Amusement Dark

Abstract

It could be said Iraqi installation artist Adel specializes in humor. In fact, it has been said, or something close to it: is how New York Times art critic Carol Vogel described Abidin's 2007 installation, Abidin Travels, in her review of the Nordic Pavilion at the [52.sup.nd] Venice Biennale. In his fictional cut-rate travel agency, deployed images of post-occupation Baghdad in a slew of cheesy brochures, videos, and websites promoting junkets, services, and lodgings. Certainly, there was plenty of grim irony in the quixotic efforts of Abidin Travels to promote tourism in what is perhaps the world's most ancient, lovely, and war-ravaged city, home of the Golden Gate Palace and Qasr al-Khalifa: Sightseeing 1. All the beautiful places that you might have read about have either been destroyed or looted. There really are no sights left. 2. Do not walk on sidewalks, they are filled with mines. But any pat reduction of Abidin's work to humor amounts to critically selling it short, no matter how or black that humor might be. How can we define as dark work that sheds so much light on the dyadic force relations of East and West, patriotism and terrorism, masculinity and femininity, visibility and (mis) recognition? Indeed, it is precisely because positions so many of these elements on the same interstitial playing field that his works complicate what is defined as 'humor -which, as Julia Kristeva points out in Revolution in Poetic Language (1984), is not always a prerequisite of laughter. Moreover^ the fact that humor is not always present in Abidin's work makes his pieces more rewarding, as the artist tangibly resists perpetuating a trademark aesthetic. In this manner, avoids stumbling into the pitfalls that plague agit-prop old and new: the didactic gesture, myopic scope, and intellectual peevishness of Werner Horvath's Clash of Civilizations (2006), or the schoolboy hectoring of Banksy's graffiti. It is Abidin's frequent alternation--not entirely seamless--between humor, tenderness, and melancholy that keeps his political tooth sharp, and makes any irony in his works bite more keenly. I will return to this notion in a moment, but suffice it to say that a nuanced blend of humor and abjection runs through all of Abidin's pieces. It can be detected in his Oil Paintings (2004), a series of three interactive plexiglass photographs slathered with axel grease, as well as more recent video installations, such as Abidin Travels/' Tasty (2007), and Foam (2007). Any humor present in these pieces is interlaced with an ominous melancholy, while their eye to conceptual breadth ensures the work remains multifarious and evocative. Foam, in its manifestation at Vienna's Projektraum Viktor Bucher in 2008, consisted of a simple video projection at the end of a long, shadowy room--a stark, even bleak setting that lent itself to the more critical aspects of the piece. In the video projection, we see a group of Iraqi barbers' apprentices learning their trade the old-fashioned way: shaving a series of black balloons with a straight razor. Each boy approaches his balloon with practiced, bored caution, slathering it with white lather and attempting to whisk it clean. The boys have conducted this ritual innumerable times and are all too familiar with the fatal slip as the razor nicks the skin, yet they always seem shocked, puzzled, and humiliated at the moment the balloon explodes (an explosion amplifies to bomb-like proportions). Even though their performances are unrehearsed, the pragmatic fact of their repetition makes them cohesive, while the formal composition of Abidin's video is tight and crisp, its colors stark and stylized. The ancient barber's chair, with its battered metal and crackled leatherette, recalls gangland scenes in Bogart movies, the faces of tough mugs wrapped in steaming cloths. [ILLUSTRATION OMITTED] The implicit violence of the piece is clearly endemic to the balloons, which typically serve as children's toys, the trappings of birthday parties and other celebrations. …