Starting in Jersey City

The Iraq War, On the Road

British artist Jeremy Deller worries that America has forgotten about the war. So he created a traveling art exhibit -- "It Is What It Is: Conversations About Iraq" -- to bring the war to us.

Here's a link to the WNYC's Studio360 below:
http://www.studio360.org/episodes/2009/05/01

Here is the artist's website:
http://www.conversationsaboutiraq.org/


Jersey City, NJ -- The RV and the bombed-out car from Baghdad that will travel across America for Jeremy Deller's art exhibit about the Iraq war called ?It Is What It Is.?


This car was destroyed in a suicide bomb attack. The exhibit premiered at the New Museum in New York and will stop in 13 cities between New Jersey and L.A.


Members of Creative Time, the arts presenting organization that organized the road trip, try to figure out how to mount the sign that will ride with the car.


The sign reads ?This car was destroyed by a bomb in a Baghdad marketplace on March 5, 2007.? The car and the sign will be exposed at all times during the road trip.


Deller's team will travel with the exhibit for 3 weeks, riding in the RV that will tow the destroyed car.


One day there will be a museum dedicated to the conflict in Iraq. Until then we have to imagine what it might contain.

A car destroyed in a suicide bomb attack is a familiar image in the Western media, often a convenient replacement for the human form (or a corpse to be more precise). This particular car was destroyed in an attack on the crowded book market at Al-Mutanabbi street in central Baghdad on March 5, 2007. Thirtyeight people were killed and hundreds injured. And only recently has the market reopened.

Al-Mutanabbi street is a cultural and social hub of Baghdad, and the attack was inevitably interpreted as an attack on contemporary Iraqi culture itself as opposed to the ancient culture of museums and historic sites.

The street is aptly named after the celebrated ninthcentury poet Al-Mutanabbi. A controversial figure even in his own lifetime, he was under no illusion as to his own talents. He harbored political ambitions and was murdered by bandits on the road from Shiraz to Baghdad.

Much of his best-known work was concerned with immortalizing his powerful patrons, most notably Prince Saif al-Daula, for whom he wrote a number of poems celebrating the Prince?s achievements on the battlefield. In contrast, in a moving poem he describes his patron?s grief on the occasion of the death of his mother:

?The age has hurled rough times at me my heart is numb from its missiles And neatly where the arrow struck me the point of one blunted the other?
?Jeremy Deller

In May of 2007, after four months of negotiation, Dutch curator Robert Kl?ijver succeeded in shipping this and another bombed vehicle from Al-Mutanabbi to the Netherlands for an event entitled ?War on Error,? which included a daylong discussion and performances, as well as the exhibition of the vehicles on Leidse Plein Square in Amsterdam. One or both of the cars have subsequently been exhibited in Rotterdam, Enschede, Utrecht, the Hague, and Houston, Texas.