Bullish tribute to a troubled nation
Michael Rakowitz, The Invisible Enemy Should Not Exist Trafalgar Square
The latest sculpture to occupy Trafalgar Square’s empty Fourth Plinth has the brash, shiny, gimcrack look of what it is: essentially, a tourist artefact blown up to massive proportions. Where the previous incumbent, David Shrigley’s Really Good - a large blue thumbs up cheekily echoed the dark, monumental bronze of the neighbouring 19th century statues, Michael Rakowitz’s The Invisible
Enemy Should Not Exist consists of a life-size replica of an Assyrian bull god that once guarded the gates of Nineveh, constructed from 10,500 flattened-out Iraqi date syrup tins.
The fact that the footprint of the original sculpture, a Lamassu or protective deity, created in 700BC and destroyed by Isil near Mosul in 2015, exactly matches the dimensions of the Fourth Plinth is just one of many aspects of this project that fit very neatly – some might say almost too neatly – together.
In recreating this inalienably great relic of a lost civilisation in the packaging of one of the country’s major industries, Rakowitz is paying tribute both to Iraq’s distant and recent pasts, while drawing attention to its calamitous present. Where the winged and bearded Lamassu was destroyed in the country’s ongoing conflict, so was the once-mighty date syrup industry – which until recently ranked second only to oil among the country’s exports.
The oddball title refers to the original words written on the side of the sculpture. Add in the fact that the Chicago-based Rakowitz is Iraqijewish on his mother’s side, giving him a personal stake in the work, and you have an irresistible package of ideas that made Rakowitz the obvious choice for the commission.
So how, finally, does the work look? Pretty much, actually, as you’d imagine. Rakowitz has picked out the original’s uniform marble surfaces in differently coloured tins, creating an impression of art deco-cinema tackiness. On the Trafalgar Square side of the image there is a lot of very bright, yellowish metal, which has all the visual appeal of, well, a tin can.
But then, this is a work designed primarily to make you think. While the final image doesn’t give the visual jolt you’d hoped for and is never more than the sum of its elements, each of these is more than worth pondering.
If Rakowitz’s work brings the benighted condition of Iraq and its people into people’s minds as they move through Trafalgar Square over the next two years, it will more than have served its purpose.