Baghdad, 5 March 2007

The latest permanent exhibit to join the national collections of the Imperial War Museum is a ruddy-coloured tangle of metal, actually the remains of a car destroyed by an insurgent suicide bombing in Iraq. Before alighting in London the car was shown in Amsterdam at an anti-war protest, then at museums in New York, Los Angeles and Chicago when it became part of Jeremy Deller's 2009 touring project, 'It Is What It Is'. Deller took a US soldier recently returned from duty in Iraq, and an exiled Baghdadi citizen on a bizarre road trip across the southern states of America, with the blasted rust bucket in tow as a way of starting conversations about the war. It might have been a very different project had Deller's proposal to place the car on the Fourth Plinth been selected; it surely would have become a rallying symbol of political protest against the war, in the most conspicuous spot imaginable. (OW)