17 - 23 May 2001
Issue No.534
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Al-Ahram Weekly On-line 17 - 23 May 2001 Issue No.534 |
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A matter of clothes
Dust laden junk shops selling spurious antiques and assorted bric-à-brac were once much more numerous than they are today: just a decade ago, it seems, there were far more Downtown, certainly enough to occupy a quiet weekend beavering away, leafing through paintings, emptying box after box of assorted cutlery, ceramics, toys. If you have any feeling for the old, the unwanted, the discarded, these dark, dank -- for they have always been dark and dank-- shops could be places of joy. They were never quite treasure chests, and in truth little of any real value could be found in them, which was not the case just 20 years before when anyone with the sense to memorise Ottoman hallmarks could now be enjoying a comfortable retirement on the proceeds of their weekend foraging.
There are, of course, areas in which the dealers still have blindspots. Decent French porcelain, for example, is probably more expensive in Cairo than in Paris, though for some reason no one seems to know much about English pottery, and so occasional bargains can still be uncovered.
The current vogue for Oriental interiors means that many of the chipped, florid, decorative items that once formed the bulk of the stock of these cave like spaces are now smartened up -- restored would be far too pompous a way to describe the kind of knock down regilding, repainting, reupholstering they receive -- to be displayed in the airy showrooms of fashionable decorators, often adorned with price tags that carry a surprising number of noughts.
For true habitués of the junk shop, though, the recent changes in the nature of the stock are not at all upsetting: the arrival of fifties, sixties and seventies tat to replace the newly fashionable, pre-Revolutionary flotsam, is simply a sign of the times, and it is a fascination with reading those signs that keeps the devotees devoted.
It is in the detritus of the past, after all, that world views are developed: it is in what we choose to discard, as much as what we keep, that the profile of our self-perception is outlined.
One should not, however, be too literal in any reading of the signs. And while the temptation is to assume that for those possessed of the wherewithal to throw things away and then acquire new old things -- i.e. the relatively well-heeled and wealthy -- the fifties, sixties, seventies have come to seem decades that should be confined to oblivion while the pre-Revolutionary is resurrected, such an assumption must be approached with a degree of caution. That carved wooden pelmet, in green and gold, with a crest at the centre, does not automatically suggest monarchical longings on the part of its proud owner. It could just as easily suggest a nostalgia for a time when the rules of social climbing were more clearly demarcated, the peaks more clearly defined.
In truth it is not the objects per se that attract the real devotees -- clean, shiny and new, they would probably merit nothing more than a glance -- but the changes time has wrought on the objects.
Several years ago, on a weekend forage, I spied a full length, almost life size portrait of woman at the back of a dusty basement off Hoda Sharawi Street. Putting on a carefully choreographed show of disinterest for the sake of the shop owner and any negotiations that might ensue, I passed backwards and forwards, casting the occasional glance. She was no beauty, certainly, a matronly figure, swathed in blue-jade satin, holding a pink ostrich feather fan in one hand, the other, hanging limply by her side, covered in enormous rings. Over the bodice of the dress was a complicated arrangement of gold chains, an ornamental reworking of a chain mail motif draped across the shoulders and hanging to the waist. The background was nondescript, burgundies that had faded into brown, a chair just discernible to the right, an elaborate standard lamp to the left, serving simply to throw the elaborately dressed figure into sharper relief, which one might safely assume was the artist's intention. The clothes indicated that it was painted some time in the 1940s, obviously a commission, obviously intended to occupy pride of place on some drawing room wall. There was no signature, though the treatment of both the fabric of the dress, and of the exposed flesh, indicated a more than averagely competent painter.
It was a patently contrived depiction of the subject. Easy to imagine this middle-aged glamour queen agonising over the choice of dress, rifling through her jewellery to find the biggest and the best, worrying over pose, makeup, lighting. That such energy should have gone into so carefully formulating an image only for it to have ended up in this particular basement seemed, for a moment, a sadly apposite comment on the foibles of vanity.
On closer inspection, though, this poor woman had been subjected to other indignities. Her shoulders -- the original dress was sleeveless, strapless, could well have been backless, held up by hope alone -- had been covered by turquoise house paint; the original hair, which I assumed had been scraped back, and was certainly off the shoulders, had been replaced by what looked like a pharaonic wig, to further cover neck and shoulders. Recent, ugly additions, crudely applied, perhaps to make this once fashionable figure more saleable to a generation deemed less able to cope with bare shoulders than the previous two. And it was these acts of sartorial vandalism that made up my mind. A quick negotiation, and I left the shop with the huge canvas, less LE100.
She now hangs, demurely, between door and cupboard, in the corridor, an unconvincingly dressed up version of the past. Like air-brushed figures doctored out of Soviet photographs, the act of purging serves only to emphasise the presence of the purged. Those painted on sleeves, that ridiculous wig -- they look less like additions for the sake of modesty than an act of mutilation, a mutilation that constitutes far too great a burden for any single pair of shoulders.
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