Ed
You know what you need, Philly? You need to buy something.
That's why you're depressed.

Philbert Noyce
​See, I'm not depressed. I'm just...

Lenny
Whoa, you definitely depressed.
I mean, when was the last time you bought something?

Phil
I charged up my Transcard yesterday.

Ed
No, stupid, we're talking about buying a real thing.
You know, a thing-thing.

Lenny
Yeah, like something that would be around for a while.
Like an object.

Phil
I don't need any objects.

Ed
Everybody needs a little something from time to time.
​Don't be a paranoid.

"Kill All Others", Philip K. Dick's Electric Dreams
season 1, episode 7, 2018
​|
​Based on "The Hanging Stranger" (1953)
​by Philip K. Dick
|
"Ordinary people...
Going home -- with their minds dead.
Controlled, filmed over with the mask of
an alien being that had appeared
and taken possession of them,
their town, their lives...
Somehow, he had been overlooked."

Earlier today a very rainy Trafalgar Square witnessed the unveiling of the latest sculpture to occupy the Fourth Plinth: Michael Rakowitz's The Invisible Enemy Should Not Exist. It is perhaps the most visually arresting, thoughtful and important commission thus far.

The work shares its title with a project that has occupied the artist for more than a decade. This involves the recreation of thousands of artefacts looted from Iraq's National Museum following the US-led invasion of 2003. These substitutes are fashioned from food packaging or local newspapers and displayed alongside explanatory labels in both English and Arabic. Whilst the presentation of these bargain-basement treasures mimic museum methods, closer inspection reveals both the mundane materials and unconventional texts. A case in point is a missing fluted beaker made of gold. The replacement consists of strips of metal from date syrup cans and a display card that includes an extract from comments made by Donald Rumsfeld during a news briefing held on April 11, 2003. The United States Secretary of Defense angrily dismissed accusations that he lacked a plan to tackle lawlessness in Iraq and instead sought to deflect criticism by characterising the anarchy and looting that was then taking place as the understandable release of pent-up anger targeted at the deposed regime of Saddam Hussein. Rumsfeld then went on to make a notorious quip that Rakowitz repeated in his museum label:

The images you are seeing on television you are seeing over, and over, and over, and it's the same picture of some person walking out of some building with a vase, and you see it 20 times, and you think, "My goodness, were there that many vases?" [Laughter.] "Is it possible that there were that many vases in the whole country?" (cited in Mockaitis 2012: 147).

Thanks to Rakowitz, one of those innumerable looted objects lives on, albeit in a new form. His act of reverse alchemy – turning gold into redundant food packaging – provides a precursor to the work that can now be seen in Trafalgar Square. It metamorphoses a winged bull known as a lamassu, specifically an Assyrian sculpture dating from about 700BC that served as a protective deity at the Nergal Gate leading to the city of Nineveh. In 2015 it fell victim to Islamic State (ISIL or Daesh) militants during their occupation of Mosul. They took a drill to the bull's face and bored out its eyes. The Iraqi archaeologist, Lamia al-Gailani found this an especially telling act, paralleling the insult 'gulla abut ainak', meaning 'I'm going to poke your eyes out' (cited in BBC 2016). Rakowitz's reference to an unseen foe in The Invisible Enemy Should Not Exist is thus particularly apposite. It is also fitting that the dimensions of the Lamassu are commensurate with the Fourth Plinth, which was designed to accommodate an equestrian statue. Its presence amidst the other monuments has the potential to trigger intriguing parallels. Rakowitz, for example, pointed out that some of the bronze elements of Nelson's Column were cast using metal from cannons salvaged from the wreck of HMS Royal George (National Gallery 2017; cf. Mace 2005: 97; Ward-Jackson 2011: 279). This chimed with his own recycling. The London Lamassu has been constructed of empty cans of date syrup, just like the surrogate vase looted from Iraq's National Museum. This is intended as a deliberate reference to a once thriving industry crippled by war and insecurity:

There used to be 30m date palms in Iraq when it was the leading exporter of dates in the world in the 70s. After the Iran-Iraq war it fell to 16m, and since the 2003 invasion it is less than 3m. The hope is that this project intersects not only the cultural tragedy but the human tragedy and the ecological tragedy, so it becomes an effigy for all those things [that] it haunts. It is supposed to be a ghost more than a reconstruction (Rakowitz cited in Brown 2017).
​
Trafalgar Square is a haunt replete with monumental ghosts of empire. It is thus a conducive milieu for the insertion of a further, intentional apparition.

-----
​
​For a longer discussion of Rakowitz's The Invisible Enemy Should Not Exist​ in the context of the destruction of the Arch of Palmyra in Syria in 2015, see:

Burch, Stuart (2017) "A Virtual Oasis: Trafalgar Square's Arch of Palmyra", ArchNet-IJAR: International Journal of Architectural Research. Special Issue: Architectural and Urban Heritage in the Digital Era, vol. 3, no. 3, 2017, pp. 58-77

​

References

BBC (2016). Museum of lost objects: Winged-Bull of Nineveh. BBC Radio 4, February 29. Retrieved
February 27, 2017 from http://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/b071skph.

Brown, M. (2017). Fourth plinth shortlist includes winged bull and giant cream blob. The Guardian, January
19. Retrieved February 27, 2017 from https://www.theguardian.com/artanddesign/2017/jan/19/fourthplinth-
shortlist-trafalgar-square-winged-bull.

Mace, R. (2005). Trafalgar Square emblem of empire. London: Lawrence & Wishart.

Mockaitis, T.R. (2012) (Ed.). Document 40: Excerpt of Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld and General
Richard B. Myers, Department of Defense News Briefing, April 11, 2003. In T.R. Mockaitis (Ed.). The
Iraq War: A Documentary and Reference Guide (145-151). Santa Barbara, CA: Greenwood Press.

National Gallery (2017). Fourth plinth shortlist exhibition. National Gallery, Annenberg Court, January 19 –
March 26.

Ward-Jackson, P. (2011). Public sculpture of historic Westminster: Volume 1. Liverpool: Liverpool University
Press.

"The weapon of nonviolence does not need
supermen or superwomen to wield it;
even beings of common clay can use it
and have used it before this with success."

D.G. Tendulkar, Mahatma, vol. 4, 1960, p. 278

'[T]he family sustains its place as a
"happy object"
by identifying those who do not reproduce
its line as the cause of unhappiness.
I call such others
"affect aliens"'.

Sara Ahmed, 'Happy Objects'
in Melissa Gregg and Gregory J. Seigworth (eds.)
The Affect Theory Reader
(Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2010)
p. 30

Not, of course, to be confused with
Peter Hogan and Steve Parkhouse's
Resident Alien​.

But definitely to be confused with
​'Happy House'
Siouxsie and the Banshees
Kaleidoscope​, Polydor, 1980

Don't ever forget:
'There's room for you if you say "I do",
​but don't say no or you'll have to go'

David Squires on …
England's latest World Cup 2018 preparations
​Guardian, 27 March 2018

"This might be a major archaeological find... If only we could come back, and carry away that stone!"

place phase plane prase peace
on of
rod god
pasture passers passage
understanding

"The place of god's passage and understanding. I think that's it. There's something satisfying about these words. So it was a religious building. What do you think, Brown? Was it a holy place?"

Brown... looked angry and miserable, "All the city is holy", he said.

Margot Bennett, The Long Way Back, London: The Bodley Head, 1954, p. 185

---
​
​"And the peace of God, which passeth all understanding, shall keep your hearts and minds through Christ Jesus."
Philippians 4:7 King James Bible

See: www.stuartburch.com/03-blog/fucking-rejoice

"I can make bad men good
​and weak women strong!" 

Wonder Woman 
cited in 
William Moulton Marston (writer)
Frank Godwin (artist) 
​"The Unbound Amazon" 
Sensation Comics 
no. 19, July 1943 
​

"The subject is:

how many men do we really need?

Think it over, they say.

Men are dangerous. Men commit the great majority of crimes.
Men are less intelligent, less diligent, less hard-working,
their brains are in their muscles and their pricks.
Men are more likely to suffer from diseases and
they are a drain on the resources of the country.

Of course we need them to have babies,
but how many do we need for that?

Not as many as women.

Good, clean, obedient men,
of course there will always be a place for those.

But how many is that?

Maybe one in ten."

Naomi Alderman
The Power
2016

"[In] the solitude of one's own room... 
we sit surrounded by objects which 
perpetually express the oddity of 
our own temperaments and enforce 
the memories of our own experience."

Virginia Woolf 
Street Haunting 
San Francisco:
The Grabhorn Press 
1930, p. 3

To live is to fly
Low and high,
So shake the dust off of your wings
And the tears out of your eyes.

I travelled to a mystical time zone
and I missed my bed
and I soon came home.

They said:
"There's too much caffeine
in your blood stream
and a lack of real spice
in your life."

I said:
"Leave me alone because I'm alright, dad
Surprised to still be on my own."

Oh, but don't mention love --
I'd hate the strain and the pain again

The Smiths
"A rush and a push and the land is ours"
Strangeways, here we come
- 1987 -

Pleasure to me is wonder --
the unexplored, the unexpected,
the thing that is hidden
and the changeless thing
that lurks behind superficial mutability.
To trace the remote in the immediate;
the eternal in the ephemeral;
the past in the present;
the infinite in the finite;
these are to me the
​springs of delight and beauty.

Howard Phillips Lovecraft
​The Defence Remains Open!
April 1921

​See also: ​http://www.stuartburch.com/03-blog/enthusiast

How does it feel
  To be on your own
Like a rolling stone
​  How?

                    Lord Byron, The Corsair, a Tale, 1814, p. 14

Dr James has a bucket in which she finds a brain.

Dr James     We are this three-pound lump of jelly. But it's not necessarily me is it? I want to be happy. I want to work hard. I want to not shout out swear words on the street. I want to sleep. It must know this. It must want that too. If it's me. But. Here I am, where my father held me on a climbing frame and I can see my shoes on the bar. Here, how much I like meringue. Here's my respiration control. Here's my impulse to kill myself. Here is my controlling that impulse. 'You're disgusting. And you're only going to get more disgusting. It's too late. This all gets worse and you can't even cope with now.' Shhh. Let's not. 'You're like your mother.' It's too hard. Other people manage(!) And still. 'You can't do anything. You can't work, well you could but you're lazy. This is the best you're capable of looking now and it's shit and you're decaying. Look at your teeth. And everything everyone says about you is right. And you're weak and you're a coward and you've ruined people's lives. And you should have done it a long time ago and you never will now.' Just put some clothes on and then we'll go from there. 'It would be better.' Just put on some pants. Then we'll deal with the next bit. Just do that. 'It would be better just to stop.' But people love you. 'No they don't. Even the people who love you hate you because you're hurting the person they love.' Why can't you stop? Where are you? Where are you?!

She tears the brain to pieces with her hands.
 
Lucy Prebble
The Effect
2012

I guess this is called...

Sweet the times (1996)

Sweet the times that leave
Sour the ones to come
I loved this world, a boy and girl
Still driving myself toward the ground

Sometime I wonder why
Sometime I just don't care
If ever I touched the sky above
I pray no one is waiting there

The silence I keep, fearfully deep
The love so gently shallow
Still within, I know where I've been
The wind says it doesn't matter

When gold being made of stone
Love of man be shown
I'll return to burn in the river
May all the water freeze
​