By Peter Simek

May 7th, 2013 12:12pm

A few weeks ago I participated in a panel about art criticism at CentralTrak, the latest in the UT Artist Residency’s Next Topic discussion series. The conversation was at moments illuminating, at others disheartening. The largest disappointment for me was that we did not clearly mark out in the course of our conversation just what the value of arts criticism is, both to art in general, but also to its role in developing and deepening the work of artists locally.

That’s why I wanted to point to this article from the Brooklyn Rail that was written a year ago by David Levi Strauss, who now heads the MFA graduate program in Art Criticism & Writing at the School of Visual Arts in New York. If you are interested in art, his entire piece is necessary reading. It carefully outlines the relationship between the art object and the words written about it, while highlighting some recent attitudinal trends. These include the tendency among some of his students to seek “protection” from the experience of art behind a critical methodology (which he rightly holds is an altogether different thing than criticism), as well as the belief among artists that criticism is unnecessary — or an attitude which too easily accepts the substitution of the market for criticism as the only means by which a work of art is evaluated.

This situation of artists “being rated only by price,” Strauss argues, results from a devaluation of criticism.

Among other things, criticism involves making finer and finer distinctions among like things. If criticism is devalued, artists and curators have no other choice in the current crisis of relative values but to heed the market’s siren song.

For local artists, this situation should be concerning, particularly because for the vast majority (I could say all, but for three or four exceptions) their art work does not come into contact with the market. Even for local artists who sell work through galleries and have a decent number of committed collectors who buy their work locally, the difficulty of establishing secondary market value for artists working in a city like Dallas inhibits the possibility of market value growth of any artist’s work (which in most cases means the inhibiting of a sustained career as a working artist). In other words, Dallas’ irrelevance as a city where art is made is directly related to the locale’s insufficient market provenance. Irrelevant, that is, only in so far as the market is concerned.

Criticism, therefore, is of paramount importance in a city like Dallas precisely because it creates a place for a work of art to mean, irrelevant of market forces. Or, as Strauss puts it:

[Art] needs something outside of itself as a place of reflection, discernment, and connection with the larger world. Art for art’s sake is fine, if you can get it. But then the connection to the real becomes tenuous, and the connection to the social disappears. If you want to engage, if you want discourse, you need criticism.

What I like about this sentence is not just how it describes the role of criticism in establishing the relation between a work of art and society, but also that in the description Strauss lays out the criteria for arts writing that can be accurately called “criticism.” On the CentralTrak panel, the question was raised whether or not critics should write negative reviews, and a few of the participants said they don’t have the time or interest to write about “bad art.” In light of Strauss’ comments, however, the question itself seems miss-framed at best, idiotic at worst. Even reviews that seem to disparage the quality of a work of art can’t be called “negative” precisely because they should be an attempt to extrapolate a work of art’s implication for — and relation to — the larger world. A review that argues that a particular work of art does not adequately or effectively bear relation or significance to society is positive in that it elucidates those shortcomings both for the viewer and the artist. For critics to say they don’t write “negative” reviews is the same thing as a critic saying they don’t write criticism.

Dallas doesn’t have enough art critics, but then no place could be said it has enough critics of any sort, particularly these days. Because of criticism’s role in connecting a work of art to public discourse, there is always a need for more and more varied perspectives on this relationship. But Dallas is perhaps worse off in terms of art criticism than many other places (I couldn’t say this, however, about the state of local theater criticism, classical music criticism, and even, perhaps, pop music criticism). The problem is, in part, that there just aren’t enough people writing criticism. The other frustration is that many publications treat visual art as a kind of creative phenomenon, and not the starting point of critical dialogue. The art work is treated as a kind of artifact of creative intent. The personality of the artist (or their fashion sense) is of more interest than the art. Creativity is celebrated, creative enthusiasm is embraced as an end in itself. We want to “support” art and artists like we would a child in a youth sporting event, in which the effort and the fun is the point and the game is of no consequence. Thus there is a tendency to champion anything that is merely presented, anyone who slaps a painting on a wall, or locks themselves in a box, or declares the fruit of their solitary doodling “art.”

This is one of the challenges to arts criticism in Dallas. It stems from an attitude shared by some artists, arts supporters, writers, and editors that implicitly suggests that critical friction is a negative force on forward progress. It is a rejection, as Strauss puts it, of one the very intentions and consequences of artistic practice.

I used to think that the plight of criticism was to be always the lover, never the beloved. Criticism needs the art object, but the art object doesn’t need criticism. Now I agree with Baudelaire: “It is from the womb of art that criticism was born.” Artists who disparage criticism are attacking their own progeny, and future.

Kohei Nawa, "Pixcell Deer #24," 2011. Courtesy Metropolitan Museum of Art.

The term Pixcell is derived from both “pixel” and “cell”—the most basic building blocks of the digital and the organic. Japanese artist Kohei Nawa has been working with his unique artificial glass medium, called Pixcell beads, since 2000, using them to address the discrepancies between exterior and interior, perceived and actual. Hundreds of crystal clear beads coat a once living, now taxidermied deer, complete with a full and proud rack of antlers.

I am initially struck by the austere image that the freestanding deer sculpture presents. It stands, in the Metropolitan Museum of Art, surrounded by ancient Japanese screens that are coated in natural imagery. Nawa’s Pixcell Deer #24 (2011) is a solitary figure emanating a cool, silvery light in an otherwise warm, golden room. But its magnetic attraction quickly ceases when I realize what lies beneath the bubble-covered skin. A deer, once living, breathing and feeling, is now stuffed, frozen and silent. From afar, the stag deceives viewers into believing that it is simply a sculpture, an inanimate object that was made from nothing into something. The realization of being tricked, as well as being confronted with what is essentially a carcass, disturbed and repulsed me.

Nawa himself confronted the difference between perception and actuality during his work on his “Cell” series. By purchasing taxidermied animals and other objects (ranging from dice to emus) online, Nawa was forced to reconcile what was presented as a pixel-based image with what he received as a cell-based object. The deer is traditionally considered a messenger for the deities of the Japanese Shinto faith. Nawa repurposes the ancient Kasuga Mandala (the compositional motif of a white deer turned toward a mirror that sits on its back) to create his own harbinger of deception, which communicates the release from physical reality in preference for images.

Nawa, "Pixcell Deer #24," detail.

His focus on the space between perception and reality, or what might be called illusion, inspires ominous feelings. The outer layer of things, the skin, is the most immediately attractive portion of the work, but it also physically and metaphorically distorts what lies beneath it. A single bead, similar in size to a fortuneteller’s crystal ball, rests in the slope of the deer’s spine. As the largest Pixcell it is the easiest to peer into, but grotesque fun-house-mirror images form within it. My own twisted and bent reflection mixes with the contorted features of the deer into a vortex of light and color. The glass eyes of the stuffed animal are near human eye-level; a dark and piercing stare hangs beyond the fractal divide.

Reflections force a viewer to both look and be looked at. But this often leads to forgetting the divide between what is presented and what is seen.

By covering a surface of an object with transparent glass beads, the existence of the object itself is replaced by a ‘husk of light,’ and the new vision ‘the cell of an image’ (Pixcell) is shown. -Kohei Nawa

Knowing that I was both staring at, and being stared at, forces me to reevaluate the relationship that was forming between this art object and myself. Is then this deer that lived into adulthood before being killed, stuffed and sold, still a deer? No. Now this animal exists solely as an image—pixels made of light and color created by its new, artificial skin. The living animal was translated to an image on a website, repurposed into a sculpture, and then recreated as a hybrid physical-image. Nawa’s use of the Pixcell beads on everything great and small, living and dead, imposes a sense of neutrality that breeds uncertainty in my mind. What is nature in the technological age? Are we people or are we images of people? And finally, will the human eye eventually lose the ability to tell the difference? By not giving answers to my many troubling questions Pixcell Deer #24 forms a chasm of worry in my mind that stirs an instinctive reaction—fear.

Albert Bartholome, "In the Conservatory (Madame Bartholome)," 1881. Oil on canvas. Displayed with the sitter's gown. Courtesy Metropolitan Museum of Art.

During the late nineteenth century, many American and European Impressionist painters glamorized fashionable clothing and the standard of living that came with it. They painted parties in opulent interiors, luncheons in lush summer landscapes, and the exquisite liveliness of going out for an evening, attending a ball or visiting the theater. These artists articulated an image of their world through a personal lens of formal style, as in the bright strokes and atmospheric perspective of Monet, the brushy, delicate figuration of Renior, or the painted dots of Seurat.

“Impressionism, Fashion, and Modernity” was organized by the Metropolitan Museum of Art’s Costume Institute in cooperation with the Art Institute of Chicago and the Musée d’Orsay, Paris. The exhibition is evidence of the Metropolitan’s rich collection of images and objects from the twenty-year period between 1860 and 1880: it presents over eighty paintings and sixteen period dresses and costumes with matching hats and shoes. In addition to an array of accessories such as fans, parasols, and walking sticks, there are also display cases of fashion illustrations, photographs, and publications from the era. The show provides the context of a Parisian bourgeoisie during the time of Impressionism, displaying an interaction between fashion and art.

The material is presented within eight galleries that are navigated linearly, one after another. In the first room is a grouping of large, full-length portraits, each demonstrating a different modern ideal of beauty. Images of women, in paintings such as Monet’s Camille (1866) and Manet’s Young Lady (1866), are shown with concurrent fashion trends, and the favored facial features of the time are represented by models in popular fashion illustrations and journals, some more provocative than others. They present the women in repose, relaxing in their beautiful attire or gently pulling off a glove or shoe.

Paintings in the second gallery explore the ambient qualities of sunlight with leisurely scenes of men, women, and children wearing their best summer clothes. The feathery white cottons and silks kept people cool, and the painters depicted them waving in the wind while they shimmered in the light. It is the perfect subject for the Impressionist eye, tuned to atmospheric phenomena and the dreamlike potential of painting.

The show continues with two counterpart gallery spaces, one focusing on the white dress and the other on the black dress. The comparison addresses the stylistic differences between wearing the two colors. White day dresses were usually made of thin, airy materials and were meant to be worn in the flowing wind. A couple of white dresses featuring light chiffon and frilly lace are shown in large glass showcases. Monet’s romantic paintings of daytime parties in the French countryside are hung adjacent to the dresses. Conversely, the black dress represented refinement and the elegance that came with rigid corseting and elaborate ornamentation, as seen in the paintings of Renoir and Manet.

Albert Bartholomé’s In the Conservatory (Madame Bartholomé), 1881, is positioned in the center of the fifth gallery as a tour-de-force example of the dialogue between fashion and art. In this comparison of dress and painting, Bartholomé’s representation of his wife wearing a white and dark blue dress is paired with the dress itself. The outfit is a conglomeration of details, including fringe, buttons and drapery; polka dotted and striped, it has a tight waist and a large bustle at the back. Viewing the dress alongside the painting, which shows the artist’s wife standing in a garden entrance to a greenhouse, is a back and forth process. One walks around the dress as if witnessing a memory.

The sixth and seventh rooms examine the role of men in art and fashion during the twenty-year period. As seen in Degas’s Portraits at the Stock Exchange (1878), men wore vested suits and top hats with canes, which seem simple and stiff compared to the lavish garments of women at this time. In the seventh space is an organization of paintings and objects that show the avid consumerism of this era, and the relationship it established between husband and wife. Advertisements, packaging, and magazines associated with selling clothes—and an image of beauty—are shown alongside paintings such as Tissot’s The Shop Girl (1883), a scene in a Parisian boutique in which a woman subtly smiles at the viewer as a man peers with confusion through the window.

The last gallery features paintings of city life, the changing weather and movement of people: snapshots of Paris with its dazzling streets and venues. In Gustave Caillebotte’s Paris Street, Rainy Day (1877), residents of the city are shown on the misty sidewalk of a cobblestone street wet with rain. They wear overcoats and clutch umbrellas, their facial expressions relating to the somber energy of the scene. Every element of the painting serves to render an emotional impression.

“Impressionism, Fashion, and Modernity” offers several ways of entering the world of fashion and of considering its meaning during the late 19th century. Aside from a couple of galleries toward the end, much of the exhibition explores the role of women and their representation during that time. A few feminist currents run through the curatorial choices. The paintings objectify women and relegate them to idealized pictorial settings, but they are also an account of their dominance, demonstrating the power of a wife in marriage and the importance of women as muses. The show also includes the work of female impressionist painters such as Mary Cassatt and Berthe Morisot, without their usual labeling as a token female other, honoring their contributions without highlighting their gender. Instead of getting derailed in a critique of the system, the show generously explores styles of painting and bourgeoisie Parisian society, and the ways in which they informed each other.

Hosted by the MFA program in Art Criticism & Writing

at the School of Visual Arts, New York City, December 1, 2013

http://criticalinformationsva.com

Proposals due June 30, 2013 to email hidden; JavaScript is required

Critical Information is an interdisciplinary graduate student conference, which provides a platform to assess current scholarship and research at the intersection of art, media, and society. Critical Information is particularly interested in engaging both collaborative and individual papers or projects that address the following issues: Art and Social Theory, Philosophy and Media, Mediated Image Making, the Work of Art in the Information Age, Media and Memory, Identity and Representation in the Mediated Environment, Mediated Intercultural Exchange, Media Excess, and the History and Future of the Image, and more. All themes pertaining to the juncture of media, theory, society and the visual arts will be considered.

Open to all current graduate students and those who have received a graduate degree within the last year, Critical Information is sponsored by the MFA Art Criticism & Writing Department at the School of Visual Arts.

Submission Requirements:

Name, School, Department Affiliation, Academic Status

Phone Number, Email Address

Title of Paper or Project

Abstract including thesis statement and main argument. 100-150 words

Please submit the above information and your abstract within the body of an email. No attached word documents.

Important Dates:

Abstract Deadline: June 30, 2013

Decision Email: September 30, 2013

Paper Deadline; November 1, 2013

Conference Date: December 1, 2013

Liu Wei, installation view. Courtesy Lehmann Maupin Gallery.

Reclaimed doors, shutters still bearing drill holes and nail punctures, metal bolts, wooden beams grainy and dull with patches of old paint: these were some of the architectural components set in frames and displayed in Liu Wei’s recent exhibition at Lehmann Maupin. These wall pieces were interspaced with paintings of lines, on some canvases taking the form of horizontal bands of color reminiscent of dawn or dusk. In other paintings, the lines transform into brilliant grids or monochromatic graphs that suggest floor maps or skylines. The tall column-like structures placed in the center of the room, however, were the most arresting works shown. These pillars, which appeared to be made out of a multitude of frames within frames of reclaimed wood and metal painted in muted blues, greens, browns and grays, seemed to mimic the infinity-through-repetition often seen in Greek, Roman or Islamic architecture, though in Wei’s case, the repetition is within the construction of a pillar rather than in its multiplication. Created out of salvaged demolition debris, Wei’s large-scale installations looked like they were part of a construction site, while his wall-hung works acted like the site’s floor plans and sections.

Dieter Roth and Bjorn Roth, installation view (with Self Tower and Sugar Tower, both 1994-2013). Courtesy Hauser & Wirth Gallery.

Born in Beijing, China, in 1972, Wei has been working with multi-media for the past 15 years. The exhibition at Lehmann Maupin, which represents a continuation of his 2009 Merely a Mistake series, was his first solo exhibition in the United States. Time and space play a huge part in Wei’s work, which is mostly an exploration of urban settings and the workings of an ever-changing, unstable society. Time, space and form are certainly also definitive elements of the works by the German artists Dieter Roth (1930-98) and his son Bjorn that were also recently on display, at Hauser & Wirth in Chelsea. During the exhibition, two columns (Self Tower and Sugar Tower) were under construction, assembled from casts made at an on-site kitchen. Elsewhere in the spacious gallery, a floor was suspended to create a wall (The Floor I , 1973-1992). The installation Large Table Ruin (1978-1998)—a glorious confusion of wood planks, paints, brushes, tools, decomposing matter, antediluvian technology, ladders, shelves holding rows of glass bottles, cardboard boxes, sheets of paper, light bulbs, wire, a round table and chairs—told a similar story of use and decay. A thin, gray, tangible film of dust sat on top of everything, impartial in its adoption of ashtray, glue, paper, wood, tools, paint, and any and all else that stretched out under its undisputed reign. These works were a testament to the artists’ beliefs that everything about life is inherently bound to art, and that the material surrounding a man’s existence is subservient to the emotional and sensual meaning attached to it. This belief is also captured in the 128 components of Solo Scenes, a video diary created by Dieter Roth between 1997 and 1998 in which the artist “traced his own trajectory through days and places by setting up cameras in his studios in Germany, Switzerland and Iceland.”

William Cordova, "smoke signals (the trans-physics we knew about)," 2011-12. Mixed media and gold leaf on paper, 52 by 100 inches. Courtesy Sikkema Jenkins & Co.

The Roths’ art is as bound to time and space as William Cordova’s; in Cordova’s second solo show at Sikkema Jenkins & Co., time was cited through the use of reclaimed wood, structural drawings, sculptures and paintings. In smoke signals (the trans-physics we knew about), 2011-12, a riot of multi-colored lines explode out of a cube-shaped form at the bottom right of the image. These multitudes of color are perhaps a reference to the transcultural complexity that is so prevalent a theme in Cordova’s work. The background is created out of sheets of gold leaf made to replicate the texture of a brick wall; the same background is repeated in extended improvisations in time (a.b.), 2011-2012, in which the drawing of a structure bearing graffiti is shown suspended mid-air, almost as if it had been lifted off the ground and was in a state of conflict regarding its true place of belonging. According to an essay by artist Ernesto Oroza, Cordova’s work acts as a radio that receives signals simultaneously from across cultures and extracts meaning from them. “The drawings and sculptures seem to behave like a pragmatic repertoire of insurgent structures, a catalogue of ingenious articulations, a systematic revision of the formal and useful value of materials.”

Born in 1971 in Lima, Peru, William Cordova has been interested in transcultural dialogue for most his artistic career. He is not alone in his commitment to reframing history. Liu Wei, and Dieter and Bjorn Roth, also seek to transform the trajectory of time and space by creating ruptures that allow the viewer to reread history through art.

Doug Aitken, "Fountain (Earth Fountain)," 2012. Plexiglas, steel, pumping system, colored methyl cellulose, lava stones, 53 by 78 1/2 by 26 inches. Courtesy 303 Gallery.

A gaping circular crater the size of a small car ruptured the gray cement floor of 303 Gallery. It was filled with murky water, turned milky with limestone deposits. Called Sonic Fountain, this work was a visual and aural treat. From five rods suspended above the crater trickled droplets of the milky water, “plop…plop…plop”; ripples spread out from five epicenters. I couldn’t take my eyes off them. The plops echoed in the big space. The pace quickened and my ears detected a rhythm. “Aitken created a 15-minute composition where he programmed the pipes to drip in specific time intervals. If you listen carefully you’ll be able to hear the pattern,” the bespectacled gallery assistant told me. The pool emitted a faint glow even in broad daylight on a particularly sunny afternoon. I felt I was listening to a clock tick. A pile of rubble sat in the far corner of the space, perhaps made of bits of floor that were torn up to create the milky pond. It lay discarded, unwanted and messy. Although evocative of a post-apocalyptic, rubble-strewn landscape, the sonic experience was therapeutic.

Time is irreversible, relentless and in short supply. Among the other work shown, Fountain (Earth Fountain) is noteworthy for its expression of time’s inexorable flow. The show’s theme of a dystopian state of collapse was intensified through this arresting work, with its sense of deteriorating hope. The letters “A R T” stood in a rectangular dish filled with a muddy liquid substance in which dark brown foam collected around darker brown, porous rock formations. Looking like melted milk chocolate, the brown sludge oozed at a steady pace from the head of each three-dimensional letter, its repetitive recycling inviting and hypnotic. The apparently melting letters were suggestive of something discarded and dwindling. It looked like the artwork was sighing, contrite and broken.

Miroslaw Balka, "The Order of Things" (2013). Steel, water pumps, plastic, rubber, water, food coloring, wood, 138 by 118 by 118 inches overall. Courtesy Barbara Gladstone Gallery.

Constant cacophonous movement is ironically peaceful. Miroslaw Balka’s The Order of Things was a lot to take in, visually and aurally. The installation was entered through a small white door that did nothing to prepare me for its impact. A huge rust-colored vat in the shape of an upside down trapezoid greeted my open-mouthed stare. A loud rush, like that of a waterfall, filled the room, and I could barely hear myself think. But the noise was interruptive in a way that was oddly welcome. I felt calm, as if this noise had wiped my mind clean of thought. The trapezoidal metal vat was halved and its pieces were placed neatly about five inches apart. An inky liquid gushed into them from two pipes positioned directly above. In the sunlight streaming into the space, the liquid took on a deep magenta hue, like wine. A few feet away from the vats sat a block of wood about 13 inches high. Sitting on it and staring up at the work from this angle was unsettling, because the angled form of the vat made it appear as if it were teetering dangerously, threatening to flatten me. My encounter with the work was multilayered—visual, aural and even tactile. Although I didn’t touch it, I could vividly imagine the vat’s rough metallic surface beneath my fingers. I could feel the inky liquid slosh around and be sucked into the pipes leading out and up, only to gush back into the vat in one systematic cycle of movement. But if watching it was therapeutic, as with Aitken’s Sonic Fountain, Balka’s behemoth also humbled me with its size and the ferocity of its sound. I imagine that the oil-like substance pouring into the vat represents the human urge for evil, part of a constant circle in which trauma is endured and contained. As the exhibition’s title suggests, this circle helps maintain “the order of things”—a reference to Michel Foucault’s book excavating historical patterns of human thought.

Tam Van Tran, Installation view, "Leaves of Ore" (2013). Courtesy Ameringer/McEnery/Yohe Gallery.

Tam Van Tran’s show, “Leaves of Ore,” was a beautiful sight from the street, his copper works shimmering invitingly to passerby. I wrestled with an urge to run my hands through the delicate, leafy, metallic protrusions with which Tran covered his canvases. The wafer-thin leaves of copper make the surfaces, which vary in size but are compositionally similar, look like they’ve been through a particularly unforgiving shredder. Stuck flat onto the canvas in some places and crumpled and torn up in others, the copper leaves fluttered in a light draft whose source I couldn’t identify. They responded to my movement, swishing lightly. It was like autumn, come early. The slight movement was, once again, extremely soothing. This is ironic, given that the works are reminiscent of ruined landscapes, the aftermaths of bloody battle. The effect is heightened by a lock or two of a dark straw-like material placed on each canvas, which looks disconcertingly like human hair, thrusting the work into a violent and deathly context. In this light, the constant swish of the leaves becomes more sinister—as if it were the only sign of movement on a battlefield. The theme of destruction continued with a work composed of a set of 12 cans in washes of military colours—forest green, muddy brown and an oddly cheerful yellow—each lined with rows of porcelain shrapnel, which formed sets of ferocious looking teeth. Broken and cratered ceramic works hang on the walls, their shattered surfaces made up of pieces of green, blue and brown ceramic that reminded me of an aerial view of the Earth.

It’s odd how watching something in a state of unrest can keep your mind at peace. Tran’s show however, when compared to Aitken and Balka’s, was decidedly more violent in theme, and its association to destruction and suffering more pronounced and poignant. This feeling lingered unsettlingly, and was not like the thoughtful repose that I was lulled into by Aitken’s and Balka’s exhibitions. Our history bears the scars of thousands of self-inflicted wounds, which Tran’s work seemed to trace.

View of Joana Hadjithomas & Khalil Joreige’s “The Lebanese Rocket Society – A Tribute to Dreamers (Parts II, III, IV, and V),” CRG Gallery, New York, 2013. Image courtesy of CRG Gallery, New York. Photo by Susan Alzner.

Joana Hadjithomas & Khalil Joreige’s

“The Lebanese Rocket Society – A

Tribute to Dreamers (Parts II, III, IV, and V)” at CRG Gallery, New York

February 28–April 20, 2013

Much to their surprise, Joana Hadjithomas and Khalil Joreige recently came across a half-century-old Lebanese postage stamp depicting a rocket emblazoned with a cedar tree. Though enshrined in official history, this inscrutable, fantastic image—seemingly the stuff of science fiction—commemorated an event no one could remember. An enigma, it intrigued the artists enough to do some research. They discovered that between 1960 and 1967, as the global superpowers vied for superiority in the space race, Armenian students at Beirut’s Haigazian University had successfully produced the Middle East’s first rockets intended for space exploration. The Lebanese Rocket Society launched more than ten of what were called “Cedar” rockets (after the country’s national emblem), reaching an altitude of two hundred kilometers with the “Cedar IV” rocket and briefly becoming the pride of a small nation riding the hopeful, modernizing wave of pan-Arabism. The amateur space program fell apart in 1967, and later, with Lebanon besieged by sectarian strife, it was forgotten.

Like many Lebanese artists who came of age during the country’s civil war (1975–1990), a period excluded from national textbooks to this day, Hadjithomas and Joreige have investigated—and invented—unofficial histories both to redress public amnesia and to question the select images and narratives that have endured. Like The Atlas Group (a fictional art collective, created by their peer Walid Raad, that has fabricated both protagonists and producers of its narratives), Hadjithomas and Joreige sometimes blur fact and fiction. Take their project Wonder Beirut (1997–2006), for instance, which posits a photographer who, in 1968, produced postcards showcasing Beirut’s luxurious beachfront. Seven years later he ostensibly seared the images—in precise correlation to real-life bombings—as war broke out. Wonder Beirut is a fantasy of a tormented, but cathartic relation between representation and reality, in which the commodified image is scarred in tandem with its referent. The actuality is more tragic: anachronistic postcards of a pristine, idealized pre-war Beirut continued to be sold after many of the buildings they depicted had been destroyed. Displaying the postcards as a series of disfigured prints and burnt negatives by the “pyromaniac photographer” Abdallah Farah, Hadjithomas and Joreige—like Raad and other contemporary Lebanese artists—symbolize the devastation of the civil war from an imaginary perspective, which becomes a necessary foil to the hollow position of official knowledge.

Though the history it charts has dissipated in collective memory, “The Lebanese Rocket Society: A Tribute to Dreamers” is entirely rooted in fact. Hadjithomas and Joreige construct a porous, layered narrative from actual events, opening the field of inquiry outwards from the Lebanese Rocket Society to its cultural context, while accentuating the spectral character this remote subject has acquired. In so doing, the artists generate traces of a past that cannot be historically integrated because it remains, in its fragmentary reconstruction, more potential than real. To be real again, they suggest, this past must first reenter the collective imagination, which has suppressed it since 1967—a “moment of disenchantment,” in the artists’ words, when revolutionary dreams of pan-Arab modernism were defeated.

The result of extensive research, the exhibition invites viewers to look and listen across layers and intervals, connecting, sifting, and unraveling. In The President’s Album (2011), photographic fragments of the “Cedar IV” rocket form an interrupted, to-scale model of the projectile across thirty-two panels, even as most of the rocket remains concealed beneath the folds of each image. Eight meters long yet irremediably partial, The President’s Album is less a monument than a symbolic testament to the chasms preventing this historical achievement from surfacing in the present.

Indeed, wary of nostalgia and triumphalism alike, Hadjithomas and Joreige guard against notions of monumentality. The artists produced a sculptural model of a “Cedar” rocket and donated it to Haigazian, where it now stands as a public tribute to the university’s forgotten space program; but rather than reproduce this model here, they reveal glimpses of yet another replica against the backdrop of Beirut’s streets. In order to transport what looked like a missile, they needed multiple authorizations and a police convoy; hence, requiring more time to document this passage, they restaged the action with yet another replica. The photographic series Restaged (2012) records their reproduced reproduction, an indistinct projectile coasting past a crisp background that has likewise undergone many stages of reproduction: Beirut’s gaudily reconstructed downtown.

The survival of the past, and its imperceptibility to the present, is also at stake with The Golden Record (2011), a twenty-minute sound collage accompanied by a video of a spinning gold disc. Inspired by a radio transmitter embedded in each “Cedar” rocket, as well as the time capsules that Americans sent into space with each Voyager mission, The Golden Record evokes the culture and politics surrounding the Lebanese Rocket Society. A radio news report on riots in Lebanon gives way to the iconic voice of Egyptian singer Oum Kalthoum; the hum of a British fighter jet intermingles with Gamal Abdel Nasser’s resignation speech.

The artists selected these sounds in conversation with people close to the Rocket Society, whose memories and affiliations likewise instigated A Carpet (2012). A wool rug depicting the 1964 stamp that led Hadjithomas and Joreige to their project, the piece is modeled after carpets produced by young Armenian girls in a Lebanese orphanage—in particular, a carpet they gave US Presiden Calvin Coolidge in 1926, in gratitude for American support of their shelter and education outside Turkey. Among the children of these refugees, the artists learned, were students at Haigazian who took part in the Lebanese Rocket Society.

It’s just such interlinked acts of hope, idealism, and generosity that were once dramatically played out on the international stage that Hadjithomas and Joreige’s project excavates. Yet even as the artists pay tribute to dreamers—notably, Armenian refugees of genocide who dedicated themselves to the pursuit of art and science—they resist naïve laments for a lost age of peace and progressivism. Instead, they are dutifully engaged with the challenges of historical recuperation, chief among these being the privileged structures through which past events become visible, whether a web search—the most popular results being, in this case, reports on the latest rockets fired between Hezbollah and Israel—or a monument, which forecloses reappraisals, petrifying a single perspective. Hadjithomas and Joreige respond to these challenges with a paradox: by paying tribute to the dreamers of the Lebanese Rocket Society, it is necessary to recover their history as a dream, unraveling fugitive associations that are shaped by—but never bound to—subjectivity, time, and place.

Kareem Estefan is a writer and editor living in Brooklyn. He is Associate Editor of Creative Time Reports.