Dry, cerebral, fragmentary and stylistically derivative, the exhibition is less affecting and less informative than any number of newspaper and magazine articles about the Palestinian situation you might have read over the last 40 years.
I went to the show’s opening and thought it was very affecting.
Anyway, despite the NYT reviewer’s claims that his problem is with the formal execution of the show–not with its political content–he spends a good deal of time questioning that content.
If one were to judge from Ms. Jacir’s work, Mr. Zuaiter was innocent of any connection to the Munich murders, eliminated rather because he was an eloquent spokesman for the Palestinian cause.
In the wall text that introduces the exhibition, however, there is a curious qualification. It says that Mr. Zuaiter was never “conclusively” linked to the Olympics murders. This introduces the shadow of a doubt. Is there a chance that he was somehow involved? Ms. Jacir’s exhibition can thus be viewed as a brief for the defense, but this is problematic. How can we know if the artist is manipulating her material, leaving out anything that might be suspicious or incriminating?
Here’s the wiki page on Zuaiter. It seems clear to me that while the Mossad suspected him of being linked to the Munich attacks, no evidence has been made public to prove this–and shouldn’t the burden of proof be on them?
I’m quite frustrated by both the review and interview in the nytimes especially in light of the article in The National by Kaelen Wilson-Goldie.
The opening statement/question of the review “when an artist uses her
art to advance a political cause, how are we to judge the result?”
immediately suggests that the reviewer, Ken Johnson, has paid no
attention to the interview in the same newspaper, the new york times,
a week prior. In the interview Emily Jacir tries multiple times
to point to larger, layered themes in her work beyond the initial obvious observation that it is political.
Although I do think the political aspects of her work are very important, I think to read it simply as such does the work some injustice. In the interview with Emily Jacir published a few weeks before this
review, Jacir states that “a lot of my work is not so directly about
Palestine, but about me wandering through space and time.” In the
same interview, when asked about what she would like an audience to
get from the piece “Materials for a Film” she answers, “Poetry.” Not
to mention other statements she made regarding her view on the
boundaries (both fixed and permeable) between art and politics.
Why does the reviewer (as you mention) dwell on judging Wael Zuaitar’s
innocence based on the work rather than examine more closely perhaps
the relationship of Emily Jacir’s experience and Wael Zuaitar’s.
Nowhere does Emily Jacir state that it is a factual, objective look at
Zuaitar’s assassination and again in the interview she says, “Since I
was a teenager I have been haunted by the Mossad massacres of
Palestinian intellectuals, poets and politicians. The more I
researched, however, the more compelled I became with Wael’s story in
and of itself. I felt that there were a thousand Palestinian stories
in the narrative of his life. I felt connected to him in that I lived
in Rome and had moved there from the gulf as he did.” It is after all
an art exhibition and not a historical/factual analysis of the event.
In much of the art I have seen the integration and confusion of fact
and fiction can become a strength of the work. The blurred boundaries
invite questions and criticality.
Ken Johnson misses an opportunity to see past the immediate politics
in Jacir’s work, and point to the deeper, more nuanced aspects of her
work. Dilemmas of movement between places and
across borders, transience and exchange (to put it crudely). Indeed, Jacir’s work is
political, but it is also about much more.