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Liz Larner
RWBs, 2005

Artwork Info

Artwork title
RWBs
Artist name
Liz Larner
Date created
2005
Classification
sculpture
Medium
aluminum tubes, steel and nylon aircraft cable, brass and chrome-plated steel padlocks, and natural and synthetic fabrics
Dimensions
82 in. × 117 in. × 117 in. (208.28 cm × 297.18 cm × 297.18 cm)
Date acquired
2009
Credit
Collection SFMOMA
Accessions Committee Fund purchase
Copyright
© Liz Larner
Permanent URL
https://www.sfmoma.org/artwork/2009.92.A-H
Artwork status
Not on view at this time.

Audio Stories

Larner untangles the backstory of RWBs

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transcripts

GEORGE BUSH: [George Bush Radio Address on Iraq March 17,2003]: My fellow citizens, events in Iraq have now reached the final days of decision…  

 

LIZ LARNER: I wanted to talk about the lies and truths of materials.  

 

BUSH: The Iraqi regime has used diplomacy as a ploy… 

 

LARNER: My name is Liz Larner and I’m the artist that made the piece. 

  

BUSH: Over the years, UN weapons inspectors have been threatened by Iraqi officials… 

 

NARRATOR: The title of piece is RWBs, a reference to WMDs–weapons of mass destruction.  In 2003, the Bush administration pointed to Iraq’s purchase of aluminum tubes—like the ones here—as proof that Sadaam Hussein was building weapons of mass destruction. Those claims turned out to be false. But they built momentum for the War. 

 

LARNER: In the end, it was an object, a thing, a material, that was used as the hard evidence.  

 

BUSH: Peaceful efforts to disarm the Iraqi regime have failed again and again because we are not dealing with peaceful men… 

 

LARNER: I was thinking about it, as everybody was. And then when I was in the salvage yard,  I came across this huge load of these aluminum tubes.  So they were the perfect armature to start the form of my sculpture. 

  

BUSH: …some of the most lethal weapons ever devised. 

 

LARNER: I wanted to bend all the lines and make this kind of wild entanglement. Then I covered those with different red, white and blue fabrics.  And the color makes it even more difficult to really read because they have a different rhythm and pattern, and if one kind of fabric that’s the same is next to another, you might think that that line is part of a line that it isn’t part of.  It’s always obscuring something else. 

 

BUSH: The danger is clear. Using chemical biological or one day nuclear weapons … 

 

LARNER: There’s a lot of issues about confusion and truth and where to find that truth, and how do we get to it and how can we all agree on it. 

  

BUSH: The United States and other nations did nothing to deserve or invite this threat 

 

LARNER: What seemed to be – It was a knowable situation, but it seemed to be unknowable. I guess that’s what I was trying to elicit in the form.  

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In 2002 the administration of President George W. Bush cited intercepted aluminum tubes as evidence that Iraq was developing nuclear weapons and used this conclusion—later found to be false—to justify the U.S.-led invasion the following year. Composed of salvaged aluminum, Larner’s frenetic sculpture is a direct response to these events. The letters R, W, and B in the title refer to the red, white, and blue color scheme deployed, the artist notes, “to be patriotic, or nationalistic, or to gain power.” For Larner this sculpture explores “the truth and lies of material and how often the truth of history comes down to an object, a material, a thing.”

Gallery text, 2016

Other Works by Liz Larner

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