Exhibition Review: “Michael Rakowitz, Lawyers for Poets and Palaces”

Welcome to One Fine Showwhen the Observer highlights an exhibit that just opened at a museum outside of New York City, a place we know and love is already getting a lot of attention.

Few contemporary artists create work about the war and its aftermath. This is strange, considering that in the past, the war inspired all kinds of fantastic art, whether we are talking about the counterculture works of the 1960s and 1970s or the Surrealism that we are all busy with today, which was a response to the First World War. If you’re middle-aged, the United States has been at war for most of your life. It’s unlikely that many working artists don’t have an opinion about those battles. Could it be as simple as people not wanting to buy war-inspired art? Consider the unintended sign of contemporary artist-turned-dealer Tony Shafrazi who painted Pablo Picasso’s Guernica (1937).

Iraqi-American artist Michael Rakowitz (b. 1973) creates some of the most vivid art about war being made today. His new exhibition at the Stavanger Art Museum, “Proxies for Poets and Palaces,” includes his first major survey in Norway and offers a strong view of his practice at a time when American saber-rattling turned to an unexpected European side.

At the center of the exhibition are eight paintings named for this exhibition as part of his ongoing series The Invisible Enemy Should Not Existwhich began in 2006 as an effort to recreate more than 7,000 artifacts looted from Baghdad’s Iraq Museum in 2003 or otherwise destroyed at archaeological sites in the war-torn country. These new works take the form of eight wall letters made of cardboard, Arabic newspapers and food packaging.

The works are placed to create a “room within a room,” which sounds large, but these pieces are fragile. The fact that they are made of garbage is a key part of the series, which touches on both the general and specific disasters that have arisen courtesy of the US government. There’s a genealogy to the fun of these cute, brightly colored labels designed to attract Iraqi families to the grocery store. It raises a bid for nostalgia, but these blessings came from a shared human history, not a local one. It doesn’t make sense that they are treated as cultural waste.

The exhibition also includes Rakowitz’s older work, including a film shown at his exhibition in Athens last year, The Ballad of Special Ops Cody (2017), when a GI Joe-style toy examines Mesopotamian stone figures in the vitrines of the University of Chicago’s Oriental Institute, he finds some sort of resemblance to them. While the title is good, Rakowitz didn’t completely invent it: Special Ops Cody was an original toy sold on military bases in Kuwait and Iraq, made infamous when a military group posted a photo of a hostage it called John Adam. Actually, it was just a doll, causing the supposed prisoner to glare angrily at the camera. Soldiers on those bases were supposed to send these toys home to their children as gifts.

“Michael Rakowitz: Lawyers for Poets and Palaces“ is on view at the Stavanger Art Museum until March 15, 2026.

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