ART AND EMPIRE: ON OIL, ANTIQUITIES, AND THE WAR IN IRAQ

Saloni Mathur
I. VIEWING THE PLIGHT OF IRAQI ANTIQUITIES It is undoubtedly a sign of our times that Matthew Bogdanos, the reserve Marine Corps colonel who led the investigation into the April 2003 looting of the Iraq Museum in Baghdad, has become somewhat of a celebrity spokesperson for the cause of Iraqi antiquities. Bogdanos, who earned an M.A. in Classical Studies and a Law degree from Columbia, served as an Assistant District Attorney in Manhattan prior to the events of September 11, 2001. Living near the World Trade Center in downtown Manhattan, his family narrowly escaped the devastation of the attacks, making their way on foot through the chaos and confusion uptown, like many other New Yorkers on that dreadful day. The events prompted Bogdanos to return to active military duty, and he joined a counter-terrorism force in Afghanistan, eventually becoming part of a military team that helped draft plans for the early phases of Operation Iraqi Freedom. I love the action and the challenges I experience in the military - I make no bones about that, he stated in his 2005 book describing these events, which claims to be a serious account of the investigation into the looting of the Baghdad Museum, titled Thieves of Baghdad. The books subtitle, One Marines Passion for Ancient Civilisations and the Journey to Recover the Worlds Greatest Stolen Treasures, however, announces the true spirit of the work: part military autobiography, part Indiana Jones-style treasure hunt, and part wartime thriller - even the Washington Post viewed the book as symptomatic of a new hubris in certain military and political circles.1 Although Bogdanos is donating the royalties from the volume (co-written with ghost-writer, William Patrick) to the Iraq Museum, he sold the story rights to a Hollywood production company that, in partnership with Warner Brothers, has been responsible for such contemporary releases as Terminator 3 and Superman Returns. This is one of the most dramatic stories of the war in Iraq, the producer of the soon-to-be-film version of Bogdanos book explained in the showbiz journal, Variety. Its a compelling adventure, with intrigue, grit and pathos.2 Meanwhile, President Bush personally rewarded Bogdanos with the National Humanities Medal in 2005, an award that honours individuals whose work has deepened the nations understanding of the humanities. What is immediately striking about Bogdanos book, and his range of efforts - some of them successful - to recuperate objects that were looted from the Baghdad Museum, is the way in which his mission to protect Iraqi
DOI:10.3898/NEWF.65.08.2008

1. Philip Kennicott, The Washington Post, 22 January 2006.

2. Pic Pair Books, Baghdad, Variety, 9 June 2006.

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3. Arindam Dutta, Sahmat, 19892004: Liberal Art Practice against the Liberalized Public Sphere, Cultural Dynamics, 17, 2 (2005): 193-226, http://dx.doi. org/10.1177/092137 4005058585; Geeta Kapur, Secular Artist, Citizen Artist, in W. Bradley and C. Esche (eds), Art and Social Change: A Critical Reader, London, Tate Publishing, 2007, pp422-439.

antiquities feeds and sustains the larger premises and procedures of the American liberation and rescue of Iraq. Bogdanos, paradoxically, does not oppose the conditions that gave rise to the destruction of material culture in Iraq in the first place. On the contrary, he is a loyal proponent of military culture, and he defends the American failure to protect the museum on those fateful days following the invasion on the tactical grounds that it was too dangerous for American soldiers. Moreover, his personal story, proceeding from the assault on Manhattan to the retaliation in Afghanistan to the necessity of regime change in Iraq, reinforces the fictional links between the events of 9/11 and the rule of Saddam Hussein, however oppressive, so actively promoted by the Bush administration. In the meantime, the real story - a human tragedy of epic proportion - remains only partially narrated: the story of damage to the ancient material culture of Iraq through looting and the destruction of archaeological sites resulting from the first Gulf War, the economic conditions caused by UN imposed sanctions, and the current occupation, now entering its sixth long year, that has unleashed a series of catastrophic civil wars in the country. Given these contexts, it seems both predictable and unacceptable that a military spokesman like Bogdanos has come to represent the face of the humanities at a national level. How can we approach in a non-trivial way the fate of cultural antiquities from Iraq? And how have the regions artistic traditions, already devastated by colonial histories of discovery and possession, found their way back into such conditions of crises in our contemporary postcolonial world? This essay argues for a different point of entry into the issue of the destruction of ancient cultural property in Iraq, and seizes the subject as an occasion for considering some of the historical interconnections between modern imperialism and the western projects of recovering artifacts and antiquities of the non-western world. I turn to a little known vision of the war in Iraq, a view outside our conventional circuits of looking, one that emerges from the Indian subcontinent, and stands in a relationship of disalignment to American global power. My analysis will begin and end with a particular body of work made by the New Delhi based artist, Vivan Sundaram, a founding member of the activist collective, SAHMAT, which emerged in India in response to the violent destruction of the Babri Masjid by Hindu nationalists in 1992.3 The work itself - a series of forty-some images using engine oil and charcoal - was undertaken by the artist in 1991, a response to the international impact of the first Gulf War and the conditions of global crises that it inaugurated. Occupying a place in between drawing, painting, and installation, these compositions, little known to the west and never exhibited outside of India, offer a powerful indictment of the acts of cultural violence generated by American militarism in the Middle East, and have therefore a new relevance in our post-September 11 political environment and the current conditions of occupation in Iraq. I turn to these images some fifteen years after their making not to offer sweeping statements about culture in ruins, or generalisations of that sort. Rather, by identifying the multiple
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and intertwined meanings of oil in Sundarams work - at once, a geological resource, a global commodity, and a painterly medium with its origins in Euro-western high culture - my aim is to highlight some of the specific kinds of destructiveness we face in the world today, and the damaging effects of the occupation of Iraq upon history and civilisation on a global scale. The co-optation of the concept of civilisation, so central to the humanities and to humanist understanding, is of course part of the problem that confronts us today. Samuel Huntingtons well-known polemic that it is the irreducible differences between civilisations (for instance, Western and Islamic) that constitute the latest phase of conflict in the modern world and define the new battle lines of global affairs has established the new paradigm of civilisational clash. It is not necessary here to rehearse the Huntington argument, or the extensive critique that has discredited it, or the performance of the clash thesis by the Bush administration following the events of September 11 even as they publicly denounced its assumptions, for these ideas have been widely discussed by intellectuals and policy-makers elsewhere. For our purposes, it is important to note the different uses and abuses of the concept of civilisation in these debates, and the contradictions that invariably emerge in relation to the ancient cultural terrain of Iraq. Iraq has itself long been inconsistent in its identifications with civilisation, at times emphasising its Arab or Islamic past, as with the early nationalists of the twentieth century, and at other times promoting its ancient Mesopotamian heritage, as did Saddam Hussein when he expanded the ancient city of Babylon, one of several populist Baathist initiatives to harness civilisation for the interests of the state. What is therefore at stake here is not merely a contest between competing definitions of civilisation, for instance, a liberal vs a neo-conservative one. Rather, what I wish to examine in the case of Iraq is the centrality of a contested notion of civilisation in the material and rhetorical practices of the modern nation-state, and the implications of its strategic and often contradictory deployment within the discourses of nationalism, past and present. I further focus on the role of Iraqi antiquities, and the museum in particular, in sustaining such national civilisational frameworks, in part by tracing the complex entanglements between the cultural and natural resources of the country. As I will show, the phenomenon of Iraqi oil and the ancient cultural artifacts of the region, although seemingly unrelated, are nevertheless connected in powerful ways by a shared colonial history of extraction, collection, and commodification, and by nationalisms response in the twentieth century to those original acts of imperial violation. I argue that Vivan Sundarams oil-drenched images of archaeological debris and fallen Akkadian Kings, which point to the interconnections between vastly different histories of oil (ecological, art historical, economic, and political), provide a key to understanding how oil, artifacts, and the museum itself have all been constituted in tragic ways as part of the currencies and casualties of the current war. Because modern Iraq physically rests upon ancient Mesopotamia,
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4. Zainab Bahrani, Iraqs Cultural Heritage: Monuments, History, and Loss, Art Journal, 62, 4 (Winter 2003): 10-17, http://dx.doi. org/10.2307/ 3558482. 5. Benjamin Foster et al, Iraq Beyond the Headlines: History, Archaeology, and War, Singapore, World Scientific Co, Ltd, 2005, p228.

that once fertile zone between the Tigris and the Euphrates where the agricultural revolution occurred, where the first cities evolved, and where writing, etched on clay tablets, was invented some five thousand years ago - it marks a contradictory space as both the birthplace of western civilisation in the master narrative of western art history, and the site of past and present Islamic cultures and their histories. Consequently, Iraqi antiquities have come to serve a variety of paradoxical agendas: they represent at once a shared ancient past, a field of coexistence in Edward Saids terms, and the continued civilian toll of the contemporary battle-field, as casualties of war or Iraqi collateral damage. Bogdanos efforts to recover artifacts looted from the Iraq Museum are ultimately about keeping score of the latter: his concern is to transfer a returned artifact from one side of the balance sheet to the other. The performance of this rescue also reactivates a dominant and enduring preservationist paradigm that has long dictated the relationship of the western colonising powers to artifacts from the non-western world. But damaged antiquities are not merely symptoms of an enduring western salvage paradigm, nor do they simply function in the numbers game of counting casualties at a time of war. Similarly, the claim to ancient Iraq as the birthplace of Western civilisation does not lessen the powerful place of artifacts and archaeological sites in the construction of local histories and identities.4 Even if recovered, looted artifacts are - as Assyrian archaeologists have reminded us - forever deprived of their former integrity.5 In spite of the efforts by the US military to promote their humanitarian concern for Iraqs material culture, I suggest that the beleaguered situation of antiquities from Iraq remains a powerful reminder of the continued chaos and violence of the occupation, the failures of American efforts at security and reconstruction, the destruction to the infrastructure of the nation-state, and the social, cultural and economic devastation experienced by the people of Iraq. II. THE POLITICS OF OIL Vivan Sundaram is often viewed as one of the first artists of his generation in India to reject painting during the late nineteen-eighties and seize formal experimentation, laying the ground for innumerable others who have now decisively made this shift. Tellingly, the series under examination here, titled simply Engine Oil and Charcoal: Works on Paper, was a pivotal moment in these transformations. For the first time the artist abandoned conventional painting; his pictures began to slide off the walls to inhabit other forms and relationships to the gallery space. The series thus marks Sundarams transition to the installation, video, digital photo-montage and multi-media work that came to pre-occupy him from that moment on, a formal move that was undoubtedly linked to a specific set of historical circumstances, namely, the international violence of the first Gulf War and the violence of communal strife in India. As the artist himself reflected in an interview, Changed circumstances and new experiences required a new articulation.6 Elsewhere he explained: I began using unorthodox media, and then I started the process of breaking out of the
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6. The Times of India, 15 November 1988.

easel format, such as by stitching sheets of paper together, which allow(ed) one into a space outside the frame, allowing me a greater flexibility.7 However, a purely formalist approach to these innovations, crucial as they have been to the emerging directions of contemporary art in South Asia, must not eclipse the persistent historical sensibility that consumes and drives a great deal of Sundarams artistic practice. Indeed, a defining feature of his oeuvre over the past three decades has been the haunting place of history in the present. Confronting the historical in a variety of ways, whether through palimpsest, refraction, ghostly recollection, or altered photograph, Sundarams extensive artistic output, transgressing a range of different media, is, in some sense, like an excavation of history through visual practices. The series I wish to revisit here, the works on paper in engine oil and charcoal produced in response to the first Gulf War, demonstrate in part the depth of historical consciousness that is present in much of Sundarams work. But the series also fuses medium and message in an uncompromising account of the global present. It is telling that these compositions have never been viewed in Europe or North America, in spite of their implicit address to a Euro-American audience and their relevance to the current war in Iraq. For they make visible precisely those connections and processes that are absent in the popular understanding of the war and the perceptions so carefully constructed and disseminated by the Bush administration in the United States. In an exemplary piece from the series, titled Land Shift, for example, we see twelve pieces of paper stitched together - beginning on the wall and stretching onto the floor - in front of which is a flat zinc tray containing a small black pool of engine oil (Figure 1). The dark swirls make the work distinctly geological; it is like a profile cut from the landscape itself. Here, a number of associations with oil are immediately established: oil is simultaneously a painterly medium, a geological entity belonging to the land, and a commodity that is dredged from the earth, hijacked, collected and contained. However, oil in Sundarams work is also at the contested centre of American militarism in the Persian Gulf, as evidenced in a second piece titled Approaching 100,000 Sorties (Figure 2). The phrase, like another of his titles, Desert Trail (Figure 3), highlights the cruel vocabulary that American militarism has produced in recent decades by playing on those perverse sets of euphemisms - for instance, Desert Storm, collateral damage, or in more recent versions, Enduring Freedom, Shock and Awe, and the War on Terror - designed to conceal the violence inherent in their
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7. Neville Tuli, Indian Contemporary Painting, New York, Harry N. Abrams, Inc., 1998, p396.

Fig 1: Land Shift, stitched paper, engine oil, zinc tray, and painted acrylic sheet, 120 x 60, 1991, photograph courtesy of Vivan Sundaram

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8. Rasna Bhushan, Tracking, Exhibition Catalogue for Engine Oil and Charcoal: Works on Paper, 1991, LTG Art Gallery, New Delhi, 7-26 Oct, 1991. 9. The Guardian, 7 June 2003.

Fig 2: Approaching 100,000 Sorties, stitched paper, engine oil, zinc tray, 132 x 60, 1991, photograph courtesy of Vivan Sundaram Fig 3: Desert Trail, engine oil and charcoal on paper, 22 x 60, 1991, photograph courtesy of Vivan Sundaram

operations. Like the previous work, this one also constructs a landscape from above, but now as a series of explosive collisions or - as the title suggests - as an act of violence on the landscape of Iraq. These and other images mimic explosions, or more accurately they propel you into the moment of an explosion: we are presented here with a formation of bombs dropped from above, a swirling cloud of black smoke, vortexes, chaos, and general fallout and debris. On the floor again is the zinc tray of engine oil, this time like a miniature boat docked in front of this great picture of destruction, or - as you move closer to the piece - like a black glass mirror through which the viewer adds his/her reflection to the whole alienating scene.8 It is the voracious historical appetite of modern warfare on petroleum, the deadly complicity between oil and war, that these oil-saturated images of combustion and destruction evoke in a particularly haunting way. What makes Iraq special, stated Paul Wolfowitz flatly when he was Deputy Defence Secretary in the Bush administration, is that the country floats on a sea of oil.9 Though it is beyond the scope of this paper to recount the history of American involvement in Middle East oil, Wolfowitzs statement is a powerful reminder of the role of this history in defining the agendas of the current petro-politicians in or close to the White House: Dick Cheney, the former CEO of the energy giant, Halliburton, James Baker, the Bush family friend and consummate oil man appointed Special Presidential Envoy to restructure the Iraqi economy, and George W. Bush himself, also a former CEO of his own oil and gas company in Texas. Their identities appear to derive in part from the mythic heroism of American oil-men at the beginning of the previous century, the heyday of economic and political expansionism

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for America, embodied by the triumph of the 1893 Worlds Columbian Exposition in Chicago. That event brought the promise of advanced technology, mass consumption, and economic prosperity to its spectators - the roots of the American dream - and consolidated the nations vision of itself as the vanguard of social, cultural, and civilisational progress. Significantly, the Chicago Worlds Fair of 1893 was also the space where the high arts of western oil painting were separated from the ethnographic exhibits of painters from the colonies, establishing oil at the centre of yet another social hierarchy, also implicit in Sundarams work. It was there in Chicago that Raja Ravi Varma, for example - the first professional artist in India to adopt the western techniques of oil and easel, and widely acknowledged as the father of modern Indian art - received two gold medals for his well-executed portraits of Indian women, launching his success on the international stage and further cementing his popularity in India. However, Varmas paintings did not make it to the venerable fine arts pavilion at the Chicago Worlds Fair in 1893. Instead, his pictures, along with those of the Indian photographer, Deen Dayal, were relegated to the ethnographic section, admired not as works of fine art, but rather commended by judges for their ethnological value and held up as evidence for the continued success of the British civilising mission in India.10 Although the medium that Sundaram employs in the series is burnt or used motor oil (it has actually been run through the engine of a car, and is preferred by the artist for its dirt and discolouration effects), the material and its murky impurities evokes some of the prejudices and enduring hierarchies confronted by the first generation of oil painters in India. The example of Varma represents some of the paradoxes that have resulted from oil paintings complicated journey to the Indian subcontinent: the medium was introduced to Indians in the eighteenth century by Europeans, promoted by the British throughout the nineteenth century in their museums and art schools as part of the civilizing mission, rejected by nationalists in the early twentieth century as a foreign medium belonging to the coloniser, and then seized by modern artists throughout the twentieth century with varying degrees of ambivalence, mimicry, and/or subversion, often at the same time. It is significant that Sundaram is both personally and professionally linked to these emblematic moments of modernism in India: it is well known that he is the nephew of the charismatic female painter, Amrita Sher-Gil, who went to Paris in the 1920s to train in post-Impressionist circles, before returning to India in the 1930s. Sher-Gils extraordinary 1934 painting titled Self-Portrait as Tahitian, where her own nude body occupies the romantic space of Gaugins Tahitian females, is a compelling, yet underexamined, subversion of the dominant tropes of western primitivism, and an expression of the entanglements of Indian painters within modernisms powerful representational dilemmas.11 Similarly, Sundarams more recent return to the hybrid and cosmopolitan legacies of his famous aunt in the digitally manipulated photo-montage series, Re-take of Amrita, exposes the stylish, yet
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10. This history is examined in more detail in my book, India By Design: Colonial History and Cultural Display, Berkeley, University of California Press, 2007.

11. See Geeta Kapur, When was Modernism?, New Delhi, Tulika, 2003.

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distinctly melancholic, mix between European and Indian social milieus within which oil painters in India like Amrita Sher-Gil confronted the perennial problem of Indianness in their art. In other words, from such a vantage point oil is not an innocent art historical material, but one that is dredged through a long history of power and infused with inescapable paradoxes and predicaments. And it is the multiple meanings of oil in Sundarams images, as I have suggested, that point to these several different historical phenomena simultaneously: the awareness of oil as a global commodity, the connection between oil and imperial violence, and the postcolonial consciousness brought to oil as an artistic medium with its origins in the west. Such a politics of the palette may not belong exclusively to artists from the formerly colonised world; critical perspectives on the history of oil can (and have) derived from a range of artistic locations and practices. But it is not surprising to me at the same time that the formal consideration of the relationship between oil as an artistic and political commodity that Sundaram undertakes at a time of war emerges from an artist positioned where he is within the intertwined histories of west and non-west, and the power imbalances of the first and third worlds. III. ARCHAEOLOGY, POLITICS & THE IRAQ MUSEUM

If Iraq floats on a sea of oil, as Wolfowitz noted, it also sits on a bedrock of antiquities, since there are more than 10,000 known archaeological sites in the country, of which barely one fifth have been excavated - making essentially all of modern Iraq an archaeological site. Moreover, the story of archaeology in the country begins at approximately the same time as the story of foreign interest in its oil: at the height of European imperial expansion in the nineteenth century, when western nations believed it was their right to possess the raw materials and cultural property they uncovered in the non-western world. By the early twentieth century, however, both oil and archaeology became inseparable from the cultural and economic nationalism emerging in Iraq at the time, and important arenas through which Iraqs anti-colonial struggle was staged. One of the greatest challenges for Iraqi nationalists in the early decades of the twentieth century was to regain control of the resources, both natural and cultural, being extracted from the new nation-state. One can imagine how the world was stunned in the 1840s when British, French and German archaeologists first encountered, rather suddenly and unexpectedly, the vast ruins of the Assyrian empire, and its capital city, Nineveh, in the northern part of what was called Mesopotamia, as well as the great walled city of the Babylonian kingdom to the south. True, Mesopotamia had long been an exotic referent for European culture, perhaps best embodied by Eugene Delacroixs famous painting of 1827/28 depicting the fall of the Assyrian king, Death of Sardanapalus. However, the survival of its material culture, which represented for Euro-western audiences the physical proof of events depicted in the Bible, was indeed a momentous revelation. In fact, for
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over a hundred years, from approximately 1810 to1910, almost all excavations in Iraq by Europeans and Americans were conducted at pre-Islamic sites like Babylon and Nippur, a source of fascination because of their relation to the Bible, while Islamic sites - not to mention the contemporary Islamic inhabitants of the area - were largely overlooked. The finds from these first excavations in the 1840s led by the Frenchman, Paul-Emile Botta, the Englishman, A.H. Layard, and the German, Robert Koldewey, today constitute, respectively, the impressive Assyrian sculpture courts at the Louvre, the distinguished Near Eastern collections of the British Museum, and the exquisite display of Babylonian gates and friezes at the Pergamon Museum in Berlin. In these sites, and elsewhere, as Frederick Bohrer has shown in his epistemological itinerary of Assyrian objects in the west, Mesopotamia itself was an inconsistent, ever-shifting signifier whose inchoate, polymorphous nature reflected the changing demands and modes of evaluation of the west.12 Moreover, the Englishman Layards claim to the discovery of ancient Assyria in his 1849 book, Nineveh and its Remains, an archaeological bestseller of the nineteenth century, must today be reckoned against his own acknowledgment that the mostly Kurdish inhabitants of the area had long been aware of the inscribed tablets and other artifacts he extracted from the ground near their homes. When British administrators first drew up the boundaries of modern Iraq in 1918-19, it was not an accident that they included the ancient sites of Sumer, Akkad, Babylonia, and Assyria within the new geo-political entity. The British had deliberately followed the contours of these long-dead ancient cultures, which was easier than outlining the current realities of the region with its Arabic, Persian, Kurdish, and Turkish speakers and its mixture of Muslim, Jewish, and Christian populations.13 This was at the heart of the paradoxical project of establishing a new nation-state in the ancient space deemed the cradle of civilisation. Gertrude Bell, one of the most famous Englishwomen in the British empire, who established the Iraq Museum in Baghdad, served as Iraqs first Director of Antiquities, and assisted in drawing the boundaries of the new nation, reflected upon this paradox at the time: History, Bell wrote, suffers an atmospheric distortion. We look upon a past civilisation and see it, not as it was, but charged with the significance of that through which we gaze, as down the centuries shadow overlies shadow, some dim, some luminous, and some so strongly coloured that all the age behind is tinged with a borrowed hue 14 The distortion of modernitys view of the past was perhaps best embodied in the particularities of the museum inaugurated by Bell in 1923 - the Iraq Museum, conceived in part to help protect the archaeological remains of Iraq from the insatiable appetite of the western museum. Paradoxically, Bell had also implemented antiquities legislation during these years that allowed for extensive exporting of artifacts based on assumptions about their universal
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12. Frederick Bohrer, Orientalism and Visual Culture: Imagining Mesopotamia in Nineteenth Century Europe, Cambridge, UK, Cambridge University Press, 2003.

13. Foster et al, Iraq Beyond the Headlines, 2005, p3.

14. Cited in Magnus T. Bernhardsson, Reclaiming a Plundered Past: Archaeology and Nation Building in Modern Iraq, Austin, University of Texas Press, 2005, p65.

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15. Ibid., p12.

16. Ibid., p153.

significance and the western museums rights to ownership.15 Bell nevertheless promoted the institution tirelessly in its early days: she organised makeshift displays, coordinated lectures from visiting archaeologists, and eventually managed to find a permanent space. It will be a real museum rather like the British Museum, only a little smaller, she stated with pride in 1926. Although Bells model may well have been the grand institution of the Victorian metropolis, the museum she created in Baghdad was an altogether different event. It did not boast an imperial collection or a universal art survey like its European counterparts; nor did it emerge from the impetus or initiatives of Iraqis themselves. On the contrary, it was the British who saw the necessity of a national museum for their nation-building efforts during the indirect rule of the Mandate period, a new identity created by the League of Nations for a country still unable to stand alone requiring the tutelage of the advanced nations. Nevertheless, by the time of Bells death in 1926, the museum had moved to a new location in northern Baghdad, and its collection consisted of some ten thousand-plus objects. With inexplicable optimism in view of her suicide later that year, Bell wrote to her father: I burst with pride when I show people over the Museum. It is becoming such a wonderful place.16 That Bells museum reflected a European imaginary somewhat at odds with the politics of the new nation would become increasingly clear. Sati al-Husri, the nationalist leader who replaced Bell as Iraqs Director of Antiquities by the 1930s, did not include, for example, visits to the museum into the pedagogy of the new Iraqi school curriculum. He focused instead on the arrival of Islam in the region from the seventh century A.D., and on generating a collection of Islamic objects for the museum through large-scale excavations of Islamic archaeological sites, like the great mosques and imperial architecture of the Umayyad and Abbasid Caliphates, (661-750 A.D.) and (750-1258 A.D.), respectively, or the second Abbasid capital at Samarra (836-892 A.D.). One result was that the museum continued to grow, acquiring a new role for itself as a nationalist repository of a shared relationship to an Islamic and a pre-Islamic past for Iraqis. As many scholars have argued, the museum in general as a cultural institution has long helped to consolidate the imagined communities of the modern nation-state, from its earliest inception in the post-Enlightenment era to its contemporary expressions in a multicultural world. The tragic destruction of the Iraq Museum by looters in 2003 must not be viewed, therefore, as a marginal aside to the real battlefield of the US-led invasion, as the Bush administration and the mainstream media have repeatedly attempted to claim. On the contrary, the Iraq museum is a central site through which to comprehend and measure the full scale of the damage inflicted by the American occupation upon the infrastructures of identity and historical foundations of the modern nation and its citizens. IV. STUFF HAPPENS The distinctive art-deco style building of the contemporary Iraq Museum
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was constructed in1966, and expanded again in 1986. It is a two-story brick structure with a basement, containing some twenty public galleries, all of them long, rectangular blocks organised around two inner court-yards. Until 2003, the galleries themselves were arranged chronologically - with the prehistoric and Sumerian periods on the first floor, and the later Assyrian and Islamic eras on the ground level. The gallery of Assyrian antiquities, in particular, was considered one of the highlights of the museum, its walls covered with giant relief panels and the massive human-headed winged bulls with five legs that once guarded the gates of the Assyrian capitals. It is still difficult to imagine how this orderly and linear repository of objects from the ancient Assyrian, Babylonian, and Sumerian city-states, and the period of Islamic ascendancy, was subjected to the unchecked frenzy and violence of looters, who pillaged government buildings and businesses after the fall of Baghdad - and for a few days in early April 2003 - also targeted the museum.17 Most of the damage was done on a single day, in fact, Thursday, April 10, when the looters, a combination of professionals who appear to have known what they wanted, and amateurs who indiscriminately smashed or grabbed whatever they could, swarmed into the grounds of the museum armed with chainsaws, sledge hammers, wheelbarrows and carts. Although the Geneva and Hague conventions make the protection of cultural heritage the responsibility of foreign powers during an occupation, the United States - as is well known - did not protect the museum under siege, in spite of repeated requests made by archaeologists to the Department of Defense before the war to safeguard specific sites. All it would have taken was one tank and two soldiers, stated the emotional deputy director, Nabhal Amin, at the time. Instead, the Bush administration expressed their priorities by deploying some two thousand American troops on that same day to defend the northern oilfields of Iraq. Even worse was Donald Rumsfelds dismissive response to the tragedy: Stuff happens, he shrugged at a press conference. Freedoms untidy, and free people are free to make mistakes and commit crimes and do bad things. Visibly irritated by the medias exaggerated reports of the damage, Rumsfeld also quipped at the same press conference: My goodness, were there that many vases? Is it possible that there were that many vases in the whole country?18 Incredibly, relatively few of the museums, libraries or ancient monuments of Baghdad were hit during the massive American bomb and missile attacks on the city, either in 1991 or 2003. It was only in the aftermath of these campaigns, after the total collapse of the government, that the largest wave of destruction occurred. During the first Gulf War in 1991, nine different regional and site museums were looted and destroyed, and more than four thousand objects taken, including statues, cylinder seals, cuneiform clay tablets, and pottery - almost all of these objects remain missing today.19 Following the fall of the Baathist leadership in 2003, numerous other cultural institutions, like the National Library and Archives, and the Ministry of Holy Endowments and Religious Affairs (al-Awqaf), were also burned, looted and
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17. See Usam Ghaidan and Anna Paolini, A Short History of the Iraq National Museum in Milbry Polk and Angela Schuster (eds), The Looting of the Iraq Museum, Baghdad: The Lost Legacy of Ancient Mesopotamia, New York, Harry Abrams, 2005, pp20-25.

18. Free to do Bad Things, The Guardian Unlimited, 12 April 2003.

19. See Polk and Schuster (eds), op. cit., p1.

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20. Zainab Bahrani, The Fall of Babylon in Polk and Schuster (eds), op. cit., pp214-216.

21. Bernhardsson, op. cit., p156.

22. Micah Garen and Marie-Helene Carleton, Erasing the Past: Looting of Archaeological Sites in Southern Iraq in Polk and Schuster (eds), op. cit., p18.

pillaged during the early weeks of the occupation. However, it is the ongoing destruction of archaeological sites - through looting and through the presence of foreign military forces - that has had by far the most devastating impact on the historical identities of the region. A military base with living quarters for two thousand American and Polish troops along with a helicopter landing pad was constructed, for example, next to the remains of the ancient city of Babylon, and the sand winds and rotor wash from the helicopters, along with other heavy equipment and machinery, and graffiti from soldiers, have caused irreparable damage to its ancient walls.20 The plundering of archaeological sites is not a new phenomenon for Iraq: Gertrude Bell, for instance, filed a report in 1925 expressing her concern at finding a large party of men, women, and children engaged in promiscuous digging at Warka, the biggest archaeological site in southern Iraq. A considerable amount of harm is undoubtedly being done, she despaired at the time.21 However, the contemporary looting and pillaging of war-torn Iraq is different in both kind and scale. Some locate the origins of this destructive activity in the 1992 Saddam Canal Project, which cut a trench through the desert from Baghdad to Basra, destroying dozens of existing archaeological sites and exposing innumerable artifacts. Villagers in this southern region, often farmers or the unemployed, seeing the treasures that were unearthed, began digging up sites, mostly at night, often to supply ringleaders of largescale looting operations. A site like Umma, for example - one of the most important of the Sumerian city-states, which had not been officially excavated until 1996 - is now (in the words of one observer viewing it from a helicopter) an unimaginably grim reality, a scene of complete destruction that unfolds before you as a sea of holes in the desert - negative spaces in history - a pockmarked landscape with craters up to five meters deep. A landscape as desolate as the surface of the moon during the day springs to life after sunset with generators, light-bulbs, trucks, and shovel, as hundreds of looters dig till dawn.22 What seems most obvious about the phenomenon of looting today, and the terrible threat to archaeological heritage it represents, is that, tragically, it emerges from war itself - from the social and economic instability of war, from the failure of governments to provide security or services, and from the conditions of depravation (and desperation) that civilians remain unable to escape. In present-day Iraq, the plundering of archaeological sites, fuelled by poverty and conditions of lawlessness, continues in spite of several preventative measures by the UN (for example, the adoption of UN Security Council Resolution 1483, which bans international trade in stolen Iraqi cultural property, or Resolution 1546, which stresses the need to protect Iraqs archaeological sites). But these measures have been difficult to enforce given the ongoing conditions of war, and they rank low on the list of priorities in the elusive project of rebuilding Iraq. Moreover, the multibillion dollar industry in the traffic of stolen antiquities, which ranks third in the illicit ventures of the global economy after drug smuggling and arms
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dealing, suggests that the world market for the ancient material culture of Iraq is thriving. It is nevertheless heartening to recall that a no questions asked amnesty extended to the public after the crowds ravaged the Iraq Museum in April 2003 resulted in the return of some 2,000 objects to museum authorities by the citizens of Iraq. Incredibly, Iraqis brought four and five thousand year old artifacts back to the museum in carts, in vehicles, and on foot; they left ancient objects outside the building in paper bags, anonymously submitted such items to nearby mosques, and handed antiquities to random American soldiers, including some that were merely directing traffic. These are touching stories of return, and they reveal the capacity of civil society to serve as custodians of a threatened cultural heritage, even as they dramatise the delicacy and painful fragility of the task: in another example, the Sacred Vase of Warka, one of the great treasures of Sumerian society dated to 3,000 B.C., was driven up to the museum in the trunk of an old car, broken into fourteen pieces, but only along cracks that had been previously restored. V. AN ARTISTS VISION: ART, POLITICS, IMAGES The engine oil and charcoal series by Vivan Sundaram, first exhibited in India in 1991, was in part inspired by a visit to Iraq two years earlier, where the artist participated in the Second International Art Exhibition in Baghdad and won one of the five gold medals that were named after Saddam Hussein awarded at the time. But Sundaram also travelled during this 1989 trip to a number of historical and archaeological sites that have since been either looted or destroyed. Some of his pictures, including the diptych titled Desert Trail, also in engine oil and charcoal on paper (Figure 3), almost seem to foreshadow the events of the looting in 2003: we are presented here with spillage, archaeological wreckage, a scattering of bones, shrapnel and more debris - the hideous trail of a storm in the desert, or more accurately, the trail of Operation Desert Storm. But who are the victims of all this destruction? Two more images, both diptychs, one titled Soldier of Babylon and the other, Death of an Akkadian King, seem to make this abundantly clear (Figures 4 & 5). Here we see not the contemporary people of Iraq, but rather the great figures of an ancient civilisation lying executed on the floor, bound or buried, limbs distorted or dismembered, heads tilted back, eyes closed in death, shrouded in angry clouds of black and grey. Another in the series, called Mesopotamian Drawing, presents the outlines of Mesopotamian imagery (a camel, a Babylonian figure, a woman, and a palm tree - reminders of the once fertile crescent) on paper stained with oil, which creates the appearance of a dense veil of smoke. In the foreground is a male figure lying dead on the ground, apparently choked by black sludge (Figure 6). The images of techno-warfare that were first promoted by the US military during the first Gulf War in 1991 depended upon a view from afar: as Susan Sontag wrote, those televisual images of the sky above the dying, filled with light-traces of missiles and shells served to illustrate Americas absolute
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Fig 4 (top left): Death of an Akkadian King (diptych), engine oil and charcoal on paper, 30 x 44, 1991, photograph courtesy of the artist Vivan Sundaram Fig 5 (top right): Soldier of Babylon (diptych), engine oil and charcoal on paper, 30 x 44, 1991, photograph courtesy of the artist Vivan Sundaram Fig 6 (bottom left): Mesopotamian Drawing II, engine oil and charcoal on paper, 22 x 30, 1991, photograph courtesy of the artist Vivan Sundaram 23. Susan Sontag, Regarding the Pain of Others, New York, Picador, 2003, p66.

military superiority over its enemy.23 The socalled smart bomb - a bomb with a camera attached to its front - allowed the television viewer to participate directly in the military triumph, and in effect constituted the television screen and its viewer as an extended apparatus of the bomb itself. Sundaram is acutely conscious of these disembodying visual acts, the kinds of involvements and detachments they enable and permit, and their role in the construction of the western viewing subject. In several pictures he constructs a CNN-type aerial view that tends to obscure the specific details of a scene into a vague or blurry haze - in one case the outline of a human figure is smudged into the fallout (Figures 7 & 8). We see forms that transmutate and metamorphosise as the present seems to explode the past: old cuneic-like forms are smudged and eroded, and new ones have not yet acquired their shape. The series was no doubt shaped by another set of Sundarams drawings that deal thematically with the second world war, a series that the artist created in 1988 after visiting Auschwitz and Birkenau for the first time. In those dark charcoal sketches, reminiscent of William Kentridges drawings of apartheid South Africa, the artist confronted the destruction of the holocaust through landscapes of loss and social devastation. But it is the aerial or civilisational view, along with the use of engine oil as a painterly medium, that marks the biggest difference between the two series, and makes the latter so sympathetic to the fate of Iraqi antiquities without reproducing the western salvage paradigm represented by the military operations of a figure like Bogdanos. A final image of Sundarams, titled From the First World/From the Third World, seems at first glance more abstract: it is a Rorschach-like composition, the top titled From the 1stWorld, the bottom inscribed with From the 3rd World (Figure 9). Yet, implicit in this hierarchy of forms (are they figures? bodies of water? landscapes?) is a strong political message about different and unequal world-views. If they are landscapes, they are not the kind of landscapes in oil that dominated European art history in the nineteenth century, a
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genre that was itself bound up in the discourses of imperial representation and the imagined geographies it charted.24 Instead they are the kind of landscapes that make visible the processes by which culture and geography are inflected in the self, and by which competing social identities are shaped. Like the Manichean separation between the settler and the native in Fanons formulation of the colonial city, this is a world cut into two compartments: these 1st and 3rd World views exist unequal and apart; they do not converge or mix; they dramatise in short the politics of global space. Does this image, then, convey the same polarities as Samuel Huntingtons clash of civilisations, or George Bushs youre with us or against us statements on behalf of the United States? Does it stage, in other words, the irreducible division between us and them in pictorial terms? It is important to recognise how it does not, and to distinguish such strategies of the left from the right. What Sundaram depicts is not a universalist account of primordial cultural difference, nor a moral clash between good and evil, itself a symptom of the self-righteous religious thinking that typifies the constituencies of the Bush administration. Nor is it a simple demonisation of the other, so pervasive a strategy at times of war. It is, rather, a positioned and geo-political response to a different set of stakes altogether: to the unequal distributions of global power today, the realities of third world social and political struggle, the histories of colonial humiliation and injustice, and the continued problems of underdevelopment in spite of (and because of) economic globalisation. It is therefore not merely the connection
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24. W.J.T. Mitchell (ed), Landscape and Power, Chicago, University of Chicago Press, 2002.

Fig 7 (top left): Imperial Overcast (diptych), engine oil and charcoal on paper, 30 x 44, 1991, photograph courtesy of the artist Vivan Sundaram Fig 8 (top right): Land of Euphrates II, engine oil and charcoal on paper, 22 x 30, 1991, photograph courtesy of the artist Vivan Sundaram Fig 9 (bottom left): From the First World/From the Third World (diptych), engine oil and charcoal on paper, 44 x 30, 1991, photograph courtesy of the artist Vivan Sundaram

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25. Bernhardsson, op. cit., p94.

26. Joe Stork, Middle East Oil and the Energy Crisis, New York, Monthly Review Press, 1975, p11.

to antiquity, or the particular relationship of belonging to an ancient past that India and Iraq appear to share, that gives this series by Sundaram its critical charge. It is, rather, the common history of subjugation within empire, in particular, the modern formation of the British empire, through which the most powerful connections between India and Iraq are foregrounded in the work. Gertrude Bell was, in fact, repeatedly drawn to the lessons and experiences of British imperial rule in India, and she visited the subcontinent in 1903 to attend Lord Curzons Delhi Durbar - a gorgeous fantasy in her view. After all, the British were interested in Mesopotamia because of its strategic position as a corridor to India. However, by the time Bell was sent to pull things straight between Delhi and Cairo, the contradictions, failures, and prejudices of empire had been increasingly exposed to its participants and observers. Bell was both concerned by what she called Britains colonial arrogance and vision of supremacy, and driven by the larger, ill-fated project of the late Victorian civilizing mission. Similarly, Lord Curzon, the enthusiastic promoter of traditional Indian art, who argued that it is equally our duty to dig and discover [antiquities], to classify, reproduce and describe, to copy and decipher, and to cherish and conserve25 concluded his career as the chief architect of the Anglo-Persian agreement of 1919, which cemented the interests of the Anglo-Persian Oil Company in Iraq (later British Petroleum). As Curzon stated at the time, we possess in the south-western corner of Persia great assets in the shape of oilfields which give us a commanding interest in that part of the world.26 Oil and antiquities were thus perceived as assets within the broader benevolence of the civilizing mission for the first generation of modern empire-builders like Curzon. And, as Sundarams images serve to make visible, such perceptions and equations continue to shape the deadly strategies of the western powers today. *** In his posthumously published volume, Humanism and Democratic Criticism, Edward Said argued for a renewed relevance of humanistic study to the heightened arenas of global conflict following the events of September 11, 2001. In this work Said conceded that James Cliffords early critique of Orientalism - namely, that its humanistic bias was fundamentally at odds with the anti-humanist post-structuralism of Foucault upon which the argument depended - was more or less correct.27 For Said, the source of the tension that Clifford recognised lay within humanism itself: his primary concern in the later work was thus to recover within humanism a more useable praxis, and to make its ideas relevant, in particular, to the cultural processes of the new global economy. Saids argument for a more inclusive, open and democratic form of humanism than that associated with elite education of the past - in his words, a critique of humanism in the name of humanism - was thus a strategy for revitalising the humanities, specifically in the American
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27. Edward Said, Humanism and Democratic Criticism, New York, Columbia University Press, 2004, pp8-9.

academy, and claiming a more active role for intellectuals in public life at a time when the humanist principles of reason, critique, and dissent seem distinctly unpopular in the United States. The hopefulness of this project, one of the last fronts Said battled before his own untimely death, is like a small flame flickering in the midst of the impossible chaos and continued violence in Iraq and elsewhere resulting from the disastrous foreign policies of the Bush administration and the terrible losses to human life that have accompanied its so-called war on terror. For it is not merely the humanistic concepts of culture and civilisation that have been hi-jacked by the likes of Samuel Huntington and others on behalf of a vision and national mission of unchallenged American supremacy. It is also that the humanist understanding of civilisation and history remains one of the last best hopes of mankind, to appropriate a term from the Retort Collective, against the reckless treatment and unchecked trafficking of cultural antiquities that has tragically become the norm in Iraq.28 Some may argue - as indeed Rumsfeld did - that against all the other disasters of this war, the destruction of an art object or an archaeological site is a trivial matter, a frivolous concern of intellectuals alone. But the archaeological record, like oil, is a non-renewable resource, and violence upon the historical memory of a place, as we know in the case of Native American populations, is directly related to the scale of human suffering, and the crises confronted by future generations. By using elemental, indeed ancient, materials (oil, hand-made paper, charcoal, zinc), Sundarams work returns us to the land as a kind of bedrock in which oil, antiquities, and the past reside - and upon which economies, nations, and wars are built - and it reminds us of the devastating impact of the war on the physical and historical environment of the region. But his images are neither wholly apocalyptic, nor entirely pessimistic in the end. They point instead towards the utopian possibilities that emerge from the dialectics of fragmentation and repair. Somewhere within this annihilated world, he has stated in another context, there is this ground plan of nature, somewhere underlying this uprooted terrain there is a need for order.29 Sundaram is not alone in his critique of the war in Iraq, or his vision for a less unjust world; he is of course accompanied by many other artists in India and around the world. But his experimentations with form, his historical consciousness, and his assertion of a specifically situated identity within the contemporary contours of global power offer us a picture of the beleaguered present that it is no longer possible to ignore.

28. Boal et al, Afflicted Powers: Capital and Spectacle in a New Age of War, London, Verso, 2005, p14.

29. Vivan Sundaram and Anil Bhatti: A Conversation, Long Night: Drawings in Charcoal (exhibition catalogue), New Delhi, Bombay, and Calcutta, 1988

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