Al-Ahram Weekly On-line 23 - 29 November 2000 Issue No.509
Published in Cairo by AL-AHRAM established in 1875

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The old familiar faces

By Nigel Ryan

If, in your accidental surfing of the Web, you inadvertently type in Smithsonian Institute and then, for no particular reason, click on the Museum of African Art site and out of simple curiosity -- which never really killed many cats despite all the anti-curiosity propaganda -- proceed to click on the brick-red coloured What's On box several familiar faces will float on to the screen. Umm Kalthoum for one, a smiling Gamal Abdel-Nasser, a few selected members of the pantheon of ancient Egyptian gods, a be-fezzed King Farouk.

The Smithsonian is hosting an exhibition -- beginning in January and continuing for a month -- of works by Chant Avedissian under the seemingly innocuous title Chant Avedissian: A Contemporary Artist from Egypt. I say seemingly only because it is a taxonomic pigeonholing to which the artist himself objects, at times more vociferously than others, but pretty constantly nonetheless. Quite why he objects is a complicated affair, bound up with a resentment of the way in which ethnicity has become a catch all peg for the curators of international exhibitions, the hanger on which anything can be placed, the means by which a reputation, of sorts, can be made. It is the flip side of globalisation, this constant harping on ethnicity: Coca Cola may be everywhere, a MacDonalds on every street corner from Beijing to Buenos Aires, but in Copenhagen an Iranian woman photographer is exhibited and promoted as just that -- an Iranian woman who takes photographs, contemporary Nigerian graphics occupy prime exhibition space in London while a sculptor from Burkina Faso takes the Parisian art establishment by storm.

It is a profoundly unbalanced set of payments, this peculiar business of cultural import export. And tellingly, the major Western institutions tend to restrict their celebrations of cultural diversity to tacking exhibitions of contemporary art on to core ethnographic collections. The British Museum, the Smithsonian, they are all at it, dressing their collections up to dress the exhibitions, and the artists, down. It is a strange business, this insistence on ethnicity, and hardly -- is it necessary to add -- a two-way street.

It is not just the institutions that do it. The big events -- the international biennales, the vast art circuses that have become such a fixture of the international cultural calendar -- are equally ambivalent in their promotion and show-casing of artists who happen not to inhabit first world countries. And sometimes, through sheer incompetence, they hit so wide of the mark it is laughable.

The last Sao Paulo Biennale is a case in point: as the curators of the Middle Eastern pavilion the organisers ham-fistedly decided on an Israeli and a Turk, hardly the most sensitive selection, and one that resulted in the Middle Eastern portion of the biennale being more or less restricted to Turks and Israelis. One of the artists they approached to take part in this celebration of regional diversity was Chant Avedissian, an Egyptian Armenian whose annoyance at being promoted merely on the grounds of point of origin was naturally compounded by just who was doing the promoting.

It is, of course, remarkably tempting for curators to rely on the exotic to promote exhibitions: the production of art, whatever the hype surrounding the big block-buster exhibitions that increasingly seek to locate themselves within mainstream entertainment, has always been a marginal activity. When the artists themselves come with an unusual provenance, the temptation invariably proves too great. And the result is a double marginalisation.

In Avedissian's case the situation is compounded by subject matter: for a decade now a significant portion of his output has been the fastidious reworking of photographs and illustrations that appeared on the pages of Egyptian magazines in the late forties and throughout the fifties and sixties. It is a sometimes hilarious take on the machinations of representation, on the mechanisms that allow supposedly neutral images, of people, places, objects, animals, to become ideologically loaded, the shock troops in a propaganda war to impose a specific nationalist sentiment.

Avedissian's multi-layered processing of such images, though, is all too easily misread: an image of King Farouk, of Ramsis station without the spaghetti tangles of overpasses, of a bee-hived Umm Kalthoum waving her trademark chiffon handkerchief -- even, come to that, the frond of a palm tree -- are glibly consumed as simple nostalgia, which is to miss the point entirely, an oversight that is, if anything, a little more understandable in the non-Egyptian than those familiar with the territory.

Those familiar with the territory, though, and aware of the iconic nature of the imagery, tend to fall into a second trap, a result of visual illiteracy more than anything else. Its crudest form is to view such pieces as a spin-off from pop art, and Avedissian as a kind of wannabe Warhol, a crudeness whose only underpinning is that the face in the painting has been recognised as Abdel-Nasser, or Yuri Grigarin, or Dalida.

This is a more insidious misreading of subtleties at play in this play with modes of representation, unless, of course, you really can perceive no difference between the manufacturing of a nationalist ideology and a can of Campbell's soup. It involves, too, a perverse desire to ignore the image in front of your eyes, a blindness to layering, texture, colour, depth, line -- to every formal and plastic aspect of the work -- which operate in precisely the opposite direction to Pop Art's commercially inspired graphic conventions.

But there you go -- playing with nationalisms is a dangerous thing. And what better way to neutralise a gentle critique of the process at work in constructing a nationalist sentiment in fifties and sixties Egypt than to denounce the artist as an American poseur.

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