29 March - 4 April 2001
Issue No.527
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Al-Ahram Weekly On-line 29 March - 4 April 2001 Issue No.527 |
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Obituary
Mahmoud Baqshish: a death foretold
The passing of Mahmoud Baqshish (b1937) was a physical occurrence not a cessation of spirit. For his paintings, no less than his articles and studies on sculpture and drawing, intended for the lay reader rather than the specialist, probe the very essence of beauties and failures that have beset us since the dawn of modern times. His regular reviews for the celebrated cultural monthly Al-Hilal, the last of which appeared in the March issue shortly before he died, profess a unique brand of enlightenment: unlike the majority of art critics in Egypt and the Arab World, Baqshish summarily rejected the cultural dependency rife in the modern Arab plastic arts scene. He rebelled against the mechanical duplication of Western currents, practiced by artists in search of a spurious "international status."
Baqshish was remarkably critical of the Arab fascination with modernist Western trends and their strangeness: "spatial arrangements" that comprise an audio-visual randomness which, in its original context, amounts to a critique of the hegemony of the rational perspective on creative art. In Arab countries -- where the norm is, by contrast, randomness and irrationality -- what could these imitations mean? Even official juries perpetuate the delusion, only works that abide by this ridiculous imperative receive prizes, and most jury members are Westerners who remain unfamiliar with our cultural and sociological reality. One might argue that such an impasse -- the object of Baqshish's impassioned censure -- is at least as tragic as physical death.
For ancient Egyptians, the death of the body comprised a mere transition from one state into the next. Genuine perdition occurred only if the dead man failed to pass the test to which he was subjected by the Forty Four (a group entity that survives in modern colloquial Arabic): each of these beings would ask a question relating to the dead man's wrong-doings during his life time; if he gave the wrong answer to any one of them he would fall irredeemably into the pit of death, never to rise again. The greatest Arab wrong-doing of our times, evident in economics as well as art, is dependency, which is reflected locally on a smaller scale in the relation of the countryside to centres of urban life. A few years ago at the Cairo Atelier, on the occasion of a collective exhibition of works from the provinces, Baqshish expressed his anguish regarding the fact that artists from the provinces were copying artists from Cairo, who were in turn dependent on inappropriate northern models: what to expect from the imitation of an imitation?
Baqshish understood that cultural diversity cannot be reduced to extending relations with the rest of the world. Rather, it is best accomplished through discovering the differences of each little village and each urban neighbourhood. The artist's reading of these intensely particular qualities comprises his most significant contribution, and establishes a genuine base from which to approach other parts of his own country and eventually the rest of the world. An artist's self vanishing in the process of imitating an Other is like flies hovering around the light bulb. Baqshish's attention to literature -- his publishing and writing activities during Sadat's presidency -- reflect another aspect of his struggle against this predicament. His paintings often depicted a light spot surrounded by darkness. Laila El-Sherbini, Siham Bayoumi and the late Mustafa Abul-Nasr are but a few of the short story writers in whose works he saw the same kind of determination.
Having entered the cultural arena in 1962, Baqshish made a wide variety of contributions. What Egypt needs at this juncture is a comprehensive compilation of his works: his paintings, his art criticism articles, his short stories, but more importantly, his admirably independent vision of humanity and culture -- the enlightenment and hope he professed.
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