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Al-Ahram Weekly On-line 19 - 25 October 2000 Issue No. 504 
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Published in Cairo by AL-AHRAM established in 1875 |
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Al-Ahram Weekly On-line 19 - 25 October 2000 Issue No. 504
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| Published in Cairo by AL-AHRAM established in 1875 |
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Egypt Elections Palestine International Economy Opinion Culture Focus Features Travel Sports Profile People Time Out Chronicles Cartoons Letters Wonderful world of interiors
By Nigel Ryan
A developing phobia to art galleries is not a particularly healthy sign, at least not in my line of work. Unfortunately, though, I appear to have reached the point where a visit to one of Cairo's art galleries is an increasingly desultory prospect.
Maybe it is no more than a case of jaded palette. Have I simply been at it for too long? Maybe, because truth be told, there really is very little that manages to excite: many of the same artists continue to do very much the same things they have been doing for a decade that I know of, and perhaps for much longer. There are, of course, honourable exceptions, but they tend to be those who exhibit least regularly. For the rest of the time, the conveyor-belt production adopted by the majority of artists, the annual exhibit-or-bust mentality that drives them into mounting shows, even when they do not have anything worth showing, makes for predictable and depressing viewing.
In an ideal world the existence of public galleries -- exhibition spaces that are not bound by the profit imperative -- should act as a palliative to the commercial galleries, a great many of which have opened only relatively recently. But sadly this is not the case. Too many of these public spaces are to all intents and purposes indistinguishable from their private counterparts. They operate in an identical manner -- as showrooms and shop windows, in which every item has a price tag.
When so much that passes for art is produced simply to be traded, as one more object for the rich to buy, a household accessory to be slotted into the kind of interior that rams its owner's lifestyle choices down the throat of whoever is unfortunate enough to cross the threshold, it becomes no more than a disingenuous conceit to speak of resistance to the commodification of art. Nor does it strike me as coincidental that so many galleries should have appeared only recently on the scene. Their opening has more or less shadowed the opening of a new breed of furniture shop, of fabric stores, of the multiplication of Interiors-type magazines and the proliferation, in general interest magazines, of the sort of interiors features that tell you nothing beyond the fact that the owner of this particular apartment/house/villa has got a lot of money and is spinning around endlessly looking for things to spend it on. In step the retailers. If you happen to be sufficiently well-heeled, it is now perfectly possible to spend a week commuting, with decorator in tow, between various outlets simply in order to find the perfect shade of raw silk for your upholstery.
When it comes to the wall furniture, though, it is best to remember that Egypt, like everywhere else, produces far more bad painting than good (and it is painting, the production of unique, discreet, portable objects that I am mostly speaking of). What particularises the situation, though, is the almost total absence of critical voices sufficiently mature to suggest that what is most often found hanging on the walls of the dentist's waiting room, or the bourgeois sitting room, or in the hotel foyer, is not necessarily art, let alone good art. Indeed, the prevailing tendency is to hype mediocrity endlessly. Paintings that no self-respecting gallery should ever deign to display are hung on the walls of galleries that otherwise exhibit all the accessories of respectability. They have openings, often under the patronage of a distinguished public figure, and attract commentators who then write reviews which duly appear on the pages of national newspapers. There is an entire infrastructure in place to reassure potential buyers that the daubs on the walls are actually pieces of Art, a word that in this context must always begin with a capital letter. And the Art imprint is as necessary as the high price per metre of the fabric: it acts as both proof, and guarantor, of the purchaser's enlightened taste.
One possible strategy to escape this vicious circle would be to begin to examine alternative venues for the display of art. It is a strategy that has been thoroughly explored in many other countries as artists, armed usually with a copy of Baudrillard in their pockets, moved outside the galleries -- an ideological journey that very quickly lent itself to co-option by an art establishment that has proved ruthlessly efficient in absorbing anything remotely threatening to its dominance.
Espace, the downtown gallery, is currently engineering its own moves outside the confines of the gallery space, to the Greek Club, not an entirely neutral venue, but one that looks positively bleached in comparison to Philosophy, the ultra-smart interior shop, where Espace is also organising an exhibition, and La Bodega, the bistro bar hangout of Cairo's new generation Yuppies, the third venue of choice for Espace. Certainly, it will take more than a pinch of Baudrillardian irony to see these last two as anything other than an underlining of the current, interior decorative concerns of the majority of artists and dealers.
A suggestion: take a stroll downtown, and pass through the alleyway that lies behind the plasticised mass of the new shopping mall on Talaat Harb. It is an anonymous, narrow little alleyway. Tacked along the walls, at irregular intervals, are drawings of mosques, on cardboard, hardboard, the lids of packing crates, usually the same mosque, with two minarets and a dome. Symmetrical compositions, in a variety of colours, sadly fading now, and in a variety of sizes. It was two years ago that new drawings stopped appearing -- enquiries among the local tradesmen revealed that the man responsible had died.
Any extolling of the naive is in danger of drowning in its own, inherent contradictions. But these images touch on something that is all too rarely found in the galleries, and the interior shops, and the bistro bar. This art -- one need not capitalise -- that mysteriously appeared in that most democratic of spaces, the street, is a product of necessity. It was made because it had to be made. No exhibition deadlines to be met, no patrons to be flattered, no reviewers to be courted -- nothing. Not a hope in hell of a sale. Anonymous, and difficult to pass without feeling resentment towards the empty daubs that other people buy. Difficult to pass, even, without feeling a slight lump in the throat. You might not want it on the sitting room wall, but then these are not the painted equivalent of curtains.
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