TWO OF US
THE LONG AND WINDING ROAD
DON’T LET ME DOWN
GET BACK
LET IT BE

Ceren Erdem: Your contribution to The Jerusalem Show culminates in a performance featuring celebrated Palestinian rock band Sabreen playing five Arabic inflected Beatles songs, selected and ordered to form a kind of poem about collaboration and collapse, and about dreams that cannot be deferred indefinitely. Can you speak to the poetics that this project engenders through its multiple forms and sites?

Michael Rakowitz: One of the things that attracted me in the first place was to take this indirect approach and think about the collapse of The Beatles as a way to somehow engage with Jerusalem as a city that is divided by fear more than by its representative four sections—Muslim Quarter, Jewish Quarter, Armenian Quarter and Christian Quarter. Although no walls separate these quarters, you really feel like there are walls that keep people out of one space versus another. Of course the Israeli army occupying the city can easily enforce this too. The other thing was hearing the sound of collapse occurring in the midst of these five beautiful songs either on the radio program or performed by Sabreen. It made me think about Shostakovich in Leningrad during the Nazi siege and his seventh symphony that was written and performed during the siege. What happens with poetry and art in the midst of these horrific moments? We know from the trench art of WWI that soldiers needed to make art in order to keep themselves somehow fixated and to think about something other than death. So I was thinking about the importance of poetry in the midst of such an occupation, and choosing those songs was not about just listing their names one after the other for the sake of a concrete poem, but also thinking about the Palestinian voice singing the refrain of Two of Us: “We are on our way home,” the pleading of Don’t Let Me Downor the symoblic meaning in Get Back. In terms of the component of the project set in Jerusalem, those are the things that play out when you narrate the collapse of a band on Palestinian radio: sometimes you don’t know whether I’m talking about The Beatles or Palestine, and similarly whether I’m talking about the gap in band members’ relations or about the wall. I like the possible slippery nature of that space but also doing something to keep myself from saying anything direct.

CE: You work with a lot of archival material. In your work these elements can appear as themselves or in different forms including the objects you make, music, drawings, and text. You also use traditional museum methods of display such as vitrines. When have the historical artifacts become the material for contemporary art as well as the everyday practice? And why are you choosing this museum structure over and over?

Detail of Study for The Breakup — The Moment(s) (The Breakup Series), 2010-2012
Courtesy the artist and Lombard Freid Gallery

MR: The culture that I grew up in was a collecting culture. We grew up collecting baseball memorabilia; the entire attic of my parents’ house is like a museum. And I learnt to preserve everything in a kind of sensibility of registrars or the conservationists of museums—not allowing too much light in the room so that the autograph can retain its full vibrancy, putting the magazine into polyethylene plastic and making sure it stays in neat condition. So I grew up with a lot of reverence for the relic or artifact. I started The Beatles collection with this mindset. For me, the museum has always been there, at home, not just a place to visit. In that sense I see it as something very domesticated, it is about everyday life. There is something that is clearly iconoclastic about writing on top of the vitrines, which is relatively a new development in the work. Whereas before that a lot of those artifacts may have been distilled into the drawings the way I used to do and accompanied by a text like in The Invisible Enemy Should Not Exist or The worst condition is to pass under a sword that is not one’s own (2009). I want to incorporate these objects because they have become primary source material for me. In this case it happened by having these two weird collections, the Middle East ephemera and The Beatles ephemera that were built simultaneously over the years and then setting up pairings to firmly ground the work in something that is museological but also at the same time incredibly idiosyncratic. The institutional language of the museum allows me to form a kind of a thread that carries through. It becomes a vehicle more than it’s anything. Otherwise I don’t have anything to say about the museum that hasn’t been critiqued before.

CE: Do you think it makes it easier for the audience to see what you’ve gathered and follow the way you think?
I think so. I also want to explore this idea of always being clear. Those vitrines in The Breakup don’t necessarily have an order. When you walk into the gallery you’re confronted with the one that’s about the maps, fragments of stone that gives you a little bit of an introduction but you can go to anyone of those vitrines before and afterwards. So I am not interested in the linearity of reading them; they are there as a diversion and also a support for what you are hearing on the radio. For me the critical components of the piece are the radio program, the performance and the record. In that sense I’m not looking at it as an exhibition design format. It was done in a way to simultaneously preserve the work in a way that my voice can communicate. Usually you would find a text below or right on the object, and that is me projecting these ideas onto it.

CE: How long did it take you to build those collections?

MR: Since the age of eleven.

CE: Are they all real or are there things that you…

MR: …lied about?

CE: Yes.

MR: No, I didn’t lie about anything. The only thing I constructed is the fantasy album. I liberated The Beatles from their album cover and I placed them in Sabratha, Libya, dreaming of how that album might have looked at the time. It is very clear that I’ve drawn the little apple label. Everything else is the stuff I collected. One of the things I enjoy is that I go shopping for my work. When I am in the market, I start putting things in a story. When I start, it becomes more solidified or concretized. I knew immediately that I was interested in doing this project just to make that unlikely connection between The Beatles and the Middle East. They are already there: Sgt Pepper, the beginning of the 6-day war, four Beatles, four sections of Jerusalem, the relative chronology of the implementation of Pan-Arabism through Nasser coinciding with the lifespan of The Beatles. Then there were all those references I came across when I listened to the tracks from their documentary about the Middle East and their discussions about Libya and Gaddafi. I was getting more and more into the state where I think I can pair these things that are poetically connected.

Study for The Breakup — Maps (The Breakup Series), 2010-2012
Courtesy the artist and Lombard Freid Gallery

CE: Are you ready to give up on them?

MR: Yes, I can live without objects. This is an impulse. The impulse of collecting The Beatles is one that I cannot continue. Because life doesn’t allow it and I am not interested in collecting for myself as much as I am interested in collecting for my projects. I can build an archive with each project. When you’re researching a particular topic, you get yourself surrounded by the primary source material. I also find myself gleefully taking the role of the curator or caretaker of these different objects and aligning them in ways that they would have never been aligned with.

CE: Speaking of the alignments, do you associate any of The Beatles with the countries and figures in the Middle East? And if so, how do you use/align the medals to refer to such an association in the paintings?

MR: I wanted the paintings to be a map of the manic nature of a way of thinking so that you could make the comparison. But the comparison is also hard as much as you can hold it together afterwards; you can suggest it. You realize every Beatle ends up being somebody who is loyal and also a betrayer at the same time. That’s also consistent with the Middle Eastern politics. When this project started out, it was a project for Jerusalem. However, so many of those governments that were outside Jerusalem had more or less turned Jerusalem into an icon. Look at any of the stamps, any of the money from any of these places and inevitably you’re going to see the Dome of the Rock. One of the objects I have but then didn’t fit anywhere in the show is an envelope sent from Tripoli to the West Bank in 1970. It is a Libyan post office envelope and had a picture of a Palestinian fedayeen together with the text, “They are not resisting Judaism, they are resisting Zionism.” There was also a kind betrayal, because let’s be honest, Palestinian people were often abandoned by all these countries. Look at what Jordan did in September 1970, you look at how Palestinians are treated in the United Arab Emirates and Saudi Arabia. In terms of the bigger picture, there is no way of not taking John Lennon as Nasser—they even look alike, the beautiful nasal voice of both of these people, and the fact that John was so insistent on calling himself the leader. That is the most distinct comparisons one can make. But I am more interest in mixing up the medals and then talking about the things that happened afterwards whereas for instance John getting the Israeli medal and then crossing out the idea. One thing I can say is that Ringo is Jordan because he is the one most uninterested in the politics and getting along with everyone, including Israel. In terms of who the leader was you could also make a connection between Nasser and Brian Epstein, the manager of The Beatles, who held them together. That’s something we also explored in the radio program. But for me the painting become a place to shut in the messiness of the thinking but also preparing something for The Beatles nerds. I basically removed the medals they wear on the cover of Sgt Pepper and replaced them with the medals received by Arab armies and the Israeli army after 1948, 1956 and 1967 wars.

Study for The Breakup — The Summer of Setback (The Breakup Series), 2010-2012
Courtesy the artist and Lombard Freid Gallery

CE: Who is your favorite The Beatles member?

MR: It has to be John. He was the genius. I don’t think Paul lacks genius and I ended up loving Paul, because I couldn’t love John. I became interested in The Beatles basically through John Lennon’s death, so he wasn’t there. But his music was the first music I got connected to because they were playing all his songs all the time when I was six or seven years old. I enjoy John’s propensity of using language in different ways, I enjoyed his drawings, I enjoyed his thoughts. It was also great to be going to art school and to be introduced to conceptual art to find out John’s connection to many people including Jonas Mekas, Maciunas and Yoko. How can you enjoy just making music with the same three people after being introduced to all those radical ideas?

CE: Do you also feel the same affection to Nasser?

MR: From a purely idealistic sense, yes. But he is still a top-down power. I am much more interested in the horizontality and the dispersals of power in being a good leader. You cannot help but bring nostalgia into the conversation a little bit, but that’s always dangerous. There are reverences still, but also there are more forward ideas out there from communities that don’t involve leadership and would go beyond this idea of allowing everyone to have power. So yes and no. I certainly think he was doing it best at that moment, and he’s heartbroken when you think about how he was trying to play matchmaker to Arafat and King Hussein.

CE: In your text for the cover concept of Live in Jerusalem 2010 you explain that it refers to Live Peace in Toronto 1969, an album documenting a September 13, 1969 performance by the Plastic Ono Band at Varsity Stadium  in Toronto.”For the cover of Live Peace, John Lennon and Yoko Ono began with Blue, a painting by Yves Klein. The work depicts a sky of pure, sparkling azure; John and Yoko introduced via photo collage the image of a single cloud. ‘By us putting a cloud there,’ Ono said, ‘it suddenly became the real sky—and the real world—as opposed to perfection.’ The cover concept adapts the original and extends its form, in much the same way that Ono and Lennon adapted the original Klein painting. Can you discuss how you draw on adaptation and collage as a form and aesthetic and the way it builds your project?

MR: It is about transposition in a lot of ways and I was really happy that John and Yoko started that for me. They were already playing with that idea when it came to this cover. They were also playing with it on the cover of Yoko Ono’s Feeling The Space, which was in one of the vitrines in the exhibition, where there is a photo collage of a stereoscopic photograph of the Middle East, the pyramids and the sphinx of Yoko’s face and John Lennon on one of the camels. John went to art school and he was interested in collage. I learnt they were playing with art history, doing something sort of iconoclastic, simultaneously celebrating and critiquing Klein. John and Yoko collaged in the cloud on Klein’s painting Blue—an ideal blue sky—rescuing it from the ideal and putting in the real. For me it went even further. In the poetic snapshot of Palestine, I really didn’t want to forget about Gaza. It had been bombed in January 2009 and still wasn’t acknowledged. So I worked around this poetic realism of John and Yoko, the arena of horrible realism in the Middle East, the realism of anYves Klein painting—making references to art history but also making references to political history.

Ringo (Jordan) (The Breakup Series), 2010-2012
Courtesy the artist and Lombard Freid Gallery

CE: You keep referring to the moment of John Lennon’s death and how your obsession with The Beatles started. So a significant part of your project is based on your childhood memories. I guess somewhere in your mind you always had the idea that you were going to do something about The Beatles. Is there a matching significant memory for the other part of the project, the politics in the Middle East?

MR: When Sadat was killed in 1981, I remember it being announced over loud speakers in my elementary school. We all had a moment of silence. I knew that it was historic; I knew that we were supposed to feel good about the Camp David Accords that Sadat signed with Begin as Jewish kids. I think for me that was when I first started to learn about the Middle East, before that it was stories about Baghdad that my grandmother would tell. I remember the scorpion they used to leave in the glass jar in the basement. They were great stories and they always seemed like from a faraway place. I didn’t know where to put it in the geography at all until Iran-Iraq war started to be reported and I paid attention to it and recognized those things. The interest really didn’t happen until high school when the first Gulf War was happening. I must have been sixteen and felt in the middle there. It was the place where my grandparents had come from. Then I really became aware of that part of my identity.

CE: The project has this other multicultural element of Sabreen’s making The Beatles covers at a place a Beatles concert could have taken place but never did. Is it realizing a utopic condition where everything else fails or it it in fact reenacting The Beatles’ rooftop performance?

MR: That is one way of reading it. I didn’t want it to be like pathetic Las Vegas style Elvis copies. I wanted it to be however they wanted. I liked their arrangements of them, I gave them the songs, I told them the order that I wanted it to be presented because of the poem from the song titles. And I wanted it on a rooftop in Jerusalem because I knew that the things like the Dome of the Rock would be in the frame. In the radio program, when I speak about that performance of The Beatles, I described their disembodied voices and the pedestrians who could not see them. They were almost at the same height of church bells and minarets. One final hail to the fanatics down below, the devoted followers. In Sabreen’s performance you see a moment where the minaret is the same height as the amplifiers and the speakers. Yes, they are both on the rooftop but their clothes, instruments and playlists are different. So it is like a reenactment of a failure but also a prayer. It is also a kind of thing that could happen in Jerusalem impromptu.

Paul (Palestine) (The Breakup Series), 2010-2012
Courtesy the artist and Lombard Freid Gallery

Detail of John (Egypt) (The Breakup Series), 2010-2012
Courtesy the artist and Lombard Freid Gallery

Inshallah at Sabratha (The Breakup Series), 2011-2012
Courtesy the artist and Lombard Freid Gallery