Academy exhibitions director Norman Rosenthal makes a passionate case for his new offering. “The idea is that the apocalypse can take place in the bed-sitting room, as well as California in the 1950s, or in the 21st century,” he told NEWSWEEK as the first viewers poured into the RA last week. (“Apocalypse” runs through Dec. 15, and there are no plans yet to send it to America.) “Art is dangerous, art is magic and art can turn the world upside down,” Rosenthal added in cheerful hyperbole. For “Apocalypse,” Rosenthal did things a bit differently from “Sensation.” Instead of operating solo, he brought in freelance curator Max Wigram to add a younger viewpoint, and went international with the selection of artists. (“Sensation” was all British.) Rosenthal also gave each of the show’s 13 participants an entire gallery to work with.
The result? A lot of nominal horror–which is to say Holocaust references. Very little beauty, mostly because few unironic attempts are made to achieve it. A whole bunch of tiresome takes on prettiness in mass culture. A few outright gags, such as Richard Prince’s cheesy two-liners printed on large canvases. And, surprisingly, a kind of professional cool that makes “Sensation” seem, by comparison, like the crazy art rave “Apocalypse” wants to be. Or is it simply that the year 2000 art audience is that much wiser to the carefully concocted art scandal?
“Apocalypse’s” centerpiece is an enormous depiction of “Hell,” by Jake and Dinos Chapman, best known for their genital-faced nymphet mannequins. (Indeed, a visit by Rosenthal to the artists’ studio to see the work in progress was his aha! moment in the exhibition’s genesis.) Consisting of some 5,000 variously deformed and mutilated Nazi toy soldiers deployed in eight big glass cases (arranged in swastika formation), “Hell” is a model railroader’s HO-gauge acid nightmare: an unbelievable orgy of shootings, beatings, crucifyings, cannibalism and chucking people into ovens. The piece is filled with grotesque cleverness–from the almost-indistinguishability of sex acts and genetic mutation to the sculptured eagles atop the ruins of a German temple morphing into live vultures. But it’s also oddly flat, even a little dull. None of the Chapmans’ mini-monsters seems to be suffering and, after a first tour around the vitrines, it hits you that the work is essentially an overwrought instance of what boys do when they’re left alone in their rooms too long. “Hell” is a marvel of obsessiveness without actually being marvelous.
If you want real horror, Jeff Koons’s room is the place. Koons–of chrome-bunny, giant-flowering-puppy and ex-husband-of-porn-star fame–says, “Early on I was involved in a Duchampian dialogue, but then I developed more of a sense of humanity.” His paintings (executed mostly by assistants) of bright, puffy things toddlers drool over, and a shiny, outsize metal replica of a balloon animal, are alleged by the artist to be innocently beautiful in a totally nonelitist way. “It’s important not to use the power of art to alienate and segregate,” Koons says. A studiously anonymous-looking man in an anonymous gray suit with a voice like HAL 9000, Koons is almost convincing in his role as The Stepford Artist. But not quite. A whole lot of anger (he admits the balloon dog is a Trojan horse filled with “negativity”) and irony (who but a Teletubby really wants to look at big paint-by-number renderings of stuffed animals?) oozes from his work. Ten minutes in the Koons gallery gives you the shudder of terror the Chapmans can’t.
A beauty/horror dichotomy is tweaked throughout the show. Mariko Mori’s ghostly meditation chamber appears to imagine what Liberace’s boudoir would be like if the pianist had converted to Zen Buddhism. (A day into the show, an electrical failure temporarily shut it down.) The British couple Tim Noble and Sue Webster pile up a bunch of trash that casts a piquant shadow on the wall of a loving couple sitting on a hill. Chris Cunningham probably comes closest to successfully baiting the bluestockings with “Flex,” a film of a nude couple’s violent sexual congress. The Academy and state censors are at a standoff regarding this over-FX’ed and oversoundtracked (there’s that obligatory techno-rumble from outer space again!) combination of soft porn and alien abduction.
The best piece in the exhibition is, however, a cosmic joke that has little to do with either beauty or horror: Maurizio Cattelan’s “The Ninth Hour.” In the midst of a vast red carpet lies the life-size, realistic and completely vestmented figure of the current pope–felled by a meteorite that has just crashed through the skylight overhead. (There’s a real hole up there, and shards of glass on the floor.) John Paul II is eerily unbloodied and still clings to his staff. Cattelan invents a new art category here–slapstick blasphemy–and at the same time asks a disturbing question about miracles, the one that struck down the pontiff in the first place, and the other one that saved him.
While most of the art in “Apocalypse” is brand new, none of it was commissioned especially for the exhibition. That means that the parts and plans for the installation-art pieces constituting the bulk of the show were already lying around the artists’ studios, waiting for a curator with a unifying concept to come along. Perhaps that’s why “Apocalypse” feels like a psychic tag sale that aims to clear our esthetic garage of late-20th-century baggage: all this trying to be profound and smartass at the same time. If there’s a beauty part to this exhibition, that’s probably it.
title: “Apocalypse Now” ShowToc: true date: “2022-12-05” author: “Christopher Alejos”
It would be easy to write off the thirty-something Zahra, who was killed along with more than 250 others in the battle, as an Iraqi David Koresh and his followers as misguided zealots. But the Soldiers of Heaven are only one of dozens of Shiite factions, some of whom have similar millenarian ideas, that have sprung up across southern Iraq. Dominated as it is by one sect, the south has generally been thought remote from the civil war that has engulfed Baghdad and its environs. The Iraqi Army took over security in Najaf from the Americans in late December; few if any of the 20,000 new U.S. troops heading to Iraq will be sent to the region. But as the new National Intelligence Estimate on Iraq released last week points out, the country is plagued by four overlapping battles–Al Qaeda and Sunni insurgent attacks on Americans, sectarian killings and Shia-on-Shia violence in the south. If left unchecked, that factional fighting could grow into as great a threat to Iraq’s stability as the ethnic cleansing farther north. “The collapse of authority in southern Iraq could be devastating for both the United States and for Iraq,” says Vali Nasr, author of “The Shia Revival.”
Under Saddam Hussein, the Shiite south was viewed as a hotbed of Iranian intrigues and deliberately neglected. Its infrastructure is noticeably worse than other parts of the country: roads are full of potholes, and open sewers are common. And, despite millions of dollars pumped into projects since 2003, most recently under the Shiite-dominated government in Baghdad, the situation hasn’t improved significantly. Unemployment in some areas is as high as 60 percent, and Iraq’s five poorest provinces are all in the south. Many reconstruction projects have been abandoned because of corruption, kidnappings and killings.
The two biggest players in the region are Moqtada al-Sadr’s Mahdi Army and the Supreme Council for Islamic Revolution in Iraq, run by cleric Abdul Aziz al-Hakim. But in Basra alone, whose oilfields account for about 90 percent of Iraq’s budgetary revenue, at least half a dozen parties are competing for power–often violently. Basra’s murder rate tripled in the first half of last year. “Security is bad in the Shiite south and may be getting worse,” says Juan Cole, a professor of history at the University of Michigan and an expert on Iraq’s Shiites.
In this chaotic environment, talk of the dhuhoor , or appearance of the Mahdi, has been growing. “The decrease of the things people need–electricity, water, a salary, peace of mind–makes them want to find something like a miracle,” says Salama Khafaji, a former member of the Iraqi Governing Council from Najaf. Sadr has astutely tapped into this longing for a better world; loyalists have hinted that he may be the Mahdi himself. Fringe groups that take the Mahdi more literally–and that rail against a Shiite leadership who are doing nothing to hasten his return–are also growing, says Khafaji. “When you have the complete collapse of society is exactly when you get these pretenders who combine social anxiety, political frustration and fear with millenarian expectations,” says Nasr.
Senior clerics familiar with Zahra say the Soldiers of Heaven was an offshoot of the Sadrist movement and had few friends among the Najaf establishment. “They were against the marjaiya [senior clerics], against the government, against the Americans,” says Sheik Fatih Kashif al-Ghitta, a senior cleric from Najaf. On more than one occasion, Ghitta says, Zahra’s followers had fought pitched battles against the Mahdi Army. They were particularly well entrenched in Zarqa, a village about 10 miles northeast of Najaf. The group had dug six-foot-deep trenches around their property and set up defensive sand berms. Weapons were buried underground or covered with palm leaves. Iraqi troops later found sniper rifles, heavy machine guns and even antiaircraft guns around the property. But the Soldiers of Heaven is hardly the only heavily armed faction in the south: gunmen from another Sadrist offshoot, the Fadhila Party, control Basra’s oilfields. Baghdad security officials worry that even more Shiite fighters will soon flood into the area to avoid the “surge” of U.S. troops in the capital.
If Zarqa is any indication, that could spell trouble. Although President George W. Bush praised Iraqi forces after the battle (“The Iraqis are beginning to show me something,” he said), in fact the Iraqis were nearly overrun. At one point, Col. Ahmad Silawi, the director of Najaf intelligence, and Abdul Hussein Abtan, the deputy governor of Najaf, were pinned down. “Help us! There’s heavy shooting!” Abtan cried over the radio. Silawi later told NEWSWEEK he’d recited the shahada , the traditional prayer before death. Only repeated U.S. airstrikes crushed the cultists.
Ironically, Iran? which U.S. military officials have blamed for fueling attacks against American soldiers in the south–probably has more influence in the region than the Coalition. “If, after this attack, the Americans haven’t realized that they need our help to stabilize Iraq, I don’t know when they’re going to learn anything,” says a Tehran official who has close ties to the senior Iranian leadership and asked not to be identified because of the sensitivity of the subject. If he’s expecting Washington to ask for help in the south, though, he may as well wait for the Mahdi, too.
