The Monument: Art and Vulgarity in Saddam Hussein's Iraq

This reissue of Makiya's well-received 1991 study inevitably addresses a different world than the one in which it was conceived, written and first disseminated. A dozen years ago, the withering account of the artistic""accomplishments"" of Hussein's regime would have been of chiefly academic interest, a passionate description of a distant reality. What a difference a war makes. The great capital whose public works Makiya meticulously describes (and skewers) has now mostly vanished. Hussein--whose mighty forearms were once cast into a triumphal arch--awaits his trial in a cell. But if Makiya's examination has perforce become an autopsy, it is no less useful and provocative. The comparatively recent demonization of Hussein and his regime has tended to downplay not only its very considerable material achievements but also the extent to which Western countries once viewed Hussein as a force for secular modernity. The tensions between that modernity and Hussein's egomaniacal channeling of Iraqi culture resulted in not only in the bizarre arch of Makiya's title, but a whole range of public buildings of a peculiarly kitsch grandeur. Makiya's exploration of art and architecture under contemporary totalitarianism is broadly informed and pungently written, offering insights into the now-departed regime that will undoubtedly prove useful to its present inheritors. Its lack of updated material is to be regretted, however.