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Al-Ahram Weekly 17 - 23 August 2000 Issue No. 495 
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Published in Cairo by AL-AHRAM established in 1875 |
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Al-Ahram Weekly 17 - 23 August 2000 Issue No. 495
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| Published in Cairo by AL-AHRAM established in 1875 |
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Egypt Region International Economy Opinion Culture Features Travel Living Sports Profile People Time Out Chronicles Cartoons Letters Public folly, private woe
By Nigel Ryan
Several years ago the enormous traffic island opposite the Mustafa Mahmoud Mosque in Mohandessin, which once served, on summer evenings, as an impromptu park and picnic ground before being made inaccessible to the general public, was the scene of several outlandish constructions -- a 20 metre high replica of a plastic shampoo bottle, an equally colossal can of hair spray, a giant toothpaste tube. From the four points of the compass traffic converged onto this tribute to personal hygiene, a tribute whose plastic gigantism was for several weeks to lend a faintly surreal touch to the otherwise bland vistas of Gamaet Al-Duwal Al-Arabiya.
Casual observers would have to be forgiven for supposing this sudden manifestation to be a demonstration of renewed interest in monumental sculpture on the part of the concerned authorities. It was, though, nothing so public spirited as an attempt by the Ministry of Culture, or the Giza governorate, to belatedly introduce the general public to the consumerist icons of pop art. It was an advertising campaign, and like so much advertising these days, had somehow contrived to colonise a once public space.
It has been an on-going process, this quiet annexing of the city's open spaces. The ham-fisted attempts of a nascent advertising industry to justify its existence by adopting the tactics of the visual stormtrooper certainly played an important role in the transformation. Yet perhaps the dismantling of the Mohandessin toiletry follies should be viewed as an industry rite of passage, marking a step towards advertising maturity when such blatant, slap-you-in-the-face tactics will eventually be replaced by a more subliminal, suggestive approach.
Once upon a time -- though not for as long as is generally supposed -- it was the responsibility of the civic authorities to administer such spaces, to provide whatever facilities they offered to the hard-pressed citizenry. The municipality would decide on who was to be commemorated in the city's squares -- be it Talaat Harb, or Simon Bolivar, or Saad Zaghloul atop his pedestal on the Gezira side of Qasr Al-Nil Bridge, hand held before him looking for all the world as if he had been caught in the middle of a fatuous gesture to stop the never ending flow of traffic. No longer, it seems. What open spaces remain are generally closed as far as the general public is concerned. The Andalus gardens have been sealed off for some time now. The Ezbekiya gardens, as soon as they were refurbished, were fenced off. New developments, such as the garden created from land hived off from the grounds of Abbasiya Hospital have never been open to the public, presumably on the grounds that such well manicured public parks can only remain well-manicured if the public itself is kept firmly on the other side of the fence. If there is something a little back to front, a tad Alice in Wonderland about the process, no one is saying anything.
Nor is it at all clear who allocated the franchise to whichever advertising agency had the bright idea of erecting a giant plastic shampoo bottle in a public square. Given the retreat of municipal authorities from the serious maintenance of many public spaces, though, perhaps one should not be surprised that the vacuum has been filled by private enterprise. Monumental commemorative public sculpture is so patently out of fashion, privatisation so completely the new mantra -- only the other day a chemist shop window downtown was given over to a display of a new aftershave enticingly called Private Businessman -- that one really should not be surprised that it is the products of the new consumerism that are being celebrated, even as they are hawked, in the place where national heroes would once hold sway.
Where the public walks, at least in the commercially prosperous areas of the city, it treads as often as not on a little bit of pavement surreptitiously privatised by the store that fronts that section of the sidewalk. Which leads to the fragmented, crazy paving effect of so many pavements -- a stretch of marble here, ceramic tiles there and then oops, a broken kerb stone, pitching the pedestrian headlong to navigate his or her way across an uncared for stretch of broken flagstones.
If this sectioning of the pavement has led in places to the creation of continuous stretches of connected patios, the aesthetic of the patio has also been adopted by the municipal authorities themselves in those few key sites in which they continue to pursue their responsibilities. Four or five years ago enormous metal baskets painted bronze and planted with trailing nasturtiums, were all the rage. Now, though, it is mosaic vases, the most prominent being the trio of 10 foot high yellow pots on the traffic island behind the Egyptian museum, home to the commemorative statuary of another age.
There is little to differentiate these metal baskets, or mosaic pots -- the city authority's own attempts at urban adornment -- from the tiled fountains with broken plaster of Paris dolphins that are sponsored by the occasional downtown shop and then left to disintegrate. It is the result of an advertorial free for all in which urban planning regulations are just one more bit of bureaucratic red tape that must be dismantled so that we can all gain access to the new Eden that will result from unfettered free trade. And the gate to that new Eden, when we eventually pass through it, will probably look like the faux-Pharaonic plaster construction that announces the beginning of the desert road to Alexandria, or else the Graeco-Roman plaster folly that announces its end. Both, incidentally, were sponsored by CIB, stock-market leader and Egypt's most successful private bank. Is there, one wonders, any correlation between economic restructuring and the deification of kitsch?
