the checklist for the exhibition, including thumbnail images.
(above: Ahmed Alsoudani, United States, born Iraq, 1975,
Untitled, 2011, charcoal and acrylic on canvas, 36 x 30 inches. ©Ahmed
Alsoudani. Photo Courtesy of Haunch of Venison, New York.)
(above: Ahmed Alsoudani, United States, born Iraq, 1975,
Untitled, 2012, acrylic and charcoal on canvas, 32 x 38 inches. ©Ahmed
Alsoudani. Photo Courtesy of Haunch of Venison, New York.)
About the author
Mark H.C. Bessire is Director of the Portland Museum of
Art.
Resource Library editor's
note:
The above text was republished in Resource Library
on October 10, 2013 with permission of the Portland Museum of Art, which
was granted to TFAO on October 9, 2013. The letters "EXH #" -
which were not accompanied by numbers - placed after all figure numbers
throughout the essay text provided to Resource Library were removed
for ease of reading.
Resource Library wishes to
extend appreciation to Kristen Levesque of the Portland Museum of Art for
her help concerning permission for republishing the above text.
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