Mask of Dimitrios

I normally don’t really know what to make of high end art – pictures or sculptures. Seems a bit beyond my intellectual pay grade and all that – unless I get an ‘in’, a clue to what it’s all about and about something that is of interest to me.

My brother and I went to an exhibition entitled ‘Encounters’ featuring the work of Alberto Giacometti and Huma Bhabha at The Barbican today. I went (happily) with low expectations, seeing it as a potentially interesting experience that would fill some time before I set off to Waterloo and the train and give us something to talk about over a coffee.

I was not disappointed and was philistining  my way around feeling bemused and not really engaged until I came to the ‘Mask of Dimitrios’ – a large, undeniably disturbing piece of a hollowed out figure sitting on the frame of a sparse chair. I read the blurb:

A hollowed out figure emerges from a metal chair, an assemblage of various scrap materials. A spine made from a metal pipe ends in a red rubber toy, elongated like the remnant of a tail lost at some stage during human evolution. Its head is misshapen and outsized, and two plastic bags dangle in the void of its body like deflating lungs.

OK, so far so artspeak, but I can’t deny that my attention has been caught. The blurb continues:

Bhabha’s use of these discarded, found materials is pointed, drawing a comparison between their value and the expendability of human life for those governments and other entities perpetuating conflict across the globe. The title of the work is borrowed from a 1944 film noir by Jean Negulesco, in which the main character profits from war atrocities.

Now I am definitely interested and begin to look at the piece with a bit more respect.

The figure with its frail limbs, modelled from pockmarked clay, wastes away in front of our eyes, reiterating the consequences of a military industrial complex where people are disposable, collateral damage.

Now I’m thinking about a podcast I’d listened to earlier that morning – Lt COL Karen Kwiatkowski talking about following the money when trying to understand the horror that is the genocide in Gaza. She points out the profits being made by the military industrial  complex of the Collective West  in supplying and re-supplying arms to Israel (and to itself) and the potentially even larger profits from clearing the rubble, rebuilding and then running the strip as a high end leisure destination.

It’s difficult to conceptualise what has and is happening in Gaza and to come to terms with the apparent indifference / complicity of those in power (who act in our name). Maybe the Mask of Dimitrios captures something of that horror, the vulnerability of Palestinians caught in this nightmare ….. and just possibly the ineffectiveness and helplessness of the resistance to the West’s determination to prosecute this unconscionable outrage.