STORIES AND DATES

On family road trips to the ski resort in Big Bear, California, where we intermittently rented cabins on winter holidays, we used to stop by a roadside stand to drink date milkshakes. Delicately sweet and topped with creamy foam, the sand-coloured beverage was made with locally grown dates; that minor agriculture detail was the real treat. Unlike the other vegetable crops that we were familiar with in the region, these dates hung high in column-like shoot trunks, which were shaded by a crown of pinnate leaves. The date tree looks royal, often inspiring associations with Mesopotamian antiquity, holy rituals or modern-day beach holidays. The stands were placed along the roadside not only to sell milkshakes, but also as rest stops from which to admire the scenic view. The majestic desert setting was different from the wide boulevards of Los Angeles, famously flanked by towering, ornamental fan palms, and even more cinematic than the city itself.

Imagine an old and narrow California highway, just like those lean ones that appear in film noir, planted in the midst of acres of palm fields. This is the Coachella Valley in Southern California, a region that was midway between our hometown in the northeast desert valley of Baja California, Mexico and the snowy mountains where we skied. Visionary horticulturists and entrepreneurial farmers imported palm seeds and shoots from North Africa and the Middle East to cultivate dates here in the barren land. The earliest known farming of date palms in the United States is attributed to Spanish Jesuit missionaries in California in the eighteenth century. After years of several unsuccessful crops, the missions began to nurture the palms as ornaments rather than date-bearing trees.¹ It was towards the end of the nineteenth century that the modern commercial date industry in the US really began. One of the first state-sponsored research trips to procure date shoots for the Coachella Valley was conducted by the botanist David Fairchild, who travelled to Iraq, Egypt and Baluchistan (in present-day Pakistan) in 1901-02. With the help of local businessmen, the entrepreneur Bernard G. Johnson followed Fairchild's lead with a trip to Algeria in 1903, his first of many visits to that country. In the following decades, a large amount of experimentation with the cultivation of date varieties was done in the desert valleys of California, Arizona and even Texas. The most significant commercial importation of date offshoots happened between 1911-22, when about 40,000 were brought to California from Algeria, Egypt and Iraq.²

The horticulturist Roy M. Nixon traces the origins of date culture to 3,000 BC in what is now southern Iraq, a region that has remained the most important centre of date culture in the world.³ Of course, Iraq was far from my imagination when we drank the sweet date shakes at the roadside stand in Coachella. We were kids at the time - a time, in fact, when the US supported Saddam Hussein and his country's nascent war against Iran. But a couple of years ago, while drinking a homemade date shake in my Brooklyn apartment in New York, it was a different story. The dates I was savouring this time had come directly from Iraq. I had purchased them from Davisons & Co., an art project in the form of a shop established by Michael Rakowitz. His family history was one of the inspirations to realise this project. Rakowitz's grandfather was an Iraqi Jew who emigrated to the US in 1946, bringing with him the tradition of making date syrup. After his grandfather's death, Rakowitz and his family had to buy the syrup. It wasn't the same, of course, and it wasn't from the family's homeland either. Things had changed. The political situation in Iraq had turned at the start of the 1990s, with the US government now against Iraq in support for Kuwait. UN sanctions had shut down nearly all trade with Iraq, and even when the embargo was lifted in 2003 importing and exporting from there has not been exactly feasible.

FRONTS

Rakowitz modelled Davisons & Co. after one of his grandfather's import and export businesses, borrowing the name from the original company. However, Rakowtiz's commerce was based on gift economy: the new Davisons & Co. shipped packages from the gallery to Iraq at no cost. The first manifestation of the project, titled Return (Drop Box) (2004), was commissioned by Jamaica Center for the Arts and Learning, a community gallery in Queens, New York. It consisted of a modest art installation that included a package drop box, which members of the general public were invited to use. The budget allocated to the project was invested directly into the business. Rakowitz's stated intention was that neighbourhood residents would use this servicebased project to send packages to friends or family members in Iraq. Whether this service was actually rendered is beside the point. Like his earlier art project paraSITE (1997-ongoing), which consists of temporary shelters for homeless people, Return (Drop Box) was made less to solve a problem than to suggest a particular situation: while paraSITE acknowledges homelessness and alternative dwellings, Return (Drop Box), at its most basic level, addresses the financial and logistical challenges of getting post to and from Iraq.⁴

A couple of years later, Rakowitz made a second version of Return. This time, he changed the presentation of the work and added another trade to the business - selling food products of Iraqi origin, dates in particular. Return now resembled an actual shop, or so it attempted.⁵ The project occupied a storefront on a commercial strip in Brooklyn, whose façade (labelled Davisons & Co.) resembled any other business on the block. From the pavement, Return was indiscernible as art. The products and services offered there were listed on its huge storefront window; the door had a notice informing of the store opening hours. But Return was a front in every sense of the word. Once inside the shop, the arrangement and display of things resembled a traditional museum display - or produce stand at a market for that matter. A diagram on the wall showed a timeline of the ancient and modern history of date culture. A metal rack displayed food products - including different brands of date syrup - originating from Iraq yet packaged in Lebanon, the Netherlands and Saudi Arabia. A series of Iraqi flags graphically suggested a history of its empires, invasions and occupations. And, at the centre of the room, a table displayed different kinds of dates for visitors to taste and purchase.

Rakowitz's second version of Return follows in the tradition of art projects that exist in the guise of shops, stores and other commercial ventures, which include Claes Oldenburg's The Store (1961); Food (1971) by a collective of artists including Gordon Matta-Clark, Caroline Goodden, Suzanne Harris and others; and Christine Hill's Volksboutique (1996). ⁶ The differences among these are significant yet worth touching on, even if briefly. Oldenburg's project was sited in a storefront in the then run-down neighbourhood of the Lower East Side in New York. While the space functioned both as the artist's studio and performance space (dubbed 'Ray Gun Theater'), it was fashioned in the form of a shop: figurative artworks were the products on sale, including his famous cakes and burgers made in plaster and displayed in ready-made vitrines.⁷ Food was, in fact, a functioning restaurant; with interior spaces altered by Matta-Clark, the founding artists designed the operation as a way to create a community and sustain their practice.⁸ Hill's Volksboutique, a second-hand clothing store in Berlin, was initially modelled much like Oldenburg's store, combining studio space and an artist-run shop. It was partly inspired by the post-War East German Volkseigener Betriebe, a system of 'collective ownership and a production label indicating products made by and for the people'.⁹

Utilising a similar strategy of historical citation in which an existing economy or lack thereof ignites informal trades, Rakowitz's Return highlights a little heard of commercial relationship between the US and Iraq. In a balancing act between political overdetermination and unbiased politics, Return operates like a self-generating metaphor: art as store, store as front, front as show, show as act, act as trade, and so on. This chain can be inversed or reordered, and still works in characterising the infrastructure of the project. In contrast, the date functions as metonym for the personal narrative of the artist vis-à-vis the political circumstance of Iraq. The date is a piece in movement, a piece of trade. It is less a product than a catalyst; it is a trigger for discussion.

OTHER STORIES AND DATES

Part of the experience of Return is learning about the process of its making. The importance of the artist's voice and, specifically, of storytelling, is instrumental to his project, so much so that narrative becomes one of the primary aspects of the work. To assure this, it is Rakowitz whom we encounter at the shop, whether performing as artist or clerk. Through casual conversations, the public learns about the artist's motivations and research, as well as the role his family and collaborators, such as Charlie Sahadi, have in the project.¹⁰ It was in this same way, through a casual conversation at Sahadi's own grocery store in Brooklyn, where he was shopping, that Rakowitz casually learnt about the Iraqi-but-Lebanon-labelled date syrup. This connects to another aspect of Return: learning about provenance, and specifically, about items at Davisons & Co.

During the first ten weeks of Rakowitz's Return, the store's main item, Iraqi dates, were unavailable. The dates on sale instead came from California (which are the product of century-old palm trees grown from Iraqi seeds). These were substitutes for the genuine Iraqi dates Rakowitz had been working to import - the months-long attempt to do so had begun well before the project's opening, but in the end only a few boxes made it to the shop. The majority of the dates lost their shape in transit and after delays in custom procedures. (While not rotten, the skin of most of the dates began to peel during the weeks of delay. To avoid this condition becoming yet another obstacle in the export process, Al Farez Co., the Iraqi date seller and shipper working with Rakowitz, only sent the boxes with still fresh-looking dates, and the rest were sold in Jordan.) This mishap became a significant part of the project, an aspect of the project to be felt. Rakowitz told the story to the public: he did so while tending the shop; he did so in interviews to the press; and he did so by posting a progress report on the import status in the store's window every time he had news of the shipment.¹¹ Not surprisingly, it was this performed longing for the dates, and in a way, the longing for a better place for Iraq, that became the focus of news articles and reviews on the project.¹²

The media impact that Return had during its showing and immediately after is impressive. It was featured in local and national media outlets, such as CBS and The New York Times, and in magazines such as The Nation, Art in America and Gastronomica, among many others. In their articles, Return was mostly approached as a human-interest story (with the date saga as its kernel) rather than as an art project alone. This publicity extended Rakowitz's site of storytelling from the storefront into the more publicly available space of mass media. At best, these stories added weight to the publicness of his art. At worst, they narrated the project as a futile if poetic attempt to work out severely impaired trade relations with a country at war. With few exceptions, articles traced or questioned the artistic practice shaping the project. But without the artist's story - that is, without his performance as clerk and spokesperson - there is no project. Both the store or the dates are conduits, sites, triggers. The work exists elsewhere. Indeed, Rakowitz's art is fundamentally discursive.¹³

ENCOUNTERS

Grant H. Kester's notion of dialogical aesthetics is based on communication. He analyses artistic practices that give preference to recurring speech encounters - works in which artists engage in dialogue with a public as part of their process - over discrete objectmaking.¹⁴ For this, Kester suggests two fundamental shifts in perception:

First, we need a more nuanced account of communicative experience: one capable of differentiating between an abstract, objectifying mode of discourse that is insensitive to the specific identities of speaking subjects and a dialogical exchange based on reciprocal openness. […]The second important shift requires that we understand the work of art as a process of communicative exchange rather than a physical object.¹⁵

In dialogical aesthetics meaning is created and given value through a collectively shaped and intuitive method whereby both artist and audience are the makers, principal receptors and interpreters of a work. Kester offers the concept of dialogical aesthetics to frame projects typically catalogued under 'community-based practices' or 'new genre public art', whose concerns are generally political and social.¹⁶ Rakowitz's earlier project, paraSITE, is a fine example of dialogical aesthetics. For its realisation, the artist worked directly and extensively with homeless people who could and would use functional sculptures as dwellings. Each paraSITE sculpture he made was personally customised. Aside from designing the pieces in dialogue with its users, Rakowitz also negotiated temporary use of building air exhaust vents, which were needed to make the sculpture technically function. The built-in dependencies of the project determined its politics and the active role of the artist as mediator between something like public and institution. Key aspects of this project recur in Return. For example, the artist continues his desire to encounter and communicate with a public. As opposed to making a finite work with self-contained meaning, or a work that relies on an institutional context to define it, Rakowitz makes Return largely dependent on public encounters and, as such, on the activation of the space. Return presented a particular situation to the art viewer, a space tense with its own interrogation. Representation and deceit - as in, 'a store that is not a store' - are part of encountering and discovering the work. As an installation hovering between a service-based project and museum display, was the space to be used or merely to be contemplated?¹⁷ More than anything, the installation was used for educating, as a space to learn, and for striking a particular kind of conversation desired, and ultimately directed, by the artist.¹⁸

During the spring and summer of 2006, while in the midst of planning Return, Rakowitz began to develop another project less concerned with publicity than with micro-politics. This work was titled The Enemy Kitchen (2006), and was immune to the tensions set forth with display or exhibition. The Enemy Kitchen was not preoccupied with formally imbuing the space with meaning. Instead, it was concerned with how to make meaning with the materials at hand: the mixing of ingredients and recipes suggests the material history of food, tracing invisible trade routes and collectively discussing the singular experience of taste. The project itself was a closed-doors event that was pedagogical in nature.19 Food was the medium of choice, putting the project in conversation with other socially engaged art projects and installations of contemporary art - from Food to Rirkrit Tiravanija's works of the 1990s. Using his grandmother's recipes and instructions, Rakowitz conducted a class on making Iraqi food with high-school students in Manhattan. As with Return, this project began again with the micropolitics of the home, and made its way from there to discuss a nation at war. Through a conversation on food the class participants could develop another image of Iraq, a different taste of it, so to say. (At this point more than three years had passed since the US occupation of Iraq, Saddam Hussein was hiding from multinational forces, and his homeland had erupted into sectarian violence.) While the figure of the professor as provider in this project could possibly be critiqued along the lines of radical pedagogy, the class dynamic tackled that problem and shaped the course differently: the students would also teach Rakowitz and each other American culture through its own foods.²⁰ Between cooking and discussing, a discourse formed around what is unknown of the ubiquitous if intricate subject that is Iraq.

While Rakowitz's Return generated dialogues, The Enemy Kitchen was exhibition as dialogue. It was a project to both generate and experience a cultural forum. No other shape was given to it other than a platform for discourse. Certainly, The Enemy Kitchen prompts comparisons to Joseph Beuys's notion of social sculpture. But the work moves far beyond speech as material, or thought as activism. In practice, it exercises and instrumentalises a situation on which to stage a political paradigm and encounter it as one's own. It politicises by personalising, implicating its viewer in the very making and hopefully in the challenge of a problem. Rakowitz's practice is storytelling. His artworks are narrations. They are iterations of his and someone else's stories, of an address to objects as conversation pieces, of remembering and citing biographical highlights and political slumps, and of doing so with all the forgetfulness and slips that this telling entails. And it doesn't stop there. His critics, collaborators and audiences all become storytellers, too, by discussing the project through recounting and anecdote. It is simply unavoidable.

— Sofía Hernández Chong Cuy