This year Chicagoans will probably see no exhibition as timely as the DePaul University Art Gallery’s “Iraqi Art Now: Looking Out, Looking In.”
But the political reasons that make the show timely have little to do with the works displayed, and anyone who sees them may be surprised, though not in ways Americans would have been prepared for by the rhetoric of politicians.
What a pity, then, that the works themselves are not more memorable and the show does not reveal concerns of the artists in greater depth. As it is, “Iraqi Art Now” is a presentation that despite its diversity — 32 exhibitors, with different political and religious influences — leaves an impression scarcely different from whenever Eastern artists work in Western media with the complex feelings of an exile.
Only five of the artists have, after all, remained in Baghdad. The rest are in Western Europe or the United States.
This colors the work on view, no matter the medium, for in a sense, the art is “about” displacement before any other formal or humanistic condition. Even those pieces that cross Western abstraction with ancient traditions in pottery, textiles or calligraphy often transmit an undercurrent of the exile’s longing and melancholy.
The surprise, such as it is, comes from our finding that Iraqi art created in Baghdad is less insular in its vocabulary than American viewers might have assumed and that the Fine Arts Academy there has instructed — and continues to instruct — women as well as men in both Western and more indigenous media.
This degree of “openness” is, however, tempered by what we see of the favored styles of, say, Western painting, as they are realism, surrealism and gestural abstraction, the very styles adopted by artists as the latest thing under more turbulent regimes of Eastern Europe. The Iraqi paintings may be inflected in very particular ways, sometimes looking back to Mesopotamia being the cradle of civilization. But still there is the sense that, overall, this work is familiar, as if from some international brotherhood of restricted, if not repressed, painters.
As also was the case with Eastern European artists, standards of precision and craft that now count for little in contemporary art of the West continues to apply to Iraqi artists. So one should not expect a kind of conceptual work that does not embody its ideas in objects. What you see is what you get. And however common the ideas might be in a world arena, a premium often has been placed on execution that assures the clearest possible communication, whether the work be in painting, sculpture, printmaking or installation.
The exhibition is less clear about how representative each piece is of each of the artists, for none is exhibited to any depth, a common failing of group shows of this kind. I’d like to see more of Naman Hadi’s realist painting, Jananne al-Ani’s photographs and Talal Refit’s sculpture — each looks spare and promisingly individual, but who knows? How sad that this should be the last we’ll see of these Iraqi artists while Iraq shall remain in the news.
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First shown in 1999 at the School of Oriental and African Studies in London, “Iraqi Art Now: Looking Out, Looking In” will continue at the DePaul University Art Gallery, 2350 N. Kenmore Ave., through March 16. 773-325-7506.
