25 - 31 January 2001
Issue No.518
|
Al-Ahram Weekly On-line 25 - 31 January 2001 Issue No.518 |
||
| Published in Cairo by AL-AHRAM established in 1875 | Current issue | Previous issue | Site map | ||
Unaccommodated man
"You know, I once got lost. In Geneva. It was in a clothes store. My mother said to wait here. And I sat on the sofa. And then I couldn't see my aunt. So I went into the dressing room, and I couldn't find my mother. Then the tears started, two," he puts his finger where one tear had been, "two tears, then I started crying. But people in the store found me and said my name on the microphone. And when they found me my aunt was crying... she was really crying..."
The six-and-a-half-year-old, unprompted by anything other than the images hanging on the wall, tells me this story -- a story even the toughest of us has known at one time or another -- when we are in the second of the three Townhouse Gallery rooms in which Yasser Gerab's paintings, collectively titled "The Human Condition," are on exhibit. He tells the story with something like detachment: a traumatic experience, has been, to use Wordsworth's description of what happens to emotion in art, "recollected in tranquility."
Gerab's paintings take aloneness and make of it something which may be contemplated and from which one need not feel compelled to flee. The remembrance of being lost, forever (that is how it feels when you are lost) was triggered, the child tells me, by "this painting." He points up. A figure -- a stick figure: Gerab's humanity, like that of which Lear caught a glimpse on the heath, is "unaccommodated," "the thing itself" stripped of both clothes and anatomical detail, shown to us in its schematic essentials -- strides across a bright orange horizon. There are brown half-circular ripples in the air. "This person is screaming," the six-year-old informs me. Where I had seen joyful abandon -- the colour orange, a balletic figure, music -- the child saw terror, isolation and voice without words. "Children," Gerab tells me later, "and those unschooled in 'art' are the best critics. They understand."
Still, there must have been something to do with joy in the image. After all, the child told his story of loss with composure, and as his narrative proceeded, with the kind of thrill related to discovery. Something -- a painful seemingly-eternal moment of bewilderment, of meaning breaking down -- which, until that moment in the art gallery, had not made sense, seemed untranslatable, unfathomably dark because agonisingly unique, was finally dawning on him. Recognising his loss in an "objective correlative" -- Gerab's mirror-image -- the child discovered that even at their most alone human beings can communicate: loss may be articulated and shared. Terror, recognised in the community of art, begets something kindred to joy. The Greeks called it catharsis.
Painting by painting, the child -- the father of the man -- explains, tells stories. About the four figures I read as emblems of misery, he says: "Those are four soldiers. See, they are walking exactly the same way." Thus, the oppression of regimentation daily suffered is simply expressed. "And here," two paintings later, "are their black boots. See, four pairs of feet belonging to the four soldiers." And the tiny figure beneath? "He is one of the little people, and he's in prison." The child says this in a matter of fact sort of way, a fact of life which, in Gerab's paintings, though hardly pretty-pretty has been cleansed of sordid particulars, has been given leave to voice "some little language such as lovers use," to borrow words from Virginia Woolf's The Waves, "broken words, inarticulate words, like the shuffling of feet on the pavement."
Gerab's images, though simple -- a couple of stick figures, two or three colours, a horizon, minimum props -- manage in a quiet way to play host to that complex phenomenon of which we barely have an inkling called "time," either within an individual image or when read in succession. "The sun has begun to set here. This one is later. See the sun has come down into the sea." "Yasser has this part here" -- the blurry bit? -- "Yes, the blurry bit, to show that the man is falling." "And this," a particularly sparse and sombre space in greys and shades of black where two figures face each other, "is Kung Fu. First they bow to each other like this," he shows me the ritual, "then you say something in Chinese, something like bismillah but in Chinese, before you start... this is before they start..."
"These two," he points to another painting, "they are dwarves..." The child tries to make himself even shorter than he is by bending his knees and stooping. "They are walking like this, like ancient Egyptians. You know, this is how they walked." No it isn't, I counter, almost snap, but that is how ancient Egyptian artists represented the human body. I say this in one go feeling no compulsion to paraphrase or simplify. I see my sentence being taken in by the child, turned over in his head, mulled over, tasted word by word. He counters? elaborates upon? the one-sentence art historical lesson that had just been pompously thrown in his direction with a canny non sequitur: "Yasser is an artist."
The child feels quite at home -- both stimulated and unafraid -- in Yasser Gerab's "The Human Condition," sometime after the fall and the acquisition of language, but still before the cunning passages of history, before the deluge of particulars that came with the city. The human condition we catch a glimpse of in Gerab's paintings touches, moves, brings us close to pathos, the stuff from which our most basic stories issue. His representation of our condition is powerful and real enough to generate recollections of, say, the words of Shakespeare's Lear to Edgar disguised as a madman and to the Fool: "Thou wert better in a grave than to answer with thy uncovered body this extremity of the skies. Is man no more than this? Consider him well. Thou owst the worm no silk, the beast no hide, the sheep no wool, the cat no perfume. [...] Thou art the thing itself; unaccommodated man is no more but such a poor, bare, forked animal as thou art. Off, off, you lendings! Come, unbutton here."
Some things only beginners in being-human, the pure of heart and the heart-broken, can effortlessly grasp. The rest fumble in a semi-darkness.
© Copyright Al-Ahram Weekly. All rights reserved
 |
|
|||||||||||||||||
| ARCHIVES Letter from the Editor Editorial Board Subscription Advertise! |
WEEKLY ONLINE: www.ahram.org.eg/weekly Updated every Saturday at 11.00 GMT, 2pm local time weeklyweb@ahram.org.eg |
 Al-Ahram Organisation |
