With access to the outside world choked off and even rudimentary art materials all but unobtainable, Iraqis, including the superb painter Hanaa Malallah, developed varieties of dafatir (notebooks): ruggedly handmade books that are like the dream diaries of constricted personal lives and thwarted artistic aspirations. A fledgling art world in Baghdad in the nineteen-eighties, led by painters bent on adapting Western modernism to native traditions, succumbed not to violence but to deprivation under the sanctions that were imposed on Iraq by the United Nations in the period between the wars.

Most informative are scrappy works by Iraqi artists whose struggle to make art becomes a subject in itself. The PS1 show, curated with abundant wall texts by Peter Eleey and Ruba Katrib, sputters with attempts to seize on tractable aspects of a daunting complexity. But, of course, things make poetry and art happen: the death of W. B. Yeats, in Auden’s case, and the causes, events, and consequences of human suffering, in that of “Theater of Operations.” The simpler the subject, as a rule, the more amenable to creative recollection and refinement. The same goes for visual and-rife in the show-conceptual art. “Poetry makes nothing happen,” W. H. Auden wrote. There’s the sour news, which is complicated by tangential sensations of grotesquerie and elegance, fury and poignance, and, perhaps, of philosophical insight. Courtesy the artist and Mitchell-Innes & Nash

“Lounging Woman,” by Martha Rosler, from 2004. Might art afford new things to know and new ways to feel about matters that are so dismaying and depressing that they hobble the brain and lock down the heart? And might it do so without sacrificing the aesthetic and spiritual cultivation that is art’s reason for being? 7 train with wary curiosity, piqued by the novelty, in these days of mutually entangled art and politics, of a show that centers on hard historical fact rather than on curatorial themes or theories. Why revisit the concatenating disasters in Iraq for which my nation bears responsibility: the blitz that drove Saddam Hussein’s troops out of Kuwait in 1991 (remember when he seemed the worst person in the world, several human beasts ago?), and the full-on invasion of 2003, whose terrible consequences have not ceased since Barack Obama declared an end to American combat involvement in 2010? But I boarded the No. I have rarely looked forward with less appetite to any art show than I did to “Theater of Operations: The Gulf Wars, 1991-2011,” which fills the Museum of Modern Art’s PS1 annex, in Long Island City, with more than three hundred works by eighty-two contemporary artists, including thirty-six Iraqis and Kuwaitis.

Art of war 2