Anywhere or Not At All. Peter Osborne
above Bitar in the opening montage. The footage documents the passing of cars and the transformation of the bomb-damaged built environment. Looking out at us as we look onto the suburban panorama, and back at him, a subtle transfer of gazes effects the displacement of Bitar’s look from us to the panorama, providing our gaze with his eyes. As a result, the rest of the work appears to us, in large part, through Bitar’s eyes – the eyes of someone with expertise in explosives.
This way of presenting contemporary Beirut and, more broadly, the recent history of Lebanon, from the dual standpoint of a fictional character and a documentation of explosions, is familiar from earlier work by The Atlas Group. It dates back to what is labelled ‘Volume 38’ of the Notebooks in the Fakhouri File in The Atlas Group Archive, Already Been in a Lake of Fire: 145 cut-out photographs of cars, allegedly corresponding to the make, model and colour of every car used as a bomb in the twenty-five years of wars in Lebanon between 1975 and 1991.41 It is probably most familiar from various presentations of material from the Group file, Thin Neck; in particular, My Neck is Thinner Than a Hair: A History of Car Bombs in the Lebanese Wars, Volumes 1–245 (Fig. 2), parts of which were shown at the 2003 Venice Biennale, for example. One hundred four mixed-media works from this document make up the whole of Volume 2 of The Atlas Group’s collected works.42 In these linked series of works, including the more recent, but rather different, ‘A Disclosure’ (2007) – about the assassination of the Lebanese Prime Minister Rafik Hariri on Valentine’s Day 2005 – the last three decades in the history of Lebanon is condensed into a history of exploding cars. Bitar’s surprisingly long life – decorated fifty-five years ago, but still with plenty of work in ‘today’s Beirut’ – encompasses this history, acting as a further condensation: a condensation of the history of the Lebanese car bomb into the figure of Bitar.43
The character of Fakhouri (compiler and annotator of the earlier cut-out photographs of exploded cars) was established at the outset of The Atlas Group’s activities in 1999, in a transitional work that was first attributed to Walid Raad (when it was published as a project in Public Culture) and subsequently appeared in the name of the group: Missing Lebanese Wars (Fig. 3), a collection of newspaper clippings of the winning horses in weekly races allegedly bet upon by ‘the major historians of the Lebanese war’. These are taped into a notebook and embellished by Fakhouri with details of ‘the race’s distance and duration; the time of the winning horse; calculations of averages; the historians’ initials with their respective bets; the time discrepancy predicted by the winning historian’ – they were betting not on the winners, but on the timing of the track photographer’s photograph of the winner, relative to the winning line – along with ‘short descriptions of the winning historian’. Fakhouri had previously appeared in the acknowledgements to an earlier work, Miraculous Beginnings (published in 1997), attributed to the Arab Research Institute in collaboration with Fouad Boustani and Walid Raad, in the foreword by Boustani, director of the Beirut Photographic Centre.44
Fig 2: The Atlas Group in collaboration wiih Walid Raad, My Neck Is Thinner Than a Hair. Document attributed to the Atlas Group. Date (attributed): 2001. Date (production): 2003.
In the presentation of Missing Lebanese Wars, Fakhouri is claimed to have been ‘the most renowned historian of Lebanon’, to have died in 1993, and ‘to everyone’s surprise’ to have ‘bequeathed hundreds of documents to The Atlas Group for preservation and display’. This surprise was perhaps not least occasioned by the fact that he died some six years prior to the formation of the Group. Systematically aberrant chronologies are a distinctive feature of all of the narratives presented in The Atlas Group’s work, and the main sign of their fictional status.
Fakhouri is one of three characters to whom files are attributed in the Group Archive – the other two being Souheil Bachar (a Lebanese man held hostage for ten years between 1983 and 1993, who is said to have spent a brief period with the famous British and American hostages) and Operator #17. Souheil Bachar is heard on the soundtrack of the two videos Hostage: The Bachar Tapes, #17 and #31 (two of a purported fifty-three short videos made by Bachar, and the sole items in his file), which narrate a secret erotic dimension of the hostages’ relations with their captors. Operator #17 is a Lebanese security agent who regularly turns his surveillance camera from the promenade in Beirut towards the sunset, producing a video document, which The Atlas Group entitled I Only Wish I Could Have Wept.
Fakhouri’s identity is fixed by a series of twenty-four photographs of him on a trip to Paris and Rome in 1958 and 1959. Yet in 2006, he returned from the dead to collaborate with The Atlas Group, on a project called ‘Vituperative Speeches’, published in the NYU drama review TDR, which also published his correspondence with its editor.45 As will already be clear, a significant proportion of Atlas Group work has its public origins in intellectual publications, and only thereafter in art spaces.
Fig. 3: The Atlas Group in collaboration with Walid Raad, Notebook Volume 72: Missing Lebanese Wars, Plate 132. Document attributed to Dr Fadl Fakhouri. Date (attributed): 1989. Date (production): 1998.
On brief inspection and reflection, the division of The Atlas Group Archive into the 3 categories of A (for authored), FD (for found documents) and AGP (for Atlas Group Project documents) is thus clearly fictional – since all are actually different types of Atlas Group Project documents. But despite the numerous, albeit at times subtle, markers of the project’s overall fictitious character, its documentary apparatus and forms, combined with its significant actual documentary content, continue to persuade viewers of its factual status. This is sometimes true even under extreme provocation, as shown by the audience reaction to Walid Raad’s performance at the 2006 Biennale of Sydney, for example, when it seemed that no fictional exaggeration, however extreme, could undermine the presumption of factuality.
Joseph Bitar, then, is the latest of a small cast of fictional characters used by The Atlas Group (to whose own status I shall return) to transfigure documentary material into art by means of fictions, posing, via the documentary form, as facts. There is a double movement here: these are fictional documentaries, but they nonetheless carry important elements of actual documentation within the art. History thus appears here both within and via art, in different ways, as a complex transaction between ‘documentation’ (as both an indexical and an institutional process) and fiction, in which fiction is the guiding hand.
Fictionalization of artistic authority/collectivization of artistic fictions: A First Transnational
Fictionalization works at two levels here and takes two main forms: the fictionalization of artistic authority or what, adapting Foucault, we may call ‘the artist-function’, and the fictionalization of the documentary form, in particular, the archive. In the work of The Atlas Group, this dual fictionalization corresponds to and renders visible the fictitiousness of the contemporary itself. It also renders explicit a certain general fictitiousness of the post-conceptual artwork, which is an effect of the counter-factuality inherent in its conceptual dimension, and imparts to it a structurally ‘literary’ aspect. Each material work, or materialization, can be understood as the performance of a fictive element or idea. In this respect, as we shall see in Chapters 2 and 4, below, the generic post-medium concept of art reincorporates ‘literature’, returning it to its philosophical origins in early German Romanticism: postconceptual art articulates a post-aesthetic poetics.
Historically, the fictionalization of the artist-function is, of course, not an uncommon authorial strategy. It represents an extension of both the strategy of pseudonymity (prevalent under conditions of censorship and the need for social dissimulation of various kinds) and the ‘impersonality’ of an Eliotian modernism. Theoretically, it is best conceived in terms of Foucault’s analysis of the author-function, which was itself in many ways (like much of post-structuralism) a theoretical generalization of the implications of the practice of the modernist avant-gardes. For Foucault, the replacement of the concept of the author by that of the author-function was ‘a matter of depriving the subject (or its substitute)