Beauty is more than skin deep on London's new Fourth Plinth sculpture

A lamassu first opened my eyes to the realisation that there was civilisation beyond the Western European tradition I called my own.

I couldn't have expressed it like that at the time. I was eight.

My mother used to escort her art history class to Chicago to show them more of what they studied "in the flesh". The University of Chicago's Oriental Institute was always on the agenda. And there, wandering by myself in a quiet, cavernous gallery, I came face to face ... actually more face-to-kneecap ... with one of the the giant winged creatures that served as guardian figures at the gates of Assyrian palaces. The towering statue is a placid bull with a man's head, delicate feathers carved from shoulders upward to give him a mighty wingspan. Chicago's lamassu gazes down with a benign smile. As alien and awesome as the creature was, I instantly understood it was a guardian.

I've had a soft spot for the creatures ever since, and that one sparked my appreciation for the staggering cultural larder between the Tigris and Euphrates. I've never been there and have no family links to the place, but I am one of those odd people who ... as politics and wars have raged across the territory ... think of magnificent ziggurats, signature scrolls, relief carvings and winged bulls before oil, deserts, dictators and terrorists.

I was, therefore, pleased to see that a modern take on a lamassu was going to top Trafalgar Square's fourth plinth for the next two-year slot in London's rotating civic art scheme. Pleasure that turned to delight when I discovered the artist is also a professor at my alma mater, Northwestern University.

The lamassu took its place on Wednesday, and I was lucky enough to attend a chat about it between artist Michael Rakowitz and journalist Jon Snow at the British Museum yesterday. Complex layers of meaning surround the sculpture. You can enjoy it in complete ignorance ... it is remarkably beautiful ... but understanding its origins makes it all the more magical.

The new sculpture is part of a series Rakowitz has been producing since 2003 called the invisible
enemy should not exist. In it, he re-creates artefacts stolen from the National Museum of Baghdad during the war or, in the lamassu's case, destroyed in ISIS' iconoclastic fury. He skins his figures in Arabic newspapers and hammered-flat tins of Iraqi foodstuffs, creating a poignant memory of lost culture.

"I was interested in making ghosts, not fakes," Rakowitz said.

London's lamassu is mostly comprised of date syrup cans, an iconic ingredient in Iraqi cooking and one that Rakowitz' grandparents .... who immigrated from Iraq to the United States ... used to import. Though modern politics mean he's never visited Iraq, he grew up highly influenced by the culture. Like the diaspora of so many nations, the taste and the smells of the family kitchen maintained the strongest link to a family's origins. (I get this: the oregano-laden mist of my mother's pasta sauce and the sweet crunch of cannoli preceded art or history in my awareness of Sicily. Food is as critical a piece of culture as great art or music; a truth that lies at the heart of this blog.) So the date syrup tins aren't just a clever way of colouring the sculpture, they plug directly into that sense of lost heritage that immigrant food celebrates all over the world.

There are harsher realities here than lost art and grandmother's kitchen, of course. These are symbols for lost lives and lost economies. Dates were a bedrock of the Iraqi economy, with groves of more than 30 million trees once supplying global markets. Now numbers have dropped to something like 3 million. So the lamassu's skin speaks of a collapsed economy. It stands looking south, toward parliament; it could shift its eyes left towards Iraq 3,200 miles beyond: a beguilingly beautiful reprimand to how quickly we forget.

While the Iraq war is over in the minds of most Americans and Brits, Rakowitz pointed out, it's still very much a live trauma for those on the ground. And for more than two million Iraqi refugees around the world who don't feel it's safe enough to go home. Estimates say that somewhere approaching a quarter of that number live in the UK. Scores turned up at the British Museum to see Michael and hear about his project, which clearly connected with their souls. The most touching moment came when a young woman born in Iraq but living in London for most of her life spoke with passion about how much this work meant to her, and of her fervent hope that it would spark awareness that could help young people like her get home. I was standing with her afterwards when we met Michael. She cried. Her mum cried. I suspect, down the road in Trafalgar Square, the lamassu cried.

Beauty and tragedy. Comfort and harsh truths. Protection and destruction. The London lamassu is a creature of contradictions. As Michael reminded the audience: "hospitality and hostility come from the same root word ... things are complicated."

You can see the lamassu at the northwest corner of Trafalgar Square for the next two years. Look on it and be amazed. But be thoughtful, as well. Like my friend at the Oriental Institute, this sculpture has lessons to teach.