Michael Rakowitz's
The Worst Condition Is To Pass Under A Sword Which Is Not One's Own coalesces around a series of bizarre and uncanny crossovers in American popular culture and Iraqi military history from the 1980s to the end of Saddam Hussein's regime in 2003. The stories, told through a series of drawings, texts, artifacts, found objects and sculptures, reveal unexpected links between the Hussein family's interest in George Lucas's Star Wars franchise, American Politics of the 70s, 80s, 90s and 00s, the fantasy and history found in Jules Verne's adventure stories, physicist Gerald Bull's dream of building the world's largest gun, and the career of an Iraqi former WWF wrestler.
At times the stories seem simply too good to be true - the tale of a 15-year-old Uday Hussein's fascination with Star Wars, and subsequent design for his father's army's new uniform, complete with Darth Vader-inspired ski mask and helmet, would be unbelievable were it not for the collection of helmets that the artist has acquired on display in the nearby case.
The sculptures and framed works are executed with a handmade quality that adds an aesthetic delight to a narrative that is largely told through a straight-forward written prose. The pencil drawings that accompany these episodes have an illustrative quality that suggests appropriation, but we are left to wonder. Found and acquired objects, such as copies of magazines ranging from Wrestling editions to Time, toys, books, articles relating to those found in Saddam's palaces, soldiers' photographs and a video clip from YouTube are selected with curatorial precision, and serve as some kind of 'proof' for the far-fetched story the artist is telling us.
The exhibition is one of the best contemporary art shows I've seen at Tate in a long time. The
Van Doesburg and the International Avant-Garde exhibition is well worth seeing while you're there, as is
Miroslaw Balka's How It Is in the Turbine Hall, if you haven't seen that yet.
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