Ridikkuluz’s “KLAB” at Salma Sarriedine Exposes the Canine Carnage of the War on Terror and the Gaza Genocide

I’ve long thought that George W. Bush works through his nagging guilt from the failures, immiseration, and carnage of his presidency through painting. The series of veterans who served post-9/11 memorializes the servicepeople he sent to be grist for the American Empire. His immigrant portraits, completed in the wake of Donald Trump’s first administration, grapple with how he and his fellow Republican buddies, at best, stood by while their party shuffled off the thin veneer of “compassionate conservatism” for the xenophobic nativism that always lurked just below the surface. My favorites, though, are his early bathroom existential crisis series—gazing at his toesies in the tub and staring at his reflection (staring back at him) in the shower like Luke Wilson’s Richie Tenenbaum minus the suicidal tendencies. Of course, I’m reading a lot into these amusingly vacant tableaux, which essentially give us nothing but running water. Yet, when I look at them (and I do quite often), I hear the faint depressive whisperings of Simon and Garfunkel in my head. Hello darkness, my old friend! Now, just because I see George W. Bush’s paintings as some kind of art therapy doesn’t mean I’m not a fan. In fact, it makes me more of one—a rare glimpse inside the shallow yet clearly troubled mind of one of our many war criminal presidents!

The one outlier has always been Bush’s transcendently kitsch dog paintings. Sure, I laugh at their wonky, too-close flounder eyes, resembling his own, not to mention this Scottie dog painting that manages to be, at once, sloppily three-dimensional and flat. A triumph of terrible technique! Yet, his dog paintings always seemed more at home at a thrift store or a regional art festival booth manned by a retired middle manager than a former president wrestling with culpability. So I wrote them off as a cute folly.

That is, until I saw Ridikkuluz’s painting Ya Kalb (tribute to Al-Zaidi) and its contextualizing placement within their masterful exhibition KLAB at Salma Sarriedine. The artist renders George W. Bush looking out toward the viewer in a dim room, holding a painter’s palette. His gaping mouth is stuffed with what first, at a distance, resembles a large larva, crawling into or out of his jaw, like the evil cicada birthed from the nuclear bomb test in the eighth episode of Twin Peaks: The Return. On closer inspection, this bug has laces—a dress shoe like the ones hurled at the president by Iraqi journalist Muntadhar Al-Zaidi. In Ridikkuluz’s hands, though, W. didn’t skillfully dodge the flying footwear. Instead, the shoe lodged in his expanded, creature-like gullet, like a permanent marker of Al-Zaidi’s well-deserved chucked rebuke and, unfortunately, the American empire’s ceaseless ability to absorb revolt and dissent. Before being disrupted by either devouring or upchucking a shoe, Ridikkuluz’s W. completed a painting: a ridiculously floofy white Bichon, resembling those pictured in a 2010s Fox segment. However, this Bich is not a pleasant little lap dog—its eyes ominously glow radioactive blue like a killer robot. And I mean that literally. The laser eyes resemble the threatening illumination of Flock cameras and law enforcement drones. Bush’s pretty pooch isn’t the only pup in KLAB with penetrating, all-seeing eyes, joined by zombie hounds shredding Palestinians and supportive protestors and anthropomorphic IDF K-9s wielding automatic rifles.

I finally got it. I could see the dog days of Bush’s own War on Terror years: the surveillance, mass arrests, and torture of Muslims and Arabs. Of course, the immediate image conjured of dogs and the War on Terror is of the black dog terrorizing a prisoner at the thumbs-up fraternizing torture-fest of Abu Ghraib. But, in her phenomenal and unfortunately all-too-timely Seasons of Fury: Four Families and the Rise of Islamophobia in America, journalist Rozina Ali reveals that using dogs for intimidation and physical harm happened much closer to home too. She addresses the experiences of the hundreds of men detained in a facility in Passaic County, New Jersey, just some of the many, many Muslims just going about their lives arrested, interrogated, and detained in the wake of 9/11:

“‘About three weeks ago, in the middle of the night, ten prison guards came into our dormitory with dogs,’ one man relayed. ‘They pulled out our roommate out of his bed and made him face the wall. They proceeded to kick him and punch him.’ Guards used dogs to terrorize the prisoners, placing them inches away from men’s faces. A few detainees were bitten.”

Ooooh…so that’s why W. paints dogs.

The best painting I’ve seen in a long while, Ridikkuluz’s Ya Kalb (tribute to Al-Zaidi) traces a direct line between the unhinged retaliatory fury of post-9/11 Islamophobic paranoia and today’s genocidal atrocities, ethnic cleansing, forever wars, and repressive backlash. As Hussein A H Omar affirms in the corresponding exhibition essay, “We are living in the world that 9/11 made.” Ya Kalb (tribute to Al-Zaidi)’s installation within Ridikkuluz’s show further asserts this point. The painting sits at the show’s entrance, directly opposite the gallery’s third-floor elevator, hung above a desk leaning at an angle. It’s as if the Resolute Desk tilted on its axis. Even though governmental surveillance of Muslim activists occurred long before, as far back as the 1960s, the installation harkens to the 9/11 moment of rupture that shook the foundations of the United States and its allies’ self-perceived stability, turning the now-naïve idealism of the 20^th century on its head. And then, the collective “Either you are with us, or you are with the terrorists” psychosis set in.

Ridikkuluz is not the only artist looking back to the 9/11 period at this moment, both in the New York art world and beyond. In a desperate plea for relevance that doesn’t bode well for their blue-chip finances, David Zwirner dug Thomas Ruff’s jpegs out of the aughts dustbin, where they probably should have stayed, in time for 9/11’s 25^th anniversary. Jpgs ny features giant prints of swiped images of the attack, heavily pixelated like a mass-casualty version of Magic Eye (I see…the end of the 20^th century) yet still wholly recognizable as the tumbling steel beams, the cloud of cancer dust, and the plumes of jet-fuel fires filling the New York skyline. Ruff’s photographs left me cold, a true feat for a September 11 show. Only the art world could make 9/11 about the image. At least, I can tell Ruff meant to evoke something in viewers. The same cannot be said for Jordan Wolfson’s tepid attempt at edgelord shock tactics with images of the Twin Towers and the gleaming dick-like Freedom Tower, glued to spiked mirrored panels, at Gagosian, alongside AI slop of Bob Dylan’s sweaty concave chest and a cartoon version of Jeff Koons’s flaccid penis. Wolfson wasn’t even bold enough to go full 4chan and use a bad-taste meme, like Ayanna Dozier, who screened a one-night-only compilation of her 9/11 meme collection, which I admittedly skipped but is worth mentioning.

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Our old pal W. is also reminiscing about September 11th with a recent exhibition at his George W. Bush Presidential Center in Dallas, which, like a true career artist, he promoted on his Instagram account on the anniversary. While I’ve tried to locate an image of every work in the show I can find, the most staggering is his painting of the much-memed moment when Andrew Card rudely interrupted his dramatic reading of My Pet Goat to whisper in the president’s ear about the second plane. Resembling Elizabeth Peyton in the middle of a nervous breakdown, W. recreates this famously photographed scene in childishly vibrant colors and sparse marks. What I find intriguing is his portrayal of his emotionless face. In the real photograph, you can at least read eyes-widened, alarmed befuddlement on his countenance (granted, that is also his resting face). Yet, in the painting, I get nothing. Is George ok? His other recent paintings also rely on well-known mediated images: There he is standing on the rubble pile at Ground Zero with his bullhorn, in which he oddly gives himself a Trumpian blond do, and sitting with his family at the National Day of Prayer and Remembrance, alongside smiley-faced Chelsea Clinton. There’s no interiority here at all. Instead, it’s as if he can only comprehend his own experiences through photojournalism—or memes. Strange.

Unlike Ruff and Wolfson’s exhibitions, some of the paintings in Bush’s show harken back to the USA! USA! USA! patriotism in the wake of 9/11, with scenes like a gigantic American flag draped over an apartment building. Sure, this togetherness masks the fact that together actually meant attacking anyone with brown skin or violating our neighbors’ civil liberties, but at least he didn’t represent 9/11 in a complete vacuum like the other two. Not surprisingly, Ridikkuluz is the only artist contending with what really happened next, forcing viewers to gaze into the brutal, monstrous abyss of Israel’s genocidal mania and the West’s complicity, acts built on the foundation of the sweeping suspicion and dehumanization of Muslims and Arabs post-9/11. There’s a reason why Benjamin Netanyahu’s immediate response to 9/11 was “It’s very good.”

While Ya Kalb (tribute to Al-Zaidi) is warmed by the glow of Salma Sarriedine’s large Elizabeth Street windows, the rest of the gallery is plunged into pitch-blackness, with only faint lights illuminating the paintings on the walls, all of which are either set at night or in the gloomy darkness of an expressionistically cloudy or sickening mustard-colored, smoke-choked sky. The viewing experience, then, requires squinting at nightmarish flashes of canine-laden imagery: An undead hound tears at the pants of a Palestinian, wearing a red keffiyeh and a Palestine shirt, exposing a coy peek of lingerie. The dog’s muzzle is smeared in red—either blood or lipstick, recalling both Heath Ledger’s Joker and the hungry wolf in Little Red Riding Hood’s grandmother’s clothing. A K-9 in a German Polizei vest attacks an anti-genocide protestor in front of, ironically, the Reichstag, a new authoritarianism violently suppressing dissent as penance for the old one. A rabid beast drags a wailing newborn baby in its jaws. A comfortably plump woman coddles a puppy while sitting in a lawn chair near a gaggle of looky-loos admiring the bombs raining down on Gaza. Wait, are her knees baby faces or am I hallucinating?

There are not just four-legged dogs, but also two. Anthropomorphic K-9s clutching automatic rifles cackle and leer over a balcony, watching two men fucking in an apartment building in How to get away with being thrown off Roofs, a voyeuristic take on the well-worn pink-washed justification for Israel’s war crimes. Are the dogs protecting or, more likely, getting ready to fire? Even more disquieting is the exhibition’s apotheosis: the monumental modern history painting, You’re Next (The Fifteenth of May), a direct reinterpretation of Goya’s depiction of another vengeful retribution from a colonial power, The Third of May 1808. Ridikkuluz replaces the firing squad stacked with Napoleon’s goons assassinating Spanish participants in the Dos de Mayo Uprising with paramilitary dogs, their eyes, as usual, radiating blue, pointing their guns at one man surrounded by crying women and children, while a drone bombs buildings in the background.

Plopped on the floor on two cement bricks, directly in the viewer’s physical space, You’re Next (The Fifteenth of May), with its death and disaster drone and bloodthirsty humanoid dogs, scared me. So did the nearby sculpture, Thalat al Knafeh, which features a vicious flying dog hurling itself at a disembodied arm that holds a plate of knafeh. This warm gesture of hospitality is shattered and amputated by the attack from above. Maneuvering through the darkness punctured by disturbing imagery, KLAB has a bit of haunted house to it. In fact, it made me think of Disney’s Haunted Mansion ride, but that could be the sonic influence of H Sinno’s flop-sweat-inducing sound installation, which interpolated a slowed version of Aladdin’s “A Whole New World,” alongside Annie‘s “Tomorrow” and unnerving ambient drones.

Yet, here the haunted mansion is our own. So much of the horror imagery derives from real genocidal terror. For instance, the military dogs in You’re Next (The Fifteenth of May) resemble the toothy canine profile at the center of the winged logo for the IDF’s Oketz Unit, a K-9 unit founded before the state of Israel by the Zionist paramilitary group Haganah. It’s hard to overstate the barbarism inflicted by the Oketz Unit: mauling a three-year-old and a pregnant woman (who later miscarried) and killing Muhammad Bhar, a Palestinian man with autism and Down’s syndrome, after, according to The Guardian, the IDF “forced his family out of their home, leaving Bhar to die alone of his wounds.” The Israelis don’t stop at dog attacks either. There are the dog rapes of Palestinian detainees in the Israeli prisons and the hair-raisingly inventive trained dogs mentioned by Oxford doctor Nick Maynard on Tucker Carlson that reportedly entered Gaza hospitals strapped with guns and cameras, with the IDF controlling their surveillance and firearms remotely.

It’s not only the dogs as trained aggressor that resonates in KLAB. Ridikkuluz also exposes how pups are prioritized over certain human lives, like the wiggly puppy given kisses while Gaza explodes and burns in Gravity Hit the Bimbo. That, too, not only recalls Republican pig Randy Fine’s tweet, “If they force us to choose, the choice between dogs and Muslims is not a difficult one. I choose my dog,” but also a damning anecdote from Akbar Shahid Ahmed’s excellent Crossing the Red Line: Biden, His Advisors, and Israel’s War in Gaza, in which a Pentagon official recalls the Biden administration “evacuated a dog belonging to U.S. citizens” in Israel while Palestinian Americans in Gaza struggled to get the United States’ attention for help. “Early in the war,” he writes, “indications the administration had a double standard—treating Palestinian life as cheap—were already strong.” Never forget the complicity is bipartisan.

And this is the true horror of Ridikkuluz’s exhibition. While their paintings could be viewed as intentionally shocking or morbid, they’re nowhere near as upsetting as, say, the footage we’ve all seen from Palestinians livestreaming their own ethnic cleansing on TikTok, accounts of stray dogs feeding on corpses in Gaza, or Drop Site‘s in-depth, stomach-churning reporting on the U.S.’s bombing of the Shajareh Tayyebeh school in Minab.

Ridikkuluz’s show is, without a doubt, one of the most direct and unflinching visual art engagements with Israel, the United States, and their butt-kissing European allies’ campaign of death,  dehumanization, surveillance, and repressive and censorious crackdowns that I’ve seen. This made the show somehow feel like a release in contrast to the determined lack of engagement from so many other NYC art spaces over the past few years. Finally, someone noticing what’s going on around us in the world! While at Salma Sarriedine, I wondered if the art world’s deliberate, near-universal avoidance of the thorny topic of the Gaza genocide might be shifting, especially with the Venice Film Festival’s 24-minute standing ovation for NAZA or the criticism of limp loser Ed Sheeran. That remains to be seen. With its righteous rage, its confrontation, its queerness, its keen understanding of how those in power are all too willing to send those it considers other to their deaths, and its witnessing against a vanishing, KLAB made me think of David Wojnarowicz’s also darkened and intentionally distressing site-specific installations. Almost thirty-five years after his death, Wojnarowicz’s critiques of violence, religious hypocrites, governmental inaction, and civilization itself are no longer too much for the visual art world to swallow. How long will it take the art world to decide they were always against this too?