Ahmed Alsoudani was born in Baghdad in 1975, but forced to flee his homeland in 1999 after the notable indiscretion of defacing an image of Saddam Hussein. His mother and siblings still live there; he watched the war on the television while learning English and working his way through two art schools. Al Jazeera English presents an excellent two-part interview with him on
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Ahmed Alsoudani Untitled, 2009 charcoal, acrylic and pastel on paper 81 1/8” x 59 13/16 “ Museum Purchase with funds provided by The Contemporaries |
Alsoudani's 81" x 60" work on paper,Untitled, 2009, has hung in the Columbus Museum of Art's thematic gallery on war and peace
until recently, when it was
moved near the entrance to a show of Caravaggio, an artist Alsoudani admires and feels indebted to.
CMA notes to this drawing mention that, "critics have cited Picasso's Guernica and Goya's Disasters of War paintings" when speaking about Alsoudani's work. From his Al Jazeera interview we learn that Alsoudani is saturated in the history of art and considers "stealing" from great predecessors virtually an obligation. Still, I'll suggest that nothing would seem to be safer for any critic remarking on works presumed to be about war (even ones Untitled) than to compare them to Guernica and Disasters of War.
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| Guernica, Pablo Picasso, 1937 |
The title Guernica refers explicitly to the unjustifiable extinction of a civilian target during the Spanish Civil War: There is no question that Picasso's work is about the tragedy of war. We understand the symbolic figures he uses to build his anti-war theme. Disasters of War, likewise, in title and imagery couldn't be clearer. Goya doesn't employ symbols. Rather, he confronts us with barely mediated scenes of slaughter, indifference to suffering, and even corpse abuse.
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| "Rabble," from Disasters of War, 1810-1820, Francisco de Goya |
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| "Heroic Feat! With Dead men!" from Disasters of War, 1810-1820, Francisco de Goya |
How does Alsoudani's 2009 Untitled present war? Dismemberment, breakage, and violent energy seem to be represented; flesh, wood and metal are all mixed up in troubling ways. But those—even the what I take to be direct echoes of Guernica's imagery—are hardly the first things I notice about this arresting drawing.
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| "horsehead" detail, bottom right |
This is immense (around 7' x 5') for a work on paper. The single sheet is of a warm, almost buttery tone that lends its warmth even to the grays and blues in the appealing palette of the composition. Alsoudani has defined the edges of the drawing so as to compose a single subject of many elements. A viewer who stands back (across the gallery; away from the computer monitor) clearly sees a single large form.
In this first impression, it's Philip Guston's compositions that leap to mind both in the massing of small forms to make one great one, and in the palette that poses gray alongside dirtied-up pink, yellow, and blue. The event—whatever it is or represents—stands out from that pristine, buttery background that recedes far behind the colorful and tightly composed collection of forms. Like Guston's moody, ominous work, this is collected parts with unclear, uneasy meaning.
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| Philip Guston, painting |
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| Philip Guston, work on paper |
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| Ahmed Alsoudani, Untitled, 2009. Columbus Museum of Art. See citation, above. |
Untitled is a figurative drawing, as I see it, with figures composed of flesh and props, and a collection of dismembered body parts. The wooden poles support a modeled torso of gray flesh with one flesh arm (the left one) that ends in torn muscle. The right arm is only the charcoal sketch of some mechanism, ending in its own blurred fade-out. Where a head and face should be are grotesque replacements—cartoon eyes, a hole "eye," a hose "trunk," perhaps as a nose? A pink "neck" lolls off like a penis-head. A red beret covered with eyes is an exposed brain? Many pieces here, and throughout the piece suggest body parts without either being them or not being them. From blood vessel emerges, as from flesh. From the other, not only a blood vessel, but the electrical cables of a transmission tower. Behind and between those poles wave two gray lungs. Or are they segments broken from a boulder to their right?
The point is that nearly every detail in the drawing may be interpreted as a body part (unless it is one, like the hand, lower left), or as an inanimate or mechanical body fantasy or prosthesis. Flashes of red may be flames, but they might be wounds, or blood. This imagery suggests Frieda Kahlo impaled on a metal rod; voodoo dolls; amputees with mechanical prostheses; Ku Klux Klan disguises; the Walking Dead.
Does this add up to war? I'm not sure that it does in the literal sense. In a psychic sense however, there's no doubt that it does. These figures are ambivalent cyborgs, composed of flesh and spare parts introduced by accident or design. They are the composites of manufacture and nature; they illustrate what humans have done to degrade the world, their own work, and species. Warfare is war on human minds and emotions. It is anomie. It is agony—maybe physical but surely mental—that steps right up to the viewer with these many eyes and says, "Look at me as hard I am looking at you. Can you stop this? Are you complicit in making this dismembered, brutal, spare-parts world possible?"
That's how I see it. That's how I see it now. The power and pleasure of such a work is that it is a fountain, always flowing with ideas and associations, new for each viewer, each time it is experienced. Those isolated, sharp strokes Alsoudani employs are piercing, we know, but whether with the keenness of lances, shards of shrapnel, or the saving wisdom of pens full of inspiration, each viewer will consider. Whether Untitled is an image to cause outrage, sorrow, or hope is an open question to be determined by each viewer curious and persistent enough to engage it, and open to the possibilities of scrapes and inner rearrangements.
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| A streak of energy? Of absorption? A loss? Future or past? |
